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

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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.