2005年NPR美国国家公共电台九月-Study: Eating Cheese Can Alter Your Dream

Somewhere on the right frontier between science and sleep and a hunk of cheddar cheese, we found our next guest.

My name is Nigel White, I'm Secretary of the British Cheese Board. The misperception has being that eating cheese before you go to bed gives you nightmares. We want to see whether or not we could approve or disapprove 1 this myth.

And this is where science comes in. Tell us about the study.
Well, we asked for a number of volunteers to eat a small piece of cheese about half an hour before they went to bed.
How small?
Well, the amount of cheese was two thirds of an ounce.
Not a lot of cheese.
Not a lot of cheese, and the idea was they would keep a diary of the type of sleep that they had, and also if they did dream, could they remember what they dreamed about.
And what did you find?
And they did this for a week, and we found that about three quarters of everybody said they slept well every night. And most of those people could remember the dreams they had, so that was pretty encouraging and the science of that we think is that there is an essential amino acid in milk called tryptophane Now, tryptophane is known to be something which is helpful in normalizing sleep and reducing stress levels. That seemed to make sense to us. What was really wacky was the type of cheese that people were eating seemed to give them different types of dreams.
And this would be consistent. In other words, the cheese was the determinative factor over there.
Well, as far as we can tell, what we found was those who were eating blue cheese, blue Stilton were coming up with some quite vivid dreams that I'm sure the sleep psychologists would have a field day with, in terms of interpreting.
Can you share some with us or you are bound by science cheese privilege
Yeah, one of the volunteers said that she dreamed of a vegetarian 2 crocodile who was upset because it couldn't eat children. Another one dreamed that they had soldiers fighting with each other with kittens instead of guns.
I would think you could consider those two examples you just gave us bad dreams. No?
AH, not nightmarish, I mean nightmares are where you've been chased by somebody or about to be pushed off a cliff or you fall off a cliff, or you get run over by a car. But these weren’t scary, they were just wacky.
Ok, well that was Stilton. What other cheeses did you put to the test.
Cheddar was the most decent cheese in this country and there seemed be a theme there where the volunteers were dreaming of celebrities 3. We have another famous cheese called Cheshire. The people who ate Cheshire said they had nice sleeps but they were dreamless.
Were you only testing British cheese here?
Yes, and the other cheeses we did were red Lester and Lancashire. With the red Lester it seemed to be very nostalgic dreams that people were having about things that happened in their childhood or with their families. As far as the Lancashire was concerned, they seemed to dream about work. Actually, one even dreamed of being the prime minister of the country, well I can assure you it wasn’t the primer minister who took part.
Well, Mr White, thanks for talking with us about your researching into dreams and cheese.
Marissa, it’s a pleasure.
Nigel White, secretary of the British Cheese Board. He admits he might have a vast interest in the study, but insists the science is good.