Researchers have found that eating too much dairy can ruin your sleep.
Researchers surveyed more than 1,000 students about their sleep quality, eating habits and any perceived connection between the two and found a strong link between nightmares and lactose intolerance - possibly because gas or stomach pain during the night affects people's dreams.
“The severity of nightmares is strongly associated with lactose intolerance and other food allergies,” Dr. Tore Nielsen of the University of Montreal, lead author of the paper, told Frontiers in Psychology. - These new findings suggest that changing eating habits in people with food sensitivities may alleviate nightmares. They may also explain why people so often blame dairy products for bad dreams." For the study, researchers surveyed 1,082 students at McEwen University. They asked questions about sleep timing and quality, dreams and nightmares, and the perceived link between different types of dreams and different foods.
They also asked about participants' mental and physical health and their attitudes towards food. About a third of respondents reported having regular nightmares. Women were more likely to remember their dreams and complain of poor sleep and nightmares, and almost twice as likely as men to complain of food intolerances or allergies.
About 40% of participants said they thought eating late or certain foods affected their sleep; about 25% thought certain foods could make their sleep worse. People who ate less healthy foods were more likely to have negative dreams and less likely to remember them.
Most participants who blamed food for poor sleep thought sweets, spicy foods or dairy products were to blame. Only a relatively small proportion - 5.5% of respondents - believed that what they ate affected the nature of their dreams, but many of these people said they thought sweets or dairy products made their dreams more disturbing or bizarre.
When the authors compared reports of food intolerance with reports of bad dreams and poor sleep, they found that lactose intolerance was associated with gastrointestinal symptoms, nightmares and poor sleep quality. It may be that dairy consumption triggers gastrointestinal disorders and the resulting discomfort affects people's dreams and the quality of their rest.
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