Health Matters

IN A CHRISTMAS CAROL, EBENEZER Scrooge at first dismisses the ghosts that torment him as mere dietary disturbances: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,” he says to one spectral visitor. “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Cartoonist Winsor McCay made his name in the early 20th century with “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend,” in which his protagonists suffer bizarre dreams and nightmares they attributed to eating Welsh rarebit—a delicacy of spiced cheese on toast.

- By Jeffrey Kluger EDITOR-AT-LARGE

A modest body of contemporary research has sought to explore the link between food and nightmares more empirically. The latest, a study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, finds that if you want to get your Z’s, you'd best limit the cheese.

To conduct the study, Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, and colleagues surveyed 1,082 students at MacEwan University in Alberta. All completed a questionnaire about their diet, food sensitivities, sleep habits, dream recall, and more. The students reported how late in the evening they eat, whether they regularly snack without feeling hungry, and if they have any gastrointestinal symptoms, food allergies, or diet-related conditions such as lactose intolerance. They also reported how well they sleep and how often their sleep is disturbed by nightmares.