A Tale of Two Sugars – Dr Richard Johnson - #CoSci

all right here we go for the first Speaker Dr Richard Johnson I love when they're already applauding before I got a chance is a professor of medicine known for his extensive research on Sugar's impact on health and his work on natural on the natural sugar alternative aulos please welcome Dr Richard j Johnson hello thank you very much uh citizen scientists and uh it's so wonderful to be here I want to thank David for inviting me and uh I'm going to tell a story today about A Tale of Two Sugars uh oh it's not moving okay sorry all right so everyone knows that obesity and diabetes are epidemic they've been really has increased dramatically in the last 100 years and we have our classic associations of obesity with things like uh diabetes and high blood pressure cardiovascular disease but also there are newer associations of of the metabolic syndrome with with diseases like Alzheimer's like cancer like behavioral disorders and so the question you know is is could these all be related and how can we uh you know combat these this pool of diseases that are affecting us and a lot of people have argued that obesity is simply from eating too much and we are eating more than you than we were before and because we're uh inactive and we are more inactive than we were before so is a lot of people have suggested that it's bad habits but we all know that it's not so easy to lose weight by exercising and reducing our food intake and it doesn't work very effectively a lot of us fail so what can nature teach us so we one way to view this is to look at obesity as a condition that you know is used in nature as a survival tool and many animals will most animals will maintain their weight very tightly during most of the year and if they eat too much one day they eat less the next they keep their weight regulated but there is a set of animal types of animals that will purposely become obese for example in preparation for high iation or longdistance migration and so if we can understand how they be what triggers them to become obese we might actually learn a little bit about obesity for us as well so it turns out that when when studies are done of these animals that are hibernating that will hibernate it turns out that they are biologically activated to gain weight and they you know beginning like eight weeks before uh they hibernate uh a bear will suddenly become voraciously hungry will eat huge amounts of food and I will you know and will store fat it can gain as much as 10 pounds a day and it also becomes insulin resistant it gets fatty liver it gets uh elevated fats in its blood it gets all the features that we call metabolic syndrome and it turns out that it's biologically driven so uh and now we're learning more and more that obesity is really a biologically driven disease not so much a cultural disease and we eat more because we stay hungry and we uh we sit more because we have less energy so the question is what triggers it and our group uh has done a lot of work on this and we've identified fructose which is the sugar present in Fruit uh when it's eaten in excess can trigger this biologic switch and our work uh has shown that when you uh feed an animal fructose you stimulate hunger you stimulate thirst you stimulate food intake you stimulate the process of foraging you the animals become resistant to leptin they eat more they become resistant to insulin they become pre-diabetic this actually helps maintain glucose delivery to the brain they develop some inflammation uh which probably is there to help protect them from infection they raise their blood pressure which is to maintain their circulation and they actually shift away from using oxygen they reduce their oxygen uh consumption because they suppress their mitochondria which uses oxygen to produce energy so that may make you think that sugar or fructose and fruits are bad but actually fruits you know an individual fruit has very little uh fructose relative to like a soft drink and the major source of fructose today is from sugars added sugars like high fructose corn syrup and table sugar and natural fruits contain small amounts of fructose but they also contain a lot of wonderful things and I'm not telling you not to eat fruit in fact fruit is healthy but if you eat a lot of fruit you can overcome that like fruit juice for example and so what we've suggested is that when what was meant to be a survival mechanism to forge and store fat for when you when there's no food around is now driving a lot of our diseases and that all these this markedly RI marked rise and in conditions like Alzheimer's and so forth might all be related to one particular pathway so of course if it's fructose I know we all thought including me that that means you know it's mainly sugar that's the problem sugar and high fructose corn syrup but we've known now that actually the body can make fructose and it makes fructose only one way there's only one way it makes it it makes it from carbohydrates and when you eat sugary Foods they contain fructose but when you eat starchy foods like rice potato cereal chips french fries a lot of things that we like that produces glucose the glucose goes up in your blood after you eat that rise what we call postprandial glucose actually triggers not just insulin but also a conversion of glucose to fructose and that pathway is accelerated by things like salt alcohol uh and stress so how does the fructose work this is actually the important slide everybody thought that the way you become fat is you eat too many calories like shown on the left that increases your energy the ATP which is the active energy in our body and then when the active energy fills up like you fill up a gas tank the extra energy gets stored is fat so that's what everyone thought but the actual way it works is that when you eat fructose it drops the ATP in the cell so it drops your Active Energy creating an alarm signal to eat and while at the same time it blocks the the release of ATP from U metabolizing the fat so it creates a false impression that you're a low energy which triggers all these things to stimulate fat and so forth and if you biopsy someone uh you know the liver or the muscle of a person who's overweight the ATP levels are low in the tissues uh even though they're they have excess energy on board so this is a famous study from 2008 where if you inject glucose like into an animal this case it's injected into the brain glucose is a good guy and raises ATP and uh it makes you uh satisfies hunger Hunger goes down food intake goes down this is in in a mouse by the way and if you give fructose ATP levels fall you get hungry and it triggers a food intake so it's all about the energy in the cell and I'm not going to go through this slide but basically this pathway we've actually figured out how it works and it works on the mitochondria which are these little uh things in the cells that make ATP it suppresses the production of ATP and that keeps the ATP levels low and that triggers food intake and the principal driver is a substance called uric acid which is only produced from fructose of all the carbohydrates and fructose generates this uric acid to do this so you might look at this guy and you say hey is he a high energy individual you know is he like up and fired up with a lot of energy no he's fatigued and tired and he has all these conditions but if you actually measure the energy in him his total energy is high because although his ATP is low the active energy his stored energy is very high so his total energy is high and this is what fructose tries to do it tries to increase your energy uh by increasing your fat and decreasing your Active Energy so what can we do well I'm going to you know i' I've talked plenty of times on how this drives metabolic syndrome and diabetes and obesity I'm going to just hit a couple neurologic diseases and show you how this happens so let's look at Alzheimer's Alzheimer's disease is uh increasing significantly uh it was extraordinarily rare uh in before 1950 it's now like the seventh most common cause of death and some places it's increasing even more it's due to this uh atrophy of the brain with these amalo plaes uh and it's been a huge uh mission for Pharma to try to develop ways to block Alzheimer's they made like 20 different drugs to block the plaques and guess what it works like crap it doesn't work at all trying to inhibit the amalo plaqu was not really an effective way to prevent Alzheimer's so people said hey we should look at what happens early in Alzheimer's before the brain really shrivels up can we actually uh intervene earlier and so when they look early they find three phenomenon present in the brains of of early Alzheimer's there's insulin resistance which we know as a fructose effect systemically there's mitochondrial dysfunction and low ATP that's also a fructose effect there's inflammation that's a fructose effect could it be fructose that's involved in Alzheimer's well the risk factors for Alzheimer's are also the risk factors that are associated with metabolic syndrome eating high glycemic carbs eating uh sugar a high salt diet other Ultra processed foods are all associated with this and in fact studies like the N hannes have shown that the more sugar you eat the worse your memory is both short-term memory and long-term memory there's a direct link between sugar intake and memory not only that there's a direct link between sugar and how big your brain is when you eat a lot of sugar your brain starts to shrink that's been shown not only and the the main area that involves memory recent memory which is the most sensitive place that's hit is called the hippocampus and the more you drink sugar soft drinks It's associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus that's not good so there's a link between sugar intake and and dementia if you give fructose to uh to laboratory rats they have trouble getting through a maze and it happens within sever weeks and it takes like a month or two to recover when you stop the sugar sometimes they don't recover at all completely and and not only that when you look at that hippocampus or other areas of the brain involved in memory and cognition you can show that fructose induces insulin resistance in the brain which we know is the earliest finding in Alzheimer's it induces oxidative stress in the brain an early feature of Alzheimer's it reduces mitochondrial production of ATP that's a fructose specific effect we see it with fructose intake but that's what we see in early Alzheimer's and in fact if you keep giving fructose guess what happens after about 18 weeks they develop amalo plaques they developed this towel protein basically I can tell you that fructose is likely the cause of Alzheimer's and we published this recently and it's uh anyway uh so here's a very interesting thing a paper just came out showing that you can block dementia in an in diabetic Animals by blocking fructose metabolism and so on the top row here the DB I should label that DB DB means diabetes so a diabetic Mouse has high fructose levels in the brain has a high uh levels of the transporter for fructose has a high level of the fructose enzyme that drives the low ATP and has a low ATP that's that you know is low ATP they they have cognition problems now if you block that if you inject a treat an anti-sense to block that fructokinase in the brain suddenly the animals improve dramatically and they can they learn how to uh go through a water maze which they couldn't do before so the diabetic animal takes a long time to get through the maze but the treated diabetic animal goes back to normal so you can reverse early dementia by blocking fructose metabolism and and also you can do this trick where you on the water maze you put these little platforms where they have to get to and if you move a platform uh if you uh the animals are in trouble if they're diabetic and they developing Demetra they can't find it but if you reverse that fructose you can reverse it they can find the plat form so what about humans well this is a study in humans Alzheimer's patients have sixfold higher fructose levels in their brain they have low ATP I can tell you that this is the cause of Alzheimer's not only that how do they get it well when you eat sugar you do get fructose levels going up in the brain but you know what's the major way to raise fructose in the brain carbs high glycemic carbs french fries potatoes because that makes the brain produce fructose this is a study in humans from Yale within 45 minutes of starting of putting a person raising their blood glucose they're making fructose in the brain and that's a lot of fructose it's actually the Blue Line uh go and and that's the increase from zero that's actually turns out to be a lot uric acid is how fructose works this is a big huge study 3 75 metabolites they call it a metabolomic study only one of them out of 375 metabolites there was one that was a dramatic increased risk for uh for uh dementia and you know what it was uric acid urate is another word for uric acid it's it's not on the the normal line it's so high uh and there's other studies that have shown this and we know that you know uric acid in the brain blocks mitochondrial ATP and uh can trigger uh low energy levels in the brain oh here's another study again this one looked at uh 400 I'm sorry 52 studies 45 risk factors only one linked with increased risk for dementia elevated uric acid and they did it through a mandalian thing so they looked at the genetics of it so if you genetically have a high uric acid it's not good so what we think is that processed foods junk Foods uh Tri that they don't just drive obesity they drive fructose production in the brain generate uric acid suppressed causes neuroinflammation insulin resistance in the brain knocks down ATP causes Alzheimer's it's reverse and it if you hit it early you can probably reverse it keto diets low glycemic diets are the way to go you guys are all here for a good reason you all all believe in keto diets I think and it they are really a great way to prevent Alzheimer's so why would why would high glycemic carbs cause Alzheimer's the reason is because high glycemic carbs trigger fructose production fructose triggers foraging foraging is where you go looking for food it's actually it's a wonderful quality to be because you have to be you have to be brave adventurous excitement seeking you have to go into areas where no one's been you have to be like an adventurer you have to be brave you have to be uh able to assess the world quickly you have to can't deliberate it's actually a successful Behavior it allows you to find food more easily but how do you do that the way you do it is you have to turn on the visual cues so you can see the food see that little red dot that's when you give fructose to a human the visual cues to pick out the cake and the food is immediate it's immediate you go oh my God where's the food the blood flow when you give glucose the first few minutes glucose takes 45 minutes to convert to fructose so if you give a five 15minute test you're actually looking at what glucose does and what frose do us when you give glucose blood supply goes up to the brain ATP goes up for the first few minutes till it converts to fructose but if you give fructose blood flow goes down to the brain it goes down in the areas of self-control they don't want you to have self-control they want you to be able to go into the lion's den they want don't want you to have vivid memory of how dangerous it is so they fructose lowers the blood flow to the hippocampus you know this is how it works it's supposed to be a good thing it is good in some respects if you raise uric acid in the animal the same thing you take a mouse you raise this uric acid it becomes exploratory it's it gets hyperactive it starts looking around for things it could goes it actually initially goes farther distances it forages but when it's not foraging it will rest Like a Rock to conserve its energy and studies in humans also have linked huric acid with excitement seing seeking and impulsivity so that's why that happened but you know what this also tells us what's causing behavioral disorders you probably know that ADHD attention deficit disorder and bipolar disease are increasing dramatically they've increased in parallel with sugar intake they uh linked with sugar intake both bipolar disease and also with high glycemic carbs recently it's been shown that ADHD is a type of foraging Behavior they did this one group just published a study showing that if you have ADHD and they test you for being able to find like berries in an online game system you will find more berries than the normal person you're going to be more successful at finding the food you're going to be more successful at forging and going to different places so you won't stay at one place long very long when it's when it starts being depleted you the first one to leave this is what this study shows think about it having ADHD actually is a is a CH you're a champion because you you can you actually can forge this was a successful Behavior the trouble is when you're doing it all the time it starts to decrease the blood supply and drops the energy in the brain and and people like with bipolar disease they tend to be insulin resistant they heat eat high carbs they have high uric acid levels and look at this they have very high fructose levels in their brain this is human studies it correlates directly with an hospitalization rate bipolar disease is due to intracerebral fructose production that lowers ATP and it was meant to be a good thing but when it's overactive it's bad so what are our Solutions well these keto diets are fantastic this is a paper from Georgia edes uh Chris Palmer has done similar work you put people on a low carb diet you can improve people you can improve their behavior you can reduce their risk for dementia it isn't just obesity some people like to get OIC to lose weight you get aifi it's good look at the dramatic weight loss it's expensive a lot of side effects and it recurs there must be better Solutions so as a I have to confess that my you know I got so in i' I've been studying fructose for 25 years and I was approached by uh people uh RX sugar is a company that markets uh allulose which is a sugar that looks like fructose but it's just one slight change and I got interested in it because it's does not activate the switch it does not drop the energy and so I joined the company and I'm halftime a professor and halftime with the company so that's my disclosure but I did it because I believe that this is actually a great potential solution so what the heck is allulose it's a natural sugar it's uh you know found in wheat and other things it's low calorie it's low glycemic it's sweet uh everyone's eating some we just not eating enough and what happens is uh when you eat allulose uh it gets absorbed and then not metabolized and then excreted through the urine uh and a little bit gets excreted through the gut and um it does not activate this bicarb switch I mean this fructose switch it does not activate this survival fit and it has some added benefits and those added benefits includes that it reduces the glucose response this is the only low calorie sugar that actually reduces the rise in glucose after a meal it actually stimulates this thing called glip one which is what OIC does but it only do it's a natural stimulant and it stimulates only during uh for a couple hours after you eat so you get this little boost that keeps the glucose levels down uh so it will reduce the amount of fructose produced uh it blocks fructose absorption as well because it competes with the fructose transporter uh and it has a lot of other benefits and so uh if you give it to animals you can see that it stimulates glip one this is the same thing that uh OIC does or OIC is a glip one Agonist that is present elevated all the time but uh and if you give it to humans you get a really whopping glip one response it suppresses food intake because of that so if you take allulose like a chocolate bar you can actually reduce your your stimulate some satiety and it can block weight gain this is in animals this mice they get less fat you can improve their diabetes it looks it's really good uh you know and it uh can reduce body weight this is a human study it doesn't have the big effect that that um you know that OIC does but it you know we've had some people uh lose you know 5050 pounds but it you know not everyone does that uh it blocks if you give it with sugar it blocks the rise like in table sugar this is sucrose or table sugar this is human studies it really blocks that rise in glucose and remember that's what triggers the fructose production in the brain and it affects uh it's been shown to help diabetics so if you have type 2 diabetes and you're taking it it will help keep that Sugar following a meal tight more tight within the range that you want it this was a study that was done in in Egypt actually uh it blocks leaky gut my work shows that leaky gut is the cause of uh anaphylactic uh you know food allergies to peanuts and so forth because you have to get those peanut antigens across the gut into the blood um it's important for the origin of celiac disease where you get the gluten across the gut if you if you can block a leaky gut you're going to block the development of celiac disease and Crohn's disease is also linked with sugar intake and may involve similar Pathways it you know it improves exercise endurance if your mouse I don't know about a human okay but it does if you're if your mous it increases glycogen in the muscle which leads to a little bit better performance we need to do studies in humans okay but bottom line is um you know oh here's a study where it improved cognition so the way again remember uh you the problem with with cognition is if you make fructose in the brain and it's made by a particular cell called the microa uh and that cell has the fructose transporter so if allulose can block that lower U it also probably lowers uric acid and these are benefits that can lead to improved outcomes in ability to uh to to to to think logically and so forth and if you give you know fructose or glucose you get all these changes in in blood flow to the brain with allulose you don't so so I've talked to you about The Tale of Two Sugars The Bad and The Good fructose is the bad it blocks the mitochondria and it lowers ATP and that is the mechanism M that seems to drive behavioral disorders it's the mechanism driving dementia and it's also uh driving all these other things but it was meant to be good transiently dropping it makes you eat more it helps you store fat so you can you know survive winter but we're not hibernating we're just continuing to eat so this is why it's bad uh Chris Palmer is I want to say that he is a fantastic guy we're going to be collaborating with him uh to look at some of these effects on behavior and as well as uh you know on dementia and alilo seems to be a good sugar we need to know more about it I'm just learning more about it but it does look like a great fructose substitute it's low calorie it's sweet it's metabolically healthy it stimulates glyp one it lowers uric acid at least we believe it does we're going to do more studies on that it promote weight loss Etc so thank you very much I'll can take questions for a [Applause] minute we have a little bit of time for questions if somebody wants to ask a question real quick go ahead add add yeah so so sugar is addicting to many many uh you can make an animal addicted to Sugar we've done it uh and is similar to alcohol we can make an animal addicted to alcohol not all animals get addicted to alcohol not all animals get addicted to Sugar but most do we've actually identified that this fructose enzyme is is what drives addiction it's not taste we've been able to you can make an addicted mouse that can't taste sugar and it will be addicted to Sugar but if you block the fructose metabolism keep the ATP levels normal they don't get addiction we think addiction is from the ATP you know makes you feel like your energy is low and you got to eat more and so we think that that's the mechanism we've actually you know published it I have a grant from the NIH $6 million Grant because when we block fructose metabolism we block alcoholism and so the alcohol Institute at the NIH funded us to develop a fructose inhibitor to block alcoholism yes well maybe yeah one more one more question I have and sacin which is the one that was published in nature that does induce insulin resistance through a gut microbiome pathway interestingly we find very subtle evidence for the others uh and they do not cause obesity but a lot of the artificial sugars they don't have benefits they they're more neutral or they could be negative because you know it is true if you keep eating sweets that seems to the the taste buds does make you want to continue to eat sweets but the addiction is actually not driven driven by taste it's driven by uh by the metabolism no I would love to I I really I think it should be done we're gonna have to wrap it here thank you so much Dr Johnson

Channel: Dave Feldman

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Length: 31min 57sec (1917 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024