Does diet affect sleep?

Does diet affect sleep?

On the whole, sleep is quite resilient to what we do to ourselves, but if one is dieting, trying to reduce weight, then that mismatch in calories seems to have an impact on the brain and causes sleep to become more restless. If on the other hand, one is becoming overweight, then the sleep is also disturbed by not being able to sleep properly. But the daytime consequences are slightly different. If one is starving, one's tending to awaken and one's aware of that happening. If one's overweight then the sleep's being disturbed not to the point of the brain waking up completely, so one ends up feeling sleepy during the day. So one ends up with different things. As I was saying before, it really doesn't matter too much whether you are a vegetarian or an omnivore or whatever, the body adapts around that. The things that can go wrong are, say if one's a vegetarian, and particularly if one is a woman, then the odds of having low iron are quite high and low iron is associated with fatigue during the day. Sometimes that fatigue is mis-associated with the sleep and a greater attempt to get the sleep right, but in fact the main problem is low iron. In the longer term, low iron has an impact on a condition called restless legs, where a woman starts to get creepy crawly sensations in the legs, running up and down the legs prior to going to sleep and that impacts on the sleep, but it's caused by the diet.