The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dr. Richard Johnson: How Sugar Fuels Cancer, Dementia, and Aging
Sugar isn't just empty calories – it's an active driver of disease through a fascinating biological mechanism that evolved to help mammals survive food scarcity. In this eye-opening conversation with Dr. Richard Johnson, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and author of "Why Nature Wants Us to Be Fat," we explore the unexpected ways fructose hijacks our metabolism.
Dr. Johnson, often described as the "Indiana Jones of nutrition science," reveals how fructose works by actually depleting cellular energy rather than increasing it. This creates a paradoxical situation where our bodies store more fat while simultaneously making us feel exhausted and constantly hungry. The biological pathway, designed to help animals like bears fatten up before hibernation, now works against us in our sugar-saturated world.
Most alarming are the connections between fructose metabolism and serious diseases. Cancer cells specifically seek out fructose to fuel their growth in low-oxygen environments, explaining why certain cancers are strongly associated with high sugar consumption. Even more compelling is the evidence linking fructose to dementia – from the earliest stages of cognitive decline showing the exact biological signature of fructose metabolism to animal studies demonstrating memory impairment after just two weeks of sugar exposure.
Perhaps most surprising is Dr. Johnson's revelation that our bodies can manufacture fructose internally, especially during mild dehydration or when consuming salty foods. This explains why the combination of salt and carbohydrates is particularly problematic for weight management – they signal our bodies to convert glucose to fructose and store fat.
The good news? Understanding this pathway opens doors to protection through specific nutrients like omega-3s and vitamin C, and explains why low-carbohydrate approaches can be so effective. Whether you're concerned about weight, cognitive health, or cancer prevention, this conversation offers practical insights into breaking free from sugar's powerful grip on your metabolism.
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Hello everybody and welcome to an interview today with Dr Richard Johnson, who is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado. He is both a clinician and a medical scientist who's been internationally recognized for his work on sugar and in particular, fructose and its byproduct, uric acid, and how they may play a role or how they do play a role in both obesity and diabetes. He's been funded by the National Institutes of Health and he has been widely published. He has over 500 articles and he's the author of several popular books. His latest book is called why Nature Wants Us to Be Fat and it is gobsmackingly interesting. It's a page-turner All of his books are.
FLORENCE:I always joke with Dr Johnson that he reminds me of the modern day Indiana Jones and literally he's off on an archaeology adventure this week. But he gets right in, right in deep into these fascinating little known facts. For example little known fact from his book Nature Wants Us to Be Fat is that the body can manufacture fructose. So it doesn't even matter if we're not eating it. It literally, in states of dehydration, will manufacture fructose. So, oh my gosh, so interesting. And why that's interesting we'll get in today. Dr Johnson is prepared to talk today on the connection between sugar and cancer and Alzheimer's or dementia and aging. So take it away, dr Johnson.
DR JOHNSON:Okay, well, thank you, florence, it's a real pleasure to be on your show and thank you for the very nice words. Yeah, I like that connection with Indiana Jones. He was my hero. So, anyway, yes, he was my hero. Anyway, yes, so I think everyone knows that sugar is not healthy, right? There's just millions of papers on it. Now.
DR JOHNSON:Originally it was pushed as just being a calorie that didn't benefit anybody, kind of like a useless calorie, but actually now we know that sugar actually is proactive in leading to obesity and diabetes, and sugar and high fructose corn syrup is another type of added sugar. These make up the two major sugars in our diet table sugar and high fructose corn syrup and both of them are mixtures of glucose and fructose, and these are two major simple carbohydrates, what we call monosaccharides, that combine to form table sugar or sucrose, and they also can be mixed together to make high fructose corn syrup, and fructose is the sweeter of the two, and so with a high fructose corn syrup, they did tests and they decided that people prefer a little bit sweeter sugar than just table sugar. So high fructose corn syrup has a little more fructose than glucose. So these two sugars make up about 15% of our diet, of the average Western diet, and it turns out that they have a very, very potent role in driving obesity and diabetes and all of these conditions. They do so not so much from their calories but because the fructose activates a whole biologic response in the body to make you hungry and to eat more than you normally do.
DR JOHNSON:Normally we regulate our weight very well, but when you eat enough fructose it activates a process that eventually makes you what is called leptin-resistant, where you basically can't control your appetite and you stay hungry, and that drives weight gain because you eat more. And actually high-fat foods are a major role in driving that weight gain. So high-fat foods do make a difference and seed oils and things like that make a difference. But if you go on a very low-carb diet where you're not being exposed to sugar and fructose and you're on a very low carb diet, you can eat a lot of fat. You won't get fat. So people on a keto diet, for example, can eat a very high fat diet but not not gain weight because they're still regulating their weight.
DR JOHNSON:So what fructose does is it dysregulates our control mechanism and animals, like bears in the fall, will eat tons of fruit, not little bit of fruit, like what we do, which is healthy. They'll eat a lot of fruit which contains the fructose, and then they become very voraciously hungry, they don't regulate their weight and they gain fat, which they use to help them survive the winters. So there was a reason for this that fructose was developed in nature as a way to help animals prepare for starvation. That's where the title nature wants us to be fat comes from. So the way the fructose works, though fat comes from.
DR JOHNSON:So the way the fructose works, though, is it acts by dropping the energy in your cells, in your body. Now, this sounds funny because normally, when we eat calories, we're eating it to increase our energy. So when we eat food, we're making energy from it that we use to do everything we want, and that energy is actually produced mainly in the mitochondria. I'm going to get to the dementia part and all this cancer, but this is a little background just to help so that people understand this better. So, when you eat calories, you're using it to make energy, and energy is what we do to do everything we want from thinking, walking, talking and that energy is from ATP, and that's produced mainly in the mitochondria. These little things in our cells churn out this ATP, and when we eat foods, the foods get converted into tiny little things that the mitochondria can use to make energy.
DR JOHNSON:And so it was thought for a long time that the way you get fat is you just eat too many calories and so once the ATP levels go up to their, they fill up the cell. Then the extra energy would go into fat. But that would mean that you'd be in a high energy state when you're obese. And yet most people with obesity, if you actually look in their tissues and biopsy their muscles and their liver, the ATP levels are low. So that's kind of a paradox. How can you be eating more calories but your ATP levels are low?
DR JOHNSON:And the trick is that this is the fructose effect, and what fructose does is it stuns the mitochondria to make the ATP levels low, to make the ATP levels low, but that creates more hunger and you're eating calories. And so what happens is you start eating more calories, but the mitochondria can't make the amount of ATP that it needs. It takes a longer time, and so the calories get shunted into stored energy, and stored energy is fat, because the fat can be broken down to make ATP. That's how the bear lives in the winter they break down that fat to make the ATP that then they use to survive. But what fructose does is it blocks the fat from breaking down and it blocks the mitochondria from making it. So you stay in a low energy state and that makes you hungry and you eat more. So it's kind of a trick.
DR JOHNSON:Obesity if you look at all the energy that an obese person or overweight person the fat contains energy but you can't use it. You can't because the fructose is blocking you from using it. So you're in a high energy state but ironically, total body energy is high but inside your cells the ATP is low. So you're tired and you're weak and it activates all these things that try to help you survive, like the body thinks you're starving. So you eat more and eventually the ATP levels do fill up. But at that point you've reset to a higher weight and if it keeps being activated you're going to continue to gain weight. So it's kind of a trick and one of the there's some bad side effects from this One is that it can cause insulin resistance.
DR JOHNSON:This causes insulin resistance and that leads to diabetes. It will raise blood pressure and when it's chronically high, that will cause hypertension. It stimulates low-grade inflammation which turns out to drive heart disease and when it comes to cancer. It's an incredible thing because when you suppress the mitochondria, the mitochondria use oxygen to make energy. But you can make energy without oxygen oxygen. There's an anaerobic pathway, it's called glycolysis. Normally we don't use it very much, but when we, if you're like, really exerting you may, may end up stimulating some anaerobic energy production. And anaerobic energy production there's always a little bit going on. But most of the energy we're making uses oxygen. That's why we breathe. That's why we have to breathe. Oxygen is because oxygen is critical to making energy, but from the mitochondria. But what fructose does is it suppresses those mitochondria and it sort of activates the anaerobic pathway. Now, this is great if you're like and the body can. As you said, florence, the body can make fructose as well.
DR JOHNSON:We make fructose from carbs. They can only be made from carbs and they're made from glucose from carbs. They can only be made from carbs and they're made from glucose. And so when you eat starchy foods that are high in glucose, they can be turned into fructose and things like pancakes and bread and rice and noodles and cereals. I don't know about you, but I really do love bread, hot bread, fresh bread. That's bad stuff actually. When it comes to fructose, because as your blood glucose goes up, that triggers a conversion to fructose and not all of it gets converted. About 30% gets converted when the glucose goes up high and normally only 3% is converted. So eating high glycemic foods is a bad thing, all right.
DR JOHNSON:So, getting back to this oxygen thing, there are these animals that will start making fructose to help them survive low oxygen states, and the whale, for example, to help them survive low oxygen states. And the whale, for example, will make fructose to keep it when it's diving and it uses the fructose. The fructose is a protection, it's a fuel that can. I mean it stimulates anaerobic ATP production. Another great example is the naked mole rat. This is a rat. It's not really a rat, it's sort of rat looking. It looks like the ugliest thing you've ever seen. It's often used in movies as a monster. They make it gigantic and it's like crawling through tunnels. And they live in Africa and they live in burrows and those burrows get in the very low oxygen. There's not much oxygen down there and so they make fructose to help them survive. And if you block fructose in these little guys, they'll die because they need it to help keep them surviving in a low oxygen environment. So fructose can be good. But here's the problem Cancer cells once they start, you know, they start growing and the bad thing about cancer cells is it's uncontrollable growth.
DR JOHNSON:And then they get into the blood vessels and they end up seeding different organs. We call it a metastasis. It's a really terrible thing where, like, you might have a cancer in your breasts and it's localized and you can cure it easily if you could just get it out then. But if it starts to spread, that spreading or metastases makes it much harder to treat and thank God there are treatments now that can help you if you have that. But it's not a great thing, right. And the way cancer spread is they have to migrate through. They do migrate through the blood, but then they get to a tissue and they kind of work their way into the tissue. They work their way in and as they get in they don't actually have a blood supply. You know, normal tissues have blood supply, but these guys are foreign cells, foreign cancers. I mean cancer is basically a foreign thing. It's not your native, it's like a growth, an uncontrolled growth, and they have to develop a blood vessel system to keep growing. But it can take a while. So for quite a while they're growing in a low oxygen state because they don't have blood vessels.
DR JOHNSON:And guess what fuel they like? You guessed it, they like fructose. And many cancers express transporters for fructose. And if you put fructose on the cancer cell the cancer cell metastasis can grow much faster. And if you give, like colon cancers and liver cancers and pancreatic cancers and brain cancers and pancreatic cancers and brain cancer, glioblastoma and breast cancers these are all cancers that like fructose and they're associated with obesity. So there's some cancers associated with obesity and these are pretty much the same cancers that like fructose. And the reason is because fructose is driving the obesity and driving these cancers.
DR JOHNSON:Now it doesn't cause cancer, it just stimulates cancer growth. And actually the uric acid that the fructose makes is important in suppressing those mitochondria and reducing the ATP and shifting it to glycolysis. So high uric acid is also often seen in people with these cancers. And we actually did a study in mice where we took normal mice and we raised their uric acid just by manipulating the genes that make uric acid and degrade uric acid. So we could take a normal mouse and we raise this uric acid and when we did that, if we gave it a tumor, you know you can inject a tumor under the skin, for example massively spread when the uric acid was high. And now we know that high uric acid is a very strong predictor for cancer growth for these particular cancers. And also a very famous scientific group at Cornell showed that high fructose corn syrup could stimulate cancer growth in animals and I just heard apparently it came out last week.
DR JOHNSON:But keto diets are being used to treat cancers and there's more and more evidence supporting them in treating cancer. I have a friend who went on a keto diet. He had a metastatic carcinoid tumor and he's been in remission for like six years on a keto diet. And there's also this recent study. Apparently I believe it's in pancreatic cancer. So what does this mean for you? If you have cancer or if you're prone to cancer, have cancer or if you're prone to cancer.
DR JOHNSON:Consider sugar and added sugars a dietary food that is not good. If you have cancer, I'm not telling you not to ever eat it. I eat sugar, but I eat small amounts of it and just be aware, like if you have. You know, if you have colon cancer or liver cancer. Maybe try to go on a low-glucose, low-carb diet. Try to go on a keto diet.
DR JOHNSON:See how it does skinny and have lost weight from the cancer. It's probably more important to eat food that will help keep your weight, because a low weight if you really lose a lot of weight that's not good. But in general, if you're doing fairly well and you get diagnosed with a cancer, consider a low-carb diet, consider a keto diet. There's actually papers and animals. There's some studies and people. It's still early, it's not proven rigorously like we like, but there are definitely studies out there and I recommend it. I know many cases of people who have responded well to a keto diet and they're usually getting other things, so it's hard to know. But if you can tolerate it it's a good move. So that's my little story about cancers and sugar.
FLORENCE:Thank you, and I understand there's also a link between cancer and insulin. Do you understand that connection? How does that fit in?
DR JOHNSON:Well, there is an association of insulin resistance and cancer. Insulin resistance is when you have high insulin levels in the blood and instead of blood glucose being low, it's high. So the insulin goes up in the blood to help move glucose into cells, but it's not very effective. There's a block and so the insulin levels go up. That is a direct, absolutely. So the insulin levels go up. That is a direct, absolutely direct consequence of fructose. That is a fructose effect and we've proven it in animals. But it is a fructose effect. It's very, very, very linked.
FLORENCE:And so for people whose bodies can naturally create. So I know of someone I'm thinking of who has been low carb, actually did stretches of carnivore, has done 10 day water fasts and she is still. You know, her insulin is still relatively high and that's very, very hard for her to go into ketosis. Still relatively high Now, it's very, very hard for her to go into ketosis. So I'm wondering if there's something in her body that's continuing to manufacture fructose. Is that possible?
DR JOHNSON:It is possible. There's a lot of things that stimulate it, but if you're on a really low carb diet, you can't make too much fructose, because fructose comes from carbs.
FLORENCE:Right, okay.
DR JOHNSON:But you can make glucose from amino acids, for example, and then that can be converted, but it's not easy, but more likely, and I haven't talked about this a lot, but I will talk about it right now. Um, what we're learning is that the diet really is important in driving obesity and the diet is really important in driving diabetes, and this fructose pathway is really important. But there is a secondary process that helps maintain those conditions. That helps maintain those conditions, and what happens is the fructose, for example, works by suppressing the ATP production. That's the primary thing. To make a person gain weight is to reduce the energy in the cell, because it makes the animal feel hungry and it triggers everything, and when you eat fructose, that is the primary nutrient that does this. There are other ways to do it, but this is the major way, and so carbs really have a big role in triggering this thing, and then fats and stuff have a big role in driving the weight gain. But the more you cause oxidative stress to those mitochondria, which is what the fructose does, and that suppresses it, and that suppresses it. It's like turning on the burner and cooking a little bit of the food. Well, actually that's a bad analogy, but what it's like is that initially it's reversible. You do this, it stuns the mitochondria and then after several hours the mitochondria come back. But when you do this continuously, eventually the mitochondria don't completely recover, and it's been shown in animals by my friend Samir Softik, and that over time those mitochondria start to break down and when the mitochondria get lower and lower in number, then they just can't make the ATP. This is actually what's going on with dementia. So let me, this is a good way to move into that.
DR JOHNSON:So for years it was thought that alzheimer's disease was this mysterious, unknown, unknown ideology. No one knew the cause, but what they found was that the brain cells would shrink and atrophy. So when you get a cat scan of your brain, instead of a normal-sized brain, it's like one half the size, it's like shrinking and there's death of the neurons and that is not reversible. Once you get to that stage, it's really so, to that stage it's really so. When they looked in the brain to see what was causing it, they see these things called amyloid plaques and this is like this kind of yucky proteins that are kind of sitting between the dying neurons and there's also a thing called tau protein which shows up in the neurons. So everyone was trying to develop treatments to block those amyloid plaques. It's almost like a virus or some crazy thing causing this, and could we stop it? But the treatments that are aimed at that have had minimal success.
DR JOHNSON:So some very wise people started looking at what happens before the brain shrinks. You know what? Can we catch it early? And you can, you can find evidence. You know people start to have a little bit of memory trouble and so forth. And the brain hasn't shrunk, it's got the chance of recovery right.
DR JOHNSON:And when you look in there what you see is the brain is insulin resistant. Normally we talk about insulin resistance, we're talking about the muscle and other parts of the body, but in the brain you can show there's insulin resistance and you can show that the mitochondria are suppressed and you can show that there's oxidative stress and you can show that the ATP levels are low and you can show there's low-grade inflammation. That is all the biosignature, the signature of fructose. When you see those things, that group of events is like fructose. So it's suggestive that dementia could be related to fructose in the brain. But that's pretty much just an association, right? It's just. That's not proof.
DR JOHNSON:But then you start looking at who develops dementia, and it's seen more commonly in people eating sugar. Sugar has been linked with it. It's been seen more commonly in people with obesity and diabetes and all these conditions associated with fructose. Now you have a second thing the people who develop Alzheimer's seem to have the same risk factors for having a fructose pathway. Then there's a third one give sugar to animals and after a few weeks they have trouble getting. Lab rats have trouble getting through a maze. They cannot get through the maze. The normal rats will keep learning. You know, the more they do it, the more they learn how to get through. These rats lose their ability to do it.
FLORENCE:In only a few weeks.
DR JOHNSON:Yeah, only a few weeks, Two weeks.
FLORENCE:Oh, my goodness.
DR JOHNSON:And when you look in their brains, they have insulin resistance, they have low ATP, they have suppressed mitochondria, they have low-grade inflammation, they have all those early features and they affect the same regions of the brain where Alzheimer's occurs. Alzheimer's doesn't affect all the brain equally. The sugar affects the same sites. Then if you give the sugar for 18 months, the animals get amyloid plaques, they get tau protein. It's like from start to finish. There's the story Not fully good enough. What else do we need? We need to look at people who are developing dementia and there have been studies where people have died with dementia and they've looked in the brains and they've looked at age-matched controls that did not have dementia and they looked in their brains. This is all autopsies, of course, and what they found was that the fructose levels are five to seven-fold higher in the brains of the demented patients and all of the things that we talk about. The enzymes that are turned on to make fructose. They're high. The uric acid mendelian randomization studies show it's there significant. All the. The whole stories can be repeated. And then two months ago, a group published or maybe it was like four months ago, sorry, a group published a study where they blocked fructose metabolism in lab mice that were developing dementia, but they only blocked it in the brain. And lo and behold, they blocked the dementia.
DR JOHNSON:So I'm willing to stand before any scientific community and make the case, and I have with David Perlmutter and Dale Bredesen. We published a paper on this in a very big journal and there's never been a story where you could explain Alzheimer's from beginning to end. This is the first one that links explain Alzheimer's from beginning to end. This is the first one that links it from the start to the end. I believe it's the main cause and like trauma has been reported to you know, like concussions, repeated concussions can increase your risk for dementia. Guess what a concussion does? It decreases the blood supply to certain regions of the brain. That stimulates fructose production there. Even that pathway has been shown in animals to be dependent on fructose. So I think we can do wonders for people by cutting back on carbs and sugar.
DR JOHNSON:There's some other things that are really good too. There's a guy in LA, really smart guy, and he showed that omega-3, this fatty acids like in walnuts and salmon fish omega-3 can counter the effects of fructose, and I think I know the mechanism, but we haven't proven it. But there is a benefit. Omega-3 is good. Vitamin C helps to block this pathway. Vitamin helps raise ATP in cells. It's vitamin B1. And my friends in England have looked at other B vitamins B12, b6. And basically it's simple Hydrate, take vitamins, take omega-3, eat well, cut back on sugar. We should be able to have a big impact on blocking dementia, the worst disease you can wish on anyone. It's worse than cancer really. Because dementia you lose that person. Because dementia you lose that person and it's so hard, not only on the individual but, it's hard on the families.
DR JOHNSON:So I feel pretty good about it. Now there's these new drugs semaglutide, ozempic, all these drugs. They look like they're blocking the fructose pathway. They're blocking sugar addiction. They're blocking alcohol addiction, which is also I haven't had time to talk about it, but it's linked with fructose, and I think that the way the reason these drugs aren't just blocking food intake by suppressing the emptying of the food from the stomach. It's more than that. They have biologic effects and there's now some studies suggesting that they interfere with fructose metabolism. So I think that this story is all linked and we can do good things and help people by promoting healthy diets. If you're overweight, you could consider trying to get one of these GLP-1 drugs. They have lots of side effects, they're expensive, they're injections. They're not everything that people would like them to be, but they do help. They reduce heart cardiovascular events. They probably reduce addiction. They have a lot of benefits. So I think we should, you know, not be so negative about them, but we certainly want them to be more affordable, more available oral, you know.
FLORENCE:Or given as a sort of like a temporary. Let's stop this fructose pathway while we teach you.
DR JOHNSON:Yes, that's the best, Absolutely would be the best, right, yeah, yeah, I've always thought that it should be given to the people who, who just can't quite get there on their own. But that's a lot of people, right. But yeah, but I agree, I agree with you, it's always better to do the lifestyle way, way.
FLORENCE:Yeah, the lifestyle changes, okay. So I find it very interesting and I want to clarify for the audience that when we're talking about sugar, we are talking processed, refined added sugars. We are never talking about the sugars that occur in whole foods, although it doesn't mean that some people don't benefit from reducing even whole food versions of carbohydrates, like potatoes or grains. Like maybe there's a window of time when you even let those go while you're restoring your metabolic health and then you try it down the road and if you can, if it's fine, great, and if not, try it longer, right.
DR JOHNSON:like, but in this conversation we're talking about ultra processed refined carbohydrates actually if you're a fruit fly and you live on fruit which is fructose. But there are other things in the fruit, there's all these good things that help counter some of the fructose, so it doesn't have as big effect. If you take a fruit fly and instead of giving it fruit you give it refined sugar, the fruit fly becomes fat. Really fly becomes diabetic. No way, for in cells, show you, they die young. They actually develop kidney, the equivalent of kidney failure. They from uric acid, of all things it's. It's unbelievable, um, how we can learn from the fruit fly and uh, and also it gives a clue that this fructose pathway is involved in aging right for sure it, for sure it is right right
FLORENCE:so it's not we're not demonizing fruit, even though fruit is a source of fructose. We're really, really talking about how we've taken fructose, concentrated it, high fructose, corn syrup, agave syrup, whatever. All all the added sugars 100 right, and but what's interesting when you're talking about the um supplements or micronutrients and nutrients that counteract the impact of fructose? Very interesting tropical countries that eat a ton of fruit in season as it comes and goes, also eat a lot of salads and fish and omega-3s and, you know, vitamin c that's actually in the fruit, and on and on and on. So it's, they're protected, they're vibrantly healthy in their indigenous diets. Because, because it's all in this package of wholeness and goodness.
DR JOHNSON:But for those of us, especially in the northern climates, that are eating fruit all all year round, or high fructose corn syrup and all these processed junk foods, yeah, or fruit juice where they've added sugar to it and and fruit juice itself can be like apple juice is pretty bad, but um, because it's so concentrated in sugar, but but natural fruits, yeah, we actually did a study of low fructose diet to treat obesity in mexican middle-aged mexicans that were overweight, and we had one arm that had fruit supplements. They did just as well as the pure low fructose and it was more tolerated, better, because you know everyone does want some sweet foods and so if you can eat a few fruit that um, as this, as in, instead of no, no sugar at all, no fruit, as in instead of no sugar at all, no fruit, it's actually better tolerated.
FLORENCE:Right, right, right. Fruits are not the problem. What we've done to our metabolism and how hypersensitive we are now to carbohydrates is so tell me a little bit more about this hydration fructose pathway. So if we get dehydrated, the body creates fructose so that we hang on to water. Is that correct?
DR JOHNSON:yeah, a little bit. So what happens it's? It's actually confusing to a lot of people, so I'm gonna try to explain it. When you make fat, we think of fat as stored energy, right? So the bear will burn the fat during the winter to make energy and it will live off that so it doesn't have to eat food. But when a bear hibernates, it's also not drinking water, and we all need water, just like we need food. So what was really interesting was, years ago it was discovered that when you burn fat, you actually produce water. There's no water in fat, but it's a chemical reaction and you start producing water and they call it metabolic water, and a lot of animals, like in the desert, will have fat, like in the camel and the hump, or some animals will carry it in their neck, others put fat in their tails, like the fat-tailed lemur, and these animals will use the fat to provide water in addition to calories if they need it, and they often do need it. So fat has another role in nature.
DR JOHNSON:Now, when you get really dehydrated, you're going to want to break down the fat, but it can be an alarm signal that you are at risk of becoming dehydrated, and so when that happens, you'll look for water, but you'll also try to increase your fat. So like, if I give a soft drink, this is is actually amazing. But if you drink a soft drink on a hot day, you think that it's relieving your dehydration, but actually it's not. It will keep you thirsty. You'll stay thirsty, so you keep drinking more and more. You're actually helping to put on more fat and you're thirsty, so you drink more and more. You're actually helping to put on more fat and you're thirsty, so you drink more and more. Now, the easiest way to activate that is sugar, does it? But you can also activate it with salt. So when you eat salted pretzels or salted french fries or salted french fries, you create what seems like low-grade dehydration because you get thirsty. But it's not true dehydration in the sense that you've lost water. Rather, you've increased the salt in your blood to make you thirsty. So you drink more water, but you also eat more food, and that eating the more food helps you to make more fat. And that's because the salt particularly likes to activate the enzymes that convert glucose to fructose. So when you eat a salted pretzel, the pretzel starch and the salts, the fire to tell you to convert that pretzel into fructose.
DR JOHNSON:Back in the 1800s the Irish ate potatoes every day, but they weren't fat and part of it was because they weren't eating a lot of. There wasn't a lot of food around. There wasn't a lot of fatty foods around, so even if they could make fructose, there was a famine. There wasn't a lot of food. But on top of that is that a potato without salt is not going to be as dangerous as a potato with salt, because the salt's going to activate the enzymes to convert the potato to fructose. So it's kind of complicated.
DR JOHNSON:But basically the bottom line is, if I create mild dehydration with salt, or if you get exposed to a situation where you're very, very mildly dehydrated, you'll be thirsty but you will also activate the process to store fat. But if I make you severely dehydrated, and especially if there's no water around, you're going to want to break down the fat. And so people say well, are you saying dehydration makes you fat or dehydration burns your fat? But it's all about the subtle aspect of very mild dehydration with water available or severe dehydration when there's no water available. And did I explain it well enough? Do you understand?
FLORENCE:I think so. Yeah, yeah, you know where my head's going, and this is a real curveball, I imagine is that I'm really, really fascinated by trauma, how trauma plays into all of this. And there's that trauma is a state that they call the freeze response, where people drop into this dorsal freeze, where they became immobilized, they have almost no energy, they, they feel, um, it's quite a dark, it's like a dark pit. They feel hopeless and helpless and depressed and right, it's like almost like this extreme form of no atp, no energy they have. They've collapsed into this state of I have no energy, I've got no get up and go.
FLORENCE:And I'm wondering there's certain, and we know there's foods that stimulate us and we know there's foods that sedate us, that help sort of have that depressive heavy, like pizza, cheese, breads, like right those are. They can absorb adrenaline and cortisol in the body and they can help give us that little bit of a heavier numbing, sedative effect. And we know emotionally, you know in different occasions, what foods to take when we're looking for food to do. Pull one of those two levers and I'm wondering, I'm wondering to what extent for those of us that are overwhelmed and overstressed and we're dropping to the freeze response if we're not partially unconsciously pulling for these fructose foods, all these refined carbohydrates, and the fats and the salt and putting them all together in a way that actually not because the body even thinks it's in a famine, but because the body's overwhelmed and it's trying to induce this immobilized state of collapse. Did that make sense to you?
DR JOHNSON:It could. Yeah, it's an interesting hypothesis. So it does have a lot that makes sense and there is a little bit of evidence that again, this is a kind of a complicated thing, but when you eat sugar or you make fructose, it activates a foraging response where you get hungry but you actually have to go out and search for food and what happens is you become hyperactive when you're looking for the food. You become hyperactive when you're looking for the food and you can't concentrate on anything too long because you've got to keep going to find the food. So it has sort of this ADHD type of behavior and it's linked with ADHD and bipolar, for example, and it's potentially related to the effects of fructose on the brain to make you impulsive and all this stuff. But it's interesting when an animal forages. While they're foraging they're really maintaining their metabolism, but as soon as they stop foraging and rest they actually drop their energy to a lower level and they kind of become almost more abundant and will kind of huddle and their energy levels go down. And this has been shown in hunter-gatherers as well. That you know, when they eat a lot of honey, for example, the hazda, for example, will be able to walk 30 miles, but at the end of the day they don't their total energy metabolism still the same as a normal person, because at rest they drop their energy metabolism to balance it out. And when you're dropping that, remember that there's this low atp, so it's sort of like a. So there's a little bit like that. And then there's this other finding, which is that people who drink soft drinks for a very long time we talked about how the mitochondria can get paralyzed permanently and it's very strongly associated with depression. And I know individual cases where people were drinking soft drinks when they woke up in the morning and they end up becoming reclusive and depressed and it's sad. It's sad and I think there's a true physiologic linkage.
DR JOHNSON:And the good news is there are ways to stimulate mitochondria, even when they're damaged, and the number one best way is try to get active, go for walks, go for jogs, go ride a bike and certain types of exercise can help stimulate mitochondria, of exercise can help stimulate mitochondria and some of the best are these, like walking fast or, you know, as fast as you can walk. That would be a good one and and just try to stimulate some exercise swim, bike. Another thing that can do it believe, believe it or not, is vitamin C in fruit and there's another one called epicatechin and epigallocatechin. So green tea contains a substance that stimulates mitochondria. Dark chocolate does. Fruit can have good things can have good things. Pomegranate seeds contain a substance called urolithin. There are a number of things we can do to help re-simulate mitochondria. I think epicatechin may be the strongest one, and so there are ways we can try to help and, of course, a lot of these times people need other helps from psychologists and medications and so forth.
DR JOHNSON:But, it would be ideal if we didn't have to rely on those medicines.
FLORENCE:Totally yes, and they all, they can work together because if there's thoughts that are stressing us out chronically stress, thoughts that's overwhelming the body and it is reaching for the foods that will help support the drop into the freeze response, we can get locked in this cycle. Yeah, and I see it so very, very much yeah no it's a hypothesis, but I think I'm onto something but it's a good hypothesis.
DR JOHNSON:I like your hypothesis.
FLORENCE:Everything begins with a hypothesis, then you have to do the experiments and then you have to look at the limitations yeah, yeah, and, and when it's true and when it's not true, because it can be true for someone and not another, and very, very nuanced that way, how would you like to summarize our, our conversation today? What would you like to leave the audience with?
DR JOHNSON:there's a lot of good things we can do to help ourselves, and it probably begins with simple things like what we choose to eat. Um, you know, there's a lot of healthy foods and there's a lot of unhealthy foods, and it's very hard for people to only eat healthy foods because of the desires that we have, the cravings that we have. But, you know, try, I think you know it's something we should be working at actively in the schools with our children, and one of the things we know is that we're eating too many carbs. That is really at the heart of everything, and the worst carbs are sugars, you know, and not milk. Milk has sugar too. It's called lactose. That does not do it. Milk has sugar too. It's called lactose. That does not do it.
DR JOHNSON:But like bread, rice potatoes, these what we call high glycemic foods, you can get a CGM. I have a CGM right here which I got from Levels, and this can help tell you what foods raise glucose. And if you eat a food that does raise glucose a lot, try to cut that out or reduce it. You can put avocado on bread if you really like bread. You can block the rapid absorption of the bread by putting some kind of fat or oil on it, putting some kind of fat or oil on it.
DR JOHNSON:And likewise, if you're at a restaurant and they bring you this big bowl of beautiful rolls in the beginning of the meal, and try not to eat in the very beginning, try to eat it in the middle of the meal or avoid it. But if you eat it in the middle of the meal the absorption will be slowed down. But when you eat it with nothing else it's going to go into the blood quickly. You know there's all these little tricks, but basically, um, I mean I go into a lot of it in my book. If you're really interested, you might find the book interesting because of that.
FLORENCE:but yeah, there's yeah that's my main message and it's simple the exercise. Yeah, it's all it's all the free things that we think that can't really be medicine. But yeah, going for walks in nature, eating whole foods, getting enough water, getting enough sleep those will heal the body so so much faster than people have any idea. It's just hard.
DR JOHNSON:It seems hard to do at the back I should mention there is a dietary sugar that I've. I've become involved with it. Um, it looks like fructose, but it doesn't activate the switch. It's called allulose.
DR JOHNSON:Yes, it's not available in canada yet not yet no it is available in the us and like and it's a chocolate that actually tends to lower glucose rather than raise it, you know. So it's a chocolate that actually tends to lower glucose rather than raise it. So it's kind of a promising snack and I'm involved in studying the science and I'm connected with a company on it.
FLORENCE:So, that's my disclosure, but it does look like a promising sugar sugar that might actually be have some health benefits, but and see, we've heard that over the years it used to be agave, and then it was stevia and monk fruit and urethra trawl and at one point we have to.
FLORENCE:We do have to be careful I know, I know and I just feel like you know, this latest one I look at, I'm like, okay, it's sort of fructose, but they've used enzymes to alter it. I'm like, okay, what's the catch? I'm just waiting for the catch, but you're not the first person who's mentioned. I'm doing research on it and I'm seeing it having a benefit on lowering blood sugars, but it doesn't mean it's not having a negative impact in some other way maybe.
DR JOHNSON:Yeah it. You know, we do need to know more about it, and I should, you know, I I believe that it would be nice to do more, more studies and I'm trying to to do some because I just think, but I do say it looks. All the studies so far looks like it's pretty healthy that's what I've been seeing too um, that's probably the most powerful one. It stimulates the GLP-1 a little bit more than most foods. You know there's a tendency for weight loss when you take it.
FLORENCE:You know all these are true, but it's also true it's still early in the process and we're trying to learn more about it I think that there are millions, hundreds of millions of people on the planet praying for sugar, that you know that they can have, that they don't have to be a total abstainer and, and you know, maybe all those prayers are being heard and maybe allulose in in this little place.
DR JOHNSON:Good choice, if you really want something sweet and rather than getting a chocolate chip cookie, if you can eat an apple or orange kiwi, you know that's probably a much healthier way to go.
FLORENCE:Totally. I love it and I want to put in a shameless plug for his book. Please do read it. It's honestly, absolutely you. You'll get my reference to indiana jones. It has that feeling of everything dr johnson does, like he's the kind of guy that actually flies around the world and goes and does like autopsies of, like ancient humans, like crazy. But in the very back of his book he shares a poem. What's it? What is it called ode to sugar or something like that?
DR JOHNSON:yes, I don't have it in front of me, but yeah. So good it came to me while I was biking.
FLORENCE:Oh, so good, it's so good. It's like he just nails it Our love-hate relationship with sugar. This like how can you taste so good and look so beautiful and be so wonderful and be, you know, stabbing me in the back, basically ruining my life at the same time?
DR JOHNSON:is not quite so harmless.
FLORENCE:Yes, yeah, thank you for thank you for your time, thank you for your work, for your books, for the 500 articles, for being the guy that's right in on the at the science level of all of this. It's I can't. I don't know how you, I don't know how you do it all, but thank you I'm a workaholic.
DR JOHNSON:I need to treat myself.
FLORENCE:We're all believing you.
DR JOHNSON:Thank you so much, Florence.
FLORENCE:Thanks everybody for tuning in today. Bye-bye.
