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 isn't just the fructose we eat. What we discovered was that the body can make fructose. And when the body makes fructose, you can get fat from the fructose you make. There's only one way to make fructose and you have to make it from glucose. And guess what? The best source of that is high glycemic carbs.
So when you eat bread and rice and potatoes and cereal and chips, even though they don't contain fructose, even though they don't contain sugar, you can still get fat from them because once you eat them, the glucose can be converted to fructose in the body and high glycemic carbs do it. Now, the other big discovery was dehydration.
So when you get dehydrated, that also stimulates the enzymes to convert glucose to fructose. And when we started studying this, we didn't really understand this, but we started saying this and it 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. So dehydration is very, very common. in people who are overweight. And the main reason they do that is it turns out that when you eat sugar, that dehydrates you. You think a soft drink hydrates you, it doesn't.
So when you eat salt, the salt concentration goes up in your blood and you get thirsty and you want to drink water. But the salt concentration in the blood activates a biologic pathway to make sugar. and it makes it from carbs. So that's why French fries are so bad because the salt in the French fry actually activates the enzyme to help convert the glucose in the French fry to fructose.
And that's why French fries, which have no sugar in them, no high fructose corn syrup, you know, but they're still bad because the salt activates this enzyme that converts the glucose to fructose.
well this morning i actually skipped breakfast and uh you know one of the things is you know it turns out that things like carb restriction and intermittent fasting and all these things that people are recommending they're they're pretty effective at losing weight and the carb restriction in particular is a very very helpful because it removes not only sugar but it reduces the amount of starch you're eating and remember the starch can be converted
to fructose. So it turns out that that is a major mechanism of protection. So if you want to lose weight, you know, carb restriction, intermittent fasting are great ways to go. But there's also, you know, what we learned from this is there are a lot of nuances. For example, it's possible to eat cake and not eat and not activate the biologic switch. And the reason is that the way fructose works
is it's the concentration that hits the liver. When the fructose concentration in the liver is high, that's when the switch activates. So for example, if I did not want to activate this switch, I could eat a piece of cake. If I could eat a piece of cake slowly, like over a couple of hours, then it wouldn't activate the switch. Now the trouble is, of course,
that our desire to eat the cake outbeats our logic where we know that it's not good. It's just like a soft drink. It's hard to tell a person to just sip a soft drink over two hours or over an hour. Everyone will drink it very quickly and that's the problem. But the truth is when you understand the science, you can actually figure things out. So for example, if you drink water
if you drink more water, you can block the effects of salty foods. So we did this. We took people, we gave them salty soup, and we could show that immediately their blood pressure went up and they activated this switch. We could prove it, that they activated the switch. But if we gave the salty soup with water,
the salt concentration did not go up in their blood, they did not trigger that enzyme, and they did not develop an increase in blood pressure, nor did they activate the switch.
So what we call low glycemic carbs don't activate the switch. So vegetables and all those things, they're very good, even though they contain carbs. So you don't have to carb restrict completely. It turns out that it's certain carbs. It's really only four or five. Sugar. and high fructose corn syrup, I put them together. And then the other big ones are bread, rice, potatoes, and cereal.
And those are the main ones that tend to raise glucose in our blood and activate this switch where the glucose gets converted to fructose.
You know, I've published on how much sugar people were eating over the decades, actually going all the way back. And, and really it started really going up dramatically in the 1970s when high fructose corn syrup was added. And, you know, we've done studies and high fructose corn syrup tends to be more fattening than table sugar causes more fatty liver, for example.
And it's because there's a little bit more fructose in it, and also probably because of how it's absorbed. By the 80s and 90s, that's when really obesity and diabetes went crazy, and they continued to increase. Now, sugar intake has decreased since 2005, particularly in soft drinks, But there's also been the rise of sugaring from power drinks.
And we're also eating more salt than we did back in the 60s. So there's a lot of factors.
In general, you want to avoid liquid sugar because liquid sugar is the worst because you get a lot of sugar in a short amount of time. And I include for sugar, I include table sugar in high fructose corn syrup and things like that. So liquid, soft drinks,
energy drinks drinks that have a lot of sugar in it anything that has fruit juice really avoid that that's number one that is your number one activator of this switch reduce your sugar intake reduce your high glycemic carbs try not to eat so much salty food and try to drink more water
There's certain umami foods, umami is another taste, and they will also enter into this switch, particularly things like beer and alcohol, but beer in particular, which has brewer's yeast in it, actually will activate the switch as well. You know, a lot of meats are good, especially poultry, fish, unprocessed red meats. There are a lot of fats that are good.
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