Sleeping too little can make you fat! What is your ideal sleep amount?

If you want to lose weight, get rid of body fat, stay away from chronic diseases and regain your health, a good lifestyle is basic and necessary, which includes diet and nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress, and emotional management.

As far as sleep is concerned, modern people's lives are busy and tight, with endless things to do, overtime and late nights, social gatherings, use of mobile phones and computers, and improper time allocation. Sleep often becomes a victim, leading to lack of sleep. Don't think that this is just because you feel bad the next day and drinking a cup of coffee to refresh yourself will be fine. In the long run, this will affect your metabolism and drag down your health.

Scholars from the University of California, San Francisco analyzed sleep time and diet and found that people who sleep less than 6 hours consume significantly more sugary drinks than those who sleep 7-8 hours; if the sleep time is less than 5 hours, they drink more sugary drinks. These sugary drinks are mainly sugary and caffeinated drinks. Although such correlation cannot tell us the exact cause and effect relationship, is it caffeinated drinks that cause poor sleep? Or is it because of lack of sleep that you need to rely on sweet caffeinated drinks to wake up? However, many studies have shown that poor sleep can indeed affect endocrine system and appetite, thereby changing eating behavior and affecting body weight.

A systematic meta-analysis by European scholars showed that people who do not get enough sleep have a significantly increased total calorie intake. Another study found that if you extend your insufficient sleep time and sleep longer, not only will you feel better, your appetite will decrease, and your craving for sweets will also decrease.

In addition to the length of sleep, bedtime is equally important. For people with the same sleep duration of nearly seven hours, night owls (who go to bed close to midnight) have higher cholesterol, triglycerides, and inflammatory index (hs-CRP), higher body fat, and less muscle mass than early sleepers (who go to bed before 11pm). Overall, night owls have a higher risk of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and sarcopenia. This study was published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM).

Not only do adults lack sleep, but school children in Taiwan also often do not get enough sleep. A foreign study on fourth-grade and seventh-grade students found that those who slept less than 10 hours a day were significantly more likely to drink sugary drinks and eat less vegetables. Insufficient sleep during infancy and childhood also increases the risk of obesity and increased body fat in the future.

In short, sleep is very important for health, from children to adults, from birth to old age! So how long should we sleep? According to the recommendations of the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), the ideal sleep length recommended for different age groups is as shown in the figure above.

Re-examine your sleep quality immediately, and start getting a good night’s sleep from now on!

This article is from: Dr. Henry Wu's Health Notes

※For more information, please see "Dr. Henry Wu's Health Notes"