New neuroscientific studies conducted with MRI reveal that lack of sleep reduces the ability of certain regions of the human brain responsible for making decisions regarding the food we eat . This could explain the close relationship between insomnia and obesity.
In the experiments, scientists from the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory of the University of California (USA) studied the behavior of 33 healthy adults after a normal night's sleep and after having spent much of a sleepless night. In both sessions they were shown different foods as they scanned their brains to determine which ones they liked the most. This is how Stephanie Greer and her colleagues found that the frontal lobe, which controls behavior and makes decisions, including food selection, works "worse" when we don't sleep well , preventing us from gathering the information we need to decide what food to eat. healthier. As a consequence, sleep-deprived subjects during the experiment chose less healthy, fattier, and also less tasty foods.
? It is not the centers related to pleasure and reward that make us eat worse when we do not rest, but the rational brain, which does not process all the signals to make 'wise' decisions ?, explains Greer, who has released the results at the SLEEP 2012 congress of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
