“Using a computer or smartphone at night can cause us to pile on the pounds, new research has revealed. The study found a link between blue light exposure – blue light is emitted by smartphones and tablets – and increased hunger,” Emma Innes reports for The Mail. “It found that exposure to the light increases hunger levels for several hours and even increases hunger levels after eating a meal.”
“Results of the US study show that blue-enriched light exposure, compared with dim light exposure, was associated with an increase in hunger that began 15 minutes after light onset and was still present almost two hours after the meal,” Innes reports. “Blue light exposure has also already been shown to decreased sleepiness in the evening increasing the risk of insomnia.”
“Study co-author Ivy Cheung, of Northwestern University, in Chicago, said: ‘A single three-hour exposure to blue-enriched light in the evening acutely impacted hunger and glucose metabolism. These results are important because they suggest that manipulating environmental light exposure for humans may represent a novel approach of influencing food intake patterns and metabolism,'” Innes reports. “The findings are published in the science journal Sleep and were presented today at an annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The study group comprised 10 healthy adults over a 4-day period.
A more comprehensive study is absurdly easy to imagine.
Damn! There’s my excuse!
Please pass the nacho platter.
Damn, and I was planning a vacation under a broad expanse of BLUE sky, sailing on a BLUE sea! Now, I have to cancel my cruise.
They don’t call it a blue light special for nothing.
I rarely spend my evenings continuously exposed to blue light for three hours. I guess I’m safe.
The light sourcein the study wasn’t a tablet or a smart phone. It was a commercially available light box.
So at least some of the 10 people got hungry while being exposed to blue light from 15 minutes to two hours after eating?
So don’t sit in the dark using your iPhone. There, problem solved.
The title should read “Blue light emitted by smartphones and tablets can make you fat”. Love the Apple hit whoring!
It’s clear that Ivy Cheung could have a great future in government if she so desired.
Statements like that inspire me to bulimia.
Seriously?! Any more then the blue screen of death and all your time wasted sitting trying to fix all those window issues?
What a waste of air.
F.lux – I use this app that cuts out the blue light at night on the laptop.
I use this excellent app on my Mac. I’d love to use it on my phone but you have to jailbreak it first. Maybe some changes in iOS 8 fix that.
Good point. F.lux is very good, although it conflicts with similar applications and ColorSync profiles.
SO! If you’re paranoid about blue lights making you FAT, or you just have a penchant for believing every bad science article foisted into the public eye, GO GET F.lux! Highly recommended.
*sigh* Missed another closing italics tag. Sorry. No wonder. Time for my dinner.
Food doesn’t cure markup dementia
Well, I’m not going back on meth! 😉
B.S. I bet these people are snacking. Just like watching TV, Movies, Sports Games, Concerts, Office Meetings and some when going poopee. lol
…but the blue light emitted from Android devices will not make you fat because hardly anyone who owns one actually uses it.
Actually the Blue Light from Android POS Devices will just make you STUPID! lol
The problem is a lot worse than that. phones and iPads are just part of the problem. EMFS are producing radiation fallout that are producing free radicals in the body. Worse place to be is in a metal tube 30,000 ft high. A 3 hour ride in a microwave oven. Drink plant of water. See Dr. Jack Kruse.
I’d rather see Dr. Vinnie Boom-Batz.
Frequent fliers probably have a higher rate of cancer and much shorter life spans. Could “jet lag” be radiation sickness? Where is the study on that?
I wonder if red light exposure causes a decrease in appetite. Red is on the opposite side of the light spectrum from blue. I also wonder if the size of the wavelength is the cause. If the wavelength is shorter it might contain more energy. This energy could speed up the biological processes and cause one to be hungrier. So, a longer wavelength exposure like to infrared would slow the biology and cause a decrease in appetite.
good lord, is blue light exposure anything like global warming and astrology?
…wait, my Ouija board says, “Yes.” My magic eight-ball says “It’s decidedly so.” That confirms it, blue light from iPads make you fat.
Before we begin making public health policy changes and regulations based on this, let us wait for a proper study.
That said, it is quite possible that this can be true (even with the minuscule sample they had here). If that is the case, more research should be done to detect if warmer light (orange) has opposite (or neutral) effect on appetite. It should be a big challenge to develop LED lighting that has warmer colour temperature.
you’re actually taking this horseshit seriously? The entire function of this crap is it has iPad and iPhone in the headline.
Actually, even a cursory google search turns up enough studies to make you fat trying to read them all. While the background question isn’t new, the transport medium is.
And if you read the article it doesn’t single out Apple products, that’s just the headline to lure you in and start raving…
“How using a smartphone or tablet could make you FAT: Blue light emitted by devices ‘increases hunger’…gee, I wonder who that could be.
Which part bothers you? The apple headline from MDN? I don’t care for it much but it did get me to read the story.
Or that exposure to excessive blue light can alter your metabolism?
what part of STFU bothers you?
That’s amusing coming from someone who shites on MDN like you have diarrhea of the keyboard.
well, like all simpletons, you’re easily amused.
but, Sean it has the parts where the big ol’ Thracian slides his net over the Nibian’s trident…I know how you love that so.
but, Sean it has the parts where the big ol’ Thracian slides his net over the Nibian’s trident…I know how you love that soooo.
No-one likes your “crusty old jerk” comments, botvijerk.
How about you try to not insult anyone for a whole day.
Then, maybe, for a whole week.
Then, who the heck knows what might be possible?
go watch your gladiator movie, Sean…nearly bedtime.
Empty comment as usual, botvijerk.
but, Sean it has the parts where the big ol’ Thracian slides his net over the Nibian’s trident…I know how you love that soooooo!
As others have commented, you sure are preoccupied with the whole “gay” thing.
“what part of STFU bothers you?”
In my case it’s the “T”. Don’t like ’em; never have , never will.
they piss me off too.
That’s it, go get ’em poopyhead!
There have been design studies from many years back that showed painting the interior of Restaurant’s red makes people more hungry. So this blue puzzles me.
4 days doesn’t prove anything. And red makes them fall in love right?
NOT!
This is like the statement, diet drinks make you fat, because your brain tastes sweet and demands calories. Therefor you go about consuming calories, more so than you otherwise would if you didn’t drink diet sodas.
It’s all absurd… Not even science. It’s the dark side of statistics where they make conclusions based on relatives instead of looking at the whole.
Statistics related to the use of birth control pills – 1:7000 women die as a base line… But 2:7000 die, when accounting for birth control pill use. This is a 100% increase, after behavior is accounted for, and is reported like that. Millions of women stop taking birth control pills, with a net result of 16,000 additional annual abortions. There’s no actual proof that anyone died from pill use, it’s just statistics with so many unaccounted for variables. Changes in death rate could be attributed to anything, such as cosmic rays.
So these guys might as well say, ghosts made them fat. However no one in their test got fat… They just ate some additional crackers, which might have come from consuming a diet coke.
AHHH, SH!T! Now I have to give up on my iPhone/iPad!
I cannot imagine there is ANY statistical significance to the collected data. Why? Profoundly inadequate sample size. But they don’t give a rat’s.
This is a terrific example of BAD SCIENCE. I’d have been thrown out of graduate school for presenting this drivel.
Welcome to Idiocracy. Expect further BAD SCIENCE ahead as our world culture and attention to reality implodes.
The solution is simple.
Play red games at night. 😉
I have to give “The Mail” credit, the words iPhone or iPad don’t even appear in the headline or the story.
The click bait here was MDN’s.
Right, and MDN did not cite a spotter, either. Revenue flattening calls for energetic measures.
…not that there’s anything wrong with that
I thought it made me fat because I sit there and look at if for 3 hours playing dumb game I’m hooked on when I should be up and moving around.
It isn’t just hunger. Blue light can cause migraine headaches, silent migraines, eye strain, nervousness as well as other neurological conditions as well as “possibly” absence seizures. I have a screen application on my iMac that allows me to control the screen color by putting a thin color filter over top it. I love that thing! There is one or two screen filters for iPhone. However if you have to use the developer’s version of a Google browser. That’s fine if you are a Google person. I’m Safari Kinda gal who DuckDuckGos. And it does absolutely nothing for the new News app, email, any other application. So I went on Amazon and purchase something called, Protective Glass. Well that is just another hated product. I think the blue light my actually be worse even though it was advertised to, “cut the blue light”… Do not fall for it. So I will continue to search for either a screen protector or screen dimmer application, paid of course, until the end of time! I get the eye strain. I have photophobia. And I also get silent migraines. And it’s obvious that it’s a direct result of using my iphone. But if anything, I don’t eat a lot.