How a Lack of Sleep Could Cause Your Child to Be Overweight

Aside from maintaining a healthy diet and ensuring regular exercise and physical activity there is a third surprising solution to making sure young children do not become overweight. According to recent findings in the British Medical Journal, there is a direct correlation between regular sleep patterns and maintaining a low mass of fat.

Children who slept the average amount, for those aged three to seven this constitutes eleven hours, were less likely to be overweight by the age of seven than those who did not. To calculate if a child was overweight the researchers, who studied 244 children, used the Body Mass Index (BMI) scale which measures a child’s weight and height. The findings also highlighted that for every additional hour of sleep a child gained, the odds of them being overweight decreased by 61%.

The levels of sleep needed vary through a child’s aging; the younger the child is the more sleep they need. So between the age of one and three the hours of sleep a child needs, accumulatively in night sleeps and naps, is between twelve and fourteen hours. This decreases with additional age; between the ages of seven and twelve the figure has dropped to between ten and eleven hours and in adulthood this figure decreases again to between seven and nine.

Ways to ensure a child gets a good night’s sleep are numerous and some are quite simple. To ensure a well balanced sleep it is important to attempt to get the human body to develop a circadian sleeping rhythm – this is simply the name for establishing a body clock which goes to sleep and wakes up at roughly the same time every day. This means making sure a child does not stay up late, even at weekends, and that a “bed time” is set and fixed as early as need be to make sure the child gets the optimum amount of sleep.

Some people, children and adults alike, can suffer from sleep problems regardless of what time they go to bed but thankfully there are a number of measures that can be undertaken to reduce this possibility. Firstly, it is imperative to ensure that sleeping quarters are as harmonious as possible – darkness and a cool temperature are the ideals. Whilst darkness is relatively easy to achieve, through a heavy curtain, there are a few small obstacles that are often ignored or not noticed; these can be computer lights or brightness emitted from a television screen. Whilst the lights may seem small in context with the rest of the room they can do much to disrupt a sleeping pattern by subconsciously stimulating the brain and making sleep difficult. With regards to heat a temperature of around 18 degrees Celsius should be aspired to as anything either colder or warmer than this would make for an awkward sleeping environment.

An interactive factor in a child’s weight and their sleep patterns can also be put down to the amount of exercise they do. Other studies have also found that sleep comes easiest to those who regularly exercise. As little as half an hour a day of physical activity can help not only burn off calories but achieve greater sleep at night which, in turn, is a wonderful health tool for the restorative effects slumber has on the body. On the other hand, a lack of exercise can make a child less able to sleep and this can cause a self defeating cycle.

References:

• Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine - Lack of Regular Exercise, Depression and Degree of Apnea are Preddictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Patients with Sleep Apnea

About the Author: Kieron Casey is a BA (Hons) Journalism graduate who blogs regularly about an array of topics including health, education and the environment. He is writing on behalf of Bed Ted, a baby bedding company.

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