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."

Comments

The obvious?

[BWJones]

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.