Quick Summary
A 2026 systematic review of 10 clinical trials involving 294 participants found no convincing overall improvement in sleep quality from tart cherry supplementation.
Two small studies involving people with insomnia reported some benefits, including one in which participants slept an average of 84 minutes longer
The study reporting 84 minutes of additional sleep involved only eight people and found no significant improvement in several other important measures of insomnia including insomnia severity.
Despite containing melatonin and potentially anti-inflammatory compounds, tart cherry supplements have not been shown to reliably increase melatonin levels or reduce inflammatory markers.
Tart Cherry Juice For Sleep & Insomnia
Tart cherry juice has attracted considerable attention as a natural sleep remedy. It’s often promoted as a way to fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer and improve sleep quality, largely because tart cherries contain melatonin, a hormone involved in regulating our sleep-wake cycle.
Cherry juice for sleep is an appealing idea. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a glass of cherry juice to taking a sleeping pill? It’s particularly appealing if you’re a tart cherry grower or supplement seller.
So how well do these claims stand up to scientific scrutiny?
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Recent Progress in Nutrition investigated whether tart cherry supplementation improves sleep (Sinclair et al., 2026). The review examined 10 randomized controlled trials (studies in which participants are randomly assigned to different treatments) involving 294 participants.
A meta-analysis combines the results of several studies to provide a clearer picture of whether a treatment works. In this case, researchers compared people taking tart cherry products with those receiving a placebo, a treatment containing no active tart cherry ingredients.
So what did they find?
Does Tart Cherry Juice Improve Sleep Quality?
Overall, tart cherry supplementation did not produce a convincing improvement in sleep quality compared with placebo. When researchers combined the results of all 10 trials, the average difference between the groups was negligible (Sinclair et al., 2026).
The studies included healthy adults, athletes and people experiencing sleep difficulties. Participants consumed tart cherry juice, concentrate or capsules, with treatment periods ranging from just two days to approximately three months.
Researchers measured sleep in several ways, including questionnaires, sleep diaries and devices that recorded sleep patterns.
Some individual studies reported improvements, while others found little or no benefit. The longest trial, by Kimble et al. (2022), gave middle-aged adults tart cherry concentrate twice daily for three months and found no improvement in sleep quality compared with placebo. If tart cherry worked gradually, that’s the trial where you’d expect to see it.
When the findings were combined, there was no clear evidence that tart cherry supplementation consistently improved sleep.
However, it’s worth noting that these studies involved very different groups of people. Someone already sleeping reasonably well may have little room for improvement, whereas someone struggling with persistent insomnia might respond differently.
So what happened when researchers looked specifically at people with insomnia?
Can Tart Cherry Juice Help People With Insomnia?
Two small studies found that tart cherry juice improved some aspects of sleep in people with insomnia. However, the results deserve considerable caution given how few people were involved (Sinclair et al., 2026)
In one study, Losso et al. (2018) found that participants slept an average of 84 minutes longer when drinking tart cherry juice compared with placebo. That’s an impressive improvement, particularly for someone struggling with insomnia.
But there’s a catch. Only eight people completed the study.
And despite the substantial increase in sleep duration, researchers found no statistically significant improvements (differences large enough to be unlikely due to chance alone) in how quickly participants fell asleep or in their overall insomnia severity.
The researchers did find an improvement in one self-reported measure of sleep efficiency, the percentage of time in bed spent asleep, but this was not confirmed by the objective sleep recordings. In other words, the study found a large improvement in sleep duration, but little supporting evidence to suggest a meaningful improvement in insomnia symptoms from the other measures.
The second study, by Pigeon et al. (2010), involved just 15 participants. It found modest improvements in insomnia severity and time spent awake during the night, but no significant improvement in total sleep time or how quickly participants fell asleep.
When Sinclair et al. (2026) combined the results of these two studies, tart cherry juice produced a statistically significant, small to moderate improvement in sleep quality compared with placebo. That’s the most encouraging finding in the review.
But between the two studies, we’re talking about just 23 people. That’s remarkably little evidence on which to judge whether something is an effective treatment for insomnia.
It’s also worth noting that a separate study involving 34 adults with self-reported sleep problems and obesity found no significant improvements in sleep duration, sleep quality or insomnia symptoms after taking tart cherry capsules (Tucker et al., 2024). Although capsules and juice aren’t necessarily equivalent, the finding provides another reason to be cautious about generalizing the earlier results.
Small studies can produce impressive findings that don’t hold up when tested in larger groups. The two insomnia studies (Losso et al., 2018; Pigeon et al., 2010) certainly warrant further investigation, but they need replication in substantially larger trials. Moreover, those trials need to establish not just whether tart cherry juice increases sleep duration, but whether it produces meaningful improvements in insomnia symptoms.
But if tart cherry juice really does help some people sleep, what might explain it?
Does the Melatonin in Tart Cherries Help You Sleep?
Tart cherries contain melatonin, but research has not established that consuming tart cherry supplements reliably increases melatonin levels in humans (Sinclair et al., 2026).
Melatonin is a hormone produced primarily by the pineal gland in the brain. Its release is regulated by our internal biological clock, with levels typically rising in the evening and declining toward morning. Rather than simply making us sleepy, melatonin helps signal to the body that it’s night and regulate the timing of sleep.
Because tart cherries naturally contain melatonin, it’s reasonable to wonder whether consuming them might help regulate sleep. An early study by Howatson et al. (2012) found that drinking tart cherry concentrate for seven days increased levels of a melatonin breakdown product measured in urine and improved some measures of sleep, including total sleep time.
However, when Sinclair et al. (2026) combined the results of three trials measuring melatonin, the overall increase was not statistically significant. In other words, the available evidence did not establish a reliable effect on melatonin levels.
There’s also the question of how much melatonin tart cherry products actually contain. The concentrate used by Howatson et al. (2012) provided approximately 0.085 milligrams of melatonin per day, considerably less than the doses commonly used in clinical trials of melatonin, which typically range from 0.5 to 5 milligrams. In other words, a full day’s serving of the concentrate delivered roughly 6 to 60 times less melatonin than a typical trial dose. Whether such small quantities of naturally occurring melatonin can meaningfully influence sleep remains unclear.
But melatonin isn’t the only proposed explanation. What about the anti-inflammatory properties of tart cherries?
Could Tart Cherries Improve Sleep by Reducing Inflammation?
Although tart cherries contain compounds with potential anti-inflammatory effects, the review found no consistent evidence that supplementation reduced inflammatory biomarkers, substances in the blood that indicate inflammation (Sinclair et al., 2026).
Tart cherries contain anthocyanins, plant compounds responsible for their deep red color. These compounds have attracted research interest because of their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
An anti-inflammatory effect could be relevant to sleep because inflammation and sleep influence one another. Inflammatory processes can alter sleep regulation, while disrupted sleep can affect immune activity.
However, when Sinclair et al. (2026) examined the available studies, they found no significant overall changes in several inflammatory markers, including C-reactive protein and various inflammatory signaling proteins.
Losso et al. (2018) did identify changes in chemical processes in the body involving tryptophan, an amino acid used to produce serotonin and melatonin. These findings suggest a possible mechanism through which tart cherry juice might influence sleep.
But identifying a possible biological mechanism is not the same as demonstrating that it produces meaningful improvements in insomnia. The changes observed in that small study (Losso et al., 2018) don’t establish that they were responsible for the additional sleep.
So, given the uncertainty about both the benefits and how they might occur, how reliable is the research overall?
How Reliable Is the Research on Tart Cherry and Sleep?
The current evidence is too limited to establish tart cherry supplementation as an effective treatment for insomnia. Although some individual findings are encouraging, the researchers rated the evidence for the insomnia studies as low certainty (Sinclair et al., 2026).
A low certainty rating doesn’t mean the findings are necessarily wrong. It means that further research could substantially change our understanding of whether tart cherry juice works and how much benefit it provides.
The review also identified concerns about the quality of the studies. None of the 10 trials was assessed as having a low overall risk of bias, meaning there were limitations in how the studies were designed, conducted or reported that could have influenced their results.
The studies also varied considerably in the products they used, their doses, how long participants took the supplements and how sleep was measured. Consequently, even if tart cherry supplementation does provide some benefit, we don’t yet know which products or doses might be effective, who would benefit most, or whether any improvements would persist over time.
The researchers rated the overall evidence for sleep quality across the broader population as very low certainty and recommended larger, better-designed clinical trials (Sinclair et al., 2026).
So, where does that leave someone considering tart cherry juice for their own sleep difficulties?
Should You Try Tart Cherry Juice for Better Sleep?
There isn’t currently enough evidence to recommend tart cherry juice as a treatment for insomnia. However, that doesn’t mean it has no potential benefit or that there’s anything inherently wrong with drinking it.
But these findings are fairly typical of what we see in research on sleep supplements. There's often very little evidence to begin with, and the studies that do exist tend to involve small numbers of participants, and don’t last long. That doesn't necessarily mean the findings are wrong, but small studies for a night or two weeks can produce impressive results that turn out to be unreliable when tested in larger groups.
Patients often fail to realise that chronic insomnia, by definition, persists for at least three months and often continues for years. Thus a two-week trial (both insomnia studies reported in this review were 2 week studies) might identify a short-term improvement, but it tells us little about whether that benefit will last. Placebo effects and normal fluctuations in sleep also need to be considered, particularly in very small, very short studies.
For us at The Better Sleep Clinic, the question isn't simply whether tart cherry juice can improve sleep over a couple of weeks. It's whether larger, independently replicated studies can demonstrate meaningful, sustained improvements in people with chronic insomnia. Until then, we’ll remain sceptical.
Where To From Here?
Persistent insomnia is rarely as simple as needing more melatonin or finding the right supplement. Sleep difficulties often continue because of a combination of psychological, behavioral and physiological factors, even after the original cause of poor sleep has resolved.
Understanding the factors maintaining your particular sleep difficulties is therefore an important part of finding an effective treatment. At The Better Sleep Clinic, we work to identify these factors and address them through a structured, individualized treatment program, including Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), the recommended first treatment for chronic insomnia.
Frequently Asked Questions About Tart Cherry Juice and Sleep
Q1: Does tart cherry juice help you sleep?
A1: Tart cherry juice has not been shown to reliably improve sleep. A 2026 review of 10 clinical trials involving 294 participants found no convincing overall improvement in sleep quality compared with placebo (Sinclair et al., 2026). The longest trial, which lasted three months, also found no improvement in sleep quality (Kimble et al., 2022).
Q2: Does tart cherry juice help with insomnia?
A2: Tart cherry juice improved some aspects of sleep in two small studies of people with insomnia (Losso et al., 2018; Pigeon et al., 2010). Combined, the two studies showed a statistically significant, small to moderate improvement in sleep quality compared with placebo, but they involved just 23 people in total and the evidence was rated low certainty (Sinclair et al., 2026). Larger trials are needed before tart cherry juice can be recommended as a treatment for insomnia.
Q3: How much melatonin is in tart cherry juice?
A3: Tart cherry concentrate contains far less melatonin than the doses used in melatonin trials. The concentrate used by Howatson et al. (2012) provided about 0.085 milligrams of melatonin per day, roughly 6 to 60 times less than the 0.5 to 5 milligram doses commonly used in clinical trials of melatonin. When three trials were combined, tart cherry did not produce a statistically significant increase in melatonin levels (Sinclair et al., 2026).
Q4: Does tart cherry juice reduce inflammation?
A4: Tart cherry supplementation did not reduce inflammatory markers in the trials reviewed by Sinclair et al. (2026). Tart cherries contain anthocyanins, plant compounds with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, but the review found no significant overall changes in markers such as C-reactive protein.
Q5: Does tart cherry juice have side effects?
A5: Tart cherry supplements appeared reasonably well tolerated in the sleep trials, with few adverse events reported (Sinclair et al., 2026). The trials were short and adverse events were not always reported consistently, so less is known about longer-term safety. Some tart cherry juice products also add a considerable amount of sugar and calories to the diet.
References
Howatson, G., Bell, P. G., Tallent, J., Middleton, B., McHugh, M. P., & Ellis, J. (2012). Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality. European Journal of Nutrition, 51(8), 909–916.
Kimble, R., Keane, K. M., Lodge, J. K., Cheung, W., Haskell-Ramsay, C. F., & Howatson, G. (2022). Polyphenol-rich tart cherries (Prunus cerasus, cv Montmorency) improve sustained attention, feelings of alertness and mental fatigue and influence the plasma metabolome in middle-aged adults: A randomised, placebo-controlled trial. British Journal of Nutrition, 128(12), 2409–2420.
Losso, J. N., Finley, J. W., Karki, N., Liu, A. G., Prudente, A., Tipton, R., Yu, Y., & Greenway, F. L. (2018). Pilot study of the tart cherry juice for the treatment of insomnia and investigation of mechanisms. American Journal of Therapeutics, 25(2), e194–e201.
Pigeon, W. R., Carr, M., Gorman, C., & Perlis, M. L. (2010). Effects of a tart cherry juice beverage on the sleep of older adults with insomnia: A pilot study. Journal of Medicinal Food, 13(3), 579–583.
Sinclair, J. K., Baker, L., & Bottoms, L. M. (2026). Effects of tart cherry (Prunus cerasus) supplementation on overall sleep quality, melatonin, and inflammatory biomarkers: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Recent Progress in Nutrition, 6(3).
Tucker, R. M., Kim, N., Gurzell, E., Mathi, S., Chavva, S., Senthilkumar, D., Bartunek, O., Fenton, K. C., Herndon-Fenton, S. J., Cardino, V. N., Cooney, G. M., Young, S., & Fenton, J. I. (2024). Commonly used dose of Montmorency tart cherry powder does not improve sleep or inflammation outcomes in individuals with overweight or obesity. Nutrients, 16(23), Article 4125.
Written By Dan Ford, DBSM, Sleep Psychologist
Published By The Better Sleep Clinic
