Overview

• Sensational headlines claiming cheese causes nightmares have been recalibrated by fact-checks showing links apply primarily to lactose-intolerant undergraduates experiencing gastrointestinal symptoms.
• A survey of over 1,000 MacEwan University students examined dietary habits, sleep quality and dream recall, with roughly one in five participants attributing disturbing dreams to dairy and nearly a third to sweets.
• Mediation analyses revealed that bloating and stomach pain at night explain the increased frequency and intensity of nightmares among those with lactose intolerance.
• Researchers acknowledge that reliance on self-reported data, a single-university sample and correlational design limit the ability to generalize findings or establish causation.
• To address these gaps, the Université de Montréal team plans randomized cheese-versus-control ingestion experiments to directly test how dairy impacts sleep and dream experiences.