Sleep and Nutrition
As a sleep coach, I investigate my client’s sleep issues with a fine-tooth comb. I’m not just looking at your sleep patterns but other important behavioural and lifestyle choices that may be affecting your sleep. My holistic approach to sleep challenges is centred around the five key pillars that make up healthy sleep:
Schedule
Movement
Headspace
Environment
Nutrition
I’d like to focus on the last pillar, nutrition, and explain the connection between what we put in our body and how it can have a positive or negative impact on your sleep. I’d also like to give you some examples of sleep promoting foods (i.e. containing melatonin and tryptophan, a hormone and amino acid that helps regulate our sleep).
Nutrition is all about timing
Just like our sleep/wake cycle, the cells in our bodies that regulate when we feel hungry and full and when we best absorb nutrients are circadian – that is, they have their own internal clocks.
And just like our sleep/wake schedules, our bodies like consistency and predictability when it comes to eating. The better aligned all our different systems in our bodies are (e.g. sleep, light exposure, exercise, nutrition), the better all these systems will communicate and work in harmony together.
Sleep deprivation and hunger cues
In our bodies, we have a set of hormones that help control when we feel hungry and when we feel satiated.
Without getting too science-y, ghrelin is our hunger hormone, and it sends a signal to our brain whenever our stomach is empty to feel hunger and seek out food. The physiological reaction to this is one of alertness – our stomach and other muscles contract, our cortisol rises, our breathing becomes shallower, and our heart rate increases. Remember the sympathetic fight or flight response that I spoke about in my previous blog about stress and insomnia? Same thing. This leftover evolutionary change was useful when food was scarce and we needed the extra energy and push to find food but now that food is abundant (although not for everyone), it's not as necessary.
Leptin does the opposite. It is the satiety hormone that sends a signal to your brain that you are full and regulates all those physiological reactions I mentioned previously.
When you have a somewhat regular eating schedule and sleep well, these hormones are happy and regulated. However, if you are sleep deprived, these hormones get adversely affected. Poor sleep patterns disrupt and confuse these two signals and make us more prone to overeat and gain weight because ghrelin levels increase, and leptin levels decrease. To make matters worse, sleep deprivation also affects our decision-making and judgement in terms of what types of food we are reaching for when we’re hungry. It’s a fact that with little sleep, we’re naturally inclined to go for high fat, high sugar, high carb foods. Hello brie, gummy bears, and almond croissants. Our brain signals are misfiring and incorrectly telling us that we’re still hungry when we’re not AND encouraging us to crave the opposite of what we should be putting into our bodies AND putting our bodies into an active state vs the rest and digest state.
To further compound sleep troubles, if we’re sleep deprived, craving sugar and eating close to bedtime, the effects of sugar can wreak havoc on our sleep system. Ever seen a kid at a birthday party stuff their face with cake, sodas and candy and then read a book quietly and hit the hay? Me neither. Excess sugar in your system will “give you energy” making it harder to fall asleep. While a sugar crash may eventually bring you down, if and when you do get to sleep, that blood sugar crash will eventually send signals to your brain screaming “Hey! I’ve got no more fuel in my nutritional tank - fill me up!” And then you know what happens? Your fight or flight sympathetic system gets activated and you’re up at 2 am thinking about the worst kinds of cravings. Furthermore, simple carbs and saturated fats represent the danger zones for pre-sleep snacks as both can reduce serotonin (a calming neurotransmitter) and be difficult to digest.
It all becomes a vicious cycle of not sleeping well, which throws your hunger and fullness hormones out of whack, which leads to poor nutritional choices, not sleeping well, and so on…
Not too full, not too hungry
There’s a sweet spot between not wanting to eat too close to bedtime but not going to bed completely hungry. It’s a Goldilocks situation. Depending on what you eat, if you eat too close to lights out, it can make you more alert and you’ll have trouble settling your mind and body to rest. Certain foods may also cause indigestion, heartburn, and GERD, which can prevent you from falling asleep or can wake you up in the middle of the night from discomfort. Lying down after a spicy curry, a hot pepper eating competition, or a citrus salad can give you acid reflux, burping and other stomach troubles that may keep you up. Ensuring you leave some time between meal time and bedtime (approximately a few hours) is the best way to ensure that your food is getting down and not keeping you up.
There are some known sleep disrupting foods you can watch out for:
Caffeinated drinks and food, such as coffee, energy drinks and chocolate. Not only does caffeine have a tendency to leave you with a racing mind, it blocks adenosine, which is a sleep promoting receptor.
Citrus fruits are acidic, which may cause acid reflux, but citrus is also a natural diuretic, which means that consuming it too close to bedtime can cause you to wake up during the night to use the bathroom.
Spicy foods tend to be acidic and cause gastrointestinal troubles and acid reflux, which may prevent you from falling asleep or wake you up in the middle of the night due to indigestion.
Alcohol, while it may make you sleepy, its sedative effects are no match for real sleep. Alcohol fragments your natural sleep cycle and robs you of the deep, restorative sleep stages you need.
Fatty foods can cause bloating and be harder for your body to digest. If you eat them right before bedtime, your digestive system will continue working to break them down and may interfere with your ability to sleep.
Pizza. Unfortunately, this classic crowd pleaser is a perfect combination of foods that can potentially ruin sleep — refined carbs in the crust, the acidic tomato-based sauce, and all the high-fat toppings like cheese and pepperoni, which can slow your digestion and cause inflammation.
On the other hand, going to bed on an empty stomach drops blood sugar levels and interferes with the body’s ability to sleep well. Hunger can signal the fight or flight response and may keep you stimulated in bed when you really want to be sleeping. So having a well-thought-out light snack may be the best option for you. While refined carbs like white bread, pasta, and sugary cereals can interfere with your sleep, research shows that having a healthy complex carb, low fat snack can be beneficial for rest. Carbohydrates help increase serotonin production, which is a precursor to our sleepy hormone melatonin, and can help reduce the stress hormone cortisol. Furthermore, when you pair complex carbs with a healthy protein or low fat item, it helps to stabilize blood sugar levels, meaning you won’t have that hunger crash in the middle of the night that might wake you up.
Example of such bedtime snacks include:
Piece of whole wheat toast with peanut butter
High fibre crackers with low fat cheese (e.g. cottage cheese, mozzarella, parmesan)
Plain yogurt with fresh fruit or almond butter
Popcorn with almonds
Fortified cereal with milk
In short, here are some tips surrounding nutrition and sleep:
Try and eat around the same time each day
Try and leave at least 2-3 hours between your last meal and heading to bed
Be mindful about eating sugar laden foods, especially in the hours before going to sleep
If you have GERD or other heartburn and indigestion problems, try and restrict spicy and acidic foods to earlier in the day
Sleep promoters
Now let’s get to the good stuff. I love to eat. It’s a part of my culture. It’s a part of my stoned brain. My kryptonite is eating bad food late at night. For my whole life I’ve never been much of a breakfast person. In fact, the unbalanced, hedonistic side of me would be happy to entirely skip that meal and start eating at an increasing pace from about 11am-11pm, which I know is the exact opposite of what best nutritional practice is. Out of all the things I can self-improve, staying nutritionally balanced is 100% my biggest challenge. Which is probably also why I found writing this blog to be the most difficult.
But I digress.
So, we love food. And we love to sleep. Should be a perfect match, no?
There is a range of food that I’ll call sleep promoters, that contain tryptophan and melatonin, both important components that help release sleep-promoting chemicals. Tryptophan is the amino acid that the body uses to make serotonin, the neurotransmitter that slows down nerve traffic so your brain isn’t so busy, calming your mind when we get into bed for the night. Melatonin is a hormone that our body naturally produces that helps kick start your sleep system. Think of it kind of like a toilet flush of the sleep process. It’s not taking your business directly to the sewage plant but it’s initiating that journey and is a necessary step to get there. In a typical, healthy sleeper, melatonin levels rise a few hours before going to sleep, while cortisol levels, our stress hormone, declines, putting our bodies and brains into a conducive state of rest.
There are several factors that can disrupt our melatonin levels, such as light and stress but the good news is, there are sleep-promoting foods that can help us naturally to boost our production of the hormone. I know some of you are thinking “but I take melatonin pills! What about these supplements?” Sure, melatonin supplements can be helpful IF you have a real deficiency in the hormone and IF it’s timed properly and IF taken in the right dose (I’ll address the melatonin debate in more detail at a later time) but supplementation isn’t always the most effective way to get important nutrients into your body. Many doctors and naturopaths would argue that it’s best to boost certain deficiencies naturally – i.e., in the case of sleep, through food, light, lifestyle and behavioural changes. I will remind you at this point that I am NOT a doctor, nutritionist, or dietician and so none this should be taken as medical advice, but I do like to illuminate the connections between food and sleep for my clients and I encourage them to speak to their healthcare practitioners for further clarification and guidance. Like sleep, each medical issue should be treated individually, and you should always visit your healthcare provider if you feel as though you are struggling with a nutritional or hormonal deficiency.
There are a range of sleep-promoting foods that can help raise your melatonin and tryptophan levels.
Foods high in melatonin include:
Milk
Pistachios (also walnuts, almonds, cashews)
Fatty fish (eg salmon and tuna, sardines)
Eggs
Goji berries
Tart cherries or cherry juice - Sometimes called sour cherries, these include Richmond, Montmorency, and English morello. Several studies have found sleep benefits for people who drink tart cherry juice, including increased total sleep time and higher sleep efficiency.
Foods high in tryptophan include:
Turkey
Rice (consumed with a protein)
Oats
Mushrooms
Corn
Bananas
I want to be clear though, eating a peanut butter sandwich and taking a shot of cherry juice before bed is not going to immediately solve your insomnia. With sleep issues, usually there are a range of intertwining factors and habits that need to be addressed before finding the cure. BUT it’s one more tool you can add to your sleep toolkit, and if you can build in some of these sleep promoting foods into your diet, you’ll feel healthier and sleepier and well-rested.
If you have any other thoughts or questions about sleep promoting foods I am always here to talk or to have a free 20-minute discovery call about my Sleep Coaching services.
