Sleep

Weight Loss Tip – Get sufficient sleep to lose weight

If you want to lose weight, get enough sleep. Sleep is crucial for weight loss as it allows you to perform physical activities properly and improves metabolism. Sleep also significantly affects the hormones of your body that influence your appetite. When you do not get enough sleep, the
hormone, ghrehlin, can enhance your appetite leading to weight gain. It has also been observed that sleep-deprived people crave for sugary and junk foods and even experience tiredness, dizziness and lack of concentration.

Further, people who work for late night shifts or have irregular sleep patterns have been found more prone to obesity and diabetes. You can follow this weight loss diet by expert dietician.

Sleep for at least 7-8 hours in a day is a must as a proper sleep will make you feel energetic and put a check on cravings for high-calorie food, hence preventing you from being a victim of obesity. Avoid eating anything before going to bed as it may interfere with your sleep. Also avoid watching the television before sleep as you may face difficulty in getting sleeping.  Combining sleep with thirty minutes of exercise and a balanced diet can set you on the path of better health and slimmer waistline.

Source: the health site

Good sleep means less sick leave at work

If you sleep for seven to eight hours, you are less likely to apply for sick leave at work, finds a fascinating study.

The risk of extended absence from work due to sickness rose sharply among those who reported sleeping less than six hours or more than nine hours per night.

Good sleep means less sick leave at work

“Insufficient sleep — due to inadequate or mistimed sleep — contributes to the risk for several of today’s public health epidemics. Getting at least seven hours of night sleep is a key to overall health, which translates to less sick time away from work,” said Timothy Morgenthaler, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

The optimal sleeping time per night is 7 hours, 38 minutes for women and 7 hours, 46 minutes for men.

The study was based on a survey of 3,760 men and women in the age group of 30-64 in Finland.

According to Tea Lallukka from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, insomnia symptoms should be detected early to help prevent absence due to sickness and deterioration of health, well being and functioning.

Successful prevention of insomnia not only promotes health and work ability among employees, but it can also lead to notable savings in reduced sickness absence costs, Lallallukka concluded.

The study appeared in the journal Sleep.

Source: Economic Times

Sleepless teens likelier to get obese

A new study has demonstrated that teenagers who get less than six hours of sleep a night might be at risk of being obese as compared to their peers who sleep more than eight hours.

Sleepless teens likelier to get obese

Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Public Health showed that teenagers had a high risk of being obese by age 21 and its was 20 percent higher among 16-year-olds who slept less than six hours.

Shakira F. Suglia, ScD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School, said that lack of sleep in teenage years could stack the deck against one for obesity later in life and if one becomes an obese adult, it was much harder to lose weight and keep it off and the longer one was obese, there was a greater risk for health problems like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Suglia added that the message for parents was to make sure their teenagers got more than eight hours a night and a good night sleep did more than help them stay alert in school and it helped them grew into healthy adults.

The study is published in Journal of Pediatrics

Source: ANI news

Healthy lifestyle cuts down negative effects of stress

Healthy lifestyle cuts down negative effects of stressA new study has revealed that following a healthy lifestyle, that comprises of a healthy diet, sleep and exercise, counters the negative effects of stress.

According to the study by UC San Francisco, the participants who exercised, slept well and ate well had less telomere shortening than the ones who didn’t maintain healthy lifestyles, even when they had similar levels of stress.

Eli Puterman said that it’s very important that we promote healthy living, especially under circumstances of typical experiences of life stressors like death, caregiving and job loss.

The researchers found that women who engaged in lower levels of healthy behaviors, there was a significantly greater decline in telomere length in their immune cells for every major life stressor that occurred during the year.

Yet women who maintained active lifestyles, healthy diets, and good quality sleep appeared protected when exposed to stress – accumulated life stressors did not appear to lead to greater shortening.

The study was published in Molecular Psychiatry.

Source: dna india

9 Foods to Help You Sleep

9 Foods to Help You Sleep

Adding these foods to your diet may help to increase your odds of a successful slumber.
Some people have trouble falling asleep. Others can’t stay asleep. And then there are the people who have trouble turning life “off” and tucking into bed at a reasonable hour.

Whatever the reason, we’re not alone—more than 50 million Americans don’t get enough shut-eye. Yet the health benefits of a good night’s rest are countless: sleep helps keep you happy, your brain sharp, your immune system strong, your waistline trim, your skin looking youthful—and lowers your risk of high blood pressure and heart disease

Here’s the good news: Adding these foods to your diet may help to increase your odds of a successful slumber.

1. Fish
Most fish—and especially salmon, halibut and tuna—boast vitamin B6, which is needed to make melatonin (a sleep-inducing hormone triggered by darkness), according to an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

2. Jasmine Rice
When healthy sleepers ate carbohydrate-rich suppers of veggies and tomato sauce over rice, they fell asleep significantly faster at bedtime if the meal included high-glycemic-index (GI) jasmine rice rather than lower-GI long-grain rice, in a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. While the authors aren’t sure how it happened, they speculated that the greater amounts of insulin triggered by the high-GI meals increased the ratio of sleep-inducing tryptophan relative to other amino acids in the blood, allowing proportionately more to get into the brain.

3. Tart Cherry Juice
In a small study, melatonin-rich tart cherry juice was shown to aid sleep. When adults with chronic insomnia drank a cup of tart cherry juice twice a day they experienced some relief in the severity of their insomnia.

4. Yogurt
Dairy products like yogurt and milk boast healthy doses of calcium—and there’s research that suggests being calcium-deficient may make it difficult to fall asleep.

5. Whole Grains
Bulgur, barley and other whole grains are rick in magnesium—and consuming too little magnesium may make it harder to stay asleep, reported the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.

6. Kale
Dairy products are well-known calcium-rich foods. But green leafy vegetables, such as including kale and collards, also boast healthy doses of calcium. And research suggests that being calcium deficient may make it difficult to fall asleep.

7. Bananas
Bananas, well-known for being rich in potassium, are also a good source of Vitamin B6, which is needed to make melatonin (a sleep-inducing hormone triggered by darkness), according to an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

8. Chickpeas
Chickpeas boast vitamin B6, which is needed to make melatonin (a sleep-inducing hormone triggered by darkness), according to an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

9. Fortified Cereals
Fortified cereals also boast vitamin B6, which is needed to make melatonin (a sleep-inducing hormone triggered by darkness), according to an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Source: eating well

Want to protect your kids from obesity? Get enough sleep

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If you wish to protect your kids from obesity, make sure you get enough sleep on a daily basis as a study has shown that a parent’s sleep has an effect on the likelihood that their children will be overweight or obese.

More parental sleep is related to more child sleep, which is related to decreased child obesity, the findings showed.

“We viewed how long parents slept and how long children slept as part of a household routine and found that they really did go together,” said Barbara Fiese from University of Illinois in the US.

In the study, socioeconomic characteristics were assessed in relation to protective routines and prevalence of being obese or overweight for 337 preschool children and their parents.

The routines assessed in parents included adequate sleep (over seven hours) and family mealtime routine.

The four protective routines assessed in children were adequate sleep (10 or more hours per night), family mealtime routine, limiting screen-viewing time to less than two hours a day, and not having a bedroom TV.

The only significant individual protective factor against obesity or overweight in children was getting adequate sleep.

Children who did not get enough sleep had a greater risk for being overweight than children who engaged in at least three of the protective routines regularly, even after controlling for parents’ BMI (body mass index) and socio-demographic characteristics, Fiese said.

But the researchers also learned that the number of hours a parent sleeps is related to how much sleep children are getting.

The study appeared in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Source: samachar

Naps Linked with Higher Risk of Death

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Middle-age and older adults who take daytime naps may be at increased risk of dying, a new study from England suggests.

In the study, people ages 40 to 79 who napped daily, for less than an hour, were 14 percent more likely to die over a 13-year period, compared to those who did not nap. Longer naps were linked with a higher risk: people whose daily naps lasted an hour or more were 32 percent more likely to die over the study period.

Many people turn to sleeping pills to help get some rest at night. But do these pills actually put you to sleep?
DCI
The findings held even after the researchers took into account many factors that could affect people’s risk of death, such as their age, gender, body mass index (BMI), whether they smoked, how much they exercised, and whether they had certain pre-existing medical conditions (such as diabetes, cancer or asthma)

In particular, naps were linked with an increased risk of dying from respiratory diseases. And the link between napping and risk of dying was highest among the younger people in the study, those between ages 40 and 65, who were nearly twice as likely to die during the study period if they napped for an hour or more, compared to those who did not nap.

The reason for the link is not known. It may not be napping per se that’s unhealthy, but rather, that those who tend to nap also have undiagnosed medical conditions that affect their risk of dying, the researchers said.

“Further studies are needed before any recommendations can be made,” the researchers, from the University of Cambridge, wrote in the May issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. “Excessive daytime napping might be a useful marker of underlying health risks, particularly respiratory problems, especially among those 65 years of age or younger,” they said.

The study involved more than 16,000 people in England (where napping is not a cultural norm) who answered questions about their napping habits between 1998 and 2000, and were followed for 13 years.

Some studies have suggested that “power naps” of less than 30 minutes can be beneficial, but the new study could not specifically look at the effect of power naps, because it asked participants only whether their naps lasted more or less than an hour.

Sleep apnea, or frequent pauses in breathing during sleep, can make people sleepy during the day, and is also linked with an increased risk of dying over a given period. The new study could not directly take into account whether people had sleep apnea, but people who had a high BMI and took medications for high blood pressure were considered likely to have sleep apnea, the researchers said.

Future studies should more precisely measure sleep apnea, and should investigate whether daily naps are linked with physiological changes that might be harmful, the researches said.

Source: discovery news

Toddlers Who Sleep Less May Eat More

Toddlers who get too little sleep tend to eat more and are at increased risk for obesity, a new study indicates.

The study included children in over 1,300 British families who had their sleep measured when they were 16 months old and their diet checked when they were 21 months old.

Those who slept less than 10 hours a day consumed about 10 percent more calories than those who slept more than 13 hours, according to the study in the International Journal of Obesity.

This is the first study to link amount of sleep to calorie consumption in children younger than 3 years, the University College London (UCL) researchers said. They suggested that shorter sleep may disrupt the regulation of appetite hormones.

“We know that shorter sleep in early life increases the risk of obesity, so we wanted to understand whether shorter sleeping children consume more calories,” Dr. Abi Fisher, of the Health Behavior Research Centre at UCL, said in a university news release.

“Previous studies in adults and older children have shown that sleep loss causes people to eat more, but in early life parents make most of the decisions about when and how much their children eat, so young children cannot be assumed to show the same patterns,” she added.

Although the study found an association between toddler’s sleeping less and eating more, it did not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

The main message from the study “is that shorter-sleeping children may [be] prone to consume too many calories. Although more research is needed to understand why this might be, it is something parents should be made aware of,” Fisher concluded.

Source: web MD

TV time linked to less sleep for kids

The more television children watch, the less total sleep they’re getting, according to a small Spanish study.

Researchers found that a nine-year-old who watched five hours of television a day, for example, slept an average one hour less a night than a nine-year-old who watched television for less than an hour and a half a day, lead author Marcella Marinelli, from the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, told Reuters Health.

The study team followed some 1,700 children for up to three years and found those who increased their TV time got even less sleep as they grew up.

“This study really demonstrated that kids who watch a lot of television and continued to do so continued to have a trajectory of less sleep than they should have,” said Christina Calamaro, from the Nemours Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware, who was not involved in the research.

Marinelli and her colleagues write in JAMA Pediatrics that theirs is the first study to examine the relationship over years between the amount of time toddlers and school-age children spend watching television and the amount they spend sleeping.

The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates the average child spends eight hours a day in front of a screen. AAP recommends that parents limit kids’ daily screen time to one or two hours.

Pre-school age children need a total of 11 to 12 hours of sleep a day and school-aged kids need at least 10 hours a day, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Using data from a larger health study, Marinelli’s team assessed the sleep and television habits of 1,713 children in two Spanish cities and on the Mediterranean island of Menorca.

In the cities of Sabadell and Valencia, researchers asked parents how much time their children slept and how much TV they watched when they were two years old and again when they were four years old. In Menorca, researchers questioned the parents of children when they were six years old and again at nine years old.

The researchers categorized children who watched less than an hour and a half a day of television as “shorter” TV viewers and those who watched more than that as “longer” viewers.

TV viewing times at the beginning of the study period ranged from zero to a maximum of eight hours a day, though the median viewing time was about one hour a day. Sleep times ranged from three to 20 hours a day initially, but the median was about 12 hours for two-year-olds, 10 hours for four-year-olds and 11 hours for the six-year olds.

At all points, kids who were longer viewers got less sleep than kids who were shorter viewers.

Median sleep times dropped by about two hours during the two-to-three year follow-up period for all age groups. But kids who increased their TV viewing during that period lost even more sleep time than the others – an average of 20 percent.

Children who reduced their viewing time during follow-up tended to get more sleep, but that result could have been due to chance, the researchers note.

Marinelli’s team did not look at what kinds of shows the children watched on television, what times of day they watched or where the TVs were located. Their study cannot prove that TV viewing caused the differences seen in sleep times or explain why that might be.

One recent study found slightly older kids, aged 11 to 13, slept significantly less when they frequently watched television before hitting the sack (see Reuters Health story of January 24, 2014 here: reut.rs/1fjXJnq).

The researchers adjusted their findings for other factors that might influence the results – including the kids’ gender, weight, exercise, symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, whether children slept alone or with others, humidity in their bedrooms and the age of their mattresses. Researchers also adjusted for parents’ marital status, educational level and psychopathological symptoms.

“They controlled for all the right variables, and television popped out,” Calamaro said.

“We are not paying attention to how much technology children are using and how much television children are watching and what it’s doing to their sleep.”

Calamaro agreed with the study authors, who theorized that fast-paced television images could disrupt children’s brain development or might cut children’s motivation to play, exercise, draw and do other things that enhance neurodevelopment. She said television time could also simply displace sleep time.

Calamaro stressed the importance of playtime and sleep to children’s development.

“This paper really says, wait a minute, when television viewing starts young, it continues to be an issue for children’s sleep as they get older. It feeds into parents’ need to limit technology at an early age,” she said.

Marinelli said she only allows her three-year-old daughter to watch educational television and limits her to no more than half an hour a day.

“Parents must control the use of television especially in very young children and also the use of other devices, for example mobile phones,” she said.

Source; reuters

Shun snacks that affect a good night’s sleep

Do some bedtime snacks help you sleep better? Perhaps not.

Several studies suggest that eating a small snack a few hours before bedtime may help you sleep by preventing hunger from waking you.

But are there snacks that guarantee you sleep?

Some people say that cereal with milk, peanut butter on toast, and cheese with crackers are good bedtime snacks because they combine carbohydrates with protein.

The theory is based on the fact that tryptophan, an amino acid, makes you sleepy.

A new research done on the sedating effects of tryptophan needed up to 15 grams of tryptophan to create an effect.

And you would need to eat more than a pound of turkey to get just one gram of tryptophan!

To get a good night’s sleep, it is more important to avoid foods like high-fat foods, garlic-flavoured and highly spiced foods, alcohol, caffeine and any beverages before bed, reported.

Other than foods, sticking to a regular bedtime and wake time schedule helps keep you in sync with your body’s circadian clock, a 24-hour internal rhythm affected by sunlight.

Try not to nap too much during the day – you might be less sleepy at night.

Exercise at regular times each day. Try to finish your workout at least three hours before bedtime, said the report.

Source: DNA India