Weight loss from diet change can improve sleep - study

Weight loss due to dietary changes can improve sleepiness at any weight, the University of Pennsylvania in the US said in a press release on Wednesday, citing a study by the institution. PHOTO | FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • They studied obesity using diet-induced obese mice. Half the mice were randomly chosen to receive regular chow (RC) while the other mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD, more than three times higher in fat content) for eight weeks.

Weight loss due to dietary changes can improve sleepiness at any weight, the University of Pennsylvania in the US said in a press release on Wednesday, citing a study by the institution.

In the research, Diet/Energy Balance Affect Sleep and Wakefulness Independent of Body Weight in the journal Sleep, three scientists looked into how weight fluctuations impact numerous aspects of sleep independent of body weight.

They studied obesity using diet-induced obese mice. Half the mice were randomly chosen to receive regular chow (RC) while the other mice were fed a high-fat diet (HFD, more than three

times higher in fat content) for eight weeks.

At the end of that period, some of the mice were switched to the alternative diet for one week, causing newly-fed HFD mice to gain weight and newly-fed RC mice to lose weight, while the rest of the mice continued to consume their current diet.

After the ninth week, mice maintained on HFD weighed 30 per cent more, slept more than one hour longer per day, and suffered from increased wake fragmentation – frequently slipping into

sleep – compared to mice maintained on RC. The “diet switch” groups, however, had similar body weight at week nine, but completely different sleep/wake profiles when compared to each other.

“Our findings suggest body weight is a less important factor than changes in weight for regulating sleepiness,” said the study’s lead author Isaac Perron.

“Diet-induced obese mice that ate a regular chow diet for only one week showed the same sleep/wake profile as mice that ate a regular chow diet for nine weeks.”

The findings have implications for the lean population as well, since mice consuming the low-fat diet for eight weeks followed by only one week of HFD had similar sleep as those eating a HFD for nine weeks.