BehindTheMedspeak: Does eating spicy food before bed disrupt sleep?

Anahad O'Connor's June 17, 2008 "Really?" column in the New York Times concludes it very well may.

Here's the piece.

The Claim: A Spicy Meal Before Bed Can Disrupt Sleep

The Facts: An old wives’ tale has it that a little kick to the palate before bed can lead to fitful sleep, if not nightmares.

It’s the sort of wisdom that often turns out to be based on no evidence at all — or, worse, flat wrong. But in this case, it’s good advice.

Research has shown over the years that a spicy meal at night can indeed lead to poor sleep. The most direct study to show this was published in The International Journal of Psychophysiology by a team of Australian researchers. The scientists recruited a group of young, healthy men and had them consume meals that contained Tabasco sauce and mustard shortly before they turned in on some evenings and nonspiced control meals on other evenings.

On the nights that included spicy meals, there were marked changes in the subjects’ sleep patterns. They spent less time in both the light phase of sleep known as Stage 2 and the deep, slow-wave Stages 3 and 4. All of which meant that they experienced less sleep over all and took longer to drift off.

Several things may account for the effect. An obvious possibility is indigestion. But the scientists also noted that after eating the spicy meals the subjects had elevated body temperatures during their first sleep cycles, which has been linked in other studies to poorer sleep quality.

The Bottom Line: A spicy meal before bed can impair sleep.

....................

Here's the abstract of the above-cited International Journal of Psychophysiology article.

Spicy meal disturbs sleep: an effect of thermoregulation?

Tabasco sauce and mustard taken with the evening meal markedly disturbed sleep of six, young, healthy male subjects; reducing slow wave and stage 2 sleep, increasing total time awake and tending to increase sleep onset latency. Whilst post meal effects on temperature and oxygen consumption were not significantly different from control meals the spicy food condition elevated body temperature during the first sleep cycle. the possibility that the spice principle capsaicin affects sleep via changes in body temperature is discussed.