Everybody wants to have a good night sleep after long hours of hard work. Even if we look from the biological angle, our body needs ample hours of rest in order to keep the hormonal balance. However, sometimes our choice of late-night snacks will have a significant bearing on our sleep. Wrong choice of food and drink would disturb hours of rest and trigger drowsiness and irritability the following day.
You shouldn't be mistaken in choosing your food before you go to bed, for it will have a negative impact on your sleeping pattern. Due to a lack of enough rest, it could lead to a variety of chronic health issues such as heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity and depression.
If you think you cannot sleep well after your late-night snack, here are eight kinds of food and drinks that you must avoid before bedtime.
Chocolate and caffeinated items
Eating a candy bar and drinking an afternoon cappuccino may be enough to disturb sleep as the body takes almost five hours to get rid of caffeine from the body.
According to studies, as little as 30 milligrams of chocolate may also wreak havoc on your sleep cycle.
Avoid spicy food
Most of the spice foods are terrible late-night meals as it wreaks your sleep pattern. If you eat spicy foods within 3 hours of bedtime, these may cause indigestion and reflux, thus you cannot sleep well.
"It is not that spice interrupts your sleep, the spice causes heartburn, and that interrupts your sleep," said Mark Mahowald, professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Avoid Alcohol
Consuming alcohol may have a very bad impact on your sleeping pattern as it tends to reverse its soporific effect within a few hours. Finally, you may miss out on enough rest.
"Alcohol has two effects, one is to put you to sleep, and the other is to wake you up three or hours later," said Jerry Siegel, professor of psychiatry of the centre for Sleep Research at UCLA.
Water
Chugging water within an hour before bedtime isn't a good idea as moderation is preferred during later hours. Though it is very important to stay hydrated, giving the body enough time to avoid the fluid before bedtime is the must.
Sleeping on an empty stomach
Given the reasons above, avoiding food and drink before bedtime may sound like a reasonable alternative. However, many experts agree that going to bed an empty stomach is not a good idea either. Starvation or excessive hunger causes sleep disorder and increased health problems.
"If there's a general rule of thumb, being too hungry makes it difficult to sleep and eating a lot of food makes it difficult to sleep," said Ruth M. Benca, Director at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
