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The Light Might Make You Heavy
Rambo Tribble writes: "Writing in the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers have found that sleeping with high ambient light levels may contribute to obesity (abstract). In a survey of 113,000 women, a high correlation was found between higher bedroom light levels and increased propensity to be overweight or obese. Excess light in the sleeping environment has long been known to adversely affect melatonin production and circadian rhythms. It is posited that such an interference with the 'body clock' may be behind these results. Although there is not yet enough evidence to call this a smoking gun, as one researcher put it, 'Overall this study points to the importance of darkness.'"
Anakin Skywalker spent a lot of time with the dark side and look how much body mass he was able to lose.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
The most obvious correlation to me would be......If you don't get a good night's sleep, then you are less likely to exercise during the day.
Or is it just that obese and other fat people are too lazy to turn it off? (the more physical effort that is required the more likely you are too leave it on)
A darkened room doesn't seem to help much either. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Sixty-or-so years ago the Vegetable Oil industry told us that butter was giving us heart attacks, that we should avoid as much fat as possible, and that if we had to use fat in our cooking, polyunsaturated vegetable oil was far superior to the saturated fats.
Recently an article was published in one of those medical journals, waving the white flag of surrender in the war against butter, but it's going to take a generation or two before the product liability lawsuits against Big Food will get anywhere.
http://www.swindledandpimped.o... - The seed oil scam is the swindle...
or you cant sleep because theres a 1000 lumen bulb right outside your window, so wake up and eat in the middle of the night.
Then the HOA outlaws dark curtains to block it
There should be laws preventing all this outdoor lighting, it really pisses me off and hurts my quality of life
http://xkcd.com/552/
Double-blind? Not possible.
With a double-blind student both the patient and the researcher don't know who is getting the test treatment and who is getting a placebo.
Most people are able to tell if the lights are on in their bedroom.
It could be that people who are heavier have more light so that they reduce the risk of falling and injury.
It could be that people who are worriers which causes them to eat more as a result and then want to protect from injury.
I can come up with about 3 more, which are less compelling/harder to prove.
Interesting nonetheless.
It doesn't work, but I do get a better sleep. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
No, the router does not need to pump 20mA through five blue ultrabrights. I do not need a blinking blue LED to tell me that the monitor is in standby mode. Dim those motherfuckers or, even better, give me an option to turn them off completely.
Now there is an other possibility.
People who are in poverty tend to live in Cities, and often get the bedrooms which are directly under the light.
Now people in poverty often do not buy healthy food, and because they are stressed from poverty, my not try to eat well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This debate reminds me of the gun control debate - people find all kinds of reasons to avoid the real issue. If you remove guns there is no more shootings. Same goes here - there is all kinds of research why people are fat. You do not need much research - food intake/exercise combination makes you fat or thin. Genetic also plays some role but not as much as exercise. Instead of getting off the couch and walking a mile, people looking for some magic bullet. Unless we admit what the problem is there will be no solution. And of course it is easier to blame all kinds of external causes than to admit that one eats too much and moves too little.
The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors. This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight. As someone that has lost over a hundred pounds, I'll tell you this: it is making good food choices, counting calories, and getting physical activity. Certainly adequate rest is helpful but there is no credible study to suggest that someone that is doing these things yet doesn't get enough sleep is obese.
Oh, the world owes me a living.
Deedle deedle didle diddle doh
Oh, the world owes me a living.
Deedle deedle didle diddle doh
If I worked hard all day I might
Sleep better when in bed at night
I sleep all day, so that's all right
Deedle deedle didle diddle doh
Not heavy...just "Big Boned"
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Correlation == Causation?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
or you cant sleep because theres a 1000 lumen bulb right outside your window, so wake up and eat in the middle of the night.
Then the HOA outlaws dark curtains to block it
There should be laws preventing all this outdoor lighting, it really pisses me off and hurts my quality of life
Double layer the curtains; light on the outside and dark on the inside. Like, duh.
Depends on your chemistry. I have the opposite problem. Sleeping in a dark room causes me to sleep too deeply/long, thereby triggering bouts of nighttime depression. Instead, I keep light curtains and play ambient music so I'm on the edge of lighter sleep. Occasionally I pull a dark pillow over my head when trying to get to sleep. But I'm athletic so I don't have obesity issues to begin with.
Yes, because a lack of sleep is the #1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right.
Give me a break.
Yeah, because it has to be the #1 reason for there to be a correlation.
Give ME a break.
Well, its hard to eat in bed without being able to see your food.
(big boned that is... ha! I kill me!)
How much is too much light?!
I've got a green LED clock and a TV with a red LED that's on when it's off. Once my eyes adjust I can see most of my bedroom FINE... especially when the moon is out and shining through my blinds...
So... the moon makes me fat?!
Or is this along the same kind of logic that because it weighs as much as a duck it's a witch...
Blue LEDs correlate with evil.
I agree, and am just glad that I have something else to blame my obesity on.
In the past 10 years there's been an obesity increase in the major Chinese cities. Industrialization of sugar and high calorie foods combined with a sedentary employment will do that.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yes, because a lack of sleep is the #1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right.
Give me a break.
Maybe it's not the #1 reason, but why couldn't it be a significant reason that we might consider?
People who don't sleep enough or don't get enough "restful" sleep often have all sorts of problems -- increased stress, difficulty in learning and retaining information, impaired judgment -- and it's correlated with all sorts of things from depression to various chronic health problems. If the lack of sleep itself can't lead to obesity, surely some set of these factors (some of which are known to correlate with obesity, like stress and depression) can contribute to it.
Next up, the new diet craze for lazy people. Blackout blinds.
I get you don't think this is useful, but why do you have to make stupid remarks? Obviously obesity rates have been rising significantly in the past few decades. There are a number of fairly obvious likely causes for this trend, but there may be many minor ones that have changed in recent decades that could be contributing -- like, for example, the amount of "light pollution" these days, which probably contributes to ambient light in bedrooms (along with decreased numbers of people in rural areas where light pollution is scarce), coupled with increased tendencies to leave various electronic devices on all the time.
Who cares if it's the "#1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right"? If it's in the top 20, it can probably be helpful to know it, and for some people, it could actually be leading to other health problems, including obesity.
I know there's this common assumption that diet and exercise is only about willpower, but the reality of life is that there are all sorts of psychological and physical factors which can make it easier or harder to pursue healthy habits. And being exhausted a lot of the time is not generally conducive to such habits. Obviously for many people blackout blinds are not the magic ticket to a thin body -- but combined with some other things, better rest could make it easier for some people to live in a more healthy manner.
This seems like a confusion of symptom and actual cause, when the root issue may be simply a lack of good sleep (for whatever reason).
Our eyelids are not opaque, they definitely allow ambient light levels through. This would imply that perhaps sleeping with high ambient light, it's just harder to get good solid rest.
I guess you could test this by checking brainwaves of people sleeping in the dark, and sleeping with bright lights on, and seeing if there's a difference in the 'depth' of sleep they reach.
-Styopa
Nonsense, there are lots of ways of countering the snarky objections of me and a few other folks around here by creatively applying "double blind" techniques. In the case of the test subjects, the light could just be turned on when ambient sensors detected that they were asleep (pulse and breathing monitors). Have a computer randomize subjects to light regimens, so the researchers can't consciously or unconsciously assign the perky people one place and the laggers another. See? Double blind.
Also many heavy people have un-diagnosed sleep apnea, which makes it even harder/impossible to get proper restful sleep.
Change your curtains and venetian blinds to roller blinds.
...There's just no way that this holds up. Watch and see.
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Perhaps larger people are more likely to sleep with a large TV on in their bedroom?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
There should be laws preventing fucking subwoofers and modified mufflers.
Two years ago i slept with the lights on all the time and was 175 lbs. (79 kg or 12.5 stones for you metric types ;)
Then i got a new girlfriend, who prefers to sleep with the lights off. Since then i've gained 25 lbs.
Yeah yeah, correlation is not causation, and anecdote is not evidence. And in this case the difference in weight is presumably due to going out to dinner with her more and going out to exercise by myself less. (I'm working on trying to change that now, but progress is slow =P)
But in my individual case either having the lights on was not helping me at all, or if i'd been sleeping with the lights off at my previous level of food intake and activity i would have ended up looking like a stick.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Hey, what happens in the bedroom between a consenting adult and a tailpipe is no one's business.
This breakthrough finding also explains why photography adds 10 pounds to its subjects. Flash photography, probably even more.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
less likely
It may not be the #1 reason, but it can be a reason for a lot of people and a good correlation between sleep and obesity as well by OP.
However, this is like the recent diet soda makes you lose weight study: Sure, but there's a lot more factors most of which are more important to losing weight.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You cannot sleep all day - unless you have been up all night - which is the point of this study and quite a few others, I might add.
You know, if I looked closely at your life, I would - without a doubt - find self defeating things that YOU do.
I don't care if you are Amish - that would be hard, but I am sure I would find something.
If we would stop bitching at one another and just say, "Dude! When I went to bed at 10 and stopped staying up all night playing video games, my life improved!" - I think things would improve.
And ask to give feedback because just giving it sounds patronizing.
Last week, I spent an hour eating left-over fried chicken right from the fridge and the light made me fat. It's true.
The lights are on to see the snacks they fall asleep eating.
Until an actual mechanism is shown for light causing obesity, I'm not giving up my blue canary in the outlet by the light switch!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
That might help explain why there is an ongoing cross-species obesity epidemic.
http://science-beta.slashdot.o...
Interestingly, photons hitting you can make you weigh (an itsy-bitsy bit) more due to "solar pressure" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
adjustment for potential confounders such as sleep duration, alcohol intake, physical activity, and current smoking
Well, it can affect things.
For one, about the only time good for me to hit the gym and exercise is EARLY in the morning. If I don't sleep well that night, I can't get up and work out and then to work on only 4 hours sleep. If I sleep 4 hours, and wake up, toss and turn till 6amâ¦I don't feel like hitting the gym and will try to crash till 7:30 or so to get a bit more sleep before having to get up and run to work. If I get a full 7 hours of sleep in a row, I wake up early, refreshed and ready to hit the gym and then start my work day from there.
That's just scheduling, but the body has been show more and more to react very badly if not properly rested each night with sleep.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I do best, falling asleep to the TV being on. I used to have a regular tv that had a timer, which would turn itself off and cut the ambient light.
Now, I have a 27" computer monitor which is my "TV", and it doesn't have a built in timerâ¦so, it stays on all night, even when the DVR cuts off on Uverse, it has a blue screensaver light which I think affects me.
I guess I need to find a wall timer and hook it to the monitor and try that.
But I just don't do well in 100% quiet environments, even in school, if the room was quiet and no tv or stereo, I would start fidgeting, and goofing off, but with tv or stereo on in background I'd study for hours and all of a sudden, notice that hours had passed and I didn't realize what had played or what tv shows had been on.
Strange.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And a person will eat more just to try to alleviate the detriments of insomnia.
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Although there is not yet enough evidence to call this a smoking gun
Yeeeeeeeah, that smoking gun is something called potential chemical energy. It was discovered at least 100 years ago, maybe more. It states that complex molecules can be broken down and release energy when they do so. That energy can be measures in calories. All mass takes energy to stop and start movement so if your body's atoms take less energy to move as a grand total than the potential chemical energy you eat, you will gain weight. It's called thermodynamics.
In other words, stop eating more energy than you use and you won't gain weight! OMG that's the smoking gun!!!
It's like I always tell people: yes eating before you sleep is more likely to turn the food into fat and yes fiber will reduce fat production and yes sugar can turn into fat easier than protein BUT everything aside, if you consistently take in less energy than you use, you will lose weight. That is the laws of physics. You will violate the laws of physics if that does not happen. Remember, humans cannot absorb wind power, solar energy, etc.
Whenever I hear this I think to myself...
What about our ancestors sleeping around a fire? Didn't that put out light?
Without artificial lights from our cities today, star light and moon light is actually very bright. Did that affect our ancestors?
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
A similar connection has been found between light pollution and sex hormone related, breast and prostate, cancers.
It was first suspected after a correlation was found between nurses working night shift and their incidence of breast cancer.
If I don't leave the lights on when I go to bed, how will I see my way to the refrigerator at 3:00 am?
Or living in a light-polluted environment is correlated with poverty, and poverty is a predictor of obesity due to the kids of food you access when poor.
"a high correlation was found between higher bedroom light levels and increased propensity to be overweight or obese" - correlation.
"The Light Might Make You Heavy" - causation.
Dammit guys. -_-
Nice try, monsters-under-my-bed, but the night light stays!
Next up, the new diet craze for lazy people. Blackout blinds.
I get you don't think this is useful, but why do you have to make stupid remarks? Obviously obesity rates have been rising significantly in the past few decades. There are a number of fairly obvious likely causes for this trend, but there may be many minor ones that have changed in recent decades that could be contributing -- like, for example, the amount of "light pollution" these days, which probably contributes to ambient light in bedrooms (along with decreased numbers of people in rural areas where light pollution is scarce), coupled with increased tendencies to leave various electronic devices on all the time.
Who cares if it's the "#1 reason why people don't exercise and eat right"? If it's in the top 20, it can probably be helpful to know it, and for some people, it could actually be leading to other health problems, including obesity.
I know there's this common assumption that diet and exercise is only about willpower, but the reality of life is that there are all sorts of psychological and physical factors which can make it easier or harder to pursue healthy habits. And being exhausted a lot of the time is not generally conducive to such habits. Obviously for many people blackout blinds are not the magic ticket to a thin body -- but combined with some other things, better rest could make it easier for some people to live in a more healthy manner.
You and the moderators are being too hard on the GP. It's disappointing to see posts marked as flamebait just because they are not written daintily enough.
The GP is saying that we need to stop looking for weak feel-good correlations and start dealing with the major factors! If you eat 2500 calories a day and only burn 1500 then you are eventually going to be obese.
It's commonly accepted that the cheap availability of high-calorie, empty-calorie diets is the major contributor to the obesity epidemic. I mean, come on, you can buy a 44oz drink that contains 1/3 of your recommended calorie intake for for under $2.
Couple that with lower exertion rate due to the loss of manual labor jobs (from the UK) to other countries and the time wasted noodling around on electronic media and it isn't hard to see why people are getting fat.
Maybe fat people just like a brighter bedroom since they are generally less nimble and don't want to trip on things when they get up to go the bathroom.
The odds of obesity, measured using body mass index, waist:hip ratio, waist:height ratio, and waist circumference, increased with increasing levels of LAN exposure (P even after adjustment for potential confounders such as sleep duration, alcohol intake, physical activity, and current smoking. We found a significant association between LAN exposure and obesity which was not explained by potential confounders we could measure.
So there's the various factors they accounted for in their calculation. If you want more "correlation/causation and all that", the data used was from the Breakthrough Generations Study. Feel free to apply for the study data and perform any extra analysis that you feel might be required.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
This just proves that nature has been a step ahead of us for decades. Nature makes you gain weight (create matter) when you're exposed to light! (I admit it's a bit of a stretch, but... :D)
Your comment is, imho, right on the money. This is precisely the reason that poor people often don't have any hope or chance to work themselves out of it. Sure, it happens to some, but for most it really is the agonizing grind you describe.
That causes Southern states to be fatter than the Northern states? Hmm.
With the room that dark how will I see the 2 big bowls of cereal I eat every night right before bed?
Have you ever seen a fat vampire, or an obese zombie, (morbid maybe), look at all those cherubim who live in the light,... you may have a point.
I bet most of these people's bedrooms are lit up because they have the television on. What does it tell you that somebody has a TV on in their bedroom? It means they lie in bed and watch television. Do these sound like the fittest people in the world? The kind of lie in bed watching TV?