This one surprising thing may be making you fat

If you’re overweight, it may not be bad diet and exercise habits that are to blame.

It may be because you go to bed at the wrong time.

A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, has found that there is a strong correlation between a person’s body mass index (BMI) and what time they go to bed, according to a Business Standard report.

The study found that teenagers and adults who go to bed late on weeknights were more likely to weigh more than those who follow Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

To make their findings, the researchers looked at data from 3,300 young people and adults in the United States. Their conclusions were surprising: for each hour of sleep lost, there was a gain of 2.1 points on the BMI index, which happened over a period of five years.

And this was unaffected by exercise or from television watching, or even the number of hours they slept. Even if you’re working out, live a relatively active lifestyle, and get the recommended amount of sleep per night, if you’re not hitting the hay until 3 in the morning, your body will suffer, states the study, which was published in the journal Sleep.

It gives the medical community a new lead in combating obesity. Now, doctors may recommend to their patients that they should change their bedtime if they’re frustrated in the weight department.

The data they used came from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which has been tracking the behavior of teenagers for the last 20 years. Using this data, researchers were able to track the bedtimes of teenagers between 1994 and 2009, and then compared it to their BMI, which is estimated by height and weight. If the study results are true, it means you can’t be staying up late and hope to keep a trim figure — or, at least, it’ll be a lot harder to do so.

BMI, which stands for Body Mass Index, is an important metric that is used to measure whether someone is at a healthy weight. It generally doesn’t work to simply tell how healthy someone is from their weight, as some people will be heavier than others simply because they are taller. That’s why BMI was developed — to determine based on one’s height and gender what their weight should be to be in the healthy range.

BMI is specifically defined as body mass divided by the square of the body height, and therefore it is expressed in units of kg/m2 if it is measured using the metric system. BMI attempts to quantify the amount of tissue mass in an individual and then determine if that person is overweight, underweight, or at a normal weight.

Still, the BMI isn’t without its detractors. Some argue that BMI should be used to judge entire populations, but it doesn’t really work on an individual level. Also, BMI doesn’t take into account body fat. Since muscle is heavier than fat, a person with a lot of muscle mass who is quite healthy may register an unhealthy BMI, even though the person’s body fat level is quite low and the person is definitely not obese.

Still, BMI is usually a pretty reliable indicator for people, those exceptions aside, so that findings by researchers that the BMI was higher was most likely due to more body fat, and not greater muscle mass, and therefore the findings are an important lead in finding new avenues to combat obesity in America, which has become a huge problem.

Obesity in the United States is one of the most significant health crises facing the country, if not the biggest health problem. Many industrialized countries struggle with the issue, but the United States has some of the highest rates of obesity in the world.

Amazingly, two out of every three Americans are considered overweight or even obese. The medical community estimates that about 120,000 people have died each year in the United States due to obesity-related factors. There’s also a big financial burden, with obese people likely to incur $1,429 more in medical expenses each year, with about $147 billion spent on medical expenses annually in the United States. Because it’s a preventable condition, it is considered one of the most important areas of focus in the medical community.

A 2008 study found that obesity in adult Americans was at 32.2 percent for men and 35.5 percent for women — findings that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention largely confirmed in 2009 to 2010.

Problems with obesity have out-paced the financial and health burden to society of other ills like smoking or excessive drinking, and it is believed to account for up to 12 percent of all national health care expenditures in the United States.

With statistics like those, it’s not difficult to see why so much effort has been expended on studying ever facet of the issue to help get a handle on a growing epidemic.

Scientists have long understood that there is a definite relationship between weight issues and sleep. But it’s not just about bad bedtimes: a lot of us are getting too little sleep, and that can be just as harmful for our waistlines. And it’s a self-perpetuating problem: the fatter we get, the more likely we are to develop sleep apnea, which is an obstruction of the airways during sleep that is often accompanied by snoring and greatly reduces the quality of sleep, causing us to feel less rested during the day. And when one wakes up not feeling refreshed, they are less likely to feel like exercising or going on a diet. Daytime sleepiness is a big factor in causing people to skip an exercise routine.