FROM

Huffpost Healthy Living

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We all know as adults what it takes to lose weight and as parents how to prevent our children from packing on unhealthy pounds in the first place: diet and exercise are the two pillars of any weight-reduction/obesity prevention program. But what if there was a third approach we have been largely ignoring, which could contribute substantially to our ability to achieve and maintain a healthy weight? That important and often overlooked factor: sleep.

A large number of studies now support a connection between both sleep amount and timing and an increased risk of obesity in adults, children and teens. When you examine the trajectory of increasing rates of obesity in the United States and the concurrent decline in average sleep duration, the graphs are nearly parallel, strongly suggesting that there is an association between the two.

Both cross-sectional studies (which look at the relationship between sleep and weight/Body Mass Index [BMI] at Time Point A) and prospective studies (which examine the relationship between sleep duration at Time Point A and BMI at a later Time Point B) have demonstrated that short sleep and increased weight are closely related even when controlling for factors we know to contribute to obesity, like family history, television viewing and socioeconomic status.

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!!!!!SleepDeprivation1.

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Click link below for article:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-anne-owens-md-mph/obesity-and-sleep-connection_b_8537238.html

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