This is why you shouldn’t eat pizza for dinner

Frozen pizza and chocolate for dinner? No wonder you slept badly. A new study from Uppsala University shows that junk food impairs deep sleep.

A sleep experiment at Uppsala University showed that participants who were given relatively junk food, for example pizza and frozen chocolate, at dinner got less deep deep sleep than those who ate more healthy food, in this case spit out salmon.

15 young men who did not suffer from sleep problems participated in it the study in Uppsala. They were divided into two groups where, for a week, each group ate exactly the food the researchers had given instructions for.

Participants were also given instructions about how much they were allowed to eat. The idea was for everyone to eat their fill.

I ate fatter

One group ate, every day for a week, relatively low-fat yogurt and muesli for breakfast, spaghetti with green peas for lunch, and baked salmon for dinner.

During the same period, the other group received fatter yogurt and sweeter muesli for breakfast, pasta with prepared meatballs and ketchup for lunch, and frozen pizza and a piece of sweet chocolate for dinner.

The ambition was to measure the effect of food on sleep. For this purpose, participants had to wear activity meters and write down information about their sleep.
In addition, the participants had to spend two days in a sleep lab where they slept with electrodes on their heads so that the researchers could measure their brain activity using an EEG.

More superficial sleep with pizza

Results?

Participants slept the same amount of time throughout the period, regardless of what they ate. They also spent the same amount of time in different stages of sleep. But deep sleep separated them. Deep sleep became shallower in those who ate more unhealthy food.

These types of changes in deep sleep can also be seen in people after a certain age who have sleep difficulties of the insomnia type, according to Jonathan Cedernes, PhD and Lecturer in Medical Cell Biology at Uppsala University.

“In such circumstances, in theory, from a sleep perspective, it might be more important to be careful with diet,” he says.

We eat wrong

The associate professor says it’s because we’re eating wrong.
“What you can tell from this aspect is that our brains aren’t really made for the high-fat, high-sugar foods that we have today,” he says.

He adds that the idea behind the study is that it will reflect the food many of us choose anyway.

“The idea was that a useless diet could be one that many people in a community could eat every day. In a way, it reminded us of the poor man’s diet of several students, for example. Unfortunately, the most wholesome food is often more expensive.” .

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[Dagens PS]