How does your diet impact the quality of your sleep?

You may have wondered how does our diet affect our sleep or which foods you should be eating and when to get the best nights sleep. Research published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine from Marie-Pierre St-Onge and their colleagues looked at the impact your diet has on the quality of your sleep. Participants sleep between days with a fixed diet and where they could choose their own showed differences in the quality of sleep. What changes in the diets caused this? The most important were carbohydrates, fiber and saturated fat. Each of these affected the participants sleep in some way, good and bad. It is possible that there is a loop between your diet and sleep, whereby what you eat affects your quality of sleep and as a result this then influences what you eat. Managing your sleep is so important and it isn’t just your diet that could be affecting the sleep you do get. If our heads are full of thoughts whirring around, and we become anxious and wired before sleeping, our body stays dialled into our sympathetic nervous system, which is connected with our stress (fight-or-flight) system. Learning how to relax our mind and switch into our healing parasympathetic nervous system is super important for long-term health, better sleep, weight loss and long-term weight management Our therapy team can work with you to find ways of turning down the noise in your head, and making your R&R time a priority. Our nutritional therapist can show you how optimal nutrition can support the sleep pathways in our brain, that will calm you into a deep slumber.   Bibliography

• Pardi, D., (2016). Does What You Eat Today Affect How You Sleep Tonight? Yes. Dan’s Plan.
• St-Onge, M. P., et al., (2015). Fiber and Saturated Fat Are Associated with Sleep Arousals and Slow Wave Sleep.Journal of clinical sleep medicine: JCSM: official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
• Shechter, Ari, et al. (2012). Alterations in sleep architecture in response to experimental sleep curtailment are associated with signs of positive energy balance. American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology.