Study: Sleep Less, Eat More

The way you eat, it seems, is tied up with the way you sleep. Researchers recently found that women who slept fewer than six hours a night took in more daytime calories than did women who slept seven hours, LiveScience reports. And the food consumed by the six-hour sleepers wasn't as healthy as the stuff the seven-hour sleepers ate. Interestingly, a separate study noted that dieting people eating fewer foods faced a higher risk of sleepiness during the day than people not on a restricted diet. Those sticking to low-fat or low-cholesterol diets felt more tired after waking.

We've all heard plenty about the importance of sleep, yet apparently we aren't paying attention, researchers in the UK and US say, per the BBC. We're facing "serious health problems" due to too little sleep, they say—problems like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, all of which researchers say are related to sleep deprivation. Yet today, we ignore our natural rhythms of daily activity and nightly rest. "We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-dark cycle," says an Oxford professor. "What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems." (More sleep stories.)