How Overeating leads to Memory Loss and 7 hours Sleep Best for Student

High school students test best with 7 hours’ rest

Whether or not you know any high school students that actually get nine hours of sleep each night, that’s what federal guidelines currently prescribe. A new Brigham Young University study found that 16-18 year olds perform better academically when they shave about two hours off that recommendation.“We’re not talking about sleep deprivation,” says study author Eric Eide. “The data simply says that seven hours is optimal at that age.”

The new study by Eide and fellow BYU economics professor Mark Showalter is the first in a series of studies where they examine sleep and its impact on our health and education. Surprisingly, the current federal guidelines are based on studies where teens were simply told to keep sleeping until they felt satisfied.“If you used that same approach for a guideline on how much people should eat, you would put them in a well-stocked pantry and just watch how much they ate until they felt satisfied,” Showalter said. “Somehow that doesn’t seem right.”

In the new study, the BYU researchers tried to connect sleep to a measure of performance or productivity. Analyzing data from a representative sample of 1,724 primary and secondary school students across the country, they found a strong relationship between the amount of sleep youths got and how they fared on standardized tests.But more sleep isn’t always better. As they report in the Eastern Economics Journal, the right amount of sleep decreases with age:

•The optimal for 10-year-olds is 9 – 9.5 hours

•The optimal for 12-year-olds is 8 – 8.5 hours

•The optimal for 16-year-olds is 7 hours

We don’t look at it just from a ‘your kid might be sleeping too much’ perspective,” Eide said. “From the other end, if a kid is only getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night because he’s overscheduled, he would perform better if he got 90 minutes more each night.

The size of the effect on test scores depends on a number of factors, but an 80-minute shift toward the optimum is comparable to the child’s parents completing about one more year of schooling.“Most of our students at BYU, especially those that took early-morning seminary classes in high school, are going to realize that 9 hours of sleep isn’t what the top students do,” Showalter said.

(Source- BYU)

How Memory Loss in Seniors Tied To Overeating

A new study suggests that overeating in older people may double their risk for mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a term that describes the stage between the memory loss that normally comes with aging and that seen in early Alzheimer's disease. The study, announced in a press release on

Sunday, is to be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's (AAN's) 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans April 21 to April 28 and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. For the study, Dr Yonas E Geda, from the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, and colleagues examined data on 1,233 dementia-free adults aged 70 to 89 living in Olmsted County, Minnesota. Of those, 163 had MCI. They found that consuming between 2,100 and 6,000 calories per day was linked to double the risk for MCI.Geda, who is a member of the American Academy of Neurology, told the press:

"We observed a dose-response pattern which simply means; the higher the amount of calories consumed each day, the higher the risk of MCI.""Cutting calories and eating foods that make up a healthy diet may be a simpler way to prevent memory loss as we age," said Geda.

The researchers obtained the participants' daily calorie consumption from questionnaires they had filled in that included questions about their food and drink consumption.They ranked the results into three groups where one-third of participants consumed between 600 and 1,526 calories a day, another third consumed 1,526 to 2,143, and the remaining third between 2,143 and 6,000 calories per day.They found that for the highest calorie consumers, the odds for having MCI was more than double that of the lowest calorie consumers.But there was no significant difference in risk between the lowest calorie group and the middle group.The figures didn't change when they accounted for other risk factors for memory loss, including history of stroke, diabetes, and years of education. Funds from the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Robert H. and Clarice Smith and Abigail van Buren Alzheimer's Disease Research Program helped pay for the study.Geda recently co-authored a paper published in January 2012 in the AAN's journal Neurology that found incidence rates for MCI varied substantially by subgroups, and were higher in men. That study also drew its data from a cohort of Olmsted County residents. (Source- American Academy of Neurology's