麻豆传媒

HOW do you deal with a perilous cheese? Caerphilly. It鈥檚 a cheesy joke to be sure, but does it contain a morsel of truth? Charles Dickens certainly thought food and fear were connected. When Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted with the ghost of his late partner Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, he at first assumes it is a night terror brought on by eating a 鈥渃rumb of cheese鈥�.

Whether or not Dickens鈥檚 tale played a part, the idea that eating cheese causes scary, possibly nightmarish, dreams is an enduring urban myth. It crops up in several nations 鈥� flick through French health magazines, for instance, and you will find stories linking cauchemars with fromage. But is there anything in it? Finding evidence or explanations for how cheese might influence the subconscious can feel like ghost-hunting 鈥� the few experiments so far have been woefully unscientific.

Disentangling the effects of a single foodstuff on our constitutions is as hard as a stale parmesan rind, especially with a substance as complex as cheese. Cheese is a bewildering mixture of compounds that can interact with our bodies in myriad ways. So what do you use for a control in any experiment? Nothing, or perhaps some other food that lacks the key physiological properties of cheese 鈥� whatever they might be?

Then there鈥檚 the slippery nature of dreams. How can we control for all the other factors that might disturb a good night鈥檚 shut-eye? And can we trust experimental subjects to accurately remember their dreams?

These problems would grate on any researcher鈥檚 nerves. Undaunted, the 鈥� no, we didn鈥檛 make it up 鈥� investigated the legend in 2005. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a body 鈥渄edicated to educating the British public about eating cheese as part of a balanced diet鈥�, it hoped to soothe the fears of anyone worried about dairy-induced nightmares. Of the 200 volunteers involved, 134 reported having nice, fluffy dreams 鈥� definitely not nightmares. But with no controls or non-cheese-eating comparators, the conclusion was about as solid as a Camembert on a balmy afternoon. 鈥淚t鈥檚 totally unscientific,鈥� says Neil Stanley, an independent sleep researcher.

鈥淒isentangling this problem is harder than the rind of a stale parmesan鈥�

To its credit, in 2014 the British Cheese Board attempted a more mature version of the experiment, teaming up with retired University of Surrey researcher Ian Hindmarch. This time 25 volunteers ate cheese on alternate nights for a fortnight, with some eating vegan cheese as a placebo. The unpublished study found that the cheese-eaters actually reported better quality sleep than the placebo group. The volunteers also said they had fewer dreams than normal post-cheese. Only six out of 156 dreams were at all nightmarish.

As yet, however, there is little academic agreement on how eating cheese, rather than any other food, might have an effect on our dreams, positive or negative. Dairy chemist Paul McSweeney at University College Cork in Ireland suggests it may be possible that the bacteria that help produce cheese play a part. These microbes can convert the amino acids in cheese protein into amine compounds. One of these is tyramine. It is plentiful in cheese and can trigger nerve cells to release molecules like noradrenalin. In the brain noradrenalin is mainly made in a region considered responsible for rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. And REM sleep is frequently associated with dreaming.

But plenty of foods, among them yogurt, chocolate and bananas, contain stacks of tyramine and no one accuses them of inducing nightmares. The same goes for Hindmarch鈥檚 suggestion that an amino acid called tryptophan could be involved. Tryptophan has been shown to make people feel sleepier, which could tie in with his study鈥檚 finding of better quality sleep. But again, foods like meat and seafood provide much more tryptophan than cheese.

Maybe this is too complicated. An alternative explanation, says Stanley, is that cheese is high in fat, and burning off those calories causes sleep disturbance 鈥� and more dreams. Yet Marco T煤lio de Mello鈥檚 team at the Federal University of S茫o Paulo, Brazil, found eating fatty food at night was associated with , and less REM sleep. 鈥淔rom our data we can only speculate that eating fatty food at night could decrease dreaming,鈥� de Mello says.

Another study led by of the University of Arizona investigated correlations between diet and sleep diaries in 459 postmenopausal women. He also found that those who ate more fatty food .

Gouda night鈥檚 kip?

Cheesed off by the lack of clarity, 麻豆传媒 set out to do its own test. Five of us were assigned a cheese, and for five nights we ate 20 grams of it half an hour before bed. The following mornings we recorded our dreams and subjectively rated how vivid they were on a scale of 0 to 3. Then we did the same for five nights of normal bedtime routine with no cheese. One of us (me, as it turned out) was assigned ricotta 鈥� which we decided was a 鈥減lacebo鈥� because it contains much less fat and tyramine than the other cheeses.

Of course, this is no more scientific than any previous study. The best bit was reading about our weird dreams afterwards (see 鈥渄iagram鈥�). But squinting hard at our data, we can tentatively agree with the British Cheese Board: cheese makes you dream less.

Leaving aside our Stilton eater (who seemed immune to dreams, reporting only three), eating cheese gave us less intense dreams compared to normal. Relatively fat-free ricotta, meanwhile, seemed to make little difference. That apparently supports Stanley鈥檚 fat hypothesis 鈥� and he stresses that the effect could happen with any food. 鈥淣o explanation accounts for the supposed particular action of cheese on sleep and dreams,鈥� he says.

If it is the fat that does it then perhaps we can take a lesson from Scrooge. After all, he didn鈥檛 just look to cheese to explain what he thought was a nightmare. 鈥淵ou may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,鈥� he railed at Marley.

(Image: Debby Lewis-Hamilton/Plainpicture)

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏rie encounter鈥�