Dr. Richard Johnson
Appearances
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well this morning i actually skipped breakfast and uh you know one of the things is you know it turns out that things like carb restriction and intermittent fasting and all these things that people are recommending they're they're pretty effective at losing weight and the carb restriction in particular is a very very helpful because it removes not only sugar but it reduces the amount of starch you're eating and remember the starch can be converted
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to fructose. So it turns out that that is a major mechanism of protection. So if you want to lose weight, you know, carb restriction, intermittent fasting are great ways to go. But there's also, you know, what we learned from this is there are a lot of nuances. For example, it's possible to eat cake and not eat and not activate the biologic switch. And the reason is that the way fructose works
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is it's the concentration that hits the liver. When the fructose concentration in the liver is high, that's when the switch activates. So for example, if I did not want to activate this switch, I could eat a piece of cake. If I could eat a piece of cake slowly, like over a couple of hours, then it wouldn't activate the switch. Now the trouble is, of course,
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that our desire to eat the cake outbeats our logic where we know that it's not good. It's just like a soft drink. It's hard to tell a person to just sip a soft drink over two hours or over an hour. Everyone will drink it very quickly and that's the problem. But the truth is when you understand the science, you can actually figure things out. So for example, if you drink water
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if you drink more water, you can block the effects of salty foods. So we did this. We took people, we gave them salty soup, and we could show that immediately their blood pressure went up and they activated this switch. We could prove it, that they activated the switch. But if we gave the salty soup with water,
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the salt concentration did not go up in their blood, they did not trigger that enzyme, and they did not develop an increase in blood pressure, nor did they activate the switch.
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So what we call low glycemic carbs don't activate the switch. So vegetables and all those things, they're very good, even though they contain carbs. So you don't have to carb restrict completely. It turns out that it's certain carbs. It's really only four or five. Sugar. and high fructose corn syrup, I put them together. And then the other big ones are bread, rice, potatoes, and cereal.
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And those are the main ones that tend to raise glucose in our blood and activate this switch where the glucose gets converted to fructose.
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You know, I've published on how much sugar people were eating over the decades, actually going all the way back. And, and really it started really going up dramatically in the 1970s when high fructose corn syrup was added. And, you know, we've done studies and high fructose corn syrup tends to be more fattening than table sugar causes more fatty liver, for example.
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And it's because there's a little bit more fructose in it, and also probably because of how it's absorbed. By the 80s and 90s, that's when really obesity and diabetes went crazy, and they continued to increase. Now, sugar intake has decreased since 2005, particularly in soft drinks, But there's also been the rise of sugaring from power drinks.
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And we're also eating more salt than we did back in the 60s. So there's a lot of factors.
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In general, you want to avoid liquid sugar because liquid sugar is the worst because you get a lot of sugar in a short amount of time. And I include for sugar, I include table sugar in high fructose corn syrup and things like that. So liquid, soft drinks,
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energy drinks drinks that have a lot of sugar in it anything that has fruit juice really avoid that that's number one that is your number one activator of this switch reduce your sugar intake reduce your high glycemic carbs try not to eat so much salty food and try to drink more water
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There's certain umami foods, umami is another taste, and they will also enter into this switch, particularly things like beer and alcohol, but beer in particular, which has brewer's yeast in it, actually will activate the switch as well. You know, a lot of meats are good, especially poultry, fish, unprocessed red meats. There are a lot of fats that are good.
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You know, omega-3 fats, saturated fat, you have to be a little careful with. But, you know, there's a lot of monounsaturated fats, olive oil-based diets, Mediterranean diets. These are really basically healthy ways to go.
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Well, there are some problems with sugar substitutes, but in general... The first good thing is most sugar substitutes do not activate this biologic switch. They do stimulate a pleasure response in the brain, what we call a dopamine response. So they do encourage you to eat sweet foods. So if you're trying to
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stop eating sweet foods, drinking soft drinks, diet soft drinks is still going to encourage you to like sweet foods. And so it doesn't get rid of the craving. Most of them do not activate the switch. There's a few significant exceptions. Like there's one artificial sweetener called sorbitol. It's often put in like sugar-free syrups. That one still activates the switch, unfortunately.
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So that's really not a good choice. And then there are also other issues with artificial sweeteners that are quite bothersome. For example, aspartame.
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um has been reported to you know affect memory and um you know there's some papers suggesting that if you give large doses to animals that they have trouble going through a maze so i'm not a big fan of aspartame um and you know so things like stevia which is a natural artificial sweetener uh splenda sucralose there isn't too much negative about that but you know they are
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Yes. So it turns out the switch is a dimmer switch. What it means that if you take two teaspoons of sugar, you're going to activate the switch, but only mildly. Whereas if you drink a soft drink, you're going to where it's like nine teaspoons, you're going to activate the switch big time. And when you do, you drop that energy and it only will last for a few hours, okay?
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And then it will recover and everything kind of goes back, but you've now stored that extra fat, right? So initially it's sort of a short-term effect, but we're eating sugar in almost every meal. You know, it's like in 70% of processed foods. So we're activating the switch a lot, a lot. And some of us are almost staying like in an activated state.
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No, it's still part of the equation, Michael, because the way, again, the way it works is the fructose is the fire and the high fat foods are the firewood. What I mean by that is you have to activate the switch so that you don't regulate your appetite. So if you eat the fructose, now you're gonna be hungry and you're not going to control your appetite.
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And so now when you could get fat just from carbs, But the carbs are only four calories a gram. So you would have to eat a lot of carbs to gain weight. The fat is like nine calories a gram. So it's very easy to gain weight with fat if you can't control your appetite. But if you control your appetite, you're not going to eat excessive fat.
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So if you are healthy and you have not activated the switch, you can go on a high fat diet. You won't gain weight. That's what a low carb diet is. A low carb diet tends to be a high fat, high protein diet. And it doesn't cause weight gain. Because you're on a low carb diet, it prevents you from activating that switch, which is mainly driven by carbs.
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So a high fat diet is not going to cause obesity if the switch is not on. But now let's say I give you sugar and I give you a lot of carbs and you've activated the switch. Now, if you have a diet that has a lot of fat in it, you're going to gain a lot of weight because that fat is so caloric rich. It's calorie dense and you're not controlling your appetite.
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Yeah, thank you, Michael.
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Hi, Michael. Thank you for inviting me.
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It's definitely true that, you know, a number of years ago, it used to be thought that it was just calories that drive obesity and basic and basically lack of exercise. So there was a lot of talk originally, you know, that all you had to do was just kind of reduce what you're eating, the amount you're eating and exercise more, and that would cure everything.
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But, and then that became quite apparent that that's not the case and that certain foods make a difference. And over the decades, following years, it became more and more apparent that things like sugar specifically tended to make people more obese and develop metabolic syndrome more than, for example, starch.
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There was a transition where we started realizing that it wasn't just behavior, but that there was something special about the particular foods we were eating. We were involved in that early work, but what we've done since then has actually kind of given a new insight. And that is that to gain weight, you actually have to activate a biological switch.
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And that when we studied that and identified that biological switch, it did turn out to be due to sugar. And it turns out that sugar is contains two, sugar really has two compounds. There's glucose and fructose. There's two carbohydrates in sugar. And it turns out that it's the fructose that triggers this biologic switch.
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So fructose is a carbohydrate. It's a type of sugar. And it's present in fruit and honey. So things that we think of as healthy, but it's also present in table sugar. And it's also present in this sweetener called high fructose corn syrup. In high fructose corn syrup and table sugar, it's actually both glucose and fructose mixed together. Glucose is the main sugar in our blood.
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It's really the essential nutrient, the essential carb we use as our fuel for the brain and for our tissues. It's our main carbohydrate fuel. But fructose is a different fuel and it's mainly present in these foods. What's unique about fructose is that it triggers the storage of fat as opposed to the production of energy.
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It really is there to try to shift the calories we're eating from instant energy to stored energy.
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It turns out that our bodies, we have a sort of a shield in our intestine where we inactivate the first four or five grams of fructose that we eat. So it turns out that natural fruits have only small amounts of fructose. And although it's really sweet to taste, we kind of inactivate the fructose in our gut so that we don't actually get a big load of fructose to our liver where everything happens.
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And so a natural fruit does not give you enough fructose to activate the switch. Now, if you drank fruit juice, now you're going to get a large load of fructose and you're going to activate the switch. There's another reason too, natural fruits have a lot of fiber.
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and they also have vitamin c and other things and it turns out that the fiber slows the absorption and the vitamin c actually helps neutralize the effects of the fructose
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When you give animals the exact same number of calories, the weight gain is still a little bit greater with sugar, but there's a major effect, which is that the other metabolic effects of the switch, which is to become insulin resistant and diabetic and develop fatty liver, that still occurs even with controlling, even if you put them on a diet restriction.
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So if you put animals on a caloric restriction, so they're eating less than normal, but they get a high sugar diet, they're still gonna become diabetic. They're still gonna get fatty liver. They're still gonna get hypertension. So those things are not driven by the excess calories. Only the weight gain is really driven by the excess calories. You know, that's what drives the weight gain.
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But all the other things, you can be skinny and diabetic if you put an animal on a caloric restriction with a high sugar diet.
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It isn't just the fructose we eat. What we discovered was that the body can make fructose. And when the body makes fructose, you can get fat from the fructose you make. There's only one way to make fructose and you have to make it from glucose. And guess what? The best source of that is high glycemic carbs.
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So when you eat bread and rice and potatoes and cereal and chips, even though they don't contain fructose, even though they don't contain sugar, you can still get fat from them because once you eat them, the glucose can be converted to fructose in the body and high glycemic carbs do it. Now, the other big discovery was dehydration.
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Turns out that people who are overweight are almost always dehydrated. They're not drinking enough water. In fact, one study showed that people who are overweight or obese tended to be 12 times more dehydrated than the lean people.
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So when you get dehydrated, that also stimulates the enzymes to convert glucose to fructose. And when we started studying this, we didn't really understand this, but we started saying this and it turns out that people who are overweight are almost always dehydrated. They're not drinking enough water.
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In fact, one study showed that people who are overweight or obese tended to be 12 times more dehydrated than the lean people. So dehydration is very, very common. in people who are overweight. And the main reason they do that is it turns out that when you eat sugar, that dehydrates you. You think a soft drink hydrates you, it doesn't.
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So when you eat salt, the salt concentration goes up in your blood and you get thirsty and you want to drink water. But the salt concentration in the blood activates a biologic pathway to make sugar. and it makes it from carbs. So that's why French fries are so bad because the salt in the French fry actually activates the enzyme to help convert the glucose in the French fry to fructose.
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And that's why French fries, which have no sugar in them, no high fructose corn syrup, you know, but they're still bad because the salt activates this enzyme that converts the glucose to fructose.