If you’re having trouble falling asleep, you may be lacking in vitamins. Explanations.
Health authorities agree that a good, restorative night lasts at least seven hours. In the United States as in France, the population sleeps less than the recommended amount. Additionally, many Americans are missing out on essential intakes of essential vitamins and minerals. A studypresented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Baltimore, suggests that these two factors may be related.
To conduct this work, the researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey (NHANES), a representative sample of American adults. They discovered that people who sleep less than seven hours a night also consume less vitamins A, D, B1, as well as magnesium, calcium or zinc. It would also seem that the deficiency in certain vitamins would affect women’s sleep all the more.
Magnesium, an ally of sleep
Vitamins and minerals are micronutrients. Our body needs it but it does not produce it. Their contribution therefore comes from food. Worldwide, billions of people suffer from at least micronutrient deficiency. These do not have an energy role but are important for the body since they allow growth and development, prevent diseases and regulate certain normal bodily functions, such as sleep.
Magnesium for example helps the body to produce melatonin, the famous “sleep hormone”. However, the study researchers point out that this is a retrospective analysis and not a randomized controlled study. The causal link cannot therefore be fully proven between nutrient deficiency and lack of sleep. “It remains to be determined whether lack of sleep leads to nutrient deficiency, or whether nutrient deficiency decreases the hours of sleep,” explains Chioma Ikonte. A clinical study will have to be carried out, precisely to clarify this link of cause and effect.
What is sleep good for?
Lhe scientific literature has shown that getting enough sleep helps protect against cardiovascular disease, stimulates the immune system and protects against metabolic diseases such as diabetes. A new study by scientists at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan (Israel) has uncovered a key factor that may be central to the indispensability of sleep: its restorative effect on individual brain cells.
Their observations revealed that during sleep, neurons were able to carry out maintenance work on the nucleus, the central element of each cell which contains most of its genetic material.
When the nucleus begins to deteriorate, the genetic information it contains is also damaged, which can lead to aging, disease, and general malfunction in an organ or tissue. However, it is precisely during sleep that neurons have the opportunity to recover from the stress they have accumulated during the day and to “repair” the damage they may have suffered.