Can Kiwi Fruit Help Promote Better Sleep?

Are you having problems getting enough sleep? Did you know that 1 in 3 adults that suffer symptoms of insomnia? There are drugs like Valium that you can take for insomnia in the short term, but they have a number of adverse side effects. Non-pharmacological approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy are often difficult, time-consuming, and not always effective. Wouldn’t it be great to have “natural treatments that can improve both sleep onset and help patients improve the quality of sleep while improving next-day symptoms over the long term?”   Of course we always like to talk about how Cool-jams can help people sleep better by effectively helping the body achieve the optimal sleep temperature, but today we thought we'd talk about an interesting study that we have been researching. It has to do with the effect of Kiwi fruit consumption on sleep quality in adults. Participants were given two kiwifruit an hour before bed every night for four weeks.

But why Kiwi fruit to begin with? Well it seems according to the research that people with sleep disorders tend to have high levels of oxidative stress, so the thinking was perhaps antioxidant rich foods might help. Even though all fruits and vegetables have antioxidants, kiwifruits were used in the study because the contain twice the serotonin of tomatoes. Kiwi fruit has folate, and a deficiency might cause insomnia—but there’s a lot more folate in some other plant foods. Of course the reason they even studied kiwi fruits is because they got grant money from a kiwi fruit company, however we're glad they did because they found some really remarkable results.

It seems that eating two kiwi fruit before bed every night for four weeks significantly improved sleep onset, duration, and efficiency using both subjective and objective measurements. Participants went from sleeping 6 hours a night to 7—by just eating a few kiwi fruit. One other tidbit about kiwi fruit. Did you know that its real name is Chinese Gooseberry? I'm guessing the name changed because kiwi fruit sounds much more appealing than Chinese Gooseberry.