Kids Who Sleep Less More Likely to Be Overweight, Study Says

Note from Connie: Parents, pay attention to this fascinating study! You need to help figure out a way to get your kids to get ample zzz's. Jennifer Moore gives you the scoop.

Kids need their sleep for lots of reasons -- to stay awake in school, to have the energy to play and to avoid being cranky.

But now a study from New Zealand just published in the journal Sleep offers another good reason: Kids who sleep less than 9 hours a night are three times likelier to be overweight than those who log in more than 9 hours of sack time.

MedPage Today reports a few caveats about this research. For starters, it measured the sleep duration of its 519 seven-year-old subjects for only a 24-hour period. 

Still, it's promising that a relatively simple thing like making sure the kids hit the hay early might give them a better chance of staying slim.

Now, if we could just get them to spend more of their waking hours exercising and less hours eating sugar and other fattening junk...

Jennifer Moore for SUGAR SHOCK! Blog