High Fat Diet Disrupts Your Sleep

Organic Pillow fans will be interested to know about a new study conducted by scientists at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis Veterans' Affairs Medical Centre showed that a diet made of up high-fat foods may diminish the quality of your sleep as well as cause you to gain weight.

To cut a long story short, we haven’t included all the science, but the findings of the study were that a high fat diet obviously leads to weight gain, but also to more fragmented sleep and a higher level of sleepiness during the day.

So what's the connection between a high-fat diet and poor sleep quality? In discussing their results, researchers suggest the link may be a chemical in the brain that's involved in regulating both sleep and weight: orexin.

Orexin is a neuro chemical that regulates our sleep wake cycle and our appetite and also our storage of brown (healthy) fat in the body. As we gain unhealthy fat in our body through a unhealthy fat diet our sensitivity to Orexin messages in our body is reduced causing poor and interrupted sleep as well as disrupted appetite.

You already know that a high-fat diet is bad for your waistline, but fat itself is not the enemy. A diet that includes reasonable portions of healthy fats can help keep you healthy, tipping that scale in the right direction. Improving your sleep is another great reason to limit your high-fat food intake and stick primarily to smart fats instead.

Source: Huffinton post Michael J. Breus, PhD