Stress, a lack of restful sleep and many other factors in your life may be causing you to become sleepy during the day but many people don’t realize that their food choices may also be having a big impact on their energy levels. A recent study has now shown that people who eat a high-fat diet are actually more likely to feel a larger amount of sleepiness throughout the day, making the term “sleeping like a baby” literal.
The study was conducted in Australia and published in the Nutrients journal. It involved the participation of 1,800 men who completed food-frequency questionnaires while also reporting on whether they felt sleepy during the day and to what degree.
Moreover, the participants were also electronically monitored in order to be able to identify causes of obstructive sleep apnea and other conditions that can cause people to wake during the night and have a less restful sleep.
This allowed the researchers to adjust for factors that could impact the rest of the participants and cause them to feel sleepy during the day aside from the food they were eating. They also took into account a person’s alcohol intake, smoking habits, physical activity levels, waist circumference, medications, depression diagnoses and others.
What they determined was that those in the highest one quarter of fat intake, when compared to those in the lowest one quarter of fat intake, were 78 percent more likely to feel sleepy for spans of time throughout the day. Moreover, they were nearly three times more likely to suffer from sleep apnea.
The link between fat intake and sleep apnea was the most easy to identify among the participants whose body mass index was greatest. However, the positive association between drowsiness during the day and fat intake was steadily apparent throughout all subjects regardless of their BMIs.
The lead author of the study, a University of Adelaide doctoral candidate, Yingting Cao, explained that there could be a relationship with meal timing that may be a mechanism for this reaction, but the research data did not provide the necessary information to make that determination. That said, Yingting Cao did point out that there was reason to believe that there is a direct connection among hormones, circadian rhythm and diet which would bring about these effects.
She explained that everyone knows that health is directly impacted by diet. However, it is also being better understood that when we eat very high levels of fat, it has a negative impact on our ability to obtain a restful sleep.
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