Milk contains some casein proteins, which may have a slight relaxation effect. There’s one more potential for milk to help with falling asleep. This is a good idea anyways, as eating a small, healthy snack an hour before bed can help you lose weight. So, to get the (ridiculously small) tryptophan effect from milk, you’d need to take it with a bowl of cereal or with some toast. Milk by itself doesn’t have many complex carbs it’s mostly simple sugars. To affect sleep, tryptophan needs to be absorbed more readily than other amino acids, and the best way to do this is to eat foods with complex carbohydrates, which cause an insulin spike to clear out the sugars and those competing amino acids. In any case, the amount of sleep-inducing amino acids that you consume before bed is not the only issue here. Drinking Milk Alone Won’t Do the Trick Drinking milk alone is sad. Still, even “sleepytime milk” has a hundredth of a typical dose you’d get from a typical melatonin supplement. It’s patented and supposedly contains over 25 times the melatonin of ordinary milk.
Milk doesn’t have much melatonin either certainly much less than those 5mg mega-doses you can get from over-the-counter supplements.Ĭreepily enough, there is a new kind of milk currently being tested called night milk, which is taken from cows at night that are fed a lot of tryptophan in their diets. So you’ll be interrupting your dreams by going to the bathroom every 20 minutes. 08grams of tryptophan, compared with the same or equivalent amount of soybeans (.59 gram), spirulina (.9 gram) and dried white egg (1gram).Īccording to sleep doctor Michael Breus, you’d need to drink a gallon of milk for the tryptophan effect.
Half a glass of milk (4 oz) contains about. Tryptophan is synthesized in the brain as serotonin, and finally melatonin.īecause of this relationship, tryptophan can also have a drowsiness effect when a lot is consumed at the right time.Ĭompared to other foods, milk doesn’t really contain much tryptophan. So, at first blush, it seems there may be something to the dreamy effect of milk.Ĭlick the picture for more about the tryptophan effectīesides melatonin, milk contains trace amounts of tryptophan, which is another amino acid that’s found in a lot of foods, including most meats as well as scores of seeds and nuts. On a purely anecdotal level, I know of many dreamers who have reported vivid, nightmarish and lucid dreams after taking very high doses of supplemental melatonin (over 10mg. There’s also some clinical studies on larger doses of melatonin (over 5mg), which have been linked with increasing REM sleep in general, at least in some people, such as patients who are suffering from REM sleep deprivation. Bizarre dreams are not necessarily populated by milk goddesses. Check it out.īy the way, in dream research lingo, bizarreness is often another way of saying creepy and nightmarish. The second milk ad really seems to key into the bizarreness of dreams. A 2000 study published in the journal Sleep and Hypnosis found that taking 6mg of melatonin at night for two weeks significantly increased bizarre dreams for college students.
However, several studies have looked into the effects of a key ingredient found in milk: melatonin, an amino acid that regulates the sleep-wake cycle. There’s no clinical study that’s ever looked at this correlation directly. To do so, the properties of milk would have to have an effect on the structure of sleep, by increasing the length of REM sleep (dreaming sleep), for example, or delaying a shift into wakefulness. Unfortunately, the evidence for a good night’s sleep thanks to a glass of milk is a little thin. Both ads suggest that drinking a glass of milk before bed will prevent awakenings in sleep and give you better dreams.
Two new milk advertisements by the dairy industry have been making their rounds on American television.
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