Sleep Duration and Waist Size Study, Article Review Example

Obesity continues to be one of the leading causes of preventable death in the U.S and has continued to escalate despite various efforts to abate obesity rates. If this problem is not adequately addressed, medical experts predict that it will overhaul tobacco ingestion as the main cause of preventable deaths by 2020 if nothing is done. The burden of such high obesity rates on human health is quite calamitous, as deaths continue to escalate due to various adverse health conditions including diabetes in addition to several kinds of cancers that are fatal. As a result, researchers continue to look for novel ways to abate the current obesity epidemic via a litany of behavioral changes. Ford et al. (2014) conducted a comprehensive study looking at the correlation between waist size and sleep duration in  order to find out whether or not the amount of sleep an individual gets directly relates to their waist size. In addition, they wanted to find out whether or not there are differences depending one people’s gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity. This research study therefore looks at whether or not sleep deprivation can be pinpointed as one of the contributing causes of obesity for individuals who are classified are obese according to the medical manual.

Sleep is very important as it has a restorative function for the enhancement of human health, which is why researchers are curious about whether or not there is a link between anthropometric measures of the waist size of people in connection with the duration of sleep they get on average every night.  The authors devised this study in which they utilized data from 13,742 participants who were over twenty years old and completed the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2005 and 2010. The sleep duration of the participants fell all across a continuum, ranging from the group categorized as short sleepers–those who slept under six hours–to participants who slept between seen and nine hours, and a final group of so-called long sleepers who slept for ten hours or more. Results indicate that those who slept less averaged waistlines that had more girth and on average weighed more than those who slept for over ten hours. Participants who lacked a diagnosed sleeping order or depressive symptoms evinced a direct connection between sleep duration and Body Mass Index and the circumference of their waist size in an inverse calculation. Furthermore, there were no discernible differences with regards to biological variables including race, gender, and/or ethnicity were evident. As a result, the authors of this study concluded that the participants who slept less were more likely to have larger waistlines regardless of their gender, race, and/or ethnicity.

This study is valuable from a scholarly perspective due to the fact that it is representative of the entire nation as it utilizes a large sample population to glean various kinds of data and to draw various conclusions regarding obesity trends as well as various kinds of human behaviors. Since there are no discernible variations noted amongst different genders, ethnicities, and races, the authors of this study recommend that Americans should increase how much they sleep so that they buck the blaring trend of incurring larger waistlines because of a lack of sleep. There are some limitations of this study however despite the valuable information it provides with regards to obesity rates, which continues to be a major problem in the current United States. The authors fail to provide a coherent and methodical intervention as a corrective for the problem pinpointed here. Nonetheless, as this study indicates, effective interventions aimed at enhancing the sleep people get–especially in young adults who are in their twenties– are vital so that this public health issue is addressed. Future studies testing out different interventions are necessary in order to amplify human health and the biological sphere as a whole.

Works Cited 

Ford, E.S., Chaoyang, L., Wheaton, A.G., Chapman, D.P., Perry, G.S., and J.B. Croft. “Sleep Duration and Body Mass Index and Waist Circumference Among U.S. Adults.” Obesity 22.2(2014): 599-607.