How Sugar is Shortening Your Lifespan: The Shocking Truth

Foreign. Digging into a juicy topic that's near and dear to my heart that I've been shouting from the rooftops for years. The impact of added sugar consumption on our health and what you can do right now to break free from sugar addiction. Because it's everywhere. Sugar hides in almost every packaged food and drink on the grocery store shelves and is in large part driving our chronic disease and obesity epidemic. You see Americans consume a staggering 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour every single year. It's no wonder we're facing an epidemic of obesity and disease. With over 75% of adults and 40% of kids now overweight, it's no wonder that 1 in 2Americans has prediabetes 1 or type 2 diabetes. 90% don't know it. And even worse, 93.2% of us are metabolically unhealthy. Which means you're somewhere on the continuum from insulin resistance to prediabetes to type 2 diabetes or what I call diabesity. But here's the thing. It's not just about our physical health. It's about our mental health too. Because sugar is wreaking havoc on our brains, our mood, and our behavior. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and welcome to Health Hacks. Research has linked sugar consumption to cognitive decline, depression, even Alzheimer's disease. So let's jump right into today's episode. I've been rolling up my sleeves and getting to work in Congress with my Food Fix campaign to make real change with with our the Other White Powder campaign, which highlights the severity of the sugar consumption crisis, aiming to provoke a shift in policy and public perception. Now our campaign seeks to engage policymakers and to mobilize grassroots support to address the harmful effects of sugar on health. I'm talking about bold policy reforms like explicit labeling on high sugar products, limits on sugar marketing, and mandates for reformulating those sugary treats. Now we're making strides in the right direction. But change doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime, we have to do our part. Big food companies have hijacked our sweet tooth. They're bombarding us with sugar in so many different forms and disguises that it's become nearly impossible to decipher what's in our food. And that's why education is so important. And today is all about learning how to detect hidden sources of sugar in our diet. Now we can begin to take our power back, consciously make better food choices, and use functional medicine to fix our broken metabolism and reclaim our health. So where does Sugar hide in our diet, not just the table sugar. What you use to make cookies, candy, or add your coffee or tea, that's sucrose, which is a disaccharide, basically two saccharides or sugars, glucose and fructose. But there are many types of sugar lurking in our diets and you may not even know they're there. For example, refined flour starch like wheat and white flour, which are basically ultra processed food staples, raise our blood sugar even more than table sugar. So below the neck, there's no difference between a bagel and a soda. Right. Sugar goes by many different names, at least 60, probably more. They're constantly changing the name to protect the guilty. High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, agave nectar, rice syrup, beet syrup, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate, maltose, dextrose, fructose, galactose, you name it. Any kind of sugar. Right. Dehydrated cane juice, that's one of my favorites. Sounds healthy. Right? And the common sources obviously are the ultra processed foods. We're eating. Sandwich breads, buns, bagels, muffins, donuts, crackers, pretzels, cereal chips, fast food, fried foods, blenders, drinks, coffees, teas, energy drinks, sugar, sweetened beverages, soda, iced tea, lemonade, fruit juice, packaging, candy, I mean, you name it, it is all around us. We are living in a food carnival of toxic sugar sweetened food foods. It's bad. Now, there are less common and well known sources that you might not know. Like, you know, if you're eating a dessert, you're getting sugar, Right? But what about salad dressing, ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, packaged sauces, condiments, marinades, ready to made meals, soup, noodles, yogurt. It's like one of the worst pasta sauce. I mean, there's more sugar in a serving of prego pasta sauce than there are in two Oreo cookies, for God's sake, fruit cups, granola bars, restaurant food, sauces, condiments. I mean, it's just everywhere. And all this sugar adds up. The average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a day and kids 34 teaspoons of sugar a day. Like I said, it's 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and 133 pounds of flour. It's about a pound a day per person per year. Now, I know I'm not having that much guys, so you are having a lot more. Now, what impact does sugar have on our brains and our bodies? To understand the what is key here, what sugar does to Our health, what's the risk for chronic disease? And if we need to look at that, we need to first understand the why and the how. So how does sugar impact our bodies? When you eat foods containing a lot of sugar, your digestive system first breaks it down into glucose, a simple sugar that enters your bloodstream. Now, this signals the pancreas to release insulin, which is a hormone, also a peptide, actually, that plays a vital role in regulating our blood sugar levels. Now, insulin helps your cells take up glucose and get them into the cells. Your cells then break down the glucose through a process called glycolysis, which turns it into smaller molecules and then turns them into ATP for energy. This all happens in your mitochondria. So basically, you take food and oxygen, you burn it in your mitochondria and produce ATP. And when you use carbohydrates to do that, it's called glycolysis. Now, any excess glucose that's not used for energy is stored in the liver and the muscle as glycogen for later use. Then your blood sugar goes back to baseline. Now, glycogen, you can't store that much, maybe about 2,500 calories. So if you're, you know, going on a marathon run, you're gonna bonk and just run out of it, but you, you know, it keeps you going for a little while. But what happens to our body when we consume too much sugar? Well, consisting, flooding the body with and your cells with sugar makes them less responsive to insulin, right? So you need more and more insulin just to get the sugar in the cells. And this is called insulin resistance. I've talked about it forever. I've been talking about it for 30 years. It's the single biggest problem facing humanity today in terms of our health and economic cost and on down the line to every downstream impact that sugar has on our society, from how we grow the food and destroys the environment, the climate, the. The cognitive impact. I mean, the list goes on. Now, your body, when you. When you have too much sugar and you're making too much insulin, the body tries to overcompensate, right, by producing more and more insulin. And as this cycle continues, it leads to chronically elevated insulin levels, which make you store fat. Now, insulin makes you store fat. It's a fat storage hormone. It locks the fat in the fat cells. It slows your metabolism down, it makes you hungry, eventually stops working. So you can't clear the blood sugar from your blood, and you end up with higher blood sugar. But having high blood sugar is a Late stage phenomena. So if you see high blood sugar on your lab test, you're already way down the road, my friends. Having high levels in the blood ultimately with diabetes is sort of starvation in the midst of plenty. The glucose is there in your blood, but it's not getting taken up by your cells, which leaves our cells starving and increases our craving for carbs and sugar. I mean, type 1 diabetes, there's no insulin and the symptom is unbelievable hunger. And people with type 1 diabetes can eat 10,000 calories a day and lose weight because there's no insulin, letting the fuel into the cells. Now, if not addressed, insulin resistance will progress over time to pre diabetes and to type 2 diabetes. And ultimately the pancreas just bonks out and can't produce enough insulin to manage blood sugar levels effectively. And this is happening to millions of and millions of Americans from all over the world. I mean, we've exported our SAD diet, the standard American diet, and now seeing the impact globally, we've literally created the worst diet in the world and are exporting it to every country on the planet. There are now 537 million adults living with diabetes worldwide. I think that's probably an underestimate. It's Projected to be 643 million by 2020 and 783 million by 2014. 45. Think about it. This is not just overweight. We're talking about almost a billion people having type 2 diabetes, a completely preventable and reversible condition that's caused by food. We talk about foodborne illness from salmonella. This, my friends, is a foodborne illness. And by the way, diabetes is the most expensive chronic condition in the US we spend about a billion dollars a day on diabetes, about $327 billion. And that's just direct costs. That's not the disability, that's not the productivity, that's not all the other downstream consequences. It's basically one out of every four US healthcare dollars. And the global costs of diabetes and its consequences are going to increase to $2.1 trillion by 2030. Imagine that money being used for other things that could make society better, like free education, free healthcare, I mean, improving communities, any homelessness, I mean, you name it, that money would go a long way. But we're using it to treat a condition that's completely unnecessary and was a historical anomaly and rarity. You know, 150 years ago. I mean, it just didn't even exist except if you had type 1 diabetes and type 2 and a few people who just gorged themselves on sugar and, you know, were affluent and it was the disease of affluence. Now, insulin resistance is a driver of many problems. Metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, every chronic disease you can think of, from heart disease to hypertension to fatty liver to obesity to metabolic syndrome to cancer, depression, mental health issues, and accelerated aging. It is the biggest driver of accelerated aging. So how does insulin resistance, for example, drive aging? Well, high insulin drives rapid and premature aging. Now, we've seen life expectancy go down for the first time in the history of humanity, and it's going down year after year for the first time ever. And the 2021 Global Burden of Disease Study published in the Lancet, found a 1.6 year decline from 2019-21 due to COVID deaths, which is, you know, the elderly were probably responsible for most of that. And, and, and, and how many of these elderly had these comorbidities that were really lifestyle diseases? But even before COVID life expectancy had been going down year over year for the first time in history. And kids born today were, will live sicker, shorter lives than their parents. Now, what about the quality of life, right? What about the quality of your years left? This is called your health span. Your lifespan is how many years you're alive. Your health span is how many years you're healthy. Now, the average American spends the last 20% of their life in poor health, right? So imagine if you're, let's kind of ballpark it, live to be 80, maybe from you starting your 60s, you're starting to go downhill and the quality of your life decreases. And a lot of that has to do with this problem of insulin resistance. Diabetics, for example, on average die six years younger than non diabetics. Excess sugar impacts everything that has to do with aging. It impacts all of the hallmarks of aging in a negative way. And I wrote a lot about this in my book Young Forever. Now, there are many hormone and nutrient signaling pathways that are regulated by sugar. And I wrote a lot about this in my book Young Forever. So sugar inhibits the longevity genes. It inhibits the activation of sirtuins, which are involved in DNA repair. And one of the key hallmarks of aging, it, it inhibits ampk. We might've heard of metformin, the drug that people are talking about for longevity. But this is a, also a drug that affects ampk. AMPK is really important for lowering inflammation, for repairing DNA, for improving energy production, reversing in some resistance, regulating blood sugar, enhancing stress resilience, improving autophagy, reducing cancer, right? So if you have problems with activating AMPK because of all the sugar. You're not doing any of those things, and sugar messes all that up. Sugar also activates one of the most important longevity switches that I call mtor. You might have heard about the mammalian targeted rapamycin. There's a drug called rapamycin people are taking for longevity. And this is an ancient, conserved metabolic pathway that when it's on all the time, is not good, right? When it's on all the time from sugar or too much food or too much protein, it drives cancer and rapid aging. And you need to be able to inhibit mtor, and getting off of sugar is a great way to do that. People say don't eat protein, but that's. That doesn't make sense because you need to have muscle and you need to cycle protein on and off to kind of quiet MToR and activate MToR. It's like kind of like Goldilocks. Too much starch and sugar also damage your DNA. They shorten your telomeres. They cause epigenetic changes. Bad ones, they damage proteins. We know the common one is called hemoglobin A1c, which measures your blood sugar. They damage mitochondria, they cause imbalances in your gut microbiome or dysbiosis. They cause inflammation. They cause zombie cells. They make your stem cells tired, right? These are all the hallmarks of aging. And so sugar screws all of them up, right? If you want to be healthy, eating sugar is not a good strategy. If you want to live a long, healthy life, definitely sugar and starch should not be high in your list of foods you're eating. There's ways of measuring your, your, your sugar levels, right? Hemoglobin A1C, which is an average blood sugar over the last six weeks, and also other things called advanced glycation end products, which is also known as ages. Basically, it means proteins and sugars glomming onto each other like crispy chicken, a cruster of bread, creme brulee, that crispy part on top, that's fine, you know, sometimes to eat it. But, but the, the. The problem is that these advanced lactation end products gum up your works. They cause inflammation, causing damage to your DNA, to your cholesterol. They age as rapidly, they cause oxidative stress, inflammation, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and, and, and they accumulate as we get older. And sugar is one of the biggest drivers to this damage. And one of the hallmarks of aging is damaged proteins. And sugar is one of the main ways that our Proteins get damaged. That's why you get kidney disease and blindness and damage to blood vessels in your legs and your penis and, you know, your heart and your brain and like it's just everywhere is just becomes a mess with diabetes. And a study, for example, of over 500 women in the community who are over 65, found that high levels of these advanced glycation end products, or ages, which is primarily from eating sugar, doubled the risk of dying from heart disease in middle aged women because they promote oxidized ldl, which is rancid cholesterol, and they damage the lining of your arteries. Well, they're bad, right, these ages. And there's a great name for it, right? Ages age you from processed diet, from fried foods. They also cause other problems you might not want, like wrinkles, fine lines because they cross link with collagen. So not only do you look old on the inside, but you look old on the outside. Obviously. Sugar is a huge driver of obesity. Added sugars and ultra processed foods. And sugar sweetened beverages are really high in calories. They're low in fiber and protein, and it makes them easy to overeat. High sugar intake, for example, leads to high blood sugar and high insulin levels. Now, insulin is a fat storage hormone. It makes you store excess calories from sugar as belly fat, even from fat if you have excess free fatty acids. Belly fat is called visceral fat. We've done a whole podcast on this. It's very dangerous belly fat that secretes a whole fire of inflammation, literally. Think of it, fire in the belly. When you eat sugar, it makes your fat cells grow in your belly, and you get a fire in the belly that creates inflammation throughout your whole body. It's like a wildfire spreading through your body, creating havoc in every single organ and tissue. And it increases the risk for every single chronic disease, like cancer, for example, high insulin levels promote cancer cell growth. What's the mechanism? Well, cancer loves sugar. So sugar feeds tumor cells, it creates inflammation and oxidative stress. It damages your tissues, it suppresses your immune system. Like sugar suppresses your immune system. Folks, just headline news. It suppresses something called killer T cells, which are scavengers that go on hunt and destroy missions for cancer. So they don increases growth factors that are bad, like forming new blood vessels, angiogenesis. It provides the fuel and nutrient to tumors, which boosts cancer cell growth. In fact, the way we test for cancer is we give you radioactive label sugar. And that sugar, like a homing pigeon, goes right to the cancer because it sucks up all the sugar kills me. The doctors say don't eat tofu for breast cancer. But they say he have a hell of a milkshake, which is probably the worst possible advice because tofu is not going to cause breast cancer. It's not really an estrogen, it's a phytochemical that modulates estrogen. So it's not bad in this constant sugar influx will also activate mtor, which you've heard a bit about for me and also I've written about in my book Young Forever. And when you, when you activate mtor, you, you stop this process that you need called autophagy or self cleaning, repair and healing to basically recycling that heals your body and extends life. Breast cancer, for example, has been very much linked to sugar. In a case control study in women under 45 who had sweets more than 10 times per week had a significantly higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who consume less than three times a week of sugar. And there was no significant link between the risk of breast cancer and calorie or fat intake. So independent of calories or fat, sugar was the main association here. In another study, women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer who drank sugary sodas five times or more a week were 85% more likely to die from breast cancer than those who rarely or never drank soda. I mean, just think about it. Sugar feeds cancer. What about colorectal and pancreatic cancer? We have to understand that many of the most common cancers are driven by insulin resistance and this whole phenomena. And studies show that sucrose intake, or basically sugar, is associated with more than a twofold increase in the risk of colon cancer. And high sucrose or sugar, high carb, high fructose soft drinks are associated with increased risk for pancreatic cancer. What about heart disease? Well, if you have diabetes, you're twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke than someone who doesn't have diabetes. How? Well, high sugar levels damage your blood vessels and causes really bad types of cholesterol we call atherogenic dyslipidemia. So 2/3 of all heart attacks are caused by these weird types of cholesterol that are formed from eating a high sugar starch diet. So they're small, dense LDL particles just like BB's instead of like light, fluffy beach ball cholesterol, they're like BB's and they damage your arteries. High triglycerides and low HDL and high blood pressure are all caused by sugar and that drives heart disease. So this increases the likelihood of the cholesterol getting stuck in the arteries, causing oxidative stress, inflammation, plaque buildup, reduce blood flow, hardening the arteries and increased risk for heart attack and stroke. It's just a domino effect. So what's the impact of sugar on the brain? Okay, we've gone through cancer and heart disease and stuff. What about the brain? Well, sugar is addicting, right? We're hardwired to seek out sugar and energy dense foods. Right. Because our survival depended on it. If we found a honeycomb or a bunch of berries, we'd suck them all down and store fat for the winter. Right. But we just keep eating all winter? Sure. Sugar stimulates the brain's reward centers, the pleasure centers, right? Through a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is exactly like other addictive drugs. Right? Heroin, cocaine, nicotine. Now this is a survival mechanism, but it's kind of backfired, right? Bears foraging for wild berries and storing excess sugar as fat for hibernation is a good thing. I mean they, they gain £500 in the summer and then they go to sleep. Well, we just keep eating all winter, right? We have sugar at our fingertips all the time. And when we consume sugar, it releases insulin to bring the glucose back into our cells. And any excess is stored in the fat tissue. Now your blood sugar drops within an hour or two, which then causes to crave more sugar. So you're on this roller coaster of sugar cravings and hunger and actually eating more sugar makes you more hungry. So sugar is highly addictive because of the way it's packaged and consumed, particularly in ultra processed foods, which by the way are scientifically designed by the food industry. And I've talked about this, they have taste institutes that hire craving experts to find the bliss point of food to create heavy users. Our own internal terms which are designed really do to hijack your brain. And they combine sugar and salt and fat and these hyper palatable, easy to overeat foods that aren't really even food, they're food like science projects. And they do this to trick our biochemistry and to maximize the consumption of products. Remember the commercial lay's potato chips? I bet you can't eat just one. Well, that's true. I mean, who binges on a bag of avocados but a bag of potato chips or cookies, not so hard, even a whole sheet cake, right? Now brain imaging scans or MRIs shows that high sugar foods work just like heroin, opium or morphine in the brain. Now we know that, and we actually can see this in animals and human models that there is Literally sugar withdrawal, when we stop sugar, like physiologic withdrawal, like they have from heroin or alcohol. Right. And we know that sugar creates inflammation also in the body, and it's some resistance. And it creates this in the brain, not just the body. And that brain inflammation is what's causing mental health crisis. It's causing increased depression, anxiety, behavioral issues, aggression, violence, and even memory and dementia. Drs. Richard Johnson, Dr. Dale Bredesen and Dr. David Perlmutter published a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discussing the damaging effects of fructose, which is fruit sugar, mostly found in soda and ultra processed food in the form of high fructose corn syrup. They looked at that on the brain's energy metabolism via brain glucose, hypometabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammation, a lot of big medical words, but basically they looked at the brains to see what happened with metabolism, with their mitochondria, and with inflammation in the brain. And it was bad. I'm just saying. And what about Alzheimer's? Just like you can be insulin resistant in your body, you can be insulin resistant in your brain too. And that's why researchers are calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. You see, research shows that decreases in brain glucose metabolism occur more than 10 years before Alzheimer's symptoms, right? So you can start to look at this way before. In a study called the Whitehall 2 cohort study, middle aged adults with diabetes had a 45% faster decrease in memory, a 29% faster decline in reasoning, and a 24% faster decline in global cognition than normal glycemic individuals. Now, the reduced glucose metabolism and insulin resistance in the brain, particularly the hippocampus, which is the memory center, increase the accumulation of amyloid beta and TAU, especially in APOE 4 carriers. And what that means in English is basically the more pre diabetic your brain is, the more you get this stuff gumming up your brain, particularly if you have the gene for Alzheimer's. So if you have the gene for Alzheimer's, sugar ain't your friend. You want to stay away. Other studies, not just on Alzheimer's, but in dementia. There was a large study called the Atherosclerosis Risk and Community Study that was published in 2023, found that being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes before the age of 60, which is a lot of people now, are seeing people as young as 2 years old getting type 2 diabetes, meaning sugar, soda. If you're, if you had type 2 diabetes before the age of 60, it was associated with a three times increased risk of Dementia, which is totally in line with other studies showing that the younger you are at diabetes onset, the higher risk of developing dementia. Now, what about depression, right? I mean, like I said at the beginning, sugar affects everything, whether it's your metabolic health, your weight, heart disease, cancer, depression, dementia, in particular depression. It's a big issue in a population study of 16,000 adults from 2011 to 2018. This is a US NHANES database. I mentioned this before on the show. It's the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that's done by the government on a regular basis with thousands of Americans tracking their blood and their stories and their food intake. The total sugar intake was positively associated with a 56% higher risk of depression in obese adults. Another study found that the risk of depression was significantly correlated with sugar intake. And for every 100 grams a day in increase in dietary sugar, there was a 28% higher risk of depression. So basically, eating sugar makes you depressed. Okay, Maybe makes you feel good for a few minutes and then boom, crash, depression. According to another study, a prospective study called the Nurses Health study, published in JAMA, 21,000 women aged 42 to 62 with depression, those who had the most ultra processed foods, which is below sugar, were 50% more likely to have depression. Now there's study after study after study. I'm not going to belabor this. I did a whole podcast episode on ultra processed food and mental health. Encourage you to listen to that. But I mean, there's no lack of data, you know, like, you know, I always hate this kind of mnemonic of evidence based medicine. Oh, well, we can't do this because it's not evidence based. Well, what it means is you haven't read the fricking evidence. I mean, there's plenty of evidence. Just go to PubMed and the National Library of Medicine. There's probably 10 million scientific papers. Go search for sugar and depression, ultra processed food and depression, sugar and dementia. It's there, the science is there. It's just not hitting your doctor's office and it's not hitting our public health recommendations. It's not hitting our policies. And that's why I work so hard on policy to try to get this changed. Now, what's the impact of sugar on the economy and the quality of life? Well, people are living longer, although our life expectancy is going down. Right. We're not living like up to 40, but there's way more disability, way shorter. Health span 2018 study of chronic disease in the US published in the International Journal of Environmental Research And Public health said that 75% of health care costs. 75%, I think it's probably more, are attributable to preventable conditions. And two thirds of all these deaths result from five chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, emphysema and diabetes. And except for emphysema, which is primarily caused by smoking, all these are diet related and primarily sugar and starch related. Now this is the kind of a scary statistic. You know, we're, we're seeing our government, federal deficit go up. We're seeing trillions of dollars being spent on health care and, and in Medicare, basically 96 cents out of every dollar is spent on chronic disease. And for Medicaid it's 83 cents of every dollar spent on chronic disease, which is almost entirely preventable. Chronic pain, depression, headache disorders and many, many other things. Now according to the World Economic Forum, health health related productivity losses cost the US employers $530 billion every year. Now globally, the cost of lost productivity is over $2 trillion. All right, so economy, bad. Money, bad. Health bad. What about our kids? Well, children are increasingly affected by this diabesity epidemic. One in five kids has obesity, 40% are overweight, 17% of kids who are aged between 10 and 17 are obese. And get this folks, one out of every four, 25% of teenage boys are either diabetic or pre diabetic. And I'm not talking about juvenile diabetes, I'm talking about, we used to call adult onset diabetes, which is a diet related problem. Now research suggests that up to 10% of kids have NAFLD or fatty liver and up to half of those have nash, which is a more serious version with inflammation, liver and liver damage that leads to liver transplants. There are now teenagers on the liver transplant list getting liver transplants from drinking soda. I am not making this up. I went to a obesity conference that was focused on children one year and I met this doctor there who was a gastroenterologist. I'm like well what are you doing here? And he was actually a liver specialist. I'm like, well sadly these kids are getting liver damage and they need liver transplants. I'm like wow. Recent research also estimates that the incidence of prediabetes in children is about 10%, which is a lot, probably likely more depending on how you define it. We see 12 year old boys who have lived on soda for years getting liver transplants from having a fatty liver. So how does conventional medicine handle excess sugar consumption and the chronic diseases that come with it? They don't. Right. Doctors don't talk about nutrition. When you come in with one of these diseases like cancer or dementia or heart disease or diabetes, they really don't talk about it. Maybe with diabetes they mention, you know, probably cut down in sugar starch, but it's, they don't do it until it's too late. And these symptoms of chronic disease are just full blown. And they kind of take a wait and see approach. And I, this one patient had a high blood sugar. I said, have you seen your doctor about this? There wasn't quite diabetes yet. It was close. Oh yeah, yeah. My doctor's there watching it. And as soon as it gets over the threshold of diabetes, they're going to give me drugs. I'm like, great. Not exactly what we should be doing in medicine. We should be much more proactive and preventive. And of course, once you get up to that level, they then diagnose diabetes. They prescribe insulin, hypoglycemic drugs, and the newest class of drugs, Ozempic, maybe they'll give you statins. They give you all kinds of stuff, right? They don't get to the root of the problem, which is our processed sugar diet or ultra processed food. The sugar addiction that comes from wit, all of it. And it's not their fault, right? I mean, they don't get trained in nutrition. You know, a study found that on average there's only 11 hours of nutrition training. And I can tell you in my medical school class I had nutrition training, but it was about starvation. Kwashiorkor, marasmus, rickets, scurvy, xerophthalmia, you know, beriberi, pellagra, all these diseases I've never seen, right? Because we all have fortified diets and vitamins. I mean, I've never seen scurvy. So that's what we learn about, not actual nutrition that matters in the 21st century. And given the advice from the government, it's even worse, right? Eat less, exercise more, there's no bad calories. It's all about moderation. It's all about energy. It doesn't matter if you have all your diet from soda, as long as you don't overshoot your calorie limit. Well, nonsense. And then of course, they told us, eat a low fat diet because there was a whole myth that fat made you fat because it had more calories than carbs and, you know, cause heart disease. But that's just crazy. And it didn't work. And we actually were told to do it and we did it. Right. The food Pyramid said in 1992 have 6 to 11 servings of diet of bread, rice, cereal and pasta every day. Well that's a disease causing diet and it's why we end up seeing this hockey stick of obesity and diabetes. I mean, don't get me started on that. And then we prescribe all these drugs like the GLP1 agonist, right? Ozempic, statins, Lipitor. I mean it doesn't really deal with diet, it doesn't look at your hormonal balance and it doesn't really look at what the issues are. I do a very aggressive screening for metabolic disease in my practice. I do it regularly and I also co created a company, co founded a company called Function Health where you can get a full panel of metabolic health biomarkers that you're not going to get at your regular doctor, including insulin, adiponectin, leptin, lipoprotein fractionation, inflammation markers, things that you're not hearing about, probably you're not tested for. And you can just check it out. You go to functionhealth.com, if you want to skip the waitlist, there's about 200,000 people on the waitlist. So you want to do that. So you want to know your blood sugar, right? Your fasting blood sugar should be under 100, but really probably more like 70, 85. Pre diabetes is 100 to 125, diabetes 126. But like what if your sugar is 124, you know you don't have diabetes. Well, it's kind of ridiculous, right? We used optimal reference ranges in functional medicine, not what's normal for a population. Right. And that should be like probably 70 to 85. Now conventional medicine doesn't test some of the most important things you need to test. They'll check your blood sugar, they'll check your cholesterol, that's about it. Maybe they'll check your liver function tests and if you have fatty liver, they'll find it. If you have kidney failure, I'll find it. But that's like late stage, right? What is the first sign? The first sign is a high insulin level. Now it could be fasting, but usually it's after it, after a sugar meal that you get high insulin. But fasting insulin is a very good marker and it's part of our Function Health panel. So the first sign of insulin resistance is a high insulin level after meals and then a high fasting insulin after, after that. And you know, by the time doctors, you know, check for your, your properly for your blood sugar with hemoglobin C and Everything, it's often too late, right? This has been going on for decades and the reference rates are just too high. And in fact, in, in insulin levels, the reference range in the labs is so stupidly high. 93.2% of us have metabolic poor health. So if you're looking at averages, which is how we, how we actually look at the reference ranges is we take the population and you look at a bell curve and you, you know, put the middle of it and then two standard deviations is the normal. Well, it should be not less than 25. For insulin, it probably should be less than 5, right? If it's optimal, it should be 2 to 5. If it's over 10, I'm concerned. Over 15, I'm really concerned. Also, you know, you might measure a few things normally with, like I mentioned, with conventional medicine, like hemoglobin A1C, your liver function test, blood pressure, cholesterol, your body weight. But, but we, we, we really need a much deeper look and I, and I think we need a much more sophisticated look. Looking at lipoprotein fractionation, looking at insulin levels, looking at atonectin, leptin, other markers that relate to your metabolic health, looking at inflammation levels, all that's important, hormonal levels. We do a really comprehensive view of what makes up your metabolic health. So how does functional medicine take a, take a look at too much sugar in your diet? Well, it's proactive, right? We do lab testing. We, we understand where you are deviating from optimal. We look at all, all the things that I just mentioned, the fasting insulin, blood sugar, A1C, liver enzymes, lipoprotein fractionation, which is a much better cholesterol test that everybody should be doing. We look at inflammation levels, leptin, adiponectin, sex hormones, cortisol. We measure your waist to hip ratio, look at body composition, ideally with visceral fat. So what's the protocol to fix this whole sugar problem? Well, number one, again, you're probably sick of me saying this, but don't eat ultra processed foods. They're just not food. They're deconstructed food, like science projects that are franken foods that should never be consumed by humans, period. End of story. Done. Right? It's just not food. Like, if I see something like that on the shelf, I could as well be looking at a rock. I'm like, well that would never go in my body. Why would I eat a rock? Right? So think of it that way. And it's not to say you can't avoid sugar sometimes Right. I think we can enjoy all these foods that are real foods that, you know, think of sugar as a recreational drug. You wouldn't have tequila at breakfast, lunch and dinner, but you, we have sugar for breakfast, lunch and dinner, right. So avoid the additional added sugars. It's not the sugar you add to your coffee of one teaspoon. It's the, you know, 12 teaspoons of sugar that are in your, you know, sweetened coffees that you get at Starbucks. Right. Avoid refined flours like gluten containing flours, particularly for other reasons. But, but just refined flours are bad. Bread, pasta, rice is sometimes okay. If it's whole grain potatoes, small potatoes can be fine, but not big, starchy potatoes. Never drink liquid sugar drinks, Soda, juices, sports drinks, energy drinks, I mean, orange juice, terrible. It's, yeah, it's got a little more vitamins and maybe a little fiber, but just basically like drinking a soda with a few vitamins and fiber. Crackers, chips, candy, packaged inserts, all that stuff, get rid of it. Now, if you really have high blood sugar or you're diabetic, you want to go a little more extreme, right? You want to cut out starchy veggies like potatoes, root vegetables, grains. Beans can be a problem for some. Too much fruit, particularly tropical fruit. And you want to eat only real whole foods. Pretty low glycemic diet, we talked about that a lot. Eat protein every meal. Protein will help a lot. So get 30 to 50 grams of protein, at least about 100 per day for most people. About a gram per pound of ideal body weight, right. If you're 120 pounds, it's 120 grams a day. It could be 100, 120. And why is protein essential? Well, it cuts your hunger, it makes you feel full, and it helps regulate your immune system. And it's critical for pretty much every function of your body and, and generally if you don't overeat it, you're not going to get any problems with your sugar. Cause protein can get turned to sugar. But you want to eat the right kind, right? Grass fed or regeneratively raised meat, lamb, beef, bison, deer, elk, pasture eggs and poultry. I love force of nature. You go to forceofnature.com they have great regeneratively raised meats, lots of healthy fats. Fat is your friend. If it's the good healthy fats, they will curb your appetite and they will help reverse this insulin resistance problem. Avocados, extra virgin olive oil, olives, nuts, seeds, omega 3 fats from small fish, mackerel anchovies, sardines, herring, nuts, seeds. And to make sure you also, you know, if you want to have some saturated fat from coconut oil or grass fed butter or ghee, if you tolerate that, that's okay. But make sure you check your lipids. Polyphenol, it's really important. Phytochemicals, all these colorful plant compounds in food. Really critical. Five to nine servings is minimum. Probably more like 10 to 18 servings a day. A serving is a half a cup. So you're talking like, you know, five cups a day would be great of veggies at least. Prebiotic fibers are really important for your gut. That helps to slow the, the, the absorption of certain foods, helps slow the spikes in sugar. You can eat slow carbs, right? Not fast carbs, right? Fast carbs are sugar. Slow carbs or veggies. I mean, veggies are carbs, right? That's good. You want your most of your diet to be that. Artichokes, arugula, asparagus, bean sprouts, beet greens, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, dandelion greens, pretty much everything, right? Mushrooms, onions, parsley, rutabaga, spinach, Swiss chard, tomatoes, zucchini. I mean the list goes on and on. Any vegetable, right? Lots of fruit, but good fruit, right? Blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, kiwis, lemons, the raspberries, small, small, non sugary fruits. Beans can be fine if you're not fully diabetic. They may be a problem if you are, you have to watch what you're doing. So whole soy products are higher in protein like tofu, tempeh, they're fine. Plenty of fiber from all kinds of plant foods. Make sure you have plenty of antioxidants from all the colorful fruits and vegetables. Use plenty of spices if you want to really cut the sugar and you really want to kind of do the best plan. And I'm not just saying this guy creative. I've done this with thousands and thousands and thousands of people and it really works. I just literally did a retreat in Spain where I did a longevity retreat. But we put people on basically on their 10 day detox diet. From my book the 10 Day Detox Diet. This really is a sugar detox diet. Helps break the addiction, helps balance your hormones, your metabolism, your brain chemistry. And it can be really powerful to just reset. And I, I just did it myself, actually. I did it and listen, I like sugar like anybody else. And I was in Spain and I was actually, you know, on a bike Trip and I was probably eating more stuff and a little more wine, maybe a little dessert here and there. And I, I've come back from doing this just a week or not even six days of detox in, in, in Spain afterwards. And I'm like, normally like, oh, I want a little chocolate after dinner. I want, I don't want anything. Like, I just, it's like I have, I even have it in my cupboard. I have like chocolate covered almonds which are my like healthy, you know, guilty pleasure. But I don't want them. I just not even attracted to it. So your body will reset. Of course. Exercise is important, you know, that'll help make you more insulin sensitive. About 150 minutes a week. Can do any kind of cardio strength training, you know, do interval training. The right supplements are important. You want the right supplements. You want basically a multi B complex lipoic acid, sometimes fiber. PGX fiber is great. It's made from cognac root. Magnesium is important for blood sugar regulation. Vitamin D, chromium, berberine is great, which is sort of a natural ampk activator which is really important. There's also probiotics that can help your gut like pendulum glucose support and so forth. So there's a lot of things you can take. Also don't skimp on sleep. Sleep really will impair your metabolism, will make you more insulin sensitive, will make you more crave more carbs, make you overeat the next day, make you more inflamed. So just make sure you get seven or eight hours sleep. Now sometimes you, you know, if you have diabetes, you need a little more aggressive approach. But I can tell you there are not many patients that I've had that I can't get off all the diabetes drugs, including insulin. You know, the, there was a large trial with Virta Health where they looked at type 2 diabetics who are on insulin and about 90, I think it was like 95 or more percent got off insulin, 99% got off the main medications. It's really possible. I encourage you to sort of look at, you know, other topics I've written on this. I, I did a whole podcast on Ozempic which may have a role, but I, again, I'm not a big fan. I think we dove deep on the pros and cons of Ozempic. It's a very nuanced topic and I'm still learning. But you know, we have to weigh the pros and cons of these new drugs, the risks and the side effects. And, and again, I've done a whole podcast in Ozempic. You can listen to that. So I just think, you know, it's really clear that that sugar in our diets is, is more than just a simple indulgence, right? It can be used, but think of it as a recreational drug and if we just overuse it like we are, it has a huge impact on our health, on our economy, the well being of our children. And, and we, and to reclaim our health, we don't have to just to cut back on sweets. We need to understand where the sugar is hiding our diets. We have to recognize its profound impact on our bodies and our brains and we have to take a proactive step toward a healthier lifestyle. It doesn't mean we have to give up sugar entirely. Maybe if you'd diabetic, you're kind of over the hill and once you reverse your diabetes and you get metabolically resilient, you can add it back, but as a, as a treatment, you probably have to cut it out. But if it's important to think of sugar as a recreational drug, right, the dose makes the poison. We just have to focus on real food, whole foods, prioritize protein, healthy fats, fiber, all which are the antidote to metabolic dysfunction. Good lifestyle changes like exercise, sleep, and basically we can really undo the damage caused by excess sugar consumption. I mean, I had a patient who'd been on insulin for 10 years and was massively overweight, like severely overweight heart failure. I talked about it before in the podcast. Three days of putting her on the 10 day detox diet. She was off her insulin three months, she normalized her blood sugar and reverse her diabetes. So remember, it's not about being perfect. It's about just making informed choices that support our health and well being. And as we've seen today, the stakes really can't be higher. It's crippling our society, it's making us sick, it's making us overweight, it's burdening our economy. And the impact of sugar reaches deep in our society. It doesn't just affect our individual health, but the health of our children and even the sustainability of our healthcare system. We're just going to, and Medicare, we're just going to buckle under the weight of all this. So hopefully now that you're armed with all this knowledge, I hope you feel empowered to make changes to transform your health. And tune in next time for another enlightening episode of Health Hacks.