Abstract
Claims that habitually less than 7 h sleep is linked to obesity and related illnesses are largely generalisations from 5 h sleepers who comprise fewer than 8% of adults. Even here it is difficult to point to short sleep causing these problems. Statistically significant findings, here, are often based on small differences, leading to distortions of actual risks. Weight gains attributed to sleep debt, even for 5 h sleepers, average less than 2 kilograms a year, contrasting with hundreds of hours of annually accumulated ‘lost’ sleep. Neither by extending sleep, nor by using sleeping tablets to achieve this, is any such weight gain likely to be offset, and incomparable with the rapid effectiveness of diet and exercise. Short-term laboratory studies of acute sleep restriction, causing ‘pre-diabetic like’ symptoms in healthy adults, seeming to endorse the adverse effects of short sleep, are usually unrealistically too extreme and intolerable.
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Horne, J. (2016). Obesity. In: Sleeplessness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30572-1_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30572-1_4
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