The Truth About Eating Before Bed | Dr. Michael Snyder & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.680 | I'd like to talk a little bit about meal timing and sleep.

00:00:06.080 | I do my best to eat my last bite of food at least a couple of hours before I go to sleep.

00:00:12.920 | Doesn't always happen.

00:00:13.920 | What do we know about how evening and nighttime meals impact sleep and next day glucose levels

00:00:21.360 | and regulation?

00:00:22.360 | Well, the party line is that you should not eat three hours before sleeping.

00:00:28.920 | And I believe that, and that's true from the studies we've run, that people who do have

00:00:33.600 | a gap and actually people who walk after dinner have lower glucose the next day.

00:00:39.340 | And if you go into the evening with a high glucose spike, in general, that correlates with poor

00:00:45.500 | sleep.

00:00:46.820 | So I think it's more complicated than that.

00:00:51.200 | I think, again, the party line will be, well, your glucose is kind of high at night and gradually

00:00:56.500 | goes down during the day and spike in the morning, you get a cortisol spike, as you probably know,

00:01:01.180 | when you wake up.

00:01:02.180 | And that's normal and that's healthy, helps energize you for the day.

00:01:06.040 | And cortisol and glucose are related.

00:01:07.920 | But when you actually look at people's glucose patterns, it's much more complicated than that.

00:01:13.340 | And I think a lot of that has to do with what their sub-phenotype is.

00:01:17.500 | We don't fully understand this.

00:01:18.500 | We're trying to sort this out.

00:01:20.180 | And what you did the day, and especially the evening before, eating that big piece of pizza

00:01:25.500 | and then falling right asleep probably is not a great thing for you.

00:01:29.240 | You will go to bed with a high glucose spike for many people.

00:01:33.180 | Again, unless you have perfect glucose control.

00:01:35.180 | So, you know, I think getting your glucose under control, it is a bit of a problem for me.

00:01:41.860 | We tend to eat late in my household just because both my wife and I work kind of late.

00:01:47.820 | And so we tend to eat a little bit later.

00:01:50.860 | But I definitely do better if I can try and eat earlier.

00:01:53.860 | And then I definitely don't snack before bedtime, that sort of thing.

00:01:58.280 | And these days I try not to make my biggest meal my dinner, which again can lead you into

00:02:03.900 | sleep with that.

00:02:05.220 | And we always take a walk.

00:02:06.440 | We have dogs and walk our dog after dinner.

00:02:08.860 | It's become a routine.

00:02:10.580 | You mentioned earlier about behavior.

00:02:12.360 | And I think the key for good behavior is to get into these routines where you can just get

00:02:18.360 | into that.

00:02:19.360 | And I think it really makes a difference.

00:02:21.420 | But yeah, always, and as I'm sure you know, going to bed, people, we'd found that in some

00:02:27.180 | of our studies as well, going to bed the exact same time, those folks have lower glucose than

00:02:33.220 | those who have highly variable sleep timing.

00:02:36.380 | Now, that's not so great for me because I travel a fair amount.

00:02:39.360 | Likewise.

00:02:40.360 | But I try when I'm not traveling to keep constant hours, at least that part I'm okay at.

00:02:46.420 | But yeah.

00:02:47.420 | I think we forget sometimes the number of interesting things that happen in sleep.

00:02:51.300 | sleep.

00:02:52.300 | And one of the most interesting papers, to me anyway, in the last few years was a paper

00:02:56.060 | that I saw where they essentially had people breathe into a tube while they were sleeping.

00:03:01.060 | Okay.

00:03:02.060 | And evaluated the different types of metabolism that were occurring during sleep.

00:03:06.240 | And it turns out that as we go from light sleep to deep sleep and then more rapid eye movement

00:03:11.060 | during sleep as the night progresses, the brain and body transition through essentially every

00:03:15.820 | form of metabolism, glucose metabolism, ketogenic metabolism, a mixture of the two.

00:03:21.820 | And it seems like sleep is this...we don't know if it's like a test run or if it's a reboot,

00:03:27.820 | or...we don't know what to call it, right?

00:03:29.820 | It's just very clear that during sleep, there's a lot of metabolism happening.

00:03:33.580 | So when you tell me that getting to bed at roughly the same time or the same time every

00:03:37.580 | night improves blood glucose regulation, my first thought is, "Oh, well, that makes sense

00:03:41.580 | because if you go to bed at the same time, then you're eating at roughly the same time, you're

00:03:44.620 | exercising at roughly the same time."

00:03:46.460 | But it could also be the case that in sleep, we're getting a tuning up of the metabolic processes

00:03:53.020 | for the brain and body.

00:03:54.220 | Is there any evidence that supports that?

00:03:56.220 | Yeah.

00:03:57.340 | Again, I don't know from the metabolism standpoint.

00:04:01.340 | I like to say the things we do the most, we understand the least.

00:04:04.540 | Nutrition, right?

00:04:06.460 | How exactly does that work on all your different organs?

00:04:09.340 | Sleep, you know, I do like the idea of the sleep.

00:04:12.780 | You would know this better than me, but your spinal fluid and such, it expands and contracts.

00:04:19.980 | The idea of emptying out the garbage, so to speak.

00:04:22.540 | Yeah, it literally rinses out your system.

00:04:24.220 | Yeah, and I like that concept, I think, and to what extent that is beneficial, I'm sure it is.

00:04:31.980 | I don't know.

00:04:32.540 | And all the other facts, but even people argue what's better for your REM versus deep sleep.

00:04:37.740 | Even some of that is debated by experts in the field.

00:04:40.380 | Again, I'm not a sleep expert.

00:04:42.540 | I have a tendency to move into fields I know nothing about, so because I'm so naive, I hope to learn

00:04:48.380 | something, especially these areas that aren't so well understood.

00:04:51.900 | So it's an area we're going to be studying a lot more around the glucose control.

00:04:55.980 | But there's no question, if you look at some people, they're spiking really bizarrely.

00:05:01.500 | And I have mixed days myself.

00:05:03.420 | I'm trying to sort that out.

00:05:04.540 | Somewhere I do hit the party line, higher glucose gradually go down by the morning.

00:05:09.340 | But then I have nights where I'm quite irregular.

00:05:12.700 | And I want to correlate that with what's going on.

00:05:14.940 | And it's not just me.

00:05:15.740 | It's true of a lot of people.

00:05:16.940 | And I don't think that's sorted out in my mind.

00:05:20.140 | And I think metabolism in general, some point we can talk about the micro-sampling stuff.

00:05:25.180 | But we found that we had 32 people drink this Ensure Shake while they were fasted.

00:05:31.180 | And they all reacted very differently to it.

00:05:33.100 | This is during the day now, not sleep.

00:05:35.260 | And for some people, it was pro-inflammatory.

00:05:37.740 | For others, anti-inflammatory.

00:05:39.340 | So interesting.

00:05:40.140 | I assume a lot of this got set early in life because your whole microbiome,

00:05:45.180 | so backing up a little bit, just so people realize that you have a lot of microbes.

00:05:50.380 | You have, in fact, more microbes in you than our human cells.

00:05:53.580 | And they're critical for digesting your food and all this.

00:05:56.860 | And they heavily interact with your immune system.

00:05:59.500 | 70% of your immune cells are in your gut.

00:06:02.460 | So you have this whole interplay between your immune system and your gut.

00:06:06.780 | And obviously, then the food you eat, which goes through your small intestine first,

00:06:12.620 | and the small molecules like glucose get absorbed.

00:06:14.860 | But then all the fibers, the big molecules go into your culinary, your large intestine,

00:06:21.260 | where they basically, you know, are interacting with these immune cells.

00:06:24.940 | So I think a lot, and a lot of that gets probably set early in life.

00:06:28.460 | In fact, people have shown your microbiome gets set in your first three years of life.

00:06:32.860 | So I think that interplay all gets established and then you are reacting to some of that,

00:06:40.620 | your food later in life.

00:06:41.900 | That's at least the postulate.

00:06:43.740 | Not that you can't modify it.

00:06:45.100 | In fact, you know, switching from carnivore to veggie diets,

00:06:49.020 | the Mediterranean-type diets, which are sort of healthier, like fish-heavy veggie diets,

00:06:55.820 | I think are helpful for people.

00:06:57.820 | But I do think some of this gets set early.

00:07:01.100 | And I think getting that set right, I think we probably need to, as a society,

00:07:07.900 | get that all set a lot earlier probably now too.

00:07:10.860 | And it's estimated, some work from Justin Sonnenberg, that, you know, native populations,

00:07:17.660 | these aboriginal, they have three times the number of microbes that, say, people in the US.

00:07:23.500 | So we just don't have the same community that is probably handling diverse foods

00:07:30.140 | and probably making essential ingredients for our health that we're now missing.

00:07:35.580 | So we probably need to restore that in some fashion.

00:07:39.340 | Otherwise, this obesity and diabetes trend is just going to continue.

The Truth About Eating Before Bed | Dr. Michael Snyder & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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