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
You know, omega-3 fats, saturated fat, you have to be a little careful with. But, you know, there's a lot of monounsaturated fats, olive oil-based diets, Mediterranean diets. These are really basically healthy ways to go.
Well, there are some problems with sugar substitutes, but in general... The first good thing is most sugar substitutes do not activate this biologic switch. They do stimulate a pleasure response in the brain, what we call a dopamine response. So they do encourage you to eat sweet foods. So if you're trying to
stop eating sweet foods, drinking soft drinks, diet soft drinks is still going to encourage you to like sweet foods. And so it doesn't get rid of the craving. Most of them do not activate the switch. There's a few significant exceptions. Like there's one artificial sweetener called sorbitol. It's often put in like sugar-free syrups. That one still activates the switch, unfortunately.
So that's really not a good choice. And then there are also other issues with artificial sweeteners that are quite bothersome. For example, aspartame.
um has been reported to you know affect memory and um you know there's some papers suggesting that if you give large doses to animals that they have trouble going through a maze so i'm not a big fan of aspartame um and you know so things like stevia which is a natural artificial sweetener uh splenda sucralose there isn't too much negative about that but you know they are
Yes. So it turns out the switch is a dimmer switch. What it means that if you take two teaspoons of sugar, you're going to activate the switch, but only mildly. Whereas if you drink a soft drink, you're going to where it's like nine teaspoons, you're going to activate the switch big time. And when you do, you drop that energy and it only will last for a few hours, okay?
And then it will recover and everything kind of goes back, but you've now stored that extra fat, right? So initially it's sort of a short-term effect, but we're eating sugar in almost every meal. You know, it's like in 70% of processed foods. So we're activating the switch a lot, a lot. And some of us are almost staying like in an activated state.
No, it's still part of the equation, Michael, because the way, again, the way it works is the fructose is the fire and the high fat foods are the firewood. What I mean by that is you have to activate the switch so that you don't regulate your appetite. So if you eat the fructose, now you're gonna be hungry and you're not going to control your appetite.
And so now when you could get fat just from carbs, But the carbs are only four calories a gram. So you would have to eat a lot of carbs to gain weight. The fat is like nine calories a gram. So it's very easy to gain weight with fat if you can't control your appetite. But if you control your appetite, you're not going to eat excessive fat.
So if you are healthy and you have not activated the switch, you can go on a high fat diet. You won't gain weight. That's what a low carb diet is. A low carb diet tends to be a high fat, high protein diet. And it doesn't cause weight gain. Because you're on a low carb diet, it prevents you from activating that switch, which is mainly driven by carbs.
So a high fat diet is not going to cause obesity if the switch is not on. But now let's say I give you sugar and I give you a lot of carbs and you've activated the switch. Now, if you have a diet that has a lot of fat in it, you're going to gain a lot of weight because that fat is so caloric rich. It's calorie dense and you're not controlling your appetite.
Yeah, thank you, Michael.
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