Dr. Robert Lustig explains how sugar and processed foods damage your liver and gut. Poor diet drives inflammation, insulin resistance, and even psychiatric disease. Your microbiome is the key to fixing it.
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What does protecting the liver really mean? So protecting it from, number one, the onslaught of mono and disaccharides, so glucose and fructose, so sugar and refined carbohydrate being, shall we say, the big kahunas in the story.
But it's also protecting it from excess.
Branch chain amino acids, because branch chain amino acids ultimately become organic acids, go into the Krebs cycle in the liver, ultimately overwhelm the liver's capacity to be able to metabolize them, end up as.
Fat as well, and also protecting it.
Against various toxins, including heavy metals, including things like glyphosate, et cetera. So there are a lot of things that go into protecting the liver, and we're not protecting the liver at all. We're basically trying to kill it.
And the second thing is feed the gut.
And the question is, what does that mean? Well, as you've heard, there's this thing called the gut microbiome. And the gut microbiome matters. It's not just good and bad bacteria, it's a whole slew of things. But in general, the bacterial content of the gut basically outnumbers us 10 to 1. There are 100 trillion bacteria in the intestine versus the 10 trillion cells we have in our body.
And they make stuff.
And the question is, does that stuff get across into our bloodstream to affect us? So there are barriers, there are junctions.
Between the cells, and there are proteins.
Called tight junctions, or zonulins. This is what goes wrong in celiac disease.
That keeps whatever's in the intestine in the intestine.
Now, the question is, does it ever get across? And the answer is, more and more, it does. And the reason is because those tight junctions are failing. And what's making them fail? Well, specific things in the food and also lack of energy. And the question is, while you're putting.
All this stuff into the intestine, why.
Aren'T they getting enough energy?
Well, it turns out fructose actually depletes the ATP within the intestinal epithelial cell, because when the fructose enters, it has to be phosphorylated.
And so it goes from fructose to fructose, one phosphate.
That takes ATP down, and that leads to incompetency, transient incompetency of those tight junctions. So stuff can now get across. And if stuff gets across, you've got.
Chance for inflammation, you've got chance for.
Introducing a protein that might end up leading to an antibody response or a T cell response. Now you've got food allergy, and it's possible a lipopolysaccharide could get across and.
That could cause more inflammation and possibly insulin resistance.
Ultimately, those same zonulins are in the brain as well as the intestine.
So if something's affecting them in the intestine, maybe it's affecting them in the brain. And now you've got mitochondrial dysfunction, you know, defective neurotransmission in the brain.
Maybe you've got psychiatric disease, maybe you've got dementia. So all of these diseases that we are seeing increasing in frequency over the course of the last 50 years commensurate with the advent of processed food in our diet, because we are not protecting the liver, because we are not feeding the gut our basically inexorable, they are to be expected.
And the problem is, as long as we eat badly, we will continue to suffer from these. And of course, they are breaking the medical bank of every country that has adopted the Western diet.
