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

在美国，睡眠不足和肥胖这两个双重问题现在影响着超过三分之一的成年人。不健康的饮食选择、肥胖和睡眠不足经常同时发生，但很难从自然发生的数据中理解这些联系的复杂性。这些数据通常与许多其他混杂因素一起出现，比如确定睡眠质量差是否会影响饮食选择，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，我们将实验性地控制年轻人在家庭环境中经历的睡眠水平。这项研究的一个关键好处是，我们将能够更自信地确定睡眠水平与饮食选择和决策之间的因果关系，因为实验环境以受控的方式改变了参与者的睡眠水平。此外，参与者在自己的家庭环境中接受睡眠治疗，这意味着他们改变的睡眠水平是在一个非常模仿现实生活的水平和环境中完成的。例如，在我们的研究中，睡眠限制并不是完全的睡眠剥夺，而是我们诱导了大部分美国人经历的慢性部分睡眠限制。这有助于确保我们的结果更好地转移到现实世界。从这个项目中获得的结果将有助于增进我们对睡眠和饮食选择之间联系的理解，并有助于为旨在改善睡眠健康和饮食选择关键领域的健康的干预措施提供信息。睡眠不足和不良的饮食习惯是严重的社会问题，影响着全球数千万成年人（更不用说青少年）。仅在美国，35%的成年人报告每晚睡眠时间不足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，但通常很难在实地数据中确定睡眠和饮食选择之间的因果关系或确定潜在机制。该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、冲动控制和当前偏见。我们将使用一项为期三周的经过验证的家庭睡眠限制协议来进行睡眠水平控制，在该协议中，每个参与者将经历整整一周的充分休息（WR）和整整一周的睡眠限制（SR）睡眠水平，从而使我们能够比较每个参与者在SR时的行为与同一参与者的基线WR行为和食物选择。此外，参与者将保留每日食物记录，以便分析实际饮食选择的客观结果，并且每个睡眠治疗周后的决策评估将在面临SR时提供关键构建块任务域的数据。独特的协议将生成与大部分人群高度相关的SR和饮食选择数据。所选择的任务将产生简单的结果测量，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因果机制。这个项目是一个独特的跨学科（行为经济学、认知神经科学/心理学和睡眠心理学），它将为不同领域的知识进步服务。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.