Moe Schlachter is a registered nutritionist and dietician who obtained his Masters of Nutrition degree at Texas Woman’s University. He is a Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist (CDCES formerly known as CDE). Moe has been recognized by the Texas Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as Young Dietician of the Year in 2015 and with the Dietician in Media Award in 2020.
Today, he joins the show to discuss the connection between sleep and nutrition and recommendations for balancing the two in order to achieve sound mental health.
Key Takeaways
01:25 – Moe Schlachter joins the show to discuss the relationship between nutrition and sleep
03:20 – Sleep disturbance, melatonin, and tryptophan
08:11 – Why it’s difficult to pinpoint or zero in on one food or nutrient to improve sleep
09:31 – Sleep and nutrition in adolescence
10:51 – Separating food from sleep and a healthy cutoff time for caffeine
13:30 – Foods to avoid and foods that help with inflammation issues
14:44 – How to recognize disordered eating
16:22 – Advice for new parents looking to improve their sleep
17:35 – Sleep debt and catching up on sleep
18:39 – Recommendations for balancing sleep, nutrition and mental health
21:19 – Dr. Flowers thanks Moe for joining today’s show to share his expertise and let’s listeners know where they can connect with him
Resources Mentioned
JFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com/
JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655
Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen
**The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests is their opinion and is not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.
🎙️🎙️🎙️
Podcast Production & Marketing by FullCast
—
Listen to the podcast here
Balancing Sleep, Nutrition & Mental Health With Moe Schlachter [Episode 68]
I’m joined by our guest and my good friend, Moe Schlachter. He’s a registered nutritionist and dietitian, and I want everybody to know, first of all, I respect Moe’s work so much, and I’m so glad he’s a part of our team here at J Flowers Health Institute. Moe obtained his master’s of nutrition degree from Texas Woman’s University, and he is a certified diabetes care and education specialist. Moe was recognized by the Texas Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics as Young Dietitian of the Year in 2015 and with the Dietitian and Media Award in 2020. I always enjoyed telling people, and one time I was in Los Angeles and turned on NBC News, nightly news, and Moe was there as a nutritional expert for NBC News. Moe, I’m so glad you decided to do this with us. Thanks so much.
Thank you so much, Dr. Flowers. It’s always great to sit down with you. It’s great to be part of the team too. I’m excited about this topic as well.
I’m super excited about it as well. Having the opportunity to discuss this. We are talking about nutrition and sleep and how those two things are intertwined. Why don’t you talk a little bit about nutrition and sleep?
I find that sleep ends up being the least sexy part of the wellness picture. Not a lot of people are going out there bragging about how many hours of sleep they got. People are taking photos of their food. They are talking about hours at the gym, but sleep is in the shadows, and sleep is super important. About 70 million people in this country have some sleep deficiency or disorder that renders sleep deficiency, and the cost is big. It can contribute to heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and stroke. It affects mood, productivity, and safety. Sleep is super important, but it’s not something that is very well talked about. I’m glad that we are having a chat about it.
“About seventy million people in this country have some kind of sleep deficiency. It can contribute to heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and stroke. It affects mood, productivity, and safety. So, sleep is super important.”
Understanding Sleep Disturbances
I am too, and I wanted to ask you. I believe you said sleep disturbance. What is sleep disturbance, or what do you consider sleep disturbance?
Sleep disturbance has a lot of different flavors to it. It can be sleep latency or someone having a hard time falling asleep. It can be not falling into the depth of sleep that’s needed for recovery. It could be waking up multiple times in the middle of the night. It can be waking up in the morning and not having felt rested. There are lots of different ways that people can have a sleep disturbance, and all of them can contribute to some. All of them will have some health impact and it’s super important to get that right.
I’m one of those people that I have to have a minimum of six hours. If I have less than six hours of sleep, the next day I can get up in the morning and get going, but around noon or 1:00, I feel my hands slightly trembling and I can feel this overwhelming fatigue. I go to bed super early when that happens to me when I get less than six hours. I have always been one of those people. I’m not a late-night person. I like to get up early in the morning and I go to bed typically around 10:00, or 10:30. I’ll try anyway. If I don’t do that, my whole day, the next day is off, and that affects my patient care. It affects communication at the office because I don’t feel like as much communication with staff and I will shut my door and do my own thing.
I don’t nap during the day. I can’t do that. It is interesting as I was growing up, my grandfather was a surgeon and I went to elementary and junior high school near their home down in South Texas. Every single day at lunch, I would walk two blocks to my grandparents’ house and have lunch with them, and they would always have a super nutritious lunch. This is in the ‘70s. After lunch, my grandfather would go take a 45-minute nap and then get up and go back to the hospital and work all afternoon. He knew the importance of nutrition and sleep as well. How does nutrition help sleep?
I grew up in New York City and I consider you the doctor who never sleeps. I find it surprising that you find time to get six hours. I know you pour everything you have into your patients and your clients. Six hours, the recommendation from the Sleep Foundation. It’s maybe 7 to 8 hours. As you said, once you are off on sleep deficiency or once you are behind on your sleep, it has this subtle domino effect where you are not as productive, and then you try to chase it with some, get some energy from somewhere. Sometimes it’s caffeine and that can interrupt sleep the next day. Stopping that cycle, catching up on sleep,p or getting to bed on time is number one.
When we think about nutrition and sleep, it is determined by a lot of different factors. There are hormones involved. We respond to different stimuli in the environment. I want to go through some of those. Melatonin is a hormone that the brain produces in response to darkness. It helps keep our circadian rhythm. It’s something that helps us stay in a state of relaxed wakefulness, if you will. It is that pre-bedtime state of zen.
Once we are in that position, our bodies are able to wind down and fall asleep. Once we fall asleep, the effects of sleep start to work right away. After about a minute of sleep, there are changes in the brain. The body temperature starts to drop, the muscles start to relax, and we see those changes almost immediately. Getting into a state of restfulness is number one.
Serotonin is another chemical that contributes to restfulness and relaxation that helps us get into a restful state. Tryptophan is a nutrient that is a precursor to serotonin, and it’s converted the body converts, the brain converts tryptophan into serotonin. Having enough tryptophan in the diet is going to help us have enough serotonin so we can relax enough to fall asleep.
Valerian is another nutrient that is an extract from a root that can help us fall asleep and increase our sleep quality. Ashwagandha is a supplement that can help us improve sleep as well. Foods like cherries and kiwis have different chemicals that help us boost the production of melatonin and can help us fall asleep too. There are lots of different things that we can do, things that we can eat, things that we can take that’ll help our body be better positioned for sleep.
“Valerian is a root extract that can help improve sleep quality. Foods like cherries and kiwis boost melatonin production and can aid in falling asleep.”
There are so many people I know who would listen to you saying this about tryptophan and everything else. You find tryptophan in turkey. The cherries and everything else you talked about. Many people would go out and buy every one of those and take them at night. Do you need one of these or do you need a combination of these? What’s your recommendation?
When it comes to nutrition science, it’s sometimes difficult to isolate specific nutrients or specific foods because we, as a being, rely on so many different nutrients to support life function. If we are trying to zero in on sleep and isolate those nutrients, we can’t control for other nutrients that we need for other life functions. It can be tricky to try to zero in on one food or one nutrient or another because there isn’t the science to back up focusing on one thing. There are studies that show that eating a couple of kiwis about an hour before bed can help you fall asleep faster. That’s something that was found in the research.
“It’s difficult to isolate specific nutrients because we rely on many for life functions. That makes it tricky to focus solely on one food for better sleep.”
The combination is a good focus. When you think about the turkey, the cherries, or you think about all the other nutrients that we need. Focusing on a comprehensive diet that feeds the body and all the body systems is the best approach, but knowing that there are some ingredients that can give you an edge when it comes to falling asleep can be helpful. When planning what fruit you might have or what protein you might have, you might steer toward the ones that are backed by science in helping you fall asleep.
Let’s talk a little bit about sleep and nutrition as it relates to young adults, like adolescents. How important is nutrition and sleep to that population?
It’s a stage of life that is super important because the body is still growing and developing. That’s the stage of life where we are preparing for the adult body that we are going to have for years and years and years. It’s the stage of life where sleep is undervalued as well. It’s something that is a tough sell to a teenager. It is the stage where muscle growth, brain development, and sexual development. That’s where sleep is so important for an adolescent because if they are running behind, they are missing out on the activities that promote development. They are missing out on the rhythms to get the nutrients that they need to grow and develop. It is super important for an adolescent, especially, to get these things because once you hit adulthood, once you hit about 24 years old, you are in the body that you have. The best thing you can do is maybe maintain it, but in adolescence, that’s your last opportunity.
You are feeding your body and your brain.
That is correct. A healthy brain development is going to set them off into healthy patterns. It’ll put them in a better position for their career, and for relationships. This is super important.
Timing Meals To Enhance Sleep
Another thing is I always notice that if I eat late in the evening, it’s more difficult for me to fall asleep. I feel too full, or I may sometimes even develop heartburn these days, which is unfortunate. Is there a correlation between eating time, nutrition, and sleep? Are there certain foods we should avoid as it gets past 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening?
Separating food from bedtime by at least an hour, but I would recommend more like 1 hour and 1.3, 2 hours at least is going to be very helpful. Once the food is eaten, the stomach is going to be working on it for quite a bit. Blood flow is going to be sent to the digestive system to help absorb and transport the nutrients. Separating food or eating from bedtime by about two hours is going to help a person stay in a relaxed state.
There isn’t going to be all that churning going on. There isn’t going to be a decrease in blood flow, although that can make someone tired. We want the body in a position where the blood flow can help bring nutrients around the body to repair tissue, to reset hormones. If it’s working on digestion, it’s occupied in that area. I would say certainly separating bedtime and food by about two hours is going to help. Foods that trigger heartburn or acid reflux are going to interrupt sleep. A person’s going to be getting up and down trying to chase those symptoms down. I would say separating food and sleep by two hours.
When I was in my 20s and even in my early 30s, I could have dinner and then we could sit around the table and have a cup of coffee and I’d fall asleep whenever I wanted to fall asleep. Nowadays, there’s no way I can have coffee after dinner or I’m not going to sleep. What’s the correlation and what’s the importance of either drinking caffeine early or not drinking caffeine later? Where do you see a typical healthy cutoff time for caffeine?
I would say the half-life of caffeine, I believe, is about six hours in the body or so. Cutting it off by 1:00 PM or so can put someone in a better position in the evening. I have a very similar experience. When I was younger, I could drink caffeine, I could fall asleep. As I get older, a little caffeine in the afternoon or evening, and I’m wired, and it’s very hard to fall asleep. I would say cutting off caffeine by about 1:00 PM or so if you are finding that caffeine is keeping you up, but if you are okay with it, if it isn’t interrupting your sleep, if you are able to fall asleep, then caffeine shouldn’t be a detractor for you.
“Cut off caffeine by about 1 p.m. if you find it keeps you up. Otherwise, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
Something that I have a passion for, obviously, and that I specialize in, is working with people with long-term chronic pain, and, as you and I have talked about historically, a lot of pain is caused by inflammatory issues. What foods would you suggest nutritionally that people either stay away from if they have pain, or ongoing physical pain, and what foods help with anti-inflammatory nutrition in the body?
Getting back to cherries or cherry extracts, kiwis those foods have melatonin in them. They also have antioxidants. Sleep is a great weapon to combat these effects as well, but those foods are the ones that you want to stick with. Those are the feel-good foods. They are going to help boost your sleep, and help you relax, which is going to have an impact on the pain experience as well. The sleep that you get from eating these foods is going to improve your mood, which is also going to help. The antioxidants are going to keep the oxidative stress in the body very low, and having something sweet like cherries or kiwis in the evening usually is a great way to end your food or your nutrition intake for the day. It works behaviorally as well.
Another thing that we treat at J Flowers Health Institute is disordered eating, and you have been a critical component and provider for us in that area of specialty. That is part of what we do here. Talk to our audience a little bit about disordered eating and recommendations and how to recognize it and how families that may be reading, or parents may be reading, or friends how they can talk to their family and friends that they see that may have an eating disorder.
Working with you side by side on these disordered eating conditions. We have found, pretty consistently, that when there’s disordered eating, there’s also disordered sleep. We have folks who come in and they are up all night and sleep some in the day. It is a cycle. Starvation makes it harder to sleep. There’s more anxiety, there’s less restfulness, there’s less relaxation, and then that promotes even more anxiety and it makes it harder and harder to eat. It’s a cycle that devolves.
“When there’s disordered eating, there’s often disordered sleep. It’s a cycle that can lead to more anxiety and less relaxation.”
When it comes to treating this condition, getting the nutrients that are needed for the body to get back to itself or the brain to get back to itself, to get from a state of panic to a state of calm, is going to help the individual latch onto treatment, but it’s also going to help them get into a better sleep cycle. It’s going to help them heal, make better treatment decisions, take more chances in therapy, and it’s going to flip that spiral upside down and elevate them to a place of wellness and healing.
Advice For New Parents On Sleep
Continuing along with the sleep thoughts, what’s your advice? I have some friends who are brand new parents who are up late at night and up all night long, up and down. What’s your advice for new parents in sleep?
I would say don’t do what I did, which was turn to my wife after like the third week of our first child and tell her like, “Aren’t we lucky that our daughter is sleeping through the night?” She looked at me and said, “No, she isn’t. You are sleeping through the night.” I would say, to know your limits, communicate, and try to get some scheduling. Work with professionals and providers if your resources are depleting, but getting children on a good schedule, getting yourselves on a good schedule, and having a good plan can help set expectations, and catch up on sleep when you know you are not going to get it.
If you are taking a 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM shift, know that you probably need to get to bed a little bit earlier. Get the total volume of sleep that you need if you know you are sleeping and your spouse is going to be awake. Making sure that you are not going to be disturbed, finding a place for you to make sure you get your sleep so that both of you aren’t running ragged. These are some things that you can do to protect your sleep during this critical time.
Another question about catching up on sleep. People will often say, “I worked overtime and I didn’t get enough sleep, and so this weekend I’m going to get caught up on my sleep.” Can you get caught up in your sleep?
To a degree, you might be able to. There are these concepts of sleep debt, so you can catch up some on sleep and if your body is tired and you fall asleep and then you wake up when your body tells you to wake up, it’s your body telling you it needed some sleep, but you cannot correct for a long pattern of chronic sleep deficiency. Whether it’s caused by a condition or it’s caused by not setting the right regimen or rules for yourself, it’s something that over time the effects can accumulate, and there isn’t this magic catch-up system that you can undo those things. Knowing where you are at, knowing what you are shooting for about maybe 7 hours minimum or maybe 10% more than you have at baseline is the thing that anyone can do.
“You cannot undo a long pattern of chronic sleep deficiency. Over time, the effects accumulate.”
Balancing Health: Sleep, Nutrition, And Mental Well-Being
Something that we talk a lot about as a clinical team here that you are a part of, is the vicious cycle of lack of sleep, depression, anxiety, poor nutrition for those who have pain, and increased pain. It seems like people bounce back and forth. The poorer the nutrition is, the less sleep people get, the less sleep people get, the more anxiety and depression they have. What’s your recommendation for a healthy, balanced, thriving life when you are balancing sleep, nutrition, and mental health?
When it comes to where treatment starts, it’s jumping in with nutrition first. When nutrition is deficient, if there’s clinical malnutrition assessed and addressed which is something that we do very well here we go with nutrition first because the body is only made out of food. It’s the corniest saying in the world, but the truth is, under a microscope, there’s only one thing going in. There’s only one thing our body’s made out of, and it is food and it’s always been that way. It’s been that way from fetal development through life. The only thing our body is made of is food. When we look at the condition of the body, we look at the condition of the brain, and we know that there’s a nutritional deficiency, the most straightforward thing to do is to correct that, to put the body back in a whole position.
Once the body’s back in a whole position, we can treat, we can enhance sleep, we can enhance mood, we can do therapy, and we can have the energy to have the conversations that we need to have, but without that, we are trying to compensate for a body that isn’t at full capacity. Getting off that cycle is jumping in with nutrition first, getting the person whole, and then prioritizing the next thing on the list and once you stop the cycle, a person feels much better. They have more confidence, they are able to see the light. They are able to see a life ahead of them where pain is reduced, where anxiety is managed, where mood is improved, and that motivates them to take more and more steps.
The most important thing I heard throughout this whole episode is you say the body is made up of food. Food and water here, and that’s so true, and we don’t think about it. When you come into J Flowers for a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation, you are a huge part of that. Assessing that food that people are not eating or drinking water, and helping us put together a proper set of diagnoses, and we all want to remind everybody that a clear diagnosis is the key to the most effective treatment, the most effective treatment. Moe, I can’t thank you enough for being here. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but please share this on your social media, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, and everything else out there on social media where you can find us. Moe, thanks so much.
I know everyone knows someone who’s having trouble with sleep. If not, anyone who’s reading this may be having it for themselves. There is something in this conversation that can help someone. I do encourage you to share it.
Final Thoughts And How To Reach Moe
One other thing I forgot, and I want to have people be able to reach out directly to you as well, for nutrition consultation and help. How do people find Moe?
You can go to Houston Family Nutrition. You can find me here through J Flowers, and you can email me.
I’m so glad we found you and you are part of our team.
I’m glad to be here. This is great.
Have a great day.
Thank you. You too.
