Romany McGuffog has been researching sleep through the University of Newcastle.

"I was looking into people from all social classes and their experience with mental and physical health and how their sleep impacted that," the PhD candidate said.

Previous research has shown that people from lower social classes generally have poorer physical and mental health.

"Heaps of researchers have tried to figure out why that's the case," Romany said.

Diet and exercise play a role, as does sleep.

"We're finding that one of the reasons people have poor health is because they're also experiencing poor sleep," she said.

She said people from lower social classes - such as the working class - have poorer sleep environments, so "they might be living in a house that's close to a train station and that's going to disrupt their sleep".

Or, they might share a house with people who disturb their sleep.

"I've spent the last 3.5 years running studies on this to investigate it," she said.

"I was able to show sleep had a really big impact. It wasn't something you could just dismiss. It wasn't something being accounted for by something else. It's a really important factor. Diet is great to look at, but you've got to consider sleep as well."

A key factor in her research was whether those affected have the capacity to improve their sleep. A good step towards improving sleep would be to get a comfy bed, but not everyone can afford this.

"My research showed if you're going to do interventions for sleep, you really have to consider what's going to be inclusive for people of all classes," she said.

"Australians are so anti-class but, once I started to look into the research, I found that class is a big thing. Unfortunately we don't like to acknowledge class, so it doesn't get discussed very often in society."

Romany said it should be acknowledged that "class is a thing in Australia and it's affecting people's health".

"I'm not suggesting that improving sleep is on the onus of the individual. It's quite cruel to say to people from working-class backgrounds, 'just sleep better'. If we're going to tackle sleep we need to tackle it as a structural thing.

"Some universities include sleep pods or nap rooms to encourage students to take a nap before they go home late.

"There are some structural things we could do to change the culture around sleep."

She said some people like boasting that they only got four or five hours sleep.

"That's not a good thing. Sleep is really, really important for you. It affects a lot of things," she said.

"A lot of people dismiss sleep as an issue."

Having listened to Romany, Topics is proposing a government subsidy for comfy beds. ScoMo would be up for that, wouldn't he? Maybe not.

Perhaps Albo would be more open to it, if he ever becomes the Big Kahuna.

What's the go with Cessnock's world famous servo yoghurt? Does anyone know?

We all know Cessnock is famous for its wine, but we had no idea it was famous for its yoghurt.

Newcastle Herald music journalist Josh Leeson was tuning into Triple J's morning show with Ben and Liam on Tuesday, when he heard them mention "Cessnock's world-famous servo yoghurt".

On the show, Ben and Liam were interviewing indie artist Mallrat, who was in a taxi travelling from New York airport.

"They got Mallrat to wind a window down and yell out, 'try Cessnock servo yoghurt' into the New York streets," Josh said.

Can we just say that using Cessnock and New York in the same sentence is just brilliant.

We did write a story about a Yoplait commercial that was filmed in Cessnock back in 2013.

It featured the story of a small country town in Australia named Yogga Yogga, where passion for yoghurt from France was so entrenched that Aussies had taken on the French way of life. The town had a pub named The Frog and Snail Hotel.

If you know anything at all about yoghurt mania in Cessnock, drop us a line at topics@newcastleherald.com.au.