Insufficient Sleep and Dietary Choices: An Ecologically Valid Examination of the Decision Foundations of Eating Behaviors when Sleep Restricted.

在美国，睡眠不足和肥胖的双重问题现在都影响着超过三分之一的成年人。不健康的饮食选择、肥胖和睡眠不佳经常同时发生，但从自然产生的数据很难理解这些联系的复杂性。这样的数据通常与许多其他令人困惑的因素一起存在，因此确定睡眠不佳是否会影响饮食选择，或者反之亦然，是一个挑战。这个项目旨在提高我们对睡眠不足对饮食选择的影响的理解。为了做到这一点，我们将在一个年轻人的样本中实验性地操纵一个人在家庭环境中经历的睡眠水平。这项研究的一个主要好处是，我们将能够更有信心地确定从睡眠水平到饮食选择和决策的因果关系，因为实验环境以受控的方式改变参与者的睡眠水平。此外，参与者在家中接受睡眠治疗的事实意味着，他们改变的睡眠水平是在一个非常接近现实生活的水平和环境中进行的。例如，在我们的研究中，睡眠限制并不是完全的睡眠剥夺，而是导致对大部分美国人口经历的睡眠不足水平的长期部分睡眠限制。这有助于确保我们的结果更好地转移到现实世界中。从这个项目中获得的结果将有助于公众进一步了解睡眠和饮食选择之间的联系，并有助于为旨在改善睡眠健康和饮食选择关键领域的幸福感的干预措施提供信息。睡眠不足和不良饮食习惯是影响全球数千万成年人(更不用说青少年)的严重社会问题。仅在美国，35%的成年人报告睡眠时间较短，每晚7小时(2014年数据)，超过39%的美国成年人被认为肥胖(2015-2016年数据)。最近的研究表明，不良的睡眠习惯往往与不健康的饮食选择并存，但在现场数据中，往往很难确定睡眠和饮食选择之间的因果联系或潜在机制。这个项目的目标是系统地研究睡眠限制如何影响年轻人在与饮食选择相关的决策任务中的选择，如信息选择、冲动控制和呈现偏见。我们将使用为期3周的有效的家庭睡眠限制协议来控制睡眠水平，在该协议中，每个参与者将经历整整一周的良好休息(WR)和整整一周的睡眠限制(SR)睡眠水平，从而使我们能够将每个参与者在SR时的行为与同一参与者的基线WR行为和食物选择进行比较。此外，参与者将保留每日食物记录，以便从实际的饮食选择中分析客观结果，每一周睡眠治疗后的决策评估将提供面对SR的关键构建块任务领域的数据。这一独特的方案将生成与很大一部分人口高度相关的SR和饮食选择数据。选定的任务将产生简单的结果衡量标准，允许测试关键假设，并将有助于确定在睡眠受限时导致不健康饮食选择的潜在原因机制。这个项目是独特的跨学科(行为经济学、认知神经科学/心理学和睡眠心理学)，将服务于在不同领域推进知识的利益。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The dual problems of insufficient sleep and obesity in the U.S. both now effect more than one-third of all adults. Unhealthy dietary choices, obesity, and poor sleep often occur together, but it is difficult to understand the intricacies of these connections from naturally occurring data. Such data are typically present with many other confounding factors such that determining whether poor sleep impacts dietary choice or vice versa is a challenge. This project is aimed at improving our understanding of the impact of insufficient sleep on dietary choice. To do this, we will experimentally manipulate the level of sleep experienced in one’s home environment in a sample of young adults. A key benefit of this study is that we will be able to more confidently determine causation from sleep levels to dietary choices and decision making because the experimental environment varies participant sleep levels in a controlled manner. Also, the fact that participants undergo the sleep treatment in their home environment means their altered sleep levels are done at a level and in an environment that closely mimics real life. For example, sleep restriction is not total sleep deprivation in our study, but rather we induce chronic partial sleep restriction to the insufficient-sleep levels experienced by a large portion of the U.S. population. This helps ensure better transferability of our results to the real-world. The results learned from this project will serve public interest in furthering our understanding of the links between sleep and dietary choice, and they can help inform interventions designed to improve well-being in the key areas of sleep health and dietary choice. Insufficient sleep and poor dietary habits are serious societal concerns that impact tens of millions of adults (not to mention adolescents) across the globe. In the U.S. alone, 35% of adults reported short sleep duration of 7 hrs/night (2014 data), and over 39% of U.S. adults were considered obese (2015-2016 data). Recent research has shown that poor sleep habits often coexist with unhealthy dietary choices, but it is often difficult in field data to identify causal links or determine the underlying mechanisms between sleep and dietary choices. The goal of this project is to systematically examine how sleep restriction affects choices of young adults in decision tasks relevant to dietary choice, such as information selection, impulse control, and present-bias. We will do this using a 3-week validated at-home sleep restriction protocol for sleep level manipulation within which each participant will undergo a full week of well-rested (WR) and a full week of sleep restricted (SR) sleep levels, thus allowing us to compare each participant’s behavior when SR to that same participant’s baseline WR behaviors and food choices. Additionally, participants will keep daily food records that will allow analysis of objective outcomes from actual dietary choices, and decision making assessments following each sleep treatment week will provide data in key building block task domains in the face of SR. The unique protocol will generate data on SR and dietary choice highly relevant to a large segment of the population. The tasks selected will produce simple outcome measures that allow testing of key hypotheses and will help identify underlying causal mechanisms responsible for unhealthy dietary choice when sleep restricted. This project is uniquely interdisciplinary (behavioral economics, cognitive neuroscience/psychology, and sleep psychology), which will serve the interests of advancing knowledge across different fields.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.