Sweet Cheese Dreams

I've always been fond of the idea that eating cheese before bed causes nightmares. It just seems fitting that something so delicious, innocent, and gas-inducing could have such a powerful and terrifying effect on our subconscious. One of my good friends swears by this phenomenon, for she has the strangest nightmares after every over-indulgence of Olive Garden's Five Cheese Ziti al Forno.  It is, however, my sad duty to report that this is largely a myth...
Thankfully, as the saying goes, every cloud has a swiss lining (...too much?), and research shows that certain cheeses encourage certain dreams! Strange but true!


For whatever reason, the British really love their cheese and seem to be leading the scientific research of everything cheese. They even have something called The British Cheese Board (BCB), where they work to educate the public on the types & benefits of cheese, providing recipes, debunking myths, etc (imagine the type of business cards these people carry in their wallets). The BCB conducted a study where they asked a group of people to eat a little less than an ounce of cheese half an hour before bedtime for a week. They found that about one-third of the volunteers felt well rested and remembered their dreams. The BCB were like "no duh, cheese rocks!"  and then went on to dumb it down for the regulars, saying "there is an essential amino acid in milk called trytophan. Now trytophan is known to be something which is helpful in normalizing sleep and reducing stress levels." Sweet!
Additionally, they discovered that the types of cheeses one ate affected the types of dreams they had. Here's the break down:

Blue cheeses = vivid, wacky dreams
(One volunteer dreamt about a vegetarian crocodile who was upset because it couldn't eat children)
Cheddar cheeses = celebrity dreams
Cheshire = nice, dreamless sleep
Red Leicester = nostalgic dreams
Lancashire = work-related dreams

As you can see, the study was conducted with mostly British cheese. Anyone wanna play lab rat and test out the BCB's theories with American cheese?

You can listen to the short clip with Secretary of Cheese, Nigel White, on NPR here.

Don't cut the cheese just yet! I stumbled upon some great cheese sculptures on google.

Apparently it's a thing?

Ick! The only time cheese isn't appealing is when it has faces.

There is also a wonderful blog about cheese, After Cheese Comes Nothing---here. (The fellow who writes this also writes for Mental Floss, all the more reason to check it out.)

But whatever you do...