The Guardian recently published a news article discussing a research study that examined the impact of sleep on obesity. The World Health Organization has identified obesity as a global epidemic with rates of weight gain, poor diet, and inadequate exercise rapidly rising in children, adolescents, and adults. Obesity is a multifaceted issue, having harmful effects on the physical and mental health of those suffering from it. Researcher Lauren Asarnow and her colleagues describe novel evidence for a link between bedtime and changes in body mass index (BMI). Recent studies have reported that circadian timing in adolescents is necessary of attention. As Asarnow states, there has been an increasing preference for eveningness, or “staying up late”
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Data was collected using surveys that were administered at home and in schools from September 1994 to April 1995, followed by three follow up interviews in 1996, 2002, and 2009. The current study was a stratified random sampling about the health and behavior of adolescents in grades 7 to 12 and young adults between the ages of 18 and 32. The final result contained 132 discrete schools and a total of 3,342 students. Sleep variables were determined via self-report measures. Investigators measured height and weight at each wave from which BMI was calculated. BMI is typically adjusted for age through conversion to a z-score because body fat percentage changes as children develop. In this study, a z-score was not generated; instead, age and sex were included as covariates to account for any age-related differences in BMI. Other variables included were fast-food consumption, television viewing, and …show more content…
The primary behavioral factors examined were: sleep duration, fast food consumption, exercise frequency, screen time, and workday bedtime. As I mentioned in the summary, the authors focused their efforts on describing the association between workday bedtime and change in BMI. The other behavioral factors were evaluated as potential mediators in this relationship. They report that fast food consumption attenuated this association but the other variables (sleep duration, exercise frequency, and screen time) did not.3 Despite reporting these associations, the authors did not discuss in great detail how these behavioral factors may influence changes in BMI. Given its short length and the novelty of the finding, I predict that the authors wanted to briefly present recent findings and describe a host of potential targets for future studies, as is often the case in research. Many peer-reviewed journals have strict criteria for the word count, type of analyses, and discussion information allowed in a given scientific publication. Therefore, it comes as no surprise to me that these authors were limited in the extent of their own explanations. However, the introduction of this paper does expand on the interplay between social, psychological, behavioral, and biological factors of obesity. For example, one study found that 60% of 11th and 12th graders stayed up late due to the
Data was collected using surveys that were administered at home and in schools from September 1994 to April 1995, followed by three follow up interviews in 1996, 2002, and 2009. The current study was a stratified random sampling about the health and behavior of adolescents in grades 7 to 12 and young adults between the ages of 18 and 32. The final result contained 132 discrete schools and a total of 3,342 students. Sleep variables were determined via self-report measures. Investigators measured height and weight at each wave from which BMI was calculated. BMI is typically adjusted for age through conversion to a z-score because body fat percentage changes as children develop. In this study, a z-score was not generated; instead, age and sex were included as covariates to account for any age-related differences in BMI. Other variables included were fast-food consumption, television viewing, and …show more content…
The primary behavioral factors examined were: sleep duration, fast food consumption, exercise frequency, screen time, and workday bedtime. As I mentioned in the summary, the authors focused their efforts on describing the association between workday bedtime and change in BMI. The other behavioral factors were evaluated as potential mediators in this relationship. They report that fast food consumption attenuated this association but the other variables (sleep duration, exercise frequency, and screen time) did not.3 Despite reporting these associations, the authors did not discuss in great detail how these behavioral factors may influence changes in BMI. Given its short length and the novelty of the finding, I predict that the authors wanted to briefly present recent findings and describe a host of potential targets for future studies, as is often the case in research. Many peer-reviewed journals have strict criteria for the word count, type of analyses, and discussion information allowed in a given scientific publication. Therefore, it comes as no surprise to me that these authors were limited in the extent of their own explanations. However, the introduction of this paper does expand on the interplay between social, psychological, behavioral, and biological factors of obesity. For example, one study found that 60% of 11th and 12th graders stayed up late due to the