This week on our podcast, we sit down with the renowned Dr. Robert Lustig, a leading expert in pediatric endocrinology, who shares his enlightening insights on the detrimental effects of sugar on our health. Dr. Lustig takes us beyond the surface-level discourse on diet and calories, diving deep into the biochemical and environmental intricacies that fuel metabolic diseases.
Key Highlights from the Episode:
This episode is a call to revolutionize our health paradigms and make informed choices that benefit not only ourselves but society as a whole. Dr. Lustig's groundbreaking insights offer a roadmap for anyone looking to escape the sweet deception that has long ensnared our society.
Tune in to this eye-opening episode and embark on a journey towards a healthier, sugar-conscious lifestyle. Together, we can challenge long-held beliefs and embrace the truth for a brighter, healthier future.
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
This week on our podcast, we sit down with the renowned Dr. Robert Lustig, a leading expert in pediatric endocrinology, who shares his enlightening insights on the detrimental effects of sugar on our health. Dr. Lustig takes us beyond the surface-level discourse on diet and calories, diving deep into the biochemical and environmental intricacies that fuel metabolic diseases.
Key Highlights from the Episode:
This episode is a call to revolutionize our health paradigms and make informed choices that benefit not only ourselves but society as a whole. Dr. Lustig's groundbreaking insights offer a roadmap for anyone looking to escape the sweet deception that has long ensnared our society.
Tune in to this eye-opening episode and embark on a journey towards a healthier, sugar-conscious lifestyle. Together, we can challenge long-held beliefs and embrace the truth for a brighter, healthier future.
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
Welcome everybody to an interview with Dr Robert Lustig today. I hope he's not someone I need to introduce to you that. You've already watched his YouTube videos, you have read his books and you're very, very familiar about his contribution to the topic of metabolic health around the world. But if you have not, let me introduce you. He is a pediatric professor, emeritus of pediatrics. He's a medical doctor in the division of anchronology at the University of California, san Francisco. He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology.
Speaker 1:His research in clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes and, as you can imagine, in trying to crack that knot and figuring out how we can support his pediatric patients, it led him to explore metabolic health, which brought him back to the topic of sugar. Dr Lustig has been a leader, and a courageous one, in the global discussion that we're having around metabolic health and nutrition, and he has been very brave at exposing some of the myths that underlie the current pandemic of diet-related diseases. He believes that the food business, by pushing processed food loaded with sugar, has hacked our brains and our minds and our bodies, compelling us to pursue pleasure at the expense of happiness, and he believes that today's epidemics of addiction and depression are directly linked. By focusing on real food, we can beat the odds of the lure of sugar in processed foods and reverse the downstream effects of our overconsumption of these processed foods, such as diabetes, obesity, depression, et cetera. Welcome, dr Lustig.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Florence, but now I don't have to talk because you just said it all.
Speaker 1:Oh, I know you Well enough to do it.
Speaker 2:It's a wonderful introduction and I have nothing more to say. Stop the mic and go.
Speaker 1:Except there are some very interesting quotes that you have collected and put on your website and I thought, oh, you know, what I'd love to do is give you an opportunity to expand on them. So I got a graph about a week ago from a medical professor, a doctor working in this in the world, and he showed profits for pharmaceutical companies this one particular pharmaceutical company and they're all very robust and very healthy and very good. And then there was this massive spike and it was like massive. And he goes oh Zempik. And on your website there is a quote that says there is no medicalized prevention for chronic metabolic disease. There's just long term treatment. And then there's another one modern medicine is not the solution to the problem. Modern medicine is the problem. Would you like the opportunity to elaborate on those?
Speaker 2:Well, so let's start with OZempik, and how crazy things are gotten. I just actually submitted a manuscript as a perspective to the journal Obesity, along with colleagues at Wake Forest. It's going to be point counterpoint, something you ignore and slut little back and forth on the question of GLP. One agonist. Their tack is they are game changers, and my tack was we're playing the wrong game, we're bandating instead of trying to actually fix the problem, and you can see how it would go on from there.
Speaker 2:The bottom line is obesity is not the problem. Obesity is a symptom of the problem. The problem is mitochondrial dysfunction, and there are a lot of things that cause mitochondrial dysfunction. Can obesity cause mitochondrial dysfunction? Yes, but you have to get really obese, and that's not what's going on for 80% of the population. But yet 93% of the population have metabolic dysfunction.
Speaker 2:So something more than just obesity is going on. It's because our mitochondria are being poisoned, and they're like I said, they're a lot of different poisons. Some of them are in the water, some are in the food, some of them are in the air, some are in the packaging, some are in the plastic, some are in the. You know, I mean they're everywhere. You know, I mean you can't turn around. They are called environmental obesity. And the question is does Osempic fix those? The answer is, of course not, it doesn't even touch those. So, yes, osempic and Vagovic and Manjaro and the ones coming down the pike afterward, yes, they will promote weight loss, but at a huge cost, at a huge human cost, because these are not benign. As soon as you stop them, the weight comes rushing back because the mitochondrial function is still there, never went away, and it's the mitochondrial. This function is going to kill you and ultimately it costs.
Speaker 2:If everybody who qualified for Osempic in America got it, that would be $2.1 trillion to the health care bill, which is currently $4.1 trillion, but an extra 50% Okay, we can't afford our current bill. So, like, that means there's going to be a portionment, so the rich people get it, the poor people are going to not get it. That's going to make things even worse in terms of not just social disparity, but actually in terms of medical expenditures going down the tubes, and it doesn't really even work. So we have to fix the problem where the problem is, and the problem is in the environment, and that is the argument that I make in this perspective that hopefully will be published shortly. So that's the answer to the first question. Now the second question was what again?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I was hoping you remembered it, I forgot.
Speaker 2:It's been so long ago.
Speaker 1:Like what was my second question, but I wouldn't mind lingering there a little bit. I think that a lot of I've interviewed a lot of doctors and they've said you know what I would be the first to recommend to my clients eat better, move more, like get off the junk food, eat whole foods, go for a walk around the block, get to bed a little earlier, start there, really make some lifestyle changes, because it's as powerful a medicine as any I could prescribe.
Speaker 2:Well, here's the problem. Can?
Speaker 1:I finish the thought so you can speak to it. And then the doctors will say but I fear that they won't do it and I've left them high and dry, and so I'm prescribing because I think they're not going to do that. So the best I can offer them is this prescription so there's truth to that, but it's not complete.
Speaker 2:Let me try to explain. It was a paper that came out just this week and I really, really enjoyed this paper. I think they finally did it right. First author is Bonaccio and it's in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Speaker 2:And what they did was they looked at an entire population on the Mediterranean diet who already have diabetes. So it's this very self-selected cohort Mediterranean diet but have diabetes. What they asked was okay, we're taking Mediterranean diet as the baseline, so everybody's eating healthfully, at least as their baseline. What they then asked was all right, what is this cohort's consumption of ultra-processed food on top of the Mediterranean diet? So some people ate none, some people ate a little and some people ate more. And they divided them up into quartiles and it turned out that the quartile who ate the Mediterranean diet, but also was the highest quartile in terms of ultra-processed food consumption, had a 64% increased rate of death versus the group that didn't consume any ultra-processed food.
Speaker 2:So what that's saying is that ultra-processed food is a poison and the Mediterranean diet can't fix that poison. Toxin A plus antidote B still equals death. So it's not that the ultra-processed food is filled with junk which it is it's that the ultra-processed food is poisoned by itself. Okay, that would be the same if you were doing alcohol. That would be the same if you were doing cocaine the highest quartile would be the ones who would have the highest mortality. So this has nothing to do with what the food is. It has to do with the fact that ultra-processed food is not food.
Speaker 1:Right. There's no supplement, no superfood, no surgery, no pharmaceutical, no medicine, no miracle that can undo the damaged sugar is doing to our bodies.
Speaker 2:That's what metabolical was about. That's what all the data say. But getting people to understand that, getting people to change that belief system, because they've been told for 50 years that sugar is love and sugar is family and sugar is fourth of July you don't have fourth of July, you have first of July over there in Canada. But sugar is empty calories is actually not true.
Speaker 1:Right. There's a quote on your website Sugar is not dangerous because of its calories or because it makes you fat. Sugar is dangerous because it's sugar. It's not nutrition. When consumed and excess it is a toxin and it's addictive there you go, nothing's changed.
Speaker 1:Right, as long as these pharmaceuticals which I'm going to play neutral on it, but just as long as people know that when they're taking OZMPAC or whatever GLP1, that it's not getting to the root cause. There was a doctor that I interviewed for the summit last week and she said she recently went to a conference. She's an obesity-trained doctor. She went to this obesity conference and one of the keynote speakers says Obesity is an incurable disease. It's incurable. She just thought it's heartbreaking if they could understand that there is a cure it's not an easy cure we have to eat whole foods and let the junk food go but that there is a cure. What would you say about that?
Speaker 2:Well, okay, the problem is there's not one cure. He's right in that respect. He said there isn't A and A meaning one cure. Different people have different reasons. If you can figure out who's who, if you can establish the processes and or the biomarkers and or the behaviors and or the demographics and or the phenotypes or the genotypes that tell you who's who, and then apply appropriate modalities to that process, yes, you can absolutely turn it around. But it's complicated and we don't have that flow chart yet. I mean, that's part of my job, that's part of what I'm trying to do is develop that flow chart.
Speaker 2:I actually developed an early form of that flow chart, based on insulin, many, many years ago and used it in clinic very successfully. 50% of my patients all got better. Now, having said that, 50% of my patients did not, but when I went to other clinics around the country and talked with my colleagues who were doing the same thing I was with their obesity programs, the best they did was 20% success. I got 50, and the reason was because not every patient was the same. So we had a method, a flow chart, an algorithm for figuring out who's who and then applying that algorithm and trying to fix the actual pathology and when. So you actually fix the pathology, then patients get better. So then it's toxin A plus antidote A equals health instead of death.
Speaker 2:All right Point is there's not one cause of obesity, and I'm very clear on that. There's not one cause of diabetes, and I'm very clear on that. Just so happens, sugar is the one that's the most common, but it is by no means the only one. But it's the one that the food industry puts in the food for its purposes, not for yours, and it's the one that we could fix tomorrow if we had the political will to do so. Like, for instance, getting the PFAS out of the water is going to be really hard because these are forever chemicals. Getting the pollution out of the air, getting the PM 2.5 millimeter particle particulate matter in the air, is going to be really, really hard. There's a lot of stuff that is sort of baked into the cake now all over the world in terms of obesogens, things that are driving atoposity, but sugar we could fix.
Speaker 2:That one we could fix, and that's what's going on for about 75% of the population. So for me that's where you start, and I've also shown with other studies that if you don't stop the sugar. Nothing else will fix it. Nothing else will matter. It's the red line. You have to do that first before anything else will work. So we need to apply that first. And because 75% of people have this as the problem, you know, this needs to be across the board and that's why it's a public health issue, not a personal issue. That's why governments have to get involved, that's why doctors have to understand, but of course they don't.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and some are waking up and I think that, as a patient, the number of times I've worked with people, or even in my own family and circles, I've said well, my doctor said there's still so much trust in doctors and if doctors were trained to say you need to just eat whole foods, let the sugar in the processed foods go. We're trying to heal your metabolism. Zero is better than none, but do your best and you know that in itself could have a massive impact.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, if it actually happens. Now, part of the problem also Florence, is that people say, well, I don't eat sugar because I don't buy candy bars or cakes or ice cream. Well, that's good, that's 16% of your lot of your dose. Okay, I don't drink soft drinks. Okay, that's 37% of your dose. So 37 and 16, that's 53%. That means that 47% of your sugar consumption is in foods you didn't even know the breakfast cereal, the yogurt, the processed meats, even the vegetables, the barbecue, potato chips, I mean just going down the list. But it's all in ultra-processed foods. That's where it is, that's the marker, that's the hallmark of sugar, that's where it lives. So that's where we have to fix the problem. So there are people who say, oh, I don't eat sugar. Oh, yes, they do.
Speaker 1:Right, right. And they often don't even think of bread as sugar. Right, there's other refined carbohydrates. It acts similar to white sugar.
Speaker 2:So other refined carbohydrates have glucose, and glucose stimulates insulin and insulin stimulates white games. So that's important. But fructose, the sweet molecule in sugar, that's the one that causes the fatty liver and that's one that causes the chronic metabolic disease. So that's why some people are obese without being metabolically ill and that's why some people are metabolically ill without being obese. The ones that are obese without being metabolically ill, the glucose drove, the insulin drove, the adiposity, the ones that are metabolically ill without being obese, they've got fatty liver and that was specifically from the fructose in the sugar.
Speaker 1:Right, and Dr Richard Johnson's work is showing us that if we have enough glucose coming in, not even fructose or fructose we're not even eating. That If just enough glucose comes in, the body can convert it to fructose.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Totally. There's an enzyme called the polyol pathway it's called aldose reductase which can basically take glucose and turn it into fructose, and you know when that happens most when? When you're pregnant, really, really. So it's an even bigger consideration there, maybe one of the reasons for gestational diabetes.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow. So Rick and I are good friends and we actually have published a correspondence to Lancet that we're waiting on for over two months now. You know it's sitting with the editor, but we did a podcast on sugar and Alzheimer's disease on the Levels channel, called a whole new level, and so you know Rick's totally on board and I'm a big fan of Rick's and he's got it right.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah. And it's about just when you think well, I'm not eating potato chips, it's just like it's a healthy bread, right, you eat enough of it. You're literally going to wind up with the same problem as someone who's binge eating ice cream, binge eating. Bringing us back to the topic of obesity, you said that I never want to hear anybody talk about the obesity epidemic again, because it's the food industry's mantra. That is what they used to obficute the truth, and you play right into it when you talk about it. Say more about that.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, it's very simple Obesity is about energy balance, Energy you know in energy out, energy balance, right.
Speaker 2:So the standard mantra is if you eat it, you better burn it or you're going to store it. Now, if that's true, then the adiposity, the energy, the storage part, is secondary to two primary behaviors Gluttony if you're going to eat it, and sloth, you better burn it. So gluttony and sloth. So the adiposity is a manifestation of two behaviors and therefore, if you are fat, number one, it is your fault. Number two, if you are fat, you have no willpower. Number three, if you are fat, you are a glutton on a sloth. And if you are fat number four, you don't deserve to live. That comes from this notion of energy balance. But energy balance is hinged on a concept. It is. The concept is called the calorie, because that's the only way to measure energy balances calories in, calories out. Now the question is does the calorie work? Is the calorie a useful measure? And the answer is not even remotely. It was a mistake from the beginning, and the more research we've done, the bigger the mistake is. But the food industry doesn't want to give it up, because it's its gravy train, because it's the thing that assuages its culpability and puts the onus on the consumer. So they're still spouting and spewing calories, calories about everything, because this is what they hide behind. So we have boatloads of data to show that the energy balance model really does not work. Now there's a second way to interpret the first law of thermodynamics, and that is, instead of starting with the primary behaviors, let's start with the biochemical process. If you're going to store it, that is an obligate weight gain set up by high insulin levels out of your control, and you expect to burn it, that is normal energy expenditure for normal quality of life, because energy expenditure and quality of life are the same thing, they're synonymous. Things that make your energy expenditure go up make you feel good, like exercise. Things that make your energy expenditure go down make you feel lousy, like hypothyroidism, starvation. So if you expect to burn it sorry, sorry. If you're going to store it and you expect to burn it, then you're going to have to eat it, okay. And so now the primary phenomenon is the weight gain, the adiposity and the two behaviors of gluttony and sloth. They're subservient to that primary phenomenon of high insulin driving weight gain, in which case the behaviors are not your fault. The behaviors are not something you had control over. In fact, you didn't have control over any of it because you didn't have any control of how high your insulin went. So that's called the energy storage theory or the carbohydrate insulin model. So we have the energy balance model, we have the carbohydrate insulin model.
Speaker 2:Now, actually, we have two more theories. One is called the redox model. It has to do with changes in reactive oxygen species generation within the cells, because these are signaling molecules by themselves, right inside cells and they can alter how your cell processes energy on the fly, right in the cell. And the third one is the obesity theory, that there are all of these compounds in our environment, which we mentioned before, that are actually driving adiposity and metabolic dysfunction, that have nothing to do with behavior. So the question is can you fit all of these together, these four hypotheses? And the answer is yes, you can. And so my colleagues Jerry Hindell, barbara Corky and I have written a manuscript and it is going to be submitted shortly.
Speaker 2:Wow and integrating all of them into one model, one unified model that actually makes sense. And when you understand that model, then you realize that the focus has to be on prevention.
Speaker 1:Got it Right and that really there's a theme of pollution, that sugar is a form of pollution to the body, that obesity forms a pollution in water, air, right, that detoxification, that to reverse obesity, we're really talking about a detoxification process.
Speaker 2:Fix the environment. Fix the environment, fix the environment. We have totally, completely F'd our environment.
Speaker 1:Right and we're wandering around and now we're seeing the consequences. Right right, People are wandering around blaming themselves, but it makes no more sense to blame yourself for having a peanut allergy than to have obesity.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not your fault.
Speaker 2:Not your fault.
Speaker 1:And if you keep looking to the medical system for medications to you know, I know they're doing their best, they believe that their you know their intentions are good, they're trying to help, but they're just not getting to the root cause of it and that if you just have the right information and the right support, you might actually be able to not only prevent but truly reverse some of the impacts of metabolic dysfunction and truly, you know, find this happiness that Dr Lustig's talking about Well.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've been mentioning, I've been bringing this up the entire conversation, but look, I'm not against GLP1 animals. It's not that I'm against them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I ran the obesity program at UCSF for children for 17 years, all right, and I had a lot of kids on medicine. Okay, one quarter of the kids in my clinic were on metformin, because that was targeting the actual pathology. These kids had hepatic insulin resistance, and that's where metformin works. It works on the liver to improve insulin sensitivity, and so for the right patient, the metformin actually was very valuable and worked well. Okay, so I'm not against medicine and I'm not even against GLP1 analogs. I'm against the idea that we're going to be able to find one medicine that's going to solve this problem. That's not true. So I think that GLP1 analogs will be an adjunct to environmental change, but I do not think it will end up being a primary therapy.
Speaker 1:Right, because it runs the risk of side effects that might require additional medications and it never gets to the root cause. It doesn't turn it around at the metabolic level.
Speaker 2:Exactly, it doesn't fix the mitochondria.
Speaker 1:Right, right and just knowing that, that's information that's not out there. And I have a one of my co-hosts for the summit this year. Her name is Shun and she's a nurse and she works in a, in a medical clinic, and half of her staff is on GLP1 and they're so excited about it and they're pushing it everywhere and they're prescribing that left, right and center and they're genuinely, genuinely feeling joy at prescribing it because they think this is going to be so helpful. But if they had access to this information, could they feel as joyful, could they feel as excited about what's possible?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to tell you that's a little hard, because fixing the environment is not something that individuals can do alone.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:This has to be at a societal level. This has to be at a national level. This has to be at a governmental level. This has to be at a global level. This is not a quick slam dunk. All right, it is going to be much harder, but it's going to have much more far reaching, long lasting effects that will ultimately be cheaper, ultimately be cheaper, and that's what governments have to understand. Problem is number one the patients think there's a magic bullet, so they don't want to fix their environment. Number two the food industry is making money hand over fist, so they don't want to fix the environment. And the politicians are not going to want to be voted out because they took this as a stance when the patients didn't quite understand what it was about, so they're not going to really want to fix the environment. Until we get everybody to the table and make sure that everybody understands what the real problem is, this will continue to plague us.
Speaker 1:Yes, pause. And that's what we're all suffering, especially in children that are the ultimate of innocence. What drives me crazy is every year, I invite the World Health Organization to come and speak to this summit. Yeah, good luck with that. Right, I've sent emails. I've sent phone calls. I said I'll fly to Geneva. You guys started this internationally, bringing health ministers and prime ministers together. They signed the Rome Declaration in 2014, I think or 2014, saying that they agreed to go back to their countries and to try and get the sugar consumption in their countries below nine teaspoons for men and below six added teaspoons for women, and there's no follow through. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Right. There's no enforcement Right.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:I'm very aware. No, look, I know people who work for WHO, and they individually are very, very nice and very good and very worthwhile. I work with Michael Roberts, who is the head of the UCLA Resnick Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and he has a project with the FAO in Rome, and sugar is part of that. So I know that that is actually being looked at at a WHO level, but actually researching it and doing something about it, of course, are two different things.
Speaker 1:Right, and that happened when people tried to ban alcohol. What was it called?
Speaker 2:Prohibition.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry, what was it?
Speaker 2:Prohibition.
Speaker 1:Thank you, that's exactly the word I'm looking for. You know, all hell broke loose right Like you, just don't take away people's drugs of choice.
Speaker 2:Don't take away my. If you're going to, if you're going to take away people's addictions, you got to substitute another one, and that's the problem with addiction transfer. So if you take away people's sugar, what are you going to put in this place? So how many stories have you heard of people who had bariatric surgery for their obesity and then became chronic alcoholics? You know Brian Wilson, his daughter, you know from the Beach Boys singer, or so she had that Hear about it all the time. My favorite newspaper article in the history of all of my reading of newspapers, which is a lot was published on August 15, 2014 in Newsday, which is a newspaper out of Long Island, New York, and the title of the article is Off Sugar and Ready to Tear my Eyes Out.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, what a compelling title.
Speaker 2:And it is written by a Republican operative. His name is William F B O'Reilly, not Bill O'Reilly, you know, from Fox News. No different guy, okay, but also Republican operative. And this guy, he was a smoker and then he realized he needed to stop and so he started drinking. And then, of course, the drinking got in his way and started putting on extra pounds, and so he stopped drinking, so he switched to sugar. Now his blood pressure's up and his arteries are starting to clog Again. He's, you know, actually more overweight than he even was before. And then he learns about me and he watches that famous YouTube video, sugar, the Bit of Truth, from 2009. And he writes this article, this op-ed piece, and everyone can find it. You know, just do Newsday William F B O'Reilly, sugar, it'll come up. And I got to. And he curses me out. He never met me before, but he curses me out because he knows I'm right. He says the last line of the article is and I hate Dr Lustig.
Speaker 1:I hate that guy, right, right. And yet, at the same time, it's heartbreaking to think that you can choose to take or leave this information, but we're doing our darnedest to get it out. You can decide. You have the adult right to choose what you know chemicals you want, drugs, alcohol, vaping, whatever but we protect children under the age of 18 from addictive substances. Sugar is a known toxin, known addictive substance and we're doing nothing to protect children. So if you can't save yourself, can we at least come together to protect them?
Speaker 2:Look, the bottom line is everyone has their addiction.
Speaker 2:It's what gets you up in the morning, yeah, and if it's not a substance, then it's a behavior. It might be work, it might be caffeine, you know, it might be something that is a productive addiction as opposed to a non-productive addiction. It might be exercise Okay, everybody's got their one, and because that's what gets you up, so I don't want to. Basically, you know, like, tell people they can't be addicted. Okay, when you block the reward system and there are two medicines now, by the way, that block the reward system the first one, in 2006, was an endocannabinoid antagonist called Romana Band. The trade name was Accomplia.
Speaker 2:It never made it to approval in the US. The FDA never approved. It Was approved in Europe, but it was never approved in the US. The reason it never got approved in the US was because in Europe, they started post-marketing surveillance after approval and they found that a whole lot of people were getting severely depressed and there were 21 suicides, oh gosh. And the reason is because when you block the reward system, there's no reason to live. Well, guess what? Glp1 analogs have induced severe depression and suicidal ideation.
Speaker 1:Is a rare one off or is kind of common.
Speaker 2:Well, common enough that it's made it all the way up to the FDA. Really, I didn't know that. So you know, is that such a good idea? I don't think so.
Speaker 1:I love another quote you've got on your website Every substance and behavior that drives up your reward triggers will just as quickly drive down your reward receptors. Yeah, think more about that.
Speaker 2:That's both tolerance.
Speaker 2:Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Dopamine is reward, it is learning, it is positive reinforcement, it is rewarded. There's all three rolled up into one. So you need dopamine. I'm not saying get out. Dopamine is essential for learning. So eventual tegmental areas where the dopamine neurons are, the nucleus accumbens, is where the dopamine receptors are. Information goes from the VTA to the nucleus accumbens, binds to receptor. Dopamine binds to the receptor and then you get a signal transduction and that is the feeling of reward. Now, what does reward feel like? Well, there are a lot of rewards. You know you can pick your reward depends on who you are. You know it can be in the food category, it can be in the work category, it can be in the sex category, it can be all over the place. A lot of rewards, okay, but that feeling of wow, I got this and I want more. This feels good, I want more. That's reward. Here's the problem. Dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Now, neurons like to be excited. That's why they have receptors. But neurons like to be tickled, not bludgeoned.
Speaker 2:Chronic overstimulation of any neuron and it doesn't have to be the dopamine, it can be with any excitatory neurotransmitter, glutamate for example Chronic overstimulation will cause neuronal cell death because neurons can't fire fast enough. When you cause them to fire too fast, they burn out. You burn out the machinery that allows those neurons to maintain themselves and to rest and get ready for the next stimulus. The reason we know this is because of kids with chronic seizure disorders. So when a two-year-old or three-year-old has status epilepticus and they go into nonstop seizure, we have to break that seizure. The longer that seizure goes, the more brain tissue is going to be lost, it's going to infarct, it's going to basically die. It behooves us as pediatricians in emergency rooms to stop that seizure as fast as possible because you're trying to preserve that kid's brain.
Speaker 2:Chronic overstimulation of any neuron leads to neuronal cell death. Glutamate, chronic glutamate. That's why they always made a big deal about MSG. Well, dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Now, neurons don't want to die, so they have a survival mechanism. They have a plan B. They have an alternative. They down-regulate the number of receptors. So there's less chance that any ligand, any hormone or neurotransmitter will find a receptor. There are fewer of them, and if there are fewer of them, then there's less chance that the cell will fire. So what you end up with is more and more for less and less, and that's the law of diminishing returns. That's called tolerance. Okay, that's one reason why addicts will shoot up even more and more than what they did before and won't even be able to feel it. They use more and more to get less and less, because there are fewer receptors to be able to see the dopamine. Okay. And when those neurons actually do start to die, that's addiction and those neurons don't come back.
Speaker 2:They do not come back they do not come back, they do not regrow.
Speaker 1:Can you? You cannot regrow dopamine cells that you've burnt out Correct, or neuroceptors.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:And that's why. And that's why when you take a hardcore addict who's had their neurons lost and you get them into rehab, they're miserable.
Speaker 2:And they go clean. They are miserable, yeah, and the reason is because they have less dopamine now to start with, because they've lost those neurons, they're dead, so they can only get this much of a response, whereas they used to be able to go all the way up. And now they only get like half a response or a quarter of a response, and it doesn't feel good, which, of course, is why so many of them will then say, oh man, I feel like shit, I need to go back and use more. And now they're recidivists. That's why there's so much relapse, and it's also they use the dose that they used to start with, that they were on before they quit, and that's why so many of them end up succumbing and how many died, like John Belushi and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Winehouse and so on. So it all makes sense when you understand how the dopamine system works.
Speaker 2:Point is when you're addicted to one thing, your dopamine receptors are downregulated. Well, that dopamine system is the same dopamine system, no matter what your drug of choice, whether it's cocaine, whether it's heroin, whether it's nicotine, whether it's alcohol, whether it's sugar. Point is, you are addicted to all of them. You're addicted to one, you're addicted to all, and so all you end up doing is playing this little hopscotch game of addiction transfer. So you end up switching from smoking to drinking, drinking to eating, just like this William F B O'Reilly did Okay, addiction transfer. You know who the world's expert on addiction transfer is? Oprah? Oprah, really, yeah, this is what she did her entire life.
Speaker 1:Oh, you mean living out? I see yeah interesting.
Speaker 2:So we need to understand that addiction, I mean that dopamine, is the wrong goal. Yes, you need dopamine to get out of bed in the morning, but dopamine is not what you should be basing your life's work on.
Speaker 1:So the cheese for dopamine is not what we should be chasing. What should we be chasing?
Speaker 2:Serotonin. A different neurotransmitter, a contentment neurotransmitter. The neurotransmitter that lets you sit like a frog. The neurotransmitter that says this feels good, I don't want or need anymore. The neurotransmitter that the difference between loneliness and solitude is serotonin. Okay, loneliness and solitude from the outside look exactly the same, Right, but on the inside they're very different. Yes, why are they different? Serotonin.
Speaker 1:Low versus adequate serotonin versus low serotonin.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:Here's where the plot thickens, doesn't it, dr Lustig? Because I know for a fact I mean from the work of Dr Kathleen DeMaison the sugar also spikes serotonin, which means that there's down-receptor, down-regulation of serotonin receptor sites. Do those ones come back?
Speaker 2:So yes, serotonin is an inhibitory neurotransmitter, so only excitatory neurotransmitters. Down-regulation of receptor, inhibitory neurotransmitters don't. They don't burn out the same way they don't need to because the neurons don't burn out, because they're inhibitory, they're not over-exciting the next moment.
Speaker 1:Oh, so that's hopeful. So, even though we think we've pooched our brains with our addiction, we haven't, because the real neurotransmitters, the inhibitory ones, are still capable of being restored and repaired.
Speaker 2:This is why yoga and mindfulness and Walks in nature. Walks in nature and music and Bugs. Psychedelics are a thing. This is. They're all trying to boost serotonin.
Speaker 1:Are these things different than it's not acting on the dopamine receptor?
Speaker 2:No, it's acting on the serotonin receptor.
Speaker 1:Give me an example of a psychedelic.
Speaker 2:All psychedelics are serotonin-ergic.
Speaker 1:Really Is that like magic mushrooms, yeah magic mushrooms, psilocybin, peyote, mescaline, dmt.
Speaker 2:Well, mdma is different because MDMA is a dopamine and serotonin reuptake inhibitor, so it does a little of both, but yeah. Interesting Because in chapter eight of my book Hacking the American Mind.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay, I have not read that book obviously.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the book you should read in the floor of the scripture.
Speaker 1:Well, clearly I'm really interested in this. Okay, I feel like I've missed out. Right fascinating. I didn't know that. I just assumed all drugs, abuse and abuse are somehow working on the dopamine receptor sites.
Speaker 2:But it's not been.
Speaker 1:And yeah, when you come off drugs.
Speaker 2:By the way, what you said is actually true all drugs of abuse. The question is are psychedelics drugs of abuse?
Speaker 1:No, Is pot a drug of abuse? Like a drug of abuse?
Speaker 2:Yes, pot's a drug of abuse.
Speaker 1:It acts on dopamine.
Speaker 2:It acts on dopamine, also acts on endocannabinolase, but it does not act on serotonin.
Speaker 1:What about alcohol?
Speaker 2:Alcohol acts on dopamine. It does, yeah, fascinating Alcohol actually lowers serotonin and it lowers serotonin. But stress and stress lowers serotonin big time.
Speaker 1:And the good news is is that that part of the brain can be repaired. That's the most hopeful thing, Because it's a little depressing to think we've burnt out all of our dopamine receptor sites. We live a little more low key life if we've done a lot of drugs and burned out those dopamine receptor sites.
Speaker 2:Well, one way to help that is to cut the sugar.
Speaker 1:Totally, because we're literally burning out our dopamine, our feel good, drive, excitement, adventure, bliss. Neuro receptors are literally being burnt out by the consumption of sugar.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:So, wow, if you want to keep your dopamine receptor sites and have that feeling of being alive, like all the good that dopamine has to offer us, yeah, there's your reason to break up a sugar. Dr Lustig, is there anything more you'd like to say today? I think that's a good place to end.
Speaker 2:Didn't we do enough damage?
Speaker 1:Didn't we scare people enough?
Speaker 2:I don't know what to tell you. Look, I have one thing to say you can't solve a problem if you don't know what the problem is. And for the last 50 years, we've been solving the wrong problem and we now have the data to show what the actual problem is. So it's time to solve the real problem. But unfortunately, people are too addicted, and so how do you fix a belief system? It's hard. It's hard to fix a belief system, but that's what we have to do. We got all these magas voting for Trump. How do you fix their belief system? You know these are hard questions. Can it be done? The answer is yes, and I can prove it. Do people change religions? When I was a kid, only 2% of people changed religions, and usually because of intermatch. Today, 25% of people change religions. Wow, and it has nothing to do with intermatch. So people can change belief systems, but it's hard.
Speaker 1:And if we can't?
Speaker 2:You have to have good reason to do so and it can't just be reason that you understand here. It has to be reason you understand right here. You feel it in your body. You have to feel it in your body. That's a tough thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I will just add that, even though we talked about this, is a food culture malfunction that has deeply impacted our metabolic health, that has led to a whole ocean of chronic disease, and that the root is, you know, food and pollution in the environment, and I get it and at the same time, there's an inner ecosystem and you can be in charge of that, what goes into your internal environment. So just take this information, let it fire you up and have the courage to be. If you're the only person in your family, your community, at work that eats whole foods, that's okay. The rest of the world will catch up or, unfortunately, they will suffer and they will die prematurely, likely.
Speaker 2:You know we try to save everybody we can, but you know you can only save people who want to be saved.
Speaker 1:Right, may that be you Thanks for your time today, Dr. Laszke, I'm so sorry. I think I cut you off there.
Speaker 2:I just said, I'm doing my best.
Speaker 1:Me too. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:My both. Thank you, thank you.