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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 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.

• 0:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  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. 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. Ange'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.

• 1:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  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. Ange'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

• 2:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  large changes in behavior and nutritional choices that the science tells 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-Haute. Dr. Marie Pierre Saint-Haute, welcome.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sleep impacts how and what we eat, and how and what we eat impacts sleep. That's a different perspective than I think most people take. 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

• 3:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  plays out in terms of our nutrition, and then we'll go in from the nutrition side to sleep.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  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

• 4:07Speaker 00

  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 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 five, six hours had much higher rate of weight gain over that 14, 15 year period than the nurses who had reported

• 4:51Speaker 00

  sleeping seven or eight hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large scale population studies cohorts. But you know, 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 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.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  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, my first study, my first NIH grant, the big R1s, 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

• 6:20Speaker 00

  sleeping adequately. So we gave them a nine hour time in bed opportunity, or we asked them to sleep too little. So they had a four hour time in bed opportunity, very short. But we did this for five nights. And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition. So for the first three days, we told our, we had our participants eat the exact same thing, regardless of how much time in bed they slept, they got at night. And then we measured appetite-regulating hormones. We did neuroimaging to really get at isolating the impact of sleep duration on appetite-regulating hormones and neuronal responses to foods.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  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 short sleep. So this hormone that triggers food intake. In women, we saw a reduction in GLP-1, interestingly enough, looking on like 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,

• 7:48Speaker 00

  a little more than that per night. Then you were 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

• 8:33Speaker 00

  as a result of insufficient sleep.

• 8:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing. This sex-specific split in the data, if I have it correctly, that when men are sleep deprived, so getting four hours per night, the signals that drive appetitive desire to eat are higher. In women, it's more that the break on eating, on satiety, is reduced.

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 8:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 GLPs are functioning different in men and women, like circadian-wise or anything like that? Or this was just a fortuitous outcome? Or actually, an incidental outcome?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  This was an incidental outcome. We really didn't know what to expect. We didn't really know at all that we'd see sex differences. Because there had been prior studies. And prior studies had shown that ghrelin was increased as a result of sleep restriction. They also showed that leptin was reduced as a result of sleep restriction. And when we got our data, we analyzed our data with all of our participants together.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  And there was no effect. And that was surprising. And people would say, "Don't you know? Don't you know sleep restriction increases ghrelin?" I guess I don't know, because in our study, it doesn't. But then we saw these sex-specific differences. And it made sense then that in the full sample, when we had an equal number of men and women, we saw no effect on ghrelin, because there was no effect in women, but there was an effect in men, which was reproducing what others had found, because all the prior studies had been done in men only.

• 10:20Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 11:05Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 11:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, I've been doing therapy for a very long time, and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are days when I want to do it, and there are days when I don't want to do it. But when I finish a therapy session, every single time I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. There's just so many benefits that come through effective therapy. Now, with BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits that come from effective therapy. You fill out a short questionnaire to match you to a therapist. And while BetterHelp has an industry-leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. And it works. BetterHelp has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for its live sessions based on over 1.7 million client reviews.

• 12:29Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 12:39Andrew D. 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 kind of like central ache. Like you just, and, and I wonder, uh, extent to which people eat to overcome, like to kind of quell the, the pain of sleep deprivation? Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation. Maybe their subjective experience of it is, is very different. But what do you think is happening in that, uh, in that short, relatively short amount of sleep that's missing? What is getting reset? Is it neural? Is it endocrine? It's obviously all those things.

• 13:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what do you think is the, the switch that allows people to enter a, a day in a, in a much more healthy fashion? Or, or a sick, essentially in a slightly sick fashion?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  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 we had screened to sleep at least seven, measured by ectography. 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.

• 13:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's like staying up late, working on a deadline, then trying to catch an early flight.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's pretty brutal.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  It's pretty brutal.

• 14:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  And that was maintained, you know, they had five nights of that.

• 14:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Five nights of that?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were they coming unglued mentally too? That, I think I would feel terrible after that kind of stretch.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  That, the end, they were done. Like, there was no way anyone would want to keep, keep coming for that. But they were in the lab, they were under supervision the whole time. We didn't let them go out on their own. Uh, so they were well-supervised, make sure that nothing, uh, nothing would happen to them.

• 14:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  No naps?

• 14:28Speaker 00

  No naps. No. 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. 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.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  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 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, meta-analysis showed 250 to 400 calories of overeating.

• 15:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which might not sound like much, but when you start layering that in day after day and you think, you know, 3,500 excess calories more or less for a pound of body weight. And then you start, 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.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  It's a real thing. Neymar Kovison in 2022 published a paper where they had sleep restriction about five hours per night versus 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.

• 16:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 16:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just to be less than adequately rested, independent of the things coming at you in life.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 17:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? Is what you're studying stress.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  So if you're thinking about physiological stress measured by cortisol levels in that study, actually cortisol wasn't changed.

• 17:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the short sleep.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  In the short sleep.

• 17:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by circadian rhythms and cortisol. So what is that? What does that mean?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  There was no difference between the two conditions, adequate sleep or short sleep on cortisol levels.

• 17:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  For five days of sleep restriction at basically four hours a night. So cortisol still peaking in the morning, still dropping in the evening.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow, that's very surprising to me.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know if it's the context of, you know, being in a lab where everything's safe, taken care of for them. There is 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 and needing to take care of your kids, needing to get to work, needing to do all of the activities of daily living, maybe then that becomes, you know, the added stressful.

• 18:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, and I'm not challenging the result. I just find it really interesting. I would have thought that basal cortisol levels would go awry.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Well, in that study also, we didn't see any effect on glucose or insulin. Nothing, nothing. The curves were superimposable.

• 18:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wild.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  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, poorer diet.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  That then triggers a worsening and maybe compounded by the lack of sleep, even worsening of of those cardiometabolic outcomes. Because we did a follow up study to this, the 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.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 20:35Speaker 00

  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 screened 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?

• 21:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're missing a full sleep cycle.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty much. And and they can sustain that for prolonged periods because that's what people report in 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, it was tough.

• 21:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I can only imagine. Wow. Okay. Because my mind always goes to, all right, well, we wake up in the morning because of an increase in cortisol. That's circadian. It's not related to sleep per se. It just kind of overlaps with the end of the night's sleep. If that's independent of sleep and cortisol drives glucose release, we know this, at least in the first study you described, glucose levels weren't altered. You said it was isocaloric, so people were, it's not like they're eating more. The hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  But we didn't let them eat more.

• 22:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. But you didn't let them. I think that's a key thing that you, 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 libitum, 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 isocaloric diet? And I have a, I have a, I have an idea what it might be, but I'm curious what the answer is.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Yes, I think they're, they're more sedentary.

• 23:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  During the day, less spontaneous activity.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Because it's 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.

• 24:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's fidgeting, movement, because we've talked before on this podcast about the non-exercise induced 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 could that possibly be?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  It's a lot.

• 24:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, that's a lot. That's at the extreme. But it is kind of interesting to observe people out in the world. And you sometimes see that people who are very, very lean, very, let's just say, thin and lean, nowadays, who knows because of the GLPs, et cetera, but they tend to have a lot of spontaneous movement. They tend to stand up quickly, 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 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.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  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 metabolic chamber, which, you know, for most people is equivalent of the size of their bathroom.

• 25:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  You have like a bed, a table and a sink, that's it. So you can't do much in there.

• 25:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you can do studies, quote unquote, out in the wild with actometry or whatever.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, activity, double legged water.

• 25:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:42Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 26:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  this is what, this is what's happening? Because I think if, if women knew that their GLPs 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. And we have a pretty big prefrontal cortex, most people anyway, and we can intervene simply on the basis of knowledge.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  I think that's what's empowering. And I think about this sometimes too, when I'm, when I'm thinking about, you know, my, my diet at times, right? I'm like, I, do I really want to eat this? Or is it because I really didn't sleep last night, right? So you can, you can make, you can ask yourself these questions. Take a pause and say, okay, do I 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, 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 the appropriate choices, right? Say, okay, I probably don't need the, the extra calories right now.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  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, so.

• 27:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  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?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  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 the principal investigator on their sleep ancillary study.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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 reduced 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.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  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 were looking at insomnia symptoms. But insomnia is one of those conditions that's not necessarily static. It resolves, right? So you can have insomnia and then, a few years later, not have insomnia. Or you can not have insomnia now and develop insomnia.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  So what we did is we broke 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,

• 32:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the DASH diet is what?

• 32:34Speaker 00

  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's been tested in a low-salt or regular-salt profile.

• 32:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  How did those work out? I'm just curious. Do you recall if the low-salt, high-salt?

• 33:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Whatever that is.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, higher in saturated fats and sugars.

• 33:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Well, GLP-1s will do that, right?

• 33:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty high.

• 34:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Well, so in population-based studies, we adjust for a bunch of covariates. We have all these questionnaires that are given out to people, asking them about their race, occupation, socio-demographic, socioeconomic status, and then we adjust for different illnesses that they may have, depression, physical activity level. So we try to take all of 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.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  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 was variability there. Some people got more or less. So we wanted to see if food intake was related to their sleep at night.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  That study, we had polysomnography assessments of sleep every single night. Like I mentioned, we had a controlled diet initially, and then we let them self-select their food intake. So we took a very systematic approach to evaluating how diet could influence sleep in that study. We said, first of all,

• 36:17Speaker 00

  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 like, okay, so there's difference between the diets. Okay, now, was their sleep at night different when they were eating the diet that we fed them compared to what they self-selected?

• 36:50Speaker 00

  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 almost 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.

• 37:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Was timing of food intake impacted? Because when I think of what impacts, what reduces slow wave, deep sleep, that's eating too close to bedtime.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  So we did not take that into consideration in that study. We didn't, we didn't look at that. We had their, 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 10:00 PM. Then the other question was, okay, what was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. So when we talk about arousals in the context of polysomnography, it doesn't necessarily mean full on waking up or awakening. It really means going from a deeper to lighter stage of sleep. So you may still be asleep throughout the night, but you're not getting deep, slow wave sleep, REM sleep as much as you would otherwise.

• 38:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you create a buffer between your last bite of food and the time you go to sleep, you personally?

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Me personally, yes.

• 38:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it an hour, two hours, three hours?

• 38:52Speaker 00

  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 cardio metabolic health. Eating earlier is better. Me personally, I feel, I feel better by eating earlier. If I eat too close to bedtime, I, I get hot.

• 39:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, yeah, it's a, it's a thermic effect of food.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  It's a thermic effect of food.

• 39:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we want to be cooling off when we go to sleep.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 39:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take it every day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. AG1 is designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. I get asked pretty much all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what should that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1. It has just been so helpful

• 40:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  for supporting all aspects of physical Health, mental health and performance. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a free bottle of their new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 product. Omega 3 and coenzyme Q10 are known to support cardiovascular health, cellular health and energy generally, brain health and much more. I personally take them both every day. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of the new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. There seems to be something asymmetric about sleep requirements in my experience, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

• 41:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Whereby, if I go to bed at 10:00 PM, I get into bed at 9:30, fall asleep at 10:00, I need about six and a half, maybe seven hours to feel completely rested. That's how long I'll sleep, wake up without an alarm, feeling great. If I go to bed at midnight, I find I could sleep till 9:00 and still not feel completely rested. So there's some weird sleep inertia stuff going on there, et cetera. The old adage is every hour before midnight is worth two after. But is there any real data to support that? Or is this just all subjective and conjecture?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  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 their melatonin's low or it should be when it's high. So they're fighting their circadian system.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  So yes, they should, they should be getting seven hours, but they're not getting seven hours because the body's not designed to be sleeping during the daytime hours. Plus, then you have You know, everything else, right?

• 42:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, the light, the stress.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  The lights, the noise, the kids, the whatever life that that happens during the daytime when everybody else is awake and you're trying to sleep.

• 42:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, my parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school, so I could afford to just, just go home for Christmas, right? Just that day.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or a couple of days and everyone else had to travel, so I could invert my schedule. It just kind of drifted that way.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at 4:00 AM and sleeping until, you know, 3:00 PM, at least for typical people. It, you, your brain gets into a kind of weird space when you're inverted from the rest of the world.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Well, the things you do when you're a grad student, I would be the opposite, right? I, I'd wake up at 4:00 AM and then study because I felt like all of the hours of studying before the sun rose were like extras.

• 43:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Extra time for me.

• 43:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Definitely extra, but you felt like you were extra sharp at those hours?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's the problem, the 1, 2:00 PM crash. Has your work explored napping at all? I'm, 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?

• 44:04Speaker 00

  So we haven't done research on napping per se. For me, there, 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. 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 at night? And you're feeling tired, you know, should you sleep?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  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, it's easy to know. But if you had sufficient sleep or sufficient opportunity for sleep at night, and you're waking up and you're not feeling refreshed, you're not feeling like you had good quality sleep,

• 45:28Speaker 00

  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?

• 45:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm chuckling because my postdoc advisor sparked this huge debate. It was a big lab and we had a couple of people in the lab who liked to nap at their desk. These were people that could just like put their head down and nap at their desk in the afternoon. Walk in, they'd be napping and then they 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 we're 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 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.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah.

• 46:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 46:43Speaker 00

  I'm very focused, very efficient.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  So I try to be really attentive at my task. I try to take, take breaks once in a while, but most of the time it's, it's very efficient. Get to the task and get it done.

• 47:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Pretty much.

• 47:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then it's down, right? Yeah. Interesting. I think some of us are more like this.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  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,

• 47:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're running too?

• 47:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Run to get my kids to school, run to work, get work done, run to, then run for fun. Run, run, run. And then I thought, okay, I kind of need to,

• 47:59Speaker 00

  I think I need a breather. And so I started incorporating yoga into my, my exercise routine. I think that's, 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.

• 48:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Exactly.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  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, than back then. I see the benefit to having, you know, the both types of exercise.

• 48:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thanks for being willing to explore that. You know, the, I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner, but the Ayurvedic folks, they'll talk about people like more fire, more water, more earth, where, you know, and, 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.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  So you know, a colleague of mine just published a paper in Nature about 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 below that, it's basically U-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 this six and a half to 7.8. 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, you know, some are more pronounced U-shapes

• 49:47Speaker 00

  in men than women in different organs. So a very interesting paper. Came out last week or two weeks ago.

• 49:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll have to check it out. What other sex differences are known to exist? And sleep requirements, sleep dynamics, that from your work or from other work? This is not something we've really covered on the podcast.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  No?

• 50:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I mean, well, not in any sufficient amount of detail.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why do you think that is?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  There could be some physiological effects, right? Some hormonal effects. Women don't sleep the same across the menstrual cycle. There was 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, you know, we were 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.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  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. Last year, we published a scientific statement for the American Heart Association about multi-dimensional 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.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  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 how much, 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,

• 52:45Speaker 00

  but, you know, allows their patient to actually tell them what's bothering them about their sleep. Then you can get to 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.

• 53:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Does apnea always include snoring?

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  So are there some people who don't snore who have apnea?

• 53:07Speaker 00

  I don't think so. You stop breathing, and then there's this gasping sound that...

• 53:13Speaker 00

  People make when they awaken from that, or they get aroused from this breathing interruption.

• 53:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  That will reduce the amount of snoring, but the sleep apnea is from the throat, right? So this 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 loss is typically like the first line treatment. If someone has excess weight to start losing weight, that might help with the, with sleep apnea. Then there's CPAP, which yes, people don't like. But if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be not as, not as high. So that might be helpful for comfort.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  I have a colleague of mine who does sleep apnea surgeries. So implantables are also.

• 54:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  If people think they might have apnea, is it just get a CPAP, pop that thing on? Is that the best line of entry?

• 54:50Speaker 00

  I think they should, they should get tested.

• 54:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  So how do we, how does one do that? Because that's the problem.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  If you're suspecting that you may have sleep apnea because you've been told that you snore, because you wake up and you're not feeling refreshed, and you're feeling sleepy during the day, I think you should talk to your doctor about this. And definitely, we have, polysomnography is the first line, you know, 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 a lab for, to get tested for this. And your doctor can prescribe that test very easily.

• 55:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  How come we can't just go buy a CPAP on Amazon?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Because you need to have the pressure.

• 55:36Speaker 00

  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 as simple as just.

• 55:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. All right, fair.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  It it needs to have the proper settings and someone needs to tell you which setting to use. Because then that's where you run into the trouble of having the wrong settings and and not being effective.

• 55:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I just know from having done this podcast a while that like if people think, okay, I gotta go to my doctor. I gotta find out or convince them that I have apnea. Then they have to like write me a script for a CPAP. Then I gotta buy a CPAP, which I'm guessing is not cheap.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I'm not sure.

• 56:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think they're very inexpensive. They might, the price might have come down. And I gotta 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 gonna 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.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  If you use it.

• 56:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  It deserves like a public health messaging.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you use it well and you feel better during the day, that's a that's reinforcing, right? To keep using it and and get treated for it.

• 56:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 Kiefer.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love Bulgarian full fat plain yogurt, but it's right next to the Kiefer.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 57:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm always like, do I get the Kiefer? Well, I don't know, I love the Bulgarian full fat plain yogurt. So I haven't tried the Kiefer yet. What's special about Kiefer and why are, why did you study Kiefer?

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Kiefer, we 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 the subject of my master's thesis. And 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.

• 57:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  So two cups, like two mugs like this?

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Two cups, like the measuring cup.

• 57:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 57:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Um, like 500 mls.

• 57:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  And we measured their, the amount of cholesterol they, they produced at baseline, endpoint, in both phases, and there was no effect. It was a null study. It was one of those. It was hard to get published. Kept at it and, and we got it published, but yeah.

• 58:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  So these fermented yogurs and things, they don't do anything for, for cholesterol levels?

• 58:16Speaker 00

  At least in our study, in this population, at this level, with this comparison, didn't have any effect.

• 58:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's your general thought about low sugar fermented foods? I don't know if Kiefer qualifies as low sugar, but based on Justin Sonnenberg's work at Stanford and others, I've been, I've been really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, full-fat Bulgarian yogurt. Fermented foods are, are interesting.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are you a proponent in general?

• 58:44Speaker 00

  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, 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? And maybe it didn't have any impact for cholesterol synthesis, but maybe gliocemic control might be better. Or for gut inflammation, it would be better.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  But, you know, you, you pick your outcomes, right? You've studied something.

• 59:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is the challenge of doing controlled science.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the opposite end of the like X, what used to be called Twitter science, where like 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.

• 59:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, exactly.

• 59:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  People get frustrated, oh, that's an observational study. Well, I'm going to continue to eat low sugar fermented foods every day. I, I, 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've been a lot of interesting discoveries that have come from researchers designing a study, a look at one thing, and then kind of noticing, oh, like, all the subjects feel better, or sleep better, their skin, they, they're reporting things that then lead to another, another line, line of inquiry. But you moved on from Kiefer. Tell me about this, um, this paper. I was intrigued by this when I looked over your CV. The, uh, a weight loss diet that includes a coffee beverage enriched in, let me try

• 1:00:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  this, manoligo saccharides.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, okay, long word. Leads to a greater loss of adipose, fat tissue, than placebo beverage in overweight men.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:00:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me about this study and what these manoligo saccharides are. And if somebody wants to lose weight, should they be including this in their coffee?

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  So this was industry sponsored research that we did. Um, 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. Uh, it was basically a placebo controlled study. We got, we were provided, um, coffee manoligo saccharides. So these are extracted from spent coffee grounds. So it was basically sachets, right? So a white packet. One had the cap, coffee manoligo 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 in women.

• 1:01:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  And so that was the end of that product.

• 1:01:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really? They would market it just because it only had an effect in men?

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  I assure you, there are many men who would love to drink a coffee drink and lose more weight as a consequence.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  It's not going to be our market, you know?

• 1:01:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  But do we know what the ingredients were?

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  It was manoligo saccharides.

• 1:01:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that, there's only one?

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it was just, uh, basically, uh, a product that was, tasted like coffee, strong coffee. But it didn't have the caffeine or anything like that. It just had this, this mena oligosaccharide that was extracted from coffee.

• 1:02:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So this substance comes from coffee ordinarily. But coffee is very low, low calorie.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  But it's from the spent ground. So you, no one really consumes this really because, you know, when you brew your coffee, you're not getting it, you know.

• 1:02:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can you buy it? Can people get it?

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I'm not sure.

• 1:02:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what, what do you, first of all, how much weight did they lose relative to the?

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  It was statistically significant, yeah.

• 1:02:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. I was intrigued by it because I thought there's, there's something that, I mean, you studied, it's interesting, you study kefir, mena oligosaccharides from coffee.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now I'm going to ask you about ginger.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  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 kefir is a fermented dairy product. It would, we were studying it for its, a functional benefit on cholesterol synthesis. That's not, 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.

• 1:03:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:03:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's been demonstrated.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Yes. So that's, 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.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  Is good for maintaining regularity, right? So anyways, I was interested in in functional foods for health benefits beyond their nutritional content. And so we studied Kefir for I studied Kefir for my master's degree and then for my PhD, studied medium chain triglycerides. And then ginger, that was that was something that I 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. I was like, oh, good.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  They had a list of different herbs and spices that they were going to donate for research. And 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. And then he did some research and came back and said, I think we should study ginger. I'm like, okay, to do what? Like, I think, you know, for energy expenditure, look at thermic effect of food. I was like, okay. So so we did this study. I had some some funds that I could use for him to do that and.

• 1:05:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  What did the study look like?

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  A study where we looked at the thermic effect of food.

• 1:05:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like, so people ate ginger root?

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:05:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Were they spicing their food?

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  We dissolved ginger powder in warm water. And so that was one beverage and then in the crossover, again, crossover design. So next time when they came, it was just hot water.

• 1:05:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And how many times a day are they drinking it?

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  This was a one time, one time consumption period. And we looked at the thermic effect of food over a six hour period. So again, they're 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.

• 1:06:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's significantly elevated.

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  With ginger.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  With ginger. Yeah.

• 1:06:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow.

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  So we think through the capsaicin 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?

• 1:06:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or more. Now, again, the GLPs are coming in and adjusting. But yeah, I'm very interested also in foods that have impact beyond their, you know, known 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.

• 1:07:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do think that the Sonnenberg and colleagues' work on low sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatome 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 inflammatome, they did a crossover design also. 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, it was always, on average, reduced. Some people who increased their fiber intake, their inflammatome decreases. For a lot of people, it increases, which is not to say that fiber is bad.

• 1:08:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I think now we're starting to think about like different types of fibers.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask.

• 1:08:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  They didn't control for that.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  They just said increase the number of servings each day.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, I think foods and the healthy foods needs better parsing.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  In my, in my opinion.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I mean, there was also habituation. You don't go from consuming six grams of fiber per day to 25.

• 1:08:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  They ramped them up, but, 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.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a lot of kimchi. You're not familiar with it, like it can be a little hard on the gut.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I actually take an enzyme, I think it's called D A O. Very inexpensive, a little, it's like a tiny, tiny pill that, uh, that for digesting histamines.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Cause I noticed after I had whey protein or I had broccoli, I would, I would get kind of sleepy. I was like, what is this? And a, a colleague at Stanford, Sean Mackey, is our 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, but, so I think that there's a, there is, food to have real effect.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  So Kiefer, these men oligosaccharides, I have to confess, I'm a little disappointed because like here it looks like it has like a cool effect, but they didn't, 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. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night.

• 1:10:23Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:11:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. In your work, or in your observation, or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you?

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Same foods, same quantity, same timing between meals. And this was done in a metabolic chamber.

• 1:12:18Speaker 00

  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, my time studying medium chain triglycerides was, you know, 15 to 20 years ago. I was like, wow, this person knows my, that work that I've done and now is applying it

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  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, that's fascinating to me.

• 1:13:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 a meal 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.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  It makes a difference.

• 1:13:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first like two thirds of your waking day?

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Roughly.

• 1:13:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  As opposed to the last two thirds?

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:14:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  That seems pretty.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  That's reasonable.

• 1:14:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Versus. 12:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

• 1:14:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  The New York schedule.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, well, I started chuckle because when I go to New York, like it's like if you go to dinner at 5:36, you're kind of alone in the restaurant. Depends on time of year.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Early bird special.

• 1:14:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it depends on time of year. In California, it's it's kind of in it's the early shifted.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:14:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  But that's just more reflective of culture, I think. In Europe, they they eat very late often. Depends on where.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  I I was saying before we we started, I was on a Fulbright program last year in in Spain, and I would joke with my with my colleagues there because they eat very late. And even the children eat very late. And I was like, OK, well, you feed me, then you feed the children.

• 1:14:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, right.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Then you have your dinner because they could have dinner at 10, 11:00 PM, and the children 8, 9:00 PM. And I'm like.

• 1:15:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can't be good. If you, my dad's from Argentina, if you go to a restaurant in Buenos Aires at 9:00 PM, you're not going to see many people. At 11:00 PM, you'll see people in their 70s and 80s, and they're up early the next day. They nap in the afternoon.

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  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 Garavulete, where she showed that in her weight loss program, the participants who have lunch, so their big bigger meal is 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 have, they tend to eat late, they still find that eating earlier is tends to be better for you.

• 1:15:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was very, very relieved when Alan Aragon, who's a I consider one of the best public educators on the topic of protein and nutrition, body recomposition, he's formerly trained in this, reassured me that, you know, nowadays, there's a lot of interest in getting like 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 have, and they can be evenly distributed or unevenly distributed. You know, I think a lot of people are feeling

• 1:16:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  this protein pressure and like, oh, I gotta eat another meal late in the day, or I have to force myself to eat breakfast in order to get their protein ration. But it turns out, the whole notion that you could only assimilate like 30 grams per meal is totally false. Turns out, can assimilate 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, the, the big, even or just late dinner. You just don't want to eat too close to bedtime.

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:17:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about these MCTs, medium chain triglycerides? These were very popular in the health and kind of biohacking space a few years ago. The, um, the whole bulletproof coffee notion, MCTs, butter coffee, and that's more or less faded away.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, what brought you to them as a research topic?

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  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, uh, but what we did was use purified MCT oil. So this is only, uh, liquid oil that contains eight carbon and 10 carbon chain fatty acids. Those are not very common in our general food source. So it was purified extracted oil that we then gave our participants. We had created this functional oil, um, that contained flaxseed oil also, to be able to get some more, some omega-3 fatty acids in

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  there. Uh, we had added plant sterols, because that was a big, um, big focus of my lab, uh, at McGill. Plant sterols for cholesterol reduction and, uh, reduced, uh, risk of cardiovascular disease. And 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

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  in peripheral circulation, get deposited in adipose tissue and the sort. And so what we did, what we found, we did two separate studies in men and women. In both men and women, there was an increase in thermic effect of food. So you 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, 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. They're 8, 0, 10, 0.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  So I said, okay, we are going to try to compare that to a saturated fat matched control comparison, and we used beef tallow. It was a lot of beef tallow. Participants were not happy with that diet.

• 1:20:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eat it direct, like spoonfuls of beef tallow?

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  We put it on to mashed potatoes. You know, when you're, when you're doing studies like this where you're trying to control the diet and you want to isolate one aspect of it, right? When we gave real foods, half of the total fat of the diet came from the, the medium chain containing versus, and the beef tallow. So it's like 20% of your fat from one of the two. So you have to pour it, mask it somehow.

• 1:20:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  MCT. There's also this issue about laxative effect of MCT oil that, that.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

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

• 1:21:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, that's reassuring.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:21:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's sort of like if you bring french fries home from a restaurant, they use tallow. And then you like put it in the fridge because you thought you wanted them as leftovers. The next day, they're sort of like in this like stuck to bottom of container configuration. Yeah, it's not very appetizing.

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  Not appealing. No, there's like, it's white all underneath.

• 1:21:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it almost always goes into the trash.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  A couple of women felt it gave them headache, just the smell of it, you know?

• 1:21:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  So with the MCTs, big significant increase in thermic effect of food?

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  That was statistically, yeah. It was about forty five to fifty, sixty calories.

• 1:22:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I thought you were gonna say percent increase.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  No, so it's a small change, but it was, if you're gonna 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, um, in weight status with medium chain triglyceride consumption.

• 1:22:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Lean mass to fat mass ratio.

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  And then we did follow up study of a weight loss study with medium chain triglyceride. This time around, it was just purified MCT oil, not added with other types versus olive oil, uh, which is much more acceptable and found greater weight loss with MCT.

• 1:22:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 to in the first two thirds or so of your day, which sounds like it will also improve sleep, which will also improve.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  Your ability.

• 1:23:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Appetite and food irregular, 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?

• 1:23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, about that.

• 1:23:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:23:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  In place of some other oil, not in addition.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  Not in addition, correct.

• 1:23:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, some ginger.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are they additive or are they synergistic?

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  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 lasted in December.

• 1:23:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm not familiar with.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:24:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's going to be a tough one to get past most of the American public. I'll tell you, as a, 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.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Nuts, they like, but easy to overeat. They hear plant sterols and like they're, they're, they're someplace else.

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  This diet was, went on a head to head comparison with lipid lowering agent, right? Like a statin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had the same cholesterol reduction as a statin.

• 1:24:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  As a statin.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  The portfolio.

• 1:24:41Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting name. People are definitely unhealthy in this country. And if, if they can lower blood lipids.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, they've expanded it to, to be more flexible. So it's not just soy protein now. It also includes legumes. They've added mono unsaturated fats, so olive oil.

• 1:25:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, when I look at a diet like the portfolio diet, which you just, I only know what you just told me about it. Where I think about that the current food.

• 1:25:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 of 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.

• 1:25:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  There seems to be this issue, like, how do you ensure cardiometabolic health while quelling hunger? 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? Or are we going to think like, you know, more protein satiety? Do you see where I'm getting at here? Like, I feel like this is the contour of things.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  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, has 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 the 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.

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  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 overemphasis 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.

• 1:27:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, but, and chicken. I'm not a big fan of fish. I keep working on this, but can't seem to quite get there. But, 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.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  So reducing white foods as much as possible is what I...

• 1:28:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  White foods?

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  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...

• 1:28:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's sugar.

• 1:28:46Speaker 00

  Not so good.

• 1:28:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 that 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...

• 1:29:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, 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.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think portion size has a lot to do with it, too. So I know, um, moving from Canada to the US, you know, the, go to a restaurant, the portion sizes are so big. Uh, 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 were talking about yogurt. So there are two things. When I moved to the US, the first thing the dietitian at my work told me was, do not buy bagged bread. I said, okay, what does that mean? Don't buy bagged bread?

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  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 bagged bread. It's like, okay, I'm not gonna buy bagged bread. So apparently, she was talking about like, too many additives, too much sugar, or 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, I ate yogurt quite a bit, and then the yogurt in the, here, in the US, tasted sweeter to me. The same thing, the same yogurt. Canada, here, the same name, the same everything, it was sweeter.

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  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 the US, and it was less sweet even than in, in Europe than Canada and US. So there's things like that that don't necessarily help.

• 1:31:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. Yeah, we, 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 retinotrite and the other GLPs, 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.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  But I do 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 US. So there's, you know.

• 1:32:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Things are changing. It's been, there's been a lot of resistance. And I think that the, the resistance has been sociological in the sense that, um, you know, there's been a resistance to people being healthy. There really has, you know, that there's this idea that like, if you're eating clean, you have an eating disorder. I did an episode about eating disorders. I've 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. It's a real neurological issue. There's obviously social pressures and things like that.

• 1:33:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 anorexia, but what I'm about to say is separate. There's this notion that if you're gonna be thoughtful about what you eat, you know, or maybe you're not gonna eat too late, or you're gonna skip dessert. Or until a few years ago, like if you're not gonna drink alcohol, like there's something wrong with you. Like that you're being restrictive somehow. I think, again, it's kind of like the parallels to Europe are kind of interesting that, or the contrasts 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.

• 1:33:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was like, everyone does this, like everyone eats hot dogs at the game. Like, and the hot dogs at a baseball game are a great thing. It's like, nothing is, is American as 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 gonna live like that? But then you look at the, 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.

• 1:34:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:34:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  What? What?

• 1:34:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:34:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tell me the data. I believe you. I'm just like, this is wild.

• 1:35:00Speaker 00

  This was funded by Frito Light. At that time, they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips. So this was Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and Tostitos. It's all the

• 1:35:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Edo's, all the Edo's.

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  All the Edo's. 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.

• 1:35:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  What were they using before?

• 1:35:26Speaker 00

  I'm not sure. I forget.

• 1:35:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it wasn't tallow?

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  I don't think so. Like, does it make a difference? Is it 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

• 1:36:15Speaker 00

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

• 1:36:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Data or data?

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Data or data?

• 1:36:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  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? Well, by the way, I'm just gonna 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.

• 1:37:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:37:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And there's some health effects of olive oil.

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I eat small amounts of butter. And so I just like 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 processing of these seed oils. This idea that when, especially

• 1:38:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  Also, 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, like you wouldn't put flaxseed oil, for example, and heat it up to very high temperature.

• 1:38:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are you a fan of flaxseed oil?

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  I'm a fan of every liquid oil. I use, I have no, no personal.

• 1:38:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  You seem very healthy.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  Restriction on the, 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, is okay.

• 1:39:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is there any reason to, I just can't find the argument for why anyone would replace olive oil with a seed oil?

• 1:39:23Speaker 00

  Olive oil has a lower smoke point than 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.

• 1:39:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  I wouldn't eat anything fried.

• 1:39:34Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:39:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Speaker 00

  So that's that's a different question.

• 1:39:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  I value my life.

• 1:39:39Speaker 00

  You know, so depending on how you want to use your oil. And and also, some people find, you know, olive oil in baked 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, uh, different foods where they're not supposed to be.

• 1:39:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you're not seed oil averse, nor are you pro seed oil, is what I'm hearing.

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  Personally?

• 1:40:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:40:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because I think that the um, 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.

• 1:40:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're much less expensive than using, you know, grass fed butter or or olive oil or even just ordinary butter. So.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:40:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  People aren't gonna start doing that.

• 1:40:40Speaker 00

  And then.

• 1:40:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll tell you, they're not gonna start doing that.

• 1:40:42Speaker 00

  And then.

• 1:40:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  I wish they would, but they they're not going to.

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  At the grocery store to 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, right? And 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 uh, where to, what to pay attention to, because otherwise it just gets overwhelming.

• 1:41:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh huh. 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 direct, um, directly addressed on this podcast. I mean, anytime I've covered a paper and uh, 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, you know, they have shares in the company, or they're being paid to do the study, obviously.

• 1:41:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:42:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you, like, how does this stuff come about?

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  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 to the best of our abilities, and we provide, we draft the research question, you get the data, you analyze it, you publish it. Some of the studies that I haven't been able to publish have been funded by industry that have had null results.

• 1:42:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Null results?

• 1:42:49Speaker 00

  Null results. So, so we did a, we did a study, it was sponsored by industry, we didn't find any significant effect of the test product compared to the control.

• 1:43:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you can't publish it?

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:43:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they've given you the green light to submit it?

• 1:43:18Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:43:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the companies aren't short-circuiting this?

• 1:43:20Speaker 00

  No, never. That's in the contract, right? Your right to publish, because otherwise, why'd you do research? There's no point of doing research if you're not going to be able to publish your research. So...

• 1:43:32Speaker 00

  Basically, it's courtesy to show that 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 null results have run out of steam much quicker than me.

• 1:44:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that's a null result issue. It's not necessarily unique to industry-funded studies.

• 1:44:13Speaker 00

  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 misconduct 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 an honest scientist, obviously, I don't think it matters who's sponsoring your research because the NIH finds misconduct.

• 1:44:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 legitimately sick, right? You know? Like, yeah.

• 1:45:02Speaker 00

  It's a lot of work.

• 1:45:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I mean, well, do they really think they discovered something if they made it? It's like, it's like, it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't.

• 1:45:08Speaker 00

  Where is that gonna go?

• 1:45:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  It doesn't compute. Well, it never ends well. And, you know, we could spend hours talking about the cases. These things, it always comes out in the wash. So I'm hearing that negative outcomes are hard to publish. When you take on funding from a company to address a particular question about a product that they sell, it sounds to me, I'm trying to, I want to be careful, I'm not like leading the witness here, that you, you don't, it doesn't sound like you feel any pressure to give them a particular answer. So what's their interest in doing this? Like, why are they, why are they funding studies? I mean, companies are selfish, and they should be. They are 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.

• 1:45:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why are they funding research?

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  They wanted to know if it had a health benefit.

• 1:45:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they could market a health benefit.

• 1:46:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:46:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  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, 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.

• 1:46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, because the budgets are better from NIH funding than from, from industry funding for nutrition research. But if you're, if you could get an NIH grant, that's, that's the ultimate goal, right? Or USDA or other government 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.

• 1:47:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 goals 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 Bhattacharya, who's been on this podcast, put that out publicly. We need, 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.

• 1:48:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  So obviously it's really important. I mean, people are eating every day.

• 1:48:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're making these choices, so there should be more federal funding for these things. And then there's no chance of bias.

• 1:48:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:48:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 1:48:28Speaker 00

  I don't know why for food in particular, right? So if you think about it.

• 1:48:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Food and drugs, food and drug companies.

• 1:48:34Speaker 00

  But drug companies, they do research on their own products all the time.

• 1:48:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Most of the R and 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, we don't see a lot of the negative outcomes that might exist. So I don't think there's a lot of.

• 1:48:56Speaker 00

  Probably they just die out before they make it to next step.

• 1:48:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I think outright scientific fraud, people making stuff up is pretty rare.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  Very rare.

• 1:49:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 null results. We will never know, and this is when you run a lab, is you know, you want to create a culture where graduate students and post-docs feel very comfortable saying, there's nothing here.

• 1:49:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:49:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because the stuff that didn't work out, you always, you know, it's just a question that you always have, like what, what stuff do we never hear about? Because the negative results, like they say, well, that mouse was sick or this, you know, there's a lot of, the brain is a crazy thing.

• 1:49:38Speaker 00

  That's what you need to teach the students well, right? You have a student who comes to you and says, hey, this, this is lower, this is better than this. And you look at, 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, you teach well to know that, you know, even numerically different effects may not be statistically significantly different. And that's just part of the, you know, the curve, right?

• 1:50:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  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.

• 1:50:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good situation.

• 1:50:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a good situation. And then eventually they're like, oh, okay.

• 1:50:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  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's coming? Like, what are your antennae picking up when you're out there?

• 1:50:59Speaker 00

  I think, what should I eat? Or, you know, or have you heard about XYZ fad? That's also one. Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world? No, I haven't heard that.

• 1:51:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Peptides are like very peptide. Right now peptides are really big.

• 1:51:18Speaker 00

  It's always something else. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's very specific to a product.

• 1:51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, often very specific to a product. Yeah.

• 1:51:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  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?

• 1:51:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:51:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  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 psyllium husk. I always thought, by the way, psyllium husk was like the husks, like you had to like, they're like, you're gonna eat like the seed husks? It's actually ground into a powder or something like that.

• 1:52:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm still afraid to take it, but I should, I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now are prescribing supplemental fiber in a pretty high rate, from what I understand.

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:52:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. People don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables.

• 1:52:28Speaker 00

  But they bring so much more, right? So. Yes, there is fiber in 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 fiber's impact on health.

• 1:52:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  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,

• 1:53:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  make better food choices and so forth.

• 1:53:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:54:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  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. 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.

• 1:54:24Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:54:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St. Anges. To learn more about her laboratory's research and to find a link to her book, Eat better, sleep better. Please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section

• 1:55:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already

• 1:55:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols, in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available

• 1:56:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie Pierre St. Orange. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

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