Drink This To Sleep More

Getting a good night's sleep is not easy. As a mom, you go to bed making checklists of everything you need to do and wake up to a full day ahead. If you could just convince your body to sleep for just a little bit longer, you know you'd have much more energy to get through that whole checklist. According to Prevention, there's a way to do it.

Give your box of chamomile a rest. New research presented at the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting finds drinking tart cherry juice twice a day can help you sleep nearly 90 more minutes a night. Researchers from Louisiana State University had seven older adults with insomnia drink eight ounces of Montmorency tart cherry juice twice a day for two weeks, followed by two weeks of no juice, and then two more weeks of drinking a placebo beverage. Compared to the placebo, drinking the cherry juice resulted in an average of 84 more minutes of sleep time each night.

Cherry juice is a natural source of the sleep-wake cycle hormone melatonin and amino acid tryptophan, says study coauthor Frank L. Greenway, director of the outpatient research clinic at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center at LSU. "Proanthocyanidins, or the ruby red pigments in tart cherry juice, contain an enzyme that reduces inflammation and decreases the breakdown of tryptophan, letting it go to work longer in your body," he says. Montmorency cherries are particularly high in those compounds. (The study was funded by the Cherry Marketing Institute, but the group had no role in the study design or outcome.)

>> Why should you get a full nights sleep? Read here!

To read the complete article, check it out on Prevention.