A recent study suggests that reducing sleep time might lead to increased sedentary behavior and weight gain.
Published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the study reveals that participants who slept 90 minutes less each night over six weeks experienced more inactivity and gained weight.
The research involved 95 individuals who usually enjoyed seven to eight hours of sleep per night. After the six-week period of reduced sleep, participants gained an average of about a pound and increased their sedentary time by roughly 17 minutes daily. Men and postmenopausal women were notably more inactive, averaging 30 additional minutes of sitting each day.
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The link between sleep and weight, particularly obesity, has been established in previous research. Insufficient sleep is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and other health issues, while a sedentary lifestyle is also linked to chronic diseases. However, many earlier studies on sleep and weight were conducted in labs over short periods and involved drastic sleep reductions, such as limiting participants to four hours of sleep over three days.
Marie-Pierre St-Onge, the study’s senior author and a professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, explains that short sleep-restriction studies do not adequately reflect chronic behavior. She emphasizes that the six-week study, conducted outside the lab with more moderate sleep restrictions, better represents chronic mild sleep deprivation, a condition affecting about 30 percent of adults.
“It’s a more naturalistic experiment, it more closely aligns with what we see, and it provides a message that’s directly applicable to what people actually feel,” she says.
In related studies with the same participants, St-Onge and her team discovered that reduced sleep could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart issues in certain groups.
This study is significant because it demonstrates that insufficient sleep is linked to and causes weight gain, according to Jean-Philippe Chaput, a senior scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario who studies sleep health and obesity, although he was not involved in this research.
“It shows what we already know in a more robust study design,” Chaput says.
While a one-pound weight gain over six weeks might not appear substantial, Chaput warns it could become more significant if the same habits are maintained over a longer term.
St-Onge intends to explore future research on interventions and the benefits of sufficient sleep.
“It’s easy to say that if you restrict your sleep, you have bad health outcomes. But the goal in life is not to do something bad to see if it has bad outcomes,” she says. “The goal in life is to do something good and then determine if it has healthful outcomes. So I think we should do a lot more of that now that we know that short sleep is not good.”
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