What Causes Obesity? with Dr. Richard Johnson

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Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert. Here I put the power of health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut, detox, and lots more. So if you want to get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry go round, I'll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast. Okay, I just finished the best, best interview. If I can throw this out to you, this is going to be like some mind blowing stuff. This will be the start of a series with Dr. Richard Johnson and he's written a couple amazing books. The the latest one, Nature Wants Us to be Fat. Holy smokes. And we are going to be digging into fructose into something called the biological switch or their survival switch. And there's so much crazy amazing information in here about leaky gut, weight gain, hypertension, metabolic health. I've literally been talking to my hero. This Dr. Richard Johnson was the one who I really studied when I wrote the Sugar Impact diet. And so this has been just like I'm giddy as you can hear. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Richard Johnson and you can learn more about him by the way by going to drrichardjohnson.com and again you'll want to grab Nature Wants Us to be Fat. He's a physician scientist with an expertise on sugar and specifically fructose. And you will literally be mind blown by the things you hear him say about fructose. Holy smoke. He is really like internationally known for his work on sugar and fructose and obesity and diabetes. He's like his work, you know, he showed the fundamental role for uric acid in metabolic syndrome and he's done loads of research, published over 700 papers, lectured in 45 countries. He authored the Sugar Fix with Timothy Gower and the fat switch in 2012 and he is a Professor of medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver. And just a super fun, cool, down to earth, brilliant, scientific doc guy. So I can't wait to share him with you. You're gonna fall in love with him. We are getting him back time and time again. This is information that you can put directly into use. So stay with me. We'll be right back.

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Learn more@mcafee.com online protection. Okay. I cannot believe I have you. Dr. Richard Johnson. My hero. Captive on a podcast. Like, you know, it's. It's. I'm. I'm gonna, like, fangirl out. That's it.

Jj, it is just wonderful to be on your show, and we definitely have our stars aligned when it comes to how we view things about nutrition.

Right? I mean, when I was writing the Sugar Impact diet, you were like my go to guru. All Things fructose. I'm like, how is this not so commonplace? How is it that we have these products in the health food store hiding in their posing that say, no sugar added, that have apple juice concentrate in them, and people are glugging them down, thinking that it just made me insane. And I was like, this guy gets it. So there's so much that we could talk about. You are going to be like, I just love to do a series with you, but I really want to talk about your Nature Wants Us to be Fat book, first of all, because, holy smokes, the title.

It's kind of scary, isn't it?

Oh, my gosh. Well, but. But it's true. As you start, like, what you're going to unpack, it'll make perfect sense to people. And so, you know, I'd love to just start before we go there. How did you get so into this?

Oh, well, first off, I'm a very curious person, as you probably know from reading my readings, my writings. And, you know, I started off, you know, being. I'm a physician. A physician studies kidney disease and metabolic health and hypertension. But very early on, I wanted to do research. I didn't want to just take care of patients. I love taking care of patients, but I was too curious about why they have their disease. More than just how to treat their disease. I became interested in how high blood pressure, what causes high blood pressure. And this led me to a substance called uric acid. And uric acid is the substance that causes gout. You know, it's this.

Oh, yeah, we've had David Perlmutter on. He's one of my besties.

So you know about uric acid. So it circulates in our blood, it causes gout, and it's associated with a lot of metabolic diseases. We were one of the first ones to kind of link it with high blood pressure and to show actually that if you raise uric acid in animals, they could develop high blood pressure. And then we did studies in adolescents that were overweight and that had high blood pressure. And we found that uric acid was playing a role in their high blood pressure as well, that if we lowered uric acid, we could control the blood pressure and then return it to normal in 90% of the kids.

So I want to ask a question about that, but I have to point out a brilliant statement you said, one of just, I'm sure will be many. And you said, you know, I want to do more than just treat the disease. I wanted to know why. And it's like when you really think about that, you go, wait a minute, wouldn't you need to know why they have the disease to treat it? Like, shouldn't it be that hilarious?

So true. You know, I have this rule, by the way, when you want to learn about a disease, you know, a lot of the medical students and residents, they always think, what's the newest thing? And so they'll, They'll Google and they'll look for the newest paper. But when I really want to understand a disease, I'll Google or I'll go to PubMed and I'll say diabetes, for example, and I'll go to the oldest paper because I'm curious how it was discovered, because usually when a disease is discovered, it starts off being relatively rare. It's easier to link it to potential causes because when it's so common that every, you know, obesity is so common, it's hard to pinpoint what's the driver. So it's really nice to go back.

That's so smart.

1890, when there's only, you know, three in 100 people have. Have obesity.

It just wasn't a thing. I mean, even 1950s, like, even. Even when I was in elementary school, there was like one chubby girl, like, you know, or one, you know, what was it called? Hefty or what? Or the Huff. Huffy, or whatever they did for the boys. They had the huskies. Huskies and Chubby. So the teens having hypertension, which obviously shouldn't be happening, what was the driver for the uric acid?

Yeah, so that was exactly where I went next. So once we began to realize that uric acid was playing a role, then it was like going, what was driving the uric acid up? And it turns out that everyone was focused on things called purines, which are these substances like that are often present in things like organs, organ meats like liver, shellfish, and things like that. But there's another major driver of uric acid, and that is sugar, table sugar. And table sugar is actually two sugars. Table sugar is called sucrose, but it's the disaccharide, which means that it's actually two sugars combined bound together. And one is glucose, which is the main sugar in our blood, and the other one's called fructose, and that's the sugar that's in fruit. And it turned out that fructose specifically raises uric acid. And so I started looking at. I started going back in time, and we actually drew these curves going all the way back to 1900, 1800 and 1700. You know, the rise of sugar intake. And then a high fructose corn syrup is another sugar that has added sugar that consists of glucose and fructose mixed together. And so that's another source of fructose. These are the two major sources of fructose in our diet. Table sugar and high fructose corn syrup. And we're eating huge amounts of this stuff.

Well, and here's. Go ahead.

Turns out, and these sugars raise uric acid. And these kids that are developing obesity, they have high uric acid and they have high blood pressure. We had found that when we raised uric acid in animals that their blood pressure went up. Dan Feig was a young pediatric nephrologist down at Baylor, and we worked together. I was the chief at the time of the adult kidney service. He did this study where he linked uric acid with blood pressure. And 90% of children with what we call primary hypertension or high blood pressure, where it's like the classic high blood pressure. 90% of them had a high uric acid. Then we got a grant from the National Institute of Health, and we did this crossover placebo controlled study, double blind. These kids had never received any medicine in their life. They hadn't even had a high blood pressure medicine. But when we lowered the uric acid, if we actually lowered it to under 5.2 to a normal level, 90% of them normalized their blood pressure.

And did you lower it by getting the fructose out? How did you lower it?

Well, at that time, we used a drug. So the easiest way to lower the uric acid was to give a drug called allopurinol. And we did it. It lowered the uric acid, and their blood pressure came down to normal. And we did another study, and we found that we could block weight gain significantly in these. These kids compared to. If they got the placebo. They would. They. They gained weight significantly because they're like, they're 15 years old and they're eating a lot of sugar.

And.

And. And then subsequently, you know, we realized it was the sugar that was really driving a lot of it. And so we even did this study where we gave fructose to people. It was. It was before I realized how bad it could be.

Yeah, I was like, oh, my gosh. You gave people. I've heard that it can induce hypertension in lab rats, but I didn't know they actually did that to people.

Well, you know, so we. What we did is we gave a large amount of fructose to. To. To people in. In a Clinical trial with or without a uric acid lowering drug. And when they took the fructose, their blood pressure went up. And when we gave it with allopurinol, we could block it, but scarily, about 25% of them in just two weeks started developing metabolic syndrome. And so at that point we said, oh, stop all this. Sorry, we can't do this anymore.

You said something crazy, though. And I'm just wondering, like, I don't, I actually don't want this to be.

Well, I want you to, I want you to know that when we stop the fructose, their blood pressure came back down to normal and they resolved. So, you know, but you're forgiven.

You're forgiven.

As I told people, I said, this is a study that no one can ever repeat, you know, because, you know, at the time, we didn't know how, how dangerous it would in two weeks.

It's just like when they did the Splenda and changed the gut microbiome in a week, it's like, okay, stop. I went, who volunteers for these things? So you said you gave the kids allopurinol, and when you gave them the allopurinol that it blocked, lowered the uric acid and blocked weight gain.

Yeah, the second study that Dan did, so we didn't actually look at weight gain in the first study, but in the second study that he did, he gave it, I think it was for four weeks. And again, these adolescents are actively gaining weight, you know, so that I think the, the control group gained like 3 pounds or 4 pounds in that month, and it was mainly fat. And the, the allopurinol group lost.

In a month.

Yeah, that was frightening.

In a month.

Yeah, it's like, I think I, I, it's in my book, I actually put the numbers, but it's, it is frightening, actually, jj. It really is frightening.

And I mean, obviously, we don't want them taking a drug to do that when they can just simply stop the problem.

Exactly. And so there have been studies now that have shown that if you reduce sugar, you can lower blood pressure. And there's also studies showing especially sugary beverages. We actually did another study where we just gave a single sugary beverage to people. And we get, we compared, you know, a soft drink that had sugar or sucrose to a soft drink that had a high fructose corn syrup. And the high fructose corn syrup has a little bit more fructose in it than the sucrose one. So this, we call it the Dr. Pepper study. And because Dr. Pepper. In this country, there's still some places where they make it with sucrose instead of with, with table sugar with like.

Coca Cola in Mexico that they make it with.

That's right. Yes, exactly. It's the same thing. But in the US There was, you know, this was also occurring. And when we compared the two, we found that high fructose corn syrup did raise blood pressure a little bit more acutely in people and raised the uric acid more because it had a little more fructose.

So what happens with all these people who are going to the health food store? I won't name names of the stores. And they're going in there and they're buying agave or things sweetened with agave because it says low on the glycemic index.

Oh, that's, that's scary.

Or apple juice concentrate. And they can, because they can literally put on the label no sugar added.

Yeah, yeah. No. Apple juice is almost like a soft drink when it comes to the amount of, well, it is like a soft drink.

It is a soft drink. I did, I did a video with, yeah, I did a video with Mindvalley and they posted, Boy, did people get angry because I said apple juice is the same as a Coke. In fact, it's worse. And if you want to get diabetes. And it was like this whole thing and boy, people, I like, it was like I was, you know, I'm sure you were attacked.

Well, we did do an apple juice study. I, I, I don't know if you remember.

I don't remember this. I'd love to hear it.

I have a good friend who's a scientist who's in Istanbul and, and he's done a number of very innovative studies. And one of the interesting things about fructose is that the way it works is it drops the energy in the cell, but it's really based upon how much fructose the liver sees. And so when you drink a soft drink or apple juice, you're getting this huge amount of fructose. That's why soft drink is so bad, because you drink it. And we tend to drink soft drinks quickly. A lot of people gustle the drinks. You know, I used to big gulps, big gulps. And so, you know, so you flood the liver and that's, you know, but it makes a difference. Like if you're taking it in the middle of a meal where you've got a lot of food in the stomach and the small bowel, that will slow the absorption. And, and so, you know, we had Done this review, and we had published that, you know, the studies show that if you. Liquid sugar is much more dangerous than solid sugar. And the reason is. Is because the liquid. We thought. We said was because we believe the liquid sugar is being absorbed faster so that the fructose concentration is higher. It's like a wave, and then that triggers this biologic switch that makes you want to put on fat and so forth. The data in the literature was very consistent with that. But what Mamet decided to do was to say, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give, I think it was 20 ounces of apple juice was a large amount. He says, I'm going to give it quickly to volunteers, or I'm going to give it over an hour, over a longer time. And we're going to see if we can find. There are these markers of the switch that you can measure in the blood. I'm going to look for that. When he did that, he found that giving the apple juice quickly activated the switch a lot more than if he gave it slow. The bottom line, jj, is if someone really wants to drink apple juice, tell them to sip it over a long time, and it will be a calorie.

Or maybe better yet, just have an apple and some water.

That is much better.

Way better.

Way better.

I know.

It's like, do that. I was so upset when I saw that, like, in the WIC program, they were giving, like, part of the funding was giving the little kids apple juice. I'm like, that, like, yeah, that's. Stop it. All right, well, you mentioned the switch. Let's dig into the biological switch and talk about that.

Yes. So the whole thing just kind of evolved. So in the very beginning, we're looking at uric acid seems to be driving blood pressure, sugar, and particularly fructose seems to be driving uric acid. I started doing experiments in animals, lab animals, where originally we were raising uric acid. And then we just started giving fructose. And we found that when we gave fructose that they didn't just get higher blood pressure. Their triglycerides or their fats went up in their blood, the fats went up in their liver. They became insulin resistant. They had all these features that we recognized was the metabolic syndrome. And this was in the early. I know it's obvious to everyone now, but this was like 2000.

It was back when it was Syndrome X.

Right, exactly. Well, back when they thought that there were people writing that metabolic syndrome really isn't anything. You should just look at triglycerides. And it's not a collection of symptoms. Honestly, even some of the people who originally pushed the idea of metabolic syndrome were writing that they didn't think it was clinically important. And what I saw was. Yeah, Jerry Reeves. And what I saw was that all these animals were developing a syndrome that really was a fat storage syndrome. They were storing fat in their blood, in their liver, in their adipose tissue or their fat tissues. They were insulin resistance. Their blood pressure was going up. This was all part of one syndrome. And it was being induced by fructose. It was associated with a high uric acid. We did this study that was done by Taka Nakagawa, Japanese scientist who was working with me. Taka lowered uric acid with this allopurinol, and he found that he could improve all the features of metabolic syndrome, not just the hypertension, but there was less fat in the liver, there was less fat in the blood, the whole thing. There was less insulin resistance. There was this light bulb that went off because the uric acid pathway is not in a caloric pathway. So the way when you eat fructose, it's broken down, generates ATP, but uric acid is like, generated in a kind of a off. It's an offshoot. It's like a side reaction. And why would blocking a side reaction, side chain reaction be working here? Everyone was saying, it's calories, it's calories.

But I knew not. Your body's not a bank account.

It's becoming very obvious.

It was, you know, what. Do you know what, Rick? Early on, like, when I was just a personal trainer going, going through grad school and, and, and I was taught that you had to create a 500 calorie deficit a day to create a 1 pound weight loss. And at 1000. And so I was dil. I'm a mathematician. I was doing it with people, and it wasn't working. So I thought, you are cheating. Why are you paying me all this money and cheating? And then I took a group away for a week and I went, wow, they can't cheat. I'm like policing everything. Some people lost weight, some people gained weight, some people stayed the same. And that's when I went, our body is not a bank account.

Exactly.

Not. Look at this. You know, there's a big difference between calories and stress and also. But it, but it was like saying, the earth is flat.

You're all wrong.

Exactly, exactly. And, you know, I wrote a paper on fructose where I challenged the idea that it wasn't calories back in 2007, it was really a challenge.

Did you get attacked?

Yeah, I did, but the pain now.

Boy, good for you.

Now you're a genius.

500 times. But. But anyway, get it. Yeah, getting. Now we've kind of evolved so we know that, you know, energy balance is still very important. And I'm happy to talk about energy balance, but. But it's as you say, it's just one part of the equation. What's actually more important is the types of food we eat. And so, and then we, yeah, calories.

Count, but where they come from counts more.

Right.

Because it's bow down on healthy food and think you're going to be okay. You have to.

Exactly. So I mean, if you're on a low carb diet and you're eating a high fat diet because you're on a low carb diet, you're not going to get fat on the high fat diet if you're on a low carb diet. If anything, a low carb diet will cause weight loss, as we know. And so, and the reason it isn't because fat is good necessarily or fat is it doesn't make people fat, but it won't in a low carb diet. And the reason is because when you're on a low carb diet, you're not making much fructose because, or eating fructose. So low carb diet, fructose is a carb, so you're not eating it. But we can also make fructose in our body from carbs. So if you're on a low carb diet, you can't make much fructose. And fructose is what makes you turns on this switch to make you hungry. And so if you're on a low carb diet, you'll tend not to be that hungry. And so you won't be eating huge amounts of food and you won't be. And the high fat diet, you're just going to maintain your weight because if you eat more, you'll just more one day, you'll eat less the next. And so low carb diet is a great way to help control of that appetite. Because if you're on a high carb diet, what happens is we tend to become, to lose our ability to control our appetite. And so, and that's because of the fructose. So what, what, what we started realizing is that this fructose, it activated this, this switch that made animals eat more and they started foraging for food. They developed the metabolic syndrome. And actually there were, there was A variety of things that we discovered and others, too. It's not just me, but our lab and others and other labs started realizing that fructose actually orchestrates a survival response. And it's this massive thing that is to help the animals survive periods when there's no food around. It really prepares them for a time for winter. And the hibernating bear and all these animals, I think probably use this fructose pathway as their main way to help store fat and so forth for when they're going to hibernate.

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So is this the thing, then? It's summer. The days are longer. The days are longer. We have less sleep. We have less sleep, we'd be more sleep, slightly insulin resistant. There's a lot of fruit around, so we're going to be able to eat more fruit. Now I'm talking this is 5,000 years ago. We can eat more fruit, which is going to help us store more fat so that in the winter when the days are shorter, we're sleeping more, we're more insulin sensitive, we can access that store of fat for fuel. Is that a crazy idea or no?

That's a great idea. I think you're totally right. I think you're totally right. And I had really thought about the sleep part, but that's really, you know, it's really important to have good sleep to help maintain your metabolic health. As I'm sure you've written, I'm a.

Big person, but it throws out the fruit question because, you know, it's like, then you get with people that are like, I shouldn't eat fruit. I go, no, no one's saying you shouldn't eat fruit. They're saying you shouldn't drink it. You shouldn't turn it into a soda and drink it or dry it and turn it into candy or turn it into a syrup, you know, so talk about the difference between where they're getting fructose now because we were eating fruit, you know, 100 years ago and we weren't Obese. So, absolutely.

So, so, so fruit, okay? It has as its main nutrient fructose. So when an animal eats fruit, the main food they're getting is fructose. They're getting some glucose. But. So when we talk about fruit or when I talk about fructose being bad, everyone goes, oh, geez, how can it be? Because fruit is healthy. And if you look, studies show that people who eat more fruit are healthier than those who are eating, like, lots of sugar.

Yeah. But are the people eating more fruit also eating more vegetables and more? Like, is it causing. Right, they're probably not eating pop tarts.

Absolutely, absolutely. So that's been one complicating feature for sure. But there. So, so then the question is, well, what is it about, you know, what is the story with fruits? And. And it turns out that each fruit has, you know, between 2 and, you know, 10 grams, maybe 2 and 8 grams of fructose. So the. Some of the richest fruits, like apples and pears, I mean, that have the most fructose, you know, are in the range of like 8 grams per fruit. Big exception of figs. They huge amounts of fructose.

So don't eat Fig Newtons.

Yeah, Fig Newtons, figs, That's. That's all. It's all fructose. Agave's got a lot of fructose. And so. So when it comes to fruit, most fruits have like 3 to 6 grams of fructose, which is significant, but not really significant, because when you have a soft drink, you know, you can have 20, 30 grams of fructose. So there's a big difference between 4 grams.

Right. But you could get it in a glass of apple juice.

Yeah, well, in an apple juice, you know, you'll take multiple apples and then you make this juice. And. And then, of course, you know, juice, ha. Or fruit has a lot of fiber, and the fiber is going to slow the absorption of the fructose. Right. Because we just. We're talking about the speed of absorption. And when you make a juice, you often lose some of the pulp and fiber. And then natural fruits also have vitamin C, a lot of vitamin C. And vitamin C turns out to actually neutralize some of the effects of fructose. It really is very real. We've done it in animals, and there's even clinical studies that suggest that. So vitamin C actually blocks some of the fructose effects. And some fruits, like kiwi, have lots of vitamin C in it. Oranges have lots of vitamin C. And so they can, you know, so that. That can Also help counter. Then fruits also have stuff like flavonols, and these are plant products. One of them's called Epicatechin, and that one seems to really also battle or fight the fructose effects. So the fruit is a mixture. It's not just sugar. It's got all these things that are actually good for our bodies.

And most people aren't going to eat four apples.

Exactly Right.

You know, it takes time. They've got fiber, they're going to get gastric distension. So they have a reasonable amount, not a crazy amount.

And I have a colleague at Princeton, Josh Rabinowitz, who did this beautiful study, published it in Cell Metabolism, I believe, one of these top journals, where he shows that the intestines also can kind of in. Inactivate very small amounts of fructose, like 2 to 5 grams. So, like, if you eat a fruit, your intestine will actually inactivate it before it gets to the liver. And it's really the liver and the brain that's the big problem.

So as long as you don't overload the liver with, like. Yeah, a pound of cherries, probably.

Yes, if you eat a pound of cherries or, you know, these. Yeah, you can definitely overdo it. And. But juice is. Is particularly a problem. I'll tell you a story that'll really be graphic about juices. So I did some studies where we gave fructose to animals, and we could show that when we gave fructose that the intestinal lining became leaky, the inner gut became leaky. We call it leaky gut syndrome.

That's what I wrote the Virgin diet about.

Yes. Okay. So the. And the leak.

And they said it wasn't a thing.

Yeah, right. Well, it's really known to be a thing. And it's. It's linked with diseases like Crohn's disease and even type 1 diabetes. And, you know, it's a. It's considered a big issue because normally the intestine is. Really wants to absorb the nutrients, but not the toxins. And if the gut's leaky, you can. You can get. Other things get absorbed. So I was at a meeting where Steve Dreskin, who's a wonderful scientist who studies allergies, food allergies, and he was talking about the meteoric rise in food allergies that's been seen over the last several decades and how so many children are developing peanut allergies and also other food allergies. He had created an animal model in which he took a mouse that was susceptible to Anaphylactic shock from foods, for example, and he could feed it peanuts, and it would become allergic to peanuts. But in order to do that, he had to make a leaky gut, because if he just gave the peanuts to the mouse, nothing happened. So he had to make the gut leaky. So in his presentation, he was giving cholera toxin, and cholera toxin is famous for making leaky gut. And I thought to myself, I know how to make a leaky gut. Just give them fructose. So after his lecture, I went up and we collaborated and we gave fructose to animals, and we could really reduce the need to give cholera toxin in order to cause anaphylaxis.

So all you had to do is to get someone toxic is to feed them. And then you look and go, okay, let's just give. Give them some. Like Captain Crunch.

Yeah, but I think it's some gluten glyphosate, some fructose.

All in a.

Yes, I think all those. We do. But I think the big culprit is probably these fruit juices that mothers think are healthy.

I know. That's the sad part.

And they giving their fruit juice to the little kid, the little babies, and the infants and the toddlers. And what's happening is they're getting leaky gut early on, so that when they get exposed to peanuts or shrimp or things like that, that with a leaky gut, some of these proteins get through. And then if they have the genetic susceptibility, they probably have to have a susceptibility, then they can become allergic and develop these food allergies. I realized that this was probably what's driving this epidemic of food allergies.

And the little fruit roll ups, the fruit being a gummies, it just goes on and on and on.

Now, I have to ask you, jj, when you were really young and we didn't know any better, did you love sugar? I mean, like, I did.

Okay, so here's what's funny. I'm an adopted kid. My adopted mom is a total sugar pusher, so she doesn't listen to the podcast so I can bust her. And I was raised. My nickname growing up was Poppy because I ate pop tarts for breakfast every day. If I didn't, I had Captain Crunch or, you know, Sven Hard's cinnamon rolls. And so I lived on this stuff. We had dessert every night after dinner. And then at the age of 12, I wanted to be a theater actress. I actually went to UCLA on a theater scholarship. And then I fell in love with nutrition and exercise science and did that instead. But I was so obsessed with the dancing and, like, my. You know, my body as a. As an instrument, that at age 12, I started going to the library. I got nutrition books. I started studying everything I could. And I quit eating. Like, I quit all of that. And I drove my mother crazy. My mom, who was from the Midwest and literally made those, like, tuna fish casseroles with. With the potato chips on top. Like, she was like, I stopped. I refuse to eat white bread. I like all of that.

Oh, good for you.

And so, like, since the age of 12, I've been very. And I was always super athletic. And, you know, here's the thing. When you're very athletic, and I would work out with the football team on weights and things like this, like, before people would ever go into a weight room. And being athletic and having more muscle mass gives you a higher margin for error.

Oh, absolutely.

To be honest. Right.

No, no, it's.

It's probably how I got away with a lot of that stuff, because I was literally a dancer from, like, early age, like, from when I can remember, and doing gymnastics and acrobatics, which didn't work well as I grew up because I'm six feet tall. So point ballerina gymnastics at six feet doesn't work, but. So that's how I got away with it. But I stopped it all at age 12. But here's the thing. I was trying so hard learning all this stuff. I stopped eating chocolate. I started eating carrots. I stopped eating ice cream. I started having frozen yogurt, thinking that I was doing better. You know, not. I'll have honey, not sugar. I'll have agave or maple syrup. Like, you think you're doing better.

Yeah, because it makes sense unless you study it.

I'll have sugar in the raw, you know?

Yeah. Natural. Things that are natural seem healthy.

Right, Right. And. And, you know, all sugar is natural unless it's artificial. Right. So it's all, you know. And so. And so when I wrote the Virgin Diet, one of the seven foods I had to pull out, at first when I wrote it, it was pulling out gluten, dairy, eggs, corn, soy, peanuts. The things I saw people reacting to because they had a leaky gut. But then I went, oh, my gosh. I pulled those out, and they didn't take sugar out. And I go, but fructose is causing the problem. So then I wrote the Sugar Impact Diet to do that, because I realized people. But they're like, oh, but it's just honey. It's from bees. You know, I'M like, no, no, no. They were so contrary, confused by it. And then, and then you have, you know, the confusion compounded by the food industry that is lying on all these labels that I just look at and I go, gosh, these moms trying to pick out the best things for their kids and these labels, it just makes me insane.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's my rant.

And one of the things that is important to know about fructose is it, it triggers the switch. But you know, if you just ate a huge amount of fruit that you were triggering the switch, but you weren't eating any fat or other foods, you would, you would be activating the metabolic syndrome. You become insulin resistant, but you might not gain as much weight until you add the fat in. So the, it's not the high fat. People get confused by this, but the fat is sort of like the firewood and fructose is the fire. If you have fructose and then you have high fatty foods around, then you're going to gain weight because the fructose gets rid of how you regulate weight. You know, it, it disrupts our weight regulation so that when you get a high fatty foods, you, you'll gain weight. But if you don't have fructose and you don't have that dysregulation, then, then you can eat the fat. And so it's really, the sugar is active, actively triggering what makes us develop this metabolic syndrome. And even if you don't eat any fat at all and you eat fructose, you may not gain as much weight, but you're still going to get fatty liver and insulin resistance and things like that.

And what do you think for fruit servings per day for. And this could be, And I now, you know, I heard the latest stats that 5% of the US population is metabolically healthy. So I guess, you know, so assuming that probably, you know, if, if it's 95% are not metabolically healthy, I'm going to assume that we have a metabolically unhealthy person here probably. Well, what would your recommendations be?

Yeah, so the first thing is I would, I think that if you eat individual fruit, like at a meal, that's great. So if, if you wanted to have one fruit or possibly two, but maybe one, one fruit at each meal, that would be fantastic. Or like, if you're, if you're intermittently fasting and so forth and you get really hungry and you need something, a fruit can help quell your satiety a bit.

Do you have your favorite fruits?

Yeah, I do. I particularly like kiwi. I like strawberries, berries in general. Blueberries.

Yes. I'm a. I'm. I'm currently going through a blueberry thing, but I. My thing is like two. Two fruits a day. I will tell you a little story I was using. I think.

Yeah, it's a good choice. Two fruits a day. You know, a lot of people say you should eat like four or five fruits. I. I haven't totally studied that, but what you don't want to do is eat four or five fruits at once, because then they're adding up.

Well, I did that. I was in. I got invited to speak in the Maldives. So I said yes.

Yes.

And while I was there, I was wearing. I was testing. I've been testing different continuous glucose monitors and apps. So I was wearing one, and they had this beautiful buffet, and on the beautiful buffet, they had kiwi. And, you know, kiwi at home is a pain. Like, it's a pain. You have to work for it, which is really good. On this buffet. You did not. It was all unpeeled and perfect, and I was like, ooh, honing pigeon. I went in for the kiwi. Right. Like, I get this huge bowl of kiwi. My blood sugar monitors, like, you know.

Exactly. Yeah. Bananas. It's really. You know, I. I had a CGM monitor, too. I think they're wonderful. And I found that I was very sensitive to bananas and, you know, well.

What a greener one or more ripe one? Like, could you do.

Well, of course. The more ripe, the sweeter and the more fructose and glucose. But. Yeah, but I found that, you know, I had to eat, like, I tend to try to eat them when they're not that ripe.

Me, too. I freeze them that way to put them in my. Put it. Yeah. So I do that. Put a little bit in my smoothie because I just like the texture of it, and I want that resistant starch. So that's what I do. I just. We get them and just as they're starting to, like, you can actually unpeel them, because if they're. Then I do it. There's a little hack.

There's a thing you said that made me think about this, is you were talking about how when you were a kid up to about age 12 or so, that you were eating Captain Crunch and all these things. Some kids, when they eating a lot of sugar, will get fat even in childhood, of course, and others seem to be immune and just wanted to talk about that a little bit. And because you. You talked about how when you're exercising a lot and when you're, you're fairly athletic, that you're, you become relatively immune to sugar. And it's really true. And the, the reason, we believe the reason is that the way, the way fructose works is primarily to work on your energy factories which are we call mitochondria. And, and that basically fructose suppresses the mitochondria by causing what we call oxidative stress to these little energy factors. When you create oxidative stress of these energy factories, they produce less ATP and that sort of energy and that sort of triggers this metabolic switch, makes you hungry and all these things. But when you're really athletic, your mitochondria become kind of like super mitochondria. And when we're young, our mitochondria tend to be quite healthy. And so like if you're working for the sugar industry, for example, and you would like to do a study to show that sugar doesn't really do too much to a person, you should pick a 20 year old who's super athletic, good looking, running on the beach, give them sugar and you probably won't be able to show any problem, at least short term. And people who are very, very athletic, many of them can eat fair amounts of sugar and seem immune. But what happens is that over time, those mitochondria slowly get damaged. Initially it's irreversible and you're turning on and off the switch. But after a number of years, this recurrent oxidative stress causes the mitochondria to decrease in number and to decrease in function. And this is sort of a turning point where it starts really getting hard to lose weight and keep it off. So in the very beginning, when the mitochondria still have this ability to go up and down, it's, it's easier to lose weight and to keep it off. But once the mitochondria become really knocked down, we think that that's the turning point where it becomes very hard to lose weight and keep the weight off. It's never harder to lose weight.

Yeah, keeping it off. And that's where I think, you know, you hear that like diet's the thing that helps you lose weight, but exercise is what keeps it off. And that what I'd hear when I hear that, I think, well, exercise and specifically exercise that's going to help you increase your mitochondria is going to be that, like it could be both muscle mass and the thermic effect of that on your metabolism. But you know, then the Mitochondria, you know that what you just said says that's maybe one of the mechanisms. Yeah.

And even in the book, I sort of emphasize exercise as a way to rejuvenate the mitochondria and to stimulate what we. It's called biogenesis, where the mitochondria actually increase in number. You can bring back mitochondria, and one of the great ways is by exercise. But it's also true. We did a study in people where we put them on a low fructose diet. And putting people on a low fructose or a low carb diet really can also improve your mitochondria. And intermittent fasting increases the mitochondria. And we even did a study showing that low salt diets are also beneficial. And especially low fructose and low salt, you can improve mitochondria. So it's true that exercise is one of the best ways to stimulate mitochondria.

But.

But getting rid of the bad foods does help, too.

Well, you got. And it's not a one plus one equals two. Right. It's an exponential effect. So likely if you're eating better, you'll exercise. If you exercise more, you'll eat better. So they all work together.

All works together.

It's so good. Okay, so I would call this the tip of the iceberg. I have so much more that I want to talk to you about. Can I beg, please, Flatter you, whatever. Send you back. Presence. Will you come back?

I would love to come back. I would absolutely love.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, so mind blown, right? Like, so much great information. Again, you can get more of rick@drrichardjohnson.com his book Nature wants you to be fat. And I think what you've really learned here is all of that information about fructose. And so a couple key takeaways. One of the things I have in the Sugar impact diet is how to take you completely off of fructose and reset over the course of a matter of weeks. So that will be helpful for you. Definitely want that book. Nature wants you to be fat. And then really becoming aware of where this. Of where fructose hides in labels. Look for fructose, look for apple juice concentrate, look for agave. Those are how they're hiding it.

Right.

And also really realizing the role of exercise here and how that can turn it around. I didn't know that part about mitochondria and fructose. And that's like another big wow. So love to hear your comments on this one. We will get we will get Dr. Richard Johnson back. And if you are not yet subscribed to the show, hello, you do not want to miss episodes like this, so go to subscribe subscribe to JJ.com see you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things Books and Reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next reading. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading Next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website. What should I readnextpodcast.com to find out more.