Most of us know going to bed on a full stomach can affect our sleep. Changing what we eat and the time of day we eat certain foods can help us sleep better.

We've all woken up the morning after a large, late night meal feeling tired out. The extra energy required to digest big portions of rich food can eat into our kip, leading to a disturbed night's sleep.

Thankfully, there are also ways we can try to improve our sleep through our diet by avoiding certain foods and drinks known to keep us awake, such as those containing caffeine. But can we also eat other foods – particularly before we go to bed – to boost the quality of our sleep further?

Several studies have narrowed in on certain suppers that could improve our sleep. Some small trials have found that tart cherry juice, for example, can help people sleep better, and others find that eating kiwifruit before bed is beneficial. There's also some research showing that warm milk can help us sleep. It is thought the high levels of tryptophan – from which the "sleep hormone" melatonin is synthesised by the body – in milk may help to induce sleep onset.

Melatonin regulates our sleep/ wake cycle. Our bodies produce more of it later in the day, when it starts to get dark. But we can also get melatonin directly from foods, including eggs, fish, nuts and seeds.

Numerous studies have found that eating melatonin-rich foods can improve sleep quality, and help us sleep for longer. But there's also a lot of research to suggest that any one particular food or drink is not enough to improve sleep – and it's our overall diet that matters.

"You can't eat poorly all day long and think that it's enough to have a glass of tart cherry juice before bedtime," says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition in New York.

This is because extracting the nutrients from food that the body can use to produce neurochemicals that promote sleep doesn't happen within a couple of hours, she says.

Instead, it's what we eat throughout the day that can improve sleep quality.

Research shows that the most beneficial diet for sleep seems to be a plant-based diet that includes lots of wholegrains, dairy and lean proteins including fish, says Erica Jansen, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan in the US.

In her 2021 study looking at the relationship between sleep and diet, Jansen found that people who started eating more fruit and vegetables every day over a period of three months can dramatically improve their sleep.

More than 1,000 participants were tasked with increasing their daily intake of fruit and vegetables. This increase was to tease apart the two-way relationship between sleep and diet that besets research in this area – population studies could show people with healthier diets have better sleep, but there's always the chance they make better choices with food because they're better rested.

Jansen found that women were more than twice as likely to experience an improvement in insomnia symptoms after eating an extra three or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day.

One reason for this is that fruit and vegetables (along with meat, dairy, nuts, seeds, wholegrains and legumes) are generally high in the essential amino acid tryptophan.

In a 2024 study in Spain, more than 11,000 students were asked about their sleep habits and diet. It found that the quartile that consumed the least tryptophan on a daily basis had significantly worse sleep outcomes. The researcher conclude that low tryptophan intake was linked to a higher risk of short sleep duration and greater risk of insomnia. Eating foods........

© BBC