Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bogabam Here. If you've ever had a meat lover's stuffed pressed pizza before bed and then spent your dreams being chased around by a saber toothed, willed beast wearing a top hat, you might have blamed
this bizarre and unsettling experience on your evening snack. This tendency is so prevalent, yet any hard data is so lacking that a study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology endeavored to crack this supposed a relationship between diet and dreams. For the article that this episode is based on how stuff works. That spoke by email with study co author Dr Torrey Nielsen, psychiatry professor and director of the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the Center for Advanced
Research in Sleep Medicine at the University of Montreal. He said, there's extremely little information available and all so some important misinformation that keeps getting recycled. This research was motivated in large part by the media itself. Questions about food and dreams are among the most frequent questions we are asked.
These questions come up particularly around food center holidays, which in our culture most holidays are the most commonly blamed nightmare inducing culprits are cheese, spicy foods, and eating too much right before bedtime? But is there any truth to this folklore? Nielsen and his team surveyed nearly four hundred participants on a range of topics such as sleep and diet quality, and asked them to report whether they thought
food affected their dreams or not. Almost eighteen percent of the participants indicated that they thought eating certain foods or eating right before bed made a difference in the development of disturbing dreams, with dairy products like milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, as well as pizza being the most commonly listed by thirty of participants. Also blamed for disturbing dreams, but to a lesser extent than dairy, were foods of
the spicy, starchy, or meat based varieties. Overall, sweets and chocolates were the second most frequently mentioned category for dream inducing foods after dairy, but they were considered most likely to foster bizarre dreams not necessarily unpleasant but still strange, like being able to fly, as opposed to more disturbing dreams. Like being chased by a werewolf. The second part of
the study delved deeper into the subjects themselves. Nielsen explained, when we broke down our sample into subjects who reported disturbing dreams and those who reported vivid but not disturbing dreams,
we found that there were two very different profiles. Disturbed dreamers at higher pathological indicators like poorer sleep, binge eating, or emotional eating, whereas the vivid dreamers had high your wellness indicators like better sleep, healthier diet, and longer times between eating, what we consider a proxy measure of fasting. The fasting note struck a chord with the scientists because various cultures have long documented the effect of the practice
on dreams. Nielsen said the finding for fasting in particular was of interest because of very old literature documenting how different peoples have used fasting to induce the recall of spiritual and life guiding dreams called vivid dreams. In our study, although it might be a stretch to recommend fasting if you're looking for some type of nocturnal intervention, it's certainly preferable to dream vividly in place of a nightmare starring
a deranged as murderer. There are any number of theories on why certain foods affect our dreams, and certainly people with certain health considerations like gastrosophageal reflux disease, have different sensitivities than others. How stuff works also spoke by email with Amy corn Reavis of Emery Sleep Solutions in Orlando, Florida. She explained foods that affect gastrosophical reflex disease tend to
be either spicy or fatty foods. The closer you eat them to bedtime, the more likely they are to affect you. This is because they are heavier and produce more acids to digest. This causes people with weak muscles at the top of their stomach to have acid move into their esophagus. This effort may impact the time and length of valuable R e M sleep, thereby affecting the type and duration
of dreams. She added that spikes or drops in blood glucose levels, especially from desserts and other foods high and simple sugars, may also affect R e M sleep, but that there isn't solid research yet to back all of this up. It seems that indeed the study of these phenomena is just beginning. Nielsen said, we need to start experimental studies that systematically vary what people eat and when, and whether this induces any regular change in their dream content.
Today's episode is based on the article Pizza Nightmares. Can your diet Determine Your Dreams? On how stuff works dot Com? Written by Leo Hoyt. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com and is produced by Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows