Junk food diet may disrupt sleep by altering brain activity

Consuming a food plan that’s excessive in fats and sugar could cut back sleep high quality by messing with the mind’s electrical exercise throughout deep sleep.

After we fall asleep, our mind’s electrical exercise slows down. The upper-frequency brainwaves that dominate whereas we’re awake, known as beta waves, are step by step changed by lower-frequency ones known as delta waves.

The deepest, most restorative stage of sleep – known as slow-wave sleep – has the very best proportion of delta waves. It sometimes happens within the first half of the night time and permits the physique to restore itself and consolidate recollections.

Jonathan Cedernaes at Uppsala College in Sweden and his colleagues examined the results of a Western-style high-fat, high-sugar food plan on slow-wave sleep in 15 males with a mean age of 23.

The lads have been randomly assigned to eat a high-fat, high-sugar food plan or a low-fat, low-sugar food plan for one week. They then slept for one night time in a laboratory sporting an electroencephalography (EEG) cap to document their mind’s electrical exercise. After a break of a number of weeks, they switched to the opposite food plan and repeated the laboratory sleep examine.

The individuals have been supplied with all their meals and needed to eat them at set instances. The high-fat, high-sugar food plan included meals like sweetened granola, pizza and chocolate, whereas the …

low-fat, low-sugar food plan contained meals like unsweetened muesli, salmon and greens. The 2 diets have been matched for energy.

Every man sometimes slept for a similar size of time on the 2 diets and felt their sleep high quality was the identical.

Nonetheless, the EEG recordings confirmed that the high-fat, high-sugar food plan disrupted slow-wave sleep by lowering the proportion of delta waves and rising beta waves, suggesting it was much less restful. This occurred in 11 out of the 14 males for whom full outcomes have been collected.

The impact could also be as a result of sugar and fats activate mind pathways that enhance how awake individuals really feel, however extra work is required to unravel the mechanisms, says Cedernaes. He additionally hopes to repeat the examine to search out out if the change additionally happens in ladies.

We don’t know the long-term impression of disrupting slow-wave sleep on this method, however we do know that poor diets sometimes result in worse well being, which can partly be defined by their impact on sleep high quality, he says.

The quantity of slow-wave sleep that we get naturally declines with age, so consuming a nutritious diet could also be significantly necessary in older age to guard in opposition to additional losses in sleep high quality, says Cedernaes.