Mark Hyman, MD | How to Eliminate Sugar Cravings

hi thank you for joining us i'm your host natalie youssef and today i'm very excited to have our featured expert return for yet another hour special dr mark hyman dr dr mark hyman is an 11 time number one new york times bestselling author and the director of the cleveland clinic center for functional medicine where physicians spend time with their patients listening to their histories mapping their personal timeline and looking at the interactions among genetic environmental and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex chronic diseases and issues today's topic sugar and we'll talk about your physiological effects from this drug and how to eliminate your sweet cravings so type in any questions you guys have below we'll get to it to the second half of this broadcast and uh and as always all things sugar everything everything it'll it'll be a good one and as always remember this is for informational purposes only and it's not intended to replace your own physician's advice but if you want to cut out sugar that's fine yeah of course of course well welcome back thank you so much for coming i know you're very very busy no i'm here this is my work that's awesome and the last time we talked about health misconceptions and um it's safe to say we're still talking about health misconceptions just more towards sugar yes so uh it's a big topic before even we go into that i want you to briefly kind of talk about back date like two million years ago how did we eat as hunters and gatherers versus how we eat today well if you believe in evolution we've been involving for eight million years we've only been eating grains and beans and agricultural foods for about 12 000 years so for most revolution we were hunters and gatherers and the truth is we ate a very plant-rich diet the average hunter-gatherer ate about 800 species of plants but they also eat wild animals and wild fish and they actually ate a diet that was not including grains not including beans didn't have dairy unless you could milk a saber-toothed tiger which is pretty hard they didn't eat sugar unless they found a honey home a honeycomb with the bees that made honey and they'll get that pretty rarely and it's also painful to get yeah i mean there's a group of hunter-gatherers in nepal called the honey honey hunters and they literally climb up these trees they're like a few hundred feet tall you know which is dangerous enough and then they bring a burning stick with smoke on it and they smoke out all the bees and then they get the honeycomb imagine if you had to climb a 200-foot tree with a smoking branch in order to get a cookie well that's kind of what it was like back then and so we really had a very different diet than we do now was much more nutrient dense much higher in fiber much more vitamins and minerals higher levels of omega-3 fats it had very very low sugar and starch it was a very different diet and as we have shifted to eating a diet that's predominantly carbohydrates which are predominantly driven through commodity crops from from our agricultural system which now is wheat and corn and soy and processed foods we've really found ourselves in a pickle which is the biggest obesity and diabetes epic in the history of the human race so we're kind of in trouble because of our changes in diet now i want to ask you first of all why do we crave sugar what is the science behind that craving that we are all getting well the thing is that anything sweet in nature is safe to eat if it's bitter it could kill you so our bodies are wired to eat sugar when we get a hold of it whether it's a lot of fruit in the summer or whether it's honey or whatever it is because when we eat something sugary it actually allows us to store fat in the way we store fat it's not by eating fat we kind of debunk that myth which is that fat makes you fat and we should be low fat this and skim that that's all nonsense we know that now people who eat a calorie restricted low-fat diet meaning they can only eat a very few calories and they have to be low-fat do far worse in terms of weight loss than people who are eating an unrestricted meaning eat as much as you want high fat low carbohydrate diet which is the opposite of what we've all been thought trained but we we now have to look at the amount of sugar we're eating as a drug because it affects the part of the brain that actually makes you addicted so this dopamine response like when you get a text on your phone bing it actually hits your brain chemistry and makes you feel a little bit of pleasure for a moment the same thing happens with sugar or cocaine or heroin or all the addictive drugs and sugar does exactly the same thing so we know mechanically how that works and there are some people by the way who have genetic variations in the receptors in their brain for dopamine and these people need more stimulation to receive the same pleasure as somebody else the bad news is when you are overweight you down regulate the receptors so the more overweight and obese you are the less your pleasure centers work which means you need more and more sugar and starch to actually stimulate the pleasure center so you get this vicious cycle where you crave more eat more need more and it's really an indicative drug so we know that you go withdrawal if you think animals you give a lot of sugar and then you actually cut the sugar out they go through physiologic withdrawal like an addict like a heroin addict if you look at animals and studies where they give them either sugar or they can get cocaine they literally have them hooked up to an iv they hit the lever they can get iv cocaine they will always prefer the sugar and they will switch if they're already addicted to a cocaine they will switch to sugar and they'll work eight times harder to get the sugar than the cocaine that's terrible that's frightening that's terrifying well let's talk about some of the labels for sugar that we can find in a box of something and because i can't pronounce it and i know there's like over 60 or something no there's hundreds of names for sugar what is what is the most common one that we can well we see obviously sugar high fructose corn syrup which is the most abundant ones there's also you know names that they give things that are healthy like coconut sugar or cane sugar or dehydrated cane juice or all these kind of names for sugar that's really sugar what is harder to know is that there's a lot of stuff that acts like sugar in the body like maltodextrin and all these derivatives of sugar that are made from processed corn or that are added to the food supply and if you just google you know one of the hundred names of sugar or tuna names of sugar you'll see there's a list and you can't even believe what's on there so often on a particular food like this breakfast here they might be five different kinds of sugar or starch that is acting like sugar in the food you don't even know it's sugar yeah yeah now i like the way you describe processed food you say it's food-like substance because it shouldn't be called food which makes a lot of sense right i mean you look at a twinkie and you've got 37 ingredients sure only one of them is food and it's down near the bottom of the list and it's banana puree so it might be a tiny drop of banana and the rest of us just food like ingredients chemicals chemicals right and i always say you know if you if you don't have that ingredient in your cupboard and you wouldn't cook with it you probably shouldn't eat it right whether it's maltodextrin you don't have a bottle of high fructose corn syrup no you don't have partially hydrogenated soybean oil you don't have butylated hydroxytoluene i don't even know what your bht right if you can't pronounce it if it's in latin if you don't recognize it if it says you know tomatoes water and salt or sardines olive oil and salt you know what it is right yeah most of the time right so is there such thing as a healthy processed food yeah sure and like i said there are foods if you look at the ingredients and every one of them recognizes food it says cashews and dates and pumpkin seeds and it's a bar it's fine you know turmeric i had one this morning it's a pumpkin bar it said you know pumpkin seeds and quinoa and i had like pepper and turmeric and salt i'm like i like okay this is food i recognize everything on here so yeah you can have packaged processed food as long as it's as close to its original stain as possible sure okay great now jumping onto fructose now fructose is in fruit because the cj has fiber with it is okay but fructose by itself yeah so so everybody heard of high fructose corn syrup right which didn't even exist until like the 1980s right so it was like now it's you know a huge portion of our dietary sweeteners because it's cheap the government subsidizes corn i once talked to the vice chairman of pepsi and he said mark he said the reason we use high fructose corn syrup is because the government makes it too cheap for us not to use it and it's in everything and so that's the problem is high fructose corn syrup is different than having let's say an apple which has fructose in it because the apple has fiber it has vitamins and minerals it's more slowly absorbed it's fine but when you take the fructose out of food in fact the vice chairman of pepsi said to me he said fructose is the problem he got it he knows he's a he's actually an endocrinologist from mayo clinic which toby cosgrove thinks is what you put on your sandwich but anyway [Laughter] so he's an extraordinary guy but he was talking about how fructose is really the bad problem why because it goes to the liver it doesn't increase insulin it goes to your liver and it causes fatty liver which now affects over 90 million americans most people don't know they have it it's caused from drinking soda and high fructose corn syrup and these these free fructose now fructose corn syrup normally sugar is 50 fructose 50 glucose but it's bound together with a chemical structure when you get high fructose corn syrup it could even be from 55 to 75 or more fructose and it's free fructose meaning it's just not bound to the glucose and so it quickly gets absorbed we know the fructose in the gut actually causes a leaky gut why because it takes energy from the gut to absorb it and when you take energy there then the things that that are keeping the cells together like legos those require energy to keep together they separate and then food and bacterial proteins and toxins leak into your bloodstream where 60 of your immune system is right under your gut and causes all sorts of inflammation so you get fatty liver you get diabetes pre-diabetes you get all sorts of cardiovascular issues heart disease cancer all that's coming from these high levels of fructose now is it true cancer like strives off of fructose right yeah you know it's interesting the pathway to keep cancer going is sugar in fact when they do diagnostics for cancer they do something called a pet scan which is where they basically tell you to starve yourself from carbohydrates and sugar for a few days they inject sugar into you radioactive sugar they can see it goes right to the cancer that's how the cancer lights up because a cancer loves sugar and starch i would say as well we know that obesity and diabetes and pre-diabetes all been linked to cancer so this is well established in the science so we know that sugar feeds cancer actually they're doing studies on ketogenic diets in cancer which is extremely high fat diet because your cells can run on sugar meaning glucose or something called ketones which comes from eating a lot of fat and cutting out the starch cancer cells can only run on sugar if you cut out their food source they die that's the theory and it's been shown to be often very effective and many difficult to treat cancers which is now undergoing a lot of research so it's kind of an interesting area but the the um sugar and cancer thing is a real thing so you're saying that if you cut out carbs or at least that's what the study is trying to show that cancer starves if you have no sugar in your body yeah so there's guys like dr um mukherjee in new york who's studying uh he's in oncology throughout the emperor of o'malley's talking about a presentation i saw was talking about how melanoma and pancreatic cancer are very difficult for cancers we're actually seeing impressive changes that's being researched in brain cancer because the brain runs on ketones very well but the sugar feeds the brain cancer so i think this is a promising area of research and we're going to learn more about it but you know maybe eventually part of the treatment for cancer which is ketogenic diets wow it's fascinating stuff now i'll kind of talk about some of the solutions um something like herbs spices condiments because we add sugar for flavor to make everything sweeter is there a more natural way of adding things in that category of earth herbs spices and condiments that we can add to our food yeah part of the problem is you know we have really become addicted to sugar yeah and our taste buds are highly stimulated by sugar and artificial sweeteners which often people go to have a thousand times more sweet flavor than sugar or more so it's super over so it makes you want even some more yeah so it takes a little while to unhook from that but there's so many incredible natural flavors out there in nature from spices and herbs and condiments and salt and pepper that actually bring out flavors in food and once people start to learn about that it tastes so much better than sugar sure i mean i you know sometimes i go to thai restaurant and it's like i put so much sugar in all the food i mean they put sugar in salad dressings i was just getting why is there sugar in salad dressing right yeah i don't get it but often you're salad dressing you get this bottled or commercially made or you know you go to mcdonald's it's actually pretty bad and the salad's fine when you put the dressing on it's worse than a big mac yeah and i see a lot of people trying to eat healthy and they go to salads with steak or chicken but then they get the dressing from the store and the thing is that dressing is kind of like what ruins the whole well yeah i mean usually it's refined vegetable oil so it's not extra virgin olive oil it's high fructose corn syrup it's gums and thickeners it's additives and preservatives like why would you put them in your salad do you think oil and vinegar i mean honestly i don't i'm so lazy i'll take my salad put in a bowl i'll pour olive oil on it yeah i'll pour some vinegar on it i'll salt and pepper it yeah and that's the whole sauce exactly if i want to get fancy i might put it in jar and add some mustard and lemon cumin cumin spices but you know i'm usually pretty lazy now we're choosing to put this poison in our body when we eat sugar i and and the scariest thing i actually want maybe choosing we might be addicted we are totally addicted but also knowing the information just like what you're doing is going around and talking about this um our kids you know i'm a single mom of two kids and i have total control of what the meal looks like but the scariest thing is changing the habits of your children when they go out in the world and they get to pick you know an apple for a snack versus the oreos or or the goldfish because you know it's an epidemic for for children right now with obesity adhd is does if they hold goldfish that would be fine but no not the whole goldfish but like the the cracker kind of get some omega-3s and proteins yeah yeah but um so it is it's very difficult to you know with your kids yeah with your kids but adhd and and obesity for children this all does that come from diet as well huge i mean we know that dietary changes play a big role in our cognitive function and our mood and behavior and that there's in fact there's a whole field of research called uh the achievement gap uh dr charles bosch from columbia has looked at how our kids diets and their health affect their ability to learn and function and their behavior in school so these kids who tend to have all these processed foods can't function and think actually here in cleveland i just met with a guy who started something called pure pantry health where he's bringing poor communities together and helping them learn how to eat healthy he was a coach in basketball he was tracking what these kids were eating how they were functioning in school how they were phasing out and spacing out and couldn't perform and he asked them what they're eating they're eating like flaming hot chips with red dye in it we know that red dye for example drives add behavior we know that that these these chemicals actually can affect paper we know that sugar and lack of good healthy nutrients affects these kids function so we we really need to focus on how do we change that i've seen schools where they've they've literally charter schools with really poor neighborhoods minority kids very disenfranchised families and they literally feed the kids three times a day yeah before the kids are going to jail now they're going to college they weren't finishing high school and now they're excelling and all the other kids in the neighborhoods and the rich neighborhoods that want to send their kids to this school because they're feeding them three times a day and eating real food and they're able to perform and function in school so it plays a huge thing and i think you know i once saw this video on youtube of this baby who got sugar for the first time and you look at the baby and it's like it's like crap the baby is getting cracked yeah and i think we get our kids used to this stuff and we think there's kids food and kids menus i mean breakfast cereals you know fruit loops and captain crunch and cocoa puffs and i mean the tricks are for kids i mean these are certified but the american heart association is heart healthy because they're low in fat but they're full of dyes and chemicals and also tons of sugar seven teaspoons of sugar in a bowl of trix cereal so it's like a dessert and even an unhealthy dessert yeah i always say you shouldn't call it breakfast called dessert yeah yeah i actually my kids when they ask me for cereal i make them eat their eggs and their vegetables and then i have them have theirs i'm a serial killer i don't think we should be eating cereal kelly i like that one now are these like kind of reversible with diet so let's say i change my diet like i know diabetes yes um is a huge one with with the diet like keto diet you can actually reverse yes so yes so we know for example that sugar and carbohydrates refined carbohydrates because vegetables are carbohydrates we want to eat a lot of those but starch and sugar flour predominantly 133 pounds of flour and 152 pounds of sugar that's driving the fact that 70 of those were overweight that one in two of us have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes that's massive half the population has pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes one in four kids teenage kids have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes when i was in medical school 30 years ago there wasn't a single case ever right now it's one in four right so how does that how does that happen it happens because of this high load of starch in the diet that raises insulin we get storage of fat and we in this vicious cycle causing diabetes and now there's some amazing research uh just came out february 2018 was about 250 patients randomized trial where they looked at type 2 diabetics who've been diabetic for a long time on insulin on maximum medical therapy they put them on a ketogenic diet it's about 70 fat i don't think it's for everybody but it's for certain people who need to move the needle and very very low starch and carbohydrates less than 50 to 30 grams which is almost nothing and they found a year that a hundred percent got off the main diabetes medication which often causes side effects called oral hypoglycemics and 94 percent got off insulin or dramatically reduced their dose and they lost an average of 30 pounds which is unbelievable or 12 of their body weight wow that's astounding there's no drug that can do this there's no other medication or shot that can actually do this result and that's the power of food so we actually can reverse diabetes you know it's funny actually my mom is a type 2 diabetic and i talk to her all the time about what you say about ketogenic diet about fasting everything like that she won the ketogenic diet for a week dr hyman and her numbers went down to 104 which is she said it's a number that she hasn't seen in six years she's been diabetic for over 10 years so it's just fascinating what you can do what you put in your body can completely eliminate medicine huge that's that's great now i want to kind of uh jump off to a true and false kind of game so okay love games all right so um food juice tell me true or false so tell me true and false and explain um you know why yes or no you answer true or false because i researched this but in case you don't know i'll help fruit juice is healthier than soda because of the antioxidants not really i mean okay you get a few vitamins a few antioxidants but essentially fruit juice is just like drinking soda and it's also got high fructose which is not a great thing so juice boxes and all these healthy juice drinks it's really not much better than soda and it and it drives the same kinds of biology weight gain diabetes obesity so don't think juice is a healthy drink now how many apples need to get in one glass of juice probably five eat the five apples good luck with that you probably won't get through the first two sure right okay um after a workout a sports drink is the best way to restore your electrolytes absolutely not you don't want to be having blue drinks or orange green drinks or whatever with all sorts of sugar and a little bit of electrolytes you know the best way to do it is actually you can get things that are powders that are just electrolytes i often have this liquid kind of use which i use a capful in a glass of water it's a little salty tasting water it's not the best thing to drink but you down it all of a sudden you feel like you're like a million bucks i do when i'm playing tennis this summer it's super hot or playing basketball and i get wiped out a little that just revives you completely all right skip the sugar skip the sugar now now if you're an elite athlete and you're training a long time you might need a little bit of carbohydrate but for the average joe that's not the way to go even after a workout desserts are the main course of added sugar in the american diet no is it breakfast it could be breakfast i mean all the cereal tops if you have a huge one of those mocha frappuccino latte something at starbucks that can have 76 grams of sugar that's like two cokes for breakfast right it's like two cokes and most of the breakfast we have in america is basically sugar donuts muffins bagels cereal waffles pancakes this is not what we should be eating we should be eating protein and fat for breakfast so the biggest source of sugar in the american diet and up to 15 to 20 percent of calories in some communities is soda sugar sweetened beverages okay great the best artificial sweetener is none at all yes it is true although there's monk fruit which is not really artificial it's from a traditional chinese fruit that has no calories but actually has a sweet taste and that can be used but what is that called monk fruit monk monk as in like a praying monk okay yeah great what about um i know we talked about honey a little bit earlier but is honey people think of like i can put honey on my tea here's the problem it's not the sugar that you add to your food it's the sugar that's added by corporations you can get 15 teaspoons of sugar in 120 ounce soda but you wouldn't put 15 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee or on your cereal right so it's it's fine to add a teaspoon of sugar or a teaspoon of honey or a teaspoon of maple syrup that's not the problem right it's the 34 teaspoons you're eating every day day in and day out it sounds very dangerous you should eat at least five servings of fruit each day well we are told need five servings to nine servings of fruit and vegetables every day which is good except it should be vegetables and fruit it should be seven of fruit and probably sorry seven of vegetables and two are fruit because fruit especially for our population listen if you're healthy and you're an athlete fine you can eat more fruit but for the average person who's overweight who's diabetic this is not a great food for you to take in large quantities you want to have a big bowl of pineapple or a big bowl of grapes and this is going to raise your blood sugar significantly so you want to cut that down and have some but it's not the main staple what are the worst offenders pineapple grapes aren't so great uh there's bananas are not great you can look at the glycemic index or glycemic load of fruit and you can kind of look at that i i wrote a book called food what the heck should i eat in the book i had go through you know from top to bottom one of the lowest glycemic fruits to the highest glycemic fruits and also fruits and vegetables you know one of the best vegetables to eat in america we eat the five most common vegetables which is basically potatoes in the form of french fries tomatoes in the form of ketchup and pizza sauce so tomatoes french fries pizza and ketchup are basically the main staples from american diet also we have onions and sweet corn in there and then of course there's iceberg lettuce which is essentially uh sawdust uh with like some water in it so okay now i want to talk about bananas real fast because a lot of people are like well i eat my bananas for potassium but i've read that avocados have more potassium than that well i mean listen all plant foods vegetables have a lot of potassium so i you can make a potassium broth just take a lot of veggies and greens and boil them up and make them like a vegetable broth that's going to be full of potassium okay much better than bananas without the sugar yeah okay great let's go to the next one so last one i have for you buying organic is a waste of money no okay there the issue is we if you look at the studies that are funded by the food industry and by monsanto and the pharmaceutical industry that makes these stuff they're going to find that they're not a problem but when you look at independent studies they are clearly a problem they contribute to cancer they contribute to autism and add behaviors in kids they contribute to crop all sorts of chronic diseases so you want to minimize your exposure to toxin in your life and food is the one of the easiest ways to do it one of the most abundant sources of toxins so in i'm on the board of this group called the environmental working group and they have something called the dirty dozen which are the 12 most contaminated vegetables and fruit and then the clean 15 which is the 15 least contaminated so if you're having an issue with your budget you can buy the clean 15 vegetables and fruits and stay away from the dirty dozen for example strawberries are the worst you never want to eat those unless they're organic i have an idea yeah and so there's there's a list of those in the book as well food what they actually you can look at all the different uh ratings and you also go to the environmental working group website ewg.org and there's a list of how do you reduce your exposure through your food through meat through fish through household cleaning products through your um through also your um your face and makeup products all that is on there so it's important to sort of be smart about reducing your exposure to toxins okay great you made it through the term false um you did i think you passed so um we're getting a lot of live questions i do have some uh pre-submitted questions that i'm to read off real quick so it could be fair for everyone so eileen um asked how does a ketogenic diet fit in this elimination of sugar i know we talked about this one of my doctors at crystal clinic suggested that i start this diet are you on board with putting your body into a state of ketosis and if you just want to describe a little bit about what i bet i know the doctor her name was carrie dayulas right so uh she's a good friend of mine uh and she wouldn't mind me saying this she's a diabetic type one and she takes almost no insulin and she's on a ketogenic diet which is pretty amazing for a type 1 diabetic just like one or two three units a day so if you have a particular issue i think ketogenic diets can be therapeutic i don't think they're necessary for everybody but they can lead to rapid weight loss they can lead to reversal of diabetes they can stop epilepsy that nothing else works for they're effective in autism they're effective in alzheimer's they're effective in neurocognitive other behavioral issues sometimes so there may be even cancer so there there are many indications for it but i don't think it's for everybody so essentially what it is is you switch from burning sugar in your cells to burning fat and when you do that all of a sudden you change the fuel source which is ketones ketones becomes the fuel source your body has a backup fuel system so let's say you didn't get to eat all day because your hunter gathered and you ran out of food well you could then switch to burning fat and you have you know a lot of fat stored in your body so you can literally mobilize the fat and burn the fat as a way of getting fuel you can also do it by cutting down the carbohydrates and increasing the fat to about 70 fat and it can be very powerful it has some amazing effects it can cause you to basically reverse all the process of aging it up regulates your mitochondria improves your gene expression reduces inflammation improves your all your cardiometabolic risk factors reduces all the things that it may be increased stem cells it may actually increase longevity so we're looking at all the research on this now it's pretty fascinating great and then i know you've talked about do not mix the two don't eat too much fat yeah and then too much sugar carbs because then you call it this is a really very dangerous and i feel like everybody should probably hear this from you very important thank you nada but here's the deal when you eat fat and a lot more fat you can't combine it with starch and sugar so when you do that it's called sweet fat think of donuts bagels and butter you know french fries ice cream where you combine fat and starch or fat and sugar that's deadly why because when you eat the sugar it's going to increase the insulin and then your fat and everything's running around your blood it all gets stored you're going to gain a lot of weight so you can't eat sweet fat if you're going to cut down on the starch that's okay but if you increase fat without cutting down the sugar and starch you're going to get in trouble so this relates to ketosis mike asks when you're in ketosis will your body burn dietary fat first or the stored fat first uh great question both it'll it'll burn the fuel you're eating as fat but it'll also start to mobilize fat so the interesting thing is sugar start is really creates a one-way street of food and calories into your fat cells it gets in there really easily and it can't get out it's like a one-way turnstile it's stuck in there because it inhibits what we call lipolysis which is the breakdown of fat so that it's a basically a biochemical mechanism where we stop the burning of fat and the release of fat from stored fat if we act in my microphone not working i'm getting that better closer does that sound better so there's you know there's a basically releasing of the fat when you start to eat fat it actually increases the release of fat from the fat cells and increases your metabolism when you eat a ketogenic diet great now i want to ask you about fasting i'm a big fan of fasting um does your body go through ketosis as well through fasting can we talk maybe a little bit about that because i actually just watched a documentary again about benefits of fasting anyways phenomenal stuff yeah if you want to talk a little bit about that well the only thing we know that actually increases longevity and you can increase your life by up to a third is what we call calorie restriction meaning you you cut your calories by a third and the problem with that is that you're miserable all the time because you're hungry so i'm not a fan so there's things called fasting mimicking diets which is essentially a we call intermittent fasting which is where you will restrict your calories or your food to an eight hour window or time restricted eating so you'll say eat dinner at six or seven at night and you won't need to lunch the next day and the reason that works is because it activates all the repair mechanisms in your body it actually helps to renew your mitochondria and cleans up all the waste from your cells in your brain it helps to stimulate stem cell production which rejuvenates you it helps to reduce inflammation increases all your cardiometabolic factors it increases ketones and helps to actually start to mobilize and burn fat from your fat cells and lose weight there's so many benefits to it extended fasting where you don't eat or you just drink water for a week or two or three can be a very effective treatment for conditions like autoimmune disease or type 2 diabetes it's not something you can do forever obviously you've got to eat but so careful with that because you you don't eat and then you refeed and you you know you can get into trouble if you don't do it right but there's actually a great guides to fasting jason fung doctor in canada's written book called the complete guide to fasting which is a great manual for understanding fasting now if you're eating a little bit of carbs and fat and everything like that after your fast how long does it take your body to go to through ketosis when you're fasting is it just like eight hours of fasting 12 hours yeah i mean you know often if you if you don't eat for 12 hours you'll start to go into twelve hours yeah okay so then you know overnight you know you eat and then overnight your body starts burning the food and then you know basically uh if you can extend it out to lunch there's also packs where you can actually add mct oil which builds ketones in your body so there's a lot of tricks okay dr hyman we have so many questions coming live so i'm going to start going through all right so first i have hassan is replacing fizzy cola drinks with carbonated water beneficial i am addicted to cola yes it's definitely beneficial make sure you get rid of the soda and if you want carbonated drinks there's ones like spend thrift or what is it called spin thrift i think it's called which is a great drink i don't have any relationship with any of these companies financially but this is a product that has a tiny bit of fruit juice it's sparkling and it's like a it's like a fake soda but it's very very good and it doesn't have any really any substantial sugar in it so there's all kinds of things like that there's like flavored lemon sparkling water there's all sorts of things you can do but you got to get off the soda all right susan hi dr hyman i eat a primarily vegetarian diet but still can't drop weight i have a very small amount of chocolate a day can this really be stopping me from losing weight yeah it's a big question about vegetarian vegan diets so the key is what are you eating right because you can eat a vegan keto diet which is extremely low carb very high fat or you can eat a vegan vegetarian very high carb diet which most people will do because they eat grains they eat beans they eat starchy chef most vegans and vegetarians will crave sugar because they're a little bit out of balance in terms of their biology and so it's tough and when you're eating foods that turn into sugar whether it's even if it's brown rice or kidney beans it will still lead if you have weight issues and you have insulin resistance it will still lead to some of these problems so i'd encourage you to sort of look at the reasons why i mean i think people can be vegan or vegetarian for moral reasons okay that's fine if you're a buddhist monk no problem for environmental reasons which i think is important because we shouldn't be eating feedlot cows because they're the number one contributor to climate change it's inhumane how we raise them we use tons of antibiotics pesticides the food they give them creates lower quality meat it's just a whole series of issues with it so it's bad for you bad for the planet and bad for the environment but grass-fed meat is very different so you look at the overall issue of environment and moral fine but the health issues are quite different and when you look at the research there's very little evidence that meat is problem in terms of our health especially grass-fed meats and more sustainably raised animals in fact they're critical to help restore the environment by rebuilding soils by sequestering carbon holding water that's a whole field called regenerative agriculture but the the health issues are really important to distinguish from these environmental and other issues and how what kind of meat we eat the quality matters so i think you know that you have to look at the reasons and i think people who do more um higher fat moderate protein very low starch and carb uh do far better in terms of weight loss and and this has been shown over and over again this was a study of uh 53 studies it was a review paper there were randomized control trials lasting a year or more and the low fat group did high far better than the low fat group the high fat group did better than low fat but the high value is also low carb and the bigger the difference in the fat and the carb the more the weight loss wow and you've done all kinds of stuff right you've done vegetarian you've done people yeah i was a vegetarian for 10 years in fact i actually um was with a friend the other day i was friends with in my 20s and she was showing me some pictures and we were out you know at a beach or something i had no shirt on i'm like wow and my body i was a vegetarian i was running five miles a day i was doing yoga i was healthy and my body was just scrawny and i'm 58 and compared when i was 28 i'm far more muscular far more you know defined and less body fat and much deeper level of health than when i was 28 because i switched my diet to getting off of all the starch and sugar okay and explain that is it the is it the protein it's getting off all the starch and sugar okay i mean when you when you and it's also the higher fat diet which actually stimulates muscle building this has been shown over and over again in human animal studies lean body mass increases with good quality protein and fat and it decreases with sugar and starch wow great and then i have debbie what are your thoughts on a plant-based whole foods eating plan and that's kind of what we just did well i just talked about that but i think i think it's important that we look at the reasons why if you think it's for health reasons i would challenge those assumptions i would check out my book uh food what that should i where i go through all the research i explain the controversies about me and i explain what the differences are and the kind of meat that has different effects and i think we just really need to look again at this and i i i will talk about a minute but the dietary guidelines group hasn't really reviewed the research on meat they basically assumed it's bad because it has saturated fat saturated fat they say is bad which is not and then you should not eat meat because of that and there's very little data to support that in fact there's a lot of data that doesn't support that at all right right well um kind of going back to sugar real fast kimberly what kind of foods would you suggest eating to get you through the sugar cravings and i'm getting a lot of these questions about how to curb your your sugar cravings right so i wrote a book about sugar addiction yes it was called the 10-day detox diet and essentially a program to get you unhooked and the secret is dramatically cutting out the starch and sugar so cold turkey it's not like well i'm just going to have you know a couple of shots of heroin today or a couple lines of cocaine i'm just cutting down on my you know you've got to like stop turkey the second thing is you've got to dramatically increase fat because fat is what makes you stop craving and within a day or sometimes less or two at the most it'll all go away your brain chemistry will change your hormones change that's how fast food works it's literally like medicine wow wow so cut the sugar cut the carbs and increase the starch increase the fat okay great um erica wants to know how do you help children kick the sugar habit and what foods do you suggest for younger picky eaters well in my house there was only two things on the menu take it or leave it it wasn't a restaurant there was no menu it was not like i want this this is what we ate and it's all real food and the fact is that we have this view of kids food in america which is so dangerous and so harmful and it's why 40 of kids are overweight in this country why you know one in six has some neurodevelopmental issue often related to what we're eating and the truth is that we know actually um that that we can feed kids real food and they will eat it right from an early age i mean think about what they eat in japan kids eat raw fish and seaweed right in indonesia they eat indonesian food there's no kids menus or kids food it's it's an invention of the american food industry which has been so detrimental and harmful to our health so i encourage you to make your home a safe zone start very early feeding your kids whole foods real food get them involved in cooking and playing with their food enjoying it and my kid my son now is a chef that's what he does for a living he like goes around teaching people how to cook healthy and eat healthy and throws these parties where he makes amazing food and teach people about health and food and he he went off track for a little bit in college but he came right back and he you know he's actually doing it for a living now so you can get your kids inspired and they and they will follow along some of those kids when they're teenagers will go off and eat mcdonald's or whatever but all their friends are doing it but if you built the foundation in their home you don't have to worry so be the example yeah family dinners every night not family dinners the average family dinner people don't have family dinners but if they do have them they lost 20 minutes or less while they're all eating a boxed food from another made in different factories heat in their microwave while they're watching tv or on their phones that's not a family dinner family dinners have been shown which i did every night with my family i cooked i worked i cooked i came home i made real food i sat down with them we enjoyed each other if families do that there's lower rates of obesity of eating disorders better school performance all sorts of benefits that come to families and kids when you eat at home with a family dinner and then um just like we talked about the restaurants going to a restaurant and you order a nice salad but then kids want to go off the kids menu and everything is mac and cheese hot dogs and chicken fingers i didn't think chickens had fingers they don't all right let's go up to sue is stevia okay and then related connie is also asking i know not all stevia is good but can you tell us what to look for in a good stevia well usually when people start to ask these questions it's a sign that they're addicted to sugar because nobody's going to be negotiating well can i have stevia can i have this can i have that i would just take a good look in the mirror and go why am i asking that question is it because i'm a sugar addict and i'm trying to substitute the sugar that i'm eating for something i think is better for me so most artificial sweeteners we know now are linked to obesity diabetes they alter the gut microbiome they create inflammation they're not a free lunch right they're calorie free but they're not free of effects on your biology that's causing disease as far as stevia goes i think we still don't know enough about it there are studies that show may not be as bad in terms of raising insulin and other effects but still it's it's not something i would consider a free food it's a treat and i would encourage you to just use a little bit of regular sugar if you want to sweeten something and the riboside a is an extract of sugar that's made by uh cargill and pepsi and coke there's two kinds of purevia and truvia and and there are sort of extracts of strebia stevia now the question is how are they bad or not i would prefer people as a whole plant stevia it's a little bitter but that's what i would suggest okay is is sugar ever okay to eat i mean you just mentioned it as a treat what is a treat how often is it right i think if sugar is a recreational drug right it's like tequila or vodka or whatever you don't want to have a bottle of vodka for breakfast lunch and dinner which is essentially what we're doing with sugar so yes enjoy sugar from time to time add it to yourself or know how much is in there don't eat processed foods which have a lot of hidden added sugar and enjoy it don't feel bad don't feel guilty but understand it's a recreational drug and the dose makes the poison so we should be having less than five teaspoons a day at the max even less depending on whether or not you're on a ketogenic diet or not but it really is important to not go overboard we're eating four to ten times that wow okay very good um cassandra wants to know what are good snack ideas without sugar no snack ideas well i you know i eat a lot of protein fat i travel a lot i have a bag of call i have an emergency food pack and uh if you go online you can go to my website dr hyman.com and you can watch the emergency food pack video where i literally show you it's like a magic trick i put other stuff in this big bag but basically it's a lot of protein and fat so i have i've you know bison jerky or grass-fed beef jerky i'll have nuts for example or seeds pumpkin seeds cashews almonds walnuts i'll have nut butter packets i'll have coconut butter in a packet i'll have almond butter cashew butter all these things i basically have in my bag uh i got something here but i'm very careful when i look at i make sure it's all whole and green so i found like the pumpkin seed bar with quinoa and like turmeric and salt i'll crunch on that there's stuff out there but you have to be really smart i know what you're doing great tracy what about alcohol consumption vodka and club soda qualify as keto friendly how do you still wisely choose in social scenarios well yeah so again remember it's a drug right so dose makes a poison and i think um you know alcohol can be helpful in small doses like glass a wine or an ounce of alcohol like tequila or vodka and it depends on you you know if you're an alcoholic no right but if you can tolerate you enjoy it i think it's okay it's just a matter of the dose and how much and when if you eat it after a meal if you eat it before a meal it's gonna have a much more adverse effect on your blood sugar and insulin than if you eat it with a meal or after a meal oh good to know i didn't know that we have monica how does eating the occasional sugary tree affect health for instance special occasions like birthday cakes or social situations where someone serves dessert those are the situations most tempting for me i feel like i'm being rude if i decline the serving she can have a serving have a bite just your bite that's hard it depends on you like listen if you ran 10 miles that day go ahead and have the dessert if you're sitting around the couch you're not exercising and you're 100 pounds overweight probably not a good idea yeah all right and then shelly how about dates and figs dried are they bad for you oh we got a lot of sugar addicts out there yeah there's tons i mean that's what we're talking about yeah they're okay dried fruit is pretty concentrated sugar and sweet but it's got a lot of other nutrients and benefits to it so again it's not like you have 10 figs or 10 dates you know having a date or a vegas fine uh there's dates sugar and sweetened products out there which are okay but again it's not a free food okay and what about ron rolland he wants to know what is your opinion on a diet high in antioxidants and free radical effects on aging and inflammation well that's a good question so we're talking about a diet high in antioxidants which essentially a plant-rich diet i don't call it plant-based they call plant-rich which is lots of vegetables and non-starchy vegetables mostly some fruits which are like berries which are powerful antioxidants eating foods that are anti-inflammatory like whole foods get away from processed foods from a lot of sugar and starch carbohydrates which are all inflammatory eating more the good fats which are anti-inflammatory all that's going to really help you deal with aging and chronic disease okay and then i have sheila what about baby formula are we addicting our kids from birth great question yeah that is a good one so if you look at the ingredients on formula they're not that great it's soybean oil it's a lot of sugar um and uh it turns out that the kids who have a lot of formula tend to have more obesity they tend to have more gut issues there's all kinds of issues so i'm not a big formula fan i think people should breastfeed until about a year and then they should cut it off they can breastfeed for two years they want which is what most populations do and then they don't need to switch to milk they don't need to switch to formula they can eat real food and you know it's tough not everybody's breastfeeding but you have to use for me you have to use formula but it's really not the most ideal thing okay and um kathy wants to know if there is any healthy bread that is okay to eat yes i mean i basically my rule for bread is if you can stand on it and it doesn't squish you can eat it right so these are very dense either nut and seed breads which you can make the recipes online i think there's one called the world's healthiest bread or something uh there's not gluten sensitive there's something called german rye bread which is not like traditional rye bread but it's actually made from whole colonel rye it's like black and it's dense and it's thin you can toast it it's really good all right great ebelin is asking if vitamin d deficient as told by a doctor how many milligrams do i need to take daily great question so if you're vitamin e deficient and your doctor says you are it's probably bad because the ideal level is 50 to 60 and most labs are either 20 is deficient or 30. so most of us are insufficient or really deficient and it's important because vitamin d regulates so many important things for us so you want to get your low between 50 and 69 some people don't need that much to do that some people need a lot it depends on your genetics so you have to test and measure but usually whatever your level is let's say it's 20 it takes a thousand units to get 10 points increase so if you want to get to 50 and you're at 20 you need 3 000. so it's like that wow all right but the average person probably between two and four thousand a day is the right amount okay now uh milo milo i'm sorry from butchering your name great information but how can we fight the cravings the anxiety for sugar well that's what i said the 10-day detox is basically a sugar addiction detox it's like a rehab for sugar yeah and it's really easy to do and every day there's a different set of steps and you want to make sure you're following them but i can tell you within 12 to 48 hours you're going to be fine and i've had people come and say i've been addicted to my whole life i'm never going to be able again and go on and on about the cravings and within 48 hours they're like oh my god i feel totally different all right great and then linda is extra potassium needed when you're on a keto diet extra salt is needed what happens is when you have a lot of sugar and starch you increase insulin insulin makes you hold on to salt or sodium and hold onto water so what happens if you switch from very high starch sugar diet to a very high fat low carb diet you're going to drop tons of water which is a good thing because that's inflammation and you're going to lose a lot of salt so you actually need to increase your salt intake especially as you're switching over because you'll get what we call the keto flu which means you feel lousy because you're not getting enough salt okay i like a lot of pickled everything pickled vegetables is that is that like a healthy thing is there a lot of sugar in that no no no no not usually you can get sugary pickled vegetables but no not usually but the truth is that most um fermented foods have been used for centuries but we didn't have refrigerators so people have ate sauce i mean it was a funny study i saw where these polish women in poland eat about 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year wow and then when they move to america they get much higher rates of breast cancer and they stop eating the sauerkraut and there may be a connection there and it may be because of how it affects their gut flora so fermented foods are really good for your gut flora great and then allison's asking what do you recommend as a long-term schedule for intermittent fasting like how many days to do it per week i find that it helps with my back pain yeah i mean you can do it every day i mean you can people are you know eat dinner by seven and only coming in the next day that's fine to do not everybody should do it because if you're very thin if you're pregnant if you're a kid if you have medical issues you want to be careful about it but for the average healthy person especially if you're you know diabetic overweight it can be very effective now i know we're talking a whole lot about processed foods and our next facebook live will be in june and it will be about processed food so we'll talk a lot more about that no i don't know the day yet but i'll let them know for sure but i want to talk about this like most terrifying thing that you've ever mentioned was about the cheese i'm gonna say cheese because it's not really cheese so that's why i'm putting quotations but can you talk a little bit about the singles the the the singles that you buy from the store you know most of wheat is not really food it's food-like substances i remember i was like in haiti after the earthquake and hadn't eaten for three days they've been leaving on a few cliff bars and some bottled water we brought in and the military shows up and these meals ready to eat and i'm like oh this is great i went to one of the soldiers and i said can i have one because we haven't eaten in like three days he's like sure so i picked out chicken and dumplings because it was a very stressful time and i founded comfort food it sounded good so i went to the back of the surgery suite i heated up and i was reading the label and we had like 500 ingredients and i like didn't see the word chicken so when it was a chicken-like substance right and so you know a lot of what we eat is is not really food and and we want to be eating real food because when you eat the junk it you know it's it's it's not actually food wow so some of the cheese items yeah so the cheese the cheese thing is interesting because the government has a regulation you have to have more than 51 percent cheese to call it cheese so they call it american slices or craft slices right but it's not really cheese it's what you see on all the mcdonald's hamburgers or their fast food burgers it's not actually really cheese it's a cheese-like substance so they can't call it cheese that's terrifying 51 doesn't even sound enough no it should be 100 cheap yes there should be jesus fight for him buying cheese that makes sense well is there hope out there i know there's new dietary guidelines that are coming out is that is that right can you talk a little bit about that yes this is fascinating so the dietary guidelines have evolved a lot since 1977 under mcgovern they were beginning this dietary recommendations for americans and it was told us to eat more carbs and less fat and no cholesterol and this was based on really bad science and then over the years they changed it then they said eat six to 11 servings of bread rice serum pasta the great food pyramid which shouldn't be called the food pyramid it should be called the food tombstone and essentially killed millions of people i'm not joking i really think it has and now we've sort of moved forward a little bit in 2015 there were new guidelines that said we should not worry about fat anymore that we shouldn't worry about cholesterol then we should cut on sugar but it still missed whole areas of important research that didn't review like low carbohydrate diets high fat diets and even uh the fact of saturated fat being an issue or not and so all these things were sort of ignored what about meat they didn't even examine the literature on meat so there's a process right now until march 30th and i encourage you to go check out the link to the usda which is asking for comments from citizens about the guidelines and the things that they want to know is do you think we should look at the data on saturated fat do you think we should review the data on meat do you think we should review the data on low carbohydrate diets and the answer is yes you want to go and post yes because because these are the things that are going to help us really review what the truth is and not get recommendations that don't match the science the national academy of sciences actually had reviewed the process by which the guidelines are created and this was based on congress mandating the national academy of sciences which is the most independent government board of science to review how we come up with the guidelines and what they found was that the guidelines had undue industry influence meaning they were funders from the dairy council and from various industry groups who are funding the committee members so they're not exactly independent and impartial and then they also found that they ignored huge amounts of data for example all the data on saturated fat they didn't review it there was so much more data randomized trials other interventions and they just ignore them that exonerate saturated fat as being a problem even dr steve nissen here at the cleveland clinic has said to me mark fat's not an issue and i don't even think saturated fat's an issue and he's also you know had like helping to advocate for this is the top cardiologist in the world probably here at cleveland clinic so we're really seeing a shift but the guidelines don't match that and it's so important because they form the base of all of our recommendations for food programs in this country and we need to fix that so i encourage you to comment on the usda page for dietary guidelines comments which is up to march 30th and we can't undo the chronic diseases that we've you know seen in the past years but at least this is an hopeful step we can we can we can if we have the right advice because it informs everything it forms a doctor say nutritionists say the front line says served in hospitals certain all the food programs school lunches all this is determined by these guidelines so the guidelines have to actually match science and not industry influence do you think that would uh change the food marketing which i think is the culture sure sure but the problem is that usually what the food companies do is they dial up and down ingredients based on what the guidelines say so it says eat low fat i'll say low-fat yogurt well low-fat yogurt has more sugar per ounce than a can of soda wow wow think about it it's crazy it's that's insane stuff and i mean kudos to you and people like you that are going around and spreading the truth the ugly truth um to people and you know doing well it's an empowering message it's empowering because people actually can change they can transform your life it's not that hard and you just have to take back your health yeah and it's amazing that what you put in your body completely can change your health and that's what you're you know advocating so thank you again for for everything is there anything that you want to kind of conclude with well i think people are confused about what to eat yeah and i think that's really why i wrote my book food what the heck should i eat and i think it provides a lot of the thinking about what the research is behind this why we're so confused a really practical guide on what to eat and what not to eat sure and if you guys would like to make an appointment with a cleveland clinic functional medicine doctor you can go to ccf.org functioning for life and if you enjoyed this facebook live make sure you guys are actually following the cleveland clinic page and then turn on your notifications as well and for more health tips and information please follow us on facebook twitter instagram and snapchat at clevelandclinic one word all right one more thing one more thing so she mentioned getting an appointment what we found is that our functioning for life groups which are groups where you work together with other people it's a 10 week course and you do with others and you get supported nutritionists dietitians doctors it's really amazing we're finding people are doing far better doing that than actually the one-on-one visits because people have a chance to have much more contact with health professionals they have contact with each other the peer support or the community relationship sort of action aspect of this is so powerful so i encourage people to really think about signing up for functioning for life we have different programs for diabetes for weight for women's health for gut issues autoimmune disease really really powerful model and i encourage you to check it out and these are shared medical appointments so there's like 10 patients around you and you feel supported because everybody's going through different issues exactly together great well thank you so much for watching and we'll see you again next time bye

Channel: Cleveland Clinic

Views: 341,626

Rating: 4.8025413 out of 5

Keywords: sugar, diet, addiction, sweets, cravings, functional medicine, Mark Hyman, cleveland clinic

Id: FyEgHsIIrx4

Length: 57min 55sec (3475 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 22 2018