Could Your Diet Be Keeping You Awake?

If you suffer from insomnia or interrupted sleep, perhaps a few dietary changes could help you snooze through the night.

Did you know that certain nutrients, foods, and eating patterns can have a great effect on your ability to get a good night’s sleep?

For instance, a lack of the nutrients calcium and magnesium can cause you to wake up after a few hours and not be able to return to sleep. Calcium has a calming effect and magnesium is needed to balance the calcium and relax muscles. A calcium/magnesium supplement can be helpful, however it is important to eat real foods that contain calcium, because they also have magnesium and the other trace minerals needed for its absorption. Vegetable choices should consist of dark green leafy types such as collard greens, kale, cabbage, and broccoli, for their high calcium content. Other food sources for calcium are almonds, asparagus, blackstrap molasses, buttermilk, carob, cheese, figs, filberts, goat's milk, kelp, mustard greens, oats, prunes, sesame seeds, tofu, turnip greens, watercress, whey, and yogurt.

Which foods you eat and when you eat them can also affect restful sleep.

You should avoid caffeine-containing foods after lunchtime. Coffee, as well as less obvious caffeine sources such as soft drinks, chocolate, coffee-flavored ice cream, hot cocoa, and tea, should not be consumed after lunchtime. Even small amounts of caffeine such as those found in decaffeinated coffee or chocolate, may be enough to cause insomnia in some people. If you suffer from extreme chronic insomnia, caffeine should be completely eliminated from your diet.

For dinner or as an evening snack, choose foods high in the amino acid tryptophan. These include turkey, milk, cottage cheese, chicken, tuna, eggs, almonds, bananas, figs, dates, yogurt, and whole grain crackers or nut butter. In the brain, tryptophan is converted to serotonin and melatonin, which are natural sleep-inducing compounds. Also, did you notice that many of these foods also contain calcium?

Those late-night bacon-cheesburgers or sugary snacks can actually be keeping you awake. Avoid eating bacon, cheese, chocolate, eggplant, ham, potatoes, sauerkraut, sugar, sausage, spinach, tomatoes, and wine close to bedtime. These foods contain tyramine, which increases the release of norepinephrine, which is a brain stimulant.

Drinking chamomile tea several times throughout the day and especially before bedtime, helps calm and tone the nervous system, promoting restful sleep.

Getting a good's night sleep is imperative to good health. It not only helps your energy levels and alertness, but is also important for weight loss. Making these simple dietary changes can greatly improve your overall health.

News Flash: Chocolate is Healthier Than Broccoli!

Over the past few years, you've probably heard about the health benefits of chocolate. However, before you go making conventional chocolates a staple of your diet, it's important to understand that the health benefits are mainly due to special compounds called flavonoids that are found most abundantly in organic, raw chocolate.

Flavonoids are natural nutrients with antioxidant properties. In fact, raw, organic chocolate is one of the most antioxidant-rich foods in the world. Ounce for ounce, it has five times more antioxidants than blueberries, ten times more antioxidants than spinach, and close to fifteen times more antioxidants than broccoli!

The flavonoids in raw chocolate play some key roles in optimally supporting health:

• They prevent premature aging by protecting your cells against free-radical damage
• They help prevent stickiness of platelets, which are cells that play an important role in blood clotting
• They help your body produce nitric oxide, a compound that promotes a healthy cardiovascular system

Unfortunately the majority of chocolates on the market are not the best choices for optimally supporting health because most of them have been processed. The more chocolate is processed, the fewer flavonoids it retains. Fewer flavonoids translates to less antioxidant content and less potential health benefits. Processed chocolate becomes even less healthful due to the addition of refined sugar, milk, and oils.

Your best choice is raw, organic chocolate that has no added ingredients. Your next best choice is dark chocolate with 70% or more cocoa content, but this ranks a distant second to raw chocolate, since conventional dark chocolate is exposed to significant heat and processing. The worst choices are milk chocolate and white chocolate. Most varieties of milk chocolate have only about 25% to 50% the flavonoid content of dark chocolate, and white chocolate has no flavonoids.

Raw chocolate is chocolate in its purest form; it's nothing but pure cocoa (cacao) beans which are dried, then cracked to remove the "nibs" (the center of the cacoa bean). To make raw cocoa powder, the nibs are pressed to extract the cocoa butter, leaving a dense, rich, and bitter substance called chocolate liquor. Despite the name, this substance does not contain any alcohol. After drying, the chocolate liquor is ground into powder form. Raw cacoa nibs and raw cocoa powder are sold in natural food markets, or can be purchased on-line.