E208 - Dr. Robert Lustig: What Modern Food Is Doing to Your Sense of Self

Dr. Robert Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, pediatrician, and bestselling author who has spent 45 years watching children get sicker despite his best efforts to stop it. His work connects the dots between ultra-processed food, mitochondrial dysfunction, dopamine hijacking, and the chronic stress epidemic in a way that is impossible to dismiss. In this conversation, we explore what he calls the hostage brain, what happens to a nervous system under sustained biochemical assault, and why so much of what we call personal failure is actually a systems problem. What We Dive Into: 1. When chronic pain, emotional or physical, goes unresolved, the brain reaches for anything that spikes dopamine to quiet it. Over time, tolerance builds and neurons die. Lustig's point is that this is not a personal weakness. The food, the screens, and the stress have conspired to put nearly all of us in some version of this state. 2. Dopamine drives wanting. Serotonin drives contentment. The loneliness epidemic is not simply a social problem but a neurochemical one. Cortisol reduces serotonin, dopamine antagonizes it, and ultra-processed food depletes the tryptophan needed to make it. 3. Lustig draws a clear line between primary needs, love, sleep, real food, and secondary desires, status, power, accumulation. Meeting the basics first is both the simplest and most radical act available. Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself. https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com ✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS: https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyself Use code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide https://www.oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELF Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off OneSkin ___________ 00:00 Intro 02:02 What Is Hostage Brain? 04:47 The Loss of Stress Resilience 09:15 Dopamine, Tolerance, and the Addicted Brain 11:26 The Five Causes of Hijacked Biology 13:08 The Amygdala: Fear Center, Air Traffic Controller, Buckshot 16:07 The Four Brakes on the Amygdala and Why They're Failing 22:13 From Real Food to Ultra-Processed Food: The Five Changes 23:51 Sugar: The Big Kahuna 29:57 Mitochondria, Body Temperature, and the Energy Crisis 32:33 The Corporate Machine: Big Food, Big Pharma, and the Atlas Network 36:26 Does Big Food Collude with Big Pharma? 40:51 Children Getting Sicker: The Systemic Failure 46:10 "Personal Responsibility" Is a Tobacco Industry Invention 51:44 Freedom of Choice Is Really Freedom to Blame 53:11 Loneliness vs. Solitude: The Serotonin Distinction 56:52 You Can't Love with an Inflamed Brain 57:25 The Gut-Brain Axis and the Light of Tryptophan 1:03:13 Orange vs. Orange Juice: Why Fiber Is the Point 1:07:44 BioLumen and Making Ultra-Processed Food Healthy 1:16:14 Insulin, the Three Fat Depots, and Thin Outside Fat Inside 1:25:10 How to Reduce Liver Fat 1:26:19 Sugar, ADHD, and the Prefrontal Cortex 1:26:41 Practical Steps: Phones, Plastics, and Environmental Toxins 1:33:18 The Four C's: Connect, Contribute, Cope, Cook 1:41:29 Community Questions: ATP, Cognition, and the Biological Basis of Consciousness 1:45:27 What Gives Dr. Lustig Hope 1:47:38 Closing Message: Tend to Yourself First ___________ ✨MORE FROM DR. ROBERT LUSTIG ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrRobertLustig/ ↳Metabolical Book: https://metabolical.com ↳https://robertlustig.com STUDIES MENTIONED: ↳https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41880620/ ↳https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/504/ ↳https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987726001544 📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF ↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l ↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ ↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum ↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/ ↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/ 👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum ↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast ↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Depression, rain fog, irritability, anxiousness. That level of pain is going on all the time. So when you're in pain, you reach for the cocaine, alcohol, the sugar, or the shopping, or the gambling, or the social media. All of those are dopamine. They mollify the pain you're feeling. That's not a big problem unless you keep doing it. I worked in a neuro intensive care unit for 45 years, watching people get sick. We're all in it.

• 0:27André Duqum?

  There's no question that this goes from a personal responsibility level to a-

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Let me stop you there. Personal responsibility.

• 0:33André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Where's it come from? Came from the tobacco industry, but it's not the only problem. Sugar's been added to all of our food on purpose by the food industry because they know when they add it, you buy more. The food industry knows what they're doing. The pharma industry knows what they're doing. There very well may be a collusion. Freedom of choice is really freedom to blame. And we'll talk about that.

• 0:53André Duqum?

  What do you make of that? Children are getting increasingly sicker despite the fact that you've devoted your life to getting them better.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  Tell me. For every kid I treated, 10 more would show up on my doorstep. This sticks in my craw that this is not getting better. We have been told that our problems are somewhere else. They're not. Only you can fix them. There are four ways to do that, and all of them are free. The first one is-

• 1:24André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself podcast. Our guest today is a neuroendocrinologist, pediatrician. He's a bestselling author and widely one of the most viewed health educators on the entire planet. He articulates incredibly well how our food systems have hijacked our biology, our brain, and even our capacity for happiness itself. This is going to be less of a nutrition lecture and more of what happens when we examine how much of our sense of self and agency is shaped by the foods we eat. Dr. Robert Lustig, thank you for being here.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Well, thank you very much for having me on, Fred. Pleasure.

• 2:02André Duqum?

  What is the hostage brain? How do you, when you use that term, what are you referring to?

• 2:07Speaker 00

  So let's start a little further back, and we'll sort of build up and get there.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  I'm a neuroendocrinologist. One of the things I study is stress, its role in systemic health and its role in mental health. What I've realized is that stress plays a major role also in societal health and also in planetary health. And we have a systemic health, mental health, societal health, and planetary health crisis, all going on all at the same time.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Coincidence or related?

• 2:57André Duqum?

  Related.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:59André Duqum?

  It's my pick.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Through what mechanism?

• 3:03André Duqum?

  Through a multifactorial situation that we got going on.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Well, indeed, there are many factors, and I don't argue that. There are loads of factors. The question is, are those factors upstream or downstream causing the problem? And I would argue that those are factors that we normally routinely identify. For instance, food pollution, screens, ideologues. I would argue that those are actually downstream, not upstream. And what I've learned in my 45 years of practice is that if you're going to fix a problem,

• 3:51Speaker 00

  you have to fix it upstream if it's going to actually solve the problem. Fixing the problem downstream only fixes the result, doesn't fix the problem. Kind of like what Desmond Tutu used to say. You know, he would be at the side of a river, and he'd be seeing, you know, people basically, you know, being carried down the river, you know, and then he'd go jump in and rescue them and bring them to shore. And then another one would be coming down the river, and he'd jump in and rescue them. And, you know, after doing this many times, he has to start asking, why are these people falling in the first place? Maybe go upstream and find out. That's kind of where this is.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  So the question is, what's the upstream driver of this? And I would argue that basically we as a species used to have the capacity of stress resilience.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  And now we don't. So what does that mean? Once upon a time, when you were three years old, you put your hand on a hot stove and you went,

• 5:06Speaker 00

  never doing that again. All right, so what happened there? You experienced a moment of uncertainty, a moment of fear, a moment of pain,

• 5:22Speaker 00

  and you developed a new neural circuit in your amygdala. And we'll talk about what the amygdala is in a minute.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Okay? And that circuit has served you well ever since.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  What I'm arguing is that that circuit is now not working, that what you have now is a society of chronic toxic stress,

• 5:54Speaker 00

  where that learning and adaptation has now basically given way to

• 6:08Speaker 00

  a loss of reality and a loss of sense of self and a true inability to manage the uncertainty. And in the process of doing that, that has led to physiologic changes in our brains and our bodies that have led to the systemic health crisis, that have led to the mental health crisis. And ultimately, as a conglomerate, led to the societal health crisis because all of this is happening all the time, not just to the individual, but to the collective. And finally, ultimately, to the planetary health crisis. And that this loss of stress resilience

• 6:53Speaker 00

  is actually at the heart of what ails us as a society and as a planet today.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Now, that switch from management of uncertainty to chronic toxic stress, I call pain brain. You ask me, what is hostage brain? Hostage brain is basically a version, a detour away from pain brain. Because pain brain is so painful. And by the way, emotional pain and physical pain use the same pathways in the brain and are just as painful. You know, I mean, breaking up with your ex is like having your arm, you know, cut off. Okay?

• 7:49Speaker 00

  It's virtually identical, and no one wants to manage that level of pain. And that level of pain is going on all the time because whenever there's uncertainty, there's pain. And so we reach for methods to mollify the pain, to distract from the pain, to reduce the pain, to basically deep six the pain. And all of those are dopamine. All of those are basically methods for deriving mollification of pain.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Dopamine is the pleasure neurotransmitter. This feels good. I want more. So when you're in pain, you reach for the cocaine or the heroin or the nicotine to calm you down or the alcohol to calm you down or buzz you up depending. Or the sugar or the shopping or the gambling or the internet gaming or the social media or the pornography. All of those are dopamine. All of those basically mollify the pain you're feeling. They distract you from the pain.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Now, in and of itself, that's not a big problem unless you keep doing it.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Because dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Every time dopamine is released, the next neuron is excited. Never inhibits, always excites. There are five dopamine receptors. When dopamine binds to any one of those five, that neuron gets excited. Now, neurons like to be excited. That's why they have receptors in the first place. But neurons like to be tickled, not bludgeoned. Chronic overstimulation of any neuron leads to neuronal cell death. Neurons like to fire, and then they like to rest. And when they keep firing, they die. And we know this because I worked in a neuro intensive care unit for 45 years,

• 10:08Speaker 00

  watching kids with status epilepticus, nonstop seizures, lose their neurons if we didn't stop their seizures.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  So chronic overstimulation of a neuron leads to neuronal cell death.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  The neuron doesn't want to die, so it's got a plan B. It's got a failsafe. It's got a defense mechanism. It downregulates the dopamine receptor. So there are fewer receptors. So a stray dopamine molecule has less chance of finding a receptor to bind to. Well, what that means is that the response to the dopamine is going to be attenuated. It's going to be lessened. So what you end up with is more and more for less and less. Okay? The law of diminishing returns. The concept of tolerance. That's what tolerance is. Then when the neurons do start to die, that's actually called addiction.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Hostage brain is the addicted brain, the addicted to dopamine to mollify the pain brain. And we're all in it. That's hostage brain.

• 11:21André Duqum?

  What do you see as the most prevalent causes that are hijacking our brain to be in that state?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Oh, where do you want to start?

• 11:29André Duqum?

  Let's give the high level overview and then we can double down on some.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Food, ultra-processed food, you know, that's the kind of what brought me to the dance, as it were. Screens and technology, sleep deprivation, drugs, ideologues, if you will. Okay. You know ideologies that, shall we say, drive inconsistency in part because of the fear. There's always fear associated with the reward. There's cortisol and dopamine at the same time. Fear and reward together, kind of like Wall Street. So I would say that those are the big ones.

• 12:18André Duqum?

  Yeah. So you said foods, so to speak, brought you to the dance. And I've heard you quote Schopenhauer, that you are allowed to do what you want, but you are not allowed to want what you want.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're a good student.

• 12:30André Duqum?

  And we have, in many ways that you've described, a food system that literally hijacks our biology and our sense of self that we are all walking around with, that we want to protect this idea of ourself and that we think these ideas and emotions are intrinsically connected to who we are. We start to chip away at that notion the more we see that the ultra-processed foods and sugar and so many of these additives directly shape our sense of self.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Indeed. So the question is, how? How does that work? How does that happen? The amygdala, okay? I believe that the problem is in the amygdala, except actually it's not. The amygdala is actually doing its job. So what is the amygdala? Okay, for your audience, you know, like, you know, they've heard of it, maybe. Maybe I've heard of it. All right. So some people think the amygdala is the fear center of your brain. And it is. That's about 10% of what it does. Some people say, well, it's the 24-hour sentry scanning for threat. And it's that, too. That's probably about 30% of what it does.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Some people say the amygdala is like the point guard on your basketball team. Okay, so basically surveying the entire court, looking at the offense and the defense in real time and figuring out best way to score. And it's that, too. That's about 30% of what it does. That leaves about 30% left over. Okay? Some people would say the amygdala is like your air traffic controller. So what does an air traffic controller do? Well, it has to let the planes take off. It has to land the planes. All of those are relatively mundane processes. Yes? Okay? Except when they're not, right? When there's an emergency, okay?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Whether it's, you know, a wheel coming off or a, you know, a door, you know, being flown off or maybe a UFO or an intercontinental ballistic missile or, you know, or a drone or who knows what. Okay? So really what the amygdala's job is to do is to sort mundane from novel. And then within novel, sort threat from reward. And it does that pretty effectively, I would argue. Okay?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  And it's been doing that for us for zillions of years. And that's basically how we survive. Is our amygdala is our first responder, if you will. Okay? And when your amygdala is working, you can basically survive a threat. That's its job, keep you alive. The problem is, in the same way that there are two ways to fire a gun, you can fire it with a bullet or you can fire it with buckshot. Okay? The bullet is much more, shall we say, surgical.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  The buckshot is, you know, basically, yeah, not as effective and does a whole lot of damage. Okay? Amygdalas like buckshot. And you want to rein it in as much as possible. So there are four control systems on the amygdala. And I'll name them for you. The prefrontal cortex, reasoning. The hippocampus, memory. The afferent vagus nerve, interception, intuition, gut feelings. And finally, oxytocin, safety.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Those four brakes on the amygdala keep it under wraps from going off hog wild, from turning that bullet into buckshot. Okay? Every one of those four brakes today is under threat. Every one of them is now dysfunctional. Every one of them has lost its capacity to keep the amygdala quiet. Now, different reasons for each of those, but they all relate back to the changes

• 17:15Speaker 00

  in our current environment that have occurred over the last 50 years. So for instance, prefrontal cortex. What damages that? Well, dopamine and cortisol. Okay? When your prefrontal cortex goes, basically you can't stop doing stupid things because your prefrontal cortex is the Jiminy Cricket of your brain. It's the part of your brain that basically reins you in and keeps you from, you know, saying or doing something you're going to regret later, like buckshot. Hypocampus, memory.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  So if you've previously experienced a threat and you survived it, you can recall that and say, oh, that's not so bad. I know I can do that. But when your hippocampus is not doing its job, that threat looks anew. The afferent vagus, okay? And what causes the hippocampus to go? Cortisol. The afferent vagus, okay? So that's transmitting information from the gut up to the brain. And what is that information? Well, it's coming from the microbiome. It's coming from your food. It's coming from the bacteria that chew up your food.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  And it's sending it via neurotransmitters, like for instance serotonin. But, you know, 90% of the serotonin in your body is in your gut. And that information is making its way up to the brain in order to basically tell your brain that things are okay inside. And when you don't get that information, you've lost intuition. Well, we've lost intuition. And that's because of the food we eat. And finally, oxytocin. So oxytocin is of course the reproduction neurotransmitter, the love neurotransmitter, the parturition neurotransmitter,

• 19:21Speaker 00

  the lactation neurotransmitter, the bonding neurotransmitter, all those. But it's really the safety neurotransmitter is what it is. And it's been shown that if you are exposed to early childhood trauma, what we call adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, that oxytocin receptor that normally binds the oxytocin gets methylated, now doesn't bind the oxytocin. And so things that were safety are now threat. And so if you see the world as threat, you can't rein in your amygdala.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  And so these four systems within our brain are responding to our current environment in a very negative fashion, basically causing our amygdala to buckshot our entire lives. And that's leading to systemic health problems, mental health problems, and since it's happening to everyone, societal health problems, and ultimately planetary health problems. So this is all about fear. We have lost control of our fear.

• 20:39Speaker 02

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• 22:09André Duqum?

  So let's see if I have this right.

• 22:12André Duqum?

  It's no question that we are living in an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 22:19André Duqum?

  To examine the mechanism, the way that you just said, when cortisol happens, there's the methylation of the oxytocin receptor, which correlates with the serotonin depletion, which correlates and causes this feeling of lack of safety and contentness. And so when you say that like the, your gut feelings and intuition are undermined and that, I've heard you say you can't love in a brain that's inflamed, you know?

• 22:51Speaker 00

  You've done your homework. I have said that.

• 22:54André Duqum?

  I think it's just so important to double click on this because so much of

• 23:00André Duqum?

  what we perceive as existential problems that need existential answers are, have oftentimes, and I want to hear your thoughts on this, simple remedy is to be able to return to our natural state and not have our amygdala be hijacked.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 23:15André Duqum?

  And that's, I think, like, health has become, largely due to so many of the podcasts out there, so many different conflicting ideas on diet and advice of what people are to do.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 23:30André Duqum?

  But when you examine on the mechanism of literally how our sense of agency is actually removed from us, I think it's a really important reminder to double click on. So you mentioned the food systems being one of the biggest.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  It's, you know, affecting all of us, all at the same time. So the question is, what about the food? I mean, food used to work, and now it doesn't. And what happened to it? And many things have happened to it. In, you know, 10 words or less, okay? We went from real food to ultra-processed food. Okay. What's ultra-processed food? Well, real food is food that came out of the ground, or animals that ate food that came out of the ground. That's real food. Ultra-processed food is food that basically, a man, or human, a woman too, human, okay,

• 24:25Speaker 00

  did something to before it got to you, you know, from the ground or the animal. That's ultra-processed food. So what did they do? You know, basically, nature got it right and man gets it wrong. That's how to look at it. And what is, what are the changes? Okay. I would basically argue that there are many changes, but there are five that matter. Here are the five. Too much sugar. Too little fiber.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Not enough omega-3s.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Too many emulsifiers. And then some petroleum dyes like RFK is worried about. I actually put that pretty darn low on the list to deal with the other four first. All right. Why? What about those things? Sugar. I've, you know, sugar's, you know, what brought me to the dance.

• 25:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, you went viral for sugar.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Back in 2009, Sugar, The Bitter Truth, you know, 25 million views. What's wrong with sugar? It tastes good. It makes celebrations. All true. But what is wrong with sugar? So first of all, sugar is two molecules, not one, two. One's called glucose, one's called fructose. They are not the same. Glucose is a six-membered ring. Fructose is a five-membered ring. They are not the same. Glucose is not very sweet. Fructose is very, very sweet.

• 25:56André Duqum?

  Starchy carbs versus your pop tart?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Well, glucose can be in sugar, like table sugar, or it can be in starch, which is polymerized glucose. All right? Fructose is only in sucrose, which is just glucose-fructose bound together, or high-fructose corn syrup, which is glucose-fructose not bound together, or in maple syrup, or honey, or agave.

• 26:25André Duqum?

  Tastes sweet in the mouth.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Tastes sweet in the mouth. Does many other things, though, aside from just tasting sweet in the mouth.

• 26:32André Duqum?

  Go figure.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Turns out, it inhibits mitochondrial function. Fructose acts like alcohol in inhibiting mitochondrial function.

• 26:44André Duqum?

  Hmm. Fructose acts like ethanol.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Everywhere throughout your body. Our livers have a innate, finite, limited capacity to metabolize alcohol. And when you go over that, you get drunk and you get sick.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  So one drink, one glass of wine, it's okay. Two, depends if you're a male or female, because, you know, males break it down faster and are bigger, so there's a greater volume of distribution. Three, you're getting tipsy. Four, don't drive. And five, you're a friggin alcoholic. All right? You get the idea. It's a dose thing. And it's a chronicity thing. Turns out, fructose and alcohol are metabolized in mitochondria exactly the same way. We, our livers, have a limited capacity to metabolize fructose in the same way that

• 27:50Speaker 00

  we have a limited capacity to metabolize alcohol. And while it does not cause you to be tipsy,

• 28:00Speaker 00

  it does reduce ATP levels, energy levels, in the liver, in the intestine, in the heart, and in the brain. And when you reduce ATP levels in the brain, how do you feel?

• 28:19André Duqum?

  Like shit.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Tired? Brain fog?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Irritability? Anxiousness?

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Ultimately, depression? And cognitive decline?

• 28:39Speaker 00

  All from ATP depletion. Well, fructose depletes ATP. Alcohol depletes ATP.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Fructose and alcohol, same problem. And the reason is because they're metabolized exactly the same way and cause the same problems inside the cells. So sugar's the big one. And sugar's been added to all of our food on purpose by the food industry because it's good for them, because they know when they add it, you buy more, because it's addictive. In the same way, alcohol is addictive. Okay? It's a legal addiction. And they can give it to kids. They can give it to two-year-olds. They can give it to six-month-olds. They can give it to friggin newborns. We have an epidemic of newborn obesity in this country.

• 29:33André Duqum?

  Newborn obesity.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Newborn obesity. They don't diet or exercise.

• 29:37André Duqum?

  Neonatal obesity.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Neonatal obesity. So four studies from around the world. Russia, South Africa, United States, Israel. Okay? Over the last 25 years, there's been an increase in birth weight by 200 grams, a half a pound. So babies born in those four countries weigh a half a pound more today than they did 25 years ago.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Now, some people might say, that's good. You know, not malnutrition. Except, of course, you know, these, you know, we're not, we're not talking about malnourished babies here. When you stick these babies in a scanner, DEXA scanner, turns out those 200 grams is all fat.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  So we have obese newborns.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Why?

• 30:35Speaker 00

  To that point, a study came out about six years ago, looking at body temperature for the last 150 years, from the Civil War all the way to today.

• 30:48André Duqum?

  Average body temperature?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Average body temperature. And it doesn't matter if you're white or black, male or female, young or old. There has been a 1.6 degree Fahrenheit reduction in basal body temperature across the board over 150 years. Now, your basal body temperature is the heat that your mitochondria can't capture when your food is metabolized. That is what basal body temperature is. Your mitochondria can capture between 35% and 40% of the inherent heat in the food you eat. Okay? So if your body temperature is going down,

• 31:31Speaker 00

  that means your mitochondria are not capturing. That means there's something going on. And it correlates with the change in adiposity. So you're diverting energy away from mitochondria and toward adipose tissue. And it's because of mitochondrial dysfunction. So your mitochondria are the little powerhouses of your cell. Everybody knows that from 10th grade, or they remember it barely from 10th grade. But that's basically what they do. They turn the chemical energy in food into the chemical energy of your cells. They turn food, amino acids, carbohydrates, fats,

• 32:15Speaker 00

  into ATP, adenosine triphosphate. That's mitochondria's job. And then the ATP is used by all of the processes in the cell to power all the things that need to be done, like make new proteins, like make new membranes, like contract muscles and think and action potentials in the brain, et cetera, et cetera. Neuroplasticity, a big one. We'll talk about that in a minute. Very energy intensive. And it comes from the food. Can't come from anywhere else. Got to come from the food. And the mitochondria are how it gets there. So if your body temperature is going down,

• 32:57Speaker 00

  it means your mitochondria are not working as well. So we have proof positive that our mitochondria are under assault. The question is, what's the assault? Well, ionizing radiation, air pollution, microplastics, PFAS, BPA, phthalates, chlorpyrifos, insecticide, glyphosate, and sugar. All of them. Well, that's everything. That's our environment. Okay? So sugar's not the only cause,

• 33:41Speaker 00

  but it's kind of the big kahuna. It's also the one we could fix tomorrow if we wanted. You can't fix the air pollution. You can't fix the ionizing radiation. You can't fix the microplastics. You can't fix the BPA or the PFAS or any of these other things. They're baked into the cake now. But you could fix the sugar. And that's why I spend most of my time talking about that.

• 34:06André Duqum?

  And yet, the profit from so many corporations, their existence is on defending that the sugar doesn't come out.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 34:16André Duqum?

  So we've seen sugar go from a treat every once in a while to nearly in every ingredient on every shelf. And we've seen obesity triple in Americans, obesity increase in newborns, diabetes almost over double. Now, we know that health has gone terribly wrong over the past 50 years. And no wonder why, obviously, as the introduction of these ultra-processed foods and increased sugar has happened simultaneously. Now, you said we could change it overnight.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  We could.

• 34:52André Duqum?

  We live in oligarchy where these these big corporations are profiting.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  That's true. That is true. And the oligarchs who are in charge of our food supply don't want it to change because this is their money machine. This is their gravy train. This is what brought them to the dance. The average percent margin on the food industry prior to 1975 was 1% per year. Well, the increase in population was 1% per year. In other words, the food industry made more money because they sold the same amount of food per person to more people.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  After 1975, that percent margin went to 5%. But our actual population increase, actually, in terms of rate, went down. Okay? So we weren't increasing by 1% per year. That's when people started not having babies and the infertility problems started, et cetera. It was around that time. So in fact, we're not growing the population by the 1% per year. So that means they're making more money by selling more food to fewer people. So what's the driver of that?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Well, something addictive. Because that's the only way to override your body's society system, is to basically give it something addictive that depletes ATP. So you think you need more. So they have basically found a legal addiction that depletes our energy, and we love it.

• 36:49André Duqum?

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• 37:34André Duqum?

  They're also available at Target and Sprouts nationwide. If you want to give them a try, head to mudwtr.com/knowtheyself. And yeah, grab your starter kit. Right now, our community gets up to 43% off your entire order, plus a free rechargeable frother and free shipping. That's M U D W T R dot com slash know theyself. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. As a side, to what degree do you think that Big Pharma is colluding with Big Food in order to sell the solution they're creating the problem to and keep customers? What are your thoughts there?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  That's a really good question. And it's a question I've spent a lot of time on and a lot of brain power on. Here's the problem. We do not have the smoking gun for this. We do not have the document that says, "Food industry, pharma industry, we're in cahoots together, and we want you, food industry, to make people sick so that we, pharma industry, can sell more drugs so that, basically, we're in collusion, and it's a conspiracy." We do not have that document.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  We have a lot of documents, though. We have a boatload of documents. At UCSF, my home institution, we have something called the Industry Documents Library. And it has data and documents on five industries. Petroleum, opioids, alcohol, tobacco, ultra-processed food. And they're all digitized and curated. And anyone, by the way, can go online and look at these documents. It's free to the public, idl.csf.edu. And please do. And we have written many, many papers on what we find in those documents.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  We have been looking for the tie between them. And we don't actually see a document that basically is the smoking gun. That we don't have. Having said that, we definitely have documents that show that the food industry knows what they're doing. The pharma industry knows what they're doing. The ultra-processed food industry knows what they're doing. The tobacco industry knows what they're doing. We have that. And actually, just this past March, we published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine

• 40:27Speaker 00

  called "Corporations as Vectors of Chronic Disease", using the industry documents library. So basically, we liken corporations to mosquitoes in this paper. And it's a very good paper, and I suggest everyone take a look at it and read it.

• 40:46André Duqum?

  We'll link it down below.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  So each of those industries, we have their telltale, you know, sign and, you know, their raison d'être already elaborated. What we don't have is the crosstalk between them saying that one's helping the other in a colluding fashion. That we don't have. Having said that, there is a professor of public health and history at Duke University. Her name is Nancy McKeonan. And she wrote a book. I'm trying to remember the name. I think it's called Democracy Unchained.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  And the book is about a stealth organization that you may or may not have heard of. It's definitely not in the news. And the name of the organization is the Atlas Network. And the Atlas Network is run by one person, group, organization, the Koch Brothers. And she has information that suggests that all of these industries are basically being, shall we say, funneled through this Atlas Network.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  And I suggest everybody take a look at that. So there very well may be collusion.

• 42:23André Duqum?

  What do you make of that? And the fact that our children are getting increasingly sicker despite the fact that you've devoted your life to getting them better? And you've watched that happen over time?

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Tell me. You know, it's really kind of a problem. You know, I was a pediatrician for 40 years. And I graduated med school in 80. And I was pediatrician all the way through, you know, 2020. I'm retired now. I'm still pediatrician, but I'm not seeing patients. But, you know, for every kid I treated, 10 more would show up on my doorstep. And, you know, that's why I wrote books, was to try to get more kids better. And the fact of the matter is, despite all of my work, kids have continued to get sick.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  So, you know, this sticks in my craw, that this is, you know, not getting better. The question is, why? And the answer is fear. Fear on the part of the, you know, industry in terms of, you know, making money and, you know, loss of resources. Fear on the part of the, you know, populace, that, you know, this is their, you know, salve. This is their, you know, the thing that mollifies their pain. Don't take that away from me. You know?

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Perfect example. I testified in front of the House Appropriations Committee, the Agriculture Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in May of 2024 about getting soda off SNAP, the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, food stamps. Because if sugar is so bad, and soda is so bad, which it is, why are we subsidizing something that's killing our populace? And making things worse? And hurting people? And driving healthcare costs through the roof?

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Why are we doing that? And so I testified. You know, there were 15 congressmen on this committee on the dais. Nine Republicans and six Democrats. And what I will say is that there were two Republicans, Andy Harris and a guy named Newhouse from Washington State, who got it, who understood it. The other seven Republicans were useless, worse than useless. But I was really surprised at the Democrats. There was one Democrat named Marcy Kaptur from Ohio, who didn't quite get it, but sort of said, maybe there's something here that we should investigate.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Maybe there's a way to work together. The other five Democrats, basically, they had prepared speeches that they gave with their five minutes, didn't ask any questions, and then left the room. And didn't even stick around for the questioning of the witnesses, like myself. And I came to realize why that was. And the reason was because their constituents don't want soda removed from SNAP. Why not? Because this is the mollification of their pain.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  This is their opiate.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  So how do you get past that? Pretty hard.

• 46:26André Duqum?

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• 47:08André Duqum?

  The company was founded by an all-woman team of PhDs in stem cell biology and skin regeneration. So basically, it's good stuff. I use it because I care about what's happening underneath my skin, not just on the surface. So for a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code KNOWTHEYSELF at oneskin.co/nothyself. That's oneskin.co/nothyself. That's 15% off. They're gonna ask you where you heard about them. Let them know we sent you. I hope you enjoy. Back to the episode. Would you not also say that a lot of political funding comes from donors of these companies?

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Of course. Absolutely. They want the status quo. They don't want to see a change. They're worried. Their fear is that if they actually did the right thing, that their market share would go down. And so they'll do anything they can to prop it up.

• 48:10André Duqum?

  It's fascinating to see what happens as the narrative and belief system of a nation gets changed over time. We've seen this, obviously, through prohibition, with alcohol change over time. We know now that alcohol is not good for us. We still have this programming deeply that's not to the same degree with sugar. I think you've spent so much of your life helping actually shed light on that. But when you first did, and showing the toxicity of sugar, you were vilified.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Indeed. For quite a while. You know, they were looking to discredit me because I was a threat. You know, I had a, you know, target on my back for a while. Now, it's so well-known, and, you know, there are so many people who are on board with this. And we've really turned, you know, the academic establishment around on this issue, which is, you know, I find very heartening that we can do that. But it took a while. You know, if something happened to me, it wouldn't change the pace of progress. But the thing that's changing the pace of progress are the dark forces that basically don't want to change.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  And so my job is to both work with them and work against them all at the same time. Okay? And, you know, the food industry is mad at me. You know, they say I'm their enemy. I'm actually not. I'm their conscience. But, you know, they don't want a conscience because they're pretty sociopathic.

• 49:47André Duqum?

  So I think most of us really feel the weight of what we're talking about. Maybe we can shift it a little bit to the empowering lens on the personal level. I mean, it's no question that this goes from one on a personal responsibility level to a health, a global healthcare issue.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Look, let me stop you there. Okay? You said, you know, the magic word, and the duck just came down. Okay? Personal responsibility.

• 50:15André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  Okay? I know a lot about personal responsibility. I've written an entire chapter on it and several pieces of a book on it. What is personal responsibility? What is that? Where does it come from?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Is it in the Constitution?

• 50:34André Duqum?

  No.

• 50:34Speaker 00

  Is it in the Declaration of Independence? Is it in the Magna Carta? Is it in any state legislature?

• 50:40André Duqum?

  So the tobacco industry, or where did it come?

• 50:42Speaker 00

  Yes, it came from the tobacco industry. Exactly right, Andre. Well done. Came from the tobacco industry. 1962. Because they were getting killed on the science. And they had to invent another reason for you to smoke. Well, nobody put that cigarette in your, between your lips. Nobody lit it for you. Okay? Assumption of risk. Which turned into personal responsibility. Okay? Personal responsibility reached its peak in 1982

• 51:22Speaker 00

  in the face of the Liggett lawsuit. Okay, that was kind of the last of its kind. Personal lawsuits against the tobacco industry for lung cancer. And basically, personal responsibility kind of took over because it's, you know, seems very libertarian. You know? You know, take your own chances, suffer the consequences. You know, seems very American. It's not anywhere in the, you know, in our, in our history. But, you know, they basically appropriated it and turned it into this thing. I would argue that personal responsibility is actually

• 52:07Speaker 00

  a form of agnotology. Agnotology. Now.

• 52:12André Duqum?

  What's that?

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Have you heard of agnotology? No?

• 52:14André Duqum?

  New word.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Have you heard of agnostic?

• 52:16André Duqum?

  Yes.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  Okay. Agnotology has the same derivation.

• 52:20André Duqum?

  Gotcha.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Agnotology is the science and the study of ignorance. Now, there's two kinds of ignorance. There's the lack of knowledge ignorance. And then there's willful ignorance. I don't want to know something. I don't want to learn to do something. Well, there's another kind of agnotology. There's emotional agnotology. I don't want to feel something. Because feeling something means pain. And I don't want the emotional pain. It's got a name, it's called alexithymia.

• 52:55André Duqum?

  Yeah. Colorblindness to your internal experience.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Kind of, sort of, yeah.

• 52:59André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 53:00Speaker 00

  A lot like that, yes. Okay? That's where personal responsibility came from. Is this concept of alexithymia. I don't want to understand and I don't want to empathize. So therefore, if someone gets sick, their problem. Okay? It's basically a societal version of schadenfreude. Okay? Deriving pleasure from the misery of others.

• 53:27André Duqum?

  Enabling toxic behavior, rebranding it as freedom of choice.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Exactly. But really, freedom of choice is really freedom to blame. Okay? Blame the victim. And we have an entire, you know, culture now of blaming the victim. Just open up the newspaper every friggin' day. But that, what that is, is that is just another manifestation of this mollifying of emotional pain. Which lives, you know, in, at a collective level as alexithymia, personal responsibility. It's a, it's an ideology. It is not biology.

• 54:10Speaker 02

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• 54:39Speaker 03

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• 55:23Speaker 03

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• 55:40André Duqum?

  Yeah, we're seeing this strongly in the young male demographic too, that become alexithymic. And when I say colorblindness to their own internal emotional experience, it feels like living a simulacrum, a simulation of your own life.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  Indeed. Very similar.

• 55:54André Duqum?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  And when you do that, you withdraw and you're alone. Now, there are two ways to be alone. There's being alone and being okay with it. And there's being alone and being miserable with it. Okay? So, Andre, you're a smart guy. Ready? Quiz. Quiz time.

• 56:18André Duqum?

  Quiz time.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Quiz time.

• 56:19André Duqum?

  Back to school.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Okay? What is the difference between loneliness and solitude?

• 56:27André Duqum?

  Solitude is simply being alone and perhaps enjoying your own company. Loneliness is you're alone, but you're in bad company. You feel the separation and the anxiety correlated with that.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Indeed. So what's the difference?

• 56:46André Duqum?

  The perception and...

• 56:47Speaker 00

  One word. Serotonin. Loneliness is serotonin deficiency. Solitude is serotonin sufficiency. When your brain has enough serotonin, being alone is okay. Because you're content. In addition, you recognize, even though you're alone, you're not really alone. Because the world is with you. A collective, if you will. It's kind of what religion is based on. You feel the collective. Okay? You experience it in whatever way you experience it. It's why religion is successful.

• 57:31André Duqum?

  I would also say that I feel like there is a big distinction. People that are lonely feel like it's happening to them as if almost, you know, one of the worst sentences is solitary confinement. Your willingness is taken away from you and you're put in isolation as opposed to the willing choice to go into an empty room and be there. And it's happening because you feel like you have agency over it.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  That's right. Indeed. Sherry Turkle, famous media watcher from MIT, you know, famously coined the term "alone together." We're all alone together. But we're alone. Okay? And the question is, how'd that happen? Okay? The sapping of serotonin. And how did that happen? Well, I just told you. All right? Screens are a big one. Turns out cortisol reduces serotonin. Dopamine antagonizes serotonin. Lack of tryptophan in your diet means serotonin depletion. Okay? So all the things that I said, that the 50 years of, you know,

• 58:38Speaker 00

  change in our environment, all have conspired to make us alone. And feel alone. And feel lonely. That's something that just calling attention to it isn't going to fix. So you brought up something I had said to Vivek Murthy several, about a year ago at a meeting. We were in London together. And I like Vivek, he's a nice guy. Okay? And he talks about loneliness as being a major affliction of the American population, which it absolutely is. And so I take nothing away from, you know, nothing away from him

• 59:24Speaker 00

  in terms of him identifying the issue and the problem. But he doesn't have an answer to it. He has identified the problem, but there's no answer to it. What are you going to do about it? And so he and I have known each other for like 12 years. And he basically has poo-pooed me for a long time. And so I was at this meeting in London with him at the Integrative and Personalized Medicine Congress. He was one of the keynotes, I was one of the other keynotes. We actually met King Charles together. Kind of cool. And I said to him, I said, Vivek, you can't love if your brain isn't flamed.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  You can't be, you can't have solitude. If your brain is inflamed, then the reason is because brain inflammation reduces serotonin. So I kept telling him that the food was part of the problem of loneliness. I'm not sure he ever got it, but anyway, bottom line, we got to fix the food too.

• 1:00:29André Duqum?

  One thing that I want to ask, because you mentioned it earlier, was the abundance of serotonin that's generated in the gut and the afferent vagus nerve that is correlated with gut feelings, intuition. Part of individual suffering is like we're disconnected from ourself and the greater whole that you're talking to. So talk to me about that mechanism a bit more, because I think a lot of people can relate to when they're feeling healthy and vital, their sense of direction and choice and intuition is like online, and when it's not, it's...

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  They feel worse, worse, yes, absolutely. Now, I will tell you, this is a very hard area to study. Okay? And we don't have good ways of assessing the vagus nerve. Okay? But we now have things like vagal nerve stimulators and, you know, ways to sort of perturb the vagus nerve to try to get, you know, get into that. We also have things that alter the microbiome in order to try to improve microbial diversity, in order to reduce gut inflammation, in order to be able to send that serotonin signal up the vagus nerve. Something I learned just last year, really fascinating, I'm waiting to see more data on it, but I'm just going to bring it up to you, to your audience as a possible, really,

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  really important issue. Years and years and years ago, a study at the University of Virginia on circadian rhythms, what they did was they blinded a bunch of rats, and then they put a light, and they fixed a light to the skull. Okay? So there was no information coming from the eyes, because they blinded them, but there was a light coming from the bone above, and these animals would still entrain because of the light that they experienced through the skull.

• 1:02:27André Duqum?

  It was still entrain, meaning what?

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  That, you know, the various hormones, patterns, like, you know, circadian rhythms, and, you know, and cortisol going up and down during the day like it normally does.

• 1:02:42André Duqum?

  Meaning circadian rhythm is not modulated simply through our visual system, but actually our biology?

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Correct, correct. And the question is, what about that light led to this issue? Okay? That was, that was the nugget of truth back in the 1990s when they did this. And I've, this has been rolling around in the back of my head for 30 some odd years, and this has to be something really important here. Okay? Why is this? Well, this paper came out last year. First off, it was Babcock, and it was in a, it was in a physics journal, like physics journal. They showed that tryptophan, the precursor to serotonin, the amino acid that is the precursor to serotonin.

• 1:03:30André Duqum?

  Made in the gut?

• 1:03:32Speaker 00

  Well, tryptophan has to be ingested. You have to take it from the food. Okay? Is the rarest amino acid of all the 20 amino acids involved in protein synthesis. Okay? It is found in, you know, eggs, fish, poultry, not exactly ultra-processed food. Okay? Tryptophan, because of the two moieties, there's a benzene moiety and an amytosyl moiety put together, it resonates. Okay? The double bonds in the benzene and the amytosyl resonate, and it gives off light. It fluoresces. And they showed...

• 1:04:17André Duqum?

  Wait, what is it exactly that's giving off light?

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  The molecule itself...

• 1:04:21André Duqum?

  Really?

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  Is giving off light. The electrons, as they buzz around the, the two rings, the benzene ring and the amytosyl ring, are giving off, photons are giving off light.

• 1:04:32André Duqum?

  And perceptible to the human eye, but...

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Totally imperceptible to the human eye.

• 1:04:36André Duqum?

  But at a microscopic level, you could see...

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:04:39André Duqum?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And they showed that that light via the vagus nerve was transmitting information to the brain. So it might not even be through neurotransmission, standard neurotransmission, you know, through neurotransmitters, but it might actually be the tryptophan sending light up to the brain.

• 1:05:04André Duqum?

  That's a trip.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  And then that would make sense with the, you know, this study from 30 years ago, you know, that, that, that light somehow has its own effects. It's like, whoa.

• 1:05:14André Duqum?

  It's a trip.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  Now, I don't know yet. I mean, this is, this is too early. And I'm not saying, oh, I've got the answer or anything, but it's like, you know, we think we understand stuff, but you know, you find out new stuff all the time. We've got to figure out how this all works.

• 1:05:28André Duqum?

  And the potential to take home there is the importance of tryptophan.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  Well, the importance of food.

• 1:05:33André Duqum?

  Importance of food in general, yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, the importance of food. I wouldn't specifically say importance of tryptophan, but the importance of food. You know, food has basically been relegated, you know, to a side gig, and what I'm saying is, no, I think it's the, the main gig.

• 1:05:47André Duqum?

  Yeah. It's the medicine.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52André Duqum?

  Hippocrates.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  If you will.

• 1:05:54André Duqum?

  Okay, man, so many exciting tangents to dive into.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Well, you know, you want to talk about know thyself, well, here we are.

• 1:06:02André Duqum?

  Here we are.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess. Like a set of Firestone all-season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road. Season after season. Firestone all-season tires. For durability you can count on, just like people count on you. Firestone. Always dependable. Since 1900.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or get a Corolla sedan packed with the latest features, advanced tech, and head-turning style. Or take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs. The spacious, family-friendly Grand Highlander and adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid and plug-in hybrid models available across the lineup, plus efficient all-electrics like the BZ, BZ Woodland, and all-wheel-drive CHR, you can drive your way and skip the pump. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering. With legendary resale value, built on a reputation for quality and reliability.

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today, to a great value tomorrow. A Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota. Let's go places.

• 1:07:35André Duqum?

  One thing, because we may or may not revisit it, just because we talked about sugar, there's clearly a difference that I would like you to articulate between an orange and orange juice.

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:46André Duqum?

  Because sugar is like a catch-all term, but, you know, different.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  So, people rail me all the time. Are you telling me that fruit is no good? Fruit has fructose. Yeah, fruit has fructose. Okay? It also has fiber. Okay? Fruit juice does not. It has soluble fiber, it doesn't have insoluble fiber. So, I mean, it's different. Okay? It's not just that it's one's solid, one's liquid, but the fiber actually is the important part of the fruit. Okay? The juice is nature's way of getting you to eat your fiber. Now, why is fiber important? My good friend and colleague, and erstwhile co-author Gary Taubes famously said, you

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  know, fiber's what makes you poop. And that's what we believed for, you know, I would say, 100 years. Fiber was what makes you poop. Because fiber's not absorbed in the gut. Goes out in the stool. That is absolutely true. Okay? And it does make you poop. And that's why a lot of laxatives are various components of fiber. And I agree with that, too. But it does so much more than that. Yes, it makes you poop, that's true. It does a whole bunch more. What fiber does, and soluble and insoluble, you need both. And real food has both. And processed food either has none or just soluble. Like fiber one bars, soluble fiber like inulin.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  You need both. The insoluble fiber's like the cellulose, like the stringy stuff in celery. The soluble fiber is the pectin or the inulin, like what holds jelly together. Okay? They're both fiber. You don't absorb either of them. They both go out in your poop. But the two together actually have synergistic effects on the intestine that are absolutely essential to good metabolic and gut health. Here's what happens. Imagine you have a spaghetti colander. No bowl holes.

• 1:09:53André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  You run the water. Water runs right through. Okay. Now, take a blob of petroleum jelly. Throw it into the center of the colander. Run the water. Still runs right through, bounces off the jelly. Now, rub your finger all the way around the inside of that colander, spreading the jelly. Now run the water. Now it doesn't run right through. You've blocked it. You've created a secondary barrier. You needed the colander, you needed the jelly, and you needed the geometry. But you have changed the mechanics,

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  the fluid dynamics of that system, right? Okay. Same thing's going on in your intestine. The insoluble fiber, the cellulose, acts like a latticework, like a fishnet, like the colander. Makes, you know, a structure with holes. The soluble fiber globular, they plug the holes in that latticework. And together, they form a secondary barrier. And that secondary barrier prevents the absorption of glucose fructose sucrose simple starches, making them unavailable for early absorption.

• 1:11:18André Duqum?

  Insulin spikes.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  So it reduces the glucose response. So therefore, it reduces the insulin spike.

• 1:11:24André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  That protects your liver, keeps your liver healthy. And because you didn't absorb it, goes further down the intestine where the microbiome will chew it up. So you have fed the gut. And in the process, you've increased microbial diversity. You've also increased intestinal transit, reduced transit time, increased transit rate in order to get the satiety signal sooner. And the colonic bacteria will turn that fiber into short chain fatty acids like butyrate, which are anti-inflammatory, preventing things like irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, leaky gut, Alzheimer's disease.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  And the cellulose, the insoluble fiber, will act like little scrubbies on the inside of the colon, getting rid of the colon cancer cells. So yeah, it makes you poop, but it did all those other things too. In fact, it did six things and it recapitulates the effects of eating the fruit. By consuming the fiber. Okay? Now, when you squeeze it and freeze it, you lose that. You've lost that capacity because you don't have the insoluble fiber anymore. It's gone down the garbage.

• 1:12:45André Duqum?

  Even just freezing it?

• 1:12:47Speaker 00

  Well, so the food industry knows that if they freeze an orange, you know, it turns into mush. And so they can't sell it. So, you know, they squeeze it and freeze it. And therefore, it became frozen concentrated orange juice. Okay? They turned a food, an orange, into a commodity, frozen concentrated orange juice. With decreased depreciation, they can sell it for longer. They can sell it on the commodities exchange. They can increase their profit because they've decreased their depreciation. Problem is, they've also ruined your health.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  So it's their profit against your health. Now, here's the problem. Real food has fiber. Processed food doesn't. But ultra-processed food is baked into the cake. You know, we're not going to get rid of it. And I'm not even sure we want to get rid of it because we've got to feed 10 billion people by the year 2050. And we're not going to have enough land and ocean to do it. So we actually have to rely on ultra-processed food to have reduced spoilage, to be able to freeze it. Because we've got to feed a lot of people.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  So this is a problem. So now that we've got a tension between the food we're eating and our health, and the profit that the food industry is making, all at the same time. And it's going to get worse. So we have to ultimately come to peace with ultra-processed food. We have to figure out a way to make ultra-processed food healthy. So I want to tell you about two things, two things I'm involved in that are related to this. One is a company that I am actually the co-founder of and chief medical officer. So full disclosure. And the other is I'm an advisor to another company that is actually trying to make ultra-processed food healthy in the Middle East.

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Not here, not yet. We're going to bring it here eventually, but not yet. Okay. So let me tell you about the company that I'm involved in. Okay. It's called BioLumen, B I O L U M E N. And it is a proprietary fiber. It is a combination soluble insoluble fiber. It is cellulose plus some proprietary hydrogels, all parts of food. What it does, you swallow it, hits your stomach, expands 70-fold over its original size like a sponge. Like that.

• 1:15:37André Duqum?

  Or chia pat in your gut.

• 1:15:38Speaker 00

  Like a chia pat in your gut, yeah, in a way, yes. Okay? And when it does that, you get a feeling of fullness. But more importantly, the nooks and the crannies in the sponge become obvious. And impregnated in the nooks and the crannies are these proprietary hydrogels, soluble fiber that are chosen specifically to sequester, absorb, soak up glucose fructose sucrose simple starches, rendering them unavailable for early absorption. In other words, it recapitulates the effects of fiber on the food that the food industry took out. It's fiber replacement therapy. And we have double-blind placebo-controlled data

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  that shows improvements in lipids, improvements in insulin response, improvements in gut health. So I was really shocked, in a good way. Nobody in our double-blind placebo-controlled trial stopped the fiber because they all felt better. If they had diarrhea on our product, they didn't. If they had constipation on our product, they didn't. If they had bloating on our product, they didn't. If they had pain on their, on our product, they didn't.

• 1:16:56André Duqum?

  Is it a powder or a pill?

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  It's a powder.

• 1:16:58André Duqum?

  Okay. You just add to smoothies?

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Add it to, smoothies, add it to, we're adding it to chocolate. We're making a protein bar. So the product is called Manch Manch.

• 1:17:08André Duqum?

  Manch Manch.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Manch Manch. I did not make this up. Manch Manch. But it's available online. Go to manchmanch.shop and purchase it. Okay? And we're starting to put it into foods. We also have a soluble version of Manch Manch that we can put into juice to soak up the sugar.

• 1:17:30André Duqum?

  And that would work.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  And that would work too.

• 1:17:32André Duqum?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  And so that's, we think, is going to be the biggest seller.

• 1:17:35André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  Because we're going to be able to make juice healthy again.

• 1:17:39André Duqum?

  Fiber is certainly having its heyday. I think it just surpassed protein in terms of Google searches.

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Fiber is the new protein. So they say, it's pretty funny. So that's one thing we're doing, and I'm very, very excited about that. And it's available to anyone right now if they want. And the other thing we're doing is working with a concern in the Middle East. Okay? It's a food company. It's a processed food company. It's called Kuwaiti Danish Dairy, K D D. They are like the Nestle of the Middle East. And they make all sorts of, you know, flavored milks, yogurt, flavored yogurt and frozen yogurt.

• 1:18:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 00

  They came to me six years ago and said, we know we're the problem. We want to be the solution. We know that Kuwait, where they're located, has an 18% diabetes rate and an 80% obesity rate. And we know we're part of the cause. We don't want to be. Can you help us make processed food healthy? So I convened a scientific advisory team of five people. And we worked two hours at a time, two days a week for three years. We looked at every ingredient. We looked at every vendor. We looked at every process. We looked at every product.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  And we basically figured out what was going on with the food. And we developed a set of tiers criteria to advance any one of their products from poison to healthy. You know, from tier three to tier one. Okay? And we ultimately came up with a simple rubric. Nine words, three clauses. Here they are. Protect the liver. Feed the gut. Support the brain. Nine words. We call them the GLBs. Not the GLPs, the GLBs, gut, liver, brain. Any food that does all three is healthy, whether it's ultra-processed or not. Any food that does none of the three is poison,

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  whether it's ultra-processed or not. And we now have a tool to help figure that out, which is online called Perfect. You can find it online at perfect.co. And you can actually determine what your diet looks like and whether or not it works to make you healthy, to keep you healthy or not. And I'm hoping that, you know, the American food industry will take this as an example. And so then the question is, well, that must reduce their sales. So they've looked at that. Hasn't touched their sales. They're making, they're making just as much money as they ever did. Okay? The one thing that mattered, they didn't tell the public.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Because if you tell the public, then they're going to say, ah, it doesn't taste.

• 1:20:34André Duqum?

  Yeah, I don't want the healthy stuff.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Don't want the healthy stuff. Okay? And that's our own, you know, fear. That's a different fear. All right? But ultimately, this can be done.

• 1:20:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 00

  And we're working toward it.

• 1:20:47André Duqum?

  Amazing. So you've shared that insulin is the bad guy in nearly every disease and can be.

• 1:20:56Speaker 00

  And we have the data for that. Insulin, insulin's good and bad. Okay? It's good if you have type 1 diabetes. And it's bad if you have anything else. All right? I mean, insulin takes energy you're not burning and puts it into storage. Insulin's the energy storage hormone. So insulin makes fat. More insulin, more fat.

• 1:21:25André Duqum?

  Now, there are three different types of fat and one correlated with most diseases.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Indeed. Well, two, two correlated with disease.

• 1:21:34André Duqum?

  Okay, yeah, visceral and

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  And liver.

• 1:21:37André Duqum?

  And liver, and liver fat.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:21:39André Duqum?

  Now, two people, one thin person, one obese person could be metabolically the same, right?

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:21:46André Duqum?

  Thin outside, fat inside.

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  That's right. Oh, boy. You have been studying.

• 1:21:52André Duqum?

  Yeah, I mean, I tried to prep a bit.

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  You sure did.

• 1:21:55André Duqum?

  But, uh, but that's important because people would assume that, oh, the obese person is clearly more unhealthy on the inside in regards to the fat.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  Not necessarily.

• 1:22:04André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  You would think so, but not necessarily.

• 1:22:06André Duqum?

  Yeah, that people would think that.

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:22:07André Duqum?

  And that's not necessarily the case, so.

• 1:22:10Speaker 00

  So, so the way to think of it is there are three fat depots. Okay? And they contribute differently to disease. Okay? So, the first fat depot is the one you can see, what we call the subcutaneous fat depot, or the big butt fat depot, as in the, does this bathing suit make me look fat, fat, that fat, okay? I never answer that question, I promise. Bad idea. Okay?

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  Turns out, subcutaneous fat is actually metabolically neutral. It's where your body wants to put the excess energy. It's your spare tire. Okay? The spare tire is not hurting your car. Okay?

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  If you put energy into subcutaneous fat, it's actually protective. And the reason we know that is because there are diseases where the cells don't make subcutaneous fat. It's called lipodystrophy. And when that happens, then the fat goes to the visceral or the liver fat. And that's when you get sick as hell. In fact, lipodystrophy patients are the sickest people on the planet. And they don't respond to insulin because they don't have subcutaneous fat. So, we know that subcutaneous fat is actually protective. Now, if you grow that subcutaneous fat enormously, eventually, individual fat cells will break

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  down and that will release cytokines, which will then call into, uh, macrophages into the picture, to mop up the grease, which will then cause chronic metabolic disease. So, there's a limit. There's a, a, a, a level of the bucket that if you overflow it, you'll get into trouble. So, I'm not suggesting that any amount of subcutaneous fat is okay, but this is where your body wants to put it.

• 1:24:10Speaker 00

  Now, the second fat depot is called your visceral fat, your big belly fat. Now, big belly fat has nothing to do with food. Big belly fat has to do with stress, has to do with cortisol, has to do with your adrenergic nervous system.

• 1:24:27André Duqum?

  But when you say it has nothing to do with food, surely there's a correlation to the amount of stress one holds and the amount of food they feel they need.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  Well, that's true.

• 1:24:35André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  But that's because visceral fat and subcutaneous fat are often related. So, in fact, people who are stressed to reduce the pain, eat more. So, I'm not arguing that. And they do go together. It's not like subcutaneous fat and visceral fat are completely separate. They overlap.

• 1:24:58Speaker 00

  But visceral fat can go up even when subcutaneous fat goes down. Example of that, endogenous depression.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  So, major depressive disorder, catatonic depression.

• 1:25:14André Duqum?

  Okay? Is there exogenous depression? Is it endogenous depression?

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is exogenous depression, the situational depression.

• 1:25:23André Duqum?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:25:23Speaker 00

  There's anxiety, we're gonna talk about that in a minute. Okay? But, let's take somebody who's, um, has to be hospitalized to keep them from hurting themselves.

• 1:25:34André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  Okay, suicidal depression. Okay? They don't eat.

• 1:25:38André Duqum?

  Sorry.

• 1:25:39Speaker 00

  They don't eat.

• 1:25:39André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  They're anhedonic.

• 1:25:43Speaker 00

  They don't derive any pleasure from food. They don't eat. They would wither away and die. But if you stick them in a scanner, they have increased visceral fat.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  They've lost their subcutaneous fat because they're not eating, but they've gained visceral fat because their cortisol's high. So, the relationship between the two has been broken. And you can make increased visceral fat without increasing subcutaneous fat. Often, you do them together, but not necessarily, you can do them separately. And it turns out that visceral fat is having a major effect on metabolic health. And then finally, the third fat, liver fat. So, the fat made right in the liver, which has nothing to do with the visceral or the subcutaneous, but the liver fat. And so, now we have this epidemic of fatty liver disease. Forty-five percent of Americans have fatty liver.

• 1:26:41André Duqum?

  Which people have likely heard from alcohol use.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:26:46André Duqum?

  And it goes back to

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Used to be alcohol.

• 1:26:48André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  Now, it's sugar.

• 1:26:49André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  Okay? Exactly right. And you can have liver fat without visceral or subcutaneous fat. And do you know who has that the most? Southeast Asians.

• 1:27:03Speaker 00

  So, they actually are thin because they don't have subcutaneous fat, but they have very high liver fat.

• 1:27:10André Duqum?

  Why is that?

• 1:27:12Speaker 00

  Sugar and alcohol.

• 1:27:13André Duqum?

  Oh, they're just more prevalent over there?

• 1:27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16André Duqum?

  Gotcha.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  So, bottom line, three different fat depots, three different causes, ultimately, three different dispositions. And so, when people stand on a scale, you're really only measuring the subQ fat department. And that's not really the one we even care about.

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• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  So it's the one people care about because of the bathing suit.

• 1:29:12André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Speaker 00

  But it's actually not the one that's related to health.

• 1:29:17André Duqum?

  Now, what would you do to get a DEXA scan? Or how do you check the fat on your liver?

• 1:29:22Speaker 00

  So there are a couple of ways to do it. The cheapest way is the free way is just a tape measure. Because your waist circumference and your liver fat are correlated together. With about an R value of about 0.7. So that's pretty good.

• 1:29:37André Duqum?

  But didn't you say someone could be thin?

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. So that's why the R value is only 0.7, one. The next best way is to draw a blood test.

• 1:29:48André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:29:49Speaker 00

  Called an ALT, alanine amino transferase, part of a standard chem panel.

• 1:29:54André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  And

• 1:29:56André Duqum?

  What's the marker there that people would look at a blood panel?

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  It's called ALT.

• 1:29:59André Duqum?

  ALT.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  ALT.

• 1:30:01André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:30:01Speaker 00

  Okay. AST is a spartate amino transferase related, but that's in a talks about acute liver toxicity. Whereas ALT talks about chronic liver toxicity. So an ALT. And if your ALT is up, chances are you have liver fat. Okay, and now the question is how high does the ALT have to be? Now, if you look at the lab slip, it'll tell you that anything above 40 is too high. That's wrong. Anything above 25 is too high. Why do I say above 25 and they all say above 40? And the answer is because over the past 50 years, the curve has shifted to the right.

• 1:30:43Speaker 00

  Because the way you determine a normal range is you take 100, you know, 1,000, quote, "normal" people.

• 1:30:49André Duqum?

  I think

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  And you measure their ALT and you develop a bell-shaped curve. The problem is, most of those people have liver fats.

• 1:30:56André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:30:57Speaker 00

  It's skewed the curve.

• 1:30:58André Duqum?

  I think Jay Krishna Murthy is quoted saying, "It's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  That's a great way to put it.

• 1:31:08André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  I'll accept that.

• 1:31:10André Duqum?

  So could someone, how would you get rid of liver fat? Is it hard?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  So the best way is stop feeding it.

• 1:31:19André Duqum?

  Right, stop growing up, making it worse.

• 1:31:21Speaker 00

  Sugar and alcohol. And so this is how we took care of kids in my obesity clinic for 17 years. Is basically we got the sugar in their diet and guess what? Their liver fat disappeared. And we've actually have, you know, shown that and published on it. That's the easiest way.

• 1:31:42Speaker 00

  Time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting is another way to do that. Okay, there are ways to do it.

• 1:31:51André Duqum?

  Have I heard you correlate this with ADHD in children?

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  Not that.

• 1:31:57André Duqum?

  Just sugar in general?

• 1:31:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, sugar and ADHD do go together. And probably the reason is because sugar depletes ATP. And ADHD is a manifestation of ATP depletion in the brain.

• 1:32:10André Duqum?

  Gotcha.

• 1:32:11Speaker 00

  Because your prefrontal cortex is not working. And so if your prefrontal cortex is not working, you basically are enormously impulsive. Because remember, the prefrontal cortex is your chiming cricket of your brain.

• 1:32:25André Duqum?

  Could you give me your highest leverage behavior changes? For anybody who's listening right now, we doubled down on sugar, but you mentioned microplastics, you mentioned air pollution. For somebody who wants to protect their environment, to at least be 80% conducive more towards health than the 20%, you know, you go out and eat, you live in a city, it's like you're exposed to toxins, whether you like it or not. But what can we do to help prevent the spikes of cortisol that then go to the methylation of oxytocin and depletion of serotonin and all that?

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Well, the way to do that is take that thing in your pocket and throw it in the garbage.

• 1:33:05André Duqum?

  But I like it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  That guy.

• 1:33:07André Duqum?

  But I like it.

• 1:33:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's part of the problem, is you like it. That's probably the source of most of the cortisol. Right there. Okay? That's one of the reasons why people are now starting to realize that we need to, like, keep cellphones out of schools, you know, till age 16 to 18, like Australia and France have done now.

• 1:33:28André Duqum?

  Yeah. What's a really practical behavior change? Obviously, like, throw it in the trash is like a quick hand.

• 1:33:33Speaker 00

  Well, a good way, a good way to do it is to, basically, only let it ping once a day. Answer your emails once a day. And otherwise, leave it alone. The best thing would be actually a flip phone.

• 1:33:52André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  I mean, you need a phone. And I, you know, I mean, look, I'm a parent. I mean, I sent my kids to school with a flip phone. Okay? On purpose, until they ultimately needed the cell phone, not because I wanted to give it to them, but because the teacher demanded it of them, which I think is horrible. Just horrible. But, you know, I didn't want my kids to actually be losing out. I think the way we're teaching kids in school is the biggest problem.

• 1:34:23André Duqum?

  I've certainly romanticized what it's like, what it'd be like to go back to the flip phone. Where I've landed is like, charging phone in a separate bedroom, no tech before, an hour before bed, or an hour after waking up. And then mindful use throughout the day.

• 1:34:38Speaker 00

  Mindful use, that's the hard part.

• 1:34:40André Duqum?

  It's hard, because it hijacks your attention.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  Indeed. And that's the problem. Is that because it hijacks your attention, okay? It makes you look at it more, which then hijacks your attention, and so it becomes a vicious cycle.

• 1:34:55André Duqum?

  Yeah, that hedonic, dopaminergic treadmill.

• 1:34:57Speaker 00

  That's right. Basically, variable reward. The reason cellphones are so bad is because they are variable reward. Now, there are some things on your cell phone that are not variable reward.

• 1:35:11André Duqum?

  Hopefully, this podcast.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  Hopefully, this podcast. My colleague Tristan Harris, who's the head of the Center for Humane Technology, I'm an advisor.

• 1:35:22André Duqum?

  Great.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  Did a study years ago, looking at the 15 happiest apps and the 15 unhappiest apps. Okay? And it turned out the 15 happiest apps, your engagement was basically two to three minutes a day. The unhappiest apps, engagement was two to three hours a day. Okay? And they were unhappy. Okay? So the happy apps, you know, GPS, you know.

• 1:35:56André Duqum?

  Notes.

• 1:35:57Speaker 00

  Notes, right? Things like that. And the unhappy apps are, you know, Candy Crush, and, you know, I don't even, I can't even remember all of them.

• 1:36:06André Duqum?

  All the TikToks and the...

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Okay? And the reason is because of social media. Because social media is cortisol. It's dopamine and cortisol together is really what it is. And so it's fueling that pain brain and mollifying it at the same time. And so cellphones really sort of took hostage brain to a new level. It's the single biggest perpetrator in our current exposome, in our current environment.

• 1:36:44André Duqum?

  Is it true that our brain is like 1/200th plastic? Something around there?

• 1:36:50Speaker 00

  So I've heard that. And then I talked with a person who actually knows something about microplastics. And they said, no, that's not true. There was one paper that came out that said that, and it got a lot of attention. And I have since been disavowed of that. By people who know.

• 1:37:10André Duqum?

  Nonetheless.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  Leonardo Trasande at the NYU Medical Center is like the guru on this. And he said, no, it's not true. But yeah, it made, it made good copy, that's for sure.

• 1:37:22André Duqum?

  For sure.

• 1:37:23Speaker 00

  And it sure raised everyone's cortisol.

• 1:37:24André Duqum?

  But in regards to, you know, protecting your environment that directly shapes you, remove the plastics?

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  Well, if you can, the question is how? The one thing that you should never do is heat plastic in a microwave. Okay? That is the single worst thing you can do. Okay? If you have plastic storage vessels.

• 1:37:58André Duqum?

  Tupperware.

• 1:37:59Speaker 00

  Tupperware. And you keep them in the refrigerator, there's not going to be a lot of leaching. But the minute those get warm, now you got a problem. And I think the biggest issue are these very thin plastic water bottles that sit out in the sun. And they've been shown to actually leach plastic much greater. So there's different kinds of plastic. Polycarbonate, you know, is virtually indestructible and does not leach anything. So polycarbonate's not a problem, but it's very expensive. You know, these very cheap plastics that you throw in the garbage after you've drunk

• 1:38:42Speaker 00

  the water, they're actually the biggest problem.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

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• 1:39:15Speaker 03

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• 1:39:59Speaker 03

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• 1:40:19André Duqum?

  Seems just ubiquitous. It's just everywhere in our environment, even I've heard some of the...

• 1:40:23Speaker 00

  And by the way, black plastic, like from the Chinese restaurants. Never, ever heat those.

• 1:40:29André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:32André Duqum?

  I've even heard some like metal water bottles because the lids are made out of plastic every time you open it, like small amounts of microplastics.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  I have heard that too. There was one study that said that the lid was the biggest problem. I've heard that.

• 1:40:46André Duqum?

  What are the four Cs? You give some to the antidote, you know, because this can all get quite depressing, but ultimately I think it's awareness is empowering.

• 1:40:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:40:55André Duqum?

  Unless you don't do anything with it.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 1:40:57André Duqum?

  But yeah.

• 1:40:58Speaker 00

  So in my book, Hacking of the American Mind, written in 2017, I argue that what you need to do is you need to get your dopamine and cortisol down and you need to get your serotonin up. That's what you need to do. And so how do you do that? And it turns out there are four ways to do that, and all of them are free. None of them require any machine or supplement or medicine or anything else. And they're all things your mother

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  taught you, but you forgot. Okay? And they're actually very simple. And they contribute to happiness. And here they are, they're the four Cs. The first one is connect. Now, connect does not mean Facebook. Digital connection is not connection. That's how Sherry Turkle found that we were alone together. Connection is what you and I are doing right now, eye to eye, face to face. And the reason is because I am reading the facial expressions that you are emanating right now, and I am turning that information in my occipital lobe into

• 1:42:18Speaker 00

  serotonin. Okay? So you are actually contributing to my serotonin right now, just from our conversation. And it does not work with a two dimensional, you know, chicklet on Zoom. Okay? It only happens in person. And so our loss of in person, you know, which started before the pandemic, but, you know, accelerated and turbocharged by the pandemic, and now everybody's online like all the time, has absolutely contributed to our serotonin depletion for that reason. So connect. Number two, contribute. And contribute does not mean

• 1:42:57Speaker 00

  to your 401k. It means contribute to others. Okay? Because contributing to others actually increases serotonin. Okay? Because purpose provides purpose. So whether you do that through church, you know, like the Purpose Driven Life with Warren, or, you know, through your work, you know, or, you know, through your hobbies or whatever, doesn't matter. But contribute, contribute outside of yourself. That's a big serotonin booster. Number three,

• 1:43:34Speaker 00

  cope. And cope means three things. Okay? It's mindfulness, exercise, sleep. Okay? Multitasking is the single dirtiest word in the English language, because no one can do it. Only two and a half percent of the US population can actually multitask. The rest of us are serially uni-tasking, and we're switching from one task to another. And every time we do that, we get a cortisol bump, and it takes 23 minutes to acclimate to the new task. So this notion that we can multitask and that our employers demanded of us is actually how we got into this mess in the first place. So tell your employer

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  to F off. Okay? I'll get it done. Okay? So uni-tasking, that's the mindfulness. Okay? One task at a time. So in my new book, which is not yet written, called Freeing the Hostage Brain, I will talk about the role of neuroplasticity. Turns out, neuroplasticity only occurs when you're not spending ATP on anything else. As long as there's an ATP drain, neuroplasticity can't occur. And so the more cortisol, the more firing rate, the less neuroplasticity.

• 1:45:01André Duqum?

  Yeah, you can't make use of what you don't have.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  That's right. So that's mindfulness. Exercise, exercise increases BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps with neuroplasticity. And finally, sleep, which is necessary for autophagy to get rid of the protein aggregates and lipid peroxidation products to get them out. Because basically, sleep is garbage night for the brain. It's autophagy. Okay? Which basically allows you to then build new circuits. Neuroplasticity is a requirement for healthy living. And if you don't engage in it, you will be depressed and you will get Alzheimer's. And then finally, number four, cook. Why? Because number one, real

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  food. Number two, tryptophan. Number three, socialization. Because you cook with people. You eat with your family or your friends. You share a meal. Okay? And you know what went into it. And it wasn't sugar. So that's it. Connect, contribute, cope, cook. They're all free.

• 1:46:17André Duqum?

  It's actually so refreshing. It maps on, we have our own four Cs. We like do retreats and stuff. We're starting with the podcast. And I didn't, I didn't clock the correlation, because they kind of map on very similarly. There's some differences for sure, but the connection, contemplation, which kind of goes hand in hand with mindfulness and those practices.

• 1:46:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:46:41André Duqum?

  Contribution is the third.

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:46:43André Duqum?

  And then celebration, play, the essential aspect of, at least in, you know, the retreat setting is like, this work can feel kind of heavy at times, you know?

• 1:46:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52André Duqum?

  It doesn't have to be over serious.

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:46:55André Duqum?

  But I love that. And those are things that we, we don't realize often how empty your cup is until we actually connect with a person in person, you know, or we share a meal and we cook. And so that, those are, those are important reminders.

• 1:47:08Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:47:09André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Speaker 00

  I couldn't agree more.

• 1:47:11André Duqum?

  We've covered some ground.

• 1:47:13Speaker 00

  I think we have.

• 1:47:16André Duqum?

  I really appreciate your passion and the energy that you bring to this.

• 1:47:19Speaker 00

  Well, Andre, there's science here. Okay? A lot of people, you know, they blow it off. They say, ah, yeah, I don't need to do that. I can manage it. The science here. Okay? We're humans. Okay? We have physiologic flaws. And we have to basically protect against them. The only way. And right now, we are deep sixing all of our, all the good stuff about being human, in favor of this thing, you know, called our bank account. And it's hurting us.

• 1:48:03André Duqum?

  You spent a lot of your career taking in patients, helping them make new choices.

• 1:48:12André Duqum?

  Yet we touched on earlier that Schopenhauer quote, and I've heard you written, wrote a little bit around free will and without diving into a whole new philosophical podcast.

• 1:48:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, we can have a whole podcast on free will.

• 1:48:24André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Speaker 00

  I'll go there.

• 1:48:26André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:27Speaker 00

  Not today.

• 1:48:28André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but to me, to whatever degree we have choice or agency or the illusion thereof, all the reminders you gave today really bring that back, that possibility back into our life. And so thank you for the work that you're doing.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  It's my job.

• 1:48:45André Duqum?

  Yeah. It's a great job. I, debatable. Possuminos. We have a couple of closing questions that our community sent in.

• 1:48:57Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:48:58André Duqum?

  So the first, from the Know Thyself Collective, shout out to y'all. First question

• 1:49:06André Duqum?

  from, from Anais Hage, "How does efficient energy metabolism support cognition and perception? And what can extreme metabolic dysfunction teach us about the biological basis of consciousness?"

• 1:49:20Speaker 00

  Oh, boy.

• 1:49:22André Duqum?

  You want to give us the TL.

• 1:49:23Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:49:23André Duqum?

  Give us the TLDR on that one.

• 1:49:26Speaker 00

  All right. Let me talk about ATP.

• 1:49:30André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 1:49:32Speaker 00

  Neurons are gas guzzlers. They do five things that other cells don't. And they all cost energy.

• 1:49:44Speaker 00

  And if you don't have the energy, you can't engage in them. Now, it has always been assumed, always been assumed, that because neurons have so many mitochondria, that you're getting all the ATP you need to make your brain work. That's a lie. That's a mistake. Okay, the reason we have so many mitochondria is because those neurons are such gas guzzlers. And they're easily perturbed. That's what we didn't know, is that mitochondria are fragile. Mitochondria can go downhill really fast. And there are a lot of things that can take them down. And I mentioned a whole bunch when we started.

• 1:50:28Speaker 00

  And they're all at work on our brains right now. So we are not making the ATP we need.

• 1:50:38Speaker 00

  Okay, that's putting us at risk to start with. Second, cortisol. Cortisol increases neural firing rate. Now, action potentials, the actual, the depolarization of a neuron does not require energy. The repolarization, bringing it back to baseline, does. And so if you don't have enough ATP, you can't repolarize. So you can't be ready for the next action potential. And that's actually what puts the neuron at risk. So increased ATP utilization from cortisol, from stress, from threat, is basically putting our neurons at risk too.

• 1:51:21Speaker 00

  So now you have inadequate ATP generation, increased ATP utilization. Now you got an energy crisis. Now you got ATP depletion. Well, you need the ATP to fold proteins. You need the ATP to engage in neurotransmission. You need the ATP for neuroplasticity, which is the most energy expensive process that goes on in the body.

• 1:51:51Speaker 00

  Well, you don't have enough. And if you don't engage in neuroplasticity,

• 1:51:56Speaker 00

  those synapses, those gap junctions, those connections between neurons start falling away. And that will manifest itself as brain fog,

• 1:52:09Speaker 00

  irritability, depression, cognitive decline, and in the extreme, Alzheimer's.

• 1:52:20André Duqum?

  That, I think that fits neatly with the descriptions you gave earlier to the effect of our cognition, that the cortisol and the effects with the ATP.

• 1:52:34André Duqum?

  Okay, great. Well, next question.

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  And consciousness, I don't even want to go there.

• 1:52:40André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Speaker 00

  Consciousness, I mean, all respect to your, to your, your audience. Okay, consciousness is kind of above my pay grade.

• 1:52:52André Duqum?

  Yeah, I think certainly, within the realms of conscious experience, I think you spoke directly to perception and cognition. And that, I think that speaks to the question. Stephanie Parker, after a lifetime slash career spent trying to contribute in a meaningful way to fixing a system you've called engineered against us, what gives you the most hope right now? What would you want a child born today to be able to say decades from now that your life's work made possible for them?

• 1:53:22Speaker 00

  Oh, good question. I have a lot of hope. I do. At first, I thought I didn't have any, but I actually have a lot of hope. And part of the reason for the hope is the education of the public. They're getting it. People are getting it. The fact that people are listening to you, you know, they're getting it. They're listening to me. They're getting it. They recognize there's something more. That, you know, this notion of the American dream

• 1:53:52Speaker 00

  is in some ways illusory.

• 1:53:56Speaker 00

  Okay, not that there's anything wrong with making money. Not that there's anything wrong with having a nice house. Not that there's anything wrong with having a bank account to be secure. I'm not against any of those things. And not that there's anything wrong with capitalism per se. But there is something wrong with abandoning primary needs for secondary desires.

• 1:54:19Speaker 00

  That's, there is something wrong with. Primary needs, love, sleep, food. You know, and abandoning those for power, pleasure,

• 1:54:36Speaker 00

  you know, anger. Okay, that, that's the problem. Okay, so you want your secondary desires? Hey, just make sure your primary needs are met first.

• 1:54:50Speaker 00

  We can have both. We can. But not when we're under the onslaught of our current capitalist directive.

• 1:55:04André Duqum?

  So would you say then that the desire for you in terms of the life, that your work would make possible for the youth that are coming into humanity right now? Is, is that, is that reminder?

• 1:55:15Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 1:55:16André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:16Speaker 00

  If, if there's, if there's one message I want to get out there is tend to yourself first.

• 1:55:24André Duqum?

  Stop sacrificing your primary needs for secondary desires.

• 1:55:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:29André Duqum?

  Some mic drop. Very last question. If you had 60 seconds to share one message with humanity,

• 1:55:38André Duqum?

  especially to the mother who's perusing down the grocery aisle, making, trying to make the right choices for her, for her children, and the many different parents that are, are trying to do the best with the knowledge they have, what's one message that you feel like they all need to hear right now?

• 1:55:57Speaker 00

  If it's in the grocery store?

• 1:55:59André Duqum?

  Sure.

• 1:55:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:56:00André Duqum?

  Let's start there.

• 1:56:01Speaker 00

  If a package has a label, it's a warning label.

• 1:56:08Speaker 00

  Because that means something was done to the food. That means a human was involved, which means something went wrong.

• 1:56:17Speaker 00

  Okay, real food doesn't have a label. There's no label on a broccoli. There's no label on a radish. Okay, there's no label on an orange. Because there doesn't need to be, because they didn't do anything to it. So if you see a label, it's a warning label. Something happened to it. The question is what? And is it relevant? And is it a problem? That's why we developed this tool that I mentioned, called Perfect. It's to basically help you navigate the grocery store in a way that is meaningful. If, if it protects your liver, feeds your gut, supports your brain, hey, you're good to go. But how are you going to figure that out?

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  So that would be my, my suggestion.

• 1:57:01André Duqum?

  Great.

• 1:57:04André Duqum?

  Is there anything else you want to share before we close out?

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. All right, you can't solve a problem if you don't know what the problem is.

• 1:57:14Speaker 00

  Okay, and we, for decades, have been told that our problems are somewhere else. That they are external to us.

• 1:57:27Speaker 00

  They're not.

• 1:57:29Speaker 00

  When you understand the problem, you can fix the problem. But only you can fix the problem.

• 1:57:37Speaker 00

  But you need to understand it.

• 1:57:42André Duqum?

  Your work is really helping us understand it. I feel like I've been educated in so many different regards in this conversation. And I can only imagine, as an extension, the audience that's tuned in. So thank you sincerely for the work that you're doing.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  My pleasure.

• 1:57:54André Duqum?

  And it's been a pleasure to connect. And we'll leave links down in the description for people to stay connected with you, your work, the initiatives, the research, the companies, all, all the things you're collaborating on.

• 1:58:04Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:58:05André Duqum?

  Yeah, thanks for tuning in, everyone. Until next time, be well.