We’ve mentioned before, the most important meal of the day is breakfast, when we break the eight-plus hour fast we’ve put or bodies through overnight. But did you know that what we chose to eat in the evening can have an impact on our health, too?
Consuming the wrong food and drink for the last meal or snack of the day could mean that the length and quality of our sleep are both interrupted. The odd night of broken sleep means that we’re tired and unproductive the next day.
But a chronic lack of good quality sleep can have negative consequences for our ability to process information, make decisions and maintain relationships with our partners, family members and colleagues. It can cause us to make poor lifestyle choices and can even put us at a greater risk of having an accident or a heart attack. What we choose to eat in the evening could also cause us to gain weight as we sleep.
So here’s the foods to avoid in the hours before bedtime, and the ones to enjoy!
1. Refined carbohydrates
Refined carbohydrates are foods such as white bread and pasta that have been made using wheat that’s been processed to remove the wheatgerm. Wheatgerm is what gives unrefined brown bread and pasta their more natural colour and their nutrients.
Sugary foods and drinks are also considered refined carbohydrates. When we eat these foods, the gut quickly breaks them down into simple sugars, and for this reason, they have a high Glycaemic Index, or GI. High GI foods quickly raise blood sugar levels, any excess sugar is then stored as fat.
It’s considered healthier to avoid or limit these foods, and if we eat them before bedtime when we don’t have a chance to burn them off, they can be even more detrimental to our waistlines and body fat percentage.
Summary:
Refined carbohydrates have a high GI and quickly flood the blood with simple sugars when we eat them. Some sugar is used for energy, but the rest is stored as fat which can lead to weight gain.
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2. Greasy foods
Consuming foods that are high in saturated fat such as takeaways, deep fried foods and some ready meals, as well as red and processed meats places a lot of pressure on our digestive systems.
Our gut needs to use a lot of energy to digest these foods, signalling to the brain that we’re still in daytime, awake mode, therefore disrupting our sleep patterns.
Sleep studies have found that eating a high fat meal for dinner will cause us to wake more during the night and that we’ll spend less time in restorative, dream-state sleep called REM, or rapid eye movement sleep. It can even affect the way we breathe whist we’re asleep and lead to sleep disturbances caused by acid reflux.
Summary:
High fat, greasy foods can lead to poor quality sleep if we eat them later on in the day. Studies show that those who eat a high fat diet experience more interrupted sleep than those on lower fat diets.
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