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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Except one of the controls had high fructose, but when they went back and looked, they decided, they realized that that patient had early Alzheimer's too. So there is an association there. Okay. But here's one of the most interesting bits of data.
So if you give fructose to a human, you, you, well, so let's go back. I want to talk about this foraging response again. Yes. So when animals get, so when animals get fructose, they start searching for food and foraging is a, Actual behavioral response, it's more than just looking for food. It involves a lot of things.
First, you have to have exploratory behavior because you're going to go out into areas we've never been. So you have to be a little exploratory. You can't deliberate on anything very long because you got to get in and get out. So you had to look around very quickly. You have to have good visual cues for food, you know, so that if you see that little piece of food up there, your eye catches it.
You can see it, you know. that latch onto that chocolate cake, you know, that light up that part of the brain. You have to have less self-control. If you have too much self-control, you're not going to go into an area that's dangerous, right? Sure. You have to be bold, impulsive, So this is a behavioral set.
In some respects, it's sort of like a hero, you know, the scout, the guy that's going to go out and try to, you know, get through the enemy lines. And, you know, I mean, there's some aspects of it that are admirable. And I think it is an admirable response. You know, you're willing to go out there and try to try to find that. But it's a it's a real behavioral response.
So it turns out that to do that, you have to stimulate certain parts of the brain and you have to inhibit other areas of the brain. So a lot of the cerebral cortex is involved in self-control, especially the frontal cortex. So you would want to inhibit that if you're going to forage.
Yes. You want to reduce the activity there so that you have the self-control is not so strong.
Right. And you got to quiet the recent memory because you don't really want to remember how dangerous it really is, what you're about to do. You don't want to remember that line you saw yesterday. So you want to quiet that. You want to stimulate the visual cues so that you can see things real quickly.
You want to reduce the activity to the areas that are involved in deliberation so that you want to stimulate locomotor activity. So there are some things you want to stimulate and some things you want to inhibit.
Mm hmm.
So when you give fructose to a human intravenously or orally, you can do this thing called bold MRI and you can do these different things where you can look at changes in blood flow. You can look at that and guess what? If you give fructose, you activate these foraging responses, you inhibit the cortex, you inhibit blood flow to the hippocampus, which is involved in recent memory.
You stimulate the, you know, other areas, you know, like the visual cortex, for cues, for food. And you can show that if you give glucose acutely and you just look in the first 15 minutes. Remember, it takes an hour for the glucose to start converting. So if you look the first 15 minutes, you see the opposite effects of fructose. Glucose is not aiming to make you hungry. It's to satisfy you.
So it's more of a, it's a different... So it turns out that the foraging response requires activation of the anterior cingulate. It's a part of the brain and the occiput. And the anterior cingulate has been uniquely known to be spared in Alzheimer's. And the visual cortex is generally spared.
Whereas all the areas that tryptophan inhibits turn out to be the regions of the brain that are specifically targeted in Alzheimer's. I mean, eventually Alzheimer's will affect all the brain, but in the beginning, you can really show this difference. And so when I presented that to Dale and to David Perlmutter, they go,
You know, this is pretty significant because not so many people have been able to explain why Alzheimer's affects one region and not another.
Yeah. So so yes. So to summarize how we think of this or the way I think of this, and I have to again thank David Perlmutter and Dale Bredesen and Maria Nagel. And but what we think is going on or is that, you know, fructose developed as an evolutionary mechanism to help animals survive. Fructose is the nutrient that helps you store energy, and it's meant to help you.
It was meant to be a good thing. When there's very little food coming, you want to eat fructose to store that fat. You want to stimulate foraging so you can get the food so you can survive. It's all meant to be short-term and to be beneficial. But what's happened is we developed taste for foods that could make fruit dust, right? We develop sweet taste so we can pick out that food.
We salt taste so that we can pick out the foods that that tend to help put fat on us. And in a world of hunter gatherers and in a world where where food wasn't so easily available, these were beneficial, you know, and if you, you know, and then
You know, now that we have all this high fructose corn syrup and sugary foods and processed foods injected with salt and sugar and we have, you know, and now that we can go to the grocery store whenever we want and we learn to crave sugar and then we, you know, we develop a craving and some people crave salty foods and we're eating all these foods to stimulate this foraging and all this.
And what's happening is we're reducing the ATP, the energy in these cells, you know, in our brain, in our muscle, and it's leading to muscle wasting, sarcopenia. It's leading to, you know, as we lose our energy in the brain, as the cells get less ATP, They can't function as well. And then what happens is they start dying and they get inflamed and they start creating these amyloid plaques.
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