How to be beautiful black women: Sleeping beauty and the science of sleep
With her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing a light, low-cut dress, Lucy Baeck is just like any other night-time beauty on the planet.
But this week, Lucy became a science hero, after scientists discovered she’s really good at sleeping.
The research has been published in the prestigious scientific journal PLOS ONE.
“When you get out of bed, you feel the most alive you’ve felt for a long time,” Lucy says.
“And the only thing I can do to make that feel even more alive is to sleep.”
Lucy’s discovery has helped scientists develop a sleeping aid that helps people relax and fall asleep at the same time.
This has allowed them to better understand the effects of sleep deprivation on human health.
“This is the first time we’ve found an enzyme that regulates sleep,” says Dr. Matthew Stadler, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan.
“We think it’s a marker of sleep loss.
And it’s an enzyme we’ve been looking for for years.”
Sleep researchers have been looking at sleep loss as a key component of metabolic disorders like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression and even schizophrenia.
These conditions all require sleep to function properly.
Sleep deprivation has long been known to lead to weight gain, metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes and other metabolic problems.
Sleep is also known to promote the growth of tumors and premature death.
The enzyme, called Nrf2, is also involved in regulating the circadian rhythm, or how our body clocks our biological rhythms.
“Sleep deprivation has been a major cause of obesity,” Stadling says.
Sleep deprivation is associated with sleep loss and insomnia in adults and children, as well as with depression and anxiety disorders.
Studies have found that adults who are sleep deprived are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.
Sleep experts say the finding has important implications for improving the quality of sleep in older people.
“I think sleep is one of the best predictors of how long people will live,” says Stadlers research assistant Jennifer L. Cusimano, a professor of preventive medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
“It’s also a risk factor for many of the conditions that we worry about in older adults.”
“It’s a big deal because we don’t know the whole picture,” says David DeBartolo, a senior author of the new study and a clinical associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
It also highlights the importance of using sleep research to address sleep deprivation as a prevention factor in the prevention of many chronic conditions.
Sleep researchers are also exploring the benefits of a “sleeping car” that helps improve sleep in people with obesity.
This car, designed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, can reduce sleep and weight loss by as much as 20 percent.
This device, called the NREM Sleep Shift, is now being tested for use in the U.S.
Sleep scientists say the results are encouraging and they plan to expand the study to include people with a wide range of conditions.
They also hope to study the effects on sleep in healthy older adults and people with sleep disorders.
“We’re seeing a lot of evidence of benefit for older adults,” says DeBartso.
“So we think this is a promising avenue for research into what may be beneficial to older adults in the future.”
Researchers hope to find out more about how Nrf1 affects sleep in humans in the near future.
If the findings are confirmed, researchers hope to be able to make better sleep choices for people of all ages and in different parts of the world.
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