SNAP Cuts in Big Tax Bill Will Hit a Lot of Trump Voters Too
President Donald Trump's allies love to talk about the food we're eating here in the US: too sugary, too processed, too artificially dyed. What they're not talking about, though, is how many Americans don't have enough of it, whether it's healthy or not. If the Republicans get their way, the number of them will only go up.
Exactly how the right-leaning majorities in the House and Senate will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP, is being negotiated. But their intentions are clear: Shrink its reach, reduce the benefits of the people still on it, and leave it to the states to take the blame.
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Popular Salt Product Under Fire As Claims of 'Improper Levels of Heavy Metals' Mount
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Is Cheese Giving You Nightmares?
Credit - Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Images: Khosrork/Getty Images, Azure-Dragon/Getty Images, Timothy Tanuwidjaya—Getty Images) For centuries, folklore and popular wisdom have linked poor eating habits and indigestion to nightmares and restless sleep. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge at first dismisses the ghosts that torment him as mere dietary disturbances: 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato,' he says to one spectral visitor. 'There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" Earlier, Benjamin Franklin lamented that '[I]ndolence, with full feeding, occasions nightmares and horrors inexpressible; we fall from precipices, are assaulted by wild beasts, murderers, and demons, and experience every variety of distress.' In the early 20th century, cartoonist Winsor McCay made his name with his 'Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend' series, in which his protagonists suffers bizarre dreams and nightmares which they attributed to eating Welsh rarebit—a delicacy of spiced cheese on toast. A modest body of contemporary research has sought to explore the link between food and nightmares more empirically. The latest is a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology—finding that if you want to get your z's, you'd best limit the cheese. To conduct the current study, Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, and his colleagues surveyed 1,082 students at MacEwan University in Alberta. All of them completed a questionnaire about their diet, food sensitivities, sleep habits, dream recall, and more. 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Of the people who believed their diet was related to worse sleep overall, 30% were lactose intolerant. 'Nightmares are worse for lactose intolerant people who suffer severe gastrointestinal symptoms and whose sleep is disrupted,' said Nielsen in a statement that accompanied the release of the study. 'This makes sense because we know that other bodily sensations can affect dreaming.' One 2024 meta-analysis, for example, found that all manner of sensory experiences—including sounds, smells, flashing lights, physical pressure, and pain—can be incorporated into dreams when people are sleeping and investigators provide the stimulus. Food-related nightmares might also be linked to depression and anxiety, the researchers say; lactose-intolerance symptoms like bloating, cramping, and gas directly affect mood, which can carry over into sleep, powering bad dreams. 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