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

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

Andrew Huberman:
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a professor of nutritional medicine at the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University School of Medicine. Today, we discuss how you eat impacts your sleep and how you sleep impacts what you eat, as well as how your body utilizes food depending on how you slept. Now, we've talked about food and we've talked about sleep many times before on this podcast, but Dr. St-Onge's work is unique because she runs one of the few laboratories in the world to look at the 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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Thank you for having me.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think most people are familiar, however, with not getting the best night's sleep, maybe feeling like their impulsivity to eat "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 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 45 minutes less here, 90 minutes less there, et cetera. How that plays out in terms of our nutrition, and then we'll go in from the nutrition side to sleep.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 the population-based studies. 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. It was published in 2006, where they tracked nurses over 14 years, and those nurses that reported sleeping five, six hours had much higher rate of weight gain over that 14, 15-year period than the nurses who had reported sleeping seven or eight hours per night. So those are observations that we get from large-scale population studies, cohorts. But what those studies tell us is that things are happening at a point in time or may influence something that's happening over time, but not necessarily that one causes the other, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So I started my work in this field trying to uncover whether sleeping too little actually causes weight gain. And so in my opinion, because I was coming from a lab where I trained in the measurement of energy balance, so how much energy you eat versus how much energy you burn, I was like, well, if sleep leads to obesity, leads to weight gain, it has to impact this energy balance regulation. So it's either that we eat more than we should or that we exercise less. We burn less or we eat more, or maybe it's a combination of the two. Let's try this out and see. So my first study, my first NIH grant, the big R01s, was To look 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 then we gave them a nine-hour time in bed opportunity, or we asked them to sleep too little, so they had a four-hour time in bed opportunity, very short. But we did this for five nights. And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition. So for the first three days, we 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 them self-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 GLP-1, interestingly enough.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 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 altogether, 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 also could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of insufficient sleep.

Andrew Huberman:
Amazing. This sex-specific split in the data, if I have it correctly, that when men are sleep deprived, so getting four hours per night-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... the signals that drive appetitive desire to eat are higher.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
In women, it's more that the brake on eating, on satiety, is reduced.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. As far as I know, the GLP pathways are not divergent by sex, but of course, I'm not deeply versed in that literature. Is there any evidence that GLPs are functioning different in men and women, circadian-wise or anything like that? Or this was just a fortuitous outcome-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or I should say, a incidental outcome?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Because there had been prior studies, and prior studies had shown that ghrelin was increased as a result of sleep restriction. They also showed that leptin was reduced as a result of sleep restriction. And when we got our data, we analyzed our data with all of our participants together.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And there was no effect.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

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

Andrew Huberman:
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Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I wonder extent to which people eat to overcome, to quell the pain of sleep deprivation. Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe their subjective experience of it is very different. But what do you think is happening in that 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?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
In our study, it was actually a 50% reduction in sleep, because when they had nine hours sleep opportunity, they slept around seven and a half.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
They were all people who we had screened to sleep at least seven, measured by actigraphy. And on average, they get seven and a half. And in the sleep restricted condition, they got on average about three hours and 50 minutes.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's pretty brutal.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's pretty brutal.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And that was maintained. They had five nights of that. So that-

Andrew Huberman:
Five nights of that.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. But-

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
At the end, they were done. 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, made sure that nothing would happen to them.

Andrew Huberman:
No naps?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No naps. No. But so what happens is, I think there's some subconscious need to eat more when you're sleep deprived. There's 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. Neuronal signaling that enhances pleasurable and reward centers of the brain, where when also fatigue sets in and now it's like, do you really want to have this conversation with yourself about what to choose at the buffet table? There's fatigue.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And others have shown also that sleepiness tends to correlate with all of this.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That there's these triggers for more pleasurable food consumption with the sleep restriction. And it's been reproduced. There's been so many studies.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And they all agree to the extent of overeating. A meta-analysis showed 250 to 400 calories of overeating.

Andrew Huberman:
Which might not sound like much, but when you start layering that in day after day, and you think 3,500 excess calories, more or less, for a pound of body weight, and when people accumulate that over time-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... if they're in a night shift condition, or new parents, or tending to a sick relative, or just final exams, it's a real thing.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's a real thing. Neema Kovesan 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 sleep less and gain almost a pound in two weeks.

Andrew Huberman:
It strikes me that for a long time in the stress research, the idea was when people are stressed, they reach for "comfort foods."

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Carbohydrate, and typically starch, fat, starch, fat, sugar combination foods to comfort them, and the just so story was always that, okay, well, 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-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... but it's stressful just to be less than adequately rested, independent of the things coming at you in life.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Is what you're studying stress?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So if you're thinking about physiological stress measured by cortisol levels, in that study, actually, cortisol wasn't changed.

Andrew Huberman:
In the short sleep?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
In the short sleep.

Andrew Huberman:
Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by circadian rhythms and cortisol.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So what does that mean?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
There was no difference between the two conditions, adequate sleep or short sleep on cortisol levels in our-

Andrew Huberman:
For five days of sleep restriction-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
For five days

Andrew Huberman:
... at basically four hours a night.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So cortisol's still peaking in the morning-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... still dropping in the evening.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow. That's very surprising to me.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I don't know. I don't know if it's the context of being in a lab where everything's safe, taken care of for them. There's nothing outside to aggravate this.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So I don't know. Maybe when you're in the context of sleep restriction, but also dealing with Your daily life-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... you're needing to take care of your kids, needing to get to work, needing to do all the activities of daily living, maybe then that becomes the added stressful event.

Andrew Huberman:
So the message is, if you suffer less than adequate sleep, get someone to take care of everything else.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
You better be in a spa .

Andrew Huberman:
You better be in a spa. Exactly. No, and I'm not challenging the result, I just find it really interesting. I would've thought that basal cortisol levels would go awry.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, in that study also, we didn't see any effect on glucose or insulin. Nothing. The curves were superimposable.

Andrew Huberman:
Wild.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
They were eating the exact same food at the exact same time, exact same quantity. The only thing we changed was the amount of sleep opportunity they got at night. So to me, this means that it's a combination of different things that causes the metabolic abnormalities that we notice in free-living populations. People aren't isolated. They're not in a box where they're not sleeping enough and they're choosing to eat higher fat, higher sugar, higher salt, poorer diet. 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 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, "Well, so what is it then? Why is it that in population-based studies, we find that people who sleep too little have higher risk of cardiovascular disease, higher risk of hypertension, higher blood pressure, higher risk of type 2 diabetes?" So because we had seen that food choices were different, that they ate a diet that was higher in calories, higher in fat and saturated fat, we thought maybe if you're in a free-living situation, that's when you start to see those cardiometabolic outcomes because it's compounded by maybe more sedentary behavior and alterations in food choices and diet. So the follow-up study then was to recruit good sleepers, people who sleep at least seven hours per night, verified by actigraphy, who answer on questionnaires that their sleep quality is good, and then to take these people and say, "Okay, now you're either going to continue your excellent sleep, or you're going to now go to bed an hour and a half later so that you get an hour and a half reduction in sleep." Because when we screen people to sleep at least seven hours per night, they sleep about seven and a half, and reducing by an hour and a half gets to six hours, which is short sleep, insufficient, on average what people who don't get enough sleep get. And-

Andrew Huberman:
They're missing a full sleep cycle.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 post-menopausal women compared to pre-menopausal women. We saw blood pressure was increased. So those cardiometabolic outcomes were adversely impacted in free-living, mild, sustained sleep restriction for six weeks. Six weeks was something else also. It was tough.

Andrew Huberman:
I can only imagine. Wow, okay. Because my mind always goes to, all right, well, we wake up in the morning because of an increase in cortisol. That's circadian. It's not related to sleep per se. It just kind of overlaps with the end of the night's sleep. If that's independent of sleep and cortisol drives glucose release, we know this.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
At least in the first study you described, glucose levels weren't altered. You said it was isocaloric, so people were-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yep

Andrew Huberman:
... it's not like they're eating more.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
The hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated. The hor-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But we didn't let them eat more.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But you didn't let them. I think that's a key thing that you pointed out before, but I think we want to underscore. And then, of course, the GLP levels in women being reduced. It's not that then they were able to eat, as we say, ad libitum, and then they happen to eat more. But they gained weight. So what's the action end of things that causes them to gain weight if they're basically in an isocaloric diet? And I have an idea what it might be, but I'm curious what the answer is.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes, I think they're more sedentary.

Andrew Huberman:
During the day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
During the day.

Andrew Huberman:
Less spontaneous activity.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right. Less spontaneous activity. Because we also did a study to look at energy expenditure. That's really difficult, actually, to measure, in my opinion, energy expenditure. There's multiple components to energy expenditure. But we did a study where, this was a small study, we enrolled only women for that, and we have a metabolic chamber at Columbia that we were able to use for this. So this small room in which we keep people, and we measure minute-by-minute oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production. And we were able to show that energy expenditure is actually increased in the context of sleep restriction in the 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

Andrew Huberman:
So it's fidgeting, movement, because we've talked before on this podcast about the non-exercise induced-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... thermogenesis. And it's a big number. People who fidget a lot bounce their knee a lot. Sometimes these people are burning 1,500 calories more per day, and everyone goes, "Oh my god, how could that possibly be?" But-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's a lot

Andrew Huberman:
... that's a lot. That's at the extreme. But it is kind of interesting to observe people out in the world.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
They tend to walk quickly. Well, you're from New York, so everyone there walks- ... faster than out here. But it's a real thing. Whereas some people, like me, are kind of more middle of the curve. I sit-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... a bit more still, unless I'm very caffeinated. These things add up over-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... time in ways that I think most people underestimate.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So for us, it was about 5% of energy increased.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And it ended up being about 90 calories, nowhere close to the 300 calories-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... that more of intake-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... they had got over a day in the prior study. So it's still an imbalance towards a positive energy balance when we do the math, but there is an increase in energy expenditure, again, in the confines of a metabolic chamber, which for most people is equivalent of the size of their bathroom.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Where you have a bed, a table, and a sink.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
A toilet. That's it. So you can't do much in there.

Andrew Huberman:
But you can do studies, quote unquote, "out in the wild" with actometry or what or-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. Actigraphy, W = water.

Andrew Huberman:
Actigraphy, excuse me. Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
A little while ago, I saw a study that said that if you are one night sleep deprived, like you get one or two hours less sleep than normally you would get to feel rested, that it's actually advantageous to exercise because it offsets some of the increase in inflammation.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But then if you're going 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?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because it's just like a body-wide response, and there are a bunch of things that have gone awry, and so a bunch of systems are dysregulated. Or can we pinpoint, okay, when you're sleep deprived, this is what's happening? Because I think if women knew that their GLPs were down-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... when they're down on sleep, so that they should expect that they would feel less satiety. If men knew that their ghrelin levels were elevated when they're down on sleep, that they're going to feel hungrier. We have a pretty big prefrontal cortex-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... most people anyway, and we can intervene simply on the basis of knowledge.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think that's what's empowering. And I think about this sometimes too when I'm thinking about my diet at times, right? I'm like, "Do I really want to eat this, or is it because I really didn't sleep last night?" Right? So you can ask yourself these questions. Take a pause and say, "Okay. Do I really want dessert, or is it just that I'm tired and I'm fine. I don't need it."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So if you step back and think that maybe part of it is because you didn't sleep well the night before, then you can make the 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's all the choice is to make, right? Because mood comes into play as well, so.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, ultimately, that brings us to the other direction of the equation, right? How does what we eat impact our sleep? This is something that I think most people have heard about in the context of try not to eat too close to bedtime.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
This is an active debate in many households, actually. Some people seem to be fine eating close to bedtime and sleeping, and even if they track their sleep. Other people, it really disrupts their sleep. I'm interested in both the timing of food intake relative to sleep, but also the content of the food and how it impacts sleep.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What's known about that, either from your work or from other work?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
When we started this conversation, I was telling you about these population-based studies, cross-sectional data where two things happen at the same time, and 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 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?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So MESA, Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, is one of those great cohorts that we have here in the US that has all of the above. So I paired up with a colleague of mine, Susan Redline in Boston, and she's the principal investigator on their sleep ancillary study And we asked the question of diet quality and its impact on sleep duration, insomnia symptoms. And we found that having a diet that more closely aligns with the Mediterranean diet was associated with better probability of having adequate sleep and reduced insomnia symptoms in this cohort. So then it launched a whole field of study, really, to keep looking at this, and we've looked at this in different studies and different cohorts. Actually, earlier this year, we published data from the Women's Health Initiative, another large cohort with good diet data and sleep information. We took a really 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 were looking at insomnia symptoms, but insomnia is one of those conditions that's not necessarily static. It resolves, right? So you can have insomnia and then a few years later not have insomnia, or you can not have insomnia now and develop insomnia. 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 insomnia at three years.

Andrew Huberman:
And the DASH diet is what?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension was developed to prevent hypertension and reduce blood pressure in people by increasing intakes of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, consuming low-fat dairy, more plant-based types of diet, and has been tested in a low salt or regular salt profile.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Others, not so much. But the DASH diet, regardless of its salt content, did better than the equivalent non-DASH.

Andrew Huberman:
Got it.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Which would be your average American diet.

Andrew Huberman:
Whatever that is.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, higher in saturated fat and sugars and-

Andrew Huberman:
Which seems to be changing now because of the GLPs.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like maybe that'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 they certainly have sales are way, way down.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But it just seems like people's appetites are down.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, GLP-1s will do that, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we were talking about this the other day here, how many Americans have tried a GLP? The estimates are anywhere from one in seven.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Oh, wow.

Andrew Huberman:
Some people say it's more.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Which is pretty incredible.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, it's pretty high.

Andrew Huberman:
But this is interesting. So how people eat impacts their sleep. I'm sure the listeners and I also am thinking, okay, but people who are eating a Mediterranean diet, right, olive oils, fish, 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?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, so in population-based studies, we adjust for a bunch of covariates, right? We have all these questionnaires that are given out to people asking them about their race, occupation, sociodemographic, socioeconomic status, and then we adjust for different illnesses that they may have, depression, physical activity level. So we try to take all this into consideration. Obviously, there's always unmeasured factors that you can't control for. Social interactions like you-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 a controlled diet initially, and then we let them self-select their food intake. So we took a very systematic approach to evaluating how diet could influence sleep in that study. We said, first of all, 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 over 70% longer to fall asleep when they self-selected their diet. And their slow-wave sleep, so deep sleep, was shorter. I think it was about 23, 20% shorter, when they self-selected their diet compared to what we had given them.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm. So we did not take that into consideration in that study. We didn't look at that. We had their food intake profile and didn't specifically look in that phase, when was their last eating period. But it could've been different than in the controlled feeding condition because in the controlled feeding condition, they had set meals at specific times, but they all went to bed at 10:00 P.M. Then the other question was, okay, what was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night? And we found that higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep, higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep, and then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. So when we talk about arousals in the context of polysomnography, 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, REM sleep as much as you would otherwise.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Me personally? Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Is it an hour, two hours, three hours?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I personally like to eat my last meal at least three hours before going to bed.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And I know there's variability there. Different people have different tolerance. You mentioned right before that-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... you know, some people may be later chronotypes. But what we know is that eating earlier is better overall. For cardiometabolic health, eating earlier is better. Me personally, I feel better by eating earlier. If I eat too close to bedtime, I get hot.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Yeah. It's the-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm not sleeping

Andrew Huberman:
... thermic effect of food.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's the thermic effect of food.

Andrew Huberman:
And we want to be cooling off when we go to sleep.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Exactly. Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take it every day, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market. AG1 is designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy. And it does so by helping to fill any gaps that you might have in your daily nutrition. I get asked pretty much all the time, "If I could only take one supplement, what should that supplement be?" And my answer is always AG1. It has just been so helpful for supporting all aspects of physical health, mental health, and performance. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. For a limited time, AG1 is giving away a free bottle of their new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 product. Omega-3 and coenzyme Q10 are known to support cardiovascular health, cellular health and energy generally, brain health, and much more. I personally take them both every day. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of the new omega-3 coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. There seems to be something asymmetric about sleep requirements, in my experience, and I don't think I'm alone in this, whereby if I go to bed at 10:00 P.M., I get into bed at 9:30, fall asleep at 10:00, I need about six and a half, maybe seven hours to feel completely rested. That's how long I'll sleep, wake up without an alarm feeling great. If I go to bed at midnight, I find I could sleep till 9:00 and still not feel completely rested. So there's some weird sleep inertia stuff going on there, et cetera. The old adage is every hour before midnight is worth two after. But is there any real data to support that, or is this just all subjective and conjecture?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm not sure there's data to support that. I haven't seen anything. But what I can say from what you're saying is that if you usually go to bed at 9:30, 10 o'clock, and then all of a sudden you go to bed at midnight, now you're kind of out of line with your personal circadian system, right? And it's always harder to get a good night's sleep if you're not going with your internal ... clock or your internal circadian preference. This is what happens with shift workers, right? For example, they're not sleeping at night. They're trying to sleep during the day. They're trying to sleep during the day where their melatonin's low or it should be when it's high. So they're fighting their circadian system. So yes, they should be getting seven hours, but they're not getting seven hours because their body's not designed to be sleeping during the daytime hours. Plus, then you have everything else, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Right. The light, the stress.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
The lights, the noise, the kids-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... the whatever life that-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... that happens during the daytime when everybody else is awake and you're trying to sleep.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the only thing I can think of that's an advantage to being nocturnal is the quiet. I used to sometimes shift to a nocturnal schedule during holidays in graduate school when everyone would go home because my parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So I could afford to just go home for Christmas, right? Just that day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at 4:00 AM and sleeping until 3:00 PM, at least for typical people. Your brain gets into a weird space-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... when you're inverted from the rest of the world.

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

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Extra time for me.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it was definitely extra. But you felt like you were extra sharp at those hours?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Extra sharp.

Andrew Huberman:
Great.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I could study and then-

Andrew Huberman:
I'm impressed

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... I got that time done, and then breakfast, but then I crash later in the afternoon.

Andrew Huberman:
That's the problem, the 1:00, 2:00 PM crash.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Has your work explored napping at all? I'm a believer in naps and non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra type things-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... meditation. Do naps factor into this diet, nutrition, hunger equation?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 this sleep pressure, this 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 get into this vicious cycle and it's not helpful. But there are some studies that say, well, what should you do if you can't sleep enough at night and you're feeling tired? Should you sleep? Recommendations are that you should make it a short nap, 30 minutes, no more than an hour, early enough in the day if possible, so that you can have sufficient time to rebuild that sleep pressure to be able to fall back asleep well when time comes. But then there's also this whole question about what's a nap for, right? Why are you sleepy? Of course, if you've pulled an all-nighter, it's easy to know. But if you had sufficient sleep or sufficient opportunity for sleep at night and you're waking up and you're not feeling refreshed, you're not feeling like you had good quality sleep, and then you're not able to maintain alertness throughout the day and you need a nap, I think you should check to see what's going on at night. Why are you not getting that good enough sleep?

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Everyone was working very hard, and he had this theory that if you're napping, it's because you're sleep deprived, that napping is unhealthy.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And it sparked a big debate, and people, because we're a bunch of nerds, people bring data in, like, "No, the sleep lab at Stanford says that naps can be healthy." And I think what you just described summarizes, I think, the takeaway. I'm a believer in the short nap, but I'm one of these people that can sleep anywhere, anytime, which may be reflective of sleep deprivation.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It may be, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you find that when you're going to design a study or when you're going to really work, like this 4:00 AM time, that it's a time of calm or are you a late-- Do you feel like your mind is moving fast or you're in this flow zone or whatever you want to call it?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm very focused.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... and get it done.

Andrew Huberman:
Earlier you were talking about biking into work.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You strike me as somebody who I always think of people who I'm always impressed by colleagues like this, that their life is like a step function. They wake up and it's like , and they're into the day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Pretty much.

Andrew Huberman:
And then it's down, right?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting. I think some of us are more like this.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But I think it's important to have a little bit of both, though.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think it's important to have downtime, speed time-

Andrew Huberman:
Yep

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... to not just be go, go, go, go, go. You were asking about my personal 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. Run-

Andrew Huberman:
Your brain too?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, yeah. Run to get my kids to school, run to work, get work done, run to then run for fun. Run, run, run, and then I thought, "Okay, I need to . I think I need a breather." And so I started incorporating yoga into my My exercise routine.

Andrew Huberman:
How is that?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think that's good.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Actually, when I was a grad student, I thought yoga was stressful- ... because I couldn't stand in those poses.

Andrew Huberman:
Exactly.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But I think yoga evolved. I think the yoga I do now, it's not as static-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... as the yoga I was doing when I was a grad student.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think it evolved to be a little more active than-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... back then. I see the benefit to having yeah, the both types of exercise.

Andrew Huberman:
Thanks for being willing- ... to explore that. I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner, but the Ayurvedic folks, they'll talk about people like more fire, more water, more earth, you know, and I think it's just a different lens and nomenclature on there's a kind of array of-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... phenotypes. But when we talk about this thing sleep, it becomes very prescriptive, right? It's like we all need six to eight hours. I mean, actually, from what you're saying today, six sounds like insufficient is what I'm hearing. I'm probably a little sleep deprived is what-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... I'm kind of hearing.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 below that, it's basically U-shaped, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So too much of one thing is not good, too little is not good. You want to be in the sweet spot. Most organs for optimal aging was in the six and a half to 7.8. And it differed a little bit by men and women, depending on which organs he was looking at. A little longer for women. Some of the curves were different where, some are more pronounced U-shapes in men than women in different organs, so a very interesting paper.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Came out last week or two weeks ago.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No? Oh.

Andrew Huberman:
No, I mean, well, not in-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in any sufficient amount of detail.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So women tend to sleep a little longer than men across lifespan. Although, 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.

Andrew Huberman:
Why do you think that is?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 there's different responsibilities, different social roles that come into play that may influence women differently than men. But we're working on a review paper actually about hypertension and sleep and sex differences, and women are more sensitive to the impact of poor sleep on different metabolic outcomes than men.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 these differences, and then knowing that there are these differences, to start probing women about their sleep. Last year, we published a scientific statement for the American Heart Association about multidimensional sleep health, and we concluded by recommending clinicians that they actually ask their patients about sleep. And not ask 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 satisfied with the sleep you got the night before? During the day, are you staying alert? Are you vigilant during the daytime hours from your past sleep experience? So having this open-ended question, maybe clinicians won't have time for the answer, but it allows their patient to actually tell them what's bothering them about their sleep.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Then you can get to something like, "My spouse keeps kicking me because I'm snoring too loud." Then, "Oh, well, maybe we should test you for sleep apnea."

Andrew Huberman:
Does apnea always include snoring?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like so many people have apnea and don't realize it.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Not because I'm sneaking into their rooms at night and listening to if they snore, but it is just remarkable how many people I speak to who say, "Yeah, I found out I had apnea because I saw that I was snoring," because they started monitoring their sleep-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and there's generally a snoring index on these. Or now-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... there are free apps that can just record you while-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... you sleep. So I know a lot of people are... I don't mouth tape-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... when I sleep, but I do sometimes use one of these nose strips that kind of pulls the nostrils out a bit.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
That certainly it's reduced the amount of snoring for me.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That will reduce the amount of snoring, but the sleep apnea is from the throat, right? So this-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... 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 the first ... line treatment if someone has excess weight to start losing weight, that might help with sleep apnea. Then there's CPAP, which, yes, people don't like, but if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be so 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-

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think they should get tested. They should-

Andrew Huberman:
So how does one do that? Because that's the problem

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... so yeah. 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 polysonography is the first line, is what we use to detect sleep apnea. But there is 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.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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-

Andrew Huberman:
Okay

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... you know.

Andrew Huberman:
All right. Fair.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It needs to have the proper settings-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... and someone needs to tell you which setting to use-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... because then that's where you run into the trouble of having the wrong settings and not being effective.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I just know from having done this podcast a while that if people think, "Okay, I got to go to my doctor. I got to find out or convince them that I have apnea," then they have to write me a script for a CPAP, then I got to buy a CPAP, which I'm guessing is not cheap.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm not sure.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't think they're very inexpensive. The price might have come down. And I got to sleep with this thing on my face, looking like Darth Vader-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... so I don't sound like Darth Vader. I just think very few people are going to do it. So somebody out there should come up with an at-home solution to this. Something like apnea seems important enough to-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... daytime wakefulness, cognitive function, longevity, metabolic. It wicks out to so many things-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that I feel like it-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
If you use it-

Andrew Huberman:
... it deserves like a public health messaging.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. If you use-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... it well and you feel better during the day, that's reinforcing, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
To keep using it-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... and get treated for it.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's talk about food-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and nutrients. You've done a substantial amount of work here in this area, and I have a bunch of questions. But first I want to talk about kefir.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I love Bulgarian full-fat plain yogurt, but it's right next to the kefir.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'm always like, "Do I get the kefir?" Well, I don't know. I love the Bulgarian full-fat plain yogurt. So I haven't tried the kefir yet. What's special about kefir and why did you study kefir?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Kefir we studied because it was a fermented dairy product, probiotics. We figured maybe it will improve cholesterol synthesis based on its impact on short-chain fatty acids. So that was the subject of my master's thesis. And for that study, that was when I was at McGill, we recruited men that had mildly elevated cholesterol levels. We gave them two cups per day versus just regular milk for a month.

Andrew Huberman:
So two cups, like two mugs like this?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Two cups like-

Andrew Huberman:
Like-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... the measuring cup.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Like 500 mls.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And we measured the amount of cholesterol they produced at baseline, endpoint in both phases, and there was no effect. It was a null study. It was one of those. It was hard to get published.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Kept at it, and we got it published, but yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So these fermented yogurts and things, they don't do anything for cholesterol levels.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
At least in our study-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... in this population at this level with this comparison-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... didn't have any effect.

Andrew Huberman:
What's your general thought about low-sugar fermented foods? I don't know if kefir qualifies as low sugar, but based on Justin Sonnenburg's work at Stanford-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and others, I've been really bullish on this idea of sauerkraut, kimchi, full-fat Bulgarian yogurt.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Fermented foods are interesting.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Are you a proponent in general?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 as important. So also, it's important to also consider that 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?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And maybe it didn't have any impact for cholesterol synthesis, but maybe glycemic control might be better-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... or for gut inflammation, it would be better. But you pick your outcomes, right? You study something, that's-

Andrew Huberman:
This is the challenge-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... that's how it is

Andrew Huberman:
... with doing controlled science.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Sort of the opposite end of the X, what used to be called Twitter science, where people just report anecdotes, but-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... actually anecdotes of that sort have become very powerful now in the public health space, for better or worse.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
People, 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." You know?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right, right, right. Exactly.

Andrew Huberman:
People get frustrated. "Oh, that's an observational study." Well, I'm going to continue to eat low-sugar fermented foods every day. I do think in a study like the one you described, occasionally there's... Let me state this differently. Historically, in science, there's been a lot of interesting discoveries that have come from Researchers designing a study 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-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... another line of inquiry.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But you moved on from kefir. Tell me about this paper. I was intrigued by this when I looked over your CV. "A weight loss diet that includes a coffee beverage enriched in," let me try this, "mannooligosaccharides."

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that okay?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Tell me about this study and what these manooligosaccharides are.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And if somebody wants to lose weight, should they be including this in their coffee?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So this was industry-sponsored research that I 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 the study. It was basically a placebo-controlled study. We were provided, coffee manooligosaccharides. So these are extracted from spent coffee grounds. So it was basically sachets, right? So a white packet, one had the coffee manooligosaccharides, the other one didn't. We gave it to our study participants. We measured their body composition. We found an effect on body composition in men, not in women.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And so that was the end of that product.

Andrew Huberman:
Really?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They wouldn't market it just because it only had an effect in men?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. They're like-

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No, it's not going to be our market.

Andrew Huberman:
But do we know what the ingredients were?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It was manooligosaccharides.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that the-- There's only one-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Just the extracted-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. So it was just basically a product that tasted like coffee, strong coffee, but it didn't have the caffeine or anything like that. It just had this manooligosaccharide that was extracted from coffee.

Andrew Huberman:
So this substance comes from coffee ordinarily.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But coffee is very low calorie on its own.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right. But it's from the spent grounds, so no one really consumes this, really, because-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... when you brew your coffee, you're-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... you're not getting it.

Andrew Huberman:
You're not consuming it.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Can you buy it? Can people get it?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I don't think so.

Andrew Huberman:
So what-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm not sure.

Andrew Huberman:
So, first of all, how much weight did they lose relative to the-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It was statistically significant. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm. Okay. I was intrigued by it because I thought there's something that... It's interesting you study kefir, manooligosaccharides from coffee.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And now I'm going to ask you about ginger.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
When I was a graduate student, I was interested in functional foods.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And I was interested in those foods that provide health benefits beyond their nutritional value.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right. So kefir is a fermented dairy product. We were studying it for its functional benefit on cholesterol synthesis. That's not a function of dairy, right? Dairy is, you consume it for bone health, right? So it's basically when we talk about different claims that foods have. There's those structure function claims, like consuming dairy contains calcium that's good for your bones. And then there's functional claims.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
That's been demonstrated?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So that's a health claim. That's an approved health claim. That's why you see the hearts on some boxes of cereal. But that's different than fiber is good for maintaining regularity, right? So anyways, I was interested in functional foods for health benefits beyond their nutritional content. And so, we studied kefir for my master's degree, and then for my PhD, studied medium chain triglycerides. And then ginger, that was something that I offered to a grad student at Columbia. It was interesting because the McCormick company had an advertisement in one of the nutrition journals, and they were going to donate spices for research. I was like, "Oh, good." 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 I don't study, but..." And then he did some research, and he came back and he said, "I think we should study ginger." And we were like, "Okay. To do what?" "I think for energy expenditure, looking at thermic effect of food." I was like, "Okay." So we did this study. I had some funds that I could use for him to do that and-

Andrew Huberman:
What did the study look like?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
A study where we looked at the thermic effect of food.

Andrew Huberman:
So people ate ginger root-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... with a spice in their food. What was the-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
We dissolved ginger powder in warm water. And so that was one beverage. And then, in the crossover, again, crossover design. So the next time when they came, it was just hot water.

Andrew Huberman:
And how many times a day are they drinking it?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
This was a one-time consumption period, and we looked at the thermic effect of food over a six-hour period. So again, they're under this, we call it a metabolic hood, right? So a little bubble. And we measure their oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production for, I think it was four or five hours.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's significantly elevated-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... with ginger?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
With ginger. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Wow.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So we think through the capsaicin receptor, there's an increase in the thermic effect of food. So yeah. So I was interested to see, are there little things that we could do, little changes we can make to our diet to boost energy expenditure relative to intake, just to tip the scale. Because- Many adults over the course of their lifetime gain weight, and it's not a big imbalance in calories on a daily basis that leads to 10 pounds of weight gain over 10, 15 years.

Andrew Huberman:
Or more.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Or more.

Andrew Huberman:
Now again, the GLPs are coming in and adjusting. But yeah, I'm very interested also in foods that have impact beyond their known-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... known roles.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The problem is in this area, in the functional foods area, not the problems with your work, but is that there are a lot of wild claims that go unchecked. Like, "Oh, walnuts are shaped like a brain, and therefore, they're good for your brain."

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Which is, they have certain things in them which are brain beneficial, but it's not related to the shape of the food. So that area, I feel, of nutrition has been marginalized on the basis of the kind of quackery associated with it. But of course, there are interesting things-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... in different foods. I do think that the Sonnenburg and colleagues' work on low-sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatome even more than fiber. Actually, in that study, even Justin will kind of downplay this a little bit. He's a colleague, so I can say. In the fiber group, when they compared to low-sugar fermented foods, and then they measured the inflammatome, they did a crossover design also.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Within the fiber group, there was a fair number of people who their inflammation went way up when they consumed more fiber.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But in the low-sugar fermented group, or when they were in that group, it was always on average reduced.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Some people who increase their fiber intake, their inflammatome decreases. For a lot of people, it increases. Which is not to say that fiber is bad, but I think now we're starting to think about different types of fibers.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, I was going to ask.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They didn't control for that.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
They just said increase the number of servings each day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I know a lot of people don't like to eat fibrous foods because they don't feel good after they eat them.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not that they don't taste good, and I think there's this whole histamine story that needs exploration. I think foods and the healthy foods needs better parsing-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in my opinion.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. There was also habituation. You don't go from consuming six grams of fiber per day-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... to 25.

Andrew Huberman:
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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a lot of kimchi. If you're not familiar with it, it can be a little-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... hard on the gut.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I actually take an enzyme, I think it's called DAO. Very inexpensive. It's like a tiny pill for digesting histamines.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I noticed after I had whey protein or I had broccoli, I would get kind of sleepy.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I was like, "What is this?" And a colleague at Stanford, Sean Mackey, he's the head of our pain center, said that he had gut pain at one point. He's a pain doctor. He directs the pain center.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And he figured out by elimination and trial and error that it was onions and other histamine-containing foods.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So he avoids histamine-containing foods. I'm not about to give up the things I just described. Onions I can do without, but- So I think that foods have real effect.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So kefir, these menoligosaccharides, I have to confess, I'm a little disappointed because here it looks like it has a cool effect, but now we can't get them. I'm not going to eat coffee grounds. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Maybe you know, maybe you don't. Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. You answer those questions, and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K, mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four 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 helixsleep.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 has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA, FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. In your work or in your observation or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Someone had a really great question for me at the Obesity Society meeting a couple of years ago. I was showing data that we had just obtained in the lab that showed that if you eat foods later in the day, your fat oxidation is reduced.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So this is a study that we're doing. We had participants on a controlled diet, and they started eating one hour after waking up, and they had a 10-hour eating window. Or they started eating five hours after waking up, so four-hour delay-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... relative to the other condition. Again, same thing for a 10-hour window. We gave our participants the exact same foods. Same foods, same quantity, same timing between meals. And this was done in a metabolic chamber. And the meals, especially the meals later in the day that were consumed late relative to the earlier version of those meals, led to less fat oxidation. And someone in the audience Stood up and said, "So would you then recommend that people eat medium-chain triglycerides in their evening meal as opposed to a different type of fat?" And 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." And 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.

Andrew Huberman:
I confess, I'm a first bite of food around 11:00 a.m. person. I'm trying to eat breakfast these days and then shift things earlier. All it's really done is added a meal because I take my last bite of food usually around 8:00 p.m.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
I just can't seem to get much earlier. But I and many other people have wondered whether it's best to eat more towards early day or whether or not it's just overall caloric load.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
You're saying that it does indeed make a difference.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It makes a difference, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first two-thirds of your waking day?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Roughly.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
As opposed to the last two-thirds.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. So in that study, one hour after waking up, so let's say basically 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... is our eating window. This is a 10-hour eating window. It's short. It's not typical. So it could be 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Andrew Huberman:
That seems pretty-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's reasonable.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. Versus 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Andrew Huberman:
The New York schedule.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. The New York schedule. Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I sort of chuckle because when I go to New York, it's like if you go to dinner at 5:30, 6:00, you're alone in the restaurant.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's... Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Depends on time of year.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Early bird special.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. It depends on time of year. In California, it's the early shifted.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
But that's just more reflective of culture, I think.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
In Europe, they eat very late often.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So-

Andrew Huberman:
Depends on where. Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... I was saying before we started, I was on a Fulbright program last year in Spain, and I would joke with my colleagues there because they eat very late.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And even the children eat very late. And I was like, "Okay, well, you feed me, then you feed the children"

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
"Then you have your dinner." Because they could have dinner at-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... 10:00, 11:00 p.m., and the children, 8:00, 9:00 p.m., and I'm like...

Andrew Huberman:
Can't be good. My dad's from Argentina. If you go to a restaurant in Buenos Aires at 9:00 p.m., you're not going to see many people.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
At 11:00 p.m., you'll see people in their 70s and 80s, and they're up early the next day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They nap in the afternoon.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know how healthy they are as a country on average, but haven't looked at the data, but very late shifted culture.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, there's been studies in Spain that have looked at timing of eating and their impact on weight management. I'm thinking of work by Marta Garaulet, where she showed that in her weight loss program, the participants who have lunch, so their bigger meal is lunch, who have their lunch earlier in the day have better weight loss than those who have their lunch later in the day. So, even in those cultures where they tend to-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... eat late, they still find that eating earlier-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... tends to be better for you.

Andrew Huberman:
I was very relieved when Alan Aragon, who I consider one of the best public educators on the topic of protein and nutrition, body recomposition, he's formally trained in this, reassured me that nowadays, there's a lot of interest in getting protein ration. It's probably overdone a little bit, but people are striving to get more high-quality protein. But that except in rare circumstances where people are really trying to optimize every bit of muscle protein synthesis, 95% of the effect of getting enough protein can be accomplished by having two meals.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Maybe a little snack. And they can be evenly distributed or unevenly distributed. I think a lot of people are feeling this protein pressure and like, "Oh, I got to eat another meal late in the day," or, "I have to force myself to eat breakfast," in order to get their protein ration. It turns out the whole notion that you could only assimilate 30 grams per meal is totally false.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
It turns out you can assimilate up to 100 grams. Now, there are conditions that set that up, like exercise, et cetera, but I find that very liberating. You could have breakfast and an early dinner-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... with a snack in the middle. You could miss breakfast, have lunch, and an early dinner. What I'm hearing from you, however, is that you really want to avoid the big or just late dinner.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You just don't want to eat too close to bedtime.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
What about these MCTs, medium-chain triglycerides? These were very popular in the health and biohacking space a few years ago, the whole bulletproof coffee notion.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
MCTs, butter coffee, and that's more or less faded away.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't see a lot of people putting oil in their coffee these days. Or coconut. What are some of the known benefits of MCTs? Where do you find them, and what brought you to them-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... as a research topic?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
This was a topic for my PhD dissertation. So yeah, 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 8 carbon and 10 carbon chain fatty acids. Those are not very common in our general food source, so it was purified extracted oil that we then gave our participants. We had created this functional oil that contained flaxseed oil also to be able to get some omega-3 fatty acids in there. We had added plant sterols because that was a big focus of my lab at McGill, plant sterols for cholesterol reduction and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. And, but the idea was to evaluate the impact on energy expenditure because the way we process medium-chain triglycerides is different than how we process long-chain triglycerides, so the 12, 14, 16, and up carbon chains. So the medium-chain triglycerides, they travel directly to the liver. They get metabolized. We burn them off more readily than the long-chain triglycerides that travel across in peripheral circulation, get deposited in adipose tissue, and the sort. And so what we found, we did two separate studies in men and women. In both men and women, there was an increase in thermic effect of food, so you burned slightly more calories from the meal that contained medium-chain triglycerides compared to the meal that contained your standard fat. For my PhD, the first study we did, we did in women, and we were trying to match the saturated fat content of the diets because medium-chain fatty acids are by default saturated. They're eight, zero, 10, zero. So I said, "Okay, we are going to try to compare that to a saturated fat-matched control comparison," and we used beef tallow. It was a lot of beef tallow. Participants were not happy with that diet.

Andrew Huberman:
Did you eat it direct, like spoonfuls of beef tallow?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, we put it onto mashed potatoes. 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-

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, my goodness

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... so it's like 20% of your fat from one of the two, so you have to pour it, mask it somehow. And-

Andrew Huberman:
The MCT?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
MCT-

Andrew Huberman:
There's also this issue about laxative effect of MCT oil that-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
We had a few participants who initially felt a lot of gargling, like just-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... gargling from their stomach from consuming MCT because it was a lot early on. It resolves.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So after a few days, it was fine. It was a one-week... One month, I mean, four-week study, so after a few days, no one dropped out for-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... any GI issues.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. That's reassuring.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So beef tallow it was initially. Beef tallow, because it has a lot of saturated fat, is solid at room temperature, so as soon as your food started to get a little colder, it would kind of gel on your plate.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's sort of like if you bring french fries home from a restaurant-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... they use tallow, and then you put it in the fridge because you thought you wanted them as leftovers, and the next day, they're sort of like in this stuck to bottom of container configuration.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's not very appetizing.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Not appealing, no.

Andrew Huberman:
No.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
There's like, it's white all underneath it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, that almost always goes into the trash.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
For sure.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
A couple of women felt it gave them headache.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Just the smell of it.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That was statistically significant, yeah. It was about 45 to 50, 60 calories.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, I thought you were going to say percent increase.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No, no, no.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So it's a small change.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But it was, if you're going to use this versus that-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... 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 over one meal. But repeated over three meals per day over a certain period of time, we did find changes in body composition, improvements in weight status with medium chain triglyceride consumption.

Andrew Huberman:
Lean mass to fat mass ratio.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Fat mass, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

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

Andrew Huberman:
Based on what you're saying, it's reasonable if somebody wants to improve weight loss. I'm hearing a sort of a constellation of things. Shift your meal timing to in the first two thirds or so of your day, which sounds like it will also improve sleep, which will also improve-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Your ability, yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... appetite and food regulation, satiety and hunger-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... 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?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, about that.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. In our weight loss studies.

Andrew Huberman:
In place of some other oil-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... not in addition.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Not in addition, correct.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Some ginger.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Are they additive? Are they synergistic?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think they could probably be additive because I think that the impact is through different mechanisms. Obviously, no one's tested that. It's interesting you bring it up this way because it makes me think of David Jenkins and the portfolio diet. It actually made The New York Times, I think last in December, November.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not familiar with it.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
The portfolio diet was a diet he designed for maximal cholesterol reduction.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So it was initially designed to have four specific foods. So it was high in soy protein, nuts, plant sterols, and soluble fiber.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, it's going to be a tough one to get past most of the American public.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And-

Andrew Huberman:
I'll tell you as a public health educator, I don't care if it comes out in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal- ... The New Yorker, and everything in between. People hear soy-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... nuts, they like, but easy to overeat.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They hear plant sterols and like they're someplace else.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
This diet went on a head-to-head comparison with lipid-lowering agent, right? Like a statin.

Andrew Huberman:
Like a statin.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
They had the same cholesterol reduction as a statin.

Andrew Huberman:
As a statin.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The portfolio diet.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting name. People are definitely unhealthy in this country, and if they can lower blood lipids-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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, so olive oil.

Andrew Huberman:
When I look at a diet like the portfolio diet, which I only know what you just told me about it, or I think about the current food suggestions by the FTA. We could call it kind of... It emphasizes unprocessed and minimally processed foods.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think that's a step in the right direction, certainly. When you look at these, the issue that always comes up for me is I think, okay, in a more plant-based, grain-heavy nut diet, it's very easy for people to overeat calories based on this whole amino acid protein foraging hypothesis. This idea that we eat until we get enough of the amino acids we want.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like a chicken breast or something, and a couple eggs, or four eggs or something is very satiating.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Whereas we can eat a lot of grains and nuts before we go, "Okay, that's enough." There seems to be this issue, how do you ensure cardiometabolic health-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... while quelling hunger?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
We can't have people walking around hungry all the time. And the GLPs help with that. And it does get down to sort of like, do you include animal-based foods or not often.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
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-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I think that is fading away. But now there's this kind of polarization of like, are we going to go mostly plants, grains, nuts, and I think low saturated fat, blood lipids improving, or are we going to think more protein satiety? Do you see where I'm getting at here?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like this is the contour of things.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. Well, I think that there's no reason to pit one another against the other, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's hard to eat a lot of food. So if your food volume is high but does not provide as much calories, you'll get that satiety from the food volume, and then you put in some nuts. Helps to prolong the satiety because then you get some protein, some healthful fats. And so I think that's important. I'm not saying animal products are bad. I think they're important for a diet. I think they're important for health. It's just a matter of portion size and making sure that there's not overemphasis on animal products over plant-based products because we know that plant-based products are so much healthier in terms of heart health, reduction of type 2 diabetes, cancer risk, and other metabolic diseases.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Well, I'm right there with you. I love fruits and vegetables. I'm a huge fan of... I do eat meat, half Argentine, and chicken, and I'm not a big fan of fish. I keep working on this, but can't seem to quite get there. But I don't eat them in excess.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The things that I feel are very, very easy for people to overeat are starch-fat or starch-sugar-fat combinations.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's just like the brain and gut respond with signals that scream "more."

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
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-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... are all pushed down and the-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... go signals are all go.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So reducing white foods as much as possible is what I-

Andrew Huberman:
White foods?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. So the white flour, white rice, white pasta, things that are-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... not as colorful. If you're eating a slice of bread and it just dissolves in your mouth, then-

Andrew Huberman:
It's sugar. Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... not so good.

Andrew Huberman:
This is more of an editorial reflection again, but it's also I was looking at the history of nutrition in this country. You're Canadian by birth-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... right? I detected that. And I don't know what the sort of traditional fare is in Canada, but if you look at the history of food in the United States, it's never been particularly healthy. The foods that we consider American foods, like hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... corn dogs, fried chicken, donuts. We've never been healthy about food. People probably just moved a lot, ate less, smoked a lot more, which is an appetite suppressant but gives you cancer, kills you.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We've never been that healthy with respect to food. Maybe food volume was more in check, but if you look at traditional food in Europe, probably in Canada, are the foods nourishing and healthy? I think we're sort of in this delusion that we were once healthy about food in this country. We were never healthy about food. The food was always pretty weak in terms of nutritional status, except for fruits, vegetables, and some animal products.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. I think portion size has a lot to do with it, too. So I know, moving from Canada to the US, go to a restaurant and the portion sizes are so big. It would never have occurred to me to take home a doggie bag at a restaurant, ever. And then here, it's like you kind of have to or else you're throwing away half your plate, unless you're finishing the whole thing. So portion size I think is a big one. And also, the foods are different in a way. We were talking about yogurt. So there are two things. When I moved to the US, the first thing the dietician at my work told me was, "Do not buy bagged bread." I was like, "Okay. What does that mean, don't buy bagged bread? That's what I always do." "No," she says, "You go to the grocery store, you go to the bakery section, they'll cut it up for you. You ask what you want. Don't buy bagged bread." Like, "Okay, I'm not going to buy bagged bread." So apparently, she was talking about too many additives, too much sugar, whatever.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Okay. We're talking about the bread that just melts in your mouth. And then the other thing was yogurt. I eat yogurt quite a bit And then the yogurt here in the US tasted sweeter to me.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 little less sweet in Canada than in the US, and it was less sweet even in Europe than Canada and the US. So there's things like that that don't necessarily help.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. We love our sugars and fats in the United States, and I think we paid a substantial health debt as a consequence. Now, again, I don't have the numbers on this, but with retatrutide and the other GLPs, I've never tried them, but a lot of people are finding it much easier, if not easy, to lose weight that they-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... just couldn't before. They just could not control their appetite.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And they're just not as interested in these foods. There's this argument that maybe they're not as interested in everything in life, and that's a important question that needs to be resolved.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But I do think that things are changing. I think we're finding a lot more, for example, the yogurt, right? There is a lot more plain yogurt options than there were-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... when I first moved to the US. So there's things.

Andrew Huberman:
Things are changing. There's been a lot of resistance, and I think that the resistance has been sociological in the sense that there's been a resistance to people being healthy. There really has. There's this idea that if you're eating clean, you have an eating disorder. I did an episode about eating disorders.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I talked to a lot of experts on this, including the group at Columbia Med that works on eating disorders. The frequency of anorexia, the most deadly psychiatric illness of all the psychiatric illnesses, hadn't realized that, is not-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... 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 talking to experts like Joanna Steinberg at Columbia and others, is that 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, or maybe you're not going to eat too late, or you're going to skip dessert, or until a few years ago, if you're not going to drink alcohol, there's something wrong with you. That you're being restrictive somehow.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think, again, it's the parallels to Europe are interesting, or the contrast to Europe are interesting, where there's a lot of social convention built up around food that was healthy. And I think in the United States, the social conventions built up around food and alcohol were pretty unhealthy. It was like, "Everyone does this. Everyone eats hot dogs at the game." And hot dogs at a baseball game are a great thing. It's like nothing as American as that, except maybe apple pie, right? But when people start making choices in the direction of their health, it was, and to some extent it still is, there's this quieter undercurrent of, well, are you being restrictive? Are you really going to live like that? But then you look at the health outcomes. And culturally, until a few years ago, it was considered very not okay to say that obesity was a health risk.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And now the open discussion about obesity and metabolic health as a real health risk-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I think now we're in the actual discussion that for a long time it was like, eh. Speaking of which, and things outside the box, there's a paper on your CV that I could not help but ask about. Snack chips fried- ... in corn oil alleviate-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... cardiovascular risk factors when substituted for low-fat and high-fat snacks.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
What?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
This was funded by Frito-Lay. At that time, they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips. So this was Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and just Titos. It was all the tos.

Andrew Huberman:
Itos.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
All the itos.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
All the itos. And so they had changed to corn oil. They're like, "This is an oil that's higher in polyunsaturated fats than what we usually have."

Andrew Huberman:
What were they using before?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm not sure. I forget.

Andrew Huberman:
But it wasn't tallow?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I don't think so.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
They're like, "Does it make a difference? Is it going to improve health if people choose those snacks compared to other snacks?" So we had three arms in that study. Each person went through each of the three arms. It was for 25 days. The question was, okay, let's say you have a choice for a snack today, and you're going to go to the vending machine, and you have your option to eat a low-fat, high carbohydrate snack, a high fat, high saturated snack, or those chips. So you just pick one, and that's that. So I think we gave, it was two snacks a day for 25 days. It was a rotation, so they had four different chips. So it was two one day, two the next day, like that for 25 days, and then the controls. And yeah, the better lipid profile was the one from the corn chips. They had the better lipid. Yeah. And they had less lipoprotein little a, which is another factor.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Cardio metabolic risk factor. But yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Data are data.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Data are data.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I know that in the head-to-head comparison of seed oils, of which corn is, right?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
With saturated fat-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... this is where 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?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, by the way, I'm just going to say, I avoid seed oils actively because I like olive oil and butter.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Mostly olive oil. I avoid seed oils. I don't like the way they taste. I love olive oil.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And there's some health effects of olive oil.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I eat small amounts of butter. And, so I just duck the whole controversy, right? And you have to make sure you're getting real olive oil, but that can be done. When you look at the studies that compare saturated fat to seed oils, you do see better outcomes for seed oils. But then there's this crowd that comes in and says, "But that's on a backdrop of reasonably high carbohydrate intake." When you start replacing some of those carbohydrates with lower carbohydrate diet, increasing protein intake, so not keto, but kind of like lower-ish-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... 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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What is the evidence for or against that?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well, so different oils have different smoke points, right? So each oil should be used for its appropriate usage, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So 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 flaxseed oil, for example, and heat it up to a very high temperature.

Andrew Huberman:
Are you a fan of flaxseed oil?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm a fan of every liquid oil. I have no personal-

Andrew Huberman:
You seem very healthy

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... restriction on the

Andrew Huberman:
Uh-huh

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... on the types of oils. I think that oils that remain liquid at room temperature, that should be your barometer for what's better to use. I'm also not saying that people should avoid butter like the plague, right? So all in moderation is okay.

Andrew Huberman:
Is there any reason to... I just can't find the argument for why anyone would replace olive oil with a seed oil.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
I wouldn't eat anything fried.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Well.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So that's

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's a different question.

Andrew Huberman:
I value my life. No, I love it. Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So depending on how you want to use your oil.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Then, also some people find olive oil in baked goods might impart stronger taste, so depending on the type. So some of them are more flavorful, right? And so they're more fragile, let's say.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And they'll impart flavors to different foods where they're not supposed to be.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Personally?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I think that the seed oil debate has been very contaminated by the issues that I mentioned before, but also because many, many processed foods contain seed oil.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
They're much less expensive than using grass-fed butter or olive oil, or even just ordinary butter. So.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
People aren't going to start doing that.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And then-

Andrew Huberman:
I'll tell you, they're not going to start doing that.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
And then I think-

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah. At the grocery store, to look at the nutrition facts panel and being like, "Okay, what's in here? What's in there?" And comparing products to one another, right? And also, what's more important for your own health.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right? What's relevant for my health may not be what's relevant for your health. Some people are... We're talking about salt sensitivity. Some people are very salt sensitive. Some people are very active and need to replace salt, and so salt is not an issue for them. But, so being able to know what to pay attention to because otherwise it just gets overwhelming.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. You mentioned the study was paid for by a company.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And earlier you mentioned companies. I think this is an important issue that we've never really directly-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... addressed on this podcast. Anytime I've covered a paper in a... 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? To me, a financial conflict of interest is if the investigators, the scientists running the study, have stakes in, they have shares in the company, or they're being paid to do the study, obviously.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But when a company funds research on this, the snack chips study-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... 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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you... How does this stuff come about?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 vocal against industry-sponsored research. But as scientists, we do research, we do research to the best of our abilities, and we provide, we draft the research question, you get the data, you analyze it, you publish it. Some of the studies that I haven't been able to publish have been funded by industry that have had null results.

Andrew Huberman:
Null results.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Null results.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
And you can't publish it.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
We wrote the paper. We wrote the report. We provided it to our sponsor just out of courtesy. Said, "This is the paper. We're going to submit it for publication." Do what you need to do

Andrew Huberman:
So they've given you the green light to submit-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Absolutely

Andrew Huberman:
... so the companies aren't short-circuiting this?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Never. That's in the contract, right? Your-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... right to publish.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Because otherwise, why'd you do research?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
There's no point 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-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... other scientists who have null results have ran out of steam much quicker than me.

Andrew Huberman:
So that's a null result issue.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's a null result issue.

Andrew Huberman:
It's not necessarily unique to industry-funded studies.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's not unique.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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 an honest scientist, obviously I don't think it matters who's sponsoring your research because the NIH finds misconduct.

Andrew Huberman:
Right. Doing science for any other reason than trying to find real answers is just insane. These people who do this are legitimately sick.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's a lot of work.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's a lot of work.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, do they really think they discovered something if they made it up? It doesn't-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Where is that going to go?

Andrew Huberman:
It doesn't compute. Well, it never ends well.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
And we could spend hours talking about the cases. It always comes out in the wash.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I'm hearing that negative outcomes are hard to publish. When you take on funding from a company to address a particular question about a product that they sell, it sounds to me, I want to be careful I'm not leading the witness here-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... that it doesn't sound like you feel any pressure to give them a particular answer.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
So what's their interest in doing this? Why are they funding studies? Companies are selfish and they should be. They have shareholders and some of them are public companies, and so the shareholders are the public. And so why are they funding research? Plenty of people eat chips.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Why are they funding research?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
They wanted to know if it had a health benefit.

Andrew Huberman:
So they could market a health benefit.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Probably.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I don't know.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm very sympathetic to the reality that there isn't a lot of research funding coming through NIH and NSF these days, but always it's been-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... low. I know because I sat on study sections which dole out grants. I got grants. But it's very competitive. Are you taking money from companies to do this work because it's a great way to fund studies? In other words, if NIH had more money to study nutrition-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I could imagine a world where you would just take money from NIH to do it. You wouldn't need the money from companies.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, because the budgets are better-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... from NIH funding-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... than from industry funding for nutrition research.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But if you could get an NIH grant, that's the ultimate goal, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Or USDA or-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... other government grant.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's the goal.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But sometimes also there's specific foods, specific products that would be kind of hard to study without industry support, because you need to get access to the specific food-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... or product.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I don't know what the status of it is right now, but my fairly frequent check-in on what the at least stated goals of the now being revised NIH-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... are, include creating a forum, even some incentive for publishing negative results, or null results-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I should say. Jay Bhattacharya, who's been on this podcast, has put that out publicly. We need those results. They're important. They steer people away from certain things that need to be steered away from. And also, it seems, at least from the whole food pyramid revision, et cetera, that there seems to be more and more interest in nutrition-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... as a research topic and something to really understand. So obviously it's really important. People are eating every day.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Yeah, I think that people assume that if industry funded a study, especially on food-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that something's not to be trusted in there.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I don't know why for food in particular, right? So if you think about it, there-

Andrew Huberman:
Food and drugs. Food and drug companies. Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But drug companies, they do research on their own products all the time.

Andrew Huberman:
Most of the R&D for drug companies is definitely done in-house. That's also part of the scary part about it. We don't see the null results. I actually would prefer if it took on a different shape. I don't know exactly what it would look like. We don't see a lot of the negative outcomes that might exist. So I don't think there's a lot of-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Because probably they just die out before they make it to-

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... next step.

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

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Very rare.

Andrew Huberman:
But I do think there's a lot of questions about people because of the incentives to need to publish. As you described, it's hard to publish null results. We will never know, and this is when you run a lab, as you know, you want to create a culture where graduate students and post-docs feel very comfortable saying, "There's nothing here."

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Because the stuff that didn't work out You always, it's just a question-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... that you always have. Like what stuff do we never hear about? Because the negative results-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... like they say, "Well, that mouse was sick," or this or-- there's a lot of... The brain is a crazy-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... thing.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
That's why you need to teach the students well, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
You have a student who comes to you and says, "Hey, this is lower, this is better than this," and you look at the numbers, and you say, "Well, it's 25 versus 27, and the standard deviation is 10." Like no, 25 is the same as 27, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So you have to make sure you teach well-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... to know that even numerically different effects may not be statistically significantly different, and that's just part of the curve, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, the ideal situation is when the student or postdoc doesn't believe their own results. They're like, "It's not real," and then you have to convince them.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
"Actually, you have something interesting." That's a good situation.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, that's a good situation.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a good situation. And then eventually they're like, "Oh, okay," you know?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That's the ideal situation. But I think this whole field of nutrition is contentious, for some of the right reasons. It's so very important, and I think it's contentious also for a lot of unfortunate and unnecessary reasons. Among the students and postdocs and general public when you interact, what are people most interested in with respect to nutrition? Like when people ask you, is it like, "What should I eat? What shouldn't I eat?" What are your antennae picking up when you're out there?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I think, "What should I eat?" Or, "Have you heard about XYZ fad?" That's also one. "Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world?"

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
"No, I haven't heard that."

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I'm surprised.

Andrew Huberman:
Peptides. Are they very peptide? Right now, peptides are really big.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
It's always something else.

Andrew Huberman:
Uh-huh.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So it's very specific to a product.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah, often very specific to a product, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You won't be held responsible for your answer, but, do you supplement your diet with minerals like magnesium or anything like that, or are you just completely careful food choices?

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
I prefer careful food choices.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
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.

Andrew Huberman:
Fiber recommendations are really growing. I looked into this and many people's doctors are now telling them, "You should take a little bit of psyllium husk." I always thought-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... by the way, psyllium husk was like the husks, like you had to, they're like, you're going to eat the seed husks.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's actually ground into a powder or something like that.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm still afraid to take it, but-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now are prescribing supplemental fiber.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
In a pretty high rate, from what I understand.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Oh, that's interesting.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
People don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
But they bring so much more, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So yes, there's fiber in fruits and vegetables, but there's also all sorts of polyphenols, right? All sorts of non-nutrient components that themselves may have benefits for health that we don't fully understand yet, that feed your gut, that are maybe just as relevant, that may enhance fiber's impact on health.

Andrew Huberman:
Listen, I'm-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So you know.

Andrew Huberman:
... preaching to the choir. I love fruits and vegetables. Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. You have a very unique research program. 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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
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-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... and so forth.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
So I talk often about a vicious cycle where you don't sleep well, you don't eat well-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
... then that makes you not sleep so well. And really hoping for people to get into a healthful cycle, right, where you get good sleep, where you can make good food choices, that then helps you get better sleep to keep propelling this cycle of better health.

Andrew Huberman:
I love it. It's a true integrative medicine-

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and science. I also can attest that, when you sleep well, you make better food choices. When you eat well, you sleep better.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
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.

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge:
Thank you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. To learn more about her laboratory's research and to find a link to her book, "Eat Better, Sleep Better," please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab Podcast, please put those in the comments section 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 presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the Menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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