This is my final research paper that describes nutrition and diet affects on sleep levels.
NUTRITION AND DIET AFFECTS ON SLEEP ACTIVITY LEVELS
Anthony Manzione
Rowan University
BACKROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW
The topic that I have chosen for my research paper is related to health. I have chosen how nutrition and diet can affect our sleep and in turn what happens to our activity levels if we do not get enough sleep. Sleep is something that is taken for granted and can affect the body in many ways. The human body is like a machine and sleep helps the body run, in turn if the body doesn’t get enough sleep it will not run efficiently and affect the way we perform activities. This research paper will dive deeper into the effects of not having an ample amount of sleep.
“Eat to Sleep Better in the New Year”
This article talks about how eating healthy turns into healthy sleeping habits. The article states that many diets consist of too much sugar or too low amounts of sugar and in order to sleep better one’s diet must consist of a balance of high fiber that’s low in added sugars. By having this type of diet people will be able to fall asleep easier at night and won’t be kept up. The article states to keep away from foods that can cause heartburn such as fried food or spicy food before bed because it could lead to sleep disorders such as insomnia. “In fact, people with nighttime heartburn are more likely to have sleep problems and disorders like insomnia, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome, and daytime sleepiness” (Sleep 2019). By staying away from foods that are high in fat, spicy, and carbonated drinks or alcohol you will get a better night’s sleep. The article states to try and eat foods high in vitamin B because it contains melatonin which regulates sleep cycles. The article concludes by talking about dieting. If someone is trying to lose weight the first thing, they need to do is get on a right sleeping schedule.
“Physical Activity Impacts Overall Quality of Sleep”
This study starts off by saying that people get better night’s sleep if they get at least 150 minutes of exercise a week. The study used 2,600 male and female subjects ages 18-85 and concluded that 65% of them slept better if they got more than 150 minutes of exercise a week. The study states that 35-40 percent of America has sleep related problems. The study states that physical activity may be the non-pharmaceutical way to improve people’s sleep habits. Besides only sleeping better, by getting 150 minutes or more of physical activity a week people had better BMI, health status, smoking status, less depressed, and didn’t run the risk of feeling groggy throughout the day. Paul Loprinzi states, “Our findings demonstrate a link between regular physical activity and perceptions of sleepiness during the day, which suggests that participation in physical activity on a regular basis may positively influence an individual’s productivity at work, or in the case of a student, influence their ability to pay attention in class” (2019). The takeaway message from this study is that exercise helps for many things but one major thing that not many people know about is that it helps with sleep problems.
“Sleep Problems and Obesity: interacting epidemics”
This article shows how there is a correlation between people who are overweight or obese and their sleep schedules. The article shows that 18 million Americans have sleep apnea which is a sleep disorder in which the person cannot breathe when they are sleeping. This can lead to people getting heart attacks, strokes, and congestive heart failure. The scary thing about it is that almost all the people who are diagnosed with sleep apnea are either overweight or obese. People with sleep apnea are less motivated to exercise or do any physical activity because of the lack of sleep that they are getting. The article then states that sleep deprivation is a huge reason why people are overweight or obese because the body lacks time to recover and digest food overnight. “A 1999 study at the University of Chicago showed that restricting sleep to just 4 hours per night for a week brought healthy young adults to the point that some had the glucose and insulin characteristics of diabetics” (Chicago 1999). Sleep deprivation and sleep apnea can lead to significantly harmful health related issues therefore people need to realize just how important sleep is.
The study that I will be conducting is the affect that sleep has on activity levels of college students. The study will look at the performance of Rowan college male athletic students over a 4-week period. There will be a control group and an experimental group. One group will get more than 8 hours of sleep a night and the other will get about 6 hours of sleep a night. Every week that goes by in the study the participants will go through a fitness test to see their performance. The fitness test will include a mile run, pushups in one minute, sit ups in one minute, and how many pullups they will be able to do. There will also be an initial test before the trial begins and a test when the trial concludes after four weeks. The data used in the study will be the numbers that the control and experiment groups obtain throughout the weeks on the fitness tests. This study will be used to see if sleep will affect performance at a collegiate athletic level.
METHOD
The topic that I have chosen is how nutrition and diet can affect our sleep and in turn what happens to our activity levels if we do not get enough sleep. I have selected these specific items about my topic because I always think about how nutrition can affect my sleep schedule. This is something that I want to learn about because every time I think that I ate healthy I usually get a better night’s sleep than when I think I ate poorly so it fascinates me that the two actually do have a correlation with each other. Some ways that people can test how much sleep someone gets is through a bar graph. By doing a bar graph a person can assess just how much sleep they actually get when eating healthy and eating unhealthily. Before someone starts their next day, they can tell themselves that they are going to eat healthy throughout the whole day. Then at night they can see how they fall asleep and keep track of how much sleep they get by taking the time they go to bed and the time that they wake up. The other end of it is to see how long it takes to fall asleep when eating unhealthily the whole day. The proper equipment needed to test this is an online application that will allow the user to create a bar graph, a computer to run the application on, a test subject, healthy food, unhealthy food, a cell phone with a timer on it, and a place to sleep. This can be tested or done in a regular home that has food available and a bed to sleep in. The preparation that needs to be done is to prepare foods beforehand. Meal prep is key because there needs to be unhealthy foods as well as healthy foods in advance to eat. There is no specific time frame in which this needs to be done as well as no specific training the person needs to have.
RESULTS
DISCUSSION
Throughout the test females and males had very similar r scores when it came to correlation between BMI and Diet score however they differed slightly when it came to BMI and sleep. Throughout this project the people whether it was male or female had high BMI scores. After looking at the results I can conclude Females usually get more hours of sleep than males because there BMI and diet scores were on average better than the males were. If I were running this test, I would have a larger variety of people male and female because it would give more accurate scores and results. Some limitations on this study is that we don’t know if any of the subjects have anything wrong with the way they sleep or if there is anything at home that may be affecting the way they sleep other than their BMI and diet scores. Another limitation may be the fact that their metabolisms may be faster or slower than one another.
REFERENCE PAGE
Davila, D. G. (2009, December). Nutrition, Exercise & Sleep. Retrieved from https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/diet-exercise-and-sleep
Follow These Healthy Eating Habits for a Good Night’s Sleep Tonight. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.sleep.org/articles/eat-to-sleep-better/
Loprinzi, P. (2019). Physical Activity Impacts Overall Quality of Sleep. Retrieved from https://www.sleepfoundation.org/articles/study-physical-activity-impacts-overall-quality-sleep
