The #1 Tip To STOP GAINING Weight & Turn Your FAT STORAGE OFF! | Dr. Richard Johnson

our main discovery is that there is a switch that animals use to go from being a normal weight to overweight that switch you can activate it by certain types of foods dr rick johnson welcome to the show thank you so much i'm delighted to be honest i'm so excited your book is crazy so the title alone grabbed me nature wants us to be fat that is certainly how it feels yeah it's certainly a bad bad uh title in terms of you know what it carries for us but yeah if only it weren't true but uh so getting into it there's a lot going on i think it's really interesting i think it's gonna profoundly impact how people approach if not hopefully their life but if nothing else the debate around is it just calories do the types of calories matter which is a debate that i've sort of been dancing on the periphery of for the last probably decade plus i don't care what the answer is i just want to know what the truth is so i'll ask point blank do calorie is it is it just a calorie question why we get fat or is there more at play well there's a lot more to at play but calories are clearly important they they are important but the type of of foods make a huge difference you know whether or not you're eating protein fat or carbs and and then within the protein fats and carbs they're good proteins and bad proteins good carbs and bad carbs and then even there if you have a bad carb the way you eat it can make a difference so it turns out can you define the what makes something good what makes something bad if it tries to drive a process that wants to make you gain weight so it turns out that our main discovery is that there is a switch that animals use to go from being us normal weight to overweight that switch you can activate it by certain types of foods and not all foods activate it and it's a specific pathway we've actually identified the very steps in that pathway and the incredible thing the more we study this the more it appears that this is a pathway that's driving not just obesity and diabetes but that it's involved in a variety of diseases including dementia and cancer and behavioral disorders and you know high blood pressure and kidney disease and liver disease i mean i feel very fortunate that i've fallen on this and we've been doing studies for now about 25 years but as it gets stronger and stronger i realized that i needed to write about it and so what's the pathway called by the way well i call it the survival switch and because it's a it's a basic process animals use to try to protect themselves from time when there's no food so for example most animals will regulate their weight very tightly so how do you know that uh oh for example like if you take a lab laboratory rat or if you take an animal in the wild and you catch it and you've let's say you force feed it you make it gain weight and then you take you quit the force feeding and the animal come right back to its weight and not only that it'll come back to the way that it's supposed to be at that time of the year yeah yeah and likewise if you take the food away from an animal and it loses weight you give it back food and it will go right back to the way it's supposed it thinks it should be at and so normally animals regulate weight really really well but there are some animals that when they know that there's going to be a problem like winter is coming like oh you know i gotta like fly 12 000 kilometers non-stop to get to my my uh you know where i'm gonna head for migration you know uh when they know that they will um suddenly start gaining weight dramatically um a bear can gain eight to ten pounds a day [Music] now so let's 20 000 calories how do we know then that because you said the animal will go back to the weight that it's supposed to be for that time of year so how do we know that there's not like a weight clock in the way that there's a circadian rhythm clock good good question so we figured out that it's there's a food that triggers this so normally weight is regulated by hormone called leptin there are other regulatory hormones too but this one is a big one so it's not a shift in metabolic rate it's a shift in hunger levels oh it's both it's a whole orchestrated event so what happens is um it turns out that the the main way a major way that it's done is by eating fructose which is a sugar that's in fruit and honey and when animals start eating fructose it activates a this metabolic pathway you have to eat a lot of it it's not like you and i eating an apple okay it's like i mean like a bear will eat like 10 000 berries like like at one setting i mean it's really like you have to eat a large amount of fructose and when you do it triggers the switch that makes you hungry it makes you thirsty it affects the brain centers you can show where it affects it and and it will want you to do foraging behavior where you go out and seek and try to find food but while you're foraging your activity continues to be good your metabolism is good but when you stop foraging your resting energy metabolism actually goes to a lower level so your basal metabolic rate or your metabo you know how many calories you're spending in a day the foraging uh will cause you'll spend calories foraging but when you're resting you'll do you'll you'll actually spend less calories you stay more quiet than a normal animal so really fast there's an idea that was introduced to me that made intuitive sense the idea was that when we're eating food is really a signaling molecule and so it gives our body certain signals and what you're saying is that eating fructose signals to our body that hey winter is coming prepare for this and so we've co-evolved with plants plants for their own reasons want us to eat their fruit right but we have evolved to really go hard on fruit at us at the time of year when it's actually available because the next thing coming is fall and then winter and so those who responded to the signal of fructose by lowering their basal metabolic rate beginning to store fat and we'll get into like some of the processes that quote unquote break but it's it's actually beneficial in terms of the people that had this response got fatter when they ate it they sought out more food their basal metabolic rate went down they started storing fat there's this whole host of things that happen and because of hard times most people that didn't have that response died and that's right the people that did they were able to survive so we're gonna for most of the episode we're gonna be talking about this as if it's bad but there's actually a reason yes why this happens and for me to think about food as a signaling molecule rather than just calories in calories out was really helpful that's right so it turns out that there is this uh symbiosis with plants but you would mention this first so you know so plants well you know the tree fruit trees will a lot of times the fruit fruit will ripen in the fall and that's at the time when the animals are trying to gain fat and so the when they ripen the sugar content goes up the fructose content goes up and the seeds mature and things like vitamin c and things that actually block the effects of fructose block this pathway go down so the vitamin c levels go down the sugar goes up the fruit drops now the seeds are mature the animals eat the fruit and then they disperse the seeds in their poop and and then you have uh it's it's great for the plants because now there's more trees and uh it's great for the animals because they can put on fat so it stimulates fat it also stimulates insulin resistance and insulin resistance i used to think of it as pathologic you know you don't want to be insulin resistant but if you're an animal insulin resistance means that the glucose in your body can't get into the muscle very well because that requires insulin to get in the muscle but the most of the brain does not require insulin and so it leaves the glucose for the brain so you can you know which is what you want to do if you don't have enough fuel you want to shunt the fuel to the brain because if you can't think you're going to not do well so so anyway so this switch is activated by fructose and and the way it works is it drops the energy in the cell i know that sounds funny because all calories create energy but there's you have to think of when i say drop the energy in the cell i mean the active usable energy so when you eat calories basically it can go into stored energy which is fat for the most part and it can go into active energy which we call atp and the atp is what you and i use to talk to think to walk i i got here using my atp i walked in with because i have atp going and so so you know atp is your immediate usable energy and so what it does is the atp normally comes from the energy factories in the cell we we call them mitochondria and they and and really this is totally it if you're into health you want healthy mitochondria mitochondrial health they make the energy and obesity is an energy disorder you know and diabetes is an energy disorder so these little mitochondria are pouring out the atp but there's an ancient system too called glycolysis which can make atp and uh and so that there's another system which is rarely kicks in so mainly it's these energy factors and what the switch does is it depresses the mitochondria it depresses and it does it by causing like oxidative stress to those mitochondria and so the amount of atp gets there's less atp being made and so the calories are shunted to stored fat instead of instant fat it just shunts it it shunts it from insulin energy to stored energy and the stored energy is the fat it's a brilliant system and so why why through oxidative stress to the mitochondria does what is shunting because i'm assuming you mean the calories so the calories instead of going to produce atp are going to be stored as fat right what mechanism in the body is saying why because it's there's some mechanism that's saying atp the production of atp has become inefficient we're better off storing this as fat so so the way atp is produced is you know there's the there's breakdown products that go into a thing called the citric acid cycle or krebs cycle and then it it moves on into the mite to oxidative phosphorylation where the uh you produce the mitochondria start producing a lot of atp and they require oxygen a lot of the oxygen we breathe goes to make the atp and what happens is some of the enzymes in these cycles the things that kind of move the stuff around and break it down to the next step and so that it can make atp they're sensitive to oxidative stress so that if there's oxidative stress goes up those enzymes get inhibited and so that that pathway to make atp is is slowed down or reduced or can it's not fully stopped but it's like slowed down and so when that happens the mitochondria make less atp so it turns out that there's more uh shunting some of the metabolites actually go and and stimulate fat production and also to block the burning effect so there's it stimulates both the synthesis of fat and it blocks the breaking down of fat and so it's like a double whammy and so what happens is the calories end up getting stored as fat and the amount of energy produced is less and then what happens is the low energy makes you hungry so then you eat more and so it stores more fat because it's the shunt still going on but eventually the atp levels start coming up because you're eating more and more so it's a brilliant system and um and when we first discovered this pathway and realized it was orchestrating the whole series of events um then then we realized that there was another side to it which is that um that the body can make fructose this is maybe one of the most shocking things in the book and i it it bears explaining to people what made you ask that question in the first place because if i look at this with my the hat on of like hold on hold on you're just violating the second law of thermodynamics like you have to be overeating in order to put on fat and so walk people through why did you start asking that question in the first place why when you discover that fructose makes people fat why weren't you like we're done yeah listen so there are two questions you just brought us so if you don't mind i'll answer the first the first one which is the the law of thermodynamics and it gets back to the calorie question okay so so when we found that animals who were eating fructose started to eat more and they got really fat and they got diabetic and they got fatty liver and they get their triglycerides went up to their blood and and they be you know they develop a low-grade kidney disease i mean i was like this is coming from sugar you know i mean oh my god you know lust it calls sugar poison i understand why because when you put this into overload you really create a monster but anyway so uh so the question was well is that because they're eating too much because it's stimulating hunger but what if we made it so that all the animals ate the same amount of food so even though you're hungry i'm not going to give you the food you want so what we're going to do is we're going to feed all the animals the same amount and then we had a control group and a high sugar or fructose group and i should say that sugar has fructose in it so table sugar high fructose corn syrup these are the main sources of fructose for us so when we did that and we took those animals and we gave them exactly the same so it turned out remember how i told you that it makes you hungry and eat more but it also drops your resting energy metabolism so because it drops your energy metabolism if you're eating the same number of calories there will be some weight gain in the sugar group also we did a trick where we gave them less calories than they normally eat so they were like on a diet but one's on a high sugar diet one's on a controlled diet and when we put them on the high sugar diet those animals became diabetic they became they got fatty liver they they uh you know developed high triglycerides did they store body fat they had they had more body fat but their weights were very very similar because of the lower energy metabolism they actually were about 10 to 20 grams difference in weight they actually even though they were on a caloric restriction they gained 10 grams and of weight these are rats so the 10 grams it's in anything for us but but if you're a rat it's a little bit more so they gained weight and the the gr the other group lost weight so but it wasn't statistically significant so in our paper we had to say it was there was no statistical difference in weight yet despite no statistical difference in weight there was a dramatic difference in everything else they were became diabetic so there's two pathways right so one is yes if you go on a high sugar diet and you [Music] also go on have a high fat in the diet the fat is actually playing a role because the high sugar makes you hungry and makes you lose control of your appetite but the high fat is like super high calories and so you gain weight very fast if you just put an animal a high sugar diet they gain weight but it's not as it takes a lot longer but the fat is like the firewood and the sugar is like the fire so if you take away the fire and you go on a low carb diet and you are on high fat now well there's no stimulus to gain weight because because you've taken away the the fructose okay and so the answer to your question is yes calories are important but also there's something special about fructose where even if you're on a caloric restriction it's going to make you diabetic that's crazy yeah so there's all these knock-on effects of having the fructose but the part where i was like okay what you're saying makes a prediction that if i'm just eating glucose for instance which literally until the the idea of uric acid and all this stuff if you haven't got to uric acid yet but until all of this got on my radar i would have said that okay fructose maybe is a little bit worse because it can only be stored in your liver and your muscles and so you just don't have a way to use it uh but that glucose would be terrible as well yeah well so you got me so you know so this leads into the second part of your question and that that was okay so uh what made you uh realize that fructose was being built made in the body and you know originally so i you know when the first data came out i said okay fructose is the bad guy and i even published a book the first book on a low fructose diet called the sugar fix and some people lost weight great and some didn't and i was on an interview with jimmy moore and jimmy says hey you know rick uh you know i i know that sugar is bad but i have to cut up bread and rice and potatoes to lose weight i have to do full carb restriction and i was pretty aware that that that that bread was fattening and um and french fries they couldn't be good you know and also there are a lot of animals in the wild that get fat and they're not eating fruit you know uh and so can you give us an example oh like for example a whale they're the fattest i haven't seen one eat a banana they probably would eat one but anyway we knew that the body can make fructose this was known for 50 years and and so fructose is actually can be made in the body there's only one way it can be made and it's through a thing where an enzyme has to be turned on and it's called it's the poly all pathways the it's called but you normally it's pretty quiet it's not present so when you're young it's not really around do we have a sense of why that would be like why are kids because they're already storing more fat like i don't understand why if there is any benefit that led us to producing fructose which i'm assuming there is why it wouldn't be present in kids well i think that um fructose is really turned this whole pathway is turned on in situations of stress okay so if you're not stressed you know so if a baby is being breastfed and everything's going fine it's going to have very low levels but you can turn it on it can even go up locally with stress like when you have a heart attack the heart cells will start will convert and start metabolizing and making fructose why when the heart starts to make fructose and and turns on the enzymes to make fructose it tries to turn on the switch locally and remember that what it does is uh it suppresses the mitochondria and the mitochondria are using a lot of oxygen to make atp can i use the phrase that you use in the book energy factors you what you call this the alarm bell oh yeah and i was like okay so and that made sense to me so alarm winter's coming alarm you just had a heart attack and so if this is the body's alarm bell then i would understand why it would be produced locally i don't understand why fructose but yeah so what happens is when the fructose is produced it causes that oxidative stress for the energy factories and it reduces the oxygen needs the the mitochondria become less active so they consume less oxygen that's why and so it's trying to protect the heart because in a heart attack you would have less yes because the blood supply has been impaired so there's less oxygen so it's trying to help you and this shifts it to this primitive system to make energy and this primitive system doesn't make a lot of energy and so what happens is it might be protective for a few minutes but over time it actually leads to thickening of the heart hypertrophy disease of the heart and this has been we also been shown like in the kidneys and with if you have acute kidney failure again this the fructose system gets turned on in the kidney and it tries to protect but it ends up causing inflammation um and fibrosis and all these things because we have an exuberant response and one of the reasons we have that exuberant response is because of uric acid but but getting back to the very basic question so when i originally thought okay the answer is we can just cut out fructose in the diet but then i realized that that you know carbs could do it that weren't that did not contain fructose and then i realized that myself and miguel and aspa who i work with the two of us were having a discussion and we realized that when you eat a high glycemic carb you could theoretically start making fructose in your body and the reason that is is that one one of the classic means for stimulating fructose turns out to be from a high glucose level in the blood so if you're diabetic and you have a high glucose level in the blood it had all been already been reported that that stimulates fructose production so people with bad diabetes have a lot of fructose that they're making and the fructose is playing a role in their kidney disease we can block the kidney disease from diabetes by by reducing the or blocking the effects of fructose so it's pretty cool so so since high glucose can stimulate fructose production we realize that you know every time you eat bread or rice or potatoes the glucose in your blood goes up a bit and you know it stimulates insulin yeah but it might stimulate fructose and so we did these experiments where we put animals on glucose and i was originally thinking they wouldn't get fat but you're right they got really fat they got they were waddling around i mean you know and uh and so then we gave the glucose to animals that could not uh either make fructose because we had genetically removed that enzyme or they couldn't metabolize fructose so we genetically removed that enzyme and when we could do that they could eat the carbs and they gained a little bit of weight they did gain modest weight but they were they didn't get a big weight gain and they didn't get the uh the fatty liver and they didn't get uh insulin resistance and they were really protected what's up everybody tom bill you here and i have a question for you at the start of this year you likely set some goals for yourself and i want to know how those are going most people give up on their goals and dreams by february but i have some good news if you're not on target to succeed at the things that you want to achieve this year it's not too late and trust me when i say you are not alone everyone gets stuck and loses momentum towards their goals at some point myself included if you know what you're doing and you're willing to take massive action though you can get back on track the trick is not to think about being stuck as a problem with your motivation or to interpret your lack of results that you're getting as a sign that you're not smart enough the trick is to recognize that the game that you're playing is a game of neurochemistry it's about managing the way that you think about yourself and framing things in the right way if you use your brain more effectively repeat things that empower you you can actually find ways to solve problems faster create positive habits and behaviors that you know are going to help you reach your goal i want you to take massive action right now so i've pulled a workshop from impact theory university called the six steps to getting unstuck and i want you to watch it right now it's going to help you get back on track with your goals and make the rest of this year your most successful ever to watch it go to unstuck class.com and register for access i'll walk you through the same process that i use to get through obstacles and make fast progress towards my goals whenever something slows down alright guys enjoy this and be legendary take care so basically if you don't produce fructose or you can't metabolize the fructose that's there you won't have this exaggerated response right yeah and there are people who lack that enzyme and that no none of them have ever been reported to be obese or diabetic they're very interesting they are completely healthy so if fructose though is the alarm bell why do you think glucose triggers the alarm bell well it's a good question so it turns out that when the glucose level goes up in the blood it creates a sense of dehydration and um and you probably know that people who are diabetic are often very thirsty and drink lots of water and it also turns out that dehydration is the biggest stimulus for fructose production more than eating uh glucose they're about the same but the eating the glucose makes you stimulates a sense of dehydration and so um but what we what happens is the what triggers the production of fructose is if you start becoming dehydrated i know the punch line here yeah that's interesting okay keep going but now that i can predict where the problem comes in that's really keep going yeah almost certain i know what the answer is so it turns out that a lot of animals use fat not just as a calorie source but as a source of water because when you burn fat you produce water so the camel has that fat on its back that breaks down the fat and the hump when it needs water the whale doesn't drink salt water so it gets its fresh water from the crustaceans and things it eats the fish and stuff it eats but it also uh gets the water from its fat there's even a primate a dwarfed fat tailed or fat tailed dwarf lemur and that guy uh lives on its it will uh hibernate or they call it estivation but it's like hibernation like five months during the dry season and it will use its fat to produce water so it turns out that fat is the source of water so when an animal gets dehydrated and it particularly if they're worried that they're going to become dehydrated they will start to gain fat as a source of as a way to help give them water during the times of need and the best way to do that is like to create a little bit of dehydration so if your glucose levels are high that's one way but if you a deer and you're looking at salt lick that would be another way because when you take salt the salt concentration goes up in the blood sort of like the glucose concentration and that triggers thirst and so crazy so when a deer or a cow is licking a salt lake it's a way to trigger in their body the storage of fat as a protective mechanism against yeah basically either famine or lack of water yeah so deer you know they eat a lot of uh grass and stuff that's calorie poor so they they need stimulus to help help them store adequate amounts of calories but what we did do though is we took a study we did studies in peoples well maybe that's more relevant so what we did well well first what we did is we we did a study in animals when we put them on the high salt diet and you know uh salt you know people know that salt's associated with blood pressure and heart trouble but um no one really had linked salt with obesity in the common literature you know but there were in the medical literature there was um some studies showing that people who eat a high salt diet are at increased risk for obesity and there's like 10 studies out there and so it seemed kind of odd how would salt which has no calories increase your risk for getting fat but when when we put animals on salt it raised the salt concentration in their blood they became thirsty of course and they started eating more and um after several months they became hugely fat diabetic and everything and then just from salt yeah they didn't increase their glucose didn't increase their fructose nope they weren't even getting any fructose they were just a normal chow and they and they became uh they became hungry they lost their control of appetite they started gaining weight um and they became diabetic and they had fatty liver off of salt off of salt just increasing salt now i will get there in a bit because i know you're we're going to talk about salt in terms of how modern diets and the low carb diet so we can get there but anyway so so what happened was they were making fructose the salt activated the enzyme that converted glucose to fructose so the glucose that they're getting from their chow was being converted to fructose very easily because the salt really turned it on so you didn't have to get have a high glucose in your blood it was just enough to just turn it on and then what glucose you have a lot of it's being converted to fructose and so what happened was if we blocked the fructose we could uh we could we could block the fructose production or the fructose the breaking down of fructose and when we did that they could eat all the salt they want and they didn't get fat wow and what's more they didn't make they even get high blood pressure so the high blood pressure was going through that pathway so then uh so then we looked at people and we found that high salt diet also predicted fatty liver and obesity and diabetes in people and so along with others and then it's there's a group that discovered that there's a hormone called vasopressin which goes up when you're dehydrated and so all these animals in the desert have high vasopressin levels and vasopressin is a hormone to help you hold water and it's high in people who with obesity so everybody with in fact um jody stuki is wonderful scientists found that that people who are obese uh depending on what measure you use they can be 12 times more likely to be dehydrated than a non-obese person that's using a thing called bioimpedance and if you measure you know the classic measure which is the salt concentration in your blood uh there are two times people who are obese are two times more likely to be dehydrated than a lean person and so it turns out that a lot of people who are obese are not just eating bad diets like sugar they're eating a lot of salt and and the salt is activating this pathway to make sugar to make fructose and to metabolize fructose and so what's going on is there's uh is that there's a secret driving another secret driving mechanism for obesity so you now we we know that high glycemic carbs can do it and we know that salty foods can do it but the way salt works is it works by converting the glucose in our body to fructose so if you're on a low carb diet and you're eating salt you're going to make less fructose because you just don't have much glucose around so a lot of people who go on a low carb diet will actually eat kind of a lot of salty foods and they don't get fat because they they don't have the glucose to convert this is so interesting to me the way that this is all working okay so we've got the salt is triggering the enzyme that allows us to turn glucose into fructose and the reason that our ancestors who did that would have been more likely to survive is because we're for us to be in that kind of situation it means that there's a drought coming so we may not have access to either enough food to get water out of the food or enough direct water to stay hydrated and therefore triggering the alarm system and making sure that we store fat so that we can repurpose it as water becomes a very meaningful thing that's insane but okay glucose can be turned easily into fructose again this is the alarm system why glucose triggers the alarm system though that's purely because i'm getting dehydrated why though does it actually dehydrate me or is it dehydration-like and if it's dehydration-like why is glucose in and of itself problematic okay well so when the glucose is high in the blood um it does create a sense of dehydration and is that the only problem because that's no because it also mimics a thing called insulin resistance so if you eat most starches for example um you know or vegetables or things like that that have glucose in them uh many of them are not going to trigger the switch because the switch only gets activated when the glucose levels are high which trick when the glucose levels are high it makes the animal feel it's dehydrated so so classically dehydration uh we talk about dehydration as a loss of water and so uh you know you have diarrhea or you're vomiting or you're sweating too much and you lose water and you become dehydrated so we usually think of dehydration as a loss of water and when you lose the water the concentrations of salt and uh goes up in your blood because the water's been stretched right because the water has been stripped out you can mimic dehydration it's really the same thing as dehydration by eating salt because when you eat salt the salt concentration goes up but you haven't lost the water so it's kind of a pseudo dehydration because you didn't lose the water you gained the salt but it's the same effect the animal wants to keep the concentrations of salt and glucose normal in its blood because it allows a movement in and out of the cells i mean it's really important in how transport works now if you eat most foods with starch or glucose you know the glucose concentrations don't go up much but if you eat high glycemic carbs and you eat like a lot of potatoes or rice or something then your glucose can go up right after the meal and we can show that with like a continuous glucose monitor yep and when the glucose goes up it there for some reason this uh pathway to make fructose is activated we don't i don't absolutely know why but i know that there's um what we call an osmolarity trigger and when you when uh an osmolarity is a a name for the concentration of glucose plus salt so when the glucose goes up and the osmolality goes up or or the number of the concentration of the blood gets higher it makes the animal feel it's dehydrated and it is it is actually a type of dehydration it's just that you're not losing water so much as your glucose is is is going up and the concentration of electrolytes and glucose go up in the blood now when you're diabetic you're also peeing a lot of urine it's because the glucose gets into the urine and so you are becoming dehydrated based on that so but it's uh it's sort of a argumentative point but when you eat if your glucose goes up in your blood it triggers the production of fructose okay so the thing that i'm trying to make sure that i understand is why the body would care about that so it seems to me like fructose is just the mechanism of action but it's really anything that's causing an imbalance in my blood that the body cares about basically so if i've got too high of a concentration of salt then my body's going to trigger fructose if i've got too much glucose in my system my body's going to trigger fructose right so it's whenever my blood is getting out of balance i'm triggering this alarm system whenever you're thirsty so the commonality is that when this goes up it creates um it creates a dehydration type of picture and dehydration and by definition you're going to be thirsty and you're going to release this hormone vasopressin all roads that lead to rome involve fructose so it's either the fructose you eat or the fructose you make if you eat a lot of fructose you're going to activate the switch and rome just so we're clear is metabolic disease that's that's the switch where you turn on to become diabetic and all these things so so when the when you eat a lot of fructose that will do it if you become dehydrated like with salty diets and so forth that will do it if you eat high glycemic foods that can do it too so those are like the three main ones and it turns out that the way the fructose works is it works through the production of a substance called uric acid and the uric acid is it's a normal substance that we all make all animals make it and when we when you make it then you have to excrete it and most animals excrete it by breaking it down but we lost our ability to break it down uh during a you know 15 million years ago and so we all humans have a higher uric acid than uh everybody than all other mammals apes also have this mutation so anyway so so we have a higher uric acid and this makes us more sensitive to the effects of fructose because fructose is working through uric acid and when when we can't break the uric acid down and fructose makes it the uric acid shoots up higher than it normally would and when that happens we become very sensitive to sugar and to all of these pathways so a normal animal has to even more fructose than we do to to really get the effect and we are very sensitive to sugar and so uh the uric acid is the thing that actually causes that stunning of the energy factories and and and so the uric acid is playing a key role so uric acid is the um oxidative yes that's what causes the oxidative stress okay it's the it's the main guy so uh so it helps orchestrate that drop in energy in the cell and when that happens when the energy goes down there's the alarm signal you trigger this huge switch and animals want to gain fat and so the problem is is we had this mutation because it occurred during the period of famine it was probably important for us to survive and now we have this mutation so we're sensitive sugar and now we're getting tons of high fructose corn syrup and table sugar and it's being put in our food and we have salt being put in all this processed food and and then here's here's the terrible twist it turns out that uric acid has its own taste uh too so so we have five tastes that we like yes that we like so there's sweet and salt we like those sweet that's to get fructose salt that's to trigger the production of fructose then we have bitter and sour which are to you know tell us not to eat those foods and then we have umami and the umami is called the fifth taste and it's this brilliant taste it's like um it's a savory flavor it's it's what you know in gravies and beef extracts and you know the drying and curing of meats uh you know leads this really delicious flavor it's uh it's in beer it's the yeast extract and beer uh it's in tomatoes believe it or not um and uh and you know the bloody mary is a perfect example of uh a nice umami food beer and it's an oregon meats um it's in blue cheese when you have that delicious blue cheese salad blue cheese freaks me out i don't know about that one okay well i like it caesar salads and the anchovies they so what it is is uh it turns out that when they figured out what umami was the thing that activates umami is an amino acid called glutamate or msg and when you eat glutamate guess what you make you're a guest it's terrible and and it's also stimulated by a substance called amp and inp which are breakdown products of atp and when you activate this switch the atp is broken down and you make the imp and amp the switch makes these substances that are part of the umami flavor and so uh when we give animals umami uh and we give them umami in in the drinking water so they get a high concentration they also can become obese and it's because they enter into this pathway after fructose when you eat fructose you make uric acid and when you eat umami you kind of bypass the fructose but you still make that uric acid you make it or it's now present because you've just eaten it no it's it's it's made from the glutamate and from the imp and uh yeah it's upstream so it actually will generate uric acid so okay now is msg more potent than even fructose yes so if you do it gram for gram msg is more potent than sugar but we don't eat very much umami so the average person's eating you know a few grams of umami a day you know and you're eating grams and grams of sugar so there's a huge difference right so in the potency sugar is number one high glycemic carbs are probably number two salty foods are a distant three and umami is a maybe even a four but you know um the whole thing's kind of interesting so you know um and and and the fructose when you eat it um is acting to activate the survival pathway which is supposed to be beneficial but when you're in overdrive because you've got the mutation all this now it's driving obesity and and and so with the the newest stuff is that we're now showing that this pathway is like involved in things like dementia and so forth and that when in alzheimer's there's evidence that their earliest problem is insulin resistance in the brain and insulin you know the brain doesn't normally need much insulin to get glucose but there's certain parts of the brain that do require insulin and insulin resistance to those parts can be the earliest sign of alzheimer's and you can show that in people with alzheimer's that they're making fructose in their brain you can show that they've activated the pathway you can show that fructose causes insulin resistance in the brain it drops the energy in the cell and in alzheimer's the atp levels are low they have mitochondrial problems they have all the all the markers so what's happening is alzheimer's i believe is actually being driven by this pathway salty foods high glycemic carbs chronically can can cause this the other um the other thing i should mention is that what we know is like this fructose sort of initiates this but over time the mitochondria will actually or the energy factories gets less and less and less because initially when you do this the there's just this transient oxidative stress and the switch is turned on and then you stop it the switch comes back you know i mean the switch is turned off and everything's fine but if you keep hitting it again and again and again and again over years what happens is the mitochondria actually get weakened and it's it's like involved in in the aging process and in the end and as the number of mitochondria go down then what happens is you it resets your body weight to a higher weight and so what happens is now when you try to lose weight um you you can lose the weight but then when you stop you go back up and that's why exercise is so important i know you do a lot of exercise good for you matt yeah if i'm honest i control my weight through diet far more than exercise i might think i was better at exercising if i wasn't married to my wife who is a beast when it comes to exercise she's really on point um man this stuff is is really crazy and one thing that i loved about the book is you walk people through because you weren't flippant about the science you would get a discovery and you'd be like let's check it from eight different angles um one of the ways that that really hit me was vitamin c yeah walk me through vitamin c's role in this we can't produce it but it has like these huge effects like why why from an evolutionary standpoint would it make sense for us to lose the ability to produce vitamin c yeah so so vitamin c is is good right it's an antioxidant it's you know so the big question is why why would we lose vitamin c uh in our past so we we used to be able to make vitamin c way way longer but probably around 60 million years ago 65 million years ago we lost the ability to make vitamin c and and it turns out when a fruit is being made you know as it's and it's maturing it starts off with a high vitamin c content and a low sugar content it turns out that vitamin c blocks the oxidative stress induced by the fructose because it's an antioxidant so it blocks it so fructose causes you to gain weight by creating oxidative stress and that vitamin c blocks it so when the fruits immature the tree doesn't want the bird to eat it because the seeds aren't mature you know it's not good so that it wants to wait till the seeds are mature and so it will wait and the vitamin c content will block you know well the animal won't gain much weight by eating a immature fruit because the vitamin c is going to block the fructose but as the fruit ripens the vitamin c goes down and the sugar goes up and now that it's good for the tree and it's good for the animal and so they'll eat the right fruit so it turns out vitamin c has a role in blocking uh fructose and what we did is we took animals that were vit had no could not make vitamin c and you have to give them a little bit or they'll get scurvy and die so that's so you got to all the animals get a little bit of vitamin c but one one group gets a little and one group gets a lot and then we give them sugar and they eat the same amount of actually high fructose corn syrup and the one that has the lower amount of vitamin c and low they got much fatter linus fallen was right we should all be on 500 milligrams a day if you take huge doses you can get kidney stones so remember that so don't take huge doses of vitamin c but 500 milligrams a day is really good and um and once you get up to a gram a day you know it also may have some effects on exercise which i talked about in my book so but 500 milligrams a day is great and it turned out that when this mutation occurred an asteroid had just hit the world and there was a massive extinction the dinosaurs became extinct and their little primates that were living that time i actually got this mutation and my belief is that the mutation uh was a survival mechanism so they they at that point they didn't make much vitamin c so they were kind of in a low vitamin c level so that when they ate a fruit even if there was some vitamin c it wasn't enough to add to what they were making so that they could make more fat so that's the hypothesis i mean so you know in my work we have the hard science and then we have the interpretation but uh i i do know that if you have a low vitamin c level you're at increased risk for obesity if you're an animal and the data in people shows the same people who are not eating a lot of vitamin c or have low vitamin c levels tend to be overweight vitamin c supplementation has been probably has been reported to help all aspects of the metabolic syndrome so it's insane yes all right walk people through really quickly than what they should be doing drink less water yes so the so the first thing is um you know uh know your foods that that can activate the switch and know the foods that don't and you know vegetables of course are good white meats a lot of fish are good red meats you have to be a little bit careful for i wouldn't eat a lot of them um and uh high glass because of umami yes because of the umami and um and and it also yes it's probably because of the umami that it it has its uh negative sides but basically the most important rule is liquid sugar is really dangerous and and the reason is is um when you have liquid sugar the uh you drink a lot very quickly and so the concentration is high as well as the amount and what triggers the switch is the concentration of fructose the liver c so if you have a soft drink and you drink it in one minute you're going to give a huge dose in a short period of time that means a high concentration if you took that large soft drink and you sipped it so that and you sipped it over three hours it's going to be a calorie you're never going to get the fructose concentration will never get high enough to activate the switch so if you do one sip every five minutes you're not you i doubt you're going to activate the switch um and then uh you know so so it's liquid sugars you got to watch that fruit juice i love fruit juice but unfortunately unfortunately it will activate the switch for sure and so i would not uh i'd be very careful with the fruit juices there may be some fruit juices that are safer like fruits that are really relatively low in fructose like kiwi and stuff there's berries some of them don't have much sugar in it and those might be fine a third thing would be um you know obviously desserts and candy and sugar cakes you have to be very careful with um but you know and try to minimize uh but you know i if my son has a birthday party i'm gonna eat a piece of cake so uh try not to eat too much of the sweets high glycemic carbs i i think there's four big ones right bread rice potatoes cereal you know our chips gosh watch those those are real i i recommend trying to avoid those if possible um and you know if you're going to eat one just eat and then you know drink a lot of water i mean one of the incredible things is most people are overweight are dehydrated and they're dehydrated not only from the salt but it turns out fructose dehydrates you too and i didn't go into that but if you give a person a soft drink that is not hydrating okay that is dehydrating and you can prove it and if you give animals uh soft drinks and you give them a lot of water you can block the effects of sugar partially i mean you know significantly uh so you should drink six to eight glasses of water a day some people can drink 10 to 12 but you know you can you can become watering toxic intoxicated and if you're a marathon runner drink to thirst and because marathon runners if they drink too much water they can actually drop their sodium concentrations and and get really really ill or immediately following surgery is another time you should not drink a lot of water but for most of us we're not drinking enough water and we should be drinking eight to ten glasses of water a day and that's probably one of the best messages can reduce your salt intake and you know things like intermittent fasting is fantastic that's a wonderful system and low carb diets wonderful for trying to lose weight and then exercising is turns out to be a great way not to lose weight because it doesn't burn many calories but it stimulates the mitochondria you won't notice the benefit except the benefits going to be happening because as the mitochondria go up your risk for relapse and gaining weight goes down so exercise and it's a particular kind of exercise we call it zone two that kind of exercise is really really important uh and it's you know it's something that i personally want to do more of a you know as a workaholic that's probably the thing i have the hardest time is finding that extra time during the day to exercise but i hear it well you've been putting your time to very good use i found your book utterly fascinating where can people follow along with you socially where do they get the book i i have a website dr richardjohnson.com and that's probably my main site um and then of course the the books available through regular you know all places are sold yeah where books are sold and um uh you know i do have uh instagram uh dr richard j johnson awesome well guys the book is fascinating i have become obsessed with what's going on metabolically from the signaling molecule idea uric acid uh that whole alarm bell chain is something that i'm starting to pay a lot of attention to i highly encourage you to read the book to follow along with him and speaking of things that you should follow along with if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 825,249

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Dr Richard Johnson, Nature Wants Us to Be Fat, The Sugar Fix, The Fat Switch, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, health tips, health advice, fructose, obesity, diabetes, fat storage, insulin, metabolic disease, uric acid, glucose, calories in food, MSG problem, glutamate

Id: saBHcqr_Glo

Length: 57min 31sec (3451 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2022