HW8: Taking deserts to bed

I remember when I was a kid; I would hide from my mom whenever I feel like eating extra plates of rice or extra plate of deserts. Sometimes it’s just so hard to resist the urge to have something that you love, and in my case that is food.

Now since I am proud to be a Filipino, I want to talk about two flavors that I know every Filipino just simply adores: sweet and salty food. And since this blog is simply about dreams, I would like to discuss about its connection.

First is the effect of sweet food on dreams. An article in Livestrong, “DOES SUGAR GIVE KIDS NIGHTMARES?” showed that food with sugar content can have an effect on dreams by causing physical sensation. These sensations can be felt while the person is still sleeping like how we tend to be affected by the sounds in our environment while we are sleeping.

Do you remember sometimes when you tend to take with you the background music that you were listening before you fell asleep? According to the article, since sugar can give a burst of energy, this can cause a stimulation in the body that can cause the brain to interpret it as excitement and take it to their dreams.

But in a way, sweet foods like chocolates secretes theobromine and caffeine that can disrupt sleep or even cause nightmares.

 

On the other hand, there was also a study conducted by the European Society of Endocrinology that showed how salty food affects dreams. According to the research, eating salty food before sleeping can cause sleep disturbances that can lead to sleeps that are not deep. And since the subjects of the research are distracted with their sleep, “…NON-REM decreases and REM increases so that the individual dreams a lot and even sometimes has nightmares.” This just shows that food really has a effect on dreams though it’s not necessarily direct. (http://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0011/ea0011p590.htm)

These data just proves why we Filipinos have a lot of cases that involve nightmares. But nevertheless, I believe that we still can’t fight the fact that sweet and salty food are already a part of our culture and Philippine genes, so the only thing that we can do about it is to try and regulate these inevitable tastes.

Eat well!