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'Social Jetlag' May Be Making You Fat
sciencehabit writes "A new study suggests that, by disrupting your body's normal rhythms, your alarm clock could be making you overweight. The study concerns a phenomenon called 'social jetlag.' That's the extent to which our natural sleep patterns are out of synch with our school or work schedules. When we wake up earlier than we're supposed to — or spend all weekend sleeping in and then get up at 6 am on Monday — it makes our body feel like it's spending the weekend in one time zone and the week in another. For people who are already on the heavy side, greater social jet lag corresponds to greater body weight."
From the article...
"...living 'against the clock' may be a factor contributing to the epidemic of obesity..."
You have to be kidding me. So they found a correlation? Yippie. I can find the correlation between number and pirates and global warming. Means nothing.
What's worse is that they don't even try to explain what's really going on here. Is it that metabolism is slower when things are out of order from circadian rhythm? Where are the citations for that suggestion? Is it actually a true case of causation with experimental evidence in biochemistry, or more regressions and "it looks this way, but we have no idea so here's a paper on it anyway" type of thing?
Or is it so much more simple? Maybe like... People are eating more calories than they burn?! No way! Common sense just can't come into play ever. Maybe people feel more hungry with less sleep! Oh goodness! Let's do a double regression on chronotypes and amount of sleep so that we can submit another paper and get more funding!