Your diet could disrupt your sleep. Here’s what to eat instead.

Eating the right foods throughout the day could be the key to a good night’s sleep.

More and more research has shown that certain foods can help your body produce optimal levels of hormones essential for good quality sleep. But other foods can have the opposite effect, disrupting your blood sugar and hormone levels and ultimately making you more likely to toss and turn throughout the night.

Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the biggest and most interesting stories from The Washington Post.

Studies have shown that many adults in the United States and other Western countries eat a diet that harms their sleep – a diet that contains many ultra-processed foods loaded with added sugars, refined carbohydrates and fats. saturated. These foods can reduce the time you spend in deep sleep, which is the nighttime phase of sleep during which your body repairs and regrows tissue, strengthens your immune system, and consolidates memories.

Researchers have found that a more sleep-friendly diet emphasizes plants and other foods rich in tryptophan — an amino acid that plays a role in sleep — as well as unsaturated fats and fiber-rich carbohydrates. , like fruits and vegetables. , nuts, fish, olive oil, avocados and unprocessed meats. Studies show that when people eat these foods, they sleep better at night and crave less junk food the next day.

Switching to this more optimal diet could lead to notable improvements in your sleep in just two weeks, said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and director of the Center of Excellence for Research on sleep and circadian rhythm.

St-Onge has conducted dozens of clinical trials and other studies over the years examining the relationship between diet and sleep. His research showed that what we eat influences how we sleep, and how we sleep in turn influences what we decide to eat the next day.

– – –

Poor diet can lead to poor sleep

Eating the wrong foods can disrupt your nighttime sleep, which in turn can cause physiological changes that cause you to crave and seek out junk food, creating a cycle of poor eating fueling poor sleep and vice versa.

But eating the right foods can create a beneficial cycle in which you sleep well and, as a result, have fewer junk food cravings and more appetite for healthy foods that promote good sleep.

“When you get good quality sleep, it’s easier to make healthy lifestyle choices,” said St-Onge, whose new book, “Eat Better, Sleep Better,” explains relationship between diet and sleep. “You make better food choices, but you also have more energy to exercise and be active, and you have a better mood and outlook in general.”

– – –

Hormones that support your sleep

Understanding how to eat in a way that improves your sleep starts with what St-Onge calls the two “must-have” hormones that promote sleep. One of them is serotonin, which plays an important role in the quality and duration of your nighttime sleep, and the other is melatonin, which regulates your circadian rhythm and helps you fall asleep.

Our body naturally produces these hormones. But to synthesize them, we need the amino acid tryptophan, which we can only obtain through food, because our body does not produce it.

You’ve probably heard the old adage that eating turkey makes you sleepy because turkey is a great source of tryptophan. This is only partially true. Turkey contains a lot of tryptophan, as do many other foods. And it’s not exactly a fast-acting sedative. A meal can take four to five hours to pass through your stomach and a few more hours to pass through your small intestine, meaning any tryptophan you consume takes some time to reach its final destination.

“The whole process of digesting, absorbing and transporting nutrients throughout the body where they can be synthesized into hormones and neurotransmitters takes some time,” St-Onge said. “But we need to have these building blocks for melatonin production and its secretion when the time comes.”

– – –

How to start a sleep-friendly diet

Only a fraction of the tryptophan we consume reaches the brain, where it can be converted into serotonin and melatonin. Indeed, tryptophan must compete with other amino acids for its absorption.

To ensure your body has a constant supply of serotonin and melatonin, you should eat foods rich in tryptophan throughout the day, St-Onge said, and you should combine them with plant foods that contain plenty fiber and complex carbohydrates.

Eating this way ensures that your body releases just enough insulin to transport the amino acids that compete with tryptophan into your muscles and fatty tissues, paving the way for tryptophan to cross the blood-brain barrier and be synthesized into melatonin and serotonin.

Some foods contain not only tryptophan, but also modest amounts of melatonin, serotonin, and other sleep-promoting nutrients, including magnesium, zinc, fiber, and vitamin D:

Tryptophan: Meat, poultry, and seafood are high in tryptophan, including salmon, chicken breast, turkey, beef, pork, clams, tuna, eggs, and yogurt. Some examples of plant foods that contain a lot of tryptophan are tofu, white beans, lentils, edamame, oats, brown rice, barley, and sesame seeds, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, flax and sunflower.

Melatonin: Animal products like beef, cheese, chicken, eggs, milk and seafood contain a lot of melatonin. But melatonin can also be found in fruits, vegetables and herbs, including apples, oranges, berries, bananas, mango, pineapple, cabbage, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes, etc. garlic and onions.

Serotonin: Serotonin is found in many plant foods, such as nuts, pecans, avocados, bok choy, plantains, plums, spinach, and wild rice. You can also find it in dark chocolate. A study that tested different types of chocolate found that dark chocolate containing 85% cocoa had the highest serotonin levels.

In her book, St-Onge offers recipes and a meal plan for better sleep that she came up with with Kat Craddock, editor-in-chief of Saveur, the food and travel magazine. Here are some examples of these meals:

Breakfast: A typical breakfast according to their plan might include plain yogurt with muesli; quiche with salmon, goat cheese and spinach; or overnight oats with ginger, nuts and fruit.

Lunch: Lunch might include a turkey and black bean burrito bowl; marinated tofu with brown rice; or a tuna salad, chickpeas and sesame-ginger vinaigrette.

Dinner: At the end of the day, a good dinner would be something like sesame-ginger salmon with Asian greens; garlic shrimp with a fresh salad; or chickpea gemelli with butternut squash, walnuts, parmesan and oven-roasted broccoli.

St-Onge’s hope, she said, is that people will one day understand that there is a connection between everything we eat during the day and how we sleep at night.

“What you eat influences your physiology and your biology but also your mental health,” she added. “I think sometimes people don’t think sleep comes from the brain, but it actually does – and diet plays a big role.”

Related content

It’s no coincidence: the Commanders won

The next phase of the true crime boom? Thematic visits.

A beloved man loved Lions. Why isn’t he here to enjoy this?