<\/strong>dietary habits are emerging as a key factor that can make the difference between refreshing rest and a night spent regretting every food choice you made in the previous 24 hours.<\/p>\nSome of the most useful insights into the effect of timing, size and quality of meals on sleep come from studies of those who work through the night to keep our world running. At CQUniversity in Adelaide, research psychologist Dr Charlotte Gupta has been studying how different eating patterns affect shift workers\u2019 performance. Her most important piece of advice for a good night\u2019s sleep is to eat well before bedtime.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not primed to be digesting food at night,\u201d Gupta says. A meal eaten too close to sleep forces the body to focus energy and resources on digestion, when it should be resting and performing other tasks that take place while we rest. \u201cSo it\u2019s likely to impact the quality of our sleep; we\u2019re more likely to wake up during the night, remember our dreams, not get that really restorative sleep,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Almost half of Australian adults report having at least two sleep-related problems. Photograph: Tero Vesalainen\/Getty Images\/iStockphoto<\/p>\n
The ideal is to eat your last food at least two hours before going to sleep, which means no pre-sleep pecking at leftovers or midnight raid of the fridge for a spoonful of cold pudding.<\/p>\n
The size of that final meal can also make a difference. Ideally, we should be having a bigger meal in the middle of the day, when light exposure means our body is very much awake and primed for digestion, and a smaller meal in the evening. But not too small. \u201cWe don\u2019t want it to be so small for dinner that you feel really hungry during the night, that your body\u2019s going to wake you up and want food,\u201d Gupta says.<\/p>\n
On the question of what to eat for a good night\u2019s sleep, the answer is less clearcut, says exercise physiologist and nutritionist Dr Elizabeth Machan from the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and the University of Sydney. \u201cWe haven\u2019t got extensive research that has given us the perfect recipe for what the evening meal should be,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Light exposure during the day helps to regulate melatonin. Photograph: courtneyk\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
There\u2019s some evidence that higher-fat meals are more filling, so in theory people will have more restful sleep, Machan says. But diets high in fat are also associated with shorter sleep duration.<\/p>\n
Similarly, despite the popular idea that eating carbs before bedtime is bad, some studies suggest having a meal higher in carbohydrate can actually help people get to sleep faster. \u201cI think a lot of people might avoid carbs in the evening, for instance, or they\u2019ll reduce their carb intake in the evening, and that\u2019s when they can become more food-seeking later in the night as a result,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Machan says it\u2019s important to include vegetables in that evening meal to help slow the digestive process. \u201cYour gut\u2019s going to be exposed to those nutrients for longer, it\u2019ll have a better chance of absorbing them,\u201d she says. \u201cSo if you\u2019ve got a meal that is lower energy, for instance, it\u2019s going to keep you full, you\u2019re not going to wake up in the middle of the night hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of interest in micronutrients such as the amino acid tryptophan, which the body can convert into the sleep hormone melatonin, and which is found in a range of foods including eggs, tofu, salmon, milk, turkey and some nuts and seeds.<\/p>\n
Some studies suggest the amino acid tryptophan, which is found in salmon, might boost melatonin and improve sleep quality. Photograph: dolgachov\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
While some studies suggest increasing tryptophan intake might boost melatonin and improve sleep quality, Machan is more sceptical, arguing that light exposure is much more important in regulating melatonin. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to make [melatonin] if you\u2019re sitting in light \u2013 it\u2019s a signal that we\u2019re not needing to go to sleep, that it\u2019s daytime,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
One of the challenges with exploring the link between diet and sleep is that it\u2019s a two-way street, says Dr Jen Walsh, director of the Centre for Sleep<\/a> Science at the University of Western Australia.<\/p>\nStudies connecting late meal times with poor sleep are measuring not necessarily sleep quality on one night, but over the last month.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what it\u2019s telling us is that individuals who have poorer sleep are more likely to eat later in the evening.\u201d<\/p>\n
While one way of looking at it is that eating later means poorer-quality sleep, another way of interpreting the data is that people who have poorer-quality sleep are more likely to eat later. \u201cIt\u2019s potentially [the case] <\/strong>that people who eat later have worse health behaviours in general,\u201d she says.<\/p>\nLike so many other health stories, good sleep ultimately seems to come back to that same old chestnut of healthy diet, healthy lifestyle. \u201cI say that sleep impacts diet and it also impacts exercise, so really we need to be getting the sleep right, and it will get everything else right,\u201d Walsh says. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Have a glass of warm milk. No, a cup of herbal tea. Eat carbs, but only the right…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[277],"tags":[18,135,19,17,508],"class_list":{"0":"post-3322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-nutrition"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}