2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29
Sleep deprivation can happen to anyone from time to time. It affects not only your mood and concentration, but also your weight. As explained by science, this has to do with the production of ghrelin, the hormone that controls the feeling of hunger, but also makes you more prone to you crave junk food.
We tend to think that this is because of the body's need for more energy. But a new study has unexpectedly found that your nose is to blame.
When you were sleep deprived, your sense of smell begins to work more intensely. This causes the brain to respond to food odors and help it better distinguish between food and non-food odors.
Then there is a disruption of communication with other brain areas responsible for food signals. This is exactly the moment when you tend to reach for the harmful donut instead of your usual healthy breakfast.
When you are deprived of sleep, these areas of the brain may not receive enough information, and you overcompensate by choosing foods with a richer energy signal, says senior study author Thorsten Kant, an assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University in Feinberg.
But it may also be that these other areas fail to maintain tabs for sharpened signals in the olfactory cortex. This can also lead to the choice of donuts and potato chips, adds Kant.
Kant and his colleagues studied what makes us eat differently when we lose sleep, conducting experiments on 29 men and women between the ages of 18 and 40. The participants were divided into two groups. One received a normal amount of sleep at night, and the other was allowed to sleep only four hours. The next day, both groups were offered a controlled breakfast and lunch menu, as well as a buffet.
We found that participants changed their food choices, Kant said. After being deprived of sleep, the people in the second group ate foods with a higher energy density, such as donuts, chocolate chip cookies and potato chips.
The scientists repeated their experiment with several different groups, and in each experiment it was clearly reported that sleep deprivation increases caloric intake by over 35%.
Regardless whether sleep deprivation is temporary or chronic, it is important to deal with the problem to help you make the healthiest food choices and regulate your weight.
One way is to be more aware of how your body reacts to sleep deprivation and to understand why it suddenly you crave junk food. Another way is to address the causes of your sleep disorder as a whole to help solve the problem.
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