If you want to lose weight, sleep in the dark: artificial light makes you fat (also on TV and mobile)

Being fat or thin does not only depend on what you eat or what you move. Things as everyday and apparently trivial as sleeping regularly with the television on or the last thing we do before going to bed, checking our Twitter account on our mobile phones, can influence the weight that the scale marks. How? A group of researchers from the University of Hong Kong and Oxford University They have reviewed a dozen different studies on the subject to draw a conclusion: that artificial night light is affecting our weight.

The conclusion of this meta-analysis is an attack for worshipers of the nightly Netflix marathons: people who are exposed to artificial light to a greater extent are 13% more at risk of being overweight and 22% more likely to be obese. In addition, this relationship that associates greater exposure to night light with worse weight results was observed even in people who slept with a light on … that is, not all the fault of the electronic devices that surround us, the problem is artificial light at night itself.

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Why is it so bad for our weight to sleep with the mobile in hand or with the bedside lamp on? Researchers at the University of Haifa concluded, after studying this relationship between weight and night light, that increasing our exposure to artificial lights interferes with the natural production of melatonin and alters our circadian rhythms which results in physiological changes in the body … including the way in which our body stores energy, and this alteration can make us fat.