The Surprising Reason People are Overweight, with Dr. Robert Lustig - TBWWP

[Music] welcome everybody I am so excited for this week and maybe we'll call it the bitter truth week I am here with my new friend Rob Lustig who is a professor of pediatrics in the division of endocrinology at UC San Francisco he is also the chief science officer at eat real a nonprofit dedicated to reversing childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes dr. Lustig consults several childhood obesity advocacy groups and government agencies his books which are just amazing include the New York Times bestseller fat chance the fat chance cookbook and sugar has 56 names a shoppers guide and his new book is called the hacking of the American mind which is really interesting because I actually submitted a proposal for a book called flying blind and the raping of the American mind but then I thought okay that's a little raping hacking no it's off it's all the same so how we actually just met a few weeks ago yeah yeah the and I wrote about you for a while and I see I take it you have known about me for a while so it was good that we finally actually laid eyes on each other yeah well it's so funny because you're in line for talking to me and I see you and I immediately recognize you from the YouTube talk sugar the bitter truth if you haven't watched that and it's more than an hour but it's fascinating it's just literally it'll change your life I watched that 10 years ago when it first came out and now I was like a million views or more and it just changed how I thought about sugar and and about fruit juice in particular so in this podcast so this week we're going to talk a lot about sugar and society and what Rob has learned but I want you to tell our and our viewers who you are and why you do what you do know I'm a pediatric endocrinologist so I study hormone problems and children I started out being interested in why boys were boys and girls were girls from the neck up I am a neuroendocrinologist so I was studying how the brain controls hormones how hormones control the brain how testosterone causes differences in you know brain formation and development and you know what that meant for individuals and for you know various disease states that's what I started doing and couldn't get funded for it well I was also interested in obesity and I had this one idea back in the early to mid 90s about whether or not the insulin played a role in weight gain now up to that point people had thought well yes insulin levels are high in the obese but it's a result of the weight rather than a cause well there is a disorder in neuroendocrinology which you may or may not have heard of called hypothalamic obesity so these are kids who had brain tumors and because of the tumor their hypothalamus is shot there by the thalamus is either dead from the surgery or from the tumor itself or from the radiation and they become massively obese now it was around the mid 90s when we had discovered this hormone called leptin okay was about 1994 and I postulated back then that these kids because of the brain damage couldn't see their leptin because they couldn't see it their brain thought they were starving so you can't fix a brain or actually I take it back you can that's what we do okay but back then we couldn't do such a good job Ryan we didn't think about it you know basically these kids had you know anatomic damage to their brain in particular the limbic system so what could we do for them so base on some old work in animals it would see it would have appeared that getting the insulin down by cutting the vagus nerve and there's a connection between the hypothalamus and pancreas via the vagus nerve cutting the vagus nerve reduces the amount of insulin that the pancreas releases and reduces the amount of weight gain in lesion danimals so well I can't cut a vagus nerve I'm not a surgeon so I said well can we do the next best thing can we give a drug that would stop the pancreas from making so much insulin so we did that we did a pilot study where we gave a drug called octreotide which is usually used to suppress growth hormone secretion from growth hormone secreting tumors of the brain of the pituitary awkward mega Lear's gigantism but we instead used it to suppress insulin release at the level of the pancreas and lo and behold these patients started losing weight Wow and no one had ever described weight loss in any of these patients before but they lost significant amounts of weight and something even more remarkable occurred that was basically spurred month the rest of my career not only did they lose weight but they started exercising spontaneously Wow these were kids who sat on the couch ate Doritos and slept and the reason was because their brains thought they were starving so they didn't want to expend any energy but when we got their insulin now with the medicine now they had energy to burn and so they actually changed their lifestyle so what this proved this and we did it again in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial we also did it in adults who didn't have brain tumors and found the same phenomenon in a proportion of them what this proved was that the biochemistry drives the behavior and this shouldn't be too much of a shock especially to you I mean every thought is a protein phosphorylation every thing that goes on in our brain is driven by biochemistry by molecules your whole a clinic is set up to fix those molecules fix the hardware before you fix the software right it's really hard to grow grandma brain that doesn't work right exactly so that's what we did we fixed the problem where the problem was we fixed the cause rather than the result and I have basically taken that on you know going forward in all of my work knowing that ultimately sometimes we're smart enough to be able to figure out the cause sometimes we're not but it's always upstream of where you think it is what we're looking at is the result of a problem rather than the cause of the problem and you have to treat the cause if you're going to be successful so besides a tumor why do people have high insulin levels right so that's the big question okay so tumors I mean that's like 1 million everyone's hyperinsulinemic today everyone's insulin levels 2 to 4 times higher than it used to be now our glue houses are the same but the amount of insulin that our bodies need to release to keep that glucose the same is 2 to 4 fold higher than it was in 1970 and that's where the work that you know I don't eat in fat chance really came from and basically I think is sugar the you know dietary sugar the the sweet stuff and there's a reason for why I think that number one it's gone up like crazy number two the molecule in sugar that makes it sweet called fructose so sugar is 2 molecules glucose and fructose glucose is the energy of life that's what's in starch that's not what we're talking about we're talking about fructose turns out fructose has a very specific biochemical profile when you consume fructose say a 20 ounce coca-cola that fructose is all ending up in the liver the liver cannot handle the load and the liver has no choice but to take that excess fructose and turn it into liver fat and it is that liver fat that is mucking up the workings of the liver and is causing that insulin resistance causing the pancreas to have to make more insulin to make delivered to its job driving the weight gain and we have now done several studies to prove that so when you get the fructose out of the diet in other words you cut the sugar from the diet the liver fat goes away the pancreas makes it less insulin and the patient loses weight naturally and the leptin starts working because the insulin was blocking the leptin so basically we can reverse metabolic syndrome just by getting sugar out of the diet so we think sugar is a primary not the only but a primary driver of the chronic disease epidemics that we see around the world today and we are doing our best to try to stem the tide how can people learn more about your work so they can get the hacking of the American mind but if I mean I want you I mean because it's just life-changing to go to youtube and just search for the bitter truth sugar the bitter truth with Robert Lustig and I want you to get your kids to watch this it's and and it's actually fairly detailed science yeah but you make it easy to understand that because you're really masterful teacher how else can they learn about your work so I what I would argue is number one that video is now 10 years old we have more out that's more recent that I think is actually you know more up-to-date and better if you do just a YouTube you know you look on my name you'll find a whole bunch of them ones called fat chance fructose 2.0 which I actually think is better although not as many hits as a TED talk I did called sugar the elephant in the kitchen actually what I would propose that people do is they take 3 hours of their time and they watch two movies and they're both on Netflix one is called fed-up which was produced in 2014 and it tells it's a documentary that tells the story of how we got to where we are today and the other is called sugar-coated which is a documentary also on Netflix which tells the story of why we got to where we are today that is the corporate subterfuge the fraud the public relations campaign to exonerate sugar and make us all sick so when we come back we're gonna talk about sugar and the bitter truth stay with us [Music] you welcome back here with dr. robert lustig professor at UC san francisco in the department of pediatrics he's a neuro endocrinologist and on the brain wave a podcast we've talked a lot about hormones because it's very important in our bright minds mnemonic and one of the things I learned I saw this study that showed if you get a sugar burst it drops testosterone by 25% and so I thought to myself if you know I go to the Cheesecake Factory and share cheesecake with my sweetheart nobody's getting dessert you say no one's getting anything so let's talk about the sugar story and why that became demonized and Schipper became the darling that in many ways ruined our society I couldn't agree more this is a very sordid story and was very specifically driven by the sugar Association a trade group you know of the industry from way back started back in 1943 but really sort of picked up steam in the 50s and 60s now the thing that really turned the tide was 1955 Eisenhower had a heart attack and everyone wanted to know why and at that point the data had started to amass that America was suffering from big-time cardiovascular disease Paul Dudley white at Mass General had demonstrated that the incidence of coronary disease in the United States had gone up something like six-fold over the previous five decades so everyone wanted to know what caused heart disease because the president had a heart attack and there were two camps one camp which was led by a British physiologist nutritionist physician by the name of doctor john eunjin said that it was sugar that was driving this and back then dr. yadkin had correlation not causation those studies remained to be done over the course of the next several decades but he had studies that looked at the amount of sugar consumed and the amount of heart disease diabetes gout several other chronic diseases and he made that case on the other side there was a second camp which unfortunately one out and that camp was led by a Minnesota epidemiologist by the name of Ancel Keys he was actually on the cover of Time magazine scientist of the year back in 1980 that he did a study which was called the seven countries study and what he looked at was the percent of the diet as saturated fat versus the incidence of coronary heart disease in seven countries and showed this very linear relationship between the two here's the problem it wasn't the seven country study it was the 22 country study he picked the seven that fit his line the other 15 he left out we only found that out later in addition there were three things that happened in the 1970s that sort of sealed the deal against yet gunnin for keys we learned three things the first thing we learned was that this molecule in our bloodstream called LDL low-density lipoprotein and we learned that LDL was a driver of cardiovascular disease because of these kids with genetic genetic inability to clear LDL called familial hypercholesterolemia and these would be the kids who would get heart attacks at age 18 the second thing we learned was that dietary fat raised your serum LDL which is true as it turns out there are two LDLs it raised one not the other and the one that didn't get raised that causes heart disease but that but when you measure it you measure both but we didn't know so people know LDL is often thought of as a particles and B particles a the big fluffy ones that are harmless right basically be the little demon ones molded like shards of glass yes that's blood vessel damage exactly so we always say LDLs bad cholesterol it turns out that LDL is actually probably neutral cholesterol and for the most part but this one particular species called small dense LDL turns out that's what's driven by sugar but we didn't know that back then and then finally epidemiologic studies showed that LDL levels did correlate with coronary disease so these three things basically if a leads to B and B leads to C then a must lead to C therefore no a no C get rid of the fat therefore get rid of the heart disease and that sealed Judkins fate he was thrown under the bus left to the dust but as a you know the dustbin of history and we went low-fat and we went whole hog low-fat the problem is when you take fat out of the food it tastes like crap okay I mean it just does food industry knew that they had to do something to make the food palatable to make the food worth eating to make you want to eat it so what they do added sugar so it took the fat out put the sugar in and you can prove this to yourselves right now if you go to the store do not buy them just look at the food label of snack wells okay they were an invention of 1982 they are still with us the two grams of fat down 13 grams of carbohydrate up four of which or dot our sucrose dietary sugar and snack Wells drive heart disease I'm sure Nabisco will not be too happy about me saying that but that is basically what happened and it happened to our entire diet my father got his heart attack eating Entenmann's fat-free cakes you know so I have a vested interest in fixing this issue because you know my father got his heart attack from it so I understand this issue my grandfather who I'm named after who is my best friend when I was a child was a candy maker and without his first heart attack at 49 and his second heart attack in his 70s that took him away from me and so I'm genetically loaded for it but I don't have heart disease why because I don't eat sugar right because because you're not a candy and it was hard breaking up with sugar yeah was hard yeah because it was attached to love when I was a child and are so often and you see this is we love children we praise children we were Ward children with Ruth's children with sugar which is just the wrong thing to do I couldn't agree more and if you're listening to this and you're a parent and you bring cupcakes for your kid's birthday at school okay you are the problem okay I'm telling you right now I'm calling all of you out stop it stop it right now and if any other mother brings cupcakes for their kids birthday stop them you're gonna be a brain warrior general okay love that that's decisive I mean you know why is it from Halloween to New Year's Day we just are stupid as a society I mean why do we celebrate Christ's birth or Thanksgiving excuse me by hurting people excuse me Valentine's Day Memorial Day Easter 4th of July Easter you know it it's it's year-round okay this is and it's and it's daytime to nighttime okay because what do you feed your kids out there breakfast cereal really okay I want to take a look at that of Nutrition Facts label again okay the 17 most common breakfast cereals for children are all over 40 percent sugar forty percent and and so high ischemic Kellogg's Honey Smacks is 56 percent sure you really want to feed your kid a breakfast cereal that is 56 percent sugar I mean like who would do that so and we just have a few more minutes with this one what is happening to the brains of children who get that sugar burst in the morning and it's not just cereal it's also waffles and pancakes and syrup which is just nothing but liquid sugar and orange juice and orange juice my dad hates us cuz he grows oranges that I'm like eat the oranges don't juice exactly eat the fruit don't drink the juice and there's a reason for that but but what happens in their brains because I know if I because I used to do this and I'm apologize had used to go to Winchell's way to work and get it to doughnuts and then I learned all you can't do that because a half an hour later my brain is mud I just can't thank because I get that insulin burst which then drops my sugar law right and I can tank so it's there probably two different phenomena going on there's one that's direct and there's one that's indirect we know more about the indirect one and that is what you just described that is you get a big pancreatic insulin burst which then drives your blood glucose down making you relatively hypoglycemic your brain functions on glucose and when you drop your serum glucose which is usually around the three to four hour mark you get a little fuzzy and you get a little irritable and you end up wanting to eat something early in order to bring that blood glucose up and that could change temperament it could change cognitive function in school but that's one make kids look like they have a DD possibly no one's proven that there's some correlative not causative data that a tough one also you know the question is are you talking about kids who don't have a TD who act like they have a TD or kids who really have a TD who just get worse a TD you know there's complications and trying to study that we there's a little correlative data but it's not for sure it's not a slam dunk that's the indirect effect the direct effect may be even more pernicious and that is fructose this sweet molecule in sugar normally gets metabolized by the liver but when you eat too much of it your liver gets overwhelmed that you end up with a serum fructose level now your brain is not designed to metabolize fructose however we now know that the astrocytes not the neurons the astrocytes those important sort of cells of the brain can take up fructose and when they metabolize it what it does is it depletes their ATP and if it depletes their ATP god knows what that's doing to neuronal function and so it's conceivable that that fructose bolus that comes when you over consume sugar might have direct effects on cognitive function as well we also know that insulin resistance which occurs not from one sugar meal but from multiple you know overtime leads to brain shrinkage and cognitive decline in adolescence this is work of Antonio confit at the NYU Medical Center showing that adolescents with metabolic syndrome have bad brain yeah and because with the work we've done on our studies that show as your weight goes up the actual physical functional size of your brain goes down which should scare the fat off anyone stay with us [Music] welcome back I'm here with dr. Robert Lustig you had talked about to Netflix documentaries that people could watch fed up and sugarcoat you're all sugar-coated you're also the author of fat chance the fat chance cookbook the new book the hacking of the American mind I hope you're finding this is fascinating as I am so what's the deal with virtues I mean everybody thinks oh if I can get my kid to eat fruit you to drink fruit juice in the morning I'm a good mom or I'm a good dad my dad's a grower of oranges and it's just been thought of as a health food for so long and then when I watched sugar the bitter truth I don't think I've had a glass of juice since then good as you should so let me try to explain a relatively complex subject the short answer is fruit is good juice is bad now you'd say they're the same and most people think of them as the same certainly the USDA thinks of them the same they consider fruit juice fruit as simple as that I would argue that they are not the same at all the difference between the two is the fiber fruit has fiber fruit juice has lost one of its fibers there are two so whole fruit and for that matter any thing that comes out of the ground any carbohydrate that comes out of the ground potatoes potatoes wheat eggplant anything comes with numerous nutrients but two forms of fiber there's soluble fiber like for instance pectins like what holds jelly together inulin which is a very specific plant sugar source storage unit these are globular they are soluble in water they it's what Metamucil is psyllium so if you add water to Metamucil you get this gel like stuff okay so that's soluble fiber which you ingest right so even so when you consume fruit you're getting the soluble fiber when you consume fruit juice you're getting the soluble fiber but then there's this second fiber insoluble fiber so like cellulose like the stringy stuff in celery tightens ok many other ends that are stringy they're long they form a lattice work on the inside of the intestine when you consume fruit you're getting both of them and you're getting them with the appropriate geometry and the a geometry matters and I'll explain how that works in a minute when you make fruit juice you're throwing the insoluble fiber in the garbage so you're only getting the soluble fiber you're only getting one of the two when you smoothie a fruit so put it in a Vitamix or a Breville or whatever you are shearing the insoluble fiber to smithereens you're cutting it up into little chunks that are so big that it will not do the function that you need it to do which I'm going to explain in a minute so you need the two together so here's how this works imagine that you have a spaghetti colander okay metal thing with holes right you run water through it water go straight through of course now take a blob of petroleum jelly throw it into the center of the colander now run the water still runs through might bounce off the petroleum jelly but basically you're gonna end up with a wet sink now take your finger and rub that petroleum jelly all along the inside of that colander now run the water now you have an impenetrable barrier the water won't go through because the petroleum jelly is basically plug the holes in the colander well that's what's happening in your duodenum in the first part of your intestine the insoluble fiber the cellulose the stringy stuff acts like a fishnet the soluble fiber acts like the kelp that plugs the holes and together the two when you have the appropriate geometry acts as an impenetrable barrier on the inside of your intestine thus reducing the rate of absorption of carbohydrate and the various molecules sugar etc from getting into the portal veins so that it doesn't all go to the liver and the whole goal of this is to keep the liver healthy by not flooding it so by cutting back on how fast the glucose and the fructose and the other nutrients reaches the liver you are protecting your liver and that is precept number one protect the liver now if you don't absorb it early because you've made this nice fiber gel that means more of what you ate we'll go further down the intestine and what's down the intestine that wasn't in the front of the intestine the bacteria the microbiome and we now know the microbiome is huge in terms of metabolic health for all sorts of reasons which we can go into if you like but you know it's it's it's a big deal you want your microbiome fed the point is that if you didn't absorb it early that means you're feeding your microbiome later so even though you consumed it even though it passed your lips you didn't get it your bacteria did so even though you counted it as calories because it passed your lips it doesn't count those calories because the bacteria chewed it up not you and you fed your gut so those are the two precepts to determine whether something is healthy protect the liver feed the gut if a food does both and fruit does both it's healthy if a fruit if a food does neither that would be like a soda it's not healthy because you're flooding your liver and starving your gut if a food does one or the other but not both like for instance fruit juice then it's halfway and that's what the data show the data into the empiric data on fruit juice and diabetes or fruit juice and heart disease or fruit juice and mortality show not as bad as soda but clearly not as good as any other non cork beverage so fruit juice is not good just not as bad as soda it's so important I mean what what an important message and then when you read the labels fruit crystals and organic grape juice oh yeah is it's just everywhere that fructose and you had said earlier it's because that's the sweet part of the sucrose molecule is fructose exactly so and and is there difference between high fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup well yes there's a difference between high fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup the question is is there a difference between high fructose corn syrup and sucrose or table sugar in the answer's no so high fructose corn syrup is cheaper and it's homegrown and Iowa is filled with corn got to do something with it 17% of the corn crop each year is turned into high fructose corn syrup for sweetening this that the other thing it is so cheap that it found its way into virtually every other food stuff that we buy at the store who ever heard of salad dressing have showed having sugar but go check your commercial salad dressing the only way you get salad dressing without sugar is if you make it yourself it's just that sir McDonald's grilled chicken yes sugar absolutely I'm like why does it have sugar in it there are only seven items at McDonald's that don't have sugar ready french fries but actually I've heard that back in the day they actually did add sugar because it browned the french fries better but I think that they've stopped doing that now number two the sausage does not have sugar in it I was surprised Chicken McNuggets do not have added sugar but the dipping sauces do so they're really not that's not a good one either hash browns for the same reason the French fries they don't have sugar and after that it's ice tea if you add if you don't want if you say no sugar coffee if you don't want sugar and water that's it okay everything else at McDonald's is loaded with added sugar on purpose for their for their reasons not for yours because they know when they added you buy more well and I think of fast food basically as fibrous food that's right that way you can go in you basically don't have to chew it you just swallow and then you go out so they get more turnover absolutely people so I'm gonna tell you so what a story I'm let me just tell you a funny story about how important fiber is so I live in San Francisco I have lived there twice I lived there when I was a fellow back in the early 80s and then I moved back in 2001 so two separate times when I went to a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco the first time I was there every restaurant had brown rice because brown rice was good for you right then I left and I lived in New York and Madison Wisconsin in Memphis when I came back to San Francisco no restaurant had brown rice only white rice now when I lived in New York they're plenty Chinese restaurants there they all had brown rice but when I came back to San Francisco they gotten rid of the brown rice they only had white rice now why is that if it's healthy for you I have no idea because in San Francisco they charge for the rice and in New York the rice was free and the restaurateurs in San Francisco realized when people ordered brown rice they only had half a bowl but when they ordered white rice they ate 2 bowls because the fiber was satiating whereas in New York they were perfectly happy for you to have brown rice because it was free why would they want to give you two bowls so you know it's funny along that line you know have you ever asked yourself why when you go to a restaurant do they give you free bread and the first thing they ask you is what alcohol beverage can really get you absolutely because both of them lower frontal lobe function that bread causes an insulin spike which drives serotonin which drives tryptophan into the brain so it actually makes you happy it's the don't worry be happy' chemical and so even though you go in and go I'm not going to order dessert I'm going to be good stay on my diet that as soon as you get the bread the diets out the window and alcohol drops your firm elopes so they're very strategic how to get more money out of yours no better collagen about how strategic they are they've got it down and they and the point is they know and you don't when we come back we're gonna talk about the hacking of the American mind and what's really going on in our society and you're gonna find how similar it is to my new book the end of mental illness and the evil ruler you've heard me talk about if I was an evil ruler how would I create mental illness in America dr. Lustig is gonna help us with that stay with us [Music] welcome back I am here on the brain where's way podcast with dr. Robert Lustig I am so grateful to you and your work I likewise you you have helped me personally so I know you would that well that is just a joy for me to share our work with you and when your book the hacking of the American mind came out it sort of reminded me of the brain Warriors Way you know we wrote my wife and I wrote the brain Warriors Way because it's everywhere we go someone is trying to put a gadget in your hand shall bad food down your throat you get this toxic look at the news and it's like you're in a war for the health of your brain and your body you need to become a warrior armed prepared and aware to really be able to win the fight of your life which is for your health indeed so the subtitle of this book is the science behind the corporate takeover of our bodies and brains and that is exactly what is going on there has been a corporate takeover and that is what I described in the book now specifically what I argue in you know in scientific detail is that what has happened and the reason why this is a war is because our society has very specifically with conscience with a conscious intent confused and conflated two separate terms so that we don't know the difference those two terms are pleasure and happiness so there are seven differences between pleasure and happiness what are they I'm dying to know all right ready number one pleasure is short-lived happiness is long lived - pleasure is visceral you feel it in your body happiness is ethereal you feel it above the neck number three pleasure is taking happiness is giving number for pleasure is achieved alone happiness is usually achieved in social groups number five pleasure can be achieved with substances happiness cannot be achieved with substances number six the extremes of pleasure now whether it be substances or behavior so substances like cocaine heroin nicotine alcohol sugar all the stuff that does bad stuff to your brain as you've shown and your families and your families or behaviors shopping gambling internet gaming social media pornography those are all behaviors there's an a holic after every one of those because excess of any of those hedonic substances and behaviors leads to addiction so we have Shopaholic alcoholic chocoholic sexaholic etc and right down the line whereas you can't overdose on too much happiness and number seven the reason for the book pleasure is dopamine happiness is serotonin so two different neurotransmitters two different sets of receptors two different areas of the brain two different regulatory patterns like why we care they both feel good why do we care and most people substitute one for the other because pleasure you can buy happiness you can't pleasure is cheap happiness is tough so why wouldn't I want to substitute one for the other here's why dopamine is excitatory when dopamine is released from one neuron to the next it excites that next neuron that's this job dopamine excites the next neuron now neurons like to be excited that's why the have receptors but neurons like to be tickled not bludgeoned they like to stimulate and they like to come to rest chronic over stimulation of any neuron anywhere in the brain or in the spinal cord or that matter in the gut will - neuronal cell death so where is it out it wears it out right and we know this because we take care of kids in the neuro intensive care unit who are in status epilepticus you know non-stop chronic seizure sores and we have to stop their seizures as quickly as possible put them into a pentobarbital coma if we have to do in order to preserve brain function because the longer those seizures go on the stupider they're gonna be so it is a priority to stop the stimulation so chronic excitation leads to neuronal cell death dopamine causes chronic excitation dopamine kills neurons excessive dope excessive over a longer a chronic excessive dopamine kills neurons now the neurons they don't want to die so they have a fail-safe they have a plan B they have a self defense mechanism what they do is they down regulate the number of receptors so it's less likely than any dopamine molecule will find the receptor dividing - so what does this mean in human terms in terms of addiction you get a hit you get a rush receptors go down next time you need a bigger hit to get the same rush because there are fewer receptors and then the receptors go down and I give you bigger hit and a bigger hit and a bigger hit until finally need a huge hit to get nothing that's called tolerance and then when the neurons actually do start to die that's called addiction and those neurons ain't coming back they don't regrow so dopamine leads to addiction when it's exaggeration over stimulation chronicity leads to addiction serotonin on the other hand is inhibitory so if it's inhibitory it puts the next neuron to rest now if it's gonna put the next neuron to rest is there any chance of wearing it out no so does serotonin down regulate its own receptor know so you can't overdose on too much happiness but there's one thing that down regulate serotonin dopamine they counterbalance each other they do and so or pleasure you seek the more unhappy you get but let me let me give you a different take on this because I've thought about this a whole bunch that if we scan you and you have sleepy frontal lobes and psychiatrist won't know because they never look at the brain but they give you an SSRI which boosts serotonin it'll actually make you worse because it'll take your sleepy frontal lobes make them sleepy er which then will dis inhibit you and cause all sorts of behavior problems well in fact do we know that if you give SSRIs to the wrong patient they will jump off roofs or kill their mother or Newall something else bad things it works for three-quarters of the patients and it doesn't work for the other quarter my experience is not 3/4 but because depressions just not one thing that's right sometimes over activity sometimes it's under activity sometimes it's trauma sometimes it's toxins and in my book feel better fast and make it last I talked about the dopamine drip versus the dopamine dump and I've been blessed to treat a number of young celebrities and fame is it dopamine yes so when they recognize you when they want your autograph when the paparazzi follow you and and overline and you know as well as I do that Fame wastes a lot of people it does because it wears out their nucleus accumbens totally ran and the other thing that wears it out is obesity that the people they go after the dopamine hit with the cupcakes that we got after moms for bringing to school and the more they do it the more treats really the less sells for dopamine to feel anything exactly at all and one of our changes the game so you know ultimately we have been so plied with sugar that if you try to get the sugar out of the food it would taste terrible and so that maintains the lowest withdrawal from sugar and they do and also the tea 1cr receptor on the tongue for sugar goes down because of all the sugar in all of our food so you end up needing more sugar to be able to get any sweet taste so we have basically desensitized our taste buds and our reward Center which basically keeps us coming back for more and if you can stay off sugar just ten days your taste buds begin to come back to you and when you eat an orange it will explode with flavor in your mouth as opposed to if you're eating a lot of sugar the orange tastes like nothing to you and so being a brain warrior is you really do see sugar is the enemy and we're here we love to talk about food and loving food that loves you back and that would be good what so many people are just in a bad relationship with with food well it's easy to get in a good relationship with food two words real food food that came out of the ground or animals that ate the food that came out of the ground that's real food anything else is processed if it has a label it's a warning label because real food doesn't have a label does it it doesn't need a label I love that it's efficient if any food has five ingredients or more leave it at the store because that means it's processed do you know corn dogs have 29 ingredients pop-tarts have 36 how is it that insane it's the insanity Robert Lustig professor of pediatric endocrinology UC San Francisco the author of the hacking of the American mind the science behind the corporate takeover of our bodies and brains how scary is that also in the documentary sugar-coated and fed up I hope you just get his books look at the documentaries this is gonna arm you prepare you to win the fight of your life and what did you learn in this week of podcast write it down put it on any of your social media sites hashtag brain warriors way podcast if you wanna win a signed copy of the brain warriors way cookbook leave a review either on Apple or on brain warriors way podcast.com also leave your questions thanks so much for being with us if you're enjoying the brain warriors way podcast please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode and while you're at it feel free to give us a review or 5-star rating as that helps others find the podcast if you're considering coming daemon clinics or trying some of the brain healthy supplements from brainmd you can use the code podcast 10 to get a 10 percent discount on a full evaluation at Amen Clinics comm or a 10 percent discount on all supplements at brainmd health.com for more information give us a call at eight fifty five nine seven eight one three six three

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Views: 120,930

Rating: 4.8642802 out of 5

Keywords: dr amen, daniel amen, robert lustig, brain warrior, brain warriors way, brain warriors way podcast, sugar, nutrition, fruit juice, fructose, obesity, sugar coated, fed up, sugar the bitter truth, the bitter truth, childhood obesity, ldl, cardiovascular disease, fiber, the hacking of the american mind, serotonin, dopamine, neurotransmitters, podcast about sugar, sugar podcast, weight loss podcast, video podcast

Id: pfwnU-uXrhI

Length: 50min 32sec (3032 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019