Is your child overweight? Does he or she get enough sleep? You may be surprised to find out what sleep, kids, and weight loss all have in common. A recent study has had some very surprising results.
Sleep is Vital
As you probably know, sleep is essential to survival. You can actually die if you do not sleep. Without proper sleep, you do not function as well mentally or physically, and your body stops performing vital functions as efficiently as well.
A recent study at the University of Chicago also found that people who do not get enough sleep also have a greater risk of being overweight. What this means is that if you want to lose weight, you might also consider getting more sleep, along with diet and exercise. This connects sleep and weight loss, but where do kids fit into the mix?
Kids and Sleep
The study at the University of Chicago, which was published in the Pediatrics journal, found that most kids do not get enough sleep, due to school and extracurricular activities. The kids that participated in the study were monitored with actigraphs, which is a monitor that logs motion. 308 children participated in the study, and they were between the ages of four and ten years old. The children’s Body Mass Index was measured at the beginning of the study.
What the study found was that the children who did not get the recommended amount of sleep each night had a four time greater chance of being obese, and a greater chance of developing health conditions such as heart disease later in life.
Kids Must Stay Busy
While this information is important, you aren’t likely to stop sending your kids to school, or to ask them to give up their extracurricular activities. With that in mind, what can you do to protect your child from obesity and poor health? Sleep is the key, but if they do not get the sleep that they need during the week, you can reduce the risk somewhat by allowing your child to sleep in on the weekends and during holidays. With that change, the risk of obesity and health problems is only increased by three times, rather than four times.
You can also set an early bedtime for your child during the week, to ensure that they are actually getting eight hours of sleep each night, which is better than trying to ‘catch up’ on sleep during the weekend.
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