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How Sleep Impacts Hunger and Nutrition

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I am writing this post at 10:00pm on a Saturday night. It’s way past my bedtime, but between coming down with a cold and feeling particularly anxious lately, I find myself up late, creating content. And what better nutrition question to write about than how sleep impacts hunger and nutrition!

I remember learning about how sleep impacts hunger and fullness cues, and overall health during my MS in human nutrition program. One of my professors did a lot of sleep research, and she was very passionate about the topic. I always found it kind of funny to learn about the importance of sleep and the detrimental impacts of stress in very stressful, time-consuming, sleep-depriving programs.

Anyways, today we are going to chat answer questions about sleep, and how sleep impacts hunger and fullness cues, and overall wellbeing. Grab some cozy PJs and get ready to read!

*Disclaimer: As always, this is general information intended for healthy adults to gather general information about what to eat (and to avoid) when you have diarrhea. Your needs may vary based on medical status, lifestyle, or life-stage. Please never replace generalized health information you’ve read online with individualized clinical care.

How Sleep Deprivation Messes with your health: It’s all about the hormones

Sleep is the natural, reversible loss of consciousness. And it’s super important to maintaining homeostasis. In addition to allowing your body time to repair itself, sleep supports growth and development, proper immune function, and plays a large role in regulating pathways that affect the central nervous system and metabolism.

Poor sleep quality or sleep deprivation influences the body’s neuroendocrine and stress responses (many believe this is through the body’s hypothalmic-pituitary-axis, or HPA for short). This means, it regulates a lot of hormones related to stress and subsequently metabolism.

Sleep and Cortisol

Sleep deprivation can increase your body’s level of cortisol – a stress hormone. Cortisol can play a large role in regulating other hormones, including those related to appetite and reward systems (more on that below).

Elevated cortisol levels have been shown to increase intake of highly palatable foods, and encourage overeating by influencing the brain’s reward systems.

Excessive cortisol levels may send your body into a “flight-or-fight” mode, and shut down any unessential functions. This includes things like digestion and reproduction.

So, if your cortisol levels are high, due to a lack of sleep, and/or other life . stressors, you may experience some digestive issues, including slower gastric emptying, or acceleration of intestinal transit (meaning it impacts the speed at which your food gets through your GI tract and into the toilet).

How Sleep Impacts Hunger and Fullness Hormones:

Sleep helps you regulate hormones that impact your appetite. If you want a more detailed refresher on hormones that regulate hunger and fullness cues, check out this post about them.

Otherwise, know this: When you are sleep deprived, the level of ghrelin (the hormone that signals to your body that you are hungry) in your body increases. This means, you may feel hungrier if you didn’t sleep enough.

I personally have experienced ravenous hunger upon extended stints of inadequate sleep, and maybe you have too. Whether I’m traveling for days on end, am trying to truck through finals week, or for whatever reason, have several nights in a row where I’m just not sleeping well, I notice I feel much snackier, and this is likely because my homeostatic control of ghrelin is a little off.

But it’s not just ghrelin that’s thrown off. Leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full, is decreased with sleep deprivation. That means, not only are you hungrier if you don’t sleep enough, you’re also less likely to feel satiated.

The increase in ghrelin and decrease in leptin brought about by sleep deprivation may have a direct impact on how much you eat.

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Understanding Your Hunger Hormones

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Hormones are a hot topic in the health blogosphere. This post is going to explain what different hunger hormones are, and what they do. Please note this is not an exhaustive list, but rather, a brief overview of those commonly discussed in colloquial and health-related literature to help you understand what exactly they do to help keep you maintaining the gloriousness that is homeostasis.

You have probably heard of some hunger hormones, including ghrelin, insulin, and leptin. I hope this posts gives you a deeper understanding of what they are and what they do in your body. 

Please note that this post is not about reproductive health, nor directly about reproductive hormones. I will address how eating impacts reproductive hormones / health in an upcoming post about PCOS/HA, but I felt this post was useful to lay the groundwork for that future post, as well as other upcoming posts about starvation metabolism and keto-dieting.

I hope this post gives those who are curious a small glimpse into some of many biological factors at play that impact human hunger and satiety. I hear a lot of language that applauds ignoring these cues, which confuses me once you overriding your hunger and fullness cues longterm can cause you to feel really out of touch with what your body needs. But more on that in another post.

For now, let’s dive into hunger hormones 101:

*Disclaimer: As always, this is general information intended for healthy adults. Your needs may vary based on medical status, lifestyle, or life-stage. Please never replace generalized health information you’ve read online with individualized clinical care.

PS: If you are interested in reading about the difference between hunger and appetite and fullness vs satisfaction, click here.

Ghrelin: 

This is known as the ‘hunger hormone.’ Ghrelin is released by cells in your stomach and intestine to stimulate appetite when calorie signals are low. The hypothalamus (a small region in your brain that is responsible for many homeostatic processes) contains a region ghrelin receptors to sense when levels increase.

Basically, ghrelin is your body’s way of saying “Hey! You up there! Feed me! I am hungry!” Your body needs food as fuel for everything you do, from walking to exercising to those important life-maintaining tasks such as breathing, pumping blood all throughout the body, digesting food, and maintaining normal brain function.

Therefore, when your ghrelin is high and your body is telling you to eat, I suggest you do so as to not override your body’s homeostatic functions!

As a meal is consumed and absorption begins, ghrelin secretion quickly declines. Your hypothalamus no longer gets a need-to-feed signal and your hunger decreases. 

Ghrelin also plays other roles in your body, including decreasing the energy your body devotes to temperature regulation. That’s why you often hear of people who are undereating or dieting as constantly being cold. 

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7 Win-Win Plant-Powered Solutions To Global Hunger That Benefit Human Health and The Planet

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Hello friends! Popping in after a hectic week to share a more formal piece about fighting global hunger with sustainable solutions. This is a mash up of my two academic passions: environmental health science and nutrition.  have an extended version I may share later with much greater detail. For now, hope you enjoy the following!

7 Win-Win Plant-Powered Solutions To Global Hunger That Benefit Human Health and The Planet

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Despite producing more than enough calories per capita needed to feed each person on earth, a stunning 830 million people have insufficient access to food, and many suffer from malnutrition-related conditions, including stunting, wasting, and micronutrient deficiencies. Meanwhile, obesity and chronic diet-related diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease present an additional concern, creating the ‘dual burden of malnutrition.’

While finding hunger solutions, we must also consider the urgent threat of global climate change. The problem is complex, as the food system is both a leading cause of anthropometric climate change, and an industry deeply impacted by its effects.

Ameliorating these problems simultaneously is an onerous task. Luckily, there are many ways to build a healthy and sustainable diet, and many innovations at our fingertips that can help get us there. The following “win-win” plant-powered solutions benefit both human health and the environment, and have use across a variety of contexts. If applied on a global scale, these innovations could help lead a path towards a healthful, sustainable,  food systems future.

1.Win-Win: Swapping protein

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It is well-known that meat, particularly livestock meats have some of the largest carbon and water footprints of all foods, representing 14.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Red and processed meats have also been associated with increased risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease. But there are other ways to consume protein. Plant-based proteins including legumes, nuts and whole grains are far less carbon and water-intensive than animal proteins, and offer numerous health benefits, including lower rates of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. A paradigm shift from meat to lesser-processed plant proteins will remain important moving forward.

2. Win-Win: Focusing on whole plant foods

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Fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains are all micronutrient-dense foods, filled with powerful plant compounds, including cancer-quenching flavonoids and heart-friendly plant sterols. Their high levels of dietary fiber provide satiety while lowering risks of developing various chronic diseases, such as stroke, hypertension, and diabetes. Fruits and vegetables vary in their water and carbon use, but are generally far less detrimental to the environment than animal-based foods, especially when carefully planned according to optimal growing seasons, and delivered to consumers at a local level, whenever possible.

3.Win-Win: Algae as food

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Although algae has been consumed as part of the human diet for thousands of years, large scale adoption of algae as food has not yet fully taken off. However, it should. Algae offers a potential sustainable source protein and vitamin B-12, an essential micronutrient primarily found in animal-based foods, offering a valuable source of nutrition for those shifting towards a sustainable plant-based diet. Algae could also be considered as an alternative to seafood as a source of DHA and EPA, while helping decrease the current harm caused to the oceans by overfishing. The humble plant also boasts a substantial amount of iodine, a mineral that ranks among the leading micronutrient deficiencies in the world. Scaling up nori (dried green and purple laver) and red algae production is worth considering for planetary and human health.

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Hunger vs Appetite, and Fullness vs Satisfaction

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Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Gosh darn it, when did eating get so complicated?” Because it really shouldn’t be. Don’t worry, you’re not alone, and it’s if you’re feeling any confusion, it’s certainly not your fault.

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We live in a food and weight loss-obsessed culture. Without even trying, we’re exposed to numerous food and fitness ads, ideas, and theories on a daily basis. They’re everywhere: the internet, social media feeds, TV commercials, even tabloids in the aisle at the grocery store.

All of these tidbits of information can be overwhelming. And oftentimes, to confuse things further, we hear opposing “facts” about the same topics. This encourages us to disengage with our natural eating instincts, and ignore our internal cues regarding hunger and fullness.

Today, I wanted to address a few words/concepts that may help you get back in touch with how to eat like an actual instinctual human rather than a confused oversaturated-with-misinformation human. Let’s go.

Hunger vs Appetite:

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These words are often used interchangeably, but actually have different meanings in the nutrition science world. Physical hunger is defined by the physiological need for food. This may manifest itself as a rumbly tummy, empty-feeling stomach, low energy, and/or inability to concentrate. I know for me personally, I feel light-headed when I need to eat. But everyone is different.

Physical hunger is a result of blood glucose dropping in your body. When this happens, and your stomach is empty, a hormone called ghrenlin is released by your GI tract, sending a signal to your brain to increase gastric (stomach) acid and let your brain know “Hey! You up there! I need food!”

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Ghrenlin stops being released when food enters the stomach, letting your brain know that the need for food has been taken care of.

Appetite, on the other hand, is a desire to eat, less from a physical need, and more as a result of physical or environmental cues, such as the smell of freshly baking cookies, routines, and/or the desire to eat the doughnuts in front of you at a meeting even though you may be physically full.

If you eat in a very rigid, routine-style fashion, you may develop appetite to eat out of habit, kind of like a dog (#relatable).

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