{"id":95266,"date":"2025-09-22T11:01:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=95266"},"modified":"2025-09-22T11:01:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T11:01:16","slug":"how-what-you-eat-can-affect-what-you-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sotnews.agency\/?p=95266","title":{"rendered":"How what you eat can affect what you dream"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Anecdotal claims that eating cheese before bed causes nightmares were once so prevalent that in 2005 the British Cheese Board sponsored a\u00a0study\u00a0on the matter.<\/p>\n

For the week-long experiment, 200 volunteers (100 women, 100 men) reported what variety of cheese they ate before bed and what their dreams were like. Though the study (more public relations than science) was never published in a peer-review journal, the details were fascinating: Stilton cheese reportedly induced weird dreams, such as one about a vegetarian crocodile that wanted to eat human children. Cheddar, on the other hand, was associated with dreams of celebrities.<\/p>\n

A hundred years prior, American cartoonist Winsor McCay made cheese the antagonist of his early turn-of-the-century comic strip. In\u00a0Dream of the Rarebit Fiend<\/em>, characters are plagued by bizarre, even nightmarish dreams, usually after eating Welsh rarebit, a mildly spicy cheese toast.<\/p>\n

A study published this June in the journal\u00a0Frontiers in Psychology<\/em>\u00a0has finally revealed clues for why certain foods might lead to more fretful sleep. In a survey of 1,000 participants, nightmares after eating cheese or dairy products were much more common in people who were lactose intolerant.<\/p>\n

It makes sense that having such uncomfortable symptoms while sleeping could influence dreams, says\u00a0Tore Nielsen, the study\u2019s lead author and a neuroscientist\u00a0at Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al who studies dreams and nightmares.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that pain influences dreams. We know that other body sensations\u2014just touching a dreaming person\u2014can enter into their dreams,\u201d he says. \u201cThese pathways for influencing dreams exist for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

How scientists studied certain foods and dreams<\/h4>\n

Nielsen\u2019s first paper examining food and nightmares published in 2015. Then, he asked 396 university students if they thought particular foods gave them bizarre or disturbing dreams. Almost 18 percent said food played a role, and dairy or cheesy dishes like pizza and poutine (the study was done in Canada) were named as the primary culprits.<\/p>\n

Nielsen\u2019s recent study found a much smaller general relationship between food and dreams. Only 5.5 percent of those surveyed reported that their dreams or nightmares were caused by food.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut that\u2019s only part of the results, because we don\u2019t really know how accurate these participants are in detecting specific cause, effect relationships,\u201d says Nielsen. \u201cThis is just an impression. And the impression could be based on folklore, mythology, even like just things that they picked up, or misattributions, you know,\u00a0I eat something late, I\u2019m gonna have bad dreams<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet when the researchers analyzed data about gastrointestinal symptoms\u2014bloating, gas, diarrhea, cramps, pain\u2014they found a distinct link: the lactose intolerant participants with the worst GI symptoms had the worst nightmares.<\/p>\n

The study authors also collected data from what Nielsen calls a \u201cstyle of eating questionnaire,\u201d and found that nightmares correlated with not paying attention to one\u2019s own feelings of satiety and using the clock rather than hunger to decide when to eat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIgnoring those bodily signals, especially, were associated with having nightmares,\u201d Nielsen said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The general eating habits that affect sleep<\/h4>\n

In addition to the usual suspects\u2014caffeine and alcohol\u2014highly-processed foods, sugar, and refined carbohydrates can interfere with a good night\u2019s sleep, say\u00a0Marie-Pierre St-Onge, director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

Her\u00a0research\u00a0has shown that eating more fruits and vegetables can lead to less fragmented sleep, while more fiber, whole grains, and nuts are helpful for better sleep overall. Low-fiber diets and diets high in saturated fat, on the other hand, are associated with lighter, less restorative sleep with more frequent arousals.<\/p>\n

And while a poor diet can cause poor sleep, too-little sleep can make it more challenging to maintain diet, according to research by\u00a0Erica Jansen, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you bring people into the lab and deprive them of sleep, whether that\u2019s a whole night of sleep deprivation or you limit their sleep to four or five hours, they eat differently the next day,\u201d she says. \u201cThey eat more calories. They have higher cravings for energy dense foods. They choose to eat more refined carbs, more fats.\u201c<\/p>\n

The mechanisms behind this aren\u2019t clear, but Jansen says that hormones, such as leptin and ghrelin, which are known to influence appetite, are altered by poor sleep.<\/p>\n

If an unhealthy diet leads to poor sleep, does it have anything to do with nightmares? Maybe.<\/p>\n

Jansen speculates that waking up more frequently, a pattern associated with foods like cheese that are high in saturated fat, can disrupt the balance between REM (rapid eye movement) and non-REM sleep. Most dreaming is done during REM sleep, and you\u2019re more likely to remember a dream if you wake up in the middle of it, says Jansen: \u201cI think that one possible mechanism could be that people are waking up more, so therefore they\u2019re remembering their dreams more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why cheese took the blame<\/h4>\n

If bad dreams are caused by a generally poor diet, and the nightmarish effect of cheese is limited mostly to the lactose intolerant, how did cheese get such a bad reputation?<\/p>\n

Lucy Long, academic\u00a0folklorist, director of the non-profit educational group Center for Food and Culture, and author of\u00a0The Food and Folklore Reader<\/em>, speculates that the association between cheese with nightmares is a relatively niche and recent belief. The idea that cheese is responsible for bad sleep is not common in many cultures, and on the contrary, warm milk is often thought to ensure peaceful sleep, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen people say, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s folklore,\u2019 sometimes it\u2019s actually something that was created in popular culture or by marketing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that the idea that cheese causes nightmares simply owes its popularity to Winsor McCay and his Rarebit Fiend.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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