Cure snoring and sleep apnea without losing weight

If you snore loudly, most likely you have underlying sleep apnea—a potentially life-threatening condition.

For a long time, being overweight and obese has been considered the #1 cause of sleep apnea. And the solution is therefore to lose weight. Makes sense, right?

A new study published in ERJ Open Research turns this traditional wisdom on its head. As it reveals how a simple diet change (that has nothing to do with weightless) may drastically improve sleep apnea.

The study used information from 14,210 people who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They all shared their typical food intake via a questionnaire.

Based on their diets, participants were put into three groups:

- those who ate a lot of healthy plant foods like fruits, veggies, whole grains, nuts, and legumes.

- those who ate a lot of animal foods like meat, eggs, fish, and dairy

- those who ate lots of unhealthy plant foods like refined grains, potatoes, sugar-sweetened drinks, sweets, desserts, and salty foods.

The researchers then checked who was more likely to have sleep apnea.

This is what they discovered:

1. Those who ate healthy plant-based foods had a 19% lower chance of having sleep apnea than those who didn’t eat much of them.

2. Those who ate a lot of unhealthy plant foods had a 22% higher chance of having sleep apnea.

3. Vegetarians, meaning those who consumed dairy and eggs but not meat, had a 16% lower risk.

4. Men could get away with more unhealthy plant food than women could, with their respective risks for sleep apnea from unhealthy plant-based diets increasing by 13 and 42%.

5. Women benefited more from healthy plant foods than men did, with their respective risks for sleep apnea declining by 23 and 10% while on a healthy plant-based diet.

The researchers guessed that the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in healthy plant-based foods reduced inflammation, which may have enabled them to prevent sleep apnea.

This study is important because it shows that not just losing weight, but also eating better quality foods, can help with this sleep breathing disorder.

But not everyone wants to go vegan (and that’s not enough anyways to cure snoring and sleep apnea), so why not do something easier and more powerful: Simple throat exercises, found here, can heal both snoring and sleep apnea in as little as 3 minutes…