Study: Eating Cheese Can Alter Your Dreams

way overtired and getting goofy..

so what better thing to do than start Googling whatever comes to mind?

such as "eating cheese", then clicking "I'm Feeling Lucky"!

I wonder what food (if any) promotes nightmares. I dont mean to take this off topic, but I really enjoy nightmares, but rarely have them. They are always the most vidid and exciting dreams I have, when I remember them. They are like a really cool scary movie and I get to be the star.

But certain types of cheeses causing different types of dreams? And they dont cause nightmares. I guess all those that keep dream journals need to start keeping food logs too.

I thought the cheese thing was pretty well known. If anyone imparts their 'wierd dreams' the standard response seems to be 'did you eat cheese before you went to bed?'.

I wish I could get a crapload of grants to perform these useful studies to prove these theories though!

I dream of cheese when I eat mushrooms!

Mmmmmm...

OMG Cosmo that's a great piccie! I'm gonna be tracking down the image source right now. That's the kind of thing I see not only in my dreams, but my waking hours.

I dunno what foods might do it, but jsut before bed try watching 'Killer Klowns From Outerspace' or Stephen King's 'It', or really, anything with clowns in it... that's enough to give me nightmares.

-Ghoti

I never ever eat pizza after 4 PM.

It always gives me disturbing nightmares (must be the mushrooms).

Woo Hoo! Pizza, Rum & Coke and Cheetos for desert.

"Killer Klowns From Outerspace" on TiVo while attending an event in Second Life.

Now that's what I call a Friday night of entertainment.

Gives me dreams like this....

I heard this broadcast; the study was intended to investigate the establish belief, Kris. It was suggested that a component of cheese tended to stimulate part of the brain that deals with dreams. The type of cheese did consistently produce varying types of dreams and I recall that bleu cheese was the one which produced the vividly bizarre yet not nightmarish ones. I think the study used British cheeses so I wasn't familiar with some of the types. Maybe one of our helpful (or bored) Brits could do some research here and provide a conversion for the rest of us.

Oh I don't think there is an equivalent for a lot of our cheeses. We do some really odd shit with cheese!

Being overheated while sleeping will give one nightmares. Vodka would give me nightmares if I drank it, which I wouldn't.

Okay, I believe that. I had a really vivid nightmare once that I was in a house fire. I woke up drenched in sweat!

Including adding mustard or chilli to it... and that's for starters.
Probably the best known blue cheese from the UK is Stilton... and yeah I guess it would work. Thing is, the veins in that sort of cheese are caused by moulds - carefully cultured ones perhaps - and well, penicillin comes from similar moulds. They play with your head, like those mushrooms.

I think the answer is... Eat more cheese, experiment!

*** Warning: Eating large quantities of cheese can damage your waistline.

Ya know, I knew that, but I never really thought about it... I'm chronically allergic to penicillin... been told that the smallest dose could kill me. And yet I lurve blue veined cheeses!

Meh. Stilton is worth gambling with your life for *shrug*

Couldn't agree more.

Raw cacao gives me unusual and vividly colorful dreams. The other day I ate a fistful of cacao seeds before sleeping and dreamed about this larval insect made out of muscle and bone with no skin, with a similar shape as ladybug larvae (but with a lot more legs), but it crawled through loose soil in the woods and had a prehensile tail. It was also very wet.

Here's what ladybug larvae look like:

I will categorically deny that I wrote this bit of seriousness amidst cheese dreams, but the answer is likely yes.

When studying biology in a former life, the question of why so many plants had so many drug like properties seemed a bit too coincidental, to be ummm... a coincidence. From willow bark (no not Willow's bark, there, I'm redeemed) to tobacco, coffee, coca, digitalis, hemp, Amanita muscaria, and so on, why? Well the answer was known, I just never asked.

Plants have a problem: they don't like to be eaten by animals but can't run away. They can make thorns and such, or they can engage in chemical warfare with those who would eat them. The plants and plantoids listed above have had hundreds of millions of years to evolve exactly such defenses. To us omnivorous big humans with large livers (for breaking down toxins) some of these toxins aren't so toxic; to a caterpillar, the nicotine in a tobacco leaf can be paralyzing if not fatal. Why the preference for psychotropism? Well, if you are going to mess with animal chemistry, neurons one of the spots where the plant may get more bang for its chemical buck, so to speak.

Even fruits, which evolved to be eaten - to have their seeds carried elsewhere and dumped (so to speak) in a nice patch of fertilizer - are wasting their energies if eaten before the seeds are mature have their own favorite weapon, tannic acid. An immature apple loads up with tannin; when it is mature it pulls the tannin and often advertises its willingness to be eaten by a conspicuous color change (e.g. green to red) thus the stories of children getting ill from eating too many green apples are not just fiction. We cannot eat oak leaves at any time because they are always loaded with a nauseating batch of tannin.

A related phenomenon is why penicillum bread molds should be so nasty to bacteria? Another happy accident? Nope, territoriality: a penicillum mold has found a tasty meal and doesn't want to share it with bacteria, what to do? Exude poisons that break down bacterial cell walls; mold party time! Various mushrooms do the same sort of thing. the musroom is the "flower" of a fungus and doesn't want to be eaten. Not that anyone here has ever tried this, but if you had eaten an A. muscaria (a.k.a. "''shrooms" and didn't know what to expect would you likely ever eat one again?

More territoriality strikes: some batcteria has happened upon a tasty piece of dead animal and doesn't want to share. How can it keep itself out of the bellies of bigger animals? It can exude emetic toxins, thus ensuring it won't be in the belly of an animal for very long. Giving off noxious odors that helps them from getting munched in the first place can only help.

Why did humans choose to ferment their grape juice or add mold to their milk when refrigeration was thousands of years off? Because the yeasts in wine and molds in cheese which we can tolerate look after their own interests by warring against other microbes which we can't tolerate. Do cheese molds have accidental low-level psychotropic effects? Probably. These phenomena are also related to pregnancy ("morning" sickness in pregnant women, but you'll have to ask bout that one.

It's a farking jungle out there.

Ok - I'm hooked, line and sinker. I'm personally facinated by this stuff and I'm asking. How is it related to morning sickness?

(edited to add - have you ever thought about giving classes on this stuff in SL? I for one would attend, heck, I'd even create the plants for you.)

Great read, Malachi!

-Ghoti

Oh, Rose, you know I'm a sucker for flattey. So here goes a brief synopsis, but the definitive work for the "New Yorker" or "Atlantic Monthly" (i.e. literate but not particularly jargon loaded) type reader is Dr. Margie Profet's book Pregnancy Sickness which has been blisfully retitled by its publisher from "Protecting Your Baby To Be" which had ensured that almost no one would pick it off the shelf.

Profet's research was based around a really simple question: "given the abundance of natural dietary toxins and their teratogenic effects on a developing embryo, should we see adaptatons in the human female to reduce those effects?" Her answer was a resounding and essentially unrefutable "yes".

Here are some observations that many pregnant women have experienced or at least know someone who has experienced. Pregnancy sickness is almost always limited to the first trimester of pregnancy. Women in their first trimester have an extremely heightened sense of smell and have a noted aversion to foods that they formerly (and subsequently) enjoy. Even thinking of an aversive food is sometimes sufficient to generate nausea.

What's so special about the first trimester? Well that is when the developing embryo/fetus is most susceptable to environmental toxins as it is laying down its initial structures. Furthermore, the caloric needs of a first trimester fetus (and mother) are rather small compared to the later trimesters which are largely dominated by calorically demanding growth. Why the hightened sensitivity and nausea? Well, two great ways to keep toxins out of the bloodstream is for mom to not eat them in the first place, or to purge them once ingested.

Does this sensitivity apply to all foods? No, it is quite targeted. Strongly aromatic foods or naturally bitter foods like coffee are more likely to trigger nausea than more benign foods. Bitterness is the easier to describe; many natural toxins are decidedly bitter for two reasons, they have a characteristic alkeloid group on them which is readily detected by our nose and tongue chemical analysis systems. This is no accident either, as our senses have likely evolved to detect these poisons. Indeed, our tongue is capable of detecting 4 or five tastes only, bitterness is sensed on the back of the tongue and is on the order of 50_000 times more responsive than our other tastes (that is, you get the same level of reponse from the bitterness sensors than you do the sweet detectors for 1/50_000th the amount of chemical). Aromatic foods are also characteristic of natural toxins; brocolli which is loaded with the teratogenic oxalic acid is a good example. Even spicy foods, which are prized by adults (but not children nor pregnant women) in particularly disease laden climes have both antimicrobial and teratogenic properties.

The older term "morning sickness" is being supplanted in the literature by "pregnanacy sickness" as any woman who has had morning sickness all day can likely tell you was a misnomer.

This is not mere armchair speculation by Dr. Profet, it is well supported by much cross-cultural research and testing. One example that springs to mind is that in pre-industrial societies, women have long known that eating clay can help ameliorate pregnancy sickness. As any modern medical text will show you, clay is a simple and effective means of binding up (chelating) environmental toxins and preventing them from entering the blood.

This post has been a very brief gloss over the work of Dr. Profit and other researchers who have studied this phenomenon. Please see the book cited above as she explains her work far better than I do.

I'll also take this opportunity to toss out my long standing but completely untestable conjecture which should appeal to the geeks out there and bring the thread back to dreams. I have yet to meet a pregnant woman (or formerly pregnant woman) who hasn't reported vivid dreams usually involving babies. These also seem to occur early in pregnancy (sometimes prior to the woman knowing she is pregnant) where confounds like I'm sleeping lightly because this kicking bowling ball in my uterus are absent. If the mind is software (which is pretty widely accepted) and that software ought modify according to changes in circumstances (also pretty accepted) and the PDP model of mind function and training is somewhat close to reality, what better way to retool the mind for the upcoming demands of motherhood than by running training scenarios across it in the form of dreams? Some recent research has lent support to this conjecture (e.g. cats running "test patterns" across their retinas in utero to help wire up the visual brain) but pregnant humans usually don't take too kindly to having probes stuck into their brains. So once again the pursuit of knowledge is hampered by people's reluctance to let me stick probes in their heads.

Ahhh. The power of Cheese.

Maybe I should try slipping my boss a few slices.

This thread makes me want to eat fungus voraciously.

Facinating stuff Malachi!

Also Thank you for this:

I always suspected that brocolli was poison.

Seriously though, this makes a lot of sense. People sometimes need to stop and listen to what their bodies are telling them I think, the body seems to have a natural defense against our occasional stupidity or carelessness (good thing too or I would not have made it to 50).

Hey Rose, could you please tell me why you and so many americans seem to dislike broccoli. It's like the official veggie of Portugal, and I love it to bits! Heck, I have never met anyone who hated broccoli... they go great with cod

I like broccoli...

I'm so glad you all discovered the wonder that is cheese.