Dr. Shebani Sethi
speaker
159 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Shebani Sethi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You downregulate the receptors for pleasure, so you have to take more of the stuff to actually stimulate that reward pathway. Yeah. And it's really this vicious cycle that people get into. And then they blame themselves and they feel guilty for doing it. And they think they just have no willpower. But you're saying it's much bigger than that.
I call sugar a recreational drug. I've never heard anybody say it, but I always write down in my book, sugar is a recreational drug. It's like if you like tequila, it's fine, but not breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the quantities we're having in America.
Yeah.
Yeah, cookies and toilet paper.
No. It wasn't a run on broccoli.
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Right. So the rates of obesity and binge eating and addictive-like eating are rising alongside the increasing dominance of ultra-processed foods in the modern food environment. And there are several mechanisms as to how this works, some which act directly on the brain and some that indirectly act through hormonal signaling. So our body is very complicated and the brain is connected to the body.
And we used to learn in medical school that you have this blood brain barrier that nothing can get across it. But that's not, it's like the Berlin Wall. But in reality, it does leak, right? And there are things that do cross.
Yeah, so ultra-processed food and sugar decrease our dopamine receptors and make us eat more compulsively. Much like addictive drugs, the highly processed foods, they trigger dopamine reward pathways and they invoke addictive-like behaviors, which have been well documented and include intense cravings, includes feelings of withdrawal when cutting down on ultra-processed food.
continuing to eat these things despite knowing the adverse consequences to it, and repeated attempts to try to quit, right? I'm describing addiction here, basically, and the consumption of larger quantities over time than intended.
It's So sugar is an addictive substance. It's not Just something we say it has a straightforward neurochemical basis in the brain just like any other drug and I think of sugar as a It's a recreational food. It's not a food that's essential for survival. We make sugar through the process of gluconeogenesis, through other foods that we consume. It's really about excess carbohydrates.
Exactly, yeah. Actually, I would like to share a story about this. Just during the era of COVID, since we're in it, just to give context as to why I wrote about this and why I'm working on this as well and continuing to feel motivated to continue to do my work is The shelter-in-place order had come, you know, a couple months back for my county, and I'm in California. I live in Menlo Park.
When it was announced, my husband, he's an infectious disease physician at Stanford, and I'm a psychiatrist and a medicine physician, as you... mentioned, we both felt doubly invested in this pandemic. We went to our neighborhood Safeway grocery store and we saw many people loading up their carts with Pop-Tarts, Hawaiian Punch, popcorn, anything ultra processed, basically.
And they weren't loading up their carts with fresh vegetables or, you know, they were out of cookies at the grocery store.
And toilet paper, exactly. And there were still, you know, produce left in the store. It wasn't like they ran out of produce.
No. Here I was at the checkout counter and I was thinking to myself, staring at the person's cart in front of me that was full of the recreational food, as I mentioned, the food that's not necessary for survival and detrimental to our health. I thought to myself, this is certainly not preparing them for the pandemic. or helping their immune system and, if anything, weakening it.
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