Get Some Sleep!

We tend to equate health with food. And it's true food plays a big, important role in being healthy (or not.) But if you stop there, you risk overlooking other factors that could play even more important roles.

My beloved health coaching professor and founder of Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Joshua Rosenthal, coined the phrases 'primary food' and 'secondary food.' Secondary food is, well, food. Primary food is everything else we feed on each day: relationships, jobs, exercise and, you guessed it, sleep. These things are primary because they're actually more important than what you eat. Primary foods affect what you eat, and they determine how what you eat affects your body.

America doesn't get enough sleep. Probably not news for anyone reading this, but it gets more interesting. We typically associate a lack of sleep with exhaustion, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating, etc. Beyond the gagillion cups of coffee, we don't really think about how it affects our appetites and the kinds of foods we crave - perhaps because if sleep deprivation is chronic, its effects have become the norm for most of us.

Shannon Wheeler; New Yorker Cartoon

There are two hormones in our body that control our appetite by communicating with our brain. Leptin tells the brain enough food has been consumed and we can stop eating. Gherlin tells the brain we're hungry and to keep eating. Given these two definitions, one would think the only thing that could influence leptin and gherlin would be (secondary) food. But primary food, and sleep in particular, does too. Heavily.

Sleep deprivation suppresses leptin and stimulated gherlin. So our brain tells us to eat even if we really don't need to. What's worse, sleep deprivation increases activity in areas of the brain that seek pleasure, so we crave unhealthier and higher-calorie foods. And without proper sleep to aid in better decision-making, those are likely the ones we'll reach for. It's like a quadruple whammy!

And it's a slippery slope. Sleep deprivation leads to poor eating habit leads to obesity leads to Type 2 Diabetes leads to heart disease leads toooooooooooooooo.......

So hopefully the point has been made to get some sleep as a big step in the healthy direction (and there could be worse advice to be given, right?!?!) But then the question is how do you know if you're getting enough? Here's a rough guide:

Sleep requirements depend on age. Newborns sleep 16 to 18 hours a day, preschoolers need 11 to 12 hours, and elementary school children need 10 hours. Adolescents should get 9 to 10 hours, though most teenagers sleep only about seven hours. Given the opportunity to sleep as long as they want, most adults average about eight hours a night.

Now here's what's crazy. We've all gotten used to the ridiculous swirl of conflicting messages about what we should and shouldn't eat (though hopefully I've helped you cut through some of them!), but here's some more confusion for you, this time relating to sleep.

Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 and 7.5 hours a night live the longest. And those who sleep 8 hours or more, or less than 6.5 hours, don't live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hours. Sleeping 8.5 hours might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hours. 

Huh?! You just have to laugh. Here's what I'll say, and at the end of the day, the same goes for the food you eat.

We are all different. Listen to what YOUR body is telling you.

I have a colleague who really only needs a handful of hours of sleep. If that's all I got I would be a useless mess, but it works for her. Most of us need a lot more. And you know who you are - you really don't need some guide to tell you.

Just be careful not to keep yourself awake at night worrying about how much sleep you're not getting!