Why You Should Eat a Banana Each Night Before Bed

Well+Good ^ | March 18 2021 | Allie Flinn

[be-baw]

Ready to crawl into bed after a long day of "normal human" cosplay? Hoping to fall asleep fast instead of staring at your ceiling for hours? You probably already have the ingredients you need for a dietitian-approved bedtime snack that'll help you drift off. s a strong case for a banana with peanut butter as the best snack for better sleep.

What a dietitian wants you to know about eating before bed:

What you eat before bed and how soon before bed that you eat it can affect both sleep and your digestion. If your food isn't digested before you go to bed then your body spends time that it should be resting on digesting food instead. Elevated glucose levels can keep you awake, Beckerman says, noting that it also depends on how sensitive your body is. She advises against refined sugar and carbs before bed because they can contribute to poor sleep and digestion. But sometimes your brain screams "feed me cookies" after a stressful day because refined sugars and carbs will give it a rush of dopamine. A banana with peanut butter is a bedtime snack that can actually help you sleep better.

Not only are these ingredients a delicious pairing, they also help each other shine. "Bananas are high in potassium and magnesium, which can help your muscles relax," Beckerman explains. (Most of us aren't getting enough magnesium.) Nut butters contain tryptophan, an amino acid that gets turned into serotonin in the brain, and is a precursor to melatonin. Eaten together, the carbs from the banana can make tryptophan more available to your brain and increase your ability to sleep. "This treat is a sleep aid wonder," she says.

[Chickensoup]

Water melon is also high in potassium

[thecodont]

Water melon is also high in potassium

One of the coolest Youtube videos I've seen is one where a chemist took about 10 lbs. of ripe bananas and extracted the metallic potassium from them.

Potassium Metal from Bananas!

[laker_dad]

Can it keep me from having the “can’t find my school locker/books/class room” dreams?

[Magnatron]

With decades of insomnia, I’ll definitely give this a try.

I having some real issues with it myself, and it came on suddenly over the holidays after years of falling asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I’ve heard about the banana thing before but haven’t tried it yet. I’m trying to limit my blue light exposure a few hours before bed and getting back to a good workout schedule.

I’ve gotta get this fixed. It’s really driving me batty. The other night I saw some apparition floating over my bed with a whacky letter name, telling me I should trust a bunch of government folks, Biden was in a fake staged White House, Ashli Babbitt was actually an actor, and the military was poised to save the country.

I thought I was going crazy, but then I looked at Free Republic...

[Paal Gulli]

Fruits and vegetables aren’t food, they’re what you feed your food to fatten them up before slaughter.

[Chickensoup]

Neat! Thanks!