#318 - How Sleep Changes What and How Much You Eat | Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge & Mike Haney

Sleep and diet don’t operate independently. Controlled studies suggest that when people sleep less, they tend to eat more, move less, and gradually gain weight. The relationship also appears to run in the other direction: what and when you eat can influence how well you sleep.

Mike Haney talks with Columbia sleep and nutrition researcher Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge about what the evidence actually shows at that intersection. Rather than chasing a perfect sleep score or a single “sleep food,” her work points toward a simpler idea: adequate, consistent sleep makes healthy eating easier, and a high-quality diet may help support better sleep in return.

Free course: Improve your metabolic health

Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: ⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl

What We Cover:

• Why even modest chronic sleep loss can accumulate into meaningful sleep debt
• What controlled experiments show about short sleep, calorie intake, and weight gain
• Why sleep deprivation tends to shift food choices toward less healthy options
• How sleep loss affects appetite hormones differently in men and women
• What the research says about eating close to bedtime
• Whether tryptophan, melatonin-rich foods, and specific “sleep foods” actually help
• Why fiber, fruits and vegetables, saturated fat, and refined carbohydrates may influence sleep quality
• How much attention to pay to wearable sleep scores versus how you actually feel

🎙️ About the Guest:

Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge is Professor of Nutritional Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Director of its Center of Excellence for Sleep & Circadian Research. Her research focuses on the relationships among sleep, diet, energy balance, body weight, and cardiometabolic health, with extensive work in controlled inpatient and outpatient sleep studies. Vagelos College

📍What Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge & Mike Haney discussed:

• 05:01 - What popular sleep talk still gets wrong
• 09:30 - A wearable score versus how you actually feel
• 10:37 - Sleep pressure and the body clock
• 13:00 - How a little lost sleep becomes real sleep debt
• 19:43 - Short sleep, and about 300 extra calories
• 27:11 - Six weeks short, and about a pound gained
• 29:05 - Why short sleep shifts you toward worse food
• 30:30 - Appetite hormones don’t respond the same in men and women
• 37:03 - What eating close to bedtime actually does
• 40:20 - Tryptophan, melatonin, and “sleep foods”
• 42:42 - Fruits and vegetables, and less broken sleep
• 46:10 - Saturated fat, refined carbs, and a better cycle

🔗 Helpful Links:

• Marie-Pierre St-Onge — Columbia University: Columbia profile
• Short sleep duration increases energy intake — American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2011): PubMed
• Prolonged short sleep and body weight — Annals of Internal Medicine (2026): PubMed
• Sleep extension reduces calorie intake — JAMA Internal Medicine (2022): National Institutes of Health
• Fruit and vegetable intake and sleep fragmentation — Sleep Health (2025): PubMed
• Fiber, saturated fat, and sleep architecture — Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (2016): Vagelos College
• Eat Better, Sleep Better: ihn.cuimc.columbia.edu

Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/WxvbJu_GnSo

Find us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1⁠

👋 Who we are:

Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.

Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.