Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News
If the weekend is your time to catch up on sleep, you may want to rethink your strategy.
In young adults, using the weekend to make up for lost sleep during the workweek can lead to increased late-night munchies, weight gain and a lowered responsiveness to insulin, researchers report February 28 in Current Biology.
“The take-home message is basically that you can’t make up for abusing your sleeping clock by sleeping a few more hours on the weekend,” says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, if I sleep in on the weekends, I’ll be better.’”
Since the 1990s, scientists have understood that missing sleep can affect a person’s metabolic health, causing behavioral and physiological changes that can lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Yet in 2014, roughly 35 percent of American adults reported sleeping fewer than the recommended seven hours per night, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Weekends may seem like an ideal time to catch up on sleep, but it was unclear whether that could actually work. So Christopher Depner, a sleep physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his colleagues put three groups of young adults in their mid-20s through different sleep regimens for roughly two weeks.
One group slept about eight hours every night; another got roughly five hours a night; the third got around five…The post Sleeping in on the weekend can’t make up for lost sleep appeared first on FeedBox.