Protein may help you stop waking up when you’re crushed
Tony Tarek/Alamy
A high-protein diet may promote deeper sleep, according to a study that found that mice and flies that ate more protein were less likely to wake up from exercise-related disorders.
When you fall asleep, you consciously de-perceive the world, including things that can interfere with your sleep, says Dragana Roglia of Harvard University. “We wanted to understand how sensory arousal could be suppressed.”
She and her colleagues evaluated how 3400 genes affect sleep in Drosophila. They used groups of eight flies to individually silence each of these genes, creating a total of 27,200 gene-edited flies. I watched for flies while sleeping on the platform above the speakers.
Low-frequency vibration awakened approximately 85% of flies in which one of the two genes was silenced. The first controls the production of a chemical messenger known as CCHa1, which regulates circadian behavior, and the other controls her receptor for CCHa1. Both genes are expressed in the nervous system and gut.
Even just removing these genes from the gut increases the likelihood that insects will wake up during vibration. Further analysis showed that specific cells in the gut produced CCHa1 upon exposure to protein. CCHa1 then migrates from the gut to the brain, where it suppresses wakefulness during sleep.
Taken together, these findings suggest that protein plays a role in preventing wakefulness during sleep. rice field. Flies on the high-protein diet woke up in response to vibration in half the number of flies on the regular diet. Similar experiments in mice yielded comparable results.
“The general idea makes sense: we sleep when other needs are met,” says Rafael Pelayo of Stanford University in California. “So eating higher quality food, a diet rich in protein, can help you sleep deeper. At least that was the case with flies and mice. This may not be the case for humans.”
The findings also apply to mechanical stimuli such as shaking. According to Rogulja, the genetic changes didn’t change how easily the animals woke up to other disturbances like heat or sound.
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