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After seeing what insomnia, general rules to facilitate sleep and the negative effects of night sleepness are, we are going to analyse how to treat and eliminate sleep disorder with nutrition.
1. Yes to foods that stimulate serotonin and melatonin. To increase the two hormone level and optimise the rhythm sleep and wakefulness, it is necessary to consume foods rich in:
- Tryptophan (an indispensable amino acid)
- Zinc e magnesium
- Vitamin B1 e B6
A deficiency of these elements may result in sleep disorder: it is important to facilitate natural sleep to have light dinners, mainly based on whole wheat cereals, a small quantity of foods rich in proteins and plenty of vegetables: for example white fish, whole wheat bread, legumes and vegetables.
2. No to foods which stimulate noradrenaline and dopamine. These two substances stimulate instead the wakefulness and inhibit sleep: to minimize the level of these two elements it is necessary to limit at dinner all those foods that are rich in tyrosine, noradrenaline precursor, and in phenylalanine, from which dopamine derives; tyrosine sources are soy and derivatives (tofu, soy sauce and etc), milk and derivatives, chicken, turkey, bananas, eggs, milk chocolate, sesame seeds and pumpkin seeds, while the phenylalanine sources are meat and fish in general, broad beans, beans, peanuts; that does not mean that you have to exclude foods rich in proteins, but you simply have to limit their quantities and combine them with a good dose of complex carbohydrates and vegetables.
3. Pay attention to nervine drinks. A caffeine dose equivalent to 300 mg daily is the limit you must not go beyond to prevent sleep disorder, keeping in mind that caffeine and theine are the same with the difference that theine is extracted from the leaves of tea plant; the avarage content of a cup of coffee is equivalent to 85 mg while that of a cup of tea is 30 mg: going beyond the limit of 300 mg/day is not so difficult.
4. No to alcohol and energy drinks. If we are interested in good health, drinking alcohol is what we absolutely have to avoid: not only it is bad for our liver and to our health in general but it causes besides night awakenings, alters the sleep and stimulates night diuresis. same speech for drinks as coke, Red Bull or similar and those with ginseng and guarana, which are powerful energizers, these have to be avoided from late afternoon onwards.
5. Yes to relaxing infusions. There are numerous herbal products on the market and they are able to sedate the nervous system, The main products are: Bach flowers (effective against anxiety too), passion flower, sage, tilia, valerian and chamomile. An home made infusion easy to prepare is the one with apple peels, which contain bromides with a powerful sedative and anti-anxiety action. You have to wash an apple throughly, peel it, boil the peels in water for about 5 minutes, pour the whole in a cup without adding any sweetener.
Finally, if night sleep is interrupted by the famous "air hunger", it is important to treat this disorder as soon as possible in order to restore the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness: there are several ways to treat sleep disorder according to its origin and the seriousness of the problem as orthodontic headgears, devices for the breathing and surgical interventions; overweight is often the primary cause of this disorder, in particular of sleep apnea and snoring because fat around thoracic area pushes on the respiratory tract in a supine position causing overwhelmed feeling and interrupting sleep.