1. Introduction
A body of evidence has shown the associations between macronutrient intake and sleep parameters, however, with inconsistency. Carbohydrate, particularly with high glycaemic index (GI) was associated with faster sleep onset in healthy young men [
1] but was associated with increased total arousal in children compared with low GI [
2]. Low intake of protein (<16%
vs. ≥16%) has been shown to be associated with difficulty in initiating sleep, but high intake of protein (≥19%
vs. <19%) has been shown to be associated with difficulty maintaining sleep in middle-aged Japanese workers [
3]. A fatty meal was found to aggravate apnoea in patients (overweight or obese) with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) [
4]. A newly published randomized-crossover study by St-Onge’s group found that low fibre and high saturated fat and sugar intake was associated with lighter sleep with more arousals in young and middle-aged healthy adults [
5]. However, other studies suggested no association between fat intake and sleep quality [
6] or insomnia symptoms [
3]. Although the inconsistent results may be attributed to a variety of study designs, uncertainty remains regarding the association between macronutrient intake and sleep in the current literature.
Studies that investigate the associations between macronutrient intakes and sleep parameters (objective measurements) at the population level in the community setting are desired. One study in Caucasian and Hispanic adolescents (
n = 319) found that total fat intake was negatively associated in girls but positively associated in boys with rapid eye movement sleep [
7]. However, there are no similar studies in adults. In this study, we aimed to assess whether macronutrient intake was associated with Apnoea-hypopnea Index (AHI) and self-reported sleep symptoms in community-dwelling middle-aged men at the population level under non-experimental conditions.
3. Results
Overall, 1815 participants with dietary intake were analysed, of whom 837 without a prior diagnosis of OSA underwent successful sleep studies and 784 completed the dietary intake. Demographic characteristics by quartiles of each macronutrient intake of the participants are presented in
Table 1. The mean age of the participants was 59.7 (SD 11.4) years. Characteristics of PSG participants with dietary intake are presented in
Table S1.
Univariate analysis results between macronutrient intake and AHI and self-reported sleep parameters are presented in
Table 2. No association was found between carbohydrate or protein intake and AHI. High intake of fat was positively associated with high AHI and self-reported daytime sleepiness. The prevalence of sleepiness was 46.4% and 37.0% among those with highest and lowest quartiles of fat intake. The distribution of AHI was significantly different across quartiles of fat intake with high fat intake associated with high AHI.
The prevalence ratio of self-reported sleep parameters (relative risk ratio for sleepiness) across quartiles of macronutrient intake is presented in
Table 3 and
Figure S1. After adjusting for age, waist circumference, education, lifestyle factors (smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity and shift work), chronic diseases and medication, the highest quartile of fat intake was positively associated with daytime sleepiness. Compared with the lowest quartile, the highest quartile of fat intake had a relative risk ratio (RRR) of 1.78 (95% CI 1.10–2.89) for daytime sleepiness (
p for trend across quartiles was 0.305). When further adjusted for total energy intake, the association was no longer significant. There were no associations between macronutrient intakes and other self-reported sleep parameters. The RRR for AHI using multinominal logistic regression are presented in
Table 4 and
Figure S2. After adjusting for age, waist circumference, lifestyle factors, chronic diseases and medication, fat intake was positively associated with high AHI (≥20/h) (Q4
vs. Q1, RRR 2.98 (95% CI 1.20–7.38) (
p for trend across quartiles was 0.046 across quartiles). Similarly, the association was not significant after further adjusting for total energy intake. BMI mediated 30% of the association between fat intake and AHI (direct effect 0.07, indirect effect 0.03,
p < 0.05) (
Table S2 and
Figure S3). However, BMI did not mediate the association between fat intake and daytime sleepiness (
Table S3).
4. Discussion
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the association between macronutrient intake and sleep in a large population based cross-sectional study using objectively measured polysomnography. We found that high intake of fat was associated with daytime sleepiness and high AHI. The associations between fat intake and AHI was mediated by BMI.
Although the mechanism of the associations between macronutrient intake and sleep parameters is yet to be clear, some possibilities have been suggested by previously published work. Sleep can be regulated by various hormones that is induced by food intake through communications between hypothalamus and the brain [
17]. Both dietary carbohydrates and protein can affect tryptophan metabolism through the availability tryptophan uptake into the brain via the blood brain barrier [
18]. Regarding the mechanism of fat intake and sleep parameters, it is suggested that fat may affect sleep by altering circadian regulation of hormonal, central nervous and metabolic systems [
19].
We found a positive association between high fat intake and daytime sleepiness. Early experimental studies showed that both infusion of lipid into the small intestine and isoenergetic meals may cause a decline in alertness and concentration [
20]. Wells et.al have shown that healthy young subjects felt sleepier and less awake 2–3 h after a high-fat-low-carbohydrate meal [
21]. Although carbohydrate rich meals have been demonstrated to be associated with postprandial lassitude [
22], a greater decline was seen in high fat intake [
20]. Other laboratory evidences suggested the potential role of gut neuro hormones in promoting hypnogenesis through vagal activation which essentially triggers fatigue [
23,
24,
25,
26,
27]. However, we did not have data on the timing of fat intake, and dietary data collection was prior to sleep measurements, so the immediate effect of sleepiness of high-fat diet was not able to be assessed. Long-term high fat intake may lead to elevated levels of leptin and decreased levels of ghrelin [
28], which could regulate arousal and wakefulness via orexin [
29]. Increased sleepiness was observed in mice with high-diet fed induced obesity [
30]. In large scale studies, positive associations between obesity and excessive daytime sleepiness has been reported [
31,
32]. This is consistent with our data that participants in the obese group had a higher risk of daytime sleepiness after adjusting for lifestyle factors (
Table S4). However, obesity does not seem to be a mediator of the association between fat intake and daytime sleepiness (
Table S3).High fat intake was also found to be associated with a high level of AHI (≥20/h) in this study, after adjusting for age, waist, lifestyle factors, chronic diseases and medication. Similarly, previous experimental studies found a fatty meal the night before bed would increase AHI in OSA patients [
4]. Long-term effect of high-fat diet on AHI is not clear. In non-obese rats, high-fat fed diet increases apnoea, and this could be reversed and prevented by a low dose injection of metformin (a drug for insulin resistance) [
33]. This may suggest that insulin resistance induced by high fat diet may be one of the mechanisms leading to increased AHI, but was dependent on body weight. In patients with type 2 diabetes, AHI (≥30/h) was associated with higher BMI [
34]. Obesity has been suggested as one of the main risk factors of sleep apnoea [
35] in the literature. In our study, being obese was strongly associated with higher AHI compared with non-obese participants (
Table S5). Our mediation modelling suggests that the direct effect of BMI on AHI was about five times stronger than the effect from fat intake, and about 30% of the effect on AHI comes from BMI (
Table S2 and
Figure S3).
Regarding energy intake, higher energy intake was associated with high level of AHI in our study (
Table S5), and our sensitivity analysis suggested that it was a confounder in the association between fat intake and AHI and daytime sleepiness. However, energy intake estimated from self-reported dietary intake has been suggested to be less accurate [
36]. Moreover, soft drink and alcohol were not included in the energy intake calculation in our study.
The main merits of this study are: (1) it is the first investigation of the association between macronutrient intake and PSG measured sleep parameters as well as self-reported sleep problems in a relatively large sample; (2) we were able to adjust for a wide range of covariates including age, waist circumference, energy intake, education, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, shift work, depression, diabetes and medication.
Several limitations in our study need to be acknowledged. Firstly, asynchronous exploration between macronutrient and sleep were performed due to the mismatch of time of the PSG study and dietary survey. Secondly, due to the nature of the cross-sectional study, causation cannot be made. Thirdly, because the study only involved men, the findings may not be generalised to women. In addition, we only conducted one overnight PSG assessment as it is not practical to have multiple night PSG assessments in large epidemiological studies. Despite objective sleep measurement, dietary intake was estimated by FFQ, rather than 24-h food recall or actual weighing. 24-h food recall provides meal specific food intake information, which has been suggested to be associated with circadian adaption [
37]. However, it is impractical to conduct 24-h food recall in studies with large sample size, and 24-h recall does not capture a long term dietary habit as FFQ does.
In conclusion, high fat intake was associated with daytime sleepiness and high AHI. BMI mediates the association between fat and AHI but not daytime sleepiness. Although a public health benefit is suggested, future studies are needed to confirm the findings at the population level.