Warning Signs You’re Eating Too Much Sugar & How To Break The Addiction! | Dr. Robert Lustig

Rob welcome to the podcast thanks for having me it's my pleasure I'd love to Jump Right In what do you think are some of the early warning signs that someone's been eating too much sugar well first of all they will say to you oh I have a horrible Sweet Tooth and how many people do you know who say that in fact virtually all of them that's sugar addiction till proven otherwise now the reason they'll say I have a horrible sweet tooth is because sugar addiction is not socially unacceptable it is perfectly reasonable and in fact when people say oh I have a horrible Sweet Tooth they're looking for you know codependence and enablers is what they're doing the fact of matter is that because sugar is not associated with violent crime it's okay to be a sugar addict you know let's think of other addictive substances that don't lead to violent crime crime caffeine it's okay to be a caffeine addict um oh and by the way that's my drug of choice and you know if you take my Starbucks away from me I might have to kill you so you know it it makes itself manifest in different ways but in fact sugar addiction is extremely common one of the issues is that the ab the ab barent behaviors only come during the withdrawal phase but the fact is because sugar is so prevalent in all of our food since 73% of the items in the American Grocery Store are spiked with added sugar for the food industry's purposes not for you you never actually have withdrawal so you don't get to see the altered mental state of the sugar addict during withdrawal you mentioned like just saying hey I have a sweet tooth can be an early sign of eating too much sugar or being addicted to Sugar from a physical standpoint what are some of the signs that you may be having acute withdrawal symptoms or you're just you're addicted to Sugar but you don't you're not even aware of it you could potentially think it's something else so sugar actually doesn't have that many obvious direct withdrawal symptoms so let let's let's Define addiction all right prior to 2013 you needed two phenomena to behavioral phenomena to be an addictive substance you had to Dem rate both tolerance that is more and more for less and less and that's because of downregulation of the dopamine receptor in the reward center of the brain because dopamine downregulates its own receptor virtually all neurotransmitters downregulate their own receptors and there's a reason for that it's because dopamine is excitatory dopamine excites the next neuron now neurons like to be be excited neurons like to be stimulated that's why they have receptors but neurons like to be tickled not bludgeoned chronic overstimulation of any neuron will lead to neuronal cell death because the amount of energy it takes to fire is greater than the amount of energy it can burn at any one time so if you have continuous firing you will become energy depleted Ed and you risk dying now we know that because we have kids in the neurologic Intensive Care Unit with chronic you know seizure disorders status epilepticus nonstop seizing and we have to stop their seizures or they will lose neurons and they will end up becoming developmentally delayed and severely uh um uh compromised so it behooves us to get the neuron s to calm down well if you are constantly applying them with dopamine they only have one way to calm down and that is to reduce the uh number of receptors so they downregulate their own receptor so that there's less chance that any given dopamine molecule will find the receptor to bind to more and more for less and less the law of diminishing returns that's tolerance and every addictive substance and for that matter every addictive behavior does the same thing it increases dopamine which reduces the dopamine receptor okay so that's number one number two prior to 2013 the American Psychiatric association said that for something to be addictive you also had to demonstrate withdrawal now withdrawal is very interesting because if you look at the symptoms of withdrawal for any of the chemicals that we know have withdrawal so heroin cocaine nicotine they all have systemic effects when there's withdrawal so the GI side effects of morphine the madas and the sweating of um of cocaine Etc the these are all outside of the brain side effects all right sugar does not have those behaviors do not have those but they're still addictive gambling does not have those but they're still addictive so in 2013 the DSM the diagnostic and statistical manual number five they rewrote the definition of addiction so it can be tolerance and withdrawal or it can be tolerance and dependence and dependence are all internal effects like for instance can't stop thinking about it motivated to go seek it you know uh gets in the way of uh you know being able to function in society um you know uh Alters your work habit and your sleep schedule things like that that's dependence now sugar does not have tolerance and withdrawal it has tolerance and dependence so under the 2013 rubric sugar is addictive so those are the symptoms that one sees with sugar addiction when we talk about sugar I think it's important to kind of Define what we're talking about here because I think people will then look at anything that has sugar in it whether it be like fruit or anything like that and compare it to a candy bar and I think what what I gather what you're talking about is really like these processed foods that have added sugar in them is what you're referencing when it comes to sugar addiction like most people I mean I mean not I haven't seen anybody just take a table a spoon and just eat sugar out of a jar it's not it's it's the hyper it's the hyper processed foods exactly you're absolutely right so let's be very clear first of all let's define what I mean by Sugar you you yourself said we need to do that and I agree so sugar dietary sugar sucrose table sugar cane sugar beet sugar the stuff you put in your coffee the crystals that you spoon out and you know add them to your tea or your coffee or whatever okay that is sucrose that is one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose bound together that's what that is the fructose molecule is the sweet molecule the glucose molecule is not all that sweet glucose would be like molasses now Doug do you like molasses I don't I couldn't really tell you I've never really add it I don't think you know I mean it might be good in a certain kind of cookie but you know you don't see people going around chugging kot syrup do you no okay you don't see people going around chugging glucola you know I mean there's no black market for glucola okay that's glucose doesn't taste that good and the reason is because glucose does not stimulate the reward center the sweetness index of the glucose molecule is only 74 compared to sucrose which is 1.0 and it does not stimulate the reward center so glucose is not that interesting fructose is the other molecule and fructose is very interesting fructose is the molecule we seek fructose is the addictive molecule fructose is the one that stimulates the reward center the nucleus accumbent it's been shown on neuroimaging you know that this is the case now glucose is the energy of life every cell on the planet Burns glucose for energy glucose is so important that you if you don't consume it your body makes it it's called gluconeogenesis you can turn amino acids into glucose you can turn fat into glucose but fructose there is no biochemical reaction in the human body or in any animal cell for that matter on the planet that requires dietary fructose for any reaction it is completely vestigial to all animal life on this planet okay nobody needs it contrary to what the food industry says they say oh well you need sugar to live just garbage you do not all right if you you if you need glucose you can make it and you don't need fructose under any circumstance need it all right but it's sweet it's got a sweetness index of 100 1.73 compared to sucrose at one okay so it's very sweet and we love it because it stimulates the reward center but it's not necessary and in chronic doses in high chronic doses it causes cellular damage and ultimately cell death and ultimately human death so Doug can you name a substance that is not necessary for life that no biochemical reaction in the body requires it that when consumed in excess causes cellular and human damage and death and we love it anyway and it's addictive uh alcohol alcohol that's right alcohol is completely unnecessary yet alcohol is loved by millions and alcohol is addictive but we don't need it but we have it and you know if you know how to consume it you can manage it but a lot of people can't 20% of humans are are either binge drinkers or chronic alcoholics same with sugar and the reason is because sugar and alcohol are metabolized in the cell the same way they are virtually identical the big difference between sugar and alcohol is that for alcohol the yeast does the first step of metabolism which we call glycolysis for sugar sugar we do our own first step after that the cell handles them exactly the same the cell doesn't care where it came from so that's why children now get the diseases of alcohol without alcohol type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease were the diseases of alcohol now they're the diseases of five-year-olds and the reason is because they have an alcohol substitute it's called sugar and so I guess to bring this back to what we were talking about in the beginning so sugar can be addictive as you've said we're talking about processed foods and we're talking about sugar and the how they're added into Foods Etc and while it can be addictive it's not to the same extent as things like cocaine heroin alcohol like as far as like people aren't destroying their lives to get these substances but doesn't mean that it's not addictive and the reason is because sugar does not have withdrawal right substances that have withdrawal exhibit altered behaviors in the withdrawal state where people ruin their lives so for cocaine alcohol heroin nicotine you know uh we have those sugar is tolerance and dependence so and in the same way uh uh you know I caffeine is with has withdraw but it doesn't ruin lives so just because you know something's addictive doesn't mean you ruin lives but you can ruin your health and also I think like when somebody's under the influence of something like alcohol it's ruined a lot of relationships you know it C can cause death from drinking and driving it can it can also ruin your life while Under the Influence where you know people aren't destroying marriages from meeting too many cookies however like you said it can certainly destroy their health how does like this the the cycle of sugar addiction and tolerance work like the way I'm thinking of it as just somebody who's a former drug addict is if somebody eats like you know a pint of ice cream consistently for two weeks are they now moving on to two pints three pints like how does this all work for somebody well the fact of the matter is that um uh sugar generates more sugar craving um you know this is well known this is work that my colleague Dr Nicole Aina did uh she is a uh professor of neuroscience at Mount siai and she is the one who demonstrated that sugar is addictive in both animals and in humans so there are four criteria in animals for demonstrating addiction tolerance Cravings externalities so externalities mean other things happen because you are consuming and in animals uh that means cross-sensitive ity with other drugs of abuse so if you for instance uh take a um a rat and you addict them to sugar and then expose them to amphetamine you get a hyper response because they've they're already addicted and vice versa so there's only one reward system there's only one dopamine system and any of these substances can alter it and so if you're addicted to one thing you're addicted to all of them and so when you try to remove one of the those that the thing that you're addicted to okay you end up transferring that addiction to other things this is known as addiction transfer and this is why when people stop smoking they start drinking and when people stop drinking they start eating okay and vice versa so there are several patients that some of them famous like Carney Wilson who were massively obese had barri atric surgery and then became chronic alcoholics afterwards and the reason was because when they had their bariatric surgery they weren't uh generating that reward signal from food anymore and they had to generate that reward signal somehow and so if somebody is looking to break free from addiction to sugar and process foods what does the process look like like how long do you think it can take for somebody if they're wanting to make this transformation and like what what are the steps that somebody can take if they want to do something about it the first thing they have to do is admit it admitting it is half the battle okay we have a lot of people in denial that's number one and if you're in denial you'll never get better it's just that simple you know you will make excuses you know every which way from Sunday as to why this is not a good week or you know I can't do it right now or blah blah blah you know the the bottom line is the first thing is admitting it now how one can deal with it after ultimately you can't um uh alter an addiction until you've regenerated your dopamine receptors your dopamine receptors are at lowb if you take the dopamine away now you have no liand and fewer receptors now you feel really lousy and we know from both um pharmacologic studies in animals and we also know in human studies with imaging that it takes at least three weeks to repopulate those reward neurons you know their dopamine receptors in order to bring the dopamine receptor level back up so you now have people in Silicon Valley going on what are known as dopamine fasts okay where they lock themselves up in a in aot hotel room and take the screens away and take the M&M's away and take all of the sugar away and the alcohol away and basically you know read books until their dopamine receptors come back up so that they can feel something that's pretty remarkable that people that this is actually a thing look you know for your audience look it up dopamine fast how bizarre is that but that's what we've got so if you if your dopamine receptors at low EB if you want to actually feel something if you if you've been a cocaine addict and you actually want to feel something you have to go on a dopamine fast now are there less extreme ways of dealing with this of course there are can you wean and the answer is yeah of course you can wean in the same way you can wean heroin you can we uh you know cocaine but then you have to be on a program you know where the a dose is being monitored and the problem is that if the food is so completely overrun with added sugar because the food industry put it there how are you going to monitor yourself and how are you going to limit your exposure if the goal is reduction in Sugar consumption do you even know what is in your food you know you can look at the side of the package and say well well do I know if there's added sugar in here there are 262 names for sugar and the food industry uses all of them so you know you don't know what's in it did you know pinoa is sugar did you know demarara is sugar evaporated cane juice you might have been able to figure out is sugar okay they use strawberry puree that's sugar okay the point is there's a lot of stuff in your food that that you didn't know was there and so it's very hard to do the weaning because you don't know when you're exposed what if what if there was cocaine in all your food and the food industry didn't tell you how would you avoid it same issue so if somebody's admitted that they've had a problem they've paid attention to some of these early warning signs that we've talked about whether it be denial or you know saying you have a sweet tooth Etc and they want to make this change if it were you knowing what you know how would you do it effectively and how long do you think it would take you so if I wanted to do it effectively I would basically do a cold turkey what we've learned and we actually did this experiment in children we in 20110 through 2015 we conducted a study here at UCSF and to this day I'm still in awe of the results of this study is really remarkable what we did was we took 43 children from our obesity clinic at UCSF with metabolic syndrome all low socioeconomic status all high sugar consumers because that's what their parents fed them that's what they could afford and what we did was we studied them on their home diet we figured out what they were eating on their home diet we studied them on their home diet and then for the next nine days we took the added sugar out of their diet we catered their meals three days at a time no added sugar we took their percent consumption of added sugar as calories from 28% of calories down to 10% of calories we gave them fruit that's it okay but all of the rest of their food was no added sugar now we didn't have to like make funky food we just bought it at Safeway but but we chose the food to be no added sugar food because 27% of the grocery store is no added sugar we controlled for their carbohydrate intake total we controlled for their protein intake total we controlled for their fat intake total we controlled for their fiber intake total so they got ate the same amount of carbohydrate is normal but instead of sugar we gave them complex carbohydrate we gave him starch we did a starch for sugar exchange all right and we gave him a scale and every day our Coordinator would call them up on the phone W you way and if they were losing weight eat more in order to keep their weight stable because we didn't want the naysayers to say well of course they got better they lost weight we wanted them to stay the same weight or even gain weight for that matter we did this for 10 days and then we restudied them on their low sugar normal calorie normal carbohydrate diet but without sugar so a fructose restricted diet okay glucose added fructose taken away and what we saw was remarkable every aspect of their metabolic Health improved their blood pressure went down by five points their insulin area under the curve went down by 25% their gluc glucose ER the curve went down by 8% even though they were getting more glucose they had a lactate level at Baseline you're not supposed to have a lactate level at Baseline if you do that means you have mitochondrial dysfunction which they did and that got better all right everything we looked at improved and their beta cells started working properly and we published this back in 2016 through 2019 all the data from this now these kids were being sugar restricted on our you know makeshift diet how did they fare at home for the first week actually five days for the first five days the parents thought these kids were going to kill them they were nasty they were angry they were irritable the teachers noticed it it was not good those first five days and then the fever broke and they became uh receptive and compliant and uh uh nice and were able to study and the teachers noticed that they weren't causing trouble in the classroom and the parents realized that their kids were actually nice kids and the kids noticed it too and they never went back they realized that the sugar was causing all of their behavioral difficulties their irritability their inability to concentrate because sugar fructose is a mitochondrial toxin all throughout the body but also in the brain and so if your mitochondria not working you don't feel good and it took about five days for the behavioral aspects of their sugar dependence to change it's super interesting so there is some I guess acute withdrawal symptoms from sugar you know being like irritable or being irritable maybe a little anxious stressed depressed Etc right exactly you can't measure it in terms of you know like sweating or cardiac you know or or heart rate you know increase and things like that that you see with withdrawal from other you know madas you know the eye that you see from other um uh addictive substances so you would say like the best the best approach for somebody who's really serious about this is to just remove Ultra processed foods and then eat a more wholesome or a diet comprised of Whole Foods and again it seems what what what I've heard you say is when you're talking about sugar you're not talking about fruit correct I think a lot of times people they kind of interchange those two things and then people are afraid of eating food that's actually good for them right so let's let's do the sugar and fruit story okay because everyone always asks about it and say well you're telling me I can't eat fruit no that's not what I'm saying at all here's the problem you get a sugar bolus into your stomach and then your dadum and then your junam it gets absorbed it goes straight to the liver the liver can metabolize a limited amount in the same way it can metabolize a limited amount of alcohol if you stay below that level then the fructose didn't do any damage but the chances are that you overe exceeded your limit for adult men that limit is about 37 grams a day for adult women that's about 25 grams a day for kids it's about 12 and a half grams a day for toddlers it's about three grams a day and for infants it's like zero grams a day okay so there's a limit to how fast your liver can clear the fructose if you stay below that level you'll be fine well fruit does have fructose in it it does but it's at low level it's not like you know fruit is absolutely you know Chuck smack you know glommed you know full of fructose there's actually yes it's sweet but it's not crazy sweet okay and and the fruit has the antidote packaged right alongside the sugar it's called fiber the fiber in the fruit forms a gel on the inside of the intestine and what that gel does the the soluble and the insoluble fiber together form this gel and you can actually see it on electromicroscopy it forms a secondary barrier that prevents absorption of glucose and fructose into the bloodstream so number one you have a lower dose because it's fruit compared to say a fruit juice and number two the fiber in the fruit acts as a barrier that prevents absorption so that you're not overwhelming your liver you're not uh uh causing the liver to basically give up because you've basic you've made it a wash in this huge tsunami of sugar that you've exposed it to so fruit is okay because number one the dose is lower and the fiber is there and that's what make fruit makes fruit okay fruit juice is another story because the fiber has been removed and the sugar has been concentrated because how many apples can you eat you know but how many how many glasses of apple juice can you drink I'd love to dive more into that because in prepping for this I was talking to somebody yesterday and I was like why is it so much easier for somebody to drink orange juice than to eat an orange like I would love for you to share your thoughts on fruit juice and why or why not it's is it's as healthy as eating fruit my uh cookbook co-author who is a nutrition educator in the East Bay in Walnut Creek her name is Cindy gersen and every year uh you know she she taught the nutrition Sciences class over at Mount Diablo high school and every year she always started with the same first experiment on the first day okay so the kids are coming in these are all you know this a title one school with you know poor kids you know who probably haven't even eaten breakfast all right and they all come in and she um takes two kids from the class as the experiment and she hands one kid six oranges and she says to the first kid here kid here's six oranges make juice so the kid squeezes the six oranges get gets 12 1/2 oz Downs the glass and says okay what's for breakfast the second kid she hands the kid six oranges and she says to the kid here kid eat the six oranges kid eats orange number one orange number two orange number three gets to Orange number four and throws up she's got the vomit Basin ready because it always happens on orange number four okay and the kid goes I'm gonna die and then the kid doesn't eat lunch or dinner either so what happened the fiber happened the fiber made the fruit self-limiting the fiber reduced Your Capacity to overc consume and the reason is because the fiber moves the food through the intestine faster to get to the end of the intestine where the satiety signal where the peptide YY hormone lives so the food gets to the end the peptide YY gets released into the bloodstream goes to the brain tells the brain I am satiated I'm not going to eat another drop the fiber makes that Happ happen faster so that's why the fruit is okay because the fiber does double duty it acts at the uh intestine to reduce absorption and it also acts to reduce at the end of the intestine to reduce consumption and so when somebody drinks fruit juice instead of eating fruit they're not getting either of those it's so it's essentially in compar comp it's essentially comparable to eating some of these um sugary Ultra processed foods that we've been referencing and talking about throughout throughout the conversation right Ultra processed food is fiberless food and the reason is because you can't freeze fiber prove it to you tonight take an orange put it in your freezer overnight take it out in the morning put it on the kitchen countertop let it thaw try to eat it see what you get you get mush why do you get mush because the ice crystals mate the cell wall let all the water rush in hey food industry knows that so what do they do squeeze it and freeze it now it lasts forever now it's frozen concentrated orange juice they have taken a food an orange and they have turned it into a commodity Frozen concentrated orange juice which they can sell on the Commodities exchange because commodity means storable food food that won't go bad so when you take the fiber out the shelf life increases well that's good for the food industry's profit but that fiber was actually good for you that was actually something you needed for your nutrition so they basically gave you a commodity that was nutritionally depleted that's wild that's wild like what about some of the foods that people typically might feel are healthy like certain cereals or even certain protein bars that have fiber in them like where does the Fiber come from and do you do you recommend people eating those or staying away from them right so there there are two kinds of fiber I mentioned it before soluble and insoluble so soluble fibers like pectin or inulin like what holds jelly together insoluble fibers cellulose like the stringy stuff in celery or cardboard for that matter okay all that's cellulose now real food has both you need both and the reason is because the insoluble fiber the stringy stuff forms a lce work on that inside of that intestine that gel I mentioned okay it has a structure it has a lce work like a fishnet if you will okay the soluble fiber they're globular they plug the holes in The Fishnet and so together they form this secondary barrier when the food industry takes the fiber out of the food they take both out they take the soluble and insoluble okay so now it's fiberless food some companies will try to add fiber back like Fiber One bars okay high fiber cereal and what they're adding back is usually usually something like inulin which is immunogenic and can cause GI distress or psyllium like what's in Metamucil okay which gels if you you know add water to it you know and that's not necessarily setting up that gel like you know we talked about because there's no insoluble fiber and the food industry hasn't figured out how to add insoluble fiber back to food yet so what the food industry is doing is basically telling you oh yeah we put the fiber back yeah we put the soluble fiber back but we didn't put all the fiber back we didn't put the insoluble fiber back and therefore it's not really working like you wanted to I'd love to get your thoughts on smoothies because I think a lot of times when people are trying to make a health transformation and transition from eating a diet that's full of ultra processed foods and eating more Whole Foods smoothies can become a way for them to do that what are your thoughts on smoothies are they in the same category as fruit juice like how do you feel about that so there are two kinds of smoothies there's fruit smoothies and there's green smoothies fruit smoothies have sugar green smoothies don't okay green smoothies or vegetables the question is what are you trying to prevent the absorption of the answer is in the green smoothie nothing so if you take all the vegetables and throw it into a Vitamix or a brevel or a Magic Bullet or quinard or whatever else whatever machine you you you prefer okay and you smoothie the green vegetables to Smither and you basically destroy all the insoluble fiber because you've sheared it into such a Gish that there's no no lattice work there's no fishnet to be able to construct it doesn't matter because there was nothing to inhibit the absorption of so green smoothie if you want to destroy your insoluble fiber have at it who cares on the other hand the fruit smoothie got lots of sugar in it now not as much as a soda but still lots of sugar and the goal is to keep that gel that mesh work that l work that fishnet intact well if you take all that fruit and throw it in a smoothing machine the blades of the machine are going to Shear those insoluble fiber um uh strands into nothingness they won't be able to build the fishnet in the intestine and now you will absorb all of that sugar that came from the fruit so the way I look at it is is eat your fruit don't drink it you often hear that Fiber One of the big benefits of fiber is sat satiety benefits right it helps keep Fuller longer you you hear the same also about protein do you think that adding in a a good quality protein powder to a fruit smoothie can be beneficial as far as how the body responds to it so that sounds like a good idea and on the surface it might be a good idea but in fact you have to delve a little bit deeper here so protein powder that you buy at C you know at the general GNC or the health food store or whatever okay the thing the bodybuilders you know add to their smoothies right what's what is that what is in protein powder the answer is it's a lot of Branch chain amino acids BCAA is they're called Branch chain amino acids Lucine isoline veiling now muscle is 20% Branch chain amino acids so if you're building muscle if you're a bodybuilder and you're Pumping Iron then you need those branch chain amino acids in order to be able to build muscle by the way those are essential amino acids you have to consume them your body doesn't make them you know there are 20 amino acids but you only have to consume nine they're essential the body can turn those nine into the other 11 okay to get the 20 but you got to take eat the nine and it turns out all the um Branch Amo acids are all essential so the only place you get them is your food all right so if you're a bodybuilder and you need Branch chin amino acids add a scoop of protein powder you're smoothie no sweat because you have a place to put them but what if you're not a bodybuilder what if you're a mere mortal like me okay and you eat an a Porter House steak okay because you're probably not drinking a smoothie but you're eating a steak and it's filled with Branch chain amino acids because it was a cornfed beef and corn has lots of Branch chain amino acids what are you going to do if you're not building muscle what what happens to the amino acids if you're not building muscle they go to the liver the liver can't store them because the only place to store them is in muscle so the liver has to do something with them it takes the amino group off so now it's a branch chain organic acid and then that gets filtered into the kreb cycle the tricarboxylic acid cycle the cycle that creates energy from the in the liver problem is the TCA cyle gets overwhelmed and when the uh cycle gets overwhelmed the liver has a fail safe a a a a pop off and that gets turned into fat so those branch chain amino acids end up as liver fat and then that liver fat can either be exported out raising your triglycerides and increasing your risk for heart disease or obesity or that liver fat will precipitate in the liver now you've got fatty liver disease which puts you at greater risk for diabetes and Alzheimer's disease so Branch chain amino acids are okay if you're building muscle and not okay if you're not so for the bodybuilders out there don't kill me you know if you if you wantan to if you want to put a a scoop of protein powder in your smoothie and you're building muscle great have at it but do I think this is a good idea for everyone else no when it compares to soda you touched on soda earlier if somebody is just looking to make something that's sweet for them that's going to be a better option than soda if they were somebody that habitually drinks soda every day or every week smoothies aren't as bad as soda correct um no I mean soda's like the worst because there're it's basically straight sugar no fiber no nothing no nutrition whatsoever I mean sodas are the devil incarnate I mean without question trans fats used to be but we know that and so they're now removed from our diet so now it's soda um and we're doing everything we can to try to reduce consumption of soda in this country and it is very difficult as you know but if you're going to stop drinking soda then maybe you would start drinking diet soda okay because after all no calories no fructose should be better right well not necessarily turns out those diet sweeteners have their own effects and those effects are not necessarily good ones turns out they change the microbiome they change the the bacteria in the intestine and they increase intestinal gut permeability thus a phenomenon called leaky gut which sets you up for insulin resistance and chronic metabolic disease also and also when you put something sweet on the tongue like a diet you know sweetener message goes tongue to brain Sugar's coming message goes brain to pancreas Sugar's coming release the insulin and it turns out you still make insulin and if you make insulin you're going to drive energy into fat and you're still going to generate chronic metabolic disease so the data on diet sweeteners is that one cocacola the toxicity of One Coca-Cola equals the toxicity of two diet coca-colas so half is bad now half is bad does not mean good it means half as bad all right the problem is that the diet soda drinker thinks I can have 10 of them but then as far as somebody who wants to shift from soda to smoothies clearly though that's a better option for somebody because at least they're not just Downing just straight sugar right sure I mean there's less sugar in each piece of fruit than there is in a soda absolutely and there's still some soluble fiber to be had which is better and also you know there are micronutrients in the fruit that are not in the soda by the way there's also pesticides so if you're going to do that make sure it's organic a lot of addictions stem from some sort of root cause where it's somebody's inability to manage stress anxiety depression trauma their environment Etc do you think it's important for somebody to like a look at that first to make sure that they're not just reaching for for sugary Foods in a response to deal with their life this is a very good question Doug and I will tell you you know more than I do having lived through it yourself here's what I can say there's an area of your brain called the amygdala the amydala is the fear center of the brain and the amydala drives almost all chronic disease and our amygdalas are on fire they are they are just disinhibited like nobody's business so the question is do you fix the food or do you fix the amydala first well if you fix the food the amydala gets better if you fix the amydala the food gets better both are true the question is what do you do first and the answer is I think it depends on who you are but both need to happen but it seems what humans are made to Brave sugar and even like salty foods when we're stressed like why is that is that is that something that we've just learned is it learned behavior or is it something biological no it's biological without question it's biological so basically um when you're stressed you have increased neuronal firing and so you have to supply a steadier stream of energy so that's one of the reasons for con wanting to consume sugar and also salt because your actually trying to raise blood pressure because that helps you run away from the lion you know that's a an Adaptive response to stress is increasing blood pressure increasing heart rate you know in in response to amygdala Activation so these are all adaptive principles in the acute situation which become maladaptive in The Chronic situation and we're all chronically stressed last question I have for you is if somebody's listening to this and they're understanding and resonating with what you're saying and they're like all right I'm going to break free from my addiction to Sugar I'm going to eat more Whole Foods I'm G to get more fiber into my diet Etc but they want to do this longterm what foods do you think are best to incorporate into somebody's diet so that longterm they're not going to fall into the same trap they did before there is a food process ing categorization system called Nova which is it's called the Nova System it was developed by my colleague in sa Paulo Dr Carlos Montero and it talks about the degree of food processing instead of what's in the food what's been done to the food there are four classes of Nova Nova the best way to explain this would be an example let's take an apple CL Nova class one would be an apple picked off a tree Nova Class 2 would be apple slices dest stemmed deed maybe deskinned Nova class three would be apple sauce macerated preservative added maybe some a little bit of extra sugar Nova class 4 would be a McDonald's apple pie now is there any Apple in that McDonald's apple pie probably not Wishful thank right it's certainly not recognizable as Apple without question all right point is it is now been shown that only the Nova class 4 category of food is associated with chronic metabolic disease only the Nova class 4 the Nova class 1 through three no problem so the question is how do you know how do you know what's Nova class 1 through3 and how do you avoid Nova class 4 well I am the chief medical officer of a company that has developed a tool to do just that so the company is called perfect p r f a not perfect perfect and you can find it at perfect. and if you go to that website you will see that there are four filters what it does is it filters everything in your grocery store so that you will only see what's healthy for you you so if you want to be gluten-free we'll only show you the gluten-free options if you want to be um sugar free we'll only show you the sugar-free options if you want to be um peanut free we will only show you the peanut free options and on and on and on and one of the filters is the Nova filter and so what it will do is it will filter out the Nova class 4 items from your grocery store and we did this for Amazon Walmart and Target so at Baseline it shows you 40,000 items after you've applied the Nova class 4 filter you are now down to 10,000 items because it is filtered out 75% of the grocery store so if you want to maintain your health if you want to not go back then the thing to do is use the Nova filter and stick to that and then you can purchase your food from the grocery store right on the app I've heard you say in the past that you generally recommend a pescatarian diet is that still the case or have you changed your mind on that no that's about right fish and vegetables is really good okay you get all the Omega-3s you need you get all the fiber you need okay and you don't get anything you don't well Rob this has been awesome thank you so much for your time if people want to learn more about your work connect with you um where's the best place to do that well I got a website robert.com where you can go to profiles. ucsf.edu robert. lustig or you know just to be honest with you just put my name into your web searcher and you'll find it you know I was on the huberman Lab podcast three and a half hours it was you know Marathon longer than a marathon for that matter um you know there's a lot of information in there that will help people bottom line is I'm easy to find uh I've written books flat fat chance hacking of the American mind which is very relevant to addiction it's about addiction and depression and also most recently metabolical I'm I'm easy to find awesome well thank you so much for coming on the podcast um I think my audience is really going to enjoy this one my pleasure thanks for having me Doug thank you so much for watching if you like this video I really think you're going to like this video as well I'll see you there

Channel: Doug Bopst

Views: 89,628

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Id: UbntWFsrIhA

Length: 53min 1sec (3181 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024