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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.
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/
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.
Yeah. Things seemed simple to me too when I didn't know anything.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
At best, correlation should lead to further investigation, not rushing to conclusions.
Not heavy...just "Big Boned"
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
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.
(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...
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
claim of correlation != claim of causation. The article and the researcher were pretty careful on that point.
"But there is not sufficient evidence to know if making your room darker would make any difference to your weight. "There might be other explanations for the association, but the findings are intriguing enough to warrant further scientific investigation."
Textbooks and Open Educational Resources
Blue LEDs correlate with evil.
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.
That's why the headline says "might" and the summary says "may" -- because they correlate strongly, but the causal link isn't proven.
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.
This article makes an overly simplistic suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight.
[Citation needed]
I read TFA and the the abstract to the actual study, and at no point do I see a "suggestion that sleeping in a darker room will magically help one shed weight."
To the contrary, from TFA: "[The researchers] caution there is not enough evidence to advise people to buy thicker curtains or turn off lights." AND "[T]here is not sufficient evidence to know if making your room darker would make any difference to your weight." AND " Dr Matthew Lam, from the charity, commented: 'It's too early to suggest that sleeping in the dark will help prevent obesity, a known risk factor for breast cancer, but the association is certainly interesting.' "
About the closest TFA comes to what you said is: "Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, from the Surrey Sleep Centre, said there would be no harm in trying to make bedrooms darker."
In other words, TFA includes at least THREE explicit disclaimers saying the exact opposite of what you said it suggested, and one suggestion that "Well, it probably wouldn't hurt..."
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.
Of course. But if you are better rested, for example, there's less chance that fatigue will live to poor judgment, stress, depression, etc., all of which are known to contribute to obesity. Sure, ultimately what you say is true, but that doesn't mean that changing some other environmental factor might not make it easier to make good food choices, count calories, exercise, etc.
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.
Well, if you actually read the linked abstract, you'd see there actually ARE animal studies suggesting precisely this in the second sentence: "In animal studies, there is convincing evidence that light exposure causes weight gain, even when calorie intake and physical activity are held constant."
So, this study is a human study suggesting something that has already been found in animal studies. As the researchers point out, they controlled for a lot of confounding factors, but there might be others -- nevertheless, as they say, it seems like enough evidence to justify further research.
As you say, "The causes of obesity are a multitude of factors" -- why do you insist on arguing so strenuously against the possibility that this might be one factor, even if a minor one?
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"
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.
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We are humbled before you.
As well you should be!
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Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
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Last week, I spent an hour eating left-over fried chicken right from the fridge and the light made me fat. It's true.
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.
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. -_-
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)
That causes Southern states to be fatter than the Northern states? Hmm.