Get to Sleep!
Some newly released studies on the importance of sleep report information that WE reported five year ago! I know, I know, you remember ALL of this info from our previous stories on sleep, but its all worth repeating. Plus, its good to see that well-vetted research continues to support earlier studies to the same sleep-promoting effect!
A recent issue of New Scientist (Jan 3, 2009) notes this about sleep and type-2 diabetes -- a bit of info that WE reported on way back in 2004: "For some time, researchers have...suspected that sleep has a crucial role to play in the physiological realm. That has now been emphatically illustrated by the discovery of a connection between sleep deprivation and Type-2 diabetes. Several large-scale genomic studies published last month in Nature Genetics (Vol 40, p1399) have revealed a link between blood sugar levels and the biological clock that cues our sleeping and waking cycles...The research suggests that the link is a protein that recognizes the sleep hormone melatonin. It's clear that the less one sleeps, the less insulin one produces, though exactly how melatonin affects the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas remains to be worked out. The intriguing possibility is that this is somehow related to the fact that sleep-poor individuals also tend to be at increased risk of obesity and immune problems."
Here's this tidbit from the August 2009 issue of Natural Solutions -- another connection we made back in '04: "A new five-year study found that middle-aged people who got just one more hour of sleep each night were one third less likely than their slightly sleep-deprived peers to have the artery-stiffening calcium deposits that can lead to heart disease."
We tend to think of sleep as "down time," but these studies (and host of other emerging research) shows that sleep is quite a quite active time indeed. Don't skip out on sleep!
There is much, much more on the importance of sleep in our archives. Read these, and then hit the hay!
Sleep Deficit: The Hidden Debt That is Hurting Us All (November 2008)
A Brief History of Sleep (June 2009)
You Snooze, You Win (November 2007)
Snooze Foods (November 2004)
Sleep is elusive as we get older. Great information.