Sleep Architecture & Fries: what's the link?

As we age, many of us battle to achieve sweet ZZZs even if in the past they came so easily. How might we sleep better and win this nighttime battle? What does what you eat have to do with your ability to achieve restorative sleep?

Study

In a Uppsala University study, participants consumed either an unhealthier or healthier diet in a randomized order. Then their quality of sleep, such as deep sleep, was tracked.

Previous epidemiological studies have shown that diets with greater sugar content, for example, are linked to poorer sleep. But no study had investigated healthy and unhealthy food choices on the quality of sleep.

The context of sleep is very dynamic. Meaning sleep consists of different stages with different functions. For example, each sleep stage is hallmarked by different types of electrical activity in the brain. This regulates aspects such as how restorative sleep is and differs across different brain regions. The depth or integrity of the sleep stages can also be negatively affected by factors such as insomnia and aging.

Slow-wave activity, a measure that can reflect how restorative deep sleep is, was monitored with healthy versus unhealthy eating. Deep sleep exhibited less slow-wave activity when the participants had eaten junk food, compared with the consumption of healthier food. This effect also lasted into a second night, once participants had switched to an identical diet.

So eating, for example, fries and pizza might ding your sleep for two nights even if you ate better the second day. The adverse effects lasted 48 hours! Essentially, the unhealthy diet resulted in shallower deep sleep.

The moral of this story, every fork in the road decision affects how you sleep and how you feel when you wake up from that sleep.

Knowledge is power if lived.

Dr. B.

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Reference:

Exposure to a more unhealthy diet impacts sleep microstructure during normal sleep and recovery sleep: A randomized trial. Obesity, 2023; DOI: 10.1002/oby.23787