How your Food choices Affect Your Sleep
Trouble sleeping? Sleep has become widely recognised as playing a really important role in our overall health and wellness – alongside diet, stress management and exercise. Poor sleep has been linked to a host of health problems, including obesity, diabetes, high-blood pressure, depression, and more. It’s generally recommended to get between 7 and 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, though many people struggle to get enough and have trouble sleeping.
Eating—and drinking—for better sleep means more than just avoiding caffeine and heavy, heartburn-inducing foods at night. There are four main vitamins and minerals that can be found in food that aid in promoting sleep: tryptophan, magnesium, calcium, and B6. If your diet is lacking these nutrients, it’s very likely your sleep hormone production will be poorer.
Here are some of the best choices to help you settle down for a quality rest. Find out which 9 foods and drinks are midnight snack-approved.
1. Almonds
Just a handful of these and you’ll be dozing off in no time. Almonds are rich in magnesium, a powerful mineral that is instrumental in sleep and is a natural relaxant that helps deactivate adrenaline. Magnesium is often referred to as the sleep mineral.
Almonds are also rich in typtophan. This is an amino acid that when ingested gets turned into the neurotransmitter serotonin and then converted into the sleep hormone melatonin. This hormone controls our sleep patterns.
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