Lack of Adequate Sleep Tied to Obesity, Research Suggests
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LONDON — The discovery is enough to make you lose sleep: Evidence is emerging of a link between a drop in the time society spends slumbering and the dramatic rise in obesity and associated diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
A flurry of worldwide research has established an intriguing connection between poor sleep and fat stomachs. This has a range of fascinating implications. Levels of obesity could be significantly cut by having a lie-in. Earlier bedtimes and later waking times could be an important, low-cost way to shrink waistlines. And children, in particular, could benefit.
One study featuring 18,000 adults participating in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey throughout the 1980s showed a surprisingly strong link between waistlines and snoozing. Those who got fewer than four hours of sleep a night were 73% more likely to be obese than those who got the recommended seven to nine hours. Those who averaged five hours had a 50% greater risk, while those who got six hours had a 23% greater risk.
“Maybe, there’s a window of opportunity for helping people sleep more, and maybe that would help their weight,” said Steven Heymsfield of Columbia University and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York, who did the work with James Gangwisch at Columbia. A subsequent study by the same team also linked lack of sleep with high blood pressure.
The implications for children were shown by a team at Northwestern University in Illinois, which studied 1,400 children aged between 3 and 12 over a five-year period. “Children who slept more weighed less and were less likely to be overweight five years later,” said team member Emily Snell.
This chimed with an analysis from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents And Children in the 1990s, which, after tracking 13,000 British children as they grew up, concluded that poor sleep at 30 months predicts obesity at the age of 7 years. “Earlier bedtimes, later wake times, and later school start times could be an important and relatively low-cost strategy to help reduce childhood weight problems. … We found even an hour of sleep makes a big difference.”
