Sleep issues are a BIG deal—just ask someone who’s been up all night involuntarily.
More than half of all Americans have difficulty falling or staying asleep.
I had a ‘Random Run In’ on Amtrak with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, a nutrition scientist and a pioneer in the field of sleep health.
I was on an Amtrak to Boston, and I happened to choose the seat next to her. She was working diligently on her computer. I kept sneaking peeks at the bright fun patterned shirt she was wearing that I finally figured out reminded me of my old Peter Max stationery I loved so much as a kid. She was focused so I was quiet.
At some point during the 3 ½ hour trip I asked what she was working on. (Couldn’t help it – I’m a curious stranger talker)
That’s how I found out I was sitting next to a very big brain wrapped in a very small feminine body.
Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD, is a nutrition scientist and a pioneer in the field of sleep health. She is the founding Director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research at Columbia University, and her cutting edge research combines her unique expertise on sleep, nutrition and weight management to address overall health issues related to sleep.
She is THE ‘go-to’ expert on the connection between food and sleep!
Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge is the author of Eat Better, Sleep Better: 75 Recipes and a 28 -Day Meal Plan that Unlocks the Food-Sleep Connection (A Cookbook). She co-authored it in a fun collaboration with Kat Craddock Editor-in-Chief, CEO and owner SAVEUR the legacy food magazine. Developed with ingredients that trigger the body’s dietary melatonin and serotonin, these recipes align with a Mediterranean diet and trigger a healthy circadian cycle, so you feel energetic during the day and ready for sleep at night.
The Big Takeaway for Me From Our Amtrak Conversation Was Learning That Sleep and Food Are Powerfully Connected!
The way you eat affects how you sleep
The way you sleep affects how you eat
It’s a loop… and if it’s broken? You feel it.
Better Diet = Better Sleep = Better Life
And not in a “perfect eating” way… in a real-life, doable, smart swaps kind of way.
So What Should We Actually Be Eating To Sleep Better?
No gimmicks here. Just smart, science-backed choices:
- Fiber-rich foods (hello whole grains)
- Healthy proteins (fish, salmon, nuts, seeds)
- Foods with tryptophan (the Thanksgiving turkey effect is real-ish )
- Balanced meals—not heavy, late-night overloads
And here’s something people don’t always realize.
Alcohol may help you fall asleep… but it messes with your sleep later.
And Wait… “Sweets for Sleep”? I’m Listening…
Now THIS caught my attention.
There are actually desserts designed to SUPPORT sleep—like:
- Sesame shortbread cookies
- Chamomile ginger panna cotta
They’re:
Lower in sugar
Thoughtfully balanced
Built with ingredients that help your body relax
So yes… you can have your dessert and your sleep. Just smarter.
Timing Matters More Than You Think
One thing I loved learning from Dr. Marie?
This isn’t about a “magic bedtime snack.”
It’s about your entire day of eating.
Because your body needs time to:
- Digest
- Absorb
- Convert nutrients (like tryptophan into sleep-supporting compounds)
This is a lifestyle—not a quick fix. But it matters.
And About Those Sleep Trackers…
I had to ask.
Her answer? Refreshingly sane:
Use them
Learn from them
BUT… don’t let them run your life
Because how you feel still matters.
My Debservation?
We spend so much time chasing energy…
…but we ignore the foundation of it—sleep.
And if food is part of the solution?
That’s empowering.
Because it means we have more control than we think.
Now back to Dr. Marie-Pierre
I have no clue when this sleep expert has time to sleep. Lol
She’s a very busy woman!
Born and educated in Québec, Canada, Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge lives with her family in New Jersey. When I met her on Amtrak, she was working on a presentation that she was supposed to have made in person in Chicago that day. However, airplane delays landed her instead on the Amtrak to Boston where she would do the presentation virtually and still be in the right place for another yet another presentation in Boston.
Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, PhD is the recipient of an Outstanding Investigator Award from the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) at the NIH, and she is a Fulbright Scholar as well as a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
She has authored close to 170 peer-reviewed publications and received scientific achievement awards from the American Heart Association and American Society for Clinical Nutrition.
Amazing right?
But Even Sleep Experts Get Tired.
I noticed after typing for hours in the seat next to me that Dr. Marie-Pierre had started to doze off.
When she woke up I offered her a sample Alert Pop™.
What are the chances?
I was on Amtrak that day heading to Boston to meet a major distributor for a new product called Alert Pop™
! I’m a Founding Partner of the company behind this new ‘better for you’ sugar free caffeinated functional energy lollipop that was invented by my partner Stephen Caldwell to help prevent drowsy driving.
Did you know 1 in 25 drivers admit to falling asleep at the wheel?
I figured Dr. Marie could appreciate the purpose of the product and told her I’d love her opinion.
She liked it! Perked her right up. I thought maybe we could somehow collaborate.
Anyway, we exchanged contacts and honestly, I felt she was way too impressive a ‘random run in’ to keep to myself. So, I’m sharing her and her knowledge with you all today on my Wellness Wednesday Show.
Listen to the Full Interview
If you missed it, here’s my conversation with Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge PhD on The Debbie Nigro Show.
It’s packed with insights that could genuinely change how you feel every single day.
And it starts with a simple and powerful premise…
What you eat today will determine how you sleep tonight.
And ‘Good Sleep’ is key to “Keeping the Live in Alive! ”
Best!
Debbie
The Debbie Nigro Show Wellness Wednesday “Keeping the Live in Alive!” Show airs Wednesdays from 11-12 noon on WGCH Radio broadcasting live to the NY/CT area but you can listen live from anywhere at WGCH.com. Podcasts posted after here on DebbieNigro.com and on all the major podcast platforms.
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If you’d rather read than listen the transcript of the audio is below.
Audio Transcript:
041526-2And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show! But you’re still exhausted and because you don’t know you didn’t sleep good. You cannot believe how many people do not sleep well in this country it’s a really big problem, and it’s gonna get in that way of My plan if I don’t do this right you don’t do this right and your plan for staying alive long, okay? Sleep is critical right so I want to tell you a little story before I introduce my stellar guest right here on the Debbie Nigro show wellness Wednesday edition Keeping the live in alive it started on a random day Amtrak ride. Okay, I happened it wasn’t random. I took the Amtrak to Boston, right, but I picked a random seat So my random seat mate was sitting there all relaxed and working intensely on her computer And I said, I’m not bothering this poor girl.
0:01:29
(Speaker 1)
You know, I’m a stranger talker, but I’m just gonna chill out But at some point I’m like, hey, what are you working on? So it ends up that this very beautiful and kind of mellow person sitting next to me has this really big brain. She is not just any expert in sleep. She is a pioneer, actually, in this industry. And her name is Dr. Marie -Pierre St -Onge, PhD. And I want to welcome her to my show today because when I found out that she’s a nutrition scientist and a pioneer in the field of sleep health, I thought, my gosh, she’d be a great guest.
0:02:09
(Speaker 1)
And then she wrote a book called Eat Better, Sleep Better. So we need to know more. Hello, Dr. Marie. Hi Debbie, how are you? Good, you remember me. Absolutely, and even more random the fact that I was actually supposed to be on my way to Chicago when we met on that trip to Boston.
0:02:30
(Speaker 1)
I know. And then I said, you can’t make this up. I’m on the train going to Boston to have a really big business meeting for my new product, which is Alert Pop, which was invented to help people avoid drowsy driving, right? So when I looked over after you were working for, I don’t know, two and a half hours straight and saw you close your eyes a little bit, I’m like, oh, when she wakes up, I’m just going to give her one of these Alert Pops, okay? And I gave it to you, right? Yeah.
0:02:57
(Speaker 1)
Yeah, it was really good, actually. Yeah, and that’s before I really knew she was a sleep expert. I’m like, okay, does it work? How do you feel? And she’s like, oh, this is really good. Then I find out, I’m like, oh, maybe we can do business.
0:03:06
(Speaker 1)
So anyway, I just fell in love with her softness, her kindness. And also, when I read about you, Dr. Marie, do people call you Dr. Marie or Marie? What do they call you? Marie Pierre. Oh, Marie Pierre. So I didn’t know where the hyphen stopped and the other one went in.
0:03:24
(Speaker 1)
So it’s Dr. Marie -Pierre Saint -Ange, but Marie -Pierre is your first name. I’m Deborah Jean, but don’t tell anybody. All right. So you are the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research at Columbia University, and your cutting -edge research combines your unique expertise on sleep and nutrition and weight management to address overall health related to sleep, and you are the recipient of an outstanding Investigator Award from the NHLBI. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. You’re a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine.
0:04:01
(Speaker 1)
You’ve authored close to 170 peer -reviewed publications, and you’ve received Scientific Achievement Awards from, let’s see, the American Heart Association, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, and I just can’t get over you. Thank you. Oh my gosh. But it sounded to me as we were talking, besides you were preparing for your lectures, that the book that you just completed and you were telling me about really has you lit up. Eat Better, Sleep Better. What’s in the book?
0:04:27
(Speaker 1)
Tell us, tell everybody. Yeah, well in the book we talk about science, which is interesting, right? In the cookbook you don’t often hear about the science behind nutrition, but we talk about the science behind the association between sleep and nutrition. So what is it about sleep that influences how you eat, and then also how well you eat can influence your sleep at night. And basically that then sets up the information for eating better, to sleep better, because we know that people who have a more healthful diet have better sleep at night, and they have lower risk of developing sleep disorders. sleep difficulties over time.
0:05:13
(Speaker 1)
Is there a food or more than one food that is good to eat to help you sleep that you came across as part of these recipes? Yeah, so there are multiple foods that are instrumental to better sleep health. Foods that are higher in fiber, lower in saturated fat. In the book, we talk a lot about nuts and seeds and also foods that provide protein. We talk about tryptophan, which is found in different animal products and dairy and grains too. And so we provide a list of many different foods
0:05:50
(Speaker 1)
ingredients that people can incorporate in their own diets and do easy swaps from their own favorite recipes but also from the basis for a lot of the recipes in our book right now. So basically focusing on whole grains, we have recipes that include whole oats, buckwheat barley but also healthful protein sources of fish, shrimp, salmon and supplemented with various spices that we don’t really think of when we talk about sleep but could also be instrumental for better sleep. You know, I’m reading the list of some of them. And it makes everything taste better, too. Yeah. You mentioned tryptophan.
0:06:38
(Speaker 1)
Growing up, of course, before all this knowledge existed and there was so much science, it was like, you know, give somebody a warm cup of milk before they go to bed. Give a kid a warm cup of milk because that warming the milk trips the tryptophan. Is that true? plays a role, but I think that a warm beverage is more soothing later in the day and that may be relevant here. But yeah, dairy products contain tryptophan. and they would be important to consume.
0:07:10
(Speaker 1)
And for me, it’s more consuming throughout the day as opposed to a specific time of the day. This is a lifestyle, you know, education is basically eat better, sleep better in general, and there are a lot of people who can’t sleep. It’s a big problem in this country. The tryptophan in Turkey seems to work if you’ve ever seen a group of relatives after a Thanksgiving dinner laying on the couch, right? That’s a good one. Yeah, but to me, it’s more everything else that goes around it, right?
0:07:35
(Speaker 1)
So maybe a little too much alcohol, maybe it’s a little too warm, maybe a little too much to eat all together. Because once, you know, tryptophan is something that needs to be assimilated right so once you eat something you need to carry it all the way down your gastrointestinal tract Absorb it and then convert it so that takes several hours gotcha a lot of people can that’s why we’re privileging Consuming a healthful diet rather gay. Yeah, I love all this We’ll talk about desserts in a second because there are some sweets for sleep which I caught as a side note about your book But a lot of people complain Who do go out and say have wine or a couple of drinks or social drinkers that it affects their sleep? Is that one of the things you talk about? Yeah, we talk about that.
0:08:24
(Speaker 1)
We talk about different, how different foods can have adverse impact on sleep. But I prefer to look at healthful and positive message. Okay, got it. Me too. I think that people can pinpoint, can often pinpoint things that will be difficult for them. So maybe foods that give them heartburn, that can, you know, prevent them from sleeping well, having a large meal, close to bedtime, will interfere with sleep.
0:08:56
(Speaker 1)
Alcohol is something that people don’t necessarily associate with poor sleep because it’s a sedative and it makes it easier to fall asleep. And maybe you don’t make the link that later at night, in the second half of the night, your sleep is more disturbed when you have alcohol. Because maybe you’ve fallen asleep. Yeah, or with your face in a pie. The sweets for sleep, you know, pies lead me to this. You talk about some things in the recipe book, Eat Better, Sleep Better, and you mention, I don’t know, sesame shortbread cookies recipes in there and chamomile ginger panna cotta.
0:09:35
(Speaker 1)
Are they’re in there for a reason? Yeah, because they do also designed to also contain those ingredients and nutrients that favor sleep. And so they’re sweet, but they’re not very sweet. I got it. So all the recipes I actually tested through a nutrition software to make sure that they too high in sugar and salt and saturated fat.
0:10:10
(Speaker 1)
And I also tested them in my kitchen to make sure that they were tasty and easy to make and would be acceptable for a busy person. Yes. And a whole family. I noticed the book is authored with Kat Craddock, who’s a New York City -based editor -in -chief and CEO of Sevour magazine. So how did she get involved with you? Yes, it’s my book agent who knew her and she paired us up.
0:10:37
(Speaker 1)
And when I met her, we hit it off right away. I had looked, researched her and looked her up and I’d found a recipe that she had developed that had Quebec flavors. And I was like, oh, you know, this is so interesting because I’m from Quebec. I was like, well, she’s interested in this culture. I think it’s, I think it’s a match made in heaven. Beautiful.
0:10:56
(Speaker 1)
Yeah, it worked out well. She, we had major, you know, very frequent discussions about specific foods that we were trying to target and nutrient profiles for the recipes. So it was a nice collaboration. It’s always exciting when you find somebody that you can collaborate with who is like sort of a balance to your talents, right? And just feels happy and good. How long did it take you guys to create this recipe book?
0:11:21
(Speaker 1)
Because it’s a very beautiful book. Oh, it took several years. Yeah, I thought so. Yeah, it takes a long time. I think there’s a lot more that goes into it than I had expected. And the other thing too I want to say about Kat is that she’s very
0:11:35
(Speaker 1)
well -traveled, and she had a lot of great ideas about different cultures, different cuisines, the taste of the world that we could incorporate into this book. That would make it not specifically focused on one specific cuisine style, but that would be open to multiple different cultures. different cultures and backgrounds. This is a great gift for somebody who has trouble sleeping. If you’re just tuning in, everybody, I’m talking about how you unlock the food -sleep connection with the author of a terrific book called Eat Better, Sleep Better, Dr. Marie -Pierre Saint -Ange. In this book, what they’ve done is create recipes that trigger the body’s dietary melatonin, and serotonin, and it’s a lot like the Mediterranean diet, they kind of align there with that, with most of their recipes, and it also, she says, triggers a healthy circadian cycle.
0:12:35
(Speaker 1)
So talk to that just a little bit. Well, that’s what melatonin is about, right? So it’s about being able to fall asleep at the right time at night and staying asleep throughout the night. So it’s really the hormone that tells your body when it’s time to sleep. And so that’s what we’re going for when we’re having, savoring the foods that provide tryptophan, provide an exogenous source of melatonin as well. Let me ask you, how do you feel about those sleep trackers as a sleep expert?
0:13:12
(Speaker 1)
Because I don’t have one. I’m thinking of getting one. And have you used one yourself? What’s your opinion on them? Yeah, I use them. I use multiples, actually.
0:13:24
(Speaker 1)
You do? Yeah, I compare them amongst each other, you know, kind of a normal thing. sense. But I also think that you should have a healthy relationship with your sleep tracker in the sense that you can look at it, see how you feel in relation to what your device tells you. So don’t let it dictate your day. Don’t let it dictate how you should perceive your past sleep experience.
0:13:56
(Speaker 1)
But bring it as something that complements other sensations about your sleep. I want you to know, you’re my first sleep nerd friend. Well, thank you. That’s a pleasure. You’re welcome. It’s really nice to have had you on the show.
0:14:11
(Speaker 1)
It’s an honor. Dr. Marie -Pierre St -Onge, PhD, nutrition scientist, pioneer in the field of sleep health. She’s got this great book out right now called Eat Better, Sleep Better. And if you want to know more about that, I’ll be, of course, I posted it on the Facebook page for the Debbie Nigro Show. I’ll be putting it up on my website. You’ll be able to hear this podcast if you missed it from the beginning.
0:14:33
(Speaker 1)
And just really nice to have you along with me today. I appreciate your time and I love meeting you. That was great. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. My random run -ins are the most fun part of my show, Marie.
0:14:43
(Speaker 1)
Marie Pierre. This is actually really fun. Thank you. You’re welcome, Marie Pierre. Deborah Jean says, thank you very much. Have a great rest of your day.
0:14:52
(Speaker 1)
Thank you, you too. Okay, why do I feel like going to sleep now? I’m kidding. I’m Debbie Nigro, more to come on Keeping the Livin’ Alive here on Wellness Wednesday.
