Product Endorsement: Food for sleep interruptions

I agree concerns about short-term fixes reinforcing the problem long term are a very big deal, and that either of the mechanisms you point to could create that effect. But...

[basically all of the following is nullified because you took care to specify sleep was the most important thing. I'm using this as an opportunity to discuss patterns around health advice specifically because you avoided the problems, so it doesn't feel like picking on someone. Which I realize is annoying, and I apologize for that]

There's a pattern in online health advice. Most of it is written by people who are putting a lot of thought and energy into optimizing for very high performance, or are very sick and putting that same amount of effort into becoming just okay. That advice is hard to do well because it's an amount of effort most people won't put in, and because optimal input at that level varies a lot from person to person. 

It's really easy for someone lower on the health ladder to read advice for optimizers and get discouraged or overwhelmed so they do nothing at all. "Okay I need to eat more protein... but not from pork, that might cause an immune reaction to myself... no cows because of global warming...fake meat is artificial and fortified and has the dreaded seed oils...eggs cause cholesterol...fish has mercury... legumes have phytins that leach nutrients...oh look a cookie"

My suggestions tend to focus on low hanging fruit for people who aren't putting in much effort. Things that pay for themselves quickly, have strong feedback loops, and don't vary that much from person to person. It's possible I should start specifying this in the relevant posts.

My guess is that it is healthier to arrange one's diet to avoid needing 3 AM snacks, for the reasons you mention, but I don't know how to tell people to do that. I have some ideas, but they're vague, effortful to implement, and harder to measure their results. My guess is there are lots of people who will be helped by the advice "try peanut butter" but bounce off if I start describing multiple vague dietary changes they could try and laboriously measure the impact of. 

I'm glad you wrote this comment. It's good for people to have threads to follow up on once they move up the health ladder, and it's good to puncture the authority bubble people sometimes project onto me, a holder of a BA in an unrelated section of biology. "Short term gains long term costs" is exactly the failure mode of this kind of advice and it's good to highlight that.  And you did several things to avoid exactly the failure mode I describe, by prioritizing sleep above all else. I think it would have been cool if you'd gone into more detail on your concerns, but it's not like I put any effort into justifying the importance of sleep so I can't throw stones. 

But I do wish people in general kept "the perfect is the enemy of the good" and "who is the target audience?" in mind when giving health advice in general.  And writing this out helped me realize that I should make that easier by clarifying my audience. 

Can you say more about this?