| Obesity
linked to hormonal changes, lack of sleep The less you sleep, the more weight you may gain.
So say School of Medicine researchers, who found in a recent study that sleep loss leads
to higher levels of a hormone that triggers appetite, lower levels of a hormone that tells
the body it’s full and an increased body mass index.
The findings not only add to the growing
body of evidence showing that sleep duration may be an important regulator of body weight
and metabolism, but they also document for the first time the relationship between sleep
and these hormones in the general population, tracking how hormonal changes are consistent
with obesity.
The paper by Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD,
associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and colleagues at Stanford and
the University of Wisconsin was published Monday in the online issue of Public Library of
Science.
“Our results demonstrate an
important relationship between sleep and metabolic hormones,” the researchers noted
in the paper. “In Western societies, where chronic sleep restriction is common and
food is widely available, changes in appetite regulatory hormones with sleep curtailment
may contribute to obesity.”
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Kids eat hefty number of calories
while watching TV
Elementary school children eat nearly 20
percent of their daily calories while watching television, researchers at the School of
Medicine have found. Their study suggests that TV-time munching may be a good target for
obesity prevention interventions. Scientists have linked television viewing to childhood
obesity in several epidemiological studies, but teasing out the reasons for this
association has proved less straightforward. Previous studies have shown that children are
affected by television advertising for (often unhealthy) foods, and research on adults
suggests we tend to keep eating for longer when the TV is on. In the current study,
researchers set out to learn more about the amounts — and types — of food that
sample groups of third- and fifth-graders ate while watching television.
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