Poor Quality Sleep Leads To Weight Gain, Smartphone App Study Reveals

Not getting a good night's sleep or getting inadequate sleep not just affects mental alertness the morning after but can also lead to various health issues, including, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and excessive weight gain.

A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine Monday showed the link between getting poor sleep and having a greater body mass index (BMI). Previously, studies on the subject mainly relied on the memories of participants to note the quality of sleep that they had. The present study made use of smartphone apps that tracked the quality of sleep of approximately 120,000 individuals in a span of two years.

The results of the study showed that the duration of sleep and the sleeping habits of people are different from each other. However, it found that people with a BMI higher than 30, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarded as obese, had shorter sleep duration and their sleep patterns were said to be more variable. What researchers noted was that those with higher BMI were short of 15 minutes in terms of sleep duration compared to their counterparts.

The researchers admitted that sleep durations and patterns were highly variable. What their findings support is that sleep patterns are linked to overall health and weight management.

One of the limitations of the study was that the individuals who often use wearables are younger and healthier and come from a higher socioeconomic status. Hence, they may not be able to generalize with other populations. They also excluded nap time and relied on the provided weight and height by participants.

Dr. Raj Dasgupta, the associate program director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study, stated that the devices usually carry a high price tag and that they were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, Dasgupta told CNN that a major plus factor of the study was that it was able to monitor people for two years and their findings also corroborated previous research.

The scientific reason behind the relationship between lack of sleep and appetite is that being sleep-deprived increases the levels of the ghrelin hormone, which is the hunger hormone, while leptin, the hormone that functions opposite to ghrelin, decreases, making you feel hungry.

Experts recommend 7 to 10 hours of sleep each night to be able to control hunger. Getting inadequate sleep, aside from a higher BMI, could also result in a weak immune system, high blood pressure, mood swings, depression, cardiovascular disease, and a lot more.