Replacing Fructose with Allulose: Exploring the Science Artificial Sweeteners - Dr. Johnson | EP 175

we're on such high carb diets especially bread rice Donuts that it's driving what was meant to be a survival mechanism has converted into what's driving metabolic [Music] diseases well hello everyone I'm Dr David prut welcome again to our program the empowered neurologist today we're going to take a deep dive into metabolism into really what is so Central to so many of the illnesses of modern times like obesity diabetes some forms of cancer and yes even Alzheimer's disease these are issues related to problems with our metabolism we'll be talking with Dr Richard Johnson many of you can recall that he has been on the program a couple of times in the past really centered on our discussions about uric acid today we're going to be talking more about metabolism M as relates to ideas like glp1 drugs like OIC for example we'll be talking about alos as a sugar substitute a sweetener that's become very popular and that is a sweetener that does have some glp1 Agonist activity I'm looking forward to our interview there's so much to learn always from Dr Johnson it's why he's coming back for his third visit on the empowered neurologist let's Jump Right In well hello Dr Johnson welcome back from Dubai thank you David it's really great to be back on your show I'm delighted to be here today um so that our audience knows we we're doing a fair amount of interaction on all kinds of platforms one of which is Alzheimer's Prevention Day that we're working on uh I think you know with our frustration of the notion of Alzheimer's awareness being enough but uh so we're getting to see each other quite a bit which is great uh but I wanted to and I mentioned this to you prior to going on a recording that you just came back from Dubai the cop 28 conference so first of all how does a guy like you end up uh being so interested in the environment well so uh well first off it's great seeing you daveid and uh it's true we are collaborating on so many uh subjects um and it's been wonderful um well uh so the the international climate meetings are held once a year uh and although these cop meetings are often uh focused on policies uh there has been a movement to look at the effects on health and to bring Physicians to these meetings um I uh have been doing as you know a lot of research in general most of it's been on sugar and obesity and uric acid but I actually have a a a research Focus as well on climate change and how it can affect kidney disease and there there's a very big epidemic of chronic kidney disease that was discovered in Central America there's been like 60,000 deaths uh and it's also in India and Sri Lanka um and there's also some going on in Mexico and I've been very actively involved in this epidemic going back to 2012 we were the first ones to link it with climate change we've also linked it with toxins uh from cutting it's often seen in sugarcane workers and uh it's the toxins are related to the burning of the sugar cane field which they do before they harvest it um and so I've been actively involved in this and with that I got involved with a foundation called the climate and health foundation and I went to this meeting because this was uh one of the very first cops that actually devoted of you know uh more than a day to uh to climate and health and um I think what's being recognized is we used to think of climate change and global warming as something that's going to threaten us in the future but what's happening is we're actually seeing a lot of people suffering from climate related uh things even now and um as a kind of a leader in medicine looking at this I I uh decided to go to this meeting I did give a presentation um and it was a very very beneficial meeting um so that's why I was there well we've been uh doing a pretty deep dive over the past couple of years into the area of specifically particulate pollution uh these so-called PM 2.5S and their role in neurod degenerative conditions I mean the literature came out about 10 years ago looking at showing relationships of 2.5 pm2.5 exposure to dementia risk and more recently as in last week published in the journal neurology a relationship between 2.5 PM 2.5 exposure and Parkinson's risk so you know I think there are multiple mechanisms that we could unpack but I think certainly inflammation is one of them uh and then I think that as it relates these pm2.5 it's reasonable to ask the question okay what exactly are these particles uh and and you know as it relates for example to the increased rate of of forest fires that we're seeing globally and exposure to this type of smoke that yes we're breathing in Forest smoke but and I think it's important for people to get their arms around the fact that cities are burning uh you know this last past summer in Canada in Northern Canada everybody says well it's a forest fire and it's being you know you have this notion that well the smoke is sitting around the campfire what could be wrong with that but it's buildings it's you know there's a lot of things being thrown in the atmosphere that are really toxic and in my world as it relates to the brain this is is something that at least in our literature we're seeing appear more and more frequently and I think with good reason and especially you important for us because we can talk about what is uh the context of our modern world in terms of what we can do about it yes from a climate uh change perspective that's for sure but also what we can do to protect people in terms of you know assessing and improving the quality of their indoor air people spend 90% of their time these days indoors what can we be doing you know I think it's a clear and present danger that's not getting much attention you are right on the money and and just to follow up on this uh you know what what they do what they were doing in these areas was to burn the sugar cane fields and also like in Sri Lanka they'll burn the rice patties for fertilization at the end and it turns out that these sugar cane and rice have a lot of silica in their in their uh plant and um and when you burn this this silica turns out to be about 70% of the pm2.5 and if you uh give sugar cane Ash to uh animals and uh like laboratory rats and we did that we gave it through the nose into the lung as well as we we've given it orally and what happens is that the sugarcane Ash has these silica nanop particles which actually adhere chemicals like agrochemicals as well and um and and these particles the nanop particles get through the body this crystall and silica can cause a disease called silicosis that's what you get with construction workers but uh in this fine smoke the uh the pm2.5 is consists of nanop particles which are smaller and they pass into the system we find them in the lung and the liver in the spleen uh and in the kidney we haven't looked at the brain David I need to do this with you actually but we have we recently were did kidney biopsies on these patients that are developing this terrible kidney disease and we found silica anoparticles in their kidneys and when we give silica to animals they start getting K kidney disease too so we do think that that's playing a role and the pm2.5 is really the the key player and uh pm2.5 is also associated with metabolic diseases and and neurologic diseases as you say so it's really an important thing to to uh consider and this is an environmental problem on top of the heat stress and all that and we think that the heat actually increases the permeability in the gut to to absorb these toxins so heat stress makes you more and also in the lung increases the ability of these toxins to get into the into the circulation yes with the heat stress being a threat in and of itself as well right in right and so we could create chronic kidney disease with repeated heat stress but we you know we're we're now doing studies to look at what we call the Synergy of these Pathways yeah it's you know it's an as we eventually control metabolic diseases these environmental and toxin uh and and climate diseases are going to start to manifest more well that was an optimistic uh statement just as we ultimately control metabolic diseases that's the preface there I like that I mean that that makes me feel good we're doing the right thing I think we're going the right direction but it is uh it's getting close to Christmas and we're gonna be talking about sugar today Santa's not going to be happy but um but I I'm telling you it's not the me just a message but the messenger I think respectfully Santa might be a little bit metabolically dysfunctional if you all due respect I mean yeah on a keto diet he could get down the chimney fast yeah but you think back about his origin what company actually brought him into being I'm we'll leave that for another day yeah uh but and but just one more thing is uh related to climate change you know it most of the interest I think over the years has focused on the changes in latitudes uh with respect to infectious disease you know we've started to see what were more tropical types of diseases spreading into Florida and then further north uh uh you know arthropod born uh types of things like chicken G uh D Etc and you know there's been the concern that these are diseases that were are you know we wouldn't see at more Central and even Northern latitudes and as the world warms we're going to see that people are not prepared for that I think that the pm2.5 and pollution in general is going to turn out to be a far more pervasive uh issue the way it spreads I mean this past summer we watched these wildfires in northeastern Canada uh and the experience was felt throughout the United States and and to some degree measurable at least in Europe so you know we share a a pretty small space and when we start to aggressively be foul our own nest then uh you know there are consequences to pay we spend some time as I've told you before in the Pacific Northwest on on a boat in the summertime and the truth of the matter is we had to close up and be underway in this beautiful pristine Pacific Northwest with windows closed and a HEPA air filter on and not even able to navigate in during a beautiful day unless we had radar on because of the thickness of w that's scary I mean that yeah I'm totally I I believe that uh you know we we need as scientists and researchers and clinicians we need to uh view the environmental and climate Associated thing uh conditions and diseases that are are occurring as a high priority and that's why I went to cop that's why um I have grants on climate change and kidney disease and climate change and its effects on on metabolism uh it it also increases the risk for obesity you know it gets hotter people drink more soft drinks but actually we've been able to show that heat stress activates some of the same processes that uh are driving metabolic disease so it's it's part and parcel of what we have to do and and I'm so delighted that you are also so focused on this we have a lot more in common David than we've than we are even aware we haven't played guitar together yet but we're I would love to do that with you the um the role of these uh PM 2.5S in amping up inflammation in the body I think has some behavioral uh Downstream effects in that we know that that inflammation uh tends to restrict the top- down control in terms of decisionmaking from the prefontal cortex that normally would temper decision making be made with the influence of the amigdala in other words impulsivity not thinking about consequences future uh effects of our decisions in other words the more inflammation we are exposed to the the less able we are to make better decisions and I I say that because you brought up an interesting uh topic and that is the idea that the hotter the environment the more soft drinks people are going to be drinking but in addition you know the more inflammation that we experience the less able we are to say no to those bad decisions and the more likely we are to engage in those inappropriate food choices which further then augments uh inflammation and further segregates our decision-making towards you know the takes the adult out of the room yeah we've even done experimental studies with heat stress and dehydration and when you do that you it actually also enhances the production of fructose in the body um because it activates P Pathways that are involved in sugar production and so uh you know we are as you and I know um sugar is contains glucose and fructose bound together and high fructose corn Sy is another type of mixture of glucose and fructose and the vast majority of of the sugar we're eating the sugar and high fructose corn syrup that's makes up a major source of fructose that we get and fructose as you know has been my the baby that I've been studing for years and seems to be involved in metabolic disease but when you do a heat stress in dehydration it will activate Pathways that will stimulate the conversion of glucose to fructose in the body and when that happens you can actually see metabolic condition changes like even fatty liver start to develop well it brings up an interesting topic and that is the the survival mechanisms that are activated in the brain uh that actually you know really kind of depend on this polyol pathway for the conversion of glucose and fructose and then the downstream generation of uric acid being being pro-inflammatory and allowing or really causing us to take more risks in life and therefore maybe that's a survival pathway it's what you and I wrote a paper about absolutely and also you're you become a world expert on uric acid yourself and uh you know it's very interesting there's a group at the National Institute of Health uh that actually did some study where they raised uric acid in animals and just by raising uric acid and animals genetically uh these animals became very impulsive and they started actually they also increased their locomotor activity like they were foraging it they would actually jump more initially uh although in the long term it's not so good in the well in the short term it would made them hyperactive that's not necessarily good either so yeah but anyway yeah it's really true what you and I kind of uh focused on the past few years has been kind of the the biochemistry changes the physiological changes that happen to pave the way for survival in our primate ancestors because of elevated uric acid you know the mitochondrial uh down functionality down regulation less energy consumption lipogenesis uh gluconeogenesis Hy raising blood pressure effects on fluid dynamics Etc we've talked about that in our books for example and certainly on podcasts Etc but I I think that you and I need to do a little bit more work on the behavioral aspects that you just alluded to in that you've noticed in animals that we tal that in the paper that we wrote we talked about might have been also a powerful survival mechanism that when you're impulsive and you take a lot of risks maybe you know being less careful is a is a good thing that you might find food by you know traversing an area that's dangerous whereas somebody more conservative with less uric acid might not feel they need to do yeah absolutely so as you alluding to uh there was a period of time 15 million years ago where when uh our ancestors were actually going through a period of global cooling and there was a loss of of food habitats they were mainly eating fruit and uh and they started starving you could actually see that because during it was season Al starvation when it was the cooler part of the Year there weren't fruit available and they would actually start to starve and you could see that from changes in their teeth actually uh and um they had that mutation that uh that involved uric acid and their their serum uric acid went up and uh we actually did studies where we resurrected the extinct Gene and did all these cool studies and we basically what we were able to show is that when they had this mutation it helped them uh significantly to store fat and also to forge and just as you're saying foraging involves being impulsive it involves all the things you say about going into a dangerous area moving fast you got to look around quickly you can't focus on anything for any particular period of time because you just have to keep moving and uh you know acutely this is um a survival tool that's really helpful there's no food around the guy you want is you want that the bravest in the group the one who's the most impulsive and the fastest to go out there and find the food as rapidly as they can but you know if you do that chronically you know it can be associated with diseases like ADHD and there's studies in in children with ADHD and they have higher uric acid levels than than uh children the same age that don't have ADHD so this is you know this it's pretty important because sugar raises uric acid and other things do too but sugar is the a major major stimulus of of uric acid and so uh you know when people eat a lot of sugar they actually it's not uncommon for parents to say that they're hyperactive um and uh you know we can go into that more but basically I think there's a there's a great uh area for you and and I to investigate more sure and I would we're going to need to jump uh jump back from the middle myos scene period to current current metabolic Mayhem yes um I I want to tell you one thing I always prepare for a podcast by writing out a bunch of questions that I think I'm G to ask the guest I post them here in front of me so I can U you know gear uh steer the conversation and I will say interestingly that chat GPT has been helping me write those questions as of late but I didn't write aing question for today and we haven't even started so that that should tell us something we're going to be talking about metabolism about sugar about allulose sugar uh we'll be talking about glp1 how The Agonist work etc we've got some grounded cover um you were kind of to provide us some slides so I'm going to turn to those slides right now thank you uh so these are some slides that we prepared for today and uh I first want to just briefly re remind everyone about fructose and and why we're interested in it and why we're this led to my interest in allulose so uh first off everyone I think knows that the classical thinking of what causes obesity is that we eat too much we exercise too little and so what happens is when you eat you're getting calories or energy and when you exercise you're burning energy and if you eat more than you get get rid of it has to go somewhere so it gets stored as fat uh next slide thank you and uh and so this is the classic thinking on the left side of the slide you'll see this you know eat too much exercise too little excess calories we fill the tank you know of you know with the energy that we're actively using and then what's excess is stored as fat but that isn't actually how it works this if you look at this classical thinking model what happens is you fill up the you're filling up the gas tank and then the leftover goes into fat but way the way it actually is working is that there's a a break done where you don't actually fill up the gas tank the gas tank stays on a on a low power or or half full and so the way it works is that there's one food that does this is one major nutrient that that switches the gas to go half full and that is fructose and when you eat foods that contain fructose which is basically sugar and high fructose corn syr or that produce fructose and fructose is only produced from carbs so when you're eating particularly high glycemia carbs like bread rice and potatoes they can be converted to fructose in the body But whichever way you get it if you make it or you eat it that fructose when it's metabolized generates uric acid uh the the mean guy the bad guy that David and I talk about and that uric acid goes to the mitochondria and the mitochondria are the energy factories that's where the energy is made the active energy is made it's called ATP and the uric acid suppresses the production of energy and when it does that it takes that gas tank and drops it to 2/3 it doesn't drop it to near empty it just drops the the gas down to enough that it makes you worry that the the that you don't have enough energy that that you're at risk of running out and that triggers a whole host of biochemical reactions that try to say we want to fill that tank of gas and that means I have to eat so that you start getting hungry and thirsty you start searching for foods you and then you also blocks satiety you block that feeling of fullness so you go into a an u a Hungry Hungry Caterpillar effect where you just keep eating and eating uh and that's what drives weight gain and so it's actually and and and because the it won't go to the ATP because it's being suppressed the energy has to go to fat that's the only uh that's the storage site so basically it keeps Active Energy down and stimulates the storage of fat but there are also effects that are activated independently of calories and those calorie independent effects are what drives diabetes and metabolics metabolic effects high blood pressure and even brain effects so there's you're you're gaining weight because you're eating more but you're you have metabolic effects that can occur even if you're if you've activated this switch you can become diabetic even without eating a lot you know uh even like being on a caloric restriction so basically in the upper right sugar is telling your body that you're starving and it's putting into play these mechanisms to keep you alive to make fat to reduce your mitochondrial function so you're not burning not using energy and you're storing fat uh even though you know that's that's inappropriate and I would say that you know these metabolic effects on the bottom right of the screen diabetes hypertension dementia that you we see the research that clearly correlates the consumption of fructose containing beverages even fruit juice as well as certainly salt drinks with Co cognitive decline with risk rather absolutely or dementia and what a you know those aren't very many dots to connect eat a lot of fructose you raise your risk of dementia it's a pretty powerful message well hi everyone Dr David prut here we hope you're enjoying this content and if you would do so go ahead and hit the like button and if you're not already a subscriber to our Channel please consider doing so uh we're really grateful to have you as part of our community so let's get right back to the presentation yes it's very powerful so the question is why would there be a system to make us fat and to uh create all these metabolic effects in next slide um and and it turns out that uh it was because there were times there are times when um animals want to get fat and that's uh you know for example like a bear that's going to hibernate in the winter because there's no food around needs to have sufficient fat stores to get through the winter and so what happens is in the fall when the when all this uh when the fruit ripens the animals will eat huge amounts of fruit I mean I mean like a 10,000 grapes in a day nothing like we do okay this is like large amounts of fruit and when they do that they trigger this fructose switch and they turn their mitochondria down they make less ATP and they eat more but the now the calories instead of going to make ATP are actually going right into fat and it's to help the animal and they become insulin resistant which means that their glucose levels instead glucose instead of going into the muscle stays up in the circulation and that can allow the brain for the areas of the brain that don't use insulin that they can that glucose can be used there um and so this is this was all meant to be a survival pathway and in the short term you know it stimulates foraging this this helps the helps survival and so this was the fructose sort of developed as a nutrient to help animals prepare for when when things are in trouble or you know so and so you can get that fat before you actually get into trouble and uh and so it's like triggered by by eating a lot of fruit in the fall before winter and and a lot of animals do it you know lemur will eat a lot of fruit to gain fat to help them through the dry season and when they when they they hibernate even in hot weather it's called estivation and then they break down the fat to make calories and water because when you break down fat you get water so uh it it's sort of interesting so this was meant to be a good thing next slide and so we actually found ways to activate this switch ourselves we even found ways to amplify it with this mutation that occurred millions of years ago uh so we we are very sensitive to sugar and if you give like sugar to a a mouse you have to give a large amount of sugar to get in effect but to humans we are very sensitive because of all these things that have happened to us but look what we what happened once we learned uh you know how to make sugar uh instead of eating four pounds a year which is what we did in 1700 now we can eat 150 pounds or more of sugar and uh and so we're eating huge amounts of sugar in high fructose corn syrup we have been able to reduce that a little bit in the last decade but we're still eating so much that it makes up 15 to 20% of our diet uh and that's enough to to basically make all this at high risk for metabolic syndrome for uh you know for having high insulin levels chronically for getting o overweight this is why so many people uh in our culture uh are overweight or obese or about to become overweight or obese okay we can go to the next slide so what's happened now is that because we're we're eating a lot of sugar plus we're eating a lot of carbs uh and the high glycemic carbs as I mentioned also can be converted to fructose in the body and in fact they may be even more dangerous than sugar under certain circumstances and um so when we're we're on such high carb diets especially bread rice Donuts that uh it's driving what was meant to be a survival mechanism has converted into what's driving metabolic diseases and we can go around this from the left to the uh go clockwise and you you know causes hunger craving fat storage and obesity diabetes uh heart disease and systemic inflammation it raises blood pressure that was meant to improve our circulation and maintain the circulation but now it's uh when it becomes high blood pressure it's it's actually damaging blood vessels in the brain and also when it's suppressed presses those mitochondria it reduces the oxygen uh that's being used by the animal because a lot of oxygen is used to make ATP and so when you block that or reduce it it actually uh leads to kind of a low oxygen uh survival you can survive with low oxygen and this this pathway is associated with what we call the warberg effect where you can uh basically what's called glycolysis and it's been found to drive cancers and if you give fructose and put it on cancer cells they grow like Matt and and if you raise uric acid the cancers can spread very quickly we've published on this and it turns out that this is another H bad consequence of this the cancers that are seen in people with obesity are probably largely linked with these Pathways so anyway so next slide so this was just a kind of an overview and of course when you hear this people say well what fructos is and fruit is that mean we can't eat fruit no you should eat natural fruits uh whole fruits uh you don't want to drink fruit juice because there you're concentrating a lot of fruits and you're getting a lot of fructose and it's it's bad but but if you're eating an occasional fruit you can see here that there's much less uh fructose or sugar in fruit compared to a soft drink uh and so you're you're there's much less fructose exposure and then you have all those wonderful benefits from fruit fruit contains vitamin C flavonols that quatin for example is can be found in apples and that's a beautiful uh flavonol U there's one called epien fiber pottassium all these things actually help counter the effects of fructose but as the fruit ripens those kind those things tend to go down uh and the sugar content goes up so when the fruit falls out of the tree and it's really ripe and mushy a lot a lot of animals will like it because it's very high in sugar but thankfully humans prefer a little bit more tart fruit that has that often has some of these vitamin C and so forth in it so uh uh everything that David has told you uh is exactly what uh we also finding in our research studies you know we need to cut back on carbs and sugar and gluten and bread and rice and potatoes uh low carb diets Mediterranean diets intermittent F fasting all these keto diets they're all quite good uh olive oil and Omega three tend to counter these effects so everything you've been learning about is pretty much the same uh based on our work uh as well and you know you you shouldn't salt is is if you're on a low carb diet Salt's actually beneficial be because you're on a low carb diet and the salt's not really you know doing anything bad it's actually probably good but when you eat salt and french fries the salt actually will stimulate the conversion of the potato uh starch to to uh to fructose and so salt enhances fructose production so and processed foods where they put a lot of salt and sugar it's it's really a a double whammy and then uh and then you know increase your water intake that would is a very important thing getting good sleep getting uh uh regular uh sleep and not uh exercising I mean exercising regularly is good so um but what about artificial sugars and I think this is the big thing that we wanted to talk about today David I do you want to say anything at this point or want I think I I'll let you finish off here and then uh we'll talk about I've been making notes so we'll talk about a few things okay great yes feel free to jump in anytime uh okay so so now we're going to go to this whole thing about what what about low calorie sugars and that I will preface this by saying that you know most of my research has been in fructose but I have done some studies on low calorie sugars and so I'll I'll try to point out what I've learned and what I've read um and so you know we we can break up low calorie sugars into artificial sweeteners sugar alcohols natural sweeteners and natural rare sugars and um there each of these uh have their own large group of compounds but um the some of the more common ones are shown here on this slide now there are benefits of all low calor substitutes for sugar because if you let's say you're you're drinking a soft drink that's got put 35 grams of sugar in it that is going to activate millions of bad things it's going to cause inflammation raise your uric acid it's going to do all those terrible things and if you drink a diet soft drink you're not going to get those bad those bad things are not going to happen anywhere near the same it's there's it's black and white and if you do a clinical trial of soft drinks versus diet soft drinks the diet soft drinks always win basically uh in a paired study a carefully done study and and that's because the sugar and high fructose coring syrup not only contain calories but they contain fructose that activates those bad things so you know there is an an some advantage to so to low calorie drinks just in general low calor um of course it would be better to drink water uh it would be better to uh you know um to to avoid artificial sugars if you can but if you've got that CRA if you have a craving for sweet you know maybe eat a fruit first but but I there are there is this argument that when compared head to head there's definitely an advantage to taking a low calorie sugar so if if someone says which is worse it's the sugar that's worse um and and that's because they don't activate the fructose switch there are some exceptions there are some artificial sugars like sorbitol which if you absorb it you don't always not everyone absorbs it as much as others but some people absorb it quite well and it's like the artificial sugar that's or it's a sugar alcohol that's actually put in syrups and it will convert to fructose in your body so that's not a good one uh and so U but there there are a lot of disadvantages to low calorie sugars too okay and one of one thing with all these artificial sugars is and in low calorie sugars is that they because they're sweet They Don't Really teach you away from liking sweet you know we we have sweet taste buds we love sweets when you uh eat uh sugar or anything sweet you get a dopamine response in the brain which is this pleasure response and you get it with both low calorie sugars as well as regular sugars um it's interesting we did studies and others have done this as well if you knock out the taste receptor so you can't taste sweet you still get a dopamine response in the brain to fructose but you don't get a dopamine response to these low calorie sugars so the low calorie sugars are working through the taste buds but the um you know to give you that that pleasure response but fructose is is driving the desire for it uh through its effects on the brain through its metabolism not just through its taste all right so but so it will maintain the you know when you're take a low calorie sugar you will uh you're not going to get rid of your liking for sweets but it's pretty hard to get rid of your liking for sweets in almost all of us even if you're go on a u diets you know we so long as you got those taste buds with the sweet taste but uh you know every now and then that craving for sweets will haunt people and U I know Ben bman was on your show the other day and he he often talks about how at night you know after dinner I'll have this kind of desire for something sweet and so uh so but having these low calorie sugars will con continue to stimulate that pathway now um some low sugar uh low low calorie sugars also can induce insulin resistance it was really the big one is sacarin and uh and we actually confirmed it it's actually a microbiome effect sacar it's hard to make an animal fat by giving it saccharine I there maybe one or two reports but we certainly never saw it ourselves in the lab but it does it can cause a little bit of insulin resistance and it's working through a funny way through the mic microbiome um and some sweeteners have been associated with cancer risk especially sacan um and some have been associated with cardiovascular risk like arrol um and and and things like aspartame there's a some thoughts that it might uh actually lead to some trouble with cognitive thinking I mean with cognition uh and um and certainly that's frightening and I'd be David I'd be very interested in your thoughts about aspartame and its effects on the brain yeah we'll talk about it when we finish the slide presentation okay all right good so anyway so there benefits and disadvantages with using lowc calorie sugars but in general um there none of these low calorie sugars have ever been really shown to have a benefit they just don't have a harm um and you know at least they don't they can they uh are safer than high fructose corn Sy but they by themselves are not really causing weight loss and that is until this new sugar came allulose and a quick uh disclaimer I became in when I be started studying and learning about allulose I realized that it was very relevant to my research and I was approached by a company RX sugar to be considered joining them as a scientific officer uh and and so I recently did that in addition to having my position uh you know at the University so that's just a quick disclaimer but I did it because of what I'm about to show you this is why I'm interested so allulose turns out to be a natural sugar so what it's out there in nature everyone's eating a little bit of it it send fruits and uh wheat and a variety of different things but basically we're all eating small amounts of it uh but someone figured out that they if they made a lot of it that it could be a low calorie sugar alternative and it's got very very minimal calories but it's still sweet and interestingly it looks just like fructose I know many of you are not chemists so this looks like go but basically the two are almost identical except for some very minor change in the direction a hydroxy group goes and um and that turns out to be a big thing because it doesn't activate that biologic switch it doesn't generate uric acid it doesn't cause the suppression of the mitochondria and so it's it's like an empty gun when it comes to fructose it it looks like fructose it's sweet not quite as sweet as fructose but it's it's sweet but it doesn't activate the biologic switch and when we start looking at it it actually seems to do good things this is why I got interested because it tends to lower glucose and it is very this is a very profound effect if you uh for example if you eat bread or rice with some allulose you won't get that rise in glucose following following the ingestion I mean it will blunt it dramatically Ally and it is very very consistent and this is good because that rise in blood glucose can be converted to fructose it also stimulates insulin I mean it turns out that when the glucose goes up in your blood it's not good that's why we say insulin resistance is not good because high fruit high blood glucose and high insulin levels is what we know plays a major role in causing things like dementia obesity and so forth so for this to block that is just really exciting and that is the main reason I joined the company because I wanted to understand um this this sugar how it's working why why is it that this guy's such uh such a good guy the other thing is um there is now Absolute Data showing that it stimulates a hormone called glip one glip one is a hormone that's released of it it's it it's released after you eat food and particularly glucose and it goes into the blood and it communicates with the brain and it actually um uh you know has all kinds of biologic effects including to kind of say that you're full it slows the gut uh the gastric motility to say you're full uh and um it tends to keep glucose levels down and one of the ways it does it is it enhances glucose uptake in the liver and in the in in the muscle where it can actually be used for good things and keeps the glucose levels relatively low in the blood so some of that glucose benefit of allulose maybe from the stimulation of this glip one well the reason that's so interesting is that is anyone knows who's been connected to the world that there are these new drugs that are being used for obesity and these new drugs are glip one uh they they look like glip one and they act like glip one but they're not actually glip one but they've been manipulated to have long half lies and so when you take them they they have halflife like where they they the blood levels are elevated for a whole week whereas normally they're not uh they're only high for minutes after you eat and so when it's high all the time remember how I told you it slows the it slows morality in the gut and it stimulates satiety or the feeling of fullness so these drugs have been found to make people feel full and they eat less and they eat less and less and if you and but it can become a problem they can actually eat so little that they're not getting the nutrients they're needing or they can get gastric motility issues where where they get a lot of side effects but they do lose weight but here alilo is stimulating the same hormone but it's a natural stimulation of the hormone as opposed to taking an artificial uh one that's elevated all the time so this enhances it uh for hours or or at least uh yeah for for at least a couple hours after you eat and that were has been associated in animal studies with blocking weight gain and so uh you know I want to do a study in humans a really good one to see if this can be uh something similar to semaglutide or you know or OIC and instead of having to uh you know to take drugs uh you can take a chocolate that has that has allulose and maybe get some benefits and so I mean we don't know how how how what the right dose is and you know i' I've got to do more work on this but it's looking very very U positive and the other thing is like by putting glucose in the muscle it seems to you know in animals it improves their exercise performance it's anti-aging it can improve cognition in some studies in animals so it's looking like a good guy so when you look at low calorie sugars we're looking at them as being neutral uh you know they're not bad like sugar or high fructose corn syrup but they're not positive they're not like creating benefit but here I'm excited because here's a low calorie sugar that might actually uh improve exercise tolerance and things like that so that's why I'm interested in that might be yeah this is just showing an example this was a clinical study where they gave sugar or sucrose sucrose is table sugar and and if you look there's a uh there's a box measuring I mean this is a graph showing the plasma glucose after you get a slug of sugar and it goes up to like three three milles which is U that's like going up the equivalent of like 70 milligrams uh per deciliter of blood and um it's blocked in half by by co-administering only a half dose of allulose and allulose alone doesn't raise blood sugar at all so this you know it's pretty pretty convincing there's lots of evidence for this in in humans it's it it's very true with even small doses so there's a there's a clear benefit NE next slide well I just want to for one moment take a closer look at this in other words eating Sugar Pops or sucrose really pops your postprandial glucose quickly they're at the 30 minute mark But if co-administered with Al C another sweetener that people are consuming then that rise in the blood sugar is dramatically blunted that's the circles the filled in black circles consuming the the the sugar and yet with the allulose you don't get that huge postprandial glucose rise that's so important yeah that's so important because you and I have uh are recognizing that this rise in glucose U is actually a major risk factor for things like dementia and and there's some studies showing that when the blood glucose goes up the brain starts making fructose and we know that that has a role in dementia so um you know this this looks good so yeah next slide and and this is the study showing that it stimulates glip and you know the usual substance that people use to rais glip is like glucose this is a measuring it in a mouse so it's a mouse uh on the left side but um as you increase the allulose dose or concentration you get a dramatic increase in glip one that you can measure in the portal vein um and that you don't really see that for the same doses of glucose so it turns out that allulose is about eight to 10 times more potent at stimulating glip one and and glip one is this drug or hormone that makes you full so Al you know a lot of people who take alos uh you know anecdotally talk about how they feel full afterwards and I know I took some with my wife one day well we eating it more than that but uh when we we find that it does suppress our appetite so like if you eat it like at lunch after lunch right at the end of lunch uh you you may end up having a dinner where you you get full with just like two-thirds of the food um and so this this has been associated with the weight loss this two grams of allulose on the right graph um that's very little alul that's like like a thumbnail and yet it's causing some weight loss in people uh over a 10-week period and they're taking this with sugar um it's amazing so yeah so um so anyway so I I am uh I want to study it I want to understand it um I'm not telling you all to go out and get it for sure but I I do uh think that it's uh it it looks very very interesting very promising and they're already well thank you for that yes well you uh you've you have been a wonderful collaborator we uh as many of you may not know David and I wrote a paper on Alzheimer's disease and fructose together and and of course we we've been reading each other stuff and are connected quite a quite a lot so good so that's a a a fascinating uh description of you know where we are what's the Leading Edge here on allulose and I would just also want to say that I serve as a Scientific Advisor as well for RX sugar um and I'm glad to be part of that I mean I uh as you know we get to explore some really good science with the collaborators who are doing some just amazing work and you know I look upon this I think as you do that this is really a GameChanger and will have Global implications I mean you know face it there's a big issue uh with these metabolic problems globally now we used to call it the standard American diet then it became the Western diet but call it like it is it's the global diet that's so high in these Ultra processed foods that raise blood sugar about 52 to 54% of all calories consumed by an American adult right now are derived from ultr processed foods which do what they they raise blood sugar and now we're looking at a sweetener it's looking like it's blunting that and one other a couple points I wanted to make first you know this is to understand this is one and how it might affect you as an observer the audience it really is I think a call to reconsider this notion of wearing a continuous glucose monitor as you know I've been talking about that for quite some time and if you were to wear a CGM you'd be able to visualize in real time these uh changes that are going on with your blood sugar in response to a meal or exercise or lack of sleep the night before Etc and then be able to see how something like allulose for example might might change the playing field a little bit and blunt that glucose response that you might uh otherwise have noted um I want to get back to a couple ideas um you mentioned quatin uh earlier on in the discussion and I think that you've also mentioned quatin uh in the context of assisting the body in um lack in reducing the formation of uric acid along with lud diolan and you know one thing I think that's really kind of interesting is the role of quatin if someone were to supplement with that as something that stimulates ucp1 or uncoupling protein one which is kind of a player as relates to this process of of mitophagy which we need uh to break down defective mitochondria in order that we might engage what's called mitochondria biogenesis or the creation of new healthier mitochondria so uh I don't know how you feel about it but I'm really kind of bullish on quatin these days I think quatin is a wonderful uh flavonol that um has many benefits and so does Ludy Olan uh we've actually studied Ludy Olan in particular but quatin is also one of the best for lowering uric acid lud diolan also can block fructo kyes a little bit which makes it very interesting there's one called ool and you know and when we uh when we give these kinds of compounds to animals we can actually block a lot of um metabolic effects of sugar um and so these These flavonols are are wonderful um and so that I do think that they probably have a place the one thing we don't know I as well as you know what's the dose in humans that um really works the most effectively but but I I'm a I'm Pro on these as well and also I like vitamin C vitamin C lowers uric acid our group has been studying this we we have some evidence that it's really a very powerful regulator of uric acid as well uh and that um like 500 milligrams a day can reduce uric acid by about a half. five milligrams per deiler which is you know about 10% um in the normal person I think that vitamin C is also a wonderful uh a way to go and the two pro together are probably better than either one alone and there was one study that was done I think at Oxford involving young men given 500 milligrams a day of quatin lowered over an 8-week period lower their uric acid by about 8% which is certainly reasonable you know the other thing that were I think seeing a lot of these days is the research that shows the role of supplemental cortin in enhancing the production of brown fat and actually the conversion of white fat into Brown fat which obviously I actually take qu it in it so do I I had I've had allulose already today as well good for you well Richard always great to see you um I I think that you are on the top of the leaderboard in terms of repeat appearances on the Empower neurologist podcast so I want to thank you for that because it's always uh great information and I sure appreciate your time uh it's really enjoyable to talk to you and to be on your show thank you so much I'm looking forward we may see each other uh next month depending on travel plans so I'm looking forward to that thanks again thank you all I can say is wow I mean Dr Johnson provides so much information and now we're learning about this uh sweetener that we can use allulose that actually acts in many ways as a glp1 Agonist we're hearing so much about that these days and really in our time of metabolic Mayhem that we live in uh it's nice to know that there are some choices that we can make day in and day out uh that can help regain better metabolic health for us and that certainly has a lot of Downstream benefits as well thank you for joining me today I'm Dr David promter here on the Empower neurologist and we will be back soon bye for [Music] now

Channel: DavidPerlmutterMD

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Keywords: david perlmutter, dr. david perlmutter, grain brain, dr. perlmutter, brain maker

Id: 8j4ATA28tlw

Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024