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Poor Sleep Alters Metabolism and Boosts Body's Ability To Store Fat, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The latest study provides new evidence that sleep deprivation has a direct influence on basic metabolism and the body's balance between fat and muscle mass. In the study, published in the journal Science Advances, 15 healthy volunteers each attended a testing session on two occasions, once after a normal night's sleep and once after staying up all night. During the visit, they gave samples of fat and muscle tissue and blood. After sleep deprivation, people's fat tissue showed changes in gene activity that are linked to cells increasing their tendency to absorb lipids and also to proliferate.
By contrast, in muscle the scientists saw reduced levels of structural proteins, which are the building blocks the body requires to maintain and build muscle mass. Previous epidemiological studies have also found shift workers and those who sleep less have lower muscle mass. This may be in part down to lifestyle factors, but the latest work shows that there are also fundamental biological mechanisms at play. The study also found an increase in inflammation in the body after sleep deprivation, which is a known risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
By contrast, in muscle the scientists saw reduced levels of structural proteins, which are the building blocks the body requires to maintain and build muscle mass. Previous epidemiological studies have also found shift workers and those who sleep less have lower muscle mass. This may be in part down to lifestyle factors, but the latest work shows that there are also fundamental biological mechanisms at play. The study also found an increase in inflammation in the body after sleep deprivation, which is a known risk factor for type 2 diabetes.
more and more we're finding that people's failings aren't their own. That a variety of physical ailments have broad, cascading effects on every aspect of human life. We figured out that underfed women give birth to babies with reduced mental capacity. That poverty and stress impact rational behavior and decision making. That people sleep less as they age due to hormonal changes and now that lack of sleep leads to weight gain (gut bacteria play a big role too).
/. is a science focused forum. And the science is pretty clear here. So are we going to start seeing a change of mind? And are we going to see folks acting on that?
As long as I've been alive one of the central narratives in my life has been that people who fail at life did so because they lack good moral character. It's been pretty well pounded into my skull. Sometimes overtly ( "Welfare Queens" and folks convinced panhandlers are making a kililng ) and sometimes less so ("You can be do anything if you put your mind to it!" and "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!").
Science is challenging that. There really are "born losers". Folks for whom nothing ever seems to go right because it doesn't. Moreover life really does kick you when you're down.
What I'm wondering is if we're going to change anything in response. I don't expect the public at large to. But, well,
I'm not so sure. Yeah, this is a science oriented forum, but it's also a forum with an aging population. And as people get older they get more conservative. Less emphatic. Funny that; I read somewhere science has found that the part of your brain associated with empathy atrophies in old age...
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No, you've never struggled with weight loss, and you lack even basic research on the topic (and you have a cognitive bias because anytime you find evidence to the contrary you give an excuse to ignore that evidence, without even investigation). Body processes aren't static: if you drop 300 calories from your diet your body will adjust (mainly noticed by having no energy and wanting to sleep a lot), and you won't actually lose weight. Is it *possible* to lose weight? Of course, but it's not easy , and the limiting factor is knowledge not "will power."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Calories eaten and absorbed minus calories burnt from exercise and resting metabolism will be stored as fat, sure. You might note that some parts of that sentence describe things not under voluntary control. I've italicized them for you in case your obvious mental deficit makes them hard for you to find.
You know there are literally drugs that will make people just drop weight off, right? Problem is they have a bunch of terrible side-effects. These things were sold, and then problems with them found, and lawsuits were had over all of that. If you can put a chemical into a fat person and that will make them thin (so long as you don't care about the other health issues it causes) there are obviously factors at play besides just gluttony and sloth.
Research like this is looking to what else, aside from those kinds of drugs, might affect those factors.
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Got any sources for those bold claims?
Why yes, I do.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co...
The NYT has a more readable summary with the key graphs: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
How about this, you stop using food as entertainment and find something else. Also, vanity works far better as a reason to lose than health.
If you really believe that people are fat because they use food as "entertainment" then it rather undermines your advice to them. Also, if vanity worked then obesity would be cured by the magazines in the doctor's waiting room. The constant bombardment of images of thin bodies and the promotion of that standard of beauty would have fixed the problem long ago.
Shaming and depression are discredited as weight loss methods. In fact they tend to have the opposite effect. Fortunately medical science knows that and is making progress towards real solutions.
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Calories eaten and absorbed minus calories burnt from exercise and resting metabolism will be stored as fat, sure.
Calories eaten is under everyones voluntary control. I'm not sure what your point is here.
His point is that the sentence is running for a bit longer than that.
Yes, "calories eaten", i.e.: things that you put into your mouth and chew on is more or less under voluntary control (though might be influenced by impulsive behaviours, etc.)
But then you don't necessarily control how much of what's in there will get absorbed by the body. (though you can slightly influence the body's ability to uptake stuff, by changing the mix of what you eat. e.g.: Food's content of fiber has an influence of how fast it goes through your gut).
You can voluntarily decide to burn some calories by doing exercice, but you don't have a direct control of how much the body will decide to burn for the rest.
Some might have indirect influence (doing lots of exercice on a regular basis, body will use more energy to make and maintain muscle mass, even while you rest), (your body burn calories to maintain temperature and you can influence that), but there are tons of other processes, where the body could decide to burn energy instead of storing it long term, on which you don't have lots of direct control.
That what the " {food eaten} - {calories burned} = {remaining fat} " crowd doesn't get.s
When you look into the details, there are gazillion of various energy consuming processes going inside a body, most of which will have some impact on body mass distribution type, but which you can't directly control necessarily.
Your basic mistake boils down to thinking of the body as a "bathtub" model : water (=food) goes in through the faucet (=eating), water (=burned calories) goes out through the drain (=exercice), the balance determine how much water there's in the tub (=fat storage).
It's a bit too oversimplified.
Something more realistic would be to imagine it as a conveyor belt. The belt rolls from your mouth (and the food on your plate) to the ass hole (and your toilet).
Along the way there are dozens of worker on station, sometime picking things up (absorbing), sometime putting things down (excreting) and most of the time passing stuff among each other.
Fat is just one guy making a pile of reservers, when instructed so (= include influence of tons of hormonal messages), and who can occasionally handle out packs or reserve whenever/if asked so by other guys working on the same chain.
Physical effort is just one of the client that might request reserves from the fat guy.
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