A good night’s rest can become more elusive as you get older.
“Biological changes that occur with age can make you wake more frequently and spend less time in deep sleep, which is essential for cell repair and clearing toxic waste out of the brain,” says John Saito, MD, a spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “So even if you think you’re getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep, you may wake up feeling less refreshed and restored than you used to.” In addition, sleep disorders—such as sleep apnea and restless legs syndrome—are more common with age.
What can you do? Having a sleep schedule and exercising regularly can help, but don’t overlook your diet.
“The evidence showing a connection between diet and sleep is so strong that eating well should be an essential part of your sleep strategy,” says Erica Jansen, PhD, MPH, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Knowing that connection and how it works can help you choose the right foods to get better rest.
How Diet Affects Sleep
Studies have found that the way you eat affects the quantity and quality of your sleep in three specific ways.
Hormone regulation. Several hormones—chemical messengers that affect and manage hundreds of body processes—are involved in sleep. Key among them is melatonin, which is responsible for regulating our sleep-wake cycles. Levels rise late in the day to tell the body to prepare for sleep and decrease in the mornings to help us wake up.
“As we age, melatonin signals and receptors aren’t as strong as they used to be, so you may need more of it to regulate your circadian rhythms,” Saito says. What we eat can help. Our bodies use tryptophan—an amino acid in some foods—to produce a lot of the melatonin we need. Some foods also contain melatonin.
Inflammation. Eating too much of certain foods—such as processed meats, refined carbohydrates (like white bread), saturated fats, and added sugars—can increase levels of inflammation in the body, which can have negative health effects. For example, an analysis published in 2021 in the journal Sleep Health found that people who ate an inflammatory diet had a 40 per cent greater risk of sleeping 6 hours or less per night than those who adhered to an anti-inflammatory diet.
One reason may be that a diet filled with inflammatory foods leads to the release of excessive amounts of inflammatory cytokines, says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep & Circadian Research at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Cytokines are molecules that help regulate sleep; some are inflammatory and others are not. High levels of inflammatory cytokines can trigger sleep disturbances.
Gut microbiome. Your gut and your brain are closely connected and communicate directly with each other through molecules called short-chain fatty acids. These are made in the gut from certain foods we eat. “Those fatty acids influence the ‘clock genes’ that help set our circadian rhythms and regulate our sleep-wake patterns,” St-Onge says. They also help keep inflammation in check.
Eat to Improve Your Slumber
“No individual food can work magic on your sleep,” says Arman Arab, PhD, a research fellow in the medical chronobiology program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “You need to follow a healthy diet over time to see positive effects.” Focus on these steps:
Put more plant foods on your plate. Diets that have been shown to improve sleep have one thing in common: All have lots of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains. A 2023 study published in Sleep Health, for example, found that people who followed a healthy plant-based diet had 55 per cent higher odds of better sleep quality. And the Mediterranean diet, which is heavily focused on plants and has few animal products, was linked to a 14 percent lower risk of insomnia in a 2024 review of 37 studies published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews.
Such a diet may improve sleep in two ways. Plant foods help the gut make short-chain fatty acids. And several of those foods (including tomatoes, walnuts, and cherries) are good sources of melatonin. Others—like legumes and leafy greens—are rich in tryptophan, the precursor to melatonin.
A plant-forward diet also increases your intake of antioxidant polyphenols. Some research has found that a higher intake helped people fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Polyphenols also suppress the production of inflammatory cytokines and boost the production of anti-inflammatory ones.
Fill up on fibre. Found in all plant foods, fibre improves the health of your gut microbiome and helps control overall inflammation and the release of inflammatory cytokines. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, legumes, seeds, and whole grains are all great sources of fibre.
Choose anti-inflammatory fats. “Using olive oil and consuming other poly- and monounsaturated fats can help reduce inflammation,” Arab says. These fats are found in avocados, nuts, and fatty fish. Limit your intake of saturated fat (found in foods like red meats and butter), which can be inflammatory.
Get plenty of “helper” nutrients. Your body requires certain vitamins and minerals to help convert tryptophan into melatonin. These include vitamin B6, magnesium, and zinc. Vitamin D may also help with melatonin production and improve sleep in other ways.
If you eat well, you probably won’t need to take a supplement. “By adhering to a Mediterranean or other healthy, plant-based diet, you’ll have a good intake of all the nutrients that are essential for good sleep,” Arab says. For example, poultry, fish, and chickpeas are great sources of vitamin B6. Nuts and green leafy vegetables provide magnesium. Legumes and whole grains contain zinc. And mushrooms and salmon supply vitamin D.
By Sally Wadyka, Consumer Reports
