Fact: Sleep prevents obesity

Obesity epidemic has been a serious issue. Overweight or obese people are the likely victims for many chronic diseases including diabetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, hypertension (high blood pressure), stroke and even certain types of cancer. The health cost to deal with diseases would be very huge and certainly this would become a heavy burden for the governments if the epidemic were not appropriately controlled.

While experts have blamed poor eating habits and lack of exercise as the culprit for the global rise of obesity, there might be other factors that could make people gain weight.

Researchers from the France's INSERM, a public organization dedicated to biological, medical and public health research suggested more sleep could be the ideal way of stabilizing weight or even slimming. In the study, around 30 surveys were carried out on wide population samples in 7 countries and researchers found that there is a link between lack of sleep and excess weight or obesity in both children and adults.

According to the researchers, 2 key hormones, namely grehlin and leptin, were produced at night to help regulate appetite. Grehlin makes people fell hungry, slows metabolism and decreases body's ability to burn body fat while leptin is a protein hormone produced by fatty tissue that regulates fat storage.

The study showed that less sleep (represented by 2 4-hour nights) could cause an 18 percent loss of appetite cutting leptin and a 28 percent gain of appetite-causing grehlin. Such changes could simply make people feel hungry and strive for foods rich in fat and sugars, for instance, chips, biscuits, cakes and other junkfoods.
The loss in sleep caused a 23 to 24 percent gain in hunger, which is translated into an extra 350 to 500 kilocalories a day. Such increase could lead to a major amount of weight gain for a young sedentary adult of normal weight. However, it is not clear if several years of lack of sleep could lastingly harm the body’s ability to restore a balance between the 2 hormones.

In another study, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health showed that children who did not have enough sleep faced a greater risk of becoming obese than those who got a good night's sleep.

By reviewing 17 published studies on sleep duration and childhood obesity, the researchers reported their findings in the journal Obesity that an extra hour of sleep at night could be crucial to cut excess weight and fight obesity.
Their analysis showed that each extra hour of sleep would cut a child’s risk of becoming overweight or obese by 9 percent. On the other hand, children who got the least amount of sleep were 92 percent more likely to become overweight or obese.
The findings clearly showed that there is association between sleep duration and children’s risk of being overweight or obese, and risk did decline with more sleep. The researchers recommended desirable sleep behavior could be used as an important low cost means to prevent childhood obesity and should be considered in future intervention studies.

While there is no general consent on the amount of sleep required by a child, most experts believe that children below 5 years old should sleep 11 hours or more a day and those age between 5 and 10 should have 10 or more hours of sleep. For children older than 10, at least 9 hours of sleep is required.
So in order to prevent obesity you should get yourself some more sleep!