For centuries, folklore and popular wisdom have linked poor eating habits and indigestion to nightmares and restless sleep. In A Christmas CarolEbenezer Scrooge Initially rejects The spirits that torment him as merely dietary disorders: “You can have an undigested piece of beef, a spot of mustard, a crumb cheese, a fragment of an under -ending potato,” he tells a spectral visitor. “There is more gravy than from grave about you, whatever you are!” Earlier, Benjamin Franklin That complained ‘[I]Ndolence, with complete food, occasions nightmares and horrors inexpressible; We fall out of abysses, are attacked by wild animals, murderers and demons and experience every variety of suffering. ”In the beginning of the 20th century, cartoonist Winsor McCay made his name with his’Dreams of the Rarebit FiendThe series, in which his protagonists bizarre dreams and nightmares they add to eating Welsh Rarebit – a delicacy of seasoned cheese on toast.
A modest amount of contemporary research has tried to explore the relationship between food and nightmares. The latter is a new one study Published in the magazine Frontiers in Psychology—Deeping that if you want your Zs, you best reduce the cheese.
To conduct the current study, Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, and his colleagues investigated 1,082 students at Macewan University in Alberta. They all filled in a questionnaire about their diet, food sensitivity, sleeping habits, dream reminder and more. The students reported what time in the evening they eat, whether they regularly snack without feeling hungry, and whether they have gastrointestinal symptoms, food allergies or food-related disorders, such as lactose intolerance. They also reported how well they sleep and how often their sleep is disturbed by nightmares.
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About 25% of people said that eating certain foods before going to sleep seemed to make their sleep worse, while just over 20% said that some foods improved their sleep. Of the people who reported that they had more nightmares after eating certain foods, 31% attributed the bad dreams to the consumption of desserts and other sweets, 22% pointed to dairy, 16% cited meat and 13% blamed spicy food.
The most frequently mentioned medical condition that was linked to sleep quality was lactose intolerance -delivering legitimacy for Scrooge’s “crumb cheese” costs. Of the people who believed that their diet was generally related to poorer sleep, 30% was lactose intolerant.
“Nightmares are worse for lactose -intolerant people who suffer serious gastrointestinal symptoms and whose sleep is disturbed,” Nielsen said in one rack That was accompanied by the issue of the study. “This makes sense because we know that other physical sensations can influence dreams.” A 2024 Meta-analysisFor example, it discovered that all kinds of sensory experiences – including sounds, scents, flashy lights, physical pressure and pain – can be absorbed in dreams when people sleep and researchers offer the stimulus.
Food -related nightmares can also be linked to depression and fear, the researchers say; Lactose intolerance symptoms such as bloating, cramps and gas have a direct influence on the mood that can be transferred to sleep, driving bad dreams. The paper quotes an earlier 2005 study By Nielsen who demonstrates that “dreams are more emotionally intense and more conflicting when abdominal cramps are in the worst case”, even during menstruation.
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If people eat can also make a difference. Eating or snack late in the evening until bed is linked to an “evening chronotype” – essentially the state of a night fire – that has already been associated with nightmares in itself quoted study.
Nielsen and his colleagues admit that their current work does not determine causal connection, with at least the possibility that bad dreams and poor sleep can lead to equally poor food habits, rather than the other way around. “The direction of causality in many studies of food and sleep remains unclear,” the authors write.
Not all foods are of course linked to nightmares and sleep disturbance, and some can even support better sleep. Almost 18% of people who eat fruit regularly reported better sleep, together with 12% of people who consume a lot of vegetables, and 13% of people who drink herbal tea.
Nielsen does not believe that the current research closes the book remotely about the Food and Sleep and Dreaming link, and sees a need for a lot of future work. “We have to study more people of different ages, of different layers of life,” he said in the explanation. “Experimental studies are also needed to determine whether people can really detect the effects of specific foods on dreams. We would like to conduct a study in which we ask people to take cheese products versus some control feed for sleep to see if this changes their sleep or dreams.”
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