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23.02.2009

An hour more sleep reduces fat percentage by three percent

Your fat percentage decreases by 2.8 percent for each hour a day more sleep you get, researchers at the University of Bristol calculated. The researchers used data from thirty healthy Greek women between 30 and 60 years of age.

The figure below shows the researchers' results. Each dot represents the fat percentage of one woman, and the number of hours sleep that the woman gets per day.

The researchers speculate that little sleep leads to an increase in the production of a hormone that stimulates appetite such as ghrelin, and at the same time decreases the production of a appetite-suppressing hormone such as leptin. They didn't find a relationship between sleep and appetite, however. According to the researchers, this was because the group of women they used was too small.

Sources:
Nutrition. 2007 Nov-Dec;23(11-12):773-7.