Does Insufficient Sleep cause Adult Obesity?
Picture two types of people at 3 AM, the first person just won the game they’ve been sweating for. Their stomach starts to growl at them for food. So they go into the kitchen and prepare a nice sandwich to devour. After that delicious snack, they get ready to go to bed by watching TikTok for the next hour, and the cycle repeats the next evening. While the second person is fast asleep at this time because they responsibly acknowledge the importance of proper sleep.
The consensus agrees that obesity is mainly caused by a poor diet and how infrequently one moves around. But, there are a lot of other factors that play into this, such as genetics, stress levels, and your environment. There is also one more important factor that can affect weight gain and it’s quite the “sleeper”.
I will be analyzing two fields from a data set, one is an insufficient sleep field that measures the percentage of people that report themselves receiving an insufficient amount of sleep in a given population. As well as an adult obesity field that measures the rate of obesity in a given population. I will be finding a correlation between the two of these variables and determining if insufficient sleep causes adult obesity and if this causal relationship makes sense.
While running these two variables in a linear regression model with insufficient sleep being the independent variable and adult obesity being the dependent variable. I observe that the correlation coefficient is around 0.4 which is a relatively strong positive correlation. I also found that with each additional percentage increase in insufficient sleep, adult obesity increases by .6%. Although that may not seem like a lot, it’ll quickly stack up for however many hours of sleep you miss in not just one night but maybe one week, one month, or even one year.
It’s better to look at this positive linear trend through a visualization to truly see the effects insufficient sleep has on the increase of adult obesity rates:
Well, to truly understand why there is such a correlation between these two variables, we should look at what sleepfoundation.org has exclaimed “Scientifically, hormone imbalance in the body promotes overeating and weight gain. Leptin and ghrelin are hormones that regulate appetite, and when you aren’t getting sufficient sleep, the production of these hormones is altered in a way that creates increased feelings of hunger.”
Looking at another study conducted by Harvard University also confirms that lack of sleep can cause increased hunger due to having more available time to obtain and eat food. Circling back to my examples of the two people, the person who is currently awake at 3 AM eating a sandwich is doing that because they have the time to eat. They are looking to fill that time awake by spending that time eating. While the other person is actively asleep they can’t afford to eat food because they risk interrupting key important processes that occur during sleep like muscle recovery.
Another study of Japanese workers conducted by Harvard University showed that “workers who slept fewer than six hours a night were more likely to eat out, have irregular meal patterns, and snack than those who slept more than six hours.”
One final study by Harvard Medical School drives this correlation home which shows that a decrease in sleep would eventually lead to an increase in stress. Having that lack of sleep can make a person more prone to irritable emotions and a way that people cope with these emotions is to suppress them through the dopamine release that is being triggered by food.
So it looks like insufficient sleep affects obesity by affecting your appetite as well. Therefore, the lack of sleep you get, the hungrier you get, and the more you eat which then correlates to the increase in obesity. The best way to combat this possible health issue found through different scientific studies and the analysis I conducted is by simply getting a good amount of sleep each night. This will keep the hormones in balance and depress hunger as well as lower stress levels which will stop you from “stress eating”.
So, if you’re reading this in the evening, it’s best to shut down the computer and get a good night’s rest to avoid possible future health complications.
