Health Tip: Foods to avoid before bedtime

It turns out science has yet to find a magical food that can send us right to slumberland.

“The bad news for people trying to talk about food and sleep is that . . . generally it’s hard to find foods that help with sleep,” says Michael Grandner, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology.

“The easier question,” Grandner says, “is what are the things to avoid?”

Though you might expect caffeine to top that list, Grandner’s most recent research, published February in the journal Sleep Medicine, found otherwise. Tracking the diets and sleep habits of 459 women enrolled in the federal government’s 15-year Women’s Health Initiative, he found that fat was the main nutrient (out of dozens tracked) associated with getting less sleep. “The more fat you ate, the less you slept,” he says.

Women who ate the most fat slept for shorter times and took more naps, a sign that they didn’t get enough restful sleep at night. (He believes his findings apply to the broader population, not just older women.)

If eating fat keeps you from sleeping, so does being fat. “People who are obese sleep less and report that the sleep they get is not as good,” Grandner wrote in an e-mail. “Some of this may be due to high rates of undiagnosed sleep apnea in these people, but it seems that obesity itself is related to less sleep. This may have to do with the fact that the hormones that control our feelings of hunger and being full get disrupted when sleep is disrupted.”

Read the full article at The Washington Post