early: More sleep may lower their risk of becoming obese.
Lack of sleep plays havoc with two hormones that regulate the appetite.
Researchers have found that every additional hour per night a third-grader
spends sleeping reduces the child's chances of being obese in sixth grade
by 40 percent.
The less sleep they got, the more likely the children were to be obese in
sixth grade, no matter what the child's weight was in third grade, said
Dr. Julie Lumeng of the University of Michigan, who led the research.
Another explanation: Tired kids are less likely to exercise and more
likely to sit on the couch and eat cookies, Lumeng said.
If there was a magic number for the third-graders, it was nine hours, 45
minutes of sleep. Sleeping more than that lowered the risk significantly.
The study gives parents one more reason to enforce bedtimes, restrict
caffeine and yank the TV from the bedroom. The study appears in the
November issue of the journal Pediatrics.
In experiments by Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago and others,
sleep-deprived adults produced more ghrelin, a hormone that promotes
hunger, and less leptin, a hormone that signals fullness.
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