FASTING AWAY DIABESITY? Ft. Jason Fung, Nephrologist & Best-selling author

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to worlds apart it's one of the cruelest and yet most avoidable and reversible diseases of our times if the prize humans pay for progress and abundance and you Frankenstein created by the collusion of industry and science obesity or rather diabesity has been making life miserable for millions of people mainly because they followed the advice of their doctors should they well to discuss that I'm now joined by Jason funk a Canadian nephrologist and a best-selling author dr. funk it's so good to talk to you thank you very much for your time oh thanks for having me it's great to be here now for starters I have to say that I'm a huge and a very grateful fan of yours but for those of our viewers who are not familiar with your work how did a kidney doctor like yourself end up on the subject of obesity or rather diabesity as you like to call it yeah so kidney disease in North America is largely related to type 2 diabetes so we've had a big obesity epidemic since the 1970s and since the 1980s we've had more and more type-2 diabetes so as I started practice I started seeing more and more of these type 2 diabetics who were developing kidney disease and that's why I really developed a very strong interest in the treatment of type 2 diabetes so standard treatment as most doctors do consists of really just giving medications but that didn't really make a lot of sense to me because if you think about type 2 diabetes it's actually a reversible disease that is if people lose weight then very often the type 2 diabetes also goes away and as it goes away you can't develop the kidney disease any further so to me that was the most important thing was to try and reverse this type 2 diabetes and part of that involves trying to get people to lose weight and that's how I became interested in this topic now most of your books and lectures are built around the premise that obesity is a hormonal dysregulation of fat it's driven by hormones rather than calories and yet I'm sure many of the of our viewers watching us right now strongly believe that in order to lose weight they have to eat less and exercise more why do you think this advice is so persistent and so pervasive despite being so ineffective yeah it's it's a good question and it's because it's been ingrained into all of us since we were young that there's this idea of calories in calories out that is and all calories are fattening it's just the number of calories so in North America sometimes people say a calorie is a calorie and the point is that really misses how the human body actually works so the human body works on hormones so if you grow taller or shorter if you build muscle or don't build muscle everything depends on the hormone so our bodies respond to hormones and body fatness the amount of body fat that we carry is really no different so we can isolate the hormones that make us gain weight for example insulin is a hormone that makes us gain weight so certain foods are going to stimulate those hormones more than others so the idea is that if you take two equal portions in terms of calories of to food so you have a hundred calories of cookies versus a hundred calories of say spinach the instant that you put it in your mouth the body responds completely differently in terms of hormones so the cookies for example spike up the insulin very very high and the spinach does not so therefore the practical implication of that is that calories some calories are more fattening than others so some foods are more fattening than others and that's not really a very hard thing to understand so when you take that hundred calories of cookies versus the hundred calories of spinach for example your body can decide what it wants to do with those calories so it can either one store it as fat or to burn it for energy and that's gonna have a huge impact on whether you get fat or not so the cookies for example stimulate insulin tells your body hey please store those hundred calories as body fat the spinach doesn't doesn't cause the insulin to go up so the body can now use that for energy so it's not the total number of calories that is the difference it's really the hormonal response of the body how the body uses those calories and that's what that's that's why it's really a hormonal disorder not a caloric disorder now everybody these days knows that sugar and simple carbohydrates are bad for you they're considered to be the main culprits of this worldwide obesity epidemic but you make a very important point that it's not only about what you eat but when you eat and more specifically how often you eat why is that important yeah and this this comes from understanding that it's really about the hormones so the hormones will go up and down depending on what you eat so certain foods make it go up more than others but every time you eat the hormone insulin goes up so if you're eating six or eight times a day which many people have been told to do eat breakfast lunch dinner and snacks in between bedtime snacks so if you're eating more frequently every time you eat insulin is going to go up to some degree so that's gonna make a difference to your body if you're telling your body to store fat which is what insulin does six or eight times a day versus once a day well that's gonna make a difference because as soon as insulin starts to fall your body is going to switch from using the food that it's eating to burning some of the energy that is stored away that the sugar and the fat and the body so that's the point if you're eating all the time you're basically going to have a much different impact on the hormones than if you eat infrequently now chronic insulin resistance is type 2 diabetes but before we talk about that let me ask you about people who are not afflicted by it or not yet afflicted I mean those people who carry a few extra pounds who graze through the day who like to snack who may even think that this is a healthy habit do they have anything to worry about absolutely so snacking throughout the day is not something that people used to do then somehow without real any scientific evidence people got the idea that you should eat six times a day snacking is healthy for you and these ideas are actually very dangerous because the more you stimulate insulin the more likely you are to run into problems with insulin resistance so the idea is that if you keep stimulating a hormone then the body eventually becomes resistant to it and you can understand it sort of and like the story of the boy who cries wolf so in this story a boy who is on the lookout for his town cries wolf and all the villagers come running but there's no wolf so the next time he does it again and again a few calm but each time he does it they realized that he's not telling the truth so they stopped coming that's essentially what body that's essentially what insulin resistance is so eating very frequently is going to lead to more insulin resistance which is a problem because that insulin resistance leads to higher insulin levels and those higher insulin levels are going to tell your body to please store some more fat and it's not only about storing fat as far as I understand it's extremely toxic the the the high insulin levels are extremely toxic to pretty much every system in the body right absolutely so all the diseases that we talk about these days which is heart disease strokes cancer Alzheimer's disease and all the diseases of type-2 diabetes all the complications such as blindness amputations kidney disease all of these diseases are essentially diseases of too much insulin but the good thing is that if we know that the disease is too much insulin then we can develop strategies to reduce that insulin and that involves changing both what we eat but also when we eat because we can use that in a therapeutic strategy to try and reduce the insulin resistance and reduce the overall insulin now this whole obesity story which has ruined millions of lives which caused government's billions of dollars in treatment is based on a series of faulty untested advice first people were told to eat glass fat and more carbs then they were told to eat five or six times a day then they were given insulin which makes that condition even worse is it all ignorant negligence or is it actually corruption and malice it's it's a bit of both I think that the the answer lies in the fact that in the 1950s in the United States there was all of a sudden a big increase in the number of people who are having heart attacks and nobody knew why but the answer probably was that people were smoking a lot more from the 1900s to the 1950s so as people were smoking more the number of heart attacks were going up by the 50s and people were looking around for a reason why the tobacco companies spent millions and millions of dollars telling people that smoking was good for you smoking didn't cause heart disease and so on we know that for about 20 years they they were able to hide the truth but when scientists were looking around for a reason why there was all of a sudden all these heart attacks they couldn't figure it out so then one of them decided that the answer was because they're eating too much dietary fat that didn't make sense because Americans at the time we're not eating any more fat than they were eating 50 years ago yet they're having many more heart attacks so that the explanation didn't make sense but people sort of ran with that and eventually that's what led to the movement in the 1970s to a very low fat diet so instead of eating bacon and eggs for breakfast for example they were eating white bread and jam and the problem with eating the refined carbohydrates and simple sugars as we now know is that insulin spikes way up but then crashes very quickly so you eat your breakfast of toast and jam in the morning and by 10:30 in the morning all of a sudden you're really hungry so you go find a low-fat muffin and then your sugar goes up your insulin spikes up and then crashes again so you're constantly eating because you're trying to satisfy that hunger and so because people we're now eating five six times a day they thought hey this must be good for you even though never before in human history where people trying to limit the amount of fat unfortunately what they didn't see was that it caused all this obesity and then it caused type 2 diabetes which then led to more heart disease but at the time obesity was not even a major consideration at the time so that's why it was sort of an unintended consequence of this whole low-fat mania now in one of your lectures you also talked about the current medical advice to decrease the intake of salt as a precaution against cardiovascular diseases which apparently is not entirely accurate either I'm asking you as a patient who like most people has a certain reverence towards doctors in the secret knowledge they possess how much can we really trust you guys I think that most doctors have you know do their best unfortunately they're taught many things that are not correct so the thing about dietary fat for example most doctors really believed it because they were taught that in medical school of course we now know of course that many fats are very good for you olive oil and nuts and all those sort of things so things do change but you do have to sort of take what they say in you have to sort of really examine it very closely and that's where a scientific debate is very useful and talking to other people so salt for example is a very good one because in many people say always should limit the amount of salt you take but many research studies coming out now say that salt is actually not that bad so the pure study for example a very recent very very large study showed really no correlation between the amount of salt people are eating and heart disease something that we had been taught for 25 30 years so yeah you have to be aware that things are going to change for example give you a great example in the United States in the 1970s 1980s people turned away from butter which they had been eating for several thousand years and we're instead told to eat margarine margarine turned out to be full of trans fats so in order to become heart-healthy people turned away from butter and ate these trans fat Laden margarine which in fact caused heart disease so in fact we had actually caused people more heart attacks than before and it was in our effort to try and prevent the heart attack so we actually caused more harm and of course the big food companies also benefited from from with handsomely dr. Frank we have to take a very short break now but we will be back in just a few moments stay tuned [Music] welcome back to worlds apart with Jason funk a Canadian nephrologist and a best-selling author dr. Fung many of these problems as you said before originated in the well in the West or more specifically in North America but they quickly spread around the world and China for example if I'm not mistaken now has the highest number of people living with diabetes and you often hear prominent organizations like w-h-o say that beating diabetes or beating obesity is much more than just a health issue it requires a whole of society solution and presumably billions of dollars of taxpayers money does it really require that it's a big problem but I think this solution is actually in front of our face and actually I think is completely free and that's really through the application of intermittent fasting so intermittent fasting I started talking about this probably about five or six years ago and at the time people thought I was just completely crazy and what fasting is is essentially a period of time where you don't eat and it's as simple as that if you're not eating you're fasting and people had thought it was a really dirty word that it was super unhealthy for you they should never do it but as I started to read about it and think about it it didn't make any sense because we know that humans have been fasting for thousands of years in fact it's a part of virtually every major religion in the world so even as we are saying fasting is so unhealthy literally billions of people around the world are fasting and it's for religious purposes it's not forced on them they do it because they understand that it there's something very healthy about it so the point is that if you are not eating insulin is going to fall and then your body is going to be forced to burn something for energy but it's okay because our body can store that energy we can store it as sugar and we can sort as body fat so as you don't eat as you fat your body's gonna start burning sugar after it burns the sugar then it's gonna burn body fat so now if you say okay well look the disease of type 2 diabetes is a disease where we have too much sugar now we have a hundred percent natural solution that allows our body to burn sugar and it's been used for thousands of years we know all about it we know what's good what's bad about it and if we have a disease of too much body fat which is obesity hey here's a solution same thing we are allowing our body to simply use body fat for what it is designed for it's not there for looks it's there for us to use so we use it and if you use it you will avoid the problem of excessive sugar which is type 2 diabetes and excessive body fat now there is a crucial difference between how a body reacts to your diet or a reduced caloric intake and how it reacts to getting no food at all which I'm sure you would agree with me the main reason for why diets almost never work and fasting never fails what's the secret here the secret is the hormonal changes that happen when with fasting so a lot of people say that well if you're it's simply a caloric restriction so if you simply cut a few calories at each meal you've got the same effect you don't because the thing is that when you eat your insulin goes up and you keep your body trying to store body fat so remember that your body essentially exists in two states that's either the fed state where you've just eaten and you're trying to store food energy or it's the fasted state where you're not eating insulin is dropping and you're burning food energy so but you can't do both at the same time you can't store body fat and burn body fat at the same time you do one or the other so if you take in calories constantly throughout the day but fewer calories you're gonna keep your body in the fed state your body's still gonna try and store body fat but since you're taking fewer calories you can't access the stores of body fat on your on your body the difference with fasting is that your snell switching fuel sources so you're actually forcing the chain from your body using food to your body using your body fat so now your burning body fat so as you start to burn body fat your body says whoa I need 2000 calories today but you have 200 thousand calories of body fat on your body so there's no problem so it keeps burning it so the difference is that when you're simply restricting calories you're not changing the hormones and therefore you're not allowing your body access to the stores of body fat as opposed to fasting where you're sort of forcing that switch it's very similar to say a hybrid car where you can use electricity or gas you switch from one to the other depending on which is optimal many people are turned off by the fears of hunger and extreme discomfort discomfort and it's worth saying that once the body adapts to fasting you don't experience hunger as you used to before I mean I'm currently into my third straight day of water fasting and it feels really good in fact I actually suspect that there must be some sort of a ketosis hi is there such a thing absolutely so one is that you start to develop these ketones and some people find that their their mind is a little bit more clear using the ketones but the other thing in terms of hunger and people don't realize this is that hunger actually doesn't continue to build so if you measure the hunger hormone which is called ghrelin over 24 hours of fasting what happens is that if you skip lunch for example you're hungry so when you normally eat lunch say noontime to one o'clock you get hungry if you don't eat at that time your body actually switches to using your body fat and then the hunger actually dissipates and the secret is that your body has eaten lunch you can think of it as taking those calories that lunch from your stores of body fat and that's why the hunger doesn't go up when people do multiple day fasts what we find is that hunger typically peaks at day one or two and then it actually drops so by day four day five and you can measure the ghrelin as well it Peaks and then it starts to drop so the hunger actually actually goes away because your body is now fueling itself on your body fat so that's perfect because if you are not hungry and you need to lose weight now you're working with your body instead of most diets like calorie restricted diets where the hunger tech typically increases but people try to sort of force their way through it dr. Fung let me ask you a technical question you and others often recommended to Mitton fasting for resetting the body's weight setpoint do we understand how it works is it all about switching from an anabolic to a catabolic state and once the body is adjusted to feeding itself or fad does it try to compensate for what it lost resetting the body set weight is takes a long time and I think that it the fasting definitely helps because I think it's related to the insulin resistance that develops and that's not a very quick process that is when you eat and don't eat your insulin can go up and down but the insulin resistance of your body is not quite that fast so it typically takes a longer time the body set weight is very interesting because it's really a interplay between the hormone insulin and the hormone leptin and leptin is a hormone that is secreted by the fat cells to tell your body actually to stop eating because it has enough and the reason that people override that leptin signal is that insulin is sort of antagonizes that so it's sort of like insulin makes you want to gain weight and leptin want to make you lose weight so it's sort of a battle between insulin and leptin for your body set weight and what you're doing is you're trying to reduce the insulin resistance and the overall insulin level so that you sort of influence the level between insulin and leptin now fasting clearly comes with many benefits physical cognitive economic it saves you tons of money but the one that I didn't expect to encounter was the help with emotional regulation because I'm naturally prone to the outbursts of anger especially in stressful situations and what I found to my big surprise is that fasting sort of resets my emotional defaults I generally have more goodwill towards people without any cognitive effort I don't have to think about my triggers etcetera it just naturally happens isn't that strange because from everything that I read cortisol was supposed to increase in the fasted State yeah there's all these other hormones that go up and these are called counter regulatory hormones so as insulin Falls other hormones go up and this includes the sympathetic nervous system so noradrenaline for example is one of the fight-or-flight response so that goes up when you don't eat so that helps increase sort of concentration and energy and cortisol does go up and but it does tend to drop when you start eating again and growth hormone goes up as well so that helps your body repair itself when you're actually start eating again your growth hormone levels will be high your body will be able to rebuild those proteins that it needs so essentially what you're doing is something very very healthy which is as you fast what you're doing is you're burning sugar you're burning fat you do burn a little bit of protein but your body is going to get rid of those proteins that are old and sort of broken down and as you start to eat again you will rebuild those you're actually putting your body through this sort of rejuvenation cycle and that may be very healthy and may actually play a huge role in trying to reverse certain diseases or people are very excited about things such as cancer prevention and so on there's so many other benefits and really what we're talking about is the balance of feeding and fasting so this is the way that humans are supposed to do it is that they're supposed to spend some of the time eating and some of the time not eating but when you lose that cycle where your fee all the time so for the minute you get up to the minute you go to bed you're just eating all the time well hey there's gonna be problems if you do that for 20 30 40 years dr. Frank let me squeeze in one more question very quickly if if we may on the link between emotional regulation and insulin and insulin resistance in addition to the diabesity epidemic many developed countries are also facing a major mental health crisis specifically a sharp increase in anxiety and depression just theoretically could there be any connection between these two epidemics is it a hypothesis worth examining I think so because there's a lot of people looking into the role of say ketones in brain function for example so we know for example that ketogenic diets which are very very low in carbohydrates and can treat epilepsy we've known that for about close to a hundred years now so clearly there is a difference between the way that the brain functions on glucose versus the way it functions on ketones and in certain situations it will calm the brain in in these epileptics so could it have another effect in terms of calming emotions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for example or what you're describing which is that you're much more calm because the brain is a little bit calmer by running on ketones and when you fast of course you're burnt you've burnt off all your stores of sugars are now you're developing these ketones for your body to run on so those are excellent questions we don't have the research to say yes it will or yes or no it won't but it's certainly worth thinking about because we know that all of these disorders have been increasing recently in recent years and this is a great way for people to sort of regain their health not only from metabolic standpoint but from a mental standpoint as well well dr. Fung has been great honor for me to talk to you on behalf of so many people whom you inspired thank you thank you I invite our viewers to keep this conversation going on our social media pages and hope to see you again same place same time here on worlds apart [Music] [Music]

Channel: WorldsApaRT

Views: 544,693

Rating: 4.8850675 out of 5

Keywords: RT, Russia Today, Oksana Boyko, Worlds Apart, Jason Fung, Obesity, Diabetes, Diabesity, Dieting, Fasting, Health, Public health, Obesity crisis, Weight loss, Hormones, Human body, public health, Type 2 diabetes, calories

Id: 5r4ql0uBIOs

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/mrgayle]

The GOAT, fan of his for years

[u/B_A_M_2019]

I love that last question of hers: Is there any link between the rise in anxiety/depression and the rise of diabesity? (paraphrased)

His answer is great. I love it :)

[u/B_A_M_2019]

Thanks for sharing! I am in the middle and its great to refresh and learn more!