How Sugar & Processed Foods Impact Your Health | Dr. Robert Lustig

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Robert Lustig, M. D., neuroendocrinologist, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a bestselling author on nutrition and metabolic health. We address the “calories in- calories out” (CICO) model of metabolism and weight regulation and how specific macronutrients (protein, fat, carbohydrates), fiber and sugar can modify the CICO equation. We cover how different types of sugars, specifically fructose, sugars found in liquid form, taste intensity, and other factors impact insulin levels, liver, kidney, and metabolic health. We also explore how fructose in non-fruit sources can be addictive (acting similarly to drugs of abuse) and how sugar alters brain circuits related to food cravings and satisfaction. We discuss the role of sugar in childhood and adult obesity, gut health and disease and mental health. We also discuss how the food industry uses refined sugars to create pseudo foods and what these do to the brain and body. This episode is replete with actionable information about sugar and metabolism, weight control, brain health and body composition. It ought to be of interest to anyone seeking to understand how specific food choices impact the immediate and long-term health of the brain and body. For show notes, including referenced articles and additional resources, please visit hubermanlab.com. Use Ask Huberman Lab, our new AI-powered platform, for a summary, clips, and insights from this episode. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Momentous: https://livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Dr. Robert Lustig (00:02:02) Sponsors: LMNT & Waking Up (00:06:41) Calories, Fiber (00:12:15) Calories, Protein & Fat, Trans Fats (00:18:23) Carbohydrate Calories, Glucose vs. Fructose, Fruit, Processed Foods (00:26:43) Fructose, Mitochondria & Metabolic Health (00:31:54) Trans Fats; Food Industry & Language (00:33:55) Sponsor: AG1 (00:37:04) Glucose, Insulin, Muscle (00:42:31) Insulin & Cell Growth vs. Burn; Oxygen & Cell Growth, Cancer (00:51:14) Glucose vs. Fructose, Uric Acid; “Leaky Gut” & Inflammation (01:00:51) Supporting the Gut Microbiome, Fasting (01:04:13) Highly Processed Foods, Sugars; “Price Elasticity” & Food Industry (01:11:51) Processed Foods & Added Sugars (01:14:19) Sugars, High-Fructose Corn Syrup (01:18:16) Food Industry & Added Sugar, Personal Responsibility, Public Health (01:30:04) Obesity, Diabetes, “Hidden” Sugars (01:34:57) Diet, Insulin & Sugars (01:38:20) Tools: NOVA Food Classification; Perfact Recommendations (01:43:46) Meat & Metabolic Health, Eggs, Fish (01:46:44) Sources of Omega-3s; Vitamin C & Vitamin D (01:52:37) Tool: Reduce Inflammation; Sugars, Cortisol & Stress (01:59:12) Food Industry, Big Pharma & Government; Statins (02:06:55) Public Health Shifts, Rebellion, Sugar Tax, Hidden Sugars (02:12:58) Real Food Movement, Public School Lunches & Processed Foods (02:18:25) 3 Fat Types & Metabolic Health; Sugar, Alcohol & Stress (02:26:40) Artificial & Non-Caloric Sweeteners, Insulin & Weight Gain (02:34:32) Re-Engineering Ultra-Processed Food (02:38:45) Sugar & Addiction, Caffeine (02:45:18) GLP-1, Semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Tirzepatide), Risks; Big Pharma (02:57:390 Obesity & Sugar Addiction; Brain Re-Mapping, Insulin & Leptin Resistance (03:03:31) Fructose & Addiction, Personal Responsibility & Tobacco (03:07:27) Food Choices: Fruit, Rice, Tomato Sauce, Bread, Meats, Fermented Foods (03:12:54) Intermittent Fasting, Diet Soda, Food Combinations, Fiber, Food Labels (03:19:14) Improving Health, Advocacy, School Lunches, Hidden Sugars (03:26:55) Zero-Cost Support, Spotify & Apple Reviews, YouTube Feedback, Sponsors, Momentous, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Robert Lustig. Dr. Robert Lustig is an endocrinologist, that is, he's a specialist in the function of hormones in the body, and a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed studies exploring how different types of nutrients, that is, food, impact our cellular functioning, our organ functioning, and thereby our health. During today's discussion, we discuss the idea of whether or not a calorie is indeed a calorie, and whether or not our body weight and body composition only reflects the number of calories we eat versus the calories that we burn.

• 0:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  We talk about how different food types, that is, how the different macronutrients, protein, fat, and carbohydrates are processed in the body, and the important role that fiber and the gut microbiome plays in that process. And we pay particular attention to the topic of how different types of sugars, and fructose in particular, can indeed be addictive to the brain and can modify the way that hormones in the body, in particular insulin, impact our liver health, kidney health, and indeed the health of all of our cells and organs. Indeed, Dr. Lustig is an expert in how sugar impacts the brain and body. We talk about how certain types of sugars can indeed be addictive in the same way that certain drugs of abuse and behaviors can become addictive.

• 1:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, in other words, how sugar actually changes the way that the brain works. And we discuss how the food industry, that is, the commoditization and sale of particular types of food, has altered the way that we eat and indeed, the foods that we crave. Today's discussion covers all of that, and by the end of today's discussion, you'll have a thorough understanding of how foods are processed when they enter your body, and how those different food choices are impacting your immediate and long-term health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

• 2:18Speaker 01

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• 3:07Speaker 04

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• 3:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  And now for my discussion with Dr. Robert Lustig. Dr. Robert Lustig, welcome.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Pleasure. Truly. Just being here, being invited, high honor. Really appreciate it. And it's not doctor, it's just Rob.

• 3:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, Rob. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I've seen your now famous, can we also say infamous, but famous YouTube video about sugar. We'll put a link to it in the show note captions. It's been viewed many, many millions of times.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I still can't figure out why that is, you know?

• 3:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I can.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  I didn't think my mother would watch it, and she didn't, but 24 and a half million people did.

• 3:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I think people are very interested in what to eat, what not to eat. And we'll start off simply talking about what most everyone believes and understands, which is that a calorie is a form of heat energy that's given off during the processing of some food bit or some thing. If that's mysterious to people, just understand that a calorie is a unit of energy.

• 4:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I was taught, and still many, many people worldwide believe that a calorie is a calorie, meaning if I consume more calories in whatever form, then I metabolize by thinking, feeling, moving, exercising, et cetera, then I will gain weight. And if I consume fewer calories than I burn, I will lose weight. And we could talk a lot about where that weight loss comes from. Does it come from adipose, body fat stores, or from muscle, or from protein, or muscle, of course, is protein, et cetera. But let's start off with, is a calorie truly a calorie when it comes to the processing of different types of calories?

• 5:04Speaker 05

  Everyone thinks that obesity is about energy balance. That is, calories in, calories out. Therefore, two behaviors, gluttony and sloth. Therefore, if you're fat, it's your fault. Therefore, diet and exercise. Therefore, any calorie can be part of a balanced diet. Therefore, don't pick on our calories, go pick on somebody else's calories. This is actually what the food industry uses to assuage their culpability for the change in the food supply and the rise in obesity and chronic disease like diabetes. Now, it is true that

• 5:49Speaker 05

  a calorie is that unit of energy that raises one gram of water, one degree centigrade. And so therefore, a calorie burned is a calorie burned. I don't argue that. That's true. That's, you know, the first law of thermodynamics. But that doesn't mean a calorie eaten is a calorie eaten. That's not the same. And that's where people get it wrong. So, let me give you some examples of how that calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten. You like almonds?

• 6:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Me too. Almonds are great. You eat 160 calories in almonds. How many of those do you absorb?

• 6:34Speaker 05

  Hundred thirty. You eat a hundred sixty, absorb a hundred thirty. Where'd the other thirty go? In the processing of that food energy? No. Turned out, the fiber in those almonds, both soluble and insoluble fiber, and by the way, fiber's sort of the key to the kingdom in this story, forms a gel on the inside of your intestine. The insoluble fiber, the cellulose, forms a fishnet, if you will, a latticework, on the inside of your duodenum. The soluble fiber, which are globular, plug the holes in that fishnet. Together, they form a secondary barrier. You can actually see it on electron microscopy, a whitish gel.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  And that prevents absorption of those thirty calories. So yes, a hundred thirty get absorbed, but many of them don't. They end up going further down the intestine to the next part, called the jejunum, and that's where the microbiome is. Now, everyone knows about the microbiome nowadays, you know? It's all the bacteria, you know? We always say, when women are pregnant, you're eating for two. Well, we're always eating for a hundred trillion. Now, they have to eat. Well, what do they eat? They eat what you eat. The question is, how much did you get versus how much did they get? Well, if you ate almonds, they're getting those thirty calories. So even though you count the calories at your lips, that doesn't matter.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  What really matters is counting the calories at your intestinal brush border. Okay, and they're not the same. So if you feed your gut, that's a good thing, because then your gut will take those calories and turn it into things like short-chain fatty acids, which end up being protective against chronic metabolic disease. Acetate, propionate, butyrate, valerate. Those are actually good. They're anti-inflammatory, anti-Alzheimer's. Because you fed your microbiome, so even though you ate a hundred sixty, you absorbed a hundred thirty. So a calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten, because if you ate it with fiber, it wasn't for you. It was for your bacteria.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  But that's not the way you count them up. So that's problem number one. Problem number two, amino acids. So we all eat protein. Let's say you eat too much protein. You have, you know, the porterhouse steak. All right? Now, if you're a bodybuilder, those amino acids might go to muscle and you might increase your muscle mass. Because you're a bodybuilder, because you're putting excess force on those muscles and you're growing those muscles. Okay. But let's say you're not a bodybuilder. Let's say you're a mere mortal like me.

• 9:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or let's say you're a kid going through puberty, who's synthesizing a lot of muscle, not because they're lifting weights, because they're gross.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  Because testosterone's making it happen. Yeah, absolutely. But let's say you're not. Let's say, you know, you're just, you know, just schlump off the street like, you know, Joe Schmo. And you eat that porterhouse. You've taken on all these amino acids. There's no place to store it, other than muscle. So your liver takes the excess and deamidates that amino acid. Takes the amino group off to turn it from amino acid into an organic acid. And then that organic acid can then enter the Krebs cycle, the tricarbicilic acid cycle, what goes on in the mitochondria in order to generate ATP, the chemical energy that your body needs in order to power itself. Okay. Now, that's a good thing.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  It takes double the amount of energy to prepare that amino acid for burning, as it does to prepare a carbohydrate for burning.

• 10:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or fat. Because when I asked about, when you asked about almonds, why the 160 versus 130, I thought it was the processing. It turned out it was fiber. You're saying for protein, let's make it realistic for a a really nice big porterhouse steak, which I love, by the way. Let's say, let's say 800 calories.

• 10:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much of that is? So that's what goes in your mouth.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  My mouth.

• 10:48Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much of it is actually?

• 10:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eaten in to stay with the your calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten in the processing of that, what percentages actually goes into your total caloric intake?

• 11:02Speaker 05

  Right, so about 10% of everything you eat goes to just maintaining body temperature. It's called the thermic effect of food. But when you're eating protein, you actually generate more heat. And the reason is because it takes two ATP to phosphorilate that organic acid as opposed to one ATP to phosphorilate that carbohydrate for consumption. So you actually have a net loss of energy because it was an amino acid versus a monosaccharide, a sugar. Now, you brought up fat.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Fat doesn't need to be phosphorlated, so it actually doesn't have any thermic effect of food at that point. So depends on what it is as to whether or not you have loss.

• 11:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so but in this, let's make it actually realistic. A 1600 calorie porterhouse with a nice slab of

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Butter?

• 12:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Grass-fed butter on there. I do this every once in a while, not often.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  With some creamed spinach and maybe some mushrooms along the side?

• 12:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Honestly, I say it, when I'm eating a porterhouse, I don't want to adulterate the taste with anything else except maybe some butter, maybe a salad afterwards. But but let's say 1600 calories of it's got some fat in there for sure. Let's say 1000 of those calories is protein, the other 600 are fat.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  Something like that.

• 12:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Something like that, depending on how marbled it is. Okay, so based on what you just said about the thermic effect of food and protein in particular, of that 1000 calories, how much actually is can we count? I'm not a calorie counter, but does one include as calories truly ingested?

• 12:51Speaker 05

  Well, if you ingested sixteen hundred.

• 12:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, that's what went in the mouth, but what is gonna go against your burn deficit?

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Right. So I would have to actually do the math to figure that out, but as a guess.

• 13:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, back of the envelope.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Back of the envelope calculation, you're gonna lose about twenty-five percent of that.

• 13:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow. So, we're talking seven hundred and fifty calories.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, and to translate this a bit, so what we're saying here is if you're somebody who is trying to lose weight or maintain weight, or perhaps even gain weight, you eat a sixteen hundred calorie porterhouse with a slab of butter on it, six hundred of those calories, we're saying, and this is fat, with the remaining thousand calories, that's, that all went in your mouth.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  So you counted at your mouth?

• 13:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. But seven hundred, but then when you compare it against your energy burn for that day, to maintain temperature, brain activity, physical activity, really it's only seven hundred and fifty calories.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 13:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a huge difference.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  Exactly, and another reason why a calorie's not a calorie. Now, let's take the third. Let's take fats. So over here, we have omega threes, heart-healthy, anti-inflammatory, anti-Alzheimer's, save your life. And over here, we have trans fats, the devil incarnate, consumable poison, because you can't break the trans double bond. You don't have the desaturase to break that trans double bond. So it basically accumulates, lines your arteries, lines your liver, causes chronic metabolic disease, causes insulin resistance. Omega threes don't even get broken down for energy, because they're so important, they stay intact,

• 14:33Speaker 05

  because your brain needs them, your heart needs them, whereas trans fats can't be broken down because of that trans double bond. One, save your life, other one, kill you. They're both nine calories per gram if you explode them in a bomb calorimeter, because a calorie burned is a calorie burned, but a calorie eaten's not a calorie eaten, because one'll save your life, one'll kill you. And finally, the big kahuna, the one that blows everything else out of the water, fructose and glucose. All right. Now, glucose is the energy of life.

• 15:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  So here we're talking carbohydrates. I think most of our audience will be familiar with the so-called macronutrients. So we talked about fat, in this case almonds. There's some fiber in there, probably a little bit of carbohydrate.

• 15:17Speaker 05

  Little bit.

• 15:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Little bit. Talked about the porterhouse with butter.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 15:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  You can be hungry already. That's protein and fat.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very little, if any, carbohydrate. It should be zero, essentially.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  Zero.

• 15:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe one.

• 15:30Speaker 05

  Zero.

• 15:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yep. And then, now we're talking about carbohydrates, and we're going to subdivide that into glucose and fructose.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Right. Galactose basically becomes glucose in the liver, so we can dispense with that, unless you have a disease called galactosemia, which is about 1 in 20,000, and causes neonatal meningitis and, you know, it's a disease, as a pediatric endocrinologist, I would take care of, but we can dispense with that for the moment. All right. So, glucose, fructose. Glucose is the energy of life. Every cell on the planet burns glucose for energy. Glucose is so damn important, that if you don't consume it, your body makes it. So it will take an amino acid and turn it into glucose.

• 16:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's gluconeogenesis.

• 16:12Speaker 05

  gluconeogenesis, that's right. It will take a fatty acid and turn it into glucose. And specifically, the glycerol portion of the triglyceride will turn into glucose. So, the Inuit, they didn't have any place to grow carbohydrate. They had ice, they had whale blubber. They still have serum glucose level. And the reason is because you had to. You have to have a serum glucose level in order to power your brain, in order to power your heart. Yes, you can use ketones, of course you can, but, you know, only if you're in a ketogenic state will you use exclusively ketones.

• 16:50Speaker 05

  And, you also need glucose for structural changes in specific proteins and particularly hormones. So, glucose molecules will stud TSH, LH, FSH, different pituitary hormones, in order to increase their potency. It's one of the reasons why aging leads to defective hormonogenesis.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  For instance, hypogonadism, hypothyroidism is the loss of glycosylation on individual peptide hormones because of the inability to add glucose.

• 17:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because of insulin insensitivity?

• 17:30Speaker 05

  No, no, just it's an aging phenomenon.

• 17:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, we'll come back to this because I think it's really important. The idea that ingestion of carbohydrates and the, as you called it, the studying of carbohydrate molecules on hormones can augment the function of those hormones. And with aging, that's a less efficient process.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  It's a less efficient process, but it's not because of consumption.

• 17:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, people are still, I see the, plenty of folks who are sixty-five and older eating plenty of carbohydrates. You're saying a lot of them have deficient thyroid, testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, et cetera, because of the way that those carbohydrates are not studying the hormones.

• 18:15Speaker 05

  Exactly. So they're, all of those are glycoprotein hormones.

• 18:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's tee that up for later because I think that's an interesting avenue to go down.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  Okay, and there's a, and there's a disease in children, in babies called congenital disorders of glycosylation, where you can't put glucose molecules on specific proteins and it causes severe mental retardation, all sorts of metabolic havoc, and a lot of those babies die, for that matter. So that's an important thing. All right, but that's how important glucose is. Fructose, on the other hand, this sweet molecule, the molecule we seek, the reason why the food industry studs every food in the grocery store, you know, seventy-three percent of all items in the American grocery store have added sugar on purpose, for the food industry's

• 19:06Speaker 05

  purposes, not for yours, because fructose is addictive, activates the nucleus accumbens, the reward center of the brain, in the same way that cocaine, heroin, nicotine, alcohol do, and drives dopamine receptors down, just like nicotine, you know, alcohol, you know, cocaine, heroin do.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  That molecule, fructose, is number one, completely vestigial to all vertebrate life. There is no biochemical reaction in any vertebrate that requires dietary fructose. That's number one. Number two-

• 19:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, sorry, I'm gonna just answer. So you're saying that even though we can process fructose-

• 19:50Speaker 05

  We have a limited capacity to process it, in the same way we have a limited capacity to metabolize alcohol. Now, if you have one drink a day, you're okay. If you have two drinks a day, depends on how big you are. You know, you and I can probably-

• 20:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would argue two drinks a week is the maximum, but let's not go there. But in terms of, you're saying, when you say fructose, processing of fructose is vestigial, what you're saying is that we don't need to do it?

• 20:18Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 20:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like the appendix. It's an organ for which it has no function.

• 20:21Speaker 05

  Exactly. And fructose has no function in the human body. Period.

• 20:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  You don't need it.

• 20:27Speaker 05

  You don't need it. Don't need it. But our diet is replete with it. In fact, our fructose consumption's gone up 25-fold since the beginning of the last century.

• 20:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have to ask this now. I love fruit. I eat berries galore, especially since the price of berry seems to have come down. It used to be that you only get them certain times of year. I'm what you call a drive-by blueberry eater, so I'll just walk past and just take a fistful. You can't put them in front of me without me eating them. This is even difficult for me when other people I don't know are eating them. So I eat lots of blueberries, strawberries, blackberries if they're in season. I love them.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  No problem.

• 21:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Loaded with fructose?

• 21:09Speaker 05

  No.

• 21:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  Plenty of fiber? Low fructose?

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Low fructose. In berries, berries are the lowest fructose of all the different-

• 21:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was so worried about asking you this today.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Not a bit.

• 21:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 21:20Speaker 05

  And fruit is okay because of the fiber. So the molecule, the fructose molecule's the same, whether it's in a berry, or in a banana, or for that matter, in a Coca-Cola. The fructose molecule is the same molecule. The difference is that in the berry, it comes with a whole lot of fiber. In the banana, it comes with a whole lot less fiber. And in the Coca-Cola, it doesn't come with any fiber. And the fiber is what mitigates the absorption. So when you consume the fructose with fiber, so your blueberries, you're feeding your microbiome. That fructose wasn't for you.

• 22:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. Such a relief. And I must say, recently I had a whole body MRI as a preemptive thing.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  How was that?

• 22:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was great. I got to watch a Netflix in there. And I never had a whole body MRI. I learned a few things that were useful to me. I've got a clean bill of health, so that's great.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Well, that's good.

• 22:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  One of the pieces of feedback I got is that my gut was filled with this very high contrast stuff.

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 22:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they asked, you know, do you consume a lot of blueberries? And I said, indeed, I do. Why? And they said, because that high contrast stuff, it shows up white on the scan, is high concentrations of magnesium that we see in people that ingest large amounts of blueberries, which is pretty rare. And yours are comparable to a bear in blueberry season.

• 22:49Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 22:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And basically, my entire gut was filled with with blueberries. I suppose I need to cut back a little bit. But now I know that fruit is okay, especially if the fruit has a lot of fiber.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  But fructose itself, especially if it's not partnered with fiber.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is, first of all, not required for survival at all. But you're telling me is problematic.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. And let me tell you why it's problematic. We haven't gotten to that yet. We're just talking about whether it's vestigial versus needed. Now, let's talk about what fructose does. Turns out, fructose inhibits three, count them, three separate enzymes necessary for normal mitochondrial function. Now, your mitochondria make ATP. Your mitochondria have to work at peak efficiency. That's what metabolic health is, is mitochondria working at peak efficiency. Well, there are three enzymes that are inhibited by fructose. Number one, AMP kinase. All right. Now, AMP kinase is the fuel gauge on the liver cell.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  It's the thing that tells the liver to make more mitochondria, fresher mitochondria. Because if your AMP levels are high, that means you've defosforilated a bunch of ATPs and you have to regenerate them. So you need some more mitochondria. So it's a negative feedback pathway. Well, you need that AMP kinase to generate that mitochondrial biogenesis signal. Except that fructose.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  A metabolite of fructose called methylglyoxal, MGO, sits in the active site of the gamma subunit of that AMP kinase and actually binds to arginines in that active site, rendering that enzyme now dead. It's an irreversible inhibition because of the covalent bonding of that methylglyoxal, that aldehyde, to the arginine. And now that enzyme is dead.

• 24:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so it basically acts like a key that doesn't turn the lock, but prevents the key that you want in that lock from entering the lock.

• 24:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like gluing a lock shut.

• 24:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. So that's one of the enzymes?

• 25:00Speaker 05

  That's one.

• 25:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 25:01Speaker 05

  Second one, acad L, acyl-CoA dehydrogenase long chain. So this is necessary to cleave two carbon fragments off fatty acids to prepare them for metabolism. So it inhibits that one. And then finally, it inhibits carnitine palmitol transferase 1, now CPT 1. Now, that's the enzyme that regenerates carnitine. Carnitine is the shuttle mechanism by which you get the fatty acids from the outer mitochondrial membrane through to the inner mitochondrial membrane so that they can be beta oxidized for energy. So if you don't have that CPT 1, you're basically carnitineless

• 25:45Speaker 05

  and therefore you can't generate beta oxidation.

• 25:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  You said fructose inhibits all three of these enzymatic pathways.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 25:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  As a biologist, I have to ask you, how potently does it inhibit them? I mean, because there are drugs that block receptors and then there are drugs that block receptors with unbelievable affinity. So, you know, I mean, mechanistically in a dish, meaning in vitro, you can see all sorts of things. But how significant is this for like, for obesity, for mitochondrial function in vivo in us?

• 26:16Speaker 05

  All right, so, you know, the dose determines the poison, right? Paracelsus 1537. There are toxins that are parts per billion and will kill you, like sarin, ricin, cyanide. By the way, cyanide is a good analogy because it's working on mitochondria. It's basically causing mitochondria to be completely defective.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  All right, then there are intermediate toxins like arsenic and carbon tetra chloride, parts per million, and they take a little longer to work, they're not gonna kill you on the spot.

• 26:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's why I can eat an apple seed that has a little bit of arsenic in it, but I'm not gonna die.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Right. And then finally, there, and by the tobacco smoke goes in there. And then finally, you have weak toxins, all right, and you know, where it's not one exposure that will kill you, it's you know, 10,000 exposures that'll kill you, like alcohol.

• 27:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or toxic people.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Toxic, well.

• 27:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sometimes it only takes one. Couldn't resist, sorry. Sometimes it only, mildly toxic people.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  Anyway, the point is that fructose is in that last category. So it's not what you do one day that kills you, it's what you do every day that kills you. And if you basically eat ultra-processed food, high in sugar, for 10 years in a row, it's gonna show up in terms of your comorbidities. And ultimately, yeah, it will kill you. And we have the data to show, you know, how many years you will lose. So, right now, in America, we pay an eight-year longevity tax.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  If you look at Japan, who, they have a mean age of death of 88, we have a mean age of 80, okay? We're paying an eight-year longevity tax just by living here. And we're talking about the healthy people. Now, if you have metabolic syndrome, it's a 15-year longevity tax, and, sorry, if you have obesity, it's a 15-year longevity tax, and if you have metabolic syndrome, it's a 20-year longevity tax. That is primarily, not completely, but primarily, sugar. It's also, you know, omega-6s, it's also trans fats, you know, leftover, because now they're gone, but, you know, people are still suffering the ravages of the trans fats, you know, from the previous generation.

• 28:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are they gone? I mean, I do remember as a kid when we had margarine in our refrigerator, there's actually a big debate in my home. One parent, I won't identify which, was pro-margarine, the other was pro-butter, anti-margarine.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  The marriage didn't last, but there were other reasons.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  That's probably why.

• 28:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I went butter.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  Butter, butter is fine. In fact, Time declared, you know, uh, front cover, butter's back. Um, margarine was the bad guy, without question. Uh, and we know now, but, you know, back when we thought it was a calorie was a calorie, we thought, oh, margarine, you know, it's the same, you know, nine calories per gram. And we said it lowers your triglycerides.

• 29:29Speaker 05

  Bad idea. It was, because what it did was, it lined your liver, because you couldn't break that trans double bond. And, um, you know, so they're, they're now gone from our uh, food supply.

• 29:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're illegal.

• 29:44Speaker 05

  They're illegal. They're banned. But you can make trans fats in your own kitchen by taking olive oil and heating it to beyond the smoking point. So, they're not completely gone. They're just gone from ultra-processed food. So, now sugar's the big problem, because of these three enzymes that you are inhibiting. The point is, we were, we started this with a calorie is a calorie. Well, if you are inhibiting mitochondrial function, then a calorie's not a calorie, is it?

• 30:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're reducing the, um, intensity of the furnace.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. So, this whole calories a calorie just makes no sense. And it hasn't worked at any level, and there is no study that actually shows that cutting calories makes a difference. And I can show you, you know, voluminous data that shows that virtually every weight loss study that caused, that led to, you know, caloric restriction, basically didn't work. Not for any length of time.

• 30:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just to round out our earlier discussion, because I find it fascinating, and I know other people will as well. You talked about that 160 calories, that's actually 130 at the business end of things.

• 30:50Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 30:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh, of almonds. We talked about the porterhouse steak with butter, and the 25% reduction in what's actually quote-unquote eaten. And I'll get back to this, because this quote-unquote issue. I think the problem is there's, there's a lack of useful language to dissociate this stuff.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, even just calling fat, fat. People think it's gonna make you gain body fat.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Totally.

• 31:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  If we called it adipose tissue and lipids, we would have avoided this confusion. So I don't, I don't wanna get there just yet, but I wanna make sure with-

• 31:20Speaker 05

  The food industry does this on purpose.

• 31:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 31:23Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. So, they tell you a sugar is a sugar. Which is not true. They tell you a calorie is a calorie, which is not true. And they tell you a fat is a fat, which is not true. Okay, this is very specifically. So when you're talking about sugar, you're talking about dietary sugar? Or you're talking about blood sugar? Because blood sugar is blood glucose.

• 31:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or cholesterol, dietary cholesterol, or circulating cholesterol, or you know?

• 31:48Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Okay, so we've done this, you know, to ourselves. But the food industry has really promulgated it. Because we farmed out nutrition policy and information to the food industry. So they actually use this for their purposes. It's one of the problems in this field.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 32:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  For the third category of macronutrients, carbohydrates, you differentiated glucose and fructose. If I ingest, let's say, a half a bagel, since we were talking about New York, your city of origin. They have great bagels on the West Coast.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know.

• 32:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not the same.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  It's pretty pitiful.

• 32:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Same with the pizza dough. It's like they claim it's the water, whatever it is, it's different back there and it's better.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 33:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Half a bagel, let's say 250 calories, mostly carbohydrate. This is an unlined, no cream cheese, no schmear as they call it back there, no, no cream cheese, no butter, none of that thing. Just half a bagel, 250 calories. So that's what I ate. You're saying that a calorie eaten is not a calorie eaten. How much of that carbohydrate, given that it's probably most, let's assume it's mostly glucose, let's do it this way.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is. It's polymerized glucose.

• 33:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, polymerized glucose. How much of that is actually utilized or burned versus, you know, the original 250?

• 33:40Speaker 05

  So if you look at what happens to energy in the body. Sixty-five percent of that which is ingested goes to resting energy expenditure, just to power the body. Ten percent goes to the thermic effect of food. And then twenty-five percent goes to activity. That's the breakdown of where the energy goes.

• 34:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's calories from fat, protein, and carbohydrates?

• 34:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, from everything together. And, you know, glucose is a perfectly good example of how that works. The point is, though, that when you ingest glucose, you're getting a big glucose excursion in your bloodstream. So you're getting a big glucose spike. And that glucose spike has to come down. Well, what makes it come down? The hormone insulin. Insulin is the bad guy in this story. The higher your glucose goes, the more your pancreas will release insulin in order to bring that glucose down. Well, it turns out that glucose rise was not benign. That glucose rise led to endothelial dysfunction. Transient, but nonetheless endothelial dysfunction.

• 34:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could you just remind people what endothelial cells are?

• 34:51Speaker 05

  The inside of your arteries. Okay? And it will change blood pressure. We've got plenty of data to demonstrate how it changes blood pressure, and over time, that will cause coronary artery disease, that will cause kidney disease, et cetera. But it's the insulin response that is really the bad guy. Now, people think insulin is good because it lowers blood glucose. After all, diabetics take insulin, you know, to lower their blood glucose. Okay, let's take a diabetic, a patient with diabetes. Blood sugar's three hundred. That's bad. We give him a shot of insulin in the arm. Blood sugar goes down to one hundred. Blood sugar went from three hundred to one hundred. Okay.

• 35:35Speaker 05

  Where did the two hundred points of blood glucose go?

• 35:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm assuming that the insulin sequestered it.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  To where?

• 35:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm assuming to the liver.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  To the fat.

• 35:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  For storage. That's insulin's job. Insulin takes whatever you're not burning and puts it into fat for storage. Insulin is not the diabetes hormone. Insulin is the energy storage hormone.

• 36:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  How quickly does it do that?

• 36:03Speaker 05

  Pretty quick.

• 36:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because if I'm, you know, having a very busy day, or that diabetic person is having a very busy day and they're moving around a lot, then you've got insulin-bound glucose in the bloodstream for how long?

• 36:16Speaker 05

  No, no, insulin doesn't bind glucose. Insulin binds to its receptor.

• 36:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure, sorry, sorry.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  And allows for glucose transporters to work.

• 36:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, but for some period of time while that person is active, there's an opportunity to utilize that glucose.

• 36:29Speaker 05

  Well, yeah.

• 36:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? So how quickly is insulin managing that glucose? We know that the spike comes down quickly, but the glucose is not available for energy utilization after what? It's sequestered to the adipose, to the fat tissue, within an hour? Is that about right?

• 36:48Speaker 05

  So about 90 minutes, yeah.

• 36:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 36:50Speaker 05

  But, I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're active, if you eat, you know, a muffin and you're active, okay, your muscles are going to take up that glucose irrespective of insulin. In fact, muscles are insulin-independent. They have glucose transporters, but they are insulin-independent. Because if they weren't, then every patient in diabetic ketoacidosis would be paralyzed. Okay? So glucose will end up in muscles irrespective of energy status and insulin status.

• 37:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in muscles, it's used as immediate fuel and glycogen?

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Both.

• 37:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  Immediate fuel and glycogen storage.

• 37:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  In the muscle, absolutely. All right? Now, if you're active, then you will clear glucose into muscle. Therefore, your blood glucose won't rise as much because it went into muscle. And therefore, your pancreas will put out less insulin. Because it doesn't have to clear as much from the bloodstream. And that's okay, that's good. Right, but let's say you didn't exercise. So you've got a big glucose excursion. Now you have a big insulin response. And that insulin is going to take the excess that's in your blood. It has to clear it and it will go to fat for storage. That insulin rise turns out to be particularly egregious in terms of metabolic disease. And I can prove it.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  There is a mouse, my favorite mouse. I love this mouse. This mouse turns medicine on its head and teaches every doctor why they have to go back to medical school and learn it right. This mouse is called the Poderco mouse. P O D I R K O.

• 38:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it discovered by Poderco?

• 38:34Speaker 05

  No, no. It was discovered in Ron Khan's lab. It was manufactured in Ron Khan's lab. So this is a tissue-specific insulin receptor knockout mouse.

• 38:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  I R K O.

• 38:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So lacks the insulin receptor in a specific-

• 38:48Speaker 05

  In the kidney.

• 38:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the kidney.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Poderco, glomerular podocyte insulin receptor knockout mouse.

• 38:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  We haven't talked too much about transgenic models and knock-ins and knockout. So just in 10 seconds or less, basically, these are mice that are genetically engineered to lack the receptor for insulin specifically in the-

• 39:09Speaker 05

  Glomerular podocyte, the kidney.

• 39:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the kidney. And everywhere else in this mouse, insulin does its thing normally.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 39:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, great.

• 39:17Speaker 05

  So, these animals are euglycemic, normal blood glucose levels. These animals are normally glucose tolerant. They, you know, go up, they go down, just like every other mouse. These mice are not fat. These mice are not thin. These mice are mice. Except, they have the worst diabetic nephropathy on the planet.

• 39:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  So their nerve, oh, their kidneys is degenerative.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  Their kidneys degenerate to nothing.

• 39:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yikes.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  Now, they have normal blood glucose levels. They have normal glucose tolerance. They have normal insulin tolerance, whole body. But their kidneys are dying. How come? Can't be the glucose. It's the insulin. Because insulin's the bad guy. Insulin's actually making the kidney disease. And so these animals that are insulin resistant, they have diabetic nephropathy without diabetes.

• 40:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the insulin is having a negative, clearly negative effect on the kidneys without binding to the receptor.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 40:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  So circulating insulin can do stuff without binding to its receptor?

• 40:33Speaker 05

  Well, it's no, it binds to its receptor in different parts of the body.

• 40:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Other parts of the body.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  Other parts of the body.

• 40:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  But in the kidney, it can't because it's a knockout.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Because it's knockout, right. The point is, insulin does stuff by itself. And it turns out insulin drives growth. Now, every cell in your body wants to burn at one time in its life and wants to grow at another time in its life. Every cell has those two pathways. Burning, growth. Burning, growth. What determines whether a cell should be burning or whether a cell should be growing?

• 41:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know what makes it burning, but presumably it's in the, has something to do with mitochondria.

• 41:19Speaker 05

  It has everything to do with mitochondria. All right. So every cell needs to burn and needs to grow at a different time in its life. Here's a way to think about it. We all start out as a zygote, a single cell. We end up an adult. Now, that single cell had to become two cells. Those two cells had to become four cells. Those four cells had to become eight cells. And on and on and on and on. So every cycle, there's a doubling. How many doublings to get from a zygote to an adult?

• 41:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's in exponential growth, so.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't, I don't know it off the top of my head.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Forty-one.

• 42:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Forty one.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Forty one, two to the forty one doublings.

• 42:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gives you an organism.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Ten trillion cells.

• 42:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  We're ten trillion cells?

• 42:13Speaker 05

  We're ten trillion cells.

• 42:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do we know that?

• 42:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Two to the forty one.

• 42:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 42:18Speaker 05

  Okay, now, of those forty one doublings, some of them had to occur in utero. Some of them had to occur postnatally. So I need two numbers that add up to forty one. How many in utero, how many postnatally?

• 42:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, way more. You start off with a lot more than you end up with, but then you have cells that turn over throughout the lifespan. So this is a tough one.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 42:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because skin cells turn over.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 42:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  With neurons, it's it's pretty straightforward. Because you're gonna, somewhere between three and ten. Right, well, you're and you're born with somewhere between three and ten X of what you end up with, depending on the brain structure.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  So but for whole body wide, I don't know how you'd come up with that number.

• 43:01Speaker 05

  Thirty six and five.

• 43:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 43:04Speaker 05

  Thirty six doublings prenatally, five doublings postnatally. And I can prove that to you too. Typical baby weighs seven pounds. First doubling fourteen pounds, second doubling twenty eight pounds, next doubling fifty six pounds, next doubling hundred twelve pounds, next doubling two hundred twenty four pounds.

• 43:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hopefully it stops there.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  Obese individual.

• 43:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hopefully it stops there. Not not all people two hundred twelve pounds are obese. Um, but some people who are of certain heights or below are two hundred twelve are obese.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  Okay. Point is, the cell has to know when to grow and when to burn. It turns out that the signal for that is oxygen. Because oxygen is necessary for mitochondria to be able to burn. In the absence of oxygen, the cell only knows how to grow. This is actually why Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in nineteen thirty one for the Warburg Effect. He asked the question, how come cancer cells don't need oxygen to grow? And the answer is because no cell needs oxygen to grow. In fact, oxygen is the thing that prevents growth.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Famous article from the New England Journal of Medicine nineteen fifty one, Mount Everest in utero. Because every fetus is oxygen deprived. So. Normal, partial pressure of oxygen, hundred millimeters of mercury out here, right? If I checked your blood, it'd be about a hundred, right?

• 44:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I hope so.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  How about a tumor cell?

• 44:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Um, guessing tumor cells probably, is it double?

• 44:45Speaker 05

  About forty-four.

• 44:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wait, you just told me-

• 44:48Speaker 05

  Partial pressure of oxygen in a tumor cell, it's about forty-four.

• 44:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you just told me that, well, tumor cells, which grow like wild-

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Right. They grow like wild because they don't have oxygen.

• 45:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  But they, but there's some of the, so here's what's peculiar about it.

• 45:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tumor cells are some of the most vascularized cells, or tumors are heavily vascularized. I mean, I mean, one way to, one way to try and kill one is to devascularize the tumor cell.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  Right, yes, and, you know, angiogenesis inhibition, et cetera, you know, it's a big deal, you know, due to Fulkman and all that from Harvard, you know.

• 45:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the excess blood to a tumor is the attempt to bring in oxygen that it's not getting.

• 45:28Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 45:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  As opposed to delivering lots of oxygen, and that's why it's growing.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 45:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  But a fetus, what's the partial pressure in the placenta? Six to thirty-one. So it's actually like a mile above Mount Everest. That's how much oxygen the fetus gets, and it's for that reason that you've got thirty-six doublings. And then, as soon as you're out, you know, and you cut the cord, and you start breathing, and now your partial pressure's at a hundred, that's when growth slows down.

• 46:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Has there been any effort to treat tumors by oxygenating tumors?

• 46:03Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 46:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  And what does that look like?

• 46:05Speaker 05

  It's hyperbaric oxygen therapy, it's a thing.

• 46:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we, we'll probably do an episode on hyperbaric chambers, it's, the, the reason we haven't yet is, it's pretty niche, but there are people who own these things, who sit in these things. Okay, so, we, we got here by way of, by way of, by the bagel.

• 46:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 46:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I just want to orient us. That, you just got two hundred and fifty calories of the, the bagel, we talked about glucose, excursions-

• 46:35Speaker 05

  But it's that insulin rise that's driving the adiposity, and it's also driving the growth. Okay? In the absence of oxygen, because if you have oxygen, then you don't need that much insulin. Okay. So... Because you're gonna burn instead of store.

• 46:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. In terms of the, the, uh, the raw metabolism of carbohydrate though, that glucose. If I eat 250 calories of glucose, how much of that did I quote unquote actually eat? How much is, is used?

• 47:10Speaker 05

  How much is used?

• 47:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, let's assume that I'm, I'm at my desk working or I'm walking around a little bit. I'm not, I'm not exercising hard in the, in the subsequent hour.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  So used for what is the question?

• 47:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm getting back to the calories, is a calorie a calorie? Clearly the answer is no, based on the processing of different types of calories. We established it for fat, the almonds, we established it for protein.

• 47:30Speaker 05

  Right.

• 47:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  The porterhouse with butter. And now we're, we're trying to establish that for the 250 calories of a bagel, which is glucose.

• 47:37Speaker 05

  Right, so the glucose has to be phosphor related. So you're going to lose, uh, an ATP in the process. So you're going to go ATP goes to ADP. And then that ADP will go to AMP, adenosine monophosphate, which will then go to IMP, inositol monophosphate, which will then go to uric acid.

• 47:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 47:56Speaker 05

  And that uric acid will be then released from the cell, circulate in the bloodstream and hopefully go out in the kidney. In the process, that uric acid can inhibit mitochondrial function and it can also inhibit endothelial nitric oxide synthase, which is the enzyme in your vasculature that is your endogenous blood pressure lowerer.

• 48:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, by expanding blood vessels and capillaries.

• 48:21Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 48:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, this is the mechanistic, uh, foundation of the drugs that were originally used for, uh, improving prostate function, but are used to treat erectile dysfunction, which are the, the PD.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  PD5 inhibitors.

• 48:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Inhibitors which allow nitric oxide to be, uh, around longer and more of it, right? People use it for other purposes too.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Right.

• 48:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Um, now no one will forget if I queue it up with that, that example.

• 48:43Speaker 05

  We, we, uh, you know, in the neonatal intensive care unit, it closes patent ductus arteriosus, which is a big deal in, uh, in the neonatal, uh, world.

• 48:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, okay, I'll, I want to ask you about that, but, but, um, so I heard two things. One is that. Glucose and the insulin that goes with it increases uric acid. Uric acid, while it has certain important functions in health, too much of it, you said, can inhibit nitric oxide.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, can inhibit nitric oxide.

• 49:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that means that the blood vessels and capillaries are going to stay more constricted. So blood pressure is going to be higher than it would be normally.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 49:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then uric acid is also inhibiting mitochondrial function.

• 49:22Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 49:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. But eating half a bagel isn't necessarily a terrible thing if it's within your caloric requirements.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  And it all depends on how much you clear and how high your insulin goes.

• 49:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, let's compare that 250 calories of glucose to 250 calories of fructose.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's come up with a food example. 250 calories of fructose would be trivial to consume in the form of high fructose corn syrup, right?

• 49:54Speaker 05

  So remember, the high fructose corn syrup is half glucose, half fructose.

• 49:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so let's not use-

• 49:58Speaker 05

  So it would be 125, 125.

• 50:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  So let's not use that. Well, so let's assume, so we can talk about a soda for, to get that 250 calories easily. Especially if it's not a can or a European-sized bottle or can.

• 50:12Speaker 05

  Eight ounce, eight ounce can of soda.

• 50:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so eight ounce can of soda and maybe let's include a food item. Let's talk like a store-bought packaged cookie, a couple Oreos, two Oreos. Probably get you to that 250 or maybe four Oreos.

• 50:26Speaker 05

  Maybe three Oreos.

• 50:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. Oreo lovers everywhere celebrating, three. 250 calories of fructose. What's the effect on uric acid? What's the effect on caloric burn? What's the effect on anything for that matter that we should be aware of?

• 50:43Speaker 05

  All right, so first of all, the Oreo has plenty of fructose in it, so keep that in mind.

• 50:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 50:47Speaker 05

  The, if, let's say you consumed 250 calories in a bagel, because that's pretty much polymerized glucose.

• 50:55Speaker 05

  Versus say the soda. So the bagel versus the soda, that's what you're.

• 50:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Equivalent calories.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Equivalent calories.

• 51:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or the the bagel versus, let's say, two Oreos and a little bit of, um, and yeah, two Oreos.

• 51:07Speaker 05

  Okay. So, number one, there's only half the glucose in the soda because the other half is the fructose. It's one twenty-five, one twenty-five. So your glucose rise won't be as high. Your glucose excursion will be lower. This is actually one of the reasons why there's this thing called glycemic index. Glycemic index is a canard. It's garbage. It is complete and utter BS.

• 51:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  The glycemic index?

• 51:36Speaker 05

  Absolute BS. Nothing, nothing is more egregious in terms of, uh, uh, argument than than than the glycemic index. And this is one of the things that dieticians as promote and espouse. And one of the things that's gotta go. Okay, this is an idea that must die.

• 51:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, we'll get back to why the glycemic index has gotta die. Uh, but so so that two hundred and fifty calories and actually, can we, can we make these equal? Just for sake of of simplicity, can we say two hundred and fifty calories of glucose from the bagel versus two hundred and fifty calories of fructose? How do we get two hundred and fifty calories of pure fructose?

• 52:15Speaker 05

  We don't.

• 52:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  You can't. Okay, you gotta bring the glucose with you.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  Lab, lab fructose. You'd have to make it.

• 52:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Then let's stay with the Oreos, which is half glucose, half fructose.

• 52:22Speaker 05

  Right. That's, I mean, there is no fructose alone in nature.

• 52:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Even crackers, some of the ones that are salty are also sweet. They have fructose in them.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 52:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  High fructose corn syrup. Yeah. That's why it's impossible to eat just one.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 52:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  And, um, so what's happening biochemically as a consequence of the fructose component specifically?

• 52:41Speaker 05

  So the fructose will, first of all, go into the intestine. The intestine will metabolize some of that fructose. Through what is known as intestinal de novo lipogenesis. About 10% of that fructose will be turned into fat right in the intestine.

• 52:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's because fructose, it just wants to be fat?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, fructose wants to be fat. Fructose is the lipogenic substrate.

• 53:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Here, we're not talking about body fat. We're talking about fat molecules that can potentially be used as energy.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  That's right. Triglyceride molecules. Okay, so 10% of that fructose will be turned into triglyceride right in the intestine and be released into the bloodstream, and it is the reason for a postprandial triglyceride response.

• 53:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Postprandial is, and I'm including myself in this group, is nerd speak for after eating lunch. Typically, it's lunch.

• 53:31Speaker 05

  So that's actually one of the drivers of cardiovascular pathology. That intestinal de novo lipogenesis, turning that fructose into triglyceride right in the intestine. Now, there's a limit to how fast and how much the intestine can do that. The rest of the fructose will be absorbed into the portal vein, but not before some of that fructose will make it further down and it will nitrate tight junction proteins.

• 54:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, portal vein of the kidney.

• 54:03Speaker 05

  Portal vein goes to the liver. Portal vein goes from the visceral, from the intestine, to the liver.

• 54:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  No kidney, it doesn't feed the kidney.

• 54:11Speaker 05

  No kidney. Intestine to liver.

• 54:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 54:15Speaker 05

  Okay, but fructose nitrates tight junction proteins. Now, let me explain that to your audience. Your intestine is a sewer. Definition of a sewer, a pipe with shit in it. Okay, that's its sewer. Our intestines are sewers. There's junk in the center, and the job of the intestine is to move the junk through to the anus, absorbing the good stuff. Why you can't. The intestine is made up of cells, intestinal epithelial cells, that are bound together, and they're bound with proteins that basically form a barrier.

• 54:58Speaker 05

  Those barriers are called tight junction proteins.

• 55:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Things like claudins and things like that.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Zonulin is the main one. Okay, there are others, but zonulin is the one that goes, is defective in celiac disease.

• 55:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  What defines a tight junction? Is it, is like completely impermeable or semi-permeable?

• 55:14Speaker 05

  Completely impermeable. Unless its function is inhibited. Turns out, if you alter the phosphorylation status, or the nitrate status of that tight junction, it will become transiently permeable.

• 55:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 55:33Speaker 05

  And so fructose nitrates tight junction proteins, causing them to be transiently permeable, allowing some of the junk in your intestine to get through into your bloodstream.

• 55:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  So this is leaky gut?

• 55:48Speaker 05

  This is leaky gut. This is what causes leaky gut. Fructose is a driver of leaky gut.

• 55:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  That causes inflammation at the level of the liver, which ultimately leads to systemic inflammation. One of the reasons why high sensitivity CRP is high in patients who eat ultra-processed food.

• 56:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  CRP is C-reactive protein, which is a marker of a, essentially an inflammatory immune response.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 56:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  You don't want it too high.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  And 93% of Americans today are inflamed.

• 56:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Does that mean that 93% of Americans have leaky guts?

• 56:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it does, because that's where it comes from.

• 56:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, in addition to limiting fructose intake, what are things that support the tight junctions of the intestinal pathway?

• 56:37Speaker 05

  So, there are three barriers in your intestine to keep the junk where it belongs, in the center, so that it can get pooped out the, your behind, all right? Three separate barriers. One is a physical barrier called the mucin layer. So it's a layer of mucus that actually sits on top of the intestinal epithelial cells. Now, that mucin is a polysaccharide, and the bacteria can use that mucin layer for its own purposes. It will eat your mucin layer if you don't feed your bacteria. You must feed your bacteria, or your bacteria will feed on you. Okay, so you are in concert with your microbiome.

• 57:20Speaker 05

  If you deprive your microbiome of the food that it needs, it will use you as its food. And that's one of the reasons why fiber is so important.

• 57:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  So fiber to build up this mucin layer is one way to reinforce the fence that is the tight junctions, et cetera, between your intestine and the bloodstream. This raises an interesting point about fasting. Many people, including myself, do a sort of pseudo intermittent fasting. I eat my first meal somewhere between 11:00 and noon. I'm not strict about this, the 11:00 versus noon thing, and probably eat my last bite of food somewhere around 8:00 PM. And occasionally, it's outside that window. I've done this for a long time, it just feels best to me. Other people use a shorter eating window. One thing that I learned from a colleague at Yale who studies the gut microbiome that was surprising to me is that when you eat in that way, there's a long stretch of time, sometimes longer for people that have a shorter eating window,

• 58:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  longer fasting window, that is, where you're actually eating up your own intestinal lining. So this idea that fasting is so great for us, on the one hand, might be true. On the other hand, you're actually consuming components of your... You're not feeding your gut microbiome, and you deplete it. But then, here's where I was positively surprised. When you do eat, provided that you eat enough fiber and in particular, high-quality fermented foods, low-sugar fermented foods, it seems that the lining of the gut and the gut microbiome is replenished to a level that is greater than if you had eaten for longer periods of the 24-hour cycle. Do I have that right?

• 58:54Speaker 05

  We do, you do have it right. And I don't know why that is true, but it does seem to be the case. And fermented foods, in part because they've got already short-chain fatty acids in them.

• 59:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that the preferred food of the microbiome?

• 59:08Speaker 05

  Well, it's what the microbiome actually turns fiber into. So it's probably helping your intestinal epithelial cells. In the same way, what the microbiome turning fiber into short chain fatty acids helps. So it's what we call a postbiotic. So you have prebiotic, which is the food for the bacteria. You have the probiotic, which is the bacteria itself. And then you have the postbiotic, which is what the bacteria make in order to heal you. Okay. And so short chain fatty acids are postbiotics. And there are a lot of people selling short chain fatty acids, you know, drinks and supplements and what have you. Whether they work or not is another story.

• 59:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  If I consume fructose in the form of, let's say, a highly processed food, has minimal antioxidants, but it's got plenty of calories typically.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 59:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's disrupting the tight junctions, making my gut leaky.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I'm also eating fiber.

• 1:00:04Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:00:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I'm having a, you know, a meal that includes a salad. I'm having, having some probiotics. And then I want like a couple of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, like in the dark chocolate ones in particular. I don't do this anymore, but I used to eat like that more often. As, as time has gone on, I've, it becomes, I don't like to call it stricter, but more, I, I tend to like healthier foods over time. And I think you can get away with different things at different stages of life. Although you work with young people, so we'll, we'll get to very young people, so we'll get to this. But how, how much damage am I doing by ingesting any fructose in the form of a highly processed food?

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  So, I'll make it very simple, Andrew. I am for dessert. For dessert. I am not for dessert for breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner.

• 1:00:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:52Speaker 05

  Okay. So if you want to have a couple of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups as your dessert, in the same way as you might have a cognac for dessert.

• 1:01:04Speaker 05

  That's fine. I have no problem with that. The question is, are you gonna eat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups for breakfast?

• 1:01:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I don't eat breakfast, but no, but I see your point.

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  The National School Breakfast Program, which 29% of schoolchildren today consume, is a bowl of Fruit Loops and a glass of orange juice. That is 41 grams of sugar. American Heart Association says that the upper limit for children should be 12 grams of added sugar per day. That's 41 grams of added sugar, and it's just breakfast.

• 1:01:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's fructose-rich?

• 1:01:44Speaker 05

  Totally, completely. So the question is, which dessert are we talking about?

• 1:01:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And, right, and can we, can we adjust that morning meal to a different reality? Because I agree that there are plenty of kids eating that, or a muffin that might be the equivalent. But what about the parent who's as, okay, let's come up with a healthier option that the kid still likes, like, I'm thinking back to my childhood, like a Honey Nut Cheerios or something. So not Fruit Loops, which is kind of the extreme.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  Take a look at the side of the package. No difference.

• 1:02:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  And now, let's say they go with some, like, waffles that are made. So with a, with a pre-made mix, some milk, some butter. You know, so mom or dad is making waffles. Great, it sounds healthier, but then if you do the breakdown, are we still ending up at very high? Are we basically eating dessert for breakfast in that case, too?

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  Are we eating Eggo waffles, or are we making waffles de novo, you know, from scratch in your own kitchen?

• 1:02:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's say making-

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  Big difference. Okay, because the Eggo waffles, you know, replete with sugar on purpose, because the food industry knows, when they add it, you buy more, because it's addictive. Okay, and we actually have the demographic, the mechanistic, the imaging, and also the economic data to demonstrate that sugar's addictive and the food industry knows it. So have you ever heard of a phenomenon called price elasticity? Price elasticity is an economic term that is used to ask the question, if the price of a given good goes up by 1%,

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  that should result in reduction in purchase or consumption, because price influences consumption. How much does it influence it? So, if it's, if something's price elastic, when the price goes up, consumption goes down equivalently. A food that is price elastic, the most price elastic food is eggs. So, when the price of eggs goes up 1%, consumption of eggs goes down 0.68%, meaning that eggs have a price elasticity of 0.32. Got it? Got it.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  Now, what's the most price inelastic food? The top three most price inelastic foods are: [

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, described the irrational actor. Now, the irrational actor cannot determine value. And the reason is because he is a risk averse. So the cost is always too great. So the utility may be the same, but the cost goes up because that's why they have, you know, aversive tendencies. The irrational actor. Jeffrey Sachs has described the hedonic actor, who also cannot determine value. Because it doesn't matter what it costs. They need their fix.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  And this is what's going on, and the food industry knows it. And that's why every food in the store has been spiked.

• 1:06:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  We talked about dessert for breakfast in the form of cereals.

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:06:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some of which are disguised or couched as healthier, you know, I think of like Honey Nut Cheerios. It seems healthier than Fruit Loops.

• 1:06:15Speaker 05

  It's not.

• 1:06:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  It looks healthier, like the, just by way of color. It looks kind of weedy, you know, color. So, but let, and in terms of lunch, I mean, one of the things that I love about Europe is that the breads are amazing.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, the breads are terrific there.

• 1:06:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I like them because they're not as sweet.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:06:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so a sandwich from, not every deli, but from a typical sandwich shopper that one makes with store bought bread, sliced bread in the US has a lot of fructose.

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  It does.

• 1:06:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  I looked this up prior to our discussion today. So in some ways, dessert is being woven into foods that are, that parents and/or kids, everyone thinks are savory are, we're actually eating sweets.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  Exactly right.

• 1:06:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  But we can't, but we don't taste them as sweet at a conscious level necessarily.

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  But our, but our taste buds do.

• 1:07:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. So the question is, why do they do that? So, question for your audience. You buy a loaf of bread at the local bakery. How soon before it stales?

• 1:07:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Two days, at best.

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  If it's really great bread.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  That's right. The better the bread, the quicker it stales.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  You buy a loaf of bread at the neighborhood grocery store. How soon before it stals?

• 1:07:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, you've got probably a week and then there's the moldy pieces at the end that you try, that you know, if you're in college and you were immediately trying to scrape that off.

• 1:07:37Speaker 05

  Well, it can last up to three weeks, depending.

• 1:07:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. You could throw it in the freezer. You could probably do that with the bakery bread, but it's never the same.

• 1:07:43Speaker 05

  Never the same.

• 1:07:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's never the same.

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  So the question is, why is that? And the answer is sugar. The answer is sugar. So the grocery store bread had sugar added to it on purpose because when you bake it, the sugar does not evaporate. It stays in the bread and the sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it holds on to water. This is a phenomenon that the food industry uses called water activity. Okay. And so it will hold on to water and so it will stay spongy and it will not stale as quickly as the bakery store bread, which did not have that sugar added to it. So even something as benign as bread has been turned into something that ultimately leads to chronic metabolic disease.

• 1:08:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  We've pivoted somewhat from carbohydrate divided into glucose and fructose to a discussion of sugar. Could you tell us the link between sugar and fructose? So table sugar, what percentage of table sugar is fructose? What percentage of brown sugar is fructose? What percentage of the sugar that's added to food is high fructose corn syrup on average? You know, just because here what we're talking about is what you're describing as an intentional lacing of food with something that's addictive, but that's also processed very differently at the level of the kidney, at the level of the liver.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:09:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's bad. It's a bad, it's a bad situation.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:09:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, so when we talk about sugar, I think we need to be as careful in describing what we really mean as when we talk about a calorie.

• 1:09:18Speaker 05

  I completely agree. So for your audience, let's be very, very clear on definitions.

• 1:09:26Speaker 05

  Let's not use the word sugar because it has multiple definitions. Let's use sucrose. Sucrose is what you put in your coffee. It's the crystals, alright? It's cane sugar, beet sugar, you know, the, you know, the stuff that you teaspoons of, right? This was all that was available for many, many years. That is one molecule of glucose, one molecule of fructose, bound together, for the chemists out there, an O-glyc acidic linkage, okay? The enzyme in your intestine called sucrase cleaves this O-glyc acidic linkage in about

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  a nanosecond. You absorb the two molecules separately. The glucose goes to the entire body, generates an insulin response. The fructose goes straight to your liver, generates fat. That's sucrose. High fructose corn syrup is essentially one molecule of glucose, one molecule of fructose. Not bound together, no O-glyc acidic linkage. So they're free. The enzyme sucrase doesn't care because the bond's already broken. Ultimately, they do the same thing, and that's why high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are indistinguishable metabolically.

• 1:10:54Speaker 05

  What they are is they're very different economically, and the reason is because high fructose corn syrup's half the price of sucrose. Because sucrose, we get from importing, and high fructose corn syrup, we make at home. Sucrose is in bags, high fructose corn syrup is in barrels. Sucrose, you can sell at the store, high fructose corn syrup, you sell to the, you know, ultra-processed food manufacturer. You can't buy high fructose corn syrup at the, you know, at the grocery store. So they're very different in terms of what they're used for. High fructose corn syrup is particularly egregious because it's so missable, because

• 1:11:38Speaker 05

  it's already a liquid. So you've probably remember Chips Ahoy cookies in the old days. Okay, they would often would seem like the sugar in the cookie had crystallized because the sugar content was so high.

• 1:11:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's been a while since I've had one. They weren't particularly good.

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you eat two of them and then you think they're good and then you want to eat four. That's what's so odd. The first bite is kind of like, and then it's bombs away.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  There you go. Well, now it's Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies.

• 1:12:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I remember the Chewy Chips Ahoy.

• 1:12:14Speaker 05

  Remember Chewy Chips? Well, that's high fructose corn syrup. Because because the two molecules are free, they don't crystallize. So you can actually up the dose.

• 1:12:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Several times throughout today's discussion, you've been talking about the quote unquote food industry.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  I am.

• 1:12:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I but I understand, you know, that most businesses exist to make money.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Many businesses start off with good intentions and drift in order to stay to stay competitive.

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  And many, many businesses, as we know, not all of which are entirely bad, such as the pharmaceutical industry, right? They're bad. There are instances of like the opioid crisis. But then there are drugs from the pharmaceutical industry that help save lives. I mean, that's my my stance. The food industry, I think there are good actors and there are bad actors. But we're talking about the food industry. Okay. Well, we can talk about the exercise industry. We talk about the podcast industry. I mean, you got good actors and bad actors.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 1:13:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what you've alluded to several times here, and you're more informed than I am, is a concerted effort to lace food with a form of sugar that makes people crave more of that food and that is causing metabolic illness, disrupting mitochondria, and on and on.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:13:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're the physician, not me. You've worked with patients who struggle with obesity and for various reasons, not me. And so we could probably spend hours, if not days, talking about all the terrible things that the quote unquote food industry has done. But What do you think is the pure motivation? Right? I don't think that they want people to be sick, but they want to sell product and this sells more product. So then it raises two questions. Why is it that more people don't know this information, although many more will know after today's conversation? And certainly in government, it's a mix, regardless of what side of the aisle you're on, or if you're right in between.

• 1:14:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  There are clearly people that care about the health of themselves and others. So I can understand how things might have gotten to this point, but what do you think are the barriers to getting people to appreciate just what a problem this is? And getting people to change their choices in terms of what they're eating? Are they truly addicted to the point where they are sick? They can't make good decisions like a drug addict who's highly addicted to heroin is a sick person. They have an illness and they need treatment, but until they get that treatment, they can't make good decisions.

• 1:15:02Speaker 05

  Let's take an analogy. Alcohol. Forty percent of Americans are teetotalers, never touch the stuff.

• 1:15:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Forty percent don't drink?

• 1:15:10Speaker 05

  Forty percent don't drink.

• 1:15:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. I'm not a big fan of alcohol. I've never seen it make anyone better at anything that really mattered.

• 1:15:16Speaker 05

  No, because it's-

• 1:15:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Except drinking. And that doesn't really matter.

• 1:15:19Speaker 05

  It's also completely vestigial. There's no biochemical reaction in the body that requires alcohol. Okay? For the same reason, by the way, fructose. Forty percent are social drinkers. Yeah, you can pick up a beer, put it down. I'm in that category. Ten percent are binge drinkers and ten percent are chronic alcoholics. Okay? Now, do you deprive the forty percent of social drinkers because of the twenty percent of binge drinkers and chronic alcoholics?

• 1:15:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I believe people should be in choice, but I believe people should know what they are doing so that they can be in choice.

• 1:15:58Speaker 05

  Well-

• 1:15:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? Like, do as you- I always say, and I said this about the alcohol episode, which turned out to be one of our most prolific episodes, where I said that, you know, more than two drinks, zero is better than any, and more than two drinks per week, you need to do other things to offset that and it's problematic. That's what, those are what the data say. But I, but I would say, do as you want, but know what you're doing.

• 1:16:17Speaker 05

  Well, so I would say that that's exactly what the food industry wants you to think. That is the food industry's mantra, is you have your own choice.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  Personal responsibility. So the question is, does personal responsibility work? And the answer is, no, it doesn't. Every public health debacle in the history of mankind started out as a personal health issue before it became a public health crisis. And you can pick your, you know, personal responsibility issue. Whether it be exposures, whether it be addictions, whether it be infections. Bottom line is, ultimately, it required a societal response. Okay? We can talk about syphilis, we can talk about tuberculosis, ultimately needed a public health response. We can talk about teen pregnancy, we can talk about

• 1:17:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Tobacco.

• 1:17:15Speaker 05

  Tobacco. Ultimately needs a public health response because the sheer enormity of it and the egregiousness of it requires that public health response. Well, turns out, this is no different. In order to exercise personal responsibility, four criteria have to be met. Those four criteria are the following. Number one, knowledge. You have to have the knowledge because if you don't have the knowledge, and how can you exercise personal responsibility? Well, in fact, the public's being kept from the knowledge. We're doing this now in part to, you know, to entrain that knowledge, to get people to understand what the problem is.

• 1:17:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I mean, I consider myself pretty informed about nutrition and health, but already today, I've learned two dozen facts about processing of fructose and calories generally that I had no knowledge of prior.

• 1:18:12Speaker 05

  Well, that's good, okay? Because it's not about the math, it's about the science. Okay? They want it to be about calories. So, we have this thing called food science, we have this thing called nutrition, and we have this thing called metabolic health. They are not the same. Food science is what happens to food between the ground and the mouth. Nutrition is what happens to food between the mouth and the cell. Metabolic health is what happens to food inside the cell. But all of the chronic diseases that we are suffering from, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease, those eight diseases, which make up 75% of healthcare expenditures in this country today.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  Are all inside the cell because they are all mitochondrial dysfunction. And there is no medicine that gets to the mitochondria.

• 1:19:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Although you and others at Stanford, Harvard, et cetera, are starting this with metabolic psychiatry being one instance, right?

• 1:19:15Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 1:19:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  And UCSF as well, for giving, I should have mentioned UCSF up front. Your home institution, wonderful institution, right up the road from Stanford. So, you know, things are changing, people are starting to think about mitochondrial health.

• 1:19:26Speaker 05

  They are.

• 1:19:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so you list off the first, the first thing, you said there are four things that stand as very, first one was knowledge.

• 1:19:31Speaker 05

  Knowledge.

• 1:19:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  Second, access, because if you don't have access, then how can you exercise personal responsibility?

• 1:19:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Access to healthier alternatives.

• 1:19:40Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:19:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which means cost effective. I mean, I love berries from the farmer's market more than I love berries from the store. I love the farmer's markets generally, but it takes time, energy to go there. And the costs are actually lower at the level of what you hand the vendor typically.

• 1:19:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:19:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  But, uh, volume is tough to achieve.

• 1:20:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:20:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  They actually have me at a, at a quota, I'm not allowed to buy as many berries as I want, because obviously there are other people who want berries.

• 1:20:07Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:20:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So there's that, right? People have to feed their family that, you know, and we're used to eating a lot of volume.

• 1:20:13Speaker 05

  But you're able to at least go there.

• 1:20:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sometimes.

• 1:20:16Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:20:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Speaker 05

  We're talking about people who live in quote, food deserts. We're also talking about people who live in food swamps. Okay? And when we're talking about food swamps, we're not talking about a plethora of healthy foods, we're talking about all the junk. That's what they, they live in the swamp of junk. So, if you live in the swamp of junk, how are you supposed to exercise personal responsibility? Number three, uh, affordability. So you have to be able to afford your choice, and society has to be able to afford your choice. And right now, we can't afford that choice because healthcare costs right now are at 4.1 trillion dollars a year.

• 1:20:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  But like so many things in, uh, Behavioral economics and health. It's so hard for people to see that the immediate choice is leading to a higher cost down the road. There are just too many nodes of separation for people to realize, hey, when I'm reaching for this cereal as opposed to making waffles for my kids from scratch, or, you know, they're thinking time efficiency, cost efficiency, volume, the kids not throwing tantrums because they're not, no longer getting the cereal. And it's very difficult to see this is the reason why healthcare costs are going up. There are just too many nodes of separation.

• 1:21:33Speaker 05

  Well, couldn't agree more, but ultimately it's because the government separates and silos food industry profits from healthcare costs. If you actually combine those, because they ultimately are the same, you would see the problem. So globally, the food industry grosses nine trillion dollars a year. Healthcare costs globally cost 11 trillion dollars a year. Dietary-related healthcare costs. Environmental costs cost 7 trillion dollars a year. And productivity costs cost 1 trillion dollars a year.

• 1:22:13Speaker 05

  So when you do the math, 9 minus 11 minus 7 minus 1 means that there is a 10 trillion dollar a year deficit because of us cleaning up the mess that the food industry makes.

• 1:22:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  And while numbers like that-

• 1:22:28Speaker 05

  That's not affordable.

• 1:22:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, I agree, and while numbers like that land really hard, I find that for myself and for many people, statistics like that are hard to keep in mind in a way... There's something about the human brain that hears that and goes, whoa, or like, that war costs that much, and this food issue costs that much.

• 1:22:47Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:22:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then we go to the store and we're hungry.

• 1:22:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:22:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the kids are hungry, and you're... And so those nodes of separation, it's almost like a neural slash memory slash prefrontal cortex issue to me. And of course, I look at everything through the lens of neurobiology.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 1:23:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, not everything, but most everything. And so how, how could I not, how could we not? But then, like, the issue is, well, there's still food on the shelves. And, you know, and so it's very, what do we do to connect, to bring closer together these nodes? What would the government do?

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  So the question is, is there food on the shelves? Let me finish the fourth one, and then I want to come back to that point. Let me just, you know, finish a concept. So affordability. And number four- Externalities. Your choice can't hurt anybody else. But what if your choice does hurt somebody else? So like for tobacco, secondhand smoke.

• 1:23:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  For alcohol, drunk driving.

• 1:23:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  But what's the argument for teen pregnancy? That someone else was gonna have to raise the kids?

• 1:23:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. All right, but what about for food? Okay. Well, how about the fact that your employer, Stanford University, has to pay $2,750 per year in obesity-related healthcare expenses that they have passed on to you, even though you're not obese? That is affecting you. So that guy's obesity, right there? That is affecting you.

• 1:24:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Ah, but there nowadays, it's especially tricky, even to have the conversation. I'm willing to have it now.

• 1:24:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which is that, you know, there's this whole concept of fat shaming, right? So if somebody is obese, whose fault is it? And if we even talk about it, is, are we subject to attack? Legitimate attack? You know, so like, so calling something, someone obese at a clinical level, like, I mean, you're an expert in endocrinology.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  Don't talk about obesity. Let's talk about diabetes.

• 1:24:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so talk about the consequence of obesity.

• 1:24:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's talk about the metabolic health issue itself. Okay? The fact is that diabetes is now 11.4% of America.

• 1:25:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  What was it 20 years ago?

• 1:25:03Speaker 05

  It was, 20 years ago, it was about 8%.

• 1:25:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was wondering this earlier. 20 years ago, there was a lot more margarine in refrigerators, but people were thinner and there was less diabetes.

• 1:25:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Everything you told us about margarine and trans fats is that it's bad, bad, bad. Now butter is back, as Time Magazine and you said.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:25:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  So clearly can't be the transition away from trans fats that's increased obesity.

• 1:25:25Speaker 05

  Well, no, no.

• 1:25:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's gonna be the increase in sugar and

• 1:25:29Speaker 05

  It's the increase in sugar.

• 1:25:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  And these hidden sugars in food.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  Exactly. That's right. All right, the key, though, is Pakistan and India. Because, and China, they are not fat, but they have 14% diabetes rates. And they're thin. And the reason is because of ultra-processed food.

• 1:25:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are there any countries in the world?

• 1:25:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  That don't allow high fructose corn syrup, or at least not at the level that we do.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  Oh, boatloads. Okay, there are boatloads of countries that don't import high fructose corn syrup or don't make it.

• 1:26:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  So Scandinavian countries?

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  Scandinavian countries, most of Europe. Other than the Asia-Pacific rim, so Japan has it, in fact, it was invented in Japan, 1966 Saga Medical School, Takasaki, at all. Korea has it, but Australia does not have it, Thailand does not have it, but they have just as much of an obesity and diabetes problem as we do, because they have sucrose. Because high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are no different metabolically, so it doesn't really matter.

• 1:26:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's that one-to-one.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  It's the one-to-one thing, exactly.

• 1:26:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Of glucose and fructose.

• 1:26:43Speaker 05

  So here's the question, Andrew, okay, so I want to go back to that. You said all this food is still on the shelves. Is it food? What is the definition of food?

• 1:26:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can I give the definition I think most people would give? It's not necessarily the one I would give, but something that contains caloric energy. Or like, I could eat this microphone, but it's not going to provide much useful energy.

• 1:27:11Speaker 05

  The definition of food, straight from the dictionary, and believe me, I looked it up and memorized it.

• 1:27:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  I believe you.

• 1:27:18Speaker 05

  Substrate that contributes to either growth or burning of an organism.

• 1:27:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  That is the definition of food.

• 1:27:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's pretty scientific.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  100% correct. Growth or burning. So any substrate that passes your lips that contributes to either growth or burning, that's food. Okay, let's do it. Let's do burning first. I just showed you that sugar, which is the marker of ultra-processed food, and 73% of the items in the grocery store are spiked with sugar, inhibits burning. It inhibits those three enzymes involved in mitochondrial function.

• 1:27:58Speaker 05

  Now, let's do growth. My colleague, Dr. Ephraim Mansinigo Ornan, who is the chairman of nutrition at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, actually looked at this question and showed that ultra-processed food actually inhibits growth. It inhibits cortical bone growth, it inhibits trabecular bone growth, it inhibits cancerous bone growth, it inhibits linear bone growth. It hijacks growth for cancer because it inhibits mitochondria. And so, you have to then grow instead of burn.

• 1:28:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And this was work that was done in vivo or in vitro?

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  In vivo.

• 1:28:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  In vivo. So, these are people that are eating high amounts of highly-processed food?

• 1:28:38Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:28:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  How did you find those in the Middle East?

• 1:28:42Speaker 05

  They found, in Israel, they found them. So, the bottom line is, if a substrate does not contribute to growth and does not contribute to burning, is it a food?

• 1:28:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see the answer is no.

• 1:28:56Speaker 05

  Well, that's 73% of what's in the grocery store. So, I would argue, you said, "The food's there." No, it's not. That's not food. In fact, it's consumable poison.

• 1:29:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, this leads to an important question of what's left. You remove all that, what's left? Just anecdotally, and what I sometimes call anecdata, you know, I've had several friends in their 40s and early 50s say they wanted to lose weight and get in shape. And the thing that's worked every, every single time for them to lose significant amounts of weight, quickly, and keep it off, and many of them were already exercising, but then also increased their exercise, was I just, since I'm not a dietitian, nutritionist, or anything, I just say, "Eat meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits. You're not going to eat starches, you're not going to drink alcohol, you're not going

• 1:29:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  to drink soda, you can still have coffee, tea, you can still have artificial sweeteners." I will get to artificial sweeteners in a little bit.

• 1:29:59Speaker 05

  We have to go there.

• 1:30:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the reason I say, "No starches," even though I personally eat rice, oatmeal, pasta, things of that sort, some, in moderation, depending on what sort of exercise and I'm doing and how much, is because of the fact that nowadays, many of those things contain fructose. And inevitably...

• 1:30:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Every one of those people is blown away by the fact that it quote unquote works and assumes that it's all because of reduced calorie intake overall.

• 1:30:28Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 1:30:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they lose like anywhere from thirty to fifty-five pounds.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:30:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  And keep it off and they're like, hey, this is great. I can actually still eat ribeye steaks and salads. And but they're not eating croutons. They're and so in some sense, it looks extreme. It sounds ketogenic, but it's nothing like that. You're just saying, basically, stay away from. You're eliminating processed foods. You're eliminating liquid calories in in general. You and on and on. And so there's nothing sophisticated about it. And my question to you is, how much of that weight loss effect do you think is a calories in versus calories out effect? Because they're eating a lot of food and in some cases. And how much of it do you think is the elimination or near elimination of this fructose? Or this glucose fructose combination?

• 1:31:16Speaker 05

  It's nothing to do with the calories. It has everything to do with the insulin. If you get the insulin down, you're not shunting energy to fat. You can lose weight. Your fat will give up the the triglycerides stored in it as soon as your insulin goes down. Insulin is pushing on your fat cell all the time. And as long as your insulin's up, your fat cell can't release it. The minute your insulin goes down, you can now engage in what we call lipolysis. Hormone sensitive lipase is an enzyme in the fat cell that is inhibited by insulin.

• 1:32:00Speaker 05

  As soon as the insulin's gone, hormone sensitive lipase can turn that stored triglyceride into free fatty acids and glycerol and release it, and you can lose weight. So get the insulin down and it all works. So the question is, what makes insulin go up? Well, two things, refined carbohydrate and sugar. Those are the two things that make insulin go up. In addition, branched chain amino acids make insulin go up as well. Leucine, isleucine, valine, which is in corn fed beef, chicken and fish, processed food. All right. Here's the deal. In one concept. My colleague, Dr. Carlos Montero, who is a professor of public health

• 1:32:42Speaker 05

  at the University of Sao Paulo, has done the world a great service. He has developed a system for categorization of food processing. It is called the NOVA system. It just means new. But he has basically categorized every food anywhere in the world into one of four classes. The easiest way to explain this would be an example. Let's take an apple. NOVA class one would be an apple picked off a tree. NOVA class two would be apple slices. Destemmed, de-seeded, deskinned, maybe. NOVA class three would be applesauce. Cooked, macerated, possibly.

• 1:33:26Speaker 05

  A preservative added, maybe some extra sugar, maybe not. NOVA class four would be a McDonald's apple pie. Now, does that McDonald's apple pie look anything like that apple?

• 1:33:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  No.

• 1:33:40Speaker 05

  Is there even any apple in it?

• 1:33:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe a tiny bit.

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  Maybe not.

• 1:33:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe a tiny bit.

• 1:33:44Speaker 05

  You know, it's all flavor-enhanced, et cetera. Okay. Turns out, and this is epidemiologic data, but nonetheless prospective epidemiologic data, so it's not useless. That NOVA class four, that ultra-processed food category, which is 73% of the American grocery store, is the class that is associated with all of these chronic metabolic diseases. NOVA class one through three? No problem.

• 1:34:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, when you say "associated," what percentage of one's daily total caloric intake needs to come from NOVA class four before that statement you just made is true? Because I love the recommendation you made earlier, or that, let's just say, the contour of a...

• 1:34:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  You don't have to avoid dessert. You can enjoy dessert, but don't eat dessert at other times of day.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:34:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And maybe you don't eat dessert every single night.

• 1:34:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:34:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And is there a rule that people have to eat dessert every single night?

• 1:34:42Speaker 05

  So the answer is about seven to 10% would be the upper limit.

• 1:34:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you can get seven to 10% of your caloric intake, daily caloric intake, from these NOVA class four foods and still

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  And still be okay.

• 1:34:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  And still be okay.

• 1:34:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  So this is, I know

• 1:34:58Speaker 05

  But that's not what's happening.

• 1:34:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. I know some very healthy physicians who I used to observe how people ate and moved. Because I would pay attention in my, in our field, right? I was like, oh, you know, people all around me at Stanford UCSF, etc., were successful or else they wouldn't be there.

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:35:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was like, you know, who looks healthy? Who can make it up the stairs and doesn't have to take the elevator? How much exercise are people doing at a given age? Are they fanatic, you know, like four in the morning runners? I'm not going to do that consistently unless I have to. And I observed that, you know, many of the healthiest people I know, they move a lot during the day. They ate very well. Many of them skip breakfast or lunch, not always. And then I also noticed that they would drink very little or no alcohol. And then, but they would enjoy like a, there's one physician at UCSF in particular I'm thinking of, who really enjoyed his dark chocolate Kit Kat after lunch. And he was sort of very ceremonial about the unraveling of that, the foil and the, and it was like, okay, so you're talking about that small percentage of calories.

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  If that's, if that's all you do, hey, you know, God bless you. But that's not what people are doing. That's the problem. Bottom line. That NOVA class four is where all the action is in terms of chronic metabolic disease. So the question is, how can you avoid that? How do you know which is which? We have a solution. So my colleagues and I have developed a web-based tool that is available to the entire world right now. And you'll put it in your show notes.

• 1:36:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we'll put a link to this.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  Absolutely. It's called PERFECT. P E R F A C T. And you can find it at perfect.co.

• 1:36:41Speaker 05

  And what it is, is it's a recommendation engine. Not AI, and we're gonna talk about AI in a minute. But it is a recommendation engine based on the science of human metabolism. That categorizes foods based on not their nutrient content, but on their metabolic effect.

• 1:37:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:37:06Speaker 05

  And so there is a Nova filter, which will filter out all the Nova Class 4 stuff. And it will go to your grocery store.

• 1:37:15Speaker 05

  And will tell you what you can buy that will be in Nova Class 1 through 3. Which turns out to only be 20% of the grocery store.

• 1:37:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  It means basically staying on the periphery of the grocery store, right?

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  That's a lot of it. In general.

• 1:37:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:37:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  The produce, the meat, the dairy, the...

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  All the things you mentioned. In fact. So, I'm not low carb, I'm low insulin. And there are a lot of ways to get to low insulin. Get rid of the refined carbohydrate, get rid of the sugar, increase the fiber, get rid of the branched-chain amino acids. Okay, so eating fish is a good place to be. Even eating a steak is okay if it's a pasture-fed steak. So let's talk about your steak.

• 1:37:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, which is also better for the animals, right?

• 1:38:01Speaker 05

  It is, absolutely. So you mentioned marbling before. We love our marbling, right? We can cut our US Grade A steaks with a butter knife, because they're so tender, right? You ever been to Argentina?

• 1:38:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, my father's Argentine.

• 1:38:16Speaker 05

  Oh, right, that's right, you're Argentinian.

• 1:38:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, they only know, they only know grass-fed steak. The only, the idea that cows would eat anything but grass is sort of like the idea that fish would fly.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  Absolutely. New Zealand, same thing.

• 1:38:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Speaker 05

  Okay. The meat is gorgeous, it's homogeneous, it's pink, it's delightful. I've been to Argentina, the meat is fantastic. But you have to use a steak knife, you can't use a butter knife.

• 1:38:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it takes more chewing.

• 1:38:42Speaker 05

  And it takes more chewing, because there's sinew, you know, it's a, it's a different experience entirely. It's delicious, but it is kind of a little bit, you know, tougher. All right. Turns out that marbling is intramyocellular lipid.

• 1:38:58Speaker 05

  That animal has metabolic syndrome.

• 1:39:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  The American corn-fed.

• 1:39:02Speaker 05

  The American corn-fed animal because that corn is filled with branched-chain amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, valine. Branched-chain amino acids are what's in protein powder. That's what, you know, bodybuilders, you know, put in their smoothies, you know, to build muscle. And if you're building muscle, that's okay because 20% of the amino acids in muscle are branched-chain. So, you know, if you've got a place to put them, you know, have at it.

• 1:39:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, there's a need there because they're breaking down muscle.

• 1:39:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, fine. But if you're not, if you're, you know, again, a mere mortal like me, you consume those excess branched-chain amino acids, they're gonna go to the liver, they're gonna be deamidated, like we talked about earlier, and they're gonna end up as branched-chain organic acids. They're gonna flood the mitochondria. The mitochondria are not gonna be able to deal with the volume, and so they're gonna divert the excess and turn that into fat. And so now you've got hypertriglyceritemia and chance for fatty liver disease and insulin resistance. So, what kind of meat you eat has a lot to do with your metabolic health.

• 1:40:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about the egg, the whole egg? Near-perfect protein score in terms of its bioavailability.

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  Eggs are terrific.

• 1:40:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:40:21Speaker 05

  There's nothing wrong with eggs. Now, there are better eggs than others, so...

• 1:40:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Pasture.

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  Well, there's yellow yolk eggs, and there are orange yolk eggs. What's the difference between a yellow yolk egg and an orange yolk egg?

• 1:40:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm guessing that's something about the feed of the mother chicken, and I'm guessing it probably also has something to do with choline content?

• 1:40:47Speaker 05

  Omega 3s.

• 1:40:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Ah, interesting.

• 1:40:49Speaker 05

  Okay. The orange yolk egg has a lot of omega 3s in it.

• 1:40:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are other great sources of omega 3s? I know some off the top of my head, but I'd like to hear it from you.

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  Okay, so marine life is number one, okay? You know, fish.

• 1:41:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Provided you're not bringing in heavy metals with it.

• 1:41:06Speaker 05

  Well, yes. So, I mean, that's always the argument. You know, the question is, you know, is it the mercury or is it the omega 3s? Ultimately, I think it's the omega 3s that is more important. But yes, I do understand the mercury issue.

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  Ultimately, there are three omega threes. There's ALA, alpha-linolenic acid, which you can get in vegetables. There is EPA, icosapentaenoic acid, which you can only get in marine life.

• 1:41:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fish oil, cod liver oil.

• 1:41:40Speaker 05

  Right. And finally, DHA, docohexaenoic acid, which you also get from marine life, but you can get from algae. So you can get algal oil, which, you know, the vegans will use.

• 1:41:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you personally take anything to increase your omega three intake?

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know there's even prescription omega threes.

• 1:42:00Speaker 05

  I take fish oil.

• 1:42:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  You take a fish oil?

• 1:42:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  The thresholds-

• 1:42:04Speaker 05

  I only take three, I only take three supplements.

• 1:42:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, I'd like to know what those are. I will say that I always, always, always say behaviors first, right? Dues and don'ts. Behaviors, nutrition, then only if needed and one can afford it, then supplementation and prescription drugs. And I'm a big consumer of supplements and always have been, frankly. So what are the three? So you take-

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  Fish oil.

• 1:42:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fish oil. And do you take, to get above a certain threshold of EPA?

• 1:42:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, about a thousand milligrams.

• 1:42:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  You say about a gram a day of EPA?

• 1:42:30Speaker 05

  Gram a day, okay. Uh, vitamin C.

• 1:42:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much vitamin C do you take?

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  A thousand milligrams a day.

• 1:42:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  You and Linus Pauling.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's actually for my rosacea. I've got a skin issue.

• 1:42:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  And vitamin C helps with-

• 1:42:43Speaker 05

  Helps with that.

• 1:42:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:44Speaker 05

  And finally, vitamin D. Now, I will tell you, vitamin D is a complicated one, all right? Uh, and we can talk about vitamin D and how either important or non-important it is, because there's a, there's a quirk to vitamin D. And, uh, it's important for your audience to know about it, because everybody and his brothers, you know, touting vitamin D as the cure for everything.

• 1:43:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's sort of funny because you have your supplement lovers, haters, and agnostics. But vitamin D somehow made it through the chute. Like, everyone's like pro-vitamin D. It's really interesting. Somehow, vitamin D, people are comfortable taking a ju-, uh, vitamin D gel cap. But like, other supplements where you say, oh, like, maybe, um, this might be good for, uh, you know, like omega threes and fish oil, then people are a little bit like more standoffish. It's really interesting that the kind of psycho-social stuff around this. Uh, how much vitamin D do you personally take?

• 1:43:38Speaker 05

  I take 5,000 units a day.

• 1:43:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so do I.

• 1:43:41Speaker 05

  Vitamin D's complicated, though. Here's the problem. If you look at the literature, vitamin D deficiency is associated with all of these chronic metabolic diseases. However, supplementation with vitamin D has not fixed any of those. So if you're vitamin D deficient, why wouldn't supplementation fix it? Couple of reasons. One, one of the reasons for vitamin D deficiencies because everyone's drinking soft drinks. That's one reason. But there's a more important reason.

• 1:44:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh, sugar and artificially sweetened soft drinks?

• 1:44:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:44:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can deplete vitamin D utilization?

• 1:44:21Speaker 05

  Well, you're not consuming dairy because you're consuming soft drinks.

• 1:44:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  But I can't tolerate milk anymore.

• 1:44:27Speaker 05

  Well, then you take vitamin D. But here's the, here's the real nugget of truth. And this is a little complicated, but the endocrinologists in the audience will, will get it. Vitamin D is a pre-pro hormone. It's not, it's not active at all. Vitamin D is converted in the liver, first step, to a compound called 25-hydroxyvitamin D. That is a prohormone. It also is inactive. It has no activity whatsoever. From there, 25-hydroxyvitamin D can be metabolized one of two ways.

• 1:45:08Speaker 05

  It can either be one alpha hydroxylated in the kidney to the active form, one alpha, uh, 25 dihydroxyvitamin D, which will then do all of the business of vitamin D.

• 1:45:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Such as?

• 1:45:22Speaker 05

  Calcium absorption from the gut, suppression of the immune system at the toll like receptor four.

• 1:45:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  That sounds like a bad thing.

• 1:45:30Speaker 05

  No, that's a good thing.

• 1:45:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  I know, but I had to bring that up because when you say suppression of the immune system, people go, oh, I'm immunosuppressed. Nobody, that sounds like AIDS.

• 1:45:37Speaker 05

  A good, uh, uh, it suppresses inflammation.

• 1:45:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 1:45:40Speaker 05

  It's a good thing. Okay, suppression of inflammation. And that's actually the point that we're, we're getting to. So there are a lot of good things about 125 dihydroxyvitamin D.

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  However, that 25 hydroxy D that came out of the liver can be metabolized a different way. It can be 24 hydroxylated in inflammatory tissue like tuberculosis, sarcoid, gut inflammation. And so you will end up taking your 25 hydroxy D, which is a prohormone, and turning it into the inactive 24, 25 dihydroxy D, which then just gets excreted out. So in other words, you consumed all this vitamin D and it didn't go where you needed it to go. And the reason was because you're inflamed.

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  You have to fix the inflammation before the vitamin D can be effective. And 93% of Americans are inflamed. So giving them vitamin D is not going to do a damn thing.

• 1:46:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. Is reducing fructose intake the one of the primary ways to reduce systemic inflammation?

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:46:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are some others?

• 1:46:56Speaker 05

  Reducing oxidative stress in general, so heavy metals like cadmium. You know, cadmium is very high in chocolate, especially South American chocolate, sorry.

• 1:47:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I'm not a fan of chocolate. I occasionally like a little dark chocolate, but, but, um, so if people are going to eat chocolate, they should be careful how much chocolate they eat.

• 1:47:14Speaker 05

  Well, especially if it's South American chocolate and processed chocolate. I mean, the really good.

• 1:47:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  We're going to be on the hit list of so many industries after this episode comes out.

• 1:47:23Speaker 05

  All I can tell you is I've been on the hit list for a decade and I'm still.

• 1:47:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're, you're just one big target.

• 1:47:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. I got it. I, it's on my back, you know, kick me. I already got that. There are, uh, the, the main thing is to make that gut work right. So fiber, short chain fatty acid production from fiber is a huge, you know, boon and benefit.

• 1:47:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  To reduce inflammation.

• 1:47:52Speaker 05

  To reduce inflammation.

• 1:47:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  How about improving sleep? Is there any evidence that, you know, chronic slight sleep deprivation can increase inflammation?

• 1:48:00Speaker 05

  Well, what it will do is increase cortisol and chronically increased cortisol will definitely lead to increased inflammation. You know, which is funny because cortisol is usually considered the anti-inflammatory, but only acutely.

• 1:48:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:48:12Speaker 05

  Chronic cortisol elevation does the opposite.

• 1:48:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  If we can contribute to, I have this secret agenda, which is not a secret, which is that people think cortisol is bad, when in fact, acutely cortisol does wonderful things, provided it's happening at the right time of day.

• 1:48:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:48:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Late shifted cortisol, bad.

• 1:48:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:48:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Too much or too frequent cortisol, bad. But cortisol, you need it. It's so essential. And I think most people just hear cortisol and it's been associated with all things bad and maybe we can help shift that narrative.

• 1:48:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm very happy. I mean, as an endocrinologist, you know, this is, you know, my wheelhouse is where I live. Cortisol is a good news, bad news deal, like so many things. Short-term gain for long-term pain. Okay? So, when you are in what we call allostasis, that is perturbation of homeostasis, that is a stress, an acute stress, cortisol is one of the things that helps you manage that bodily and mental stress. So, an English test, a car accident, running away from the lion, you know, the famous, you know, pygmy running away from the lion.

• 1:49:28Speaker 05

  All of those require cortisol in order to manage and mitigate that stress.

• 1:49:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  The upcoming 2024 election.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  That's chronic stress. That is not acute stress.

• 1:49:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Didn't mean the last.

• 1:49:41Speaker 05

  That's the worst.

• 1:49:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  That'll be the only mention of politics on this podcast.

• 1:49:45Speaker 05

  And we don't have to go there. But we're all chronically stressed and we can talk about why that is and what's going on, and I'm actually very interested in that. And a colleague of mine in Paris and I have built a computational model of the limbic system, which focuses on the stress center of the brain, the amygdala, to understand how chronic stress is different from acute stress and how that chronic stress ultimately leads to metabolic and mental health disaster.

• 1:50:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very interested in learning more about that. Before we touch on that. You've worked a lot with kids. People age, as you put it, zero to nineteen.

• 1:50:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know about the exact numbers, but when I was growing up, there were some kids in school that were overweight, but it was the occasional kid.

• 1:50:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:50:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, it seems, depending on where one draws the threshold for overweight, it seems that there are a lot of kids that are overweight.

• 1:50:47Speaker 05

  How about twenty-five percent obese and forty percent overweight?

• 1:50:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so obviously a serious problem.

• 1:50:54Speaker 05

  Serious problem.

• 1:50:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now and going forward.

• 1:50:56Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 1:50:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about adults in the US? I remember seeing at a meeting a map of obesity in the US and over time, and it very quickly filled in from very few people were obese to very many. Colorado was this, was this like beacon of fit people, but now it's no longer...

• 1:51:16Speaker 05

  And that's bullshit, too.

• 1:51:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, okay, cool.

• 1:51:18Speaker 05

  I'll tell you why. There are four things that can increase mitochondrial biogenesis.

• 1:51:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are you gonna tell me altitude is one of them?

• 1:51:25Speaker 05

  Cold?

• 1:51:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Speaker 05

  That's why Colorado's less obese. Altitude, that's why Colorado's less obese. And what were the other two? But those were the reasons. It had nothing to do with being more fit. It had to do with cold and altitude. Example, Switzerland compared to Germany. They got the same crappy food, but Switzerland has half the obesity that Germany does.

• 1:51:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love...

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  Because Switzerland is higher.

• 1:51:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I love the food. When I go to Munich, I love the schnitzels and the sauerkrauts.

• 1:51:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, they got that in Switzerland, too.

• 1:51:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so they have great food.

• 1:51:59Speaker 05

  Switzerland's less obese. Right? Same way Colorado's less obese. It's because of the altitude.

• 1:52:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  You mentioned cold. Many listeners of this podcast are at least interested in some, also practice deliberate cold exposure, cold showers, cold plunges, mainly for the... I think the best data are the increases in catecholamines, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, that are long lasting. People feel a big state shift, they feel better. But when one looks at the effects on metabolism, they're pretty slight.

• 1:52:28Speaker 05

  They are slight.

• 1:52:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're slight. However, studies like that, to me, always seem short sighted in the sense that if there's a longer arc of effect on the mitochondria that's affecting other things in terms of how calories are processed... Or how calories are feeding into mitochondrial function or dysfunction. There I could see how it might shift the shift the scales, so to speak. I mean, cold is is an amazingly powerful stimulus.

• 1:52:56Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:52:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I think of light, cold, food, movement. It's kind of like the core four ways in which you can shift physiology easily.

• 1:53:05Speaker 05

  All of these things are eminently manipulable and for almost zero dollars. Okay, but you have to know what you're doing. And right now, we've been actually kept from that knowledge. And, you know, if you're addicted, it's really hard to unaddict yourself.

• 1:53:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  So that brings us back to this thing about food industry conspiracies, government conspiracies and the rest. Boy, this is going to be an interesting.

• 1:53:34Speaker 05

  We can go.

• 1:53:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Section, but what do we do? Like, so if you and I go up to Capitol Hill.

• 1:53:42Speaker 05

  Which I've done.

• 1:53:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, which you've done, and maybe I'll join you someday. And, you know, you're UCSF, I'm down at Stanford. You're a clinician, I'm a scientist and a public health advocate, podcaster. And we explain to people, hey, listen, like, there's the food is laced with a drug. It's not even really food.

• 1:54:02Speaker 05

  That's right, it's not food.

• 1:54:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's an aggregate of food and non-food parts that make you think it's food. It's sort of like telling people, hey, your kids are, you know, they're swimming in a swimming pool. It looks like water, but it's actually part poison and it's harming them. It's giving them, you know, if you say those kinds of things. I mean, congressmen and women are, they're like reasonably smart people, right? I mean, are they going to do something about it?

• 1:54:23Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:54:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  So where is the conflict? Is it that the food industry has the government by the short hairs?

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  That's exactly right.

• 1:54:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they have them by the short hairs where? I mean, is it, are they lining their pockets? I mean, where, where, where is the leverage actually exerted?

• 1:54:39Speaker 05

  Okay, so they are lining their pockets. That's number one. That is absolutely true. We have the data to support that. Blanche Lincoln, who was a senator from Arkansas, who was the chairman of the Nutrition Committee, you had to see her campaign contributions every time she was up for reelection.

• 1:54:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's all about getting reelected, or it's about them like having a like a third home in the Hamptons?

• 1:54:58Speaker 05

  So I think it's the third home in the Hamptons.

• 1:55:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  More than anything.

• 1:55:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so it's really as bad as

• 1:55:03Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:55:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  as some of the documentaries would make us believe.

• 1:55:06Speaker 05

  Without question.

• 1:55:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:55:08Speaker 05

  Goodness. And we have the data. There is a an organization that I absolutely want to call out because they are, you know, the most egregious political organization on the face of the earth. They're called the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC or ALEC. And they write bills. They are a bill mill. Okay? And they are for whoever gives them money. And who gives them money? Big Pharma, Big Agra, Big Oil, and Big Food.

• 1:55:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're so you're including Big Pharma, you're a physician, you've written scripts before, you've written prescriptions for patients before. Isn't that Pharma that provides the drugs that allows your patients to feel better?

• 1:55:49Speaker 05

  Well, the question is, do they? Do they feel better? This is a big question. Let's you want to go there?

• 1:55:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  But you're writing the script. I mean, I mean, I'm just trying to I'm not trying to

• 1:55:59Speaker 05

  I'm not.

• 1:56:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  trying to challenge you, but I see. So you don't there have to be instances where someone's thyroid deficient and you give them, you know, a drug?

• 1:56:07Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So if you've got a disease and a medicine will replace what's missing, sure. Okay? So for deficiency diseases, which as an endocrinologist, that's what I do, absolutely. And I did that, you know, with no compunction of impropriety whatsoever. But that's not what we're talking about here. Let's talk about what we're really talking about. Let's start with statins. Statins lower LDL.

• 1:56:39Speaker 05

  Okay. Do statins reduce heart disease? Yes or no?

• 1:56:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I seem to be whiffing today on all the quizzes and it's kind of becoming fun for me at this level. I'm gonna go with no, but I will say, you know, my friend and I think is an expert physician as well, you know, Peter Attia and others, you know, has talked about some of the positive attributes of statins in certain cases for certain patients.

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  In certain cases, that's exactly right, and I completely agree. And by the way, Peter's a friend and, you know, someday we'll, you know, all, you know, go out drinking together.

• 1:57:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, well, I won't drink, but how about we share a steak?

• 1:57:18Speaker 05

  Share steak, absolutely. You got it.

• 1:57:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  You guys, I don't know if he drinks. He drinks a little bit.

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  If you're listening, okay?

• 1:57:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  He drinks a little bit.

• 1:57:25Speaker 05

  Porterhouse on me.

• 1:57:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I don't do the dessert or the alcohol anymore, but I'm, and it's not so I can live to be 120. So I can wake up the next morning and keep up with you guys.

• 1:57:35Speaker 05

  It's fine. Yeah, I get. So for primary prevention, that is, your LDL is high, you need a statin. That's primary prevention. You haven't declared yourself, you haven't had an event. For primary prevention, the mean increase in lifespan for being on a statin is four days.

• 1:57:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Four days?

• 1:57:58Speaker 05

  Four days.

• 1:57:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Four days. So I have to chuckle. That's, that's.

• 1:58:02Speaker 05

  And the risk for diabetes is 20% increase.

• 1:58:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about any improvement in quality of life?

• 1:58:09Speaker 05

  None. For primary prevention. Now, for secondary prevention, for secondary, in other words, you've already declared yourself. You already have a problem. For secondary prevention, that's where statins shine. So there's a value to them. I'm not arguing that. And if you have familial hypercholesterolemia, which is 1 in 500, okay? Not only do you need a statin, but you need a low-fat diet and a priest.

• 1:58:34Speaker 05

  Okay, so there is definitely a value to statins, but not for primary prevention. But that's what everybody, what every doctor's doing. Oh, your LDL, it's over eighty, you know, you need a statin. That's ridiculous. That is absolutely a joke. And the data show that. In fact, in fact, my colleague, Asim Malhotra, in the UK, participated in an analysis where they took the entire UK population and they took out everybody under age sixty-five. So you're looking at people sixty-five to ninety. And it turned out that the LDL level correlated with longevity. The higher the LDL, the longer they lived.

• 1:59:18Speaker 05

  When you took out all the people who had problems. So LDL is not really the problem. And the reason is because there are two LDLs. There's one called large buoyant, there's one called small dense. Turns out dietary fat raises your large buoyant. Your large buoyant is irrelevant. It is cardiovascularly neutral. But that's the one that statins affects. The small dense, that's the atherogenic particle. When your small dense LDL is high, that means you are not clearing triglyceride peripherally, because that's what small dense show you. That's, that's what happens to triglyceride is because they become small dense.

• 1:59:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can I take a guess and say that the best way to reduce small dense is to reduce insulin?

• 2:00:08Speaker 05

  Yes, by reducing sugar. Because that triglyceride is made in the liver. It's all palmitate, and that's the only fat that the liver knows how to make. And so triglyceride is your liver output of carbohydrate. That's how you have to look at triglyceride. So triglyceride turns out to be much more important as a cardiovascular risk factor than LDL ever was.

• 2:00:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  So does the, does big pharma and big food, do they know all of this?

• 2:00:39Speaker 05

  Yes. I know they know because they've told me so.

• 2:00:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And?

• 2:00:43Speaker 05

  But they have statins to sell.

• 2:00:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  And foods in the Nova Class Four.

• 2:00:50Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. They know this too.

• 2:00:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, you know, I'm an optimist, or, you know, what's it gonna take to really move the needle? I mean, you described the four barriers. We're trying to add to the knowledge component now.

• 2:01:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, what's it gonna take? Is it going to take, you know, having a president in office or congresspeople in office that really understand and care about this stuff?

• 2:01:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:01:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, to really revamp the whole system.

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, right now, the system is completely and utterly broken. Completely and utterly broken. And there's a reason why it's completely and utterly broken. Because the food industry likes it that way.

• 2:01:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, it's profitable for them, obviously.

• 2:01:33Speaker 05

  There are 51 different federal agencies that manage our food. Fifty-one. And none of them know what the other one's doing. And the food industry likes it that way.

• 2:01:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, communication across these 51 organizations would help?

• 2:01:49Speaker 05

  Well, if we had a centralized food czar, or food, you know, if we split the food off the FDA, because, you know, it's like, it's not the FDA, it's the DA. Or, the FDA is not the Food and Drug Administration, it's the Federal Drug Administration. They spend a lot of time on drugs. They spend almost no time on food.

• 2:02:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, let's think about where there's been success. So, I can recall when people smoked on planes. I actually recall going to a gym in Europe, and there was an ashtray molded into the squat rack.

• 2:02:22Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:02:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  That was telling.

• 2:02:24Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:02:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't see people smoking cigarettes around Stanford Hospital anymore, but I remember when they initially said that people couldn't smoke anywhere, except in this one little designated area.

• 2:02:35Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:02:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that's typically what you see nowadays. And my understanding of the anti-smoking campaign, at least for kids, for people 18 and younger, was that telling people it was bad for their health didn't work. Showing them lungs that were decrepit didn't work.

• 2:02:49Speaker 05

  Did not work.

• 2:02:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  What worked was showing them commercials of cackling, hand writhing.

• 2:02:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  White guys who were talking about how much money they were making off of these naive kids who were buying cigarettes and other tobacco products. So it became a, the effective campaign to end smoking in young people was to hijack their inherent rebelliousness of youth. And then they were like, no.

• 2:03:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, stick it to the man.

• 2:03:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Stick it to them. Like, you know, the, as my friend calls it, like, the two finger business card. Like, no. And so, that worked. That worked. Vaping's making a comeback. Vaping's a separate episode. We won't get into that. But, because nicotine is still addictive. But, you don't see a lot of people smoking cigarettes. So it worked. Like, something that you would never imagine could ever work, worked.

• 2:03:43Speaker 05

  Well, so, yes, no. I mean, that's part of it. I'm not going to tell you that it's not. It is part of it. And we actually have an example of how that could be applied to another toxic substance, sugar. We had Berkeley versus Big Soda. You know, that's how Berkeley ended up with its soda tax. That dates back to 2015.

• 2:04:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  The city of Berkeley.

• 2:04:06Speaker 05

  City of Berkeley. We just celebrated the five-year anniversary of the Berkeley Soda Tax. And we've been able to actually look. Gestational diabetes, way down. Obesity, down slightly. Not a lot, but a little bit. Cardiovascular disease, down. Dean Schillinger and Chris Mattson at UCSF and UC Berkeley just presented at San Francisco General just three weeks ago.

• 2:04:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  So a soda tax, like the cigarette tax. Just makes soda expensive.

• 2:04:37Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:04:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you're telling me that a can of Coke that I buy on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley costs more than a can of Coke that I buy in, on University Avenue in Palo Alto?

• 2:04:47Speaker 05

  It does.

• 2:04:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Huh, okay.

• 2:04:49Speaker 05

  By a dime.

• 2:04:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that was sufficient enough to create this kind of change?

• 2:04:55Speaker 05

  Well, yes, it is.

• 2:04:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because money hurts.

• 2:04:57Speaker 05

  Because money hurts. Exactly. So, Andrew, there have been four, count them, four cultural tectonic shifts in America in the last 30 years. And they're all undeniable. Here they are. Number one, bicycle helmets and seatbelts.

• 2:05:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, yeah, everybody uses those.

• 2:05:17Speaker 05

  Two, smoking in public places.

• 2:05:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Nobody does that.

• 2:05:21Speaker 05

  Three, drunk driving.

• 2:05:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hopefully, fewer people are doing that.

• 2:05:26Speaker 05

  Four condoms and bathrooms.

• 2:05:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Condoms in bathrooms?

• 2:05:30Speaker 05

  In bathrooms, in public bathrooms.

• 2:05:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, you see those more available.

• 2:05:34Speaker 05

  Okay, all right. Thirty years ago, if a legislator stood up in a state house and proposed legislation for any one of those four, and I don't care if it's in a state house, or in Congress, or in Parliament, or in the Duma, or anywhere else in the world, then it got laughed right out of town. Nanny state, liberty interest, get out of my kitchen, get out of my bathroom, get out of my car. Okay, today, they're all facts of life.

• 2:06:03Speaker 05

  Nobody's bellyaching about any of those. The point is, we were able to solve those four public health debacles. How did we do it? How did we solve those four? No one could imagine that we would ever solve smoking, right? But we did, sort of. I mean, we brought consumption down by half. Okay, that's pretty good, when you think about it, for an addictive substance.

• 2:06:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  How many fewer people are dying of lung cancer nowadays in the US?

• 2:06:33Speaker 05

  It's like eighty percent lower.

• 2:06:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow. Well, there's also been improvements in treatment, but...

• 2:06:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, but no, it's, but it's, it's the incidence.

• 2:06:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Diagnosed with the incidence.

• 2:06:42Speaker 05

  It's incidence, incidence's gone down.

• 2:06:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing.

• 2:06:43Speaker 05

  Okay, because tobacco's gone down. So, the question is, how did that happen? And the answer is very, and why did it take thirty years to do it? We taught the children, the children grew up, and they voted. And the naysayers are dead.

• 2:07:04Speaker 05

  That's how you make a cultural tectonic shift. So, we now have this real food movement. We have people who are arguing against ultra-processed food. We have kids who are demanding different in their schools. And by the way, what is the biggest fast-food franchise in the United States?

• 2:07:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm gonna get this wrong, so...

• 2:07:30Speaker 05

  Try me again.

• 2:07:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know, I've never tried it, but I've heard of, is it Chick-fil-A?

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 2:07:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it McDonald's? I don't know.

• 2:07:39Speaker 05

  It is this nation's public schools.

• 2:07:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Ah.

• 2:07:43Speaker 05

  You can add up McDonald's, Subway, Burger King, Chico A, and Wendy's, and every other fast food franchise, Jack in the Box, every fast food franchise in the entire country, and it would only be half our nation's public schools.

• 2:08:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow. So, could you imagine a world where there were no Class III or Class IV NOVA foods allowed in, in public schools?

• 2:08:15Speaker 05

  And we're doing it. So I am the chief science officer of a nonprofit, and put this in the show notes, called Eat Real, eatreal.org, and we have a new business model for public schools. So, in 1971, the Department of Education issued an administrative ordinance called Resolution 242. And they did this purely on monetary reasons. This was under Nixon. And what this Resolution 242 said was that all school cafeterias all throughout the country had to make book. They had to basically cover their costs.

• 2:08:59Speaker 05

  They couldn't be loss leaders for the school. They had to fend for themselves. Well, this sent every food service director in the country scurrying for, you know, how am I going to do this? Because I got all these, you know, you know, lunch ladies, you know, which, you know, personnel and, and food preparation equipment and, and, and costs, you know, that are, you know, mounting. How am I going to break even? They couldn't do it. So, in walks, you know, Aramark and Cisco and Guggenheim and McDonald's, and they say, hey, we'll do it for you. We'll provide every kid in America with a nutritious meal every single day.

• 2:09:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hot lunch.

• 2:09:44Speaker 05

  Well, they didn't say hot.

• 2:09:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:09:46Speaker 05

  They just said lunch.

• 2:09:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:09:48Speaker 05

  Nutritious. They said nutritious.

• 2:09:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:09:49Speaker 05

  And I put that in air quotes too, because it wasn't nutritious. And here's the added benefit. You can take your food preparation facilities and your footprint in the school, and you can turn that into classrooms, because you're going to need them. And that was the goal. Because as soon as you've moved the food preparation facilities out of the school, you are now hostage to the food industry for the rest of your life.

• 2:10:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I could also see how that allows room for them to use these commoditized foods, foods that have very long shelf life.

• 2:10:23Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:10:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, because you want to make sure that, you know, if you only sold, you know, two-thirds of the lunches that were prepared, that on next Tuesday, after the weekend, you could still give them food that isn't moldy.

• 2:10:34Speaker 05

  Exactly right. And I will tell you, so that's how it happened. And you can actually trace IQ scores and reading and math scores in this country down from 1971 to today.

• 2:10:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  When I went to school, I was allowed to get, I called it hot lunch because it was usually hot, I was allowed to get the school lunch one day a week.

• 2:10:59Speaker 05

  One day a week.

• 2:11:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  The other days, I had to bring my lunch. That one day was pretty special, like you felt like you were getting a treat. It was usually like corn dog or a hamburger. The hamburger was pretty paltry, but the.

• 2:11:11Speaker 05

  It's a commoditized hamburger.

• 2:11:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, commoditized hamburger. You had to go looking for the patty portion. And the bread was sweetened, and so it was different. But I don't remember nearly as much obesity. I went to high school in the early 90s. So you're saying that now, if I went to a high school, it would be a lot more sodas and donuts and pizza and, got it.

• 2:11:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, pizza's a vegetable, didn't you know?

• 2:11:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  They claim it's a vegetable?

• 2:11:38Speaker 05

  Congress said pizza's a vegetable. Amy Klobuchar made pizza a vegetable.

• 2:11:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe they need their eyes checked.

• 2:11:43Speaker 05

  Because the biggest frozen pizza producer is in Minnesota.

• 2:11:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, the ketchup is a vegetable was a stretch, but at least it made sense on the Nova system of going from tomato all the way to, to.

• 2:11:58Speaker 05

  To ketchup. Since high fructose corn syrup is the primary ingredient in ketchup. Indeed. So, the point is that our kids are suffering under the weight, the burden of this chronic disaster of ultra-processed food, which is not food. And no wonder they're all obese and, uh, um, uh, sick and, um, uh, you know, doing so poorly in school. And by the way, also depressed. Ultra-processed food has now been shown in three separate studies to correlate with depression in teenagers.

• 2:12:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what is the relationship between processed food, or maybe we call it NOVA system level three, four foods, and depression and other psychiatric challenges? And if you could, you separate out metabolic syndrome from obesity in answering that? Like, is there something inherently depressing about carrying excess adipose tissue, setting aside any kind of aesthetic, um, uh, stuff, you know, how people want to look or are perceived? You know, just, is there anything bad about carrying a lot of body fat, independent of the metabolic syndrome, for mood and an overall sense of well-being?

• 2:13:17Speaker 05

  No, I'm really glad you asked that, Andrew. And we should have actually covered this earlier. Um, everyone thinks fat is fat. As we've learned, fat is not fat. And AFAT is not AFAT. But, um, body fat is not body fat. There are three fat depots, and they are metabolically different. The first is the, does this bathing suit make me look fat fat? By the way, never answer that question. That's called subcutaneous fat, or big butt fat, if you will. So here's the question. How many pounds or kilos of subcutaneous fat do you have to gain before you become metabolically ill?

• 2:14:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have no idea.

• 2:14:03Speaker 05

  About 10 kilos, about 22 pounds.

• 2:14:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:14:06Speaker 05

  Why? The reason is because that subcutaneous fat drains into the systemic circulation.

• 2:14:16Speaker 05

  So you have to have a lot of cytokines coming from those subcutaneous adipocytes to raise the blood level of cytokines to the point where it starts doing damage at the level of the liver.

• 2:14:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  So fats are releasing cytokines which are pro-inflammatory?

• 2:14:34Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:14:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they're doing that at rest, any fat cell?

• 2:14:37Speaker 05

  Any fat cell.

• 2:14:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:14:39Speaker 05

  Any fat cell, but if it's going to the systemic circulation, you have a volume of distribution of six liters. So you have to lose, you know, you have to have a lot of cytokines to get the concentration up.

• 2:14:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Now, just out of fairness to the fat, how many cytokines does a muscle cell release? I mean, are we unfairly picking on adipose tissue? Because why would adipose tissue be pro-inflammatory? I mean, a single fat cell, I've got a fat cell sitting at, you know, on my shoulder someplace, right? I mean, I'm not zero fat at my shoulder. Why would it be pro-inflammatory?

• 2:15:14Speaker 05

  So in fact, the fat cell itself is not. Here's what happens. The fat cell has a fat vacuole. It has a storage place for this lipid droplet. You stuff it, you stuff it, you stuff it, the fat vacuole gets bigger, bigger, bigger. The peri-lipin border that encompasses that fat vacuole, that borders the space, ultimately can't get any bigger and it starts breaking down. When that happens, it spills the grease into the fat cell. The fat cell dies, becomes necrotic.

• 2:15:56Speaker 05

  That calls macrophages in to clean up the grease. And it's the macrophages that release the cytokines. All right? So in fact, the fat cell is not the problem. It's the breakdown of the grease that leads to the macrophage activation. That's the problem. But when you do it in subcutaneous fat, it's going into this six-liter tank. And so the concentration doesn't go up very much. So 10 kilos before you start seeing some effect. Fat depot number two.

• 2:16:38Speaker 05

  Visceral or big belly fat. Now, how many pounds or kilos of big belly fat do you have to gain before you get metabolically ill?

• 2:16:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know, but I'm guessing it's less than 22 pounds.

• 2:16:51Speaker 05

  It's way less.

• 2:16:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, for once I got an answer right today.

• 2:16:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. About five, about five pounds. Now, question is why?

• 2:17:02Speaker 05

  Number one, the visceral fat does not drain into the into the systemic circulation. It drains into the portal vein, which goes straight to the liver. So you're getting a bigger load going straight to the liver of cytokines.

• 2:17:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not to the kidney. The good thing about getting an answer wrong, folks, is that you never forget the correct answer. That's what I always tell my students, right? So I'll never forget that.

• 2:17:24Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 2:17:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 2:17:26Speaker 05

  And the question is, what made the visceral fat in the first place? Was it calories? Nope. It's cortisol. It's stress. It's the combination of the sympathetic nervous system and cortisol. And the reason we know this is because you can take patients with major depressive disorder, with endogenous depression, who are suicidal, who have to be admitted to the hospital to keep themselves from killing themselves, stick them in a scanner, and they are losing subcutaneous fat like crazy because they're not eating, but they're gaining visceral fat because of the high cortisol and the stress.

• 2:18:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  So there's something about the adrenal corticoid receptors in that area that just preferentially depot fat there when cortisol is high?

• 2:18:13Speaker 05

  Indeed. Because that's the metabolically active fat. All right, and five pounds will do it. And then finally, the third fat depot, the liver. Now, how many pounds of fat can the liver store before you become metabolically ill?

• 2:18:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I've got to be even less because the liver's not nearly as large as the sort of abdominal region.

• 2:18:40Speaker 05

  Half a pound, quarter of a kilo.

• 2:18:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  How much does a healthy liver weigh?

• 2:18:45Speaker 05

  A healthy liver weighs 1,500 grams. Okay? So, you know, it's not very.

• 2:18:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm trying to translate quickly to pounds, so we're going metric, we're going as standard.

• 2:18:58Speaker 05

  So 1,500 grams would be three pounds. So, you know, basically, half a pound. Okay, so not very much.

• 2:19:08Speaker 05

  Because that's where the action is. And so when you have fat in your liver, it causes metabolic dysfunction right away. And the question is, where did that fat come from? That came from alcohol or sugar. So alcohol and sugar, most metabolically egregious because it affects the liver directly. Stress, second most because it affects the visceral fat. And subcutaneous fat, the least important in terms of metabolic derangement. So, yes, it may not look good in a bathing suit, but from a metabolic standpoint, it is actually the least important. So, the question then becomes, all right, what are you trying to fix?

• 2:19:54Speaker 05

  If you're trying to fix liver fat, it's really easy, get rid of the alcohol and the sugar, except of course, they're both addictive. Will that also liberate any fat that's already in the liver? Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why intermittent fasting works, is because it gives your liver a chance to basically offload what it's already stored. That's one of the things that intermittent fasting will buy you, is a little less liver fat. So that's a good thing. All right. Now, stress, on the other hand, as you know, and as we've talked about, and as you know, you've had Dr. Les Apple on your podcast before, you know, stress is tough. You know, trying to mitigate stress, especially in today's environment.

• 2:20:38Speaker 05

  And I hope you'll invite me back sometime to talk about the role of stress on the amygdala. Yeah, gladly. Okay. And then finally, you know, the subcutaneous fat. So, when people go on diet sweeteners, what are they doing? Are they really reducing?

• 2:21:01Speaker 05

  The fat. And the answer is no.

• 2:21:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  When you're talking about artificial sweeteners.

• 2:21:06Speaker 05

  Artificial diet sweeteners of any sort. You can pick your artificial sweetener. So aspartame, or, you know.

• 2:21:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sucralose.

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  Sucralose.

• 2:21:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Stevia.

• 2:21:15Speaker 05

  Stevia, monk fruit, uh, uh, the new ones, you know.

• 2:21:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, the one that people are more excited about nowadays is Alulose.

• 2:21:22Speaker 05

  Alulose.

• 2:21:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's expensive, it tends to have less of an artificial sweetener taste that people can detect.

• 2:21:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:21:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Um, so you're saying that regardless of, oh, and we should, I'm remembering. From the comments section, I do read them. Artificial sweeteners and non-caloric sweeteners.

• 2:21:40Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:21:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because the moment you say artificial, people say, what about stevia? What about Alulose? So, so let's just say, um, uh, non-caloric sweeteners can wrap our arms around all that entire category.

• 2:21:51Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:21:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Unless we need to distinguish among the different participants in that category. So you're saying that even though people can, um, lower their total caloric intake, pretty effectively. I've seen the studies that show if, you know, dieters who consume, um, water only as their, you know, main liquid versus diet sodas with aspartame typically, or stevia. The diet soda drinkers actually lose more weight. Uh, we, we know that, but you're saying there may be deposition of fat in the liver in those individuals. Specifically because of the artificial sweetener.

• 2:22:28Speaker 05

  Because of the insulin. Turns out there's still an insulin response. So a very, very famous study done in, um, Copenhagen. A hundred normal individuals, 25 in four different groups. One group, uh, one, uh, one liter of sugared soda per day for six months.

• 2:22:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  One liter, that's a lot of sugared soda.

• 2:22:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. One group, one liter of diet soda per day for six months.

• 2:22:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  I probably did that in graduate school.

• 2:22:57Speaker 05

  One group, one liter of milk per day for six months.

• 2:23:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I probably did that when I was an infant.

• 2:23:03Speaker 05

  And finally, one, final group, one liter of water per day for six months.

• 2:23:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do that. I do more than that, but yeah.

• 2:23:11Speaker 05

  The one liter of soda per day in six months gained 10 kilos.

• 2:23:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  The sugary soda?

• 2:23:17Speaker 05

  The sugary soda.

• 2:23:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  10 kilos?

• 2:23:19Speaker 05

  10 kilos. No surprise. The one liter of water per day lost 2 kilos. Also no surprise. Those were the easy ones. Now let's do the ones in the middle. One liter of milk per day, no change.

• 2:23:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Presumably that was full fat milk, which I buy Europe.

• 2:23:39Speaker 05

  Full fat milk.

• 2:23:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, they like their, their full fat milk.

• 2:23:42Speaker 05

  No change. Why is that? They're taking on an enormous increase in total caloric intake.

• 2:23:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm guessing that there was a blunted insulin response due to the fat in the milk?

• 2:23:55Speaker 05

  And also because lactose is not a very, uh, uh, big driver of insulin response. And because there's a satiety effect.

• 2:24:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like food.

• 2:24:05Speaker 05

  They eat less.

• 2:24:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's like food.

• 2:24:07Speaker 05

  Like food. And finally, the key, the kicker to the whole thing, diet soda. The one liter of diet soda. What, what would you predict their weight would do?

• 2:24:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  More weight loss than in the water group based on my understanding of the literature?

• 2:24:23Speaker 05

  They gained 2 kilos.

• 2:24:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wild. Because they ate more?

• 2:24:28Speaker 05

  Well, you tell me. Why did they gain 2 kilos if they were consuming a liter of diet soda? Which are 0 calories. The answer is because they still generated an insulin response.

• 2:24:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that insulin response generated more hunger?

• 2:24:43Speaker 05

  More, more weight and more hunger. Exactly. And that's the key. So they didn't gain the 10 kilos, they gained 2 kilos. So it looks better compared to the sugared, uh, uh, version. But it looks like, you know, a problem compared to the water version or even the milk version.

• 2:25:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  So unless you bootstrap calories and hold that constant, you're gonna see a weight gain due to artificial sweetener in.

• 2:25:08Speaker 05

  Exactly right. And that's been shown 50 ways from Sunday at a whole bunch of different studies. So compared to sugar, yeah, it's better. But compared to water, it's way worse. And the reason is the insulin response. You put something sweet on the tongue. Message goes tongue to brain, sugar's coming. Message goes brain to pancreas through the vagus nerve. Sugar's coming, release the insulin. And so tongue doesn't know if it's sugar or not.

• 2:25:37Speaker 05

  It releases the ins- the pancreas releases the insulin, which drives energy into fat, whether it was, you know, from the diet sweetener or not.

• 2:25:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  I saw some really interesting data from Dana Smalls' group at Yale.

• 2:25:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:25:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Showing that when people have a diet soda with food, so this is like the diet Coke with the sandwich, or with the burger, maybe even with the pasta, the insulin response from the food and the insulin response from the diet soda are compounded, but there's a classical conditioning effect, Pavlovian effect, such that then later, if they just drink the diet soda, they get an even bigger insulin response just to the diet soda than they would have originally if they'd only had the diet soda separate from food. So in other words, the insulin, the food-induced insulin response is conditioning a greater insulin response from the diet soda.

• 2:26:24Speaker 05

  And we actually have another study that demonstrates the same thing, out of Singapore, Tayetol, in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2018, I believe, that looked at a similar paradigm. Here's what they did. They took a bunch of people and they admitted them to their clinical research center four times a week apart, and they did them in random order. And each time, they started the morning fasting, and they did either a sucrose tolerance test, or an aspartame tolerance test, or a sucralose tolerance test, or a monk fruit

• 2:27:06Speaker 05

  tolerance test. So two hours, you know, ingesting one of the three, one of the four, and measuring glucose and insulin over the course of the next two hours.

• 2:27:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Fasted.

• 2:27:17Speaker 05

  Fasted.

• 2:27:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:27:19Speaker 05

  Okay. Then, it was time for lunch. And they let them have whatever lunch they want. It was a metabolic buffet. They could eat whatever they wanted off the buffet.

• 2:27:30Speaker 05

  Except that they were being clocked. And the same for dinner. They were being clocked. But they could eat whatever they want.

• 2:27:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  In a given period of time.

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  In the twenty four hours.

• 2:27:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 2:27:39Speaker 05

  And you know, or you know, from seven AM to seven PM, whenever they went home. Okay. Turned out. The sucrose tolerance test generated an insulin response, as you'd expect. The monk fruit, the sucrose and the aspartame did not. But then, when they ate lunch. They, if they'd had one of the three diet sweeteners in the morning. They ate more at lunch and more at dinner. And generated an increased insulin response, both at lunch and dinner. So that the area under the curve for the whole day was exactly the same.

• 2:28:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they ate a significantly more.

• 2:28:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, because they had the diet soda in the morning.

• 2:28:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wild. Well, I drink.

• 2:28:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Drinks that contain stevia. And I don't worry about it too much. But what you're saying is, even if I bootstrap my calories. There's a possibility that the insulin response could have direct effects on the liver.

• 2:28:40Speaker 05

  Exactly right.

• 2:28:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  And not for the better.

• 2:28:42Speaker 05

  And not for the better. Now, having said that.

• 2:28:46Speaker 05

  We have undertaken an interesting project, which I don't know if you know about.

• 2:28:55Speaker 05

  In two thousand twenty, during the pandemic, I was approached by a food company. In the Middle East. Called Kuwaiti Danish Dairy Company, KDD. It's the Nestle of the Middle East. Now, they make all sorts of junk. Frozen yogurt, flavored milks, ice cream, confectionery, biscuits, tomato sauce. Okay.

• 2:29:20Speaker 05

  Kuwait has an eighteen percent diabetes rate and an eighty percent obesity rate.

• 2:29:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Eight zero.

• 2:29:27Speaker 05

  Eight zero.

• 2:29:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow.

• 2:29:28Speaker 05

  In the adults. All right. Now. The company recognized that they wanted to be a metabolically healthy company, and they knew they weren't.

• 2:29:41Speaker 05

  They contacted me and said, would you put together a scientific advisory team to advise us what we need to do to change the food in order to be a metabolically healthy company? And we want to lead. And I said, we'd be hap- I'd be happy to do that with one proviso. We get to publish what we did, so that it can serve as a roadmap for the rest of the food industry. And they said, fine. And so I convened a scientific advisory team with my colleague Wolfram Alderson, who started the very first farmer's market in Los Angeles, and is now actually the Director of Sustainability and Nutrition for KDD,

• 2:30:22Speaker 05

  Tim Harlan, who is the Head of Culinary Medicine at George Washington University, Rachel Gao, who is a fatty acid expert, who ran the Omega 3 for ADD trial at the NIH, and Andreas Kornstadt, who's actually a computer scientist from Stanford. And we basically stripped down every single thing that KDD did in terms of procurement, in terms of ingredients, in terms of packaging. We submitted every single ingredient to biochemical analysis because you couldn't trust what the vendors were basically telling KDD was in the food. We had to actually know what was in the food. And that was a half a million dollars all

• 2:31:04Speaker 05

  by itself. I mean, this was not a cheap little, you know, sojourn into the woods. This was a big deal. We basically re-engineered their entire 180-item portfolio. And they have now turned over 10% of their products to be metabolically healthy. And the precepts that we set in this paper, which is in Frontiers in Nutrition in March of this year, 2023, three things, three principles. If you adhere to these three principles, you can turn any food healthy, including ultra-processed food. Number one, protect the liver. Number two, feed the gut. Number three, support the brain.

• 2:31:51Speaker 05

  If you have a food that does all three of those, it is healthy. If you have a food that does none of those three, then it's poison because it's not food.

• 2:32:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's, I was gonna say, it doesn't sound like food is the right descriptor in that case.

• 2:32:05Speaker 05

  Exactly, and if it does one or two but not all three, then it's gonna be somewhere in between. So the goal was to take all of KDD's products and move them from, you know, the lowest tier up to the highest tier by adhering to these three principles. And we came up with some very simple things. Number one, gotta get rid of the sugar. Number two, gotta add fiber. Number three, gotta add omega threes. Number four, gotta do something about the emulsifiers. Because the emulsifiers are causing the gut inflammation. Because after all, emulsifiers are detergents. They hold fat and water together. They burn a hole in the mucin layer. So they're actually contributing to that gut inflammation.

• 2:32:49Speaker 05

  And emulsifiers are, you know, streamed throughout ultra-processed food.

• 2:32:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  We've heard about hidden sugars a lot during today's episode and elsewhere. But based on everything you told us about artificial, excuse me, low-calorie sweeteners. It makes more sense to me now why foods that are not touted as diet foods would be laced with things like sucralose. Because it should drive the craving for that food through increases in insulin and craving of other foods later that day and later that evening. Is that why non-caloric sweeteners are added to all sorts of foods now? Because typically, one thinks non-caloric sweeteners probably only added to, quote-unquote, "diet foods," low-calorie foods, but that's not...

• 2:33:35Speaker 05

  You're right, that's not the case. And they are adding diet sweeteners to foods that you didn't know had diet sweeteners in them. That's right. There are two reasons that this happens. One is insulin, because insulin blocks leptin signaling at the level of the hypothalamus and the nucleus accumbens. So if it blocks leptin, leptin is the hormone that your fat cells make that tells your brain you've had enough. So if insulin blocks leptin, it makes you hungrier and it also extinguishes, it stops the extinguishing of reward by that food so that you want more of it. So it does both because leptin normally suppresses food intake and reduces craving.

• 2:34:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  The analogy that comes to mind is a slot machine that encourages you to feed more money and hit go to pull the lever, but that also blinds you to the outcome. So even if you win, you don't even know that you have wins. It's also blinding you to your losses. You're effectively becoming an automaton

• 2:34:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  of just eating without any conscious understanding of what you're bringing in or tasting the food any longer.

• 2:34:47Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:34:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. It's not this like, Anna Lemke, when she came on the podcast, author of Dopamine Nation and obviously head of our dual diagnosis addiction clinic at Stanford, talked about, you know, these consumptive behaviors where people are scrolling social media or consuming porn or consuming drugs or alcohol in a way that like, they're not in touch with the pleasure of the substance or behavior anymore.

• 2:35:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:35:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  They become automatons, but if they don't do it, they feel lousy. So the pleasure is gone, the pain is definitely awaiting.

• 2:35:18Speaker 05

  Tolerance and dependence, that's the definition of addiction. So dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. It excites the next neuron always. There is no such thing as dopamine inhibiting a postsynaptic neuron. Dopamine stimulates the next neuron and it doesn't matter which dopamine receptor it is, one through five, it's always excitatory. Now neurons like to be excited, that's why they have receptors. But neurons like to be tickled, not bludgeoned. Chronic overstimulation of any neuron, and you know this, leads to neuronal cell death. And the reason is because the neuron needs energy.

• 2:35:57Speaker 05

  The neuron is the most energy dependent tissue in the body. It needs those mitochondria to be pumping out ATP like crazy to engage in neurotransmission. Well, when you're firing nonstop.

• 2:36:16Speaker 05

  You risk cell death. So the excitatory neuron, the postsynaptic neuron, has a plan B. It down-regulates the receptor. It down-regulates the dopamine receptor. So there's less chance that any stray dopamine molecule will find a receptor to bind to. And this is its plan B in order to try to mitigate the risk of dying. Well, what does that mean in human terms? It means you get a hit, you get a rush, receptors go down. Next time you need a bigger hit to get the same rush, and receptors go down. And you get a bigger hit, and a bigger hit, and a bigger hit, until finally you need a huge hit to get nothing. That's called tolerance.

• 2:36:59Speaker 05

  And then, when the neurons do start to die, that's called addiction. That's what we've got. And that's what's happened in terms of food addiction. So, the question is, what's addictive? Is fat addictive? No. Because if fat was addictive, then all the people on the Atkins diet, or on the ketogenic diet, would be gaining weight, not losing it.

• 2:37:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'd be craving ribeyes all day. I like a ribeye pretty often, actually. But, I know, I know, people say no, but hey, look, my lipids are in line, and I don't eat many starches, and I certainly avoid sugar. Although now I'm thinking I might want to really reduce my low-calorie sweetener intake. I don't see myself reducing my stevia intake to zero, because it's in some things I really like.

• 2:37:45Speaker 05

  Andrew, I am not the food police.

• 2:37:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know? I always say that to people, "I'm not a cop." But the, um, but, but, but data are data, and, and, and health data are interesting.

• 2:37:57Speaker 05

  The data say that, that's not helping you any, that's what the data say. Um, point is, that the fat's not the problem, the salt's not the problem.

• 2:38:09Speaker 05

  The caffeine's a problem.

• 2:38:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 2:38:11Speaker 05

  Caffeine's a classic addictive substance at every level.

• 2:38:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, but in terms of-

• 2:38:16Speaker 05

  And the sugar's a problem.

• 2:38:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  But if one can cut out caffeine by the early afternoon, or even sooner in the day, and it's not consumed to excess, and it's in the form of coffee, yerba mate, some other form that's healthy, you know, is it really that much of a problem?

• 2:38:33Speaker 05

  Um.

• 2:38:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love coffee and yerba mate.

• 2:38:36Speaker 05

  Me too, that's my addiction.

• 2:38:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like with a capital L, underline, boldface, highlight.

• 2:38:41Speaker 05

  I, I, I, I feel your pain. And the answer is, no one has shown that coffee is toxic. It is addictive, but it's not toxic. Now, if you mix the coffee with alcohol, now you got Four Loko, now it's toxic. But in and of itself, caffeine is not toxic. And that's why there's a Starbucks on every street corner.

• 2:39:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it is highly reinforcing. I did an episode on caffeine where it covered some data that was published in the Journal Science, one of the three Apex journals. And if you put caffeine, unbeknownst to the consumer, into plain yogurt, people will crave plain yogurt-

• 2:39:19Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 2:39:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  -much more. I mean, people will like the feeling of being caffeinated, as long as it's not creating anxiety levels of energy.

• 2:39:25Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 2:39:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm gonna stick with caffeine.

• 2:39:27Speaker 05

  That's fine, and so will I.

• 2:39:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  We've been talking a little bit about the hypothalamus, as well as some peripheral gut-based mechanisms for hunger and satiety.

• 2:39:36Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:39:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is a great opportunity to talk about some of the GLP-1 agonists that are now widely used. So typically called Ozempic, but GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide 1-

• 2:39:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:39:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  -originally discovered in the Gila monster, which eats very seldom, and some really smart biologist, I love biology like this, said, "How come they don't have to eat very much?" Well, their blood is loaded with GLP-1.

• 2:40:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:40:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And so they only have to eat one, whatever Gila monster's delight in, per year or something outrageous like that. Humans make GLP-1 as well. My understanding is that GLP-1 that, not that's injected, but that one makes naturally, is acting on both the brain and the gut to increase satiety.

• 2:40:22Speaker 05

  So, it is acting on the brain, no argument, but the primary action is on the gut.

• 2:40:32Speaker 05

  GLP-1 decreases the rate of gastric emptying. That is its primary driver. Yes, it does affect the brain. I'm not arguing that it does. But the primary effect is to reduce the rate of gastric emptying. So you stay fuller longer because the food doesn't move through the stomach and the intestine.

• 2:40:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting. In South America, in Uruguay and Argentina, it was long thought that Yerba mate consumption, which we know very modestly increases GLP-1. And by the way, a lot of other things do too. That people were taking it for its after meals for its laxative effect, partially. But that's, you know, it's not pleasant.

• 2:41:14Speaker 05

  But that's also at the colon.

• 2:41:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's at the level of the colon.

• 2:41:17Speaker 05

  Rather than stomach.

• 2:41:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it is used fairly effectively for people to space their meals without snacking. That you're, you know, and maybe it's the GLP-1, maybe it's something else. But people are injecting themselves with GLP-1 analogs now.

• 2:41:31Speaker 05

  At thirteen hundred dollars a month.

• 2:41:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that what it costs?

• 2:41:33Speaker 05

  That's what it costs right now.

• 2:41:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it seems to be pretty effective at inducing weight loss, although a significant amount of that weight loss seems to be from skeletal muscle tissue.

• 2:41:42Speaker 05

  And we're going to, we need to talk about that.

• 2:41:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what are your thoughts on Ozempic as a primary? Earlier, you talked about primary and secondary control. You referred to it a little bit differently in the context of statins. So a kid comes in who's obese or slightly overweight. And it's like, mm, I don't know what to do. I'm trying to eat better, exercise. Or a person comes in and says, hey, I've had a really hard time getting that last twenty-nine pounds off for so many years. Will you prescribe Ozempic?

• 2:42:09Speaker 05

  So the short answer is, number one, I'm retired, so I'm not prescribing anything. But let's, let's, let's go with it. The data show that GLP-1 analogs like semaglutide and now tirzepatide, which is Lilly's version, Monjaro is the diabetes version, Zepbound is the obesity version, in the same way that Ozempic is the diabetes version for Novo Nordisk and Wegovy is the obesity version.

• 2:42:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  But they're all GLP-1 analogs.

• 2:42:41Speaker 05

  They're all GLP-1 analogs.

• 2:42:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're synthesized in a lab. It looks like GLP-1, smells like GLP-1, acts like GLP-1 when injected.

• 2:42:47Speaker 05

  Tirzepatide, the Lilly one, actually has a dual function. It binds to the GIP.

• 2:42:55Speaker 05

  Receptor, so it might have double duty and the data show that it's actually even slightly more effective at weight loss than the Novo Nordisk version. So we'll be seeing a shift in terms of consumer preference soon, no doubt. But here's the thing. You look at the data, one year of treatment, 16% weight loss. Now that sounds great. And I'm not saying it's bad.

• 2:43:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  And people are not craving food all the time. Is that because people are feeling full longer?

• 2:43:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:43:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they're eating less.

• 2:43:31Speaker 05

  They're eating less.

• 2:43:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is the calorie in, calorie out model.

• 2:43:34Speaker 05

  They're eating less, and so they are losing weight. I'm not arguing that.

• 2:43:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  And they might be craving alcohol less, according to some recent reports.

• 2:43:41Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah, well, we can go there for a minute, too, in a second. Here's the problem. When you look at that 16% weight loss, as you just said, when you put people in a DEXA scanner, they have lost equal amounts of fat and muscle. Now, is it good to lose muscle? No, it is not good. Ask any little old lady who breaks her hip if she wish she had a little bit more muscle.

• 2:44:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or somebody who dieted, lost a lot of muscle because they weren't offsetting the weight loss with resistance training or some other form of exercise, and the amount of food that they can eat in order to maintain that weight, to put it in scientific terms, sucks.

• 2:44:19Speaker 05

  And, you know, we mentioned Peter Attia earlier, okay? In Outlive, he's made it very clear that sarcopenia, lack of muscle mass, is one of the drivers of mortality. So losing muscle is not a good idea. But you lose equal amounts of fat and muscle. What else causes loss of equal amounts of fat and muscle? Starvation. In fact, the reason that all these GLP-1 analogs work is because you stop eating.

• 2:44:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like the Heal Monster.

• 2:44:52Speaker 05

  It's starvation. Yeah, just like the Heal Monster.

• 2:44:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Although the Heal Monsters look pretty chubby to me.

• 2:44:55Speaker 05

  Well.

• 2:44:57Speaker 05

  Ask another Gila monster.

• 2:44:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I did, but unfortunately, whatever answer it provided was not interpreted.

• 2:45:03Speaker 05

  Indeed. The point is that starvation is not so good. And if you think about why it's working, it's reducing gastric, the rate of gastric emptying. All right? Well, it turns out that that's the reason for its side effects, the reduction in gastric emptying. That's why you get nausea, that's why you get vomiting, that's why you get pancreatitis, and most importantly now, gastroparesis. Your stomach turns to stone. And you can't move any food through your intestine at all. And worse yet, when you stop the medicine, the gastroparesis doesn't get better.

• 2:45:47Speaker 05

  This is not a good idea.

• 2:45:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is like the opposite of the Yerba Montane induced effect, which has a sort of pro-laxative gastric emptying, maybe GLP-1 agonism. Gosh, okay. So it's obvious why people who've struggled to lose weight like it. Especially if their struggle to lose weight was, at least in their mind, the consequence of being hungry all the time and needing to eat more.

• 2:46:08Speaker 05

  Or was it because of the reward and, you know, their dependence? Because in fact, yes, these GLP-1 analogues reduce reward, and that's one of the reasons why they've noticed that, you know, thing, reduction in alcohol consumption as well. And that sounds like a good thing, except there are also numerous cases now of major depressive disorder in response to these drugs.

• 2:46:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's almost like naltrexone or something for the treatment of addiction.

• 2:46:43Speaker 05

  Well, worse.

• 2:46:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which sometimes can be useful, but now, but attempting to remove the amplitude of that reward signal, I mean, on paper, it makes sense, but it doesn't always play out, right?

• 2:46:55Speaker 05

  And in practice, it doesn't play out. That's right. And so I'm going to refer you now to an old literature that was from 2006. There was a drug that was approved in Europe called Romanabant.

• 2:47:11Speaker 05

  Okay, a trade name, Akamplia. And it was approved in Europe for weight loss. And it was pretty good at weight loss. It caused about 20% weight loss. It also caused severe depression and 21 suicides.

• 2:47:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's no longer available?

• 2:47:27Speaker 05

  Because it was the, yeah, it was pulled from the European market, never approved in the United States. And the reason this happened was because this was the anti-marijuana drug. This was the anti-munchies drug. This was an endocannabinoid antagonist. Well, when you reduce reward, you also reduce your desire to live. And that's why this concern about reduction in alcohol consumption, we've already seen major depressive disorder in patients receiving Ozempic. So are we going to see the same thing play out as we did for Romanabant? I'm worried about it.

• 2:48:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or Fen-Phen?

• 2:48:06Speaker 05

  Well, Fen-Phen didn't have, um, uh...

• 2:48:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, it was cardiac.

• 2:48:09Speaker 05

  It was cardiac, right. We had cardiac problems due to the Phenfluoramine, because of the serotonin 1B receptor agonism.

• 2:48:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, I'm just referring to the fact that these, these quote-unquote blockbuster drugs for obesity, they tend to follow a contour of, you know, very promising, very exciting, a lot of people losing weight, suicides are very promising, a lot of people losing weight, cardiac issues, very promising, losing weight, and now you're saying the stomach turns to stone. It sounds so biblical.

• 2:48:38Speaker 05

  Uh, well, indeed. So that's the question. And then finally, we can really talk biblical. If everyone in America who qualified for Ozempic got it, that would be 2.1 trillion to the healthcare system, which is currently at 4.1 trillion. So that would be a greater than 50% increase in healthcare costs. Okay, at 1,300 a month. Conversely, if we just got sugar consumption down to USDA guidelines by basically, you know, putting some limits on how much added sugar the food industry can put into

• 2:49:17Speaker 05

  any given product like Fruit Loops, we could reduce weight by 29% and save 3.0 trillion dollars. So we'd get better weight loss and we'd save 5.1 trillion dollars. Which makes more sense to the US government?

• 2:49:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, earlier you were alluding to government, big food, big pharma relationships. I mean, there's a huge win here for whoever's manufacturing these GLP-1 analogs.

• 2:49:51Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 2:49:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  But the question is, who's paying the tab?

• 2:49:53Speaker 05

  Well, we are. Now, the question is, why can't the government see that? And the answer is because the government's on the dole too. Because the government, through tariffs on US-made foods, grosses $56 billion a year. So they're a player. They're not just a regulator. They're an actor.

• 2:50:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  To play devil's advocate a little bit, listen, I'm gonna be the last person to step in and try and defend government as a unified body. I'm not qualified to do that, but you could see how if you looked at it like checkers instead of chess, you'd say, okay, here's a drug that's going to allow many millions of people to reduce their overall body weight. Overall body weight is a risk factor for a number of things, and there will be savings on the back end as a consequence of that weight loss. I mean, so that's the checkers version.

• 2:50:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:50:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  The chess version is how you're describing it. And I think that, I mean...

• 2:50:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Clearly, people in government are, well, most, some perhaps are smart enough to play chess, not checkers, or to at least understand it, but there's very little incentive for the chess model. So what would, quote unquote, solve this problem is the same thing that happened to Fen Fen or this Romana, which is if suddenly there's a major issue with the drug, then everyone stops taking it. And traditionally, that's how it's gone. It sounds like these GLP-1 analogs are gonna make it through the chute, though.

• 2:51:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, there is a very clear downside to these medicines. On the other hand, you know, there's an upside. And so I'm not sad that these medicines exist. I'm for them. I'm not against them. I'm for them for the right patient. And right now, it's not the right patient who's getting them.

• 2:51:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just like the statins. So what if somebody who's taking one of these analogs makes it a point to do resistance training? And here, you know, you mentioned bodybuilders early. I'm not, I'm not suggesting they become bodybuilders, but we now know, and I think Peter or Tia and others would agree, that everybody should be doing some form of muscle loss offsetting resistance exercise.

• 2:52:07Speaker 05

  I agree.

• 2:52:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  At least past, you know, they're reaching their adult height or something, you know? I know there are those that say weight training doesn't blunt your height, but anyway, let's just say that from, you know, early twenties onward, do something.

• 2:52:19Speaker 05

  Especially, especially if you're on these medicines.

• 2:52:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 2:52:22Speaker 05

  In order to maintain muscle mass.

• 2:52:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. So that's a different picture, right? People are drinking less alcohol. Again, I'm playing devil's advocate here. So if we look at these, these compounds, not in a vacuum, but, okay, the person who's been carrying that extra 30 pounds is now only carrying a few extra pounds of adipose tissue. They've lost a lot of muscle, but now they feel well enough to exercise. The depression part worries me.

• 2:52:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:52:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  But anyway, I'm just, I'm just trying to round the contour of it.

• 2:52:49Speaker 05

  What we've seen in children, you know, because that's who I took care of, was that often they needed a jump start. Okay, and there were different ways to get him to jumpstart.

• 2:53:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Stomach stapling.

• 2:53:02Speaker 05

  Well, that's not jumpstart, that's.

• 2:53:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  But that was what a lot of people did. I know, I have a friend, he's, he was and sadly still is really big. And he always talked about the stomach stapling, like if I could just get fifty pounds down quickly, then I could exercise, but exercise is painful, this kind of thing, and sadly, he's, he's continued to maintain or creep up in a very excessive weight.

• 2:53:23Speaker 05

  And that's the point, is, you know, that this concept of jumpstart actually, i- if you're only doing it yourself, doesn't really work. And the question is, why is his weight creeping up if he's had the stomach stapling? The answer is, because he's a sugar addict.

• 2:53:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, he's definitely addicted to the super big gulp soda.

• 2:53:43Speaker 05

  If you drink your calories, it doesn't really matter, does it?

• 2:53:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, and, and he's got such terrible psoriasis and joint pain and all this that the prospect of exercising is like a, you might as well tell him to, to like flap his wings and go to Mars.

• 2:53:58Speaker 05

  You know, fructose is a driver of immune dysfunction. If he got off, you can tell him, from me, if he got off the sugar, his psoriasis would get better, his weight would get better, his arthritis would get better, and he could have then that jumpstart.

• 2:54:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is a perfect example to bridge to the brain component of all this, because I've long wondered, based on what I understand about neural circuitry and neuroplasticity, I know we share in this knowledge, that at some point, carrying a lot of adipose tissue means that the brain sort of represents the body differently. I mean, we know there are these, these somatotopic maps of self, you know, but that the neural machinery in the hypothalamus, sure, which is responsible for motivated states, et cetera, but, but also just the entire mapping of the self changes. In other words, if one is fat long enough, that it becomes.

• 2:54:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Increasingly hard to get to a healthy weight because of the way that the neural circuitry is impacted. It basically remaps to maintain that fat person, not necessarily even just at the level of appetite, but just in terms of what do big animals do? I had a bulldog that weighed ninety pounds, bulldog mastiff. He was very economical with his movement, right? He was extremely powerful. He could run, at least when he was younger. But if he could be still, he was still, as opposed to certain smaller animals that are like peripatetic, right?

• 2:55:26Speaker 05

  Because, because he was leptin resistant. So leptin, as we talked about briefly, is the hormone that tells your brain you've had enough. If you are leptin sensitive, you are happy to burn. If you are leptin resistant, your brain thinks you're starving. And if your brain thinks you're starving, it's going to affect your behavior in two ways. It's going to make you want to eat, and it's also going to make you want to conserve, because the goal is to try to increase the leptin levels in order to overcome that resistance, which of course you can never do, because all you're going to do is lay down more fat and make more leptin.

• 2:56:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  That makes so much sense, because leptin comes from the adipose tissue.

• 2:56:05Speaker 05

  Exactly. So that leptin resistance is what you have to be able to break through. You have to fix the leptin sensitivity. Well, what's the driver of the leptin resistance? Insulin. Insulin inhibits leptin signaling. And it does it at three separate places in the POMC neuron, the pro-opiomelanocortin neuron in the hypothalamus. It does it at IRS2, insulin receptor substrate 2. It does it at SOX3, suppressor of cytokine signaling 3. And it does it at PIP3, phosphatidylinase triphosphate.

• 2:56:43Speaker 05

  Those three separate arms of the leptin receptor are all basically put to sleep by high insulin. Insulin blocks leptin signaling. So the higher the insulin goes, the more your brain thinks you're starving. And the more your brain thinks you're starving, the hungrier you get and the less you want to move. So the... Gluttony and sloth that we've been talking about all, all in our podcast is really biochemical. It is secondary to this phenomenon of insulin blocking leptin signaling. You gotta fix that first. Get the insulin down any way you can.

• 2:57:27Speaker 05

  And the best way? Get rid of the refined carbohydrate and sugar. That's where you start.

• 2:57:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  It makes so much sense.

• 2:57:37Speaker 05

  It works too. How about that?

• 2:57:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's always good.

• 2:57:40Speaker 05

  It is.

• 2:57:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I once heard you say, I think it was in a conversation with Peter Attia on his podcast, and this really stuck in my mind, that when a person consumes glucose, that it activates a number of different brain sites. You know, neurons loving glucose. But that when one ingests fructose, that it preferentially activates neurons in the reward pathway.

• 2:58:07Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:58:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  At maybe seven times the, the magnitude or, or something like that.

• 2:58:12Speaker 05

  Glucose activates the basal ganglia. This is work from Wolnerhausen in Switzerland and also Eric Stice at Oregon Health Sciences.

• 2:58:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Circuits for movement and planning and execution.

• 2:58:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. Okay. Fructose basically stimulates the nucleus accumbens, the reward center. It is just like heroin, just like cocaine, just like nicotine. It activates the reward center. It doesn't do anything for the basal ganglia. So it is addictive. Anything that stimulates the reward center in the extreme is addictive. So we have chemical addictions, heroin, cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, sugar. We have behavioral addictions, shopping, gambling, internet gaming, social media, pornography. Doesn't matter. They all stimulate dopamine in the reward center. And in the extreme, they are all addictive.

• 2:59:04Speaker 05

  So the question is, if you are addicted, is that personal responsibility?

• 2:59:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, it's a very, um.

• 2:59:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a question I think about a lot because I know a lot of people in the addiction recovery community, both from the treatment end and the addict end.

• 2:59:27Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:59:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And this always comes down to this question when somebody is suffering from an addiction of any kind and they're resistant to getting treatment. If you look at them as being sick, at least in that moment, is a sick person in the best or worst, or at least diminished, position to guide their own treatment? So for instance, somebody with dementia, would you ask them, do you want to go see a neurologist? You might ask them that, but are they the best person to make that decision?

• 2:59:55Speaker 05

  Well, this is the problem. So this is where personal responsibility falls down. So, personal responsibility, as we, you know, we talked about four criteria have to be met, none of them are met. That's the first issue. Second one is a little bit, shall we say, cheekier. Who invented personal responsibility? Any idea?

• 3:00:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm definitely gonna get this one wrong.

• 3:00:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're gonna get this one wrong. Are you ready?

• 3:00:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 3:00:21Speaker 05

  The tobacco industry.

• 3:00:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  The notion of personal responsibility?

• 3:00:25Speaker 05

  They invented it. There was no personal responsibility until tobacco in 1962, because they were getting killed on the science, and they needed to invent another reason for you to smoke. In fact, there's a paper that came out, Dorfman et al., that looked at the New York Times and the Washington Post, and they did a entire lit search of the entire, of, you know, all of the output of those two newspapers for decades to look for the term "personal responsibility." And the very first time it was ever mentioned was 1962, and it didn't pick up in speed

• 3:01:07Speaker 05

  until 1986, which was the same year as Cipollone v. Liggett in the, at the Supreme Court, which basically said that, you know, that the cigarette industry was guilty of plying people with an addictive substance. So, this is very specifically industry-driven, and we have the data to prove it.

• 3:01:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Amazing.

• 3:01:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  I wonder, along the lines of personal responsibility, given that many listeners to this conversation are going to be thinking about their own food intake and food choices, that of their children and other relatives, that we could play a little, not a game, but a little rapid-ish fire Q and A. Never done this before on this podcast, but I think it's particularly appropriate for a discussion like this that wicks out into so many areas, and I absolutely will invite you back and perhaps along with

• 3:02:09Speaker 05

  My pleasure.

• 3:02:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Melissa Apple to talk about some of the exciting work you guys are doing, because there's so much we could cover. But people are going to wonder, in a very practical sense, whether or not they should or should not be consuming certain things. And I know you're not the food police.

• 3:02:22Speaker 05

  I'm not the food police.

• 3:02:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm not a cop, and I do believe people should be in choice about these matters. But I also believe that, because you're a guest on the podcast and you're highly informed, and I've done clinical work and research for so many years in this area, and you have such a clear stance on the role of big food, and we really, really appreciate your honesty and directness, that you'd be willing to provide a comment about a couple of different terms that I'll throw out. And if you choose to say really nothing to say about that, fine, that would be a quick pass. So, here we go. And we covered a little bit of this earlier, but fruit in whole form, so has fructose, but has fiber, so thumbs up, thumbs sideways

• 3:03:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  or thumbs down for fruit consumption.

• 3:03:09Speaker 05

  Fruit is fine. Fruit juice is not.

• 3:03:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great, thank you. White rice versus brown rice, and among the white rice is the sticky rice and the rices with added sugars, which you'll find in a lot of restaurants.

• 3:03:25Speaker 05

  Brown rice, because of the fiber. White rice, polished, you know, number one, all the vitamin B1 gone, and of course, a much larger glucose excursion. That glycemic index thing, which of course I hate, it's glycemic load that matters. And that is a very high glycemic load. So brown rice.

• 3:03:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  So brown rice is better than white rice?

• 3:03:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:03:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, in a meaningful way?

• 3:03:51Speaker 05

  In a meaningful way.

• 3:03:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. Earlier you mentioned tomato sauce. I love tomato sauce that's made from just tomatoes. So are most tomato sauces filled with sugar?

• 3:04:02Speaker 05

  Perfect. Our little recommendation engine looked at this question and it turns out that only 10% of the available tomato sauces out on the market don't have added sugar. So you have to know which ones, where you can look yourself, where you can look up Perfect, and it will tell you which ones you can buy.

• 3:04:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  If people chose to consume bread, which many people do, is there a way to, just across the board, without just baking your own or looking at the ingredients list, to make a better choice? Is it like sourdoughs tend to have less sugar than blank?

• 3:04:40Speaker 05

  Well, sourdough has been fermented, so it will have actually consumed some of the sugar. So it would be a better choice. But really, the best choice is the highest fiber breads. Now, if you look at a wheat berry, it is 25% of fiber. The husk is 25% of the weight of that wheat berry. That means that the carbohydrate to fiber ratio of a wheat berry is three to one. So a good bread should have a carbohydrate to fiber ratio of somewhere between three to one to five to one, tops. Anything above that means that they've stripped the fiber away. So that's something you could do.

• 3:05:23Speaker 05

  But the easier way is to actually look it up on Perfect.

• 3:05:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  You mentioned meat and meat sourcing, egg and chicken sourcing earlier. Maybe we just revisit that. Meat, fish and eggs, thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down, or it depends?

• 3:05:38Speaker 05

  It depends. It depends on where the meat came from. It depends on whether it was pasture raised. It depends on whether it's organic or not. If the animal was injected with antibiotics, stay away from it because those antibiotics are in the meat. They're going to basically sterilize your gut and then the bad bacteria are going to take over. We haven't really talked much about the microbiome today, but that's a whole podcast all by itself.

• 3:06:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, we can touch on it a little bit more. Low sugar fermented foods, thumbs up, thumbs sideways, thumbs down?

• 3:06:10Speaker 05

  Fermented foods, short chain fatty acids, all good.

• 3:06:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  What are your favorite sources of fermented foods?

• 3:06:16Speaker 05

  I like kimchi.

• 3:06:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I like kimchi too. I like some of the live sauerkrauts.

• 3:06:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's also good, but with the right, you know, the right accoutrement. The one thing I would be careful about is yogurt. Okay, so there are yogurts with live cultures and there are a whole lot of yogurts with dead cultures. And if it's a yogurt with dead cultures, it's kind of irrelevant and the chances are they've actually covered up the sourness with sugar. So, you know, large commercially available yogurt, be very, very careful. Okay, if it's a, you know, artisan yogurt, you know, made by, you know, people you know or trust, you know, that's a very different story. You know, yogurts with live cultures.

• 3:07:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Intermittent fasting, do you practice it and what do you think about it?

• 3:07:09Speaker 05

  I don't practice it, but I am for it. For the right patient. Turns out who's the right patient, the patient with liver fat. Because the reason it works is because it gives the liver a chance to basically burn off the fat that it's stored.

• 3:07:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Zero calorie soda.

• 3:07:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it. It's definite no. And I don't even have to ask about sugary soda.

• 3:07:32Speaker 05

  That's basically just poison in a can.

• 3:07:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Food combinations, I have a feeling I know what your answer is, but the glycemic index, which we know your feelings on now,

• 3:07:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  asserts that if you combine some fat with a sugary, like eating ice cream, you have a more blunt insulin response than if you were to eat pure sugar of equivalent calories. But what are your thoughts on food combinations as a way to blunt the insulin response?

• 3:07:59Speaker 05

  Food combinations are great if there's some fiber associated with it.

• 3:08:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Comes back to fiber again.

• 3:08:05Speaker 05

  And by the way, and by the way, I, you know, full disclosure, I am the chief medical officer of a fiber company.

• 3:08:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  What is it?

• 3:08:13Speaker 05

  It is called Biolumen and it is a proprietary fiber. It is a microcellulose sponge, seven microns in diameter, so the size of a red blood cell.

• 3:08:26Speaker 05

  You swallow it, it goes to your stomach, it expands seventy fold over its original size, and so it'll give you a feeling of fullness because it's taking up space in your stomach, but more importantly, when it expands, the nooks and the crannies in the sponge become available, and embedded in those nooks and crannies are a set of proprietary hydrogels, soluble fiber, which sequester glucose, fructose, sucrose, simple starches, and render them unavailable for early absorption in the duodenum, thus reducing the glucose response, reducing the insulin response, protecting the liver, and moving it through the intestines so that microbiome can chew it up for its own purposes, feeding

• 3:09:10Speaker 05

  the gut. We can reduce glucose absorption by thirty-six percent, fructose absorption by thirty-eight percent, sucrose absorption by forty percent, simple starch absorption by nine percent, and increase short-chain fatty acid production by sixty percent without an increase in gas.

• 3:09:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  When do people take this?

• 3:09:32Speaker 05

  With meals.

• 3:09:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 3:09:34Speaker 05

  So it comes as a sachet, one teaspoon, sprinkle it on your food, or take it as a, you know, in a drink, you know, just mix it in and slug it down, and then eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and it will basically act like you ate real food. It will turn processed food into real food in the intestine, and we have clinical trial data that demonstrates that.

• 3:10:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it available as a commercial product?

• 3:10:03Speaker 05

  It is available. It is called Munch Munch. Now, I hate that name.

• 3:10:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  I hate it, too.

• 3:10:08Speaker 05

  I didn't make it up.

• 3:10:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I'm aware.

• 3:10:10Speaker 05

  The marketers did that.

• 3:10:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Your marketing team sucks, but the product sounds amazing.

• 3:10:14Speaker 05

  Yes, BioLumen.Tech.

• 3:10:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great, thank you for that. Sorry, Munch Munch marketing team, but you got a munch munch to a new product name. But it sounds like a very interesting product, and it actually answered my next question, which was about fiber supplements.

• 3:10:32Speaker 05

  Fiber is good, but there are two kinds of fiber. There's soluble, and there's insoluble, and they are not the same. So soluble is what goes into Fiber One Bars, you know, that psyllium, inulin.

• 3:10:49Speaker 05

  Peckton, like what holds jelly together. That's good, I'm not saying it's bad, but you need the insoluble fiber, the cellulose, the stringy stuff in celery, the cardboard, if you will. Together, they form this gel that we talked about earlier. If you only consume the soluble fiber, which is what the food industry will add to food, because insoluble fiber is not missable. If you only add the soluble fiber back, you're not getting the benefits of the entire fiber complement.

• 3:11:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Earlier, when talking about the NOVA system and how most, all of our foods are nine, let's say, I know it was seven to 10%, let's say 95%, let's err on the side of better. 95% of our food should come from NOVA system class one or class two foods.

• 3:11:37Speaker 05

  Or three.

• 3:11:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or three, okay, staying away from those NOVA class four foods. Could you give us some examples of NOVA class one and class two foods, just broadly speaking?

• 3:11:48Speaker 05

  Okay, NOVA class one is any food without a label. Period. If you see a label on a food, it's a warning label.

• 3:11:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, there's ground, ground beef has a label. Okay, so that's.

• 3:12:02Speaker 05

  Well, does it?

• 3:12:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you're talking about apple, well, when I buy it, it has a label. I'm asking this because people are gonna wonder, so.

• 3:12:07Speaker 05

  Well, it does have a nutrition facts label. Is there a nutrition facts label on a thing of ground beef?

• 3:12:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  I buy that, that ground beef where I consume venison, where if you flip it over, it says how many calories, how many protein, so there's a label. But, but it's just beef or venison.

• 3:12:24Speaker 05

  Okay, and that's class one.

• 3:12:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, egg?

• 3:12:27Speaker 05

  Egg is class one.

• 3:12:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, and then, of course, fruit, apples, oranges. Okay, so it doesn't matter if it has, it has a name, a name tag, as long as it, it doesn't have an ingredient list.

• 3:12:36Speaker 05

  Nutrition facts label.

• 3:12:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Got it.

• 3:12:38Speaker 05

  Real food does not need a label. It's only if they did something to it that it needs a label. So you have to look at every label as a warning label. Now, the problem with the label is it only tells you what's in the food. What you really need to know is what's been done to the food, because it's the ultra-processed food that's the problem. They don't wanna tell you that. That's secret. Okay, secret from a proprietary standpoint, but also secret because if you knew what they did to it, you wouldn't eat it. You would never buy it. And they don't want you to know. So they only tell you what's in the food. That's not what's important. It's what's been done to the food that's important. And that's why this Nova Class Four is so important, and that's why Perfect is so important, because it'll do the work for you.

• 3:13:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. We'll definitely provide links to all of these. So if you could pick one thing to recommend to people that want to improve their health?

• 3:13:34Speaker 05

  Get rid of the sugar.

• 3:13:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 3:13:36Speaker 05

  Period.

• 3:13:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very clear.

• 3:13:37Speaker 05

  That's number one. Number two? Go for a walk.

• 3:13:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  The exercise piece.

• 3:13:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. Go for a walk.

• 3:13:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  And if you could recommend one thing that the general public can do to try and assist in this advocacy for not redefining, but actually clearly defining what is food and what isn't, and making people aware at the level of policy and change and school lunches. I mean, if there were one thing, what can we do? I mean, you've clearly activated my neurons surrounding like the set of problems that exist and the paths to correct them, but should we be writing to our congresspeople? Should we be getting angry at hospitals because they've got all these fast food machines and that the cafeteria food is like illness promoting?

• 3:14:26Speaker 05

  At UCSF, we've gotten rid of all sugar beverages. We have the Healthy Beverage Initiative. So

• 3:14:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  No Coke machines at UCSF?

• 3:14:32Speaker 05

  No Coke machines at UCSF.

• 3:14:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow, Stanford, check that out, because, you know, people always send me pictures of the Coke machines in the School of Medicine. I'm like, listen, I didn't put them there, but I

• 3:14:42Speaker 05

  We have to model for the public, you know? I mean, where was the first place that smoking was banned? Hospitals. Okay? Because we knew. So if you get rid of the, you know, soda, if you get rid of the sugared soda at the hospital, you're telling people something. So yeah, I think that every hospital and really every public venue in America needs to clear out the junk.

• 3:15:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  So post photos of junk that are supposed to be in, uh, in health promoting institutions. And, um, I guess we're trying to cancel junk food.

• 3:15:19Speaker 05

  Shame.

• 3:15:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  We're trying to cancel junk food. I'm pretty opposed to cancel culture, but here we go. We're gonna cancel. Um, marvelous. It's actionable. It's straightforward. It's low cost, low time investment, uh, zero cost, um, very low time investment. Thank you for that.

• 3:15:33Speaker 05

  And look up Eat Real because we're doing it for your kids. So you need to help support it. Any school district in America can do it. So what do we do? We have a business model whereby the, uh, food services director, um, either purchases or rents a dilapidated factory in the center of the district, repurposes it into a food preparation facility. They can make 27 to 30,000 meals a day. Okay. With a, you know, skeleton crew and then they, uh, and, and you control what's in it. And because you're buying in volume, it actually reduces the cost.

• 3:16:14Speaker 05

  So it's cheaper than buying it from Cisco or Aramark or Sedexo or wherever. And then you farm it out via, you know, truck or bus to all the different schools. So every kid gets a hot meal made from scratch each day. And we can solve this problem.

• 3:16:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can't help but ask this one last question. For people that wanna cut out sugar, which you clearly stated is the most important thing to do for one's health. How do we know how much sugar is in something? So should people be looking at labels and just looking for how much sugar, how much carbohydrate? Or could we even go so far as to say if it says, um, high fructose corn syrup, then it's, it's on the no-fly list? Don't, don't, don't eat it.

• 3:17:04Speaker 05

  So the problem, the problem is that there are 262 names for sugar. And the food industry uses all of them. And the reason they use all of them is because they can include a different sugar as number five, number six, number seven, number eight, number nine on the list. And when you add it up, it becomes number one. They hide it in plain sight and they do it on purpose. Now, do I expect everybody to memorize all 262 names? No, of course not. Can you figure it out yourself? Well, the answer is no unless they have the line where it says added sugars. If it says added sugars, it is either sucrose or high fructose corn syrup. No one's adding lactose.

• 3:17:49Speaker 05

  Okay, that's not happening.

• 3:17:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or glucose.

• 3:17:52Speaker 05

  They're not even adding glucose because glucose isn't that sweet. Glucose is not that interesting. You don't see people going around chugging Caro syrup, do you? Okay, that's glucose. Who cares? Yeah, it might be good in the molasses cookie, but that's it. All right. So it's fructose. So you need to know what's been added. So if it says added sugars, that's a good place to start. No greater than one teaspoon per serving. No greater than four grams per serving of added sugars. Anything greater than that, leave at the store.

• 3:18:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  And aim for those NOVA type, type one, type two.

• 3:18:30Speaker 05

  And aim for NOVA types one, two, and three. And if you don't know whether it's NOVA type one, two, or three, you can use PERFECT. And if you don't look at that, then go look at the nutrition facts label. And anything that has more than four ingredients is NOVA class four.

• 3:18:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Robert Lustig, thank you so much. You've provided such an incredible education in nutritional biochemistry, the processing of fat, protein, carbohydrates, sugar, fructose in particular, the clear detriments of consuming fructose on so many different organ systems. I love, love, love that you separated out food science, nutrition, and metabolic health. That's just, that's a, you know, that's a gazillion dollar delineation for people to understand and to shape their understanding of all the information that's out there and bins into these different categories. You've given us so many actionable tools, new conceptual frameworks.

• 3:19:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  You've given us a real tour de force today in just oh so clear language. So I want to thank you. I've learned a ton and I know everyone else has as well. And if people have questions, they can. Of course, put them in the comments section on YouTube. That's the best place. We'll provide links to all the companies and websites that you referenced and some of your other work. And listen, I just, I'm so, so grateful that you exist and that you've done the work that you've done and your passion and your advocacy for health is, it's just oh so clear. So, thank you so much.

• 3:20:09Speaker 05

  So, I want to, I want to thank you. And the reason I want to thank you is first of all, you know, inviting me, that's nice. You know, that's good. But the reason is because people need to understand science. I am completely in agreement with you. The public needs to understand science. They listen to you because you, number one, provide the science and number two, you don't talk down to them. You treat them as equals. And that is truly remarkable. And so, I want to thank you for your service.

• 3:20:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, you're most welcome. It's a labor of love and I think it was the great Max Del Brook that said, "When teaching, assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence." And I do believe that humans are infinitely intelligent, although sometimes as a whole we mask it. People deserve the knowledge. So, thank you so much for sharing that knowledge today and let's absolutely have you back.

• 3:21:04Speaker 05

  My pleasure. Thank you.

• 3:21:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Robert Lustig about nutrition and how sugar impacts the health of our brain and body. To learn more about Dr. Lustig's work and to find links to the many books that he's written on this and other topics, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific, zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests you'd like me to consider on the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast.

• 3:21:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not so much on today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep, for hormone support, and for improving focus. To learn more about the supplements discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast, go to Live Momentous, spelled O-U-S, so livemomentous.com/huberman.

• 3:22:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on Instagram, X formerly called Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Threads. And at all of those places, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content covered on the Huberman Lab podcast. So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero-cost newsletter that comes out every month. It includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of short PDFs of maybe just one to three pages where I list out the specific protocols, for instance, for improving dopamine functioning, or for

• 3:22:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  improving your sleep, or for deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure, or fitness protocols, and on and on, all of which are presented in brief fashion, very direct, just the protocols listed out. Again, completely zero cost. To sign up, you simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu function, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Robert Lustig. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.