Getting enough sleep is very important, especially for a weight-conscious teenager.

In a LiveScience report, a study suggests that teens who have less than eight hours of sleep on a weeknight tend to get more of their daily calories from fat and fewer from carbohydrates.

"It really adds to the growing body of literature that emphasizes the need for children and teens to get sufficient amounts of sleep every night as one of the key ways to promote health and prevent weight gain," study researcher Dr. Susan Redline, a professor of medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, said.

However, this is not to say that sleep loss is the main reason why teenagers eat more fatty food items, and that the link between sleep loss and obesity is true only for the age group.

It has been reported by other studies that lack of sleep may alter levels of hormones that regulate one’s appetite, but only a few tried to see the influence of sleep loss on a person’s eating habits.

In the current study, Redline and her colleagues examined the sleeping and eating habits of 240 teens ages 16 to 19. For five to seven nights, the teens wore wrist actigraph that measured their sleeping patterns at home. The device detects movement and can detect whether a person is awake or asleep. The participants were also interviewed about their eating habits over a 24-hour period.

It was found that subjects who slept fewer than eight hours a night consumed 2.2 percent more calories from fat and 3 percent fewer calories from carbohydrates compared with those who slept eight hours or more.

"The relative increase in fat consumption among shorter sleepers by 2.2 percent per day chronically may contribute to cumulative increases in energy consumption that would be expected to increase risk for obesity and cardiovascular disease," Redline said.

In this study, the results were most significant for girls, contrary to the results of previous works that show sleep loss-obesity link is strongest for boys. However, Redline said this must be interpreted carefully so as not to get into wrong conclusions.

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