Industry Funding and Scientific Integrity

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, highigher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep And then more refined carbohydrates, simple sugars, more arousals. You're not getting deep slow wave sleep, RN sleep as much as you would otherwise Welcome to the Hubberan Lab Hark cuss science and science based tools for everyday life I name'm Andrew Huberan and I'm a profess of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Marie Pierre Stain. Anange 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 doror Sain. Oj'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 doror Sain. Anj'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 elsehere 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 Sain. Angeange. Dr. Marie Perre Sain. Anorange. Wlcome. Thank you for having me. Sleep impacts How and what we eat and how and what we eat impacts sleep That's a different perspective than I think most people take. I think most people are familiar, however with getting the best night's sleep maybe feeling like they're Ipulsivity to eat quote unquote, bad foods is a little higher And then also hopefully familiar with Having a great night's sleep, and feeling like we're It's just kind of in control in a different way Maybe you could just kind of share for us what's really going on beneath that experience And when subtle or not so subtle. ronic sleep loss. So not an all nighter necessarily, but you know, forty five minutes less here, ninety minutes less there et et cetera. How that plays out in terms of our nutrition. And then we'll go in from the nutrition side to sleep ure. So there's a couple of questions that you have in there actually about the extent of sleep loss and how that influences your food intake. What we see in the general population versus what we do in a lab to address causality. So let me start with, you know, the population based studies, right? So When I started being interested in sleep, it was coming from an obesity angle. My PhD is in nutrition. I trained as a postdoc in body composition, obesity research And we were getting a lot of information from population based studies that People who sleep too little have a higher body mass index than people who get adequate amount of sleep thenen it became there's a higher prevalence of people with obesity in this short sleep A group then Studies evaluating changes over time Seeing that people who don't sleep enough tend to gain more weight. There was a famous nursse's health study that I really like to cite when I give talks, that was published in two thousand six where They track nurses over fourteen years and Those nurses that reported sleeping five, six hours had much higher rate of weight gain over that fourteen, fifteen year period than the nurses had reported sleeping seven or eight hours per night So those are observations that we get from large scale population studies, cohorts You know, what those studies tell us is that things are happening at a point in time or may influence something that's happening over time, but not necessarily that one causes the other, right? So I started my work in this field trying to uncover whether Sleeping too little actually causes weight gain And so in my opinion, because I was coming from a lab where I trained in the measurement of energy balance. so how much energy you eat versus how much energy you burn. I was like, well If sleep Lillians to obesity, leads to weight gain. It has to impact this energy balance. regulation. So it's either 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 tryry this out and see So my first my first study, my first NIH grant the Digar Wands, you know, was to look exactly at this. So we had people who had adequate sleep And we brought them in the lab And we them in a crossover design. so Half of the participants started out sleeping adequately. so they gave him a nine hour time in that opportunity or we asked them to sleep too little. So they had a four hour time in bed opportunity, very short But we did this for Five nights And then we took all sorts of measurements in a controlled feeding condition So for the first three days We told we had our participants eat the exact same thing. reggardless 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 neeuronal responses to foods and then On the last day We let themselves select their food intake. And we measured that in the lab from that study, we showed that in men specifically, we saw an increase in grelin in response to short sleep. So this hormone that triggers food intake In women, we saw a reduction in GLP one. interesterestingly enough, looking unli peptide one. So the satiety hormone was reduced as a result of short sleep in women And then when we measured their food and take in the lab, they ate three hundred calories more in the short sleep condition, then the when they got there regular adequate sleep of at least seven and a half hours, a little more than that per night thenen you're asking about, you know brain responses, we looked at neuronal responses to food stimuli. We found up reggulation in reward centers of the brain in the context of sleep restriction compared to the context of adequate sleep. So all together really building a case that When you don't sleep enough at night, you have Both physiological signals to eat more for men or not stop eating in women lead to greater food intake thats also could be impacted by just pleasurable centers that are activated to a greater extent as a result of insufficient sleep. Amazing. This sex specific split in the data. If I have it correctly, that when men are sleep deprived getting four hours per night. signals that drive competitive desire to eat are higher in women, it's more that the break on eating on society is reduced. Exactly. Okay. As far as I know, the GLP pathways are not Divergent. by sex, but of course, I'm not deeply versed in that literature. Is there any evidence that JLPs are functioning different in men and women like circadian wise or anything like that? or this just this was just fortuitous outcome or say incidental outcome. This was an incidental outcome. We really didn't know what to expect. We didn't really know at all that we'd see sex differences because There had been prior studies and prior studies had shown that Glin was increased as a result of sleep restriction. They also showed that lepttin was reduced as a result of sleep restriction. And when we Got our data've we analyzed our data with all of our participants together And there was no effect And that was surprising. And people would say, donon't you know? donon't you know Sleep restriction inccreases grellin I guess I don't know because in our study it doesn't And 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 Grelllin because there was no effect in women, but there was an effect in men, which was reproducing what others had found because all the prior studies had been done in men only I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David David makes protein bars unlike any other Their newest bar, the Bronze bar, has twenty grams of protein, only one hundred and fifty calories and zero grams of sugar I have to say, these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years These new David bars have a marshmallow base and they're covered in chocolate coating, and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods. I eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs fruits, vegetables, etcetera But I also make it a point to eat one or two David bars per day as a snack which makes it easy to hit my protein goal of one gram of protein per pound of body weight And that allows me to take in the protein I need without consuming excess calories. I love all the David Bronze Bar flavors, including cookie dough, caramel chocolate, double chocolate, peanut butter chocolate. They all actually taste like candy bars. Again, they're amazing. But again, they have no sugar, and they have twenty grams of protein with just one hundred fifty calories If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein d. com slash Hubberman. Right now, David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. You can also find David on Amazon or in stores such as Target, Walmart, and Kroger. Again, to get the fifth carton for free, go to davidprotein d. com slash Hubberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Better Help BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online Now I've been doing therapy for a very long time, and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are days when I want to do it, and there are days when I don't want to do it But when I finish a therapy session, every single time I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent There's just so many benefits that come through effective therapy. With better help, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits that come from effective therapy You fill out a short questionnaire to match you to a therapist And while Better Help has an industry leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time And it works. Better Help has an average rating of four point nine out of five for its live sessions based on over one point seven million client reviews If you would like to try better help Go to betterhp dot com slash Hubberman to get ten percent off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp dot com slash hubberman Whenever I'm sleep deprived, So four or five hours of sleep consider sleep deprived. I used to pull all nighters years ago. Now I avoid them at all costs. But whenever I have that experience, I feel like My whole body to some extent is in a low level of pain. It it kind of looks like central ache. like you just and I wonder extent to which people eat to overcome like to kind of quell the pain of sleep deprivation Maybe people react differently to sleep deprivation. Maybe their subjective experience of it is very different. but What do you think is happening in that in that short relatively short amount of sleep that's missing. What is getting reset? Is it neural, is it endocrine? It's obviously all those things. But what do you think is the switch that allows people to enter a day in a much more healthy fashion or a sick essentially in a slightly sick fashion? In our study, it was actually a fifty percent reduction in sleep. becausecause when they had nine hours sleep opportunity, they slept aroundround seven and a half And when they had the They were all people who had screen to sleep at least seven, measured by ectigraphy. So on average they get seven and a half And in the sleep restricted condition, they got on average, about three hours and fifty minutes. So it's like staying up late working on a deadline then trying to catch an early flight. Yeah. It's pretty brutal. It's pretty brutal. Yeah. And that was maintained they had five nights of that. So that fiveive nights of that. Yeah. Were they coming un gllued mentally too? that I think I would feel terrible after that of stretch. At the end theyn' done. Like there's no way anyone would want to keep keep coming for that. But they were in the lab, they were under supervision the whole time. We didn't let them go out on their own. So they were well supervised, make sure that nothing Nothing would happen to them. No naps. No naps But so what happens is I think there's some conscious need to eat more when you're sleep deprived. there's also, you know, there's a thermic effect of food, right? So it gives you a jolt of energy to eat something. So peopleople know that. you eat It wakes you up in a way. you know, neuronal signaling that that enhances pleasurable and reward centers of the brain where you know, when also fatigue sits in and now it's like you really want to have this conversation with yourself about what to choose at the buffet table not it There's fatigue. and others have shown also that sleepiness tends to correlate with all of this, that there's these triers for more pleasurable food consumption with sleep restriction. And It it's been reproduced. There's been so many studies. and they all You agree T the extent of overeating, you know a meta analysis showed two hundred and fifty to four hundred calories of overeating, which might not sound like much, but when you start layering that in day after day and you think, you know, thirty five hundred excess calories or less for a pound of body weight and then you start when people accumulate that over time if they're in a night shift condition or new parents or teending to a sick relative or just final exams, like it's a real thing. It's a real thing. Nya Kovas and twenty twenty two 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 gain almost two down. in two weeks. It strikes me that, you know for a long time in the stress research The idea was when people are stressed, they reach for kind of quote unquote comfort foods, carbohydrate and typically starch fat, starch fat, sugar combination foods to comfort them. And the just so story was always that okay, well, you know, cortisol's main role is to deploy glucose. and so people are doing this as a way to bring excess energy And it all kind of fits together. What is the relationship between these forms of sleep deprivation that you work on and stress? Is it really a way of I'm not saying just inducing stress because I think sleep is its own thing, but it's stressful just to be less than adequately rested independent of the things coming at you in life. right? is what you're studying stress. So if you're thinking about phhysiological stress measured by cortisol levels. in that study, actually cortisol wasn't chang the short sleep. In the short sleep. Tell me more about that. I'm fascinated by circulating rhythms and cortisol. So is that what does that mean? There was no difference between the two conditions, adequate sleep or short sleep on cortisol levels. in five days of five. Basically four hours a night. So cord is all still peeking in the morning. still dropping in the evening Wow, That's very surprising to me I don't know, I don't know if it's the context of you know being in a lab where everything's safe, taken care of for them. There's nothing outside to aggravate this So I don't know, maybe when you're in the context of sleep restriction, but also dealing with your daily life You needing to take care of your kids, needing to get to work, needing to do all of the activities of daya living. maybe then that becomes You know, the the added stressful. So the message is if you suffer less than adequate sleep Get someone to take care of everything else. You've ever been in a spa, exactly, exactly. No, I'm not challenging the result. I just find it really interesting. I would have thought that basal cortisol levels would go awry. Well, in that study also, we didn't see any effect on glucose or insulin Nothing Nothing. Curves super impposable Wild. They were eating the exact same food A 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 highigher fat, higher sugar, higher salt Horror diet. That then triggers a worsening and may be compounded by the lack of sleep even worsening of of those cardi metabolic. 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 Andyere I go. So what is it then? why is it 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 two diabetes. 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 cardioetabolic 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 ectigraphy, who answer on questionnaires that their sleep quality is good And then to take these people and say, okay, now, either going to continue Y excellent sleep. or You're going to now G 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. reeducing 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. They're missing a full sleep cycle. Vrety much. And 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 Priested 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 cardio metabolic outcomes were adversely impacted in free living, mild sustained sleep restriction for six weeks. Six weeks was something else also. it was tough can only imagine Wow, okay because my mind always goes to all right, well, we wake up in the morning because of an increase in cortisol. That's circadian. It's not related to sleep per se. It just kind of overlaps with the end of the night's sleep If that's independent of sleep And cortisol drives glucose release, we know this. At least in the first study you described, glucose levels weren't altered. You said it was isocchaloric. so people were it's not like they're eating more. No. The hormones that are driving the desire to eat more are elevated didn't let them Yeah. But you didn't let them. I think that's a key thing that you pointed out before, but I think we want to underscore. 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 liibidum and then they happen to eat more, but they gained weight So what's kind of the action end of things that causes them to gain weight if they're basically in an isocchaloric diet. And I a have ae I have an idea what it might be, but I'm curious what the answer is Yes, I think they they're more sedentary the day. Less spontaneous activity. Right, less spontaneous activity. because we also did a study to look at energy expenditure. That's really difficult actually to measure. in my opinion, energy expenditure. There's multiple components to energy expenditure But we did a study where this was a small study. We 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 Mabog chamber because It's more costly energetically to remain awake than to fall asleep So energy expenditure when participants were awake identical In both conditions, regardless of how much sleep they got the night before. So it's fidgeting movement because we've talked before in this podcast about the non exercise and thermogenesis. It's a big number. I mean, people who fidget a lot, bounce their knee a lot. I mean, sometimes these people are burning fif thousand five hundred calories more per day and everyone goes, Ohh my God, how could that possibly be? lot. I mean, that's a lot. That's at the extreme It is kind of interesting to observe people out in the world. and you sometometimes see that people who are very, very lean, very Let's just say thin and lean nowadays, who knows because of the GLPs, et cetera. But they tend to have a lot of spontaneous movement. They tend to stand up quickly. They tend to walk quickly. We're from New York. So everyone they're wal faster than out here. but it's a real thing You know, whereas Some people like me are kind of more middle of the curve, but you know, I sit a little bit more still unless I'm very cffeinated. These things add up over time in ways that I think most people underestimate. Yeah. so for us it was about percent of energy inccreased It it ended up being about ninety calories nowhere close to the three hundred calories that more of intake that they got over a day in the prior study. So it's still an imbalance towards a positive energy balance Might we do the math there is an increase in energy expenditure againgain in the confines of a metabolic chamber, which you know for most people is equivalent of the size of their bathroom Right where you have like a bed table and a sink, a toilet, that's it. So you kind of I can't do much in there. can do studies quote unquote out in the wild with actometry or whate ectigraphy, d Yeah. Yes. A 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 to feel rested that it's actually advantageous to exercise because it offsets some of the increase inflammation. But that 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 in the under the conditions of sleep deprivation, do you think are downstream or upstream? of this thing that we just call inflammation. L it's just like a body wide response and there are a bunch of things that have gone awry and And so like a bunch of systems are dysregulated, or can we point, okay when you're sleep deprived This is what this is what's happening. Be I think if women knew that their GLPs were down when they're down on sleep, so that they should expect that they would feel less satiety. If men knew that their ghlin levels were elevated when they're down on sleep going to feel hungry Hunger I mean, we have a pretty big prefrontal cortex most people anyway, and we can intervene simply on the basis of knowledge. I think that's what's empowering. And I think about this sometimes too, and I'm When I'm thinking about, you know my diet at times, right? L Do I really want to eat this or is it because I really didn't sleep last night, right? So you can make you can ask yourself these questions, stick a pause and say, okay Do I really want, you know, dessert or This is just that I'm tired and You know, I should just I'm fine. I don't need it. So if you step back and think that maybe part of it is because you didn't sleep well the night before, then you can appropriate choices, right S, okay probably don't need the The extra calories right now orr maybe you say, you know what I had a really bad night last night. Th those extra calories I don't really care because they're going make me feel good and I need some pick me up You know That's that's all the choices to make, right? you know, because Mood comes into comes into play as well. So 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 heard about in the context of try not to eat too close to bedtime This is an active debate in many households actually Some people seem to be fine eating close to bedtime and sleeping and even if they track their sleep Other people, it really disrupts their sleep I'm interested in both the timing of food intake relative to sleep, but also the content of the food and how it impacts s. What's known about that either from your work or from other work? When we started this conversation, I was telling you about these population based studies, you know cross sectional. data where two things happen at the same time. and You know, you don't really know causality. they happen at the same time. And I think early on in this field We started thinking about sleep as promoter of food intake or as a sleep causing Changes in diet, exercise. but didn't really think that maybe it's the other way around or maybe the other way around is just as plausible. So I started thinking about that and said, well, what if we took 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 multiethnic study of atherosclerosis. actually ' kind of hard to find good cohorts that have Nutrition data Good sleep data And data over years, right? So MesA, multiethnics of study of atherosclerosis is one of those great cohorts that we have here in the US has of the above. So I paired up with a colleague of mine, who's in Redline in Boston. and she's a 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 in different cohorts. actuallyctually, earlier this year, we published data from the Women's Health Initiative and other large large cohort with good diet data and sleep information. We took a really, really nice approach in this longitudal analysis. I don't know. usually when we do L jal studies We exclude people who have the condition at baseline, right? So if you're trying to see This factor baseline, how does it influence hypertension ten years later You usually exclude people who have hypertension at baseline because you want to see the development of hypertension. In this case, we're looking at insomnia symptoms, but insomnia is one of those conditions that's not necessarily static. It resolves So you can have insomnia and then A few years later or not have insomnia or you can not have insomnia now and develop insomnia. So what we did is we broke our down our participants into two groups, the people who had No insomnia at baseline And ree years follow up Our assistants who had insomnia at baseline, but not at three years follow up So they were in the Full sleep. Proving sleep And then the other group was all those women who had insomnia baseline and at three years and no insomnia baseline, but insomnia at three years. So they were the persistent insomnia progressing towards pooor 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, we're less likely to have hyperension insomnia three years. And the Dash diet is what Dietary approach to stop hypertension was developed to reduce prevent hypertension, reduce blood pressure in people by increasing intakes of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds consuming low fat dairy, more plant based types of diet and can be has been tested in a low salt or regular salt profile. How did those work out? I'm just curious, do you recall if the low salt high salt condition? There is salt sensitivity. so there are some people who are very sensitive to salt and so having a reduced salt diet will really improve their blood pressure. Others not so much, but the Dash diet, regardless of its salt content, did better than the equivalent non Dash Dt beger average. you know, American f, whatever that is. highigher in saturated fat and sugars and which seems to be changing now because of the GLPs. I feel like that's, you know maybe it's a skewed perspective, but I feel like the The typical American diet is it might not be changing so much in content, but in volume, it seems like people are eating less. Certainly the snack food companies from what I understand are struggling alcohol companies, that's a different issue, but there's certainly have Sales are way way down, but it just seems like people's appetites are down. Well, GLP once will do that right? Yeah. Yeah. And we were talking about this the other day here How many Americans have tried at GLP? The estimates are anywhere from like one in seven, S people say it's more is pretty incredible. Yeah, it's pretty high. But this is interesting. So how people impacts their sleep, I'm sure the listeners and I also am thinking, okay, but peopleeople who are eating a Mediterranean diet olive oils, fish, you know, fruits, vegetables they are probably more apt to Walk more Exercise more, socialize more, How do you separate out the variables in a study like that? Well 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, socio demographic status, socioeconomic status, and then we adj we adj for U 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. you mentioned, it's usually not captured very well. it's not something that we can adjust for One thing that we did in my lab going back to that original study was to look at how diet influenence sleep at night in the participants in our inpatient study So the nine hour time in bed opportunity phase, only that one In the four hour time in bed opportunity, participants were very efficient. There was not much variability in sleep duration in that phase, they slept as much as they could in that for our opportunity But in the nine hours, there's variability there. Some people got more or less. So we wanted to see if Food intake was related to their sleep at night. That's steady We had Poly snography assessments of sleep every single night Like I mentioned we had a controlled diet initially, and then we let them seves select their food intakes. So we took a very systematic approach to evaluating how diet could influence sleep in that study. We said first of all, was a diet that they chose different than the diet that we gave them. first step, right It was. So they ate almost four hundred and fifty calories more They ate thirty three percent more saturated fat A little less protein, I believe, a little more carbohydrates, notot much, but it It was different. So' like, okay, so there's difference between the tes. o now Was there sleep at night? differentifferent when they were eating the diet that we fed them compared to where the 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 not over seventy percent longer to fall asleep when they self selected their diet And there are slow wave sleep, so deep sleep was shorter I think it was about twenty three, twenty percent shorter when they self selected their diied compared to What we had given them was timing of food intake? impacted because when I think of what impacts what reduces slow wave deep sleep that's eating too close to bedtime So did not take that into consideration in that study. We't We didn't look at that. We had their their food intake profile and didn't specifically look in that phase when was their last eating period. But it could have been different than in the controlled feeding condition, because in the controlled feeding condition, they had set meals at specific times But they all went to bed at ten PM Then the other question was, okay What was it that they ate that day that impacted how they slept that night And we found that Higher intakes of fiber were associated with more deep sleep Higher intakes of saturated fat, less deep sleep And then more refined carbohydrates, simple suugars, more arousals So when we talk about arousals in the context of polysmnography, it doesn't necessarily mean full on waking up or awakening. It really means going from a deeper to lighter stage of sleep. so you may still be asleep throughout the night, but you're not getting Deep slow wave sleep, Rren sleep as much as you would otherwise to you create a buffer between your last bite of food and the time you go to sleep You personally? Me personally? Yes. Is it an hour, two hours, three hours I personally like to eat my last meal at least three hours before going to bed And I know there's variability there. differentifferent people have different tolerance. you mentioned right before that you, some people may be later chronotypes. but What we know is that eating earlier is better overall for cardi metabolic health, eating earlier is better. Me personally, feel I feel better by eating earlier. If I eat too close to bedtime, I get hot. G ye Yeah, it''s a therm effective. It's a thermic effect. We wantan to be cooling off when we go to. Exactly, Eactly I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG Wan. AG one is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. I discovered AG one way back in twenty twelve long before I ever had a podcast and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking AG one and the reason I still take it every day is because AG one is to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market AG one 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 AG one. It has just been so helpful for supporting all aspects of physical health, mental health, and performance. If you would like to try AG one, you can go to drinkagG one d. com slash hubberman to get a special offer For a limited time, AG one is giving away a free bottle of their new Omega three coenzyme Q ten product Omega three and Coenzyme Q ten 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 drinkagG one d. com slash Hubberman to get a free bottle of the new Omega three cooenzyme Q ten with your first AG one 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 ten PM. Iain in bed at nine thirty falseleep but ten. 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 Nine 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 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 nine thirty, ten 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 circadan system, right? And it's always harder to get a good night's sleep if not going with your internal G your internal swaking 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 is low or it should be when it's high. So they're fighting their circenin system. Yes, they should they should be getting seven hours, but they're not getting seven hours because The body is not designed to be sleeping during the daytime hours. plus then you have Everything else, right? Right. The light The light annise the kids, the whatever life that that happens during the daytime. When everybody else is awakeen, you're trying to sleep. Yeah, the only thing I can think of that's an advantage to being noctrurnal is the quiet. I used to sometimes shift to a noctrurnal schedule during holidays in graduate school when everyone would go home because I live My parents lived relatively close to where I went to graduate school. so I could afford to just go home for Christmas, right? just that day or a couple of days and everyone else had to travel. So I could invert my schedule. It just kind of drifted that way I promise that's the only advantage of going to bed at four AM and sleeping until you know three PM at least for typical people. your brain gets into a kind of weird space you're inverted from the rest of the world. Well, the things you do when you're a grad student, I would do the opposite, right? I'd wake up at four AM and then study because I felt like all of the hours of studying before the sun rose. or're like, r Interesting. Extra time for. definitely extra, but you felt like you were extra sharp at those. Era sharp. I great study and then you know, I got that time done and then, you know breakfast, but then ash have That's the problem. The one two PM crash. Has your work explored napping at all? I'm a believer in naps and non sleep deep breath, yoga Nidra type things, meditation, Do naps factor into this diet? Nutrition, hunger So we haven't done research on napping per se. For me There's a lot going on with napping. I don't think we have very good data to be able to say what's appropriate about napping. What we do know is that You don't want to nap too close to bedtime because You want to build sleep pressure throughout the day. And if you're dissipating the sleep pressure, the sleep need too close to bedtime, then you're not going to be able to fall asleep when time Time comes to go to bed at your usual hour And then you know, you get into this vicious cycle and it's not helpful You know, there are some studies that say, well, what should you do if you can't sleep enough at night and you're feeling tired, you know, should you sleep recommendations are that you should make it A short nap, thirty 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 an up for? Why are you sleepy? Of course, if you've pulled an out not, it's easy to know 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 good quality sleep and then you're not able to maintain Alertness throughout the day and you need a nap. I think you should check to see like what's going on at night? L why are you not getting that good good enough sleep? I'm chuckling because my postdoc advisor sparked this huge debate. It was a big lab And we had a couple of people in lab who liked to nap at their desk. These were people they could just like put their head down and and nap at their desk in the afternoon.d walk in, they'd be napping and then they'd wake up and keep working. Everyone was working very hard And he had this theory that if you're napping, it's because you're sleep deprived. that like napping is unhealthy, you know, And it sparked a big debate And people because we're a bunch of nerds, people bring data in like, no, you know, the sleep Lab at Stanford says that NAaps can be healthy. And I think it what you just described summarizes, I think that 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. Mbe. Yeah. Do you find that like when you're going to design a study or when you're going to like really work, like this four AM time that it's a time of calm or are you like a lazer? Are you do you feel like your mind is moving fast? where you're kind of in this like Fow zone or whatever you want to call it. I It' veryy focused very efficient So I tried to be really attentive at my task. I try to take breaks once in a while, but u Most of the time it's very efficient Get to the task and get it done. Earlier, you were talking about biking into work. You strike me as somebody but I always think of people who I'm always impressed by colleagues like this that their life is kind of like a step function. They wake up and it's like they're into the day And then it's down, right? Yeah. Interesting. I think some of us are more like this. But I think it's important to have a little bit of both though. I think it's important to have Downtime your speed time. to not just be go go, go, go, go. Like you're asking about my personal, you know actions and att one point I was running a lot for exercise and u felt like my whole life was just running all the time. You were run to. Yeah, yeah, runun 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 gota need to I think I need a breather. And so I started incorporating yoga into my my exercise routine. I think that I think that's good. Actually when I was a grad student, I thought yoga was stressful because I couldn't stand in those poses. Exactly. Yeah. yeah. But I think yoga evolved. I think the yoga that I do now it's not as static as the yoga I was doing when I was a grad student. I think it evolved to be a little more active than back then I see the benefit to having Yeah that bothoth types of exercise. Thanks for being willing to explore that. You know that I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner, but the Ayurvvedic folks, they'll talk about people like more fire, more more earthw, you know, and I think it's just a different lens and nomenclature on There's a kind of array of phenotypes. But when we talk about this thing sleep It becomes very prescriptive, right It's like we all need sixix to eight hours. I mean, actually from what you'reing today, six sounds like insicient' what I'm hearing. I'm probably a little sleep deprived. is what we're kind of hearing. So you know, a colleague of mine just published a paper in nature about biological clocks and aging in different organs. and the sweet spot really was six and a half to about seven and a half eight hours for optimal aging. Once you get to blow that, it's basically you shaped, right? So too much of one thing is not good, too little is not good. You want to be in the sweet spot, most organs for optimal aging was in this six and a half to seven point eight. And it differed a little bit by Men and women, depending on which organs he was looking at, a little longer for women Um some of the curves were different where, you know, Some are more pronounced U shapes in men than women in different organs. veryery interesting paper came out last week or two weeks ago. to check it out Um, what other sex differences are known to exist in sleep requirements, sleep dynamics that from your work or from other work. This is not something we've really covered on the podcast. No. No. I mean, well, not in any sufficient amount of detail. Yeah ye. So women tend to sleep a little longer than men across lifespan, although, you know, if you ask women about their sleep They don't rate their sleep as very good. More women than men report having difficulties with sleep. insomnia, for example, insomnia symptoms, more women than men say they have difficulty falling asleep, difficulty maintaining sleep across the adult lifespan. Why do you think that is? There could be some physiological effects, right? some hormonal effects donon't sleep the same across a menstrual cycle There is discomfort at different times, and there's different responsibilities, different social roles that come into play that may influence women differently than men You know, we were working on uh on a review paper actually about hypertension and sleep and sex differences. And you know, Wen are more sensitive to the impact of poor sleep on different metabolic outcomes than men. So for blood pressure, at lower sleep apnea, for example, at lower thresholds of sleep apnea, their blood pressure would be higher than men. So I think that There needs to be for sure, a lot more research in this area to be able to uncover, you know these these differences and then you know knowing that there are these differences to start probing women about their sleep. Last year we published a scientific statement for the American Heartors Association about multidimensional sleep health. and we concluded by recommending clinicians that they actually ask their patients about sleep and not ask a question, a targeted question, just ask their patients, how's your sleep Because if you start asking about Oh, how much sleep do you usually get at night Then you tell the person that the only thing that matters is how many hours of sleep you got at night That's not all sleep is about, right? move on to just about the number of hours that you got, but it's also about The regularity, the quality, your satisfaction with it. there's nighttime experiences, there's daytime experiences from sleep. When you wake up from sleep, are you feeling refreshed Are you feeling like you had are you satisfied with how the sleep you got the night before during the day Are you staying alert? Are you vigilant during the daytime hours? I from your past sleep experience. So having this open ended question, maybe clinicians won't have time for the answer, but you know it allows their patient to actually tell them what's bothering them about their sleep. then you can get to something like, you know, my spouse keeps kicking me because I'm snoring too loud, then oh Maybe we should test you first sleep bab Yeah. Apnea always includes snoring. Yes. So are there some people who don't snore who have apnea You stop breathing and then there's this gasping sound that people make when they u they awaken from that. or they get aroused from from breathing interrupt Like so many people have apnea and don't realize it, not because I'm sneaking into their rooms at night and listening to if they snore, but it's It' just remarkable how many people I speak to who say, yeah, I found out I had apnea because I saw that I was snoring because they started monitoring their sleep and there's generally a snoring index on these. or now there are free apps that can just record you while you sleep So I know a lot of people are I don't mouth tape when I sleep, but I do sometimes use one of these nose strips that kind of pulls the nostrils out a bit that Certainly it's to reduce the amount of stnoring No reduce the amount of snoring. The sleep apnea is from the throat, right? So this closure in the throat that that abstructs trachea and that's what then prompts The awakening breathing and then the sound that comes from there Aually weight loss is typically like the first line treatment, if someone has excess weight to start losing weight, that might with sleep apnea, then there's sleep ap which yes people don't like. but if they are at a lower weight where the apnea is milder, the pressure may be notot as u Not as high So that might be helpful for comfort. I have a colleague of mine who does sleep apnea surgeries. so implantables are also If people think they might have apnea, is it just get a CPA, pop that thing on? Is that the best line of entry? I think they should they should get tested. How do we do? How does one do that? Because that's the problem You're 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 Polynography is the first line, you know This is what we use to detect. u sleep apnea, but there was in home sleep testing that can be done. so you don't have to stay overnight in a lab for to get tested for this. and your doctor can prescribe that test very easily. How come we can't just go buy a CPA on Amazon? Because you need to have the the pressure determined for you, right? So you need to know what kind of pressure to apply and you know how to set it up. It's not as simple as just o. All right fair It needs to have the proper settings and someone needs to tell you which setting to use because then that's where you run into the trouble of having wrong settings and not being effective. Yeah, I just know from having done this podcast a while that like if people think, okay, I gott to go to my doctor. I gota find out or convince them that I have apnea, Then they have to like write me a script for a CPAP. Then I gott to buy a CPAP, which I'm guessing is not cheap I'm not sure. I don't think they're very inexpensive. The price might have come down And I gott to sleep with this thing on my face like looking like Darth Vader. so I don't sound like Garth Vader I just think very few people are going to do it. So somebody out there should like come up with an at home solution to this. Something like apnea seems important enough to daytime wakefulness Cognitive function, longevity, metabol, it wicks out to so many things that I feel like it If deserves like a public health messaging. Yeah. If you use it well and you feel better during the day, that's reinforcing too keep using it and get tweaked for it Let's talk about food and nutrients. You've done a substantial amount of work here in this area. and I have a bunch of questions. but first I want to talk about kefer Bulgarin. full fat plain yogurt But it's right next to the kefir And I'm always like, do I get the kefir? Well, don know, I love the Bulgarian full fat plain yogurt. So I haven't tried the kefir yet. What's special about kefer and why did you study kefir? Kfer we study because it was a fermented dairy product Pbiotics, we figured, you know, 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 of that study, that was when I was at McGill We recruited men that had mildly elevated cholesterol levels. We gave them two cups per day versus just regular milk for a month So two cups like two mugs like this? Two cups like the measuring cup. Okay. ye. Okay. Like five hundred mils. Okay And uh And we metas there the amount of cholesterol they they produced baseline end point in both phases. And there is no effect. It was an null study. It was one of those It was hard to get published at it and we got it published, but yeah. So these fermented yogurts and things, they don't do anything for for cholesterol levels. At least in our study in this population at this level, with this comparison, didn't have any effect. What's your general thought about low sugar fermented foods? I don't know if Keeford qualifies as low sugar, but based on Justin Soonenberg's work at Stanford others I've been really bullish on this idea of Sauerkraut, Kim Chi . fat bulgarian yogurt. Fermented foods are interesting. Yeah. Are you a proponent in general? I'm a proponent. yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to feed your gut. I think that the gut microbiome is getting a lot of attention for all sorts of you know, uh, health Benefits So I think that that's something that is important. So also It's important to alsoso consider that, you know for that study, right, ourur main outcome was cholesterol synthesis. There's so many other things we could have looked at that we didn't look at, right? And maybe it didn't have any impact for cholesterol synthesis. but Maybe Glyocemic control might be better or for Gut inflammation, it would be better. But you know, you pick your outcomes, right? You study something This is the challenge of doing controlled science. Yeah, yeah ye. Soort the opposite end of the like what used to be called Twitter science where like people just like report dot but A actually anecdotes of that sort become very powerful now in the public health space for better or worse, like people you know, because We can look at any study and say, well, that's a very artificial circumstance. You say, well, intentionally, because we're trying to isolate variables. Right exactly. People get frustrated. Oh, that's an observational study I'm going to continue to eat low sugar fermented foods every day. I do think In a study like the one you described, occasionally there's just there's Let me state this differently historically In science, that been a lot of interesting discoveries that have come from Researchers designing a study look at one thing and then kind of noticing unli like all the subjects. feel better, sleep better, their skin, they're reporting things that then lead to another anotherine line of inquiry. But you moved on from Kefer. Tell me about this paper. I was intrigued by this when I looked over your CV. the A weight loss diet that includes a coffee beveraged enriched in, let me try this, Menoosaccharides. Yeah. okay. a long word. leads to a greater loss of adipose fat tissue than placebo beverage in overweight men. Tell me about this study and what these mental Oo Saccharides are And if somebody wants to lose weight, should they be including the their coffee? So this was industry sponsored research that we did. They wanted to replicate a study that had been done in a different country because they wanted to replicate the findings So we did this study. It was basically a placebo controlled study We got we were provided coffee mananoigosaccharides. So these are extracted from spent coffee grounds. So it was basically satchets right? Wh packet one had coffee metal inggal sschari, 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, none in women So that was the end of that product Really, they would market it just because it only hadn ant affected. Yeah Yeah, I assure you there are manyen who would love to drink a coffee drink and lose more weight as a consequence. It's not going to be our market, you know But do we know what the ingredients were? Manuela go saccharides exactly. extracted. Yeah. so it was just basically a product that was Tastes like coffee, strong coffee but it didn't have the caffeine or anything like that. It just had this Manuelago saccharide that was extracted from coffee This substance comes from coffee ordinarily, but coffee is very low low calorie it's from the spent grounds. so no one really consumes this really because you know when you brew your coffee you You're not getting me. No in you. buy it? Can people get it? I don't think so. So what sure So what do you first of all, how much weight did they lose relative to the It was statistically significant Okay, I was intrigued by it because I thought there's there's something that I mean, you study it's interesting. you study kefer Mena Oligo saccharides from coffee. Yeah. now I'm going to ask you about ginger When I was a graduate student, I was interested in functional foods. And I was interested in those foods that provide health benefits beyond their nutritional value. you fear is a fermented dairy product. it would We were studying it for a functional benefit on cholesterol synthesis. That's not That's not a function of dairy, right? Dairy is You consume it for bone health, right? So it's basically when we talk about different claims that foods have. You know, there's those structure function claims Consuming dairy contains calcium that's good for your bones. and then there's functional cl Those functional claims are health claims, we call them that say, okay, well, health claim there's a health claim for oats for example, right? So consuming fiber from oats reduces cholesterol levels. That's been demonstrated. Yes. that's That's a health claim. That's an approved health claim That's why you see the hearts on some boxes of cereal 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 study fir for I study kfir for my master's degree and then for my PhD studied medium chain triglycerides and then Ginger that was That was something that I that I offered to a grad student at Columbia. It was interesting because the McCormick compomany had an advertisement in one of the nutrition journals and they were going to donate Um spices for research It was like, okay, they had a list of different herbs and spices that they were going to donate for research. And I had a grad student And I said Take a look at this list Come back to me, say if there's something in there that we should Test in the lab based on the things that I do don't come to me with something that's you know that I don't study, but And then he did some research and he came back and he said, I think we should study ginger. And I'm like, o, to do what Kathy you know, for energy expeiture Look at theermmic effective food I was like, Okay. So so we did this study. I had some funds that I could use for him to do that. And What did the study look like? A study where we looked at the thermic effect of food. L So people ate ginger root. without spicing their food. We dissolved ginger powder in wararm 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. And how many times a day are they drinking it? This was a one time one time consumption period and we looked at thermic effect of food over a six hour period. So again, they're under this We call it metabolic hood, right? So a little bubble and we measure their oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production for I think it was four or five hours. Is it significantly elevated withith ginger. With ginger Yeah. 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 therapies? Little things that we could do little Changes we can make to our diet to boost. energy expenditure relative to intake, you know, just to tip the scale. because Many adults over the course of their lifetime gain weight And it's not a big imbalance in calories on a daily basis that leads to pounds of weight gain over ten, fifteen years or or more now again, the GLPs are coming in and adjusting, but yeah, I'm very interested also in foods that have impact beyond their you know, known known roles. I mean, the problem is in this area in the functional foods area, not the problems with your work, but is that there are a lot of wild claims that go unchecked, like, oh, you know, walnuts are shaped like a brain and therefore they're good for your brain or, you know, which is they have certain things in them which are brain beneficial, but it's not related to the shape of the food. So you get there's a area I feel of nutrition has been u, marginalized on the basis of the kind of like quackery associated with it. But of course, there are interesting things in different foods. I do think that the The Soonenbergen colleagues's work on low sugar fermented foods has been very informative for lowering the inflammatome even more than fiber I mean, actually in that study, This is kind of the like, even Justin will kind of downplay this a little bit. He's a colleague, so I can say In the fiber group, when they compared to low sugar fermented foods and then they measured the inflammatome. they did a crossover design. also within the fiber group, there was a Fair number of people who their inflammation went way, way up when they consumed more fiber But in the low sugar fermented group Or when they were in that group, it was always on average, reduced 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 like different types of fibers. I was going to ask. Yeah. They didn't control for that.. They just said increaseed to the number of servings each day. And I know a lot of people don't like to eat fibrous foods because they don't feel good after they eat them It's like it's that they don't taste good. And I think there's this whole like histamine story that needs exploration. I think foods and the healthy foods needs better parsing Yeah in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, there was also aituation. you don't go from consonsuming six grams of fiber per day to twenty five. 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 for like four servings per day. Okay. A lot of kim Chi. You're not familiar with it. Like it can be a little hard on the gut. Yeah. I actually take an enzyme, I think it's called DAO veryy inexpensive, little it's like a tiny tiny pill that for digesting histamines. because I noticed after I had whey protein or I had broccoli, I would get kind of sleepy. I was like, what is this? A colleague at Stanford, Seaan Mackkeie, who's our head of our pain Center said that he had gut pain At one point, he's a pain doctor and directs the pain center and he figured out by elimination, trial and error that it was onions and other histamine containing foods. because it aoids histamine containing foods. I'm not about to give up the things I just described. Onions I can do without. But so I think that there foods have real effect. So Kfer These m Oligos saccharides have to confess I'm a little disappointed because like here it looks like it has like a cool effect, but they didn' they didn't now can't get them. I'm not going to eat coffee grounds I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night 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 DUSK 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 Hix, you can go to helixleep. com slash Hubberman 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 twenty seven percent 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 Helixleep dot com slash Hubberman to get up to twenty seven percent all in your work or in your observation or in your curiosity, what other foods are kind of intriguing to you? Someone had a really greatreat 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 You're Fat oxidation is reduced So this is a study that we're doing. We had participants on a controlled diet, And they started eating one hour after waking up. And they had a ten hour eating window, or they started eating five hours after waking up. So four hour delay relative to the other condition. Again, same thing for a ten hour window an hour window. We gave our participants the exact same foods. same foods, same quantity, same Himing between meals, and this was done in a metabolic chamber And The meals, especially the meals later in the day consumed late relative to the earlier version of those meals led to less fat oxidation. And someone in the audience stood up and said so Would you then recommend that people eat medium chain triglycerides in their evening meal as opposed to, you know a different type of fat And my eyes just went like this because, you know, my My time studying medium chain triglycerides was you know fifteen to twenty 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 The timing of intake of different foods and how it influences metabolism is something that's fascinating to me I confess I'm a like first Bite to food around eleven AM person I'm trying to eat breakfast these days and then kind of shifip things earlier. All it's really done is added a meal. because I take my last bite of food usually around eight PM. I just can't seem to get much earlier. I and many other people have wondered, whether it's best to eat more towards early day or whether or not it's just overall caloric load. You're saying that It does indeed make a difference. It makes a difference. You want to shift most of your caloric intake to the first like two thirds of your waking day Roughly Yeah, as opposed to the last two thirds Yes. So in that study, one hour after waking up, so let's say Basically eight AM to six PM is our reading window I mean, this is a ten hourating window. It's short. It's not, you know typical. so it could be eight AM to seven PM. That seems pretty That's reasonable. Yeah. Yeah versus PM to ten PM. The New York schedule. Yeah, the New York schedule. Yeah, well I startort chuckle ' when I go to New York, like it's like if you go to dinner ty six, you're kind of alone in the restaurant.. deepends on time of year. E really bird special. Yeah, depends on time of year. in California, it's kind of in it's the early shifted Y. But that's just more reflective of culture, I think. In Europe, they eat very late often. Itepends on where I was saying before we started, was on a ful bright program last year in Spain. and I would joke with with my colleagues there because they eat very late. And even the children eat very late. And I was like, okay, well You feed me, then you feed the children Right,. Then you have your dinner because they could have dinner at ten eleven PM. and the children ate nine PM and I'm like, Can't be good If you my dad's from Argentina, if you go to a restaurant in Buenos Aires at nine PM. You're not going to see many people att eleven PM, you'll see people in their seventies and eighties and they're up early the next day. They nap in the afternoon. Yeah. I don't know how healthy they are as a country on average, but haven't looked at the data, but very, very late shifted culture. Well, there's been studies in Spain that have looked at timing of eating and their impact on weight management. thinking of work by Marta Gaaoulette, where she showed that in her weight loss program partarticipants who have lunch, so their big 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, you know, even in those cultures where they have they tend to eat late They still find that eating earlier tends to be better for you. very, very relieved. When Alan Aragon, who's I consider one of the best public educators on the topic of protein and nutrition, body recomposition, he's formally trained in this reassured me that, you know nowadays there's a lot of interest in getting like protein ration. It's probably overdone a little bit, but people are striving to get more high quality protein. Except in rare circumstances where people are really trying to optimize every bit of muscle protein synthesis ninety five percent of the effect getting enough protein can be accomplished by having like two meals. mayaybe a little snack. that you don't and they can be evenly distributed or unevenly distributed you know, I think a lot of people are feeling this protein pressure and like, oh I gott 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 like thirty grams permel is totally false.s out and similly up to one hundred grams. Now there are conditions that set that up, like exercise, etcetera. But I find that very liberating Like you can have breakfast and an early dinner with a snack in the middle. You could miss breakfast, have lunch and an early dinner. What I'm hearing from you, however, is that you really want to avoid the Even or just late dinner. You just don't want to eat too close to bedtime. Correct. Okay What about these MCTs, medium chain triglycerides. These were very popular in the health and kind of biohacking space a few years ago. the whole bulletproof coffee notion, MCTs, butter coffee. and that's more or less faded away. Yeah. I don't see a lot of people putting oil in their coffee these days or coconut. what are some of the known benefits of MCT's? Where do you find them and what brought you to them? as a research topic This was a topic for my PhD dissertation. So my PI got a grant that Medium tain triglycerides. He had done prior work on this. but what we did was use purified MCT oil. So this is only Liquid oil contains eight carbon and ten carbon chain fatty acids Those are not very common in our general food source So it was purified extracted oil that we then gave our participants, we had created this functional oil that contained flaxseed oil also to be able to get some more some omega three fatty acids in there. We had added plant sterils because that was a big big focus of my lab at McGill plant sterils 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 triglyceres is different than how we process long chain triglyesserides. So the fourteen sixteen 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 peripheral circulation, get deposited in adipose tissue and a sort And so what did what we found we did two separate studies in men and women. In both men and women, there was an increase in thermic effect of food. so you burned slightly more calories from the meal that contained medium chain triglycerides compared to the meal that contained your standard fat For IPHD, 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 Hurry. C is eight zero, ten zero So it's okay We're going to try to compare that to a a saturated fat matched control comparison and we use beef tallow I was a lot of beef alo U Participants were not happy with that.et. eat it like spoonfuls. We put it ono mashed potatoes. You know, when you're doing studies like this where you're trying to control the diet and you want to isolate one aspect of it, right? We gave real foods half of the total fat of the diet came from the medium chain containing and the beef towel, So it's say twenty percent of your fat from One of the two, so you have to it, mask it somehow. MCT. And also this issue about lacks of effect of MCT oil that We had a few participants who initially felt a lot of gargling went like just gargling from their stomach, from consuming MCT because it was a lot early on It resolves. So after a few days, it was fine. It was a one week, one month, I mean, four week study. After a few days, no one dropped out for, you know, any GI issues. that's pressuring. Yeah So beefed how it was initially Yeah 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 Shell on your plate Yeah sort of like you bring french fries home from a restaurant they use tallo and then you like put it in the fridge because you thought you wanted them as leftovers the next day. They're sort of like in this like stuck to bottom of container configuration. Yeah. Yeah, it's not very appetizing. Not of dealing. No, there' like it's white all underneath. Yeah. that almost always goes into the trash. for. A couple of women felt it gave them headache does the smell of it, you know? So with the MCT's big significant increase in thermic effect of food? That was statistically similificar. Yeahah Who's about Fty five to fifty, sixty. calories Oh, I thought you say percent increase Oh. So this is a small change. It was If you're going to use this versus that You're getting a little boost here. if you repeat this a few times in a day, because when we measured thermic effect of food, we measured it only after over one meal. 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 trilyeride consumption. Lean mass to fat mas mash. Yeah. interestnteresting. And then we did follow up study of a weight loss study medium chain trigified. this time around it was just purified MCT oil, not added with other types versus olive oil which' much more acceptable and found greater weight loss with MCT. Based on what you're saying, it's reasonable. if somebody wants to improve weight loss, I'm hearing sort of a constellation of things shhift your meal timing to in the first two thirds or so of your day would It sounds like it will also improve sleep, which will also improve atety regular. satciety and hunger signals. What is it like a tablespoon or two of MCT per day? Is that kind of what this looks like for the typical person Yeah, about that. Okay. Yeah Inast of some other oil, not in addition. Not in addition, cororrect some ginger Are they additive? Are they synergistic? I think they could probably be additive because I think that the impact is through different mechanisms. Obviously no one's tested that. You know, it's interesting you bring it up this way because it makes me think of David Jenkins in the Portfolio diet. It actually made the New York Times, I think it last in December.. The portfolio diet was a diet designed for maximal cholesterol reduction So it was initially designed to have for specific foods. so it was high in soy protein. Nuts, plant sterils, and soluble fiber. Yeah, It's gonna be a tough one to get past most of the American public. I'll tell you as a public health educator, I don't care if it comes out in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker and everything in between. peopleeople hear soy. Yeah. Nuts, they like, but easy to overeat they hear plant steros and like They they're someplace else. This diet was went on a head to head comparison with lipid loring agent, right? like a Pakistan. Yeah, yeah. They had the same cholesterol reduction as a statin As a statin. Yeah. the portfolio. interestnteresting name People are definitely unhealthy in this country and if they can lower Bood lipids. Yeah. They've expanded it to to be more flexible. So it's not just soy protein now, it also includes legumes. They've added monounsaturated fat so olive oil You know, when I look at a diet like the portfolio diet, which you just I only know what you just told me about it. O think about the current food suggestions by by the FDA, which are you know, we could call it kind of, um, It emphasizes unprocessed and minimally processed food. So I think that's a step in the right direction, certainly We look at these issue that always comes up for me is I think, okay, in a more plant based grain heavy n diet, It's very easy for people to overeat calories based on this whole like amino acid protein foraging hypothesis, this idea that we eat until we get enough of the amino acids we want. like a A chicken breast or something and a couple eggs or four eggs or something is very satiating, whereereas we can eat a lot of grains and nuts before we kind of go, okay, that's enough There seems to be this issue like how do you ensure cardiometabolic health while quelling hunger. We can't have people walking around hungry all the time And the GOPs help with that And it does get down to sort of like do you include animal based foods or not often So how do you think just from a public health perspective that we can reconcile this Clearly the highly processed food diet is not going to work. The standard American diet. I think that is fading away. But now there's this kind of polarization of like, are we going to go mostly plants, grainens, nuts I think low saturated fat, blood lipids improving. A we going to think like you know, more prrotein society Do you see where I'm getting at? Yeah. Like I feel like this is the contour of things. Yeah. Well, I think that There's no reason to one another against the other, right? So like this one on one. but What's important is that Also, having a diet that's based and's higher volume, that's filling. It's hard to eat a lot of food. So if you're Food volume is high but does not provide as much calories. you'll get that sciety from the food volume. and then you you put in some nuts to prolong this sety 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 u There's not over emphasis on animal products over plant based products because we know that plant based products are so much healthier in terms of Heart health. a reduction of sub to diabetes, cancer risk and other Metabot diseases. Yeah Well, I'm right there with you. I love fruits and vegetables. I'm a huge fan of I do eat meat half Argentine. I mean, you know, but and chicken 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. The things that I feel are very, very easy for people to overeat are starch fat or starch sugar fat combinations It's just like the brain and gut respond with signals that scream more. You just It's very hard for people to do like a slice of pizza. I love pizza. It can be done But it's just very hard for people to do It's like the stop signals just are all pushed down and the go signals are all go. So are we producing white foods as much as possible as White foods? Yeah. So the white flour, white rice, white pasta, white, you know, things are Not as colorful. You know, if you're eating a slice of bread and it just dissolves in your mouth, get sugar. Not so good. This is more of an editorial reflection again, but it's also I was looking at the history of nutrition in this country. You're Canadian by birth, right I detected that.. And I don't know what the sort traditional fare is in Canada. but if you look at the history of food in the United States, it's never been particularly healthy The foods that we consider like American foods, like hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, corn dogs, fried chicken, donoughnuts, like we've never been healthy about food. People probably just moved a lot, ate less, smoked a lot more, which is an appetite suppressant but gives you cancer, kills you. We've never been that healthy with respect to food. Maybe food volume was more in check. If you look at traditional food in In Europe, probably in I mean in Canada, what sort of are the foods nourishing and healthy? I think we're sort of in this like delusion that like we were once healthy about food in this country. We were never healthy about food. The food was always pretty weak in terms of nutritional status except for fruits, vegetables and someome animal be it ortion size them. has a lot to do with it too. So I know Um Moving from Canada to the U.S, you know all to go to a restaurant, the portion sizes are so big. It would never have occurred to me take home doggy bag or for at a restaurant E And then here is like kind of hal to are else You know, you're throwing away half your plate or unless you're finishing the whole thing. So portion size, I think is a big one. And also the foods are different in a way. we're talking about yogurt So they' two things when I moved to the U S. The first thing the dietitician at my work told me was do not by bagged breread Okay What does that mean? Don't buy bagged bread. Like that's what I always do. No 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 bu bagged bread Okay, I'm not going to buy bed breit So apparently she was talking about like too many additives, to a shk or whatever Okay And we're talking about like the bread that just melts in your mouth So and then the other thing was yogurt. used I yogurt quite a bit and then the yogurt in here in the US. Tasted sweeter The same thing, the same Yogurt Ga, herear the same name, the same everything It was sweeter. And I don't know why, but thenen it occurred to me that, you know Foods are formulated in different ways in different countries to appeal to the population of that country. So theder was one where it's a less sweet in Canada than in U.S and it was less sweet even than in Europe then Canada and the U.S. So there's thingsings like that that don't necessarily help Yeah, we love our sugars and fats in the United States. And I think we paid a substantial health debt as a consequence of we now Again, I don't have the numbers on this, but with Redditure Tide and the other GLPs, I've never tried them, but a lot of people are finding it much easier, if not easy to lose weight that they just couldn't before. They just could not control their appetite. And they're just not as interested in these foods. There's this argument that maybe they're not as interested in everything in life and that's an important question that needs to be resolved. I do things that think that things are changing. I think we're finding a lot more, you know, for example, the yogurt right, there was a lot more plain yogurt options than there were. You know when I first moved to the US. so there's, you know Things are changing. It's there's been a lot of resistance and I think that the The resistance has been Um sociological in the sense that u You know, there's been a resistance to people being healthy There really has. you know, there's this idea that like if you're eating clean, you have an eating disorder And in an episode about eating disorders, I've talked to a lot of experts in this including the group at Columbia med that works on eating disorders. You know, the frequency of anorexia, the most deadly psychiatric illness of all the psychiatric illnesses, hadn't realized that is not increasing as a function of social media or magazines or anything. It's been very steady for maybe hundreds of years. This is a real neurological issue. There's obviously social pressures and things like that. but I discovered in like talking to experts like Joanna Steinberg at Columbia and others is that You know, like There is this so that was about interactive, but what I'm about to say is separate. There's this notion that if you're going be thoughtful about what you eat, You know, orr maybe you're not gonna eat too late or you're going to skip dessert. or until a few years ago, like if you're going to drink alcohol Like there's something wrong with you. that you're being restrictive somehow. I think again, it's kind of like the parallels to Europe are kind of 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 it was like, everyveryone does this. Like everyone eats hot dogs at the game. And 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 there's this when people start making choices in the direction of their health It was and to some extent it still is a there's this quieter undercurrent of Well, like are you being restrictive? Like are you really going to live like that But then you look at the health outcomes. And culturally until a few years ago, it was considered very not okay to say that obesity was a health risk And now the open discussion about obesity and metabolic health is like a real health risk. I think now we're kind of like in the actual discussion that for a long time it was like Speaking of which and kind of things outside the box, there's a paper on your CV that I could not help but ask about snack chips fried in corn oil alleviate cardiovascular risk factors when substituted for low fat and high fat snacks.. What? What Yes Tell me the data, I believe you. I'm just like, this is wild. This was funded by Frito Light. At that time, they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips So this was Doritos, frritos, Cheetos, and detos all thees all the eaters. All the eaters And so they had changed to corn oil. And like this is an oil that's higher in polyunsaturated fats than what we usually have. What were they using before? N'mot sure I forget. But it wasn't tallo I don't think so. Like Does it make a difference It's gonna improve 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 twenty five 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 High saturated snack or those chips So you just pick one and that's that. So I think we gave It was two snacks today day for twenty five days, there was a rotation. So that four yeah, they had four different chip So to one day to the next day likeike that for twenty five days and then the controls And yeah, the better Lipid profile was the one with was the one from the corn chips has a better lipid. And they had less lipperrotein little A, which is another, you know factor card metabolic risk factor. Data data. Data data. Well, I know that in the head to head comparison of seed oils of which corn is, right with saturated fat, this is where kind of the contention starts to where There are many studies now, I think, showing that when you substitute saturated fat with seed oils that cardiomet metabolic Risk factors go down and this is true, right? Well by the way, I'm just gonna say, I avoid seed oils actively because I like olive oil and butter, mostostly olive oil I avoid seed oils. I don't like the way theyaste. I love olive oil. Okay. And there's some health effects of olive oil. Yeah. and I eat small amounts of butter and So I just like Duck the hole. 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 saturate fat to Sed oils, you do see better outcomes for seed oils. But then there's this crowd that comes in and says but That's on a backdrop of reasonably high carbohydrate intake when you start replacing some of those carbohydrates with lower carbohydrate diet, increasing protein intake. so not keto, but kind of like lower ish starch and sugar, then maybe that balances out. okay. But the big contention seems to be around the processing of these seed oils, this idea that when especially when you make things like chips, that when you fats and you combine them with carbohydrate and you heat them up a lot. that you create factors that are not good for the body. What is the evidence for against that? Well different oils have different smoke points, right? So each oil should be used for its appropriate usage, So cooking process So I think that's where know people think that they should be using one type of oil for everything that they do some or like you wouldn't put Flack seed oil, for example, and heat it up to very high temperature. Are you a fan of floxed oil I'm a fan of every liquid oil. I use I haveve no no personal You seem veryict restriction on the on the types of oils. I think that, you know, oils are that remain liquid at room temperature That should be your barometer for what's better to use I'm also not saying that People should avoid butter like the plague, right? So all in moderation is is okay. Is there any reason to I just can't find the argument for why anyone would replace olive oil with a seed oil Olive oil has a lower smoke point than other seed oils. So peanut oil, for example, has a higher smoke point. So you can fry in peanut oil. You wouldn't fry anything in olive oil. I wouldn't eat anything fried. Well, ye. So that's that's a different value. So depending on how you want to use your oil, then you also some People find, you know, olive oil and baked goods might inart stronger taste, so depending on the type. So some of them are more flavorful, right? And so they're more fragile, let's say, and they'll impart flavors to different different foods where they're not supposed to be So you are not seed oil averse, nor are you proro seed oil is what I'm hearing Personally? Yeah. no Be 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' much less expensive than using you know, grassfood butter or olive oil or even just ordinary butter. So it's important to be Nutrition facts literate. So when you're talking about processed foods S it as much as possible cooking at home, but that's something that A lot of people don't really know how to do, feel they don't have the time for. People aren't gonna start doing that. And then I'll tell you, they're not gonna start doing that. And I wish they would, but they're not going to. At the grocery store to look at the nutrition facts panel and being be like, okay, what's in here, what's in there? and comparing products to one another. And also what's more important for your own health Right? What's relevant for my health may not be what's relevant for your health You know, some people are we're talking about salt sensitivity. some people are very salt sensitive. Some people are very active and need to replace salt. and so salt is not an issue. for them but so being able to know where what to pay attention to because otherwise it just gets overwhelming You mentioned the study was paid for by a company. earlier you mentioned companies. I think this is an important issue that we've never really directly addressed on this podcast. I mean, anytime I've covered a paper and sometimes I do these solo episodes, I'll get back to them soon. I used to do a lot more of them. 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. likeike like to me, a financial conflict of interest is if the invvestigators, the scientists running the study have stakes in, you know, they have shares in the company or they're being paid to do the study, obviously. But when a company funds research on like this Snack chips study that you did I think everyone would like to assume that they don't have any, you're not feeling any There's no explicit nor implicit pressure for a particular outcome. Right. Could you like how how does this stuff come about? So I'm glad you're asking that question because that's something that People often have this knee jerk reaction to industry sponsored studies. And I know there are people who are very very vocal against industry sponsored research. but as scientists We do research, we do research to the best of our abilities and we provide we 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 an all results No res results. So so we did we did a study. It was sponsored by industry. We didn't find any significant effect of the test product compared to the control and you can't publish it. We wrote the paper, we wrote the report, we provided it to our sponsor just out of, uh, courtesy So this is the paper. we're going to submit it for publication Do what you need to do. So they're giving you the green light to simil. So the companies aren't short circuiting. No. Never. That's in the contract, right? Your right to publish. Because otherwise, why' you do research? There's no point. doing research if you're not going to be able to publish your research So Basically 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 The findings are not exciting. They're showing that there's no effect O outcomes and it got rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, and I'm pretty persistent I runan out of steam. So if I run out of steam, I can imagine so many other people, other scientists who have no results have ran out of steam much quicker than me That's a no result issue. That's not necessarily unique to industry funded studies. No. That's not unique.. So industry sponsored studies, you know, I often also say They're We get NIH eports of scientific misconduct. So reports of scientific miscond conducts 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 gonna if you're not an honest scientist, Obviously, I don't think it matters who's sponsoring your research because the NIH finds misconduct Right. I mean doing science For any other reason than trying to find real answers is just insane. Like I mean these people who do this are like legitimately sick you know, like yeah, it's a lot of work. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of Do they really think they discovered something if they made it? It's like it's like it doesn't it's not it doesn't whereere it doesn't It doesn't compute. Well, it never ends well. And then you know, we could spend hours talking about the case. Th these things always it always comes out in the wash. So I'm hearing that negative outcomes are hard to publish when you take on funding from a company to address a particular question about a product that they sell you it sounds to me I'm trying to I want to be careful I'm not like leading the witness here that you you don't doesnn't sound like you feel any pressure. give them a particular answer. So what's their interest in doing this Like like why they why are they funding studies? I mean, companies are selfish and they should be. They have shareholders and they need to Some of them are public companies and so the shareholders of the public. And so why are they funding research? I mean, plenty of people eat chips. Yeah. Why are they funding research? They wanted to know if it had a health benefit so they could market a health benefit. Probably market a health benefit at some point. that could be. And then if they don't find a health benefit Maybe they could Switch it to something else, right I don't know I'm very sympathetic. to the reality that there isn't a lot of research funding coming through NIH and NSF these days, but but always it's been, you know, it's been low. I know because I sat on study sections, which dole out grants. got grants, but it's very, very, very competitive. Are you taking money from companies to do this work because it's a It's a great way to fund studies. Like in other words N IH had more money to study nutrition I could imagine a world where you would just take money from NIH to do it. Like you wouldn't need the money becausecause the budgets are better from NIH funding than from industry funding for nutrition research Beten If you if you can get an NIH grant, that's That's the ultimate goal, right? or USDA or other government grant. That's the goal. But sometimes also there's specific foods, specific products that would be kind of hard to study without industry support because need to get access to specific Ht or product. Well I don't know what the status of it is right now, but my fairly frequent kind of check in on what att least stated goals of the now being revised NIH or include creating a forum even some incentive for publishing negative results or null results, I should say you know, Jay Butari that has been on this podcast. 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 release from the whole food ure mid revision, etca. there seems to be more and more interest in nutrition as a research topic and something to really understand. Obviously it's really important. I mean, people are eating every day Yeah. They're making these choices. So there should be more federal funding for these things. And then there's no chance of bias. R, right Yeah, I think that people assume that if industry funded a study that especially on food, that like something's not to be trusted in there. I don't know why for food in particular, right? So if you think about it, food and drugs, food and drug companies. But drug companies, they do research on their own The R and D for drug companies is definitely done in house That's also part of the scary part about it. We don't see the null results actually would prefer if it took on a different shape. I don't exactly what it would look like. I mean, drug we don't see a lot of the negative outcomes that might exist. So I don't think they probably they just die out before they make it to next step. And Yeah. I think outright scientific fraud peopleople making stuff up is rare,er rare. But I do think there's a lot of questions about people because of the incentives to need to publish to as you described, it's hard to publish no results. We will never know, and this is when you run a lab is, you you want to create a culture where graduate students in postdocs feel very comfortable saying, there's nothing here. Right. Because the stuff that didn't work out you always, you know, it's just a question that you always have like what What stuff do we never hear about because the negative results like they say, well, that mouse was sick or you know, there's a lot of The brain is a crazy thing. That's why you need to teach the students well, right? You have a student who comes to you and says Hey, this This is lower, this is better than this and you' look at you look at the numbers and you say, well twenty five versus twenty seven and the standard deviation is ten. L no twenty five is the same as twenty seven, right? So you have to make sure You teach well know that You know even numerically different effects may not be statistically significantly different. and that's just partart of the, you know, the curve, right Yeah, the ideal situation is when the student or postdoc doesn't believe their own results. They're like it's not real. And then you have to convince actuallyually you have something interesting. That's a good situation Thats a good situ That's a good situation. And then eventually they're like, oh, okay, you know, that's the ideal situation. but I think this whole field of nutrition is is contentious. for some of the right reasons, it's so very important. and I think it's contentious also for a lot of unfortunate and unnecessary reasons. Among the students and postdocs and general public when you interact, what are people most interested in with respect to nutrition Like when people ask you, is it like, what should I eat What shouldn't I eat? Like what what what what's coming? like what are your antennai picking up when you're out there I think, what should I eat or you know, Or have you heard about XY Z fad, That's also one. Have you heard that whatever product cures everything in the world No, I haven't heard that. epides or very peptide? Right now, peptides are really big. It's always something else Yeah, yeah. So it's very specific to a product. Yeah, offten very specific to a product. Yeah. You won't be held responsible for your answer, but do you supplement your diet with with minerals like magnesium or anything like that are you just completely Careful food choices I prefer careful food choices. I think it's more pleasurable to eat complete food diet That said, I think that there are some people who may need to supplement their diets But peopleeople should strive to get their nutrients. from Whole Foods. Fiber recommendations are really growing. I looked into this and many, many people's doctors are now telling them, you should take a little bit of cliium husk I was thought by the way celium husk was like the husks, like you had to like they're like you're going to eat like the seed husks. It's actually ground into a powder or something like that Yeah. I'm still afraid to take it, but should I should take a little bit of it. But doctors now prescribing supplemental fiber. in a pretty high rate from what I understand. That's interesting. Yeah. people don't want to eat their fruits and vegetables. But they brings so much more, right? 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 We don't fully understand yet that feed your gut that are maybe just as relevant that me enhance Fiber's impact on health And I sa preaching to the choir. I love fruits and vegetables. Well Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. You have a very unique research program. You know, I have to say, very few people can work on it many different things and find their points of intersection. and so I'm grateful that you're exploring these things. I appreciate your open about industry funded research. This is something that people need to know about. I certainly learned about that from you today. and based on your work, I think it's fair to say that we shouldn't just be encouraging people to get great sleep. We should be encouraging people to eat times and foods that allow them to get great sleep, which will allow them to better make better food choices and so forth. Yeah. So you know, I talk often about a vicious cycle where you don't sleep well, you don't eat well, then that makes you not sleep so well. and really hoping for people to get into a healthful cycle, right whereere you get good sleep, where you can make goodood food choices that then helps you get better sleep to keep propelling this cycle of better health I love it. It's a true integrated medicine and science I also can attest that when you sleep well, you make better food choices when you eat well You sleep better. Right. So thank you so much for coming for taking time out of your schedule. Really appreciate it And I've learned a ton. Thank you. Thank you Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Marie Pierre Sain. Anange. to learn more about her laboratory's research and to find a link to her book Sep 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 podcasts, 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 thirty years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep 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 mananual for the human body And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Hberman 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 newewsletter, 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 hubbermanlab dot comot 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 Sain.t And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science