Enrich's Guide to Sleep and Eating

Sleep is an essential function for individuals, allowing our bodies to rest and recharge. Most adults should aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night. This range is a recommendation; some individuals might function better when getting more than the recommended amount of sleep, while others may function normally on the lower end of this range. Sleeping less than six hours each night is not recommended for most adults. Without adequate sleep, brain function decreases, hormones become imbalanced and there is a general decline in our overall state of wellbeing. Here at Enrich, we value sleep, and it is one of our core pillars of our programme. This article will take you through the importance of sleep in our lives and explain the cyclical relationship between eating behaviours and sleep.

How does what I eat affect my sleep?

It has been found that getting proper nutrition and meal timing can improve overall sleep quality, sleep length and enhance health and wellbeing.

Types of food that impact sleep

• Ultra-Processed food: Diets containing large amounts of low fibre, high saturated fat, and or high sugar foods affect sleep quality and length These foods have been linked to sleep that isn’t as restorative.
• Caffeine/Alcohol: Both substances have been found to reduce sleep quality, especially if taken within two to three hours before bedtime. They disrupt your sleep by interfering with sleep architecture (how your body cycles through the normal stages of sleep), resulting in a highly fragmented and disrupted sleep episode causing poor sleep quality, and next day tiredness. They also are both diuretics and so will affect the need to go to the bathroom in the middle of your sleep cycle.
• Sleep promoting foods: Foods that contain sleep-promoting components, like the amino acid tryptophan, essential vitamins, like magnesium, or melatonin, improve sleep quality. Tryptophan can influence mood and sleep by affecting serotonin and melatonin production, which significantly impact sleep quality and mood. Sources can include:
  
  • Tryptophan – poultry (chicken & turkey), eggs, fish, milk, tofu and soy products, chocolate, and seeds.
  • Magnesium – Fish, nuts, seeds, legumes, fortified grains, spinach, and soy products.
  • Melatonin – Eggs, fish, nuts, seeds, berries, tomatoes, and peppers.
• Balanced Diet: A well-balanced diet with adequate amounts of carbohydrates, protein, and fat appears to be best for good sleep. Not eating enough fat, carbohydrates, or protein has been linked to lessor worse quality sleep.

Meal timing

The time in which you consume your food influences how well your sleep quality is going to be. Eating too much food or too close to bedtime may interfere with healthy and sound sleep. A person’s basal metabolic rate (BMR),or the amount of energy their brain and body uses, overall decreases during sleep. Digestion continues while a person is asleep, but digestion at night differs from digestion during the day. The muscle activity that moves food through the oesophagus, stomach, and intestines slows down during sleep.  This slowdown is why most people only have bowel movements while awake, and why acid reflux may be more common at night. It has been found that snacking between meals / after dinner and skipping meals is also related to a decrease in sleep quality and quantity.

Does the amount of sleep I’m getting every night affect the foods I’m choosing to eat?

Research has made it clear that sleep patterns influence how a person eats and how the body responds to food. As we all know, the effects of a bad night’s sleep can be felt the next day, causing lethargy, inability to focus and excess hunger. Sleep influences our appetite by regulating our hormones.

- Ghrelin (the hunger hormone)

- Leptin (the satiety hormone)

Shortness of sleep and poor sleep quality throw off these hormones, decreasing leptin and increasing ghrelin. This could result in increased hunger sensations paired with decrease satiety.

When our body feels hungry, the brain signals us to grab food that increases energy. When we lack energy / sleep, we choose foods that are easy and convenient. Usually, they do not require any cooking or effort and tend to be higher in sugar, saturated fat, salt and lack any fibre. They give us a short burst of energy (energy spike), and this causes us to feel hungry again in a short space of time. As mentioned earlier, our satiety is decreased with poor sleep, meaning, we tend to overeat also, and this can lead to a higher calorie intake for that day. If this becomes a pattern, it can cause an increase in weight gain for an individual and this can lead to an increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart problems.

As you can see, the relationship between food and sleep is a very influential part of our everyday lives, dictating our behaviours more than we think. Finding the time to prioritise sleep length/quality and including good food in our diets is a great way to improve our overall health and wellbeing!