Dr Robert Lustig - How To Protect The Liver and Feed The Gut

in this episode i'm going to be talking to dr robert lustig [Applause] [Music] robert is professor emeritus of the pediatric division of endocrinology at the university of california in san francisco robert specializes in the field of treating or hormonal disorders in children and he's very interested in how the brain controls hormones and how hormones control the brain he was head of the university pediatric obesity program for 17 years robert has fostered a global discussion of metabolic health and has exposed some of the leading myths that underlie the current pandemic of diet related diseases he believes that the food business by pushing processed foods loaded with sugar has hacked our bodies and our minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness this he believes has fostered today's epidemic of addiction and depression robert is a global best-selling author and his presentation on youtube sugar the bitter truth has been viewed 8.9 million times robert thank you for for joining us it's been an ambition of mine for many years to have a chat with you and when we both spoke at the phc uh earlier in the year we we sort of our past didn't really cross very long uh i wasn't there for very long you flew in and flew out but your sleep absolutely fantastic i want to spend most of the time talking about the book the hacking of the american mind and explaining to people the difference between pleasure and happiness but before we do for the sake of the uk audience who maybe maybe don't know you as well as uh as you know in america give us your background story you know where you've come from you know what drives you uh your experiences and and then we'll get on to some of the books that you've written okay first of all thanks for having me second of all it's not the hacking of the american mind it's the hacking of the british mind it's the hacking of the french minds the hacking of the german mystacking of the contemporary mind um this is a global phenomenon and um there's a reason why this is happening and we're gonna you know explore it so you know people ask me all the time you know like how'd you get here and like to be honest i'm not even sure how i got here i went where the data took me and so i'll sort of do the really really fast version so i'm a neuroendocrinologist i treat hormone disorders in children and i'm interested in how the brain controls hormones and how hormones control the brain i was the head of the ucsf pediatric obesity program for 17 years so how i got here is i can sort of sum up in like one word uh sentences i went from obesity to insulin to metabolic syndrome to sugar to addiction to technology and that's how i got here so throughout the hour we'll link all those dots up and let me just quickly say at the beginning for those that haven't seen your youtube presentation first of all where have you all been uh 8.9 million people have watched you on youtube uh with your brilliant sort of presentation sugar the bit of truth uh i've watched it probably three or four times so maybe it's eight million nine hundred and thousand less three or four times because they're me um tell everybody about sugar and the bitter truth and then we'll get to hacking the american mind yeah um so in 2007 i gave a talk at the nih they asked me to speak at a uh their 100th anniversary of public health and they celebrated you know the gains that they had made in environmental exposures in public health on the first day so like for instance lead poisoning and pollution and asthma and the second day was for the new challenges so it was going to be about metabolic syndrome it's going to be about add and autism so they asked me what did i think was the biggest exposure that led to metabolic syndrome and they expected me to come up with some chemical in the water or you know some pollutant pollutant or something like that you know that they could normally uh you know potentially just get rid of and i was sitting there getting ready for this talk and i thought to myself what are the two diseases that children now get that they never got before these was type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease these two and i pulled out my biochemistry text and i said all right type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease and i looked at what normally causes those two things which was alcohol and i said all right well what's like alcohol and then it was just right there on the page fructose fructose is metabolized in the liver just like alcohol i said oh my god here it is it's just staring me in the page and that book was you know published in 1971 and the funny part was i was a nutrition and by a nutritional biochemistry major in college and i knew it back then and then i went to medical school and they beat it out of me told me it was all about calories so i went to this meeting and i said i think sugar is the reason for this and i explained why and i showed the mechanisms and the pathways and i gave my talk and then was the bathroom break and nobody came back i thought that's weird i went outside to see why and everyone was basically like oh my god oh my god oh my god he's right he's right he makes this makes perfect sense they said you have to go tell everybody about this this is the nih you say and that's sorry in the uk the nih is the national institute of health it'd be like your mrc okay uh and that was like the start of it and then in 2009 i gave this talk to the general public called sugar the bitter truth you know as part of ucsf's mini med school for the public as a public service and i basically connected the dots and now there are nine million views and sugar taxes around the world including at the in the uk because the science is there and it makes sense and people are starting to understand that it makes sense to be honest with you it makes sense to everybody except for one uh the food industry and they're battling back like crazy so this has become a public policy and also now a litigation issue sure and for those that um haven't heard the phrase metabolic syndrome before which i think was it raven that originally in the state sort of coined the phrase and worked out about insulin resistance maybe explain a little bit more what metabolic syndrome is please sure so metabolic syndrome are the constellation of diseases that travel with obesity so type 2 diabetes hypertension lipid problems cardiovascular disease cancer dementia fatty liver disease polycystic ovarian disease turns out these this is now 75 of all health care costs in both the us and in the uk well yeah and you you put a large percentage of that down to what we're eating consuming so people thought this was about obesity turns out it's not about obesity it is true that obesity travels with these diseases i don't argue that it is true that obesity is a risk factor for these diseases i don't argue that too but normal weight people get all of those diseases as well in fact clinical depression causes weight loss but causes these diseases through the same mechanism just not through subcutaneous you know the fat you can see turns out this is the fat you can't see it's the fat in your organs it's the fat in your liver and there are ways you get it it turns out sugar is the most potent way of driving fat in your liver which drives all of these diseases and now we've demonstrated the mechanism we even have the molecule we even have the intermediate by which sugar is metabolized that causes all of these diseases it's called methylglyoxal it is an intermediary metabolite of the sugar fructose and it poisons the liver cell and in the process drives all of these chronic metabolic diseases so we now have molecule to disease disease to medical calamity medical calamity to agricultural disaster agricultural disaster to planetary uh immolation i mean basically we've gone from molecule to planet with one concept and you know this is worrisome this is something the you know public needs to understand in order to be able to turn this around and do you think the the only chance of reversing this is the education part which then might change compute consumer habits and only by changing those consumer habits with knowledge we can maybe get out of this mess well so i think it has to start with education okay education is necessary but it's not sufficient okay education has not solved any substance of abuse yet did nancy reagan's just say no work we have an opioid crisis all right the fact the matter is that's the definition of addiction you can know that whatever it is you're addicted to is ruining your life your health your family your community your economy and your powerless to do anything about it that's why it's addictive because education alone can't solve it because the biochemical drive to continue to consume is too great so for everything that's addictive whether it be substances or behaviors for that matter like gambling shopping pornography social media internet gaming um for everything that's addictive we have personal intervention which for lack of a better word we can call rehab and education is a primary driver of rehab but not a lot not a successful alone and also societal intervention which for lack of a better work we can call laws rehab and laws rehab and laws we have rehab and laws for tobacco for alcohol for street drugs heroin morphine etc okay for sugar we have nothing now we have rehab and laws for gambling now but for internet gaming for social media for pornography even really no rehab and laws so um we still have a problem and um you know linking the mechanism to the policy is absolutely essential because you have to bring the public along with you in terms of being able to do something about it and so you have to educate first but ultimately the education as i said is necessary not sufficient you can't educate your way out of this problem these problems ultimately education allows you to you know soften the playing field so that you can ultimately do something societally that does work okay so i think we're going to get to your book hacking the american mind faster than we thought we would because i think from reading your book what you're saying is that addiction comes because we're chasing too much pleasure and not chasing enough happiness and the confusion of what is pleasure and what is happiness is that correct right so so the reason they wrote the book is you know fat chance my original book was about diet and physical health hacking is more about diet and behavioral health and as i was you know doing the research for fat chance it was very clear that we had this burgeoning literature on diet and behavioral health and we had this addiction and depression you know a mega crisis going on you know not just in the u.s but you know really throughout the world today 4.4 percent of the entire world has been diagnosed with clinical depression that's a 20 increase in a decade that's fine the question is you know where does this come from and you know what are we going to do about it my thesis in the book and the reason i wrote the book is because i believe that we as a society have lost track of these two positive emotions pleasure and happiness we think they're the same we've been told they're the same and i think we've been told they're the same by the people who want us to buy stuff to quote get happy because they have something to sell hedonics sell in fact four out of the top ten exports of the united states are hedonic substances oil corn soy sugar so this is a gravy train this is a juggernaut for the industries that are involved in selling them and so they want us to buy them so they tell us these things will make us happy but pleasure and happiness are not the same in fact i would argue that they are diametrically opposite they seem like they are related they're both positive emotions we like them both so like why should we care well i'm going to give you seven differences between pleasure and happiness that i outline in the book and then i'll explain to you why we should care so pleasure is short-lived like a meal you know for an hour and get over it happiness is long-lived like for a lifetime pleasure is visceral you feel it in your body happiness is ethereal you feel it above the neck pleasure is taking happiness is giving pleasure is experienced alone happiness is usually experienced in social groups pleasure is achievable with substances happiness is not achievable with substances which of course is why those substances are there for us the extremes of pleasure whether it be substances or behaviors and like i said substances could be nicotine cocaine tobacco alcohol street drugs heroin working sugar or behaviors uh shopping gambling internet social media pornography in the extreme all of these lead to addiction so there's an aholic after every one of those shopaholic sexaholic chocoholic alcoholic at seven set but there's no such thing as being addicted to too much happiness and then finally number seven and the reason i wrote the book pleasure is dopamine happiness is serotonin so two different neurotransmitters in the brain two different sets of receptors two different mechanisms of action two different regulatory pathways these are not the same two different areas to bring where they work in so like why do we care like so what they both feel good and in fact that's kind of what the public did it was say so what well i think it matters a lot and i think that one of the reasons we're in this boat is because we lost track of this so and you can kind of understand why we lost track of it can't you because even many um the dictionaries many google places where you're going to find out what words mean confuse the whole thing up i totally agree i couldn't agree more and actually you know who did it probably the food companies nope the pharmaceutical companies nope you know you know who originally coalesced these two concepts of pleasure and happiness no i don't right there in london really if you go to the center of the university college london campus there is a statue of the guy who screwed it up his name is jeremy bentham the founder of ucl okay that's all it's all his fault so maybe we'll take responsibility in great britain for getting happiness and pleasure wrong but then again you gave us hansel keys and we screwed the whole dart that's so sweet so maybe we're even there yeah maybe maybe so bentham turns out he was a odd bird to say the least he had asperger's you know i mean in retrospect we can diagnose him now and he went around trying to quantitate happiness they put metrics on everything as to happiness and he very very uh famously equated um uh he said you know the avoidance of pain is paramount but there are lots of ways to avoid pain and pleasure and happiness basically amount to the same thing wow and unfortunately for us uh his uh work got promulgated and it ended up becoming the basis of the german stock market and um i don't know why but it did and then the americans when we developed our stock market we based hours on the german stock market so basically money became the major issue and money became sort of the source of happiness up to that point that would you know had not been sort of the case then the next thing that happened was 1929 and the great depression and we needed in the united states we needed a metric for being able to figure out whether or not we were doing better to climb out of this and uh that that same year a metric called gdp gross domestic product was advanced and the uh formula for gdp is consumption plus investment plus government plus exports minus imports so consumption is the primary driver of gdp now the guy who uh invented this uh formula simon kuznets very famously said that you cannot infer the health of a population from its wealth or its income so he cautioned people from you know using this inappropriately didn't matter you know just like we conflated and confused pleasure and happiness we conflated and confused help with gdp and you know i can prove to you gdp is not the right answer because gdp is food plus pharma whereas health is food minus pharma sure so it's very clear that health and gdp have nothing to do with each other right off the bat but nonetheless that's what we did because you know we're screwed up okay and then in 19 1970s we screwed it up even more so up to that point we were basically all keynesians you know john maynard keynes another brit who basically understood the difference between pleasure and happiness himself and you know wrote about it consistently and then came along at the university of chicago school led by a guy named milton friedman who basically said that it corporations are basically people and of course you know we've codified that now with citizens united and the job of a corporation is to generate happiness and of course the way to do that is to generate as much money as possible again by you know making money the issue and you know up to that point keynesian economics was regulated capitalism and what friedman said was anything that detracts from the production of money uh was basically the antithesis to happiness and he advocated unregulated capitalism which is of course is what we have today and in the process what we have done is we have made everybody fat sick stupid addicted and broke uh because we have peddled hedonics because those are what sell and we have made everybody miserable and sick and we have basically destroyed the economies of countries all over the world through chronic disease so the question is is this okay well and what are we gonna do about it yeah the answer is definitely no it's not okay and uh yeah looks like you're really bringing that i mean i'd never you everybody knows that phrase you know money can't buy you love um and everybody knows lots of phrases money doesn't really make you happy i have sex you know i mean you can you can buy you some pleasure yeah but it can't buy you happiness and um you know people don't recognize the difference and by seeking these short-term dopamine hits they uh are actually doing themselves damage so the question you know so this then becomes a scientific argument why is dopamine bad when we always thought dopamine was good right what gets you up out of bed in the morning the whole concept of reward is necessary for survival of the species after all if there was no dopamine there'd be no sex and if there was no sex there'd be no you know babies and if there's no babies there's no human race all true i don't argue that very very true can i just jump in there though rob and just say for those that are maybe one step uh remove that haven't yet quite understood the difference between dopamine and serotonin can you just quickly explain that these are two processes that happen in the brain what those processes do and how one is linked to short-term sort of pleasure and one is linked to long-term happiness for me please very good very very important so dopamine is a neurotransmitter it is a chemical that neurons make that tell other neurons what to do they are released from one neuron go across the synapse the little cleft between neurons bind to proteins on the next neuron called receptors so the dopamine binds to a receptor like so and in the process causes that neuron to fire and in the process of firing we get emotions we get behaviors we get pleasure so dopamine is the pleasure neurotransmitter it is the motivation neurotransmitter it is the positive reinforcement neurotransmitter it is the neurotransmitter that basically tells our brain this feels good i want more i want to do this again so it dopamine is the source of habit it is why you develop habits of various sorts so it's not that dopamine is not important it is important and it's not that you can do without dopamine because if you didn't have dopamine you would be a sloth you would have no reason to get out of bed you'd have no reason to do anything so don't be matters but here's the problem with dopamine dopamine is excitatory so it always excites the next neuron when it's released it excites the name but meiosis receptors excites the next neuron now neurons like to be excited they like to be stimulated that's why they have receptors in the first place but neurons like to be tickled not bludgeoned chronic over stimulation of any neuron leads to neuronal cell death and we know this because i take care of kids i'm a pediatrician i take care of kids in the neural intensive care unit who are having chronic seizure disorders you know are in status epilepticus non-stop seizures we have to put these kids into pentobarbital coma to stop their seizures while we get a handle on it because the longer they seize the more neurons they're going to fry and the more developmentally delayed they're going to be so chronic over stimulation of any neuron is not good leads to neuronal cell death now can i just one quick question there then so i used to drink too much and it was a problem to stop drinking so much and yet in the early days i had one glass of wine and i didn't want a second one then a few months later it was two glasses of wine and that was enough and then but then that didn't do anything and then i'd need half a bottle of wine then a bottle of wine and then eventually when i went i've got to stop doing this a bottle of wine was doing nothing for me is that the same thing and is it a bit like almost insulin resistance if you keep shoving you know the sugar at the fat cells eventually it says hey i've had enough it's kind of shorter yeah so basically look neurons like to be excited that's why they have receptors but they don't want to die so neurons have a plan b they have a self-defense mechanism what they do is they down regulate the number of receptors so it's less likely that any given dopamine molecule will find the receptor to bind to so more dopamine fewer receptors means less signal less signal means less benefit less buzz and so you end up needing more and more to get less and less and that's the phenomenon that we call tolerance which is what you just described so here's how it works you get a hit you get a rush receptors go down next time you need a bigger hit to get the same rush receptors go down you need a bigger hit and a bigger hit and a bigger hit just like you described so huge hit to get nothing now you got tolerance and then when the neurons actually do start to die now you got addiction and the thing is when neurons die they don't come back they're gone for good so when you kill those neurons in that reward center that means you're never going to get the gain you're never going to get the amplitude of the response that you originally got which means you're never really gonna get the same pleasure that you did before and this is of course the reason for recidivism from addiction and why people go back to using because they're trying to get back what they knew they had and they can't get it and so they're miserable and they try again and then of course they end up using a dose say of opioids for instance that you know gave them that level which turns out to now be too much because now they're you know they've been weaned off and then that's too much and then they die which is the reason for all the opioid overdoses is because of this recidivism and the fact that these neurons are dead so we know this we you know this is not you know new data this is not rocket science you know we understand this so dopamine kills neurons dopamine is excitotoxic all neurotransmitters that stimulate neurons are in the extreme excitotoxic so that's not good so serotonin on the other hand this neurotransmitter this feels good i don't want or need any more i'm zen the zen neurotransmitter the contentment neurotransmitter the relaxation almost neurotransmitter okay it's not excitatory it's inhibitory it inhibits the next neuron it keeps it from fight error so if you're inhibiting the next neuron do you have to down regulate the receptors you're not trying to protect yourself because you know there's nothing to protect from so serotonin does not down regulate its own receptor so you can't overdose from too much happiness but there's one thing that down regulates serotonin dopamine right so the more pleasure you seek the more unhappy you get so the more rewards you're after whether that be alcohol whether it be drugs whether that be sex short term rewards too much food big meals sugar rushes all if you're constantly searching for more reward right now it actually down regulates happiness in the long term exactly and so if you don't know the difference between pleasure and happiness and pleasure is cheap you're going to overload on that because you can and make yourself extraordinarily miserable and so addiction and depression are actually two sides of the same coin and they're driven by the same five changes in our environment which have occurred over the last 50 years they are technology processed food sugar sleep deprivation drugs all five of those are dopamine stimulators all five of those drive reward and all five of those also lead to metabolic syndrome all these diseases which then leads to low serotonin then add some stress on top of that and what stress by affecting an area of the brain right here in the front called the prefrontal cortex stress puts that prefrontal cortex to sleep stress basically tells your inhibitory center your executive function center your jiminy cricket of your brain the part of your brain that keeps you from doing stupid things tells you don't do that because you'll pay for it tomorrow that's what the prefrontal cortex does but stress puts that to sleep basically i'm only worried about today i'm not worried about tomorrow okay i am now a lizard because there's only today because you've basically taken your prefrontal cortex offline that's what stress does what that does is that revs up dopamine even more and also uh cortisol the uh the stress hormone reduces the receptors for serotonin thereby making you even more unhappy so addiction depression driven by the same phenomena those five things that have happened to our environment add some stress mix you know add water and stir and that's what the you know that's what the paradigm is and unfortunately not just the food industry but the technology the gaming industry you know uh virtually you know every uh you know hedonic uh uh substance or behavior industry has figured this out and are peddling it and we're getting sick well they they figured it out but what i read in your book was very interesting they they've obviously at the high level figured out rewards uh pleasure and happiness of different things but they're trying to sell use the word happiness when really they know deep down what they're selling is pleasure so we have this happy hour the happy meal this is all things that sort of you've quoted so i don't want to see happiness coca-cola's campaign for 10 years you know i love to show a slide of raisin bran okay you got raisin bran in the uk [Music] oh you know raisin bread okay well it the it's got raisins falling from the sky and the uh the tagline is the road to your happy place is paved with raisins and flakes wow and pavement right basically telling you if you're fat it's your fault yeah fact matter is the raisins that are falling from the sky are not the raisins and raisin bread because the raisins in raisin bran are coated in sugar on purpose to get you to eat it the good news is that here in the united states raisin bran is now not heart healthy because of that added sugar so they had to remove the claim the health claim because it has been demonstrated that they were full of crap in the first place crikey i tell you what i did when i read your book i got a pen and paper and just the week before i was talking to a professor about the ph scale of water and maybe we should be having you know more alkaline water than acidic and i went ph i went oh pleasure happiness so i drew this scale 1 to 14. and i sat down i've got seven children and i sat down with with they're not the youngest but the next four you've got seven children yes i know what causes it now and it's all critical i think i've been seeking too much pleasure and not happiness although that may be one example where you eventually get more happiness but maybe not but i i sat there i said right let's think of lots of different words and we think through the book and we looked at you know uh things that make give you pleasures and they give you happiness and we're trying to put them on the scale uh and it was really really interesting we did come up uh with a couple of things that sort of fell into both camps um but pretty much you could separate them so you know that short-term happiness of a big meal at the time you feel it's not happening so it's pleasure you think you're getting loads of pleasure but actually it's not doing you any good because then you put on weight and it's so interesting how you see some people binge out looking for that short term pleasure when even on a diet chasing you know the happiness of you know being truman and looking healthier for longer um so tell us a little bit a few things about what we can be doing rob to sort of cut down on the dopamine and actually encourage more serotonin right so in order to turn this around this you know global uh chronic disease addiction economic climate change debacle because climate change is related to this as well we need to tamp down our dopamine not get rid of it but tamp it down we need to up our serotonin and we need to reduce our cortisol okay those are the three goals if we do that we will get healthy we will enjoy our lives and we will solve virtually all of our biggest problems in our society all at once because really it's one problem not four sure so what can we do well the one thing we can't do is rely on government to help us because government is actually addicted to the money that the hedonic substances bring in for them and they are all paid off by those industries anyway so don't expect anybody to help you out of this at least not anytime soon because no that's not they're not going to do it so you got to do it for yourself so what can you do in the book i describe four ways all clinically proven to work all efficacious all mechanistically driven all evidence-based that will do all three of those things that is tamp down your dopamine up your serotonin reduce your cortisol so it is doable but oh and and more importantly they're all free so anyone can do them it doesn't cost a nine for any of them okay but you have to want to do them so here they are i call them in the book the four c's number one connect and that does not mean facebook okay that means face to face eye to eye now you and i are connecting right now but i'll be very honest with you connection over a digital uh landscape is not connection okay and there's a reason it's not connection is because i can see your eyes but i can't actually see you because when you make it two-dimensional it loses something in translation we are talking about face to face connection eye to eye connection so why is that important turns out you have a set of neurons in the back of your head called mirror neurons okay they reflect like that can you say that again tim you just uh robbie just broke up there could you repeat that one again yeah we you have a set of neurons in the back of your head called mirror neurons m-i-r-o-r okay and you can record from them you know so you know they're separate neurons and what they're doing is they're transducing the facial expressions of the person you are talking to and turning those expressions into your own emotion you're basically taking information from another person and you're adopting it to alter your own emotion we have a name for this phenomenon it's called empathy okay this is how you transmit empathy is through face-to-face interaction not voice-to-voice interaction but face-to-face interaction how do we know this paul ekman famous uc berkeley psychologist went to papua new guinea back in 1968 they'd never seen a white person ever they had they didn't speak english they had the exact same facial expressions for the same emotions we did or where'd they learn them they'd never seen a white person right sir because it's hard wired it's baked into our dna everyone's got we always had it it's how we communicated with each other before there was language so this is as old as we are the point is when you are face to face with another person you're engaging in conversation directly with another person in whatever venue you're doing you are adopting their emotions and this is necessary because this is what drives up serotonin a way i like to describe the difference between dopamine and serotonin and pleasure and happiness is religion so religion is a great way to explain how this works there are 4 200 religions on the planet why i guess because in different areas that are remote they come together in communities and villages and start to share a common belief so the one thing that all religions share in common there's only one thing a meeting place interesting and that's the serotonin that's very once the rabbi or the priest or the imam you know starts to speak that's the dopamine all right yeah i can cite you to riot and a few other things too all right the point is that you know religion is serotonin and dopamine at the same time you know if we harness the the right thing we'd be a lot better off unfortunately you know that these demagogues you know think otherwise on this point then the meeting face-to-face uh the world health organization some 50 60 years ago said there's actually three pillars to health and one of those was social interaction and they've got to know the technical things you're talking about now but is that one of the reasons why social interaction is so powerful for our health all around empathy absolutely so what i can say is that um you have two parts to your autonomic nervous system you have the sympathetic nervous system fight-or-flight part of your nervous system which raises your blood pressure increases blood glucose utilization etc all of which drive chronic disease in the long term and in the extreme you also have the parasympathetic nervous system the vagus nerve the vegetative nerve the heart slowing there it turns out the afferent vagus the part of the vagus nerve that takes information from the periphery from your gut from your liver and transmits it back to the brain is absolutely essential in terms of basically putting you to rest and reducing risk of chronic disease this is one of the reasons why people meditate is because they're oh they're upping they're afron vegas okay so and that's helping calm them it's helping lower their blood pressure and their blood glucose and it is leading to contentment so the aphrod vagus drives serotonin production so connection very important so that's the first c second c contribute and that does not mean to your individual retirement account okay that means contribute outside of yourself right so you know habitat for humanity or you know volunteering or something okay if you are contributing to yourself that's called greed if you're contributing to other people that's called contribution or you know uh uh you know altruism volunteerism that contributing to yourself is dopamine contributing to others is serotonin exactly right one is pleasure one is happiness that's exactly right taking versus giving okay so you know you can go to a casino and make money that's dope with me if you go to church and you give money that's certain not the same okay um you know people always ask me you know the most important question in today's day and age can you derive your contribution through your work the answer is yes you can provided two uh uh criteria are met number one you can see how your work helps others and number two your boss can see it too very good point if neither if either or both of those are not true then you ain't going to get it out of work i get it out of work you know i mean i do other things too but that's where i get my contribution by seeing how my work ultimately helps others yeah i wrote about color business books over the years and one of the things i said that one of the things that truly makes people happy at work even more than salary increases which everybody says they want but that again just fuels uh reward fuels uh uh dopamine but the thing that really makes people truly happy is when they people know their managers pat them on the back and they're recognized for doing a good job especially if it's something that is for the greater good so uh got it got it so that's second c third c cope and cope is three things sleep mindfulness exercise sleep mindfulness exercise and the reason is because every one of those reduces cortisol okay so it's turns out 35 of the adult population are sleep deprived get less than seven hours of sleep per night and 23 are clinical insomniacs that's a fryingly high number unbelievable high and what happens when you're sleep deprived is your ghrelin which is your hunger hormone goes up so you eat more which lowers your serotonin and of course your cortisol goes up and so it's driving that unhappiness and metabolic syndrome so sleep is essential the problem is we have created a sleep deprived environment okay we got this thing got it okay that is the ultimate sleep depriver for those that are listening and not watching uh rob's just lifted up a mobile phone and uh he's blamed a lot of interruptions which i totally get you know it and it's the blue screen if nothing else you know so um my colleague chris madsen at uc berkeley uh did a quick study showing that kids who charge their cell phone in their room get 28 minutes less sleep per night than kids who charge their cell phone outside their room cry okay well you know what i'm doing you know what i'm doing when i get home this evening making sure all the kids charge their mobile phones downstairs because that's a and what they need to do is they need to stop using screens one hour before bedtime no screens that includes television as well laptops communication all screens okay paper fine you know books fine but no screens one hour before to do the screens not to sleep or is it detrimental to the production of serotonin it's detrimental to production sir tom by itself okay number two mindfulness now the dirtiest word in the english language is multitasking the reason is because nobody can do it only 2.5 of the population can actually multitask the rest of us are serially uni-tasking and every time we switch from one task to another we get a cortisol bump and it takes 23 minutes to refocus so we're losing all that time so this concept of multitasking i mean you can't get a job today if you can't multitask on the other hand it's exactly the multitasking that's going to ultimately make you not be able to work at that job so this is truly you know on its head and we have to undo this concept and and so to keep interrupting rob does that does that also mean that because i read recently in fact i wrote about it uh recently um that people are saying that kids that use their mobile all the time that keep getting interrupted will eventually have an iq probably 10 percent lower because they can't concentrate on the task at hand you know you and i if you're not using mobiles can read a book and concentrate for a long period of time but if the mobile keeps interrupting and ringing and facebook likes and whatever and instagram or whatever it is these days that by itself is interrupting you therefore you're trying to multitask when that's not possible right so i've heard that but i haven't seen the data that support that what i do know is that it the those constant interruptions definitely alters prefrontal cortical activity that i do know because we have the data for that and the thinner your prefrontal cortex the bigger the problem with executive function and the bigger problem also with obesity paper just came out just uh this week demonstrating that okay so uh mindfulness is essential and of course how do you teach mindfulness to you know five-year-olds well you know it's a problem but i'll tell you if you're handing an ipad to your 15 month old to shut them up you're not helping the matter which is of course you know the ipad has turned into the mobile babysitter so we you know this is a problem as well and then finally exercise and i have a confession i've done it i'll be in that well you know i i understand you know the point is we now have the data to show the folly of that uh practice but will people actually do something different recognizing it and the answer is i don't know i'm worried about that sure and then finally exercise it turns out exercise is as good as ssris you know serotonin reuptake inhibitors at treating depression and if you couple mindfulness and exercise you can basically reverse depression so even though exercise will often give you short uh bouts of stress when you're weight training or sprinting that short release of cortisol isn't a bad thing you're talking about sort of sustained cortisol as being a bad thing exactly short bursts of cortisol are not really a problem it's the long sustained cortisol that goes basically into the night time that is the big problem okay because that's raising blood glucose at a time when it shouldn't be and also cortisol kills hippocampal neurons well-known phenomenon robert sapolsky you know i showed this back in the 1980s so cortisol is not your friend you know that's what ultimately i mean gets you out of bed but it's not your friend it's good and bad like everything and then finally the fourth c cook so there are three things in food that matter for this tryptophan so tryptophan is an amino acid it is the rarest amino acid it is the amino acid in shortest supply it is the precursor of serotonin so if you're not getting enough tryptophan you're not getting them making enough serotonin so where do you get tryptophan so number one by far and away x highest concentration of tryptophan next poultry salmon flax uh sorry not flux poultry sand mostly and uh you know vegetables not very much not very much tryptophan uh so you need those things but you know every the world's going vegan this is not necessarily good because you're not getting enough tryptophan um uh omega-3s so omega-3 fatty acids are heart-healthy anti-inflammatory anti-alzheimer's they're also membrane stabilizers especially in the brain especially in the neurons of your brain they reduce inflammation and they also help signal transduction and they are associated with salmon flax you know marine marine life mostly uh and you know we're not getting enough of those either and then finally too much sugar so fructose because it drives dopamine also lowers serotonin as i said before so what you want is a high tryptophan high omega-3 low-fructose diet and why particularly fructose you keep saying fructose which you mainly get from fruit and you're not saying glucose why why fructose and why why are you focusing on fructose as more of the problem than just glucose so sugar dietary sugar sucrose you know cane sugar beet sugar the stuff you put in your coffee those white crystals are two molecules bound together one's called glucose one colds fructose now glucose is not very sweet molasses is glucose now is molasses sweet a little bit you know not not exciting you know people see you don't see people going around chugging caro syrup or anything you know i mean you know unless is okay but it's not a big seller not a big winner you know maybe for a special cookie something you know all right glucose what's in molasses is the energy of life every cell on the planet burns glucose for energy glucose is so goddamn important that if you don't consume it your body makes it the inuit the eskimos okay they didn't have a place to grow carbohydrate they didn't have any carbohydrate in their diet they had whale blubber you know they had ice okay they still had a serum glucose level and the reason is because the liver can take fats and proteins and turn it into glucose for energy so even though they did not consume any glucose they still had a blood glucose level because their liver would make it because glucose is so important that you can't not make it is that the word lipogenesis making fat new fat out of sugars yes but when you're consuming glucose there's not a real reason to need to do that now fructose that other molecule in sugar the one bound to it it is very sweet it's the reason we like sugar it's the reason we crave sugar because it is addictive it goes to that reward center and activates it glucose does not so fructose is the addictive component of sugar turns out fructose is completely vestigial to all animal life it is a holdover from our plant ancestors it is how plants stored energy that's why fruit has sugar and for plants it's probably fine for us you know we have a limited capacity to metabolize it our livers have to metabolize it because fructose does not enter any other cell because it doesn't have the other cells don't have that transporter so basically when you take a fructose load like a coca-cola basically it's all going to your liver and the liver gets overwhelmed the liver has a an innate capacity to metabolize fructose that's true but it's fixed there are a few things you can do to manipulate it like exercise will up your capacity to metabolize um but basically it's fixed and if you overwhelm your liver's capacity to metabolize the fructose the liver doesn't know what to do with the rest because it's fixed so what happens is the liver will turn that extra fructose into fat and that's the process you were referring to called de novo lipogenesis new fat making and then that fat has one of two fates it can either be exported out of the liver in which case now you've got the substrate for obesity and for heart disease or it will precipitate in the liver not make it out of the liver now you've got a lipid droplet now you've got that fatty liver disease i was talking about earlier and now you have liver dysfunction insulin resistance metabolic syndrome so if i get if i'm getting this straight when you have the fructose which you get 50 half of your table sugar is fructose or high concentrations in high corn uh syrups and obviously in fruits it gets into the liver but it never comes out of sugar that's why we don't have fructose blood monitors we have glucose blood monitors it does something with it it either keeps itself makes fatty liver or bundles it up sends it out as fat because it never sends it into the bloodstream as a sugar is that right that's right it doesn't send it out as a sugar because the rest of your body can't metabolize fructose now we don't have serum fructose levels because most of the time our serum fructose level zero unless you overwhelm your liver okay so no one's looking for that it is a research test it is a research tool to measure fructose in the blood so normally if i if i measured your fructose level right now it would probably be zero mine would be zero too but if i drank a coke it wouldn't be zero and the question is that fructose level it does more damage than the glucose ever did and the reason is because fructose binds to proteins and causes those proteins to stiffen up if they're in the arterial tree that's atherosclerosis if they're it you know uh elsewhere like in the liver it can cause liver dysfunction and death ultimately these are the phenomena that are associated with chronic disease so you can think of fructose as the aging compound it is the cause of wrinkles wow wow so many people have lots of fruit thinking it's good for absolutely everything and maybe a little bit of fruit on its own isn't too bad but certainly if you're taking a lot of fruit and drinking coke all that fruit is doing is compounding the problem well i'm not really against fruit per se fruit has lots of other things in it too but the main thing that fruit has in it is fiber now fiber is what makes fruit okay okay the fructose is what makes fruit enjoyable but the fiber is what makes uh fruit healthy and the reason is because when you consume fruit the fructose is not actually being absorbed completely the fiber is setting up a gel on the inside of your intestine so you need both fibers insoluble and soluble and fruit of course has both what's happening is you're setting up a latticework on the inside of your intestine the cellulose is setting up like a fish net and the ins and the soluble fiber like the pectins and the inulin are plug in the holes in that lattice work to provide this gel which is then reducing the rate of absorption so it is protecting your liver well if you don't absorb it early then it goes further down the intestine where the microbiome the bacteria will chew it up instead so even though you consumed it you didn't get it because your bacteria did so the two rules of diet which people do not understand but i am actually writing a book about right now is protect the liver feed the gut foods that do both protect the liver and feed the gut are healthy foods that do neither are unhealthy foods that do one or the other but not both are in the middle okay that's really really really interesting what's the new book going to be called rob when you give it to a publisher it changes the name on you i don't have a name yet okay so you don't know maybe about processed food okay so we don't definitely have the name yet but what we give us some examples of something that protects the liver and the gut give us some foods that fall into the best category and anything with fiber okay so fruit fruit fruit is fine now fruit juice you've strained the fiber out you've destroyed the fiber and you've spoofed you've smoothed it you've destroyed the insoluble fiber so you have not protected the liver now soluble fiber is still there so it may feed the gut so fruit juice would be an example of something that's in between okay but it's not healthy it's just less unhealthy and if you look at the data on fruit juice it causes diabetes and cancer too just at a high you have to consume more than say a sugar soda yeah we had a great dentist on the other day that was saying you just can't imagine the damage it does to to cavities and the teeth as well so maybe who's the dentist uh you've met him before james golnick oh yes of course his main gripe was with bread and people not realizing that if you have bread at breakfast lunch and dinner that instantly turns into sugar in the mouth and and causes cavities well you know yes no um it converts to glucose in the mouth glucose can be a source of fermentable carbohydrate but often starch contributes to the biofilm so that's not automatically apparent to me now the thing that automatically causes dental caries is fructose sugar and the reason is because the primary bacteria that cause cavities strip mutants they are a fructose eating machine they love it and they make lots of lactate which burns a hole in the tooth so um starch less so very much more yeah very interesting thought so anything that's got fiber and that's natural and organic so we're talking nuts seeds vegetables there's some what's your view view on things like glucomannan which is a fiber that we're seeing in a lot of products easter glucomannan is a potential problem because it swells a lot and has actually caused deaths in two and three-year-olds because of the swelling so there are candies that were made with glucomannan which actually uh lodged in the esophagus of children and uh have caused death so you have to be careful of glucometer okay so mainly just go for the natural fibers that we get in whole natural wholesome foods real food works processed food doesn't that's the you know take-home message of this new book is we have to rethink our food supply if we're going to solve our uh metabolic health problem our mental health problem our economic problem and our climate problem i want to pick on something in fact that's a baby i want to speak upon you mentioned it earlier you just finished on that sentence there solve a environmental problem how do you see the link of eating well solving the environmental issues so people talk about greenhouse gases like they're all the same they're not turns out there are three greenhouse gases not one the only greenhouse gas anyone's talking about is methane that's a mistake here's why there are three greenhouse gases number one carbon dioxide all right carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas it has a heat retaining capacity of one now you need carbon dioxide because that's what the plants use to make sugar and oxygen called photosynthesis so if you wiped out all the carbon dioxide we died too now it's true we have too much carbon dioxide that's true and it does retain heat that's true and so it is a problem i'm not suggesting it's not it is a problem but you need carbon dioxide second greenhouse gas methane yes methane is a problem no argument it is it has a heat retaining capacity of 25 carbon dioxide one methane 25 way worse no argument and animals make methane sure ruminants make more methane true that's why they want all the beef and the lamb out the vegans want the beef and the lamb gone um in addition uh grass-fed animals actually make more methane than corn-fed animals so you'd say well wait a second that's you know then we should corn feed the animals well not not so much you know there's other reasons why that's not a good idea um the point is that the amount of methane that the uh ruminants make is only about five percent of all the methane and agriculture total is only about 9.0 percent of all the methane most of the methane is coming from industry and industrial sources cars seven petroleum uh cars not the animals so yes the animals do contribute but they are actually a relatively minor contributor you know let's focus on the things that are bigger contributors and number three get greenhouse gas and this is the one people totally don't get and totally miss the point and basically makes the argument nitrous oxide laughing gas nitrous oxide has a heat retaining capacity of 210 nine times greater than methane so where do you get nitrous oxide from if it's not in a laughing gas canister at the dentist where is it well it's in every field and the reason is because that's what happens to the nitrogen runoff from the nitrogen fertilizer that was needed to grow the crops because the animals who used to fertilize the crops because of their manure because that's nitrogen fixing now aren't there because the cattle are in kansas and the corn is in iowa so you have to spray the corn with the nitrogen which becomes nitrous oxide which creates way more heat retaining capacity way more greenhouse gas emissions than the methane ever did and guess what you have to do that for vegans too you know i'm glad you said that so so passionately we had patrick holden on uh doing this interview a few weeks ago who was the ex-director of the sword association and he said exactly the same thing he said this whole thing uh you know he said vegans want to be vegans and vegetarians because they don't want to eat meat for religious reasons or because they just love animals that's fine but he said if they're doing it for the planet it's completely wrong he said because we've said if we're doing it for metabolic health if they're completely wrong yeah and he said because if you're doing it for to save the planet no longer are we cycling those fields in the uk where you know we need the animals there to have we need the grass to sequester carbon we need to then stop using industrial fertilizers and if we have organic grass-fed beef and organic grass-fed sheep that's part of the solution not part of the problem exactly right and of course it will cost more but and that will reduce consumption because you know increasing the price reduces effective availability which is the idea yes we eat too much beef i don't argue that we do i agree with that that doesn't mean we should ban it yeah what we need to do is let the market forces work but in order to do that we have to stop the subsidies in order to stop the subsidies we have to fix washington and london so you know this problem is real okay but it's man-made it's been done out of this con you know policy directive and ultimately to make bad food cheap and that unfortunately that bad food it not only causes metabolic syndrome but it also causes addiction and depression yeah that's so so true um i'm so glad you got that message out i'm so so glad yourself and robert over the um and and three or four others have said something i'm so glad you're getting that out let the vegetarians decide what they want to eat based on the facts and the vegans the facts yeah the vegans want to be vegan fine yeah you can do what you want you know people want to be keto that's fine too i have no problem and the fact of the matter is the vegans the ketos are actually in agreement they think they're in a war the fact matters they're actually on the same side what makes you that they're on the side against the processed food industry very good point the enemy of my enemy is my friend yeah okay if they would stop battling each other and start battling the real enemy we would solve this problem and that you believe firmly is the processed foods because that correlation between uh demise into all these metabolic illnesses and the rise of processed foods all at the same time and all they've talked about exactly um so i want to just pick up on one one or two last things if we could uh the hour's gone have flown by um as you know i mentioned i got seven children uh and you know well they're all quite young um and they are definitely overusing social media and the computers and they are probably you know not going out and playing outside with their friends and having that social interaction which you talked about earlier on being so important face-to-face they are sitting there waiting for you know the computer games to light up and their friends to come online and they think they're doing just as good and having such a good time over using the computers i personally was one of those dads that did what you said earlier which had certainly my youngest one grow up and been shoved a laptop in the ipad in front in restaurants so that we could have a quiet meal give me some things i can go back to my children and say look these are some of the reasons why it's really advisable to cut back on all that digital use and get back to what we were doing some generations back right very simple it's called creativity creativity requires a prefrontal cortex creativity requires your whole brain working and what digital media does is it cuts your prefrontal cortex off from the rest of you and makes everything immediate and makes it stymies imagination it's time is creativity okay because you're seeing something instead of imagining it this is why kids are getting stupid yeah and we're seeing it we're seeing and it's been going on since tv you know but it's it's you know really revved up since the internet generation no that's that's great advice thank you very very much um and finally i asked this of all doctors all export experts as we come towards the end of our hour together give us your top five tips and they'd have to be in order but if you can try and prioritize towards top what's the five tips that that you have robert for what you tell your friends your loved ones to help them live healthy and happier for longer happier not pleasure for longer number one buy far and away eat real food okay and that means food that came out of the ground or animals that ate what came out of the ground that's number one and it's really number one through five all all rolled up into one yeah um you want some others sure um but i mean that's that they're on its own is it that's in bold capitals that's a lie right that's that's number that's by far and away number one okay and the next thing i would argue is that you need to take time for yourself okay and people don't know what that means that means get inside your own head whether that be meditation yoga or a good book exercise that prefrontal cortex make it work okay because that's what separates you from the lizards and if you use your prefrontal cortex you will tamp down on the five behavioral health disasters that we have befallen as a society the prefrontal cortex inhibits the nucleus accumbens that's addiction the prefrontal cortex inhibits the dorsal raphe that's depression the prefrontal cortex inhibits the amygdala that's anxiety the prefrontal cortex inhibits the associative cortex that's add and inattention and finally the prefrontal cortex inhibits the insula different part of the limbic system that's xenophobia and hate wow those five problems addiction depression anxiety add and hate are what have blossomed all over the world over the past really twenty years corrupt preferential cortex is the reason that because it's not working that all of these have occurred exercise your prefrontal cortex read a friggin book that's just great great advice and because you passionately said number one and number two i normally ask for five that's kind of the big big bit it's enough yeah let's stop there let's stop there look it's been a fascinating hour the final question i ask every doctor every professor that comes on what would robert lustig like his legacy to be um i would like my legacy to be that this problem goes away and and and the problem being define what you what you think the problem is i would the the problem is the problem i have just described the problem of healthcare health diet addiction depression climate change all rolled up into one because it's really all one problem it's called hedonics and consumerism it's called taking your prefrontal cortex offline that's a great place to finish robert thank you very very much i i've really enjoyed the hour i hope you have too and uh for those that haven't read your book yet they're hacking the american mind which you said at the very beginning literally could be the hacking of anybody's mind in a consumerism world whether it be america the uk germany even china now and india anybody that's affected by corporatization this will tell you what they're doing to your brains and the steps you need to unravel the mess that we're all in now robert thank you very very much for your time today thank you for having me steve it's been my pleasure if you enjoyed the podcast and would also like to watch it online you can find a webcam version on youtube or the primal living website www.primaliving.com the fat and furious podcast is the perfect introduction to helping you and those you love live happier and healthier for longer and if you are a fan of the series then please let your friends and family know they'll truly thank you for it and so will we until next time live life naturally

Channel: Primal Living

Views: 62,119

Rating: 4.908772 out of 5

Keywords: robert lustig, dr. robert lustig, Protect The Liver, Feed The Gut, health, health podcast, health professional, nutrition, diet, disease, mental health, physical health, obesity, the bitter truth, depression, insulin resistance diet what to eat and why, insulin resistance and heart disease, healthy meal prep, nutrition facts, obesity epidemic, obesity in america, addiction big krit, health tips, gut health, liver, liver detox, fatty liver, liver disease, cirrhosis, gut bacteria

Id: 7PQ3SITmAcM

Length: 81min 5sec (4865 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 18 2020