Do you suffer from insomnia or find it hard to fall asleep? Maybe bananas are the secret to getting back to sleep well

Perhaps you sleep little. Or go to bed, close your eyes for a few hours and then stay awake staring at the ceiling without being able to fall asleep anymore.

Don’t worry: it happens. Suffering from insomnia is a very widespread condition that affects about one third of Italian adults. For the 10% of them, moreover, it is a persistent problem.

In most cases, insomnia is anyway negotiable. There are several medications able to help you sleep even if, as you can easily guess, the “medicine” best is to change your own lifestyle verso more balanced habits e sane. By eliminating, for example, the sources of stress.

But have you ever tried to manage your insomnia withPower supply? Proper food choices can also help regain good sleep quality.

Avoid hard-to-digest foods o Allowing enough time to pass between meals and sleep are small steps that could really help you, especially if you have gastroesophageal reflux.

Alongside the foods to avoid there are some, however, that you should include in your diet. This is the case of the banana.

Eating a banana in the evening before bedtime really feels like you can play a positive role in the quality of your sleep. And the credit would lie in some of the nutrients contained within them.

One of these is the tryptophan. “It is the precursor amino acid of serotonin: that substance used by the body to produce the melatoninthe hormone that is responsible for regulating the sleep-wake rhythm” the doctor explained to us Silvia Soligonnutritionist biologist, then underlining that in normal conditions melatonin tends to rise at the end of the dayjust before falling asleep to then decrease in the morningleaving room for cortisol, another substance that instead “turns on” the organism.

Taking good doses of tryptophan through your diet can therefore promote a good functioning of the sleep-wake mechanism.

This substance, however, would have an intrinsic limit. “To work – continued Dr. Soligon – must arrive in brain passing the blood brain barrier and this step is less efficient when there are others neutral amino acids to counter it “.

To have enough tryptophan in the brain to trigger good melatonin synthesis, therefore, it is clear that there must be one in the body. sufficient quantity to compete with other amino acids. “Increasing your tryptophan consumption could therefore help you sleep better. And bananas can be used in this sense ”.

The other “secret” of banana as a sleep medicine is the magnesium. That is, that macro-element involved both in the development and in the management of the stress.

“Magnesium and stress have a relationship similar to a vicious circle. Reduced doses of magnesium, in fact, promote stress but at the same time it is stress that cause and reduction the levels of magnesium in the body. The only way to keep balance is to take sufficient doses of magnesium “ explained the biologist, according to which the banana can represent a food sano and able to not make us go in deficiency of this macronutrient.

Tryptophan is the amino acid precursor of serotonin, the substance from which melatonin, the hormone that regulates the sleep-wake rhythm, originates

Among the other extremely useful and beneficial components contained in bananas there is also the vitamin B6. Belonging to the B vitamin group, it is one of the substances involved in protein metabolism, carbohydrates e grassiin the formation ofhemoglobin (the substance that carries oxygen to tissues) but also in the synthesis of serotonin.

“Although in very low doses and insufficient to fill the whole requirement daily, bananas also contain vitamin B6. A comparison of several scientific studies seems to suggest that this substance it might actually help you sleep”.

According to Dr. Soling, then, the attention should also be placed on the concentration of fibre e carbohydrates present in bananas. “This fruit has a lot of carbohydrates, there are many simple sugars and other carbohydrates complex, as well as a good dose of fiber. These macronutrients promote good sleep because they seem to favor the relationship between tryptophan and other amino acids in the brain ”.

The revision of the scientific literature offered by Dr. Soligon actually demonstrates that bananas, as well as other foods rich in these substances, can actually help improve the quality of one’s sleep.

At the same time, however, it also offers the opportunity to rethink the role of this fruit in our diet in a broader way. “Banana is rich in simple sugars and owns a high glycemic indexcharacteristics that often make it a food to beware of – said the nutritionist biologist – If we look more closely though, we can see that bananas can offer big benefits for our healthalso towards a better quality of sleep “.

The secret, concluded Dr. Soligon, is therefore not to move away from food or deprive oneself of certain foods. “If anything it is important to eat a little bit of everything but in a balanced way”.