Children deprived of adequate sleep tend to overeat

A new study published in the International Journal of Obesity indicates children who don’t get enough sleep may be more tempted to overeat.

Five-year-olds who slept less than 11 hours a night were more eager to eat at the sight or reminder of a favorite snack, compared to those who slept longer, researchers reported.

The children who slept less than 11 hours at night also had a higher body mass index – a measure of weight in relation to height – than those who slept 11 hours or more, which is the reccomended amount for pre-school aged children.

“There is now accumulating evidence in both children and adults to suggest that short or insufficient sleep increases reward-driven (‘hedonic’) eating,” said Laura McDonald, the study’s lead author and a researcher at University College London, in email to Reuters Health.

“This is, of course, a concern,” she added, “given that we live in a modern ‘obesogenic’ environment” where tasty, high-calorie foods “are widely available and cheap to consume.”

The new study gauged 1,008 five-year-olds born in 2007 in England and Wales. The researchers had mothers answer a questionnaire about their kids’ responsiveness to food cues and their behavior toward food when they were presumably full, soon after eating.

Among kids who slept less than 11 hours a night, food responsiveness was 2.53 on a scale of 1 to 5, compared to 2.36 for those who slept 11 to 12 hours, and 2.35 for those who got at least 12 hours of sleep a night.

“We know that parents have a huge influence on the sleep patterns of five-year-olds. So really, it’s incumbent on parents to make sure their kids are getting enough sleep,” said Emerson Wickwire — a board-certified sleep specialist director of the Insomnia Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine — in an email to Reuters.

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