Don’t fuss when the kids sleep late on weekends. New research indicates that snoozing late on Saturdays and Sundays may help them fight obesity. Researchers believe that children’s active lifestyles cause them to lose crucial sleep during the week, and it is essential for them to catch up during the weekends.
The National Sleep Foundation recommends that preschoolers sleep from eleven to thirteen hours each day. Elementary school students are recommended to get ten to twelve hours of sleep, pre-teens nine to eleven hours, and teens should sleep eight-and-a-half to nine hours each night. Yet, many children get less and it’s having an effect on their waistlines.
A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that children who slept the least had a whopping 92 percent higher risk of being overweight when compared to children who slept the longest. They also found that each hour of additional sleep lowered the risk of a child becoming overweight or obese by nine percent. The association between sleeping longer and a reduced risk was more pronounced in boys.
“Our analysis of the data shows a clear association between sleep duration and the risk of overweight or obesity in children,” Youfa Wang, MD and senior author of the study said in a statement. “The risk declined with more sleep.”
The new research, conducted by scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and published in the journal Pediatrics, is the first study to show that sleep lost during the week can be “made up” on the weekend and can help “reset” sleeping habits.
After tracking the sleeping habits of more than 5,159 children, they discovered that most of the children slept a little over nine hours most nights during the week, but a significant number slept less. When the researchers examined their sleeping patterns over the weekend, they found that those who caught up on their sleep stayed slender.
"Overweight and obese children tended to wake up earlier and had shorter sleep durations throughout weekdays, weekends and holidays than their normal-weight peers,” the researchers said in a statement.
"Our study suggests sleeping longer on weekends or holidays could lower the risk of being overweight or obese."
The study authors noted that sleeping less is common in today’s modern society, with people generally sleeping an hour or two less each night than only a few decades earlier.
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