Sugar: When The Kitchen Cabinet Is Your Drug Dealer

Sugar is everywhere, socially approved, and often handed out as comfort, reward, and love. That’s exactly why it can be so hard to spot when it stops being “a treat” and starts acting like an addiction. I’m Dr. Casey Grover, and I sit down with Mike Collins, known as the Sugar Free Man, for a clear-eyed talk about what sugar addiction looks like in real people’s lives and why willpower is such an unreliable tool when cravings take over.

We get into the recovery lens: triggers, cravings, relapse language, and the emotional roots of using sugar to self-soothe. Mike shares how his own family history shaped his relationship with sweets, how his coaching and meeting-based community grew during COVID, and why support groups can be the difference between “trying again” and actually changing behavior. We also talk about who shows up for help, why so many people seek weight loss or type 2 diabetes relief first, and how diet culture has often missed the point.

Then we go deeper on the science Mike leans on, especially fructose. We discuss why fructose may be a key driver of cravings, how it’s processed in the liver, and why gut health topics like "leaky gut" get brought up in the sugar conversation. Finally, we compare moderation vs abstinence, how eating disorder treatment can clash with sugar-free protocols, and how finding healthier dopamine through exercise can support long-term recovery.

If this conversation helps you see your own pattern more clearly, subscribe, share it with someone who’s stuck in the loop, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

To learn more about Mike's work:

https://sugaraddiction.com

https://www.skool.com/no-sugar-nation/about

To contact Dr. Grover: ammadeeasy@fastmail.com

Transcript

Sugar Addiction And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Hi, I'm Dr. Casey Grove. I spent years practicing emergency medicine before shifting my focus to addiction medicine. This podcast grew out of caring for patients, hearing their stories, and wanting to do better. Here we talk about recovery, medicine, and compassion. This is Addiction Medicine Made Easy. Today's episode is something a little different. It's an interview with Mike Collins who calls himself the Sugar Free Man, and he helps people quit their addiction to sugar. Now my podcast is focused on treating addictions, and so you might be thinking, is sugar addictive? And the answer is yes. We had a fantastic conversation about sugar, how it affects us, how we treat it as a society, and Mike's work helping people quit sugar. We had a fantastic conversation, and given my history of binge eating and bulimia, sugar was one of my vices, we had a lot to talk about. A few clarifications. About halfway through the podcast, Mike talks about some of the changes that fructose causes in the body. It affects the villi in the gut. These are small parts of the intestine that act like little fingers to increase the absorption of nutrients. And it also affects the tight junctions in the cells of the gut. These are the connections between the cells in the lining of the gut that actually hold them together. And if you're wondering, fructose is the sugar that is naturally formed in ripe fruit. And Mike talks about the reason fruit has fructose during the podcast. Now, if you want to learn more about Mike's work, you can find him at sugaraddiction.com. We didn't end up having time for him to share with me and all of you what his technique actually is to quit sugar. So if you want to see what his work is like, you can find it on his website. And Mike references a few websites in the episode, so I will include them in the show notes. And with that, let's dig in. All

Meet Mike Collins Sugar Free Man

SPEAKER_01 2:22

right. Good early afternoon, my time. Good late afternoon your time. Let's start with who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

I am Mike Cullen, the sugar free man. You find me there or wherever, but yeah, history goes probably back two generations. And my mother was my favorite sugar junkie. And her mother died when she was only eight. And she basically, it's a long story, but the short version is she and I grew up believing sugar was love. Gently, when she passed away, they made a deal with the uh the cousin across the street that owned the store, a little candy store, that anytime she walked in, she could have any anything she wanted, just put it on my grandfather's tab. And that was wonderful for her. And I think this is very common in families. I'm not a big believer in the genetic disposition theory. I think that the learned behavior of how we cope with emotions comes from what family we grew up and how that family handled it. So anyway, I grew up just covered up. We could had unfettered access to the sugar bowl. I still have that sugar bowl from the estate. And quarter of an inch, half an inch of sugar at the bottom with the milk was no problem. And every candy and cookie my mother would bake every Saturday, and it was how we bonded. My father was a tough character, a little abusive physically and emotionally and verbally. And she was basically our using buddies. She would soothe us with the sugar. And I first run into beer at 14 or 15, and I knew this was changing my state. I knew it changed how I felt. I was shy. I could drink beer behind the high school and talk to the girls at the dance. And this is an important construct about the recovery from sugar addiction, is that it's not about food, it's not about exercise. It's really about using sugar as a self-soothing method, right? Again, yeah, right? So I get sober at 28. I'm willing to talk about all that. It's not a big secret. It actually has been a lot of people join our community because I am open about it. And they had trouble after sobriety not being able to get off sugar, which is wild, but they were sophisticated, addiction sophisticated. Anyway, I somehow talked my wife at the time into having two kids sugar-free. And so from the womb until they were six, they never had sugar in the house. And then only outside birthday parties after that. And they obviously grew up a little differently, and that experiment worked. We could talk about that too, but I I there's a lot of science now that the brain development in those first three years, they even have big nonprofits now talking about the nutrition of the brain in that time period. Anyway, long story short, is those guys thought they grew up a little differently. And they said, Write a book, Dad, write the book. So I was semi-retired and I wrote a book in 2018 and the book did okay on Amazon. And I started to coach people. And I was coaching people. And but I knew from my recovery background that I was gonna need meetings, I was gonna need a support system. And so all the people I would coach in, we would get together on Tuesdays. And that meeting still exists to this day, seven, eight years later.

COVID And The Boom In Meetings

SPEAKER_00 5:53

But during the pandemic, all hell, bro. It literally just you saw the newsreels where everything's gone, all the sugar, all the flour, all the cookies, all the ice cream, all the candy, all the soda, everything got bought up. And and people were just at home gaining weight and abusing sugar, whatever. And big important and and but is that they all learned how to use Zoom. Even grandma could use Zoom. And so we went from one meeting a week to three to five meetings a day in about 18 months in our platform. And that's where we are today. And we have those meetings, we have a 30-day challenge in there. And we got approved by the National Board of Health and Wellness coaches. So we also train and certify coaches. And so I mentioned, or you mentioned sugar-free man, that kind of happened during the pandemic. But yeah, that's the short version. That's a podcast version, how I ended up sitting here.

SPEAKER_01 6:53

I remember people talking about the COVID-19, meaning the 19 pounds you gained during COVID from sitting at home and eating. So, yes, there's tons to unpack

Sugar As Love And Self-Soothing

SPEAKER_01 7:05

here. My patients, when they get sober from alcohol or meth or whatever, a lot of times turn to sugar. I can say my own experience with an eating disorder. Yeah, I really struggle with sugar. And yes, my family was the same way. Food is love. We bake cookies, that's love. And yes, you've really found something here to work on. You must have just an unlimited number of clients. Sugar is so pervasive in our foods and it's changed how we eat and our taste. And good heavens, there's so much to unpack here.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

It's not too dissimilar from alcohol and drug recovery, substance use disorder recovery, in that it's still stigmatized in a lot of ways. And even though we know there's a high percentage of people that have a substance use disorder, it's still not talked about. There's still a stigma to it. There's still a it's not a healthcare issue, which is my goal in these podcasts and my work, is to make it a healthcare issue, not a moral issue or a willpower issue or whatever. And but sugar's not anywhere near where substance use disorder is. So yeah, I struggle with the ability to get the messaging out because most people are brainwashed by the diet industry, which is eat less and exercise more. There's some need. All they want is a food plan and an exercise plan. They're not interested in what we just talked about. And like it's a very common construct in the world of alcohol and drugs is you started using alcohol and drugs at 14 or 15, you stopped growing emotionally. 100%. Yep. Yeah. Your life's upside down. And the reason is because you never really solved any of adult issues. The next day would come around and you would use and stop. Now extrapolate that backwards to four or five, maybe probably in the womb, but definitely as a young child. And maybe your parents were complicit in this because what would happen is you'd be upset and they would instead of giving you a hug and talking to you, say what's wrong, they'd give you a cookie and send you to the TV. And the little brain that just got an adult-sized blast of dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, gob, oxytocin, adrenal glands, can boiders, all of the brain and body reward chemicals registered this unconscious emotional knowing that this substance would shut that stuff down. And then you extrapolate it to 40 or 50, and that process is still inactive. And it's largely unconscious. It's not like you needed a beer on a Friday. I got a tough week. I'm an adult. I'm gonna have a beer, forget about it all. It just bubbles up as wouldn't a piece of chocolate be nice? Wouldn't a soda be nice? It's not the same, and it's not treated the same in the person who's abusing it or in society, right? So it's complicated to get people to understand that's exactly what's happening. 98% of the people that come to me for weight loss originally, or that they got a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. But like people that might want to recover from drugs and alcohol, they're not willing to dive into this emotional part of it. They don't think of it as part of the solution.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

I've often wondered why we've trained our children that you get a sweet or a treat every time anything happens. I felt very conflicted as a parent of a toddler, and my daughter's now 16. But, like, why do you have to get something sweet after everything? Or you'll be in a store and there's a little bowl of candy on the counter. Can I give your kid a candy? I'm like, why? Can't we just go to the store and cheap dopamine, I think, is capitalism at this point. And it's you go to the store and you get a sticker or a trinket or a toy. And really, my wife and I have tried to reduce the amount of cheap dopamine that our daughter gets as parents. And it with capitalism the way it is, it's hard. One of our colleagues had a son that was quite a few years younger than our daughter. And I remember her asking, How do you teach your kid not to expect something every time they go in the store? Once that precedent is set that you get dopamine when you go to the store, you get a toy, a ball, a car, whatever it is. But yes, I've struggled with this as a parent. Why does it always have to be sugar when you do something good?

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Boy, I wish I knew the answer to that. I can tell you a little antidote from my kids' childhood. You've seen everyone's experience this, where there's a child who's sitting in the cart, but reaching and screaming and crying so much that they're tipping the cart over to get to the candy, which is right at the checkout, right? And my kids used to pile it with blocks, like they were green or colored blocks, because they had no idea what it was. There was not yet that mental connection at three, four, or five years old. They had no idea what it was. They and they didn't consider it something that they needed to get a treat. But look, this is the strangest statistic you may hear today is that 95% of my clients are women between the ages of 45. I like to say 45, but it's probably closer to 50, pre-menopausal and 70 or 80. And men are just not attracted to this program. Younger women are not attracted to this program. We've done a kids summit, a sugar-free kids' summit, and it just performed very poorly because that age woman is just not interested or not, they haven't really succumbed or understood that it's their Achilles heel and dieting and weight. In my belief system, in our lifetime, like someone quits smoking or drinking, when they find out they're pregnant, they will stop using sugar. And the science is going to prove that out pretty unequivocally in the next 10 years. It's already there. If you're kind of in my ecosystem, it's already understood. Even the American Pediatric Society has said that you shouldn't have any added sugar for three. But it's going to be real and it's going to be like when you and I were young, drinking and driving was just don't get caught. And the cops were the enemy. And now that social moray is completely different. And that's going to happen with sugar in children. But to date, younger women are not interested in this protocol, this transformational process yet. I don't know why.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

So make sure I understand your patients are predominantly women between about 50 and 80. Is that right? That's correct. Now, you and I both know that the age in which we are born determines our lived experiences, which is why we divide ourselves into generations.

Low Fat Era And Food Industry

SPEAKER_01 13:53

Yeah. So you're dealing with predominantly baby boomer women. Is there something about that generation you think contributes to why they're interested? Or is it more there's something about that time period in a person's life being female? Or I'm assuming the answer is probably a combination of both.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

I think it's probably the latter. I think it's the time period of their life because they have struggled from what I've garnered over the 60,000 detoxes, this pattern recognition at scale, is that they've struggled with weight and health, weight mostly and dieting their whole life. And they finally are willing to accept the idea that the Achilles heel in the process is sugar and ultra-processed carbohydrates. They are able to do most diets and adhere to them, whatever they are. And they do the exercise even, but they can't get past the sugar. They just can't. One of the most interesting stats talking about drinking and recovery from alcohol and drugs is that a lot of my clients are people who are sober. It's in the book, a big book of Alcoholics Anonymous twice. It's okay to use sugar. And they're addiction-savvy people, and they're five years, 10 years, 20 years sober, and they can't put down the sugar. You talked about the COVID-19 and the freshman 15 when you go to college. In recovery, it's the freshman 50. People gain that much weight that fast in that first year. And again, this is a convalence of just years of doing this and people and realizing what the patterns have been for folk. So it was a great question.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

One other point on that. So we have to, I think, also factor in the food industry here. So I'm 42, so I'm the child of boomers. And as a kid, I was taught that the macronutrient that was evil was fat.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

So everything was low fat, and it doesn't taste good. So what did they add to it? Sugar. As you and I both know, sweetness is the taste that overpowers all the other. That's why we put it in all sorts of stuff, including alcohol, to make it taste better. So I grew up with wheat thins, triskets, bread, all that was good. And yeah, sure, three musketeers can't be bad because it's a low-fat candy bar. So just I wonder if there's some lived experience there with your clientele around the anti-fat 80s and 90s, contributing to what they were exposed to.

SPEAKER_00 16:28

Okay, so I would stand corrected that you're 100% correct in that. That this fat, this fat, this demonizing of fat from Ansel Keys forward and John Yudkin losing the argument, which is a long story, but I can get into it if you want, has played a big role in this group of people, right? But I also am very curious that the people that are younger are still exposed to all the sugar and they still ingest all the sugar, but they don't seem ready to change that behavior. They just are not ready to admit that they can't. And look, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I help people get sober in the early days, everybody came to me, they didn't want to stop drinking. They just wanted me to teach them how to drink normally. And this is what people come to with the sugar. They don't want to quit sugar, they just want me to teach them how to use sugar, whatever they consider normally is, just so it doesn't make them gain weight or have their type two flare up or whatever. Yeah, it's uh it's an interesting paradox we find ourselves, an interesting dilemma we find ourselves in. One of my mentors says, this is a 30-year deal. Mike, all the older doctors, they all gotta die before we get to the we can get to the point.

Addiction Language And Stigma Problem

SPEAKER_01 17:44

I'm curious as to what terminology you use in sugar addiction compared to other addictions. So obviously, in my world of addiction medicine, I ask my patients, how are your cravings? What are your triggers? When was your last slip up or relapse? And the food industry uses the word craving in a positive way. They'll talk about let's engineer the food to create a cravable experience. Yeah. Or Lay's potato chips don't even hide it, right? Bet you can't eat just one. Hey, everyone, our product is addictive. So I can say from my own experience with an eating disorder and binge eating and bulimia, you bet I got food cravings. Yeah. But how do you talk about it when someone goes back to sugar? Do you use those more traditional recovery terms like relapse?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Okay, so I do inside the community to answer your question. But outside the community, which is a closed community off of social media, it has been you are veering into the marketing and awareness part of this process. For me, we have a solution that works for people, but it's been very difficult over the last decade to present it to people. You couldn't even use the word addiction five or six years ago on Facebook. There were certain rules that you had to follow. And I own sugaraddiction.com. It opened in 2009 and it did okay. I was still working, but I had to change that to sugardetox.com. I had to start running the summits. I had to start getting information out because people just don't, they don't want to face it as a substance use disorder. In my opinion, which I've just started saying, this is the largest addiction pandemic the world has ever known. It absolutely is. And it's still not considered, it's like when I was younger, I used to go to these meetings, right? There's older guys there, all men, right? And they used to call me the weird addiction specialist. And they would say, I'd talk about the sugar stuff, and they'd say, Are you sober today, Mike? And I say, Yeah. Don't worry about the sugar, right? And even in that sophisticated community, Rodney Dangerville, remember him? I get no respect. Sugars has no respect as a substance that over time could kill you because you can't get arrested for it. You can give it to a baby, and nine, like you said, 90% of parents will thank you. And so it hasn't crossed into the the place of dangered Will Robinson, danger. It's still considered innocuous, empty calories, right? It's not considered something that over time can will kill you. And honestly, I think it causes almost every chronic illness on the planet. I I don't pull punches. I've seen every remission known to man. There's not one that you can mention that I haven't seen go in remission. Now that's not everybody, but stuff people get pregnant, type two, forget about it. Rheumatoid arthritis, forget about it. These things just go away if you are consistent in your elimination of sugar, ultra-processed carbohydrates.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

So you're looking at sugar as more like cigarettes, which is a chronic habit that leads to damage over decades, as opposed to fentanyl, which is a short addiction that either leads to quick rock bottom or overdose.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Correct. Absolutely. And alcohol, people can drink quite a while, and it doesn't seem to be ruining their life, but then they retire at 62 and die at 63.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

Yeah. It's interesting. I think as I'm we're talking through this, I think one of the reasons why sugar is maybe viewed as more benign, just as much as cigarettes were for a while viewed as more benign, is they're less psychoactive. There's less of that intense effect on the brain, right? If I have five drinks and get behind the wheel, I'm gonna crash my car. If I have five cigarettes, I can still drive. If I have five donuts, I can still drive. But I have to say, Well, get me started here, Casey. Don't get me started on not seeing psychoactive here. I was gonna say I think the psychoactivity of sugar is under a pre. Appreciated. Okay. So let's segue into your rant. I can't wait to hear it.

Fructose Pathway And Leaky Gut

SPEAKER_00 22:04

No, look, one of my favorite people on the planet is a guy named Richard Johnson who has studied, actually has a grant from the NIH that believes if he can block the fructose pathway, he can cure alcoholism. Actually, he just had a paper come out just like a few days ago. The offending molecule, the problem molecule in the inability for behavioral change is not the glucose, it's the fructose, okay? And for your audience, half of the table sugar molecule is fructose and half of it is glucose. And Dr. Johnson has chronicled changes in behavior in animals, risky behaviors, foraging behaviors, true change. And there's a great scene in the documentary, or actually more than a documentary, it's a show on Netflix called Empire Chimp. And an Empire Chimp will share 98 point something percent of our DNA. The big tribe had this fruit tree in it, and they guarded their territory, and it only bloomed every two, three years. The small tribe wanted to get to that tree. One of them got killed getting to that tree because they had to go through the big tribe's territory, right? And this is in a couple of physical manifestations of that, the villi in your intestines get longer, larger, so you're always hungry, right? And the loose, the junctions in your endotheliola, the lining of your gut and your intestines, they loosen up. The tight junctions loosen up, and the common slang is leaky gut happens, right? And so people get leaky gut. I always say if you want to study get off sugar, study fructose. That's the real offending molecule. And I genuinely believe it is psychoactive. I've asked a bunch of these guys to their face, is it psychoactive? And they immediately said yes. And here's why I believe it's psychoactive. And now I'll also remind you that it's completely vestigial. It has no known function in the human body, and only a small percentage can be processed in the intestines, and the rest of it has to be processed in the liver, which causes fatty liver. And we have an epidemic of five-year-olds that have fatty liver. And right? And so when you think about this behavioral change process, I always think about the symbiotic nature of what fruit was created for. And here's some amazing statistics. The molecule in fruit, the fructose molecule is identical to the fructose molecule in table sugar. The molecule does not change. When you eat these fruits and these fruit juices and these dried fruit, it keeps the cravings alive. And the symbiotic relationship of what fructose, I believe, was created for over time was that only at the peak of ripeness did these did animals and humans eat the berries and whatever. And then it irritated your bowels and spread the seeds out a couple days later. And here's the important part we only got fructose once or twice a year. That's it. We didn't have a 24-7 drip hybridized fruit that is just this big giant fructose package, right? Even the vegetables have hybridized to take the bitterness, and at what people think are nuts have been hybridized to take the bitterness out, which is adding or hybridizing for fructose. And so even though it's subtle, more subtle than table sugar, the difference between coca leaves and cocaine is that you still get a little bit of soothing, you get a feel, a little lift in self-esteem. There's a little bit of a psychoactive nature to it. And when you're pounding 20 or 30 teaspoons of a day of table sugar and sodas and candy and sugar, it's a problem. And this is the reason people can't quit. It's not the glucose spikes, it's the fructose.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

So if you're the sugar-free man, I am right behind you.

What Sugar-Free Eating Looks Like

SPEAKER_01 26:31

I I had to figure out how to eat again after getting in recovery from my eating disorder. And my go-to is non-starchy vegetables and protein. So I have to ask you, as the sugar-free man, what do you actually eat?

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Okay, so I have cycled through absolutely everything. And this story is not so much interesting that it's my story, but it's interesting in the evolution of the recovery and the evolution of that I've hopefully made quicker for a lot of my folks. And so I have been a vegetarian, a vegan, a macrobiotic, a fruitarian, a whatever, a whole bunch of other vegetarian types. And for 25 years, I ate fruit. I drank fruit juice. I ate oats every morning. I ate brown rice twice a day. And I was just starting to do the summits 11 years ago, and I started listening to these folks. And I was the chairman of the board during the pandemic of a food addiction institute, which helps people understand this stuff, right? And a woman there had been sober for 50 years and been fruit and grain-free for 25. So she caught my attention. I listened to her. Anyway, I'm doing these interviews, and all of them are starting to talk about animal food and animal products and whatever. And so I just started slowly incorporating fish, whatever. But when I found out about the fruit, the grains, and most of that kind of heavy fruit juice, dried fruit, grains, I had adult acne. I had rosacea, I had bleeding gums, I had basal cells, diagnosed basal cells. They were starting to cut off. I had my nose is all goobered up from cutting off basal cells. And literally within four to six months, all of that was gone when I let go of the grains and the fruit juices and the dried fruit from my past. And the scariest part is I was getting cognitive lapses. I was not even 60 yet at the time. And I was starting to get cognitive lapses. And both my parents were dying of Alzheimer's. My mother died of sugar addiction, not Alzheimer's, but they were dying of Alzheimer's. And I was getting these lapses. That took about a year, but that cleared as well. And my first coach was a vegetarian. I've interviewed all of the most famous vegetarians in the world, and then we're all on the same page to stop the sugar and ultra-processed carbohydrates. But it's just more difficult as a vegetarian to get off of the ultra-processed stuff because so much of the other glucose spikes and fructose is in your diet. It's possible she's still thriving, and I know a lot of vegetarians who are sugar-free, but it's just more difficult. It takes more time.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

100% agree. We tried to go vegan for environmental reasons, and it's really hard. And then you find yourself getting all these ultra-processed items to get any protein as a vegan. So we just loosened up from pretty strict vegan for about five years to vegetarian. But yeah, I'm with you. It's non-starchy vegetables, and then some sort of lean protein item is the absolute foundation of my diet. What kind of fat do you eat eggs? Do you have dairy? For a while we were very strict. And again, when we were vegan, it was no dairy, no eggs. Currently, we do eggs and we do some dairy as well. Now, granted, you and I both know that lactose is a sugar. That's why when you go to plant-based milk, your breakfast cereal stops tasting good. So we actually make our own cashew milk. My wife loves her fancy Vitamix blender. So we do cashew milk, which is basically soaked cashews in water. And yeah, cereal's a different experience without the sugar and milk.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Okay, so I'm going to ask you a question. And I

Eating Disorders Abstinence And Harm Reduction

SPEAKER_00 30:29

this will be a learning moment for my team, my group, my coaches, everybody. And this is a discrepancy or an issue that I think in the eating disorder world that, and moreover, in the emotional eating world that needs to be rectified. So currently, the standard line in the world of eating disorders, binge eating, and bulimia, and the emotional eating folks believe that if you can't eat sugar and flour moderately, you're not well. You're not graduating. If you're demonizing one food, then that's not correct or that's wrong, or whatever the hell they do it. And the emotional eating part, folks, they got the gurus and the book writers, they have a portion of the equation, but they also believe that you can intuitively moderate sugar. What are your thoughts on that? What are your beliefs on that possibility that because I found, and I learned this from people that have had boots on the ground a lot longer than I have, that about a third of people biochemically cannot ingest sugar without setting up cravings for more sugar and never getting off the hamster wheel.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

Yeah. So I'll answer your question three ways.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

So the first is sobriety from whatever substance, cocaine, alcohol, sugar, sex, whatever. It's a very individualized process. I do want to hear about your approach to sugar addiction, because obviously you've got a program.

SPEAKER_00 32:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

But if someone comes to me and says, Dr. Grover, this is so weird, you're never going to believe me. But when I put mayonnaise on my left ear, I'm sober and I don't want to drink. I go buy them mayonnaise. Meaning that if one of your clients is able to be completely sugar-free and can have a piece of cake once a month, and it works for them, great. So I don't necessarily like to think of absolutes as a doctor because everyone's a little bit different. Now, the second thing I have to say, Mike, is as a physician, a lot of what I do is harm reduction for humanity. There's so many different ways we hurt ourselves, whether it's exhaust from cars, whether it's these forever chemical plastics, whether it's refined food, whether it's cocaine, whether it's pornography, whatever, right? My role is to help people find what they believe to be their worst harm and quit that. So if someone comes to me and they're like, Dr. Grover, I'm dying of cirrhosis from alcohol, I'm gonna try cannabis for a while. I'm like, you know what? I don't want you to use either. But if alcohol's killing you, let's start with that. Yep. And then we may we eventually we make progress. We learn tools, we create connections, we learn community, we find exercise, we find art, music, whatever it's gonna be. Now, the third thing is you ask about biochemically around eating. So in the world of alcohol addiction, some people, when they take a drink, the pleasure chemicals are off to the races. And those are the best, yeah. You, yes, you for alcohol, me for food. So when people take naltrexone, which is an opiate blocker, and they've got that particular response to alcohol, it makes the alcohol less enjoyable and they don't want to drink. Now, I like to see what my patients feel, so I took naltrexone to see what would happen. Again, that's an opiate blocker. Yeah, and food stopped tasting good. And I have learned that I am one of those people that when I am exposed to sugar, my brain releases more pleasure chemicals than the average person. So I cannot myself, and this is not science, this is the anecdote of one. I cannot take a chance eating a piece of birthday cake.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:30

Now, interestingly, this is again, this is not science, this is an anecdote. I've learned over the years if that I have a few small pieces of deep dark chocolate after every meal, I have zero sugar cravings.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:44

So, in other words, in the world of addiction, people take suboxone to get off of opioids. It's a partial activator of the opiate receptor, which scratches that itch to keep them from craving, but doesn't make them high. My wife is also an addiction doctor, the fantastic Dr. Close, and she couldn't figure out like, why are you eating chocolate after every meal? And I was like, Reb, it's like my Suboxone. So I coming back to the mayonnaise on the left ear, I had to find that a little bit of kind of some low-risk sugar keeps me in control. But again, that's my mayonnaise on the ear, unique me, Casey Grover experience.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Got it.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

So, same thing with alcohol. Most people will tell me, Doc, I'm gonna have one beer. I'm like, oh my gosh, no, you and I both know that one beer is not one beer for you. I do occasionally get people who can drink casually after significant addiction, but it is definitely the minority.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

Yeah. That's a great answer. So what I found is the people who were bulimic, a lot of people have to weigh and measure. A lot of programs, including most of the 12-step or all of the 12-step programs, have this weighing and measure thing. And we found that if they can get off the sugar and the flour and have an abstinence, about 85% of them, they don't need to weigh and measure. They can what it is, I think that they've learned volume eating and it stretches their stomach receptors and they get a lot of endorphins and a lot of dopamine from that, and they have to cut back on that. But I don't think that's a primary to get off of binge eating and whatever. So eating disorders are interesting. There's a few guys in my world who are very diplomatic and very credentialed as well, uh, PhDs in public health and addiction backgrounds, addicts themselves, who are trying to bridge the gap between the eating disorder world, the eating disorder folks, and they're not working too much on the emotional eating folks. I think that's more of a side group, and they're not really all, they don't all have licenses or MDs or stuff like that or treatment centers. But the folks in the treatment centers, they have this need, I think, to not demonize the food. And I think that's an error that's going to have to be corrected.

SPEAKER_01 37:07

Yeah, again, I'm speaking as a doctor. I would say, yes, I consider sugar like alcohol. For some people, those pleasure chemicals go crazy when they get exposed to sugar, and it really changes their relationship with it, and they need to focus on abstinence. On a personal note, I don't really demonize anything except that I know what would be triggering for me, and I try to avoid that.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

Yeah, I'm a big harm reductionist too. I believe any reduction in sugar for a family or a person is wonderful. Totally agree. But the I always the name of my book was The Last Resort Sugar Detox. I'm the last house on the block. They've tried everything. And so that part of the equation where I'm dealing with the folks, they're addicts. And most of a lot of them will admit it going in, but they don't seem to know how to fix it, right? They've tried so many different ways to stop. And there's a second group of people that are harmful users, and those folks with a reset might be able to go back to having some cookies at Christmas and some birthday cake and whatever, but that and these numbers track pretty well with the obesity numbers, meaning that a third of people in the United States are obese. That's a hundred million plus, and 72% of those people self-describe as sugar addicts. So they know they're addicted to sugar, but they have a difficulty stopping. And the drug and addiction recovery world is called behavioral health. And it's the protocol or the change in behavior that we have to figure out how to create for folks that are struggling, not telling them to eat less and exercise more because that doesn't work.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

Yeah, it's real interesting. So

Exercise As A Better Dopamine Source

SPEAKER_01 38:55

there is a link between liking alcohol and liking exercise. And they found that when they bred rats to like alcohol, they compulsively ran. Uh-huh. And there's also a link between distance athletes and alcohol addiction. And there's probably some signal that if you like one addictive thing, you can, through cross addiction, get to the next thing. So a lot of what I try to do is inspire a love of exercise in a healthy way to help retrain those addiction pathways in a good direction. So I actually do CrossFit with my patients. I'm going at 4:30 my time today. And we're going to do a Spartan race as a group actually later this month, and to try to create kind of some of those transitions from sugar to getting their dopamine from exercise. So yeah, it's been wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 39:54

I love Greg Glassman too. He's doing some broken science initiative. It's pretty cool, actually. But yeah, I like CrossFit.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

Yeah. So truly, for me, my own, again, lived experience, not science but anecdote, as I emerged from my eating disorder, I discovered fitness as a way to get those feel-good feelings that food was giving me. And again, a lot of my patients, they're used to the alcohol doing X for them. It's it calms me down, it relaxes me, whatever it is. And I really try to coach them to find it through exercise. And then coming back to your work, being able to truly quit sugar and find healthy things like exercise, that to me is that's the holy grail. That's when we've really achieved significant changes in a person's lived experience.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

You're like you're an anomaly in a lot of ways. Like for to be open about anorexia and bulimia as a male is almost unheard of, genuinely. It's weird, but it's true. And I think I told you 95% of my clients are women. And it's just it's a mystery to me. And all of them have been through multiple treatments, bariatric surgery, GLP one, they've done it all, right? And they've had eating disorders, and they get a little nervous that I am quote unquote demonizing a food or that I have 100% abstinence as part of the protocol. They don't like, because of the what they've learned from treatment centers and 12-step and all that.

SPEAKER_01 41:24

The one thing I'd also say is I was at uh an elementary school this morning teaching about addiction. One of my side things I do is I do a lot of school education. And when I teach the kids which drug puts people in the hospital most, it's alcohol because it's so available, right? They go to the grocery store, you go to the gas station, you go to the restaurant, whatever. Sugar is the same way. And I have found as someone in recovery from an eating disorder, going to a restaurant is like going into a pit of lions. It's really hard to find something that fits what I need food to be for me. I'm curious how that resonates with you and your clients.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

Oh, so you're hitting one of the big triggers, and that is the social aspect. You mentioned it earlier. Everything is a reward from sugar, but every celebration from birth to death is sugar. And it's a cultural thing that evolves. It's not something that, you know, back in the day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, they didn't revolve around sugar and pies and all that kind of crap. It just wasn't, that wasn't what the holiday was about. And then the candy industry, and I don't have anything against them. They had to maximize shareholder value. And the science was not in sure then. No one knew, right? And to unwind this is going to be a 10 or 15 year process. It's going to take time, maybe longer, before it's a cultural norm.

Why Community Beats Going It Alone

SPEAKER_01 42:49

Mike, what what's next on your to-do list? What's next on what you're working on?

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Good question. I just want to build this platform, right? I want people to have a place, they a safe place, a third space, they call it, to meet. And the efficacy proven by the COVID and telemedicine now is that it's almost as good as in-person. And we have 27 or 28 coaches in there running meetings, and we got a couple thousand people in, but I've had as many as 25,000. And I had two platforms that sucked, and I had to close them down. And so we're rebuilding that part of it. And I want to get to 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 people and have them have access to coaches and experience. This is a strange stat. So 85% of our clients do not have spousal support. They've changed the diet around the house so many times that they're the husband and the kids are not playing any. They're not. You do you, girl. They're not, they're done. And so they need this tribe. They need this extra, this group of people. That's the only thing that's ever worked in substance use disorder, is some. Sort of community. And even if it's heart disease, right? It's like you join a survivor's group, your chances for long-term survival go through the roof if you are in a support group, as opposed to the person going it alone. And so I really do believe in the efficacy and the power. I've seen it live and in person over the decade. I've seen so many people change their life because not anything I did, but because of the vessel I created. Yes, I give some nuances and some instruction, but it's them meeting each other that is the important part of the equation.

SPEAKER_01 44:34

100%. So, Mike, as we wrap up our time together, if somebody wants to get on your program, they want to learn about what you do, what's the best way to find about your work and how to get sugar free?

SPEAKER_00 44:45

That's

Where To Start With No Sugar Nation

SPEAKER_00 44:46

a great question. And I'm a little torn. It's a hard, it's a long business answer. But I in this circumstance with this audience, I would tell them to go to Google No Sugar Nation and go to school, which is spelled S K-O-O-L. It is spelled differently than the regular schools, S-K-O-O-L and No Sugar Nation. If you go to No Sugar Nation, you can join us. I would suggest getting the meetings, which is a couple of bucks more, and just jump in there. And I'm not gonna bore you with the long-term business part of this because it's been a little bit of a challenge over the years keeping a team together, spinning plates, getting people to understand that this is not a diet, and to get a protocol that works. And inside of that group, it just I don't want to say magic, but I will say it is the most loving group of people you will ever meet because they all been there. There's not a story you can tell me of people. I take these coaching calls, right? And people they've thrown stuff in the garbage, poured dishwashing liquid over it, and gone back and cut the half off that doesn't have and then eat it, and they think that no one has ever done this before. They think they're alone on the planet, right? Yeah, exactly. They think they're the only person that's ever done this thing, and they're just alone because their husband thinks they're nuts, or they feel like their husband thinks they're nuts. And they've tried everything and they've gained 50 and lost 50 and gained 50. So I just want to build the platform up. I want a space that is recognizable as a brand, as a community that people can check into this.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

I have to say, Mike, great work as one person in recovery from binge eating. I thank you for your time and attention to this, and just thank you for your time and expertise today.

Final Thanks And Review Request

SPEAKER_01 46:56

Thank you so much for listening to Addiction Medicine Made Easy. If you found this helpful, please leave a review. It really helps others find the show. And a huge thank you to Central Coast Overdose Prevention for supporting this podcast. And always remember treating addiction saves lives.