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

**Marie-Pierre St-Onge** (0:00)
What was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep, higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. You're not getting deep, slow-wave sleep, REM sleep as much as you would otherwise.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:26)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University School of Medicine.
Today, we discuss how you eat impacts your sleep, and how you sleep impacts what you eat, as well as how your body utilizes food depending on how you slept. Now, we've talked about food, and we've talked about sleep many times before on this podcast. But Dr. St-Onge's work is unique because she runs one of the few laboratories in the world to look at the bi-directional relationship between sleep and food. For instance, you'll learn how even modest sleep deprivation increases hunger but differently in men and women. In men, it happens to increase the hormones that drive the desire to eat, whereas in women, it reduces naturally made peptides such as GLP, which suppress hunger. Today's discussion gets into the specific actionable items that you can do to improve your sleep and the way that your body handles food and hunger. We talk about the role of sleep in regulating blood sugar, cortisol levels, overall metabolism and cardiometabolic health. Now because Dr. St. Onge's research focuses on sleep and nutrition, but she's also spent a significant amount of time studying how specific nutrients impact overall health and not just sleep, we also talk about that.
I'm certain that you'll come away from today's episode with a lot of new information you haven't heard elsewhere, as well as with the intention to make small or perhaps even large changes in behavior and nutritional choices that the science tell us can significantly improve your sleep, your metabolism and overall health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, welcome.

**Marie-Pierre St-Onge** (2:31)
Thank you for having me.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:33)
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, 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.

**Marie-Pierre St-Onge** (3:22)
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 in 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 is 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 nurses 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 5, 6 hours, had much higher rate of weight gain over that 14, 15 year period than the nurses who had reported sleeping 7 or 8 hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large scale population studies, cohorts.