Surely sometime they have told you that, if you have a glass of hot milk before going to bedIn addition to noticing a feeling of relaxation in the body, you will rest better.
For years scientists have affirmed these properties of milk and have explained that it was due to the tryptophan that this dairy contains.
However, a new group of experts has now discovered that there is a mixture of peptides in milk, known as tryptic casein hydrolyzate (CTH), which relieves stress and improves sleep of people.
In this research that has been published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, In the journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), experts have identified several specific peptides in HTC that could be used in the future as Natural medicine for sleep.
Milk vs. sedative medications
There are many people around the world who claim that on a daily basis they have trouble sleeping because sometimes it is difficult to fall asleep and it is often normal for these people to wake up many times in a row in the same night
Some of these people often go to a specialist to explain their symptoms. After diagnosis, these experts usually prescribe sedatives, such as benzodiazepines and zolpidem, to combat this insomnia that floods the nights of many people.
However, sedatives can cause side effects and there are even people who end up turning addicted to them. The truth is that many sedatives work by activating the GABA receptor, a protein in the brain that suppresses nerve signaling.
The effect of milk before going to sleep
Now the scientists who publish this research assure that they have discovered several natural peptides, or small pieces of proteins, that bind to the GABA receptor and have anxiolytic and sleep-enhancing effects.
In this way, as they state, when treating a cow’s milk protein, called casein, with the digestive enzyme trypsin, the mixture of peptides that improve sleep known as CTH is produced. Within this mix, a specific peptide known as a-Casozepine (a-CZP) has been identified that could be responsible for some of these beneficial sleep effects.
For this reason, Lin Zheng and Mouming Zhao, researchers in this study, wondered if it was possible to find other, perhaps more potent, peptides in HTC to improve sleep.
Thus, together with their colleagues, these researchers first compared the effects of HTC and a-CZP in mouse sleep tests, and found that HTC showed better sleep-enhancing properties than a-CZP alone. This result suggested that there are other sleep-promoting peptides in HTC as well as α-CZP.
They then used mass spectrometry to identify bioactive peptides released by HTC during simulated gastric digestion, and virtually examined these peptides for their binding to the GABA receptor and their ability to cross the blood-brain barrier.
Thus, once they tested these operations in mice, they saw that the number of mice that fell asleep quickly by about 25% and sleep duration by more than 400% compared to a control group.
However, experts explain that, in addition to this promising peptide in milk, it would be necessary to to explore others from HTC that could improve sleep through other avenues.
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