How Does Our Sleep Shot Work?
Why We Made This Product
It seems ‘sleep’ is everywhere you look these days. Whether it be the Joe Rogan podcast, the Amazon bestseller list or BBC Panorama, discussions around sleep, how well you slept, how little sleep you got last night or how much sleep you actually need are popping up everywhere.
The fact of the matter is, that sleep is critically important to our health. More important than we imagined, I believe. The more we learn about sleep, the more we begin to understand just how important it it for us. Remarkably, 60% of adults and 69% of children report sleep problems at least a few nights each week. Even more remarkably, most, if not all of these issues go untreated or unresolved, with the issue just compounding over time.
Sleep problems are associated with serious health issues such as weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and more. Short term, sleep issues are also associated with daytime sleepiness, lack of focus or attention, impaired memory, all of which can impact your performance in the workplace or school. Sleep issues are known to place greater stress on relationships (new parents) and impact overall quality of life.
More significantly, sleep issues are associated with a significant increase in the likelihood of a car accident, including minor scrapes all the way to major fatalities. Being completely frank, research has shown that sleep deprivation was found to produce a greater degree of overall driving impairment than alcohol intoxication. That is a chilling statistic.
If that is not enough to motivate you to invest more time and effort into your sleep habits then this final nugget of information may well do. Chronic sleep deprivation can significantly increase circulating cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol is known to increase the degradation, or breakdown of collagen. Collagen is the protein found in soft tissues such as skin, tendons and ligaments, responsible for keeping your skin strong and smooth. So sleep deprivation can quite literally impact the way you look and accelerate the ageing process.
Sleep is an absolutely essential part of our overall well being and prioritising not only enough sleep (duration), but enough high quality sleep should be atop of our agenda each day. Think about it practically, you spend X on a gym membership, X on supplements and XY on organic food. Sleep trumps almost all of these in regard to health benefits and takes the lowest actual investment.
The issues around sleep are widely reported, as are the benefits of good sleep. But too much concern over sleep can lead to sleep anxiety and insomnia, or simply sitting in bed trying to sleep, but keeping yourself awake with worry about not being able to fall asleep. A truly viscous cycle.
Why did we use these ingredients?
At B.Fresh we have a truly holistic approach to wellness. We realise that good food is just a very small part of a healthy lifestyle. However, we also understand the impact food can have on other aspects of our life, such as sleep. Research has shown that food can both positively and negatively impact our sleep. Highly processed and refined foods, caffeine and a low protein diet can quite literally keep you awake at night. Fortunately, however, there is also evidence to show that consuming foods such as tart cherries and kiwi, both rich sources of melatonin and serotonin respectively, both help you sleep.
The nutrition nerds at B.Fresh got to work developing a natural and functional shot that delivers a daily dose of nutrients known to benefit sleep. We have included tart cherries and kiwi, both of which supply sleep inducing nutrients, and some apple and orange. We have combined this base blend with L-tryptophan, a precursor to the neurotransmitter (or chemical signal) serotonin. Serotonin is often referred to as the ‘happy hormone’, it can improve mood and reduce anxiety, while also increasing feelings of lethargy and sleepiness. A specific dosage of L-tryptophan consumed alongside some carbohydrate shortly before bed can reduce the time taken to go to sleep and improve sleep quality. Within our sleep shot, we opted for natural honey, which increases the hormone insulin and allows the L-tryptophan to pass into the brain to make you feel sleepy a little quicker. The final ingredient within this specific sleep shot is chamomile, a herb containing apigenin, which is a bioflavonoid known to reduce anxiety and promote calmness, supporting you and your sleep.
We have left no stone unturned in our quest to develop and deliver a natural sleep shot to help you sleep. We cannot wait for you to try it.
“Sleep is so important to our health, general wellbeing and performance. It’s important that we understand what helps and hinders our sleep. Caffeinated drinks are probably the biggest concern. The half life of caffeine is 6 hours, so if you have a large coffee in the middle of the afternoon to get you through the remainder of the day, half of that caffeine will still be in your blood, keeping you awake while you are trying to sleep. So when consuming these sleep shots, consider adjusting the other nutrients that will hinder your sleep too, for maximum benefit"
https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article-abstract/80/2/306/6263432?redirectedFrom=fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5617749/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3133468/
