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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Appearances
It's kind of a inflammation, inflammatory response to the low energy state. And so that's what's going on, I think. And And so the wonderful – it's not wonderful, but the wonderful aspect of this is that if we actually understand what causes it, we can design and try to figure out how to prevent it. And, you know, already groups are – I mean, Dale Bredesen has been a leader at –
you know, developing healthy diets and approaches to to try to block Alzheimer's. And there are other groups as well that are doing keto diets and low carb diets as a mechanism to try to reduce, you know, to improve the energy in the brain. And, you know, I think there's a lot of positive things coming.
We've known that hunter gatherers like the Samani who live in Bolivia don't really get Alzheimer's and and they're living in a very healthy environment. We know it's not natural fruits, so please, all of you. We're not trying to create fruit phobia. I want you to continue to eat fruits. But dense sugars, high glycemic carbs, we need to reduce those. We need to drink more water.
We discovered that when you drink water, you can block that enzyme that converts the glucose to fructose, you can actually inhibit that enzyme by staying well hydrated. And we could stop weight gain and so forth in animals on sugar by just giving them water. And we did studies in people too. So drinking like eight glasses of water a day, eight, eight ounce glasses
is very healthy, drinking a glass of water before you eat your meal is very beneficial. I have some water right here.
Turns out that people who are overweight are almost always dehydrated. They're not drinking enough water. In fact, one study showed that people who are overweight or obese tended to be 12 times more dehydrated than the lean people.
Hi, Michael. Thank you for inviting me.
It's definitely true that, you know, a number of years ago, it used to be thought that it was just calories that drive obesity and basic and basically lack of exercise. So there was a lot of talk originally, you know, that all you had to do was just kind of reduce what you're eating, the amount you're eating and exercise more, and that would cure everything.
But, and then that became quite apparent that that's not the case and that certain foods make a difference. And over the decades, following years, it became more and more apparent that things like sugar specifically tended to make people more obese and develop metabolic syndrome more than, for example, starch.
There was a transition where we started realizing that it wasn't just behavior, but that there was something special about the particular foods we were eating. We were involved in that early work, but what we've done since then has actually kind of given a new insight. And that is that to gain weight, you actually have to activate a biological switch.
And that when we studied that and identified that biological switch, it did turn out to be due to sugar. And it turns out that sugar is contains two, sugar really has two compounds. There's glucose and fructose. There's two carbohydrates in sugar. And it turns out that it's the fructose that triggers this biologic switch.
So fructose is a carbohydrate. It's a type of sugar. And it's present in fruit and honey. So things that we think of as healthy, but it's also present in table sugar. And it's also present in this sweetener called high fructose corn syrup. In high fructose corn syrup and table sugar, it's actually both glucose and fructose mixed together. Glucose is the main sugar in our blood.
It's really the essential nutrient, the essential carb we use as our fuel for the brain and for our tissues. It's our main carbohydrate fuel. But fructose is a different fuel and it's mainly present in these foods. What's unique about fructose is that it triggers the storage of fat as opposed to the production of energy.
It really is there to try to shift the calories we're eating from instant energy to stored energy.
It turns out that our bodies, we have a sort of a shield in our intestine where we inactivate the first four or five grams of fructose that we eat. So it turns out that natural fruits have only small amounts of fructose. And although it's really sweet to taste, we kind of inactivate the fructose in our gut so that we don't actually get a big load of fructose to our liver where everything happens.
And so a natural fruit does not give you enough fructose to activate the switch. Now, if you drank fruit juice, now you're going to get a large load of fructose and you're going to activate the switch. There's another reason too, natural fruits have a lot of fiber.
and they also have vitamin c and other things and it turns out that the fiber slows the absorption and the vitamin c actually helps neutralize the effects of the fructose
When you give animals the exact same number of calories, the weight gain is still a little bit greater with sugar, but there's a major effect, which is that the other metabolic effects of the switch, which is to become insulin resistant and diabetic and develop fatty liver, that still occurs even with controlling, even if you put them on a diet restriction.
So if you put animals on a caloric restriction, so they're eating less than normal, but they get a high sugar diet, they're still gonna become diabetic. They're still gonna get fatty liver. They're still gonna get hypertension. So those things are not driven by the excess calories. Only the weight gain is really driven by the excess calories. You know, that's what drives the weight gain.
But all the other things, you can be skinny and diabetic if you put an animal on a caloric restriction with a high sugar diet.
Showing 101–120 of 152 · page 6 of 8
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