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What’s the best diet for healthy sleep? A nutritional epidemiologist explains what food choices will help you get more restful z’s
By Erica Jansen, University of Michigan
You probably already know that how you eat before bed affects your sleep. Maybe you’ve found yourself still lying awake at 2 a.m. after enjoying a cup of coffee with dessert. But did you know that your eating choices throughout the day may also affect your sleep at night?
In fact, more and more evidence shows that overall dietary patterns can affect sleep quality and contribute to insomnia.
I am a nutritional epidemiologist, and I’m trained to look at diets at the population level and how they affect health.
In the U.S., a large percentage of the population suffers from poor sleep quality and sleep disorders like insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which the upper airway becomes blocked and breathing stops during sleep. At the same time, most Americans eat far too much fatty and processed food, too little fiber and too few fruits and vegetables.
Although it is difficult to determine whether these two trends are causally linked to one another, more and more research points to linkages between sleep and diet and offers hints at the biological underpinnings of these relationships.
How diet and sleep quality can be intertwined
My colleagues and I wanted to get a deeper understanding of the possible link between sleep and diet in Americans who are 18 and older. So we analyzed whether people who follow the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans get more hours of sleep.
Using a nationally representative dataset of surveys collected from 2011 to 2016, we found that people who did not adhere to dietary recommendations such as consuming enough servings of fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains had shorter sleep duration.
In a separate study, we followed more than 1,000 young adults ages 21 to 30 who were enrolled in a web-based dietary intervention study designed to help them increase their daily servings of fruits and vegetables.
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