Midnight snacks may affect dreams

That guilty pleasure you allow yourself before bed may be providing you with an added bonus, or not.

By TEDDYE SNELL

C’mon, admit it. You do it.

It’s 11:30 p.m., you’ve either been in bed sleeping or are about to go there, yet that enticing morsel in the fridge or pantry keeps calling your name.

Like many people, you succumb to the midnight snack, enjoying that last slice of rare roast beef, or a quick bit of dark chocolate, slink back to bed and fall asleep.

The next morning, you awaken to remember either a ghastly nightmare or a surreal dream. Could it be that the snack’s to blame?

Maybe.

According to Lar Rune Foleide, drugs, herbs and foods all have the capability to affect dreams.

“During REM [sleep], protein synthesis is highly active, so you body needs high levels of amino acides, wrote Foleide on his website. “The neurotransmitter in use durin gREM is acetylcholine, made from the B-vitamin choline and vitamin B-5. But there are more vitmains that can make us dream more.”

Foleide asserts the body can synthesize choline, but in order to do that it needs vitamin B-12, folic acid, the amino acids methionin and serine.

“Vitamin B-12 plays a role in the activation of amino acids during protein formation,” wrote Foleide. “It has also the ability to increase the production of acetylcholine and normalize neurotransmissions in the brain.”

London-based writer and blogger Emma Payne relishes dreaming as it’s “free and fun.”

“Done correctly, it can fill those apparently useless sleeping hous with adventure,” wrote Payne on her blog FedbyBirds. “For the benefit of mankind, we have tested the following notorious dream-causing foods, to see which has the most spectacular results: Cheese, chocolate, chili and lobster.”

According to Payne, cheese is probably the most famously dream-inducing food in popular myth. In order to test the theory, Payne ate a large amount of gorgonzola pizza shortly before retiring for the evening.

“[The results were] tedious dreams which are mostly administrative,” wrote Payne. “Having a lot of visitors turn up without enough beds, people whose invitations I hven’t replied to, packing suitcases for a plan that’s about to leave, etc.”

Payne said she’d heard eating chocolate before bed would result in bad dreams, but believed it sounded like an invention dreamed up by overprotective parents. To test the theory, she indulged in double-chocolate mousse, hot chocolate and a few truffles “to be on the safe side.”

“Surprisingly, that parental threat turns out to be completely true,” wrote Payne. “An almost textbook nightmare follows: A figure suddenly sits up in the next bed ... and says ‘I am the undertaker.’ It’s all downhill from there.”

Spicy foods, specifically chili, and lobster, provided Payne with cascading, surreal dreams that weren’t altogether unpleasant.

Despite what Payne found, local resident Denise Deason-Toyne said chocolate can’t be all bad.

“I am not much of a late-night snacker, and have never had drams that I could relate to what I had eaten,” she said. “I can state unequivocally that chocolate has never, ever caused me to have bad dreams!”

Most diet gurus agree, to keep unwanted pounds off, it’s best to eat earlier in the day.

Stefanie Hunt disagrees completely, and enjoys eating later in the evening.

“I’m a late-night eater by nature,” said Hunt. “As per Jenny Craig [TV diet specialist], it doesn’t matter what time of day you eat, it’s all about portion size, frequency and calorie control.”

Hunt has a favorite midnight snack, but said it didn’t affect her dreams.

“I love peanut butter and maple syrup,” she said. “Not on bread. Just stirred together and eaten with a spoon. And my guilty pleasure is chocolate chip cookies and milk. Spicy food, on the other hand, gives me bad dreams.”

Hunt’s co-worker, Bronwyn Murphy, stays away from poultry late at night.

“I can’t eat fried chicken,” she said. “No way. It gives me awful dreams.”

If your body craves a snack at midnight, it is possible to satisfy that yen with healthy foods.

Experts at Natural Home Remedies recommend oatmeal porridge made with skim milk, yogurt, popcorn, and Hunt’s favorite, minus the syrup, peanut butter.

The enzymes in the yogurt maintains a healthy digestive system, and the probiotics soothe hunger pangs. Yogurt has also been found to aid sleep. If popcorn is your choice, avoid using butter. Corn is a whole grain, and popcorn is relatively low in calories and carbohydrates.

The trick to a good night’s sleep is avoiding drinking anything other than water or skim milk, as beverages with caffeine – like soda – can disturb sleep cycles.