Wen Jiabao's Lawyer Hints At Legal Action Against NYT

Wen Jiabao

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's lawyer has responded to the bombshell allegations in Friday's New York Times.

In a statement translated by the South China Morning Post:

I. The so-called “hidden riches” of Wen Jiabao’s family members in the New York Times’ report does not exist.

The statement goes on to specifically refute allegations, before hinting at legal action:

VI. We will continue to make clarifications regarding untrue reports by the New York Times, and reserve the right to hold it legally responsible.

The NYT story specifically said that Wen's extended family had more than $2.7 billion in hidden assets, and that his wife was notorious as China's "diamond queen".

Please follow Business Insider on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/Stnir-K54io/wen-jiabaos-lawyer-refutes-nyt-story-2012-10

stop debt collectors student loan debt relief texas debt collection act uk government debt

Is The Old Rob Gronkowski Back?

The Summer of Gronk was epic. But ever since the season has started Rob Gronkowski has been very, very quiet. The party boy even claimed he "doesn't crush beers."

The Patriots are in London for its game against the St. Louis Rams Sunday and at a fan gathering in Trafalgar Square a glimpse of the old Gronk came out to play when he spiked the mic at the crowd's chanting request.

[h/t Larry Brown Sports]

Please follow Sports Page on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/2mAhUYCfzGM/rob-gronkowski-spikes-mic-in-london-2012-10

business debt relief business debt settlement capquest debt recovery christian debt relief

The Election Could Be Decided By These Two Ohio Counties

obama ohio

If the race for president can be boiled down to two key counties in one key state, then those jurisdictions are Hamilton and Cuyahoga, here in the Buckeye State. Mitt Romney began a three-stop tour of Ohio on Thursday in the former, and President Obama ended a 40-hour blitz of swing states in the latter.

Both campaigns are placing a heavy emphasis on this state as Election Day draws near, but the frequency of Romney’s visits underscore the belief on both sides that he must make up ground quickly to win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes and thus have a shot at the White House.

Meanwhile, as the candidates hold big events in the two counties to draw out their bases of support, their running mates are sniffing out votes in less populous areas of the state.

And so it was that Obama staggered into Cleveland near the close of a whirlwind week that had taken him all over the country.

His Ohio team excitedly talked up the closing rally of the two-day tour all week: Air Force One would fly into Cleveland over Lake Erie just after the sunset, and the president would step off the plane into a sea of supporters.

Sure enough, in that dramatic fashion, Air Force One landed at Burke Lakefront Airport and wheeled once past the entire length of the rally setup. The pilot turned the aircraft around and paraded by again, giving the crowd of 12,000 a full view of the opposite side of the famous plane, then finally turned once more and parked behind the podium.

Obama disembarked and jogged wearily up to the stage, but his first few lines were nearly inaudible. “Ohio, I've got to tell you, even though I've been going for about 38 hours straight, even though my voice is getting kind of hoarse, I've still got a spring in my step,” he said.

Throughout his speech, the president pressed voters to vote early. His stump message is also getting more positive: Voters can trust him (the implicit suggestion, however: they can’t trust his opponent).

“After four years, you know me,” he said. “You know every single day when I get up in the morning, I’m thinking about you.”

He ended on this telling note: “If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and work with me, knock on some doors with me, make some phone calls with me, we’re going to win Cuyahoga County. We’re going to win Ohio. We’re going to win this election.”

As of last year, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 1.3 million of the state’s 11.5 million residents live in the Cleveland-area county, more than 11 percent of the entire state. (There are 87 other counties.)

Voters don’t register by party in Ohio, but parties count their totals based upon the last primary in which a registered voter participated. And in Cuyahoga, Democrats count 345,000 voters, and Republicans count about 126,000. Overall, as of Oct. 1, some 916,000 Cuyahoga residents were registered to vote.

What’s more, 30 percent of the county is African-American, whereas just 12.4 percent of the state is.

In the 2010 governor’s race, Democrat Ted Strickland lost narrowly to Republican John Kasich. But Strickland outperformed Kasich in Cuyahoga, 251,000-149,000, giving him a cushion of more than 100,000 votes there alone.

Four years ago, Obama more than doubled up on John McCain in Cuyahoga, winning 458,000 votes to the Republican’s nearly 200,000. How telling was this margin? Obama won the entire state by a smaller number of votes (206,830) than he won the county by (258,542).

And given that disparity, it’s obvious why the president staged the rally he did there on Thursday night: His team is looking to run up the score in this densely concentrated area.

Romney knows this all too well, of course, which is why he is charging hard to offset that advantage with a heavy presence in the southwestern corner of Ohio, where Cincinnati is located.

When the GOP nominee arrived late Wednesday night, he whipped up some local TV coverage by letting the media aboard to capture him stepping off his plane at the small Lunken Airport, where Republican Sen. Rob Portman was waiting to greet him. (It didn’t get nearly the same treatment on Cincinnati TV as the president’s “historic” rally did on Cleveland TV, demonstrating the benefit of incumbency in granular -- but potentially pivotal -- ways. Nonetheless, for Romney, every mention and extra few seconds of footage can help.)

On Thursday morning, the former Massachusetts governor held a rally for about 4,000 supporters in a factory called Jet Machine in Bond Hill. That’s in Hamilton County, the state’s third largest jurisdiction behind Cuyahoga and Franklin (where Columbus is located).

Unlike Obama, who is trying to firm up his support, Romney is working to generate enthusiasm. He frequently told the Cincinnati audience that his campaign is about “big change,” big things and big ideas.

“For the last year, and four debates, three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate, the president's been looking for a plan,” Romney said. “He hasn't been able to find a plan. He hasn't been able to define what he's going to do to make America strong going forward. I have.”

Though Hamilton County is a bit smaller than the two Obama strongholds, it still boasts about 800,000 residents. That means Hamilton has a larger population than that of four states -- Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.

The demographics of the county mirror the state more closely than Cuyahoga does, although it is similarly home to a higher proportion of African-Americans, at about 25.8 percent. An Obama aide in Ohio told RCP this week, “We will win Hamilton County,” and returning it to the Democratic column could well be the difference if the election remains close.

In 2008, Obama won about 225,000 of the county’s votes compared with 196,000 for his opponent, a much slimmer difference than in Cuyahoga, of course. But two years later, Strickland lost Hamilton to Kasich in the governor’s race, 140,000 votes to 126,000. The voter registration stands at about 564,000.

Central to the Obama team’s thinking is that this is a presidential election, not a midterm, and they’ve built a stronger network of support since Strickland’s loss. They expect to score more votes because they’ve determined where the less-likely voters are, and if those voters don’t cast ballots early, they will drag them to the polls on Election Day. Already, the campaign is building a significant lead among Ohioans who have voted early.

Both sides acknowledge that the president is ahead here, but the Romney campaign issued a memo Thursday afternoon asserting that the race is still very much in play and that they can win it.

“A steady upward trajectory among key voting blocs indicates a close race, but one that is unmistakably moving in Mitt Romney’s direction,” read the memo from political director Rich Beeson and Ohio director Scott Jennings.

Of course, to coax the numbers in Romney’s direction, the candidate and running mate Paul Ryan are spending a large chunk of their time in the state. After the standard-bearer wrapped up the Cincinnati event Thursday morning, he spoke to 3,000 supporters at Worthington Industries outside of Columbus and then traveled northwest to the state’s border with Indiana, appearing before 12,000 supporters at Defiance High School.

The Republican nominee is making a quick detour to Iowa on Friday morning to give a speech on the economy, but he’ll return to Ohio in the afternoon for an evening rally in Canton, where Ryan will join him.

Ryan will tour the state this weekend, making eight stops in some smaller towns that, with one exception, are far from the state’s big cities: He’ll go south from Canton to New Philadelphia, then will wind his way farther south and west to Zanesville, Circleville and Yellow Springs, ending up Saturday evening in Dayton. Then he’ll head north to Celina, Findlay and Marion, which puts him in a rural region due west of where he began Friday night.

Vice President Biden took a similar, three-day tour of the state’s smaller towns last week, but if there’s anything that unnerves the Obama camp about Ohio, it’s the constant visits by both Romney and Ryan, which the president doesn’t have the time to replicate.

He will, however, be back in the state on Monday, when President Clinton will join him for a rally in Youngstown, the heart of car country.

Please follow Politics on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/PwHcFQTaQHw/election-hinges-on-two-ohio-counties-2012-10

ways to get out of debt american credit card debt american debt relief american debt settlement

How 8 Famous Acquitted Defendants Spent The Rest Of Their Lives

OJ SimpsonOJ Simpson

The beneficiary of one of history’s most famous not-guilty verdicts saw his legal luck run out after a 2007 armed robbery in Las Vegas.

Simpson was convicted on 10 charges related to an attempt to regain some of his sports memorabilia, and he’s currently serving a 33-year sentence in Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center.

Here’s how life shook out for a few other acquitted defendants in high-profile trials.

Lizzie Borden

Although 32-year-old Lizzie Borden was never convicted of the 1892 ax murder of her father and stepmother, her highly publicized trial followed her for the remaining 34 years of her life.

Borden became close friends with actress Nance O’Neill, but she lived out the rest of her life as a recluse.

Although Borden remained largely out of public sight, mourners at her 1927 funeral remembered her as a quiet source of charitable donations. Her will certainly demonstrated her charitable streak; the largest earmark from her substantial estate was a $30,000 donation to the local Animal Rescue League.

Fatty Arbuckle

Silent film actor and comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was one of the biggest stars in the medium’s early days, but his career flew off the rails in 1921. Actress Virginia Rappe fell ill at a party thrown by Arbuckle and died several days later, and the rotund funnyman found himself facing accusations of raping and killing the young woman. Arbuckle weathered two mistrials for manslaughter before being found not guilty in a third trial.

The trial may have legally cleared Arbuckle’s name, but the scandal all but destroyed his Hollywood career. Hollywood briefly blacklisted Arbuckle entirely, but even after the ban was ostensibly lifted he couldn’t find work. Meanwhile, his existing films were rarely shown. (Many prints of Arbuckle’s films have been lost.)

Arbuckle eventually found work directing comedy shorts under a pseudonym before making an acting comeback with Warner Brothers in 1932. In 1933 he signed a contract to make a new feature film, but he died in his sleep the very same night.

Sam Sheppard

Sheppard, a Cleveland-area physician, was convicted of the 1954 murder of his pregnant wife in their suburban home. Sheppard spent nearly a decade behind bars before a 1966 retrial acquitted him.

After a brief attempt to return to medicine following his release from prison, Sheppard found an unlikely second career as a professional wrestler who went by the name The Killer before his death in 1970.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Please follow Law & Order on Twitter and Facebook.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/5CpobVyDUXk/life-of-8-famous-acquitted-defendants-2012-10

bankruptcy debt relief best debt consolidation company best debt consolidation loan best debt management

How to Get Your Insurer to Pay Your Frankenstorm Damage Claim

--> Home flood damageSo, let's assume you did the right thing in getting insurance to protect yourself against those times when Mother Nature comes knocking. Well, if you live on the Eastern Seaboard, it looks like she'll be banging on your door early next week, and this time, she's bringing Frankenstorm.

This rare hybrid of three big weather systems could be a challenge for your emergency plan. But it's after Hurricane Sandy blows through that you may face the real challenge: Getting your insurance company to pony up the cash instead of trying to deny your claim.

As J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America and former federal insurance administrator, noted in connection with Hurricane Irene last year: "Families will have to dig deeper into their pockets, because insurers have been steadily increasing hurricane wind coverage deductibles and imposing other policy limitations."

"This liability shift to consumers may take some by surprise, since disclosures are often buried in renewal paperwork that consumers may not understand or even read," he said.

"We urge homeowners dealing with losses ... to be vigilant with their insurance companies to ensure that that they receive a full and fair settlement," concluded Hunter.

All still good advice.

How to Boost Your Odds of Getting Paid

The names of the storms may change, but what you need to know doesn't. So, let's look back at the advice we first offered back when we were reeling from Hurricane Irene, from DailyFinance's Sheryl Nance-Nash, because if you want to increase the likelihood that your insurer writes that check, there is much to do.

Don't dillydally when it comes to reporting your claim: Insurance companies generally handle them first come, first serve, warns Hunter.

Once your claim is reported, get your claim number and write it down. Having that number will make your life -- and the insurance company's -- easier.

Find out a little about the adjuster who will come to your house to assess the damage. You want to know if he is an employee of the insurance company or an independent adjuster hired by your insurer. The answer matters: If the person is independent, get the name of the actual insurance company adjuster whom the independent adjuster is sending your information to, and find out whether they are authorized to make claim decisions and payments on behalf of your insurance company.

Beware of firms that demand up-front fees for services, regardless of the outcome they negotiate on your behalf with the insurance company. Public adjusters work purely on a contingency basis, ensuring that a homeowner does not pay anything unless he or she receives some form of settlement, said David Charles, president of Catastrophic Claims Consultants.

Build Your Evidence

Anticipate the possibility of push-back from the insurance company, and be ready to hit them with documentation. When you file a claim, CFA advises immediately starting a notebook detailing all your contacts with the insurance company. List the date, time and a brief description of what went down. If you need to amplify later, this will give you a leg to stand on. If an adjuster says he or she will not come out, for example, write it down. If an adjuster is a jerk, note that too.

You own a ton of stuff. Make a list of it all. Better still if you took photos of your possessions before the storm, but If you didn't, don't sweat it. "Those snapshots from a party may offer proof of your TV that was destroyed, or the rug that was ruined," said Phillip Sanov, an attorney with The Lanier Law Firm.

Do, however, take photographs of the damage before doing any repair work to your home. Also, make an itemized list of all damage sustained during the storm and its aftermath, advises Frank Keaney, who specializes in homeowners insurance with Amity Insurance. Do all you can to minimize secondary damage: Your homeowner's policy requires that you "mitigate damage," said Kevin Lynch, an assistant professor of insurance at The American College.

You'll want to do some homework by getting a repair estimate from a contractor to help you in talking with the adjuster. Hang on to receipts for any emergency repairs, and costs such as if you have to stay in a hotel. This may be reimbursable under the "additional living expense" portion of your homeowners' policy, said Keaney.

If needed, you can use weather data provided by the Forensic Weather Consultants at www.weatherconsultants.com, a company of forensic meteorologists who can substantiate hurricane based insurance claims.

It should go without saying, but be honest. Claim inflation invites claim denial, said Michael Huber, partner with the law firm of Ver Ploeg & Lumpkin.

Fight Back

Make sure you follow up on your case: Don't just file the claim, sit back and wait for your payment. Check in regularly with your insurance agent or company on the progress of your claim, said John Egan, managing editor of InsuranceQuotes.com.

If your insurer denies your claim or offers a piddly amount, don't just accept it. CFA advises demanding that the company identify the language in your homeowners' policy that served as the basis for denying your claim or offering so little. The company may be right and you may not know it. Once the company pinpoints the key language in the policy, you should be able to make this determination. Then too, it could be that the company has craftily put new limitations into the policy and didn't make them clear to you. If you feel misled, weigh whether you want to contact an attorney.

For example, said Hunter, the introduction of percentage deductibles (up to 10% of the value of a home), will greatly shift the cost from insurance companies to consumers. The practice of shifting the cost of previously insured events back to consumers is acceptable, as long as consumers are clearly given the option to select the level of coverage they want with fully informed consent.

Another new way insurers can pull a "gotcha" is by putting a limit on replacement cost payments, which might come into play in the event that a home is totally destroyed. A typical cap is 20% above the face value of the policy. According to CFA, if costs surge because of the spike in demand for materials or labor following a major storm (or if the state does not monitor price gouging sufficiently) this limit might apply. For example, if a home was expected to cost $200,000 to replace and that amount was the limit on the policy, the insurance company would pay no more than 20% more, or $240,000. If the surge in construction costs due to extreme demand caused the price of replacing the home to jump to $300,000, the homeowner would be short $60,000.

Know Your Rights

The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Do complain to the powers that be in the insurance company if you feel like a denial was unwarranted or the reimbursement too little. Don't stop there. Complain to your state insurance department: It will make an inquiry with your insurer. See a lawyer if you want to take it a step further.

Once the insurance company tells you the reasons for its action, it legally can't produce new reasons for denying payment or making a low offer at a later time. You have locked them in -- a major advantage for you.

If you review the policy and find that, without stretching your imagination, it seems plausible that you should get the full amount of your claim, you will likely win if you go to court. The CFA notes that courts consistently rule that if an insurance policy is ambiguous, the reasonable expectation of the insured party will prevail since the consumer played no part in writing the language of the insurance policy.

Expect the worst, but hope for the best. Said Hunter, "Not all insurance companies handle claims badly, so go into the claims process with an open mind. Be vigilant though, or you run the real risk of being shortchanged."

More on storm preparedness:
Hurricane Sandy the Frankenstorm Is Coming: Do You Have Flood Insurance?
How to Protect Your Home From Damage in a 'Perfect Storm'
How to Avoid Home Repair Ripoffs After Frankenstorm Passes



Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | Amazon Plugin Wordpress | Android Forums | Wordpress Tutorials

Source: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/10/26/how-to-get-your-insurer-to-pay-your-frankenstorm-damage-claim/

debt collection process debt collection rights debt consolidation agency debt consolidation blog

Should You Consolidate Debt With 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers?

Consolidation Loans For People with Bad Credit With the new CARD act, a lot of card companies started to change their business models which helped in making zero percent credit card balance transfers a very rare commodity according to the wall street journal. But there are still a few and when properly executed, they can [...]

The post Should You Consolidate Debt With 0% Balance Transfer Credit Card Offers? appeared first on legal debt help online.

Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2012/06/28/should-you-consolidate-debt-with-0-balance-transfer-credit-card-offers/

credit card debt collection credit card debt death credit card debt forgiveness credit card debt in america

Shop Owner Drives To Customer?s House After Bad Yelp Review

After receiving his first negative Yelp review, the owner of a California store made repeated attempts to contact the disgruntled customer in the hopes of turning him into a gruntled customer, and ultimately ended up at the Yelper’s doorstep. But before you go looking for the shop owner’s mug shot, this is actually a good thing.

According to the AP[More]

Source: http://consumerist.com/2012/10/26/shop-owner-drives-to-customers-house-after-bad-yelp-review/

consumer debt solutions credit card debt advice credit card debt collection credit card debt death

Not Getting Enough Sleep Could Be Making You Gain Weight

Fat man sleeping park

Getting seven to eight solid hours of sleep each night might seem an almost impossible luxury to many people.

But not getting enough sleep is known to impair mental function and increase the risk for heart disease, among other ill effects.

Accumulating evidence also suggests that even short-term, partial sleep deprivation could pave the way for weight gain and other negative metabolic consequences.

More than 28 percent of adults in the U.S. report that they get less than six hours of sleep a night, with this cumulative deprivation becoming more common in the past three decades.

And now that more than 35 percent of U.S. adults are currently obese, researchers have been searching for potential links between the two conditions, in hopes of reducing the increasing health and economic burden of obesity.

Establishing lack of sleep as a risk factor for weight gain could have important clinical and public health effects, possibly allowing people to make simple lifestyle changes to improve their metabolic health.

A new report, published online October 24 in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, reviews 18 carefully controlled laboratory studies that tested human subjects' physiological and behavioral responses to sleep deprivation as they relate to metabolic health.

Reena Mehra, an associate professor of medicine who studies sleep and health at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and who was not involved in the new analysis, notes that the new paper is "a well done review of the experimental data."

The researchers found that studies of people without sleep-related conditions who got consecutive nights of four to six hours of sleep revealed a wide range of negative effects involving appetite hormone signaling, physical activity, eating behavior and even fat-loss rates. "From a population health perspective, this helps to get people to understand that sleep deprivation really does have an impact on your health," Mehra says.

To sleep, perchance to eat less
Perhaps some of the best-documented effects of sleep deprivation on weight are based on two powerful hormones: ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is involved in sending hunger signals and leptin helps to tell you that you are full. In one study, after just two consecutive nights of four-hours' sleep, test subjects had a 28 percent higher ghrelin (hunger) hormone level and 18 percent lower leptin (satiety) hormone level in their blood compared with subjects who had spent 10 hours a night in bed. In the same study, for those who were sleep deprived, "self-reported hunger and appetite ratings significantly increased by 24 percent and 23 percent, respectively," noted the authors of the review paper, which was led by Julie Shlisky, a researcher at The New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center at Saint Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. "The greatest increase in appetite rating was for energy-dense, high-carbohydrate foods," Shlisky and her co-authors noted. Other studies found additional increases in fat and saturated fat consumed by those suffering from sleep deprivation. One study also found a change in another eating signal called peptide YY, which is thought to tell the body it is full after eating enough. It dropped off in a group of subjects who had been allowed only five hours in bed for two nights, suggesting that these sleepy subjects would be more inclined to eat more given the opportunity.

Not all of the studies found such drastic differences in hormone levels. But many have also documented study subjects eating more and/or more often in the lab after they have had consecutive nights of partial sleep deprivation. One study tested women, reducing their nightly sleep from seven to four hours over the course of four nights. During the sleep deprivation phase, women ate an average of about 400 more calories daily than they had at the beginning of the session—and even gained weight over the course of the short study.

As Shlisky and her colleagues point out in their paper, people who are awake longer simply have more opportunities to eat. "Partial sleep deprivation may increase the risk of overeating in the evening due to low circulating leptin levels and additional time spent awake," the researchers noted, adding that "evening and late-night hours are when overeating of less-healthful foods is most likely to occur." Furthermore, additional research that shows "impulse control and delayed gratification are lowered with sleep deprivation, perhaps making sleep-deprived individuals more vulnerable to hedonic eating," rather than resort to healthful foods to sate hunger.

Stressed and sleepy
Do these extra waking hours also help us get in more physical activity? As with eating, it might seem reasonable to think that being awake longer would lead to more beneficial activity, resulting in more energy expended. Not necessarily, according to the researchers. One study found that after just two nights of being allowed only four hours asleep, subjects had "significantly lower activity" than those subjects allowed eight hours rest. Although lab study results on exercise levels after sleep deprivation have been mixed, people generally report feeling more lethargic and less capable of getting the recommended moderate- to high-intensity exercise. So, although one might spend an extra two to four hours prone in bed, during the 16 to 17 hours of wakefulness a well-rested person would be more likely to meet exercise recommendations and improve his or her metabolism.

Sleep deprivation can also lead to muscle loss and fat gain. With too little sleep, the body is also more likely to produce the stress-response hormone cortisol. After sleep deprivation, subjects in several studies had higher levels of cortisol later in the day, a time when it should be tapering off to prepare the body for rest. Heightened cortisol prompts the body to store more fat and be more inclined to use other soft tissue, such as muscle, as energy, which means that sleep-deprived dieters lose more muscle and gain more fat than do those who are well rested. One study found that after two weeks of minor calorie restriction (10 percent less than their daily energy expenditure), subjects who were getting 5.5 hours in bed a night lost just 0.6 kilogram of fat but 2.4 kilograms of other tissue, such as muscle; subjects who got 8.5 hours slumber each night lost 1.4 kilograms of fat and 1.5 kilograms of other tissue. "Some of these metabolic effects occur pretty quickly," Mehra notes.

Parsing zzz's
The studies reviewed in the current report were all small and of short duration. But larger, long-term epidemiologic studies have come back with similar results. Nevertheless, the relationship between sleep deprivation and weight gain is still not crystal clear. Obesity itself can contribute to sleep loss. Frequent co-occurring conditions, such as sleep apnea (disrupted breathing during sleep), are large contributors to disrupted and poor-quality sleep in the general population. So is obesity causing sleep deprivation, rather than the other way around? "There could be a bidirectional relationship," Mehra says. Although sleep apnea and other conditions can make for low-quality sleep, which can then also lead to heart disease, Mehra suggests that there is ample data that show people who began as normal weight and healthy but did not get enough sleep, over time developed worse health outcomes.

"I think there's room for us to learn more about the underlying mechanisms," Mehra says. But she notes that losing sleep is likely contributing to metabolic disregulation, at the very least: "I think we can pretty safely say, getting insufficient sleep is detrimental to your health," including metabolic health.

Not all doctors—and certainly not all patients—currently focus on sleep as a potentially important intervention for weight loss and metabolic health. For example, people trying to lose weight, especially via calorie reduction and exercise, might find it particularly difficult to feel full, ignore cravings for unhealthful foods and get enough high-energy exercise if they are short on sleep. "Clinicians assisting in weight-loss interventions may improve patient outcomes by discussing sleep time within a healthy lifestyle intervention," the researchers noted. Mehra adds that many of the patients referred to her for sleep-related concerns seem surprised to hear they should be getting more sleep.

Of course, getting more sleep can be difficult, especially with perpetually lit indoor environments and the glow of screens confusing our circadian rhythms. "Demands of a modern lifestyle, excessive time in front of brightly lit computer and television screens, shift work and jet lag, among other factors, result in partial sleep deprivation," Shlisky and her colleagues noted. But this new report, and other accumulating studies, suggest that it might be an important, and relatively simple step—compared with eating well and exercising—in the battle against the bulge, and for a healthy life in general.

Please follow Science on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/businessinsider/~3/j4tFhv7qkq8/sleep-deprivation-causes-weight-gain-2012-10

texas debt collection act uk government debt ways to get out of debt american credit card debt