Roles of sleep and circadian rhythms in the origin and nutritional management of obesity and metabolic disease

In our latest blog post Fiona Giles talks about her attendance to a conference on the importance of sleep in our health. 

In December I was lucky enough to attend a two day conference held by the Royal Society of Medicine and the Nutrition Society on the importance of sleep in health.  This was a fantastic opportunity to hear some new and original research on the importance of sleep quality and duration in reducing obesity and the risk of metabolic diseases such as diabetes.  The conference covered a wide variety of topics relating to sleep and circadian cycles, ranging from the importance of vitamin D for sleep to the effects of shift work and the importance of regular meals in maintaining a healthy body weight.

This conference was of interest to me both as a member of the eHealth Unit, working on the HeLP-Diabetes project and as a Public Health Nutritionist.  Several research studies presented across the two days demonstrated interesting findings in relation to sleep and diabetes. These studies showed that longer sleep duration was associated with better glucose control and less variation in glucose levels.  This suggests that improving one’s sleeping environment, going to bed earlier and using relaxation techniques could all help diabetic patients better control their condition.

The importance of regular meals and, in particular, eating breakfast was also mentioned throughout the conference.  The take home message of many conference papers was that eating earlier in the day was related to significantly higher weight loss than eating late in the day.  Furthermore, studies showed that participants who skipped breakfast were significantly less likely to lose weight, over six weeks, compared to participants who did eat breakfast, even though the breakfast group consumed substantially more calories.  An interesting point considering breakfast is the meal most often skipped by those trying to lose weight!

Although there is lots of interesting new research on sleep and the effects of circadian cycles on metabolism, much of the evidence comes from rodent studies and small, limited, human cohorts.  Therefore it is difficult to generalise findings to the population as a whole. Nevertheless, current evidence shows us that improved sleep quality and duration could have a substantial effect on reducing the risk of metabolic diseases and be a key tool in helping diabetic patients to better control their condition.