Alternative Health Blog

The Alternative Health Blog is presenting “Stay Younger Longer Week” from Sept. 22 through Sept. 27.

Forget the whole cutesy “beauty sleep” thing. What we need to know about how sleep can keep us younger is crystallized in a study by Eve Van Cauter and colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Van Cauter scared up about a dozen healthy young men, easy enough to do on a college campus. She asked them to stay overnight in the university sleep lab facility for six consecutive nights.

Then she and her fellow researchers methodically disrupted the sleep patterns of these young men, waking them up frequently, turning on lights, requiring certain mental tasks before going back to sleep. The subjects averaged four hours of sleep each night

Which sounds like a typical sleep pattern during finals week.

After the six nights the young men were tested for vital signs. Their results for blood pressure, insulin response and cortisol (stress hormone) levels matched a diabetic man in his 60s.

Staying younger longer starts with getting enough sleep. Four hours is clearly not enough and, face it, neither is six hours. Averaging seven hours per night is the minimum and eight is better. There is some evidence that sleeping longer than nine hours could be counterproductive.

If you still insist you are exception, that you can prosper on four to six hours of sleep per night—or you have a loved one who makes the claim—here are a few more studies to connect feeling and looking younger to getting seven to eight hours, on average, most nig

– One 2005 study of 10,000 Americans shows those adults between 32 and 49 years old who sleep less than seven hours are significantly more likely to be obese or at least 20 percent over a healthy body weight. It is believed that short sleep corrupts the body hormones that regulate appetite, a biological finding confirmed in the University of Chicago research.

–  The long-standing Harvard Nurses Health Study reveals that lack of sleep is linked to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In particular, insufficient sleep appears to wreak havoc with our hormonal systems

– Other studies point to increased inflammation in the body with lack of sleep. Inflammation is believed to be at the root of cardiac episodes and an overall shorter life span.

On the more hopeful side: One researcher, Alexandros N. Vgontzas at Penn State University has found that a person who sleeps less than seven hours per night can protect against biological damage by adopting a habitual napping habit that gets total hours sleeping up to at least seven hours per day. 

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.