You should be getting that beauty rest

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Features

February 2013

You Should Be Getting That Beauty Rest!

Michael Bonner, a Boston College senior, wakes up tired every day. He sleeps between four to five hours per night on an average weekday, and on a bad day drinks up to six cups of coffee, two of them by 8 a.m. He heads to his internship at Bank of America in downtown Boston before attending classes at the Carroll School of Management, where he is studying finance and accounting.

Bonner drinks so much coffee that the caffeine barely helps him stay awake. “I’m feeling pretty burnt out right now,” he says about juggling five classes and an internship.

Bonner knows he probably could use a few more hours of sleep and fewer cups of coffee.

After all, sleep deprivation is not new to college students.

But what he doesn’t know is that lack of sleep can make you become obese, according to new research findings.

You snooze, you lose?

Insufficient sleep, even for a short amount of time, leads to a risk of obesity and Type II diabetes in the long run, according to a study published in October in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal of the American College of Physicians. After four hours of sleep per night for four days, the fat cells of research participants were 30 percent less able to respond to insulin compared to a person who was not sleep-deprived, the researchers say.

The sleep-deprived people’s fat cells resembled those of a diabetic or an obese person.

“It was once thought that sleep was only necessary for the brain,” says Josiane Broussard, one of the researchers of the sleep study and a post-doctoral fellow at a nonprofit community medical center in Los Angeles.

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By Marion Halftermeyer COPY EDITOR

But this study and others show that sleep can be important for the other organs and tissues in the body as well, such as its effect on the cells that respond to insulin and other side effects of not getting enough sleep.

The study also revealed that more research is needed to determine whether getting more sleep could offset or delay obesity or diabetes. Adequate sleep may be just as important as diet and exercise in preventing and treating obesity and diabetes, it says.

Sleep and the college student Sleep deprivation particularly affects college students, who are overwhelmingly and increasingly not getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control. About 70 percent

of college students sleep less than eight hours per night, according to a 2010 study by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

Nationally, the average college student gets about 6.87 hours of sleep per night, says Robyn Priest, associate director of the Office of Health Promotion at BC. As students are sleeping less, they are becoming unsatisfied with the quality of the sleep they are getting, and usually are not sleeping as deeply or as well as they would like to. In 1969, fewer than a quarter of students reported being unhappy with the quality of sleep they were getting; today that number has risen to 71 percent, Priest said citing data collected by the office from the CDC. Although there has been no study of sleep patterns at BC, Priest says, “most of the student body is consistently getting an hour or two not enough sleep (per night) during the week.”

A perfect storm Students are not only sleeping less, but national trends show that on average they are also getting fatter.

Over the past 20 years, obesity in the United States has dramatically increased. More than one-third of adults and 17 percent of people aged 2 to 19 years old are obese, according to the CDC. In 2005 to 2007, a quarter of all adults and 42 percent of people aged 18 to 24 years old were obese, according to a survey on health behaviors by

February2013

the National Center for Health Statistics.

“Maybe the ‘freshman 15’ is due to the drastic reduction in sleep that most college students undergo,” Broussard says in reference to the belief that first-year college students gain 15 pounds during the adjustment to college.

“Students seem to compensate by sleeping in ridiculously late on the weekends, drinking energy drinks and sugary beverages and caffeinated beverages, like coffee,” Priest says.

For Lyuda Gorbach, a senior at BC, coffee-drinking is almost a science. Gorbach, who studies finance at the Carroll School of Management, times her first cup of coffee to be ready the minute she steps out of the shower in the morning. “I want to be ready for it and I want it to be ready for me when I’m ready. It’s perfect timing,” she says. She’ll drink up to five cups a day on a busy day.

But Priest says turning to caffeine and sugar is unhealthy and can make you gain weight.

Having too much caffeine or sugar in your system before bed could cause even more sleep deficiency.

What’s more alarming is that sugar does not actually give you energy, says Sheila Tucker, the nutritionist in the Office of Health Promotion. She says it’s a central nervous system stimulant; it makes you feel like you have more energy. “That’s why I call it fake energy,” she says.

While energy actually comes from calories in food, ‘fake’ energy from drinks like a 5-Hour Energy can leave you feeling more tired. “Going all day on coffee or Diet Coke,” Tucker says, “you aren’t fueling your brain so you could be more tired from that.”

Tucker adds that when you’re tired, you don’t necessarily have enough energy or time to make the effort to eat well.

“It’s easy to just take the easier

Infographic courtesy of the Office of Health Promotion

www.bcgavel.com

route through junk foods,” she says.

Given the risk of becoming fat from sleep deficiency, unhealthy coping habits like eating junk food and drinking energy drinks are only making students’ health worse. “It’s the perfect storm,” Tucker says.

Storm or not, sleep < homework + internship/ job + social time + working out Bonner worries about his health. Because he’s so busy that he doesn’t sleep more than five hours per

night, he finds himself needing to eat more the sleepier he is. He’s scared of being overweight later on in life, so he works out three to four times per week to compensate for his snacking habits in addition to the four to five meals he eats per day. “That’s what keeps me going,” Bonner says.

Photos by Kara Weeks/Photo Editor

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