Do you dream of eating pizza every night? In addition to your line, it would ruin your nights. Junk food and bad sleep often go hand in hand.
Géraldine Zamansky, journalist for Health Magazine on France 5, tells us today the story of 15 Swedish volunteers who slept badly after agreeing to eat fat and sugar for a week.
franceinfo: Junk food and sleep obviously don’t mix…
Geraldine Zamansky: Exactly. They ate prepared pasta dishes, with meatballs every lunchtime, and an industrial pizza with a chocolate bar, every evening. It looks like a dream menu for a lot of children and teenagers… Even older ones. But these 7 days of meals very rich in fat and sugar damaged the sleep of the 15 participants. He became less restorative.
The comparison was made thanks to the same volunteers who spent another week where their plate contained vegetables with pasta, and salmon in the evening. Exactly the same number of calories consumed in all. And each time, after those 7 days, they spent the night in a lab with their heads covered with sensors to track their brain’s electrical activity.
Is that how the researchers were able to see the deterioration in sleep after the week of catastrophic dieting?
The designer of all this research at Uppsala University in Sweden, Dr. Jonathan Cedernaes, explained to me the rather subtle attack that they observed. Not on the quantity of sleep but on its quality. And more precisely on the so-called “deep” phases.
In electrical terms, this results in particularly slow waves. And after a week of junk food, there was a lot less. However, this moment spent “in slow motion” is essential. For the brain to update its memory and to clean itself! But also for the heart to rest and blood pressure to drop… The list is long.
So eating too much fat and too much sugar damages the functioning of our brain?
Excellent deduction. A kind of excessive stimulation, which could be toxic for our neurons, especially in the long term. And a real risk of a vicious circle pointed out by Dr. Cedernaes: when he has slept badly, the brain, this traitor, especially asks for this type of food, which provides “fuel” faster than fibers, which are long to digest. A hellish trap.
We have therefore found an additional motivation today to improve the content of our plate. Start by adding as many vegetables as possible.
The study