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.
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It increases pressure in the kidneys to facilitate excretion of the stuff through the kidneys. It causes insulin resistance, which is to help preserve some glucose in the blood for tissues that need it. It makes fat, but it blocks the breaking down of fat. And so it's stimulating all of these at once, and it's all working together.
Through the mitochondria, there's specific chemical pathways that are driving each one that we've been studying. So we can actually show how the insulin resistance develops, why you can't break down the fat. It's all driven through this this particular chemistry. And then we realized that fructose was meant to help us store energy and prepare us for times when there's no food around.
Yes. whereas glucose is therefore the immediate fuel and then glucose is like trying to raise the atp in the cell fructose is trying to get us to store fat and the way it does it is it drops it stuns the mitochondria drops that atp and activates all those pathways and that was the fundamental discovery we go oh my gosh this is super important in evolution in biology glucose is really meant
has a different role than fructose. And then we realized, though, that if you eat too much glucose, it gets turned over into fructose. And we found out that very mild dehydration could also stimulate fructose production because fructose helps the animal store water by generating fat. And then we realized that the best way to create an animal to cause mild dehydration was to eat salt.
And then we started doing studies with salt and we realized that when you eat salt and you get thirsty, you're actually stimulating fructose production from glucose. So salt activates the chemical reaction that converts glucose to fructose. So you've got two things that are important for making fructose. One is you gotta have glucose around.
So if you're on a low carb diet, you're in good shape because you're not going to have so much glucose around because all glucose comes from, you know, the main source of glucose in our body comes from the carbs. You can make glucose from amino acids and so forth, but it's not very much. And so most of the glucose that we in our body comes from the carbs.
So if you're on a low carb diet, you're not going to make very much fructose. That's why low carb diets are so fantastic because not only are they reducing sugar intake, but they're reducing carb intake that will reduce the amount of fructose you make. But salt is a very powerful way of converting glucose to fructose.
And that's why French fries, for example, cause so much obesity and are so bad because you've got the carbs, you've got that starch, the potato, And then you got to coat it with salt, make it taste really good. And that salt activates the conversion of the carb to fructose, the glucose to fructose. And then you coat it with the fat. And now you've got the fat.
Yeah, you got the trifecta.
Yeah. I still eat cake on my birthday. I'll eat salt. I'll have salty food occasionally. It's not that we want to eliminate these foods in any way, but what we want to do is to be aware that they can convert to fructose. And if we're doing a lot of it, we're going to generate a lot of fructose in our body and we're going to eat a lot of fructose if we eat sugary foods.
So we want to cut it back, we want to reduce it. If you can get rid of it, soft drinks, that's a good move.
Yes, right.
That's right. And natural fruit turns out to be much healthier than we think. If you're a bear and you're eating 10,000 grapes, you're going to get fat if you eat 10,000 grapes. But when you eat a natural fruit, it's only three or four grams of fructose typically in a fruit. And my friend Josh Rabinovich showed that the intestine inactivates about three to four grams of fructose.
So you can eat a natural fruit and you won't get any fructose to your liver, you know, because it's all removed by the intestine. And it's really in the liver where it controls this metabolic syndrome. And so if you just eat occasional fruit, you're going to get all the good things in the fruit. Phytonutrients. Yeah, vitamin C. Fiber. Potassium, fiber, and all these things are good.
And actually, vitamin C and flavanols and all these things, potassium, they actually counter the effects of fructose. So we actually did studies where we put animals or people on a low fructose diet and we supplemented them with natural fruits. So they were getting back fructose, but only in the form of fruit, not in the form of refined sugars.
And they lost weight and they did well, just as well as the people who did not get the natural fruit supplements.
So fruit juice. So fruit juice is where you take multiple fruit, you juice it, you get rid of some of the pulp and the fiber, and you end up with a drink that often has like three or four fruits in it. And so instead of having three or four grams of fructose, now it can have maybe have 20, 20 grams of fructose. And now it's similar to like a fruit, like a soft drink and, you know, apple juice.
I love apple juice, but it's not good for you because there's a lot of sugar in it, a lot of fructose, and it will trigger the switch. It will trigger this this activation.
so um so i don't recommend fruit juice so anyway so you know the first discovery was that fructose was diff different from glucose or from other foods that it really dropped the energy in the cell and that this uh and that this activated an alarm signal that triggered metabolic syndrome the second discovery though was that there are other ways you can make fructose you can make fructose and some of them are from high glycemic carbs and salty foods
And and then we realized that if you ate a lot of those foods, you could get into trouble, too. And so but it all related to fructose, because if we blocked fructose metabolism, animals could eat salt and they wouldn't get fat. They would. They could eat salty foods. They could eat processed foods, you know. But and so it turned out to be fructose.
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