How To Break Free From Sugar Addiction - Do This Today To Stop Craving Sweets! | Dr. Robert Lustig

if somebody is looking to break free from addiction to sugar and process foods what does the process look like like how long do you think it can take for somebody if they're wanting to make this transformation and like what what are the steps that somebody can take if they want to do something about it the first thing they have to do is admit it admitting it is half the battle okay we have a lot of people in denial right that's number one and if you're in denial you'll never get better it's just that simple you know you will make excuses you know every which way from Sunday as to why this is not a good week or you know I can't do it right now or blah blah blah you know bottom line is the first thing is admitting it now how one can deal with it after ultimately you can't um uh alter an addiction until you've regenerated your dopamine receptors your dopamine receptors are at lowb if you take the dopamine away now you have no liand and fewer receptors now you feel really lousy and we know from both um pharmacologic studies in animals and we also know in human studies with imaging that it takes at least three weeks to repopulate those reward neurons you know their dopamine receptors in order to bring the dopamine receptor level back up so you now have people in Silicon Valley going on what are known as dopamine fasts okay where they lock themselves up in a in a hotel room and take the screens away and take the M&M's away and take all of the sugar away and the alcohol away and basically you know read books until their dopamine receptors come back up so that they can feel something that's pretty remarkable that this is actually a thing look you know for your audience look it up dopamine fast how bizarre is that but that's what we've got so if you if your dopamine receptors at lowb if you want to actually feel something if you if you've been a cocaine addict and you actually want to feel something you have to go on a dopamine fast now are there less extreme ways of dealing with this of course there are can you wean and the answer is yeah of course you can wean in the same way you can wean heroin you can wean uh you know cocaine but then you have to be on a program you know where the dose is being monitored and the problem is that if the food is so completely overrun with added sugar because the food industry put it there how are you going to monitor yourself and how are you going to limit your exposure if the goal is reduction in Sugar consumption do you even know what is in your food you know you can look at the side of the package and say well do I know if there's added sugar in here there are 262 names for sugar and the food industry uses all of them so you know you don't know what's in it did you know pinoa is sugar did you know Demerara is sugar evaporated cane juice you might have been able to figure out is sugar okay they use strawberry puree that's sugar okay the point is there's a lot of stuff in your food that you didn't know was there and so it's very hard to do the weaning because you don't know when you're exposed what if what if there was cocaine in all your food and the food industry didn't tell you how would you avoid it same issue so if somebody admitted that they've had a problem they've paid attention to some of these early warning signs that we've talked about whether it be denial or you know saying you have a sweet tooth Etc and they want to make this change if it were you knowing what you know how would you do it effectively and how long do you think it would take you so if I wanted to do it effectively I would basically do a cold turkey what we've learned and we actually did this experiment in children we in 2010 through 2015 we conducted a study here at UCSF and uh to this day I'm still in awe of the results of this study is really remarkable what we did was we took 43 children from our obesity clinic at UCSF with metabolic syndrome all low socioeconomic status all high sugar consumers because that's what their parents fed them that's what they could afford and what we did was we studied them on their home diet we figured out what they were eating on their home diet we studied them on their home diet and then for the next nine days we took the added sugar out of their diet we catered their meals three days at a time no added sugar we took their percent consumption of added Sugar's calories from 28% of calories down to 10% of calories we gave them fruit that's it okay but all of the rest of their food was no added sugar now we didn't have to like make funky food we just bought it at Safeway but we chose the food to be no added sugar food because 27% of the grocery store is no added sugar we controlled for their carbohydrate intake total we controlled for their protein intake total we controlled for their fat intake total we controlled for their fiber intake total so they got ate the same amount of carbohydrate as normal but instead of sugar we gave them complex carbohydrate we gave them starch we did a starch for sugar exchange all right and we gave them a scale and every day our Coordinator would call them up on the foam wedge away and if they were losing weight eat more in order to keep their weight stable because we didn't want the aayers to say well of course they got better they lost weight we wanted them to stay the same weight or even gain weight for that matter we did this for 10 days and then we restudied them on their low sugar normal calorie normal carbohydrate diet but without sugar so a fructose restricted diet okay glucose added fructose taken away and what we saw was remarkable every aspect of their metabolic Health improved their blood pressure went down by five points their insulin area under the curve went down by 25% their glucose area under the curve went down by 8% even though they were getting more glucose they had a lactate level at Baseline you're not supposed to have a lactate level at Baseline if you do that means you have mitochondrial dysfunction which they did and that got better all right everything we looked at improved and they're data cells started working properly and we published this back in 2016 through 2019 all the data from this now these kids were being sugar restricted on our you know makeshift diet how did they fare at home for the first week actually five days for the first five days the parents thought these kids were going to kill them they were nasty they were angry they were irritable the teachers noticed it it was not good those first five days and then the fever broke and they became uh receptive and compliant and uh uh nice and were able to study and the teachers noticed that they weren't causing trouble in the classroom and the parents realized that their kids were actually nice kids and the kids noticed it too and they never went back they realized that the sugar was causing all of their behavioral difficulties their irritability their inability to concentrate because sugar fructose is a mitochondrial toxin all throughout the body but also in the brain and so if your mitochondria not working you don't feel good and it took about five days for the behavioral aspects of their sugar dependence to change it's super interesting so there is some I guess acute withdrawal symptoms from sugar you know being like irritable or being irritable maybe a little anxious stressed depressed Etc right exactly you can't measure it in terms of you know like sweating or cardiac you know or or heart rate you know increase and things like that that you see with withdrawal from other you know madas you know the eye that you see from other um uh addictive substances so you would say like the best the best approach for somebody who's really serious about this is to just remove ultr processed foods and then eat a more wholesome or a diet comprised of Whole Foods and again it seems what what what I've heard you say is when you're talking about sugar you're not talking about fruit correct so I think a lot of times people they kind of interchange those two things and then people are afraid of eating food that's actually good for them right so le le let's let's do the sugar and fruit story okay because everyone always asks about it and saywell you're telling me I can't eat fruit no that's not what I'm saying at all here's the problem you get a sugar bolus into your stomach and then your dadum and then your dunum it gets absorbed it goes straight to the liver the liver can metabolize a limited amount in the same way it can metabolize a limited amount of alcohol if you stay below that level then the fructose didn't do any damage but the chances are that you overe exceeded your limit for adult men that limit is about 37 grams a day for adult women that's about 25 grams a day for kids it's about 12 12 grams a day for toddlers it's about three grams a day and for infants it's like zero grams a day Okay so there's a limit to how fast your liver can clear the fructose if you stay below that level you'll be fine well fruit does have fructose in it it does but it's at low level it's not like you know fruit is absolutely you know Chuck smack you know glommed you know full of fructose there's actually yes it's sweet but it's not crazy sweet okay and and the fruit has the antidote packaged right alongside the sugar it's called fiber the fiber in the fruit forms a gel on the inside of the intestine and what that gel does the the soluble and the insoluble fiber together form this gel and you can actually see it on electromicroscopy it forms a secondary barrier that prevents absorption of glucose and fructose into the bloodstream so number one you have a lower dose because it's fruit compared to say a fruit juice and number two the fiber in the fruit acts as a barrier that prevents absorption so that you're not overwhelming your liver you're not uh uh causing the liver to basically give up because you've basic you've made it a wash in this huge tsunami of sugar that you've exposed it to so fruit is okay because number one the dose is lower and the fiber is there that's what Mak fruit makes fruit okay fruit juice is another story because the fiber has been removed and the sugar has been concentrated because how many apples can you eat you know but how many app how many glasses of apple juice can you drink I'd love to dive more into that because in prepping for this I was talking to somebody yesterday and I was like why is it so much easier for somebody to drink orange juice than to eat an orange like I would love for you to share your thoughts on fruit juice and why or why not it's is it's as healthy as eating fruit my uh cookbook co-author who is a nutrition educator in the East Bay in Walnut Creek her name is Cindy gersan and every year uh you know she she taught the nutrition Sciences class over at Mount Diablo high school and every year she always started with the same first experiment on the first day okay so the kids are coming in these are all you know there's a title one school with you know poor kids you know who probably haven't even eaten breakfast all right and they all come in and she um takes two kids from the class as the experiment and she hands one kid six oranges and she says to the first kid here kid here's six oranges make juice so the kid squeezes the six oranges gets 12 and a half ounces Downs the glass and says okay what's for breakfast the second kid she hands the kid six oranges and she says to the kid here kid eat the six oranges kid eats orange number one orange number two orange number three gets to Orange number four and throws up she's got the vomit Basin ready because it always happens on orange number four okay and the kid goes I'm gonna die and then the kid doesn't eat lunch or dinner either so what happened the fiber happened the fiber made the fruit self-limiting the fiber reduced Your Capacity to overc consume and the reason is because the fiber moves the food through the intestine FAS to get to the end of the intestine where the satiety signal or the peptide YY hormone lives so the food gets to the end the peptide YY gets released into the bloodstream goes to the brain brain tells the brain I am satiated I'm not going to eat another drop the fiber makes that happen faster so that's why the fruit is okay because the fiber does double duty it acts at the uh intestine to reduce absorption and it also Acts to reduce at the end of the intestine to reduce consumption and so when somebody drinks fruit juice instead of eating fruit they're not getting either of those it's so it's it's essentially in compar comp it's essentially comparable to eating some of these um sugary Ultra processed foods that we've been referencing and talking about throughout throughout the conversation right Ultra processed food is fiberless food and the reason is because you can't freeze fiber prove it to you tonight take an orange put it in your freezer overnight take it out in the morning put it on the kitchen countertop let it thaw try to eat it see what you get you get mush why do you get mush because the ice crystals mate the cell wall let all the water rush in hey food industry knows that so what do they do squeeze it and freeze it now it lasts forever now it's frozen concentrated orange juice they have taken a food an orange and they have turned it into a commodity Frozen concentrated orange juice which they can sell on the Commodities exchange because commodity means storable food food that won't go bad so when you take the fiber out the shelf life increases well that's good for the food industry's profit but that fiber was actually good for you that was actually something you needed for your nutrition so they basically gave you a commodity that was nutritionally depleted that's wild that's wild like what about some of the foods that people typically might feel are healthy like certain cereals or even certain protein bars that have fiber in them like where does the Fiber come from and do you do you recommend people eating those or staying away from them right so there there are two kinds of fiber I mentioned it before soluble and insoluble so soluble fibers like pectin or inulin like what holds jelly together insoluble fibers cellulose like the stringy stuff in celery or cardboard for that matter okay all that cellulose now real food has both you need both and the reason is because the insoluble fiber the stringy stuff for perms a lattice work on that inside of that intestine that gel I mentioned okay it has a structure it has a lattice work like a fishnet if you will okay the soluble fiber they're globular they plug the holes in The Fishnet and so together they form this secondary barrier when the food industry takes the fiber out of the food they take both out they take the soluble and insoluble okay so now it's fiberless food some companies will try to add fiber back like Fiber One bars okay high fiber cereal and what they're adding back is usually something like inulin which is immunogenic and can cause U GI distress or psyllium like what's in Metamucil okay which gels if you you know add water to it you know and that's not necessarily setting up that gel like you know we talked about because there's no insoluble fiber and the food industry hasn't figured out how to add insoluble fiber back to food yet so what the food industry is doing is basically telling you oh yeah we put the fiber back yeah we put the soluble fiber back but we didn't put all the fiber back we didn't put the insoluble fiber back and therefore it's not really working like you wanted to

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Length: 20min 31sec (1231 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024