Huberman Lab - Eating for Better Sleep & Foods that Improve Metabolic Health | Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, is a professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University School of Medicine and an expert on the bidirectional relationship between nutrition and sleep. We discuss how even moderate sleep loss increases appetite, changes hunger-related hormones, and causes weight gain, even when calories are not increased. We also explain how meal timing and specific foods, like fiber, ginger, saturated fat, and various oils, affect sleep onset, sleep quality, and metabolism. Throughout the conversation, we discuss specific foods and diets that directly support weight loss, better sleep, and long-term cardiometabolic health. Read the show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Marie-Pierre St-Onge (00:02:29) Sleep Loss & Appetite, Men vs Women (00:10:20) Sponsors: David & BetterHelp (00:12:39) Sleep Loss, Overeating & Cardiometabolic Health (00:21:56) Weight Gain & Sleep Loss, Tool: Informed Food Choices (00:27:59) Diet & Sleep, Insomnia; Tool: Mediterranean Diet, DASH Diet (00:33:25) Food Choices & Sleep Quality, Food Timing (00:39:33) Sponsor: AG1 (00:40:52) Personal Circadian Clock, Shift Work; Naps; Running & Yoga (00:53:00) Snoring, Sleep Apnea & Testing (00:56:46) Kefir; Coffee Mannooligosaccharides & Weight Loss; Ginger; Fiber (01:09:49) Sponsor: Helix Sleep (01:11:23) Food Timing & Burning Fat, Tool: Early Meals (01:17:20) Medium-Chain Triglycerides (MCTs), Body Composition & Weight Loss (01:22:54) Tools: Eating for Sleep & Metabolism; Portion Size; Portfolio Diet (01:34:38) Corn Oil, Seed Oils & Processed Foods, Smoke Points (01:41:20) Industry-Sponsored Studies (01:50:41) Supplements, Whole Foods, Fiber (01:54:25) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, rent sleep as much as you would otherwise. 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 Saint-Ange, 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. Ong'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 JLP, 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. Aunges' 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 Saint-Aange. Dr. Marie-Pierre-Saint-Hge. Welcome. Thank you for having me. 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. 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. I'm 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. 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 sleep, it was coming from an obesity angle. My PhD is nutrition. I trained as a postdoc in 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 group. Then studies evaluating changes over time, seeing that people who don't sleep,

enough tend to gain more weight. There was a famous nurse's health study that I really like to cite when I give talks that was published in 2006, where 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 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? So I started my work in this field trying to uncover whether sleeping too little actually causing.

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 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. We burn less or we eat more. Or maybe it's a combination of the two. Let's try this out and see. So my first study, my first NIH grant, the big R-O-1s, you know, was to look exactly at this.

So we had people who had adequate sleep and we brought them in a lab and we asked them in a crossover design. So half of the participants started out sleeping adequately. we gave him 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 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 neuroimaging, to really get at isolating the impact of sleep duration on appetite-regulating hormones and neuronal responses to foods. And then on the last day, we let themselves select their food intake. And we measured that in the lab. From that study, we showed that in men specifically, 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 GLP1, interestingly enough, looking unlike peptide 1. So the satiety hormone was reduced as a result of short sleep in women. And then when we measured their food intake in the lab, they ate 300 calories more in the short sleep condition than when they got their regular adequate sleep of at least seven and a half hours, a little more than that per night.

Then you're asking about, you know, brain responses. We looked at neuronal responses to food stimuli. We found upregulation in 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 could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of insufficient sleep.

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, the signals that drive a pettative desire to eat are higher. In women, it's more than... the break on eating, on satiety is reduced. Exactly. Okay. As far as I know, the GLP pathways are not divergent by sex, but of course I'm not deeply versed in that literature.

Is there any evidence that GLP's are functioning different in men and women, like circadian-wise or anything like that, or this was just a fortuitous outcome? Yeah. Or I should say, incidental outcome. This was an incidental outcome. We really didn't know what to expect. We didn't really know.

all that we'd see sex differences because there had been prior studies. And prior studies had shown that Grelin 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, we analyzed our data with all of our participants together. And there was no effect. And that was surprising. And people would say, don't you know? Don't you know? Sleep restriction increases Grellin.

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 Grelin 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. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the bronze bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories, and zero

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If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Whenever I'm sleep deprived, though 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 like central ache. And I wonder the extent to which people eat to overcome, like to kind of quell the pain of sleep deprivation. Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation. Maybe their subjective experience of it is very different. But what do you think is happening in that, 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 switch that allows people to enter a day in a much more healthy fashion or a sick, essentially in a slightly sick fashion? In our study, it was actually a 50% reduction in sleep. Because when they had nine-hour sleep opportunity, they slept around seven and a half. And when they had the, they were all people who 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. So it's like staying up late working on a deadline and trying to catch an early flight. Yeah. It's pretty brutal. It's pretty brutal. Yeah.

And that was maintained, you know, they had five nights of that. Five nights of that. Yeah. Were they coming unglued mentally, too? that I think I would feel terrible after that kind of stretch. The end they were done. Like there was no way anyone would want to 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. So they were well supervised, make sure that nothing would happen to them. No naps? No naps. No. But so what happens is I think there's some subconscious need to eat more

when you're sleep deprived. There's also, you know, there's a thermic effect 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 enhances pleasurable and reward centers of the brain where, you know, when also fatigue sits in and now it's like, do you really want to have this conversation with yourself about what to choose at the buffet table?

you know, there's fatigue. And others have shown also that sleepiness tends to correlate with all of this, that there's these triggers for more pleasurable food consumption with the sleep restriction. And it's been reproduced. There's been so many studies. And they all, you know, agree to the extent of overeating. You know, a meta-analysis showed 250 to 400 calories of overeating. 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 when people accumulate that over time, if they're in a night shift condition or new parents or tending to a sick relative or just final exams, like it's a real thing.

It's a real thing. Nehakovison in 2002 published a paper where they had sleep restriction about five hours per night versus a son. 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 almost a pound in two weeks. It strikes me that, you know, for a long time in the stress research, the idea was when people are stressed, they reach for kind of quote-unquote comfort foods, carbohydrate, and typically starch fat, starch, fat sugar combination foods to comfort them. And the just so story was always that okay, well, you know, cortisol's main role is to deploy glucose and so people are doing this as a way to

bring excess energy and it all kind of fits together. What is the relationship between these forms of sleep deprivation that you work on and stress? Is it really a way of, I'm not saying just inducing stress because I think sleep is its own thing, but it's stressful just to be less than adequately rested, independent of the things coming at you in life, right, is what you're studying stress. So if you're thinking about physiological stress measured by cortisol levels. In that study, actually, cortisol wasn't changed. In the short sleep. In the short sleep. Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by circadian rhythms and cortisol. So what does that, what does that mean? There was no difference between the two conditions, adequate sleep or short sleep on cortisol levels. For five days of

sleep restriction at basically four hours a night. So cortisol still peaking in the morning, still dropping in the evening. Wow. That's very surprising. to me. I don't know. I don't know if it's the context of, you know, being in a lab where everything's safe, taking care of for them. There's nothing outside to aggravate this. So I don't know. Maybe when you're in the context of sleep restriction, but also dealing with your daily life, you're needing to take care of your kids, needing to get to work, needing to do all the activities of day living, maybe then that becomes, you know, the added stressful. So the message is if you suffer less than adequate sleep, get someone to take care of everything else.

You better be in a spa. Exactly, exactly. No, I'm not challenging the result. I just find it really interesting. I would have thought that basal cortisol levels would go awry. Well, in that study also, we didn't see any effect on glucose or insulin. Nothing. Nothing. The curves, were superimposable. Wild. They were eating the exact same food at the exact same time, exact same quantity.

The only thing we changed was the amount of sleep opportunity they got at night. So to me, this means that it's a combination of different things that causes the metabolic abnormalities that we notice in free living populations. People aren't isolated.

They're not in a box where they're not sleeping enough and they're choosing to eat higher fat, higher sugar, higher salt, poor diet, that then triggers a worsening and maybe compounded by the lack of sleep, even worsening of those cardiometabolic outcomes. Because we did a follow-up study to this severe sleep restriction study. So the reason why we did that was because exactly for this reason, because we did not find any adverse impact on glucose or insulin or lipid profile.

And we're like, so what is it then? Why is it that in population-based studies, we find that people who sleep too little have higher risk of cardiovascular disease, higher risk of hypertension, higher blood pressure, higher risk of type 2 diabetes? So because we had seen that food choices were different, that they ate a diet, that was higher in calories, higher in fat and saturated fat. We thought maybe if you're in a free living situation, that's when you start to see those cardiometabolic outcomes

because it's compounded by maybe more sedentary behavior and alterations in food choices and diet. So the follow-up study then was to recruit good sleepers, people who sleep at least seven hours per night, verified by actigraphy, who answer on questionnaires, that their sleep quality is good. And then to take these people and say, okay, now you're either going to continue your excellent sleep or you're going to now go to bed an hour and a half later so that you get an hour and a half reduction in sleep. Because when we screen people to sleep at least seven hours per night, they sleep about seven and a half. And reducing by an hour

and a half gets to six hours, which is short sleep, insufficient. On average, what people who don't get enough sleep get. They're missing a full sleep cycle. Yeah, pretty much. And they can sustain that for prolonged periods because that's what people report in population-based studies. And now when we did that, we saw that insulin resistance was increased after six weeks of sleep restriction compared to adequate sleep. We saw insulin sensitivity was reduced. It was worse, actually, in postmenopausal women compared to premenopausal women. We saw blood pressure was increased. So those cardiometabolic outcomes were adversely impacted in free-living, mild, sustained sleep restriction for six weeks. Six weeks was something else also. It was tough. I can only imagine.

Wow. Okay. Because my mind always goes to, all right, well, we wake up in the morning because of an increasing cortisol, that 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, at least in the first study you described, glucose levels weren't all You said it was isocoloric, so people were, it's not like they're eating more. No. The hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated. But we didn't let them eat more.

But you didn't let them. I think that's a key thing that you pointed out before, but I think we want to underscore. And then, of course, the GLP levels in women being reduced. It's not that they were able to eat, as we say, ad libidum and then they happen 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 isochloric diet. And I have a, I have an idea what it might be, but I'm curious what the answer is. Yes, I think they're more sedentary.

During the day, less spontaneous activity. 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. But we did a study where the 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. 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 a metabolic chamber because it's very much. more costly, energetically, to remain awake than to fall asleep. So energy expenditure when participants were awake was identical in both conditions, regardless of how much sleep they got the night before. So it's fidgeting, movement, because we've talked before in this podcast about the non-exercise and use thermogenesis. It's a big number.

I mean, 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 would get that possible? be. It's a lot. That's at the extreme. But it is kind of interesting to observe people

out in the world. And you sometimes see that people who are very, very lean, 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. They tend to walk quickly. Well, you're from New York. So everyone there walks faster than out here. But it's a real thing.

You know, whereas some people like me are kind of more in the middle of the curve, but you know, I sit a bit more still unless I'm very caffeinated. These things add up over time in ways that I think most people underestimate. Yeah.

So for us, it was about 5% of energy increased. But it ended up being about 90 calories, nowhere close to the 300 calories that more of intake. They got over a day in the prior study. So it's still an imbalance towards a positive energy balance when we do the math. but there is an increase in energy expenditure. Again, in the confines of a metabolic chamber, which for most people is equivalent of the size of their bathroom. Right.

You have like a bed, a table, and a sink, a toilet, that's it. So you can't do much in there. But you can do studies, quote unquote, out in the wild with actometry or whatever. Yeah, actigraphy, double-evaled water. Yes. A little while ago I saw a study that said that if you are one night sleep, deprived. Like you get one or two hours less sleep than normally you would get to feel rested, that it's actually advantageous to exercise because it offset some of the increase in inflammation.

But then if you're growing multiple nights that way exercising on a regular basis when sleep deprived, it just sets up susceptibility to illness, susceptibility to injury and so forth. How much of what you observe under the conditions of sleep deprivation do you think are downstream or upstream of this thing that we just call inflammation. Like, is it just like a bodywide response and there are a bunch of things that have gone awry. And so, like, a bunch of systems are dysregulated or can we pinpoint, okay, when you're sleep deprived, this is what, this is what's happening.

Because I think if women knew that their GLP's were down when they're down on sleep so that they should expect that they would feel less satiety, if men knew that their ghrelin levels were elevated when they're down on sleep. that they're going to feel hungrier. I mean, we have a pretty big prefrontal cortex, most people anyway, and we can intervene simply on the basis of knowledge. I think that's what's empowering. And I think about this sometimes too when I'm thinking about, you know,

my diet at times, right? I'm like, do I really want to eat this? Or is it because I really didn't sleep last night, right? So you can make, you can ask yourself these questions. Stick a pause and say, okay, do I really? really want, you know, dessert? Or is it just that I'm tired? And, you know, I should just, I'm fine. I don't need it. So if you step back and think that maybe part of it is because you didn't sleep well the night before, then you can make your appropriate choices, right? Say,

okay, I probably don't need the extra calories right now. Or maybe you say, you know what? I had a really bad night last night. And those extra calories, I don't really care because they're going to make me feel good and I need some pick me up. But, you know, that's all the choices to make, right? You know, because mood comes into play as well. Well, ultimately, that brings us to 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. 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. What's known about that, either from your work or from other work? 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, you know, you don't really know causality. They happen at the same time.

And I think early on 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 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 years, right? So Mesa, multi-ethnics study of atherosclerosis is one of those great cohorts that we have here in the US that has all of the above.

So I paired up with a colleague of mine, Susan Redline in Boston, and she's a principal investigator on their sleep insulary 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 probability of having adequate sleep and reduce insomnia symptoms in this cohort. So then it launched a whole field of study really to keep looking at this. And we've looked at this in different studies and different cohorts. actually earlier this year, we published data from the Women's Health Initiative,

another large cohort with good diet data and sleep information. We took a really, really nice approach in this 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 want to see the development of hypertension. In this case, we're 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 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 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, insomnia at three years. And the dash diet is what? Dietary approaches to stop hypertension was developed to 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 diet and can be, It has been tested in a low salt or regular salt profile.

How did those work out? I'm just curious, do you recall if the low salt, high salt condition? There is 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. Others not so much. But the dash diet, regardless of its salt content, did better than the equivalent non-dash. Which would be your average, you know, American diet.

Whatever that is. Yeah. higher and saturated fats and sugars. Which seems to be changing now because of the GLPs. I feel like that's, you know, maybe it's a skewed perspective. But I feel like 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 there certainly have sales are way, way down. But it just seems like people's appetites are down. Well, JLP wants, we'll do that, right? Yeah. And we were talking about this the other day here. How many Americans have tried a GLP? The estimates are anywhere from like one in seven.

Some people say it's more, which is pretty incredible. Yeah, it's pretty high. But this is interesting. So how people eat impacts their sleep, I'm sure the listeners, 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. How do you separate out the variables in a study like that? Well, so in population-based studies, we adjust for a bunch of covariates, right?

We have all these questionnaires that are given out to people asking them about their race, occupation, socioeconomic status, and then we adjust for different illnesses that they may have, depression, a physical activity level. So we try to take all this into consideration. Obviously, there's always unmeasured factors that you can't control for. Social interactions like you mentioned, it's usually not captured very well. It's not something that we can adjust for. But one thing that we did in my lab, going back to that original study,

was to look at 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 that phase.

They slept as much as they could in that four-hour opportunity. but in the nine hours, there's 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 polysumography assessments of sleep every single night. Like I mentioned, we had controlled diet initially, and then we let themselves 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, a little less protein, I believe, a little more carbohydrates.

Not much, but it was different. So there's difference between the diets. Okay, now, was there sleep at night different? when they were eating the diet that we fed them compared to what they self-selected. And 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 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 when they self-selected their diet compared to what we had given them. Was timing of food intake impacted? Because when I think of what impacts, what reduces slow wave deep sleep, it's eating too close to bedtime. So we did not take that into consideration in that study. We didn't look at that. We had their food intake profile and didn't. specifically look in that phase, 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 p.m. 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 polysymognography, 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, rent sleep as much as you would otherwise. Do you create a buffer between your last bite of food and the time you go to sleep, you personally? Me personally? Yes. Is it an hour, two hours, three hours? I personally like to eat my last meal at least three hours before going to bed.

And I know there's variability there. different people have different tolerance. You mentioned right before that, you know, some people may be later chronotypes. But what we know is that eating earlier is better overall. For cardiometabolic health, eating earlier is better. Me personally, I feel better by eating earlier. If I eat too close to bedtime, I get hot. Right.

Yeah. It's a thermic effect of food. make effective food. And we want to be cooling off when we go to sleep. Exactly, exactly. 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

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you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a free bottle of their new omega-3 co-enzyme Q-10 product. Omega-3 and co-enzyme 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 slash Huberman to get a free bottle of the new omega-3 co-enzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. 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 p.m., I get into bed at 9.30,

fall asleep at 10. 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. If I go to bed at midnight, I find I could sleep till nine 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 in conjecture? 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 o'clock, 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 get a good night's sleep if you're not going with your internal clock or your internal circadian preference. This is what happens with shift workers, right? For example, they're not sleeping at night. They're trying to sleep during the day.

They're trying to sleep during the day where they're melatonin's low or it should be when it's high. So they're fighting their circadian system. So, yes, 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? Right. The light, the stress. The lights, the noise, the kids, the whatever life that happens during the daytime when everybody else is awake and you're trying to sleep. Yeah, the only thing I can think of that's an advantage to being nocturnal is the quiet.

I used to sometimes shift to a nocturnal schedule during holidays in graduate school when everyone would go home because I lived, my parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school, so I could afford to just go home for Christmas, right, just that day or a couple of days and everyone else had to travel. So I could invert my schedule. It just kind of drifted that way. Yeah. I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at 4 a.m.

and sleeping until 3 p.m., at least for typical people. Your brain gets into a kind of weird space when you're inverted from the rest of the world. Well, the things you do when you're a grad student, I would be the opposite, right? I'd wake up at 4 a.m. and then study because I felt like all of the hours of studying before the sun rolls or like extras.

Interesting. Extra time for me. It was definitely extra. But you felt like you were extra sharp at those hours? Extra sharp. I could study and then, you know, I got that time done and then, you know, breakfast. But then I crashed later in the afternoon.

the problem, the 1, 2 p.m. crash. Has your work explored napping at all? I'm a believer in naps and non-sleep deep rest, yoga, nidra type things, meditation. Do naps factor into this diet, nutrition, hunger equation? So we haven't done research on napping per se. For me, there's a lot going on with napping. I don't think we have very good data to be able to say what's appropriate about napping. What we do know is that you don't want to nap too close to bedtime because you want to build sleep pressure throughout the day. And if you're dissipating the sleep pressure, the sleep need too close to bedtime, then you're not going to be able to fall asleep when time comes to go to bed at your usual hour. And then, you know, you get into this vicious cycle and it's not helpful.

But, you know, there are some studies that say, well, what should you do if you can't sleep enough night and you're feeling tired, you know, should you sleep? Recommendations are that you should make it a short nap, 30 minutes, no more than an hour, early enough in the day, if possible, so that you can have sufficient time to rebuild that sleep pressure to be able to fall back asleep well when time comes. But then there's also this whole question about what's a nap for, right? Like, why are you sleepy. Of course, if you've pulled an out, not it's easy to know. But if you had sufficient sleep or sufficient opportunity for sleep at night, you're waking up and you're not feeling refreshed, you're not feeling like had good quality sleep, and then you're not able to maintain

alertness throughout the day and you need a nap, I think you should check to see, like, what's going on at night? Like, why are you not getting that good enough sleep? I'm chuckling because my postdoc advisor sparked this huge debate. It was a big lab. And we had a couple of people in lab who like to nap at their desk. These were people that could just like put their head down and nap at their desk in the afternoon. You'd walk in, they'd be napping and then they'd wake up and keep working. Everyone was working very hard. And he had this theory that if you're napping, it's because you're sleep deprived, that like napping is unhealthy, you know. And it sparked a big debate. And people, because it were a bunch of nerds, people bring data in like, no,

You know, the sleep lab at Stanford says that naps can be healthy. And I think it, what you just described summarizes, I think, the takeaway. I'm a believer in the short nap. But I'm one of these people that can sleep anywhere, anytime, which may be reflective of sleep deprivation. Maybe, yeah. Do you find that like when you're going to design a study or when you're going to like really work, like this 4 a.m. time, that it's a time of calm or are you like a lazy, are you, do you feel like your mind is moving fast or you're kind of in this like flow zone or whatever you want to call it? I'm very focused, very efficient.

So I try to be really attentive at my task. I try to take breaks once in a while, but most of the time it's very efficient, get to the task and get it done. Earlier you were talking about biking into work. You strike me as somebody. I always think of people who I'm always impressed by colleagues like this, that their life is kind of like a step function.

They wake up and it's like, and they're into the day, and then it's down, right? Yeah. Interesting. I think some of us are more like this. But I think it's important to have a little bit of both, though. I think it's important to have downtime, you know, speed time, to not just be go, go, go, go, go.

Like you were asking about my personal, you know, actions. And at one point, I was running a lot for exercise. And I felt like my whole life was just running all the time. You're brain to? Yeah, yeah. Run to get my kids to school. Run to work. Get work done.

Run to. Then run for fun. Run. Run. And then I thought, okay, I kind of need to. I think I need to breathe. And so I started incorporating yoga into my exercise routine. I think that's good.

Actually, when I was a grad student, I thought yoga was stressful because I couldn't stand in those poses. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But I think yoga evolved. I think the yoga I do now, it's not as static as the yoga I was doing when I was a grad student.

I think it evolved to be a little more active than back then. I see the benefit to having both types of exercise. Thanks for being willing to explore that. You know, I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner, but the Ayurvedic folks, they'll talk about people like more fire, more earth, you know. And I think it's just a different lens and nomenclature on there's a kind of array of phenotypes. But when we talk about this thing, sleep, it becomes very prescriptive, right?

It's like we all need six to eight hours. I mean, actually, from what you're saying today, six sounds like insufficient is what I'm hearing. I'm probably a little sleep deprived is what I'm kind of hearing. So, you know, a colleague of mine just published a paper in nature about the biological clocks and aging in different organs. And the sweet spot really was six and a half to about seven and a half, eight hours for optimal aging. Once you get to blow that, it's basically you shaped, right?

So too much of one thing is not good. Too little is not good. You want to be in the sweet spot. Most organs for optimal aging was in the six and a half to seven point eight. And it differed a little bit by men and women, depending on which organs he was looking at, a little longer for women. Some of the curves were different, where some are more pronounced U-shapes in men than women

in different organs. Very interesting paper. It came out last week or two weeks ago. I had to check it out. What other sex differences are known to exist in sleep requirements, sleep dynamics, from your work or from other work? This is not something we've really covered on the podcast. No?

No. I mean, well, not in any sufficient amount. of detail. Yeah. So women tend to sleep a little longer than men across lifespan. Although, you know, if you ask women about their sleep, they don't rate their sleep as very good. More women than men report having difficulties with sleep. Insomnia, for example, insomnia symptoms. More women than men say they have difficulty falling asleep, difficulty maintaining sleep across the adult lifespan. Why do you think that is? There could be some physiological effects, some hormonal effects. Women don't sleep the same across a menstrual cycle. There's discomfort at

different times. And then there's different responsibilities, different social roles that come into play that may influence women differently than men. But we're working on a review paper actually about hypertension and sleep and sex differences. And, you know, women are more sensitive to the impact of poor sleep on different metabolic outcomes than men. So for blood pressure, at lower sleep apnea, for example, at lower thresholds of sleep apnea, their blood pressure would be higher than men. So I think that there needs to be, for sure,

a lot more research in this area to be able to uncover, you know, these differences. And then, you know, knowing that there are these differences to start probing women about their sleep. But last year we published a scientist, statement for the American Hours Association about multidimensional sleep health. And we concluded by recommending clinicians that they actually ask their patients about sleep. And not ask a question, a targeted question, just ask their patients, how's your sleep? Because if you start

asking about, oh, how much sleep do you usually get at night? Then you tell the person that the only thing that matters is how many hours of sleep you got at night. That's not all sleep is about, right? sleep is not just about the number of hours that you got, but it's also about the regularity, the quality, your satisfaction with it. There's nighttime experiences. There's daytime experiences from sleep. When you wake up from sleep, are you feeling refreshed? Are you feeling like you had, are you satisfied with the sleep you got the night before

during the day? Are you staying alert? Are you vigilant during the daytime hours? from your past sleep experience. So having this open-ended question, maybe clinicians won't have time for the answer, but allows their patient to actually tell them what's bothering them about their sleep.

Then you can get something like, you know, my spouse keeps kicking me because I'm snoring too loud, then, oh, well, maybe we should test you for sleep apnea. Does apnea always include snoring? Yes. So are there some people who don't snore who have apnea? I don't think so.

You stop breathing. And then there's this gasping sound that people make when they awaken from that. Or they get aroused from this breathing interruption. I feel like so many people have apnea and don't realize it, 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 and there's generally a snoring index on these. Or now there are free apps that can just record you while you sleep.

So I know a lot of people are, I don't mouth tape when I sleep, but I do sometimes use one of these nose strips that kind of pulls the nostrils out a bit. That certainly it's reduced the amount of snoring for me. That would reduce the amount of snoring, but the sleep apnea is from the throat, right? So there's closure in the throat that obstructs the trachea. And that's what then prompts the awakening and breathing and then the sound that comes from there. Actually, weight losses typically, like the first line treatment. If someone has excess weight to start losing weight, that might help with sleep apnea.

Then there's CPAT, which, yes, people don't like. But if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be not as high, so that might be helpful for comfort. I have a colleague of mine who does sleep apnea surgeries, so implantables are also. If people think they might have apnea, is it just get a CPAP, pop that thing on? Is that the best line of entry? I think they should get tested. So how do we do?

How does one do that? Because that's the problem. If you're suspecting that you may have sleep apnea because you're. 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 polysypynography is the first line, you know, is what we use to detect sleep apnea. But there's in-home sleep testing that can be done. So you don't have to stay overnight in the lab to get tested for this.

And your doctor can prescribe that test very easily. How can we can't just go buy a CPAP on Amazon? Because you need to have 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. It's not as simple as just, you know. All right, fair. It needs to have the proper settings and someone needs to tell you which setting to use because then that's where you run to the trouble of having the wrong settings and not being effective.

Yeah, I just know from having done this podcast a while that like if, People think, okay, I got to go to my doctor. I got to find out or convince them that I have apnea. Then they have to, like, write me a script for a CPAP. Then I got to buy a CPAP, which I'm guessing is not cheap. I'm not sure. I don't think they're very inexpensive. The price might have come down.

And I got to sleep with this thing on my face, like looking like Darth Vader. So I don't sound like Darth Vader. I just think very few people are going to do it. So somebody out there should, like, come up with an at-home solution to this. Something like apnea seems important enough to daytime wakefulness, cognitive function, longevity, metabolic, like it wicks out to so many things that I feel like it deserves, it deserves like a public health messaging. Yeah, if you use it well and you feel better during the day, that's reinforcing, right, to keep using it and get tweaked for it.

Let's talk about food 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. Yeah. I love Bulgarian, full fat, plain yogurt, but it's right next to the kefir. 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 did you study kefir? Kiefer we studied because it was a fermented dairy product, probiotics. We figured, you know, maybe it will improve cholesterol synthesis based on its impact on short chain fatty acids. So that was the subject of my master's thesis. For that study, 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. So two cups, like two mugs like this? Two cups like the measuring cup. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Like 500 emils.

Okay. And we measured the amount of cholesterol they produced. at baseline endpoint in both phases, and there is no effect. It was a null study, it was one of those. It was hard to get published, kept at it, and we got it published, but yeah. So these fermented yogurts and things, they don't do anything for cholesterol levels? At least in our study, in this population at this level, with this comparison, didn't have any effect. What's your general thought about low-sugar fermented foods?

I don't know if Kiefer qualifies as low sugar, but based on Justin Sondonberg's work at Stanford and others, I've been really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, full-fat Bulgarian yogurt. Fermented foods are interesting. Yeah. Are you a proponent in general? I'm a proponent.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to feed your gut. I think that the gut microbiome is getting a lot of attention for all sorts of, you know, health benefits. So I think that that's something that's important. So also it's important to also consider that, you know, for that study, right, our main outcome was cholesterol synthesis. But there's so many other things we could have looked at that we didn't look at, right? Then maybe it didn't have any impact for cholesterol synthesis, but maybe glycemic control might be better.

or for gut inflammation, it would be better. But, you know, you pick your outcomes, right? You study something. This is the challenge of doing controlled science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So of the opposite end of the, like, X, what used to be called Twitter science, where people just, like, report anecdotes.

But actually, anecdotes of that sort of become very powerful now in the public health space for better or worse. Like people, you know, because we can look at any study and say, well, that's a very artificial circumstance. You say, well, intentionally, because we're trying to isolate variables. Right, right, right, exactly. People get frustrated. Oh, that's an observational study.

Well, I'm going to continue to eat low sugar fermented foods every day. I do think in a study like the one you described, occasionally there's just, there's, let me state this differently. Historically, in science, there's been a lot of interesting discoveries that have come from researchers designing a study and look at one thing and then kind of noticing. I like all the subjects feel better or sleep better, their skin, they're reporting things that then lead to another line of inquiry. But you moved on from Kiefer. Tell me about this paper. I was intrigued by this when I looked over your CV.

A weight loss diet that includes a coffee beverage enriched in, let me try this, menologosaccharides. Yeah. Okay? Yeah. Long word. Leads to a greater loss of adipose, fat tissue, than placebo beverage in overweight. men. Yeah.

Tell me about this study and what these men oligococcharides are. And if somebody wants to lose weight, should they be including this in their coffee? So this was industry sponsored research that we did. They wanted to replicate a study that had been done in a different country because they wanted to replicate the findings. So we did this study. It was basically a placebo-controlled study. We were provided coffee manual oligosaccharides.

So these are extracted from spent coffee grounds. So it was basically satchets, right? So a white packet. One had the coffee manual illegal saccharides. The other one didn't. We gave it to our study participants. We measured their body composition. We found an effect on body composition in men, not women.

And so that was the end of that product. Really? They would market it just because it only had an effect in men? Yeah. I assure you there are many men who would love to drink a coffee drink can lose more weight as a consequence. It's not going to be our market, you know. But do we know what the ingredients were?

It was manuallygosaccharide. It's just the extracted, yeah. So it was just basically a product that was tasted like coffee, strong coffee. But it didn't have the caffeine or anything like that. It just had this manual oligalaccharide that was extracted from coffee. So this substance comes from coffee ordinarily. But coffee is very low, low calorie on its own. from the spent grounds.

So no one really consumes this, really, because, you know, when you brew your coffee, you're not getting it, no. Can you buy it? Can people get it? I don't think so. I'm not sure. So what do you, first of all, how much weight did they lose relative to the? It was statistically significant.

Yeah. Okay. I was intrigued by it because I thought there's something that, I mean, you studied, it's interesting. You said, kefir, manna oligosaccharides from coffee. Yeah. And now I'm going to ask you about ginger. When I was a graduate student, I was interested in functional foods.

And I was interested in those foods that provide health benefits beyond their nutritional value. Right. So kifere is a fermented dairy product. We were studying it for a functional benefit on cholesterol synthesis. That's not a function of dairy, right? Dairy is, you consume it for bone health, right? So it's basically when we talk about different claims that foods have, you know, there's those structure function claims, like consuming dairy contains calcium that's good

for your bones. And then there's functional claims, those functional claims or health claims, we call them, that say, okay, well, health claim, there's a health claim for oats, for example, right? So consuming fiber from oats reduces cholesterol levels. That's been demonstrated. Yes. So that's a health claim. That's an approved health claim.

That's why you see the hearts on some boxes of cereal. But that's different than fiber is good for maintaining regularity, right? So anyways, I was interested in functional foods for health benefits beyond their nutritional content. And so we studied Kifir for my master's degree and then for my PhD. studied medium chain triglycerides. And then ginger, that was something that I offered to a grad student at Columbia. It was interesting because the McCormick company had an advertisement in one of the nutrition journals, and they were going to donate spices for research.

It was like, okay. They had a list of different herbs and spices that they were going to donate for research, I had a grad student. And I said, take a look at this list. Come back to me. Say if there's something in there that we should test in the lab based on the things that I do, don't come to me with something that's, you know, that I don't study. But.

I had some funds that I could use for him to do that. What did the study look like? A study where we looked at the thermic effect of food. So people ate ginger root when they're spicing their food? We dissolved ginger powder in warm water. And so that was one beverage. And then in the crossover, again, crossover design. So the next time when they came, it was just hot water.

And how many times a day are they drinking it? This was a one-time consumption period. and we looked at the thermic effect of food over a six-hour period. So again, they're under this, we call it metabolic hood, right? So a little bubble. And we measure their oxygen consumption carbon dioxide production for, I think it was four or five hours. And it's significantly elevated with ginger. With ginger.

Yeah. So we think through the capsaic receptor, there's an increase in the thermic effect of food. So yeah, so I was interested to see, are there little things? that we could do little changes we can make to our diet to boost energy expenditure relative to intake, you know, just to tip the scale. Because many adults over the course of their lifetime gain weight, and it's not a big imbalance in calories on a daily basis that leads to 10 pounds of weight gain over 10, 15 years, right?

Or more. I mean, now, again, the GLP's are coming in and adjusting. Yeah, I'm very interested also in foods that have impact beyond their, you know, known roles. I mean, the problem is in this area, in the functional foods area, not the problems with your work, but is that there are a lot of wild claims that go unchecked. Like, oh, you know, walnuts are shaped like a brain and therefore they're good for your brain or, you know, which is they have certain things in them, which are brain beneficial, but it's not related to the shape of the food. So you get there's a, that area I feel of nutrition has been marginalized on the basis of the kind of like quackery associated with it. But of course, there are interesting things in different foods. I do think that the Sonnenberg and colleagues work on low sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatory, even more than fiber.

I mean, actually in that study, this is kind of the like, even Justin will kind of downplay this a little bit. He's a colleague, so I can say in the fiber group, when they compared to low sugar fermented foods, and then they measured the inflammatoryome, they did a crossover design. So within the fiber group, there was a fair number of people who their inflammation went way, way up when they consumed more fiber. But in the low sugar fermented group, or when they were in that group, it was always, on average, reduced. Some people who increase their fiber intake, their inflammatoryome decreases.

For a lot of people, it increases, which is not to say that fiber. is bad, but I think now we're starting to think about, like, different types of fibers. I was going to ask. Yeah. They didn't control for that. They just said increased to the number of servings each day. And I know a lot of people don't like to eat fibrous foods because they don't feel good after they eat them. It's like, it's not that they don't taste good.

And I think there's this whole, like, histamine story that needs exploration. I think foods and the healthy foods needs better parsing in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, there was also abituation. You don't go from consuming six grams of fiber per day to 25. They ramped them up, but I have to say they ramped them up pretty high. Like even the low sugar fermented foods, I think they got them up to like four servings per day. Okay.

It's a lot of kimchi. You're not familiar with it. Like it can be a little hard on the gut. Yeah. I actually take an enzyme. I think it's called DAO. Very inexpensive. It's like a tiny, tiny pill for digesting histamines.

Because I noticed after I had way protein or I had blood. broccoli. I would get kind of sleepy. I was like, what is this? And a colleague at Stanford, Sean Mackey, is their head of our pain center, said that he had gut pain at one point. He's a pain doctor and directs the pain center. And he figured out by elimination and trial and error that it was onions and other histamine-containing foods. He avoids histamine-containing foods. I'm not about to give up the things I just described. Onions I can do without. So I think that there's a, there is food to have real effect. So Kiefer, these men oligosaccharides, I have to confess, I'm a little disappointing because

like here it looks like it has like a cool effect, but they didn't want, now can't get them. I'm not going to eat coffee grounds. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helic 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

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that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixleep.com slash 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 helixleep.com slash Huberman to get up to 27% off. In your work or in your observation or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you? Someone had a really 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. So this is a study that we're doing. We had 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 relative to the other condition. Again, same thing for a 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 audience stood up and said, so would you then recommend that people eat medium chain triglycerides in their evening meal as opposed to, you know, a different type of fat? And my eyes just went like this because, you know, my time studying medium chain triglycerides

was, you know, 15 to 20 years ago. I was like, wow, this person knows 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 fascinating to me. I confess I'm a, like, first bite of food around 11 a.m. person. I'm trying to eat breakfast these days and then kind of shift things earlier.

All it's really done is added to me. because I take my last bite of food, usually around 8 p.m. 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. You're saying that it does indeed make a difference. It makes the difference, yeah. You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first, like, two-thirds of your waking day?

Roughly, yeah. As opposed to the last two-thirds. Yes. Yeah. So in that study, one hour after waking up, so let's say basically 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. 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 a.m. to 7 p.m. That's reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. Versus 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The New York schedule. Yeah, well, I started chuckle because when I go to New York, like, it's like if you go to dinner at 536, you're kind of alone in the restaurant. Yeah. Depends on time of year. Early bird special. Yeah, it depends on time of year. In California, it's kind of in, it's the early shifted. Yes.

But that's just more reflective of culture, I think. In Europe, they eat very late often. Depends on where. I was saying before we started, I was on a full bright program last year in Spain. And I would joke with my colleagues there because they eat very late. And even the children eat very late. And I was like, okay, well, you feed me. Then you feed the children.

Right, right. Then you have your dinner because they could have dinner at 11 p.m. And the children, eight, nine p.m. And I'm like, can't be good. If you, my dad's from Argentina, if you go to a restaurant in Buenos Aires at 9 p.m., you're not going to see many people. At 11 p.m., you'll see people in their 70s and 80s, and they're up early the next day. They nap in the afternoon.

Yeah. I don't know how healthy they are as a country on average, but I haven't looked at. the data, but very, very late-shifted culture. Well, there's been studies in Spain that have looked at timing of eating and their impact on weight management. I'm thinking of work by Marta Garraoulette, where she showed that in her weight loss program, the participants who have lunch, so their bigger meal is lunch, who have their lunch earlier in the day, have better weight loss than those who have their lunch later

in the day. So, you know, even in those cultures where they... They tend to eat late. They still find that eating earlier tends to be better for you. I was very, very relieved when Alan Aragon, who's I consider one of the best public educators on the topic of protein and nutrition, body recomposition, he's formally trained in this,

reassured me that nowadays there's a lot of interest in getting protein ration. It's probably overdone a little bit, but people are striving to get more high-quality protein. But that except in rare, circumstances where people are really trying to optimize every bit of muscle protein synthesis, 95% of the effect of getting enough protein can be accomplished by having like two meals, maybe a little snack that you don't, and they can be evenly distributed or unevenly distributed.

You know, I think a lot of people are feeling this protein pressure and like, oh, I got to eat another meal late in the day or I have to force myself to eat breakfast in order to get their protein ration. It turns out the whole notion that you could only assimilate like 30 grams. for meal is totally false. It turns out, can it's similarly up to 100 grams. Now, there are conditions that set that up, like exercise, et cetera, but I find that very liberating.

Like you could have breakfast and an early dinner with a snack in the middle. You could miss breakfast, have lunch and an early dinner. What I'm hearing from you, however, is that you really want to avoid the big, even or just late dinner. You just don't want to eat too close to bedtime. Correct. Okay. Yeah.

What about these MCTs, medium chain, These are very popular in the health and kind of biohacking space a few years ago, the whole blip-proof coffee notion, MCTs, butter coffee. And that's more or less faded away. I don't see a lot of people putting oil in their coffee these days or coconut. What are some of the known benefits of MCTs? Where do you find them and what brought you to them as a research topic? This was a topic for my PhD dissertation.

So my PI got a grant looking at the medium chain triglycerides. He had done prior work on this. But what we did was use purified MCT oil. So this is only 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 that contained flaxseed oil also to be able to get some

more, some omega-3 fatty acids in there. We had added plant sterols because that was a big focus of my lab at McGill, plant sterols for cholesterol reduction and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. 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 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 a sort. And so what we did, what we found, We did two separate studies in men and women, in both men and women that was an increase in thermic effect of food. So you burned slightly more calories from the meal that contained medium chain triglycerides compared to the meal that contained your standard fat. For my PhD, the first study we did in women. And we were trying to match the saturated fat content of the diets because medium chain fatty acids are by default saturated. or C is 8-0, 10-0. So it's okay, we're going to try to compare that to a saturated fat matched control comparison, and we use beef tallow. It was a lot of beef tallow.

Participants were not happy with that diet. And eat it direct, like spoonfuls of beef tallow? We put it on to mashed potatoes. You know, 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? When we gave real foods, half of the total fat of the diet came from the medium chain containing and the beef tallow. So it's a 20% of your fat from one of the two. So you have to pour it, mask it somehow. MCT. There's also this issue about laxative effect of MCT oil that...

We had a few participants who initially felt a lot of gargling when I was a lot of the like just gargling from their stomach, from consuming MCT, because it was a lot early on. It resolved. So after a few days, it was fine. It was a one week, one month, I mean, four weeks study. So after a few days, no one dropped out for, you know, any GI issues. Okay, that's reassuring.

Yeah. So beef tallow it was initially. 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. Yeah, it's sort of like if you bring French fries home from a restaurant that used tallow and then you like put it in the fridge because you thought you wanted them as leftovers in the next day. They're sort of like in this like stuck to bottom of container configuration. Yeah. Yeah, it's not very appetizing. Not a feeling. No, there's like, it's white all underneath.

Yeah, it almost always goes into the trash. A couple of women felt it gave them headache. Just the smell of it, you know? So with the MCT's big, significant increase in thermic effect of food? That was statistically, yeah. It was about 45 to 50, 60 calories. Oh, I thought you were going to say percent increase. No, no, no. So it's a small change.

But it was if you're going to use this versus that, you're getting a little boost here. If you repeat this a few times in a day, because when we measured the thermic effect of food, We measured it only after over one meal, but repeated over three meals per day over a certain period of time. We did find changes in body composition, improvements in weight status with medium chain triglyceride consumption. Lean mass to fat mass ratio. Yeah.

Interesting. And then we did follow-up study of a weight loss study with medium chain triglysis ride. This time around it was just purified MCT oil, not added with other types versus olive oil. which is much more acceptable and found greater weight loss with MCT. Based on what you're saying, it's reasonable if somebody wants to improve weight loss. I'm hearing a sort of a constellation of things. Shift your meal timing in the first two-thirds or so of your day, which sounds like it will also improve sleep, which will also improve.

Your appetite and food regular, satiety and hunger signals. What is it like a tablespoon or two of MCT per day? Is that kind of what this looks like? for the typical person? Yeah, about that. Okay. Yeah. In place of some other oil, not in addition.

Not in addition, correct. Okay. Some ginger. Yeah. Are they additive? Are they synergistic? I think they could probably be additive because I think that the impact is through different mechanisms.

Obviously, no one's tested that. You know, it's interesting. You bring it up this way because it makes me think of David Jenkins and the portfolio diet. It actually made the New York Times. I think it was in December. I'm not familiar with. The portfolio diet was a diet he designed for maximal cholesterol reduction. So it was initially designed to have four specific foods.

So it was high in soy protein, nuts, plant sterols, and soluble fiber. Yeah, it's going to be a tough one to get past most of the American public. I'll tell you, as a public health educator, I don't care if it comes out in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and everything in between. people hear soy. Yeah. Nuts they like but easy to overeat. They hear plant sterols and like they're there someplace else.

This diet went on a head-to-head comparison with lipid-loring agent, right? Like a statin. Yeah, yeah. They had the same cholesterol reduction as a statin. As a statin. Yeah. The portfolio? Interesting name.

People are definitely unhealthy in this country. if they can lower blood lipids. Yeah. They've expanded it to be more flexible. So it's not just soy protein now. It also includes legumes. They've added mono-unsaturated fats or olive oil. You know, when I look at a diet like the portfolio diet, which I only know what you just told me about it.

I think about the current food suggestions by the FTA, which are, you know, we could call it kind of, it emphasizes unprocessed and minimally processed food. So I think that's a step in the right direction, certainly. We look at these. The issue that always comes up for me is I think, okay, in a more plant-based grain-heavy nut diet, it's very easy for people to overeat calories based on this whole like amino acid protein foraging hypothesis,

this idea that we eat until we get enough of the amino acids we want, like a chicken breast or something, and a couple eggs or four eggs or something is very satiating. Whereas we can eat a lot of grains and nuts before we kind of go, okay, that's enough. There seems to be this issue, like how do you ensure cardiometabolic health while quelling hunger? And we can't have people walking around hungry all the time. And the GLPs help with that. And it does get down to sort of like, do you include animal-based foods or not often?

So how do you think, just from a public health perspective, that we can reconcile this. Because clearly the highly processed food diet is not going to work. The standard American diet, I think that is fading away. But now there's this kind of polarization of like, are we going to go mostly plants, grains, nuts, and I think low saturated fat, blood lipids improving. Are we going to think like, you know, more protein satiety? Do you see where I'm getting at here? Yeah. Like I feel like this is the contour of things.

Yeah. Well, I think that there's no reason to pit one another against the other, right? So like this one-on-one. But what's important is that also having a diet that's more plant-based, as higher volume, that's filling. It's hard to eat a lot of food. So if your food volume is high but does not provide as much calories, you'll get that satiety from the food volume.

And then you put in some nuts. helps to prolong this satiety because then you get some protein, some healthful fats. And so I think that's important. I'm not saying animal products are bad. I think they're important for a diet. I think they're important for health. It's just a matter of portion size and making sure that there's not over-emphasis on animal products over plant-based products because we know that plant-based products are so much

healthier in terms of heart health, reduction of type 2 diabetes, cancer risk, and other metabolic diseases. Yeah. Well, I'm right there with you. I love fruits and vegetables. I'm a huge fan of, I do eat meat, half Argentine. I mean, you know, and chicken. I'm not a big fan of fish.

I keep working on this, but can't seem to quite get there. But I don't eat them in excess. The things that I feel are very, very easy for people to overeat are starch fat or starch sugar fat combinations. It's just like the brain and gut respond with signals that scream more. It's very hard for people to do like a slice of pizza. I love pizza. It can be done, but it's just very hard for people to do.

It's like the stop signals just are all pushed down and the go signals are all go. So reducing white foods as much as possible. White foods? Yeah. So the white flour, white rice, white pasta, white, you know, things are. Not as colorful. You know, if you're eating a slice of bread and it just dissolves in your mouth, then it's not so good. This is more of an editorial reflection again.

But it's also, I was looking at the history of nutrition in this country. You're Canadian by birth, right? I detected that. And I don't know what the sort of traditional fare is in Canada. But if you look at the history of food in the United States, it's never been particularly healthy. The foods that we consider like American foods, hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, corn dogs, fried chicken, donuts. Like, we've never been healthy about food.

People probably just moved a lot, ate less, smoked a lot more, which is an appetite suppressant, but gives you cancer, kills you. We've never been that healthy with respect to food. Maybe food volume was more in check. But if you look at traditional food in Europe, probably in, I mean, Canada, what sort of are the foods nourishing and healthy? I think we're sort of in this like delusion that like we were once healthy about food in this country. We were never healthy about food.

The food was always pretty weak in terms of nutritional status except for fruits, vegetables and some animal products. I think portion size has a lot to do with it too. So I know moving from Canada to the U.S., you know, go to a restaurant, the portion sizes are so big. It would never have occurred to me to take home doggy bag for, at a restaurant ever. And then here it's like kind of have to or else, you know, you're throwing away half your plate or unless you're finishing the whole thing. So portion size I think is a big one.

And also the foods are different in a way. We're talking about yogurt. So there are two things. When I moved to the U.S., the first thing the dietitian at my work told me was do not buy bagged bread. I was like, okay, what does that mean? Don't buy bagged bread. Like, that's what I always do.

No, she says, you go to the grocery store, you go to the bakery section, they'll cut it up for you, you ask what you want. Don't buy bad bread. Like, okay, I'm not going to buy bad bread. So apparently she was talking about, like, too many additives, too much sugar, whatever. Okay. We're talking about, like, the bread that just melts in your mouth. So, and then the other thing was yogurt. I used to eat yogurt quite a bit.

And then the yogurt in the here in the U.S. tasted sweeter to me. The same thing, the same yogurt. Canada here, the same name, the same everything. It was sweeter. And I didn't know why, but then it occurred to me that, you know, foods are formulated in different ways in different countries to appeal to the population of that country.

So yogurt was one where it's a little less sweet in Canada than in U.S., and it was less sweet even than... in Europe, then Canada and U.S. So there's things like that that don't necessarily help. Yeah. Yeah, we love our sugars and fats in the United States. And I think we paid a substantial health debt as a consequence. I mean, now, again, I don't have the numbers on this,

but with Reda True Tide and the other GLP's, I've never tried them, but a lot of people are finding it much easier, if not easy, to lose weight that they just couldn't before. They just could not control their appetite. And they're just not as interested in these foods. There's this argument that maybe they're not as interested in everything in life. And that's an important question that needs to be resolved. But I do things that think that things are changing.

I think we're finding a lot more, you know, for example, the yogurt, right? There was a lot more plain yogurt options than there were, you know, when I first moved to the U.S. So there's, you know. Things are changing. There's been a lot of resistance. And I think that the resistance has been sociological. in the sense that, you know, there's been a resistance to people being healthy. There really has, you know, there's this idea that, like, if you're eating clean, you have an eating

disorder. I did an episode about eating disorders. I talked to a lot of experts in this, including the group at Columbia Med that works on eating disorders. You know, the frequency of anorexia, the most deadly psychiatric illness of all the psychiatric illnesses, hadn't realized that, is not increasing as a function of social media or magazines or anything, it's been very steady for maybe hundreds of years. This is a real neurological issue. There's obviously social pressures and things like that. But what I discovered

in like talking to experts like Joanna Steinberg at Columbia and others is that, you know, like there is this, so that was about the interrexia, but what I'm about to say is separate. There's this notion that if you're going to be thoughtful about what you eat, you know, or maybe you're not going to eat too late. Or you're going to skip dessert or until a few years ago, like if you're not going to drink alcohol. Like, there's something wrong with you. Like, you're being restrictive somehow. I think, again, it's kind of like the parallels to Europe are kind of interesting that or the contrast to Europe are interesting where there's a lot of social convention built up around food that was healthy. And I think in the United States, the social conventions built up around food and

alcohol were pretty unhealthy. It was like, everyone does this. Like, everyone eats hot dogs at the game. And hot dogs at a baseball game are a great thing. It's like nothing is as American is that except maybe apple pie, right? But there's this, when people start making choices in the direction of their health, it was, and to some extent it still is, there's this quieter undercurrent of, well, like, are you being restrictive? Like, are you really going to live like that? But then you look at the health outcomes.

And culturally, until a few years ago, it was considered very not okay to say that obesity was a health risk. And now the open discussion about obesity and metabolic health as like a real health risk. I think now we're kind of like in the actual discussion that for a long time it was like, speaking of which and kind of things outside the box, there's a paper on your CV that I could not help but ask about snack chips fried in corn oil alleviate cardiovascular risk factors when substituted for low fat and high fat snacks. Yep. What? Tell me the data. I believe you. I'm just like, this is wild. This was funding.

by Frito-Lite. 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's all the T-Os. All the E-Os. All the E-Os. And so they had changed to corn oil. They're like, this is an oil that's higher in polyunsaturated fats than what we usually have. What were they using before? I'm not sure. I forget. But it wasn't tallow. I don't think so. Like, does it make a difference? it's going to improve health if people choose those snacks compared to other snacks. So we had three arms in that study. 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 going to go to the vending machine and you have your option to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate snack. a high fat, high, more high saturated snack, or those chips. So you just pick one and that's that. So I think we gave, it was two snacks a day for 25 days. It was a rotation. So they had four, yeah, they had four different chips.

So it was two one day to the next day like that for 25 days and then the controls. And yeah, the better lipid profile was the one. with was the one from the corn chips. They had the better lipid. Yeah. And they had less lipoprotein little A, which is another, you know, factor, cardi metabolic risk factor.

Data or data. Data or data. Well, I know that in the head-to-head comparison of seed oils of which corn is, right, with saturated fat, this is where kind of the contention starts to erupt, where there are many studies now, I think, showing that when you substitute saturated fat with seed oils,

that cardiometabolic risk factors go down. And this is true, right? By the way, I'm just going to say, I avoid seed oils actively because I like olive oil and butter, mostly olive oil. I avoid seed oils. I don't like the way they taste. I love olive oil. Okay.

And there's some health effects of olive oil. And I eat small amounts of butter. And so I just duck the whole controversy, right? And you have to make sure you're getting real olive oil. but that can be done. When you look at the studies that compare saturated fat to seed oils, you do see better outcomes for seed oils. But then there's this crowd that comes in and says,

but that's on a backdrop of reasonably high carbohydrate intake. When you start replacing some of those carbohydrates with lower carbohydrate diet, increasing protein intake, so not keto, but kind of like lower-ish starch and sugar, then maybe that balances out. Okay. But the big contention seems to be around the price, processing of these seed oils, this idea that when, especially when you make things like chips,

that when you take fats and you combine them with carbohydrate and you heat them up a lot, that you create factors that are not good for the body. What is the evidence for or against that? Well, so different oils have different smoke points, right? So each oil should be used for its appropriate usage, right? So cooking process. So I think that's where, you know, people think that they should be using. one type of oil for everything that they do. But some oil, like you wouldn't put flaxseed oil,

for example, and heat it up to very high temperature. Are you a fan of flaxseed oil? I'm a fan of every liquid oil. I use, I have no, no personal, you seem very healthy. Restriction on the types of oils. I think that, you know, oils that remain liquid at room temperature, that should be your barometer for what's better to use. I'm also not saying that people should avoid butter like the plague, right? So all in moderation is okay. Is there any reason to, I just can't find the argument for why anyone would replace olive oil with a seed oil? olive oil has a lower smoke point than other seed oils. So peanut oil, for example, has a higher smoke point.

So you can fry in peanut oil. You wouldn't fry anything in olive oil. I wouldn't eat anything fried. Well, yeah. So that's a different question. So depending on how you want to use your oil. And also some people find olive oil in big goods might impart stronger taste. So depending on the type.

So some of them are more flavorful, right? And so they're more fragile, let's say, and they'll impart flavors to different foods where they're not supposed to be. So you're not seed oil averse, nor are you pro seed oil, is what I'm hearing. Personally? Yeah. No. Because I think that the seed oil debate has been very contaminated by the issues that I mentioned before, but also because many, many processed foods contain seed oil. They're much less expensive than using, you know, grass-fed butter or all.

olive oil or even just ordinary butter. It's important to be nutrition facts literate. So when you're talking about processed foods, so as much as possible cooking at home, but that's something that a lot of people don't really know how to do, feel they don't have the time for. People aren't going to start doing that. I'll tell you, they're not going to start doing that.

I wish they would, but they're not going to you. At the grocery store to look at the nutrition facts panel and being like, okay, what's in here, what's in there? And comparing products to one another. And also what's more important for your own health, right? What's relevant for my health may not be what's relevant for your health. You know, some people are, we're talking about salt sensitivity. Some people are very salt sensitive.

Some people are very active and need to replace salt. And so salt is not an issue for them. But so being able to know what to pay attention to because otherwise it just gets overwhelming. You mentioned the study was paid for by a company. And earlier you mentioned companies. I think this is an important issue that we've never really directly addressed on this podcast. I mean, anytime I've covered a paper and 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, if any? Like to me, a financial conflict of interest is if the investigators, the scientists running the study, have stakes. And, you know, they have shares in the company or they're being paid to do the study, obviously. But when a company funds research on like this, the snack chips study 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. Right. Could you, like, how does this stuff come about? 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 I know there are people who are very, very vocal against industry-sponsored research. But as scientists, we do research. We do research. It's 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. No result. No result. So we did a study. It was sponsored by industry. We didn't find any significant effect of the test product compared to the control. And you can't publish it. We wrote the paper.

We wrote the report. We provided it to our sponsor. Just out of, you know, courtesy. So this is the paper. We're going to submit it for. publication, do what you need to do. So they've given you the green light to submit it. So the companies aren't short-circuiting.

No, never. That's in the contract, right? You're right to publish because otherwise why did you do research? There's no point of doing research if you're not going to be able to publish your research. So basically, it's courtesy to show 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 pretty persistent. I ran out of steam. So if I run out of steam, I can imagine so many other people, other scientists who have no results of ran out of steam much quicker. That's a no result issue. It's not necessarily unique to industry funded studies. No, that's not unique.

So industry-sponsored studies, you know, I often also say we get NIH reports of scientific misconduct. So reports of scientific misconducts can be found from NIH-sponsored studies where they find that the principal investigator falsified data that have been published in a specific paper. So to me, if you're not going to, if you're not an honest scientist, obviously I don't think it matters who's sponsoring your research because the NIH finds misconduct. Right. I mean, doing science for any other reason than trying to find real answers is just insane. Like, I mean, these people who do this are like legitimately sick, right? You know, like, yeah. It's a lot of work.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of work. Well, do they really think? they discovered something if they made it. It's like it's not, it doesn't, it doesn't, where is that going to go? It doesn't compute. Well, it never ends well. No. And, you know, we could spend hours talking about the cases. These things always, it always comes out in the wash.

Yeah. So I'm hearing that negative outcomes are hard to publish. When you take on funding from a company to, to address a particular question about a product that they sell, you, it sounds to me, I'm trying to, I want to be careful. I'm not like leading the witness here. No, no. That you, you don't, you don't. it doesn't sound like you feel any pressure to give them a particular answer.

No. So what's their interest in doing this? Like, why are they funding studies? I mean, companies are selfish and they should be. They have shareholders and they need to, some of them are public companies. And so the shareholders are the public? And so why are they funding research? I mean, plenty of people eat chips.

Yeah. Why are they funding research? They wanted to know if it had a health benefit. So they could market a health benefit. Probably market a health benefit at some point. That could be. And then if they don't find a health benefit, maybe they could switch it to something else, right? I don't know.

I'm very sympathetic to the reality that there isn't a lot of research funding coming through NIH and NSF these days. But always it's been, you know, it's been low. I know because I sat on study sections, which dole out grants. I got grants, but it's very, very, very competitive. are you taking money from companies to do this work because it's a great way to fund studies? Like, in other words, if NIH had more money to study nutrition, I could imagine a world where you would just take money from NIH to do it. Like, you wouldn't need the money from companies.

Yeah, because the budgets are better from NIH funding than from industry funding for nutrition research. But if you could get an NIH grant, that's the ultimate goal, right? or USDA or other governmental grant, that's the goal. But sometimes also there's specific foods, specific products that would be kind of hard to study without industry support. Because you need to get access to this specific food or product. Well, I don't know what the status of it is right now, but my fairly frequent kind of check-in on what the, at least stated goal, of the now being revised NIH are include creating a forum, even some incentive for publishing

negative results or null results, I should say. You know, Jay Butichario has been on this podcast, put that out publicly. We need those results. They're important. They steer people away from certain things that need to be steered away from. And also, it seems, at least from the whole food pyramid revision, et cetera, that there seems to be more and more interest in nutrition as a research topic and something to really understand. So obviously, it's really important. I mean, people are eating

every day. They're making these choices. So there should be more federal funding for these things. And then there's no chance of bias. Right. Right. Yeah, I think that people assume that if industry funded a study that, especially on food, that like something's not to be trusted in there. I don't know why for food in particular, right? So if you think, about it. Food and drugs. Food and drug companies. But drug companies, they do research on their own products all the time. Most of the R&D for drug companies is definitely done in-house. That's also part of the scary part about it. We don't see the null results. I actually would prefer if it took on a different shape. I don't know exactly what it would look like. I mean, drug companies,

we don't see a lot of the negative outcomes that might exist. So I don't think there's a lot of- they just die out before they make it to next step. Yeah. I think outright scientific fraud, people making stuff up is pretty rare. Very rare. But I do think there's a lot of questions about people because of the incentives to need to publish, as you described, it's hard to publish no results. We will never know, and this is when you run a lab, as you know, you want to create a culture where graduate students and postdocs feel very comfortable saying there's nothing here.

Because the stuff that didn't work out, you always, you know, it's just a question that you always have, like what stuff do we never hear about? because the negative results, like they say, well, that mouse was sick. You know, there's a lot of, the brain is a crazy thing. That's how you need to teach the students well, right? You have a student who comes to you and says, hey, this is lower, this is better than this. And you look at the numbers and you say, well, it's 25 versus 27. And the standard deviation is 10.

Like, no, 25 is the same as 27, right? So you have to make sure you teach well to know that even numerically different effects may not be statistically significantly different. And that's just part of the curve, right? Yeah, the ideal situation is when the student or postdoc doesn't believe their own results. They're like, it's not real. And then you have to convince them. Actually, you have something interesting. That's a good situation.

That's a good situation. That's a good situation. And then eventually they're like, oh, okay, you know, that's the ideal situation. But I think this whole field of nutrition is contentious for some of the right reasons. It's so very important. And I think it's contentious also for a lot of unfortunate and unnecessary reasons. Among the students and postdocs and general public when you interact, 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 are your antennae picking up when, when you're, what's coming? Like, what are your antennae picking up when you're out there? I think what should I eat or, you know, or have you heard about X, Y, Z, fad? That's also one. Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world? No, I haven't heard that. Peptides are, like, very peptide.

Right now, peptides are really big. It's always something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's very specific to a product. Yeah, often very specific to a product, yeah. You won't be held responsible for your answer, but do you supplement your diet with minerals, like magnesium or anything like that? Are you just completely careful food choices? I prefer careful food choices.

I think it's more pleasurable to eat a complete food diet. That said, I think that there are some people who may need to supplement their diets. but I think people should strive to get their nutrients from whole foods. Fiber recommendations are really growing. I looked into this and many, many people's doctors are now telling them, you should take a little bit of celium husk. I always thought, by the way, sealing husk was like the husks. Like you had to like, they're like, you're going to eat like the seed husks.

It's actually ground into a powder or something like that. Yeah. I'm still afraid to take it. But I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now are prescribing supplemental fiber in a pretty high rate from what I understand. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

People don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables. But they bring so much more, right? So, yes, there's fiber and fruits and vegetables, but there's also all sorts of polyphenols, right? All sorts of non-nutrient components that themselves may have benefits for health, that we don't fully understand yet, that feed your gut, that are maybe just as relevant,

that may enhance fibers impact on health. Listen, I'm preaching to the choir. I love fruits and vegetables. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. You have a very unique research program. You know, I have to say, very few people can work on as many different things and find their points of intersection. And so I'm grateful that you're exploring these things.

I appreciate your openness about industry-funded research. This is something that I think people need to know about. I certainly learned about that from you today. And based on your work, I think it's fair to say that we shouldn't just be encouraging people to get great sleep. We should be encouraging people to eat at times and foods that allow them to get great sleep, which will allow them to get better, make better food choices. and so forth. Yeah.

So, you know, I talk often about a vicious cycle where you don't sleep well, you don't eat well, then that makes you not sleep so well. And really hoping for people to get into a healthful cycle, right, where you get good sleep, where you can make good food choices, that then helps you get better sleep to keep propelling this cycle of better health. I love it. It's a true integrative medicine and science. I also can attest that when you sleep well, you make better food choices.

When you eat well, you sleep better. Right. So thank you so much for coming for taking time out of your schedule. Really appreciate it. And I've learned a ton. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre Saint-Aung.

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