Craving burgers, chips and snacks? Could be you didn’t sleep enough
- Only one night without sleep can change people’s brain activity and cause them to eat more sweet and processed food, new research reveals
- But hormones may have little to do with it, as previously suggested
A single night without sleep leads people to view junk food more favourably, research suggests.
Scientists attribute the effect to the way food rewards are processed by the brain. Previous studies have found that a lack of shut-eye is linked to expanding waistlines, with some suggesting disrupted sleep might affect hormone levels, resulting in changes in how hungry or full people feel.
But the latest study suggests that hormones may have little to do with the phenomenon, and that the cause could be changes in the activity within and between regions of the brain involved in reward and regulation.
“Our data brings us a little closer to understanding the mechanism behind how sleep deprivation changes food valuation,” said Professor Jan Peters, a co-author of the research from the University of Cologne.
Writing in The Journal of Neuroscience, Peters and colleagues describe how they recruited 32 healthy men aged between 19 and 33 and gave all of them the same dinner of pasta and veal, an apple and a strawberry yogurt.