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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And so then I, you know, we began to realize that it wasn't just activating the metabolic syndrome. It was also it had these neural effects. So like the brain effects. So when animals start eating fructose, they actually start to forage for food. And that foraging is part of the survival response. So it actually, if you give fructose to an animal, it will start moving around and looking for food.
They're hungry, they get thirsty, and it triggers a foraging response. And that information made me start thinking more about what was going on in the brain. How is fructose affecting the brain? And we knew that if you give fructose to an animal or to a human and you label the fructose, only about 1% of it gets to the brain. So there had to be another mechanism.
And the insight was that when you take these high glycemic foods or soft drinks, they stimulate fructose production in many sites, including in other tissues. And so they stimulate fructose production in the brain. And there is a brilliant doctor named Sherwin at Yale who did these studies where he infused glucose in people and he could measure fructose production going up in the brain of people.
And it happens like after about an hour. So if you infuse glucose, it takes a little while for that conversion to occur. But you can start measuring an increase in fructose in the brain.
Well, no, he was given an intravenous thing. Okay, so it still has to go to the brain, blood-brain area. Exactly. And he brought the blood glucose up. And when the blood glucose goes up, we know it converts to fructose.
But it will convert, tissues will start making fructose wherever that glucose hits.
Right. And it also can induce insulin resistance. So now I'm going to tell you this story of how we started putting together Alzheimer's.
So the first thing is you look at what are the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. And dietary ones, guess what they are? Eating sugar. Sugary foods has been reported to be a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's. Eating high glycemic carbs. They make fructose, right? A risk factor. Salty foods. There are all these papers showing that high salt diets increase the risk for Alzheimer's.
What sometimes they do is like they take these little shrimp and they'll inject them with salt water. Saline water, right? Yeah. And then what that does is it makes the shrimp big, looks big.
And then people go into the market and they see these big shrimp and they go, oh, they look good. And they bring them home and then they start grilling them. And then the water comes out and they shrink. But they keep that salt in there.
So now you're getting the salt. Yes. Processed foods.
They contain so much salt, so much sugar, and they're associated with Alzheimer's too.
Processed foods. Bread rolls, pasta sauce.
All these things. All these things we get in the grocery store. So first off, there's this association of foods that can make fructose or that contain fructose. Correlate, you know, and I don't mean natural fruits. I mean like soft drinks and fruit juice. You know, these things are associated with Alzheimer's.
Obesity is associated with Alzheimer's. Diabetes is. And these are conditions associated with, you know, that we think fructose is driving. Okay. So then, so that's the first thing is there's this association. Then the second thing is that if you give sugar to an animal, after a number of weeks, they actually have trouble going through a maze.
So normally you can measure how long it takes for a lab mouse to get through a maze. And each time it will get a little bit smarter and it'll shorten the amount of time to get through it. But if you feed it sugar, it doesn't show that shortening. It continues to have trouble all the time getting through the maze.
And when you give the sugar to the animal and you look in the brain, guess what you find? You find suppression of the mitochondria with less, you know, there's oxidative stress to the mitochondria, which we know happens in other tissues with fructose. And it's associated with lower ATP production, low-grade inflammation, and insulin resistance. That is the hallmark of early Alzheimer's. Right.
I mean, these are the exact same things. You can show exactly the same things. And then over time, if you take the animals out to like 18 weeks and you then you start seeing the amyloid plaques as well as tau protein in the brains of those mice. Wow. So that's pretty strong evidence. Okay.
They call it an Alzheimer's model, but it's, yeah, exactly. Just fructose in the drinking.
Now, here's another bit of evidence. If you take people with early Alzheimer's, and there was an autopsy study done, In early Alzheimer's, they had like nine subjects, and all nine had fructose levels in the brain five-fold higher than the controls, than the control autopsy brains. There was five times more fructose.
Showing 61–80 of 152 · page 4 of 8
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