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# Two kiwis an hour before bed, and 55 more minutes of sleep
- URL: https://the-last-hour.ghost.io/two-kiwis-an-hour-before-bed-and-55-more-minutes-of-sleep/
- Published: 2026-10-23T23:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T23:00:00.000Z
- Description: Most of the people studied were women who slept badly. The result is big, and the reason is still a mystery.
- Author: Vanessa Leikvoll

Two kiwis an hour before bed, every night for four weeks. Total sleep time on a wrist monitor went up by about 55 minutes a night.

Twenty-two of the 24 people in that study were women, aged 20 to 55, who said they slept badly. That is about as close to this newsletter’s reader as sleep research gets.

Here is the strange part. Nobody has shown why it works.

Kiwifruit is rich in serotonin, and the researchers floated that as one reason. Serotonin from food does not cross into the brain, so that explanation is shaky at best.

Their other candidates were the fruit’s antioxidants, including a large dose of vitamin C, and its folate. The study did not measure any of these in the people eating the fruit.

So the mechanism is still open. What is not open is the timing: one hour before bed, every night.

More sleep is the outcome that shows up as energy. The study did not test how people felt during the day, so the energy part is the likely payoff, not a measured one.

---

The study, published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2011, tracked sleep with diaries and a wrist actigraph before and after four weeks of kiwis. On the wrist device, sleep efficiency rose from 93.9 to 95.9 percent alongside the extra time asleep.

In their diaries, people said they fell asleep in 20 minutes instead of 34\. The wrist device showed a smaller drop in time to fall asleep that was not statistically clear.

Now the limits. There was no comparison group, and Zespri, the kiwi company, funded the work and supplied the fruit.

💡

****Tonight:** Eat two medium green kiwis about an hour before lights out. Cut them in half and scoop them out with a spoon.  
Give it more than one night. The study ran four weeks, and that is the timeframe for judging it.

> Two kiwis, one hour, four weeks. Fifty-five more minutes asleep, and nobody yet knows exactly why.

Skip this if kiwi makes your mouth itch or you have a latex allergy, since the two allergies can go together.