JJ Virgin: The Sugar Impact Diet, Artificial Sweeteners, & Your Gut Microbiome - #169

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I'm Dave Asprey, and this is Bulletproof Radio. Today's cool fact of the day is that cats prefer salty over sweet. And that's because they have a defect in one of the two genes that cause your taste buds to form sweet receptors. The big question now is how do we transfer that to humans so that we like less sugar? Today's guest has been on Bulletproof Radio before and she's a nutritionist and an author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including her latest book, The Sugar Impact Diet. JJ Virgin, welcome to Bulletproof Radio.

It's great to be here.

I'm excited that we get to record in person because— I know. I see you when I go to your Mindshare summits and I get to hang out with you a lot, but we almost never get a chance to film in person. We're actually doing an episode live. If you're watching this on YouTube or you're watching this on iTunes on video, you can actually see us together in the studio, which is kind of cool.

It's working for me.

JJ, let's jump into sugar. Neither of us think sugar is very good for you. But you focused a whole book on it, whereas I'm like, put it low on the diet infographic.

Well, there was a reason for that. I mean, the number one question asked on The Virgin Diet was about sugar, and it seemed that there were two camps. People were either confused by it and thinking they were doing everything right, but actually still getting in high sugar impact and still suffering from all the symptoms that that does, like fatigue and weight gain and brain fog and moodiness and joint pain and gut issues, or they're just controlled by it. They knew they needed to give it up. I mean, it's like sugar is bad, duh, you know, but they were controlled by it and they couldn't get rid of their cravings. And so that's why I devoted an entire book to it. But what was so interesting as I dove into the subject, because I don't have a sweet tooth, like I don't like sugar, but that didn't happen overnight. I was raised on Pop-Tarts. My nickname growing up was Poppy. I mean, seriously, not for the flour. It literally was frosted Pop-Tarts.

I'm using that against you later.

I know you are. I know I just threw that out there and I thought, oh damn. But, you know, so I actually had a sweet tooth. And what I did over the years, I got very into health when I was 12 and working out and just was crazy about it. I grew up in Berkeley, so that was helpful. But I thought that I was getting the sugar out of my diet when I started having frozen yogurt, when I switched to dried fruit, when I went to carob. But in reality, I hadn't lowered my sugar impact at all. And so that's what's really important for people to understand because they think they're doing better because they have the green drink that says no sugar added, but in reality it's got 56 grams of sugar because it's like all fruit juice with some greens thrown in. You know, or they're having one of the enhanced waters that have 31 grams of sugar. Maybe they're even having just some, God forbid, gluten. It raises your insulin as much as sugar does. So it's really about reeducation because if you're just pulling the sugar out and it's just the obvious stuff, that we think of like desserts or cookies or cakes, and you don't realize that those things you don't really consider like the balsamic vinegar or the sun-dried tomatoes or the fruit juice, they're still creating the same problems.

Is this just the glycemic index all over again?

Don't you hate the— can we agree? Like, how did this happen? You look at it and you go, how did we create a framework and live by a framework that's making us all fat, old, and tired.

I'm so happy you said that because I mean I've read your book. I know it's not the glycemic index again. And I used to eat according to the glycemic index, which drove me to eat a lot of really crappy foods.

Right.

It's entirely useless as far as I can tell as a health indicator. But why do you not use the glycemic index?

Why does it make me so angry? Yeah. You know, because it makes agave look like this great food. Like we should have agave and skim milk. You know, this is the perfect thing, right? You know, so here's the challenge. There's a couple challenges with the glycemic index. The first being that it makes a carrot look like a potato because it takes a 50-gram dose of a food and then measures your blood sugar response to that. But people don't eat in isolated 50-gram doses of carbohydrates, so it doesn't really work. And in reality, should we just be looking at what's happening with your blood sugar? Should we also look at what's happening with insulin and ghrelin and leptin and cortisol? So it's really the impact that's so critical. So what's really got a bigger impact? 'Cause when you look at sugar, there's two fates. It's gonna be broken down into glucose or fructose, and those fates are so different. And so while glucose isn't something we should be hitting ourselves heavy with, fructose is the scariest of all because as we know, fructose got this great stamp of approval because it didn't raise blood sugar, so it was low on the glycemic index. But that's because it just went straight to the liver where it's going to make fat. And along the way, because it bypasses all those satiety signals, you're still hungry. The more of it you eat, the better off you get at absorbing it fast. It's glycating, so it ages more than any other sugar. It leads to fatty liver, so we have fatty liver in kids. Remember when fatty liver used to have— it was only alcoholics, and now we have to call it non-alcoholic fatty liver disease? So you look at like the increase in weight gain, diabetes, heart disease. It's crazy for cancers. It actually creates a much more aggressive cancer type than regular glucose does. So you look at this and you go, how can you create a glycemic index that makes the worst sugar of all look great. And then discounts doesn't even take into account like fiber and nutrient density. So I blew that thing up and I created a whole new rating scale that incorporated glycemic load, how much of a food you actually eat, fructose grams, and then contrasted it with fiber and nutrient density.

It is a far more sane way of looking at the insulin impact of what you eat. One of the anti-aging things that I follow and that I recommend is I like to keep my fasting blood sugar below 87, which is kind of a well-established anti-aging number. And anytime you eat, your blood sugar spikes a certain amount and then it falls very quickly. It's called a postprandial spike. When people eat according to the things you outline in the Sugar Impact Diet, what happens to their average fasting blood glucose and what happens to the postprandial spike?

Well, I haven't looked at the postprandial spike, but what I have looked at is I've now got case studies of this where I just had one who just went from 97 down to 80 in a matter of weeks. Because what's happening when you eat this way is a couple things. Number one, there's a transition phase where I actually take people to as low of fructose as possible, hopefully close to zero. If not zero, so that their ability to transport glucose— sorry, fructose goes away and they lose their sweet tooth, but they also start to become more insulin sensitive. I mean, one of the challenges with— and I know we're both like not fans of the snacking thing— the snacking thing, you know, if you look at something that's really going to jack your blood sugar and make you fat, where did this urban legend of snacking as this great thing to do— and I still see it in these diet books. I mean, there is one well-known diet book that tells you you should have a Evening snack before bed, and one of the recommended evening snacks is a diet soda and pretzels. Like crazy craziness. So I know that it helps now with reclaiming, reclaiming glucose tolerance and glycemic control, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. And one is because you're getting great fiber, which slows down the blood sugar response but also feeds the good gut bacteria so that you're restoring the better gut bacteria, not having those bad gut bacteria that can make you more glucose intolerant. I mean, I'm sure you just saw that study that came out that's like, hallelujah.

It's talking about the effect of gut bacteria on insulin levels?

Well, it was looking at artificial sweeteners and your gut microbiome. I mean, was that like— I was like, finally, people. I mean, it's like we knew Splenda did that. It was like, shh.

Having a real study to say what we all knew is really cool.

Well, who— do you see thin people having diet sodas?

All right. One of the things that drives me nuts— there's a low-carb community, many of them are our dear friends, and I was like this when I started my path more than a decade ago. I would eat according to the glycemic index, and I would eat lots and lots of protein, moderate to low fat, the wrong kinds, and I would always use acyl sulfate potassium. I figured out NutraSweet made me weak.

Weak.

It made me shake. It affected my vision. It was really bad for me. Splenda was actually something that hadn't quite come out on the market yet. I tried all these different things, and all of them create toxins. What I got from Ace-K was not a blood sugar spike, at least not that I monitored, but I got benign nodules growing on my thyroid. They went away when I quit using acetylsulfame potassium. All of them contribute to your body's toxic burden, which makes you fat. So low-carb, high-fat with a set of principles that says it doesn't really matter what kind of protein you're eating.

Yeah, it could be pork rinds and diet and tap, you know. One of the challenges with low-carb is low-carb could be soy-based. Like you see a lot of the low-carb, it's got tons of soy in it, right, to lower the carbohydrate. And then they use artificial sweeteners.

And that will jack you up. I used to eat that years ago, but your brain goes—

I did too. I mean, I was like diet. Diet Coke was probably the toughest addiction for me to break. I still remember when I was eating, you know, and I went totally fat-free vegan too. Now, a fat-free vegan, what does a fat-free vegan eat?

Pretzels.

Right? I mean, if you're a fat-free vegan, you are basically eating almost completely carbohydrates. I mean, I was trying to get my fat down to 10 grams a day. Do you remember the Pritikin days? Like any diet fad, this body has has had to recover from. It's like crazy.

That's damaging, especially for women.

Yeah, to not have the fat and the protein and to live on diet soda and nonfat, fat-free frozen yogurt. And I would literally drive throughout the day and get sourdough bread and then frozen yogurt, then a bialy, then pretzels, because I was a trainer at the time. Craziness. But we were all trying to get our fat down to as low as possible. Yeah, and then when it got to be that like some fats were okay, but you still want to eat very very low carbs, then you went into soy. And then you see people who's all of a sudden now their thyroid is just trashed. So all of these things have issues with them. None of them are benign. And I think that's like when I look at creating this new way of looking at sugar, it doesn't, it's not about calories. And I know we've always been like this. I mean, if you look at the obesity epidemic, the heart disease epidemic, it's not a calorie tracking. Look at what's happened with sugar and look especially what happened when all of a sudden we learned how to unwrap fruit You know, pull the fructose out of corn and start just hitting people with things where they always would have gotten it in food before. And all of a sudden, all of these disease rates are skyrocketing. So there's no simple way to do this, but artificial sweeteners are way worse than sugar, and that's clear. So way worse.

Thank you for getting that message out there. On the Bulletproof Diet, I put them at the very bottom, and it makes a set of people very angry.

Those people who are addicted, well, they're just, they're as addictive as any of these. I mean, look at gluten, dairy, sugar, and artificial sweeteners are all drugs. You know, if you looked at them in any other context, especially let's look at something that stimulates the, well, Oreos, 'cause Oreos are the perfect one. And they did that study at the Connecticut College where they gave rats morphine or Oreos. And then they let them go out and have their way with them. And the rats, when they were given the choice, because they checked their brain on both of them and they both lit up their brain, both triggered the reward center, but given the choice, they chose the Oreos because they got more pleasure. Same reward center, but more pleasure cracking that Oreo open, and that's what they did. They cracked the Oreo open and went straight to the middle. So if you looked at that and you said, okay, we don't let people just have morphine, we don't go to the store and you can have some morphine, but you can go to the store and get the Oreos. It's crazy.

How would you rather have morphine than Oreos?

I think it would be better. It wouldn't be better for you. So you look at these things and you look what artificial sweeteners do and how they light up your brain and what they do. I mean, the fact that you're not supposed to as a pilot go hit yourself with a bunch of NutraSweet before you go fly. Like, what more do we need to know here? There's so many levels of bad with artificial sweeteners besides the calorie dysregulation. So you no longer can calibrate the degree of sweetness with how much you're eating. And they glycate too. They raise insulin too. They feed the bad bacteria in the gut. They make you crave more. Sweet, that's for sure. So like, why would you touch them? They clearly don't work for the whole point of what they were set out to do.

Well, there's a dark side there. If you want to make a lot of money in the diet industry, there's a very simple formula. You get people to do something that makes them fat and tell them that it'll make them thin. And then like, I must need to do it more. And that's been like the diet—

I know, isn't it?

It's been the diet so long.

That's the message of insanity.

Yeah, one didn't work, I'll do two. 2 didn't work, I'll do 3. And I was also hooked on those and diet gum, sugar-free gum. I used to eat it all the time because I was like terrified I might have bad breath because I was so toxic I actually did have bad breath. So I'm always chewing on this stuff, constantly dosing myself. And I remember really distinctly when it finally hit me what I was doing to myself. I had eaten probably 5 or 6 pieces of gum and then I got like a giant big gulp with all diet soda on an empty stomach. And I drank it, and I was trying to perform in this college class, and like the room started swimming, and I was in this extreme weird altered state, and the only thing I had done was just masses of this stuff, and I'm like, what if I stopped all of it? And I did, and it made a huge difference.

Yeah, what if I just eat like real food?

Well, I was in college, the only real food was one of those like prepackaged pies. I'm like, there must be fruit inside there.

See, I worked in catering. I ate great in college. I figured that one out.

You were smart. To not eat that well. And the thing that still kind of makes me mad is that no one was talking about this stuff. Like, I honestly believe that what I was doing was scientifically based and I was making good decisions. And if you believe you're making good decisions because you have bad data, you're kind of screwed.

Well, I believe most of us are being duped and that the misinformation is killing America. And I mean, if you just— I'll just give the example of this green drink that literally on the front says no sugar added. And it's Green Boost. It's got a green boost, which really— and if you look at it, it's actually got 4 fruit servings in it. 4? And in 16 ounces. Now, okay, so a 16-ounce soda has 44 grams of sugar, and a 16-ounce of this green drink has 56 grams of sugar. But the challenge is you look at it just like you look at the jam or you look at any of these things and it says no sugar added. Or if it does have sugar added, what they'll do to distract you is they'll say fat-free. So they'll do one or the other of those so you go, oh, it must be good. Or maybe they'll put organic. So they've got all these things, or all natural. All natural is a great one they can use because natural means really nothing. So they can use these different words. And think about the person who's not studying this stuff and trying to make good decisions for their kids. And that's what makes me so angry.

There's just about no way if you buy stuff that comes in boxes. There are too many—

Jars, cans. —transferred lives. Yeah, yeah. Well, because they have to sell them. And the average person wants to make a better choice. So if it says low-fat pretzels or fat-free pretzels or low-fat chips, you know, guess what?

What about gluten-free on the Sugar Impact Diet? Because gluten-free foods, we all know they're better for us than gluten foods, right? How do you account for those? How do you help people understand what they're eating?

Well, so a gluten-free food like an avocado or grass-fed beef or asparagus, those ones are fine. Yeah, we like those. We like those. You know, the ones that actually don't have to put gluten-free on the label. But if you look at most of the gluten-free food out there, it's absolute junk. And so it falls all into high sugar impact. So what I did was I rated things as high, medium, and low sugar impact, and I have a transition period. So I have people first figure out all the places it's sneaking in, and it is amazing how many places for people who think they're eating healthy that these high and medium sugar impact foods are sneaking in. Because you just don't, you don't pay attention. You go out to eat, you don't really think about the Asian vinaigrette, you know, or the balsamic vinaigrette, or, you know, the— you'll get something that's glazed. I say if your fish was glazed, it just got shined with sugar, right? If you have that, that salad with the glazed nuts and the dried fruit. And I just got a little note from one of the dried fruit companies that said, we have to add sugar because otherwise it's a little bitter. Like cranberries? And they said, but it has the same amount of sugar as raisins do. And I'm like, that doesn't— that's the point. You missed the point.

I think I get the point. Crack has less cocaine in it than cocaine, so therefore it's good for you.

Yeah, so it's better. So it's better. You look at all of these things that they've done and again, now gluten-free being this big buzz, it's like you weren't eating cookies before, you know? And you look at even, say, a gluten-free muffin. And you take that muffin, look at a cupcake, if you took the cupcake with the icing off, you'd have the same amount of sugar. Do you know that 2 Hostess cupcakes has the same amount of sugar as a lot of these healthy muffins at the coffee places? 2 Hostess cupcakes.

So you're saying we should eat Hostess cupcakes?

Yes, that's exactly, that was the message. That's the takeaway for today. We actually don't have to talk anymore, just go get some Hostess cupcakes, wash them down but make sure it's fat-free milk.

Now if you go to Costco and you buy like a bran muffin or something, you're seeing the same thing.

And by the way, those bran muffins at Costco, we actually looked at them once. They were like 1,000 calories and mainly all, and not just from sugar because carbohydrates turn to sugar. And that's the real important thing is people say, okay, I'm not eating any sugar, right? And we are all now focused on how much added sugar people have, but it's not the issue. We are eating 150 pounds of sugar per person and I think, well, we are not so that means there are some people that are really eating a lot. But that's not the problem. It's all the places that you don't realize you're getting it in that they're actually not counting because they're looking at added sugar but it's like, well, what about the juice and what about the jam and what about the flour? What about the gluten-free flour that's now this corn flour and, you know, what about all those things because the minute The minute that you start to put them in your mouth, they start turning into sugar. It's all the same. All that matters is the impact. What's it telling your body? Is it helping you burn fat or store it? Is it making you tired or energetic? You know, we should be able to go 4 to 6 hours before we need to eat again. If we have to snack, you're a sugar burner. You've taught your body how to eat, raise your insulin, drop your blood sugar down so you need to eat right away again. You know, it's like boop, boop, you know, right? You should not have to eat every 2 to 3 hours. That is a marketing ploy by the snacking foods group. And I got invited to be in one of their— I remember I got a note and a big box of all these low-fat chips. I get this big box. I'm like, someone did not do their homework. And they invited me to join their snacking council. Wow. Yeah, could you imagine? Snacking council? Snacking council. I'm like, a snacking— what is a snacking council? What do you want me to do? Be tweeting out, oh, did you have your fat-free Frito-Lays today? Go get them. Don't forget to snack.

You should have joined. You could have been our inside mole. I know.

Well, I just got that cranberry one that I could join. There you go. They want me on board. Like, what's happening?

It's kind of sad. Snacking board or the other business model we talked about, you know, selling things that don't work. 100-calorie bars that are mostly sugar and carbs. 100 calories isn't enough to do anything. You cannot fuel your energy with that.

But you can raise your blood sugar.

You can get really hungry.

You can raise your blood sugar. And who eats one? Who eats one snack pack?

Well, that's the best business model ever. First one's free. We get that from drug dealers. If they had those packs at the store, you know, a dozen of those little 100-calorie things, which is still only 1,200 calories, like less than you eat in a day, and the one on top was free and you could just open it right there and eat it in the store, they'd double sales. 'cause you're like, "I gotta have another one." If your food makes you hungry, you're doing it wrong?

Would you agree with that? Like cereal. Well, cereal, first of all, to me cereal is the perfect trifecta. Think about it. It's cereal and milk. Sugar, gluten, and dairy. Talk about just the perfect triple hit of opiates. So, but you look at cereal and milk, and of course you had fat-free milk, and you are literally hungry within an hour. And so yes, if you eat something and all of a sudden you're hungry again, there's clearly something wrong. You clearly didn't get enough fiber, protein, and healthy fats in there to keep you sustained. And that really is a benchmark for me, is you should— you know, when people say, "God, I had to remember to eat," go bingo, we got there. You should be able to go 4 to 6 hours.

"I had to remember to eat." So this may go a little beyond just the Sugar Impact Diet, but you're a nutritionist and you've done a lot of work with with a lot of really high-performance people who look great. What's the difference between hunger and a food craving?

Hmm, that's a good one. So a craving, for me, a craving has nothing to do with being hungry, and you gotta have that thing, and it's a drug. Now it can happen because you become intolerant to that food, you have a delayed food reaction, you have a food sensitivity, or it could be because you've created a drug-like effect to it. So you look at— it's interesting because I've never heard someone ever say to me, and I've been doing this 30 years, I had such a craving for Brussels sprouts, I just had to go get them. Never in 30 years. It's always the same foods. It is dairy, it is gluten, and it's sugar. If I had to say what are they, I mean, you'll get the random, like, I need some corn chips. Fat and salt, aren't those the 3 main foods? You know, sugar, salt, and fat. Sugar, salt, and fat. But it's not fat like I'd like to have an avocado, you know. It's not like I'll go, I mean, well, I have an issue with almond butter, but it's not typically like I'm going to go eat the jar of almond butter. It is I'm going to go have the fat, it's wrapped up with some sugar and salt, like a corn chip. That's the ultimate sugar, salt, fat. And people don't look at it like that, but corn is sugar.

Corn is sugar. And the other thing that amplifies the effects of sugar is when you damage fats with heat. So you're frying oils that should never touch heat, in fact, oils that shouldn't be eaten, and then you're doing it on a sugar substrate. How does that change the sugar impact of a chip?

Well, what's so fabulous about that is now you're going to eat eat something that's high sugar and raise insulin so that your body's going, "Cool, let's store it all." You know, so now you got these damaged fats, it's like incoming, you know, it does get worse than that. And then you've got these damaged fats that are making your receptors less sensitive to the message. So they're destroying your receptor walls, so now your walls are not able to have the flow they need so the hormones can get in to give their messages, to talk. So it's just, if you start to look at all of the levels of bad, because I think people don't think long-term. And what I loved about the gut microbiome artificial sweetener study is that these changes happen in 6 to 7 days. You know, we think of these things, we go, oh, you know, sugar is bad, but you know, I'll just do it this once. Which of course is this once and this once and this once. But these things, these changes happen very quickly, very quickly, you know. And the good news there is they can also get and they can be fixed fairly quickly too.

If you look at how quickly you can fix the gut biome, it sounds kind of like a good story. We know the gut biome changes within 24 hours of eating food. You can have marked changes when you add resistant starch or other things. Collagen is a good substrate to make butyric acid, for instance. But when you have all of that going on, a lot of people have bad bacteria in their guts. So what does eating sugar do if you have bacteria going on in the gut?

So sugar is basically the fuel for the bad bacteria. And that's the worst thing you can do. You know, we don't think about this. I think the coolest thing going and the next biggest trend I'm hoping is gonna be all about the gut microbiome. It is the biggest thing controlling us. It's for obesity, it is huge. You have too much bad bacteria in the gut, You extract more calories from the food you eat and you store them as fat. So it can just be that. I had a client, Suzanne Somers' stepdaughter was a client of mine and she'd gone to all of these doctors in LA and she had this chronic gas and bloating. And so they kept giving her probiotics and it was getting worse because no one was dealing with the fact, well, wait a minute, what's— and they said she just needs to exercise more. You know, she needs to eat less. And exercise more. That's it, right? Because that's why we've got this obesity epidemic. Clearly, we've all of a sudden eaten 10 times the calories we used to eat 100 years ago. So it's interesting. So I'm looking at her, I'm like, well, she already exercises and she was doing all high-intensity training and she actually wasn't eating enough.

That happens a lot, yeah.

But she was bloated all day long and the reason she wasn't eating is because whether she ate or not, she just got more bloated as the day went on. Well, there's a— I mean, that is a just slam dunk on you've got small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. You just get more bloated as the day goes on whether you eat or not. And so we went on a killing spree. And it took a while. I mean, if you've got an overgrowth of bad bacteria, you got to get those things gone. And if you just keep going, I'll just keep feeding those good ones, no, you're going to get the bad ones jump in there too. They take over.

That's one of the problems with some approaches to fixing the gut bacteria is that you don't know which ones you're feeding.

[Speaker:DR_LYDIA_GRAY] Right. And those bad ones are worse. They're the big bad army. So, you know, you look at things that are so great, berberine, cultured foods, first off, I mean, shout out to Donna Gates who made me try the cultured veggies. I'm like, "Eh," you know. And they're a little scary, but the cool news is when you eat those, you will develop a taste for them. That's something that we don't have in our culture that we should. And the sour takes the sweet taste away. And I drink a lot of cultured drinks. I do cultured coconut water every day. And you can develop a taste for these things and it works and it helps feed the good bacteria and fiber is so critical too. But I love berberine and garlic. Like just, I think these— and berberine is like one of the coolest herbs on the planet because it also helps balance blood sugar and it probably helps balance blood sugar because it's killing the bad bacteria in your gut.

Berberine is magic stuff. And people who listen to Bulletproof Radio all the time know I'm not a garlic fan as an herb. As a medicinal herb—

Well, see, raw garlic, throwing some in is a great thing.

Exactly. When you're dealing with bad bacteria, that's an appropriate time to use a medical herb. I wouldn't suggest using it every single day. And I think we probably differ on that.

Yeah. Well, no, I don't.

No, I don't think so. There's so many people like, "Well, garlic must be good, therefore I should have it 3 times a day. And I've found that it affects cognition when you have high doses like that on a regular basis.

Yeah, I think when you're going after gut microbiome and the bad stuff, you have to hit it hard. And that's what I see is most people don't hit it hard enough, and so they don't get it dealt with. Because for a lot of people, this just— especially if you've eaten a high-sugar diet or you've done birth control pills or antibiotics or any of this stuff and set up this inhospitable area, you've got to go in hard, hard and heavy, and then And then you've got to come back now and be gentle and repopulate, right? So—

Part of the Bulletproof Diet, the stuff that I've written about in there, has to do with what you were saying and the things that you've written about and certainly things that you've researched when you were writing the Sugar Impact Diet about this gut microbiome issue. It turns out that when you eat certain strains of probiotics, ones that are even sold in stores, that they can make you fat. And I wrote this blog post that really made a lot of people angry. Like yogurt has some of these strains. So if you're eating sugar and you're taking things like that, weird stuff can happen. For instance, I thought, "All right, I'm gonna try doing a probiotic Bulletproof Coffee in the morning." So I made Bulletproof Coffee and I added artichoke syrup, which is sweet tasting, but actually, sorry, Jerusalem artichoke syrup. Syrup.

God, didn't that make you gassy? Sorry to ask. Yeah. Let's find out. Dave, did that make you gassy?

It didn't just make me gassy. This stuff is a big source of FOS, or fructooligosaccharides. Yes, so it's like— But I took some probiotics with it, so the idea is it would feed the probiotics. So if you've had Bulletproof Coffee and you have too much oil in it, which gives you disaster pants, you add gas on that and it's not okay. But worse than that, I can cope with a little bit of gas. The problem is, and especially if I'm expecting my gut to transform itself, after a week on this, I gained 10 pounds. Like, my pants didn't fit. And it was because of the species of—

That is— well, there's some very interesting testing now to look at that whole— and I'm gonna kill this, but it's the Firmicutes to the Bacteroidetes and seeing which— and I think it'll be so interesting if we start to look at that and understand that your gut really is the master switch that we don't think about. You know, and that's why honestly I keep going back to this article, but I went, people will start to get it with this one. Because now you've hit them, they can make sense of it, especially when you saw it happen in 6 to 7 days.

I was mystified, and I know there was a sugar impact. I was eating sugar at the beginning of that. So that is, FOS is a form of sugar, and I don't know if it raises insulin spikes, specifically. But what I discovered, and this actually kind of made me mad, I'm a computer hacker by background, so I look at systems differently. And when you look at what your gut bacteria are doing, like, okay, how do I hack my own system so I can lose fat and gain muscle and stuff like that? And eliminating sugar, do it. Eliminating high insulin foods, do it. So very much in alignment with what you teach in your book. But the problem is that when you try to attack or hack a system, there might already be a hacker in there, and the gut bacteria are hackers. There's this annoying hormone. It's called fasting-induced adipose factor. And what happens is that bacteria, the Firmicutes, the ones that tend to be higher in fat people, well, they make extra FIAF. And FIOF, if you like the acronym, is something made by your liver. So your liver will naturally regulate your energy, even if you eat too many calories or even if you eat the wrong kind of food. But once you introduce bacteria, the bacteria are afraid that you'll die, so they make extra FIOF or turn it off. So your liver is doing its job, and a hacker came in and compromised your ability to regulate your weight and your metabolism and your insulin, just like you're saying. And, well, depending on what you eat, you can suppress those. You eat less sugar, you eat less fermented foods.

I mean, isn't that cool? That's the bottom line. You've got 100 trillion bacteria, 100 times the DNA, and you can control those guys with what you're eating. Yeah. Like, talk about powerful. And what will be so cool is as we start to do more testing so that people can look at that and go, "All right, now I know this. Like, I shouldn't have this strain. I should have this strain. I should, you know, I need to kill off first." "what should I do?" I put a client early on when I didn't know this stuff on the probiotics and she just got bloated. I remember she walked in and she was like 50 with this bowling ball stomach and I'm like, "Oops," you know? Like, "What did I do here?" Because I didn't know. I just— probiotics are good. You've got bloating, take more.

It's also a question of like these probiotics worked and these ones didn't because different ones do these things. So I'm a fan of, like you, a zero sugar breakfast. Which gives the bacteria, the ones that make you fat, very little to eat. And when they don't get fed, they send a little— basically, they change their excretion of fasting-induced adiposity factor. So by eliminating sugar the way that you recommend, you actually get the bacteria to behave themselves. Well, we saw—

so what I do is I have a taper week because I understand that most people walking in, If you take someone who's a sugar burner who's used to eating a lot, even if they think they're doing well but they're eating those gluten-free things and they're eating some of this crap, it's like, ugh. But they're having the marinara sauce with all the sugar in it and all this stuff. So I have them taper down the first week from high sugar impact to medium sugar impact. But I'll tell you, those 2 weeks where the fructose goes down to basically nothing and we have such low sugar impact is mind-blowing. And it looks like the Bulletproof Diet. It's like that same thing where all of a sudden Sure Impact is so down, you're regaining your glucose control, your insulin sensitivity, your leptin sensitivity, you're not hungry, your waist is just going. I mean, I had someone 4 inches off your waist for like a woman. I mean, it's one thing if it's a big guy, but it's for a woman, it's like, what? I said, email her again and check that one again because, you know. And the average person was 10 pounds, but what I really wanted to prove and I think we've seen this now enough times, is that you can lose your sweet tooth. You can lose your sweet tooth. You can't lose it if you're having artificial sweeteners, all this crap. But as you know, when you don't drink sweet stuff and you taste something, I mean, even water with some sweetener, you're like, "Ugh, like what's that?" Like it just doesn't taste good anymore. And I saw the biggest diehard sugar addicts, 'cause that's what I wanted to prove. I don't need to prove it on you and me. Like, wow, whoopee, you know? Dave didn't like the Pop-Tart. You know, if you can prove it on the most diehard sugar addict that you can get rid of their sweet tooth in 2 weeks, and a lot of that's happening because it's changing your gut microbiome. Now, I know people listening to this are like, "Cool, that's awesome," but the average person out there really doesn't care. They just don't want to be controlled by sugar anymore.

They'll say things like, "End my cravings and tell me what to do." And I think that you did a really good job in Sugar Impact Diet of of explaining the source of sugar cravings. And one of the things that's a part of the introductory section, like the psychology of food that's in the Bulletproof Diet, is that if you have cravings for whatever reason, like the ones you're outlining in your book, those cravings suck your willpower and you get tired.

We shouldn't have— first of all, there's no such thing as willpower. If there was willpower, we wouldn't be here as a species. You know, we are hardwired to seek out sugar and fat. There's a reason that we're going after these things. So you just got to get— you've got to set systems into place so you don't have to rely on willpower. It's like, don't bring ice cream into the house. And if you're having cravings, there's a reason. So figure out why that is, right? You know, it's like, so if you're having a drug, I know that if I had wine every night, every night I want more wine. So I don't do that because that would be stupid, you know? It's like, don't set yourself up to fail.

So I think we both agree that if you have cravings, it's your fault. It's something you did and it's something you can control.

But that's the good thing. It's your fault, it's under your control. If you have cravings— so I always like to say this isn't— this— all of this stuff really isn't your fault. You're being duped by misinformation. But now that you know you can do better, and if you knew that the Oreo cookies or those healthy low-fat Snackwells that you're having or whatever these things are that are just crazy, are lighting up your brain and making you crave more, stop it. You know, but taper down. I have people taper for a first week and really become more aware and start to trade high sugar impact for medium, and then they're ready to really just go. Just let it go. Yes.

Cool. We're coming up on the end of the podcast, and I've already asked you the cool question about the top 3 recommendations for performing best. So I'm going to ask you something different. What are your top 3 recommendations for getting rid of a sugar addiction?

This is what is so great is it really has to do completely with number 1, making the decision. I think so if you don't decide you're gonna do something, if it's not important, if you haven't attached enough importance into this, then you won't do it. So the number 1 way to get rid of a sugar addiction is to just decide that this is important enough that you wanna live a great healthy life. And you want your kids to too because whatever you're doing, they're doing. So if you want your kids to be drug addicts, be a drug addict. And if you're addicted to sugar, you're a drug addict. So get that. Get real about that. And then attach how important it is and what you're really being held back in your life from getting because of this so that you will go after this. What is that big aspiration that the stupid Oreo cookie is keeping you from doing? And if you get to that point of how ridiculous this is, you'll stop it. So that's the first part. Second part is get a sane scientific program. Again, stop being misled by the misinformation out there. Don't trick yourself into doing more of what's not working, you know. And a lot of that is because we really wish it would work. Hey, I wish it would work that I could live on black licorice and Diet Coke. That would be awesome, you know, and popcorn, Skinny Pop. I would love that. That would be great. It doesn't work. So let's get real about that. Get a program that works. And then get into a community of people to support you so that if you start to go off the rails, they will grab your hand and pull you back in. Because it's going to take some time to go through that. Not long. I see people in 2 weeks totally lose their sweet tooth. But you want some support during that time to help you get through it. And I think that's that magic formula that you really need is that grab that lifeline of support. I know you've got an amazing community. It's so important to have that amazing community of people because let's face it, you go out into the real world and 70% of the people are overweight or obese, 35% are obese now, 20% of the kids now are obese. You know, so those aren't gonna be the people probably to support you because they're right now being duped by misinformation. So grab that community and then start pulling your friends in to save them too.

That's a wonderful piece of advice. JJ, thanks for being on the show and also thanks for coming to the Bulletproof Conference and speaking. we're actually filming this at the conference— and so people know how you thought it went today, I'd love just a short comment because people who hear this will probably want to come.

Will need to come next year to this conference because there is nothing like this anywhere. First of all, it's like, you know, I couldn't come till today, which was upsetting, so we will block it out for— do we have the dates for next year? We'll be blocking this out for next year because just to come to play and to and see all the other cool people. Again, I'm all about community. And just the lineup of speakers that you have are just amazing. Not just me. You know, but I mean, it's just, you've really put together something really cool and special. I don't really know anywhere else where you can come and find this type of information. And I got my, you know, CoQ10, B vitamin, cool shot. Your injection. I mean, it's like, it's awesome.

Wellness for Health conferences where we had just out on the floor injectable vitamins.

I know, how awesome is that? I was like, oh, this is the best. I was having my Bulletproof coffee and getting a B vitamin shot. It doesn't get better than that.

I still have needle marks from the conference.

This conference or was that a different conference? So yeah, you really have put together something amazing. And just to come and play, I was looking at pictures of you doing some spinning thing and I'm like, "Ah-ha," as I was driving in going, "I gotta get there faster." You'll get a shot on all the big Flow Genome toys, JJ.

In the meantime, where can people learn more about your work and specifically your new book?

The new book is sugarimpactdiet.com. Yes, we've got great stuff, training videos, but more importantly, you can take the quiz to test your sugar impact and your sugar IQ.

Thanks again, JJ. Always a pleasure to get to spend time with you. You too.

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