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

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What was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep, higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. You’re not getting deep slow-wave sleep, REM sleep as much as you would otherwise. >> Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and [music] science-based tools for everyday life. I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University School of Medicine. Today we discuss how you eat impacts your sleep, and how you sleep impacts what you eat, as well as how your body utilizes food depending on how you slept. Now, we’ve talked about food, and we’ve talked about sleep many times before on this podcast, but Dr. St-Onge’s work is unique because she runs one of the few laboratories in the world to look at the bidirectional relationship between sleep and food.

For instance, you’ll learn how even modest sleep deprivation increases hunger, but differently in men and women. In men, it happens to increase the hormones that drive the desire to eat, whereas in women, it reduces naturally made peptides such as GLP, which suppress hunger. Today’s discussion gets into the specific actionable items that you can do to improve your sleep and the way that your body handles food and hunger. We talk about the role of sleep in regulating blood sugar, cortisol levels, overall metabolism, and cardiometabolic health. Now, because Dr.

St-Onge’s research focuses on sleep and nutrition, but she’s also spent a significant amount of time studying how specific nutrients impact overall health and not just sleep, we also talk about that. I’m certain that you’ll come away from today’s episode with a lot of new information you haven’t heard elsewhere, as well as with the intention to make small or perhaps even large changes in behavior and nutritional choices that the science tell us can significantly improve your sleep, your metabolism, and overall health. Before we begin, I’d like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today’s episode does include sponsors.

And now for my discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, welcome. >> Thank you for having me.

Sleep impacts how and what we eat and how and what we eat impacts sleep. That’s a different perspective than I think most people take. I think most people are familiar, however, with not getting the best night’s sleep, maybe feeling like their impulsivity to eat quote-unquote bad foods is a little higher, and then also hopefully familiar with having a great night’s sleep and feeling like we’re just kind of in control in a different way. Maybe you could just kind of share for us what’s really going on beneath that experience and when subtle or not-so-subtle chronic sleep loss, so not an all-nighter necessarily, but you know, 45 minutes less here, 90 minutes less there, 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 the lab to address causality. So, let me start with, you know, the population-based studies, right? So, when I started being interested in in sleep, it was coming from an obesity angle.

My PhD is in nutrition. I trained as a postdoc in body composition, obesity research. And we were getting a lot of information from population-based studies that people who sleep too little have a higher body mass index than people who get adequate amount of sleep. Then it became there is a higher prevalence of people with obesity in this short sleep uh group. Then studies evaluating changes over time seeing that people who don’t sleep enough tend to gain more weight.

There was a famous uh Nurses’ Health Study that I really like to cite uh when I give talks that was published in 2006 where uh they tracked nurses over 14 years and those nurses that reported sleeping 5-6 hours had much higher rate of weight gain over that 14-15 year period than the nurses who had reported sleeping 7 or 8 hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large-scale population studies, cohorts. But, you know, what they what those studies tell us is that things are happening at a point in time or may influence something that’s happening over time, but not necessarily that one causes the other, right? So I started um 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. We burn less or we eat more or maybe it’s a combination of the two. Let’s try this out and and see. So my first my first study my first NIH grant the big R01s, you know, was to look at exactly at this. So we had people who had adequate sleep and we brought them in the lab and we asked them in a crossover design.

So half of the participants started out sleeping adequately. So they we gave them a 9-hour time in bed opportunity or we asked them to sleep too little. So they had a 4-hour time in bed opportunity, very short. But we did this for 5 nights. And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition.

So for the first 3 days, we told our we had our participants eat the exact same thing regardless of how much time in bed they slept they got at night. And then we measured appetite regulating hormones. We did neuroimaging uh to really get at isolating the impact of sleep duration on appetite regulating hormones and and um neuronal responses to foods. And then on the last day, we let them self-select their food intake and we measured that in the lab. From that study, we showed that in men specifically, uh we saw an increase in ghrelin in response to the short sleep.

So this hormone that triggers food intake. In women, we saw a reduction in GLP-1, interestingly enough. Glucagon-like peptide-1. So the satiety hormone was reduced as a result of short sleep in women. And then when we measured their food intake in the lab, they ate 300 calories more in the short sleep condition than the when they got their regular adequate sleep of at least 7 and 1/2 hours, a little more than that per night.

Then you were asking about, you know, brain responses. We looked at neuronal responses to food stimuli. We found upregulation in reward centers of the brain in the context of sleep restriction compared to the context of adequate sleep. So all together really building a case that when you don’t sleep enough at night, you have both physiological signals to eat more for men or not stop eating in women that lead to greater food intake that’s also could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of insufficient sleep. >> Amazing.

This sex-specific split in the data, if I have it correctly, that when men are sleep-deprived, so getting 4 hours per night, the signals th