The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dr. Eric Berg: Exposing the Food Industry’s Dirty Secrets
Did you know that many so-called healthy foods can spike your blood sugar higher than a teaspoon of pure sugar? Or that seed oils—commonly found in everything from salad dressings to so-called “heart-healthy” snacks—are wreaking havoc on our health?
In this eye-opening episode of The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast, I sit down with Dr. Eric Berg to expose the hidden dangers of ultra-processed foods, misleading food labels, and the deceptive marketing tactics used by the food industry to keep us hooked. We also dive into the battle between big agriculture and small farmers—and why it’s more important than ever to support local, ethical food sources.
Episode Highlights:
✅ The truth about “complex carbohydrates” (they’re worse than sugar!)
✅ How seed oils are silently harming your health
✅ The food industry’s sneaky tactics to keep you addicted
✅ Why healthy keto is different from the mainstream version
✅ The grassroots movement fighting to protect small farmers
✅ Dr. Berg’s #1 tip for breaking free from food addiction
If you’ve ever struggled with food cravings, wondered why processed foods are so addictive, or felt overwhelmed trying to make sense of ingredient labels—this episode is a must-listen!
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Welcome to the Kick Sugar Coach podcast. Join me each week as I interview experts who will share the science of sugar, sugar addiction and different approaches to recovery. We hope to empower you with the information and inspiration, insights and strategies you need to break up with sugar and fall in love with healthy, whole foods so you can prevent and reverse chronic disease. Lose weight foods so you can prevent and reverse chronic disease. Lose weight, boost your mood and energy. Feel free to go to my website for details on my coaching programs and to access free resources kick sugar coachcom. Hello everybody, welcome to an interview today with Dr Eric Berg. Hello everybody, welcome to an interview today with Dr Eric Berg.
Florence:Everybody probably has heard of him working in this space, but just to hit you up with some highlights, he's known as a knowledge doctor.
Florence:He's a doctor of chiropractic medicine and for 30 years he worked at a Virginia and he worked with over 40,000 patients and clients.
Florence:And he didn't just do traditional chiropractic work. He started to bring in diverse um, natural medicine protocols and practices that helped people with their medical conditions. And, interestingly as well, like long before he hit the YouTube and became the YouTube star that he is today, he was doing these, these um trainings, and he had clients that were in government departments brought him in to share his information, to learn about his information. So this has been going on a very long time, this role he's played in understanding reading the research, reading obscure medical texts, like really on the people who are on the cutting edge of understanding human health. He's been pulling their information and he just it just seems like the kind of guy's like, oh my gosh, I have to share this and hits record and, you know, just start sharing it. So we're in the midst of someone whose brain is hungry for all of the nuances of what we need to know about how to optimize human health. So welcome, dr Berg.
Dr. Eric Berg:Hey, thanks for having me on.
Florence:What inspired you to go to chiropractic school? Did you know way early on, when you were young, that you wanted to work in this space?
Dr. Eric Berg:you know, you type in all these different things and you have this version of this computer that pushes out things that, based on your skillset, what you would be good at, whatever and it says chiropractor. I'm like chiropractor, my grandfather was a chiropractor. What is a chiropractor? So I started looking at it and I eventually got hurt in wrestling. I went to see one and I was like, wow, that felt great. So I just I stood up and I said, do you like what you do? He goes, I love it, I go, I want to do this. So anyway, that's what I started. You know, ninth grade, I knew what I wanted to do. So that's how I got started initially and through personal experience, Amazing.
Florence:I know I had one of those. I was a long distance runner and I had this little niggle on my lower back and I just couldn't get rid of it and I kept thinking, oh, it's fine. I stretched it, I tried everything and someone said you should go to a chiropractor. I'm like no way am I going to a chiropractor, no way are they snapping my bones. And I finally got desperate enough and I walked out of that office going. I don't know what you just did, but that was. That was amazing. So that was the turning point for me. I guess you have to live the experience to believe it.
Dr. Eric Berg:But yeah, and also also like what. What happened was as I got into it, you know, cause I had a lot of health problems. Um, I had this right shoulder trap, uh, rhomboid problem and a lot of digestive issues. And I tried, you know, after I graduated I tried to fix it with chiropractic. It didn't do anything, and so I you know it was actually diet. So you know, there's a philosophy in chiropractic that you can pretty much fix everything by adjusting a person. But then you find out that's not actually true. So then I got started getting into diet and like, wow, that's, that's like way more. I mean, it's just a, it's so important. If you don't fix the diet, you're going to have referred pain from the gallbladder to your right shoulder, you're going to have inflammation and so many different issues.
Florence:I was just. That was my next question is what led you to expand? It was your own understanding that there's something more I need here to heal my own body. When was that? When was that awakening of the power of diet that it plays into my life?
Dr. Eric Berg:28 years old, I was literally a junk food junkie. Even all through chiropractic, even after I was like the worst. I was the worst of the worst. I had never ate anything healthy at all, just tons of breads, pasta, cereal, crackers, sugar cereal in the morning. So it finally caught up to me. When I was 28, I was literally. I had arthritis in my fingers, my back, I had like sandpaper on the inside of my eyelids like that's all pre-diabetes. So I chronic fatigue syndrome. I was so sick, I was literally. My wife said you're looking a bit green and gray. I was just like, really, really bad.
Dr. Eric Berg:So then I tried everything. I tried a lot of vitamins, but of course I tried everything but the diet. Right, I was trying oh, let me just take this, take that. It was so wild to look back. I had no awareness on nutrition, none. So I eventually stumbled on a book that talked about insulin and I'm like, why don't I just connect the dots? So the next morning I had protein. I was like, oh my gosh, I feel great, like my entire, like someone took a helmet off my head. I just was like it was a huge shift. And then I got seriously interested in insulin as a topic and then insulin resistance and then that spread from a whole bunch of problems. But that was the turning point for me a personal experience.
Florence:And I love how I first stumbled on this information as well in my 20s and back then when I made dietary changes. The next day, I literally could make one change and feel immediately different a little bit different as we get older. It might take longer for that. Oh my gosh, that did something. So you're a junk food junkie and you're awakening to the fact that these are making you sick and feel bad. How long did it take you to unhook from it? What was that journey like for you?
Dr. Eric Berg:It was one of those things where I was, I was desperate, I hit bottom. So it didn't take much. I mean, you know, I changed my ways immediately and you know, even to this day, you know, I don't smoke, I don't drink alcohol, I don't even eat any junk food, and the problem is like at a social activity I'm not like with the group. I'm like over here, so everyone's doing their thing and I'm doing this other thing right here, so I just never I've been able to stick to it because of the pain of where I was at. You know, I'm like, okay, I don't want to feel like that, I just want to feel good. So you know, at first I kind of did different versions of the ketogenic diet. If you saw my first book, I was recommending a little bit heavier on vegetables for the liver and not as much protein, and then also I was recommending snacks. I didn't do intermittent fasting. So then, when I discovered intermittent fasting, I was like, oh my gosh. I mean, I just not discovered, I just became aware of it. I was like, wow, the combination of these two things together are amazing, you know. So, you know it's also one thing I want to bring up is that you know. We know sugar is bad for you, right. But if we take a look at a label on any box of, like a cereal or something, you'll see you'll have the total carbohydrates, right. And then underneath it you have the fiber, and in a ketogenic diet you're going to deduct that to get the net carbs. And then, of course, you also have and because fiber is a carb but it doesn't affect insulin but then you have sugars underneath that, right. So if we deduct the fibers and the sugar, we still have carbohydrates. But what type of carbohydrates are those? What I found is a lot of people don't know what that is, and that is starches. So really, we're talking about starch and when we deal with, you know, when we think about starch, we think, okay, well, that could be a vegetable, it could be a salad, it could be a potato, it could be rice. But most of these starches are none of those. They're.
Dr. Eric Berg:In the food processing industry you have maltodextrin, modified food starch, modified corn starch. Those are classified as complex carbohydrates. Isn't that crazy? So people think complex are healthy. If it's simple, it's bad. Simple carbohydrates are bad. Complex are healthy. Well, these particular starches that a lot of people don't talk about, because they're just focused on sugar. They behave not just like sugar, but even worse than sugar on the glycemic index. So this is another hidden area that I just like to make people aware of. It's the starches, too, because what is a starch? It's called a polysaccharide. Poly means many, saccharide means sugar, so it's just more sugar. So when you're consuming anything with modified food starch, maltodextrin, which is in a lot of foods, you're dealing with just a lot of sugar, and even worse than the sugar that's listed on the label just a lot of sugar, and even worse than the sugar that's listed on the label Right.
Florence:I think it was quite a revelation for me when I realized that a piece of whole grain toast was higher on the glycemic index than a teaspoon of sugar. I was like how is that? How is that even possible?
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, because of the processing you remove so much of it, you remove everything from it. You have no longer any protection from the fiber or the phytonutrients. And then you have this, this thing. That's like all it's called. They call it ultra processed it's a nice way of saying junk food. But ultra processed foods are highly industrially processed, to the point where they're literally just, they're so dead. There's nothing in them but just pure garbage. And it's so altered, it's so different.
Dr. Eric Berg:And one of the things I just want to just bring up is we're just at the very tail end of developing an app.
Dr. Eric Berg:So people could just take this free app and just scan their barcode on any food in the grocery store or their refrigerator or pantry and it'll list out in a visual form how much of these three ingredients sugar, the hidden sugars, which is the starch, and then the seed oils so that way someone can actually quickly see how much of that food is those three things and we've been doing some testing. It's the majority, it's like over 95% of most junk food is those three ingredients. So it'll be a really interesting thing and we'll have that available real soon that people can just start scanning. But you know, because if you were to read the label. You have to kind of understand a little bit of chemistry, because how are you going to understand what polydextrose, all these different names? So there's like over 50 different names for sugar, there's over 100 names for starches. So this does that for you, so you don't have to have a dictionary with you.
Florence:How does it do that?
Dr. Eric Berg:Because it can interpret the terms under the ingredients and then it can calculate yeah, it just picks it up, it reads it for you and then it just tells you how much of that sugar in a visual form, just to really, um, get people to start being aware of the stuff in the refrigerator, in the pantry, and, uh, because we're going into people's homes right now we're doing videos on this I haven't released it yet but and we start teaching people about the label and what we're realizing is that very few people read the label because they don't really understand it.
Dr. Eric Berg:So, because you can't really tell what's going on by the nutritional or the nutritional facts, you have to understand the ingredient part of that. So this does the whole thing and it just gives you a summary of what it really means in a visual form. So you'll see this container with these three different colors and it'll say sugar, starch and seed oil. So I mean the average, even seed oils. An average person consumes eight gallons of seed oil a year. Person consumes eight gallons of seed oil a year. So it's good to start to identify, like what you're putting in your body as like a really important thing, because the medical profession is not they're not focused on this, you know, so someone needs to be. It's like so, so important.
Florence:I don't know that I've. I think I may have had. I think Nina spoke about seed oils this year on the summit. I don't know if there's anything you want to add about it, like what's the big deal?
Dr. Eric Berg:Seed oils are made from seeds, not necessarily like the the they say vegetable oils. No, it's actually the seed oil. Seed oils have a lot of. It takes a lot of seeds to make oil, but to extract that oil it takes solvents. So you're adding hexane, which is poisonous, but it's not even listed on the label. So you have this industrial solvent that extracts.
Dr. Eric Berg:You have heat pressure, chemicals, you have pulverizing it to the point where it doesn't even resemble it. And then these seed oils are unsaturated, which means they're very unstable. So how can you even keep it in a bottle with light exposure, oxygen exposure? So it's been highly heated, so it's very oxidized. So it means it's very reactive on your bodies and it goes into the membranes of your cell and it gets stuck there for a few years. So that much seed oil creates all sorts of problems with your eye, the macula, with the heart.
Dr. Eric Berg:But of course, because they did an experiment and showed that it does lower cholesterol, they say it's heart healthy, but that's a lie. You're going to see I don't know when this is going to happen, but you're going to see Clash Action suits on this, because it's one of those things, just like you know when they allowed DES and then they found it causes birth defects, like 30 years later. The same thing with trans fats it's been around for a hundred years and then they finally go. Oh, we found it causes heart disease. We better take it off. I'm like, so you allowed it for this long?
Florence:The same thing with seed oils for this long the same thing with seed oils, where it's a huge human experiment. So really I know this is a bit simplistic and maybe not realistic for for many people, but if it has more than one ingredient, maybe just avoid it yeah, if it, if it has a label, avoid it.
Dr. Eric Berg:I mean, if you have, um, if you have to have this ingredient thing, you know, avoid it or understand it, because I built a kitchen right next, on the other side of this and I filled it up with the typical foods that people eat, and so I do videos on this. This, and it's amazing once you start digging into this topic what people have normalized as a part of a diet right, it's just normal it's not on their radar yet. So that's one of the things that I do is I just bring it up to your awareness to say do you realize that the quantity of exposure is going to end up affecting your body? So the point is that you have these people eating junk foods, we teach them what to eat, and then the question is what should I eat? Right? Do I start cutting out carbs? Do I do this?
Dr. Eric Berg:I think the first thing a person should do is start to add protein, like grass-fed meat, to their diet, because if you look at all these junk foods, all these processed foods you know Twinkies, pringles, doritos there's no protein in any of these things. There's no protein. So our bodies will continue to eat, and animals and insects do. They'll continue to eat until their protein requirements are satisfied. So that's another interesting point. It wasn't until I had some really good quality protein and I was like wow, feeling satisfied. Then it's going to be a lot easier to start cutting down the carbs, even if you have a blood sugar issue. Don't go for the sugar. Go for the protein. That will fix it.
Florence:Yeah, I recently heard about that. I didn't realize it was. I thought it was still like a theory, but there's some evidence to suggest that it's true that our bodies will continue to eat in search of this ideal protein ratio for our body, and once we reach it, there's a sense of satiation.
Dr. Eric Berg:You're right, it is a theory. They say it's a theory but, like I have, I raise horses. Okay, and the horse I know the horses will. They get fat in the spring and the fall when they have too much carbohydrate in the grass. And then now, with horses, you're not going to feed them meat but you can feed them an organic or non-GMO soy meal, which I wouldn't feed to a human, but they can consume legumes or things like that. So when they start consuming, I'll give them like a pound of it a day. Okay, wow, give them that protein. And then they're not obsessive about eating too much, because when they get too much carb it's called foundering, they start to be sluggish, they get fat, they get inflammation in their hoofs and it's actually prediabetes or even diabetes. So animals get the same thing.
Dr. Eric Berg:And like two of my horses they were wild horses they just got really fat and they just got sluggish. They kind of just stood around, didn't move or anything. I'm like, what am I going to do? And so I basically it was right before the winter, so I didn't even see them. They went on the other side of my property where I don't even go to. I didn't see them all winter. Obviously they didn't have much to eat, but they ate some of the grass Came back like new horses, like completely rejuvenated. They looked super healthy because they did obviously they did a lot of intermittent fasting there, but yeah, Right, right, I was going to say they were fasting, they rejuvenated.
Florence:So I floundered a horse. Once my sister who runs an organic farm and has horses and cows and the whole shebang she lent one of her horses to my daughter Skye, who was really into horses when she was a teenager, and we were taking care of it and there was this beautiful field of this most incredibly shiny, rich green grass and this poor horse was like getting this crunchy, dry, gross looking hay all the time in these little pellets and I thought, oh, I'm going to go give her some of that fresh. It just seemed like the right thing to do and I totally floundered her horse and it was a heck of a revelation for me. Wow, Like, wow. The sugar literally in a horse can make it sick too, just like humans.
Dr. Eric Berg:I know, I know.
Florence:Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Eric Berg:It survived.
Florence:Thank God it didn't it recovered.
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, and I think the big mistake is a lot of people start feet. They think they have to feed the horse the extra grains. Yeah, I don't do that, I don't do that. So, um, yeah, it's one way just to keep. They say, well, I'm going to keep. Keep the weight on. Yeah, you're keeping fat on this horse and they're just inflamed. They're inflamed.
Florence:So yeah, yeah, no-transcript brain, that's going to go. Oh well, that's not true. Come on, it's not that bad. But what do we need to know about sugar? What do we need to understand?
Dr. Eric Berg:Well, the biggest thing is when you consume the chronic amount of refined foods I'm talking about refined sugars and I'm not necessarily talking about fruit and stuff like that because I think we start doing the refined foods and we destroy the mitochondria and the mitochondria no longer works that well and it becomes not very flexible and that basically means that it cannot go from carbs to fat very easily and so it has a hard time processing fuel. And so now what happens is called metabolic inflexibility. Now you have a problem when you have just a little bit of carb, it doesn't feed the body anymore. So then you need more because there's insulin resistance right and because the body's not allowing that. When you have insulin, you don't allow the carb to go into the body. You can't fuel it. This is what starts off the nerve cells in the brain and start getting dementia. So we're in this situation where, metabolically, you destroy the cells. You have to have a different way of feeding them Ketones, which is basically it's kind of packaged fat, so the body can quickly use it, so you can bypass that whole metabolic pathway and go right and feed the cells with ketones by lowering the carb, and so this allows people to really rejuvenate their bodies and do very well to get to the point where their cells actually now become more flexible. So now, if they do go off their keto and they do have more, let's say, fruit or something like that, they can handle it a lot better, whereas before they couldn't.
Dr. Eric Berg:Now there's a certain few influencers that really have taken this to the extreme, where they're doing a lot of sugar. Yeah, some of them are doing a lot of carb and I think you know what I'm talking about and they're promoting like you need to do more carb. They were keto, but the problem with that is that the average person is not. Their system is not set up flexible enough to handle those carbs. If you put them on that, you're going to literally push them right into diabetes because their system hasn't been fixed. But if you've never eaten a lot of junk foods, you could probably tolerate more sugar if it's not so refined. But I'm a perfect example of destroying your entire biochemistry to the point where I can't eat a lot of sugar. So then, what about honey? Well, it depends on how well your system can process it.
Dr. Eric Berg:But the big thing is, you know, without getting too far into the woods, I think, if you take an average person, get them off the really bad stuff, the ultra-processed crap, and you start recommending whole foods. And you know, families have children that are not going to be pure keto. At least give them maybe some fruit or something like that, or something that is like not so packaged. That's the way to go. And so that's kind of what we're dealing with now is like we're going to into homes that are like the worst case scenario and they can't buy grass-fed, grass-finished meat and all organic. They're not going to do that. They can't. They can't afford it too. So you have to do what they can do, right. So just start eating whole foods, whether it's organic or not. So there's different levels of, I would say, quality and it has to be based on your affordability. I mean, I live on a farm. I eat all my food that I grow, right. So not everyone could do that. So I'm not going to be recommending that, because it's really hard to do that, but you can maybe go to the farmer, the local farmer that you have. That's going to be really important because right now and I think you probably are going to ask me this and I'll just kind of graduate into it what's happening right now with keto and what's happening now with? Well, I would say that red meat is part of the keto diet and so is carnivore, right.
Dr. Eric Berg:So, as you know, there's been a lot of campaigns to kind of put keto in a negative light, as well as red meat being a dirty thing. It's bad for the environment, right? You've heard about that. So what's happening is that you have two things there's four main companies that pretty much own the industrial livestock industry four companies and then you have a lot of little farmers, and what's been happening since COVID is this huge increase in grass-fed meat and things like that from farmers that are local, that are not part of those four companies, and so they're losing a little market share.
Dr. Eric Berg:So what they're doing is they have this whole campaign and they're just trying to wipe out these poor small farmers so they can have more control. One thing they're doing is they're just trying to wipe out these poor small farmers so they can have more control. One thing they're doing is they're establishing what's called um elect electronic uh identification of animals, so they can start tagging them and controlling them, and then um monitoring them. I'm not kidding, and what's interesting, the the large farms are exempt from that, which is even more fascinating. So, and of course they're. They're using that in the name of climate change. So they because cow or grass-fed animals are apparently bad for the environment because of the methane, whatever, and so this is what's happening now, and so it's making it harder for a farmer to afford to be in a business.
Dr. Eric Berg:So one thing is what I'm doing now is trying to support the small farmer and have people start buying food from the small farmer so they can exist and continue, because this is going to be our food. And the four companies that own this market also are hedging, which means they're buying up all the plant-based fake meat companies, as well as doing research on lab-grown meat it's called cultured meat which is more fake meat, which you're never going to do. So whether someone buys it from them, from this way or this way, they pretty much still want to own the whole protein thing, and so it's all about now how can we make this? How can we get people to consume it? Well, we can make it bad for the environment and scare people, and that's kind of what they're doing, unfortunately. That's kind of what they're doing, unfortunately, and keto gets in the way of that, because keto recommends a lot of beef and things like that.
Dr. Eric Berg:So this is why you'll start seeing all the stuff on the news where, oh, keto, you might lose weight, but you don't know what happens long-term it could be dangerous. It's like all these different, crazy, insane, different things could be dangerous. You know, it's like all these different, crazy, insane, different things, and I did a whole presentation on this. Um, because, as soon as keto became very popular, uh, some of these companies especially, I think, barilla, the, the largest pasta company they were freaking out because they didn't want to lose that. So they all band together and they're doing all sorts of like attacks on keto. Keto is is bad, whatever. And of course, I'm like right in the front there. So I get a lot of vegan doctors that attack me and other bad press that, oh yeah, dr Berg's recommending eggs, it's going to kill people, or his diet is so unhealthy, whatever. But that's going to come with the territory. But that's really what's happening. Keto has been getting a black eye recently.
Florence:I did not know and I'm sorry I missed that presentation. I bet you that was at the low-carb event, which I wasn't able to go to, but I didn't realize it was from other farmers, the livestock that are feeding them grains and they're tortured and miserable and not eating the foods that make them feel well. I didn't realize that they were turning on the grass fed farmers.
Dr. Eric Berg:Really they want to control, because these the grass fed industry and even raw milk too. It's going up like this, it's taking away market share from these companies. They want to maintain that control. So it's highly political. So what can we do about it? Well, I just did a whole video I didn't release it yet. That will get the awareness out to pass bills to stop this from happening.
Dr. Eric Berg:Because in Ireland, in Ireland, they drank the Kool-Aid and so the thing is like 40,000 animals were culled, that means aka killed, and you can't sell it for food because of climate change. So they say one thing it's kind of a bait and switch. They say it's for just safety, but they really want to just control the population. Population because it's, um, it's, it's infringing, infringing on their, their monopoly over over beef. If you take a look at you know you have all these uh.
Dr. Eric Berg:You also have these farmers that raise cattle to a certain time frame and then they sell them to the feedlot people, right? So they go to the feedlot people for a few months to fatten them up, um, so you have all these um, uh farmers. You probably have hundreds of farmers, but guess how many buyers you have, right, like two or three. Oh so what happens? It's like they they have it really tight-knit, they're working together and they really have a control over the whole industry. But anyway, I don't want to depress everyone, but the point is you just want to keep supporting the local farmer and buying food from them as much as you can.
Florence:Incredible, yes, farmer's markets. Is there any sort of grassroots movement to support us connecting to local farmers? Can you tell us about that?
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, yeah. In fact, if I have the option to put some links, I'll put those down below. There's a couple organizations that are fighting this right now and they're very successful, but they need support, they need awareness. So there's a lot of people that are fighting this. But you know, this is our future food right. We need the small farmers. I don't you saw some of the. You've seen some of these industrial farms, chicken farms, I mean even the.
Dr. Eric Berg:I drove down the street and when I was traveling and I saw a feedlot I drove down the street when I was traveling and I saw a feedlot. They had like hundreds of cows in this tiny little space. Right, they don't get exercise and they're just feeding them grains. So I don't want to eat that. I don't want to eat those cows. I feel bad for the cows. So we need to create transparency and awareness. Yes, low carb, but then it'd be great to consume healthy versions of beef right, the healthier, not the fake stuff, and obviously, grain fed. I mean, it's better than nothing, but we want to definitely keep our food existing.
Florence:Right, right, the animal's healthy and happy. Us happy and healthy, yeah, so one day. So my daughter did your keto course Actually, I signed up for it, but she completed it and so she was on the Dr Berg site a fair bit and at one point in time there was a shriek coming from her little office and I'm like, are you okay? She goes, mom. I don't know what happened she goes. Whenever I used to type in keto and Dr Berg, you know his YouTube videos had come up. But look at this, the top five videos are all like this red line with his face Keto will kill you. She goes. Look at all this. I was like that's so weird. So I was like, well, ask Dr Berg about that. Like was there some algorithm change? Like what's going on there?
Dr. Eric Berg:I think this was last May, if I'm not mistaken in May.
Dr. Eric Berg:They introduced medical in YouTube. So YouTube started. They wanted to introduce this whole medical team to filter out all the disinformation, right? They want to get rid of all the crazy misinformation and the quacks and the information that conflicts the World Health Organization. That's really what this is all about, and so I used to rank for a lot of different things, and now you'll see these medical people in front of me.
Dr. Eric Berg:But, what's interesting, it's backfiring, because people are not clicking on those stupid videos. Really, yeah, they're not clicking on them and they have their comments shut off. Um, and they're. They're finding. They're finding me anyway, because if you just open a incognito and you just type any subject on health, you'll see who's searching and what they're searching on, and Dr Berg is right at the top of a lot of these different topics. So people are finding my information regardless. I thought it was going to really affect the numbers and it did initially, but it came back up. So at this point in time, we still have a voice. I don't know how longer we're going to have a voice, because they're trying to.
Dr. Eric Berg:One thing they're going after right now is any type of viral videos, because they don't want to have a viral video go out there, because then it can influence whoever in someone's opinion. So, unfortunately, there's this whole battle of just getting the right information out there and I mean, you know, with all the fact checkers and all this other stuff, the stuff that's promoted, some of the doctors that do Dr Berg videos, first of all, they like, they're very much against keto. They're very, they're very much against, they're more vegan they. They're very much against beef especially. So they're going to attack doctors that do videos on that.
Dr. Eric Berg:I don't even know how this is working, but if you go to Google not YouTube and you type red meat, for some reason I'm ranking number one on the video section. I have no idea why, but I think there's enough people who watch my videos that are maybe in YouTube and things that are allowing it to exist or something like that, or else they would have shut me down a long time ago. But I'm a big threat to the sugar industry, the refined food industry, the vegan industry, and so obviously they don't like that. So that's why you have to put some videos on Rumble and other places so you, you talk about keto and you talk about healthy keto.
Florence:What's the difference?
Dr. Eric Berg:quality, like. So if you can't afford it, I would do more organic, pasture-raised type stuff, while caught grass, fed, grass, finished, versus just, you know, going like dirty keto, going to um a fast food place and just having the burger where, by the way, that burger probably came from 500 different sources. So you know it's like that will work because it's low carb. But if you take the definition of keto is like you're doing low carb but it doesn't talk necessarily about the type of fats, like seed oils, for example, right? So if seed oil have olive oil, something like that. So with healthy keto, you're doing ingredients that are just higher quality and you're not just doing like the Atkins keto bar that has tapioca fiber and starch and I mean everyone's jumping on the bandwagon on the keto bars, right. I mean all the big companies have keto lines of food and they're just all crap. I mean that's what I'mfriendly. And I'm talking about soluble cornstarch, soluble tapioca starch, I'm sorry, soluble corn fiber, soluble tapioca fiber. We don't even know the long-term studies and what's going to happen to our gut microbiome by consuming that.
Dr. Eric Berg:But because there's a loophole, industry can monitor their own safety. They can do their own studies and submit something to the FDA which they get rubber stamped as generally recognized as safe. So it's called GRAS certification. So I mean trans fats had GRAS at one time, so it doesn't mean anything. Oh, it's generally recognized as safe. When you type on ChatGPT or Google, yeah, that doesn't mean anything. And also they have another rule. I think it's called Roundup Rule. If sugar, trans fats, If sugar trans fats maltodextrin for example has less than a gram like 0.5 grams or less, they can round it up to zero, so they don't have to list it. Okay, yeah, I know. So you can have 495 milligrams of trans fats or starch or sugar and they don't have to have that in the calculation because they round it out to zero.
Florence:Got it. That's why you can see on the label sometimes in ingredients that there's some kind of sugar in there, but when you look at the ingredients it says zero. It's because they rounded it down.
Dr. Eric Berg:Yep, got it. So this little app is going to pick that up, though, because we we have ways around it so you can actually see all the hidden stuff. Yeah, it's actually. If it's point, it's 0.5 grams or less per serving size, so that's why like even a lot of supplements the supplements. I mean that's a really easy way to stick a lot of filler in there and starch and sugar, especially the kids' multivitamin mineral, I mean the gummy bears. Have you seen that Like, one serving size is a teaspoon of sugar?
Florence:Oh, my goodness, wow, no, I don't even look at them. So I think the other piece just to put in a plug for your book and your approach to keto is that I think when I first started to learn about keto, I thought of the Atkins eat meat, eat as much bacon as you can, cheese burgers, guacamole and a side of pork rinds that's a meal. I think. Oh good God, I couldn't do it. I need way more veggies. I love fresh salads, especially in my summers and springs, and you have tons of space for lots of variety of vegetables, which I think is kind of unique in the in the keto space. Do you want to speak to? Why?
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, yeah, because you have a lot of people that have switched to a carnivore because they can't handle the uh, the fiber. That's fine and that that seems to help a lot of people. I'm not changing my method. I'm not going to drink that cool just because it's working for me and a lot of other people that follow me. So. So I think, um, it really depends on your gut. If you have inflammation in the gut, that you can't tolerate that.
Dr. Eric Berg:But if you don't have inflammation in the gut, I mean the plants. I have a lot of salads, a lot of vegetables, Brussels sprouts, cabbage all the time I like it. You know. You have to realize that. You know you might say plants kill, they're out to kill people. Well, no, they're just trying to protect themselves and it's not that they're trying to kill us. But if you have certain nutrients, certain things in plants that are anti this or that, the dosages are so small. They have anti herbicides and stuff like that in plants because they're trying to protect themselves. But it creates a hormetic effect on our bodies. So it creates a little stress so we can adapt and become stronger.
Dr. Eric Berg:But also, you're feeding your microbiome and if you look at what microbiome live on, they do need some fiber and so if you completely neglect the fiber, we don't know. Yes, some of them eat meat, but we don't know long term if they're going to need some fiber or not. But I do want to say I think one of the big reasons why people have to go to carnivore is because of gut inflammation, because somewhere along the line they had antibiotics or junk food or steroids or other things that destroyed their microbiome to the point where now they have leaky gut. Point where now they have leaky gut and I'm sure you've heard this where if you take an antibiotic it's only temporary. They'll come back within a few weeks. Right, have you heard that? That is such a lie? If you just had even one broad-spectrum antibiotic, there are certain microbes that will never come back.
Dr. Eric Berg:You have altered the ratios of certain microbes. Some of those microbes help you digest fiber, so now they're called keystone microbes. Keystone microbes An architect builds this arch and there's a keystone that supports the whole arch. You have keystone microbes that have like. Even one of them it's called L reuteri has been lost in 95% of the population and L reuteri is one of the most keystone microbes that not only prevent the leaky gut and support to prevent autoimmune diseases. But it's one of the microbes that helps us make a lot of oxytocin, which is the greatest anti-cortisol stress hormone that you have. So you start putting that back and you start sleeping better, you get more. It increases stem cell for muscles and skin.
Dr. Eric Berg:So there's a lot of things, I think, that are missing in our gut because of earlier stuff that, yes, go on carnivore, but then what about replacing those microbes, what about putting them back and preventing things like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and things like that? Because then you start putting them back and you have microbes now that can digest that fiber. All of a sudden, the allergies, the lactose intolerance goes away. So there are different ways.
Dr. Eric Berg:I think the book on Super gut by Davis Davis William Davis is a great book because he makes that yogurt out of. You can actually grow that specific species in half and half within 36 hours and have like super high levels and you just take a half a cup of that a day and you start reseeding the gut, which I think is mind-blowing awesome, because it's uh, um, sometimes probiotics don't even work all the time to do that um. But also you want to change the environment and this is why I recommend like apple cider, vinegar and kombucha, and also um sauerkraut, fermented vegetables. So you start changing the ph and all of a sudden, some of these other microbes start coming back. So, yeah, you might say, well, I don't like vegetables, whatever, but your microbes do thrive on them if you can tolerate them, and I think you can actually increase the health of the microbiome with that. But that's just my opinion.
Florence:And I hear you, yeah, and I hear that everyone's a bit different and maybe what we have to start with isn't where we end up and maybe the goal is eventually to restore and maybe it's impossible. Maybe it's impossible but to restore our digestive tract, where it could handle any whole food. And now there's just so much damage done that we now have to be very strategic and clever and very specific with our own bodies how to repair the damage done from all our ultra processed foods and stress and antibiotics. And is it possible? So I have been. I probably could win a Guinness World Record for the number of antibiotics taken by a human being, truly all throughout my childhood.
Florence:But when I was in my early to mid twenties, I lived in a graduate student residence. I was doing my master's in Trinity college, dublin, and there was this entire wall of our dining room that for about four or five months of the year, during the rainy season, had about a fuzz of about half an inch, maybe a fuzz of mold. The entire time we we hated it. We pulled the dining room table away, we thought it was disgusting and all of us were chronically sick, like we had to. Actually, people have to leave and go home. None of us had any idea.
Florence:It was years later that I figured out that there was probably a mold poisoning. Anyways, I wound up with rosacea, stage of progress to stage four, the only treatment, and I was told it was incurable, that I would go blind, that the best I could do is a daily antibiotic, probably for the rest of my life, and I was on them for years and I just I just like my body breaks out in heat. I think, oh my goodness. But it's hopeful to think that maybe there's things like you know, they got solution and antibiotics and have you checked that book out yet?
Florence:I haven't. He's on our summit this year, so it's all my. It's making its way to the top of my to read pile so.
Dr. Eric Berg:So the one thing that's really interesting about l-reuteri, that microbe, is it produces uh, it's called reuterin. It's a molecule. There's six, seven molecules root of reuterind that are, um, are natural antibiotics. So think about it, they're selective just to the bad guys. So, basically, our rooterite goes in there and kills off the bad guys in the small intestine. It lives in the small intestine as well as the large, so it starts to push down these fecal microbes that invaded because of these antibiotics, because you're killing off the bacteria that keep the yeast and fungus in check. So they come up there, it pushes all that back down there and it kills it off. And that's really what you should talk to him about, because that'll be a great solution.
Dr. Eric Berg:And then the way you make it is you take ultra-prasterized, half and half organic, half and half, and you get a yogurt maker and you cultivate it for 36 hours. Um, pastor, ultra pasteurized, half and half organic, half and half, and you get a yogurt maker and you cultivate it for 36 hours, just with one microbe though. So you're not making a bunch of microbes and, uh, you one, maybe one or two really key microbes and you're gonna, you're gonna grow these microbes in like 300 billion, concentration enough to survive the stomach acid. Go into the small intestine, create huge effects, start to fix the gut and the reason probably why you got the rosacea is because that's all microbiome stuff.
Florence:It's just in balance yeah. Incredible, Anyway. So I'm just thinking anyone's listening to this and they're like oh, I've been on so many antibiotics, it can't be worse than me.
Dr. Eric Berg:So there's hope for us.
Florence:Yeah, I was on that as well. So one last thing I wanted to ask you is about you're up at 4 am reading medical journals and books and constantly turning around to share it with the world. What's your vision and your mission? What drives you?
Dr. Eric Berg:Why do you keep doing this for us? Just just so you know, after, since I'm taking this rooter, I this this yogurt thing, I'm sleeping nine hours. Now I'm getting up at six 30. So that's, that's really amazing. Um, but yeah, um. So my vision is to um. I want to, I want to um.
Dr. Eric Berg:You know, I want to create more demand for healthier alternative solutions to health, to diet. So I want to create that demand. So I'm not trying to attack the food industry. All I want them to do is I want them to change their ingredients and make healthier, because you're never going to win that battle. But if you can drive the market to some healthier, quality ingredients, then guess what happens? Those companies follow the market demand.
Dr. Eric Berg:So it's all about increasing awareness, finding out what to eat, because right now people just don't have options. So I'm trying to. I want to put people in the driver's seat of like how to create their own health, and the medical profession is pretty much gone. I mean, it's just like people already don't. They don't want drugs, they haven't adapted. It's just a joke, just manipulating your symptoms. So we don't want to fight with them, we just want to have a new model of. Let's focus on creating health rather than suppressing symptoms of disease, and at the core of that is diet and nutrition. So my goal is just to increase more awareness so people can have better options, because then the companies that sell these products and the food they're going to have to adapt, they're going to have to stick with raising grass-fed animals and not have the whole confined thing. So I mean, it's a crazy goal, but that's that's something I'm interested in right now.
Florence:Incredible, and you know that expression all the tide raises all boats. What is it?
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, I wish I would have known.
Florence:Floats all boats or whatever it is. Yeah, and and because you've you've done such a great job of capturing, being so tireless at putting out your videos and sharing the message and bringing hope and really practical things people can do to make a difference with their health. You know those of us that are struggling to try and and it is a struggle. I don't know anyone working in the alternative healthcare space that there isn't a struggle to have our services paid for. And it's so clear to me that if you want to make money, work with addictions sell cigarettes, vaping, junk food, something right If you want to make money, work in a system where the mainstream people have their trust and are spending their money, and so you're helping those of us who have solutions, be ready to catch people who are awakened, and so it's such a service to the all of us, the hundreds of thousands of us who have awakened, who are working in this parallel sort of medical paradigm.
Dr. Eric Berg:Yeah, it's kind of weird how like to get you to buy that food right, because it's literally it's not even food right. I mean, do you ever eat a teaspoon of modified food starch?
Florence:No.
Dr. Eric Berg:Okay, it's disgusting, okay. And then they have to put food coloring in it, they have to put flavoring in it, and then they have to put emulsifiers for mouthfeel, and they have to put these really when they put a natural flavor in it. And then they have to put emulsifiers for mouthfeel and they have to put these really when they put a natural flavor in there. There's over 200 chemicals. Okay, to do all this explosion to your mouth like, oh my gosh, like a Dorito, I can't wait to have another one. But the taste comes up and it comes down. So now I need another one. So they're basically not tricking your taste buds. They're tricking your brain, forcing your brain to be addicted to it, and so that's how they're selling. This is to basically get you addicted to something that's really bad for you. But that's exactly. You're right. It's like that's how they're able to sell it. They can't.
Dr. Eric Berg:Why don't you just have a great quality food? It's too expensive to do that. Let's take cornflakes. I can buy right now a metric ton of corn for $198. That can make a lot of boxes, I think. 4,000 boxes of cornflakes, that's 7,000% profit. Okay, do you know how the meat industry they're operating off of? Like a if they're lucky a 2% or 3% profit. So junk food is a great industry to get into because it's so highly profitable. But how do you get people to eat it? Well, you just got to make them addicted. And so that's where we're at, and if you and I understand how they make it, you're not going to eat it. So I think the way out is just to is awareness and education.
Florence:Thank you so much. Thanks for all that you do. Is there any final words you'd like to share today?
Dr. Eric Berg:No, I'd say if you, wherever you're at, I would just, you know, jump in and get started and test it out and start getting more knowledge about how to go without sugar and refine foods, and you'll be happy if you did that. Thank you again, thanks everyone for tuning in Sure.
Florence:Thanks for tuning in this week. If you would like more interviews, more information and more inspiration on how to break up with sugar, go to my YouTube channel KickSugarCoach or my website KickSugarCoachcom. See you next week.
