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A new burger with limited duration at Burger King has a particular selling point: it is supposed to give you nightmares.
Yes, according to a company press release, Burger King's Halloween-themed "Nightmare King" burger would be "clinically proven" to cause nightmares.
But in reality, the study that the chain of hamburgers had ordered to determine whether the nightmares caused by green beef and bacon burger was not designed to prove anything, clinically or not. And the little data available on food and nightmares suggests that fast food should reduce bad dreams. [11 Ways Processed Food Is Different from Real Food]
Marketing with science?
To show that his preparation for Halloween causes nightmares, Burger King commissioned Florida Sleep and Neuro Diagnostic Services Inc. to follow the sleep and dreams of 100 people who ate the hamburger before going to bed for 10 nights.
"According to previous studies, 4% of the population would experience nightmares every night," said Dr. Jose Gabriel Medina, sleep specialist, at the head of the study. "But [for people who slept] after eating King of nightmares, the data from the study indicate that the incidence of nightmares is multiplied by 3.5. "
Burger King attributed this phantasmagorical effect to the hamburger's "unique combination of protein and cheese," which, according to the company, disrupts REM sleep. It's the part of sleep when most dreams occur.
A Burger King publicist confirmed that all study participants had eaten the new burgers. This means there was no control group of people eating their usual diet before going to bed or even a group of people eating a regular hamburger, as opposed to the monstrosity of three Halloween meats. In the absence of control group, the study can not prove anything about the effect of the burger on nightmares.
Dreams and diet
So what does the current science of fast food and dreams say? Not much. There are very few studies on food and dreams. But research suggests that if anything, fast food removes nightmares.
A 2007 study in the journal Psychological Reports asked about 50 undergraduates to state their dreams and preferences for food. People who said they preferred fast foods, chips and other carbohydrates were less likely to say they remember their dreams than those who preferred organic foods. A larger study, published in 2015 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, surveyed nearly 400 students on sleep and food. She also revealed that people who reported unhealthy diets also reported relatively few bright dreams.
For nightmares in particular, the 2015 study found no link between diet and bad dreams. The 2007 study found that people who said they liked more junk food had fewer nightmares. [7 Mind-Bending Facts About Dreams]
According to the 2015 study, however, it is certain that fasting leads to more living dreams. Participants in this study who indicated that they went longer between meals or snacks during the day also reported more vivid dreams. This result could be due to the effects of fasting on the brain, the researchers wrote. Or, people who skipped meals did so because they slept late in the morning, which allowed them to sleep in an extra paradoxical sleep.
Still, many people believe that some foods, especially spicy foods or cheese, make bad dreams, wrote the authors of the 2015 study. Indeed, 11.5% of the participants in this study have stated to believe that their dreams were affected by the consumption of specific foods. Some foods contain nutrients that can theoretically affect sleep, the researchers wrote. These participants may have been right.
But, the researchers added, foods could also cause gastrointestinal disorders, leading to sleep disturbances and dreams. Scientists have also written that it is possible that people simply attribute their bad dreams to food randomly, as they already believed in the folklore that connects them.
In any event, Burger King is not the only commercial interest in trying to attract consumers by promising them that a product will infiltrate their dreams. In 2005, the British Cheese Board published a study stating that cheese does not cause nightmares. According to the study, different types of cheeses have sparked different types of dreams. Cheddar eaters, for example, have dreamed of celebrities.
This study has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal and probably is no more reliable than Burger King's. Unfortunately for science, he also did not investigate the main ingredient of Nightmare King, American cheese.
Originally published on Science live.
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