By Staff Reports
(Oahu)– From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I’m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.
A study indicates sleep might be a good weight control plan for teens. Researcher Jonathan Mitchell of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania saw this in data on more than 1,000 Philadelphia-area teens from their freshman through senior years in high school.
Mitchell found that teens who slept less had higher body mass indexes – the ratio of their weight to their height. And he says:
“Based on these data, we predict that an increase in sleep duration from seven to eight hours per day to 10 hours per day could lower the prevalence of adolescent overweight and obesity by about 4 percent.”
And Mitchell says the heaviest teens might get the most weight-control benefit from sleeping more.
The study in the journal Pediatrics was supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I’m Ira Dreyfuss.