Missing out on adequate sleep may bloat your waistline, researchers have warned.
According to the findings of a new study, sleep-deprived people are more likely to be fat, with larger waistlines, as compared to individuals who get a comfortable night sleep.
The researchers compiled the results of 11 studies including 172 participants.
Researchers from the Diabetes & Nutritional Sciences division at King’s College London and Vrije University in Amsterdam found that sleep deprived participants consumed on average 385 more calories a day than their counterparts who slept well.
As sleep deprived people feel lazy and stressed out the whole day, they don’t have significant ways to burn the additional calories, researchers said. Thus, they ended up with a net gain of 385 calories a day.
The findings of the study appear in the November 2 issue of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“The main cause of obesity is an imbalance between calorie intake and expenditure and this study adds to accumulating evidence that sleep deprivation could contribute to this imbalance. So there may be some truth in the saying ‘early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy and wise,’” said senior study author Gerda Pot.
Cases where sleep deprivation lasts long-term, people tend to gain an extra 385 calories a day.
“Reduced sleep is one of the most common and potentially modifiable health risks in today’s society in which chronic sleep loss is becoming more common. More research is needed to investigate the importance of long-term, partial sleep deprivation as a risk factor for obesity and whether sleep extension could play a role in obesity prevention,” Pot concluded.
