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 when sleep as much as you would otherwise. Welcome to The Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marie Pierre Saint-Aunch, 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. Saint-Aunch's work is unique because she runs one of the few laboratories in the world to look at the bi-directional relationship between sleep and food. For instance, you'll learn how even modest sleep deprivation increases hunger, but differently in men and women. In men, it happens to increase the hormones that drive the desire to eat, whereas in women, it reduces naturally-made peptides, such as GLP, which suppress hunger. Today's discussion gets into the specific actionable items that you can do to improve your sleep, and the way that your body handles food and hunger. We talk about the role of sleep in regulating blood sugar, cortisol levels, overall metabolism, and cardiometabolic health. Now because Dr. Saint-Aunch's research focuses on sleep and nutrition, but she's also spent a significant amount of time studying how specific nutrients impact overall health and not just sleep, we also talk about that. I'm certain that you'll come away from today's episode with a lot of new information you haven't heard elsewhere, as well as with the intention to make small or perhaps even large changes in behavior and nutritional choices that the science tell us can significantly improve your sleep, your metabolism, and overall health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Marie Pierre Saint-Aunch. Dr. Marie Pierre Saint-Aunch, welcome. Thank you for having me. Sleep impacts how and what we eat, and how and what we eat impact sleep. That's a different perspective than I think most people take. I think most people are familiar, however, with not getting the best night's sleep, maybe feeling like their impulsivity to eat, quote-unquote "bad foods" is a little higher, and then also hopefully familiar with having a great night's sleep. I'm feeling like we're just kind of in control in a different way. Maybe you could just kind of share for us what's really going on beneath that experience. And when subtle or not-so-subtle, chronic sleep loss. So not an all-nighter necessarily. But you know, 45 minutes less here, 90 minutes less there, etc., etc., how that plays out in terms of our nutrition. And then we'll go in from the nutrition side to sleep. Sure. So there's a couple of questions that you have in there actually about the extent of sleep loss and how that influences your food intake, what we see in the general population versus what we do in a lab to address causality. So let me start with, you know, the population-based studies, right? So when I started being interested in sleep, it was coming from an obesity angle. My PhD is in nutrition. I trained as a postdoc in body composition, obesity research. And we were getting a lot of information from population-based studies that people who sleep too little have a higher body mass index than people who get adequate amount of sleep. Then it became there'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 would reported sleeping seven or eight hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large-scale population studies, cohorts. But when those studies tell us 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, how much energy you eat versus how much energy you burn? I was like, well, if sleep leads to obesity leads to weight gain, it has to impact this energy balance regulation. So it's either that we eat more than we should or that we exercise less, 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 at exactly at this. So we had people who had adequate sleep and we brought them in the lab and we asked them in the crossover design. So half of the participants started out sleeping adequately. So they gave him a nine-hour time in bed opportunity or we asked them to sleep too little. So they had a four-hour time in bed opportunity, very short. But we did this for five nights. And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition. So for the first three days, we had our participants eat the exact same thing. Regardless of how much time in bed they slept, they got at night. And then we measured appetite regulating hormones, we did neuroimaging to really get at isolating the impact of sleep duration on appetite regulating hormones and neuronal responses to foods. And then on the last day, we let themselves select their food intake. And we measured that in the lab. From that study, we showed that in men specifically, we saw an increase in ghrelin in response to the short sleep. So this hormone that triggers food intake in women, we saw a reduction in gel P1, interestingly enough, looking on like peptide one. 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 three re calories more in the short sleep condition than when they got their regular adequate sleep of at least seven and a half hours a little more than that per night. Then you were asking about brain responses. We looked at neuronal responses to food stimuli. We found upregulation in reward centers of the brain in the context of sleep restriction compared to the context of adequate sleep. So all together, really building a case that when you don't sleep enough at night, you have both physiological signals to eat more for men or not stop eating in women that lead to greater food intake. That's also could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of insufficient sleep. Amazing. This sex-specific split in the data, if I have it correctly, that when men are sleep deprived of getting four hours per night, the signals that drive a petitive desire to eat are higher. In women, it's more that the break on eating on satiety is reduced. Exactly. Okay. As far as I know, the GLP pathways are not divergent by sex, but of course, I'm not deeply versed in that literature. Is there any evidence that GLPs are functioning different in men and women, like circadian-wise or anything like that? Or this was just a fortuitous outcome. Or actually, incidental outcome. 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 Grellin was increased as a result of sleep restriction. They also showed that leptin was reduced as a result of sleep restriction. And when we got our data, we analyzed our data with all of our participants together. And there was no effect. And that was surprising. And people would say, "Don't you know? Don't you know?" Sleep restriction increases Grellin. I guess I 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 Grelan, because there was no effect in women, but there was an effect in men, which was reproducing what others had found, because all the prior studies had been done in men only. I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Our newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories, and 0 grams of sugar. I have to say, these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base, and they're covered in chocolate coating, and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods. 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BetterHelp offers professional therapy with the licensed therapist carried out entirely online. 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 through 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. If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to BetterHelp.com/Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's BetterHelp.com/Huberman. Whenever I've been 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. And I wonder, extent to which people eat to overcome, like to kind of quell the pain of sleep deprivation? Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation. Maybe their subjective experience of it is very different. But what do you think is happening in that short, relatively short amount of sleep that's missing? What is getting reset? Is it neural? Is it endocrine? It's obviously all those things. But what do you think is the switch that allows people to enter a day in a much more healthy fashion or essentially in a slightly sick fashion? In our study, it was actually a 50% reduction in sleep because when they had nine-hour sleep opportunity, they slept around seven and a half. And when they had the. They were all people who had screened to sleep at least seven, measured by a cartography. And on average, they'd get seven and a half. And in the sleep restricted condition, they got on average about three hours and fifty minutes. So that's like staying up late, working on a deadline, then trying to catch an early flight. Yeah. It's pretty brutal. Yeah. And that was maintained. They had five nights of that. Five nights of that. Yeah. Were they coming on glued mentally to that? I think I would feel terrible after that kind of stretch. At the end, they were done. Like, there was no way anyone would want to keep coming for that. But they were in the lab. They were under supervision the whole time. We didn't let them go out on their own. So they were well supervised, make sure that nothing would happen to them. No naps. No naps. No. No. But so what happens is, I think there's some subconscious need to eat more when you're sleep deprived. And there's also, you know, there's a thermic effect of food, right? So it gives you a jolt of energy to eat something so people know that you eat. It wakes you up, in a way, you know, neuronal signaling that enhances pleasurable and reward centers of the brain where, you know, when also fatigue sits in and now it's like, do you really want to have this conversation with yourself about what to choose at the buffet table? You know, there's fatigue and others have shown also that sleepiness tends to correlate with all of this, that there's these triggers for more pleasurable food consumption with sleep restriction. And it's been reproduced. There's been so many studies and they all, you know, agree to the extent of overeating. You know, a meta-analysis showed 250 to 400 calories of overeating, which might not sound like much. But when you start layering that in day after day, and you think, you know, 3500 excess calories more or less for a pound of body weight, and then you start when people accumulate that over time, if they're in a night shift condition or new parents or tending to a sick relative or just final exams, like it's a real thing. It's a real thing, named Macauvison 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, gain almost a pound in two weeks. It strikes me that, you know, for a long time in the stress research, the idea was when people are stressed, they reach for kind of, quote, unquote, comfort foods, carbohydrate and typically starch fat, starch fat, sugar, combination foods to comfort them. And the just so story was always that, okay, well, you know, cortisol's main role is to deploy glucose. And so people are doing this as a way to bring excess energy and it all kind of fits together. What is the relationship between these forms of sleep deprivation that you work on and stress? Is it really a way of, I'm not saying just inducing stress because I think sleep is its own thing, but it's stressful just to be less than adequately rested independent of the things coming at you in life, right? Is what you're studying stress. So if you're thinking about physiological stress measured by cortisol levels in that study, actually cortisol wasn't changed in the short sleep, in the short sleep. Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by circadian rhythms in cortisol. So what is it? What does that mean? There was no difference between the two conditions, the adequate sleep or short sleep on cortisol levels. For five days. For five days. For five days. Basically, four hours, right? So cortisol is still peaking in the morning, still dropping in the evening. Yeah. Wow. That's very surprising to me. I don't know. I don't know if it's the context of, you know, being in the lab where everything's safe, taking care of for them. There's nothing outside to aggravate this. So I don't know. Maybe when you're in the context of sleep restriction, but also dealing with your daily life, you're needing to take care of your kids. They need you to get to work, needing to do all the activities of daily living. Maybe that becomes, you know, the added stress wall. So the message is if you suffer less than adequate sleep, get someone to take care of everything else. You've ever been a spa. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm not challenging the result. I just find it really interesting. I would have thought that nasal cortisol levels would go awry. Well, in that study, also, we didn't see any effect on glucose or insulin, nothing, nothing. Those curves were superimposable while they were eating the exact same food at the exact same time, exact same quantity. The only thing we changed was the amount of sleep opportunity they got at night. So to me, this means that it's a combination of different things that causes the metabolic abnormalities that we notice in free living populations. People aren't isolated. They're not in a box where they're not sleeping enough and they're choosing to eat higher fat, higher sugar, higher salt, poor diet, that then triggers a worsening and may be compounded by the lack of sleep, even worsening 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. So because we had seen that food choices were different, that they ate a diet that was higher in calories, higher in calories.
in fat and saturated fat without maybe if you're in a free living situation, that's when you start to see those cardiometabolic outcomes because it's compounded by maybe more sedentary behavior and alterations in food choices and diet. So the follow-up study then was to recruit good sleepers, people who sleep at least seven hours per night, verified by optigraphy, who answer on questionnaires that their sleep quality is good and then to take these people and say, okay, now you're either going to continue your excellent sleep or you're going to now go to bed an hour and a half later so that you get an hour and a half reduction in sleep because when we screen people to sleep at least seven hours per night, they sleep about seven and a half and reducing by an hour and a half gets to six hours which is short sleep and insufficient, unoffers what people who don't get enough sleep. Get? They're missing a full sleep cycle. Yeah, pretty much and they can sustain that for prolonged periods because that's what people report in population-based studies and now when we did that, we saw that insulin resistance was increased after six weeks of sleep restriction compared to adequate sleep. We saw insulin sensitivity was reduced. It was worse actually in postmenopausal women compared to premenopausal women. We saw blood pressure, it 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 stuff. 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 circadian, it's not related to sleep per se, it just 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 isochaloric, so people were, it's not like they're eating more. The hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated. But we didn't let them eat more, yeah. But you didn't let them. I think that's a key thing that you pointed out before, but I think we want to underscore. Then of course, the GLP levels in women being reduced. It's not that they were able to eat, as we say, add libidum and then they happen to eat more. But they gained weight. So what's kind of the action end of things that causes them to gain weight if they're basically in an isochaloric diet? And I have a, I have a, I have an idea of what it might be, but I'm curious what the answer is. Yes. I think they're more sedentary. They're less spontaneous activity, right. Less spontaneous activity because we also did a study to look at energy expenditure. That's really difficult, actually, to measure in my opinion energy expenditure. There's multiple components to energy expenditure. But we did a study where this was a small study. We are enrolled only women for that. And we haven't met about chamber at Columbia that we were able to use for this. So this small room in which we keep people and we measure minute by minute oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. And we were able to show that energy expenditure is actually increased in the context of sleep restriction in a metabolic chamber because it's more costly energetically to remain awake than to fall asleep. So energy expenditure when participants were awake was identical in both conditions, regardless of how much sleep they got the night before. So it's fidgeting movement because we've talked before on this podcast about the non-exercising thermogenesis and it's a big number. I mean, sometimes these people are burning 1,500 calories more per day and everyone goes, oh my god, how could that possibly be? That's a lot. 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 walk quickly a year from New York, so everyone there walks faster than out here. But it's a real thing, whereas some people, like me, are kind of more middle of the career, but I sit up more still, unless I'm very caffeinated. These things add up over time in ways that I think most people underestimate. Yeah. So for us, it was about 5% of energy increased, but it ended up being about 90 calories and we're 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, right? You have like a bed of table and a sink, so you can't do much in there. But you can do studies, couldn't go out in the wild with an actometry or whatever. Yeah. Tiger feet, double level water. Yeah. 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 in 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 under the conditions of sleep deprivation do you think are downstream or upstream of this thing that we just call inflammation, like it's just like a body-wide response and there are a bunch of things that have gone awry and so like a bunch of systems are dysregulated or can we pinpoint, okay, when you're sleep deprived, this is what, this is what's happening because I think if women knew that their 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 growing levels were elevated when they're down on sleep, that they're going to feel hungrier. I mean, we have a pretty big prefrontal cortex of most people anyway, and we can intervene simply on the basis of knowledge. I think that's what's empowering. I think about this sometimes too when I'm thinking about, you know, my diet at times, right, I'm like, do I really want to eat this or just because I really didn't sleep last night, right? So you can make, you can ask yourself these questions, stick your paws 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 step back and think that maybe part of it is because you didn't sleep well night before, then you can make your appropriate choices, right, say, okay, I probably don't need the extra calories right now, or maybe you say, you know what, I had a really bad night last night, and those extra calories, I don't really care because they're going to make me feel good and I need some pick me up. But, you know, that's all the choices to make, right, you know, because mood comes into play as well. So ultimately, that brings us to the other direction of the equation, right? How does what we impact our sleep? This is something that I think most people have heard about in the context of trying 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 really disrupts their sleep. I'm interested in both the timing of food intake relative to sleep, but also the content of the food and how it impacts sleep. What's known about that, either from your work or from other work? When we started this conversation, I was talking about these population-based studies, you know, cross-sectional data, where two things happen at the same time, and you, you know, you don't really know causality, they happen at the same time. And I think early on in this field, we started thinking about sleep as the promoter of food intake or as a sleep-causing, changes in diet, exercise, but didn't really think that maybe it's the other way around, or maybe the other way around is just as plausible. So I started thinking about that and said, "Well, what if we took the other approach? What if we looked at diet and examined how diet influenced future sleep?" And my first paper in this field was using data from the multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis. It's actually kind of hard to find good cohorts that have good nutrition data, good sleep data, and data over years, right? So Mesa, multi-ethnic study of atherosclerosis, is one of those great cohorts that we have here in the U.S. that has all of the above. So I paired up with a colleague of mine, Susan Redline and Boston, and she's a principal investigator on their sleep insularies.
study. And we asked a question of diet quality. It's impact on sleep duration, insomnia symptoms. And we found that having a diet that more closely aligns with a 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 and other large cohort with good diet data and sleep information. We took a really, really nice approach in this longitudinal analysis. I don't know. Usually when we do longitudinal studies, we exclude people who have the condition at baseline, right? So if you're trying to see this factor at baseline, how does it influence hypertension 10 years later, you usually exclude people who have hypertension at baseline because you want to see the development of hypertension. In this case, we're looking at insomnia symptoms, but insomnia is one of those conditions that's not necessarily static. It resolves, right? So you can have insomnia and then a few years later, not having insomnia, or you can not have insomnia now and develop insomnia. 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, but we also looked at an American type of diet profile called the dash diet, the dietary approaches to stop hypertension, women who had a dietary profile closer to those two types of diets, healthful diets were less likely to have hypertension insomnia at three years. And the dash diet is what? Dietary approaches to stop hypertension was developed to reduce prevent hypertension, reduce blood pressure in people by increasing in takes 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. How did those work out? I'm just curious, do you recall if the low salt, high salt condition? There is salt sensitivity. So there are some people who are very sensitive to salt and so having a reduced salt diet will really improve their blood pressure. Oh, there's not so much, but the dash diet, regardless of its salt content, did better than the equivalent non-dash, which would be your average American diet. Whatever that is. Yeah, higher insaturated fats and sugars. Which seems to be changing now because of the GLPs. I feel like that's, you know, maybe it's a skewed perspective, but I feel like the typical American diet is, it might not be changing so much in content, but in volume, it seems like people are eating less. Certainly, the snack food companies from what I understand are struggling alcohol companies. That's a different issue, but there certainly have sales are way, way down, but it just seems like people's appetites are down. Well, GLP ones will do that, right? Yeah. And we were talking about this the other day here. How many Americans have tried a GLP? The estimates are anywhere from like one in seven. Somehow they say it's, it's more. It's just pretty incredible. Yeah, it's pretty high. But this is interesting. So how people eat impacts their sleep. I'm sure the listeners and I also am thinking, okay, but people who are eating a Mediterranean diet, right? All of oil is fish, you know, fruits, vegetables. They are probably more apt to walk more, exercise more, socialize more. How do you separate out the variables in a study like that? Well, so in population based studies, we adjust for a bunch of covariates, right? We have all of these questionnaires that are given out to people asking them about their race, occupation, socioeconomic status, and then we adjust, 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, you mentioned, it's usually not captured very well. It's not something that we can adjust for. But one thing that we did in my lab going back to that original study was to look at how diet influenced sleep at night in the participants in our inpatient study. So we took the nine hour time in bed opportunity phase, only that one. In the four hour time in bed, opportunity participants were very efficient. There was not much variability in sleep duration in that phase. They slept as much as they could in that four hour opportunity. But in the nine hours, there was variability there. Some people got more or less. So we wanted to see if food intake was related to their sleep at night. That study, we had polysomnography assessments of sleep every single night. Like I mentioned, we had control diet initially, and then we let themselves select their food and takes. So we took a very systematic approach to evaluating how diet could influence sleep in that study. We said, first of all, was the diet that they chose different than the diet that we gave them. First step, right? It was. So they ate almost 450 calories more, they ate 33% more saturated fat, a little less protein, I believe, a little more carbohydrates, not much, but it was different. So 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. 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% shorter when they self selected their diet compared to what we had given them was timing of food intake impacted because when I think of what impacts what reduces slow wave deep sleep that's eating too close to bedtime. So we did not take that into consideration in 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 when was their last eating period. But it could have been different than in the controlled feeding condition because in the controlled feeding condition, they had set meals at specific times, but they all went to bed at 10 p.m. Then the other question was, okay, what was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? So when we talk about arousals in the context of polyseminography, it doesn't necessarily mean full on waking up or awakening. It really means going from a deeper to a lighter stage of sleep. So you may still be asleep throughout the night, but you're not getting deep slow wave sleep, breath, sleep as much as you would otherwise. Do you create a buffer between your last bite of food and the time you go to sleep? You personally. Me personally? Yes. Is it an hour, two hours, three hours? I personally like to eat my last meal, at least three hours before going to bed. And I know there's variability. There are different people have different tolerance. You mentioned right before that, you know, some people may be late or chronotypes, but what we know is that eating earlier is better overall for cardiometabolic health. Eating earlier is better. Me personally, I feel better by eating earlier. If I eat too close to bedtime, I get hot. It's a thermic effective food. It isn't thermic effective food. And we want to be cooling off when we go to sleep. Exactly. Exactly. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking 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.
A.G.1 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 A.G.1. It has just been so helpful for supporting all aspects of physical health, mental health, and performance. If you would like to try A.G.1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. But at a time, A.G.1 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 A.G.1 subscription. There seems to be something asymmetric about sleep requirements in my experience. And I don't think I'm alone in this. Whereby, if I go to bed at 10 p.m., I get into bed at 9.30 fall asleep at 10, I need about six and a half, maybe seven hours to feel completely rested. That's how long I'll sleep, wake up without an alarm feeling great. If I go to bed at midnight, I find I could sleep till 9. I 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? 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 there are melatonnes lower. It should be when it's high. So they're fighting their circadian system. So yes, they should, they should be getting seven hours, but they're not getting seven hours because the body's not designed to be sleeping during the daytime hours. Plus, then you have, you know, everything else is right. Right. The light, the noise, the kids, whatever life that happens during the daytime, when everybody else is awake and you're trying to sleep. Yeah. The only thing I can think of that's an advantage to being nocturnal is the quiet. I used to sometimes shift to a nocturnal schedule during holidays and graduate school when everyone go home because I lived, my parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school. So I couldn't afford to just go home for Christmas, right? Just that day or a couple of days and everyone else had to travel. So I could invert my schedule, it just kind of drifted that way. Yeah. I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at 4 a.m. and sleeping until, you know, 3 p.m. At least for typical people. Your brain gets into a kind of weird space when you're inverted from the rest of the world. Well, the things you do when you're a grad student, I would be the opposite. Right. I'd wake up at 4 a.m. And then study because I felt like all of the hours of studying before the sun rolls were like extra. Interesting. Extra time for me. Well, it was definitely extra. But you felt like you were extra sharp at those hours. Extra sharp. I could study and then, you know, I got that time done and then, you know, breakfast. More than that crash later in the afternoon. And that's the problem. The 1 to p.m. crash. Has your work explored napping at all? I'm a believer in naps and non-sleep deep rest, yoga, knee droid type things, meditation. Do naps factor into this diet, nutrition, hunger equation? So we haven't done research on napping per se. For me, there's a lot going on with napping. I don't think we have very good data to be able to say what's appropriate about napping. What we do know is that you don't want to nap too close to bedtime because you want to build sleep pressure throughout the day. And if you're dissipating the sleep pressure, the sleep need too close to bedtime, then you're not going to be able to fall asleep when time comes to go to bed at your usual hour. And then, you know, you get into this vicious cycle and it's not helpful. But, you know, there are some studies that say, well, what should you do if you can't sleep enough at night and you're feeling tired? You know, should you sleep? Recommendations are that you should make it a short nap, 30 minutes, no more than an hour, early enough in the day if possible so that you can have sufficient time to rebuild that sleep pressure to be able to fall back asleep well when time comes. But then there's also this whole question of about what's the nap for, right? Like, why are you sleepy? Of course, if you, if you're pulled in out not, it's easy to know. But if, 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 a good quality sleep and then you're not able to maintain alertness throughout the day and you need a nap, I think you should check to see like what's going on at night? Like why are you not getting that good enough sleep? I'm chuckling because my postdoc advisor sparked this huge debate. It was a big lab and we had a couple of people in lab who like to nap at their desk. These were people they could just like put their head down and nap at their desk in the afternoon, walk in, they'd be napping and then wake up and keep working. Everyone was working very hard and he had this theory that if you're napping, it's because you're sleep deprived. That like napping is unhealthy, you know, and it sparked a big debate and people because it was a bunch of nerds, people bring data and like no, you know, the sleep lab at Stanford says that nafs can be healthy and I think what you just described summarizes, I think the take away. 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. 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 lace? Do you feel like your mind is moving fast or you're kind of in this like flow zone or whatever you want to call it? I'm very focused, very efficient so I try to be really attentive at my task. I try to take breaks once in a while but most of the time it's very efficient, get to the task and get it done. Earlier you were talking about biking and the 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 that they wake up and it's like million to the day and then it's down, right? Yeah, interesting. I think some of us are more like this. But I think it's important to have a little bit of both. No, I think it's important to have downtime, you know, speed time to not just be go, go, go, go. We're asking about my personal, you know, actions. And at one point I was running a lot for exercise and I felt like my whole life was just running all the time. You bring to? 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 I thought, okay, I got a need to, I think I need a breather. And so I started incorporating yoga into 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. Exactly. Yeah. But I think yoga evolved. I think the yoga I do now, it's not as static as the yoga I was doing when I was a grad student. I think it evolved to be a little more active than back then. I see the benefit to having, you know, the, both types of exercise. Thanks for being willing to explore that, you know, that I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner, but the Ayurvedic folks, they'll talk about people like more fire, more, more, more earth, 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, it's what I'm kind of hearing. So you know, a colleague of mine just published a paper in nature about the biological clocks and aging in different organs. And the sweet spot really was six and a half to about seven and a half, eight hours for optimal aging. Once you get to blow that, it's basically you shaped, right? So too much of one thing is not good, too, too little is, is not good. You want to be in the sweet spot, most, most organs for a optimal aging was in this six and a half to seven point eight and a different 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, you shapes in men and women and different organs, so very interesting paper came out last week or two weeks ago. I'll have to check it out. What other sex differences are known to exist?
sleep requirements, sleep dynamics from your work or from other work. This is not something we've really covered on the podcast. -No. -I mean, well, not in any sufficient amount of detail. -Yeah. -So, women tend to sleep a little longer than men across lifespan, although, you know, if you ask women about their sleep, they don't rate their sleep as very good. More women than men report having difficulties with sleep. Insomnia, for example, insomnia symptoms. More women than men say they have difficulty falling asleep. Difficulty maintaining sleep across the adult lifespan. -What do you think that is? -There could be some physiological effects, right? Some hormonal effects. Women don't sleep the same across a menstrual cycle. There's discomfort at different times. And then there's different responsibilities, different social roles that come into play that may influence women differently than men. But, you know, we're working on a review paper, actually, about hypertension and sleep and sex differences. And, you know, women are more sensitive to the impact of poor sleep on different metabolic outcomes than men. So, for blood pressure at lower sleep apnea, for example, at lower thresholds of sleep apnea, their blood pressure would be higher than men. So, I think that there needs to be for sure a lot more research in this area to be able to uncover, you know, these differences. And then, you know, knowing that there are these differences to start probing women about their sleep. But last year, we published a scientific statement for the American Heart Association about multidimensional sleep health. And we concluded by recommending clinicians that they actually ask their patients about sleep. And not to ask a question, a targeted question, just ask their patients, "How's your sleep?" Because if you start asking about, "Oh, how much sleep do you usually get at night?" Then you tell the person that the only thing that matters is how many hours of sleep you got at night. That's not all sleep is about, right? Sleep is not just about the number of hours that you got, but it's also about the regularity, the quality, your satisfaction with it. There's nighttime experiences, there's daytime experiences from sleep. When you wake up from sleep, are you feeling refreshed? Are you feeling like you had, are you satisfied with how 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? Having this open-ended question, maybe clinicians won't have time for the answer, but allows their patient to actually tell them what's bothering them about their sleep. Then you can get something like, "My spouse keeps kicking me because I'm snoring too loud." Then, "Oh, maybe we should test you first sleep apnea." Does apnea always include snoring? Yes. Are there some people who don't snore who have apnea? I don't think so. You stop breathing, and then there's this gasping sound that people make when they awaken from that, or they get aroused from this breathing interruption. I feel like so many people have apnea and don't realize it, not because I'm sneaking into the rooms at night and listening to it 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." Now, there are free apps that can just record you when you sleep. So, I know a lot of people are, I don't mouth tape when I sleep, but I do sometimes use one of these nose strips that kind of pulls the nostrils out a bit, that certainly it's reduced the amount of snoring for me. That 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 sleep apnea, then there's CPAT, which people don't like. But if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be not as high, so that might be helpful for comfort. I have a colleague of mine who does sleep apnea surgeries, so implantables are also. If people think they might have apnea, is it just get a CPAT, pop that thing on? Is that the best line of eventually? I think they should get tested. So, how does one do that? Because that's the problem. 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. Polycynography 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 to get tested for this, and your doctor can prescribe that test very easily. How come we can't just go buy a CPAT on Amazon? Because you need to have the pressure determined for you, right? So, you need to know what kind of pressure to apply and how to set it up. It's not as simple as just. Okay. All right, fair. You need to have the proper settings, and someone needs to tell you which setting to use, because then that's where you run through the trouble of having the wrong settings and not being effective. Yeah, I just know from having done this podcast a while that, like, if people think, "Okay, I gotta go to my doctor. I gotta find out or convince them that I have apnea." Then they have to write me a script for a CPAT. Then I gotta buy a CPAT, which I'm guessing is not cheap. I'm not sure. I don't think they're very inexpensive. The price might have come down. And I 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 come up with an at-home solution to this. Something like apnea seems important enough to daytime wakefulness, cognitive function, longevity, metabolic. It wicks out to so many things that I feel like it deserves a public health messaging. Yeah, if you use it well, and you feel better during the day, that's reinforcing. To keep using it and get waiting for it. Let's talk about food and nutrients. You've done a substantial amount of work here in this area. And I have a bunch of questions. At first, I want to talk about kefir. Yeah. I love Bulgarian full fat playing yogurt. But it's right next to the kefir. Uh-huh. And I'm always like, "Do I get the kefir?" Well, I don't know. I love the Bulgarian full fat playing yogurt. So, I haven't tried the kefir yet. What's special about kefir? And why did you study kefir? Kefir, 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 wasn't the subject of my master's thesis. I don't know for that study. That was when I was at McGill. We recruited men that had mildly elevated cholesterol levels. We gave them two cups per day versus just regular milk for a month. So, two cups, like two mugs like this? Two cups, like the measuring cup. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Like 500 ml. Okay. And we measured the amount of cholesterol they produced. And baseline endpoint in both phases. And there's no effect. It was a null study. It was one of those. It was hard to get published. kept at it and we got it published, but yeah. So, these fermented yogurts and things, they don't do anything for cholesterol levels? At least in our study. In this population, at this level, with this comparison, didn't have any effect. What's your general thought about low sugar fermented foods? I don't know if kefir qualifies as low sugar. But based on Justin Sonnenberg's work at Stanford and others, I've been really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, full fat bulgurian yogurt, fermented foods are interesting. Yeah. Are you a proponent in general? I'm a proponent. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to feed your gut. I think that the gut microbiome is getting a lot of attention for all sorts of health benefits. So, I think that that's something that's important. So, also, it's important to also consider that, you know, for that study, right? Our main outcome was cholesterol synthesis. But there's so many other things we could have looked at that we didn't look at, right? And maybe it didn't have any impact for cholesterol synthesis. But maybe can I assume a control? Might be better or for gut inflammation, it would be better. But, you know, you pick your outcomes where you study something. This is the challenge of doing controlled science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's over 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 we can look at any study and say, well, that's a very artificial circumstance. You say, well, intentionally, because we're trying to isolate variables. >> Right, right, exactly. >> People get frustrated. Oh, that's an observational study.
Well, I'm going to continue to eat low sugar fermented foods every day. I do think, in a study like the one you described, occasionally there's just, let me state this differently. Historically, in science, there's been a lot of interesting discoveries that have come from researchers designing a study and look at one thing and then kind of noticing, oh, like all the subjects, feel better or sleep better or their skin, they're reporting things that then lead to another line of inquiry, but you moved on from key for, tell me about this paper I was intrigued by this when I looked over your CV, the weight loss diet that includes a coffee beverage enriched in, let me try this, Menolgo saccharides, okay, long word, leads to a greater loss of adipose fat tissue than placebo beverage in overweight men. Tell me about this study and what these Menolgo saccharides are, and if somebody wants to lose weight, should they be including the senior coffee? So this was industry sponsored research that we did. They wanted to replicate a study that had been done in a different country because they wanted to replicate the findings. So we did this study. It was basically a placebo controlled study. We were provided coffee manolgo saccharides, so these are extracted from spent coffee grounds, so it was basically satchits, right? So a white packet, one had the coffee manolgo saccharides, the other one didn't. We gave it to our study participants, we measured their body composition, we found an effect on body composition in men, not women. And so that was the end of that product. Really, they wouldn't market it just because it only had an effect in them. I assure you, there are many men who would love to drink a coffee drink and lose more weight as a consequence. It's not going to be our market, you know. But do we know what the ingredients were? It was manolgo saccharides, it was the extracted, yeah, so it was just basically a product that was tasted like coffee, strong coffee, but it didn't have the caffeine or anything of that. It just had this manolgo saccharide that was extracted from coffee. So this substance comes from coffee or gherly, but coffee is very low calorie. Right, but it's from the spent grounds, so no one really consumes this really, because you know, when you brew your coffee or you're not getting it, you know, can you buy it? Can people get it? I don't think so. I'm not sure. So what, what do you, first of all, how much weight did they lose relative to the? It was statistically significant. Yeah. Okay. So I thought there's something that, I mean, you study, it's interesting, you say kefir, manolgo saccharides from coffee, and now I'm going to ask you about ginger. Well, and 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. So we were studying it for a functional benefit on cholesterol synthesis. That's not a, 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. So functional claims, those functional claims or health claims, we call them, that say, okay, well, health claim, there's a health claim for oats, for example, right? So consuming fiber from oats reduces cholesterol levels. That's been demonstrated. Yes. So that's, that's a health claim. That's an approved health claim. That's why you see the hearts on some boxes of cereal. But that's different than fiber is good for maintaining regular clarity, right? So, anyways, I was interested in, in functional foods for health benefits beyond their, their nutritional content. And so we studied kefir for, I say, 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. So go, okay, 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. Oh, okay. And to do what? Like, I think, you know, for energy expenditure, look at thermic effective food, it's like, okay. So, so we did this study. I had some, some funds that I could use for him to do that and, uh, what did the study look like? I said you're, we looked at the thermic effective food. Like, so people ate ginger root when they're spicy in their food. We dissolved ginger powder in warm water and so that was one beverage and then, uh, in the crossover again, crossover design. So, next time when they came, it was just hot water. And how many times a day are they drinking it? This was a one time, one time, uh, consumption period and we looked at the thermic effective food over a six hour period. So again, they're, they're under this, um, we call it metabolic hood, right? So a little bubble and we measure their, uh, oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production for, I think it was four or five hours. And it's significantly elevated, with ginger. With ginger. Yeah. Wow. So we think through the capsaicin receptor, there's an increase in the thermic effective 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 life, 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 or more. Or more. I mean, 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 there is that there are a lot of wild claims that go unchecked like, oh, you know, walnuts are shaped like a brain and therefore they're good for your brain or, you know, which is, they have certain things in them which are brain beneficial, but it's not related to the shape of the food. So you get, there's a, that area I feel of nutrition has been marginalized on the basis of the kind of like quackery associated with it. But of course, there are interesting things in different foods. I do think that the the Saunenberg and colleagues work on low sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatory tone 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. So I can say in the fiber group when they compared to low sugar fermented foods and then they measured the inflammatory tone, they did a crossover design also within the fiber group. There was a very 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 inflammatory tone decreases for a lot of people at increases, which is not to say that fiber is bad, but I think now we're starting to think about like different types of fibers. I was going to ask. Yeah. They didn't control for that. Okay. They just said increased to the number of servings each day. Yeah. And I know a lot of people don't like to eat fiber's foods because they don't feel good after they eat them. It's like it's not that they don't taste good. And I think there's this whole like histamine story that needs exploration. I think foods and the healthy foods needs better parsing in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, there was also a bituation. You don't go from consuming six grams of fiber per day to 25. They ramped them up, but I have to say they ramped them up pretty high. Like even the low sugar fermented foods, I think they got them up to like four servings per day. Okay. It's a lot of kimchi. You're not familiar with it. Like it can be a little hard on the gut. Yeah. I actually take an enzyme. I think it's called DAO. Very inexpensive. It's like a tiny, tiny pill that for digesting histamines. Because I noticed after I had way protein or I had broccoli, I would get kind of sleepy. I was like, what is this? And a colleague at Stanford, Sean Mackie, his head of our pain center said that he had gut pain at one point. He's a pain doctor, directs the pain center. And he figured out by elimination and trial and error that it was onions and other histamine containing foods. He avoids histamine containing foods. I'm not about to give up the things I just described onions I can do without. So I think that there's food to have real effect. So key for 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 want it 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.
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I've been sleeping on a dusk mattress for more than 4 years now and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try helix, you can go to helixleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz and helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix is also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. In your work or in your observation or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you? Someone had a really great question for me at the obesity society, meaning 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 for our delay, relative to the other condition, again, same thing for a 10-hour window. We gave our participants the exact same foods, same foods, same quantity, same timing between meals. That was done in a metabolic chamber. 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 a different type of fat?" My eyes just went like this because my time studying medium-chain triglycerides was 15 to 20 years ago. I was like, "Wow, this person knows that work that I've done, and now is applying it to this work that I'm doing currently." I thought that was fascinating, and I think that timing of intake of different foods and how it influences metabolism is something that's fascinating to me. I confess I'm a 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 that'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. I and many other people have wondered whether it's best to eat more towards early day or whether or not it's just overall caloric load. You're saying that it does indeed make a difference. It makes a difference. You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first two thirds of your waking day. Roughly, as opposed to the last two thirds. Yes. So in that study, one hour after waking up, so 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 typical. So it could be 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. That seems pretty reasonable. Yeah. Versus 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. The New York schedule. Yeah. Well, I started chuckle because when I go to New York, like it's like if you go to dinner at 536, you're kind of alone in the restaurant. Yeah. Depends on time of year. Early bird special. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of in, it's the early shifted. Yes. Well, that's just more reflective of culture, I think. In Europe, they eat very late often. Depends on where. So I was saying before we started, I was on a full bright program last year 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, okay, well, you feed me. Then you feed the children. Right. Then you have your dinner because they could have dinner at 11 p.m. And the children ate 9 p.m. And I'm like, can't be good. If you, my dad's from Argentina, if you go to a restaurant in Buenos Aires at 9 p.m., you're not going to see many people at 11 p.m., you'll see people in their 70s and 80s. And they're up early the next day, they nap in the afternoon. Yeah. I don't know how healthy they are as a country on average, but haven't looked at the data. But very, very late shifted culture. Well, there's been studies in Spain that have looked at timing of eating and their impact on weight management and thinking of work by Marta Garoulette, where she showed that in her weight loss program, the participants who have lunch, so their big, big meal is lunch, who have their lunch earlier in the day, have better weight loss than those who have their lunch later in the day. So, you know, even in those cultures where they have, they tend to eat late, they still find that eating earlier tends to be better for you. I was very, very relieved when Alan Erigan, who's a, I consider one of the best public educators on the topic of protein and nutrition, body recomposition. He's formally trained in this reassured me that, you know, nowadays there's a lot of interesting getting like protein ration, it's probably overdone a little bit, but that 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 this protein pressure and like, oh, I got to eat another meal late in the day or I have to force myself to eat breakfast in order to get their protein ration, but turns out the whole notion that you could only assimilate like 30 grams per meal is totally false, turns out it 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 big, even or just late dinner. Right. You just don't want to eat too close to bedtime. Correct. Okay. Yeah. What about these MCTs? Medium-chain triglycerides. These are very popular in the health and kind of biohacking space a few years ago, the whole bulletproof coffee notion, MCTs, butter, coffee, and that's more or less faded away. Yeah. I don't see a lot of people putting oil in their coffee these days or coconut. What are some of the known benefits of MCTs? Where do you find them and what brought you to them as a research topic? This was a topic for my PhD dissertation, so my PI got a grant looking at the medium-chain triglycerides. He had done prior work on this, but what we did was use purified MCT oil. So this is only liquid oil that contains eight carbon and ten carbon chain fatty acids. Those are not very common in our general food source. So it was purified, extracted oil that we then gave our participants. We had created this functional oil that contained flaxseed oil also to be able to get some more some omega-3 fatty acids in there. We had added plant steriles because that was a big focus of my lab at McGill plant steriles for cholesterol reduction and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. But the idea was to evaluate the impact on energy expenditure because the way we process medium-chain triglycerides is different than how we process long-chain triglycerides. So the 12, 14, 16 and up carbon chains. So the medium-chain triglycerides, they travel directly to the liver, they get metabolized, we burn them off more readily than the long-chain triglycerides that travel across the peripheral circulation, get deposited in that opposed 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, that was an increase in thermic effect of foods, so you burn slightly more calories from the meal that contained medium-chain triglycerides compared to the meal that contained your standard fat. Now 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, 8,0,10,0. So it's okay, you're 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. And did it eat it like spoonfuls of beef tallow? Well, we put it on to mashed potatoes. You know, when you're doing studies like this where you're trying to control the diet and you want to isolate one aspect of it, right, when we gave real foods, half of the total fat of the diet came from the medium chain containing, and the beef tallow, so they'd say 20% of your fat from one of the two. So you have to pour it, mask it somehow and- MCT. There's also this issue about laxative effect of MCT oil that- We had a few participants who initially felt a lot of gargling when, like, just gargling from the stomach, 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, it went a month, I mean, four week studies. So after a few days, no one dropped out for, you know, any GI issues. Okay, that's reassuring. Yeah. So beef tallow, it was initially beef tallow because it has a lot of saturated fat, is solid at room temperature. So as soon as your food started to get a little colder, you would kind of gel on your plate. Mm-hmm. Yeah, sort of like if you bring french fries home from a restaurant that used tallow and then you, like, put it in the fridge because you thought you wanted them as leftovers the next day, they're sort of like in this, like, stuck to bottom of container configuration. Yeah. Yeah, it's not very appetizing. Not if dealing. No, there's, like, it's white all underneath it. Yeah, it almost always goes into the trash. A couple of women felt that gave them headache, just a smell of it, you know. So with the MCT's, big significant increase in thermic effect of food? That was statistically so many. Yeah. It was about 45 to 50, 60 calories. Oh, I thought you were going to say percent increase. No, no, no. So it's a small change, but it was, if you're going to use this versus that, you're getting a little boost here. If you repeat this a few times in a day because when we measured the thermic effect of food, we measured it only after over one meal, but repeated over three meals per day over a certain period of time, we did fine changes in body composition, improvements in weight status with medium chain triglyceride consumption. Lean mass to fat mass management. Fat mass, yeah. Interesting. And then we did follow-up study of weight loss study with medium chain triglyceride. And this time around, it was just purified MCT oil, not added with other types versus olive oil, which is much more acceptable and found greater weight loss with MCT. Based on what you're saying, it's reasonable if somebody wants to improve weight loss. I'm hearing a sort of 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 appetite and food regularly. Satiety and hunger signals. What is it like a tablespoon or two of MCT per day? Is that kind of what this looks like for the typical person? Yeah, about that. Okay. In place of some other oil, not in addition. Not in addition. Correct. Okay. Some ginger. Yeah. Are they additive? Are they synergistic? I think they could probably be additive because I think that the impact is through different mechanisms. Obviously, no one's tested that, you know, it's interesting. You bring it up this way because it makes me think of David Jenkins in the portfolio diet. It actually made the New York Times. I think it lasted just in December. I'm not familiar with that. 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 steriles, and soluble fiber. Yeah. It's going to be a tough one to get past most of the American public. I'll tell you, as a public health educator, I don't care if it comes out in the New York time, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and everything in between. People hear soy. Yeah. Nuts, they like, but easy to overeat. They hear plant steriles and like, they're, they're, they're, they're someplace else. This diet was, went on a head-to-head comparison with lipid luring agent, right? Like a statin. Like a statin. Yeah, yeah. Some cholesterol reduction as a statin. As a statin. Yeah. The portfolio. Interesting name. People are definitely unhealthy in this country, and if they can lower blood lipids. 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 monounsaturated fats or olive oil. You know, when I look at a diet like the portfolio diet, which I, you just, I only know what you just told me about it, or think about the, the current food suggestions by, by the FTA, which are, you know, we could call it kind of, um, it emphasizes, um, unprocessed and minimally, 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, and in a more plant-based, um, 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, like a, a chicken breast or something, and a couple eggs or four eggs or something, is very satiating. Mm-hmm. Whereas we can eat a lot of grains and nuts before we kind of go, okay, that's enough. There seems to be this issue, like, how do you, how do you ensure cardiometabolic health while quelling hunger? Mm-hmm. And we can't have people walking around hungry all the time. And the GLP's help with that. And it does get down to sort of, like, do you include animal-based foods or not often? Mm-hmm. 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. Mm-hmm. 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 kind of 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? Yeah. Like, I feel like this, this is the contour of things. Yeah. Well, I think that there's, there's no reason to pick 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 and is higher volume, that's filling. It's hard to eat a lot of foods. 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 take, you put in some, some nuts, helps to prolong this satiety because then you get some protein, some healthful fats. And so I think that's important. I'm not saying animal products are bad. I think they're, 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. Yeah. Well, I'm right there with you. I'm a huge fan of, I do eat meat, half Argentine, I mean, you know, but I'm not a big fan of fish. I keep working on this, but I can't seem to quite get there, but I don't eat them in excess. The things that I feel are very, very easy for people to overeat are starch fat or starch sugar fat combinations. It's just like the brain and gut respond with signals that scream more. It's very hard for people to do like a slice of pizza. I love pizza. It can be done, but it's just very hard for people to do. It's like the stop signals just are all pushed down and the go signals are all go. So we're producing white foods as much as possible as white foods? White foods. Yeah. So the white flour, white rice, white pasta, white, you know, things are not as colorful. You know, if you're eating a slice of bread and it just dissolves in your mouth. It sugar. Yeah. That's so good. Perfection again. But it's also I was looking at the history of nutrition in this country, your Canadian bug earth. Right? I detected that. And I don't know what the sort of traditional fair 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, you know, in Europe, probably in, I mean, Canada, what sort of the, 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. It was always pretty weak in terms of nutritional status, except for fruits, vegetables, and some animal food. I think portion size has a lot to do with it too. So I know moving from Canada to the U.S., you know, all the. go to a restaurant and the portion sizes are so big. It would never have occurred to me to take home doggy bag for at a restaurant, ever. And then here's like, kind of, have two arrows. 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 U.S., the first thing the dietician at my work told me was, do not buy bagged bread. Okay, what does that mean? Don't buy bagged bread, like, that's what I always do. No, if 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. Like, okay, I'm not gonna buy bagged bread. So apparently she was talking about like, 20 additives, to a 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 to eat yogurt quite a bit. And then the yogurt in the here in the U.S. tasted sweeter, the same thing, the same yogurt. Canada here, the same name, the same everything. It was sweeter. And I didn't know why, but then it occurred to me that 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 less sweet in Canada than in the U.S., and it was less sweet even than in Europe than Canada in the U.S. So there's things like that that don't necessarily help. Yeah, yeah, we love our sugars and fats in the United States. And I think we paid a substantial health debt as a consequence. I mean, now, again, I don't have the numbers on this, but with red and true tide 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 than 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 as in everything in life. And that's an important question that needs to be resolved. But I do think that things are changing. I think we're finding a lot more, for example, the yogurt, right? There was a lot more plain yogurt options than there were. You know, when I first moved to the U.S., so there's, you know, things are changing. There's been a lot of resistance. And I think that the resistance has been sociological in the sense that, you know, there's been a resistance to people being healthy. There really has. You know, there's this idea that, like, if you're eating clean, you have a needing disorder, and in an episode about eating disorders, I've talked to a lot of experts. And 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. But what I discovered in, like, talking at experts like Joanna Steinberg at Columbia and others is that, you know, like, there is this, so that was about the anorexia, but what I'm about to say is separate. There's this notion that if you're going to be thoughtful about what you eat, you know, or maybe you're not going to eat too late, you're going to skip dessert. Or until a few years ago, like, if you're not going to drink alcohol, like, there's something wrong with you. Like, you're being restrictive somehow. I think, again, it's kind of like the parallels to Europe or kind of interesting that, or the contrast to Europe or interesting where there's a lot of social convention built up around food that was healthy. And I think in the United States, the social conventions built up around food and alcohol were pretty unhealthy. It was like, everyone does this. Like, everyone needs hot dogs at the game. And like, and hot dogs at a baseball game are a great thing. It's like, nothing is as American and 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 a, there's this quieter, undercurrent of, well, like, are you being restrictive? Like, are you really going to live like that? But then you look at the, 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, as like a real health risk. I think now we're kind of like in the actual discussion that for a long time, it was like, speaking of which, and kind of things outside the box, there's a paper on your CV that I could not help, but ask about snack chips fried in corn oil. Aliviate. Cardiovascular risk factors when substituted for low fat and high fat snacks. Yep. What? What? Yes. Tell me the data. I believe you. I'm just like, what? This is wild. This was funded by Frito. Like, at that time, they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips. So this was Doritos Fritos, Cheetos and DeStoetos. All the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, uh, and so they had changed to corn oil. They're like, this is an oil that's higher in polyunsaturated fats than, but we usually have. What were they using before? I'm not sure I forget. But it wasn't tall. I don't think so. Like, doesn't make a difference. It's going to improve health if people choose those snacks compared to other snacks. So we had three arms in that study. Each person went through each of the three arms. It was for 25 days. The question was, okay, let's say you have a choice for a snack today. And you're going to go to the vending machine. And you have your option to eat a low fat high carbohydrate snack, a high fat high more high saturated snack or those chips. So you just pick one and that's that. So I think we gave, it was two snacks today for for 25 days. It was a rotation. So they had four, yeah, they had four different chips. So it was two, one day to the next day and like that for 25 days and then the controls. And yeah, the, the better lipid profile was the one with, was the one from the, the corn chips. They had the better lipid. Yeah. And they had less hyper protein, little A, which is another, you know, factor cardiometabolic risk factor. Data data. Well, I know that in the head-to-head comparison of seed oils of which corn is, right, with saturated fat. This is where kind of the contention starts to erupt where there are many studies now, I think, showing that when you substitute saturated fat with seed oils that cardiometabolic risk factors go down and this is true, right? Well, by the way, I'm just going to say, I, I avoid seed oils actively because I like olive oil and butter, mostly olive oil. I avoid seed oils. I don't like the way they taste. I love olive oil. Okay. And there's some health effects of olive oil. Yeah. 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 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 against that? Also, different oils have different smoke points, right? So each oil should be used for its appropriate usage, right? So the cooking process. So I think that's where people think that they should be using one type of oil for everything that they do. But you wouldn't put fax seed oil, for example, and he did up to very high temperature. Are you a fan of fax seed oil? I'm a fan of every liquid oil. I use, I have no personal restriction on the types of oils. I think that oils that remain liquid at room temperature, that should be your, your, 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. Is there any reason to, I just can't find the argument for why anyone would replace olive oil with a seed oil? Olive oil has a lower smoke point than other seed oils. So peanut oil, for example, has a higher smoke point. So you can fry in peanut oil. You wouldn't fry anything in olive oil. I wouldn't eat anything fried. Well, yeah. So that's, that's a different question, but like, yeah. So depending on how you want to use your oil, and you know, also some people find, you know, olive oil and big goods might impart stronger taste, so depending on the type. So some of them are more flavorful, right? And so there are more fragile, let's say, and they'll impart flavors to different, uh, different foods where they're not supposed to be. So you,
You're not seed oil averse nor are you pro seed oil is what I'm hearing personally. Yeah, no because I think that the the seed oil debate has been very contaminated by the issues that I mentioned before but also because many many processed foods contain seed oil. They're much less expensive than using, you know, grass-fed butter or olive oil or even just ordinary butter. So it's important to be nutrition facts literate. So when you're talking about processed foods so as much as possible cooking at home but that's something that a lot of people don't really know how to do feel they don't have the time for. People aren't going to start doing that. And then I'll tell you they're not going to start doing that. I wish they would but they're not going to. And the girls restored 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 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 where to what to pay attention to because otherwise it just gets overwhelming. You mentioned the study was paid for by a company and earlier you mentioned companies. I think this is an important issue that we've never really directly addressed on this podcast. I mean, anytime I've covered a paper and sometimes I do these solo episodes, I'll get back to them soon. I used to do a lot more of them. But I would always look like are there financial conflicts of interest? What's the difference between a company funding a study and a financial conflict of interest if any? Like to me, a financial conflict of interest is if the investigators, the scientists running the study have stakes and you know, they have shares in the company or they're being paid to do the study, obviously. But when a company funds research on like this, the snack chips study that you did, I think everyone would like to assume that they don't have any, you're not feeling any, there's no explicit nor implicit pressure for a particular outcome. Could you like, how does this stuff come about? So I'm glad you're asking that question because that's something that people often have this knee jerk reaction to industry sponsored studies. And I know there are people who are very, very vocal against industry sponsored research. But as scientists, we do research. We do research. The best of our abilities is that 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 no results. No results. So we did a study. It was sponsored by industry. We didn't find any significant effect of the test product compared to the control. And you can't publish it. We wrote the paper. We wrote the report. We provided it to our sponsor. Just out of, you know, courtesy. So this is the paper we're going to submit for publication. Do what you need to do. So they're giving you the green light to sit low. So the companies aren't short circuits. No, never. That's in the contract, right? You're right to publish because otherwise, why did you do research? There's no point in doing research if you're not going to be able to publish your research. So basically, it's courtesy to show the paper that you're going to be submitting for publication. That one paper that I'm referring to, I must have tried five different journals. But the findings are not exciting. They're showing that there's no effect on our outcomes. And it got rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected. And I'm pretty persistent. I ran out of steam. So if I run out of steam, I can imagine so many other people, other scientists who have no results of ran out of steam much quicker than me. That's a no result issue. That's not necessarily unique to industry funded studies. No, that's not unique. So industry sponsored studies, 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 going to, if you're not an honest scientist, obviously, I don't think it matters who sponsoring your research because the NIH finds misconduct. Right. I mean, doing science for any other reason than trying to find real answers is just insane. Like, I mean, these people are who do this are like legitimately sick, right? Yeah. It's a lot of work. I mean, well, do they really think they discovered something if they made it? It's like, it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't compute. It doesn't compute. Well, it never ends well. And then, you know, we could spend hours talking about the case. These things always, 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, you, 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, 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. Yeah. Why are they funding research? They wanted to know if it had a health benefit. So they could market a health benefit. Probably market a health benefit. At some point, that could be. And then if they don't find a health benefit, maybe they could switch it to something else, right? I don't know. I'm very sympathetic to the reality that there isn't a lot of research funding coming through NIH and NSF these days, but, but always it's been, you know, it's been low. I know because I sat on study sections, which dull out grants. I got grants, but it's very, very, very competitive. Are you taking money from companies to do this work because it's a great way to fund studies? Like, in other words, if NIH had more money to study nutrition, I could imagine a world where you would just take money from NIH to do it. Like, you wouldn't need the money. 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 food, specific products that would be kind of hard to study without industry support because you need to get access to the specific food or product. Well, I don't know what the status of it is right now, but my fairly frequent kind of check-in on what the at least stated 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 has been on this podcast. I just 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, etc., that there seems to be more and more interest in nutrition as a research topic and something to really understand. So obviously it's really important. I mean, people are eating every day. Yeah. They're making these choices. So there should be more federal funding for these things. And then there's no chance of bias, right? Yeah, I think that people assume that if industry funded a study that, especially on food, that like something's not to be trusted in there. I don't know why for food in particular, right? So if you think about it for food and drugs, food and drug companies. But drug companies, they do research on their own products all the time. The R&D for drug companies is definitely done in-house. That's also part of the scary part about it. We don't see the null results. I actually would prefer if it took on a different shape. I don't know exactly what it would look like. I mean, we don't see a lot of the negative outcomes that might exist. So I don't think there's a lot of- Because probably they just die out before they make it to next step. Yeah. I think outright scientific fraud, people making stuff up is pretty rare. Very rare. But I do think there's a lot of questions about people because of the incentives to need to publish. And as you described, it's hard to publish in all results. We will never know, and this is when you run a lab, as you know, you want to create a culture where graduate students and postdocs feel very comfortable saying there's nothing here. Because this stuff that didn't work out, you always- It's just a question that you always have. What stuff do we never hear about? Because the negative results, like they said, well, that mouse was sick. There's a lot of- The brain is a crazy thing. That's all you need to teach the students well. You have a student who comes to you and says, hey, this is lower. This is better than this. And you look at the numbers and you say, well, it's 25 versus 27. And the standard deviation is 10. No, 25 is the same as 27, right? So you have to to make sure.
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? 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. And then eventually they're like, oh, 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? What's coming, like, what are your antennae picking up when you're out there? I think what should I eat or, you know, or have you heard about XYZ FAD? That's also one. Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world? No, I haven't heard that. Peptides are like very peptide. Right now, peptides are really big. It's always something else. Yeah. Yeah. So it's very specific to a product. Yeah. Often very specific to a product. Yeah. You won't be held responsible for your answer. But do you supplement your diet with minerals like magnesium or anything like that? Are you just completely careful food choices? I prefer careful food choices. I think it's more pleasurable to eat a complete food diet. That said, I think that there are some people who may need to supplement their diets. But I think people should strive to get their nutrients from whole foods. Fiber recommendations are really growing. I looked into this and many, many people's doctors are now telling them you should take a little bit of ceilium husk. I always thought by the way, ceilium husk was like the husks. You had to like, you're going to eat the seed husk. It's actually ground into a powder or something like that. I'm still afraid to take it. But I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now are prescribing supplemental fiber and in a pretty high rate from what I understand. That's interesting. Yeah. People don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables. But they bring so much more. Right? So yes, there's fiber and fruits and vegetables. But there's also all sorts of polyphenols, right? All sorts of non-nutrient components that themselves may have benefits for health, that we don't fully understand yet, that feed your gut, that are maybe just as relevant, that we enhance fiber's impact on health. Yeah, listen, I appreciate it. 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 make better food choices and so forth. Yeah, so you know, I talk often about a vicious cycle where you don't sleep well, you don't eat well, then that makes you not sleep so well. And really, hoping for people to get into a health full cycle, right? Where you get good sleep, where you can make good food choices, that then helps you get better sleep to keep propelling this cycle of better health. I love it. It's a true integrative medicine and science. I also can attest that when you sleep well, you make better food choices. When you eat well, you sleep better. Right. So thank you so much for coming for taking time out of your schedule. Really appreciate it. And I've learned a ton. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. 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 Hubertman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols, an Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by
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