Longer sleep protects against cold and overweight

Staying in the bed half an hour longer is a luxury that can afford only some of us, so the only opportunity to spend more time in bed in the morning is going to sleep earlier in the evening. There are a number of reasons why you should do that. American scientists have announced that getting more sleep protects against infection, obesity and depression.

Scientists have found that people who get little sleep suffer from frequent colds much more than those who sleep longer. Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University team of scientists conducted the experiment – they took 153 participants who sleep different periods of time and gave them the agents that initiate runny nose. The less sleep time was given, the more symptoms of cold participants felt.

According to the study, participants who slept less than 7 hours a day were three times more likely to feel the symptoms of cold than those who slept eight hours or more. It should be noted that time people spend in bed is not important – the most important thing to improve your immune system is the actual duration of sleep. People who just lie down in bed for a long time were even in a greatest risk of infection: it was 5 times higher than those who slept 98% of the time.

Getting enough sleep not only protects against infection, but it guarantees the protection against overweight.  The scientists of University of California have found new evidence that chronic insomnia is a cause of obesity. They compared the balance of hormones of those people who suffer from insomnia with the balance of hormones of the healthy ones and found clear differences. Unbelievable, but people who were sleeping shorter had the lower hormone, causing the appetite, level in their blood. Additionally, that leads to a sharp increase of this hormone of hunger later in a time of the day, say researchers.

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