In the run up to at home's March issue, with Dr Christian Jessen as guest editor, we've got all things health-related on the brain. Racking our brains for the most niggling health questions, that perhaps don't warrant a visit to the doctor, we sought Dr Christian's wisdom on an age-old phenomenon: does cheese really give you nightmares?
Just where this dairy-based dream myth originated from is almost as curious as the theory itself. Charles Dickens’s character, Ebenezer Scrooge, famously blames ‘a crumb of cheese’ for his night-time visitations in A Christmas Carol, and a health scare in the Fifties found cheese to be problematic for people using a particular antidepressant. Yet this is all that springs to mind.
Nightmares caused by eating cheese before bed are, in fact, fictitious, based on no sound science whatsoever, according to Doctor Christian. In fact, researchers have found that cheese can actually aid sleep.
When volunteers were fed a 20g piece of cheese every night before going to sleep 72% slept very well. Seventy per cent remembered their dreams, however, none of them were nightmarish in any way. Remembering your dream is a sign of a good night’s sleep, notes Doctor Christian.
And if your mind's boggled about how a cheese toastie can whisk you off into the land of nod, it's the protein and amino acids in cheese, such as tryptophan, that encourage sleepiness.
Speculating further, our guest editor claims that: 'While it doesn’t cause bad dreams, the type of cheese you choose can affect the dreams you have: Stilton causes the craziest dreams, cheddar-eaters have more dreams about celebrities, and nostalgic dreams of old friends and the past seem to be prompted by eating Red Leicester. Cheshire cheese seems to induce the deepest night’s sleep of all.'
Now, what about the effects of pre-bedtime cheese board?
Picture credit: Skånska Matupplevelser
