sleep

Obesity, Brown Fat and Being a Night Owl; What Glasses are YOU Wearing?

June 27, 2015 by James Bogash

sleep and brown fat — karuka/Dollar Photo Club

It seems like there is a definite trend of families (both parents and kids) not getting to sleep at a decent hour. There are lots of issues with this.

“Sure,” you say, “from the guy up at 11 PM starting to write a blog post. I would be the first to admit that I probably don’t get enough sleep several nights a week. (Which is why I start to blather towards the end of this article) But the rest of my lifestyle is in line with what I recommend to my patients.

So why is lack of sleep a big deal? For starters, there are some clear links between light maps of the United States and rates of breast cancer. There are also links between lack of sleep and pretty much every single chronic disease. And this includes obesity.

While the mechanism by which poor sleep contributes to chronic disease is not completely understood, there are a few things we do know:

By not getting enough sleep, we may not spend enough time in the deeper stages of sleep when tissue healing and memories are implanted.
Problems falling asleep may be due to stress and stress pretty much kills. Enough said.
Melatonin is a hormone produced in the pineal gland deep in the brain when light on the blue end of the spectrum no longer strikes the retina. Melatonin serves several purposes, but one of these is to act as an antioxidant in the brain, protecting it from damage.
None this even begins to address how much damage sleep apnea does to the body and brain.

This particular article gives us some additional insight but it takes it from a different angle. Rather than looking at not getting enough sleep or when we go to bed, researchers asked to question about total light exposure’s effect on obesity. In other words, how much light are you exposed to during the day.

If you think about it, we were really only designed to be exposed to light from the blue end of the spectrum during daylight hours. Blue light tells our system that it is time to be awake and running around looking for food, shelter and a mate to club over the head and drag back to the cave.

The problem is that almost all of our electronic devices emit light at this end of the spectrum. Cell phones, TVs, tablets, IPads, overhead lights. They will all interfere with our sleep wake cycle. Just in case you or your child stares at one of these devices anytime after sunset, you could consider trying one of the blue blocking glasses that can be found on Amazon by clicking here. It’s a pretty small investment for something that could potentially make a big difference.

In the study, researchers exposed mice to a prolonged day lengths (16 and 24 hours instead of the regular 12 hours). Here’s what happened:

The was increased fat but not an increase in food intake or activity.
This increased exposure to light led to a change in the activity of brown fat. Brown fat is a literal fat-burning factory, burning calories only to make heat.

For those of you who have read some of my prior articles on brown fat, it really is something that we all want to have more of. More brown fat = lower rates of obesity and diabetes. Anything that is going to increase the amount of brown fat we have is generally a good thing, while anything that slows down the activity of or reduces the number of brown fat cells is a bad thing.

If you or your child are a night owl, could getting a pair of blue blocking glasses (or, better yet, shut down that IPad or TV…) actually keep you from gaining weight? According to this study the answer may be yes.

Think You’re Doing Everything to Protect Your Heart? Even THIS?

August 20, 2013 by James Bogash

heart disase sleep — Enough sleep needed to protect the heart

Despite societal beliefs, heart disease is NOT genetic. It is almost entirely environmental. Lifestyle factors to lower your risk are very well established.

Most of you can probably name off the top few easily: Exercise, not smoking, plant based diet, don’t stress, avoid animal based saturated fats, more omega-3 fatty acids, etc… But some are a little more elusive and less well known. But usually these risk factors may play a smaller (but no less important) role, such as BPA in plastic water, dark chocolate, nuts and lycopene in tomatoes. But what if there was a very important risk factor that had a large impact on your risk of a heart attack or dying of a heart attack that you were not aware of?

Enter this large study out of the Netherlands. Luckily, the Dutch are a generally healthy people, so these researchers were actually able to find some healthy people to study (as opposed to the US, where researchers have to peek into dark corners and seedy vegan restaurants to find the healthy residents). Basically, they looked at 17,887 men and women and how their health behaviors were linked to the later risk of heart attacks or cardiac deaths.

Here’s the behaviors and the amount they lowered the risk individually:

Sufficient physical activity (≥3.5 h/week cycling or sports–52% of study participants) led to 26% lower risk.
Healthy diet (Mediterranean Diet Score ≥5–37% of participants) led to 12% lower risk.
Moderate alcohol consumption (≥1 beverage/month–91% men, 78% of women participants).
Non-smoking (65% of participants) led to 43% lower risk.

Overall, when all 4 of these healthy lifestyles were done together, there was an overall 57% lower risk of heart disease and 67% lower risk of fatal heart attack. Sadly, even in this healthier country, only 12% of the study participants adhered to all the factors studied. And like many of the studies on heart disease, these guidelines are pretty basic and very easy to achieve. More specific lifestyle changes would likely lead to much greater reductions.

There was one more behavior they look at:

Sufficient sleep duration of at least 7 hours per night.

Man, I better hit the hiking trail drinking red wine and eating raw nuts dipped in pure cacao.

In the study, 80% of men and 86% of women obtained sufficient sleep. Pretty sure we wouldn’t see these numbers here in the US with salaried employees with kids (or 5 blog / week health related blog authors…). Overall, getting sufficient sleep lowered the risk of heart disease by 22% and fatal heart attack by 46%. These are some pretty strong numbers.

But when added to the 4 factors listed about, the protection jumped, lowering risk of heart disease by 65% and fatal heart attack by 83%. These are some pretty serious numbers.

Overall, this really should not come as too big of a surprise because we know that sleep is incredibly important and, conversely, not sleeping well is unhealthy. Study after study have linked poor or too little sleep to increased inflammation, obesity and diabetes.

Lest you think that you’re ok because you load up on Ambien and Lunesta with your valium, there are some pretty scary associations between the use of these types of drugs and death (arguably something we want to avoid…).

And stress kills sleep quality and duration, which likely feeds into this entire picture of preventing heart disease and fatal heart attacks.

With that said, I’m off to bed to lower my risk of a heart attack..

SLEEP DEPRIVED? YOU PROBABLY DO THIS…

March 15, 2012 by James Bogash

There is no doubt that sleep is a critical factor in a healthy lifestyle. Sleep deprivation quickly destroys rational thought and brain function. Within a short period of time, if the brain does not slip into microsleeps, it is very likely that the organism (human or otherwise) will die.

Nothing destroys sleep patterns faster than stress. That’s ok in today’s society, because we can just use medications to override the problem. Pay no mind to the man behind the current claiming that recent studies suggest that this may cost American’s half a million lives per year, all the while being only minimally effective.

So stress begins to interfere with sleep. Stress also wreaks havoc on pretty much every organ system in our bodies and increases the risk for almost (if not all) chronic diseases that we suffer from. Stress also begins to affect the decisions we make about things like diet and exercise. We have seen that stressful situations increase our desire for high calorie, low nutrient density foods instead of broccoli.

This particular study paints the picture just a little grimmer. Normally, our appetite is partially regulated by the amount of glucose running through our bloodstream. However, researchers found that, under acute sleep deprivation (a night without any sleep), hedonic desires for food dominated irrespective of glucose levels. Basically, getting less sleep is going to increase your hunger levels and overall food intake.

Then, putting these studies together, we can bet that your ability to override going for that Cinnabon roll over the vegetarian omelette after a night of sleep deprivation is pretty darn non-existent.

HOW MUCH SLEEP DOES YOUR CHILD GET?

October 3, 2011 by James Bogash

It seems that children are forever picking up on parents’ bad habits. If mom and dad wouldn’t recognize broccoli if a man in a giant broccoli suit rang the front doorbell, it’s likely the children are not going to be eating cruciferous veggies like they’re going out of style. We are know that stressful behaviors of the parents are picked up on by the children. I’m sure that the behavior in this study is reflective of parental influence as well.

In this particular study, researchers looked at high school students who were sleep deprived during the week and tried to catch up on sleep on the weekends. Good thing these behaviors are limited to the kids and not the overworked parents…

Researchers found that, in those with the “catch up sleep” pattern, attention related tasks were negatively affected, despite the appearant “catch up” of lost sleep on the weekends.

The bottom line is that sleep is important for all of us, but especially on our kids’ mental performance. Remember that these behaviors are just as likely picked up from the parents as they are from their peers.