Good health depends on a healthy diet and sufficient exercise and sleep. There are clear associations among these components; for example, good nutrition provides energy for exercise, and many people report that getting enough exercise is important to their ability to get enough sleep. So how might nutrition affect sleep? A new study looks at the connection between fruit and vegetable intake and sleep duration.
The research, by a team from Finland's University of Helsinki, National Institute for Health and Welfare, and Turku University of Applied Sciences, is published in Frontiers in Nutrition . Sleep gives our bodies the chance to rest and recover from wakeful activity. Our hearts, blood vessels , muscles, cells, immune systems, cognitive abilities , and memory-making abilities depend on regular, healthy sleep for optimal functioning, and a 2019 study suggests that sleep is important for repairing DNA damage that occurs during wakefulness.
Restful sleep takes place in 3–5 nightly cycles, each lasting 90–120 minutes, on average. During each cycle, we begin with a stage of non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, then move through two increasingly deeper periods of non-REM sleep before backing out of them. Our non-REM sleep becomes lighter and lighter until we reach a REM stage, after which a new cycle begins, or we awaken.
Adults should aim to sleep from 7 to 9 hours per night. However, recent studies show that insomnia and shorter sleep duration is becoming more common among.