Robert Lustig explains how emulsifiers in processed foods work like detergents, breaking down the mucus layer in your gut. This lets bacteria cross into your bloodstream, triggering insulin resistance and inflammation throughout your body, including your brain.
Ultra processed foods are very high in emulsifiers. Well, it turns out emulsifiers are detergents. That's what you put.
In your clothes washer. That's what Tide is, right? It binds fat to water and that's how you were able to lift the stain out of your clothes. Right?
The point is what happens when you swallow a detergent?
It burns a hole in your intestine.
All right? Now obviously if it's an emulsifier in food, it's not going to burn a hole. But what it does do is it chews through the mucin.
Layer, which is.
A layer of mucus that sits on top of the intestinal endothelial cell in an attempt to protect it. It's one of the barriers of the intestine. Emulsifiers destroy that mucin layer and then bacteria that are in your intestine, in your gut can get through into your bloodstream and then drive insulin resistance or worse, you know, can actually go to the brain and generate its own inflammation.