Why Quitting Sugar Could Save Your Life - ENCORE

As we wind down for the holiday season, we’ll be taking a short break. But I didn’t want to leave you without something meaningful to explore. So for today’s Monday episode, we’re revisiting one of our most powerful deep-dive topics of 2025. Thank you for being part of this community. We’ll be back in the new year with brand-new episodes and I truly can’t wait to share what’s coming next Did you know that sugar is lurking in more places than you might think, and it could be sabotaging your health in ways you never imagined? In this episode, I look back on my conversations with Dr. Richard Johnson and Dr. Robert Lustig. We examine how certain foods, especially those loaded with sugar, can trigger overeating, disrupt your metabolism, and lead to a cascade of health issues. Plus, I'll share practical strategies for detoxing from sugar, managing blood sugar levels, and reclaiming your health. ⁠This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to ⁠bioptimizers.com/hyman⁠ and use code HYMAN to save 15%. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: ⁠Why Sugar And Fructose Are So Deadly with Dr. Richard Johnson⁠ ⁠Depressed or Anxious? You May Never Eat Sugar Again After Watching This⁠ ⁠The True Dangers Of Sugar with Dr. Robert Lustig (0:00) Introduction and overview of health tools (0:57) The impact of sugar on weight gain and metabolism (2:18) Obesity, calorie intake, and food triggers (7:27) Weight regulation and survival mechanisms in animal studies (10:05) Processed foods and increased caloric intake (21:36) Sponsor: Benefits of quitting sugar for 14 days (23:19) HealthBite on sugar addiction and mental health (29:05) Gut health and its impact on mental health (34:20) Steps for a sugar detox and diet composition (45:29) Supplements, exercise, sleep, and stress management for blood sugar (47:52) Eight metabolic processes driving chronic disease (1:04:01) Summary and key to fixing metabolic processes

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  There are certain food that trigger you to want to eat more and triggering you to not satisfy your appetite so that when you eat, you don't feel, you know, you don't feel full, so you want more.

• 0:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap "Try Free" to start your seven-day free trial.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Sugar contains glucose and fructose, and these are two different sugars that are bound together to make table sugar or sucrose. And it turns out that fructose can activate a biological switch that tells a person or sets off a program to gain weight. So when you eat sugar, you're actually triggering, you know, this biologic process to gain weight. At the same time, sugar tastes really good. We have these sweet taste buds that really like sugar, and we're eating a ton of sugar and high fructose calories, as you know,

• 1:39Speaker 01

  like 15% of the diet. And then, and it's being put in all these foods. So, you know, it can be a real menace. And, you know, and what's really interesting about sugar, just as an aside. Is that if you take an animal and you genetically alter it so it can't taste sweet or it can't taste at all, it's still like sugar. It loses its flavor or desire for artificial sugars, but it still will seek out foods that have sugar.

• 2:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Really? That's fascinating.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  And they'll still get fat from this sugar, even though they can't taste it.

• 2:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing. So, so this fat switch you're talking about is quite interesting. And what do you mean when you say fat switch? Literally, is there, is there some kind of metabolic switch that gets turned on that makes us store fat and gain weight? And how does that work?

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was one of our kind of big discoveries. I know, so, you know, everyone knows that, you know, obesity is linked with eating a lot of calories, bad foods. And one of the classic theories is that it's driven by the fact that we eat too much and we exercise too little. And so there's excess energy that we end up eating that is not used and that gets stored as fat. And, and so the, when this hypothesis came out in the 1920s,

• 3:12Speaker 01

  it was, you know, our, we were the ones to blame because it's over nutrition. You know, we're eating too much, we're exercising too little, all the da, da, da, da. But we now know.

• 3:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Blames the victim. Blames the victim essentially.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's your fault that you're overweight. It's your fault to go away.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. So quit eating, you know? Why are you getting such a big plate of food? You know, don't go back for seconds. You know, it's your fault.

• 3:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Exactly.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  You're, you're, you're taking the escalator when you should be taking the steps, you know? And, and, and so this has been the classic teaching, but it turns out that there are certain foods.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  That trigger you to want to eat more and triggering you to not satisfy your appetite. So that when you eat, you don't feel, you know, you don't feel full. So you want more. And there's certain foods that actually will reduce your, how much energy you have. So it will actually make you, uh, drop your energy metabolism. So the formula is the same. You end up eating more and you exercise less, but the issue turns out not to be because uh, it's your choice. It's because you've eaten specific foods that activate the switch.

• 4:30Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. So your work is sort of very similar to Dr. David Ludwig's work. So the, the, the whole idea that it's our fault we're overweight is one that is promoted by the food industry, by the government, by most doctors and certainly most nutritionists, which is really about this whole idea of the energy balance hypothesis, which is all about calories in, calories out. And what you're saying, what I hear you saying, what Dr. David Ludwig, who's been on the podcast is saying, is that it's actually the quality of the calories that matter and the information in the food that matters. And that, that not all calories are created equal. Now,

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a hundred percent right.

• 5:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We know, we know this kind of, you know, if you ask a fifth grader, if a thousand calories of soda or a thousand calories of broccoli are the same, they'd go, no. But if you, and I have, and I'm, by the way, uh, Richard, I have, I have asked this question to the vice chairman of Pepsi. I said, okay, who by the way, was a diabetic. I said, I said, look, I said, I said, let me ask you this. If I, is a thousand calories of Pepsi, it's same as a thousand calories of almonds when you eat them? He's like, yes. I'm like, okay. So, uh, you know, this, this is a great narrative. If you're selling junk, because it, it just, it, it just all about moderation, right? There's no good or bad calories. It's all about moderation. It's all about exercising more, eating less.

• 5:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What you're saying is that there's, there's a, a different biological imperative, which is that our bodies are designed to store fat under certain circumstances, which is a great adaptation to scarcity. But we have a problem of abundance. We don't have scarcity anymore. We have. On every corner, in every gas station, and pretty much everywhere we look, there's an abundance of food. And so what is happening with this ancient mechanism? Tell us exactly how it how it works. When you when we eat sugar, we slow metabolism, and we actually want to exercise less because we slow it down.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So so it turns out that that normally animals will try to stay at a certain weight. They don't want to gain a lot of weight. They and they'll they'll maintain their weight. If they eat more one day, they'll eat less the next. If they exercise more one day, they'll exercise less. So they try to keep their weight normal. But there are some animals that really do want to gain weight, and those animals will gain weight by, you know, like in preparation for hibernation, for example, like when the winter is coming. And, you know, and they know there's not going to be much food around. So these animals

• 7:10Speaker 01

  will suddenly, you know, they'll they'll be regulating their weight fine for most of the summer. And then sometime in the fall, suddenly, they start to eat a lot more. And and they they will eat, you know, thousands of thousands and thousands of more calories. A bear will start gaining 10 pounds a day. And I mean, it's just that goes crazy. And the animal will stay hungry and thirsty and go foraging for food. And that's actually part of this behavioral response. And then then they'll start storing fat, and they do it by by both synthesizing more fat, but also by breaking down the burning of fat.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  And so the fat starts to accumulate, and they they will become insulin resistant as part of this. And it's actually a survival mechanism because you know, it keeps the glucose elevated in the blood, which the brain likes because the brain doesn't really need a lot of insulin for it to work. Whereas the muscles really do need insulin. So by making the tissues resistant to insulin, the glucose, instead of going to the muscles, is staying in the blood and it's good for the brain. So it helps shut the glucose from where it would be used, muscle to the brain. So insulin resistance is part of this survival response. Blood pressure goes up, you know, because they want you to have strong circulation

• 8:38Speaker 01

  in this kind of setting. And so all this happens, and we know it in humans as the metabolic syndrome, but it's actually something that long distance migrating birds do before they migrate. It's animals do it before they nest. And it seems to be like triggered. So you know, our big insight, first one was that there was this trigger that created this. And so, and then

• 9:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Is that what you call the fat switch?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yes, a biologic switch. You know, I also call it the survival switch when it's for these animals because it's, it's the same thing. Initially, it's there to help you survive. But when you're chronically activated it, it becomes a fat switch. And yeah.

• 9:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, it's funny, I remember going to Admiralty Island, my daughter, years ago, on a kayak trip in Alaska. It was where they had the greatest density of grizzly bears in the world. And they were, they were fishing for salmon, we were watching them, was this one little postage area, postage stamp area you could stand on with the guy with a shotgun. And when the grizzly bears are all over, and they were just chowing down on the salmon. And, and you know, and then they go up into the mountains and the end of the summer, and they just chowed on the berries and they gained 500 pounds.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And unlike, unlike, unlike the game of thrones, for us, winter never comes. Winter never comes. So we just keep storing and then winter never comes. And we just keep in this process. And I think, you know, I think the other thing that sort of happens is that if we eat the wrong food, we're hungrier. And I want to talk to you about this because, you know, I remember this study was, I think, Kevin Hall did, where he looked at people ate ultra processed food versus whole foods. And people, and they could eat as much as they want to buy. There was two groups, or I think it was a crossover study. And they, and they actually found that The people who who got to eat the processed food ate 500 calories more a day. Now, in a week, that's gaining a pound a week. In a year, that's 52 pounds of extra weight simply by eating processed food, which is 60% of our diet.

• 10:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This is the problem, right?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  It is a big problem because processed food is often filled with sugar, and it's also filled with salt. And I know we're going to talk about that later because it turns out that this fructose pathway can be activated by many different foods. So it's not just the sugar we eat. So, so, but anyway, so, yes. So what our discovery was, was that this switch is activated by fructose. And when we gave fructose to animals, they, they got this very exact switch. They start foraging, they get hungry, they're thirsty, all the things that we talked about in the biology switch.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  And so fructose turned out to be it. You know, one of the big questions we asked, you know, was, is, is the weight gain because they're eating more? Is this energy balance? Or is there another thing besides? And, and, and what we found, the way you do that is you actually feed animals the exact same number of calories. So one group gets sugar and another group gets other foods that don't have sugar. And everybody eats the same. And, and if one guy doesn't eat very much, then all the guys can't eat very much. And so we actually did this, we did this study multiple times. But one time we did it, there was a little guy that did not eat much food.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And so everybody was eating less than normal. All these laboratory rats were eating about two thirds what they normally eat. But one of them was eating a high sugar diet and one was not. And the high sugar diet rats, they became diabetic. They all became diabetic, every one of them. They all, they all developed fatty liver. They had fat in their tissues, their blood pressure was high. So the sugar was activating the, this switch, even though they weren't gaining weight because they were on a caloric restriction. Now, when we looked at weight.

• 12:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So metabolically, they were fat, even though they weren't overweight.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Right. So weight, weight is driven, you know, it is related to energy belt. So, you know, when we measured their metabolism, their, their, their resting energy metabolism was lower. So even though they were eating the same amount of food, they were spending less energy. So they tended to be a little higher. They were like 10%, you know, maybe 5% higher in weight.

• 13:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You just said something really important. I want to highlight it and I want to let you continue because what you said was so important. I just want to underscore it. When you eat sugar, your metabolism slows down. Is that what you just said?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 13:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That is mind blowing, right? If you eat sugar, your metabolism slows down. That should get everybody to pay a lot of attention.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it absolutely does. So you're, you're, but it's your resting energy metabolism, actually. So you could, they, when you're foraging, you don't, you, you, they, you know, nature didn't want you to not be able to forage for food. Because you're, you know, they're worried that, you know, that you're, you're preparing for a bad time ahead. So, so they want the sugar, you know, the fructose still allows you to forage. It's when you're resting, instead of kind of moving around like, I tend to, you know, jiggle in my seat and so forth. But I'm just sitting because I, I have a lot of energy, right? But, um, but you know, uh, when you're eating a lot of sugar,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  your resting energy metabolism falls. So your net energy metabolism drops. And so even though these rats were eating exactly the same amount, the, the, uh, the, the, the one group actually started was losing weight, right? The other group actually gained a little weight because of that. The sugar group gained a little weight, but it wasn't significant. The bottom line is the, the major thing driving weight gain is the number of calories you eat. That's what drives weight gain. And, and so the energy balance, people always focus on the weight. But, but if you look at what the, what the specific calories are doing, this metabolic switch includes blood pressure, fatty liver, fat, you know, and those things and insulin resistance, they're not driven by excess calories.

• 14:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So in other words, it's me, in other words, your blood pressure, your cholesterol,

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  your blood sugar, fatty liver, inflammation, diabetes, prediabetes, all are driven by the quality of the food you're eating, by the quality of the calories. Because in the sense that, you know, we're eating really crappy quality calories, that's what's driving this problem.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  You know, 100%.

• 15:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Reminds me of a study that David Ludwig did years ago, where he took rats and he fed them, you know, either a high fat, low starch sugar diet, or a regular kind of high carb diet, which is what we all recommended. In fact, what we were recommending for the diabetics was eating a lot of carbohydrates, which is crazy. Anyway, he found that basically he had to keep reducing, he had to keep increasing the caloric intake of the low starch sugar rats, the high fat rats, because they were losing too much weight. And then when, at the end of the experiment, it's kind of awful, but he opened them up, and the, the ones who, and they were eating exactly the same calories, the ones that were eating the high sugar diet, had all this fatty liver and fat around their organs, and fat, like all this visceral fat, belly fat. And the other ones didn't, even though they were eating exactly the same calories, because they were eating high fat, low starch sugar.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're 100% right. And, and Dave Ludwig, you know, that's a, was a beautiful study.

• 16:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he, he also, he also, it's being, it's not overeating that makes you fat, it's being fat that makes you overeat. That's a, flipping everything on its upside down.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  And that's pretty cool. I, I hadn't heard that. That's, that's really cool.

• 16:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Well, one of the questions we asked, I mean, which was a question that actually Ludwig, so a lot of people say that the, the primary problem with carbs is that they stimulate insulin. And then the, the insulin drives the glucose into the, into this, into the tissues, and then that causes the fat accumulation. And that's, it turns out from our research, that's partly true, but it's not completely the, the story. So what we, what we did is we, we had animals that could metabolize fructose, you know, normal animals. But we also had animals that we genetically modified so that they could not metabolize fructose, but

• 17:05Speaker 01

  they could still, you know, metabolize glucose, they could still produce insulin, all that kind of stuff. And what we did was we gave them, we gave them of

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Fructose and we could block the effects of fructose in the animals eating uh fructose, but then we gave them sugar. We gave them uh soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup. And so when we gave high fructose corn syrup, that contains both glucose and fructose. So we could see which was the more important player. And what we found was that if we blocked fructose metabolism, they still drank a lot of high fructose corn syrup. Cause but but they did. They did not get fat. They did not get um uh they did not get fatty liver. They did not even gain weight very much and that they gained a little, but very little.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And so that told us that it wasn't really the insulin that's causing the obesity. But really it was the the fact that the fructose that present in the high fructose corn syrup was really what was driving obesity.

• 18:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, this is really a remarkable statement because you know, we we and this was like a a common belief among nutritionists and doctors was that if fructose was good for diabetics because it doesn't raise blood sugar.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Right, right? Exactly.

• 18:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And and and the other thing about fructose is that, you know, in sugar, i- in regular sugar, it's bound tightly with with glucose. In high fructose corn syrup, it's free fructose. And and the high fructose corn syrup may be fifty five to seventy five percent.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Fructose. We've never seen this before. Now, uh, the other thing is so fascinating about fructose, and I want to unpack what and take us on the fructose conversation, how it works to actually generate fatty liver, insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes in a minute. But but what really what struck me years ago is, you know, Dr. Bruce Ames is a researcher, very famous guy. And I don't, I hope he's alive. I don't even know.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think he is.

• 19:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think he's still, he's like really old. He writes about aging now. But he basically said that they were doing uh studies looking at fructose requiring a lot of energy. To be absorbed and the high fructose corn syrup leads to ATP depletion in the gut, meaning that the energy source that we need to actually keep our our gut intact, preventing leaky gut was impaired because when you have a lot of fructose in your diet, the energy gets depleted and the little tight junctions that keep our cells together in our gut, the little lining together, preventing leaky gut starts to break down. So then you get all these proteins from food and bacteria crap actually in your bloodstream,

• 20:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  causing inflammation, which causes even more insulin resistance and more weight gain. So can talk about that and talk about why, why is high fructose corn syrup so bad? Because if you listen to, you know, the food industry and everybody else say, oh, it's just the same. It's all the same. High fructose corn syrup, sugar. There's no difference. And I wrote an article years ago called five reasons why high fructose corn syrup will kill you.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember reading that. No, it actually is. I have to compliment you, you know, on your, your knowledge and what you've been doing and how you've been helping people.

• 20:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, thank you.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I really, really mean that. So we actually did studies where we compared high fructose corn syrup to, to sucrose or table sugar. And in general, even when you leveled the playing field by giving high, you know, so high fructose corn syrup is free fructose and free glucose mixed together. And sucrose, they're bound together. So one will be absorbed more differently, more rapidly. And the high fructose corn syrup, and when we give them so that the high fructose corn syrup is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, and you give exactly the same amount of food that you'll the, the animals that get high fructose corn syrup will get worse fatty livers. So there's something beyond, you know, it's, it's more than just the fact

• 21:20Speaker 01

  that, that there's more fructose, but it's also the problem.

• 21:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Free fructose.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  That it's free fructose.

• 21:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Now, for years, you've heard me talk about the dangers of sugar, but what happens to your body when you quit sugar for 14 days? All sorts of stuff can happen, right? Maybe you have issues you didn't even know were fixable by quitting sugar. Maybe you're dealing with chronic stress responses and inflammation, or anxiety, panic attacks, maybe hormone imbalances. Maybe you have acne, or maybe you're just tired and lethargic and have brain fog, or joint pain, or digestive issues, cravings, fluid retention. This goes on and on and on. Now, these are all warning signs that sugar may be harming you, or worse, that you're addicted to sugar. And in fact, studies show that 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria for food addiction. And just for comparison's sake, about 14% of the total population

• 22:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  has alcohol addiction. So it's about the same in the cat and the kids, it's worse. Now, the good news is that most of the health issues from eating sugar can be completely reversed, and you can break the cycle of addiction in as little as 14 days or less. Everywhere you look, there's added sugar. From blended coffees to protein bars, drinks, dressing, salad dressing, sauces, ketchup, you name it. Sugar is lurking everywhere in our diet, even in seemingly healthy foods. Now, we eat today, in the modern world, about 22 teaspoons a day. Historically, as Hunter gathers, we ate 22 teaspoons a year. And kids now eat about 34 teaspoons a day. That's almost 150 pounds per person of sugar.

• 23:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a lot of sugar. And aside from making us inflamed and causing us to gain weight by spiking insulin, which is the fat storage hormone, consuming too much sugar is also at the root of many health problems, including mental health problems. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Mood swings, anxiety, depression, and various metabolic diseases are all consequences of eating a high glycemic, or also known as a high sugar and starch diet. Now, in today's Health Bite episode, we're diving into the research linking sugar addiction to poor mental health, and how you can detoxify from excess sugar in your diet in as little as 14 days. Now, once you clean up excess sugar, and you clean up the refined carbs in your diet, your brain's going to work better, your mental health is going to improve. And as a bonus, your skin's going to clear up,

• 23:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and your hormones get back in balance, and a whole host of other things. Now, I've done this with thousands of people and I wrote about how to do this in my book, The 10 Day Detox Diet, and I've seen profound results. In fact, there's an average reduction of 70% from all symptoms, from all diseases in just 10 days, plus an average weight loss of seven pounds and a significant drop in blood pressure and blood sugar. So now let's dive deeper into the data about sugar. How do we reset our body to its original factory settings? All right. So why is sugar consumption so out of control in the United States? Well, 60% of American calories come from ultra-processed foods. And what are ultra-processed foods? Well, essentially, anything that comes in a bag, or a box, or a package, something with

• 24:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  a long ingredient list. These are typically energy-dense foods that are high in calories but have minimal nutrition value. So they're basically high-calorie, low-nutrient. That's not good. They're high in sugar, like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, cane sugar, fructose, any millions of kinds of names of sugar that we have. They're high in refined grains from enriched wheat flour, sometimes corn, and these are the commodity crops that are put in all these ultra-processed foods, and they act just like sugar in the body. I mean, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of sugar and a bowl of cornflakes. Now, the US dietary guidelines recommend six servings of grains per day, which is a lot, half of which must be whole grains.

• 25:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That means the other half can be basically what amounts to sugar. That's crazy. But 74% of Americans exceed that limit for refined grains. So we're way over in terms of what we're eating. Crackers, pretzels, cakes, cookies, pancakes, breakfast cereals, bread, tortilla, pasta, rice, all of it is just stuff that's causing our blood sugar to spike, and it's the majority of our diet. Now, 65% of our calories and 92% of added sugar in the US comes from ultra-processed foods. So the one big thing you can do to really drop your sugar content is just get rid of all that stuff that's made in the factory, right? Factory-made foods. We call that a plant-based diet. If it's made in a plant, don't eat it, basically. Added sugars make up about 14% of kids' total energy intake,

• 26:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  meaning they're eating a lot of sugar. About one in every seven calories comes from sugar. Now, school lunches is another huge issue. I mean, it's crazy that we allow sugar in school lunches. That should not be allowed. And in fact, it's allowed a lot. And the USDA report 69% of school lunches and 92% of school breakfast. Meaning this is food we're feeding our kids in school funded by the government. They exceed the limit of the 10% total energy intake that's been set by the Dietary guidelines for Americans, meaning they're eating way over that. The average American consumes 17 added teaspoons of sugar or 22. So it's a lot. And sugar sweetened beverages and coffees and teas actually may contribute up to 40% of the daily intake of added sugar.

• 26:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So think about it, you know, you're going to get a coffee, you're going to get tea, you're having all this stuff you think is okay to drink, but it's not. It's just a sugar bomb. I think Starbucks should just be recognized for what it is. It's a sugar dispensing factory, not a coffee shop. Now, 30% of the sugar we eat comes from desserts, sweet snacks, candies, sweetened breakfast cereals, but 70% comes from just regular food. It's in everything, right? And we're just eating so much, people don't realize it. You wouldn't put like 16 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee, but if you drink a 20 ounce bottle of soda, that's what you're getting. That's 64 grams of sugar, which is a lot. The average medium sized blended coffee contains about 50 grams of added sugar. Again, that's about, you know, 14 teaspoons of sugar, 13 teaspoons of sugar. That's nuts, right?

• 27:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You don't put that in your coffee, but that would be what you'd find in a blended coffee drink. An average serving of flavored yogurt contains 16 grams of added sugar. So you're eating yogurt, you're getting healthy probiotics. But the truth is that per ounce, most of your sweetened yogurts have more sugar per ounce than Coca-Cola, right? The average serving of packaged salad dressing, get this, has six grams of added sugar. That means you're eating over a teaspoon, about a teaspoon and a half of sugar in your salad dressing. Like, why should you put sugar on your lettuce? Studies that link Excess sugar to poor mental health are really abundant. This is not just my opinion. Again, all the things I'm talking about in this health bite, in all the health bites are from the peer reviewed literature. All the references are included in the show notes. Have a look yourself if you don't believe me.

• 28:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's pretty scary out there, but what I'm saying is actually based in science. And here's a study that looked at a large group of people. It was a meta-analysis of observational studies. So it was in cause and effect, but it was a pretty impressive study. So it gives you things that point in the right direction. They looked at 37,000 people with depression and they found that sugar, sweetened beverage consumption was dramatically increasing the risk for depression. Those who drank the most soda had a 31% increased risk for depression compared to those who drank the least. So basically, if you're a big soda drinker, you're more likely to be depressed. Compared to those who did not drink sugar sweetened beverages, those who drank two cups of soda per day, about 45 grams of sugar, which is 11 teaspoons of sugar, increased

• 28:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  the risk by about 5% for depression. Those who drank three cans, right? So you look at the dose response on these studies. So the one can bad is two cans worse, or three cans. So you kind of can see where the trend's going. But those who drank three cans of soda a day, which is 98 grams of sugar, which is like, I don't know, almost 25 teaspoons of sugar, increased the risk by 25% for getting depressed. Another study, a prospective cohort study out of Spain, 15,000 Spanish university graduates, showed that those in the highest quartile of added sugar intake had an increased risk for depression, meaning those who had the most sugar in their diet. Those who consumed the highest amounts of sugar had a 35% higher risk of depression. Comparing it to those who had the highest intake of high quality carbs from whole grains,

• 29:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  high in fiber, low glycemic diet, those people had the opposite. They had a 30% lower risk of depression, right? So more sugar, more depression, less sugar, less depression. Seems like a trend. Another large prospective cohort study of 70,000 women, post-menopausal women, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. So they looked at glycemic index and the highest glycemic index, I mean, the higher the like load of food was to spike your sugar, there was a 22% increased risk of depression. If you had added sugars, right? The added sugars that are added to the food, there was a 23% higher risk of depression. And refined grains, even wheat, right? Flour, that also was associated with depression. And if you had higher amounts of fiber, or fruit, or veggies, or even lactose, it was

• 30:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  significantly associated with a lower risk of depression. So. Sugar and flour, higher risk, whole foods, lower risk. Not surprising. All right, so let's talk about the why. Why does this happen? We're seeing the correlation. We're seeing the connection. People know, you know, you get the sugar blues. You know, people understand that that mood and sugar are very connected even through their own experience. But what's the science behind how sugar affects our brain health, affects our mood? And obviously other things, but you've heard me talk a lot about other things. But we're going to talk about sugar and the mood and brain function today. So one is you get reactive hypoglycemia. And we'll talk about what that is. Essentially, it's where you you get a spike in sugar, followed by a spike in insulin. It then causes your sugar to crash.

• 31:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then what happens is you overshoot and you get low blood sugar. Now, what happens when you get low blood sugar is you get a spike in cortisol, spike in adrenaline, and it helps bring the blood sugar back up. But it also increases the activity of the amygdala. So cortisol will will increase amygdala activity, which is our emotional anxious brain. And it's interesting, the symptoms are pretty obvious for people who have this. But you get cravings for carbs and sugar just a few hours after eating. That's kind of a mild symptom. You can have like really serious feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, irritability, panic attacks. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. I mean, people heard of being hangry, right? I get that a little. Heart palpitations, shakiness, shortness of breath, feeling you're going to faint, like you're going to die,

• 31:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  brain fog, fatigue, headaches. And so what happens is when blood sugar drops, it's a life threatening emergency. You got to find food, run away. And I I tell you a quick story of a guy who told me that he was having these panic attacks. And he was like, yeah, every day in the afternoon, I start getting this overwhelming feeling of anxiety. I start sweating, I can't breathe, I my heart's racing, I just feel like I'm going to die. I said, and what happens? Well, I drink a can of Coke and it goes away.

• 32:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think, you know, most people don't even connect the dots between what they're doing and how they feel. So now what happens if you continue to do this, you get insulin resistance, right? If you keep having sugar over time and it'll drive your sugar up, your insulin up, and high levels of insulin resistance has a really significant negative effect on mood and mental health. And the data is really clear on this. We'll go through the research. But essentially what happens with insulin resistance, you get inflammation in the body. And anything that causes inflammation will cause depression or anxiety or mood disorders. So what is the kind of link between insulin and metabolic dysfunction and mood disorders like depression, anxiety? Well, our researchers from Stanford, they looked at a nine-year study over time in the Netherlands, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

• 32:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they found that those who got prediabetes during the first two years of the study were more than two times as likely to have major depression versus those who had normal blood sugar. So in other words, when they follow people over a long period of time, if you were more likely to have prediabetes, you're going to get more depression. Right? So you don't even have to have diabetes. Now, they measured the sort of the degree or severity of insulin resistance, and they used something called the triglyceride HGL ratio, which by the way is available on everyone's test. The ratio should ideally be one to one. If it's more than two to one for triglycerides to HGL, you're starting to get into trouble. But if they had a higher ratio of triglycerides to HGL, there was an 89% increase in new cases of major depression. Think about that.

• 33:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For every five centimeters of belly fat, just on your, around your waist, right? If you take a tape measure, then that was associated with 11% higher risk of depression. And every slight increase in this one unit increase in the ratio of triglyceride to HGL. And for every bump in fasting glucose, that was linked to a 37% higher risk of depression. So as your sugar goes up, your insulin goes up, more depression. Conservatively, at least one in three people have insulin resistance. But I think it's a lot more. I mean, if you look at the data, one in two people have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes by very conservative measurements. If you open up those measurements a little bit and don't just look at deviations from the worst level, right? Like if your blood sugar's over 100, you're prediabetic. Well, maybe you don't even have to have.

• 34:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A hundred to actually have insulin resistance. And so that goes to the 93.2% who are metabolically healthy. So maybe even 90 plus percent have some degree of this, right? One in five adults on top of that have a mental health issue, right? That's a lot. That's 20% of the population. If you have diabetes, you're 20% more likely to have anxiety and you also have more depression. So how does this work? Well, low-grade systemic inflammation from any source, and mostly in our case, it's the diet and sugar is the biggest driver of inflammation because sugar is like pouring gasoline on the fire. So the problem with insulin resistance is that it causes low-grade systemic inflammation everywhere in the body and the brain.

• 35:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that causes dysregulation of cortisol, which is the stress hormone. This regulates what we call the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, regulating all sorts of things that mood. It screws up neurotransmitter signaling when you have too much sugar like serotonin and dopamine. It leads to energy problems in the cell, which you need good energy to have good mood, right? So actually, this friend of mine, Casey Mead, she wrote a book called Good Energy, all about metabolic function and mitochondrial function and how that relates to our health and mood. Now, the brain relies mostly on glucose as its primary source of energy, but it's extremely energy efficient. It only needs about 60 grams a day to do its job. And flooding the brain with too much glucose creates a lot of inflammation, oxidative stress,

• 35:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  and insulin resistance, and it leads to depression and mental health issues, and even things like Alzheimer's, which now they're calling type 3 diabetes. So when you have too much sugar, it screws up your ability to make energy, and it causes mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria are really important for neurotransmitter function and production and the release of neurotransmitters in the body. When you have sugar, it also does something really bad. It activates stress responses in the body. So when you look at the data on this, it's pretty clear. David Ludwig, my friend at Harvard, did a lot of work on this. And he basically showed that feeding kids isocaloric, meaning same calories of, let's say, oatmeal, which basically turns into sugar in your body, or eggs, that the ones who had the oatmeal had higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline

• 36:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  because their bodies were having this perceived stress of eating too much sugar. Now, that's kind of scary. We know that independent of your mental state, that your diet can make you stressed, right? Can increase stress hormones. And that is bad for your brain. Insulin also helps regulate neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and also something called BDNF. And when you have too much insulin resistance, which is what most of America is suffering from, it impairs dopamine signaling, which means you don't get the pleasure sensation, which means you want more sugar and create more carbs. It's a vicious cycle. Also, stress itself will increase cortisol, just emotional stress, and that can cause issues. So it can be that the sugar causes stress, or that actually literally

• 37:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  stress causes stress. And that stress will spike your cortisol. And what does that normally do? When you have a stressful situation, like you're being chased by a tiger, you want to increase your blood sugar. You want to have all the fuel available so you can run as fast as you can. So that's a good thing. You want to have more adrenaline, but not chronically. And so you have chronically elevated cortisol in your body from chronic psychological stress that increases your blood sugar, it increases insulin resistance, and it's a vicious cycle. So if you give someone prednisone, for example, for an autoimmune disease, they can develop diabetes and they can develop high blood pressure just from the stress hormone that they're giving as a pill. And also, stress really messes up your gut. And gut is another factor that is influenced by our diet, and particularly sugar. Now, we talked a lot about the microbiome and mental health on the podcast.

• 38:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I've written about this a long time ago in my book, The Ultra Mind Solution. Again, the data has been there for a long time. It's mostly been ignored, but I think I'm glad people are talking about it now. There's a whole department of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard where they're talking about metabolic health and the gut health and mood health. And Uma Naidu has been on the podcast. We'll link to the show notes there. But just to get into this around mood, you know, when you have a high sugar starch diet, it has a really bad impact on your microbiome. So it changes the composition of bacteria in there to be bad bugs. Those bad bugs reduce the abundance of good bugs, which do good things, and the bad bugs do bad things. And that creates inflammation, leaky gut, yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, all that can lead to mood swings, irritability,

• 38:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  depression, you know, something called the bacterial endotoxins. So when you have too many bad bugs, it produces the toxins that basically get into your system through a leaky gut. And that triggers your immune system to create an inflammatory response, and that impacts the brain. It also makes you more insulin resistant. So it creates a vicious cycle. So gut health is extremely important for brain health and for mood health. And when you look at the data on this, it's very compelling. Leaky gut, which we used to get laughed at for talking about is now well-recognized, increased intestinal permeability. But it's been linked to things like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and lots of other mental illnesses. And it's, it's actually fixable. Okay, so we know that we're all eating too much sugar. We know that sugar is linked to mental health issues.

• 39:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We know that the mechanism is there through inflammation, insulin resistance, and gut dysbiosis and mitochondrial function. Great. Now what? Well, you can do a sugar detox. That's what. You don't have to take my word for it. You don't have to listen to me. Your body's the smartest doctor in the room. It'll tell you what's working, what's not working. And listen to your body. It's very smart. And listen to how you feel. I encourage everybody to do this. It's why I wrote my book, The 10 Day Detox Diet. I think 14 days is a little longer, and I encourage you to do that a little longer just to see what happens. But let's talk about how to do it. First thing is you've got to get rid of all the flour and sugar, right? Get rid of all the high glycemic foods. Get rid of all the added sugar. Get rid of ultra-processed food.

• 40:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Stop all the refined flours, you know, refined wheat flour, gluten, all those things. Get rid of those. My joke for bread is if you can stand on a dozen smush, you can eat it. I was in Germany and they had these meat slicers in the house. I'm like, what is that for? He says, well, to slice the bread because it's so dense. It's made from whole grains. It's not made from flour. It's made from actual rye and grains. So you have to cut it with a meat slicer, like a deli meat slicer. I encourage also people to get rid of all the liquid sugar calories. Those are the worst. Sugar sweetened beverages, teas, coffees, energy drinks, you name it, juices. Just eliminate all of that. And what do you eat? Well, real, whole food. What I've been talking about for years. You can do the 10-day detox, which is a little more extreme, but essentially they're blood sugar balancing foods. And the way to do that is start with protein at every meal.

• 40:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A bit, not a huge amount, but about a palm-sized portion, depending how big you are. Different size, right? If you're Shaquille O'Neal, it's different than if you're Nadi Komanyi, who you probably don't know who that is, but she was a very famous gymnast in the seventies, but she was very little, like four eleven or ten or something. But basically, you want to eat a palm-sized portion of protein every meal, usually about forty-six ounces. You want to aim to eat about your body weight in grams of protein, depending on how active you are, anywhere from half to one gram of protein per ideal body weight. You want to get really good quality protein. So regeneratively raised meats, I use force of nature, I love them. You can get bison, elk, venison, even beef, pasture-raised chickens and eggs, certain fish can be great. If they're small fish, you know the smash fish for me is the salmon,

• 41:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  mackerel, anchovies, herring and sardines. Most people don't like those, but it can be good. Also, you want to eat a lot of fiber. Fiber basically is a sponge for sugar. In fact, last night I had shirataki miracle noodles, which were so good. They're essentially made from cognac root. Cognac root is Japanese food, but it actually has zero calories and absorbs all this water and it slows the absorption of sugar. And you can actually take it as a supplement and call PGX, but you can actually just buy the noodles too. So we had these delicious noodles last night. You don't have to feel guilty for eating noodles. So lots of fiber, lots of good fats. Fats are really important because fat also slows the spiking sugar. So olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds. For breakfast, really important,

• 42:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  have fat and protein. If you want to cut your cravings, you cannot start the day with sugar. If you want to detox from sugar, you've got to start the day with protein and fat and no sugar. That's going to set you up from having balanced blood sugar. It's going to avoid the swings that I talked about. It's going to avoid the spikes in insulin. It's going to avoid the hypoglycemia, avoid the cravings. So you'll see. Also, get on slow burning carbs that are high in fiber and that reduce blood sugar spikes, that are rich in polyphenols that promote the growth of good gut bacteria. So all the veggies, right? These are what I'm talking about. Carbs are broccoli is a carb, right? Asparagus is a carb. Green beans are a carb. Mushrooms are, you know, protein and carbs. And so you can get a lot of foods that are delicious to eat, that are high in beneficial compounds

• 43:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  that help reduce inflammation, support gut bacteria, help your mitochondria, reduce oxidative stress. And all these foods, what they do is they help in the gut particularly because they have a lot of benefits, but they increase something called short chain fatty acids. So when you eat a lot of fiber, you feed the good bugs, right? And it creates byproduct that is really essential for your health. Called butyrate, or this is a short chain fatty acid, and it's very anti-inflammatory. And that gets used by the body as a regulator of all sorts of functions, including cancer. You also want a wide variety of low glycemic plant foods, right? Seventy-five percent of your plate should be non-starchy colorful veggies like leafy greens, cauliflower, dandelion greens, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, cabbage, bok choy, broccoli rabe, collards, unlimited. You can eat as much as you want. So if you wanted five pounds of broccoli, go ahead.

• 43:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Low glycemic fruit is fine, berries, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries, that's fine. Stone fruit can be helpful, no more than a few pieces a day of apples and pears. Lots of whole grains that can be good, is to be careful about what you're eating, but you want the low glycemic phytonutrient-rich grains. I love black rice, for example, red rice, quinoa, buckwheat, taff, all these are great. Certain legumes can be helpful, lentils, chickpeas, split peas, edamame, adukey beans, black navy beans, lupini beans, all these can be part of your healthy diet. If you want to really go extreme on the blood sugar stuff, you can cut out grains and beans for the first few weeks, but you don't have to, but I would for sure cut out gluten. Lots of fats, so one or two servings of healthy fats, you can pour olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, macadamia oil, olives, avocados, fatty fish, lots of nuts and seeds, flaxseeds, chia

• 44:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  seeds, hemp seeds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecas, all that's fine, really essential. Nuts are really great for you, and also help you feel full, and it's a great snack. Limit starchy vegetables, so you can have some, but like not, don't be eating sweet potatoes all the time, or tons of potatoes and so forth. Eat your foods in the right order, right, to lower the glycemic load. So if you have protein and fat before the carbs, it slows the absorption and you don't end up getting these spikes. Don't eat carbs alone, right? So, for example, if you're eating apple, throw a little nut butter on there, a handful of nuts, or if you have sweet potato, make sure you have it with like, say, a piece of chicken or non-starchy veggies. So you sort of create a mixture of the meal, it's called the glycemic load, basically how the overall composition of the meal affects your blood sugar.

• 45:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you can offset effects of some carbs by eating them in the right order or with protein and fat. Lots of spices are good, too. Cinnamon is amazing. It helps blood sugar, green tea. Then also supplements can be really important. So high quality multivitamin and mineral, vitamin D, omega three fats, and certain things are really important for blood sugar, like lipocac acid, but B vitamins, certain herbs are great that I use cinnamon, green tea, chromium minerals like magnesium, also great. Fenugreek has been used a lot in Ayurvedic medicine, great for blood sugar. Exercise, obviously, I mean, I always talk about that, but resistance and aerobic exercise, about 150 minutes a week. Muscle is critical and improves insulin sensitivity. Here's a simple hack, is take a half an hour walk or even 15

• 46:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  minutes after eating your dinner. It's going to dramatically blunt the sugar spikes and insulin. So your body's going to suck that up. Sleep, also really important. We know that lack of sleep causes more sugar cravings, more carb cravings. I've had it. I felt that I used to work at the ER in Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts. And I would sometimes get the night shift and it was two in the morning. The only thing open was McDonald's and I would go on and get the sort of apple turnover because it was the only thing that you could get. I mean, I didn't want a burger and I craved the carbs. I felt it. I knew it, even though I knew better. Really important to get enough sleep. So try to set a regular bedtime, stick to it. Try not to eat at least three hours before bed. Get rid of all late

• 46:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  night snacking. Give yourself at least a 12 hour overnight fast. So dinner at six, eat breakfast at six, or if you want to do 14, you can eat breakfast at eight if you eat dinner at six. So not that hard, but giving yourself that break will help improve your insulin sensitivity. What else can you do to help your sugar and manage it? Well, get your stress under control and it's more up here. You know, stress is defined as the the real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a lion chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your, you know, your wife is an hour late coming back from something and you think she's having an affair or something. So that could be totally fabricated in your head, but the end result in your body is the same. And this chronic levels of stress

• 47:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  we all have are really driving a lot of health issues, including insulin resistance, diabetes, and depression, anxiety, and much more. So how do you do that? Well, you kind of have to actively reduce stress, exercise, journaling, meditation, yoga, all this helps. I've got this new app I use called Newcom. It uses binaural beats. So I put on my headphones, I go into the zone and kind of go into a deep state of relaxation. So there's lots of ways to do it. No magic to it, but you just have to find what works for you.

• 47:52Speaker 02

  You frame all these diseases as really the tip of the iceberg and underneath it, you say are these eight processes, these eight metabolic phenomena, these subcellular pathologies, you call them, that are really driving everything. And I'll just list them and then we can kind of go into them all. We talked a little bit about insulin resistance, but glycation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, we touched on this, membrane integrity, inflammation, epigenetics, autophagy. You talk a lot about this in the book. It's a lot of big words, but it's actually a lot of the same topics I wrote about in my book, Young Forever, because it all drives chronic disease, all drives aging. And they're underneath, well, they're often, these are also known as the hallmarks of aging, which are the phenomena

• 48:35Speaker 02

  that happen that are driving the disease. So hallmarks actually are upstream and they're not, they're not symptoms. They're basically these phenomena that happen from different insults, mostly from food, by the way. We're talking about how to fix them with food. And you kind of break it down. I was just like jumping up and down when I saw it. I was like, wow, this is, this is it. You've got it, you know? So tell us about these eight processes and how they lead to all these diseases.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. So these eight processes are, you know, for the most part, not processes that you can sort of test for. They're happening in the cell. Okay, there are ways to do it. I mean, researchers can do it, but they're not, shall we say clinically available, but they're going on, they're going on in all of us. It is part of life. All of these are part of life. You can't stop them, but you can slow them down, but you can only slow them down with food. All right. So.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  So they're foodable.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  They're all foodable. Right. Exactly. Not druggable, all foodable. All right. Example, glycation. So glycation, a glucose binds to a protein.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Now, when it does that, it makes that protein less flexible. It makes that protein end up being recycled. Okay, it might change the function of that protein. It might cause that cell to become more fragile and friable and might end up causing cell death. Okay, so glycation is not a good thing. Now, this is what diabetics measure when they measure hemoglobin A1C. This is glycated hemoglobin, glucose binding to the hemoglobin molecule. Well, that's happening all over your body. It's happening all of the time. Yeah. The question is, how much? It is the cause of wrinkles. It is the cause of cataracts. Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  The cause of cardiovascular disease. Inside the blood muscles. Well, it's one of the causes of dementia, not the only one. But it's all, the bottom line is, you don't want to be glycating. All right, now you're going to be glycating because it is a process you can't stop. Okay, it is part of life, but you can slow it down. How do you slow it down? Stop providing the substrate. Okay, and the substrate for glycation are two. That glucose, yes, but fructose is seven times worse.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  So both good, but fructose does it seven times faster and releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals, which will lead to in number two. That's why high fructose corn syrup does it, everything is super bad. Right? Because extra fructose. Yeah, but there's fructose and sucrose too. I mean, so it almost doesn't matter. The point is, sugar's a bad guy in the story. Okay, you know, full stop. That's, that's what we don't, you know, tell our patients. And that's the thing that they need to watch. And it's the thing that they can control themselves if they choose to. So that's number one. Number two, oxidative stress, those little hydrogen peroxides.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Now, hydrogen peroxide is good if you have a wound, but it's not good if it's inside the cell. Because those hydrogen

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Unless you want to kill an infection or cancer or something, then it can be good. But, but you know, your body makes a little bit, but it shouldn't make too much.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Right, but it shouldn't, you shouldn't be making it in your liver. Right? Well, every time a hydrogen peroxide gets made, it's doing damage. It's doing damage to a lipid, it's doing damage to a protein. Ultimately, it will kill cells. The bottom line is oxidative stress occurs every time that glycation reaction occurs. It also occurs from iron, it also occurs from various other processes that go on in the body. But the sum total of that oxidative stress is the aging reaction. That is what it is. And so we need to basically try to mitigate it as much as possible. Now, you can't mitigate the iron, but you can mitigate the sugar.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  You can mitigate some other reactive oxygen species drivers, like for instance, environmental toxins.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Okay, like insecticides and things like that, that will cause it as well. All right. Number three, mitochondrial dysfunction.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  We talked about mitochondria being sort of at the heart of this whole problem. Well, it turns out fructose, that sweet molecule in sugar, inhibits three, count them, three separate enzymes. That mitochondria need. We've talked about one, CPT1.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  And mitochondria basically make energy from the food you're eating and the oxygen you breathe that runs everything in your body. So when that process gets up, you're having a energy crisis.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Exactly right. Exactly. It inhibits an enzyme called AMPK1, which is the fuel gauge on the liver cell. It inhibits an enzyme called ACADL, acyl CoA dehydrogenase long chain, which is necessary to get the fatty acids oxidized. So the bottom line is if your mitochondria are dysfunctional, you're going to be sick. And fructose is a three in one mitochondrial toxin.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  There are others. I mean, there's. Well, they're a good deal. Three for one, right? You know, but yeah, I mean, but bottom line, that's, that's like number one. Yeah. Number four. Okay. Insulin resistance. Now, we've spent enough time on that. So I think we'll go to number five. Yeah. Number five, membrane instability. Now, imagine you have a balloon. Okay, you blow up the balloon. And you try to pop a hole in that balloon with your finger. Yeah. But if you, if you take a pen, it will pop. Okay. Now, take a balloon, blow it up,

• 54:39Speaker 03

  and put it in your, the corner of your bedroom for three weeks. It will slowly deflate. Okay, now undo the knot. And now blow up the balloon again.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Now try to puncture the balloon with your finger. Now it'll puncture.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  What happened? How come the balloon would not puncture with your finger the first time, but it would three weeks later? Mm hmm. How come? Answer, because the membrane, the balloon, okay, changed properties. So Yeah. The membranes of your cells and especially of your neurons. Okay. Yeah. Have to turn over and they have to basically maintain integrity. And the problem is that there are a lot of things that can inhibit that integrity. Again, one of them being sugar, insulin being another one. But there's a way to fix that. There's a way to Yeah. treat that. Omega three fatty acids.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  These are the things that improve membrane integrity in your liver, in your arteries, and most importantly, in your neurons. So where did the omega threes come from? Well, unfortunately, not farmed fish. They're omega sixes. The omega threes are made by the algae. The wild fish eat the algae. We eat the wild fish. Well, unfortunately, wild fish is expensive and not immediately available in many parts of the country and parts of the world. Right. Another reason for problem. Number six, inflammation. Now, you have talked about inflammation till the cows come home. Yeah, yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Okay, if, I mean, your PBS special is all about inflammation. I know, and I agree. I totally agree. Okay, question is, where's the inflammation coming from? Yeah. A bunch of places. Could be, you know, me, like, for instance, if you have an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis, you know, it's coming from your immune cells and stuff. But where's the inflammation coming from in people who don't have autoimmune disease? Yeah. It's coming from your gut. Yeah. Your gut microbiome. So, your intestine is functionally outside your body, and your intestine provides a barrier to keep the stuff in your intestine,

• 57:03Speaker 03

  the literal [BLEEP] in your intestine. You might have to bleep that out, but. No, it's fine. All right, the, the bacteria, the cytokines, the lipopolysaccharides, the stuff you do not want to get into your bloodstream. Okay? It's a sewer in there. It's a sewer. That's exactly right. It is a sewer in there. And the goal is to maintain the barrier so that those bad guys don't end up in your bloodstream. Now, you have two mechanisms for doing that. One is the mucin layer. Okay, so there's a mucus layer on. Like mucus, yeah. Like mucus on the top of your intestinal epithelial cells. That's one.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And the second is that there are proteins that guard the junctions between the cells, you know, that where stuff could slide through. Okay, those are called tight junctions. Tight junctions, like for instance, zonulins, that's what goes wrong in celiac disease. Yeah. So, you need the mucin layer, you need the tight junctions, you need to all be effective, right? In order to maintain that intestinal barrier. Well, guess what?

• 58:16Speaker 03

  If you don't feed the bacteria in your intestine, your bacteria will choose the mucin layer to be its food. It will chew through the mucin layer, exposing all those intestinal epithelial cells to all these bad guys and you will have intestinal pathologies. I just saw a paper that just came out that showed that Crohn's disease severity and incidence severity is related to ultra-processed food consumption for exactly this reason. Interesting also if cholesteroid was not, but Crohn's was. So that's, so you gotta feed your bacteria,

• 58:59Speaker 03

  your microbiome, those little, you know, they're 10, you've got 100 trillion bacteria in your intestine. Okay, they gotta eat. What do they eat? They eat the fiber in your food. So you have to feed your gut. Well, unfortunately, what your diet is fiberless food. And so they're gonna eat the mucin, okay, exposing your intestine and generating inflammation. Second, you have those tight junctions. Well, those tight junctions can become dysfunctional. You can nitrate those tight junctions. And guess what nitrates those tight junctions best? Sugar.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Again, so again, the bad guy.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, I don't know if this is true, Robert, but I talked to Bruce Ames, and he said that they did research in his lab where they found that fructose, because it requires extra energy to be absorbed, meaning it requires more ATP to be absorbed. It actually draws energy out of the gut, and you need energy to keep those tight junctions together. And so just the fructose actually has another effect, which is to create a leaky gut. And then you get this whole phenomenon we call metabolic endotoxemia, meaning the bacteria and toxins leak out. It activates your immune system, your immune system is activated, and that causes insulin resistance at the cellular level. So it's like all connected.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  Things all connected. Exactly right. So you need that intestinal barrier to be working, and you need to be working 24/7. And you're right, fructose, because it has to be phosphorylated in order to get across, is depleting ATP from those intestinal epithelial cells. So, again,

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Oh, and the paper came out just about two weeks ago in the journal Cell from Evenov's group at Columbia, which showed that sugar depletes the TH17 cells, which are the barriers, the IL-17, which is the barrier, which then allows all the fat to rush in and generate its own inflammation. So, bottom line, you gotta keep your gut happy. And the way to do it is to feed it. And what you have to feed it is fiber. And the problem is, processed food is fiberless food. So, there you go. Number seven. Yeah. We're not done. No, I know, there's two more.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Two more, two more. Number seven, methylation. So, methylation is a process that goes on normally, but you don't want to methylate things out of hand. And if you are methylating

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  proteins, they are losing function. Okay? You can methylate DNA, and it will also cause problems in terms of function. We know this from various genetic differences, like for instance, the agouti mouse, and also from patients with methyltetrahydrofolate reductase deficiency. They end up having high levels of protein called, of amino acid called homocysteine. And homocysteine is a sticky amino acid that can drive cardiovascular disease. And so,

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  by increasing B1, B2, B6, B12 folate, we can keep methylation at bay. But again, processed food, not high in those things. And then finally, number eight, which is my favorite, autophagy. Autophagy is garbage night for the cell. Okay? Yeah. Your cell makes junk, okay? During the course of the day, it makes junk. And those junk, that junk can be protein aggregates, or lipid epoxides, various dysfunctional mitochondria, because they burn out. And so, you have to recycle the stuff to get it out. So, imagine,

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  you, wherever you live, you live in Massachusetts, imagine your garbage men go out on strike.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  For the first week, now you're okay. For the second week, eh, you know, maybe starting to smell. Third week, you know, now the rats are kinda, you know, tempted. By the fourth week, you know, you may have some problems with your plumbing. And by the fifth week, you're gonna move out of your friggin' house. All right?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  That's autophagy. That's garbage night. Okay, you have to recycle all the junk in order to make room for the new stuff. Okay?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a key part of longevity is to activate autophagy.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Autophagy and longevity are, you know, part and parcel of the same thing. And we're actually very interested in that. We're studying a specific supplement that might improve autophagy and therefore improve longevity. So that's near and dear to home.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  So now, Robert, you've talked about all these A processes. And the key to fixing them is what?

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  The key to fixing virtually all of them is food. Okay? Now, glycation, fructose and glucose, oxidative stress, fructose, glucose, various fatty acids like trans fats, mitochondrial dysfunction, again, fructose, cadmium, other insecticides, insulin resistance, fructose, glucose, branched-chain amino acids, intestinal, sorry, membrane integrity, omega threes, inflammation, fiber, methylation, vitamins, B1, B2, B6, B12, folate.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  And finally, autophagy, intermittent fasting, and also keeping your insulin down.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  So bottom line, all eight fixable by food.

• 1:05:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

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