Dr's Casebook: Eat your five a day for better sleep straight away
I have been interested in the nature of sleep and the problems of insomnia all of my career, every since I was working in p syc hiatry.
In fact, the very first medical paper I had published in a journal was back in the early 1980s, and it was about insomnia. It continues to fascinate me because it is a problem area for so many people. I was interested to see that a very simple dietary adjustment has recently been demonstrated to improve sleep virtually straight away.
Getting enough good quality sleep a night is important for one’s health. It is well known that it can have an impact on heart and metabolic health, memory, learning, general productivity, emotional balance, and even relationships. It is admittedly a very complex subject and just switching off and allowing oneself to sleep is not simple. Having a good bedtime routine can help, but your daytime routine including your diet also may have a beneficial impact.
Studies have shown that getting too little sleep or too little good quality sleep can make people crave unhealthier eating patterns, going for high fat and sweet foods. However, little research has been done on the opposite, that is on how diet can affect sleep.
Everyone is aware of the advice to ensure that you eat five portions a day of fruit and vegetables. Many people do not achieve this on a daily basis. This was part of the aim of a study on a group of young adults recently done at the University of Chicago, and published in the journal Sleep Health last summer.
In the study the participants logged their daily food intake using an app and wore a wrist monitor that tracked their sleep. This enabled the researchers to measure sleep fragmentation, which captures how often a person wakes up or shifts between lighter and deeper stages of sleep during the night. They found that those who ate more fruits and vegetables, actually reaching their daily five cupful’s of fruit and vegetables a day and consumed more complex carbohydrates such as whole grains, all experienced longer periods of deep, undisturbed sleep. When this intake was actually met they could see a 16 per cent improvement in sleep quality compared with those who didn’t.
The significant thing is that this improvement can be achieved straight away, simply by hitting the five portions a day. A very simple dietary thing to do that will improve general health and sleep.