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

Andrew Huberman talks with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge about how sleep loss alters appetite hormones and food choices, and conversely how diet quality and meal timing shape sleep and metabolic health. They cover sex differences in the hunger response to sleep deprivation, the cardiometabolic costs of mild chronic short sleep, and why eating earlier in the day improves fat oxidation and sleep. The conversation tours St-Onge's research on functional foods including kefir, ginger, coffee oligosaccharides, and MCT oil. It closes with a candid discussion of industry-funded nutrition research, the difficulty of publishing null results, and the value of whole-food, higher-volume diets.

• Sleep deprivation raises the hunger hormone ghrelin in men, but in women it lowers the satiety hormone GLP-1 instead - an unexpected sex difference.
  00:07:15
• In severe 4-hour-sleep lab studies, cortisol, glucose, and insulin were unchanged - suggesting metabolic harm comes from compounded real-life factors, not sleep loss alone.
  00:16:40
• A 6-week study of mild sleep restriction (down to 6 hours) raised insulin resistance and blood pressure, worse in post-menopausal women.
  00:20:50
• When subjects self-selected food, they took 70% longer to fall asleep and got ~20% less deep slow-wave sleep than on a controlled diet.
  00:36:35
• A coffee oligosaccharide product caused weight loss in men but not women, so the company shelved it entirely.
  01:00:28
• A Frito-Lay-funded study found corn-oil chips improved lipid profiles versus other snacks - 'Data or data.'
  01:34:51
• St-Onge says she has run multiple industry-funded studies with null results that journals repeatedly rejected, never getting published.
  01:42:37

• Meta-analyses show sleep restriction drives 250-400 extra calories of eating per day.
  00:15:36
• In one study, two weeks of ~5-hour nights led participants to gain about half a kilo (nearly a pound).
  00:16:08
• Staying awake burns more energy than sleeping - but only ~90 extra calories, far less than the ~300 extra calories eaten.
  00:23:30
• Higher fiber intake predicted more deep sleep; saturated fat predicted less deep sleep; refined carbs predicted more nighttime arousals.
  00:37:37
• St-Onge personally stops eating at least three hours before bed and feels better eating earlier.
  00:38:38
• A new Nature paper found the sweet spot for organ aging is roughly 6.5-7.5 hours of sleep, in a U-shaped curve.
  00:49:01
• Ginger dissolved in warm water significantly raised the thermic effect of food, likely via the capsaicin receptor.
  01:05:11
• Eating meals later in the day reduces fat oxidation; shifting calories to the first two-thirds of the day is metabolically better.
  01:11:31
• The '30 grams of protein per meal' absorption cap is a myth - the body can assimilate up to 100 grams.
  01:16:43
• MCT oil raised the thermic effect of food by ~45-60 calories per meal and produced greater weight loss than olive oil.
  01:21:51