Have you ever sipped fresh mint leaves in steaming hot water while looking out at the Mediterranean at Sunset? I have. It is not the same as drinking lettuce water, the bilgelike concoction made of boiling water and romaine leaves that TikTok users claim aids in sleep.
For months TikTok users have passed around the lettuce-water trend—millions of people have watched videos of wide-eyed creators drinking hot lettuce tea. “I slept for 12 hours,” announced one intrepid leafy greens drinker in a TikTok watched 3.7 million times. “I thought for sure it was not gonna work because nothing works for me, melatonin doesn’t do anything for me anymore,” said another creator. “But that knocked me out.”
We want the key to wellness to not be a drink, a pill or a meditation app. Could lettuce be the key to a miraculous, all-natural sleep water, an accessible dream-drip à la the enchanted water of the ancient Greek sleep god Hypnos? Lettuce water isn’t evidence-based, but it also isn’t totally baseless. Lettuce contains lactucin and lactucpicrin, which are “known as sleep enhancement substances,” according to a study published in 2019 in the Biological and Pharmaceutical Bulletin. You shouldn’t eye-roll the idea of using plants on the body, anyway. The use of lettuce to treat ailments dates back hundreds years. The New York Times reports. Many commenters on TikTok pointed out that hot lettuce water is used as a sleep aid in Mexican culture.
But, does lettuce water help you to sleep? There is no scientific evidence to prove that it has any effect. That doesn’t mean lettuce water won’t make you doze off—it just means there aren’t studies on its effect on humans. The limited studies that focus only on latucin, lactucpircrin, and lettuce extract on mice, use lettuce seeds or lettuce extract, and not whole leaves, even boiled. But think of it this way—we all understand that a lavender or rose essential oil is much more concentrated than a few crushed petals. There is a difference between a capsule of vitamin C and a spoonful of orange juice. Lettuce is known to have sleep-enhancing properties. But, is it possible to get these benefits by boiling a few leaves? The better question is: How much rest do you need?
According to the American Sleep Association, 10% of adults suffer from chronic insomnia. It’s cruel and awful. It’s why sleep deprivation is considered torture and why there are lists of the best apps for sleeping. It’s understandable that a person struggling to sleep would try anything—let alone the very low-risk intervention of lettuce water—to fall asleep. Many of us were teenagers when we read that yogurt or lemon could be applied to our hair and faces. Raw eggs! Lettuce-water tea is nothing—nothing!—compared to those dark days. And as someone who agreed to a job of testing things from the internet, I know this: Sometimes you just have to swill around your steamy lettuce water and toast, “At least it’s not a Tide pod.”
Source: Glamour