Can the wrong food give you nightmares? - blogPEI | Prince Edward Island - Breaking News.
During Halloween last year, Burger King announced that they had created a “Nightmare King Burger” which promised to give its eaters bad dreams. To add to their claim, the fast food brand released the results of a study that observed 100 people who ate this ghoulish burger every night for 10 nights straight before going to bed. According to Burger King, eating their Nightmare Burger increased the rate of nightmares by 3.5 times.
The burger, by the way, included a one-quarter pound of beef, a crispy chicken fillet, melted American cheese, thick-cut bacon, mayonnaise, and onions on a green sesame-seed bun.
Excellent marketing tactics aside, doctors began to wonder whether there was some truth to the study.
Could eating certain kinds of food lead to nightmares?
There are a few peer-reviewed studies that show that food may affect the quality of dreams. A 2015 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that 17.8 percent of around 400 undergraduate students reported that their dreams were affected by the time they ate (e.g. eating a heavy meal late at night) or by the kind of food they ate.
More interestingly, the most commonly blamed food was dairy. Eating, or drinking, a lot of dairy just before bed seemed to induce “bizarre” or “disturbing” dreams.
Adding on to this, the British Cheese Board conducted their own study and found that eating different cheeses gave people different types of dreams – not necessarily nightmares. Eating cheddar cheese, for example, made more people dream of their favorite celebrities. Participants of this study who ate Cheshire cheese (a type of hard cheese) had nice, restful sleep but had no dreams. Authors of the study hypothesized that the different effects could be linked to the amount of tryptophan found in different cheeses. The more of this amino acid the cheese had, the more vivid the dreams.
It’s all very interesting, but sleep experts are unconvinced, saying that it’s more likely that people who have nightmares after eating cheese or drinking any dairy product may just be suffering from lactose intolerance.
Eating certain foods may cause a food intolerance which may impact the quality of your sleep. Your dreams are also affected by what you experience in the waking world and can be influenced by what you believe. If you believe that eating a certain food will cause bad dreams, most likely you’ll have nightmares.