New Delhi: Wondering why you’re not losing that extra flab despite giving up those sugary beverages and fatty foods? It could be due to the fact that you’re losing out on your good night’s sleep. Research has clearly linked sleep deprivation to negative changes in the body’s metabolism, meaning a lack of sleep can adversely affect your weight loss efforts. Sleep duration plays a key role when it comes to achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight. You are more likely to put on the pounds even with the very best diet and fitness routine if you’re not getting enough snooze time. According to the researchers at Uppsala University, even one night of sleep loss has a tissue-specific impact on the regulation of gene expression and metabolism in humans that could cause weight gain.
A number of research studies have found a link between sleep restriction and obesity. A lack of sleep can trigger the area of your brain that makes you crave for unhealthy foods. It can also cause a spike in blood sugar levels, increasing the risk of diabetes. It is recommended that a healthy adult gets 7-9 hours of sleep per night, although sleep requirements vary from person to person.
Sleep loss causes weight gain
The researchers say the new study may explain how shift work and chronic sleep loss impairs our metabolism and adversely affects our body composition. In the current work, the researchers analysed 15 healthy normal-weight individuals who participated in two in-lab sessions in which activity and meal patterns were highly standardised. In randomised order, the participants were made to sleep a normal night of sleep (over eight hours) during one session and stay awake the entire night during the other session.
The morning after each night-time intervention, the researchers took small tissue samples (biopsies) from the participants' subcutaneous fat and skeletal muscle. These two tissues often exhibit disrupted metabolism in conditions such as obesity and diabetes, said the study published in the journal Science Advances.
Blood samples were also taken to enable a comparison across tissue compartments of a number of metabolites at the same time in the morning. These metabolites comprise sugar molecules, as well as different fatty and amino acids.
The researchers used the tissue samples for multiple molecular analyses, which first of all revealed that the sleep loss condition resulted in a tissue-specific change in DNA methylation, one form of mechanism that regulates gene expression. The researchers observed changes in the fat and muscle tissue in participants in response to sleep loss.
“Our research group was the first to demonstrate that acute sleep loss in and of itself results in epigenetic changes in the so-called clock genes that within each tissue regulate its circadian rhythm. Our new findings indicate that sleep loss causes tissue-specific changes to the degree of DNA methylation in genes spread throughout the human genome. Our parallel analysis of both muscle and adipose tissue further enabled us to reveal that DNA methylation is not regulated similarly in these tissues in response to acute sleep loss,” said Jonathan Cedernaes who led the study.
“We, therefore, think that the changes we have observed in our new study can constitute another piece of the puzzle of how chronic disruption of sleep and circadian rhythms may impact the risk of developing for example obesity,” Jonathan added.