Kind: captions
Language: en
our main discovery
is that there is a switch that animals
use
to go from being a
normal weight to overweight
that switch you can activate it by
certain types of foods
dr rick johnson welcome to the show
thank you so much i'm delighted to be
honest i'm so excited your book is crazy
so the title alone grabbed me nature
wants us to be fat that is certainly how
it feels yeah it's certainly a bad bad
uh title in terms of you know what it
carries for us but yeah if only it
weren't true but uh so getting into it
there's a lot going on i think it's
really interesting i think it's gonna
profoundly impact how people approach
if not hopefully their life but if
nothing else the debate around is it
just calories do the types of calories
matter which is a debate that i've sort
of been dancing on the periphery of for
the last probably decade plus
i don't care what the answer is i just
want to know what the truth is so i'll
ask point blank do calorie is it is it
just a calorie question why we get fat
or is there more at play
well there's a lot more to at play but
calories are clearly important they they
are important but the type of of foods
make a huge difference you know whether
or not you're eating protein fat or
carbs and and then within the protein
fats and carbs they're good proteins and
bad proteins good carbs and bad carbs
and then
even there if you have a bad carb the
way you eat it can make a difference so
it turns out can you define the what
makes something good what makes
something bad if it tries to drive a
process that wants to make you gain
weight so it turns out that
our main discovery
is that there is a switch that animals
use
to go from being us normal weight to
overweight
that switch you can activate it by
certain types of foods
and not all foods activate it and it's a
specific pathway we've actually
identified the very steps
in that pathway and the incredible thing
the more we study this
the more it appears that this is a
pathway that's driving
not just obesity and diabetes but that
it's involved in a variety of diseases
including
dementia and
cancer and behavioral disorders and
you know high blood pressure and kidney
disease and liver disease i mean i
feel very fortunate that i've fallen on
this and we've been doing studies for
now about 25 years but as it gets
stronger and stronger
i realized that i needed to write about
it and so what's the pathway called by
the way well i call it the survival
switch
and
because it's a it's a basic process
animals use
to try to protect themselves from time
when there's no food
so for example most animals will
regulate their weight very tightly so
how do you know that uh oh for example
like if you take a
lab laboratory rat or if you take
an animal in the wild and you catch it
and you've let's say you force feed it
you make it
gain weight
and then
you take you quit the force feeding and
the animal come right back to its weight
and not only that it'll come back to the
way that it's supposed to be at that
time of the year
yeah yeah and likewise if you
take the food away from an animal and it
loses weight
you give it back food and it will go
right back to the way it's supposed
it thinks it should be at
and so normally animals regulate weight
really really well
but
there are some animals that when they
know that there's going to be a problem
like winter is coming like oh you know i
gotta like fly
12 000 kilometers non-stop to get to my
my uh you know where i'm gonna head for
migration you know uh when they know
that they will um
suddenly
start gaining weight dramatically um a
bear can gain eight to ten pounds a day
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now so let's 20 000 calories how do we
know then that because you said the
animal will go back to the weight that
it's supposed to be for that time of
year so how do we know that there's not
like a weight clock in the way that
there's a circadian rhythm clock
good good question so
we figured out that it's there's a food
that triggers this so normally weight is
regulated by hormone called leptin
there are other regulatory hormones too
but this one is a big one so it's not a
shift in
metabolic rate it's a shift in hunger
levels
oh it's both it's a whole orchestrated
event so what happens is um
it turns out that the the main way
a major way that it's done is by eating
fructose which is a sugar that's in
fruit
and honey and when animals start eating
fructose
it activates
a this metabolic pathway you have to eat
a lot of it it's not like you and i
eating an apple okay it's like i mean
like a bear will eat like 10 000 berries
like like at one setting
i mean it's really like you have to eat
a large amount of fructose and when you
do
it triggers the switch that makes you
hungry
it makes you thirsty
it affects the brain centers you can
show where it affects it and and it will
want you to do foraging behavior where
you go out and seek and try to find food
but while you're foraging your activity
continues to be good your metabolism is
good but when you stop foraging
your resting energy metabolism actually
goes to a lower level
so your basal metabolic rate or your
metabo you know how many calories you're
spending in a day
the foraging
uh will cause you'll spend calories
foraging but when you're resting you'll
do you'll you'll actually spend less
calories you stay more quiet than a
normal animal so really fast there's an
idea that was introduced to me that made
intuitive sense the idea was that when
we're eating food is really a signaling
molecule and so it gives our body
certain signals
and what you're saying is that eating
fructose
signals to our body that hey winter is
coming prepare for this and so we've
co-evolved with plants plants for their
own reasons want us to eat their fruit
right
but we have evolved to really go hard on
fruit at us at the time of year when
it's actually available because the next
thing coming is fall and then winter and
so
those who responded to the signal of
fructose by lowering their
basal metabolic rate beginning to store
fat and we'll get into like some of the
processes that quote unquote break but
it's it's actually beneficial
in terms of the people that had this
response got fatter when they ate it
they sought out more food their basal
metabolic rate went down they started
storing fat there's this whole host of
things that happen and because of hard
times
most people that didn't have that
response died
and that's right the people that did
they were able to survive so we're gonna
for most of the episode we're gonna be
talking about this as if it's bad but
there's actually a reason yes why this
happens and
for me to think about food as a
signaling molecule rather than just
calories in calories out was really
helpful that's right so it turns out
that there is this uh symbiosis with
plants but you would mention this first
so you know so plants well you know the
tree fruit trees will a lot of times the
fruit fruit will ripen in the fall
and that's at the time when the animals
are trying to gain fat
and so the when they ripen the sugar
content goes up the fructose content
goes up and the seeds mature
and things like vitamin c and things
that actually block the effects of
fructose block this pathway go down so
the vitamin c levels go down the sugar
goes up the fruit drops now the seeds
are mature the animals eat the fruit
and then they disperse the seeds in
their poop and and then you have uh it's
it's great for the plants because now
there's more trees and uh it's great for
the animals because they can put on fat
so it stimulates fat it also stimulates
insulin resistance and insulin
resistance i used to think of it as
pathologic you know you don't want to be
insulin resistant but if you're an
animal insulin resistance means that the
glucose in your body can't get into the
muscle very well because that requires
insulin to get in the muscle but the
most of the brain does not require
insulin and so it leaves the glucose for
the brain so you can you know which is
what you want to do if you don't have
enough fuel
you want to shunt the fuel to the brain
because if you can't think you're going
to not do well
so so anyway so this switch
is activated by fructose and
and the way it works
is it drops the energy in the cell i
know that sounds funny because all
calories create energy but there's you
have to think of when i say drop the
energy in the cell i mean the active
usable energy
so when you eat calories basically it
can go into stored energy which is fat
for the most part
and it can go into active energy which
we call atp
and the atp is what you and i use to
talk to think to walk i i got here using
my atp i walked in with because i have
atp going and
so
you know atp is your immediate usable
energy and so what it does
is the atp normally comes from the
energy factories in the cell we we call
them mitochondria and they and and
really this is
totally it if you're into health you
want healthy mitochondria mitochondrial
health they make the energy and obesity
is an
energy disorder you know and diabetes is
an energy disorder so these little
mitochondria are pouring out the atp
but there's an ancient system too called
glycolysis which can make atp
and uh and so that there's another
system which is rarely kicks in so
mainly it's these energy factors and
what the switch does is it depresses the
mitochondria
it depresses and it does it by causing
like oxidative stress to those
mitochondria and so the amount of atp
gets
there's less atp being made and so the
calories are shunted to stored fat
instead of instant fat it just shunts it
it shunts it from insulin energy to
stored energy
and the stored energy is the fat it's a
brilliant system and so why why through
oxidative stress to the mitochondria
does
what is shunting because i'm assuming
you mean the calories so the calories
instead of going to produce atp are
going to be stored as fat right what
mechanism in the body is saying why
because it's there's some mechanism
that's saying atp the production of atp
has become inefficient we're better off
storing this as fat so so the way atp is
produced is you know there's the there's
breakdown products that go into a thing
called the citric
acid cycle or krebs cycle and then it it
moves on into the mite to oxidative
phosphorylation where the
uh you produce
the mitochondria start producing a lot
of atp and they require oxygen a lot of
the oxygen we breathe goes to make the
atp
and what happens is some of the enzymes
in these cycles the things that kind of
move the stuff around
and break it down to the next step and
so that it can make atp they're
sensitive to oxidative stress so that if
there's oxidative stress goes up
those enzymes get inhibited and so that
that pathway to make atp is is slowed
down or reduced or can
it's not fully stopped but it's like
slowed down
and so when that happens
the mitochondria make less atp so it
turns out that there's more
uh shunting some of the metabolites
actually go and and stimulate fat
production and also
to block the burning effect so there's
it stimulates both the synthesis of fat
and it blocks the breaking down of fat
and so it's like a double whammy and so
what happens is the calories end up
getting stored as fat and the amount of
energy produced is less
and then what happens is the low energy
makes you hungry
so then you eat more and so it stores
more fat because it's the shunt still
going on but eventually the atp levels
start coming up because you're eating
more and more so it's a brilliant system
and um and when we first
discovered this
pathway
and realized it was orchestrating the
whole series of events
um then then we realized that there was
another side to it which is that um
that the body can make fructose this is
maybe one of the most shocking things in
the book and i it it bears explaining to
people what made you ask that question
in the first place because if i look at
this with my the hat on of like hold on
hold on you're just violating the second
law of thermodynamics like you have to
be overeating in order to put on fat and
so
walk people through
why did you start asking that question
in the first place
why when you discover that fructose
makes people fat why weren't you like
we're done yeah listen so there are two
questions you just brought us so if you
don't mind i'll answer the first the
first one which is the the law of
thermodynamics and it gets back to the
calorie question okay so
so when we found that animals who were
eating fructose
started to eat more and they got really
fat and they got diabetic and they got
fatty liver and they get their
triglycerides went up to their blood and
and they be you know they develop a
low-grade kidney disease i mean i was
like this is coming from sugar you know
i mean oh my god you know lust it calls
sugar poison i understand why because
when you put this into overload you
really create a monster
but anyway so uh so the question was
well is that
because they're eating too much because
it's stimulating hunger
but what if we
made it so that all the animals ate the
same amount of food
so even though you're hungry
i'm not going to give you the food you
want so what we're going to do is we're
going to feed all the animals the same
amount and then we had a control group
and a high sugar or fructose group and i
should say that sugar has fructose in it
so table sugar
high fructose corn syrup
these are the main sources of fructose
for us
so when we did that and we took those
animals and we gave them exactly the
same
so it turned out remember how i told you
that it makes you hungry and eat more
but it also drops your resting energy
metabolism
so because it drops your energy
metabolism if you're eating the same
number of calories there will be some
weight gain in the sugar group also we
did a trick where we gave them less
calories than they normally
eat so they were like on a diet but
one's on a high sugar diet one's on a
controlled diet
and when we put them on the high sugar
diet
those animals became diabetic they
became they got fatty liver they they uh
you know developed high triglycerides
did they store body fat they had they
had more body fat but their weights were
very very similar
because of the lower energy metabolism
they actually were about 10 to 20 grams
difference in weight they actually even
though they were on a caloric
restriction they gained 10 grams
and of weight these are rats so the 10
grams
it's in anything for us but but if
you're a rat it's a little bit more so
they gained weight and the the gr the
other group lost weight so but it wasn't
statistically significant so
in our paper we had to say it was there
was no statistical difference in weight
yet despite no statistical difference in
weight there was a dramatic difference
in everything else they were became
diabetic so there's two pathways right
so one is yes if you go on a
high sugar diet
and you
[Music]
also go on
have a high fat in the diet the fat is
actually playing a role because the high
sugar makes you hungry and makes you
lose control of your appetite
but the high fat is like super high
calories and so you gain weight very
fast if you just put an animal a high
sugar diet they gain weight but it's not
as it takes a lot longer but the fat is
like the firewood and the sugar is like
the fire
so if you take away the fire and you go
on a low carb diet and you are on high
fat now
well there's no stimulus to gain weight
because
because you've taken away the the
fructose
okay and so the answer to your question
is yes calories are important but also
there's something special about fructose
where even if you're on a caloric
restriction it's going to make you
diabetic
that's crazy yeah so
there's all these knock-on effects of
having the fructose
but the part where i was like okay what
you're saying makes a prediction that if
i'm just eating glucose for instance
which literally until the
the idea of uric acid and all this stuff
if you haven't got to uric acid yet but
until all of this got on my radar i
would have said that okay fructose maybe
is a little bit worse because it can
only be stored in your liver and your
muscles and so you just don't have a way
to use it
uh but that glucose would be terrible as
well yeah well so you got me so you know
so this leads into the second part of
your question and that that was okay
so uh what made you uh
realize that fructose was being built
made in the body
and you know originally so i you know
when the first data came out i said okay
fructose is the bad guy
and i even published a book the first
book on a low fructose diet called the
sugar fix and some people lost weight
great and some didn't
and i was on an interview with jimmy
moore
and jimmy says hey you know
rick uh you know i i know that sugar is
bad but i have to cut up bread and rice
and potatoes to lose weight i have to do
full carb restriction and i was pretty
aware that that that that bread was
fattening and um and french fries they
couldn't be good you know
and also there are a lot of animals in
the wild that get fat and they're not
eating fruit you know uh and so can you
give us an example oh
like for example a whale
they're the fattest
i haven't seen one eat a banana they
probably would eat one but anyway we
knew that the body can make fructose
this was known for
50 years and
and
so fructose is actually can be made in
the body there's only one way it can be
made and it's through
a thing where
an enzyme has to be turned on
and it's called it's the poly all
pathways the it's called but you
normally it's pretty quiet it's not
present so when you're young it's not
really around
do we have a sense of why that would be
like why
are kids because they're already storing
more fat like i don't understand why
if there is any benefit that led us to
producing fructose which i'm assuming
there is why it wouldn't be present in
kids well i think that um fructose is
really turned this whole pathway is
turned on in situations of stress okay
so if you're not stressed
you know so if a baby is being breastfed
and everything's going fine
it's going to have very low levels but
you can turn it on it can even go up
locally with stress like when you have a
heart attack
the heart cells will start will convert
and start metabolizing and making
fructose why
when the heart starts to make fructose
and
and turns on the enzymes to make
fructose it tries to turn on the switch
locally and remember that what it does
is uh it suppresses the mitochondria
and the mitochondria are using a lot of
oxygen to make atp can i use the phrase
that you use in the book energy factors
you what you call this the alarm bell oh
yeah and i was like okay
so and that made sense to me so alarm
winter's coming alarm you just had a
heart attack and so if this is the
body's alarm bell then i would
understand why it would be produced
locally i don't understand why fructose
but yeah so what happens is when the
fructose is produced
it causes that oxidative stress for the
energy factories and it reduces the
oxygen needs the the mitochondria become
less active so they consume less oxygen
that's why and so it's trying to protect
the heart
because in a heart attack you would have
less yes because the blood supply has
been
impaired so there's less oxygen so it's
trying to help you
and this shifts it
to this primitive system to make energy
and this primitive system doesn't make a
lot of energy and so what happens is it
might be protective for a few minutes
but over time it actually leads to
thickening of the heart hypertrophy
disease of the heart and this has been
we also been shown like in the kidneys
and with
if you have acute kidney failure again
this the fructose system gets turned on
in the kidney and it tries to protect
but it ends up causing inflammation um
and fibrosis and all these things
because we have an exuberant response
and one of the reasons we have that
exuberant response is because of uric
acid
but but getting back to the very basic
question so when
i originally thought okay the answer is
we can just cut out fructose in the diet
but then i realized that that you know
carbs could do it
that weren't that did not contain
fructose and then i realized that
myself and miguel and aspa who i work
with the two of us were having a
discussion and we realized that when you
eat a high glycemic carb
you could theoretically start making
fructose in your body and the reason
that is is that one one of the classic
means for stimulating fructose
turns out to be
from a high glucose level in the blood
so if you're diabetic and you have a
high glucose level in the blood it had
all been already been reported that that
stimulates fructose production so people
with bad diabetes have a lot of fructose
that they're making and the fructose is
playing a role in their kidney disease
we can block the kidney disease from
diabetes
by by reducing the
or blocking the effects of fructose so
it's pretty cool
so so since high glucose can stimulate
fructose production we realize that you
know every time you eat bread or rice or
potatoes the glucose in your blood goes
up a bit and you know it stimulates
insulin yeah but it might stimulate
fructose and so we did these experiments
where we put animals on glucose and i
was originally thinking they wouldn't
get fat but you're right
they got really fat they got they were
waddling around i mean you know and uh
and so then we gave the glucose to
animals that could not
uh either make fructose because we had
genetically removed that enzyme or they
couldn't metabolize fructose so we
genetically removed that enzyme and when
we could do that they could eat the
carbs and they gained a little bit of
weight they did gain modest weight but
they were
they didn't get a big weight gain and
they didn't get the uh the fatty liver
and they didn't get uh insulin
resistance and they were really
protected
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this and be legendary take care
so basically if you don't produce
fructose or you can't metabolize the
fructose that's there you won't have
this exaggerated response right
yeah and there are people who lack that
enzyme and that no none of them have
ever been reported to be obese or
diabetic they're very interesting they
are completely healthy so if fructose
though is the alarm bell
why do you think glucose triggers the
alarm bell
well it's a good question so
it turns out that when the glucose level
goes up in the blood
it creates a sense of dehydration
and um
and you probably know that people who
are diabetic are often very thirsty and
drink lots of water
and it also turns out that dehydration
is the biggest stimulus for fructose
production
more than eating uh glucose
they're about the same but the eating
the glucose makes you
stimulates a sense of dehydration
and so um but what we what happens is
the what triggers the production of
fructose is if you start becoming
dehydrated i know the punch line here
yeah that's interesting okay keep going
but now that i can predict where the
problem comes in that's really keep
going yeah almost certain i know what
the answer is so it turns out that a lot
of animals use fat not just as a calorie
source
but as a source of water because when
you burn fat you produce water
so the camel has that fat on its back
that breaks down the fat and the hump
when it needs water the whale doesn't
drink
salt water so it gets its fresh water
from the crustaceans and things it eats
the fish and stuff it eats but it also
uh gets the water from its fat
there's even a primate a dwarfed
fat tailed or fat tailed dwarf lemur
and that guy uh lives on its it will uh
hibernate or they call it estivation but
it's like hibernation like five months
during the dry season and it will use
its fat to produce water so it turns out
that fat
is the source of water so when an animal
gets dehydrated and it particularly if
they're worried that they're going to
become dehydrated they will start to
gain fat as a source of as a way to help
give them water during the times of need
and the best way to do that is like
to create a little bit of dehydration so
if your glucose levels are high that's
one way but if you a deer and you're
looking at salt lick that would be
another way because when you take salt
the salt concentration goes up in the
blood sort of like the glucose
concentration and that triggers thirst
and so crazy so
when a deer or a cow is licking a salt
lake it's a way to trigger in their body
the storage of fat as a protective
mechanism against yeah
basically either famine or lack of water
yeah so deer you know they eat a lot of
uh grass and stuff that's calorie poor
so they they need stimulus to help help
them store adequate amounts of
calories but what we did do though is we
took
a study we did studies in peoples well
maybe that's more relevant
so what we did well well first what we
did is we we did a study in animals when
we put them on the high salt diet and
you know uh salt you know people know
that salt's associated with blood
pressure
and
heart trouble but um no one really had
linked salt with obesity in the common
literature you know but there were
in the medical literature there was um
some studies showing that people who eat
a high salt diet are at increased risk
for obesity and there's like 10 studies
out there and so
it seemed kind of odd how would salt
which has no calories
increase your risk for getting fat but
when when we put animals on salt it
raised the salt concentration in their
blood they became thirsty of course and
they started eating more
and um after several months they became
hugely fat
diabetic and everything and then just
from salt yeah they didn't increase
their glucose didn't increase their
fructose nope
they weren't even getting any fructose
they were just a normal chow and they
and they became
uh they became hungry they lost their
control of appetite they started gaining
weight
um and they became diabetic and they had
fatty liver off of salt off of salt just
increasing salt now i will get there in
a bit because i know you're
we're going to talk about salt in terms
of how modern diets and the low carb
diet so we can get there but anyway so
so what happened was they were making
fructose
the salt activated the enzyme that
converted glucose to fructose so
the glucose that they're getting from
their chow
was being converted to fructose very
easily because the salt really turned it
on so you didn't have to get have a high
glucose in your blood it was just enough
to just turn it on and then what glucose
you have
a lot of it's being converted to
fructose and so what happened was if we
blocked the fructose
we could uh
we could we could block the fructose
production or the fructose the breaking
down of fructose and when we did that
they could eat all the salt they want
and they didn't get fat wow and what's
more they didn't make they even get high
blood pressure so the high blood
pressure was going through that pathway
so then uh so then we looked at people
and we found that high salt diet
also predicted fatty liver and obesity
and diabetes in people and so along with
others and then
it's there's a group that discovered
that there's a hormone called
vasopressin which goes up when you're
dehydrated
and so all these animals in the desert
have high vasopressin levels and
vasopressin is a hormone to help you
hold water
and it's high in people who with obesity
so everybody with in fact
um jody stuki is wonderful scientists
found that
that people who are obese
uh depending on what measure you use
they can be 12 times more likely to be
dehydrated than a non-obese person
that's using a thing called bioimpedance
and if you measure
you know the classic measure which is
the salt concentration in your blood uh
there are two times people who are obese
are two times more likely to be
dehydrated than a
lean person and so it turns out that a
lot of people who are obese are not just
eating bad diets like sugar they're
eating a lot of salt
and and the salt is activating this
pathway to make sugar to make fructose
and to metabolize fructose and so what's
going on is there's uh
is that there's a secret
driving another secret driving mechanism
for obesity so you now we we know that
high glycemic carbs can do it and we
know that salty foods can do it but the
way salt works
is it works by converting the glucose in
our body to fructose so if you're on a
low carb diet
and you're eating
salt
you're going to make less fructose
because you just don't have much glucose
around
so
a lot of people who go on a low carb
diet will actually eat kind of a lot of
salty foods and they don't get fat
because they they don't have the glucose
to convert this is so interesting to me
the way that this is all working okay so
we've got the
salt is triggering the enzyme that
allows us to turn glucose into fructose
and the reason that our ancestors who
did that would have been more likely to
survive is because we're
for us to be in that kind of situation
it means that there's a drought coming
so we may not have access to either
enough food to get water out of the food
or enough direct water to stay hydrated
and therefore triggering the alarm
system and making sure that we store fat
so that we can repurpose it as water
becomes a very meaningful thing that's
insane but okay
glucose can be turned easily into
fructose again this is the alarm system
why
glucose
triggers
the alarm system though that's purely
because i'm getting dehydrated why
though does it actually dehydrate me or
is it dehydration-like and if it's
dehydration-like
why is glucose in and of itself
problematic okay well so when the
glucose is high in the blood
um it does create a sense of dehydration
and is that the only problem because
that's no because it also
mimics a thing called insulin resistance
so if you eat most
starches for example um
you know or vegetables or things like
that that have glucose in them
uh many of them are not going to trigger
the switch because the switch only gets
activated
when the glucose levels are high which
trick when the glucose levels are high
it makes the animal feel it's dehydrated
so so classically dehydration uh we talk
about dehydration as a loss of water
and so uh you know you have diarrhea or
you're vomiting or you're sweating too
much and you lose water and you become
dehydrated
so we usually think of dehydration as a
loss of water and when you lose the
water
the concentrations of salt and uh goes
up in your blood
because the water's been stretched right
because the water has been stripped out
you can mimic dehydration it's really
the same thing as dehydration by eating
salt
because when you eat salt the salt
concentration goes up but you haven't
lost the water so it's kind of a pseudo
dehydration because you didn't lose the
water you gained the salt
but it's the same effect the animal
wants to keep the concentrations of salt
and glucose normal in its blood because
it allows
a movement in and out of the cells i
mean it's really important in how
transport works
now if you eat
most foods with starch or glucose you
know the glucose concentrations don't go
up much
but if you eat
high glycemic carbs and you eat like a
lot of potatoes or rice or something
then your glucose can go up right after
the meal and we can show that with like
a continuous glucose monitor yep and
when the glucose goes up it
there for some reason this uh
pathway to make fructose is activated we
don't i don't absolutely know why but
i know that there's um
what we call an osmolarity
trigger
and when you when uh an osmolarity is a
a name for the concentration of glucose
plus salt so when the glucose goes up
and the osmolality goes up
or or the number of the concentration of
the blood gets
higher
it makes the animal feel it's dehydrated
and it is it is actually a type of
dehydration it's just that you're not
losing water
so much as your glucose is is is going
up and the concentration
of electrolytes and glucose go up in the
blood now when you're diabetic you're
also peeing a lot of urine it's because
the glucose gets into the urine and so
you are becoming dehydrated based on
that so but it's uh it's sort of a
argumentative point but when you eat if
your glucose goes up in your blood it
triggers the production of fructose
okay so the thing that i'm trying to
make sure that i understand is why the
body would care about that
so it seems to me like fructose is just
the mechanism of action but it's really
anything that's causing an imbalance in
my blood
that the body cares about basically so
if i've got too high of a concentration
of salt then my body's going to trigger
fructose if i've got too much
glucose in my system my body's going to
trigger fructose right so it's whenever
my blood is getting out of balance i'm
triggering this alarm system whenever
you're thirsty so the commonality is
that when this goes up it creates um
it creates a dehydration type of picture
and dehydration and by definition you're
going to be thirsty and you're going to
release this hormone vasopressin
all roads that lead to rome involve
fructose
so it's either the fructose you eat or
the fructose you make
if you eat a lot of fructose you're
going to activate the switch and rome
just so we're clear is metabolic disease
that's that's the switch where you turn
on to become diabetic and all these
things so
so when the when you eat a lot of
fructose that will do it if you become
dehydrated like with salty diets and so
forth that will do it if you eat high
glycemic foods that can do it too so
those are like the three main ones and
it turns out that the way the fructose
works
is it works through the production of a
substance called uric acid
and the uric acid is
it's a normal substance that we all make
all animals make it and when we when you
make it then you have to excrete it
and most animals excrete it by breaking
it down
but we
lost our ability to break it down uh
during a you know 15 million years ago
and so we all humans have a higher uric
acid
than uh everybody than all other
mammals
apes also have this mutation so anyway
so so we have a higher uric acid
and this makes us more sensitive to the
effects of fructose because fructose is
working through uric acid and when when
we can't break the uric acid down and
fructose makes it the uric acid shoots
up higher than it normally would and
when that happens we become very
sensitive
to sugar and to all of these pathways so
a normal animal
has to even more fructose than we do
to to really get the effect
and we are very sensitive to sugar
and so uh
the uric acid is the thing that actually
causes that stunning of the energy
factories
and and and so the uric acid is playing
a key role so uric acid is the um
oxidative
yes that's what causes the oxidative
stress okay it's the it's the main guy
so uh so it helps orchestrate that drop
in energy in the cell
and when that happens when the energy
goes down there's the alarm signal you
trigger this
huge switch and animals want to gain fat
and so the problem is is we had this
mutation because it occurred during the
period of famine it was probably
important for us to survive
and now we have this mutation so we're
sensitive sugar and now we're getting
tons of high fructose corn syrup and
table sugar and it's being put in our
food and we have salt being put in all
this processed food and and then here's
here's the terrible twist it turns out
that uric acid has its own taste uh too
so so we have five tastes that we like
yes that we like so there's sweet and
salt we like those sweet that's to get
fructose salt that's to trigger the
production of fructose then we have
bitter and sour which are to you know
tell us not to eat those foods and then
we have umami and the umami is called
the fifth taste
and it's this brilliant taste it's like
um
it's a savory flavor it's it's what you
know in gravies and beef extracts and
you know the drying and curing of meats
uh you know leads this really delicious
flavor
it's uh it's in beer it's the yeast
extract and beer
uh it's in tomatoes believe it or not um
and uh and you know the bloody mary is a
perfect example of uh a nice umami food
beer
and it's an oregon meats um it's in blue
cheese when you have that delicious blue
cheese salad blue cheese freaks me out i
don't know about that one okay
well i like it
caesar salads and the anchovies they so
what it is is uh
it turns out that when they figured out
what umami was the thing that activates
umami is an amino acid called glutamate
or msg and when you eat glutamate guess
what you make you're a guest
it's terrible
and
and it's also stimulated by a substance
called amp and inp which are breakdown
products of atp and when you activate
this switch the atp is broken down and
you make the imp and amp the switch
makes these
substances that are part of the umami
flavor and so
uh when we give animals umami uh and we
give them umami in in the drinking water
so they get a high concentration they
also can become obese and it's because
they enter into this pathway after
fructose when you eat fructose
you make uric acid and when you eat
umami you kind of bypass the fructose
but you still make that uric acid you
make it or it's now present because
you've just eaten it no it's it's it's
made from the glutamate and from the imp
and uh yeah
it's upstream so it actually will
generate uric acid
so
okay now is msg more potent than even
fructose yes so if you do it gram for
gram msg is more potent than sugar but
we don't eat very much umami
so the average person's eating you know
a few grams of umami a day
you know and you're eating
grams and grams of sugar so there's a
huge difference right so in the potency
sugar is number one
high glycemic carbs are probably number
two
salty foods are a distant three
and umami is a maybe even a four
but you know um
the whole thing's kind of interesting so
you know um and and and the fructose
when you eat it um is acting to
activate the survival pathway which is
supposed to be beneficial but when
you're in overdrive because you've got
the mutation all this now it's driving
obesity and and
and so with the
the newest stuff is that we're now
showing that this pathway is like
involved in things like dementia and so
forth and that
when in alzheimer's there's evidence
that their earliest problem is insulin
resistance in the brain
and insulin you know the brain doesn't
normally need much insulin to get
glucose
but there's certain parts of the brain
that do require insulin and
insulin resistance to those parts can be
the earliest sign of alzheimer's and you
can show that in people with alzheimer's
that they're making fructose in their
brain
you can show that they've activated the
pathway you can show that fructose
causes insulin resistance in the brain
it drops the energy in the cell and in
alzheimer's the atp levels are low they
have mitochondrial problems they have
all the all the markers so what's
happening is alzheimer's i believe
is actually being driven by this pathway
salty foods high glycemic carbs
chronically can can cause this
the other um
the other thing i should mention is that
what we know is like this fructose sort
of initiates this but over time the
mitochondria will actually or the energy
factories gets less and less and less
because initially when you do this the
there's just this transient oxidative
stress and the switch is turned on and
then you stop it the switch comes back
you know i mean the switch is turned off
and everything's fine but if you keep
hitting it again and again and again and
again over years what happens is the
mitochondria actually get weakened and
it's it's like involved in
in the aging process and in the end and
as the number of mitochondria go down
then what happens is you it resets your
body weight to a higher weight
and so what happens is now when you try
to lose weight
um you you can lose the weight but then
when you stop you go back up and that's
why exercise is so important i know you
do a lot of exercise good for you matt
yeah if i'm honest i control my weight
through
diet far more than exercise i might
think i was better at exercising if i
wasn't married to my wife who is a beast
when it comes to exercise she's really
on point um
man this stuff is is really crazy and
one thing that i loved about the book is
you walk people through
because you weren't flippant about the
science you would get a discovery and
you'd be like let's check it from eight
different angles
um
one of the ways that that really hit me
was vitamin c
yeah walk me through vitamin c's role in
this we can't produce it but it has like
these huge effects like why why from an
evolutionary standpoint would it make
sense for us to lose the ability to
produce vitamin c yeah
so so vitamin c is is good right it's an
antioxidant it's you know so the big
question is why
why would we lose vitamin c uh in our
past so we we used to be able to make
vitamin c way way longer
but
probably around 60 million years ago 65
million years ago we lost the ability to
make vitamin c
and
and it turns out when a fruit is being
made you know as it's and it's maturing
it starts off with a high vitamin c
content and a low sugar content it turns
out that vitamin c
blocks the oxidative stress
induced by the fructose because it's an
antioxidant so it blocks it
so fructose causes you to gain weight by
creating oxidative stress
and that vitamin c blocks it so when the
fruits immature
the tree doesn't want the bird to eat it
because the seeds aren't mature you know
it's not good so that it wants to wait
till the seeds are mature
and so it will wait and the vitamin c
content will block you know well the
animal won't gain much weight by eating
a immature fruit because the vitamin c
is going to block the fructose but as
the
fruit ripens the vitamin c goes down and
the sugar goes up and now that
it's good for the tree and it's good for
the animal and so they'll eat the right
fruit so it turns out vitamin c has a
role in blocking
uh fructose and what we did is we took
animals that were vit had no
could not make vitamin c
and you have to give them a little bit
or they'll get scurvy and die so that's
so you got to all the animals get a
little bit of vitamin c but one one
group gets a little and one group gets a
lot
and then we give them sugar and they eat
the same amount of actually high
fructose corn syrup and the one that has
the lower
amount of
vitamin c and low they got much fatter
linus fallen was right we should all be
on 500 milligrams a day
if you take huge doses you can get
kidney stones so
remember that so don't take huge doses
of vitamin c but 500 milligrams a day is
really good and um
and
once you get up to a gram a day you know
it also may have some effects on
exercise which i talked about in my book
so but 500 milligrams a day is great and
it turned out that when this mutation
occurred
an asteroid had just hit the world
and
there was a massive extinction the
dinosaurs became extinct and their
little primates that were living that
time i actually got this mutation and my
belief
is that the mutation uh was a survival
mechanism so they they at that point
they didn't make much vitamin c so they
were kind of in a low vitamin c level so
that when they ate a fruit
even if there was some vitamin c it
wasn't
enough
to add to what they were making so that
they could make more fat
so that's the hypothesis i mean
so
you know in my work we have the hard
science and then we have the
interpretation
but uh i i do know that if you have a
low vitamin c level you're at increased
risk for obesity if you're an animal and
the data in people shows the same people
who are not eating a lot of vitamin c or
have low vitamin c levels tend to be
overweight
vitamin c supplementation has been
probably has been reported to help
all aspects of the metabolic syndrome so
it's insane yes all right walk people
through really quickly than what they
should be doing
drink less water yes so the so the first
thing is um you know uh
know your foods that that can activate
the switch and know the foods that don't
and you know vegetables of course are
good
white meats
a lot of fish are good
red meats you have to be a little bit
careful for
i wouldn't eat a lot of them um and uh
high glass because of umami yes because
of the umami and um and and it also yes
it's probably because of the umami that
it it has its uh negative sides but
basically the most important rule is
liquid sugar is really dangerous and and
the reason is is um
when you have liquid sugar
the uh you drink a lot very quickly
and so the concentration is high as well
as the amount
and what triggers the switch is the
concentration
of fructose the liver c so if you have a
soft drink and you drink it in one
minute you're going to give a huge dose
in a short period of time that means a
high concentration if you
took that large soft drink and you
sipped it
so that and you sipped it over three
hours it's going to be a calorie you're
never going to get the fructose
concentration will never get high enough
to activate the switch so if you do one
sip every
five minutes you're not you i doubt
you're going to activate the switch um
and then uh you know so so it's
liquid sugars
you got to watch that
fruit juice
i love fruit juice but
unfortunately
unfortunately it will activate the
switch for sure and so i would not uh
i'd be very careful with the fruit
juices there may be some fruit juices
that are safer like fruits that are
really relatively low in fructose like
kiwi and stuff there's berries some of
them don't have much sugar in it
and those might be fine a third thing
would be um
you know
obviously desserts and candy and sugar
cakes you have to be very careful with
um but you know and try to minimize uh
but you know i
if my son has a birthday party i'm gonna
eat a piece of cake
so uh try not to eat too much of the
sweets high glycemic carbs i i think
there's four big ones right bread rice
potatoes cereal you know our chips
gosh watch those those are real i i
recommend
trying to avoid those if possible
um and
you know if you're going to eat one just
eat and then you know
drink a lot of water i mean one of the
incredible things is most people are
overweight are dehydrated and they're
dehydrated not only from the salt but it
turns out fructose dehydrates you too
and i didn't go into that but if you
give a person a soft drink
that is not hydrating okay that is
dehydrating
and you can prove it
and if you
give animals uh soft drinks and you give
them a lot of water you can block the
effects of sugar partially i mean you
know significantly
uh so you should drink six to eight
glasses of water a day some people can
drink 10 to 12 but you know you can you
can become watering toxic intoxicated
and if you're a marathon runner drink to
thirst and because marathon runners if
they drink too much water they can
actually drop their sodium
concentrations and and get really really
ill or
immediately following surgery is another
time you should not drink a lot of water
but for most of us
we're not drinking enough water and we
should be drinking eight to ten glasses
of water a day and that's probably
one of the best messages can reduce your
salt intake
and you know things like intermittent
fasting
is fantastic that's a wonderful system
and low carb diets wonderful for trying
to lose weight
and then exercising is turns out to be a
great way
not to lose weight because it doesn't
burn many calories but
it stimulates the mitochondria you won't
notice the benefit
except the benefits going to be
happening because as the mitochondria go
up
your risk for relapse and gaining weight
goes down so exercise and it's a
particular kind of exercise we call it
zone two
that kind of exercise is really really
important
uh and it's you know it's something that
i personally want to do more of a you
know as a workaholic that's probably the
thing i have the hardest time is finding
that extra time during the day to
exercise
but i hear it
well you've been putting your time to
very good use i found your book utterly
fascinating where can people follow
along with you socially where do they
get the book i i have a website dr
richardjohnson.com
and that's probably my main site um and
then of course the the books available
through regular you know all
places
are sold yeah where books are sold
and