Influence your dreams with cheese!

**newcarcaviar** · 10-16-2009, 11:18 PM

I was listening to Coast to Coast earlier in the week and one of the guests was a guy named James Nestor who has written a book about natural highs. Things like binaural beats, different herbs and foods, optical tricks, meditation, breathing exercises and so forth.

At one point he was talking about different cheeses and how they can influence your dreams. I found it truly fascinating and so I did some research on it. Thought I'd pass along some cool links to study results for you to mull over.

From NPR
Study: Eating Cheese Can Alter Your Dreams : NPR

Quote:

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I'm Melissa Block.

Somewhere on the ripe frontier between science and sleep and a hunk of Cheddar cheese, we found our next guest.

Mr. NIGEL WHITE (Secretary, British Cheese Board): My name is Nigel White. I am secretary of the British Cheese Board. The misperception has been that eating cheese before you go to bed gives you nightmares. We wanted to see whether or not we could prove or disprove this myth.

BLOCK: And this is where science comes in. Tell us about the study.

Mr. WHITE: Well, we asked for a number of volunteers to eat a small piece of cheese about half an hour before they went to bed.

BLOCK: How small?

Mr. WHITE: Well, the amount of cheese was two-thirds of an ounce.

BLOCK: Not a lot of cheese.

Mr. WHITE: Not a lot of cheese. And the idea was that they would keep a diary of the type of sleep that they had, and also, if they did dream, could they remember what they dreamt about.

BLOCK: And what did you find?

Mr. WHITE: And they did this for a week, and we found that about three-quarters of everybody said that they slept well every night, and most of those people could remember the dreams that they had. So that was pretty encouraging. And the science of that, we think, is that there is an essential amino acid in milk called tryptophan. Now tryptophan is known to be something which is helpful in normalizing sleep and reducing stress levels. That seemed to make sense to us. What was really wacky was that the type of cheese that people were eating seemed to give them different types of dreams.

BLOCK: Oh, and this would be consistent? In other words, the cheese was the determinative factor here?

Mr. WHITE: Well, as far as we can tell. What we found was that those who were eating blue cheese, Blue Stilton, were coming up with some quite vivid dreams that I'm sure the sleep psychologists would have a field day with in terms of interpreting.

BLOCK: Can you share some with us, or are you bound by science cheese privileges?

Mr. WHITE: Yeah, I mean, one of the volunteers said that she dreamed of a vegetarian crocodile who was upset because he couldn't eat children. And another one dreamed that they had soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns.

BLOCK: I would think you could consider those two examples you just gave us bad dreams, no?

Mr. WHITE: Not nightmarish. I mean, nightmares are where you're being chased by somebody, you're about to be pushed off a cliff or you fall off a cliff or you get run over by a car. But these weren't scary; they were just wacky.

BLOCK: OK, well, that was Stilton. What other cheeses did you put to the test?

Mr. WHITE: Cheddar is the most eaten cheese in this country, and there seemed to be a theme there where the volunteers were dreaming of celebrities. We have another famous cheese called Cheshire. The people who ate Cheshire said they had nice sleeps, but they were dreamless.

BLOCK: Were you only testing British cheese here?

Mr. WHITE: Yes. And the other cheeses we did were Red Leicester and Lancashire. With the Red Leicester, it seemed to be very nostalgic dreams that people were having about things that happened in their childhood or with their families. As far as the Lancashire was concerned, they'd seem to dream about work. Actually, one even dreamed of being the prime minister of the country. Well, I can assure you it wasn't the prime minister who took part.

BLOCK: Well, Mr. White, thanks for talking with us about your research into dreams and cheese.

Mr. WHITE: Melissa, it's a pleasure.

BLOCK: Nigel White, secretary of the British Cheese Board. He admits he might have a vested interest in the study, but insists the science is good.

From Daily Reporter
Cheese unlocks your wildest dreams, says study

Quote:

Eating cheese before you go to bed will not give you nightmares but different varieties could help you choose the dreams you do want to have, says a study by the British Cheese Board.

Not one of the 200 volunteers who took part in the British Cheese Board's 'cheese & dreams' study reported having nightmares after eating 20g of cheese 30 minutes before bed.

The industry body said 72 per cent of participants slept very well and 67 per cent remembered their dreams.

The study, believed to be the first of its kind, serves to dispel the old wives' tale that eating cheese before bed means a restless night in-store. It was endorsed by Neil Stanley of the Sleep Research HPRU Medical Research Centre at the University of Surrey.

Dr. Judith Bryans, a nutrition scientist at Britain's Dairy Council, added the science bit: "One of the amino acids in cheese - tryptophan - has been shown to reduce stress and induce sleep."

The research, in an intriguing twist, also found that different cheeses appeared to give participants different kinds of dreams.

Cheddar, officially Britain's most popular cheese with 55 per cent of the market, enhanced dreams about celebrities. One girl said she dreamt of helping to form a human pyramid under the supervision of film star Johnny Depp.

Stilton was the wild card, especially for women. Around 85 per cent of women experienced bizarre dreams after eating Britain's iconic blue cheese, including talking soft toys, dinner party guests being traded for camels and a vegetarian crocodile upset because it could not eat children.

Of the others, Red Leicester is likely to have you dwelling on the past and Lancashire will get you focused on the future.

The boring award goes to crumbly Cheshire, which gave more than half its consumers dreamless nights. Cheshire and Red Leicester, however, gave the best nights' sleep.

So there it is, although with more than 700 varieties of British cheese it seems there is much left to discover.

The British Cheese Board said it hoped to use the results to encourage more cheese eating before bed. Britons currently eat 30g of cheese every day on average, yet continental Europeans eat twice as much.

The Cheese Board says 30g of cheddar contains around 30 per cent of the recommended daily calcium intake for adults.

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