Want to learn more about how to control the cravings during teen years?
Here is a tip: Sleep better!
I present the research below:
"Associations of Sleep with Food Cravings, Diet, and Obesity in Adolescence
Nutrients 2019, 11, 2899; doi:10.3390/nu11122899"
Hope you find this helpful!
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Want to learn more about how to control the cravings during teen years?
Here is a tip: Sleep better!
I present the research below:
"Associations of Sleep with Food Cravings, Diet, and Obesity in Adolescence
Nutrients 2019, 11, 2899; doi:10.3390/nu11122899"
Hope you find this helpful!
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Are you getting frustrated with what to feed a teenager who is always hungry? Everybody knows that teenagers have a huge appetite. It seems like you need to feed them constantly to satisfy their hunger. It's even more difficult where teenagers who struggle with their weight truly want to make changes like cut down on junk food or stop ever eating, and they can't. There is frustration, isolation, stress, and that's why I decided to create a recipe collection of 30 easy and healthy meals for teenagers. They are all high in protein to satisfy your teenager's hunger and they can all be ready in less than 30 minutes. If you want to grab a free copy, go to lifestell14scom for the last recipes.
Speaker 2:
This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 1:
Hello, welcome for another episode on the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. This is Dr Jenny Gorgary. I'm here with you today to talk about a topic I've talked before, but I'm going to approach it from a different angle. I'm going to talk today about food cravings and their relationship with poor sleep in teenagers, and we all have experienced food cravings. Now, what is a food craving exactly? Food craving is this strong desire for something that you really want to eat, and it's not necessarily driven by hunger. So if you ask yourself, can I have an apple right now? Am I really hungry? If you're really hungry, the answer to that question is going to be yes. But if you're not hungry and you say no, I don't want an apple, I just want to have a piece of cake, and that's what I want. And if you offer me anything else besides this piece of cake, I don't want it. So that is really what a craving is. I'm sure you have experienced it. I know I experienced cravings frequently in my life in the past more frequently so and the reason I wanted to make this podcast is because one reason why we can have these cravings is because we are not having good quality sleep. There are other reasons, but this episode is going to really focus on a research study that actually was done in teenagers and investigated what is the association between the sleep and those unhealthy food cravings. Okay, so let's dive right into it. The title of the manuscript is associations of sleep with food cravings, diet and obesity in adolescents. It was published in 2019 in the Journal of Nutrients and it was done by Celsic Crutch and the team at the University of Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute.
Speaker 1:
So let's see what the researchers did. They asked teenagers between the ages of 10 to 16 years of age to wear a specific accelerometer in their wrist. Accelerometers are similar to smart watches. They have the ability to not only measure how much physically active you are and how many steps you do, but they also can, if you wear it at night, they can also check your sleep, like what time you go to bed, what time you wake up, and they can also check and see what time of this time that you spent in bed you're actually sleeping. The way they can calculate it is because they are very sensitive in movement. So if you know that you're not moving at all when you're sleeping, that's how you know you are in deep sleep. So they gave them these smart watches let's call them like that to wear them so they can capture the information on their sleep and their movement. And they asked them to wear it at least three days in order for them to be eligible to get all the data that they needed. And one of these days was a weekend, right, so they asked at least two days during the day and one at least one weekend day.
Speaker 1:
Now they also asked them to collect what we call dietary recalls. You probably have heard about this from others studies that have presented. Basically, they asked them to fill out questionnaires on what they ate on the previous three days and just write down the quantity and the quality of what they ate exactly. So after they do that, then they were collecting data on how many calories they consumed and also what type of food they ate. So they also, in this particular research, they collected data on what was the quality of the food.
Speaker 1:
Then they also gave teenagers a specific questionnaire that is designed to measure food cravings. So this particular questionnaire was asking like, for example, did you crave chocolate how many times? Like, did you always check it and the cravings was done to assess the cravings over a month, the previous month prior to participation in the study. So they say I never had this craving the last month, or I had it a few times, or I almost had it every day. So they tried to get a sense of how strong were these cravings.
Speaker 1:
And then they had specific categories of food. There were like eight foods that they were in high-fat foods. There were other foods that were in sweet foods. There are eight foods that they were in the carbohydrate category. There were four foods in the fast food and they also actually did fruits and vegetables. And just so to give you few examples that are also used in this food craving scale, like, for example, they would ask how frequently did you have the craving for fried chicken, sausage, bacon, cookies, chocolate or donuts or cake or cinnamon rolls or ice cream or pancakes or biscuits or rice or baked potato or pasta or cereal or hamburger, french fries, chips, pizza, gravy, fried fish, cornbread, hot dog, steak, brownies, cookies. So those are some examples of food cravings. So if you ever had an intense desire for any of those foods that I just mentioned, that may be an indication that you are experience like what we defined in the beginning as a food craving. Okay.
Speaker 1:
So once they feel that this questionnaire, of course they also ask them to come to the clinic, and where they collected data on their height, weight and again they calculated the body mass index, which, as I've mentioned before, is a measurement of how much overweight a certain teenager is. So if you want to learn more about that, I invite you to go back on the episode one, where I explain what the body mass index, because it's a measurement that is used across all studies. It's an assessment tool for the degree of obesity. Okay, so then what did they find after this study? Let me tell you right now. So there were a total of 342 participants that completed the initial questionnaires. The average age was 12.4 years and 45% of them were boys and the rest were girls. The average time that they slept was 8.7 hours. And then, when they looked at what was, was there any association between the sleep duration and any particular food cravings for high fat, sweets, carbs or fast food? They did not find a significant association. However, when they looked at the relationship of the sleep efficiency with those particular categories of food, then they did find a significant association of the sleep efficiency with high fat foods, with sweets, and with carbs and starch cravings.
Speaker 1:
Now, what is sleep efficiency? Sleep efficiency is the amount of time you actually spend sleeping when you are in what we call total sleep period, because there are interruption. There can be interruptions in the sleep and you don't spend the whole time. While you're sleeping in deep sleep, where you're actually sleeping and your brain is in this mode where it recovers and a lot of balance of your brain takes place, there you may be sleeping, you may be in bed nine hours, but you may, for example, wake up very frequently. You may have bad dreams and wake up, or your phone may ring and you may have periods where you don't sleep until later or you may have trouble sleeping, trouble breathing, so that can affect also how much time you sleep in. Good sleep affect your sleep efficiency. So you may think that you spent nine hours, which is the actual total sleep duration, but the quality