Could kiwi fruit help you sleep better
15-05-2014
In our ongoing quest to find the best food or drink to help you sleep better, we bring you the kiwi fruit! Yes, that green (or sometimes golden) fruit may be the sleep aid that you have been looking for. As with any of the suggestions we make to you, it also may not help you at all. That is the reality with these dietary sleep aids, they do not have an even and objective impact on everyone who uses them, but they have been found to help some people some of the time, so with that stated, let’s have a look at how the kiwi fruit may help you, or not.
The kiwi fruit is a delicious fruit that has been claimed by New Zealand even though it used to be called the Chinese gooseberry. This fruit is not just tasty but has been found to have a positive impact on people’s sleep. Researchers at the Taipei Medical University in Taiwan were looking at the impact of kiwi fruit consumption on people’s sleep and found that if eaten daily it had a positive influence on both the length of sleep and the quality of the sleep.
The study looked at 24 participants, 22 women and 2 men, who were all aged between 20-55. All of the participants had been suffering from some kind of disturbed sleep before they took part. Over a four week period each of the study participants ate several kiwi fruit an hour before bed.
The researchers then studied their sleep, getting data on how long they slept and the quality of their sleep. They also had the participants fill out a range of questionnaires and sleep diaries that assessed the quality and quantity of sleep they were experiencing.
The results were very interesting, they found that after a month of consuming kiwi fruit before bed all of the participants had noticed an improvement in both sleep quality and sleep quantity. The findings, while only focused on a small group of people and being limited as any study of this nature is, are very interesting and hold great promise.
• The participants found that they fell asleep much more quickly. Their sleep onset latency—the length of time it takes to fall asleep after going to bed—decreased by 35.4%.
• The participants also slept more deeply. They reported that their waking time after sleep onset—the amount of time spent in periods of wakefulness after initially falling asleep—dropped by 28.9%.
• The participants found that their sleep quality got better. Their scores on a standardised sleep quality questionnaire—with lower scores meaning a better sleep—dropped by 42.4%.
• The participants’ sleep efficiency—the measure of how much time they spent sleeping compared to the total amount they spent in bed—rose by 5.41%.
• The participants also slept more in general with the total sleep time growing by 13.4%.
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