Can too little sleep make you gain weight?

People who got very little sleep ate more but didn't burn any extra calories in a new study that adds to evidence supporting a link between sleep deprivation and weight gain.

Although the findings don't prove that sleeplessness causes people to pack on extra pounds, or exactly how the relationship between sleep and body weight might work, they do show that "sleep should be a priority," said Michael Grandner, who studies sleep and sleep disorders at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"If you're making your diet a priority and trying to be healthy, don't forget that getting healthy sleep is probably an extremely important part of being healthy," Grandner, who was not involved in the new work, told Reuters Health.

Previous studies have tested the link between sleep and diet and weight in multiple ways, Grandner explained. Some surveyed large populations of people with questions about their sleeping and eating habits and tracked their future health conditions. Others, including the new report, looked at a smaller group of people very closely, manipulating their sleep schedule and observing how their food cravings and appetite responded.

Both kinds of research have generally supported the idea that less sleep is associated with more extra weight.

One recent study in Sweden found, for example, that young men who were sleep-deprived ate about the same amount of food as usual, but burned between 5 and 20 per cent fewer calories than when they were well-rested.

Approximately 50 to 70 million Americans -- including a significant number of shift workers -- suffer from chronic sleep loss and sleep disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health.

For the current study, Marie-Pierre St-Onge of the New York Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital and colleagues recruited thirty men and women in their 30's and 40's, all of roughly normal weight. The participants lived and slept in a research center during two different five-night periods.

During one of those visits, they were allowed to sleep for nine hours each night. During the other, participants were only permitted four hours of shut-eye. Both times, they were fed a strict diet for the first four days of their stay and then were allowed to eat whatever they wanted on the fifth and final full day.

Researchers tracked how much energy they burned on a daily basis, and also asked participants how energetic they felt.

The tests showed that regardless of which sleep schedule they were on, people burned a similar amount of calories -- about 2,600 per day.

But when they were sleep-deprived, they fed themselves about 300 more calories on average on the final day of the study compared to when they had been sleeping normally. Well-rested participants ate an average of 2,800 calories that day, compared to 2,500 when they were running on less sleep.

If that kept up in a person's normal daily life, it would put the sleep-deprived at higher risk of obesity, the authors write in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Participants also said they felt more sluggish and less energetic after a few days on the short sleep schedule.

People with eating disorders likely to die earlier, study shows

Photograph by: Thinkstock, canada.com

Anorexia increases a patient's risk of death fivefold, and people with bulimia or another nonspecified eating disorder also face an increased risk of death -- about twice as likely to die as people without those disorders, a study said.

The cause of deaths wasn't always clear, but among anorexics who died, one in five was a suicide. The other deaths were attributed to the eating disorders' brutal effects on the body over time, researchers wrote in Archives of General Psychiatry.

"Of course, eating disorders have serious physical consequences," said lead author Jon Arcelus, of Loughborough University in the UK.

"The study could not identify how people died, but there is no doubt that the reasons behind this are related to the physical problems of the illness," he told Reuters Health in an email.

His group carried out a meta-analysis of 36 studies published between 1966 and 2010, which included 17,000 people with an eating disorder, of whom 755 died.

Their analysis showed that five of every 1,000 people with anorexia died each year, which was five times greater than would be expected for comparable people in the general population without an eating disorder.

Among those with bulimia or other eating disorders, the death rate was twice as high as expected compared to those without an eating disorder.

One reason for the results is that people with anorexia nervosa have both psychiatric and medical problems, but most facilities that treat anorexia focus only on the psychiatric problems, said Laird Birmingham, medical director of the Woodstone Residence, a residential facility for people with eating disorders on Galliano Island in British Columbia.

He noted that most people with anorexia also suffer from depression, anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder.

"Almost all centers only treat (the) anorexia, not the other disorder. Unless both are treated, they won't get better," he told Reuters Health.

The higher risk of death among those with anorexia reflected the more serious consequences of the disease, he added.

"They are very malnourished. That isn't the case with the other disorders," he said.

Arcelus and his colleagues wrote that the results highlighted the seriousness of eating disorders, noting that people who are diagnosed with anorexia later in life, those who are already severely underweight when diagnoses and those who also abuse alcohol seem to be at the greatest risk of dying.

"This sort of study reminds people that a significant percentage of people die of this disorder," Birmingham said.





SOURCE: Archives of General Psychiatry