Is Cheese Giving You Nightmares?
For centuries, folklore and popular wisdom have linked bad eating habits and indigestion to nightmares and restless sleep. In A Christmas songEbenezer Scrooge first rejects the ghosts that torment him like simple eating disorders: “You can be a little uncomfortable beef, a mustard stain, a cheese crumb, a fragment of a potato under a potato,” he said to a spectral visitor. “There are more sauce than serious on you, whatever you are!” Earlier, Benjamin Franklin deplored that “[I]Ndolence, with a complete diet, nightmares and inexpressible used horrors; We fall from the precipices, are attacked by wild animals, murderers and demons, and know all the varieties of distress. At the beginning of the 20th century, the designer Winsor McCay made his name with his series “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend”, in which his protagonists undergo dreams and bizarre nightmares that they attributed to eat Welsh rarebit – a delicacy of spicy cheese on toast.
A modest body of contemporary research sought to explore more empirical the link between food and nightmares. The latest is a new study published in the journal Borders in psychology—Itizing that if you want to get your Z, you would better limit the cheese.
To conduct this study, Tore Nielsen, professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, and his colleagues interviewed 1,082 students at the University of Macewan in Alberta. All have fulfilled a questionnaire on their diet, their food sensitivities, sleep habits, dream recall, etc. Students have reported how late they eat in the evening, whether they are regularly nibbled without being hungry, and if they have gastrointestinal symptoms, food allergies or food conditions such as lactose intolerance. They also reported how much they sleep and how often their sleep is disturbed by nightmares.
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About 25% of people said that eating certain foods before the bed seemed to worsen their sleep, while a little more than 20% said that certain foods have improved their sleep. Among the people who said they had more nightmares after eating certain foods, 31% attributed bad dreams to the consumption of desserts and other candies, 22% stressed dairy products, 16% cited and 13% blamed spicy foods.
The most commonly quoted medical condition linked to the quality of sleep was lactose intolerance: stretching legitimacy charging “cheese crumbs” of scrooge. Among the people who believed that their diet was linked to a less well sleepy sleep, 30% were intolerant lactose.
“The nightmares are worse for lactose intolerant people who suffer from serious gastrointestinal symptoms whose sleep is disturbed,” Nielsen said in a press release that accompanied the release of the study. “It makes sense because we know that other bodily sensations can affect the dream.” A meta -analysis of 2024, for example, revealed that all kinds of sensory experiences – including sounds, odors, flashing lights, physical pressure and pain – can be incorporated into dreams when people sleep and researchers provide stimulus.
Nightmares related to food could also be linked to depression and anxiety, say the researchers; Symptoms of lactose intolerance such as bloating, cramps and gas directly affect mood, which can be asleep, feeding bad dreams. The article quotes a previous study of 2005 from Nielsen showing that “the dream is more intense emotionally and conflicting when the abdominal cramps are at worst”, including during menstruation.
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When people eat can also make a difference. Eat late in the evening or snack until bedtime is linked to an “evening chronotype” – in addition to being a night bird – which was associated with nightmares in studies mentioned above.
Nielsen and his colleagues concede that their current work does not establish causality, with at least the existing possibility that bad dreams and bad sleep can lead to just as bad eating habits, rather than on the contrary. “The Directorate of Causality in many studies on food and sleep is not clear,” write the authors.
Of course, not all foods are linked to nightmares and sleep disturbances, and some may even support better sleep. Almost 18% of people who eat fruit regularly have reported better sleep, as well as 12% of people who consume a lot of vegetables and 13% of people who drink luts.
Nielsen does not think that current research closes the book on the bond of food and sleep and reverie, seeing a need for many future work. “We have to study more people of different ages, from different backgrounds,” he said in the statement. “Experimental studies are also necessary to determine if people can really detect the effects of specific foods on dreams. We would like to conduct a study in which we ask people to ingest cheese products compared to certain control foods before sleeping to see if it changes their sleep or their dreams. ”
