High Carb Feasts and Sleep - a Failed Attempt

Last week in High Carb Feasts Could Help You Sleep I put forward the hypothesis, based on my gluttony episodes over the festive season, that going to bed with a belly full of carb-laden, tryptophan-rich food could represent one big timed-release sleep aid. For reasons I will give in a moment, I had an opportunity on Wednesday night to test the hypothesis further.

On Thursday I was due for my latest scheduled blood test to assess the status of various counts in the context of a supposed condition, aplastic anemia. I had been eating wheat-based products daily for just over two weeks leading up to the test, to see whether this would make any difference to the results - I explain more about this in Doctors and Nutrition Part 2 - My Wheat Experiment. I am pulling together the results from the last few years into a chart to provide context and will post about the results in a day or two.

Elephant's Ear

Since Wednesday night was the last night before the test, I decided to have a good dose of wheat just to be sure. Conveniently, I was eating at an Indian restaurant that night and this afforded me the opportunity to combine business with pleasure by ordering a garlic naan the size of an elephant's ear instead of my normal salad. The more astute amongst you will recognise the signs of classic dietary rationalisation. My resolve has not yet returned to its normal iron-like state after the festive indulgences so I allowed my weaker self to be convinced that this was necessary despite having previously determined that a lower daily dose of wheat was appropriate.

Regardless of the necessity of guzzling this pizza-sized, reeking slab of dough, it provided me with most of the necessary ingredients to replicate my supposed sleep-inducing meals - a large amount of tryptophan-rich poultry (I also had a half roasted chicken) and a large amount of carbohydrate.

Chocolate

Another tryptophan-rich food I had consumed as part of my Christmas feasts was chocolate. I certainly had no intention of re-visiting the kind of sugary nasties I had been eating a few weeks prior, but as luck would have it we had in the house a block of unsweetened chocolate Mrs M had bought on a whim for cooking. This I consumed voraciously, with Mrs M just managing to muscle in to acquire a small piece for herself. It's actually rather nice - or at least I found it nice as someone whose taste buds are not daily dulled by sugar-laden junk.

Worst Night's Sleep in Months

Did I sleep well? No. In fact, ironically, I had one of the worst night's sleep in months. As usual, a few hours of solid sleep gave way to the familiar broken, restless slumber. There is a small amount of caffeine in chocolate, but the fact that the problems were later in the night suggests this was not the issue. A counter argument would be the timed-release idea that forms part of the hypothesis, but as I say, the amounts in chocolate are small.

I don't intend to turn this into a Seth Roberts style self-experimentation series, not least because I am simply not willing to subject myself to these foods regularly. The Wheat Experiment was probably a one-off and after that and the festive season, I feel like a several-month run of strict Paleo is called for.

Dairy

However, the one difference that stands out between the recent test and the feasts over Christmas is dairy. Milk is a tryptophan-rich food, and over the festive season my feasts invariably culminated in some kind of dessert with lashings of cream, custard or both. My recent naan, chicken and chocolate event, did not. Perhaps at some point in the future I will take the opportunity to continue this entirely unscientific research...

See Also:
High Carb Feasts Could Help You Sleep
Doctors and Nutrition Part 2 - My Wheat Experiment... Read more

High-Carb Feasts Could Help You Sleep

Over Christmas I slept better than I have for months - in several cases sleeping for a full 8 hours. This was followed by at least 30 minutes of blissful dosing, the like of which I have not experienced since I was a bone-idle student with nothing to worry about except which bar I was supposed to attending that night.

I also had more episodes of carb-laden gluttony than for several years. If you are interested in the gory details, I posted about the first one a couple of weeks ago (Paleo Apple Crumble and Gluttony) and alluded to the additional lapses last week (When does Intermittent Fasting become an Eating Disorder.)

Of course it's very hard to separate out the potential factors - unless I had sought out and somehow monitored a parallel universe. Assuming you believe in the theory that there are an infinite number of parallel universes in which all possible scenarios are being played out, there is presumably another one in which parallel Methuselah remained strictly Paleo over the holiday and is not currently lugging round an extra 2% body fat like a flack jacket.

Stress

Another potential factor is stress: the festive season saw me take one of the longest complete breaks from what is normally a very busy work life. I typically have a lot of work-related challenges in my head and my brain has the disappointing habit of firing itself up one or two hours before I would like.

One other factor to mention is alcohol. I was drinking a glass or two of wine with these large meals, but not continuing to drink afterwards. This is something I periodically do with normal Paleo meals, some of which were pretty large last year, but the absence of any special sleep experiences at those times probably rules out that angle.

Toxins

In spite of the potentially confounding factors, I was sufficiently sure that diet had played a role to do some Googling. One of the reasons for my conviction was that the nights where my sleep had been best were those directly following the 4 or 5 large meals - in spite of going to bed with a painfully full stomach, something you would expect to make sleeping harder. The rest of the time I was either fasting of sticking to largely hunter gatherer fayre.

My theory was that the toxins from the food were somehow slowing down my system and making me sluggish. In the morning when my brain kicked the throttle, there was a sputtering sound followed by silence. As I slept on, old Brainy would periodically have another go, only finally achieving success when the normal waking mechanisms on which I so rarely normally call, had overcome the sluggishness.

Tryptophan and Serotonin

Not surprisingly, I found little or no support for such a vague hypothesis - but I did find this article on msnbc.com talking about the use of tryptophan as a sleep aid. Apparently a 2005 study found that tryptophan-containing foods taken before bed with carbohydrates had 'improvements on all measures of sleep'. Tryptophan, it turns out, is used by the body to make serotonin, a neurotransmitter released by the body to make us feel sleepy.

I was unable to track down the study but was happy to take it at face value for the purposes of my investigation. Has anyone else seen it around? Use the comments to let us know if so!

A visit to Wikipedia told me that foods particularly rich in tryptophan are chocolate, oats, bananas, durians, mangoes, dried dates, milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, red meat, eggs, fish, poultry, sesame, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, spirulina, and peanuts.

I have highlighted some foods because it immediately struck me that my large meals had very much centred around them. Festive meals usually feature a meat, poultry or fish dish and in our case it was no different; and my Paleo instincts naturally drove me to eat plenty of whichever animal was on offer. Of course I then ignored those instincts at the dessert course, where I consumed copious quantities of things like cheesecake, washed down with custard or cream. As we know, many desserts are egg-based and custard and cream could be considered synonymous with milk for the purposes of this discussion.

Timed Release Sleep Aid

So - my meals were comprised mainly of tryptophan-rich foods and were also high in carbohydrates, such as sugar and flour. If we believe the article then this was the perfect recipe for sleep. Add to that the sheer size of the meals and you have one big timed-release sleep aid - my morning slumbering could in fact have been a result of the continued digestion of the meal.

However, even if I did have access to parallel universes (or a medical trials unit!) for the purposes of researching this issue, I am not sure it would be of much help to know that my hypothesis is right. Much as I enjoy sleeping well and get frustrated by my sleep-hindered gym progress, I cannot see a way to easily adapt my festive behaviour to work in a day-to-day context. I already eat a lot of meat in the evening along with a fair amount of vegetables which are, or course, carbohydrate. So the missing components would seem so be the very ones my hunter gatherer principles would not allow me to regularly consume.

In any case, right now I am still reluctantly eating a slice of bread and tablespoon of wheat germ powder each day as part of my Wheat Experiment, so perhaps I am less receptive than normal to experimentation that would disrupt my preferred diet. Perhaps it is something to think about again in a few months...

See Also:
Paleo Apple Crumble and the Chestnut Tojan Horse - Bending the Rules to Breaking Point
When does Intermittent Fasting become an Eating Disorder?
Doctors and Nutrition Part 2: My Wheat Experiment... Read more