Sleep Conference 2013- The Stuff of Dreams

I can't believe I'm here in Baltimore, MD at the annual Sleep Conference! This is my first real academic conference and already I'm exhausted and delighted. There are talks and posters over an entire spectrum of sleep-related fields (cognition, disease, metabolic rates, etc.)

While I've had a full day of presentations, I think my favorite topic of the day has been sleep, circadian rhythms, and metabolism. I suppose it could be because this is the issue most relevant to my current lifestyle. As an undergraduate student, twice a year the dreaded finals swing around and you find people living in the library and barely sleeping. These same students, afraid to waste precious procrastinating studying time, bring boxes of goldfish and coolers filled with red bull to sustain them. Personally, I try to avoid this behavior but I'm not always successful. And it's usually on nights when I'm scarfing down a whole box of cookies that I wonder, 'how the heck can I be so hungry when I've been sitting perfectly still for the last 8 hours?'

Well I'm not saying that the Sleep Conference is my personal answer to this question, but there has been quite a bit of recent research linking sleep deprivation with increased hunger, caloric consumption, and (in the end) weight gain. What I found most interesting was that one study (which I believe came out of this link) showed that sleep deprived participants did consume more calories, but statistically consumed less calories per waking hour than non-sleep restricted participants. This indicates to me that caloric intake isn't the whole story, and perhaps metabolic rates are shifted because of the lack of sleep so that the calories consumed are not efficiently put to use.

Mind you, this is just my take on a particular presentation and I suggest checking out original sources such as this to get the full story. Please feel free to chime in on the comments below as well!