{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Mikkipedia","title":"I Was Wrong About Why Carbs at Dinner Help You Sleep","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1149,"description":"Episode Summary\nMikki has said many times — on this podcast, on other podcasts, and repeatedly on Instagram — that eating carbohydrate at dinner helps calm the nervous system, and that this is why people who feel wired at night sleep better when they add some back in. In this episode she corrects herself. Not on the advice, which she still gives and still sees work, but on the mechanism she has been attaching to it: insulin clearing branched-chain amino acids out of the bloodstream, tryptophan winning the competition at the blood-brain barrier, and the resulting serotonin and melatonin sedating you. Every step in that chain is real biochemistry, which is exactly why it sounds right. It just does not happen at the doses found in any meal she would actually recommend.\nFrom there she works through what is more likely going on. She covers the head-to-head trial that put carbohydrate, two proteins and a placebo up against each other before bed and found nothing; why the pre-sleep protein literature is muscle research rather than sleep research; the difference between an energy deficit and low energy availability; and the body of work on cognitive dietary restraint — the mental effort of not eating, which carries measurable physiological consequences independent of how much is actually eaten. She is careful throughout about how messy cortisol data is, and about which parts of it she thinks still stand. The practical conclusion is unchanged but better founded: if you are wired and under-eating relative to your training, it is probably the calories, and carbohydrate is usually the easiest thing to add back.\nKey Topics\nWhy the mechanism matters even when the advice is fine — Mikki's argument is that people do not just follow advice, they extend it using the mechanism you gave them, so an explanation that isn't real can cause problems in situations you never had in mind.\nThe tryptophan pathway, and where it breaks — the effect requires carbohydrate high enough and protein...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/5uUjJw6NUZC5FWMQgLCI47ibFa6tBB2C0z8A_feCZiY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8wNjI2/NTEwMjAyMWQ2M2Iy/ZjliYjA4ZGFhMTBh/N2E2Ni5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}