Marie-Pierre St-Onge says Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and Tostitos fried in corn oil had better lipid profiles than other snacks

The Cheeto, somehow, has entered the cardiometabolic chat. On Huberman Lab, Marie-Pierre St-Onge said a Frito-Lay funded study found Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and Tostitos fried in corn oil produced a better lipid profile than the study’s comparison snacks.

This is the sort of sentence that makes nutrition Twitter put down its psyllium husk and sprint toward the quote-tweet button. It also needs a fire extinguisher. St-Onge is not saying a family-size bag of Cool Ranch is basically salmon. She is saying that in a controlled snack substitution study, the corn-oil chips beat other snack conditions on lipid markers. That is real, limited, and extremely funny.

This was funded by Frito-Lay. At that time they had changed the oil that they were using to fry their corn chips. So this was Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, and Tostitos.

The brand roll call is what makes the moment sing. Not “a corn-based snack matrix.” Doritos. Fritos. Cheetos. Tostitos. The Four Horsemen of the vending machine. St-Onge says the company had switched the frying oil to corn oil and wanted to know whether that change had a health effect compared with other snack choices.

And yeah, the the the better lipid profile was the one with was the one from the the corn chips. They had the better lipid. Yeah. And they had less uh lipoprotein little A, which is another you know, factor cardiometabolic risk factor.

The snack aisle didn’t become a cardiology clinic

Here is the adult version. The study was funded by Frito-Lay. It ran 25 days per arm, with participants rotating through three snack conditions. The corn chips were compared with a low-fat, high-carbohydrate snack and a high-fat snack. The lipid markers looked better in the corn-chip condition.

That finding fits a familiar nutrition pattern: when polyunsaturated fats replace saturated fats, blood lipid markers often improve. Corn oil is a seed oil, which means this little finding lands directly in the internet’s most exhausting food fight. Huberman, to his credit, names the fight: seed oils look better than saturated fats in many head-to-head studies, but people object to the processed-food package they usually arrive in. St-Onge’s answer is refreshingly boring. Different oils have different smoke points. Liquid oils are generally better than fats solid at room temperature. Butter is not Voldemort. Read the label.

The verdict: the chip result is plausible, but it is not permission to launder ultra-processed snacks into wellness. It is a substitution finding, on biomarkers, in a short study, funded by the company whose products were being tested. That doesn’t make it fake. It makes it a result with a very small leash.

The useful claim is less crunchy

The less viral but more useful part of the episode is St-Onge’s core argument about sleep and nutrition: bad sleep nudges you toward worse eating, and worse eating nudges you toward worse sleep. Not spiritually. Mechanically.

In one sleep-restriction study, men showed increased ghrelin, the hunger signal, while women showed reduced GLP-1, a satiety signal. The sex split matters because the older literature had often been done in men only. Combine the groups, and the effect can vanish. Separate them, and the biology starts waving its arms.

Then St-Onge flips the arrow. What you eat changes the night you get. In her lab’s inpatient work, when participants self-selected food instead of eating the controlled diet, they ate more calories and more saturated fat, took much longer to fall asleep, and got less slow-wave sleep. The most practical sleep supplement may be dinner behaving itself.

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 sugars, more arousals.

That quote is the episode’s fridge-magnet science. Fiber, more deep sleep. Saturated fat, less deep sleep. Simple sugars, more arousals. You may not fully wake up, but your sleep gets knocked from deeper stages into lighter ones, like a bouncer moving you from the VIP room to the hallway.

Industry funding, null results, and the boring scandal

The best part of the Frito-Lay detour is not the chips. It is St-Onge’s explanation of industry-funded research. She does not pretend the optics are pristine. She also does not accept the lazy assumption that company-funded means cooked.

Some of the studies that I haven’t been able to publish have been funded by industry that have had null results.

Her more depressing point is that null results often die because journals don’t want them, not because companies always bury them. That is the quieter scandal in metabolic health: the drawer full of “nothing happened” studies that could have saved everyone time, money, and several thousand confident supplement threads.

So yes, the corn-oil chip result is the headline because it is the thing a normal person would Google with one eyebrow raised. But the actual takeaway is stricter and less snackable. If you want better sleep, eat earlier, eat more fiber, go easier on saturated fat and refined carbs, and don’t let a biomarker win for Cheetos become a personality.