Blue-enriched light exposure immediately before the evening meal may increase hunger, according to a new study published in the journal Sleep (abstract in .pdf).
Blue light may increase hunger. Image credit: Alexofdodd / CC BY-SA 3.0.
The study group comprised 10 healthy adults with regular sleep and eating schedules who received identical carbohydrate-rich isocaloric meals.
They completed a 4-day protocol under dim light conditions, which involved exposure to less than 20 lux during 16 hours awake and less than 3 lux during eight hours of sleep.
On day three they were exposed to three hours of 260 lux, blue-enriched light starting 10.5 hours after waking up, and the effects were compared with dim light exposure on day two.
The findings of the study show that blue-enriched light exposure, compared with dim light exposure, was associated with an increase in hunger that began 15 minutes after light onset and was still present almost 2 hours after the meal.
“It was very interesting to observe that a single three-hour exposure to blue-enriched light in the evening acutely impacted hunger and glucose metabolism,” said Dr Ivy Cheung, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, and the first author of the study.
Blue light exposure also decreased sleepiness and resulted in higher measures of insulin resistance.
“These results are important because they suggest that manipulating environmental light exposure for humans may represent a novel approach of influencing food intake patterns and metabolism,” Dr Cheung said.
“More research is needed to determine the mechanisms of action involved in the relationship between light exposure, hunger and metabolism,” he concluded.
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Cheung IN et al. 2014. Evening Blue-Enriched Light Exposure Increases Hunger and Alters Metabolism in Normal Weight Adults. Sleep, vol. 37, abstract supplement, paper # 0114, p. A42
