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Not getting enough sleep at nights may be causing your junk food cravings, according to a study.
After scanning 23 young adults after a normal night’s sleep and after a sleepless night researchers at UC Berkeley found “impaired activity in the sleep-deprived brain’s frontal lobe, which governs complex decision-making, but increased activity in deeper brain centers that respond to rewards. Moreover, the participants favored unhealthy snack and junk foods when they were sleep deprived.”
“What we have discovered is that high-level brain regions required for complex judgments and decisions become blunted by a lack of sleep, while more primal brain structures that control motivation and desire are amplified,” said Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and senior author of the study published t in the journal Nature Communications.
This is not the first study to link lack of sleep to poor eating choices but according to the authors of the study, this new research explains why our food choices change for the worse after a sleepless night.
“These results shed light on how the brain becomes impaired by sleep deprivation, leading to the selection of more unhealthy foods and, ultimately, higher rates of obesity,” said Stephanie Greer, a doctoral student and lead author of the study.
By The Numbers
142
Percent
Expected rise in Latino cancer cases in coming years
