Slashdot Mirror
Sleep Less, Eat More?
Ant writes "A study, published Monday, found that people who sleep less tend to be fat, and experts said it's time to find if more sleep will fight obesity. Monday's study from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk covered 1,000 people and found that total sleep time decreased as body mass index -- a measure of weight based on height -- increased. Men slept an average of 27 minutes less than women and overweight and obese patients slept less than patients with normal weights, it said. In general the fatter subjects slept about 1.8 hours a week less than those with normal weights."
Ummm, yeah. I talked about this in my journal some time ago back in November. And yes, I used to run a sleep lab, so I feel validated in commenting on this from a medical perspective. At any rate, there were some serious problems with this study in terms of proper controls, including analysis of sleep disordered breathing (causing sleeplessness) that may in of itself be due to pre existing obesity. However, the simplest explanation could be the obvious one which the original poster commented on in the title and that John Harrison also got in a comment in my journal: Sleeping less means more time available for eating! Simple correlative studies are rarely terribly valuable, but on topics as important or as commonly dealt with including obesity, cancer and heart disease always get a fair bit of press.
Granted, studies with large numbers of people in them tend to be expensive and are the only way to detect small variances in the population, but I often think the money would be better spent on smaller, more thorough, better designed studies with more controls and experimental conditions.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
If you're interested in all things sleep, there's a new blog called Circadiana about that sort of stuff.
[o]_O
I didn't RTFA, but I want to get a quick soundbyte in anyhow.
Repeat after me:
Correlation =! Causation
Sank you!
There is no magic bullet for losing weight. The only thing that works is a life long commitment to excercise and a proper diet. Atkins will probably cut years of your life and any fat absorbsion reducing pill is just going to give you greasy shits and destroy liver.
Studies show this, this diet seems to be working that. Well, next year studies are going to show this and that are actually harmful.
Eat more veggies, eat no fast food and walk and take the stairs. That is the least you can do for yourselves. You should do a lot more.
Other studies provide evidence that there is a link between les sleep and increased calorie intake. I remember reading a summary of a couple of studies to this effect in the NYTimes. It was in the NYTimes Health section on 14 Dec 2004 (available now only through their archive $ervice). Google gave the the following from this site. It appears to be a similar writeup.
No author is given for the article.
Exercise is almost never bad for a person, and does help one fall asleep, but that's not the issue with sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea causes a person who's already sleeping to stop breathing (or have great difficulty), at which point the brain wakes the body up, and the body resumes breathing. This can happen dozens or more times a night.
So even if the victim is able to fall asleep five minutes after his head hits the pillow, he still can't get rest, because REM is constantly disrupted.
Erlang.org: wow