More sleep might cut your sugar cravings. Your next diet might involve lying in bed a little longer. A new study has found that sleep deprived, overweight adults who “got an average of 96 extra minutes of sleep per night, cut their cravings for sweet and salty junk food by 62 percent and reduced their overall appetite by 14 percent.” Participants in the study started at six and a half hours per night before bumping up to the optimal eight hours. Authors think cravings increase without sleep because “[w]hen we are sleep deprived, we incur a metabolic cost for being awake, so we tend to compensate for this extra energy expenditure by eating. With all the tempting snack foods so widely available, we tend to overeat and choose unhealthy foods.

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