Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a major risk factor for many chronic diseases, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Sleep is recognized a risk factor for many of the conditions comprising MetS (e.g. high blood sugars, obesity). Interestingly, fat metabolism during your sleep is important for regulating several key components of health, like risk of obesity and glucose tolerance. While exercise is recognized as a health enhancing behavior to reduce the risk of many chronic diseases, the effect of exercise on sleep quality and nocturnal fat metabolism is largely unknown. This study plans to learn more about how the time of day that you perform exercise influences sleep quality and fat metabolism overnight in adults with metabolic syndrome. In this study, exercise will be performed in the early evening and the investigators will measure your sleep quality and fat metabolism overnight in our metabolic room. Findings from this study will identify how exercise influences novel contributors to metabolic syndrome (sleep quality and nocturnal metabolism) and shed light on some potential mechanisms to explain the variability in exercise responses.
