Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have found a link between high fat/high sugar diets and poor sleep, according to a study published this week in the Obesity journal.
“Both poor diet and poor sleep increase the risk of several public health conditions. As what we eat is so important for our health, we thought it would be interesting to investigate whether some of the health effects of different diets could involve changes to our sleep,” explained Jonathan Cedernaes, physician and associate professor in medical cell biology at Uppsala.
During the one-week crossover study, 15 “healthy young men consumed two isocaloric diets in random order for a week,” researchers said. One was high in fat and sugar, while the other was low in fat and sugar.
“Following each diet, in-lab sleep was recorded using polysomnography during a full night of sleep and during recovery sleep after extended wakefulness,” according to the study. “Sleep duration, macrostructure, and microstructure (oscillatory pattern and slow waves) were investigated using machine learning-based algorithms.”
Cedernaes said that sleep duration was not impacted by the different diets. Participants also spent the same amount of time in different stages of sleep. However, there were some notable differences.
“Specifically, we looked at slow-wave activity, a measure that can reflect how restorative deep sleep is,” said Cedernaes. “Intriguingly, we saw that deep sleep exhibited less slow-wave activity when the participants had eaten junk food, compared with consumption of healthier food. This effect also lasted into a second night, once we had switched the participants to an identical diet. Essentially, the unhealthy diet resulted in shallower deep sleep.”
According to a 2013 blog post from the National Institutes of Health, deep sleep is a stage of sleep that helps strengthen memories. While the study found that diets high in fat and sugar appear to alter sleep oscillatory features that regulate the restorative properties of sleep, it did not indicate if these changes have an effect on health outcomes.
Researchers who conducted the study believe that further studies are warranted.
“Currently, we do not know which substances in the unhealthier diet worsened the depth of deep sleep. As in our case, unhealthy diets often contain both higher proportions of saturated fat and sugar and a lower proportion of dietary [fiber]. It would be interesting to investigate whether there is a particular molecular factor that plays a greater role,” said Cedernaes. “Our dietary intervention was also quite short, and both the sugar and fat content could have been higher. It is possible that an even unhealthier diet would have had more pronounced effects on sleep.”
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