Does your overall diet and the specific foods you eat affect how you sleep? There’s some evidence that eating a balanced diet promotes good shut-eye, but experts say a lot of the details are still unknown.
If you’ve ever tossed and turned in bed after a spicy meal gave you reflux or some deep-fried food gave you gas, you know that your food choices can mess with your sleep in some very direct ways.
But is there enough scientific evidence for doctors to make recommendations about what to eat to promote good sleep?
“There’s some credible research out there that has looked at various foods in relation to sleep,” says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, whose research focuses on the relationship between sleep, diet, and cardiometabolic disease.
Along with some specific foods, there’s also evidence that certain diets or eating patterns may also help promote better sleep.
Are Certain Foods Good for Sleep?
For example, there’s data showing that both kiwis and tart cherries are linked to sleep improvements.
People who, for four weeks, ate two kiwis approximately one hour before bed fell asleep 14 minutes faster and slept 40 minutes longer than people who did not eat any kiwis, according to a study from Taiwan. Another study, this one from the United Kingdom, found people who drank 8 ounces of tart cherry juice twice a day — 30 minutes after waking up, and also 30 minutes before dinner — slept longer and more “efficiently” than people who drank a placebo cherry drink.
What could explain the sleep benefits of these foods? Dr. St-Onge says both kiwi and tart cherries contain melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone naturally produced by the body that helps regulate the sleep-wake cycles. It’s also found in some foods (and in supplements).
Increasing melatonin levels at certain times of the day by way of eating melatonin-rich foods could have a beneficial effect on sleep, St-Onge says — though she’s quick to add that more research is needed. (Neither of the studies assessed whether people’s melatonin levels actually changed after eating the kiwis or drinking the tart cherry juice.)
So should you stock up on kiwis and tart cherry juice if you’re having trouble sleeping? There’s probably no harm in trying these out, but at this point, sleep experts aren’t recommending them to patients. Still, the research is valuable because it lends support to the idea that melatonin-rich foods might increase melatonin in the body — and improve sleep as a result.