After finals end, you're probably going to party for the following week without sleep. After that week of booze, sandy feet and agape ends, my one piece of advice to you is to re-regulate your body clocks. U.Va. students may be the fittest in the nation, but that doesn't protect those Lacoste shirts from the swelling stomach of sleepless nights.
I questioned writing this column because American science is always brewing excuses for its overweight citizens. Last week, Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker finally took a stand and stated the obvious: Americans are fat because of their trust in science. While there is still no wonder-drug for obesity besides a healthy lifestyle, scientists have found another cause for the augmented American body -- sleep deprivation.
If you think eating right and getting enough exercise is enough to avoid a body dominated by juicy adipose, think again. Researchers at Northwestern University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have determined that humans need to pay more attention to their circadian rhythms. The study suggested that staying up past bedtime--along with skipping meals and constant snacking -- caused weight gain, fatty livers and high cholesterol levels for an unlucky group of mice whose internal biological clocks were genetically disrupted.
The mice in the study had defective clock genes, which are responsible for controlling daily rhythms in the brain and throughout the body, including sleeping and eating. The clock gene and a half-dozen other proteins run 24-hour oscillating clocks in most cells in the body and in a specific part of the brain that controls appetite and wakefulness. About 3 to 10 percent of the genes in any given tissue turn on and off in circadian rhythm.
Mice typically sleep during the day and then eat a meal at the beginning and at the end of their active nocturnal day, much like breakfast and dinner. Instead, the clock mutant mice skipped their meals, stayed awake far into the usual rest time and snacked often. The insomniac mice also were a little more sluggish, as measured by infrared sensors in their cages. The researchers removed the exercise wheels used to gauge mouse activity because regular spins can help the mice reset their biological clocks.
Mice with the mutant clock gene ate more than normal mice, and they gained more weight, which was evident within six weeks of birth. The circadian-challenged mice also developed high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood sugar, low insulin, bloated fat cells, and lipid-engorged liver cells as a result of the unregulated genes.
Project researchers consider the body to be like a symphony. Following this metaphor, the tissues important in metabolism have to be conducted properly. When the clock gene causes each tissue plays to its own beat, a cacophony at the biological level is created that sets up the animal for obesity and metabolic misregulation.
The discovery of the clock gene reinforces the connection between circadian rhythms, sleep, metabolism and hypothalamic regulation. Even partial sleep deprivation can change the blood levels of several appetite-regulatory hormones, including leptin and Ghrelin, an effect likely to increase food intake and obesity in the general population.
We live in a society in which our president is too afraid to take a stand against obesity because he might lose his portly electoral support. America has to face the facts. The government isn't going to take a stand on obesity as long as it's dominated by the interests of the porcine population of the red states. We are thus doomed to retain our international image as being passively plump.
I offer a solution to the Bush administration. Instead of taking a direct stand on obesity, take a stand on sleep deprivation. A nice slogan could be "To sleep--perchance to lose weight." And you wouldn't even alienate your corpulent constituents!
As afraid as Americans are of it, exercise is one of the few remedies to fix misregulated biological clocks. Without exercise, sleep becomes more difficult as was the case with the mice. When their exercise wheels were removed, they had trouble sleeping and resetting their biological clocks. Sleep and exercise are part of a double-sided coin that must be flipped daily.
I'm not trying to scare you out of your pants. I'm just trying to help you reduce their size. In doing so, you will aid me in finding the increasingly rare pants of size 30 waste. Then again, if you help me find them, they will likely be oversized because of the fashion industry's continuing ploy for consumer happiness.
Yes, Virginia. We have a problem. The government isn't going to encourage you to lose weight. You'll just have to take the word of spindly-yet-sexy science columnists such as myself. Take the first step by taking a snooze. And if this column put you to sleep, then I have succeeded.
Ryan McElveen can be reached at ryanmcelveen@cavalierdaily.com.
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