Are There Any Healthy Sugars And Sweeteners?

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

You know, it's not the sugar that you add to your food that's the problem. It's the sugar that's added by corporations.

Hello, it's Dr. Mark. One of today's episode sponsors is ButcherBox and I'm always being asked, how do I get enough high quality protein in.

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Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy Within F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you have any confusion about sugar sweeteners, what's good, what's bad, should you have any, which kinds can you have? Well, this is the podcast you're gonna listen to because I'm gonna answer all those questions. And this is one of my new favorite forms of my podcast called Health Bites. Well, this is a very big bite. We're gonna talk all about sugar, but I'm excited to talk to you about it because sugar is so damaging to our health and increasingly to almost everything that matters to us in the world, which is a rabbit hole. I can't go down, but it was in food fix. If you want to learn about how our food system and sugar in particular is the cause of so many of our ills, read it. But it is a driver of obesity, of diabetes, of heart disease, of cancer, of dementia, of stroke, depression, you limit infertility. And if that's true, why are we eating it at the incredible amounts that we're consuming it, which is about 152 pounds of sugar a year? And even worse, why are we giving this to our kids? You know, I had a friend who's a pediatrician who said, if, if we were having a foreign nation due to our kids, what we're doing to them, we'd go to war to protect our children. And yet 40 of our kids are overweight and increasingly it's getting worse and worse. And now little kids have type 2 diabetes. I talked to a surgeon who treats kids with liver issues and he said he literally had to do two liver transplants on 15 year old kids because they were drinking so much sugar and soda. So today we're going to talk about the truth about sugar, artificial sweeteners, how they're killing us, we're going to talk about how sugar can dramatically alter your metabolism and your brain chemistry. It can cause you to have really bad sugar cravings and carb cravings and how quitting sugar can rapidly improve your health just like that. And we're gonna walk through all the different types of sugars and what sugars we should absolutely stay away from. So let's do a quick round of true or false. The main problem with sugar is that it's just empty calories, true or false. False, sugar isn't just empty calories, it's dangerous calories. It causes heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all the things I mentioned. It doesn't just make you overweight, it makes you sick even if you don't gain weight. So a lot of people are what we call skinny fat, they look skinny, but they're skinny on the outside, fat on the inside. Next question, agave syrup is a healthy alternative to high fructose corn syrup and sugar. Sounds great, agave comes from a plant, it's all natural, yeah, yeah, cool, but no way, that's false, 'cause it sounds healthy, but it's pure fructose. Now fructose is fine when you have it in fruit, but if you have pure fructose, it drives all these metabolic pathways that cause fatty liver, diabetes, inflammation, high uric acid, which causes all kinds of dangerous downstream effects. You can read my friend David Perlmutter's book, Drop Acid, if you wanna learn about that. It creates dangerous types of cholesterol and is produced with all sorts of toxic chemicals. So, no agave syrup, sorry fans. Next question. Saturated fat from butter or meat, causes heart disease, but not carbs or sugar. In other words, it's meat and fat that cause heart disease, not carbs and sugar. False. That is a lie we're all told for years. But we now know that sugar in all its forms, not fat, is a leading cause of heart disease. And this is well documented in study after study, which we're going to share with you on our show notes. But it is very, very significant that that saturated fat for most people is not the boogeyman, but sugar and carbs are. And I mean refined carbs, obviously broccoli is a carb. Sugar also, next question, may be more addictive than cocaine. Is that true or false? Sounds false, but it's actually true. And I actually documented this in my book, Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? And the 10-day detox diet. And what they did was they took animal studies, 'cause it's hard to do on humans, but they also did it in humans. They found real withdrawal symptoms when people stopped sugar. like heroin or cocaine. But they found that if you took a rat and you put an IV of cocaine in its arm and you let it push the lever as much cocaine as it wanted, if it had sugar next door, it would always go to the sugar and give up the cocaine. And if they basically had to work to get sugar, they would work eight times harder to get sugar than they would to get cocaine. So it's really bad. They even put them on electric shock. pad and they kept feeding him sugar and they kept drinking the sugar water even while they were getting electrocuted. So that's how addictive it is. Next question. One of the benefits of eating sugar is that it provides fuel to your brain. Your brain has to have glucose, right? I was trained that that's true in medical school, except it's false. In fact, your body will make whatever sugar you need. There are essential amino acids, there's essential fatty acids, but there's no such thing as essential carbohydrates. Now, with that said, you can get plenty of glucose and sugar from eating fruits and whole foods, grains, nuts, seeds, beans, obviously all have that carbohydrate in it, but that's fine for your body. But you do not need sugar for your brain. In fact, it runs better on fat, particularly in MCT oil. We know a lot of studies now are looking at brain disorders, whether it's schizophrenia, autism, whether it's Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain cancer, even that putting people on a ketogenic diet can actually improve or even cure some of these problems. Now, next question, high fructose corn syrup, it's just sugar with a different name. Is it really that different? You know, true or false? Well, it's not just sugar with another name. It's particularly bad for a number of reasons. And I think I wrote a blog will link to years ago called Five Ways that High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill youl. and here's the reason when you have sugar, it's bound with a bond with a glucose and a fructose molecule, which is table sugar, and it's 50 50 and it takes the body work to break apart those bonds. Table sugar is glucose and fructose bound with a bond, and it's 50 50 and it takes work to break apart the glucose and the fructose, whereas high fructose corn syrup is free fructose and it's anywhere from 55 to 75% fructose. Now, free fructose. is not found in nature. It's bound up in fruit, for example, and other foods. And it's incredibly dangerous to the body in that form that causes tremendous amounts of fatty liver. That's how the 15-year-olds need a liver transplant because they're drinking high fructose corn syrup sodas. It's an industrial product that is metabolized very differently than sugar. And it also may contain mercury as part of the making of it. They use chloroalkali to actually kind of separate it out and make it, and that actually contains some mercury. So it might have mercury in it. And it also is harder for the body to absorb it. In other words, it takes energy to absorb fructose, where glucose just goes in. The body uses ATP or energy to absorb fructose. And what that's done, this is the work of Bruce Ames and others, it literally causes a depletion of energy in the gut. or ATP, and you need energy to keep the tight junctions, the little Lego kind of connections that keep your intestinal cells together. You need those in order for your gut to not be leaky. When you have a leaky gut, it creates inflammation, obesity, cancer, heart disease, you name it, autoimmunity. And so when you eat a lot of fructose, free fructose, it causes a leaky gut, which compounds the problem. So it's just should not be in your diet. If there's one single thing you can do to dramatically improve the quality of your diet is never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever eat anything with high fructose corn syrup. Read the labels. Next question on the quiz is if you wanna lose weight, just replace sugary drinks with diet soda. True, right? No, it's actually false. And this is because when we look at the data on artificial sweeteners, they're a thousand times sweeter than regular sugar. They trigger the brain to all sorts of weird metabolic chaos. In other words, you know, Pavlov's dogs when they just rang the bell, the dog would salivate, right? Even if there was no food. The same thing happens. You ring that sugar bell on your tongue and your brain goes into gear, produces insulin, it makes you store fat, it shuts down your metabolism, it seems to lead to diabetes, and it's really nasty to the gut floor. It actually promotes obesity, type two diabetes, weight gain. So I, I, we're gonna link to a lot of the studies that show this, but it's, it's just, just no place for traditional artificial sweeteners that we have like saccharin or aspartame or sucralose or any of these. And, there are different ones that are problematic for different reasons. And, we'll talk about the natural ones like monk fruit and we'll talk about stevia and other ones. But, basically if you have to ask, can I have, it generally means that you're an addict and you should pay attention to that voice in your head that's trying to negotiate with me about what kind of sweetener you can have. that's a very important thing to learn. Okay, so what's the problem with sugar? We're gonna kind of recap a little bit, but it causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol, actually causes low HDL, the good cholesterol, it causes small particles which are super dangerous, super high triglyceride disease, triglycerides and heart disease. In fact, they looked at 75% of people who came into the emergency room with a heart attack had either diabetes or pre-diabetes. based on a glucose tolerance test, and most of them were undiagnosed. So it's really the sugar that's the problem. Also cancer. We know that cancer is driven by insulin resistance, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and that the common cancers we see are fueled by sugar. And so when oncologists go, oh, just have milkshakes and whatever, I'm like, no, no, no, no, this is bad. So you want to make sure that if you are at risk for cancer or if you have cancer, that you don't eat a lot of sugar or very much at all. In fact, there's work being done in this space with Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee who wrote the Emperor of All Maladies. I think it won the Pulitzer Prize, some award, amazing book about cancer. He's an oncologist and he's really leading some of the research on ketogenic diets and cancer reversal, whether it's stage four melanoma or stage four pancreatic cancer. I was at a conference once with him he said, Mark, you know, we found what the real driver of cancer. And I'm like, sugar? He's like, how did you know? I'm like, yeah, well, pretty obvious. It also not only does it lead to cancer, but it accelerates every aspect of aging. And I just finished my book, Young Forever, which is coming out February 2023. And in there I talk about how every age-related hallmark of aging, all the things that go wrong with aging, are worsened or caused by sugar and starch. And if you want to get dementia, for sure, eat a lot of sugar. Remember Ronald Reagan and his big jar of jelly beans? Well, I don't know, but I think that might have had something to do with the dementia. We know very clearly that dementia is linked to the amount of insulin resistance. In fact, a lot of dementia researchers are now calling dementia or Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. Also, just like alcohol does, it damages the liver and causes fatty liver, which affects about 90 million people in America and it leads to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, everything else. It's just bad news. If you think artificial sweeteners are good, well think again. They actually may be worse for your brain and metabolic health. Aspartame is a neurotoxin. We know this. I have so many patients who have cognitive issues, memory issues, headaches, migraines. We get them off the diet sodas and drinks. They feel so much better. They actually make you want to drink more sugar and more food. In fact, they'll eat more food if you have more artificial sweeteners because you're hungrier because you've created this Pavlov response in your body that makes you think, and then what happens, there's no food, so your body's like, wait a minute, there was no sugar. I don't know what's going on. And it just creates this whole process of slowing your metabolism and increasing weight gain. All right, so what are the six things that we need to know about sugar? One, it's addictive. Despite the industry's best efforts, it's not a secret anymore that sugar is bad for you. In fact, just to recap on a study that was done in the '60s by the two leading Harvard nutritionists, at the time there were not a lot of nutritionists in academia, but these were Harvard nutritionists who were the leading thinkers at the time in nutrition science. and they wrote an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, this is before peer review, and in that article they basically said fat was the problem, not sugar. And it turns out that a forensic analysis essentially by researchers today found that those authors were paid off the equivalent of about $50,000 to write the article saying it was fat, not sugar, and they were paid off by the Sugar Lobby, basically the Sugar Association. So there's been a lot of, suppression of the sugar conversation, even in our dietary guidelines. I mean, the, the, the food in Lobby is so big. So I've written a lot about this in food fixes. You can read about that there. But it's, it is very addictive, and it's why people struggle to give up their cookies, cakes and ice cream. And it, it also alters your metabolism and brain chemistry. They've done studies, for example, on these, these, these men who are overweight, and they gave them this milkshakes, one milkshake. or they both tasted the same. And they gave the same group of men, you know, the one kind of milkshake on one day and another type of milkshake another day. And the one milkshake was same protein, same fat, same carbohydrate, same fiber. Everything was the same. Except, except the carbohydrate in one was fast acting, and then it was slow acting. So they took the slow acting carbohydrate. Nothing really happened. They, their blood shares didn't Spike, their cholesterol didn't change, or insulin didn't Spike, their cortisol didn't Spike, their brain chemistry looked fine when they gave them the quickly absorbing sugar. And, by the way, the people, they know they were eating something different. It tasted the same. So, they thought they were having the same milkshake. Their insulin went up, their cortisol went up, their adrenaline went up. It's like a stress. Their, obviously, blood sugar and their cholesterol went up. All these things happen. And, when they looked at the brain imaging on a functional MRI scan, they found that the area called the nucleus accumbens lit up like a Christmas tree, which is the addiction center that gets lit up by heroin or cocaine. So we know the biology of this is real. Next thing you should know about sugar is that stopping will quickly fix things. It's so over the place. It's so easy to access and its effect on our brain is so powerful that it feels like you're never gonna be able to quit. And I did a workshop once with this sort of on sugar detox and it was a long time ago. Anyway, there's a woman there's like, oh, look, I'm addicted to sugar. I know it. I can't stop. There's nothing you can do. I know this isn't gonna work, but I'll do it anyway. I'm like, okay, just see what happens. So like day two, she comes up to me and she says, I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. I don't have any cravings for sugar. I feel totally different. It's amazing. And all I did was feed her in a way to balance her blood sugar by having protein and fat in the morning, getting rid of all the obvious sugars and refined carbohydrates, lots of veggies, lots of fiber. It's not that hard. Your body wants to be healthy. And I wrote a book called the Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, which is about sugar addiction and it takes you through in 10 days how to reset your whole nervous system. And not only will you, you know, not crave sugar anymore, but your average person lost about seven or eight pounds in a week. They, at 10 days, their blood sugar dropped 10, 20 points, their blood pressure dropped 10, 20 points. They reduced all symptoms from all diseases by about 70%. So if you have migraines, digestive issues, sleep problems, joint pain, whatever it was, everything dropped 70% by getting your system healthy. so that's important to remember. It's quick. You don't have to wait forever to see the results. So we had a woman in our, in our Cleveland Clinic program called functioning for life. Within three days of joining the program, this woman was on insulin for 10 years, was severely overweight. In three days, she was off her insulin by changing her diet. In three months, she reversed her diabetes completely and her heart failure and everything else. Pretty impressive. Next thing you should know about sugar is there's many ways to say sugar. To quote Shakespeare, you know, a rose is but a rose by any other name. The other thing you should know is that, you know, we have many names for sugar, you know, in, I think, you know, the Inuit from the, you know, the Arctic say they have a hundred words for snow. And we have so many ways of saying sugar and often we miss it. on the label because it's kind of hidden. So, you know what food companies will do? They'll literally put four or five different kinds of sugar in some product because you're forced to list the ingredients in order of the amount on the label. So, basically, if they put five different kinds of sugar, they can list a healthier ingredient first, like flour or something, and not actually put sugar as the main ingredient. So it's really, really sneaky what they do. The other thing you should be aware is there's a lot of words that you might see like agave, cane sugar, corn, anything, rice, even brown rice syrup, any kind of evaporated cane juice. What the heck's that? That's sugar. Even fruit, you might see fruit concentrate or fruit juice. I mean, that's just basically sugar. Anything with O's in the end, like fructose, dextrose, maltose, trio, sucrose. These are all sugar. Anything with malt in it, like malt syrup, flow malt, maltodextrin. Also sugar. Anything with ISO, like isoglucoe, isomaltose. Basically, there's a million names for sugar. Syrup, bright maple syrup, sorghum syrup, corn syrup, pancake syrup, which is usually per fructose, molasses, anything with the word sugar in it. Date sugar, coconut sugar, brown sugar, beet sugar, confection sugar. It's all sugar. So sugar, sugar, sugar. Now is high fructose corn syrup, a little worse, yes, but in the end, it's all bad. Next thing you need to know is that artificial sweeteners are also not so great for you. So here's a classic example of what happens when you try to outsmart Mother Nature. Rather than accepting that, you know, we really shouldn't be eating a lot of sugar or we shouldn't be having a lot of artificial sweeteners, and rather than accept the fact that we just should try to eat less and, you know, not have so much sugar, we kind of want the hack, right? We want the magic loophole to avoid doing what's really good for us. We tried this with fat, right? We thought, oh, you know, butter is bad and saturated fats are bad. So let's have margarine. Margarine. I grew up on Fleischmann's margarine, but it turns out that trans fats are not only not good for you. They're very bad for you. And, and they've killed hundreds of thousands of people. They cause heart disease, diabetes, and they're really unsafe. And the government finally, after 50 years and a lawsuit, finally caved and said, oh, gee, it's not safe anymore. It's, they called it a grass. Generally recognized as safe. They removed the grass label. The problem is, I, it's still in the marketplace. because they're FDA is in cahoots with the food industry, and essentially they gave them a lot of loopholes and ways to kind of leave it in there. So I go to the store regularly and I kind of hunt for products. Now, a lot of companies have taken it out, but what they're replacing with may not be any better. Right. So I think we have to be very careful, like Palm, Palm shortening, which can be from, you know, palm trees. But they're, they're often, they're often you know, kind of harvested in ways that destroy rain forests and destroy habitats of orangutans. I mean, it's really bad. So also, there are also five things that have received FDA approval. There are sweeteners, saccharin, sweet and low, as a selfotame, which is sun and or sweet one, and aspartame, Nutra Sweet equal and others. Sucralose, which is Splenda and neotame. So these are all things you should avoid. They're really bad for you. Don't have them. People who drink diet drinks every day in a study about heart disease had a greater risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome. They are carcinogenic in animal studies. They destroy your gut microbiome. I mean, they're really bad for the good bugs in your gut and they cause more glucose intolerance, diabetes, certain compounds are excitotoxins like damaged neurons like the aspartame in the brain have neurologic issues. So, not so good. And you go, well, what about sugar alcohols? Are those not bad because you don't absorb them? Well, sugar alcohols sound great, but they're kind of these weird, strange names. They're derived from plants, fruit and vegetables sometimes, and they're in everything, candy, bubble gum, cough drops, chewable vitamins, to smoothies, to even quote of health foods often have these. Now, they're kind of less sweet than traditional artificial sweeteners. They do have calories, but we don't absorb them because they're too big. So anything with the word all on it, like mantal, maltitol, sorbitol, xylitol, erythritol, these are things you don't want to eat. When you do, they tend to cause a lot of gut issues. They cause the bugs in your gut. They love these. They just munch them down and they'll create bloating. I mean, I remember once when these first came out, like 25 years ago or something, this patient of mine gave me this chocolate bar. Look, Dr. Hyman, here's a chocolate bar and there's no sugar and it's amazing and it tastes good. And I'm like, great. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna eat it. So I was tired that day, I think, and I just scarfed the whole thing down in the afternoon. I was hungry, you know, seeing patients and my stomach blew up like a balloon. Like, I literally, my gut bacteria did not like it. So I would not really consume these at all. they can cause diarrhea, bloating, gas, all kinds of digestive issues. They mess with your gut floor. So there's some that are a little bit better, like erythritol, but still be very, very careful with these. Don't, don't think you have a free pass. And I think for men, it can cause all kinds of issues. So, so don't, don't, don't take it, especially if you have gut issues. Now, some natural sweeteners are a little bit better than others, so I'm not, I mean, listen, we all like sweet stuff, but kind of my view is if you're gonna something sweet. Just have it. You know, you know, you have like, you know, like a large, like, like a sort of sugary kind of coffee drink in the morning. You know, that can have more sugar than a soda. That can have like eight or nine teaspoons of sugar or more in, in that. Now, you wouldn't, you wouldn't put eight or nine teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. Right? If you even take like a teaspoon of sugar and you put in your coffee, that's probably a lot better. than trying to do all these other things and being really aware. So I would say, you know, not more than five teaspoons a day, but that can be even too much for some of us. Most adults consume 22 teaspoons a day, kids about 34 teaspoons. Artificial sweeteners, as we said, not good. Sugar alcohols, not good. So, Dr. Hyman, like you're killing me. What am I gonna do? I mean, well, first of all.

If.

You stay healthy, if you're metabolically tuned up, if you're a metabolic engine and your muscles and your mitochondria and your weight and you don't have a lot of organ and belly fat and you want to have a little sugar and you exercise regularly, okay, it's not going to kill you. But if you are not metabolically tuned up, which by the way is 93.2% of Americans are not in good metabolic health, which is frightening to me, and how you tell is check your insulin. If your insulin is less than five, you're probably okay. If it's less than two, you're good. But if your insulin's high, you know, you're kind of in trouble and you're not gonna have a lot of Tolerance. And what I call metabolic degrees of Freedom. We, we get more metabolic degrees of Freedom by being healthier. We have more resilience, metabolic resilience. But most of us are metabolically just a train wreck, so be careful. But let's say you want to have a little something. I mean, I'm not against having a little maple syrup, a little honey, a little, you know, actual sugar sometimes, but. But I would not. I would not use this kind of hacks like agave or corn syrup or brown rice syrup. They're just. They're just not healthy for you, and they're gonna be mostly fructose and not a good thing. Date sugar can be okay. They might have antioxidants. Molasses actually has iron and things that could be okay a little bit. You could use dates just. as a sweetener, little maple syrup, a little raw honey. Okay, fine. But, you know, it's not the sugar that you add to your food that's the problem. It's the sugar that's added by corporations that's the problem. If you have 120 ounce soda, that's 16 teaspoons of sugar. You wouldn't put that in your coffee, all right? Now, here's another thing you should know about sugar. It's not just bad for you, it's bad for the environment. According to the nonprofit, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, sugar production has severe consequences on our air, soil, water, wildlife, sugar mills pollute waterways, they create toxic environments for aquatic life. And conventional production of sugar cane and sugar beets requires massive amounts of pesticides, glyphosate, which is terrible. It causes cancer. I mean, there's like, I think, 14,000 lawsuits about glyphosate and billions of dollars in settlements. They're really bad for farm workers, for wildlife consumers. I mean, glyphosate is terrible for your microbiome. So bad news. High fructose corn syrup, another one. High fructose corn syrup, you know, most of the corn we eat in America is not corn. Like we don't, like of all the bushels of corn grown in America, I think 5% we actually eat as corn on the cob or, you know, tortillas or whatever. Most of it is industrial food products. Obviously maltodextrin, weird kind of food additives, but also the growing of it and the production of high fructose corn syrup comes from this. It depletes the soil nutrients. It's the tilling and the industrial agriculture and the pesticides, the herbicides causes the destruction of organic matter in the soil, promotes climate change, uses huge amounts of fertilizers that destroy our waterways, all kinds of biodiversity loss because the herbicides and pesticides, I mean it's just nasty. And then of course the mercury thing, you don't want me eating that because that's not good for you. What about Splenda? Well, According to researchers at University of North Carolina, Splenda is also bad for rivers and oceans. In fact, your body absorbs about 10% of it. The rest is kind of flushed down the toilet and goes into the waterways. And the EPA says it's a contaminant of emerging concern. So another reason not to have that honey can be okay, but, you know, industrial beekeeping has terrible practices like cutting the wings off queen bees. and it's basically turned into this insect factory farming with pesticide use, and there's all kinds of diseases that pop up and kill huge numbers of bees, and it threatens the entire world bee population. I mean, I don't know if it's true or not, I think attributed to Einstein, he said, once we lose bees, humans have four years left to live. And a lot of our food requires pollination. One of the shocking things I learned was that these giant almond orchards in California have to be pollinated and they have to be, they're, they're so big that there's just not enough bees locally to pollinate them. So they literally fill up jumbo 747s with bee colonies from all over the world. They ship them to California. They release them for a while, put them back, and then they take them back in order to pollinate the trees, which is just nuts. There's also these class of pesticides, these nicotinoids, which are especially harmful for bees that, that are dangerous. And honeybees are dying. so it's a problem. Now, what about eating some sugar? Well, for getting ethically produced sugar, you use fair trade organic palm sugar or maple syrup, organic maple syrup. There's great options on the website of fair trade USA for non-caloric sweeteners Stevia can be okay, but I would say the whole plant Stevia, not repicide A, which is made by Cargill and Pepsi and Coca-Cola so that should tell you something about it. Also, There's other kinds of sweeteners that you can use, which is like monk fruit sweetener, which is I think my favorite. It's generally well tolerated. It's tasty. I don't particularly like stevia because I think it causes problems, but any sweetener could be this brain stimulant. So be careful. Look for a product with the Rainforest Alliance certified seal to make sure your stevia is grown in ways that are sustainable. If you want honey, you can check out the Ethical Consumer Guide. We'll provide the link in the show notes. And sweeteners, you know what? are things we can include? Well, juice, pureed fruit juice, molasses, organic palm sugar, date sugar, coconut sugar has got a little lower glycemic index, monk fruit sweetener, which is a non-caloric sweetener, organic maple syrup, honey as I mentioned, stevia and monk fruit are typically the ones I would recommend, but sparingly. Erythritol, some people can tolerate it but don't have that much. And what should we avoid? Well, we shouldn't be eating mounds of sugar of any kind, but artificial sweeteners like big no-No liquid sugar calories. If you want to do one thing for your health besides the high fructose corn syrup, it's getting rid of sugary beverages. Liquid sugar calories are the worst because of how they affect your metabolism. High fructose corn syrup. Don't eat that. Anything with the word syrup in the name except maple syrup. Any, any things that are all natural, you know, agave is natural, sugar cane's natural, evaporated cane juice natural, brownie soup is natural. That means it's good for you. So the arsenic. That's natural. packaged foods that have added sugar. Just stay away from that stuff. In order to make food taste good, that's industrial food, they have to add sugar or salt or fat. And, and it's surprising, you know, there's more sugar in serving of Prego tomato sauce than there are in two Oreo cookies. Right. So salad dressings, granola, cereals, ketchup, soups, candy, yogurt. I mean, I was surprised. I, I'm Jewish, and we had Passover, and I didn't even look at the label. I just bought a jar of gefilte fish that my mother used to buy. And I'm like, this is kind of sweet. And I kind of looked at the labels, it was like full of sugar. And I'm like, why do they put sugar in fish? So it's pretty much everything. And obviously, refined sugars of all kinds, brown sugar, aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, selfotame, just pass on those things. And there are a lot of ways to enjoy sweetness. Also, a little hack, use a continuous glucose monitor from Levels. That'll help you find out what things are affecting you and what are not. You can also eat protein and fat before you eat something sweet or carby. For example, if you drink a glass of wine or alcohol on an empty stomach, you get a quick buzz, right? But if you basically have it after a meal or in the middle of the meal, you don't get that instant buzz. Why? Because of the quick absorption. Same thing with sugar. We may not get, you know, a buzz, but our bodies don't get the buzz. if we eat protein and fat before. So that's a lot about sugar, probably more than you want to know, but it is one of the most important things to know about in terms of how it affects your health, how it affects the environment, how it getting rid of most of it in your diet can create dramatic improvements in your overall well-being and health. And there's only, you know, really one term, one really long term solution. We need to kind of wean ourselves off and then we need to them as a recreational treat, right? I talk about having it occasionally and sparingly. I like tequila, but I might have like a shot, you know, maybe twice a month. That's not gonna kill me. So learning how to live without all this stuff may take a minute, but your brain will reset, your hormones will reset, your immune system will reset. And if, you know, if you look at the data, even on COVID, for example, if you eat a lot of sugar and are overweight, It suppresses your immune system. So that's another reason. So you have to learn about other foods and other tastes and spices and I mean phytochemically rich food and bitter foods and sour foods and savory foods. So enjoy other foods and get your palate kind of having more fun things. And of course, I know be realistic. I mean, we love sweet. We always go for sweet, you know, like it's just how we're programmed because when we got something sweet in nature, if we were found a berry patch or we found a honey thing, we'd store all that. for the winter because we wouldn't be eating all winter, but we just keep eating all winter. So if you have also insulin resistance or diabetes, autoimmune diseases, a lot of gut issues, really you should stay away from all the sugars and sweeteners. If you want to use sugar occasionally at home, go ahead, but use some of the choices I said and understand that it's not the sugar that you add to your food. Typically, it's a sugar that's added by corporations. So I know that's a lot about sugar, but I had to do it because I think it's one of the most important things to know about for people to take care of their health long term and to live a long healthy life. And that is all for today's health bite. If you loved it, be sure to share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment. Have you navigated your sugar habits and either gotten off it or where are your struggles? We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next time. on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning in to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health. and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi everyone.

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