You may have noticed that you often feel like falling asleep after lunch. And it is not just the fact that the brain centers of saturation and sleep are close to each other and interact, but it is also important to know what you are eating for lunch.
The U.S. scientists have found that sleepiness during the day may depend on what the representatives of various professions eat and whether the food has a high fat content. Having a good night sleep does not matter in this case. However, the researchers found that the carbohydrate-rich diet increases the overall tone of the body, making a person more alert and focused, which is so necessary in many professions.
This is the conclusion that the staff of the medical college at the University of Pennsylvania in Hershey drew after having conducted an experiment involving 30 healthy people whose age was between 18 and 65 years old. Within 5 days the volunteers slept in special rooms, which were in the lab. The scientists treated them to different foods, which had a different ratio of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. The degree of daytime sleepiness was measured using a multiple sleep latency test, which is widely used in Somnology.
As a result, it was found that a high or low protein diet does not affect the daytime sleepiness. However, carbohydrates and fats are capable to influence its appearance: carbohydrates increase work efficiency, while fats, conversely, increase the degree of drowsiness during the day. It should be noted that this phenomenon was observed in all participants of the experiment, regardless of their gender, age, duration of sleep at night, and the number of calories consumed.
