BIOLOGY NEWS
The findings show that missing a night of sleep burns roughly 135 calories, the equivalent of two slices of bread or a 225 ml glass of semi-skimmed milk. In terms of physical exertion, this amounts to walking just under two miles. On the flip side, eight hours of sleep saved the same approximate amount of energy.
‘While the amount of energy saved during sleep may seem small, it was actually more than we expected,’ says Professor Kenneth Wright, lead author of the study and Director of Colorado University’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory. ‘If one considers the amount of positive energy storage needed to explain the obesity epidemic is 50 calories a day (Hill et al., 2003), the energy savings represented by sleep is physiologically meaningful.’
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