The Link Between What you Eat & How you Sleep
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As you know, sleep is one of the key pillars for physical and mental health. Sleep affects every system in your body. Sleep is important for focus, immune function, and mood. Sleep is when we repair tissues, remove waste, and restore energy levels. When we get enough sleep we just feel awesome!
On the other hand, poor sleep is associated with mental fogginess, impaired exercise performance, decreased mood, and of course fatigue. Poor sleep also increases the risk of numerous chronic diseases, including obesity. One of the reasons for this is because sleep helps to regulate appetite.
You might have noticed that on days you don’t sleep as well you tend to make poor food choices. This isn’t a coincidence! There is a strong link between sleep and the food we decide to consume that day. There are two main theories for why this is:
1. The Homeostatic Response. Hormones help regulate how satisfied or hungry you are to maintain your energy balance. The two main hormones involved in this system are leptin and ghrelin. Leptin is the “satiety hormone”, which inhibits your appetite when you have adequate energy stores. Ghrelin is the “hunger hormone”, which signals to your brain that you’re hungry when you’re low on energy stores. Sleep helps regulate the amount of leptin and ghrelin in your body. However, studies have shown that short and disturbed sleep can disrupt these hunger and satiety regulating hormones. Poor sleep can cause a decrease in circulating levels of leptin and an increase in levels of ghrelin, leading to overeating - particularly in foods high in sugar and fat.
2. The Hedonic Response. The other factor affecting your diet choices when you’re really sleepy is the hedonic system. The hedonic system is also known as your reward system. “Hedonic eating” is when you crave food for pleasure, as opposed to eating food because you’re hungry. Studies have shown that after poor sleep, there is higher activation in the areas of the brain that are responsible for reward and pleasure. Basically, a poor night sleep can increase your drive to eat, even when you’re not physically hungry.
These physiological responses are related and both play a role in dysregulated eating following a poor night’s sleep. Not to mention when you’re sleep deprived, your executive function is significantly impaired, making it harder to make good food choices!
So what can you do about this?
1. Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep each night. The ideal amount depends person to person, but do your best to get at least 7 hours of shut-eye each night.
2. Be consistent. Short sleep is associated with dysregulated eating, but so is a disrupted circadian rhythm (your internal biological clock). So make sure you’re going to bed and waking up around the same time every day.
3. Everyone has a bad sleep once a while. If you work irregular hours or if you have young children at home, this is sometimes unavoidable. But the more you are aware of the association between sleep deprivation and poor diet, the better you can be prepared. One idea is to make sure you always have healthy snacks readily available (and unhealthy snacks NOT readily available!). This will help you make better choices on those days you don’t sleep very well and you want to reach for that sweet or bag of chips.
What are we finding in the research?
Last year, a team of researchers looked at the effect of shift-work on “hedonic appetite” (the desire to eat food for pleasure as opposed to physical hunger). The researchers found that a decrease in sleep quantity and quality led to increased food cravings, and increased drive to consume more palatable foods (high fat foods, sweets, carbohydrates, and fast foods). The researchers suggest that hedonic factors likely play a big role in the weight gain often associated with shift-work.
