Why does cheese give nightmares

Eating heavy meals with a high fat content late at night can give you indigestion, which in turn disturbs your sleep. Disturbed sleep often involves more nightmares, or at least the memory of more nightmares, because you wake more often and remember them. In some countries the last course eaten in a big meal is cheese, which might suggest that cheese leads to nightmares, but it could of course be the quantity of food, rather than cheese in particular which led to indigestion.

But there is another substance contained in cheese which might be pertinent here — tryptophan. It is an amino acid found in various foods, including milk, chicken, turkey and peanuts. The body uses it to produce serotonin, a chemical messenger associated with stable mood and sound sleep. Sometimes it has been suggested that this is why people who celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving with roast turkey often feel sleepy after lunch — that and the alcohol, of course.

Studies on tryptophan as a sleeping pill have shown mixed results , but for some people it is effective. And its slightly younger brother, does cheese give you strange dreams? Anyway, enough about me, back to the point. In , The British Cheese Board put the question to the test. They gave a load of lucky people 85 grams of cheese to eat before bedtime.

The result? Rumour has it, the amino acid in milk, and therefore in cheese was working to stabilise sleep patterns and reduce stress levels. Want funky dreams? The study claims that different cheeses can give people different types of dreams. Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Gingerbread Cookies. Getty Images. This content is imported from Twitter.

And that, of course, can mess with your sleep, which can have an effect on dreams. Another possibility? Spicy foods can induce heartburn, leading to fragmented sleep, she says. And foods higher in fat also take longer to digest, which can alter sleep, too, since your digestive system will be hard at work to shuttle those foods through your system Here are the seven worst things you do when you just can't sleep. Also, you may remember dreams more often because your pre-sleep meal is waking you up in the middle of your REM cycle—in the middle of your dream state.

And if you notice a pattern? United States. Type keyword s to search.