One hour of extra sleep can help get rid of excess weight

A number of American scientific and medical institutions have conducted a collective experiment to study the effect of sleep on the appetite of overweight people. They have already established that lack of sleep leads to increased food intake. But what happens if we do the opposite and let overweight people sleep longer than usual?

The experiment involved 80 obese adults who were instructed to sleep 1.2 hours more than their usual norm. There were no other changes in their lives, including diet. To control the results, the scientists used the “labeled water” method, where oxygen and hydrogen molecules are replaced with stable isotopes in drinking water. These are easy to track and this way, as the isotopes are washed out of the body, you can check energy expenditure down to every calorie.

The result was predictable, but contradictory. On average, increased sleep duration led to a decrease in food intake of the equivalent of 270 calories, with variations of up to 500 calories. Over the two weeks of the experiment, none of the subjects lost significant weight, their appetite also did not change, but they began to saturate themselves with less food. Scientists honestly admit that they have not yet figured out the mechanism of what is happening, but now they are confident that sleep plays a critical role in regulating food intake.