“I ate 6–8 almonds every day and slept through the night”... Baek Ji-yeon praises “this” as a “natural sleeping pill” [Health Talk]

[Financial News] Broadcaster Baek Ji-yeon drew attention by praising almonds as a “natural sleeping pill,” saying she slept soundly for a week without waking once after eating them before bed.

On the 5th, Baek Ji-yeon said on her YouTube channel, “50% of middle-aged women suffer from insomnia. It’s about one in every other household,” adding, “The natural sleeping pill I discovered is almonds.”
She said she usually has dinner around 5 or 6 p.m. and goes to bed without eating anything afterward, and admitted she had wondered why she kept waking up in the early hours.
Baek Ji-yeon said, “When I used a blood glucose monitor in the past, I saw a few times that my blood sugar sometimes fell into the hypoglycemic range while I was asleep,” adding, “They say that when blood sugar drops during sleep, the body declares an SOS emergency and switches into survival mode.”
She went on to explain, “If a lot of epinephrine or cortisol is released, it can have an arousing effect. You don’t wake up thinking, ‘What time is it?’—you just suddenly wake right up,” adding, “Symptoms such as a pounding heart can also occur.”
She added, “That’s a menopausal symptom. It’s impossible to know whether it’s caused by falling levels of the female hormone estrogen or by a sudden drop in blood sugar that triggers an arousing effect.”
Citing a research finding, Baek Ji-yeon explained, “One study found that the group who ate almonds showed improvements in sleep. Of course, polysomnography showed no substantial difference in the results, but when people were asked, ‘Did you sleep well?’, they said they had slept much better.”
She said that she, too, “ate 6–8 almonds before bed and slept without waking once that night,” adding with satisfaction, “I slept really soundly like that for a whole week straight.”

Baek Ji-yeon added, “Among nuts, walnuts contain the most melatonin. To get the 0.3 mg of melatonin we need when we sleep, we’d have to eat 240,000 almonds, but it was just six almonds that put me to sleep—a very tiny amount.”
Even so, she stressed, “I decided to believe it anyway. After all, eating almonds doesn’t do any harm to my body, does it? They’re healthy nuts. What I want to say is this: ultimately, it’s important to create your own environment where you can rest comfortably.”
Meanwhile, almonds may help with melatonin secretion and muscle relaxation through nutrients such as tryptophan and magnesium, and can be used as a supplement when you have trouble falling asleep or want to improve your sleep quality. However, individual differences are substantial and the evidence is limited, so regularly including a small amount is recommended rather than consuming them excessively.
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