The Link between Sleep and Nutrition
In the last two weeks, we’ve talked briefly about our core Pillars of Health — sleep, nutrition, exercise, and the mind — and explained why sleep is such an important pillar that we don’t typically give enough attention. This week, we want to touch on the relationship between sleep and nutrition, and why a lack of sleep might be sabotaging your healthy eating attempts.
How sleep loss effects what you consume
You might have experienced feeling hungrier or having more cravings on a day where you didn’t get enough sleep — turns out, the science backs this up.
Sleep loss affects the rewards center of your brain, which makes high-fat, sugary foods much more appealing. Studies have also shown that insufficient sleep increases snacking and the frequency of meals consumed throughout the day. It also actually makes you feel hungrier through the hormone ghrelin. This is the hormone responsible for telling the brain you’re hungry, and during sleep deprivation it gets released in larger amounts. It also causes the hormone leptin to be released in smaller amounts, which is the hormone that starts appetite suppression as the stomach fills. Sleep deprivation also affects your brain activity in regions that increases the desire for high-calorie foods.
You’ve probably heard not to grocery shop on an empty stomach, but it turns out sleep deprivation also causes you to buy higher-calorie foods, and we all know that when we have tempting foods in the house we’re more likely to consume them.
How what you eat effects your sleep
What you might not have been able to experience directly is how our diets impact the way we sleep. The composition of your diet, when you eat, and how much you drink can all have impacts on your quality of sleep.
Certain diets promote lower quality sleep
Though more studies do need to be conducted, many have started exploring the effects of different compositions of diets on our sleep patterns. It has been shown that high fat diets lower your REM sleep and increase brain arousals during the night. Data has also shown that diets low in fiber and high in saturated fat and sugar causes lighter sleep with more periods of waking during the night.
Hydration plays a big role
Dehydration causes your mouth and nasal passages to dry, causing snoring and promoting mouth-breathing during sleep — which disrupt your sleep and your partner’s. It can also cause leg cramps that keep you awake in bed. You also lose quite a bit of fluid while you sleep through breathing, sweating, etc., so going to bed dehydrated causes you to wake up even moreso, which will make you feel drowsier and less alert the next day.
When you eat also affects how you sleep
A common tip from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine is to not go to bed hungry, but eating something too dense too close to bed might also trigger your digestion to fire up while you’re sleeping, which can disrupt your quality of sleep. Another big factor is your body’s cortisol circadian rhythm. This is an entire topic in itself, but the key takeaway is that this is a 24-hour rhythm that determines when your cortisol is produced — which helps regulate a ton of bodily functions. Normally the most cortisol is produced in the morning and the least at night, and if this is reversed it will disrupt your REM sleep, causing your sleep quality to be lower regardless of how much time you spend sleeping.
Like we will most likely find with the links between the other Pillars in this series, the link between sleep and nutrition is a chicken-and-egg problem — a lack of sleep causes your nutrition to suffer, and a lack of nutrition causes your sleep to suffer. The best course of action to break this cycle is to take it slowly; try starting with a more forced nutrition routine of fixed, prepared meals and eating times, make sure you are getting enough water throughout the day, and try your best to get into a consistent sleep routine. Next week we’ll be exploring the link between our sleep and exercise!
