Dietary patterns and sleep symptoms in Japanese workers: the Furukawa Nutrition and Health Study

Experimental studies have shown that some nutrients are involved in initiating and maintaining sleep, but epidemiological evidence on overall dietary patterns and insomnia is scarce. We investigated the relationship between dietary patterns and sleep symptoms in a Japanese working population.

The participants were 2025 workers, aged 18-70 years, who participated in a health survey during a periodic checkup in 2012 and 2013. Dietary intake was assessed with a self-administered diet history questionnaire. Dietary patterns were extracted by principal component analysis on the basis of the energy-adjusted intake of 52 food and beverage items. Sleep duration, difficulty initiating and maintaining sleep, and poor quality of sleep were self-reported. Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratios of each sleep symptom according to quartile categories of each dietary pattern with adjustment for potential confounding variables.

We identified three major dietary patterns. A healthy pattern, characterized by a high intake of vegetables, mushrooms, potatoes, seaweeds, soy products, and eggs, was associated with a decreased prevalence of difficulty initiating sleep once or more a week (P for trend = 0.03); the multivariate adjusted odds ratio in the highest quartile of this score compared with the lowest was 0.75 (95% CI: 0.57-0.99). This association persisted after the exclusion of individuals with severe depressive symptoms. However, there was no significant association with difficulty initiating sleep at least three times a week.

Our findings suggest that a healthy dietary pattern may be associated with difficulty initiating sleep at least once a week.