Sometimes we think that if we sleep a lot during the weekend , it is possible to recover the lost sleep during all that we had to wake up early and sleep late.
To prove this, a group of scientists from the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA) designed an investigation to measure the effects of sleeping a lot on the weekend with the aim of recovering the hours lost during the week.
In the study, published in the journal Current Biology , the participants were divided into three groups: the first of them slept nine hours a day over a nine-night period; the second, five hours a day during the week and as much as they could during the weekend; and the third, five hours the nine days of the experiment.
The researchers evaluated sleep, the circadian clock, energy intake, weight gain and insulin resistance during insufficient sustained sleep and then in the weekend recovery sleep.
The experts found that people in the groups that slept less often ate something after dinner and had an increase in weight.
This also happened in the group of the two days to recover the sleep lost during the week . In addition, they reduced the sensitivity to insulin, which is essential for the body to assimilate food, and there was a mismatch in the circadian clock.
The authors affirmed that “this discovery is something unforeseen and shows that the recovery time of sleep during the weekend is probably not an effective measure to counteract the metabolic problems when the loss of sleep is chronic”.
