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| Tiredness contributing to obesity in early childhood |
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Pre-schoolers who don't sleep enough may be more inclined to consume more calories, a finding which has serious implications for understanding growing rates of childhood obesity.
The finding comes from a new CU Boulder study, which examined the link between napping and calorie consumption in pre-school aged children.
For the study, the pre-schoolers, all regular afternoon nappers, were deprived of roughly three hours of sleep on one day. They had no afternoon nap and were kept up for about two hours past their normal bedtime before being awakened at their regularly scheduled times the next morning.
During the day of lost sleep, the 3 and 4-year-olds consumed about 20 per cent more calories than usual, 25 per cent more sugar and 26 per cent more carbohydrates, says Assistant Professor Monique LeBourgeois, lead author of the study.
The following day, the children were allowed to sleep as much as they needed and on this "recovery day" they returned to normal baseline levels of sugar and carbohydrate consumption, but still consumed 14 per cent more calories and 23 per cent more fat than normal.
"We found that sleep loss increased the dietary intake of pre-schoolers on both the day of and the day after restricted sleep," said A/Professor LeBourgeois.
These results may shed light on how sleep loss can influence weight gain and why a number of large studies show that pre-schoolers who do not get enough sleep are more likely to be obese as a child and later in life.
A/Professor LeBourgeois said that even with extensive obesity prevention efforts in the past decade, childhood obesity remains an epidemic and in 2014, 23 per cent of American children under the age of 5 years were overweight or obese.
Childhood obesity increases the risk for later life chronic illnesses like diabetes and is associated with low self-esteem and depression. Overweight youth are about four times more likely to be obese as adults.
"We think one of the beauties of this study is that parents were given no instructions regarding the kind or amount of food or beverages to provide their children," said LeBourgeois. Parents fed their children just like they would on any normal day.
The researchers also studied each child across all study conditions – meaning when their sleep was optimized, restricted and recovered – which gave them control over how kids could differ individually in their eating preferences and sleep.
The children in the study – five girls and five boys – each wore small activity sensors on their wrists to measure time in bed, sleep duration and sleep quality. Parents logged all food and beverages consumed by the pre-schoolers, including portion sizes, brand names and quantities, using household measures like grams, teaspoons and cups. For homemade dishes parents recorded ingredients, quantities and cooking methods.
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