What Mattress Is Best, By Science?
Cracking the Code to Better Sleep: From Myths and Apnea to the Science of Memory Foam and Grid Mattresses. Get the Rest You Deserve!
The Foundations of Good Sleep
You probably know the importance of good sleep for good health. If not, here’s a quick refresher:
- Why You Probably Need More Sleep
- How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?
- The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)
You should also definitely check out this quite famous book on the topic:
Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker
What helps, to get that good sleep
We’ve covered this a little before too, for example:
- Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors
- Sleep Better With Better Air
- How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)
How to level-up from there
One of the biggest barriers to good sleep for many people is obstructive sleep apea:
Healthier, Natural Sleep Without Obstruction!
We covered (in the above article) a whole lot of ways of mitigating/managing obstructive sleep apnea. One of the things we mentioned as beneficial was avoiding sleeping on one’s back, and this is something Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Somers agreed with:
Back Sleeping, And Sleeping Differently After 50
“But side-sleeping is uncomfortable”
If this is you, then chances are you have the wrong mattress.
If your mattress is too firm, you can get around it by using this “five pillow” method:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically
If your mattress is too soft, then sorry, you really just have to throw that thing out and start again.
The Goldilocks mattress
While different people will have different subjective preferences, the science is quite clear on what is actually best for people’s spines. As this review of 39 qualified scholarly articles concluded:
❝Results of this systematic review show that a medium-firm mattress promotes comfort, sleep quality and rachis alignment❞
~ Dr. Gianfilippo Caggiari et al.
Read in full: What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature
Note: to achieve “medium-firm” that remains “medium firm” has generally been assumed to require a memory-foam mattress.
How memory-foam works: memory-foam is a moderately thermosoftening material, designed to slightly soften at the touch of human body temperature, and be firmer at room temperature. This will result in it molding itself to the form of a human body, providing what amounts to personalized support for your personal shape and size, meaning your spine can stay exactly as it’s supposed to when you’re sleeping on your side, instead of (for example) your hips being wider meaning that your lumbar vertebrae are raised higher than your thoracic vertebrae, giving you the equivalent of a special nocturnal scoliosis.
It will, therefore, stop working if
- the ambient temperature is comparable to human body temperature (as happens in some places sometimes, and increasingly often these days)
- you die, and thus lose your body temperature (but in that case, your spinal alignment will be the least of your concerns)
Here’s a good explanation of the mechanics of memory foam from the Sleep Foundation:
Sleep Foundation | What is Memory Foam?
An alternative to memory foam?
If you don’t like memory foam (one criticism is that it doesn’t allow good ventilation underneath the body), there is an alterative, the grid mattress.
It’s very much “the new kid on the block” and the science is young for this, but for example this recent (April 2024) study that concluded:
❝The grid mattress is a simple, noninvasive, and nonpharmacological intervention that improved adults sleep quality and health. Controlled trials are encouraged to examine the effects of this mattress in a variety of populations and environments.❞
~ Dr. Heather Hausenblas et al.
Read in full: Effectiveness of a grid mattress on adults’ sleep quality and health: A quasi-experimental intervention study
However, that was a small (n=39) uncontrolled (i.e. there was no control group) study, and the conflict of interest statement is, well, interesting:
❝Heather A. Hausenblas, Stephanie L. Hooper, Martin Barragan, and Tarah Lynch declare no conflict of interest. Michael Breus served as a former consultant for Purple, LLC.❞
~ Ibid.
…which is a fabulous way of distracting from the mention in the “Acknowledgements” section to follow, that…
❝Purple, LLC, provided financial support for the study❞
~ Ibid.
Purple is the company that invented the mattress being tested. So while this doesn’t mean the study is necessarily dishonest and/or corrupt, it does at the very least raise a red flag for a potential instance of publication bias (because Purple may have funded multiple studies and then pulled funding of the ones that weren’t going their way).
If you are interested in Purple’s mattress and how it works, you can check it out here ← this is a link for your interest and information; not an advertisement or an endorsement. We look forward to seeing more science for this though, and echo their own call for randomized controlled trials!
Summary
Sleep is important, and while it’s a popular myth that we need less as we get older, the truth is that we merely get less on average, while still needing the same amount.
A medium-firm memory-foam mattress is a very good, well-evidenced way to support that (both figuratively and literally!).
A grid mattress is an interesting innovation, and/but we’d like to see more science for it.
Take care!
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Stop Cancer 20 Years Ago
Dr. Jenn Simmons shares vital tips on preventing cancer and inflammation, advocating for lifestyle changes and proactive health management at any age.
Get Abreast And Keep Abreast
This is Dr. Jenn Simmons. Her specialization is integrative oncology, as she—then a breast cancer surgeon—got breast cancer, decided the system wasn’t nearly as good from the patients’ side of things as from the doctors’ side, and took to educate herself, and now others, on how things can be better.
What does she want us to know?
Start now
If you have breast cancer, the best time to start adjusting your lifestyle might be 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. We realize our readers with breast cancer (or a history thereof) probably have indeed started already—all strength to you.
What this means for those of us without breast cancer (or a history therof) is: start now
Even if you don’t have a genetic risk factor, even if there’s no history of it in your family, there’s just no reason not to start now.
Start what, you ask? Taking away its roots. And how?
Inflammation as the root of cancer
To oversimplify: cancer occurs because an accidentally immortal cell replicates and replicates and replicates and takes any nearby resources to keep on going. While science doesn’t know all the details of how this happens, it is a factor of genetic mutation (itself a normal process, without which evolution would be impossible), something which in turn is accelerated by damage to the DNA. The damage to the DNA? That occurs (often as not) as a result of cellular oxidation. Cellular oxidation is far from the only genotoxic thing out there, and a lot of non-food “this thing causes cancer” warnings are usually about other kinds of genotoxicity. But cellular oxidation is a big one, and it’s one that we can fight vigorously with our lifestyle.
Because cellular oxidation and inflammation go hand-in-hand, reducing one tends to reduce the other. That’s why so often you’ll see in our Research Review Monday features, a line that goes something like:
“and now for those things that usually come together: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, and anti-aging”
So, fight inflammation now, and have a reduced risk of a lot of other woes later.
See: How to Prevent (or Reduce) Inflammation
Don’t settle for “normal”
People are told, correctly but not always helpfully, such things as:
- It’s normal to have less energy at your age
- It’s normal to have a weaker immune system at your age
- It’s normal to be at a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, etc
…and many more. And these things are true! But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for them.
We can be all the way over on the healthy end of the distribution curve. We can do that!
(so can everyone else, given sufficient opportunity and resources, because health is not a zero-sum game)
If we’re going to get a cancer diagnosis, then our 60s are the decade where we’re most likely to get it. Earlier than that and the risk is extant but lower; later than that and technically the risk increases, but we probably got it already in our 60s.
So, if we be younger than 60, then now’s a good time to prepare to hit the ground running when we get there. And if we missed that chance, then again, the second-best time is now:
See: Focusing On Health In Our Sixties
Fast to live
Of course, anything can happen to anyone at any age (alas), but this is about the benefits of living a fasting lifestyle—that is to say, not just fasting for a 4-week health kick or something, but making it one’s “new normal” and just continuing it for life.
This doesn’t mean “never eat”, of course, but it does mean “practice intermittent fasting, if you can”—something that Dr. Simmons strongly advocates.
See: Intermittent Fasting: We Sort The Science From The Hype
While this calls back to the previous “fight inflammation”, it deserves its own mention here as a very specific way of fighting it.
It’s never too late
All of the advices that go before a cancer diagnosis, continue to stand afterwards too. There is no point of “well, I already have cancer, so what’s the harm in…?”
The harm in it after a diagnosis will be the same as the harm before. When it comes to lifestyle, preventing a cancer and preventing it from spreading are very much the same thing, which is also the same as shrinking it. Basically, if it’s anticancer, it’s anticancer, no matter whether it’s before, during, or after.
Dr. Simmons has seen too many patients get a diagnosis, and place their lives squarely in the hands of doctors, when doctors can only do so much.
Instead, Dr. Simmons recommends taking charge of your health as best you are able, today and onwards, no matter what. And that means two things:
- Knowing stuff
- Doing stuff
So it becomes our responsibility (and our lifeline) to educate ourselves, and take action accordingly.
Want to know more?
We recently reviewed her book, and heartily recommend it:
The Smart Woman’s Guide to Breast Cancer – by Dr. Jenn Simmons
Enjoy!