Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | The Truth About Sugar and Ultra-Processed Foods with Neuroscientist Dr Tommy Wood #526 About this episode Today’s guest, like myself, is passionate about empowering individuals to take control of their health by simplifying the wealth of information that exists and giving people practical, realistic recommendations.
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today’s clip is from episode 404 of the podcast with Dr Tommy Wood.
Tommy is Assistant Professor of Paediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington, US. He holds a degree in biochemistry from Cambridge, a medical degree from Oxford, achieved his PhD in physiology and neuroscience in Oslo, and has published papers and lectured across the globe. It’s fair to say that when it comes to health and longevity, Tommy knows what he’s talking about.
In this clip, we cut through some of the confusion on the hot topics of sugar and ultra-processed foods and try our best to give some nuanced, practical advice.
Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore
Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore
For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com
Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/404
DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Rangan Chatterjee? Today's bite-sized episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. Now, this is the time of year when our immune systems are under the most pressure. It's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defences. But most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients: vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system.
0:41 Rangan Chatterjee? These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use. And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty daily serving. For a limited time only, get a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first-time subscribers.
1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 404 of the podcast with Dr Tommy Wood. Tommy, like myself, is passionate about empowering individuals to take control of their health by simplifying the wealth of information that exists and giving people practical, realistic recommendations. In this clip, we cut through some of the confusion on the hot topics of sugar and ultra-processed
2:05 Rangan Chatterjee? foods and try our best to give some nuanced, practical advice. Where do we go wrong with sugar? Is sugar intrinsically problematic for us? Or is it more the volumes that we're consuming?
2:21 Speaker 01 Of course, I think it's the latter. It's both the quantity and the context of it. So, basic sugar, sucrose, which is 50/50 glucose and fructose is a disaccharide, which just means two sugars bound together. And fructose has really come under the microscope recently because it can affect our uric acid levels, which is often used as a risk factor for gout, but it's often used as like a sort of marker of our metabolic health. And fructose can affect cellular energy levels if it's in the way that it's metabolized and it can be quite intensive on the cell, particularly in the liver.
2:58 Rangan Chatterjee? What does that mean, cellular energy levels?
3:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, so inside the cell, we have this energy currency called ATP. And in order to metabolize fructose, we end up using all of that within the cell. And you can get to this point where it's almost a stressor on the cell in order to metabolize it. And that's maybe one of the reasons why fructose is an issue for some people. And it's certainly, you know, high amounts of fructose consumption and/or sugar, which is 50% fructose, can increase the risk of things like fatty liver disease, which is increasingly common. Although the other side of that is that there are potentially other nutritional deficiencies that are affecting your risk of that as well, particularly choline, which is important for packaging fat out of the liver.
3:44 Speaker 01 And if you don't have enough of that, then the liver can accumulate fat with high amounts of sugar. But in reality, when I think about individual food components, and there were several other things that we could talk about that are controversial in addition to sugar, but it's really the context of the sugar that we're currently consuming. And like you said, the quantities of it. I like to think that the majority of our diet should be minimally processed and nutrient dense foods, so they support the function of our bodies. And other than just being a source of energy, there's nothing else in sugar that's really beneficial.
4:22 Speaker 01 So if you're consuming a large proportion of calories from sugar, you're not consuming foods that have nutrients in that are then important for doing everything else. And that's really the same with all ultra-processed foods. Highly processed packaged foods, they're generally nutrient poor, calorie dense. They negatively affect our ability to understand our hunger and satiety signals. And we know that we overconsume them because they're hyper palatable. We eat much more of them than we would of something else that's less processed. And people get into the issue of what processing actually is or what processing means. And so the definition of ultra processed foods basically means that it's highly refined.
5:06 Speaker 01 And they've usually added additives, fillers and things like that in order to keep it shelf stable. So you can just like stick it in a packet and it can stay there for for months or years on end.
5:17 Rangan Chatterjee? Yes.
5:18 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so I don't particularly ever focus on sugar individually because it would be very easy to remove sugar, but you just replace it with some other highly processed food that is going to have the same effects because it's out competing more nutritious foods. So in general, I would think about the entire dietary pattern because there's no evidence that some sugar is detrimental to our health, really.
5:46 Rangan Chatterjee? What do you mean by that? Because some people are going to go, what do you mean? And wait a minute, I thought sugar was bad for me. So when you say there's no evidence that some sugar is detrimental, just expand on that a little bit.
5:56 Speaker 01 Yeah. So in general, if you are eating within your caloric requirements and you're otherwise healthy, then consuming some sugar doesn't really seem to have a negative effect. Right? It's a source of energy. There's no real reason to assume that, you know, a large part of our metabolism runs on glucose. When we metabolize fructose, which is the other half of sugar, it gets turned into glucose, it gets used as an energy source. So if you're in otherwise good health and you're consuming enough of the nutrients in general from your diet. There's no reason why sugar should be detrimental. It's when it then becomes the major source of energy and you're not getting all these
6:41 Speaker 01 other things that we might need from our diets. So when, usually when people cut out sugar, what they've done is they've dramatically improved the quality of their diet because they're eating other things now. So I'm not exonerating sugar in itself, but I think that focusing purely on that doesn't really tell us the greater story of what's the overall quality of your diet and what's the overall sort of balance of nutrients you're taking in and fibre and other things.
7:11 Rangan Chatterjee? Again, it's that point of context and what else is going on in your life kind of influences whether sugar's a problem for you or not. And it's interesting, you know, Mark Sisson, for people who don't know Mark, I think he's just gone 70 years old.
7:27 Speaker 01 He's in fantastic shape.
7:29 Rangan Chatterjee? Fantastic shape, eats a very primal ancestral way of eating for a number of years, he's been talking about it, promoting it. But if he ever tweets about the fact that he will, I think he enjoys sugar in his coffee each morning, like one spoon of sugar, oh my God, people go nuts on it. And I would imagine that that really speaks to exactly what you're saying, that 90% of his diet is really good.
7:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:53 Rangan Chatterjee? Whole foods, nutrient dense, he's fit and active, he moves his body every day, he looks after himself. In that context, one small spoon of sugar in a coffee each day is probably not a issue, right?
8:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:10 Rangan Chatterjee? In that context, someone else who, let's say, has a highly processed food diet, eating to excess, not because they're lazy or gluttonous, because they struggle, we all struggle, right? In that context, they may find that sugar or the amount of sugar in their diet is problematic. Is that another way we can look at this?
8:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think so. And some of it can also be. Yeah, there's a big debate in the scientific world as to whether sugar is addictive or not. And you'll have people who have some evidence on both sides and.
8:44 Rangan Chatterjee? Sounds like most things these days.
8:45 Speaker 01 Like most things. And I would say that I'm not really sure. Like in some people who consistently overeat, they do, you know, get a large activation of reward centers in the brain when they eat sweet things. Whether that's the same as addiction is very difficult to really pass out, although some people certainly have very problematic eating behaviors and that's its own psychological disorder that requires specialist intervention. But you're right that when we think about how we respond to certain foods, part of the problem with the processing is that, and so when you're taking refined sugar, you've extracted
9:28 Speaker 01 it from sugarcane or sugar beet, you know, we're as a species, we very regularly have consumed sugar either from honey or from fruit, right? And nobody would tell you that eating an apple is going to be bad for you, even though, you know, there's a few grams of sugar in there.
9:41 Rangan Chatterjee? Or some people would these days, actually.
9:43 Speaker 01 Well, that I think we can say is, I'm confident in saying that's not correct. But when you process foods with industrial, modern methods, you divest the calories from their context. And so.
10:00 Rangan Chatterjee? Divest is a big word, Simon.
10:01 Speaker 01 Sorry. You separate, you separate them out. So say we're historically, evolutionarily, if you did eat some fruit, you eat some sugar and that it comes in this context of water and fiber and all these other things. And there's, the body expects some context for that sugar in terms of, and then how it affects your physiology and your hunger signals and stuff like that afterwards. When we process those foods and strip them out, the response that you get physiologically is no longer the same from the same amount of, of that food. So they've done this with various grains, right? If you take a whole grain, you could cook and eat a handful of pearl barley, say.
10:46 Speaker 01 You know, it's minimally processed. That's how it looked on the stem. It's still got all the fiber, all the context. And then you look at how that affects your blood sugar. It probably has a quite a small effect on your blood sugar. If you then take that same thing and you cook it and you grind it, or you grind it and you cook it and you turn it into a paste or you turn it into bread. It has a much bigger effect on your blood sugar. It's exactly the same thing. But what you've done is you've changed the context of the food. And then that affects how your body responds to it. So you're no longer getting macronutrients, like things like carbs and fats or protein in the context that our bodies are used to getting them. And so that's where it starts to become problematic.
11:27 Speaker 01 So when you create processed foods, you might add sugar to something that doesn't normally have sugar in it. And then that makes you want to eat more of it. Because you've you've started to create, and that's the idea of creating high palatable foods. So even savory foods have some sugar in because you start to activate different receptors. You start to then drive a greater likelihood of overeating them. So that's where it starts to become problematic.
11:51 Rangan Chatterjee? So let's say the population we were looking at was all healthy. Everyone was of a, you know, a healthy weight in inverted commas. They were metabolically healthy. Then in that context, of course, which isn't the context we're living in today, certainly not in most countries around the world these days. If that was the situation, then sugar here or there in our tea or coffee or whatever, a sweet treat, if you want, and I'm not convinced I love the word treat, but we, I think people know what we mean when we say that. You know, maybe once a week or once a fortnight or whatever you choose to do may be okay.
12:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:28 Rangan Chatterjee? How does that though sit in the context of what we have today? So we know in the US, for example, is it 90% of US adults may have some degree of metabolic dysfunction?
12:38 Speaker 01 And actually, the UK and Europe and most of the world are catching up. So you can't, we can't even single out the US anymore.
12:44 Rangan Chatterjee? So if we're saying the bulk of the adult population, and it's not just adults, I know, but the bulk of the population, unfortunately, these days have a degree of metabolic dysfunction. So the way they're processing energy in the body is not as efficient as it could be. And that's leading to an increased risk of all kinds of diseases. In that context, is sugar now becoming even more problematic?
13:12 Speaker 01 It's absolutely contributing due to the way that we're using it. But again, I think it comes down to the entire context of the diet. Because you could certainly get to a point where, say, we dramatically reduce sugar in foods. If that then comes with like a parallel decrease in overall caloric intake, say, there will absolutely be benefit. But when other people are in charge of creating these foods, you know, these ultra-processed foods, those sugar calories are just going to be replaced by something else. And you're going to, you're going to overeat it just as much. And it's not really going to, going to change anything. So I think that if by reducing your sugar intake, you decrease your overall caloric intake and you improve the overall quality of your diet,
13:57 Speaker 01 that's absolutely going to be beneficial. But if that doesn't happen, and this, this often happens with the way that we engineer foods nowadays, is just it'll be replaced by something else and it may not make the same difference. So I, I think it really depends on how that gets enacted. So if you say that I want to reduce my, you know, I'm going to focus on sugar. And you focus on reducing sugar intake. And then with that comes, you know, you're not eating cakes or biscuits. And with that, you've dramatically both decreased your, you know, overall energy intake and improved your diet quality. That's going to come with, with health benefits. But it's if you then say, well, I'm not going to have cake,
14:38 Speaker 01 but I'm going to have, you know, an extra serving of fries instead. Right. There's no sugar in that, but I'm not convinced you, you're not going to get any healthier. So it really depends on how those changes then, what the knock on effect is. I had what some people might have considered disordered eating a long time ago and being very hyper focused about the quality of the food that I ate and what I ate. And so it's taken me a long time to work on some of those things. And In reality, I've gotten to a point where I'm where if I have decided to do it, then I lean into enjoying it. So if I'm gonna eat this cake, I'm gonna enjoy this cake. Like, this is, you know, I'm all and all the reasons why why I'm eating it. Just like if I'm gonna have a nice cocktail,
15:23 Speaker 01 I'm gonna make sure it's a it's a nice cocktail. I'm really gonna enjoy it. I'm with my friends. I'm having a nice dinner. So I really lean into the enjoyment factor because the the alternative is spending hours then worrying about the thing that I ate or the thing that I drank and how that's gonna affect my health. And that worrying is probably worse than the eating and drinking itself. So I embrace the the positive sides of it because, you know, it's usually a social aspect or some other thing. And I think that's that's how I approach it.
15:51 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're gonna love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel good
16:32 Rangan Chatterjee? to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchattity.com/fridayfive. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
Previous How To Feel More In Control Of Life: A Revolutionary Approach to Stress, Relationships & Inner Peace with Mel Robbins #525 Next The New Science of Awe & How It Improves Your Physical & Mental Wellbeing with Dr Dacher Keltner (re-release) #527 Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated