Symposium to take on weighty issues of sleep, stress and obesity

If recent news headlines are correct, Americans are sleeping less, getting more overweight and feeling increasingly stressed compared with decades past. One of the first scientific conferences to focus on how the three health risks interact will be held next week at the University of California, Berkeley. "Never before in the history of humankind have so many people gained so much weight over such a short period of time, implicating a major environmental shift that we are reacting to,” said conference co-chair Lorrene Ritchie, director of research at the UC Berkeley Atkins Center for Weight and Health, who called obesity "our nation's greatest epidemic and public health challenge.” "One of our goals,” she said, "is to further understand the impact of the social and personal environment on obesity, and to shed light on the understudied but potentially powerful triggers for overeating and inactivity: sleep and stress. The conference, "Sleep, Stress & Obesity: A Weighty Issue,” is the Fifth Annual Obesity Symposium sponsored by the UC Berkeley Atkins Center for Weight and Health; UC San Francisco Center for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment (COAST); and the UC Office of the President. It will be held Thursday, Sept. 20, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at UC Berkeley International House's Chevron Auditorium. (See map here.) "Sleep has emerged as a key behavioral risk factor for obesity and the underlying metabolic processes that lead to chronic disease,” said Elissa Epel, director of COAST and a UCSF associate professor of psychiatry.