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Would
Lack Of Sleep Cause Childhood Obesity? There is no doubt that sleep is extremely important for a person’s health and wellbeing. However, millions of people including children just do not get enough sleep and many are suffering from lack of sleep. While sleep duration required varies among people, it is believed that most healthy adults would need an average of 8 hours of sleep at night. As for children, according to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), toddlers aged 1 to 3 years old should sleep for 12 to 14 hours a night; preschoolers, aged 3 to 5, should sleep 11 to 13 hours, school-aged children, aged 5 to 10, should get 10 to 11 hours, and teens, aged between 13 and 19, should get 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep nightly. Survey conducted by NSF during the period between 1999 and 2004 showed that at least 40 million Americans suffer from over 70 different sleep disorders and 60 percent of adults reported having sleep problems at least a few nights a week. Meanwhile, 69 percent of children experienced one or more sleep problems a few nights or more during a week. In another findings released on March 28, 2006, NSF reported that only 20 percent of teens get the recommended 9 hours of sleep on school nights, and more than 1 in 4 found sleeping in class. There is growing evidence that links chronic lack of sleep with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and infections.
In fact, as suggested in the findings published in the September 2010’s issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, there is a critical time period prior to the age of 5 when sufficient nighttime sleep would lead to a healthy weight later on. Researchers from the University of California and University of Washington in Seattle found that children aged 4 and below who get less than 10 hours of sleep a night are nearly twice as likely to be overweight or obese 5 years later. The relationship between sleep and weight was examined in 1,930 children who aged between 0 and 13 years old and took part in a survey in 1997 and again 5 years later in 2002. For children who were 4 years old or younger at the time of the first survey, sleeping for less than 10 hours a night was associated with nearly a twofold increased risk of being overweight or obese at the second survey. As regards older children, sleep time at the first survey was not associated with weight status at the second survey but current short sleep time was associated with increased odds of a shift from normal weight to overweight status or from overweight or obese status at follow up. The new study might not be the first to link short sleep duration to overweight in children, but many of previous studies have been cross-sectional. This means that they only looked at a single point in time making it difficult to determine if not getting enough sleep would cause a child to become obese, or vice verse. While no reasons were furnished to explain why short sleep duration in early life would lead to excess weight gain later on, researchers cited a number of theories to back their findings. Kids, who do not get enough sleep, would be too tired to participate in the activities that they were supposed to do so. Meanwhile, children staying up late would have more opportunities to eat. Finally, there is evidence that adults who do not have adequate sleep have altered levels of the appetite-related and hunger-related hormones leptin and ghrelin, and the same could just be true in children.
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