A new study suggests being sleepy might make you more prone to eating junk food rather than eating nutritious snacks, according to CBS News.
Nature Communications found that lack of sleep leads to brain changes that make it harder for an individual to make good eating decisions and more likely to give in to their unhealthy cravings.
"What we have discussed is that high-level brain regions required for complex judgments and decisions become blunted by a lack of sleep, while more primal brain structures that control motivation and desire are amplified," study senior author Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience, said in a press release.
Walker said the study simply means that high-calorie foods are more appealing because of the brain's altered state. For the study, researchers looked at the brain activity of 23 healthy young adults, after they have had a normal night's sleep and after a sleepless night.
According to CBS News, each individual's brain activity was measured using an MRI scan. During the scan the subjects were shown 80 different pictures of food that ranged from healthy and unhealthy. Some items include burgers, pizza, doughnuts, strawberries, apples and carrots.
The researchers discovered that lack of sleep negatively affected the brain's frontal lobe, CBS News reported. The frontal lobe is the region which is in charge of decision-making process. When a non-healthy foods and healthy foods were placed in front of a sleep deprived person, the brain activity swerved more towards the "greasier" path.
"These results shed light on how the brain becomes impaired by sleep deprivation, leading to the selection of more unhealthy foods and ultimately, higher rates of obesity," lead author Stephanie Greer, a doctoral student in Walker's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, said in a press release.
Getting a sufficient amount of sleep is an important factor to making healthier choices, CBS News reported. A study published in the May edition of the JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that shopping on an empty stomach makes people more likely to buy higher-calorie foods.
According to the New York Times, Dr. Kenneth P. Wright Jr., director of the sleep and chronobiology lab at that University of Colorado at Boulder, said the study might explain why people make bad food choices when they are tired and eat more when they are exhausted. Wright is not part of the study.
"There's something that changes in our brain when we've sleepy that's irrespective of how much energy we need," Wright said. "The brain wants more even when the energy need has been fulfilled."
