It may sound unbelievable but the fact is that the food which you consume influences not only your health and weight but also the quality of your sleep. Some foods have a positive impact on sleep, making it longer and deeper, while the others may cause various sleep disorders or even deprive you of sleep at all.
Positive influence on sleep is made by fruits, vegetables, cereals, mushrooms and other foods of vegetable origin. Especially here must be singled out some spices, which help to fight sleep disorders. They are dill, sage, basil and some others.
You may remember how grandparents forced you to drink a glass of hot milk with a honey before going to bed and how you did not like it. If you want to know, your grandparents were right and you were not, as milk and honey are very effective meal in helping a human to fall asleep. The secret of this useful quality of milk and honey hides in an amino acid called tryptophan which is a constituent of most proteins and is used by an organism to generate the serotonin hormone that controls sleep. Tryptophan is also may be found in the eggs, turkey and tuna, which are also good to eat at evening.
Tyramine is a substance which causes the opposite effect to tryptophan, stimulating the brain and hampering people to fall asleep. Cheeses, sugar, bacon, ham and tomatoes all include tyramine. The other harmful for sleep substance is well-known caffeine, so you must refuse from caffeine-rich products at evenings. Those products are coffee, tea, cocoa (and, hence, chocolate), soft drinks, and some others.
Alcohol has a dual impact on sleep. Usually it can make you drowsy and may help to fall asleep, but later, in the middle of the night, it will wake you up frequently to urinate, so the quality of alcohol-induced sleep is under big question.
Sleep depends not only from what you eat but also from how much and when you eat. It is recommended to start a day with a decent meal at breakfast, to have the main meal around noon, and the supper at the beginning of the evening should be light. You may have heard the useful joke which says: eat the breakfast by yourself, share the dinner with your friend and give the supper to your enemy.
To increase the general quality of the sleep, you must use some definite minerals and vitamins, such as calcium, magnesium, vitamins B6 and B12. All dairy products, such as yoghurts and cheeses are extremely rich in calcium. Some people may be allergic to milk, so they may found calcium in other products, such as beans, broccoli, blackstrap molasses, nuts and seeds. The same foods are also rich in magnesium. To get vitamins B6 and B12, you should use meat, liver, soy products, whole grain products, nuts, fish and shellfish, poultry, eggs and milk products.
Now you know what products may help you sleep better and what may harm your sleep, so be careful in eating if you want to have healthy sleep.
P.S. Sleep well.
John
