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Ah, to Sleep. Perchance to Lose Weight | Send Feedback
With apologies to Shakespeare, this week's posting is something that I hold sacred. Sleep. It is the nectar of the god's. If I didn't have this blog due in about 15 minutes, do you know what I'd be doing? That's right Bunkie, I'd be taking a well-deserved, leisurely nap on my handy office couch.
Who doesn't love to sleep?
Kids, that's who.
I can remember putting up a fight when my sweet grandmother made me take an afternoon nap when I visited her. Of course, to show me what a good sport she was, she took a little snooze with me. I now appreciate all aspects of that dynamic.
For as long as there have been kids, they have balked at going to bed on time. For some reason, in the past couple of generations, parents have balked at being parents...thus allowing kids to stay up later and later.
So, what's the big deal? The kid's happy. She's up in her room watching TV or texting friends, or surfing the web or any number of other multi-tasks. You're happy because you're in your den watching more adult fare or web surfing or pontificating on what's wrong with that crazy younger generation.
The problem, dear Brutus or Betty is that your kids need more sleep than they are getting. If they don't get this sleep and don't get any exercise, they are very likely going to develop obesity and everything that comes along with that ugly word.
In the November issue of Pediatrics magazine, researchers led by Dr. Julie Lumeng of the University of Michigan found that every additional hour per night that a third grader spends sleeping reduces the childs chances of being obese in the sixth grade by 40%! The less sleep the child got, the more likely he/she was to be obese in the sixth grade, no matter what the child's weight was in the third grade.
The study noted that the optimal time for third graders to sleep was 9 hours and 45 minutes per night. Sleeping more than this lowered the risk for obesity significantly.
Some studies among adults suggest some reasons for this. Apparently, a lack of sleep affects two hormones that control appetite regulation. Sleepy gown-ups produced more ghrelin, a hormone that promotes hunger and less leptin, a hormone that signals fullness. This might have a similar effect on kids. Another explanation: tired kids are less likely to exercise and more likely to sit on the couch and eat cookies.
This research should give parents and kids some motivation to stack some more ZZZ's. Who wants to be fat when you can get a little exercise and sleep more? Plus, it's a very good argument to enforce bedtimes, restrict caffeine in the form of soft drinks and remove the TV and computer from the bedroom.
Your parents, their parents, their parents and so on back to the beginning of time have all set and enforced bedtimes. Somewhere along the way to our current state of affairs, we have gotten away from being "parents" and became "buddies."
Just so we're all on the same page, parents look out for their kids. They don't let them do things that will make them sick. And if they're lucky, they get to take a nap with their kids and call it "important physical fitness activity."
So have you got a clue about sleeping? Wake me up and post it in morning.