Shut-eye is vital, but here’s why the stuff you’re eating and drinking could be hijacking your effort to get enough ZZZs
Energy drinks are gulped down by many of us, but consuming them regularly can play havoc with your shut-eye, thanks to the caffeine inside.
Caffeine is a stimulant, which disrupts your natural sleep-wake cycle making it harder to fall – and stay – asleep. It can also make you feel jittery or anxious. This effect can last for hours, so avoiding canned coolers in the late afternoon is a good start to improving health.
However, it can also be easy to get into a vicious cycle with energy drinks whereby you’re tired, so you neck one to stay perky, before then getting bad sleep again. Try to break this routine.
Soldiering is tough, and without enough kip you are more likely to underperform and get injured.
According to the Army Health Promotion team, water is the best source of hydration. Cans like Monster or Red Bull should not be used as your primary source of hydration – not least because they offer very little nutritional value and often contain high levels of sugar too.
Energy drinks can also interfere with your ticker. According to the Service experts, they can change cell function, possibly causing your heart to beat faster or irregularly. This could lead to serious heart conditions. Therefore, these products should not be consumed before or during phys.
Junk and processed food can reduce the amount of kip you get, too, believe it or not.
Scientists in Sweden recently found a diet high in fat and sugar may reduce sleep quality by messing with the brain’s electrical activity.
And that’s before you consider how large, high-fat meals before bedtime can slow down digestion and keep you awake with complaints like heartburn or bloating.
What you eat also feeds the trillions of bacteria in your gut, with research suggesting that the diverse microbes found within may improve sleep for some people.
Feedback from the individual health behaviours check – a data capture exercise started by the Army last year to assess soldiers’ behaviours and help them reflect on their choices – found that British troops are not eating enough fruit and vegetables (or getting enough sleep for that matter). And when you think of the realities of ration packs, life on the road, service stations and camp convenience shops, it is not hard to see why this is the case.
Consuming more of the good stuff might be a big ask in some instances, but planning meal times where possible and thinking about what you eat in advance can go a long way to cutting out junk.
Personnel can also look up the “military performance plate” on Defence Connect to see what types of food they should be trying to eat, according to activity level, as advised by the Defence Nutrition Advisory Service.
