We’ve all been there: Pull a few
late-nighters, and suddenly you can’t stop eating everything in
sight.
Now, there just might be a scientific reason
for your hungry, sleep-deprived moments. Research from scientists
at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine suggests
that your brain is more sensitive to food smells when you haven’t
slept in a while.
Their study involved the carefully-controlled
food and sleep patterns among a group of volunteer participants.
First, participants were allowed only four hours of sleep and were
even repeatedly woken up throughout the night. (We’re not sure why
anyone would volunteer for this experiment, but…we digress.) Over
the course of the next day, these same participants were asked to
inhale odors like potato chips, cinnamon rolls, and non-edible
items like fir tree samples. Their brain behavior was observed
through a functional MRI scan.
A few weeks later, the participants were
invited back for another round of food-smelling—but this time, they
were allowed a full 8 hours of sleep the night before.
Interestingly, they showed less brain activity in response to those
same foods than they did when observed a few weeks earlier
operating on less sleep. There was no spike witnessed with the
non-food odors.
“When tired, participants showed greater brain
activity in two areas involved in olfaction—the piriform cortex and
the orbitofrontal cortex—in response to food smells than they did
when well rested. That spike wasn’t seen in response to nonfood
odors,” study co-author Surabhi Bhutani told Science
News.
So, while it’s
unclear why there’s a connection between the
amount of sleep the study participants had and their reaction to
food smells, there almost certainly is one. And it could definitely
be one of the reasons your current diet’s not working out too
well.
Personally, we’ll be climbing into bed a few
hours earlier tonight.
This article originally
appeared in Food & Wine by Rebekah Lowin.