Episode 134 – Foods to Improve Sleep and Mood

Can we eat food that will improve both our sleep and our mood? Of course we can! And I’ll share with you what they are in this week’s podcast episode.

Digestion is key

Having a healthy digestion is key to ensuring you have good quality sleep and improve your mood. The key hormones associated with both are mostly made in the guts. So ensuring your guts are healthy is the first step, without that it doesn’t really matter what you eat.

Thinking about eating foods that support your microbiome and digestive health, from fermented foods which help repopulate to foods that specifically feed our healthy gut bacteria. And conversely reducing foods that might feed the ‘bad’ bacteria.

Gut Brain Axis

Our brains and our digestive system (our guts) are connected by the Vagus Nerve. The key thing to understand about this connection is that 80% of the messages travel from the gut to the brain. Therefore our digestive health is key to sending good messages to our brain – simply put, healthy gut, happy mood.

Many hormones are actually synthesised in the gut, hormones such as Serotonin and Melatonin. Serotonin is our happy hormone and Melatonin is our sleep hormone. So making sure that the digestive system has time to make these hormones is key, which is why I encourage clients to have food-free windows – periods which allow the digestive system time to do all the other things it needs to do.

Some Science

Tryptophan is an amino acid and it is the main raw ingredient we need to make both serotonin and melatonin. So making sure you include portions of these key foods every day will help.

Turkey and Chicken
Eggs
Fish
Peanuts
Pumpkin and Sesame Seeds
Tofu and Soy

This is not the whole story, we need lots of things called cofactors which include Iron, Vitamin B6 and Magnesium. This sounds a bit complicated but the easiest way to ensure you get all of these is by eating a wide range of whole foods – vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and whole grains.