It’s no secret that both nutrition and sleep play a fundamental role in our health, but the complex and important relationships between them are frequently overlooked.
Diet and nutrition can influence the quality of your sleep, and certain foods and drinks can make it easier or harder to get the sleep that you need. At the same time, getting enough sleep is associated with maintaining a healthier body weight and can be beneficial for people who are trying to lose weight.
Recognizing the connections between sleep and nutrition creates opportunities to optimize both in order to eat smarter, sleep better, and live a healthier life.
How Nutrition Affects Sleep
“You are what you eat” may be a cliche, but it reflects the fact that nutrition serves as a backbone for health, providing the energy we need and other inputs that make the body function properly. The links between nutrition and obesity, diabetes, and heart health are well-known, but many people are unaware that their diet can also affect sleep.
What Is the Best Diet for Sleep?
As a general rule, a balanced diet made up largely of a variety of vegetables and fruits is able to provide the recommended daily intake of vitamins and nutrients, contributing to better sleep while promoting a healthy weight.
Because both sleep and nutrition are extremely complex and involve multiple interconnected systems of the body, it is challenging to conduct research studies that conclusively demonstrate a single diet that is best for sleep. Instead, what appears most important is that a person gets adequate nutrition without over-consuming unhealthy foods.
A central role of nutrition is having a high enough intake of a broad range of vitamins and minerals that enable almost all types of bodily systems and processes.
Growing evidence indicates that sufficient nutrient consumption is important for sleep. One large study found a lack of key nutrients, such as calcium, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, D, E, and K to be associated with sleep problems advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. While this research does not prove cause-and-effect, it supports the likelihood that diet affects hormonal pathways involved in sleep.
High-carbohydrate meals with high glycemic indexes can also affect one’s energy level and sleep quality. It has been well established that high-carbohydrate meals often can make you feel drowsy. High-carbohydrate meals can also impair your sleep quality. In fact, high carbohydrate intake has been shown to increase the number of awakenings at night and reduce the amount of deep sleep you get. It is not a surprise that frequent consumption of energy drinks and sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with poor sleep quality.
Many different types of diets can offer this kind of nutritional balance, and some have been evaluated more closely for how they affect sleep. For example, the Mediterranean Diet, which is plant-based while incorporating lean meats and high-fiber foods, has been found to improve heart health and sleep quality.
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet, or DASH diet, involves reduced salt and saturated fats along with a focus on whole foods with high levels of fiber, potassium, and magnesium. The DASH diet was designed to reduce blood pressure, but research has found that people who closely follow it tend to report better sleep.
While the Mediterranean and DASH diets have shown benefits for sleep, other dietary approaches that balance macronutrients and ensure adequate vitamins and minerals may have similar effects. Further research will be necessary to identify the sleep benefits of different diets and to test the comparative effects of those diets on sleep.
Because of the effects of dietary changes on numerous systems of the body, it’s important for anyone who is considering starting a new diet to talk with a doctor or nutritionist who can review their nutrition plan and its benefits and downsides in their specific situation.
Does an Unhealthy Diet Affect Sleep Disorders?
Some sleeping problems are directly due to sleep disorders. One of the most serious sleep disorders is obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which causes impaired breathing and numerous nighttime awakenings. Obesity is a key risk factor for OSA, which means that an unhealthy diet that contributes to excess body weight may cause or worsen this sleep disorder.
Alcohol is known to worsen obstructive sleep apnea as it further impairs airway muscle tone throughout the night. This leads to increased blockage of the upper airway during sleep.
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