Sleep-deprived eat nearly 300 more calories per day

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

When people are sleep-deprived, they eat almost 300 calories a day more than when they are well-rested, a study has found — and ice cream is one of their favorite foods to eat when they’re tired.

That’s according to a Columbia University study, reported at an American Heart Association conference in Atlanta, that looked for a reason behind a fact scientists have long known: Too little sleep can lead to weight gain and obesity.

To determine whether people actually eat more when they’re sleep-deprived, they recruited 26 normal-weight men and women who routinely slept between seven and nine hours a night and brought them into an inpatient hospital-like setting for six days on two different occasions. Half slept four hours a night for six nights. The other half slept for nine hours a night for six nights.

For the first days, they got a portion-controlled diet. The last two days, they could eat what they wanted. The entire procedure was repeated a second time, with people getting a different amount of sleep.

The key findings:

†People consumed an average of 296 calories more when they were sleep-deprived compared with when they were well-rested.

†When women were sleep-deprived, they ate an average of 329 more calories a day; men ate 263 more calories.

†Most of the extra calories came from high-fat foods like ice cream and fast food.

†Sleep-deprived women ate an average of about 31 more fat grams a day. Men’s fat intake didn’t climb that much.

“Ice cream stood out as the preferred food during the sleep-deprived state,” says lead author Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an assistant professor of clinical nutrition medicine at Columbia. “Sleep deprivation makes you more susceptible to overeating, so that can be something to consider when you’re trying to lose weight.”

University of Chicago sleep researcher Eve Van Cauter says an additional 300 calories day “is a substantial increase in energy intake that, if maintained chronically, would lead to rapid and robust weight gain.”

The reduction in sleep in this study “is pretty drastic but nonetheless occurs in real life under a number of situations, including among medical interns and residents who are known to pack on the pounds,” Van Cauter says.

Dr. Gina Lundberg, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and a preventive cardiologist in private practice in Atlanta, thinks sleep-deprived people not only eat more, but also, “When you’re tired, you’re less motivated to exercise. You just want to go home and go to bed.”

Gannett News Service