Ever Thought That Sleep and Food Choices can be Interlinked
With increasing work opportunities in high stress environments, eating habits of most individuals has gone for a toss. These days sleep is a luxury for sound health, as globally people are sleep deprived. Moreover, eating habits do have a direct influence on sleep or vice versa. Therefore, a group of researchers carried out a study to find out the food choices made by people after deprived sleep. A Northwestern Medicine study reveals that people having deprived sleep next day go for high fat and calorie-dense food.
Sleep Deprivation Results in Higher Consumption of High Fat Food
Researchers state that the reason behind consuming high fat food is linked with olfactory system. The nose or say the olfactory system gets affected due to sleep deprivation. The study shows two ways with which sleep deprivation affect this system. First, the olfactory system goes into hyperdrive that sharpens the food odors for the brain. This assists the brain to differentiate better between food and non-food odors. However, after that there is failure in communication with other brain areas that get food signals, due to this interruption the decisions about what to eat changes.
According to the senior author of the study and assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Thorsten Kahnt, parts of the brain does not receive enough information due to sleep deprivation. This further leads in overcompensating of food choices with a richer energy signal. Though there are chances that these areas fail to keep tabs on the sharpened signals in the olfactory cortex. This in turn, results in going for potato chips and doughnuts. Thus, the answer is not focus on getting more sleep, but focuses more on how our nose sways our decision in making food choices.
