Huberman LabEating for Better Sleep & Foods that Improve Metabolic Health | Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
105 min read · 21,482 words- 0:00 – 2:29
Marie-Pierre St-Onge
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
What was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep, higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. You're not getting deep, slow wave sleep, REM sleep as much as you would otherwise.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University School of Medicine. Today, we discuss how you eat impacts your sleep, and how you sleep impacts what you eat, as well as how your body utilizes food depending on how you slept. Now, we've talked about food and we've talked about sleep many times before on this podcast, but Dr. St-Onge's work is unique because she runs one of the few laboratories in the world to look at the bidirectional relationship between sleep and food. For instance, you'll learn how even modest sleep deprivation increases hunger, but differently in men and women. In men, it happens to increase the hormones that drive the desire to eat, whereas in women it reduces naturally made peptides such as GLP, which suppress hunger. Today's discussion gets into the specific actionable items that you can do to improve your sleep and the way that your body handles food and hunger. We talk about the role of sleep in regulating blood sugar, cortisol levels, overall metabolism, and cardiometabolic health. Now, because Dr. St-Onge's research focuses on sleep and nutrition, but she's also spent a significant amount of time studying how specific nutrients impact overall health and not just sleep, we also talk about that. I'm certain that you'll come away from today's episode with a lot of new information you haven't heard elsewhere, as well as with the intention to make small or perhaps even large changes in behavior and nutritional choices that the science tell us can significantly improve your sleep, your metabolism, and overall health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge.
- 2:29 – 10:20
Sleep Loss & Appetite, Men vs Women
- AHAndrew Huberman
Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, welcome.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Thank you for having me.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Sleep impacts how and what we eat, and how and what we eat impacts sleep. That's a different perspective than I think most people take.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I think most people are familiar, however, with not getting the best night's sleep, maybe feeling like their impulsivity to eat, quote-unquote, "bad foods" is a little higher, and then also hopefully familiar with having a great night's sleep and feeling like we're just kind of in control in a different way. Maybe you could just kind of share for us what's really going on beneath that experience and when subtle or not so subtle chronic sleep loss, so not an all-nighter necessarily, but, you know, 45 minutes less here, 90 minutes less there, et cetera, et cetera, how that plays out in terms of our nutrition, and then we'll go in from the nutrition side to sleep.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Sure. So there's a couple of questions that you have in there actually about the extent of sleep loss and how that influences your food intake, what we see in the general population versus what we do in a lab to address causality. So let me start with, you know, the population-based studies, right? So when I started being interested in, in sleep, it was coming from an obesity angle. My PhD is in nutrition. I trained as a postdoc in, uh, body composition, obesity research, and we were getting a lot of information from population-based studies that people who sleep too little have a higher body mass index than people who get adequate amount of sleep. Then it became there's a higher prevalence of people with obesity in this short sleep, uh, group. Then studies evaluating changes over time, seeing that people who don't sleep enough tend to gain more weight. There was a famous, uh, nurse's health study that I really like to cite, uh, when I give talks that was published in 2006, where, uh, they tracked nurses over 14 years, and those nurses that reported sleeping five, six hours had much higher rate of weight gain over that 14, 15-year period than the nurses who had reported sleeping seven or eight hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large scale population studies, cohorts. But, you know, what they, what those studies tell us is that things are happening at a point in time or may influence something that's happening over time, but not necessarily that one causes the other, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So I started, uh, my work in this field trying to uncover whether sleeping too little actually causes weight gain. And so in my opinion, because I was coming from a lab where I trained in the measurement of energy balance, so how much ener- how much energy you eat versus how much energy you burn, I was like, well, if sleep leads to obesity, leads to weight gain, it has to impact this energy balance regulation. So it's either that we eat more than we should or that we exercise less, or we burn less or we eat more, or maybe it's a combination of the two. Let's try this out and, and see. So my first, uh, my first study, my first NIH grant, the big R01s, you know, was-To look at exactly at this. So we had people who had adequate sleep and we brought them in the lab and we asked them in a crossover design, so half of the participants started out sleeping adequately, so they, we gave them a nine-hour time in bed opportunity or we asked them to sleep too little, so they had a four-hour time in bed opportunity, very short. But we did this for five nights. And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition. So for the first three days we told our, we had our participants eat the exact same thing regardless of how much time in bed they slept, they got at night and then we measured appetite regulating hormones, we did neural imaging, uh, to really get at isolating the impact of sleep duration on appetite regulating hormones and, and, um, neuronal responses to foods. And then on the last day we let them self-select their food intake and we measured that in the lab. From that study we showed that in men specifically, uh, we saw an increase in ghrelin in response to the short sleep, so this hormone that triggers food intake. In women we saw a reduction in GLP-1 interestingly enough-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... glucagon-like peptide one, so the satiety hormone was reduced as a result of short sleep in women. And then when, uh, we measured their food intake in the lab, they ate 300 calories more in the short sleep condition than the in, when they got their regular adequate sleep of at least seven and a half hours, a little more than that, uh, per night. Then, uh, you were asking about, you know, brain responses. Uh, we looked at, uh, neuronal responses to food stimuli. We found upregulation in, uh, reward centers of the brain in the context of sleep restriction compared to the context of adequate sleep. So all together really building a case that when you don't sleep enough at night you have both physiological signals to eat more for men or not stop eating in women that lead to greater food intake that's also, uh, could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of, uh, insufficient sleep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Amazing. This sex specific split in the data, if I have it correctly, that when men are sleep deprived, so getting four hours per night-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... the signals that drive appetitive desire to eat are higher.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
In women it's more that the break, uh, on eating, on satiety is reduced.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Exactly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay. As far as I know, the GLP pathways are not, um, divergent by, by sex, but of course I'm not deeply versed in that literature. Is there any evidence that GLPs are functioning different in men and women, like circadian wise or anything like that, or this just, this was just a fortuitous outcome?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Or I should say, uh, incidental outcome.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
This was an incidental outcome. We really didn't know what to expect. We didn't really know at all that w- we'd see sex differences.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Because there had been prior studies and prior studies had shown that ghrelin was increased as a result of sleep restriction. They also showed that leptin was reduced as a result of sleep restriction. And when we got our data, you, we analyzed our data with all of our participants together.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And there was no effect.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And that was surprising and people would say, "Don't you know? Don't you know sleep restriction increases ghrelin?" It's like, well, I guess I don't know because in our study it doesn't. But then we saw these sex specific differences and it made sense then that in the full sample when we had an equal number of men and women we saw no effect on ghrelin because there was no effect in women, but there was an effect in men which was reproducing what others had found because all the prior studies had been done in men only.
- 10:20 – 12:39
Sponsors: David & BetterHelp
- AHAndrew Huberman
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- 12:39 – 21:56
Sleep Loss, Overeating & Cardiometabolic Health
- AHAndrew Huberman
Whenever I'm sleep deprived, so four or five hours of sleep, I consider sleep deprived. I used to pull all-nighters years ago. Now I avoid them at all costs. But whenever I have that experience, I feel like my whole body, to some extent, is in a low level of pain. It's a, kind of this, like, central ache. Like you just-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And, and I wonder, uh, extent to which people eat to overcome, like, to kind of quell the, the pain of sleep deprivation. Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Maybe their subjective experience of it is, is very different. But what do you think is happening in that, uh, in that short, relatively short amount of sleep that's missing? What is getting reset? Is it neural? Is it endocrine? It's obviously all those things, but what do you think is the, the switch that allows people to enter a, a day in a m- in a much more healthy fashion or a, or a sick, essentially in a slightly sick fashion?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
In our study, it was actually a 50% reduction in sleep, because when they had nine hours sleep opportunity, they slept around seven and a half.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And when they had the... They were all people who we had screened to sleep at least seven, measured by actigraphy. So, and on average they get seven and a half. And in the sleep restricted condition, they got, on average, about three hours and 50 minutes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So that's like staying up late working on a deadline, then trying to catch an early flight.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
It's pretty brutal.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It's pretty brutal.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And that was maintained, you know, they had five nights of that. So that-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Five nights of that.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah. But-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Were they coming unglued mentally too? That, I think I would feel terrible after that kind of stretch.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
At the end they were done. Like, there was no way anyone would want to keep, keep coming for that. But they were in the lab. They were under supervision the whole time. We didn't let them go out on their own. Uh, so they were well supervised to make sure that nothing, uh, nothing would happen to them. Uh-
- AHAndrew Huberman
No naps?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
No naps. No. No. Uh, but so what happens is, I think there's some subconscious need to, to eat more when you're sleep deprived. There's also, you know, there's a thermic effect of, of food, right? So it gives you a jolt of energy to eat something. So people know that. You eat, it wakes you up in a way. You know, neuronal signaling that, that enhances, uh, pleasurable and reward centers of the brain where, you know, if when also fatigue sets in and now it's like, do you really have, want to have this conversation with yourself about what to choose at the buffet table? You know, it, there's fatigue.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And, uh, and others have shown also that sleepiness tends to correlate with all of this.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
That there's these triggers for more pleasurable food consumption with, um, with the sleep restriction. And it's been reproduced. There's been so many studies.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Uh, and they all, you know, agree to, to the extent of overeating. You know, a meta-analysis showed 250 to 400 calories of overeating.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Which might not sound like much, but when you start layering that in day after day and you think, you know, 3,500 excess calories more or less for a pound of body weight, and then you start to c- when people accumulate that over time-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... if they're in a night shift condition or new parents or tending to a sick relative or just final exams, like it, it's a real thing.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It's a real thing. Uh, Neema Covassin in, uh, 2022 published a paper where, uh, they had sleep restriction about five hours per night versus, uh, seven and a half hours per night for two weeks, and participants gained half a kilo in a two-week period. So you do nothing and you just, you know, sleep less and gain, gain almost two, a pound in two weeks.
- 21:56 – 27:59
Weight Gain & Sleep Loss, Tool: Informed Food Choices
- AHAndrew Huberman
Wow. Okay. Because my mind always goes to, all right, well, we wake up in the morning because of an increase in cortisol. That's circadian. It's not related to sleep per se. It just kind of overlaps with the end of the night's sleep. If that's independent of sleep and cortisol drives glucose release, we know this.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
At least in the first study you described, glucose levels weren't altered. You said it was isocaloric, so people were-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yep
- AHAndrew Huberman
... b- it's not like they're eating more.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
No.
- AHAndrew Huberman
They're... The, the hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated. The hor-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
But we didn't let them eat more.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But you didn't let them.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I think that's a key, a key thing that, uh, you, you pointed out before, but I think we wanna, uh, underscore. And then of course the GLP, uh, levels in women being reduced. It's not that then they were able to eat, as we say, ad libitum, and then they happened to eat more, but they gained weight. So what's kind of the action end of things that causes them to gain weight if they're basically in an isocaloric diet? And I have a hyp- I have a the-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... I have an idea of what it might be, but I, I'm curious what the answer is.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, so I think they're, they're more sedentary, um-
- AHAndrew Huberman
During the day
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... during the day.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Less spontaneous activity.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Right, less spontaneous activity. Because we also did a study to look at energy expenditure. That's really difficult actually to measure, in my opinion, energy expenditure. There's multiple components to energy expenditure. Uh, but we did a study where, this was a small study, we enrolled only women for that, and we have a metabolic chamber at Columbia that we were able to use for this. Uh, so this small room in which we keep people and we measure minute by minute oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. And we were able to show that energy expenditure is actually increased in the context of sleep restriction in the metabolic chamber because it's more costly energetically to remain awake than to fall asleep. So energy expenditure when participants were awake was identicalIn both conditions, regardless of how much sleep they got the night before
- AHAndrew Huberman
So it's fidgeting, movement 'cause we've talked before on this podcast about the non-exercise induced-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yes
- AHAndrew Huberman
... thermogenesis. And it's a big number. I mean, you- people who fidget a lot, bounce their knee a lot, I mean, sometimes these people are burning 1,500 calories more per day and everyone goes, "Oh my God, how could that possibly be?" But-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It's a lot
- AHAndrew Huberman
... I mean, that's a lot. That's at the extreme. But it is kind of interesting to observe people out in the world.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And you sometimes see that people who are very, very lean, very let's just say thin and lean, nowadays who knows because of the GLPs, et cetera, but they tend to have a lot of spontaneous movement. They tend to stand up quickly.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
They tend to walk quickly. Well, you're from New York, so everyone there walks-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- 27:59 – 33:25
Diet & Sleep, Insomnia; Tool: Mediterranean Diet, DASH Diet
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, ultimately, that brings us to the, the other direction of the equation, right? How does what we eat impact our sleep? This is something that I think most people have heard about in the context of try not to eat too close to bedtime.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, this is an active debate in many households actually. Some people seem to be fine eating close to bedtime and sleeping and even if they track their sleep. Other people, it really disrupts their sleep. I'm interested in both the timing of food intake relative to sleep, but also the content of the food and how it impacts sleep.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
What's known about that, either from your work or from other work?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
When we started this conversation, I was telling you about these population-based studies, you know, cross-sectional data where two things happen at the same time and y- you know, you, you don't really know causality. They happen at the same time. And I think early on, uh, in this field, we started thinking about sleep as the promoter of food intake or as a sleep causing changes in diet, exercise, but didn't really think that maybe it's the other way around or maybe the other way around is just as plausible. So I started thinking about that and said, "Well, what if, what if we took the other approach? What if we looked at diet and examined how diet influenced future sleep?" And my first paper in this field was using data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. It's actually kind of hard to find good cohorts that have good nutrition data, good sleep data, and data over, over years, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So MESA, Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, is one of those great cohorts that we have in the, here in the US that has all of the above. So I paired up with a colleague of mine, Susan Redline in Boston, and, uh, she's the principal investigator on their sleep ancillary study.And we asked the question of diet quality and its impact on sleep duration, insomnia symptoms, and we found that having a diet that more closely aligns with the Mediterranean diet was associated with better, uh, probability of having adequate sleep and reduced, um, insomnia symptoms in this cohort. So then it launched a whole field of study really to, to keep looking at this, and we've looked at this in different studies and different cohorts. Actually, uh, earlier this year we published, uh, data from the Women's Health Initiative, another large, large cohort with good diet data and, and sleep information. We took a really, really nice approach in this, uh, longitudinal analysis. I don't know. Usually, when we do longitudinal studies, we exclude people who have the condition at baseline, right? So if you're trying to see this factor at baseline, how does it influence hypertension 10 years later, you usually exclude people who have hypertension at baseline because you wanna see the development of hypertension. In this case, we were looking at insomnia symptoms, but insomnia is one of those conditions that's not necessarily static. It resolves, right? So you can have insomnia and then a few years later not have insomnia, or you can not have insomnia now and develop insomnia. So what we did is we broke our-- down our participants into two groups, the people who had no insomnia at baseline and at three years follow-up, participants who had insomnia at baseline but not at three years follow-up, so they were in the healthful sleep, improving sleep. And then the other group was all those w-women who had insomnia at baseline and at three years and no insomnia at baseline, but insomnia at three years. So they were the persistent insomnia progressing towards poor sleep group. And we found that the women who had a diet that was more closely aligned to the Mediterranean diet, but we also looked at, uh, an American type of diet profile called the DASH diet, the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. Women who had a dietary profile closer to those two types of diets, healthful diets, were less likely to have hypertension-- uh, insomnia at three years.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And the DASH diet is what?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypert-Hypertension was developed to, uh, reduce, prevent hypertension, reduce blood pressure in people by increasing intakes of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, consuming low-fat dairy, more plant-based types of, uh, diet and, and can be s- has been tested in a low salt or regular salt profile.
- AHAndrew Huberman
How did those work out? I'm just curious. Do you recall if the low salt, high salt, um, condition-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
There is a salt sensitivity, so there are some people who are very sensitive to salt, and so having a reduced salt diet will really improve their blood pressure.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Others not so much. But the DASH diet, regardless of its salt content, did better than the equivalent non-DASH.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Got it.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Which would be your average, you know, American diet and-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Whatever that is
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... yeah, higher in saturated fat and sugars and-
- 33:25 – 39:33
Food Choices & Sleep Quality, Food Timing
- AHAndrew Huberman
Which seems to be changing now because of the GLPs.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I, I feel like that's, you know, uh, maybe it's a skewed perspective, but I feel like the, the typical American diet is it might not be changing so much in content, but in volume it seems like people are eating less. Certainly the snack food companies, from what I understand, are struggling. Alcohol companies, that's a different issue, but th-they're s-certainly have, uh, sales are way, way down.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But it just seems like people's appetites are down.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Well, GLP-1s will do that, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And we were talking about this the other day here, uh, how many Americans have tried a GLP. The estimates are anywhere from, like, one in seven.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Oh, wow.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Some people say it's, it's more.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Which is pretty incredible.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, it's pretty high.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But this is interesting. So how people eat impacts their sleep. I'm sure the listeners and, and I also am thinking, okay, but people who are eating a Mediterranean diet, right, olive oils, fish, you know, fruits, vegetables, they are probably more apt to walk more, exercise more, socialize more, all the... How do you separate out the variables in a study like that?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Uh, well, so in population-based studies, we adjust for a bunch of covariates, right? We have all these questionnaires that, uh, that are given out to people asking them about their race, occupation, sociodemographic, uh, sta- socioeconomic status, and then we adjust, we adjust for, um, different illnesses that they may have, depression, uh, physical activity level. Uh, so we try to take all this in cons-into consideration. Obviously, we, y- there's always unmeasured factors that you can't control for, social interactions like you-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... um, you mentioned. It's usually not captured very well. It's not something that we, uh, we can adjust for. But one thing that we did in my lab, uh, going back to that original study, was to look at, uh, how diet influenced sleep at night in the participants in our inpatient study. So we took the nine-hour time in bed opportunity phase, only that one. In the four-hour time in bed opportunity, participants were very efficient. There was not much variability in sleep duration in, in that phase.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
They slept as much as they could in that four-hour opportunity. But in the nine hours, there was variability there. Some people got more or less. So we wanted to see if food intake was related to their sleep at night. That study, we had polysomnography assessments of sleep every single night.Like I mentioned, we had a controlled diet initially, and then we let them self-select their food intake. So we took a very systematic approach to evaluating how diet could influence sleep in that study. We said, first of all, was the diet that they chose different than the diet that we gave them? First step, right? It was. So they ate almost 450 calories more. They ate 33% more saturated fat. Uh, a little less protein, I believe. A little more carbohydrates. Not much, but it, it was different.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So like, okay, so, so there's difference between the diets. Okay, now, was their sleep at night different when they were eating the diet that we fed them compared to what they self-selected? And it, it, it was different. It wasn't different in terms of duration, but it was different in time it took them to fall asleep, which was almo- over 70% longer to fall asleep when they self-selected their diet. And their slow-wave sleep, so deep sleep, was shorter. I think it was about 23, 20% shorter, uh, when they self-selected their diet compared to what we had given them.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Was timing of food intake impacted? Because when I think of, of, uh, what impacts, what reduces, um, slow-wave deep sleep, it's eating too close to bedtime.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm. So we did not take that into consideration in that study. We didn't, uh, we didn't look at that. We had their, their food intake profile and didn't specifically look in that phase when's, when was their last eating period. But it could have been different than in the controlled feeding condition because in the controlled feeding condition they had set meals at specific times, but they all went to bed at 10:00 PM. Then the other question was, okay, what was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep, higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. So when we talk about arousals in the context of polysomnography, it doesn't necessarily mean full on waking up or awakening. It really means going from a deeper to a lighter stage of sleep, so you may still be asleep throughout the night, but you're not getting deep slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, as much as you would, uh, otherwise.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Do you create a buffer between your last bite of food and the time you go to sleep, you personally?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Me personally? Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Is it an hour, two hours, three hours?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I personally like to eat my last meal at least three hours before going to bed.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And I know there's variability there. Different people have different, uh, tolerance. You mentioned right before that, uh-
- 39:33 – 40:52
Sponsor: AG1
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take it every day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. AG1 is designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy, and it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. I get asked pretty much all the time, "If I could only take one supplement, what should that supplement be?" And my answer is always AG1. It has just been so helpful for supporting all aspects of physical health, mental health, and performance. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a free bottle of their new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 product. Omega-3 and coenzyme Q10 are known to support cardiovascular health, cellular health and energy generally, brain health, and much more. I personally take them both every day. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of the new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription.
- 40:52 – 53:00
Personal Circadian Clock, Shift Work; Naps; Running & Yoga
- AHAndrew Huberman
There seems to be something asymmetric about sleep requirements, in my experience, and I don't think I'm alone in this, whereby if I go to bed at 10:00 PM, like get into bed at 9:30, fall asleep at 10:00, I need about six and a half, maybe seven hours to feel completely rested. That's how long I'll sleep, wake up without an alarm feeling great.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
If I go to bed at midnight, I find I could sleep till 9:00 and still not feel completely rested. So there's some weird sleep inertia stuff going on there, et cetera. The old adage is every hour before midnight is worth two after. But is there any real data to support that, or is this just all subjective and conjecture?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I'm not sure there's data to support that. I haven't seen anything. But what I can say from what you're saying is that if you usually go to bed at 9:30, 10:00, and then all of a sudden you go to bed at midnight, now you're kind of out of line with your personal circadian system, right? And it's always harder to, to get a good night's sleep if you're not going with your internal c-Clock or your internal circadian r- preference. Um, this is what happens with shift workers, right? For example, they, they, they're not sleeping at night. They're trying to sleep during the day. They're trying to sleep during the day where their melatonin's low or it should be when it's high, so they're fighting their circadian system. So yes, they should, they should be getting seven hours, but they're not getting seven hours because their body's not designed to be sleeping during the daytime hours. Plus then you have, you know, everything else, right, that-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right. The light, the stress
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... the lights, the noise, the kids-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... the whatever life that-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... uh, that happens during the daytime when everybody else is awake and you're trying to sleep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, the only thing I can think of that's an advantage to being nocturnal is the quiet.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
I used to sometimes shift to a nocturnal schedule during holidays in graduate school when everyone would go home because I lived, my, my parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... so I could afford to just, just go home for Christmas, right? Just that day.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Or a couple of days, and everyone else had to travel, so I could invert my schedule. It just kind of drifted that way.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at 4:00 AM and, uh, sleeping until, you know, 3:00 PM, at least for typical people. It, you, your brain gets into a kinda weird space-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... when you're inverted from the rest of the world.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah. All the things you do when you're a grad student. I would do the opposite, right? I'd, I'd wake up at 4:00 AM and then study because I felt like all of the hours of studying before the sun rose were, like, extras.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Interesting.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Extra time for me.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, it was definitely extra.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It was-
- AHAndrew Huberman
But you felt like you were extra sharp at those hours?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Extra sharp.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Great.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I could study and then-
- 53:00 – 56:46
Snoring, Sleep Apnea & Testing
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
for sleep apnea.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Does apnea always include snoring?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So are there some people who don't snore who have apnea?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I don't think so. You stop breathing, and then there's this gasping sound that people make when they, uh, they awaken from that or they get aroused from, from this breathing interruption.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I feel like so many people have apnea and don't realize it.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Not because I'm sneaking into their rooms at night and listening to if they snore, but it is just remarkable how many people I speak to who say, "Yeah, I found out I had apnea because I saw that I was snoring," because they started monitoring their sleep-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and there's generally a snoring i- index on these. Or now-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... there are free apps that can just record you while you sleep.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So I know a lot of people are... I don't mouth tape-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... uh, when I sleep, but I, I do, I do, uh, sometimes use one of these nose strips that kind of pulls the nostrils out a bit.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
That certainly it's reduced the amount of snoring for me.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
That will reduce the amount of snoring, but the sleep apnea is from the throat, right? So this-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... closure in the throat that, uh, that obstructs the trachea, and that's what then prompts the awakening and breathing and then the sound that comes from there. Actually, weight loss is typically, like, the first... line treatment if someone has excess weight to start losing weight, that might help with the, uh, with sleep apnea. Uh, then there's CPAP, which, yes, people don't like, but if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be s- not as, uh, not as high, so that might be helpful for comfort. I have a colleague of mine who does, uh, sleep apnea surgeries, so implantables are also-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh. If people think they might have apnea, is it just get a CPAP, pop that thing on? Is that the best line of, of entry?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I think they should, uh, they should get tested. They should see-
- AHAndrew Huberman
So how do we, how does one do that? 'Cause that's the problem.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So yeah, if you're suspecting that you may have sleep apnea because you've been told that you snore, because you wake up and you're not feeling refreshed, and you're feeling sleepy during the day, I think you should talk to your doctor about this. And definitely we have... Polysomnography is the first line, you know, uh, is what we use to detect, um, sleep apnea. But there's in-home sleep testing that can be done, so you don't have to stay overnight in a lab for, for, uh, to get tested for this. And, uh, and your doctor can prescribe that test very easily.
- AHAndrew Huberman
How come we can't just go buy a CPAP on Amazon?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Because you need to have the, the, the pressure determined for you, right? So you need to know what kind of pressure to apply and, you know, how to set it up. Uh, it's not as, as simple as just-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... you know.
- AHAndrew Huberman
All right. Fair.
- 56:46 – 1:09:49
Kefir; Coffee Mannooligosaccharides & Weight Loss; Ginger; Fiber
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
treated for it.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Let's talk about food-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and nutrients. You've done a substantial amount of work here in this area, and I have a bunch of questions. But first I want to talk about kefir.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I love Bulgarian full-fat plain yogurt, but it's right next to the kefir.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Uh-huh.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And I'm always like, "Do I get the kefir?" Well, I don't know. I love the Bulgarian full-fat plain yogurt, so I haven't tried the kefir yet. What's special about kefir, and why are, why did you study kefir?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Kefir we, we studied because it was a fermented dairy product, uh, probiotics. We figured, you know, maybe it will improve, uh, cholesterol synthesis based on its impact on short-chain fatty acids, so that was at, the, the subject of my, uh, master's thesis. And for that study, uh, that was when I was at McGill, we recruited men that had mildly elevated cholesterol levels. We gave them two cups per day versus just regular milk for a month.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So two cups, like two mugs like this?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Two cups like-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Like-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... the measuring cup.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Um, like 500 mLs.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And, uh, and we measured their, the amount of cholesterol they, they produced at baseline, endpoint in both phases, and there was no effect. It was a null study. It was one of those. It was hard to get published.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Kept at it and, and we got it published, but yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So these fermented yogurts and things, they don't do anything for, for cholesterol levels.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
At least in our study-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... in this population at this level with this comparison-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... didn't have any effect.
- AHAndrew Huberman
What's your general thought about, uh, low-sugar fermented foods? I don't know if kefir, uh, qualifies as low-sugar, but based on Justin Sonnenburg's work at Stanford-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and others, I've been, I've been, uh, really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, uh, full-fat Bulgarian yogurt.
- 1:09:49 – 1:11:23
Sponsor: Helix Sleep
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach. Maybe you know, maybe you don't. Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. You answer those questions, and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K, mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA, FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off.
- 1:11:23 – 1:17:20
Food Timing & Burning Fat, Tool: Early Meals
- AHAndrew Huberman
In your work or in your observation or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Someone had a really, um, great question for me at the Obesity Society meeting a couple of years ago. I was showing data that we had just obtained in the lab that showed that if you eat foods later in the day, your fat oxidation is reduced.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So this is a study that we're doing. We had, uh, participants on a controlled diet, and they started eating one hour after waking up, and they had a 10-hour eating window, or they started eating five hours after waking up, so four-hour delay-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... relative to the other condition. Again, same thing for a 10-hour wind- 10-hour window. We gave our participants the exact same foods. Same foods, same quantity, same timing between meals, and this was done in a metabolic chamber. And the meals, especially the meals later in the day that were consumed late relative to the earlier version of those meals, led to less fat oxidation. And someone in the audienceStood up and said, "So would you then recommend that people eat medium-chain triglycerides in their evening meal as opposed to, you know, a, a different type of, of fat?" And my eyes just went like this because, you know, my, my time studying medium-chain triglycerides was, you know, 15 to 20 years ago. I was like, "Wow, this person knows my, that work that I've done and now is applying it to this work that I'm doing currently," and I thought that was fascinating. And I think that, you know, timing of intake of different foods and how it influences metabolism is something that's, uh, that's fascinating to me.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I confess, I'm a like first bite of food around 11:00 AM person. I'm trying to eat breakfast these days [laughs] and then kinda shift things earlier. All it's really done is added a meal. 'Cause I, I take my last bite of food usually around 8:00 PM.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Okay.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I just can't seem to get much earlier. But I and many other people have wondered whether it's best to eat more towards early day or whether or not it's just overall caloric load.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You're saying that it does indeed make a difference.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It makes a difference, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first like two-thirds of your waking day?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Roughly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
As opposed to the last two-thirds.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah. So in that study, one hour after waking up, so let's say basically 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... is our eating window. I mean, this is a 10-hour eating window. It's short. It's not, you know, typical, so it could be 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM.
- AHAndrew Huberman
That seems pretty-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
That's reasonable
- AHAndrew Huberman
... pretty, yeah, yeah.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, versus 12:00 PM to 10:00 PM.
- AHAndrew Huberman
The New York schedule.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah. [laughs] The New York schedule, right?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, the... Yeah, well, I, I sort of chuckle 'cause when I go to New York, like, it's like if you go to dinner at 5:30, 6:00, you're kind of alone in the restaurant.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs] It's kinda... Yeah.
- 1:17:20 – 1:22:54
Medium-Chain Triglycerides (MCTs), Body Composition & Weight Loss
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
What about these MCTs, medium-chain triglycerides? These were very popular in the health and kinda biohacking space a few years ago, the, um, the whole Bulletproof coffee notion-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... MCTs, buttered coffee, and that's more or less faded away.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I don't see a lot of people putting oil in their coffee these days-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
... or coconut. What are some of the known benefits of MCTs? Where do you find them, and what, what brought you to them-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
All right
- AHAndrew Huberman
... as, as a research topic?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
This was a topic for my, uh, PhD dissertation, so yeah, my PI got a grant looking at, uh, medium-chain triglycerides. He had done prior work on this. Uh, but what we did was use purified MCT oil. So this is only, uh, liquid oil that contains eight carbon and 10 carbon chain fatty acids. Those are not very common in our general food source, so it was purified, extracted oil that we then gave our participants. We had created this functional oil, um, that contained flaxseed oil also to be able to get some more, um, some omega-3 fatty acids in there. Uh, we had added, uh, plant sterols because that was a big, um, big focus of my lab, uh, at McGill, plant sterols for cholesterol reduction and pr- uh, reduced, uh, risk of cardiovascular disease.And, uh, but the idea was to evaluate the impact on energy expenditure because the way we process medium-chain triglycerides is different than how we process long-chain triglycerides, so the 12, 14, 16 and up, uh, carbon chains. So the medium-chain triglycerides, they travel directly to the liver. They get metabolized. We burn them off more readily than the long-chain triglycerides that travel across the peripheral circulation, get deposited in adipose tissue, and the sort. And so what we did... What we found, and we did two separate studies in men and women. In both men and women, there was an increase in thermic effect of food, so you burn slightly more calories, uh, from the, the, the meal that contained medium-chain triglycerides compared to the meal that contained your standard fat. For my PhD, the first study we did, we did in women, and we were trying to match the saturated fat content of the diets because, uh, medium-chain fatty acids are by default saturated. They're C... It's 8, 0, 10, 0. So I said, "Okay, we are gonna try to compare that to a, uh, a saturated fat-matched control comparison," and we used beef tallow. Uh, it was a lot of beef tallow. Uh, [laughs] participants were not happy with that diet.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Did you eat it, eat it direct- like spoonfuls of beef tallow?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Well, we, we put it onto mashed potatoes. You know, when you're, when you're doing studies like this where you're trying to control the diet and you want to isolate one aspect of it, right, and we gave real foods, half of the total fat of the diet came from the m- the medium chain containing versus... And the beef tallow.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Oh, my goodness.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So it's like 20% of your fat from one of the two, so you have to pour it, mask it somehow. And-
- AHAndrew Huberman
The MCT?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
MCT-
- AHAndrew Huberman
There's also this issue about laxative effect of MCT oil that, that-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
We had a few participants who initially felt a lot of gargling when... Like just-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... gargling from their stomach, uh, from, from consuming MCT 'cause it was a lot early on. It resolved.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So after a few days, it was fine. It was a one-week, one-month, I mean, four-week study, so after a few days, no one dropped out for-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... you know, any GI issues.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay. That's reassuring.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Um, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So beef tallow it was initially. Uh, beef tallow, because it has a lot of saturated fat, is solid at room temperature, so as soon as your food started to get a little colder, it would kind of gel on your plate.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's sort of like if you-
- 1:22:54 – 1:34:38
Tools: Eating for Sleep & Metabolism; Portion Size; Portfolio Diet
- AHAndrew Huberman
Based on what you're saying, it's reasonable if somebody wants to improve weight loss. I'm hearing a c- sort of a constellation of things. Shift your meal timing to in the first two-thirds or so of your day, which sounds like it will also improve sleep, which will also improve-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah. [laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
... uh-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Your, your ability, yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... food, food appetite and food regula- satiety and hunger-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... signals. What is it, like, a tablespoon or two of MCT per day? Is that kinda what this looks like for the typical person?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, about that.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
In place of-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
In our weight loss studies
- AHAndrew Huberman
... some other oil.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Not in addition.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Not in addition, correct.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay. Some ginger.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Are they additive? Are they synergistic?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I think they could probably be additive because I think that the impact is through different mechanisms. Obviously no one's tested that. Um, you know, it's interesting you, you bring it up this way 'cause it makes me think of, um, David Jenkins and the Portfolio Diet. It actually made the New York Times, uh, I think last Dec- in December of-
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'm not familiar with
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... the Portfolio Diet, uh, was a diet he designed for maximal cholesterol reduction.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So it was initially designed to have, uh, four specific foods, so it was high in soy protein, nuts, plant sterols, and soluble fiber.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah, it's gonna be a tough one to get past most of the-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah
- AHAndrew Huberman
... American public.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
And-
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'll tell you as a, as a public health educator, I don't care if it comes out in The New York Times-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- 1:34:38 – 1:41:20
Corn Oil, Seed Oils & Processed Foods, Smoke Points
- AHAndrew Huberman
Speaking of which, and, um, kind of things outside the box, uh, there's a paper on your CV that I could not help but ask about. Snack chips fried-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
[laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
... in corn oil alleviate-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... cardiovascular risk factors when substituted for low-fat and high-fat snacks.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
What?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
What?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Tell me the data. I believe you. I'm just like, [laughs] what? This is wild.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
This was funded by Frito-Lay. At that time, they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips. So this was Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and just 'Titos. It was all the tos.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Itos.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
All the itos.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
All the itos. Uh, and so they had changed to corn oil. And they're like, "This is an oil that's higher in polyunsaturated fats than what we usually have."
- AHAndrew Huberman
What were they using before?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I'm not sure. I forget.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But it wasn't tallow.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I don't think so.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
They're like, "Does it make a difference? Is it gonna improve health if people choose those snacks compared to other snacks?" So we had three arms in that study. Uh, each person went through each of the three arms. It was for 25 days. The question was, okay, let's say you have a choice for a snack today, and you're gonna go to the vending machine, and you have your option to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate snack, a high-fat, high-more s- high-saturated snack, or those chips. So you just pick one, and that's that. So f- I think we gave... It was two snacks a day for, for 25 days. It was a rotation, so they had four... Yeah, they had four different, uh, chips. So it was two one day, two the next day, and like that for 25 days, and then the controls. And yeah, the, the better lipid profile was the one with, was the one from the, the corn chips. They had the better lipid. Yeah. And they had less, uh, lipoprotein little a, which is another-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... you know, factor-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... cardiometabolic risk factor. But yeah. [laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
Data are data.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Data are data.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, I know that in the head-to-head comparison of seed oils, of which corn is, right?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- 1:41:20 – 1:50:41
Industry-Sponsored Studies
- AHAndrew Huberman
You mentioned, uh, the study was p- paid for by a company.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And earlier you mentioned companies. I think this is an important issue that we've never really direct-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... um, directly addressed on this podcast. I mean, anytime I've covered a paper in a... Sometimes I do these solo episodes. I'll get back to them soon. I used to do a lot more of them. But I would always look, like, are there financial conflicts of interest? What's the difference between a company funding a study and a financial conflict of interest, i- if any? Like, uh, like, to me, a financial conflict of interest is if the investigators, the scientists running the study, um, uh, have stakes in, you know, they have, uh, shares in the company or they're being paid to do the study, obviously.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But when a company funds research on, like, this, uh, the snack chips study-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Mm-hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... that you did, I think everyone would like to assume that they don't have any... You're not feeling any... There's no explicit nor implicit pressure for a particular outcome.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Could you... Like, how did, how does this stuff come about?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So I'm glad you're asking that question because that's something that people often have this knee-jerk reaction to industry-sponsored studies. And there... I know there are people who are very, very vocal against industry, uh, sponsored research. But as scientists, we do research, we do research to the best of our abilities, and we provide, we draft the research question. You get the data, you analyze it, you publish it. Some of the studies that I haven't been able to publish have been funded by industry that have had null results.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Null res- Wait.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Null results.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
So, so we did a, we did a study. It was sponsored by industry. We didn't find any significant effect of the test product compared to the control.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And you can't publish it.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
We wrote the paper. We wrote the report. We provided it to our sponsor just out of, uh, you know, courtesy. Said, "This is the paper. We're gonna submit it for publication."Do what you need to do
- AHAndrew Huberman
So they've given you the green light to submit-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Absolutely
- AHAndrew Huberman
... so the companies aren't short-circuiting this.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
No.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Never. That's in the contract, right? Your-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
... right to publish.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Because otherwise, why'd you do research?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
There's no point in doing research if you're not gonna be able to publish your research. So y- basically, it's courtesy to show the, the paper that you're going to be submitting for publication. That one paper that I'm referring to, I must have tried five different journals, but the findings are not exciting. They're showing that there's no effect on our outcomes, and it got rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected. And I'm w- pretty persistent. I ran out of steam. So if I run out of steam, I can imagine so many other [laughs] people-
- 1:50:41 – 1:54:25
Supplements, Whole Foods, Fiber
- AHAndrew Huberman
Among the students and postdocs and general public when you interact, what, what are people most interested in with respect to nutrition? Like when people ask you, is it like, "What should I eat? What shouldn't I eat?" Like what, what do, what do... what's coming? Like what are your antennae picking up when, when you're out there?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I think what should I eat or, you know, [laughs] or have you heard about X, Y, Z fad? That's also one. Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
No, I haven't heard that. [laughs]
- AHAndrew Huberman
Hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I'm surprised.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Peptides? Or is it like very peptide? Right now peptides are really big.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
It's always something else.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Uh-huh.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So it's, it's, it's very specific to a product.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah, often very specific to a product, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You won't be held responsible for your answer, but, um, do you supplement your diet with, with minerals like magnesium or anything like that, or are you just completely careful food choices?
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I prefer careful food choices.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
I think it's more pleasurable to eat a complete food, uh, diet. That said, I think that there are some people who may need to supplement their diets, but I think people should strive to, to get their nutrients from, uh, from whole foods.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Fiber recommendations are really growing. I, I looked into this, and many, many people's doctors are now telling them, "You should take, uh, a little bit of psyllium husk." I always thought-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Hmm
- AHAndrew Huberman
... by the way, psyllium husk was like the husks, like you had to like... They're like, "You're gonna eat like the seed husks."
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
It's actually ground into a powder or something like that.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'm still afraid to take it, but, uh-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Uh-huh
- AHAndrew Huberman
... I should, I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now are prescribing, um, supplemental fiber.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
In, in a pretty high rate from what I understand. Um-
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Oh, that's interesting.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- MSDr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge
Yeah.
- 1:54:25 – 1:57:03
Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter
- AHAndrew Huberman
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. To learn more about her laboratory's research and to find a link to her book, Eat Better, Sleep Better, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience, and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am hubermanlab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Again, it's hubermanlab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [outro music]
Episode duration: 1:57:04
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