How your diet influences your sleep

We have known for a long while that foods like crackers and milk before bed are sleep-promoting foods because they boost levels of sleep-inducing chemicals like serotonin. That’s all well and good but it is limited thinking when you consider that you eat food all day and now a new study has shown that your overall food intake also influences your quality of sleep.

More fibre led to more time spent in deep slow-wave sleep, more saturated fat led to less low slow-wave sleep and more sugar led to more arousals from sleep.

In the study, adult men and women of normal weight and an average of 35 years old spent five days and nights in a sleep laboratory where they spent nine hours per night in bed (from 10pm to 7am). Sleep data was gathered every night by polysomnography, a technique that measures your brainwaves, the oxygen level in your blood, heart rate and breathing, as well as eye and leg movements during sleep. Sleep data was analysed from night three, after the subjects had been put through three days of controlled diets, and on night five, after a day where they had been free to eat whatever they wanted.

The results showed that a daily diet involving less fibre, more saturated fat and more sugar is associated with lighter, less restorative and more disrupted sleep. Specifically, more fibre led to more time spent in deep slow-wave sleep, more saturated fat led to less low slow-wave sleep and more sugar led to more arousals from sleep.

Very interestingly, just one day of higher fat and lower fibre consumption could influence sleep arousals.

Your diet influences more than your waistline.