Rhonda Patrick· PhD
For every 30 minutes of sleep loss/day the risk of obesity increased by 17%
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
For every 30 minutes of sleep loss/day the risk of obesity increased by 17%
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Why short sleep facilitates obesity
Losing 30 min. of sleep per day on weekdays leads to a 19% increase in obesity & 39% increase in insulin resistance.
So there was like, "Okay, something's there, but what's going on?" And actually, when you looked further into this hormone regulation by the body, and I've actually published one study in narcoleptics and ghrelin, and we didn't find that
So you had a 55% risk increase for obesity if you were getting less than six hours of sleep per night.
So at one point, it was a couple years ago, but I had a slide on a presentation that was 81 out of 89 studies, epidemiological or longitudinal studies, that looked for an association between sleep loss and weight gain had a positive finding.
If you look at your propensity for being obese or being overweight, also not great if you're an owl and you're not sleeping according to your schedule.