SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

This couple probably didn't have a two huge cups of high-caffeine coffee with 400mg caffeine, each, before bed ;-) The recent publications of a paper by Drake, Roehrs, Shambroom and Roth in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine woke my interest in the quantitative and qualitative significance of the potential negative effects coffee / caffeine can or will have on sleep (Drake.2013). In the experiment, Drake et al. describe in their latest paper, the researchers made (much to my surprise) a first attempt "to investigate the relative effects of a given dose of caffeine administered at different times of day on subsequent sleep." (Drake. 2013) Fixed dose (400mg) + varied times To do so, Drake and his colleagues from the Sleep Disorders & Research Center at the Henry Ford Hospital and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State College of Medicine , in Detroit, as well as a scientist who worked for Zeo Inc in Newton, compa...

Image 1: It looks awkward, but sleep masks and ear-plugs are effective, cheap and save ways to improve sleep quality (image from lackofsleepsymptoms ) I think you will be familiar with the idea that an insufficient amount of sleep has been found to correlate (! not induce !) with visceral obesity and other negative health markers (e.g. Strian. 2005 ). Now a study from a the Department of Human Biology, Nutrition and Toxicology Research Institute Maastricht (NUTRIM) at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands found that not getting a good nights sleep or, in this particular case, waking up every hour, reduces the amount of fat you burn in a period of 24 hours by -52% ( Hursel. 2011 , cf. figure 1). Other than in the initially mentioned epidemiological guesswork ... ah pardon, correlation studies, Hursel et al. had their 15 healthy male volunteers report to the laboratory twice (>2 weeks between the sessions of the randomized, single-blind cross-over study). Du...