Why Excess Added Sugar is Driving Modern Diseases and How to Take Back Our Metabolic Health and Overcome a Sedentary Lifestyle
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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.
And when you've got the fat in your liver that the sugar caused, now your liver doesn't do its job. Now your pancreas has to make extra insulin. Now you've got insulin resistance. Now you've got high insulin levels at the brain. Now your leptin doesn't work. So all those extra calories you're eating is because your brain doesn't see the leptin because of the sugar you ate. Fix the sugar, you'll fix the calories too. But it doesn't work the other way around. So it's not about the calories. And I'll be happy to debate anybody who says it does.
So as a byproduct of this, you would also say that somebody could have their calories within range. They could even be at their sort of a match between their general day-to-day energy expenditure and their calories. But if we look at their labs and their fasting insulin, that could be really high. Could be. Even if their calories are within range.
So there is a phenomenon, which I think we talked about it the last time I was on the podcast. It's called TOFI, T-O-F-I. Thin on the outside, fat on the inside, real medical term, 1500 Medline citations coined by Dr. Jimmy Bell, neuroimager at University College London. You can be thin sick and you can be fat healthy. 20% of obese people are fat healthy. Now, 80% are fat sick, I agree.
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