How to Eat Well to Sleep Well to Keep Well #wellnesswednesdays

by Ciara Wright, The Wellness Crew

Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the single most important things you do for your health, both in the short term and long term.  We need and deserve sleep, so what can you do to ensure you get it?

How you eat and what you eat can help you achieve optimum sleep for a happy, healthy existence. This article will show what you can do to support your sleep hygiene with your eating habits.

The Importance of sleep

Why is sleep one of the first things we are willing to sacrifice when we get busy?  We perpetuate a myth that sleeping one hour less will give us one more hour of productivity. In reality, research suggests that even small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our health, our cognitive capacity and can lead to weight gain.

Check out some of the negative implications of sleep deprivation.

• After just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep, your natural killer cells – the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day – drop by 70%.

• Lack of sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, prostate and breast.

• A 2013 study reported that men who slept too little had a sperm count 29% lower than those who regularly get a full and restful night’s sleep.

• Lack of sleep reduces your lifespan. More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night.

• Part of the reason for this has to do with blood pressure: even just one night of modest sleep reduction will speed the rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase their blood pressure.

• Getting too little sleep across the adult lifespan  raises your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. When we sleep, the housekeeping is done, cleaning out all the days waste from the brain.
• Weight Gain. Studies suggest that people who sleep fewer than 6 hours per night gain almost twice as much weight over a 6-year period as people who sleep 7 to 8 hours per night.  Among the reasons for this are the fact that inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signallinghormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger signalling hormone, ghrelin meaning we are more likely to over-eat.  Also, staying awake beyond midnight seemed to increase the likelihood of obesity. These associations have a “dose-response” relationship, with later bedtimes and shorter sleeping hours resulting in greater levels of body fat gain.

To make it even harder, you can’t just recover with a lie-in at the weekend.  One night of recovery sleep does not allow the full reboot of immune cells and restoration of inflammation markers.  You need to have a sleep hygiene routine of consistent, quality sleep.

So, how much sleep do you need?

We are all different and all need different amounts of sleep.  However, research shows that only 1 in 40 of us need less than 7 hours sleep a night to feel fully rested.  About a century ago we slept an average of 9 hours.  Now, two-thirds of adults in developed nations fail to obtain the nightly eight hours of sleep recommended by the World Health Organisation.

If falling asleep, staying asleep or simply not getting enough sleep is a concern for you then one of the ways you can improve your sleep hygiene is by minding how and what you eat.  Let’s take a look.

How You Eat

It’s not just what you eat right before bed that impacts our sleep. Actually, what and how you eat throughout the day can influence it.

If you don’t eat enough throughout the day, either because you’re trying to be ‘good’ to lose weight or because you’re too busy and skip meals, this can influence your sleep in two ways.

Firstly skipping a meal, or indeed eating a meal with high glycemic index foods, such as sugar and refined starches, cause cortisol levels to rise. The cortisol may remain elevated all day and during the early part of the night. An elevated cortisol level during the night results in a disruption of REM sleep meaning you struggle to get to sleep or stay asleep or may simply have non-refreshing sleep.

The second aspect of not eating enough during the day is that you’re likely to be starving in the evening and eat too much at this time. It’s important to avoid eating large dinners late at night, especially those high in fat, according to a recent Brazilian study. The body requires energy to digest food and this can impair the sleep cycle. Aom to eat dinner 3 or 4 hours before bed.

Some people, however, will benefit from a small snack before bedtime. If you’re sensitive to blood sugar and feel you need to eat regularly then you may need to have a small snack 60 – 90 minutes before bed. This can help avoid a blood sugar dip during the night. A typical pattern is waking at the same time each night, usually somewhere between 2 and 4am. If you find yourself quite awake and can’t get back to sleep for an hour or two, having alight healthy snack an hour before bed might do the trick.

What You Eat

Protein foods

There is no one magic food that can help sleep, although you might have heard that turkey can help? All poultry, eggs, prawns, crab and yoghurt are good sources of the amino acid tryptophan, which helps increase levels of feel-good hormone serotonin (thus reducing anxiety) and sleep-supporting hormone melatonin. Many studies show that tryptophan can help to reduce the time it takes to get to sleep and some studies show that it helps increase total sleep time.

Calcium

Old wives’ tales suggest that warm milk can make you sleepy. There is some truth in this, because having enough calcium in your diet does help sleep. Calcium (found in cheese, yogurt, milk, kale…) helps the brain use the tryptophan found in dairy to manufacture sleep-triggering melatonin and helps attain the REM sleep phase.

Protein and complex carbs work best together, as the carbs help tryptophan to cross the blood brain barrier and support levels of serotonin and melatonin. To increase tryptophan in the brain, an ideal bedtime snack is a couple of oatcakes with almond butter or natural yoghurt with flaked almonds.

Nuts & seeds

Nuts and seeds are an excellent source of magnesium, a mineral often referred to as Nature’s tranquilliser. It helps muscles, blood vessels and indeed the brain to relax. It also helps to regulate melatonin and supports levels of GABA, a neurotransmitter responsible for calming down nerve activity. Sleep drugs such as Ambien target GABA.

Some nuts like walnuts are also good sources of tryptophan, and of course healthier than many other evening snacks we might typically go for!

Pre and probiotic foods

There is still so much we don’t know about the residents in our gut but emerging science demonstrates that there is a very real, dynamic connection between the microbiome and sleep. We know that sleep deprivation and altered circadian rhythm can negatively effect our gut bacteria. We also know that lots of neurotransmitters are made in our gut which can affect our ability to relax.

Help to replenish your good bacteria with probiotic foods such as natural yoghurt, miso soup or sauerkraut. Eating a good fibre rich diet with plenty of fruits and veggies will help feed your gut friends while avoiding too many processed foods that feed the bad guys instead.

What You Drink

Coffee

Coffee is the first thing we think about when we think of sleep deprivation. It’s the most widely used drug in the world and can really help us get going on a sleepy morning. However, it’s a vicious cycle as taking in too much caffeine will disrupt your sleep the next night.

Too much is usually considered more than 2 cups per day. It takes time for the effects to wear off. It can take up to 6 hours to clear just half the amount of caffeine in one cup from your body. So if you want to enjoy coffee, try and keep it before lunch time to get the benefits and not the disadvantages.

Alcohol

Some people use a nightcap as a sedative, to help them get to sleep but actually it’s a ‘sleep stealer’. It can make you drowsy initially, but it impairs sleep cycles later in the night. This might result in falling asleep after the red wine, but then being wide awake at 4AM and unable to nod off again.

Alcohol can also impact your ability to get enough REM sleep, which is often considered the most restorative type of sleep. With less REM sleep, you’re likely to wake up feeling groggy and unfocused.

And what if you are disturbing someone else’s sleep? Alcohol causes your whole body to relax, including the muscles of your throat. This makes you more prone to snoring and sleep apnea. This may not bother you so much, but could be a bit of a nightmare for your partner!

Finally, alcohol is a diuretic, so may cause more nighttime bathroom trips, disrupting sleep further.

Water

Going to bed even mildly dehydrated can disrupt your sleep. Dehydration can act as a powerful roadblock to your body’s production of the sleep hormone melatonin, making it hard to both fall asleep and stay asleep. A lack of pre-bed fluids can also lead to nocturnal leg cramps that may keep you awake.

But the solution isn’t just to knock a few glasses of water back before getting into bed. If you do this the bathroom trips are inevitable! Drinking smaller amounts more steadily during the day will maintain hydration levels better.

Herbal tea

chamomile tea is well known as a bedtime drink. The truth is that many herbal teas can help us prepare for sleep. Have a cup of herbal tea before bed; there’s any amount of ‘night time’ or ‘bedtime’ combinations containing relaxing herbs such as lavender, oat flower, chamomile or vervain.

Sweet Dreams!

I hope by reading this article that eating well to sleep well will bring you sweet dreams. Of course, nutrition is just one factor in achieving sleep wellness. Exercise will also help and there are many good sleep habits you can adopt in your daily sleep routine to maxximise the benefits of sleep.