PNTV: Fat Chance by Robert Lustig (#386)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Philosopher's Notes. TV Today we've got another great book, Fat Chance by Robert Lustig. Fat Chance Subtitle Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and and Disease Robert Lustig, MD is a colleague of Elizabeth Blackburn and Elissa Epel who wrote the Telomere Effect. They quote him to make their point on why sugar is so damaging to telomeres. He is one of the world's leading endocrinologists. He's A professor at UCSF, he's written over 100 peer reviewed articles and he makes some powerful points in this great book, Fat Chance. As always, we've got a Philosopher's note with a bunch of my favorite big ideas. Let's cover five of them now. We'll start out at the top. One of the things that Blackburn, the Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn says is that a calorie is not a calorie. And she cites Lustig and his work to make the point. So a lot of people think that a calorie is just a calorie, right? And that the reason why people struggle, struggle with their weight is simply an energy balance issue, which we're going to talk about more in our next episode on Gary Taubes Case Against Sugar. But basically, most people, if you talk to them, health practitioners will say, look, if you want to lose weight, the issue is simply you're eating more than you're burning. That's it, right? You just need to eat less and move more, then you'll take care of your weight. It's an overly simplified perspective. Of course, our consumption of calories and our burning of those calories, it does matter, but it's too simple the way that they look at it. And they think that a calorie is just a calorie. In that model, they look at things like sugar as simply empty calories, right? So, oh yeah, sugar, whatever. It's a harmless pleasure. You do need to reduce your sugar, but only in the context of the fact that you're having too many calories. And Lustig's work is so powerful for a number of reasons, but principally because he demonstrates the fact unequivocally that a calorie is not a calorie. And in fact, sugar calories do things that are very different than other calories. And that's a really, really important distinction. One of the key points that he makes that has driven me or driven the point home most powerfully for me is this. You can do research and you can increase calories by say, 150 calories. Right? So let's just say you increase calories by 150 calories. That won't have a huge impact on the prevalence or the rate of diabetes unless those calories come from sugar. So if you have an increase in 150 calories, people won't, you won't see a huge increase in rate of diabetes. But if those hundred and fifty extra calories come from sugar, for example, in a can of soda, you will see a seven fold increase in the risk of diabetes. You can increase by 150 calories if they just come from wherever. Not that big of a deal. But if those calories come from sugar in a can of soda, you will see an increase in diabetes. According to his research of sevenfold likelihood of getting diabetes. That's a staggering, staggering statistic. And it's a very, very strong data point for the case that a calorie is not a calorie. Sugar is not just harmless pleasure. He describes sugar as the Darth Vader of the food world. Sugar matters. Sugar needs to be controlled if we want to have a chance at controlling our fat. Which leads us to our next big idea, insulin. So why is sugar such a big deal? Well, sugar is such a big deal because it messes with our insulin. Insulin is a master hormone. And again, when we talk about the different theories of why we may struggle to lose weight or why we as a culture, the crazy stats on the number of people who are a percentage of people who are overweight and those who are obese, there's the energy balance theory. Hey, you just need to eat less and burn more calories. Then there's the metabolic theory. People who say, no, no, no, no, this is a hormonal issue. You need to look at what's happening with the types of calories we're eating. And the particular hormone we need to look at is insulin. As Lustig says. And again, this is what all of his research has demonstrated. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. Right? So when insulin is high, your fat storage is going to be high. If you remove the insulin which is responding to blood glucose or glucose levels and moderating that which is triggered by our overconsumption of sugar, you're going to deal with the fat challenges that we all face, or as a culture, we all face. Again, check out the notes for more. It's a powerful, powerful distinction. The other thing we need to know is that insulin also affects another hormone called leptin. There's a feedback loop when you eat and your body and your Mind basically kind of perceives all of the data and says, okay, we're good, I've eaten enough, I have enough energy, I, I don't need to eat anymore. What happens when your insulin levels are high? Right. So your insulin levels are high, often as a result of eating too much sugar. That leptin is never released in the proper fashion, such that your brain still thinks you're starving. So you're over consuming these insulin jacking foods, the sugar, the refined flours, the junk foods, right? Raising the insulin. But the leptin is not actually triggering you to believe that you're satiated, that you actually have enough energy so you continue to eat. Right? And he says, this is how we describe the physiology behind gluttony and slothfulness. Right? Your leptin isn't working properly, so you're simultaneously wanting to eat more and more and more and move less and less and less to conserve your energy. The solution is to get your insulin under control. And the solution to that, the most simple solution to that, is to get your sugar consumption under control. But if you don't have these things taken care of, then you're fighting a losing battle again. We're going to talk about this more in our next episode. On the fact that is sugar a food or is it a drug? Research shows that it triggers the same addiction centers, the nucleus accumbens, as cocaine, heroin, alcohol, et cetera. We want to get this under control. Longer chat. We'll have more to say about that tomorrow. Third, big idea, he says there's different kinds of fat, right? There's big butt fat and then there's big belly fat. He says, actually big butt fat. He describes playfully as what gave Marilyn Monroe her hourglass figure. That's when fat is distributed throughout your body. It's called subcutaneous fat. It's the bulk of your fat in your body that's actually not that big of a deal. And in fact, more subcutaneous fat has been shown to have a positive health impact on longevity, etc. The issue is big belly fat, which is also known as visceral fat. And he says the number one health data point that will be the greatest predictor of your odds of experiencing a chronic disease, etc. Is your essentially measuring that, measuring your belly fat, your visceral fat. You can do that in a couple different ways. You can take a simple waist measurement where you can look at your belt size. He says the easiest way to look at it is if you're a man and you have over a 40 inch, belt or waist size, that's a red flag. A woman with over 35 inches is a red flag. Phil Maffetone, in the over fat pandemic, which we'll talk about soon, he offers another equation. He says there's a waist to height ratio, right? So you can measure your waist and then you can look at your height. You want the difference between your ratio, I should say between your waist and your height to be less than 0.5, right? So if you are 6ft tall, what is that, 72 inches? You want to have less than a 36 inch waist, you can throw in your math and know that. Lustig says that's actually the most important health data you can have. Visceral fat is extraordinarily dangerous and a sign of not good things to come. And again, it's triggered by insulin, which is triggered by our sugar. There you go. Big butt versus big belly fat. Fourth big idea is why all diets work. So he says, why is it that all of these diets work, right? You can have a Dean Ornish low fat, high carb diet, you can have an Atkins high fat, low carb diet, you can have everything in between Paleo diet, etc. Why do all these diets work? And he says the number one reason why all those diets work is that they restrict sugar. The number two reason is they all have a high level of fiber, which create fibers associated with more micronutrient value. So you're simultaneously reducing the microtoxins and sugar, getting your insulin under control via that process, and you're getting micronutrients via the fiber. So, so that's his response to why all diets work. Primarily, they're restricting sugar. You look at all these long lived cultures, they did not have refined sugar in any meaningful quantity, nor the refined foods. And they didn't have the western diseases that we see now. Again, we're going to talk about this in the next one, next episode, the Case Against Sugar. Pointing at the one thing that is the cause, he believes, of all these chronic Western issues. Another little point here we've talked about soda, the 150 calories that come from soda, sevenfold risk of diabetes. He talks about the fact that you may think orange juice, for example, is a health food. He says it's not. When you strip away the fiber lattice that slows in the absorption of all of that otherwise potentially healthy sugar in the form of a whole food. When you have that squeezed into an orange juice, you have a similar effect on your body and insulin as if you were drinking a can of soda. So if you think orange juice is a health drink, reconsider that. In our notes on I Think It Was Spark and Go Wild by John Rady, he says that one of the number one mistake he sees otherwise mindful parents make in their parenting is fruit juice for their kids, not a health food. Longer chat. We'll leave it at that. The fifth idea here is exercise. He makes a really, really strong point that exercise is the best deal in medicine. Exercise is the best deal in medicine and he actually quantifies it. He says that if you work out 15 minutes a day and he makes the point that consistency is important. You, if you just give a day, after a day your insulin levels start changing after one day of not exercising. So you want to show up consistently. Says the weekend warrior who shows up on the weekends isn't doing themselves as much good as the one who shows up consistently, even if just for 15 minutes a day. But 15 minutes a day, he says, and the way he runs his math is 273 hours of investment, right? 273 hours invested via this little tiny incremental exercise. On a consistent basis, he says, we'll get you three years of additional lifespan and hopefully health span, right? Versus the disease span we talked about in the telomere effect. Now that 273 hours to get a three year return, he says, is something like a, what was it, 64,000 return on investment. He says that is by far the greatest investment you can make in your health, the 15 minutes exercise. So keep that in mind. How's your exercise? Are you making that investment? Know that it offers a tremendous ROI. If I told you I can give you a 64,000 times return on your investment, you gave me some cash and I gave you that return, would you invest? I think you would. Well, guess what? Energy wise, exercise is the same thing. Remember why all diets work? They're restricting sugar while increasing fiber. Big butt versus big belly. Be mindful of the visceral fat. Know that that's connected to insulin. And then know that when your insulin levels are jacked around, you're going to have issues with your leptin. You're not going to actually even know that you're full. And then it's not even a moral thing and a willpower thing. Your physiology is just wacky and your nucleus accumbens is driving bad behaviors. You're acting like an addiction. We need to remove the source of that, which is sugar, which is the Darth Vader of the food world. And then we got to remember that a calorie is not a calorie. If you burn a calorie in a vacuum, yes, calories are calories, but in the human body, it's more complex than that. Remember this data point. If you add 150 calories to, you know, in a study, individual's diet won't have a huge impact on their risk of diabetes. But if those 150 calories come from sugar and a can of soda, you will increase their likelihood of getting diabetes by sevenfold. That number just blows me away, which is why I've repeated it three times. That is a quick look at Fat Chance. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to us optimizing our energy and using that energy to make a difference in the world. One final point in the note we talk about, the final words of the book is basically a call to action here and, and that there's a lot going on behind the scenes in the sugar industry and otherwise to ignore this data. This data is clear. We know this. But there are a lot of industries involved in making a lot of money on selling these sugary products. And we as individuals need to take it seriously, make a change in the world. He says that 90% of the food we consume comes from 10 major corporations around the world. 90% of our food from 10 corporations. And we as individuals, he says, and I agree, need to vote with every dollar we spend. Let's bring mindfulness to our lives, to our family's lives, and let those ripples go out so we can affect the world on a significant scale. There you go. Have an awesome day. See.