The 5 WORST Foods for Sleep
The following 5 foods cause significant sleep disturbance and lead to poor sleep quality, as a result. If you're currently suffering from restless nights, insomnia, or poor quality sleep, please consider removing these five foods from your diet, removing electronic devices from your bedroom, and avoiding all other activities in your bedroom outside of sleep and sex.
The more you "purpose" your room for sleep, the greater your body becomes trained for sleep. You'll want to consider avoiding late night exercise, stimulating conversations before bedtime, and writing down anything on your mind (i.e. making a list you can revisit in the morning) before bedtime, as good sleep hygiene.
Outside of the foods you eat, the most common culprits are electronics, too much light entering the room, poor air quality, excessive thoughts that circle in the mind (hence, writing them down), anchors such as work, reading, or arguments that take place in the bedroom, and caffeine consumption later in the day.
We sincerely hope that you find this report useful. And please don't forget to read until the end for our #1 most important sleep tip to increase your quality of sleep and help you fall back asleep more easily when you wake up.
Sleep Sabotaging Food #1:
Inflammation takes priority over the normal healing process that your body undergoes while sleeping. In other words, if your body is inflamed, it's trying to reduce inflammation all night long, rather than imbibing (filling) with fluid to heal joints, your digestive tract, your brain, and your heart.
A busy body while you sleep is a restless body, so even if you're able to fall asleep, you're likely to experience low quality sleep throughout the night.
Sleep Sabotaging Food #2:
Not only does chocolate contain caffeine, but milk chocolate is loaded with processed sugar. Processed sugar is bad for your brain, affects your hormones, and leads towards sleep deprivation. Essentially, an ounce of milk chocolate now is a pound of poor sleep later.
Sleep Sabotaging Food #3:
Fried foods are heavy on the body, difficult to digest, and disturb the quality of sleep. This can be deceiving, because it's easy to fall asleep after eating fatty, fried foods. The only thing is, you're not really resting... so it's a bit of an illusion.
Sleep Sabotaging Food #4:
While many people find fried chicken to be a delicious treat, it's both inflammatory and heavy to digest. The inflammation from the bread crumbs (gluten) + the fried-factor make your body inflamed, your digestive tract swollen, and your body unable to truly rest.
Sleep Sabotaging Food #5:
Tofu's effect on sleep depends on when it is eaten, as it contains both sleep-promoting and potentially sleep-disrupting compounds. Eating tofu earlier in the day can be beneficial because it is a good source of tryptophan, an amino acid that helps produce the sleep hormone melatonin. However, fermented soy products like aged or heavily processed tofu should be avoided close to bedtime to avoid excessive brain activity and delayed sleep.
Why to avoid tofu before bed
- Tyramine content: Fermented and aged soy products like some types of tofu, miso, and soy sauce can contain high levels of tyramine, an amino acid that stimulates the release of norepinephrine, a compound that increases brain activity and can interfere with sleep.
- Protein timing: While tofu is a good protein source, consuming high-protein meals too close to bedtime can sometimes block the brain's ability to produce serotonin and can lead to difficulty sleeping.
As you can see, meal timing affects sleep. This can be especially important when it comes to eating magnesium-rich foods, such as leafy greens, legumes, nuts, seeds, and whole grains. Magnesium is probably the #1 most important mineral when it comes to sleep. It also helps with bone health, digestion, exercise tolerance, and heart health. Plus, one specific form of magnesium is known to cross the blood-brain-barrier, and it's called 'Magnesium Threonate', which supports better brain health.
The main challenge is that over 70% of Americans eat a Magnesium-deficient diet... which is why many doctors are now recommending you take a magnesium supplement.
And just as meal timing affects whether tofu makes you sleep better or worse, so does the timing with supplements like magnesium. Magnesium competes with calcium, so you never want to take magnesium while eating food (as many foods contain calcium). Instead, take Magnesium first thing in the morning or last thing at night to avoid this mineral competition.
To give you a bit more information surrounding which minerals you may want to supplement, perhaps the two most important minerals to consider are:
- Zinc -- helps boost immune function, reduce swelling, improve skin health, improve age-related vision deficits...
- Magnesium -- improves sleep, brain health, mood, heart health, blood sugar regulation, bone health, digestion, nerve and muscle function, and exercise performance...
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