And how does sleep effect nutrition? What is the connection and why does it matter?
Research suggests that our circadian rhythm plays an important role in digestive physiology. When we don’t honor the natural cycle our bodies are meant to follow on an evolutionary basis (eating during daylight hours vs late night and sleeping on a diurnal, nocturnal schedule) we can end up with suboptimal digestion plus disturbances in sleep patterns, potentially causing alterations in the gut microbiome that over time can even lead to digestive disorders such as IBS and IBD.
Human studies have demonstrated that lifestyles associated with later bed times night are associated with lower levels of melotonin production, making it harder to fall asleep and stay asleep. And when we wake up after a poor night of sleep, this has a downstream effect on our body’s ability to balance blood glucose levels (impacting mood, energy, cravings) as well as hormones involved in the metabolic processing of food and appetite regulation (ghrelin and leptin).
If you have kids involved in sports after school you know first hand that by the time the games and practices are over, and you are home trying to make dinner, its well into the evening and you are lucky to have a hot family meal on the table before 8pm.
So what to do? Try earlier meals whenever possible to sync with the body’s natural prime time for digestion. Putting a soup or stew together in the slow cooker or instant pot can help reduce the time spent preparing meals after a long day and speed up serving a nutrient dense dinner. Also encourage kids/family members to eat more nutrient and energy dense foods earlier in the day – this will be easier on digestion since it is aligned with circadian rhythms and lead to better quality sleep. It can be a vicious cycle with late night meals/poor sleep quality/compromised digestion- but one that can be fixed with a proactive approach, grounded in knowledge on WHY it matters!