I am frequently guilty of burning the midnight oil. I have been known occasionally to read well into the wee small hours of the night. But after reading about some of the latest research linking lack of sleep to obesity I might start heading up the wooden hill to bedfordshire much sooner in future.
The research published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Reports doesn't read like a bedtime story. It's a meta analysis of the last 15 years worth of research papers looking at the effects of partial sleep deprivation on weight regulation. They looked at the results of the studies and compared study populations, the designs of the studies, energy intake levels, energy expenditure and measurements of hormones known to play a role in weight regulation including ghrelin, insulin and leptin and cortisol.The analysis identified a set of patterns amongst sleep deprived people: reduced insulin sensitivity, increases in ghrelin, decreases in leptin.
Why may this impact upon our weight ? Leptin plays a key role in regulating energy intake and energy expenditure - it acts as the signal to the brain to tell it that the body has had enough to eat so it stops us thinking that we're still hungry. If leptin levels are too low we may just keep on eating. Ghrelin works in the opposite way: its levels rise when its time for us to eat and again with high levels of this in the bloodstream we may be prompted to overeat. Reduced insulin sensitivity would result in increased circulating levels of insulin in the blood stream. Insulin is the primary hormonal signal for energy storage into fat cells and insulin resistance stimulates the formation of new fatty tissue and accelerates weight gain.
So the current available evidence is suggesting that lack of sleep can contribute to a hormone imbalance in the body which increases appetite and which can lead directly to weight gain. Something for us all to sleep on I suspect.
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