Two reasons you get fatter if you don’t sleep enough or
sleep well enough?
One is that when we’re up, we eat. Period. After all, do
you visit the library when you’re awake at 2 AM, or the fridge?
But the 2nd reason is also important: when you
do visit the fridge after hours, and trust me, we all do (but often only to
check that you have milk for the next day’s coffee, and if you believe that’s
the real reason anyone checks the fridge at night, you’ll also believe what
politicians say), according to a new study presented at the recent annual
meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, you will pick junk
food.
In this study, the researchers found that functional MRIs
of the brain, which measure brain activity in real-time, when people were made
to be sleep deprived and they were also exposed to junk food, their areas of
the brain that are “more involved in addiction” became way more active than when
those people were not sleep deprived.
In other words, sleep and you will eat less. And you will
eat better.
