Eat a lettuce sandwich before bedtime helps you sleep easier!

This is a really weird bit of advice that someone told me about this weekend. It was apparently mentioned on a BBC documentary a couple of years ago as a way to help cure insomnia.

The advice on a programme about how to get to sleep faster and stay asleep suggested you eat a lettuce sandwich before bedtime.

So is there any science behind this or is it just an old wives tail?

We traced back and it appears that this is the basis of a very old English recipe for curing insomnia dating back to the eighteenth century.

So I asked Maureen Lumsden a nutritionalist friend of mine to explain why this should be?

It turns out that there is a lot of truth in this – but the sandwich needs to be made more specifically of the lettuce stem and it needs to be fresh. It’s the white latex from the plant’s stem — known as lettuce opium — that does the job.

Looking into it further Food expert and Author Anne McIntyre explains in her book Simple Home Remedies for Common Ailments that the substance in the plant’s stem “looks and works the same way as the opium poppy.”

So salad for supper tonight – At least it will be healthier than biscuits or a slice of toast!

Dan Kennedy has written a free ebook on how to Cure Your Insomnia. To download it visit www.cure-your-insomnia.com