Dhru Purohit Show
Why Excess Added Sugar is Driving Modern Diseases and How to Take Back Our Metabolic Health and Overcome a Sedentary Lifestyle
Mon, 02 Jun 2025
This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Ollie. Sugar is everywhere in the modern diet, and it's silently driving a massive wave of chronic illness. From insulin resistance and fatty liver to cognitive decline, the overconsumption of ultra-processed, sugar-laden foods has created a health crisis hiding in plain sight. As scientists uncover deeper connections between sugar, metabolism, and brain health, one thing is clear: this isn’t just about cutting calories—it’s about changing the way we eat to protect our long-term well-being. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, we’re bringing you a special compilation episode featuring Dhru’s conversations with top experts on the connection between insulin resistance, fatty liver, and Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Robert Lustig shares the impact of added sugar on mitochondrial health and metabolism. He also discusses what you can expect when significantly reducing the amount of added sugar in your diet, why the quality of your calories matters, and the fascinating ways our bodies store fat. Dr. Richard Johnson discusses his revolutionary new hypothesis on the link between fructose consumption and Alzheimer’s disease. Dhru and Dr. Johnson discuss the evolutionary mechanism behind fructose metabolism, insulin resistance, and weight gain, which has backfired due to its overconsumption. In this episode, Dhru and his guests dive into: What is leptin resistance (2:11) Thin on the outside, fat on the inside (TOFI) (5:55) The three sites of fat deposition in the body (6:47) Key findings from the SHINE study (17:03) The Metabolic Matrix: feed the gut, protect the liver, and support the brain (21:35) Dr. Johnson’s hypothesis on the link between Alzheimer’s and fructose consumption (25:05) The origins of Alzheimer’s: what’s happening in the brain (33:28) Uric acid as a driver of fat accumulation, and its connection to gout, obesity, and other diseases (31:13) The relationship between salt, dehydration, and fructose production (45:51) How fructose increases our cravings for sugar (50:01) The role of fructose in Alzheimer’s disease (56:56) Also mentioned: Full episode with Dr. Robert Lustig Full episode with Dr. Richard Johnson This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Ollie. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets and sleepwear. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Want to give your dog the best in clean eating? Take the online quiz and introduce Ollie to your pet. Right now, Ollie is offering 60% off your first box of meals when you subscribe today! Just head to Ollie.com, use the code DHRU, and you’ll get 60% off your first box of meals in your subscription.Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the dangers of added sugar in our diets?
Hi everyone, Drew Proat here. We all know that sugar can be a huge driver of weight gain and chronic disease, especially when it's tied into excess calories. But the truth is, as we're all starting to learn in this nuanced world, sugar itself is not the enemy.
It's when we eat it in the form of added sugars, tucked into over 60% of the ultra-processed foods that make up the modern, especially American diet, that we run into problems. I'm talking about the added sugars that big food mixes into everyday foods like salad dressing, pasta sauces, and protein bars, just to name a few.
And our overconsumption of added sugar in our diets, in excess, huge levels of metabolic diseases, including, as a lot of experts on my podcast have talked about, insulin resistance, fatty liver, and there's even a strong argument to be made that there's a connection to Alzheimer's disease.
So on today's episode, I talked to two experts on the podcast about the links that are there between insulin resistance, fatty liver, and Alzheimer's disease. First off, we have Dr. Robert Lustig, a neuroendocrinologist with an expertise in metabolism, obesity, and nutrition. In our conversation, Dr. Lustig breaks down the ways that sugar acts as a metabolic disruptor.
In our conversation, Dr. Lustig breaks down the ways that excess sugar, that's the key, excess sugar, we're not fear-mongering sugar in general, especially from whole foods, but excess sugar and how it acts as a metabolic disruptor, damaging the liver, disrupting hormonal signaling, and over time, laying the groundwork for cognitive decline, especially when you add on top of the excess sugar, a sedentary lifestyle.
He also explains the fascinating ways that our body stores fat. And I'm also speaking with in today's episode, Dr. Richard Johnson, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver, who is internationally recognized for his seminal work in the role of fructose in obesity, diabetes, and now even potentially Alzheimer's disease.
But first, let's listen into my conversation with Dr. Robert Lustig.
Leptin resistance. The inability to see your leptin. The higher your sugar consumption, the more your insulin resistance. The more your insulin resistance, the less well your brain can see its leptin. The less well your brain can see its leptin, the more your brain thinks it's starving. And the more you'll eat those calories.
So you can get your calories down not by starving yourself, not by dieting and caloric restriction. You can get your calories down by getting rid of the insulin resistance, which means getting rid of the sugar because that's what caused the insulin resistance because it's the fat in your liver that led to the insulin resistance because your pancreas makes insulin to make the liver do its job.
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Chapter 2: How does leptin resistance affect hunger?
You know, it's a hypothesis.
It's a hypothesis.
So everybody who's looking at me, please don't, you know, it's not like I'm saying this is the cause, but I would like to present you the evidence because it's very strong.
Right. And one of the individuals, before we get to it, and this buildup is great because it's not just that we're trying to tease people before we get into it. We're actually trying to give you background knowledge of how you are showing your homework of how you arrived to this hypothesis. because everything in science starts off as a hypothesis. Exactly. Right?
And it's important for the audience to understand how you got there because even if the hypothesis is not 100% exactly true in the way that it's being presented, there are many instances where it could still be a big factor, the thing that we're going to get into that you think is deeply linked into, you know, that connection with Alzheimer's. And then...
with a lot of lifestyle factors and diet factors, there's things that we can do now where we could essentially play a little bit of a precautionary role in our life, right? If we find out that a food or an ingredient or a particular behavior that there's not 100% consensus about it's linked to a disease like Alzheimer's, but there does seem to be some strong links.
We can say, okay, what are the pros and cons? Should we lower this ingredient in our life? Right? Yes. Should we maintain the amount that we're eating right now? Should we at least take a precautionary approach because the argument is so strong. And the downside is we might even get healthier.
If you follow some of the advice in this podcast and what you're presenting inside of the paper with Dale Bredesen and David Perlmutter, the downside, knock on wood, is that people are just gonna get healthier. The upside is that we actually could potentially lower our risk of developing Alzheimer's. And I'm gonna say one more thing.
The analogy that you gave about what's going on in the brain is very powerful. you know, not only is the fuel to the power plant being disrupted, but the power plant itself is not working as efficiently. That's the mitochondria. And on top of that, there's a fire at the power plant, which is this low grade inflammation. So all these things are going on in the brain.
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Chapter 3: What is TOFI and why is it significant?
Obesity is associated with Alzheimer's. Diabetes is. And these are conditions associated with, you know, that we think fructose is driving. Okay. So then, so that's the first thing is there's this association. Then the second thing is that if you give sugar to an animal, after a number of weeks, they actually have trouble going through a maze.
So normally you can measure how long it takes for a lab mouse to get through a maze. And each time it will get a little bit smarter and it'll shorten the amount of time to get through it. But if you feed it sugar, it doesn't show that shortening. It continues to have trouble all the time getting through the maze.
And when you give the sugar to the animal and you look in the brain, guess what you find? You find suppression of the mitochondria with less, you know, there's oxidative stress to the mitochondria, which we know happens in other tissues with fructose. And it's associated with lower ATP production, low-grade inflammation, and insulin resistance. That is the hallmark of early Alzheimer's. Right.
I mean, these are the exact same things. You can show exactly the same things. And then over time, if you take the animals out to like 18 weeks and you then you start seeing the amyloid plaques as well as tau protein in the brains of those mice. Wow. So that's pretty strong evidence. Okay.
You basically are inducing Alzheimer's in these laboratory rats.
They call it an Alzheimer's model, but it's, yeah, exactly. Just fructose in the drinking.
Just by giving fructose in the drinking. Correct.
Now, here's another bit of evidence. If you take people with early Alzheimer's, and there was an autopsy study done, In early Alzheimer's, they had like nine subjects, and all nine had fructose levels in the brain five-fold higher than the controls, than the control autopsy brains. There was five times more fructose.
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.
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