Attached in this blog is a short informative course about the importance of sleep and how to the most out of it. Tips to help you sleep better and how it affects weight loss and muscle gain, basically body composition.
And for those of you that want to dive deeper her is an article about sleep.
Sleep, an important part of good health, is even related to obesity in young adults. Spiegel, Knutson, and Leproult (2005) found that normal-weight young adults who got less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night showed hormonal changes that inhibited their ability to process glucose (sugar) and a 30% increase in their levels of insulin over normal sleepers. Insulin and weight gain often go hand in hand.
Supporting information how sleep affects your body;
Previous studies have found that reductions in sleep duration over multiple nights result in impaired glucose tolerance, but this is the first study to examine the effects of only a single night of partial sleep restriction on insulin sensitivity.
In this study, researchers examined nine healthy subjects, once after a night of normal sleep duration (approximately eight hours), and once after a night of four hours of sleep. Insulin sensitivity of each study participant was measured using the hyperinsulinemic euglycemic clamp method. This method uses catheters to infuse glucose and insulin into the bloodstream and then determines insulin sensitivity by measuring the amount of glucose necessary to compensate for an increased insulin level without causing hypoglycemia.
"Our data indicate that insulin sensitivity is not fixed in healthy subjects, but depends on the duration of sleep in the preceding night," said Donga. "In fact it is tempting to speculate that the negative effects of multiple nights of shortened sleep on glucose tolerance can be reproduced, at least in part, by just one sleepless night."
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by The Endocrine Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Reference siting
the Endocrine Society (2010, May 5). One sleepless night can induce insulin resistance in healthy people. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 14, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2010/05/100505091632.htm
