Sleeping in on the weekend can’t make up for lost sleep
Lack of Zs increased weight, late-night munchies and insensitivity to insulin
By Jeremy Rehm
If the weekend is your time to catch up on sleep, you may want to rethink your strategy.
In young adults, using the weekend to make up for lost sleep during the workweek can lead to increased late-night munchies, weight gain and a lowered responsiveness to insulin, researchers report February 28 in Current Biology.
“The take-home message is basically that you can’t make up for abusing your sleeping clock by sleeping a few more hours on the weekend,” says Paul Shaw, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as simple as saying, ‘Oh, if I sleep in on the weekends, I’ll be better.’”