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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 lard butts sleep all day? Just saying. That's why you need double blind studies (no pun intended), correlation/causation, and all that.
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...
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.
M'You sse, even
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.
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!!!
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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.
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...
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.
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
Fat white women usually sleep with black men?
Change your curtains and venetian blinds to roller blinds.
...There's just no way that this holds up. Watch and see.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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"
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
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.
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?...
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.........
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?
"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!
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?