How To Break Your Sugar Addiction And Improve Your Overall Health

I started off just being trying to avoid sugar.

Yeah.

And then I looked at everything else.

Yes. I was like, what is that?

I can't even pronounce that, let alone like put it in my body and.

Think it's actually going to do anything good. Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. We are all programmed to like sugar, and having a sugar addiction is not a moral failing, nor is it due to lack of willpower. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which your hormones taste buds and brain chemistry have been hijacked by the food industry and it's making us sick. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman sat down with actors Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper, who each overcame their own health and weight issues by breaking their sugar addictions.

I had a friend who worked in the Obama administration in charge of the food programs and the food labeling. He's like, the food companies don't want to have sugar listed as the number one ingredient on the label. So they'll put five different kinds of sugar because the list of ingredients is in order of the amount. But if you have, let's say, wheat as the first ingredient and then you have like five kinds of sugar, actually sugar is the most predominant ingredient. Because they don't call it sugar or they don't have the same kind of sugar. It's just a loophole in the law that allows the food companies to get away with bamboozling us. It's pretty bad. And then I was shopping the other day, I was in CVS and getting something, I don't know what. And I looked over and I saw this big freezer of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. And I have a weakness for Häagen-Dazs ice cream. But I don't eat that often. And they said, this non-dairy Häagen-Dazs. And I'm like, oh cool. And I walked over and I pull it out, says plant-based, gluten-free, dairy-free.

And I'm like, oh this is health food, right? Turn the label over and it's like high fructose corn syrup and processed ingredients. And I'm like, what is this? But this is one thing I wanted to ask you then, as a doctor, as someone that does this, as an advocate, goes around and travels and talks to everybody. What would you say to the younger generation if they wanna start somewhere? What's the first step to really recognizing, not just like reading labels, but what is the real first step that can be a tangible first step for someone who maybe lives in rural America? I mean, Lennox, I've been to Lennox before. I've been there. I know what that place is like. I'm surprised that you came out of Lennox and you're like, you know what, I'm gonna do this and bring it to the world. What was it in your journey that was the first step?

Well, I used to be vegetarian too, and I loved sugar and starch and bread and pasta. I bought into the whole low-fat movement.

And you were doing it for health reasons? You were vegetarian because you thought that was healthier?

Yes, health reasons, yes. And I thought this was the way to go. And, it's interesting now that I've sort of cleaned up my diet and got rid of the starch and the sugar for the most part, you know, if I look at pictures of myself without a shirt when I'm 30, I'm like way scrawnier and like kind of flabbier than I was than I am today at 60. Right.

Yeah.

And I don't do that much exercise. You know, like if I'm in the gym like five times a month weightlifting, that's a lot. Right. You know, I do yoga, I'll do other stuff, but I just, you know, just because I'm busy, I'm planning on doing more. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. They don't get you to help me, but you look like you know what you're doing. And I, and I, then I got very sick and I started to look at what I was doing and had to sort of shift. And as a science changed, I began to sort of look at, you know, because I think ideology is so problematic in nutrition. There are all these diet wars, there are always people in conflict with each.

Other, paleo, vegan, it's that.

And it's kind of crazy because- A lot of little religions, aren't they? It is, but I say let's get away from that because I came up with this term, Pegan, which is a joke. It was like paleo vegan. And I just published this book, Food Fix, and it was number one in paleo and number one in vegan books.

Yeah.

There you go. Because we have far more in common with each other than with the standard American processed diet. So you can be a chips and soda vegan, right? Or you can be a cheeseburger, whatever, bacon, paleo, but that's not necessarily either of them are good, right? It's more going towards whole foods. So your question was, what would I say to people? I think it's really easy to just sort of start simply. If you're eating industrial food, stop doing that. If you look at the ingredients and you see refined flour, soybean oil, or high fructose corn syrup, just don't eat it. If you can, the next step would be look for non-GMO certified foods. Not because GMO is that bad for you. It may be, it may not be. There's a lot of controversy about that. But it's a form of agriculture that's a structure of the environment. And there's often other things in there like glyphosate, which is Roundup, which they spray on 70 different crops from canola to corn to wheat to soy. And that is definitely harmful for our microbiome. It destroys our gut bacteria, which affects everything. And it's linked to cancer. And there is a $2 billion lawsuit that got a settlement of the judgment about Roundup or, glyphosate or weed killer. And so just be aware that if you just stop those things, the quality.

Of your food is already making a difference.

Yeah, whatever you do. And so those are really simple things we can do. And then if you can, try to look at what you're eating. Is it whole food? I mean, is it something you can recognize? Like an almond or almond butter? It's like not that many steps of processing because most food gets processed in some way. We cook it or.

Yeah, it's all got some kind of intervention.

Yeah, but if you know, most of the time I just eat stuff that looks like what it is. You know, broccoli is a chocolate, you know, it's a fish to a fish, grass-fed meat.

Well, I was caught at what I said to him when, when we first started, when, when he was a pretty diabetic vegan sick man in Australia. I, I call it the, the of the Earth diet.

Yeah.

So if you're eating stuff that the Earth naturally provides, then you're, you're never really in, in harm's way. Right. You know, how many steps did it.

Take to get from the field to the fork? Yeah. Right, exactly. If you can trace them all. Okay. But if you don't know how it got like that.

Yeah. And yeah, we've got a problem. The ingredients list is your ingredient, right? A sweet potato is a sweet potato.

A piece of chicken breast is a.

Piece of chicken breast. There's no ingredient list on that. Yeah, exactly right. It is what it is. And I think the other thing I found as well, which is an important thing to talk about, I think, is how people who do make the shift, they have to go through a process themselves. Like, I know I went through a process where I kept Going back, I kept going, oh, I want that. That addiction to that kind of food doesn't just disappear. I didn't do it overnight. My wife always says this to me. She was like, you know, when I'm talking to people saying, you just do this, you just do that. She's like, Tom, you have to remember that you took two years probably to just not eat any of this stuff anymore. So your taste buds have to change. You have to give your taste buds time to make that change and really know what things taste like again. broccoli can taste frickin awesome.

Right, it's so true. And people get off that for a week even and then they have blueberries, they go, my God, this is like candy, right? And I think people don't understand how hard it is because of the biology of sugar. It's not a moral failing, right? It's not that you're weak-willed, but you cannot overcome your biology with willpower. It will fail every time. So you have to use science and the science of Sugar is fascinating because it not only drives mechanisms that make you gain weight because it produces more insulin so it stores belly fat. It makes you hungry, it slows your metabolism and it locks the fat in the fat cell so it can't get out. It's like a one-way turnstile, you can't get out. And when you look at the biology on the brain, it's even scarier. So in really well-controlled studies, They've shown that by looking at brain imaging and blood tests, eating the exact amount of calories, protein, fat, carbs, and fiber in a shake, like a milkshake, they just swapped out the level of the kind of carbohydrate so that one raises your blood sugar a lot and one doesn't. It's like a slowly digested starch. When they did that, they found that the brain imaging showed that the addiction center, which is stimulated by heroin or cocaine or whatever, gets lit up like crazy by the sugar and their insulin goes up, their blood goes up, their adrenaline goes up. So sugar causes your adrenaline to go up, your cortisol, which is the stress.

Hormone, so it literally creates a biologic stress. The interesting thing that I wanted to volley this back to you then, with your immune system, sugar is not the only culprit to lowering your immune system. There are canola oils, there are... What other stressors?

Lifestyle as well. I find stress and fatigue and lack of sleep are ones that can that can drop it for sure.

That's that cycle, is that like if you eat sugar, if you eat processed foods, then you don't really sleep that well, they don't really move that well.

And it's just... Well, the other part about eating a diet of processed food and sugar is it depletes your nutrients, right? It actually doesn't have the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need to metabolize stuff. So, the people who are often the most nutritionally deficient are the most obese, which is kind of surprising. How can you be malnourished and obese at the same time? The nutritional density of our food is so important and processed food just doesn't have it and sugar depletes our nutrients like B vitamins. And so, when you have low levels of zinc and you have low levels of vitamin D and low levels of omega-3 fats and low levels of iron and vitamin A, your immune system can't function. So, in the developing world, we know very clearly that the kids who die from diarrhea or respiratory infections or measles is because they're malnourished. If a kid gets measles who's well-nourished in America, they're not going to die from it usually. But in the developing world, these kids die all the time from basic disease because they're so malnourished. And I think we are a malnourished country. 90% of us are deficient. And so the best way to build your immune system is to eat whole food, cut out the sugar, make sure you take your vitamins, get enough sleep, like you said. Deal with stress as a huge factor. And I think, you know, I think something simple like just meditation. Yeah. It's so powerful. Yeah.

It's a thing that doesn't have to be woo-woo. But it works.

We just don't talk about that enough. People just understand. And the fact that we eat about 152 pounds of sugar per person. Yeah. That's almost half a pound a day. Yeah.

It's sugar. Well, it's hidden in every single thing.

That you could pick up when we.

Were at the gym.

Yeah.

We go to the bar at the gym. They have like a smoothie or something. Oh my God. Everything that is laid out that says healthy, organic, gluten free, is so counterproductive at the gym.

And you know, all everything you see in there, there's like signs for Coca-Cola in some gyms and stuff.

Yeah.

That's awful.

You go to those green smoothie things and you look at the label, it has more sugar than a can of Coke.

Yeah. I mean, that's just insane.

And then people become addicted to it because they're like, well, I'm eating healthy, I'm drinking this healthy juice. But what they're doing is they're spiking their insulin levels. They're becoming addicted to this fructose almost. I'm sure that some of it maybe even is a hidden, there's so many different names for hidden sugars now.

There's like 200 names for sugar. If you Google names for sugar, you'll see it'll come up with a list of like 200 different things that you don't even know are sugar.

Yeah, that's one of the things that started me on the journey of like, I'm just not going to eat anything that isn't whole food. Because I remember thinking, well, there's all this other stuff in there now. Like, I started off just being trying to avoid sugar. And then I looked at everything else. I was like, what is that? I can't even pronounce that, let alone put it in my body and think it's actually going to do anything good. So I started to just go, no, I can't put that in anymore.

I mean, the average American eats three to five pounds of additives every year. And it's really deliberate. And the biology of addiction in the food is not, it's not like an emotional response. It's not because you have no willpower. It really is hijacking your brain chemistry and your metabolism in ways that we don't really understand. And so I've seen people within a very short time really transform that.

The food is medicine theory. There's so much in that. And I think people can really take the steps forward in terms of a mindset. Because that's the thing, changing mindset is, is the first step. Like you saying this, you know, like you took a while from you and me chatting back and forth to really go, no, there is actually something in this. Yeah. And changing that mindset. So once you change that mindset and just keep driving that through of food is medicine, food is medicine, you'll see the difference. Simple as that. It's so easy really when you get down the road, but you've got to put the steps in place to actually get there. and that's not easy.

Yeah, something I teach all the time is that food isn't just calories, it's information. Yeah. So are you upgrading your biology or downgrading it with every bite? Yeah. And it affects everything, your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome, and every aspect of your health is controlled by what you're eating. And it's literally like code, so it's.

Like you're putting in malware into your biology. Yeah, that's what it is. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you'd like to hear more about the specifics of Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper's personal health struggles and how they overcame them, I'd encourage you to check out the full length version of this interview. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends or family and leaving us a comment with your feedback. Until next time.