Q: I HAVE been under stress at work lately. Over the past two months, I have been waking up at 2am and then trying to go back to sleep, usually unsuccessfully, until 4am or 5am. I am exhausted during the day and feel unproductive. But I seem to have developed a good appetite. Do insomniacs eat more food? Dr Rose writes: People who have trouble sleeping, either by choice so that they can stay up to complete work or studies or inadvertently through stress or anxiety, do tend to snack more. People who are up during the night usually do eat, either to keep awake by fuelling their bodies with some needed sugar or out of boredom. Also, one's metabolic rate is higher when awake, even if just lying in bed staring at the ceiling, than when one is asleep, so higher body fuel requirement is needed.
Animal studies support this finding. Sleep-deprived rats develop a larger appetite than rats which have a normal sleep pattern. The encouraging news is that this increase in appetite does not appear to be accompanied by any increase in weight since the metabolism appears to be revved up leading to no net increase in weight.
Q: I HAVE read about a woman who has given birth to twins of different races. How is this possible? I think both she and her husband are white but one of their twins is black or of mixed race.
Dr Rose writes: As strange as it may sound, there are two scenarios where a woman can give birth to twins of different races.
Theoretically, since sperms have a life span of around 36 hours, if a woman releases more than one egg during her ovulation cycle, and she has sexual intercourse with two men of different races within a short period of time, it is possible for one egg to become fertilised by one man's sperm and a second egg to be fertilised with the second man's sperm. This is, however, highly improbable.
A second scenario involves the use of in-vitro fertilisation techniques. Often in this procedure, the physician extracts and fertilises multiple eggs from a woman's ovaries to increase the chance of at least one good ovum developing. If a technician is careless and fails to follow protocol of one pipette per donor, it is possible that a pipette which has been used in a prior donor insemination procedure may contain sperms from two donors. Again, this would be an exceedingly rare situation.