Hello, I am Danny Lennon and you are listening to Sigma Nutrition Radio, the podcast that brings

you deep discussions about nutritional and health science. And today I want to dive into an area

that is of great interest to me and I think many of you within the Sigma Nutrition audience.

And it's this overlap between the areas of sleep and nutrition.

And we know quite clearly that insufficient sleep can set the stage

for lots of poor health outcomes across all sorts of different measures and chronic disease states.

And one of the areas that tends to get looked at is how insufficient sleep can play a role

in our dietary intake.

And on the show previously, we've discussed how it can impact various homeostatic controls

that regulate our likelihood of consuming a certain

amount of food. So, for example, changes in leptin, grelin, and other gut hormones that may lead

to us to having a greater drive to consume food and also greater levels of hunger and greater appetite.

And that can certainly be an important component.

Another component, though, of excess energy intake and some of the downsides that occur from that

is related to factors beyond just increased hunger.

And they come down to more hedonic factors like food reward, palatibility, cravings that we have, food liking, and so on.

Our ability to adequately pick a suitable portion size can be tied into this.

And this has been at the heart of the research focus of Dr. Robin Tucker

and her lab at Michigan State University. There she is an assistant professor of food science

and human nutrition. And at the Ingestive Behavior Lab that they have at MSU, which is under Dr. Tucker's direction, they examine

many of these biological and environmental factors that influence human feeding practices.

And of particular interest at the lab is how many of the chemical and sensory aspects of

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