Correlation Between Sleep And Body Mass Index Detected In Late Night Sleepers

It is estimated that a healthy adult BMI range is between 18.5 and 24.9.

“Obesity is obviously growing among adolescents and adults, and there’s also an epidemic of lack of sleep and later bed time preference in teens”, study author Lauren Asarnow, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, told CBS News.

Researchers studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which has tracked the influences and behaviors of USA teenagers since 1994. “People who stay up late are also less likely to eat breakfast and breakfast skipping is associated with weight gain”.

While this does not seem alarming at first glance, it should be noted that any increase in BMI may take a person from normal to overweight.

“Later average bedtime during the work week, in hours, from adolescence to adulthood, was associated with an increase in BMI over time”.

Asarnow is a researcher on UC Berkeley’s Teen Sleep Study, a treatment program created to reset the biological clocks of adolescents who have trouble going to sleep and waking up.

“Although sleep duration, screen time and exercise frequency did not attenuate the relationship between work day bedtime and BMI over time, fast food consumption was recognised as a significant partial mediator of the relationship between bedtimes and BMI longitudinally”.

Each participant reported their weekday and weekend bedtimes at three time points: during the onset of puberty, college-age years and young adulthood.

Asarnow says that the results suggest that youngsters who sleep earlier will be able to set their weight at a “healthier scale” for when they have eached the latter stages of adulthood.

However, a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that only 31% of high school students report getting at least 8 hours of sleep a night, while nearly 30% of adults report sleeping fewer than 6 hours nightly.

During the research teenager reported their bedtimes and sleep hours while researchers calculated their BMI based on their height and weight.