Nothing beats a good night’s sleep. Without it, you can feel tired, irritable and even depressed, but a new study has shown that getting insufficient sleep doesn’t just affect your energy levels and emotional wellbeing, but also your food choices.
According to the study’s researchers, as an adult, if you increase the amount of sleep you get, you could better look after your wellness during the day because the right amounts of sleep could mean that you reduce the amount of food you consume. The team of experts also found that this health concern is gender-dependent, as short sleep affects your hunger differently depending on if you’re a man or a woman.
The study’s principal investigator, Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, FAHA, said, ‘Restricting sleep in healthy, normal weight participants has limited effects on metabolic risk factors and may affect food intake regulating hormones differently in men and women.’ She also commented that, ‘We were surprised by the lack of a significant effect of sleep on glucose and insulin, leptin, and sex differences in the hunger-stimulating hormone ghrelin and the satiety hormone GLP-1.’
For the study, which was published in the journal SLEEP, 27 normal weight men and women, aged 30 to 45, provided fasting blood draws, and were studied under two sleep conditions: short (four hours) or habitual (nine hours). The researchers tracked the participants sleep duration, glucose dysregulation, and hormonal regulation of appetite, and the results were that short sleep increased total ghrelin levels in men but not in women, and it reduced GLP-1 levels in women but not in men.
This a sex difference, which has not been reported before, suggests that if you’re a man, you are more susceptible to overeat during short sleep if you have an increased appetite, whereas it is more related to reduced feelings of fullness in women. St-Onge explained, ‘our results point to the complexity of the relationship between sleep duration and energy balance regulation. The state of energy balance, whether someone is in a period of weight loss or weight gain, may be critical in the metabolic and hormonal responses to sleep restriction.’
So far, this is the largest controlled clinical investigation of the effects of sleep reduction on hormonal regulation of food intake that there has ever been. The researchers concluded by saying that their results support a causal role of sleep duration on energy intake and weight control.
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