Today, we're digging into a juicy topic that's near and dear to my heart that I've been shouting from the rooftop for years, the impact of added sugar consumption on our health and what you can do right now to break free from sugar addiction because it's everywhere. Sugar hides in almost every package food and drink on the grocery store shelves and is in large part driving our chronic disease and obesity epidemic. You see, Americans consume a staggering 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour every single year. It's no wonder we're facing an epidemic of obesity and disease with over 75% of adults and 40% of kids now overweight. It's no wonder that one in two Americans has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, 90% don't know it. And even worse, 93.2% of us are metabolically unhealthy, which means you're somewhere on the continuum from insulin resistance to prediabetes to type 2 diabetes, or what I call diabesity. But here's the thing. It's not just about our physical health. It's about our mental health, too, because sugar is wreaking havoc on our brains, our mood, and our behavior. Hi, I'm Dr. Marc Hyman, and welcome to Health Hacks.

Research has linked sugar consumption to cognitive decline, depression, even Alzheimer's disease. So let's jump right into today's episode. I've been rolling up my sleeves and getting to work in Congress with my Food Fix campaign to make real change with the other white powder campaign, which highlights the severity of the sugar consumption crisis, aiming to provoke a shift in policy and public perception. Now, our Our campaign seeks to engage policymakers and to mobilize grassroots support to address the harmful effects of sugar on health. I'm talking about bold policy reforms like explicit labeling on high sugar products, limits on sugar marketing, and mandates for reformulating those sugar retreats. Now, we're making strides in the right direction, but change doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime, we have to do our part. Big food companies have hijacked our sweet tooth. They're bombarding us with sugar in so many different forms and disguises, that it's become nearly impossible to decipher what's in our food. And that's why education is so important. And today, it's all about learning how to detect hidden source of sugar in our diet. Now, we can begin to take our power back, consciously make better food choices and use functional medicine to fix our broken metabolism and reclaim our health.

So where does sugar hide in our diet? Not just the table sugar, what you use to make cookies, candy, or add your coffee or tea. That's sucrose, which is a disaccharide. It's basically two saccharides or sugar, it's glucose and fructose. But there are many types of sugar lurking in our diets, and you may not even know they're there. For example, refined flour, starch, like wheat and white flour, which are basically ultra sugar, processed food staples, raise our blood sugar even more than table sugar. So below the neck, there's no difference between a bagel and a soda. Sugar goes by many different names. At least 60, probably more. They're constantly changing the name to protect the guilty. High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, agave nectar, rice syrup, beet syrup, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate malt, dextrose, fructose, galactose, you name it, any sugar. Dehydrated cane juice, that's one of my favorite. Sounds healthy, right? The common sources, obviously, are the ultra-processed foods we're eating: sandwich, bread, bun, bagels, muffins, donuts, crackers, bretzels, cereal chips, fast food, fried foods, blenders, drinks, coffees, teas, energy drinks, sugar-sweetened beverages, soda, ice tea, lemonade, fruit juice, package of desserts, candy.

I mean, you name it. It is all around us. We're living in a food carnival of toxic sugar-sweetened foods. It's bad. Now, there are less common and well-known sources that you might not know. You know if you're eating a dessert, you're getting sugar, right? But what about salad dressing, ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, package sauces, condiments, marinades, ready to Made meals, soup, noodles, yogurt? It's like one of the worst. Pasta sauce. I mean, there's more sugar in a serving of pasta sauce than there are two Oreo cookies, for God's sake. Fruit cups, granola bars, restaurant food, sauces, condiments. I mean, it's just everywhere. And all this sugar adds up. The average American consumes 22 teaspoon of sugar a day, and kids, 34 teaspoon of sugar a day. Like I said, it's 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and 133 pounds of flour. It's about a pound a day per person per year. Now, I know I'm not having that much, guys, so you are having a lot more. Now, what impact does sugar have on our brains in our bodies. To understand the what is key here. What sugar does to our health?

What's the risk for chronic disease? And if we need to look at that, we need to first understand the why and the how. So how does sugar impact your bodies? When you eat foods containing a lot of sugar, your digestive system first breaks it down into glucose, a simple sugar that enters your bloodstream. Now, this signals the pancreas to release insulin, which is a hormone, also a peptide, actually, that plays a vital role in regulating our blood sugar levels. Now, insulin helps your cells take up glucose and get them into the cells. Your cells then break down the glucose through a process called glycolysis, which turns it into smaller molecules and then turns them into ATP for energy. This all happens in your mitochondria. Basically, you take food and oxygen, you burn it in your mitochondria and produce ATP. When you use carbohydrates to do that, it's called glycolysis. Now, any excess glucose that's not used for energy is stored in the liver and the muscle as glycogen for later use. And then your blood sugar goes back to baseline. Now, glycogen, you can't store that much, maybe about 2,500 calories. So if you're going on a marathon, you're going to bump and just run out of it, but it keeps you going for a little while.

But what happens to our body when we consume too much sugar? Well, consisting flooding the body and your cells with sugar makes them less responsive to insulin. So You need more and more insulin just to get the sugar in the cells. And this is called insulin resistance. I've talked about it forever. I've been talking about it for 30 years. It's a single biggest problem facing humanity today in terms of our health, it's economic cost, and on down the line to every downstream impact that sugar has on our society, from how we grow the food, it destroys the environment, the climate, the social impact, the cognitive impact, the list goes on. Now, your body, when you have too much sugar and you're making too much insulin, the body tries to overcompensate by producing more and more insulin. And as this cycle continues, it leads to chronically elevated insulin levels, which make you store fat. Now, insulin makes you store fat. It's a fat storage hormone. It locks the fat in the fat cells. It slows your metabolism down. It makes you hungry. It eventually stops working so you can't clear the blood sugar from your blood and you end up with higher blood sugar.

But having high blood sugar is It's a late-stage phenomenon. If you see high blood sugar on your lab test, you're already way down the road, my friends. Having high levels in the blood, ultimately with diabetes, is starvation in the midst of plenty. The glucose is there in your blood, but it's not getting taken up by your cells, which leaves our cells starving and increases our craving for carbs and sugar. I mean, type 1 diabetes, there's no insulin, and the symptom is unbelievable hunger. People with type 1 diabetes can eat 10,000 calories a day and lose to wait because there's no insulin letting the fuel into the cells. Now, if not addressed, insulin resistance will progress over time to prediabetes and to type 2 diabetes. Ultimately, the pancreas just bonks out and can't produce enough insulin to manage blood sugar levels effectively. This is happening to millions and millions of Americans all over the world. We've exported our SAD diet, the standard American diet, and are now seeing the impact globally. We've literally created the worst diet in the world and are exporting it to every country on the planet. There are now 537 million adults living with diabetes worldwide.

I think that's probably an underestimate. It's protected to be 640, 3 million by 2020, and 783 million by 2045. Think about it, this is not just overweight. We're talking about almost a billion people having type 2 diabetes, a completely preventable and reversible condition that's caused by food. We talk about foodborne illness from Salmonella. This, my is a foodborne illness. And by the way, diabetes is the most expensive chronic condition in the US. We spend about a billion dollars a day on diabetes, about 327 billion dollars. And that's just direct cost. That's not the disability, that's not the loss of productivity, that's not all the other downstream consequences. It's basically one out of every four US health care dollars. And the global costs of diabetes and its consequences are going to to $2.1 trillion by 2030. Imagine that money being used for other things that could make society better, like free education, free health care, improving communities, and any homelessness, you name it. That money would go a long way, but we're using it to treat a condition that's completely unnecessary and was a historical anomaly and rarity 150 years ago. I mean, it just didn't even exist, except if you had type 1 diabetes and type 2, and a few people who just gorge themselves ourselves on sugar and we're affluent, and it was the disease of affluence.

Now, insulin resistance is a driver of many problems: metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, every chronic disease you can think of, from heart disease to hypertension to fatty liver to obesity, to metabolic syndrome, to cancer, depression, mental health issues, and accelerated aging. It is the biggest driver of accelerated aging. So how does insulin resistance, for example, drive aging? Well, high insulin drives rapid and premature aging. Now, we've seen life expectancy go down for the first time in the history of humanity, and it's going down year after year for the first time ever. And the 2021 Global Burden of Disease Study, published in The Lancet, found a 1.6 year decline from 2019 to '21 due to COVID deaths, which is the elderly were probably responsible for most of that. And how many of these elderly had these comorbidities that were really lifestyle diseases. But even before COVID, life expectancy had been going down year over year for the first time in history. And kids born today will live sicker, shorter lives than their parents. Now, what about the quality of life, right? What about the quality of your years left? This is called your health span. Your lifespan is how many years you're alive.

Your health span is how many years you're healthy. Now, the average American spends the last 20% of their life in poor health. Imagine if you're, let's ballpark, it looks to be 80, maybe from your starting in your 60s, you're starting to go downhill and the quality of your life decreases. And a lot of that has to do with this problem of insulin resistance. Diabetics, for example, on average die six years younger than non-diabetics. Excess sugar impacts everything It has to do with aging. It impacts all of the hallmarks of aging in a negative way. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever. Now, there are many hormone and nutrient signaling pathways that are regulated by sugar. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever. Sugar inhibits longevity genes. It inhibits the activation of sertuins, which are involved in DNA repair, and one of the key hallmarks of aging. It inhibits ANPK. We might have heard of metformin, the drug that people are talking about for longevity, but this is also a drug that affects ANPK. Anpk is really important for lowering inflammation, for repairing DNA, for improving energy production, reversing insulin resistance, regulating blood sugar, enhancing stress resilience, improving autophagy, reducing cancer, right?

So if you have problems activating MPK because of all this sugar, you're not doing any of those things. And sugar messes all that up. Sugar also activates one of the most important longevity switches that I call. Mtor, you might have heard about a million targeted rapamycin. There's a drug called rapamycin. People are taking for longevity. And this is an ancient conserved metabolic pathway that when it's on all the time, it's not good, right? When it's on all the time from sugar or too much food or too much protein. It drives cancer and rapid aging. You need to be able to inhibit MTOR. Getting off of sugar is a great way to do that. People say don't eat protein, but that doesn't make sense because you need to have muscle and you need to cycle protein on and off to quiet MTOR and activate MTOR. It's like Goldilocks. Too much starch and sugar also damage your DNA. They shorten your telomeres. They cause epigenetic changes, bad ones. They damage proteins. We know the common one is called hemoglobin A1c, which measures your blood sugar. They damage mitochondria. They cause imbalances in your gut microbiome or dysbiosis.

They cause inflammation. They cause zombie cells. They make your stem cells tired. These are all the hallmarks of aging. And so sugar screws all of them up. If you want to be healthy, eating sugar is not a good strategy. If you want to live a long, healthy life, definitely sugar and starch should not be high in your list of foods you're eating. There's ways of measuring your your sugar levels, hemoglobin A1c, which is an average blood sugar over the last six weeks, and also other things called advanced glycation end products, which is also known as ages. Basically, it means proteins and sugars gloming onto each other, like crispy chicken, a cruster of bread, creme brûlé, that crispy part on top. That's fine, sometimes to eat it, but the problem is that these advanced glycation end products gum up your works. They cause inflammation, causing damage to your DNA, to your cholesterol. They age us rapidly. They cause oxidative stress, inflammation, and some resistance, type 2 diabetes, heart disease. They accumulate as we get older, and sugar is one of the biggest drivers to this damage. One of the hallmarks of aging is damaged proteins, and sugar is one of the main ways that our proteins get damaged.

That's why you get kidney disease and blindness and damage to blood vessels in your legs and your penis and your heart and your brain. It's just everywhere becomes a mess with diabetes. A study, for example, of over 500 women in the community who are over 65, found that high levels of these advanced glycation end products or ages, which is primarily from eating sugar, doubled the risk of dying from heart disease in middle-aged women because they promote oxidized LDL, which is rancid cholesterol, and they damage the lining of your arteries. Well, they're bad, right? These ages, and it's a great name for it, ages, age you, from processed diet, from fried foods, they also cause other problems you might not want, like wrinkles, fine lines, because they cross-think with collagen. So not only do you look old on the inside, but you look old on the outside. Obviously, sugar It's a huge driver of obesity. Added sugars and ultra-processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages are really high in calories. They're low in fiber and protein, and it makes them easy to overate. High sugar intake, for example, leads to high blood sugar and high insulin levels. Insulin is a fat storage hormone.

It makes you store excess calories from sugar as belly fat, even from fat, if you have excess free fatty acids. Belly fat is called visceral fat. We've done a whole podcast on this. It's very dangerous belly fat that secretes a whole fire of inflammation. Literally, think of it, fire in the belly. When you eat sugar, it makes your fat cells grow in your belly, and you get a fire in the belly that creates inflammation throughout your It's like a wildfire spreading through your body, creating havoc in every single organ and tissue. And it increases the risk for every single chronic disease. Like cancer, for example, high insulin levels promote cancer cell growth. What's the mechanism? Well, cancer loves sugar. So sugar feeds tumor cells. It creates inflammation and oxidative stress. It damages your tissues. It suppresses your immune system. Like sugar, it suppresses your immune system, folks. Just headline news, it suppresses something called killer T cells, which are scavengers that go on hunt and destroy missions for cancer, so they don't work. It increases growth factors that are bad, like forming new blood vessels, angiogenesis. It provides the fuel and nutrient to tumors, which boost cancer cell growth.

In fact, the way we test for cancer is we give you radioactive label sugar, and that sugar, like a homies pigeon, goes right to the cancer because it sucks up all the sugar. Kills me that doctors say, Don't eat tofu for breast cancer, but they say, Give me a milk shake, which is probably the worst possible advice because tofu is not going to cause breast cancer. It's not really an estrogen. It's a phytochemical that modulates estrogen, so it's not bad. In this constant sugar influx will also activate MTOR, which you've heard a bit about for me and also written about in my book, Young Forever. When you activate MTOR, you stop this process that you need called autophagy or self-cleaning, repair, and healing to basically recycling that heals your body and extends life. Breast cancer, for example, has been very much linked to sugar. In a case control study, women under 45 who had sweets more than 10 times a week had a significantly high risk of breast cancer compared to those who consume less than three times a week of sugar. And there was no significant link between the risk of breast cancer and calorie or fat intake.

So independent of calories or fat, sugar was the main association here. In another study, women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer who drank sugary sodas five times or more a week were 85% more likely to die from breast cancer than those who rarely or never drink soda. I mean, just think about it. Sugar feeds cancer. What about colorectal and pancreatic cancer? Well, you have to understand that many of the most common cancers are driven by insulin resistance and this whole phenomena. Studies show that sucrose intake, or basically sugar, is associated with more than a two-fold increase in the risk of colon cancer and high sucrose or sugar, high carb, high fructose soft drinks, are associated with increased risk for pancreatic cancer. What about heart disease? Well, if you have diabetes, you're twice as likely to have heart disease or stroke than someone who doesn't have diabetes. How? Well, the high sugar levels damage your blood vessels and causes really bad types of cholesterol. We call it atherogenic dyslipidemia. So two thirds of all heart attacks are caused by these weird types of cholesterol that are formed from eating a high sugar-starch diet. So there's small, dense LDL particles.

There's like BPs. Instead of like light, fluffy beach ball cholesterol, they're like, Bibis. They damage your arteries. High triglycerides and low HDL and high blood pressure, all caused by sugar, and that drives heart disease. So this increases the likelihood of the cholesterol getting stuck in the arteries, causing oxidative stress, inflammation, plaque buildup, reduced blood flow, hardening the arteries, and increased risk for heart attack and stroke. It's just a domino effect. So what's the impact of sugar on the brain? We've gone through cancer and heart disease and stuff. What about the brain? Well, sugar is addicting. We're hardwired to seek out sugar and energy dense foods because our survival depended on it. If we found a honeycomb or a bunch of berries, we'd suck them all down and store fat for the winter, but we just keep eating all winter. Sugar stimulates the brain's reward centers, the pleasure centers, through a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is Exactly like other addictive drugs, right? Heroin, cocaine, nicotine. Now, this is a survival mechanism, but it's backfired, right? Beries foraging for wild berries and storing excess sugar as fat for hibernation is a good thing. I mean, they gain 500 pounds in the summer, and then they go to sleep.

But we just keep eating all winter, right? We have sugar at our fingertips all the time. And when we consume sugar, it releases insulin to bring the glucose back into our cells, and any excess is stored in the fat tissue. And your blood sugar drops within an hour or two, which then causes us to crave more sugar. So you're on this roller coaster of sugar cravings and hunger. And actually eating more sugar makes you more hungry. So sugar is highly addictive because of the way it's packaged and consumed, particularly in ultra-processed foods, which, by the way, are scientifically designed by the food industry. And I've talked about this. They have taste institutes that are craving experts to find the bliss point of food, to create heavy users, their own internal terms, which are really do to hijack your brain. They combine sugar and salt and fat in these hyper palatable, easy to over eat foods that aren't really even food. They're food like science projects. They do this to trick our biochemistry and to maximize the consumption of products. Remember the commercial laced potato chips? I bet you can't eat just one. Well, that's true.

I mean, who binges on a bag of avocados? But a bag of potato chips or cookies, not so hard. Even a whole sheepcake, right? Now, brain imaging scans or MRIs shows that high sugar foods work just like heroin, opium, or morphine in the brain. Now, we know that, and we actually can see this in animals and human models, that there is literally sugar withdrawal when we stop sugar, like physiologic withdrawal, like they have from heroin or alcohol. We know that sugar creates inflammation also in the body and it's a resistance, and it creates this in the brain, not just the body. That brain inflammation is what's causing It's causing mental health crisis. It's causing increased depression, anxiety, behavioral issues, aggression, violence, and even memory and dementia. Doctors Richard Johnson, Dr. Dale Brettison, and Dr. David Perlmutter published a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discussing the damaging effects of fructose, which is fruit sugar, mostly found in soda and ultra-processed food in the form of high-prustose corn syrup. You looked at that on the brain's energy metabolism via brain glucose hypometabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammation. A lot of big medical words. But basically, they looked at the brains to see what happened with metabolism, with their mitochondria, and with inflammation in the brain.

It was bad. I'm just saying. What about Alzheimer's? Just like you can be insulin resistant in your body, you can be insulin resistant in your brain, too. That's why researchers are calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes. You see, research shows that decreases in brain glucose metabolism occur more than 10 years before Alzheimer's symptoms. You can start to look at this way before. In a study called the Whitehall to Cohort Study, middle-aged adults with diabetes had a 45% faster decrease in memory, a 29% faster decline in reasoning, and a 24% faster decline in global cognition than normal glycemic individuals. Now, the reduced glucose metabolism and insulin resistance in the brain, particularly the hippocampus, which is the memory center, increase the accumulation of amyloid beta and tau, especially in APOE4 carriers. And what that means in English is basically the more prediabetic your brain is, the more you get this stuff gumming up your brain, particularly if you have the gene for Alzheimer's. So if you have the gene for Alzheimer's, sugar ain't your friend, you want to stay away. Other studies, not just on Alzheimer's, but on dementia, there was a large study called the atherosclerosis Risk and Community Study.

It was published in 2023. It found that being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes before the age of 60, which is a lot of people now. We're seeing people as young as 2 years old getting type 2 diabetes, meaning sugar, soda. If you had type 2 diabetes before the age of 60, it was associated with a three times increased risk of dementia, which is totally in line with other studies showing that the younger you are at diabetes onset, the higher risk of developing dementia. Now, what about depression? Like I said at the beginning, sugar affects everything, whether it's your metabolic health, your weight, heart disease, cancer, depression, dementia. In particular, in depression, it's a big issue. In a population study of 16,000 adults from 2011 to 2018, this is a US and Haynes database. I'd mentioned this before in the show, it's a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that's done by the government on a regular basis with thousands of Americans tracking their blood and their stories and their food intake. The total sugar intake was positively associated with a 56% high risk of depression in obese adults. Another study found that the risk of depression was significantly correlated with sugar intake, and for every 100 grams a day in increase in dietary sugar, there was a 28% higher risk of depression.

Basically, eating sugar makes you depressed. Maybe makes you feel good for a few minutes, and then boom, crash depression. According to another study, a prospective study called the Nurses Health Study, published in JAMA, 21,000 women aged 42 to 62 with depression, those who had the most ultra-processed foods, which is a lot of sugar, were 50% more likely to have depression. Now, there's After study, after study, after study. I'm not going to even labor this. I did a whole podcast episode on ultra-processed food and mental health. I encourage you to listen to that. But there's no lack of data. I always hate this mnemonic of evidence-based medicine. Oh, well, we can't do this because it's not evidence-based. Well, what it means is you haven't read the freaking evidence. I mean, there's plenty evidence. Just go to PubMed and National Library Medicine. There's probably 10 million scientific papers. Go search for sugar and depression, ultra-processed food and depression. Dementia, sugar and dementia. It's there. The science is there. It's just not hitting your doctor's office, and it's not hitting our public health recommendations. It's not hitting our policies. And that's why I work so hard on policy to try to get this changed.

Now, what's the impact of on the economy and the quality of life? Well, people are living longer. Although our life expectancy is going down, we're not living up to 40, but there's way more disability, way shorter health span. A 2018 study of chronic disease in the US, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, said that 75% of healthcare costs, 75%, I think it's probably more, are attributable to preventable conditions. Two-thirds of all these deaths result from five chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer, stroke, emphysema, and diabetes. Except for emphysema, which is primarily caused by smoking, all these are diet-related and primarily sugar and starch-related. Now, this is a scary statistic. We're seeing our government federal deficit go up. We're seeing trillions of dollars being spent on health care. And in Medicare, basically, 96 cents out of every dollar is spent on chronic disease. And for Medicaid, it's 83 cents of every dollar spent on chronic disease, which is almost entirely preventable. Chronic pain, depression, headache disorders, and many, many other things. Now, according to the World Economic Forum, health-related productivity losses cost the US employer's $530 billion every year. Now, globally, the cost of loss productivity is over $2 trillion.

All right, so economy bad, money bad, health bad. What about our kids? Well, children are increasingly affected by this diabetes epidemic. One in five kids has obesity. 40% are overweight. 17% of kids who are aged between 10 and 17 are obese. And get this, folks, one out of every four, 25% of teenage boys are either diabetic or prediabetic. I'm not talking about juvenile diabetes. I'm talking about what we used to call adult onset diabetes, which is a diet-related problem. Now, research suggests that up to 10% of kids have Nafoldy or fatty liver, and up to half of those have NASH, which is a more serious version with inflammation of the liver and liver damage that leads to liver transplants. There are now teenagers on the liver transplant list getting liver transplants from drinking soda. I am not I'm making this up. I went to an obesity conference that was focused on children one year, and I met this doctor there who was a gastroenterologist. I'm like, Well, what are you doing here? And he was actually a liver specialist. I'm like, Well, sadly, these kids are getting liver damage, and they need liver transplants. I'm like, Wow.

Research also estimates that the incidence of prediabetes in children is about 10%, which is a lot. It's probably likely more, depending on how you define it. We We see 12-year-old boys who have lived on soda for years getting liver transplants from having a fatty liver. How does conventional medicine handle excess sugar consumption and the chronic diseases that come with it? They don't. Doctors don't talk about nutrition. When you come in with one of these diseases, cancer or dementia or heart disease or diabetes, diabetes, they really don't talk about it. Maybe with diabetes, they mentioned, probably cut down in sugar or starch, but they don't do it until it's too late. And these symptoms of chronic disease are just full-blown, and they think a wait-and-see approach. I This one patient had a high blood sugar. I said, Have you seen your doctor about this? There wasn't quite diabetes yet. It was close. He said, Oh, yeah, my doctor said they're watching it. And as soon as it gets over the threshold of diabetes, they're going to give me drugs. I'm like, Great. Not exactly what we should be doing in medicine. We should be much more proactive and preventive.

And of course, once you get up to that level, they then diagnose diabetes, they prescribe insulin, hypoglycemic drugs. The newest class of drugs is Ozempic. Maybe statins, they give you all kinds of stuff. They don't get to the root of the problem, which is our processed sugar diet or ultra-processed food, the sugar addiction that comes from it, all of it. It's not their fault. They don't get trained in nutrition. A study found that on average, there's only 11 hours of nutrition training. I can tell you in my medical school class, I had nutrition training, but it was about starvation. Quashyorkor, mirasmus, rickets, scurvy, xerophthalmia, beriberry, palagry, all these diseases I've never seen, because we all have fortified diets and vitamins. I've never seen scurvy. That's what we learned about, not actual nutrition that matters in the 21st century. Given the advice from the government, it's even worse. Eat less, exercise more. There's no bad calories. It's all about moderation. It's all about energy. It doesn't matter if you have all your diet from soda as long as you don't overshoot your calorie limit. Well, nonsense. Then, of course, they told us to eat a low fat diet because there was a whole myth that fat made you fat because it had more calories and carbs and caused heart disease.

But that's just crazy. It didn't work. We actually were told to do it, and we did it. The food pyramid said in 1992, have 6-11 servings of diet of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta every day. Well, that's a disease-causing diet. It's why we end up seeing this hockey stick of obesity and diabetes. Don't get me started on that. Then we prescribe all these drugs like the GLP-1 agonist, Ozempic, statins, Lipitor. It doesn't really deal with diet. It doesn't look at your hormonal balance, and it doesn't really look at what the issues are. I do a very aggressive screening for metabolic disease in my practice. I do it regularly. I also co-created a company, co-founded a company called Function Health, where you can get a full panel of metabolic health biomarkers that you're not going to get at your regular doctor, including insulin, adiponectin, leptin, lipoprotein fractionation, inflammation markers, things that you're not hearing about, probably you're not tested for. You can just check it. I go to functionhealth. Com/mark if you want to skip the waitlist. There's about 200,000 people in the waitlist, so you want to do that. You want to know your blood sugar, right?

Your fasting blood sugar should be under 100, but really probably more like 70, 85. Pre diabetes is 100 to 125. Diabetes is But what if your sugar is 124, your normal diabetes? Well, it's ridiculous. We use optimal reference range in functional medicine, not what's normal for a population. That should be probably 70 to 85. Now, conventional medicine doesn't test some of the most important things you need to test. They'll check your blood sugar, they'll check your cholesterol. That's about it. They'll check your liver function test. If you have fatty liver, they'll find it. If you have kidney failure, they'll find it. But that's late stage, right? What is the first sign? The first sign is high insulin level. Now, it could be fasting, but usually it's after a sugar meal that you get high insulin. But fasting insulin is a very good marker and it's part of our function health panel. The first sign of insulin resistance is a high insulin level after meals and then a high fasting insulin after that. And by the time doctors check properly for your blood sugar with hemoglobin C and everything, it's often too late, right? This has been going on for decades, and the reference rates are just too high.

And in fact, In insulin levels, the reference range in the labs is so stupidly high. 93.2% of us have metabolic poor health. So if you're looking at averages, which is how we actually look at the reference rates as we take the population and you look at a Bell Curve and you put the middle of it and then two standard deviations is the normal. Well, it should be not less than 25 for insulin. It probably should be less than five. If it's optimal, it should be 2-5. If it's over 10, I'm concerned. Over 15, I'm really concerned. Also, you might We measure a few things normally, like I mentioned, with conventional medicine like hemoglobin A1c, your liver function test, blood pressure, cholesterol, your body weight. But we really need a much deeper look, and I think we need a much more sophisticated look, looking at lipoprotene fractionation, looking at insulin levels, looking at advenectin, leptin, other markers that relate to your metabolic health, looking at inflammation levels, all that's important. Hormonal levels. We do a really comprehensive view of what makes up your metabolic health. How does functional medicine take a look at too much sugar in your diet.

Well, it's proactive. We do lab testing. We understand where you are deviating from optimal. We look at all the things that I just mentioned, the fasting insulin, blood sugar, A1c, liver enzymes, lipoprotene fractionation, which is We look at much better cholesterol tests that everybody should be doing. We look at inflammation levels, leptin, adiponectin, sex hormones, cortisol. We measure your waist to hip ratio. We look at body composition, ideally with visceral fat. So what's the protocol to fix this whole sugar Well, number one, again, you're probably sick of me saying this, but don't eat ultra-processed foods. They're just not food. They're deconstructed food-like science projects that are Franken Foods that should never be consumed by humans. Period. End of story, done. It's just not food. If I see something like that on the shelf, I could as well be looking at a rock. I'm like, Well, that would never go in my body. Why would I eat a rock? So think about that way. And it's not to say you can't avoid sugar sometimes. I think we can enjoy all these foods that are real foods. But think of sugar as a recreational drug. You wouldn't have tequila at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but we have sugar for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

So avoid the additional added sugar. It's not the sugar you add to your coffee of one teaspoon. It's the 12 teaspoon of sugar that are in your sweetened coffees that you get at Starbucks. Avoid refined flowers. Like gluten-containing flowers, particularly for other reasons. But just refined flowers are bad. Bread, pasta, rice is sometimes okay if it's whole grain. Potatoes, small potatoes can be fine, but not big starchy potatoes. Never drink liquid sugar drinks, soda, juices, sports drinks, energy drinks. I mean, orange juice, terrible. Yeah, it's got a little more vitamins and maybe a little fiber, but just basically like drinking a soda with a few vitamins and fiber. Crackers, chips, candy, package desserts, all that stuff. Get rid of it. Now, if you really have high blood sugar or you're diabetic, you want to go a little It's a little more extreme. You want to cut out starchy veggies like potatoes, root vegetables, grains, beans can be a problem for some. Too much fruit, particularly tropical fruit. You want to eat only real wholefoods. Pretty low glycemic diet. We talked about that a lot. You'd protein every meal. Protein will help a lot. So get 30 to 50 grams of protein, at least about 100 per day.

For most people, about a gram per pound of ideal body weight. If you're 120 pounds, it's 120 grams a day. It could be 100, 120. Why is protein essential? Well, it cuts your hunger, it makes you feel full, and it helps regulate your immune system, and it's critical for pretty much every function of your body. And generally, if you don't overreat it, you're not going to get any problem with your sugar because protein can get turned into sugar. But you want to eat the right kind, grass-fed or regeneratively-raised meat, lamb, beef, bison, deer, elk, pastorate, eggs, and poultry. I love Force of Nature. You go to forceofnature. Com. They have great regeneratively-raised meats, lots of healthy fats. Fat is your friend. If it's a good healthy fat, they will curb your appetite. They will help reverse this insulin resistance problem. Avocados, extra virgin olive oil, olives, nuts, seeds, omega-3 fats from small fish, macrowal, anchovies, sardines, herring, nuts, seeds. To make sure you... Also, if you want to have some saturated fat from coconut oil or grass-fed butter or ghee, if you tolerate that, that's okay. But make sure you check your lipids. Polyphenol is really important.

Phytochemicals, all these colorful plant compounds in food are really critical. 5-9 servings is minimum, probably more like 10-18 servings a day. A serving is a half a cup. So you're talking like five cups a day would be great of veggies. At least prebiotic fibers are really important for your gut. That helps to slow the absorption of certain foods. It helps slow the spikes in sugar. You can eat slow carbs. We're not fast carbs, right? Fast carbs or sugar. Slow carbs are veggies. I mean, veggies are carbs, That's good. You want your most of your diet to be that. Artichokes, arugula, aspergus, beansprouts, beet greens, broccoli, brusselsprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, dandelion greens, pretty much everything, right? Mushrooms, onions, parsley, rutabega, spinach, just charged, tomatoes, bikini. The list goes on and on. Any vegetable, right? Lots of fruit, but good fruit, right? Blackberries, strawberries, cranberries, kiwis, lemons, raspberries, small, non-sugary fruits. Beans can be fine if you're not fully diabetic. They may be a problem if you are. You have to watch what you're doing. So whole soy products are higher in protein like tofu, tempe. They're fine. Plenty of fiber from all kinds of plant foods. Make sure you have plenty of antioxidants from all the colorful fruits and vegetables.

Use plenty of spices. If you want to really cut the sugar and you really want to do the best plan, and I'm not just saying this got created, but I've done this with thousands and thousands of people, and it really works. I just literally did a retreat in Spain where we did a longevity retreat, but we put people based on a 10-day detox diet. From my book, The 10-day Detox Diet. This really is a sugar detox diet. It helps break the addiction, helps balance your hormones, your metabolism, your brain chemistry, and it can be really powerful to just reset. I just did it myself. Actually, I did it. Listen, I like sugar like anybody else. I was in Spain, and I was actually on a bike trip, and I was probably eating more stuff and a little more wine and maybe a little dessert here and there. I've come back from doing this just a week, and not even, six days of detox in Spain afterwards. And I'm like, Normally, I want a little chocolate after dinner. I don't want anything. I even have it in my cupboard. I have chocolate-covered almond, which you might A healthy, guilty pleasure.

But I don't want them. I'm just not even attracted to it. So your body will reset. Of course, exercise is important. That'll help make you more insulin sensitive, about 150 minutes a week. You can do any cardio, strength training, you can do interval training. The right supplements are important. You want the right supplements. You want basically a multi B-complex, lipoic acid, sometimes fiber. Pgx fiber is great. It's made from cognac root. Magnesium is important for blood sugar regulation, vitamin D, chromium. Verborine is great, which is a natural ANPK activator, which is really important. There's also probiotics that can help your gut, like pendulum glucose support and so forth. There's a lot of things you can take. Also, don't skimp on sleep. Sleep really will impair your metabolism, will make you more insulin sensitive, will make you more create more carbs, make you over eat the next day, make you more inflamed. So just make sure you get seven or eight hours sleep. Now, some Sometimes if you have diabetes, you need a little more aggressive approach. But I can tell you, there are not many patients that I've had that I can't get off all the diabetes drugs, including insulin.

There was a large trial with Verta Health where they looked at types of diabetics who are on insulin, and about, I think it was like 95 or more % got off insulin, 99 % got off the main medications. It's really possible. I encourage you to look at other topics I've written on this. I did a whole podcast on Ozempic, which may have a role, but again, I'm not a big fan. I think we dove deep on the pros and cons of Ozempic. It's a very nuanced topic, and I'm still learning, but we have to wear away the pros and cons of these new drugs, the risks and the side effects. And again, I've done a whole podcast on Ozempic. You can listen to that. So I just think it's really clear that sugar in our diets is more than just a simple indulgence. It can be used, but think of it as a recreational drug. And if we just overuse it like we are, it has a huge impact on our health, on our economy, the well-being of our children. And to reclaim our health, we don't have to just to cut back on sweets.

We need to understand where the sugar is hiding our diet. We have to recognize it's profound impact on our bodies and our brains. And we have to take a proactive step toward a healthier lifestyle. It doesn't mean we have to give up sugar entirely. Maybe if you're diabetic, you're over the hill. And once you reverse your diabetes and you get metabolically resilient, you can add it back. But as a treatment, you probably have to cut it out. But it's important to think of sugar as a recreational drug. The dose makes the poison. We just have to focus on real food, wholefoods, prioritize protein, healthy fats, fiber, all which are the antidote to metabolic dysfunction, good lifestyle changes like exercise, sleep. Basically, we can really undo the damage caused by excess sugar consumption. I had a patient who had been on insulin for 10 years and was massively overweight, severely overweight. Heart failure. I talked about it before in the podcast. Three days of putting on the 10-day detox diet, she was off her insulin. Three months, she normalized her blood sugar and reversed her diabetes. So remember, it's not about being perfect. It's about just making informed choices that support our health and well-being.

And as we've seen today, the stakes really can't be higher. It's crippling our society. It's making us sick. It's making us overweight. It's burning our economy. And the impact of sugar reaches deep in our society. It doesn't just affect our individual health, but the health of our children, and even the sustainability of our healthcare system, and Medicare. We're just going to buckle under the weight of all this. So hopefully, now that you're armed with all this knowledge, I hope you feel empowered to make changes to transform your health, and tune in next time for another enlightening episode of Health Hacks.