I'm worried! It's not that staying up late makes you fat, it's obesity that makes you sleepless
For a long time, people have formed a consensus: staying up late not only makes people "bald", but also leads to obesity.
A study published last year in the Journal of Neuroscience found that sleep deprivation boosts the need for junk food and increases the risk of overeating and obesity.
However, a recent study published in PLOS Biology upended this relationship between obesity and sleep. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that it may not be lack of sleep that causes obesity, but obesity that affects sleep quality.
In general, lack of sleep makes people yearn for high-sugar and high-fat foods more than usual, and people who lack sleep for a long time are more likely to become obese and develop diabetes; at the same time, hunger affects sleep in humans, rats, and fruit flies. This information suggests that sleep is regulated to some extent by nutrients. However, the mechanism by which sleep and eating work together is unclear.
To understand how sleep states coordinate with metabolism, the researchers genetically modified the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (hereafter referred to as the "worm"). This is a widely used model organism in biology and medicine with a homologue of salt-inducible kinases (SIKs) called "KIN-29", which are conserved regulators of sleep and metabolism. The researchers "turned off" the neurons that control sleep in the worms. In other words, the worms at this time have lost their sleep function, but they can still eat, breathe and reproduce.
The researchers compared the levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a source of energy for all living things, in normal and engineered worms. The results showed that the sleep-deprived worms had significantly lower ATP levels, but they still stored excess fat, causing a situation similar to obesity in humans.
The researchers then hypothesized that the release of stored fat is a mechanism that promotes sleep, and that the reason why the KIN-29 knockout worms can't sleep is because they can't release fat.
To test this hypothesis, the researchers went on to engineer the worms to express fat-consuming enzymes in the KIN-29 mutant worms, while the worms were able to sleep peacefully.
"There may be a signaling problem between fat storage and the brain cells that control sleep," Dr. Raizen said. This may be why obese patients have sleep problems.
At the end of the article, the researchers suggest that the relationship between sleep deprivation and increased fat reserves in humans should be explained as chronic obesity promotes sleep deprivation, which will help people treat common sleep disorders.
Editor: Li Chenyan
Responsible editor: Fan Liping
biological exploration