Sorry dairy lovers: cheese may be fueling your nightmares

I had never heard of eating cheese before bed causing bad dreams, but it is well-known enough bit of common wisdom that there was an entire comic, "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend," devoted to dairy-fueled nightmares. However, up until now, no one had tried to determine if the effect is real or an old wives' tale. A group of Canadian researchers published their results in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

After studying over one thousand participants, they discovered that the answer is "maybe." While over 40% of participants reported that certain foods negatively affected their sleep, only about 5.5.% said that foods influenced their dreams. They found that the Nightmare Disorder Index, a tool that uses a self-reported questionnaire to evaluate frequent nightmares that disrupt sleep, was correlated with food allergies and intolerances. These subjects also reported poor dream recall.

In their conclusion, the team stated,

Specifically, the frequency of dream recall was associated with indicators of healthy eating, i.e., higher scores on a subscale of the Intuitive Eating Scale-2 and less frequent eating in the evening, while both negative emotional tone of dreams and nightmare severity on the NDI were associated with unhealthy indicators, i.e., combinations of Lactose Intolerance, GI symptoms, less reliance on hunger and satiety cues, and a tendency to eat in the evening. In broad outline, these results are consistent with previous findings that a healthy eating style is associated with more vivid dreaming and higher dream recall while an unhealthy eating style is associated with more disturbing dreams or lower recall

So, there you have it, another study that encourages healthy eating, and also to avoid foods for which you have allergies or intolerances.

Previously:
• Timer, the 'I hanker fer a hunk o' cheese' guy, was originally from a 1973 afterschool special
• Yet another reason to hate bar soap: it might be cheese, and you might be drunk
• Watch this video to learn how a can of aerosol cheese works