Why dieting helps you get sounder sleep

Washington D.C: You may want to switch to a healthier diet as a recent study has suggested that weight loss through diet changes can improve sleep at any body weight.

The University of Pennsylvania findings offer new insights into how weight fluctuations impact numerous aspects of sleep independent of body weight.

Lead author Isaac Perron said that the findings suggest body weight is a less important factor than changes in weight for regulating sleepiness, adding that diet-induced obese mice that ate a regular chow diet for only one week showed the same sleep/wake profile as mice that ate a regular chow diet for nine weeks.

The findings have implications for the lean population as well, since mice consuming the low-fat diet for eight weeks followed by only one week of HFD had similar sleep as those eating a HFD for nine weeks.

Perron noted "If you're overweight and often feel tired, you may not need to lose all the weight to improve sleep, but rather just beginning to lose that excess weight may improve your sleep abnormalities and wake impairments."

Co-author Sigrid Veasey said that this study has mapped a completely novel food and sleep interaction. That changing to a healthier diet can acutely improve alertness and sleep is extremely important and certainly an interaction to now test in humans.

The study appears in the journal Sleep.