The medial prefrontal cortex may play a direct role in controlling our desire for weight promoting foods, high in sucrose content, when we are sleep deprived.

A new paper published on December 6 in the journal eLife finds that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep loss leads to increased consumption of unhealthy foods, specifically sucrose and fat. The researchers at the University of Tsukuba’s International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine (IIIS) used a new method to produce REM sleep loss in mice along with a chemical-genetic technique to block prefrontal cortex neurons and the behaviors they mediate.