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A new study of 1,082 people links eating dairy before going to bed to having disrupted sleep and frequent, vivid nightmares. The scientists who conducted the study believe it has something to do with gastrointestinal distress caused by the consumption of dairy products including cheese.
This new research, published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, found that people who reported having frequent nightmares and disrupted sleep were more likely to also report having food allergies such as lactose intolerance.
“In the earlier study [research conducted in 2015], people were blaming cheese all the time for their bad dreams,” NBC News reports study co-author Dr. Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, said. “And so I think we got some better answers in the study for that.”
The study found that “40.2% of participants reported that certain foods either worsened (24.7%) or improved (20.1%) their sleep.” They also found that women reported more food intolerance, nightmares, and dream recall than men did.
“The effect was also associated with food allergies and gluten intolerance, while worse sleep perceptions were tied to lactose intolerance,” the authors wrote. “Nightmare Disorder Index scores were strongly associated with food allergy and lactose intolerance, the latter being mediated by the severity of gastrointestinal symptoms. Healthy eating, such as less evening eating, predicted higher dream recall, while unhealthy eating — including gastric symptoms, lower reliance on hunger and satiety cues, and evening eating — predicted nightmares and dream negativity.”
In conclusion, the authors found “that a healthy eating style is associated with more vivid dreaming and higher dream recall while an unhealthy eating style is associated with more disturbing dreams or lower recall.”
“These new findings imply that changing eating habits for people with some food sensitivities could alleviate nightmares,” Dr. Nielsen told Science Daily. “They could also explain why people so often blame dairy for bad dreams!”
In related news, another recent study claims frequent nightmares are a strong indicator of an increased risk of early death and accelerated biological aging. It found that having night terrors on a weekly basis is a stronger predictor of premature death and faster aging than even notable risk factors such as smoking, obesity, poor diet, and a lack of exercise.