Excess amounts of this macronutrient could be causing your heavy eye lids.
It’s happened to us all, we’ve just ate a plate and a half of food and decide to sit down on the couch for a few moments, then pretty soon you’re being shook awake and you’ve slept most of the day away.
Well according to new research from Australia, if you eat a high fat diet, it could be causing your acute case being really tired after you’ve eateness (that’s the technical term for it we’ve been informed).
But the research showed that people who consumed 135 grams of fat per day were 78% more likely to suffer excess daytime sleepiness than those who consumed 58 grams per day.
The author of the study Yingting Cao, Ph.D. said that if you eat a diet like this long enough, the overdose of fat can cause your gut to create different types of neurohormones which make your brain react more slowly.
This could be why you feel sleepy and sluggish after you eat but while it can cause sleepiness, it doesn’t improve the quality of your sleep, quite the opposite in fact.
It increases your risk of sleep apnea, a condition that causes you to stop breathing multiple times while you sleep and results in you waking from the deep cycle of your sleep.
The study advises that if you feel sleepy during the day despite getting seven hours of sleep at night, you should cut back on your fat intake and see if your daytime drowsiness abates.
According to some nutritionists around the world, your daily fat intake should be 20-30% of your calorie intake but then again everyone is different and you should adjust this to suit your own body.
So if you want to avoid the post-meal lull, it may be worth cutting down on the fats you eat.
