The connection between two basic survival necessities -- sleeping and eating -- has always fascinated fad dieters, with some weight loss paperbacks urging you to get more shut-eye and others telling you to stay up late and burn those extra calories.
Now, researchers have made some progress in nailing down the sleep-eat dynamic. According to coverage by MedPage Today of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies' annual meeting, lab experiments suggest that sleep deprivation leads to poor food choices. It makes sense: Who hasn't experienced a dive into a bag of Cheetos after a wild night out on the town?
Two separate studies with healthy volunteers, sleep-deprived and well-rested, looked at functional magnetic resonance images of their brains and found clear differences. What lit up in the well-rested subjects were the areas associated with high-powered, integrated decision-making -- the parts of your brain that get it cooking on all four burners, and help you weigh complicated choices. As in: Is that croissant that seems so tantalizing really what I need to look good in a bathing suit three months from now?
"We did not find significant differences following sleep deprivation in brain areas traditionally associated with basic reward reactivity," said Stephanie Greer, a graduate student at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. "Instead, it seems to be about the regions higher up in the brain, specifically within the frontal lobe, failing to integrate all the different signals that help us normally make wise choices about what we should eat."
These studies are small and preliminary. But they raise the interesting hypothesis that what Americans used to call will power (and Buddhists call mindfulness) really can be a factor -- when our energies are not depleted and we can harness them to keep all the parts of our brain working at the same time.