Midnight Snacks Will Make You Fatty

How much weight you gain may depend on when you eat, according to a new study that looked at the timing of meals in mice. Scientists at Northwestern University fed two groups of mice the same amount of high fat food, but one group ate during regular waking time, while the other ate during what would normally be their sleeping period. The second group gained twice as much weight as the first group!

“For a long time we questioned whether or not eating patterns had anything to do with gaining weight,” says obesity expert Dr. Louis Aronne of NewYork-Presbyteria n Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He points to previous observational research suggesting that people who skip breakfast in favor of massive meals in the evening hours tend to be overweight. “We had no proof that it’s a real problem,” says Aronne, who was not involved in the study. “If an experiment like this is replicated in humans, it might clarify for us just how much time of day matters when it comes to obesity.”

It is not yet clear whether the difference is due to hormone production or the disruption of sleep patterns.

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Too much or less sleep ups diabetes risk

People who sleep too much or not enough are at greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, say researchers at

Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine.

The risk is 2½ times higher for people who sleep less than 7 hours or more than 8 hours a night, according to the study published in journal Sleep Medicine.

To reach the conclusion, researchers analysed the life habits of 276 subjects over a 6-year period.

They determined that over the timespan, approximately 20 percent of those with long and short sleep duration developed type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance versus only 7 percent among subjects who were average duration sleepers.

Even after taking into account the effect attributable to differences in body mass among the subjects, the risk of diabetes and insulin resistance was still twice as high among those with longer and shorter sleep duration than average sleepers.

The researchers also point out that diabetes is not the only risk associated with sleep duration. A growing number of studies have shed light on a similar relationship between sleep and obesity, cardiovascular disease, and overall mortality.

The authors observe that among adults, between 7 and 8 hours of nighttime sleep appears to be the optimum duration to protect against common diseases and premature death.

However, it seems that fewer and fewer people sleep the optium number of hours.

A survey conducted in 1960 showed that American adults slept an average of 8 to 8.9 hours a night. By 1995, that average had dropped to 7 hours. A study conducted in 2004 by the National Center for Health Statistics found that one-third of adults aged 30 to 64 slept less than 6 hours a night

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