Dr. Richard Johnson
speaker
152 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Dr. Richard Johnson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And then there is stored energy and stored energy is fat and can be carbohydrates too, but most of stored energy is fat. And so when a bear is hibernating and he's not eating and not getting the energy from food, he can use the stored energy or fat to produce the ATP he needs. So
That's right. So I became interested because we found that uric acid had a role in causing fat and it had a role in raising blood pressure and causing things. So, you know, as I mentioned, uric acid is a substance circulating in our blood and it varies. And a lot of people have low levels and some people have very high levels of uric acid.
And if the levels get really high, they can cause a disease called gout.
Yeah, they get this joint pain. It's basically an inflammation of the joints. And so you get this red hot joint, typically the big toe or the knee or the ankle, sometimes the wrist, and it's miserable. It's very, very painful. It lasts a couple of weeks. Sometimes people take medication like Advil and ibuprofen can help reduce the inflammation.
But it's, you know, although people used to think of gout as just being an arthritis, there's more and more evidence that it's not. And these uric acid crystals can also go to the kidneys and go to the blood vessels. And about, there's recent studies that suggest that people with gout that they have crystals in their aorta and their coronary arteries too.
The majority have some crystals in their blood vessels that tends to go to the plaques in the blood vessels. And so gout is not just an arthritis and it's been known for a long time that gout is also associated with obesity and diabetes and hypertension and kidney disease.
That's right.
So anyway, so for a long time, people linked gout with being a rich man's disease, also with being overweight, obese, hypertensive, all these conditions. It's about 70% of people with gout are overweight. I mean, it's like a very strong association. 60 or 70% are diabetic. I mean, it's a very strong link. And
People were saying for years, you know, hypertension and diabetes and obesity increase your risk for gout. But actually, the high uric acid usually precedes the development of obesity. It precedes the development of diabetes. It precedes the development of kidney disease. It's one of the earliest markers that predicts the development of these conditions. It's a very strong predictor.
And when we were studying it, we realized that uric acid doesn't just form crystals and cause inflammation. Uric acid is biologically active. And one of its main things that it does is it acts on mitochondria, those little energy factories, and it causes stress to them and reduces their energy production. Think about that. Okay.
So anyway, so I was studying uric acid and that took me to, you know, what, we had this evidence that it was driving blood pressure and might have a cause in hypertension. And we did this study actually in adolescents who were overweight, where we lowered uric acid in them and their blood pressure corrected it. And we published it in the JAMA. It was a big deal.
Yeah. We used the drug to lower the uric acid and 90% of them or so became normotensive. It was amazing. They'd never received a blood pressure test.
Then the question was, what drives the uric acid up? Most people think of alcohol and actually things like red meats, but actually one of the major things that raises uric acid is fructose and sugar. And so actually Gary Taubes, who I'm sure you know, interviewed me related to a paper that was published in the New England Journal on gout and its relationship with, you know, with diet.
And when we were talking on the phone, he says, well, what do you think about sugar as a driver of uric acid? I said, well, it's definitely is a driver. It's the fructose component. And then, you know, and, you know, after I had my conversation with him, I went home and I thought, you know, we should give fructose to animals and see if they develop high blood pressure.
And if we lower the uric acid, can we lower the blood pressure? Because at this point I was focused on blood pressure. And so what happened was, you know, some people in my lab, Taka Nakagawa, we gave fructose to animals and they became hypertensive. And so fructose is that component of sugar. So table sugar or sucrose is half fructose and half glucose.
And there's another sweetener, high fructose corn syrup. It's also about half and half fructose and glucose, but fructose is the only sugar that raises uric acid. And so we gave fructose to animals and they became hypertensive.
Blood pressure went up just like this. And we gave the drug to lower the uric acid and the blood pressure came down. But there was a big surprise because the animals got fructose also started getting fat. And they started developing insulin resistance. And their fats went up in their blood. The fat went up in their liver.
I mean, they were developing obesity and metabolic syndrome right in front of us. And when we lowered the uric acid, we actually could reduce all of those. And I go, oh, it can't be. It can't be just lowering the blood pressure and but also lowering all these other things. And then we started realizing this was that fructose was first off, it was a very potent driver of obesity.
But the other thing is we could lessen it by lowering uric acid. And the cool part is uric acid is not in the caloric pathway. You know, so there's calories. You know, everyone says it's calories. Calories are the big driver of obesity. But uric acid was being produced independently of the calories. And when we block that part, we actually were blocking the obesity.
So what we figured out, it's not so much the insulin resistance causes inflammation, it's that fructose is driving a series of events to help the animal survive acutely. It's stimulating inflammation to help fight off infection. It's raising blood pressure to maintain circulation in a state where it thinks that it's maybe starving.
Showing 21–40 of 152 · page 2 of 8
← Previous
Next →