Can Burger King's "king nightmare" really give you bad dreams?

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.

The fast-food chain has commissioned a sleep study to reinforce claims that the green meat hamburger has bad dreams. Needless to say, this study was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. And the little data on food and peer-reviewed nightmares suggests that, the least we can say, fast food should actually 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 entrusted Florida Sleep and Neuro Diagnostic Services Inc. with the sleep and dream follow-up of 50 people, 25 of whom ate Nightmare King, a chicken from beef and bacon, do not. According to a Burger King reporter, seven of the participants who ate the sandwich reported nightmares, compared to two who did not eat it.

"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.

Dreams and diet

So what does the scientific community say about fast food and dreams? 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.

More general eating habits could affect dreams, said Tore Nielsen, a psychologist who does research on dreams at the University of Montreal and co-authored the 2015 study. People who report a binge eating or emotional eating also reported more disturbed dreams in this survey, Nielsen told Live Science. (It is possible that the underlying emotions at the base of these eating habits also give rise to weird or frightening dreams.)

Yet many people believe that certain foods, such as spicy foods or cheese, cause bad dreams, Nielsen and his colleagues discovered. Indeed, 11.5% of participants in this study reported believing 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.