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Abnormal Sleep Habits Can Lead to Weight Gain in Adults
A new study suggests that healthy adults with late bedtimes and chronic sleep restriction may be more susceptible to weight gain due to the increased consumption of calories during late-night hours.
In the largest, most diverse healthy sample studied to date under controlled laboratory conditions, results show that sleep-restricted subjects who spent only four hours in bed from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. for five consecutive nights gained more weight than control subjects who were in bed for 10 hours each night from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m.
The study found an overall increase in caloric intake during sleep restriction, which was due to an increase in the number of meals consumed during the late-night period of additional wakefulness.
Researchers also found that the proportion of calories consumed from fat was higher during late-night hours than at other times of day.
“Although previous epidemiological studies have suggested an association between short sleep duration and weight gain/obesity, we were surprised to observe significant weight gain during an in-laboratory study,” said lead author Andrea Spaeth, a psychology doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania.
The study, which appears in the July issue of the journal SLEEP, was conducted in the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Researchers randomized 225 healthy, non-obese individuals, ranging in age from 22 to 50 years. Subjects were assigned to either the sleep restriction or control condition and spent up to 18 consecutive days in the laboratory.
Meals were served at scheduled times, and food was always available in the laboratory kitchen for participants who wanted to eat at other times of day. Subjects could move around but were not allowed to exercise. They were permitted to watch TV, read, play video games or perform other sedentary activities.
The study also found that during sleep restriction males gained more weight than females, and African-Americans gained more weight than Caucasians.
“Among sleep-restricted subjects, there were also significant gender and race differences in weight gain,” said Spaeth.
“African-Americans, who are at greater risk for obesity and more likely to be habitual short sleepers, may be more susceptible to weight gain in response to sleep restriction. Future studies should focus on identifying the behavioral and physiological mechanisms underlying this increased vulnerability.”
Source: The American Academy of Sleep Medicine
Divorce Troubles Younger Kids’ Later Relationship with Parents
Researchers discovered divorce during the first few years of the child’s life can lead to insecure relationships with their parents as adults.
“By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn more about how early experiences predict the quality of people’s close relationships later in life,” said R. Chris Fraley, Ph.D., of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Researchers say the impact of childhood experiences often extend into adulthood, but studying such early experiences is challenging, as people’s memories of particular events vary widely.
Parental divorce is a good event to study, Fraley said, as people can accurately report if and when their parents divorced, even if they do not have perfect recollection of the details.
In two studies recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Fraley and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus fathers.
In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who participated in a survey about personality and close relationships through yourpersonality.net. More than one-third of the survey participants’ parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9 years old.
The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as secure.
And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3 to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in childhood.
“A person who has a secure relationship with a parent is more likely than someone who is insecure to feel that they can trust the parent,” Fraley said.
“Such a person is more comfortable depending on the parent and is confident that the parent will be psychologically available when needed.”
Although there was a tendency for people to experience more anxiety about romantic relationships if they were from divorced families, the link between parental divorce and insecurity in romantic relationships was relatively weak.
This finding was important, the researchers say, as it shows that divorce does not have a blanket effect on all close relationships in adulthood but rather is selective — affecting some relationships more than others.
Researchers also found that parental divorce tends to predict greater insecurity in people’s relationships with their fathers than with their mothers.
To help explain why divorce influences maternal relationships more than paternal ones, and to replicate the first study’s findings, Fraley and Heffernan repeated their analysis with a new set of 7,500 survey participants.
Unlike in the first study, however, they asked the participants to indicate which of their parents had been awarded primary custody following their divorce.
The researchers speculated that paternal relationships were more insecure following divorce because mothers are more likely than fathers to be awarded custody.
The majority of participants – 74 percent – indicated that they had lived with their mothers following divorce or separation, while 11 percent indicated living with their fathers; the remainder lived with grandparents or other caretakers.
The researchers found that people were more likely to have an insecure relationship with their father if they lived with their mother and, conversely, were less likely to have an insecure relationship with their father if they lived with him. The results were similar with respect to mothers.
While it is premature to speculate on the implications of this work for decision-making regarding child custody, the work is valuable as it suggests that “something as basic as the amount of time that one spends with a parent or one’s living arrangements” can shape the quality of child-parent relationships, write Fraley and Heffernan.
“People’s relationships with their parents and romantic partners play important roles in their lives,” Fraley said.
“This research brings us one step closer to understanding why it is that some people have relatively secure relationships with close others whereas others have more difficulty opening up to and depending on important people in their lives.”
Source: Society for Personality and Social Psychology
Parents fighting photo by shutterstock.
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