February 23, 2009 • 10 mins
When sleep eludes you, are you more prone to put on pounds? Science says yes. Explore the link between sleep and obesity in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop Mom never told you?
From housetop works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. How are you feeling today?
(00:22):
We're recording on Monday. Are you well rested from the weekend?
You know, I'm I'm I could probably have a few
more hours to sleep in me. I tend to get
a little off off my schedule on the weekends. Do
you think you sleep more or just just at different times.
I think so that you know, by Sunday night, I'm
not quite ready to go to bed at my normal time.
I hear you. I had similar problem last night, and
(00:44):
that's why on my way home from work today, I
am going to pick up a sleep mass fancy I
decided to do it. I just I wake up too
many times in the middle of the night, and um,
I just I need I need a full eight hours
of sleep uninterrupted. It's affecting your health. I just feel
sluggish during the day. You know. Mom always told me
to get my get my beauty sleep. I don't like
(01:05):
waking up and having, you know, puffy eyes. And I've
noticed that there's a week when I don't get enough sleep.
My skin's not as good, I don't have as much focus.
So I think that it definitely affects me. Well, Kristen,
can I ask you something of a personal question? Sure?
Do you find that those weeks so when you don't
get enough sleep, you might feel a little chubbier, might
(01:26):
gain a pound or two. I think I eat worse
than I normally would if there's a week when I'm
not uh, when I'm not sleeping as much, because I'm
probably just eating out of stress. Well, there actually it
might be a link between a bad night's sleep and
wake gain. That's right. There's been a lot of research
recently linking obesity and lack of sleep. And there was
(01:50):
a study of nine thousand people between nine two and
nine eight four that found that people who average six
hours of sleep per night or and more likely to
be overweight than people who got seven to nine hours
of sleep and okay, more likely. That's that's pretty big.
But Molly checked this out. People in the same study
(02:11):
who are only sleeping five hours a night or more
likely to be overweight. I know that's pretty pretty frightening
because I think there are definitely a few nights where
I clock in at five hours, and sometimes you try
and say, oh, I only need six hours. I'm really
more of a ten hour sleeper. But there's really not
as much um leeway as we might think. Basically, researchers
(02:32):
are saying that you need seven hours as a minimum,
except you know, for babies and the elderly, right seven
to nine hours of sleep. And I know that it's
a rare week when I when I hit that number
every single night. Well, you might be hitting new numbers
on the scale if you don't start hitting your sleep number.
And let me tell you why what Because it misses
with your hormone. Of course, I'll goes back to hormones.
(02:54):
All goes back to hormones, but in this case, these
are hormones that affect both males and females. The hormones
we're talking about are called lepton and greenland, and leptin
is the hormone that triggers our body to turn off
our appetites. Let's if we're eating a big meal. Um,
it kicks in once our stomachs are full and we
(03:15):
need to put our fork down. So when we go
to sleep, it's really convenient that ore leptin levels rise
so that we don't wake up in the middle of
the night starving. Exactly. So if you've have like a
late night and you end up at a place like
waffle House or I hop in, might because you're not asleeping,
don't have enough lectin to shut that off. So basically,
when you're sleep deprived, you have two little lepton So
basically your brain is never getting the message that you're full.
(03:37):
You don't have any energy, so you just keep eating
and eating and eating mindless snacking, mindless snacking. And then
at the same time, there's another hormone related to eating
called greenland, and this is basically the hunger hormone. This
signals your body that you need to eat more food
because you don't have enough energy to fulfill your your
physical needs, right, and so when you're sleep deprived, you
(03:58):
have too much of this. So basically left in and greenland,
when they're working right, are sort of like the checks
and balances system from your appetite. Exactly, one is telling
you that you're fall and then one will kick start
and be like, oh, you know what we need to
do soon, right, so if you're not getting enough sleep,
that means that your greenland levels are going to be higher,
which means you're going to be abnormally hungry. And not
(04:19):
only that, it triggers your body to sore. Energy is
fat instead of burning it. And you know Kristen, sleep
deprivation has also been found to increase levels of certain
stress hormones and it might create insolent resistance in people, right,
and that could lead to weight weighting and also type
two diabetes. Now, the reason why this is a particular
(04:42):
problem for women is because women statistically are twice as
likely to report sleep problems as men. Insomnia is the
number one sleep problem that that women experience, according to
the National Sleep Foundation UM and while sixty of women
report insomnia, only of men do the same thing. Right,
And the same study from the National Sleep Foundation, more
(05:03):
than half of American women say they get a good
night's sleep only a few nights per week. So I
mean that's half the week where you might be at
risk for these higher higher levels of lepton and lower
levels of greenland. And one thing that I found most
interesting about these statistics dealing with with specifically with women
who have sleep problems was the number one category of
women who were having trouble sleeping or stay at home moms. Yeah,
(05:26):
it's pretty interesting. So this Christian leads me to ask,
is sleep the new diet? Do you have to exercise?
Do you have to eat right? Can you just sleep
more and keep your appetite and check? I don't think
that we can ever deny Molly that healthy diet and
exercise is going to be important for being healthy. But
a number of studies have also found that, um, if
(05:48):
you aren't sleeping enough at the same time, the health
benefits of exercise and good proper eating are basically going
to cancel each other out. For instance, there was a
recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science that found that slim, healthy adults whom were deprived
(06:09):
of slow wave sleep for only three nights built up
the same level of insulin resistance as someone who gained
twenty to thirty pounds. So it seems pretty apparent to
me that we need to focus a lot on how
much sleep we're getting. Well Kristen to play Devil's advocate,
I have found some research that says it might be
(06:31):
um a little the connection might be a little bit
more tenuous than all this previous research is shown, because
remember how you're talking how you wake up a lot
in the night. It turns out it's a lot about
the quality of sleep you're getting. So when people started
figuring out that there was a connection between sleep and obesity,
they started to look at sleep problems people had, and
a lot of people have sleep apnea, which is when
(06:52):
they stop breathing while they sleep, and that's can happen
like hundreds of times and night, which means that if
you're getting eight hours of sleep, it only feels like
four because you can't get into the deep levels of sleep,
so you're still experiencing that slow wave sleep deprivation that
that was reflected in that study that I just talked about,
probably exactly. But do you know what they found in
terms of leptin and those people. You know how we
(07:13):
were talking about how most people who are superprived to
have two little leftin right and lefton is the appetite
suppressing hormone, right, But people who have sleep apne i
have really high levels of leptin, which was really contrary
to what they thought they were going to find. So
what does that mean. It means that leptin maybe more
of an individual saying than than than we might be thinking.
It can't be just you know, a one size fits
(07:34):
all left in uh solution. Okay, well, um, I will
back that up with UM studies that have also exploring
kind of the gender differences in sleep, looking at why
women have more sleep problems than men. In addition to
we've got these different levels of lefton and greenland hormones,
but also UM scientists think that it might be related
(07:57):
to levels of trip to fans there atnin and melotonin
um in women and men that could be leading women
to to not have his RESTful sleep. Oh, Kristen, why
does it always come back to hormones? Always hormones? So
I think what we're dealing here with, Kristen, is a
lot of interesting studies that show us that there's this
connection between sleep and OBC and it couldn't hurt to
(08:20):
get more sleep, right, But we also can't give up
yet our gym memberships or our diet exactly. So that
leads us to, Molly, how do we get more sleep?
How when I turn my light out and put my
new sleep mask on, how am I not going to
wake up? Like eight times in the middle of the night.
Do you exercise before you go to sleep. I am
(08:42):
a night exerciser. I trying to exercise in the morning
and I cannot do it. We'll just make sure you
finish that work up work out before about three hours
afore that time. Well, one thing that I've also been
trying to do that's supposed to help with sleeping is
not spending as much time in bed before I'm actually
ready to go to sleep, because I like to just
lounge around read some for like an hour or so
(09:04):
before going to bed, and supposedly that it is actually
making it harder for me to go to sleep. Yeah,
I hear. You've got to like build this relationship with
your bed where sleep is only gonna happens in. And
the good news is that for normal people who are
getting the right amount of sleep, it takes about fifteen
minutes to actually fall asleep. So if you're if you're
hitting the pillow and you're not immediately nodding off, that's
(09:26):
actually a good sign, right, But if it takes you
more than say half an hour or an hour to
fall asleep, you need to get up and do something.
If you keep tossing and turning in bed. It's actually
going to kind of create a negative relationship with your
bed and build up anxiety around falling asleep. So it's
going to create a negative feedback cycle and you're really
not going to be able to have a RESTful night's sleep.
(09:49):
So Molly, what I recommend if you are a restless
sleeper you need to get up and and and do
some things before you fall asleep. You could just go
go out your laptop, put your PC and just go
to how stuff works dot com and read read some
more articles about sleep and hunger and obesity and anything
else that might satisfy your needs. So there's our advice
(10:14):
from Dr Kristen. Head on over to how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop Mom never told you?
From housetop works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. How are you feeling today?
(00:22):
We're recording on Monday. Are you well rested from the weekend?
You know, I'm I'm I could probably have a few
more hours to sleep in me. I tend to get
a little off off my schedule on the weekends. Do
you think you sleep more or just just at different times.
I think so that you know, by Sunday night, I'm
not quite ready to go to bed at my normal time.
I hear you. I had similar problem last night, and
(00:44):
that's why on my way home from work today, I
am going to pick up a sleep mass fancy I
decided to do it. I just I wake up too
many times in the middle of the night, and um,
I just I need I need a full eight hours
of sleep uninterrupted. It's affecting your health. I just feel
sluggish during the day. You know. Mom always told me
to get my get my beauty sleep. I don't like
(01:05):
waking up and having, you know, puffy eyes. And I've
noticed that there's a week when I don't get enough sleep.
My skin's not as good, I don't have as much focus.
So I think that it definitely affects me. Well, Kristen,
can I ask you something of a personal question? Sure?
Do you find that those weeks so when you don't
get enough sleep, you might feel a little chubbier, might
(01:26):
gain a pound or two. I think I eat worse
than I normally would if there's a week when I'm
not uh, when I'm not sleeping as much, because I'm
probably just eating out of stress. Well, there actually it
might be a link between a bad night's sleep and
wake gain. That's right. There's been a lot of research
recently linking obesity and lack of sleep. And there was
(01:50):
a study of nine thousand people between nine two and
nine eight four that found that people who average six
hours of sleep per night or and more likely to
be overweight than people who got seven to nine hours
of sleep and okay, more likely. That's that's pretty big.
But Molly checked this out. People in the same study
(02:11):
who are only sleeping five hours a night or more
likely to be overweight. I know that's pretty pretty frightening
because I think there are definitely a few nights where
I clock in at five hours, and sometimes you try
and say, oh, I only need six hours. I'm really
more of a ten hour sleeper. But there's really not
as much um leeway as we might think. Basically, researchers
(02:32):
are saying that you need seven hours as a minimum,
except you know, for babies and the elderly, right seven
to nine hours of sleep. And I know that it's
a rare week when I when I hit that number
every single night. Well, you might be hitting new numbers
on the scale if you don't start hitting your sleep number.
And let me tell you why what Because it misses
with your hormone. Of course, I'll goes back to hormones.
(02:54):
All goes back to hormones, but in this case, these
are hormones that affect both males and females. The hormones
we're talking about are called lepton and greenland, and leptin
is the hormone that triggers our body to turn off
our appetites. Let's if we're eating a big meal. Um,
it kicks in once our stomachs are full and we
(03:15):
need to put our fork down. So when we go
to sleep, it's really convenient that ore leptin levels rise
so that we don't wake up in the middle of
the night starving. Exactly. So if you've have like a
late night and you end up at a place like
waffle House or I hop in, might because you're not asleeping,
don't have enough lectin to shut that off. So basically,
when you're sleep deprived, you have two little lepton So
basically your brain is never getting the message that you're full.
(03:37):
You don't have any energy, so you just keep eating
and eating and eating mindless snacking, mindless snacking. And then
at the same time, there's another hormone related to eating
called greenland, and this is basically the hunger hormone. This
signals your body that you need to eat more food
because you don't have enough energy to fulfill your your
physical needs, right, and so when you're sleep deprived, you
(03:58):
have too much of this. So basically left in and greenland,
when they're working right, are sort of like the checks
and balances system from your appetite. Exactly, one is telling
you that you're fall and then one will kick start
and be like, oh, you know what we need to
do soon, right, so if you're not getting enough sleep,
that means that your greenland levels are going to be higher,
which means you're going to be abnormally hungry. And not
(04:19):
only that, it triggers your body to sore. Energy is
fat instead of burning it. And you know Kristen, sleep
deprivation has also been found to increase levels of certain
stress hormones and it might create insolent resistance in people, right,
and that could lead to weight weighting and also type
two diabetes. Now, the reason why this is a particular
(04:42):
problem for women is because women statistically are twice as
likely to report sleep problems as men. Insomnia is the
number one sleep problem that that women experience, according to
the National Sleep Foundation UM and while sixty of women
report insomnia, only of men do the same thing. Right,
And the same study from the National Sleep Foundation, more
(05:03):
than half of American women say they get a good
night's sleep only a few nights per week. So I
mean that's half the week where you might be at
risk for these higher higher levels of lepton and lower
levels of greenland. And one thing that I found most
interesting about these statistics dealing with with specifically with women
who have sleep problems was the number one category of
women who were having trouble sleeping or stay at home moms. Yeah,
(05:26):
it's pretty interesting. So this Christian leads me to ask,
is sleep the new diet? Do you have to exercise?
Do you have to eat right? Can you just sleep
more and keep your appetite and check? I don't think
that we can ever deny Molly that healthy diet and
exercise is going to be important for being healthy. But
a number of studies have also found that, um, if
(05:48):
you aren't sleeping enough at the same time, the health
benefits of exercise and good proper eating are basically going
to cancel each other out. For instance, there was a
recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science that found that slim, healthy adults whom were deprived
(06:09):
of slow wave sleep for only three nights built up
the same level of insulin resistance as someone who gained
twenty to thirty pounds. So it seems pretty apparent to
me that we need to focus a lot on how
much sleep we're getting. Well Kristen to play Devil's advocate,
I have found some research that says it might be
(06:31):
um a little the connection might be a little bit
more tenuous than all this previous research is shown, because
remember how you're talking how you wake up a lot
in the night. It turns out it's a lot about
the quality of sleep you're getting. So when people started
figuring out that there was a connection between sleep and obesity,
they started to look at sleep problems people had, and
a lot of people have sleep apnea, which is when
(06:52):
they stop breathing while they sleep, and that's can happen
like hundreds of times and night, which means that if
you're getting eight hours of sleep, it only feels like
four because you can't get into the deep levels of sleep,
so you're still experiencing that slow wave sleep deprivation that
that was reflected in that study that I just talked about,
probably exactly. But do you know what they found in
terms of leptin and those people. You know how we
(07:13):
were talking about how most people who are superprived to
have two little leftin right and lefton is the appetite
suppressing hormone, right, But people who have sleep apne i
have really high levels of leptin, which was really contrary
to what they thought they were going to find. So
what does that mean. It means that leptin maybe more
of an individual saying than than than we might be thinking.
It can't be just you know, a one size fits
(07:34):
all left in uh solution. Okay, well, um, I will
back that up with UM studies that have also exploring
kind of the gender differences in sleep, looking at why
women have more sleep problems than men. In addition to
we've got these different levels of lefton and greenland hormones,
but also UM scientists think that it might be related
(07:57):
to levels of trip to fans there atnin and melotonin
um in women and men that could be leading women
to to not have his RESTful sleep. Oh, Kristen, why
does it always come back to hormones? Always hormones? So
I think what we're dealing here with, Kristen, is a
lot of interesting studies that show us that there's this
connection between sleep and OBC and it couldn't hurt to
(08:20):
get more sleep, right, But we also can't give up
yet our gym memberships or our diet exactly. So that
leads us to, Molly, how do we get more sleep?
How when I turn my light out and put my
new sleep mask on, how am I not going to
wake up? Like eight times in the middle of the night.
Do you exercise before you go to sleep. I am
(08:42):
a night exerciser. I trying to exercise in the morning
and I cannot do it. We'll just make sure you
finish that work up work out before about three hours
afore that time. Well, one thing that I've also been
trying to do that's supposed to help with sleeping is
not spending as much time in bed before I'm actually
ready to go to sleep, because I like to just
lounge around read some for like an hour or so
(09:04):
before going to bed, and supposedly that it is actually
making it harder for me to go to sleep. Yeah,
I hear. You've got to like build this relationship with
your bed where sleep is only gonna happens in. And
the good news is that for normal people who are
getting the right amount of sleep, it takes about fifteen
minutes to actually fall asleep. So if you're if you're
hitting the pillow and you're not immediately nodding off, that's
(09:26):
actually a good sign, right, But if it takes you
more than say half an hour or an hour to
fall asleep, you need to get up and do something.
If you keep tossing and turning in bed. It's actually
going to kind of create a negative relationship with your
bed and build up anxiety around falling asleep. So it's
going to create a negative feedback cycle and you're really
not going to be able to have a RESTful night's sleep.
(09:49):
So Molly, what I recommend if you are a restless
sleeper you need to get up and and and do
some things before you fall asleep. You could just go
go out your laptop, put your PC and just go
to how stuff works dot com and read read some
more articles about sleep and hunger and obesity and anything
else that might satisfy your needs. So there's our advice
(10:14):
from Dr Kristen. Head on over to how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.