Sleeping ten hours each night can help adolescents fight obesity, claims study

A new study has claimed that increasing their sleep duration to ten hours each night can help adolescents fight obesity. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that fewer hours of sleep was linked to higher levels of body mass index (BMI) for teens. Even after studying and adjusting the time spent watching television and playing sports, the relationship between sleeping and BMI stayed constant. The study suggested that increasing the duration of sleep to 10 hours per day helped reduce adolescent obesity. Almost thousand high school students from their high school years were observed in the study. After a period of six months, height weight, sleeping patterns and BMIs of all the participants were calculated. "The psychosocial and physical consequences of adolescent obesity are well documented, yet the rate has more than tripled over the last four decades," said lead author Jonathan A Mitchell, postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Penn Medicine. "What we found in following these adolescents is that each additional hour of sleep was associated with a reduced BMI for all participants, but the reduction was greater for those with higher BMIs. "The study is further evidence to support that getting more sleep each night has substantial health benefits during this crucial developmental period," Mitchell said. The study was published in the journal Pediatrics.