Lightness of being
Could all these glowing perhipherals make us fatter?
The rising Australian obesity rate has been attributed to everything from high-calorie diets to sedentary lifestyles, but we would like to propose another possible cause: mouse lighting systems.
A huge 62.8% of Australian adults are considered to be overweight or obese, while that number for children (aged 2-17) is one in four.
Alarmed, we put down our triple- llet Bondi burgers and Dagwood dogs and turned our minds to the 2010 publication of a paper from Ohio State University, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which examined how night-time light can a ect weight, body fat and glucose intolerance in male mice (the animal kind). The study discovered that persistent exposure to a little light, when it should be dark, leads to increases in all three.
Light’s role as a regulator of the body clock is already well understood, and a genetic cause for obesity has been identified, again, in mice. Ohio State wanted to test the e ect, if any, of ambient lighting on waistlines. The mice were split into three groups. One group was kept in natural lighting conditions, one was exposed to 24-hour daylight and the last group was kept in a natural cycle but with a dim glow instead of true darkness at night. Each group was fed comparable amounts and was not stopped from moving around.
After eight weeks, the mice who’d had more light at night had put on 50% more weight than those kept in a natural cycle. They also put on more fat, rather than increased muscle, and showed a decreased tolerance to glucose in their bloodstream, a symptom often associated with diabetes later in life.
Now, if dim lighting can make a mouse fatter, imagine what dim lighting from a mouse does to you! [You’re red — Ed.]