> It may be particularly helpful to eat ... low in red and processed meat and whole-fat dairy.
Then in the next paragraph states,
> It’s partly because protein-rich foods such as nuts and seeds, fish, poultry and eggs contain tryptophan, an amino acid from which the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin is produced.
Dairy and meat are very protein-rich and high in tryptophan, so based on what the author says, should be consumed for better sleep. The author says nothing about why we should avoid red meat and whole-fat dairy.
Modern nutrition research is often imprecise and contradicts itself. An example:
> Research conducted at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health has found that eating even small amounts of red meat—especially processed red meat—on a regular basis is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke, and the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease or any other cause.
Processed meats are defined as:
> Processed meat refers to any meat that has been “transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation.”
So they don't seems to make a distinction between a regular cut of beef and ground beef. I would think this distinction is important, because I believe ground meat often comes in a "whole unhealthy package" (burger, pizza, often it goes with cheese and sauces). But based on that article, there is no way to prove or deny that. Even with all of that they said, it's possible that a subset of what they consider "red meat" could be good for you, and another subset really terrible. The fat percentage and types may have an influence. The animal may have an influence. How the animal was fed may have an influence.
I have a hard time believing that 100g of local, grass fed beef steak is exactly the same as 100g of kebab meat from a low-quality kebab shop. But this article doesn't make a distinction between the two. There is also this statement:
> Plant-based protein sources are more unsaturated, which lowers LDL cholesterol—an established risk factor for heart disease. Also, plant sources contain no cholesterol. Other factors are likely to contribute to the lower risk, but this is a key factor.
> The biggest influence on blood cholesterol level is the mix of fats and carbohydrates in your diet—not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food.
> The discovery half a century ago that high blood cholesterol levels were strongly associated with an increased risk for heart disease triggered numerous warnings to avoid foods that contain cholesterol, especially eggs and liver. However, scientific studies show a weak relationship between the amount of cholesterol a person consumes and his or her blood cholesterol levels
> In studies of more than 80,000 female nurses, Harvard researchers found that consuming about an egg a day was not associated with higher risk of heart disease.
> The body uses cholesterol as the starting point to make estrogen, testosterone, vitamin D, and other vital compounds.
There's a problem here. One article is claiming that you should eat plants because they don't have cholesterol, and cholesterol is an established risk factor for heart disease. The other article says that this makes low to no difference, especially if you don't have heart disease already.
The Mediterranean diet study [0] is correlation analysis, not causation. As in, the purported vicious cycle may not exist, but both may be symptoms of something else.
I skimmed the 4h/night study too. [1]
Not sure whether it holds up. People eat a little more if they sleep half as much. Maybe people generally bad at avoiding hunger cravings, and more time awake means more giving into cravings?
"People consistently eat while awake" wouldn't be a good paper, I guess.
(I have to ask whether the purported 20g more fat is a typical amount for a meal, 8g more saturated fat. That's butter, lard, cheese, cured meats.)
EDIT: I looked at the Fiber intake paper too [2]. The dataset from the origin study excludes so many people (such as poor sleep quality people?) I wonder who is left:
> Some exclusion criteria included shift work or any work that required frequent travel across time zones, metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension, smoking, and eating disorders, sleeping disorders, or neurological disorders. Further exclusion criteria included the use of medication, including benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and other medications for insomnia. The presence of sleep disorders, excessive daytime sleepiness, and poor sleep quality were also exclusionary, and were assessed with the Sleep Disorders Inventory Questionnaire, Epworth Sleepiness Scale, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, respectively.
Not to say this is p-hacking, but excluding people who report poor quality sleep seems very odd for someone recommending diets to improve sleep.
The author also says stuff in there like "Clinical studies have shown that sleep restriction leads to increased energy intake, energy intake from snacks, and intake of energy-dense foods." yet their citations are both correlation analysis.
Yes, the causation is poorly disentangled. He says:
"In our research, those who followed [a healthy, Mediterranean style diet] were 1.4 times more likely to have good night’s sleep and 35 percent less likely to have insomnia."
One naturally thinks "people who have healthy diets probably also make other healthy lifestyle choices, which may be the cause of the better sleep".
I feel like this effect is multiplied because, when I’m tired, I am much more likely to want fast food because it takes less effort, not just because it’s greasy and salty.
Have you tried doing keto or intermittent fasting?
My energy levels are much more constant and I generally feel better and more productive. For instance, I don't get the after lunch drowsiness that forced me to have more coffee in the afternoon.
The downside is that these approaches are either more expensive (processed carbs are by far the cheapest option in any supermarket), more time consuming, or harder to get into (keto flu can be a massive pain in the butt).
However, they are sustainable and that's why I didn't use the word "diet" that for me is something limited in time. In fact, I have been doing some form of fasting since shortly after covid started because being stuck at home I noticed I was snacking way too much out of boredom.
I've been mostly keto for roughly the last nine years. It has been pretty much the best decision I ever made for my health.
The hardest part about it continues to be the fact that it's largely misrepresented in the mainstream as a fad diet. And unfortunately when you go to research keto on the Internet, there is a staggering amount of bullshit to wade though. I feel like neither is a coincidence but I'll just leave it at that rather than get too political.
Funny you should mention it. I am back on this band-wagon but in the context of a crash diet (Michael Mosley - Fast 800). The precise parameters are low-carb/keto, a narrow eating window of about 6 hours, and exercise in the gentle cardio range (though I have trouble keeping to this with some sports and go a little harder than recommended). Do this for 8 weeks.
This has worked well for me in the past: I lost 10kg about 2 years ago and largely kept it off, but I failed to persist to my ideal weight. Now is the time!
With respect to adaptation, a few days of "must resist" mentality against the temptations of sugar, snacks, and unnecessarily big meals, and I'm already comfortable. Other people can eat unhealthy fats & sugars around me and I'm not tempted.
I think the long-term recommendation is to keep with the diet but increase calories once the desired weight has been lost. I'm not sure. I'll re-read the book once I'm happy with my body composition. (It's a really light paperback.)
One question I have yet to answer is: what do I substitute for untoasted muesli? I still eat less than a cup with a lot of berries & a few nuts for "breakfast" (12-2 PM, hunger depending).
Not sure about muesli. In Switzerland we have this option: https://www.ketoshop.ch/collections/konfi-mueesli-aufstriche... but as you can see they are crazy expensive. I tried them once and they definitely taste good, but it is just too much money for me. For my breakfast I go now with natural skyr jogurt with a bit of sweetener blended with a large coffee. And as I mentioned I mostly do intermittent fasting, so I am not super strict about the keto part of the equation.
Idk, I tried keto and lived through keto-flu, but it just doesn't give me enough energy. My head hurts after few hours of work and only a cup of sugared tea helps it (I tried zero carb for a couple+ of months). It's either a personal thing, or keto is for those who lift weights, not abstraction levels.
I've done keto a couple of times, with massive weight loss each time. The last time was 30kg in 6 months.
The first time, I tried close to 0g carb as a goal. The second time, I was a bit more relaxed about it, had some yogurt (still very slow carbs, but some), peanuts (again, low but still some), olives, more veg than before. I was still comfortably under 50g-100g per day though, and lost more.
But in each case, I never really had "keto flu" which everybody seems to complain about. I did get strongish hints from my body that I needed some carbs, which is normal at first as your body is used to having a ready supply of carbs, but this phase only lasts about a week. Rather than going cold turkey, I'd just have a SMALL amount of carbs, e.g. half a small chocolate bar, or whatever. Enough for my body to get the immediate "give me carbs now" that it neeeded, but not enough that I got a big insulin spike and disrupted the transition into keto.
After about a week or so, the body doesn't really need carbs any more at all, although every now and then I'd set a sudden craving for something sweet. I found it worked best just to give in and have a small amount rather than going fully cold turkey on carbs. Probably it wasn't even carbs my body needed, but rather something else that my body associated with carby foods. For instance, I had to consciously increase my salt intake when eating primarily just meat, as I realised I wasn't getting enough, but it's so ubiquitous in processed carby foods that you don't realise how important it is.
Keto flu for me is really hard to cope with. Even a walk on flat terrain feels too much and I feel miserable for the few days it lasts (usually 4/5). But still I lack explosive energy even when I am fully keto adapted which is a problem because I really like Bouldering. That's why I stay more on the intermittent fasting and less strict about keto.
Finally, you are correct that increasing salt helps, but just barely for me.
I work in tech and have been on keto for the last 5 months. Mental energy and clarity are definitely up for me, and I lost 30 lbs.
I struggled a bit about a month ago to keep up. My wife and I started using the diet doctor app (not affiliated) to cook more
satisfying and diverse keto dinners than before, and we’ve been going pretty strong with it. Drawback is that we spend more money on food and more time on cooking (but we do it together to make it fun).
lack of sleep cause tiredness, tiredness causes you to reach for a cup of coffee, this makes you wired, being tired and wired almost causes me a sort of depressed excitation, where as if i drink coffee when i'm well rested i have an optimistic excitation. Optimistic excitation causes me to focus on the mental world to derive pleasure and pass time, like studying, depressed excitation causes me to want to get material pleasure like eating sugar, or fast food or drinking alcohol to pass time. I ultimately understand that coffee works best in conjunction with good rest, if you caffeinate to power through sleep depravation, you will notice that your ROI is severely diminished and worst of all you will most likely disrupt your sleep the next day. We in the modern world hate listening to our bodies, we try to do all sorts of things to get more out of our day, in the long term this might be the wrong way of looking at things.
I have found that cutting all carbohydrates out of my diet (with the exception of Lactose, in milk) has caused my appetite to decrease when I have gotten tired late at night, which is the opposite of what I had experienced before.
absolutely, I eat worse when I sleep less and the effect is doubled in winter. I really lay on the calorie rich "soul food" in winter as much as I try really hard not to.
This is anecdotal but I find a couple things get me off of soul food kicks.
One, exercise seems to keep me on the straight and narrow. I almost never drink, but when I did, running reduced it a ton. Today I find it increases my appetite for all varieties of foods. I still want the biscuits and gravy, but a carrot is super appealing to. As a result I’ll end up filling dietary space with a wider variety of food.
I also find my eyes become more aligned with my stomach. As in my desire for a lot of food reduces and I’ll start eating more sensible amounts.
Otherwise really prioritizing sleep makes a huge difference. In winter I tend to get bored because so little is going on, or so it seems. I can fall into habits of staying up too late trying to find something engaging to do. Of course, I rarely do. The hours fly by and suddenly I’m primed to get a terrible sleep.
I try to make sure I go to bed earlier than I would in summer, then wake up early and experience first light and stuff. Like walk to work as the sun rises, walk to get a coffee outside if I’m already at work. Get fresh air and light nice and early.
Anyway, just sharing in case you hadn’t tried these things and you’re curious about other experiences. I really struggle with eating way too much in winter.
yeah exercise drops off for me in winter. this next winter i'm going to do something about that... I gained almost all that I'd lost in the last winter :-/
Ha, yeah… I’ve had my share of winters like that. I had a big string of them.
Winter seems to be mostly a mental battle of getting past lethargy. Once you break through, the exercise is so easy. It’s like any other time. Your body switches on, your brain accepts what’s going on, you stop wanting to take it easy. Cold rain and air stops feeling so awful. Your body warms up, movement becomes less difficult. And you can really build momentum with that energy too.
I think the key is taking small steps. When I finally succeeded in breaking the cycle it was because I finally set aside my ego and ran a 2km run and left it at that. Then a 3km run. And so on. It was so manageable, wore me down so little that I could run a couple day later, and as I broke the rust off and got myself into the habit I could actually handle it.
This was after years and years of regularly running 10-30km effortlessly all year round. I guess I got pneumonia one summer and it threw me off terribly, I got lethargic, then inactive, then gained about 50lb over several years. Getting back to it was physically and mentally so hard. But yeah, letting myself take baby steps and not being ashamed of my loss of fitness seems like it was key. For anyone I imagine the mindset of “I’ll go run around the block and see how I feel” would probably yield a lot more runs than the mindset I had that I felt bad about not running, losing my fitness, didn’t want to subject myself to an hour of cold and suffering, didn’t have enough time, etc. None of that mattered.
I suppose even getting up and going for a walk beats the hell out of sitting inside barely moving. Even if it isn’t way better, any amount is worth it.
No mention of Taurine and how the older you get the more you need to consume and the longer you can sleep for.
Take it right before you go to bed to see the best results, if taken during the day, you'll be hauling rear-end.
Word of warning, you will probably sleep through man made noises, like fire alarms & vehicles, natural sounds like dogs barking, people talking things like that should still wake you up though, so maybe choose a natural alarm clock sound.
Creatine may also play a role in increasing sleep especially if stressed, but little research into that side of things, what some would still consider anecdotal.
> No mention of Taurine and how the older you get the more you need to consume and the longer you can sleep for.
I was curious about this claim so I tried researching and couldn't find anything. Everybody just seems to look to the same study of Taurine that was done in fruit flies. I didn't see any human studies, let alone interventional studies. Even the idea that you need to consume it didn't pan out -- your body can synthesize it from a couple amino acids and B6. Do you have a source?
Your body can synthesise a lot of things, which is why they are often considered non essential, glycine being one of them.
Here's a study, not read this one before, but its not hard to find
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115565/
"The pineal hormone melatonin was also measured in the present and previous study (11), with significantly increased plasma concentrations being observed during sleep deprivation. Increased tryptophan and taurine could explain the increased melatonin levels, as taurine has been shown to increase pineal melatonin by stimulating the activity of its rate limiting biosynthetic enzyme, N-acetyltransferase (42). "
Never mind, just figured out what you're doing here - reading your comment history, you're basically Hackernews' resident quack doctor giving dangerous, unscientific advise.
Good luck with that.
> Do you know of any research that support this much for sleep
I look into it but because I started at a low dose and increase it until I find a dosage that works for me.
I love how refreshed and relaxed I feel when I wake up in the morning when I use it and it increases my sleep time. Its concentration falls as we age and my eyes have got sensitive to monitors again so its not all bad as it reduces my screen time. Taurine, like all chemicals does other things in the body which need to be factored in as well.
Unfortunately modern medicine, which doctors are keen to knock out, often have side effects and they have destroyed what little authority they had with me, which is their own doing.
Hauling ass is the more common form of the phrase. It means going very fast. What he means here is that if you take it in the day, it’s stimulating, but at night it will help you sleep. I have personally never heard of Taurine as a sleep aid, but it’s a common component of energy drinks.
It's interesting. It could be related to the fact that if you didn't have enough sleep you feel tired and this "bad" so your natural inclination is to think maybe if I ate something good I would feel better.
The best thing to do would be to follow the natural instinct and juts get some sleep but often that is not possible, in the office for instance.
> Our work showed that reducing sleep by about four hours per night, for four nights, led to an increase in eating, amounting to about 300 calories per day
Is it just me or is this a rather extreme amount of sleep deprivation for a comparatively small caloric effect?
300 calories a day is roughly +1/2 a pound per week. That actually adds up rather quickly, 2 pounds in a month, 12 pounds in 6 months, 24 pounds in a year.
To get rid of that, you need to drop 600 calories off what you got used to, for the same time period. So I wouldn't underestimate the effort here.
Fair point, but doesn't that assume that calorie burn is static? Presumably if these people are up for four hours extra they are burning more calories than they'd be if they spent equivalent time asleep.
IIRC average basal metabolic rate is under 100 calories an hour when awake and about 50 when asleep. All it'd take is a can of Coca Cola to wipe out the difference.
Using your numbers, the base metabolic rate accounts for 2/3 of the difference; if one engages in just 100 calories of activity during 4 waking hours then 100% of the difference is matched by energy expenditures.
Right, but the time I can manage with four fewer hours per night is measured in days, not months. I'd be more worried about falling asleep in traffic than gaining one pound.
Good article, however I miss one thing that is commonly lacking in studies and other works involving health and diet, and that's recognizing socio-economic causes and effects:
- poor people having to work two (or, sometimes, three) jobs just to make rent
- poor people (and more and more of the middle class) having long commute times because they cannot afford to live near their work or have to rely on public transport (which tends to take longer than driving by car) [1]
- many people having to work in jobs that don't allow for remote work
- schools are not teaching students how to plan healthy meals or cook, which means children who don't get taught these skills at home (because their parents don't have these skills themselves and/or don't have the time and money to do so) are out of luck
- access to high-quality fresh produce is sometimes spotty and often expensive (not just the produce itself, but also the cost of getting to where said produce is sold!) [2] [3], whereas highly processed, low-quality industrial food is cheap and readily accessible
The result of all of that is that many people having to cut down on sleep and don't have the time/skills/money to eat healthy foods.
The author acts like "diet" is a primary factor, but bad diet habits are a secondary factor. And as long as the socio-economic issues are not recognized as the underlying primary cause, no matter what gets done (e.g. sugar taxes and similar "nudging"), the symptoms (obesity and its followup diseases, sleep problems, mental health issues) won't vanish - the only thing that happens is that the poorer classes of society pay more as a simple result of being poor.
Ha! You mean the one mention in the article where they said that diet seemed to have a bigger impact on sleep quality than popular mindfulness practices? So even an article that downplays the significance of mindfulness contains too much mindfulness for you?
Too lazy to look them up but there have been studies done showing that eating while watching tv causes you to eat significantly more calories than just eating.
The word mindfulness gets thrown around a lot but that doesn’t necessarily negate the strength of these studies.
> It may be particularly helpful to eat ... low in red and processed meat and whole-fat dairy.
Then in the next paragraph states,
> It’s partly because protein-rich foods such as nuts and seeds, fish, poultry and eggs contain tryptophan, an amino acid from which the sleep-regulating hormone melatonin is produced.
Dairy and meat are very protein-rich and high in tryptophan, so based on what the author says, should be consumed for better sleep. The author says nothing about why we should avoid red meat and whole-fat dairy.