In this life-changing episode, endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig talks about the state of food, our gut microbiome, and the key for those living with PCOS and other metabolic conditions.
Get ready for this life-changing lesson, uterinekind! No seriously, this episode will change lives if you take this priceless information and apply it to your daily life. I promise you this is not a “health nut” diet promotion or anything of the sort. Not only does science prove the success of these methods, but some of us at Uterinekind are living proof as well. The information here will be beneficial for everyone, but especially those struggling with PCOS, weight loss, metabolism, diabetes, inflammation, and so much more. We are giving you the key information to hacking your health with food!
And this is all thanks to Dr. Robert Lustig. Dr. Lustig is an endocrinologist and New York Times bestselling author of two incredible books, including the book that started it all here: Metabolical–the Lore and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. We get into an insanely in-depth conversation on the state of food, our gut microbiome, and why it is so crucial to proactively limit your exposure to these two foods that are poisoning us all. Dr. Lustig exposes the real key to fixing many of the conditions that plague us such as PCOS and breaks down a step-by-step method of how you can take your health into your own hands today!
Lastly, we end on a high note from us. To anyone affected by the East Palestine train derailment, we are arming you with the Uterinekind app for free.
Thanks for listening, learning, and being you. And join us back here every Tuesday for all things uterus, in service to you, uterinekind.
Carol: Connecting the dots on disease and the gut microbiome just may be the best diet ever. I'm Carol Johnson, and this is Hello Uterus.
Dr. Robert Lustig, the world renowned pediatric. Chronologist and author joins us today for a tell it like it is conversation on the state of food, our gut microbiome, and why it is so crucial to proactively limit your exposure to ultra processed food, which doesn't have to be as processed as you'd think to qualify as ultra processed.
This is not a health nut talk. This is literal basic health building blocks. While we wait for science to continue to catch up, no fault of science, only the fault of funding and the lobbyists who don't want us to know the science common sense is nodding emphatically yes that the chemical soup within and outside of us is causing disease.
So I'm gonna jump right into it, but I wanna quickly share my own experience. Just one month after having red metabolical, for those of you who have ever been pregnant, there's this thing that happens in the first trimester, maybe longer, where certain smells make you absolutely nauseous and you don't wanna breathe in the air, and you leave the environment where those odors are, or a certain food will be offered to you, or you'll think you're gonna want to eat a certain thing.
And then just that thought of chewing, it makes you. After reading Metabolical, that is exactly what happened to me. It was as if like a switch my body, which, which I'm gonna say it's really my brain just refused to ingest certain things. In the past month, I've had a single bite of a Snickers bar could easily.
Consumed, uh, the entire candy bar in, you know, a minute or so in prior to reading Metabolical and took one bite and it, it didn't even taste like a Snickers bar. I have had toast with peanut butter every morning for the last, like 40 years, and I have not had it in the last. Almost four weeks. Honestly, I didn't even have to read the whole book for this to happen.
It was by about like page 50. Just, I really wanna share this with you cuz I am not making it up. It has changed my life and I think the reason why is because of this thing that keeps coming up over and over and over again when we talk. Health conditions and, and symptoms and you know, the, the chemicals that we're putting into our body, when we connect the dots on something and it lights up because we connected those dots, you can't ignore it anymore.
And that's what happened with Metabolical. So after this quick break, join us for this conversation and I hope it's, it will be as life changing for you as it has been for.
Follow the Uterine Kind team and me over on Instagram and TikTok at Uterine Kind.
We are honored and thrilled to introduce to you Dr. Robert Lustig. He's the Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics, division of Endocrinology at the University of California San F. He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology with an emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system.
His research and clinical practice is focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lu, a Bachelor in Science from M I T A, doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University Medical College, and a master's of Studies in law from uc, Hastings College of Law. He is the author of several books and the one that has been keeping me up all night, and which happens to have the best title of any book in recent memory.
Metabolical, the lore and the lies of processed food, nutrition, and modern medicine. Dr. Lustig, welcome to Hello Uterus. Thank you for spending the time with us today.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Thanks so much for having me, Carol.
Carol: It's my pleasure. The title Metabolical Sticks. When I saw it, it inspired me to buy the book and it is a haunting title.
What does it represent to you?
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, , um, that's a good question. Um, I have been a, an endocrinologist for 40 years and I know a lot about metabolism, but the reason that I needed to write this book was because in the last eight years or so, I've sort of, um, shall we say, discovered or delved into, or somehow unearthed some of the dark underbelly of the corporate tactics.
That have basically made our environment unlivable and there's a, a, shall we say, a uh, a scheme going on. And you know, we know this playbook from tobacco. We know this playbook from climate change. We know this playbook from opioids, and unfortunately, it's going on with. And so Metabolical is a port monteau, if you will.
Uh, you know, two words conjoined together, metabolic the workings of the body and diabolical the workings of big food, big farm, and big
Carol: government. It's perfect. It's perfect and, and terrifying. And actually, I wanna say, um, however, that the book itself, it's not terrifying. First of all, people might think like, What well in If I, well, I wanna finish.
I I'm gonna finish that thought. It, it, it is in a way, but I don't want people to be like, oh gosh, you know, scaremonger book or whatever. When I read the bio, you're probably thinking to yourself, I might understand one eighth of what Dr. Lustig is about to say, but when you read this, Book it is one of the most entertaining.
Entertaining is not the right, quite the right word either. It's the connections that you make. It's like one after the other. Aha moment. Holy goodness. You know, it's that kind of a book, right? So like a show could be entertaining but terrifying at the same time. It it is That kind of book. Yeah. It, it is just diabolical, is, is exactly the perfect word.
And what we're doing now, Uh, I think just, we're just at the beginning of connecting these dots, um, and you're helping us do that in this book. I wanna read a, a quick quote from a study that was published in 2021. It's in the N I H and the impact, and it's called the impact of the gut microbiota on the Reproductive Metabolic Endocrine System.
And the quote is, Imbalance of the gut. Microbiotic composition can lead to several diseases and conditions such as pregnancy complications, adverse pregnancy outcomes, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis and cancer. However, research on this, the mechanisms is limited. Can you give us a 1 0 1 on the gut microbiome and help us understand it's like a black hole and maybe it's only to me, but I think probably a lot of other people too.
And clearly it's crucial to us understanding how to protect our bodies.
Dr. Robert Lustig: I'm gonna throw out two words, and these are the two words that describe the entire problem. Metabolism and inflammation. Yikes.
Carol: That second
Dr. Robert Lustig: one, if you have problems with either one, you end up with problems in the other. So they all kind of come together.
But in order to fix the problem, you have to fix both of them. If you get both of them right. The problem goes. , but it's not that easy because you have to ultimately figure. Where the problem is, and that's part of why I wrote metabolic, is to explain to people there are multiple pathways into this thing we call metabolic syndrome.
And metabolic syndrome is the thing that causes all of these diseases. Uh, problem of metabolism is the problem of sugar. And the problem of inflammation, okay, is the problem of the gut microbiome. So gut microbiome is basically there to both help you and your intestine is there to keep it from hurting you.
Your intestine is filled with a four letter word that starts with S and ends with T . The goal of the intestine is to let the good stuff in and keep the bad stuff from getting into your bloodstream. That's your intestine's job, and it has three barriers. It has a mechanical barrier called mucin that basically serves as a thick mechanical barrier on top of the intestinal epithelial cells to keep the bad stuff in the intestinal lumen and not let it cross into bloodstream where will wreak havoc?
There is a biochemical. Barrier. These are called tight junction proteins that hold the intestinal epithelial cells together. You know, kind of like a chain-link fence such that things can't pass. But if those become dysfunctional, then stuff gets across and then finally there's an immunologic barrier.
There are cells that are designed to basically ward off evil infection, and they're called th 17 cells. So you have three barriers. You have the mucin layer, you have the tight junction proteins, and you have the TH 17 cells. Sugar. My, you know, nemesis, well turns out alters what's going on in the intestine to the point where the mucin layer ends up being gobbled up by the intestinal bacteria themselves.
Because they need fiber. They need fiber to. , but the fiber's been taken out of the food. And so the intestinal bacteria will eat the mucin layer, the fructose, the the sweet molecule and sugar will nitrate those tight junction proteins and we rendering them incompetent. And then finally the th 17 cells get depleted by sugar and let all the other stuff, including fats that shouldn't come.
So the combination of what's going on in the intestine leads to this inflammatory process. Then that inflammation goes to the liver because after all, the gut goes straight to the liver through the portal vein, and it starts infl the inflammatory response there. And now you. Liver insulin resistance. And when you have in liver insulin resistance, your pancreas has to make more insulin to make the liver to its job.
So there's a reflex between the liver. When the liver has got a problem, the pancreas has to work harder, and so that raises insulin levels all over the body. This phenomenon called hyper insulin hyperinsulinemia, and this has now been shown in virtually anyone with any form of chronic metabolic disease.
Including, and especially polycystic ovarian syndrome. Now that insulin is a bad guy in this story because insulin is changing the function of the ovary. It's changing the function of the uterus. It's causing cell proliferation when it shouldn't be. And so it also blocks, uh, the conversion of androgen to estrogen.
And so getting the insulin down. Is job one. It's the job, one of the metabolic side, and it's the job, one of the inflammatory side. Get the insulin down any way you can. Well, the easiest way to do that is eat real food because real food is low in sugar, so you won't have the metabolic problems and the mitochondrial problems that go with the sugar and you won't have the inflammatory problems because you'll be feeding your.
you put the two together, your insulin levels drop, and guess what? You get better. The problem is that 90% of the food in the store is basically making your worse,
Carol: right? It's garbage. And we haven't even talked about the containers that the food is packaged in and, and all of our other environmental exposures and things like that.
Yep. With regard to that description, which like, I, I sometimes I think that when people hear. Clinical talk. It's just like the, oh God, I'm not gonna be able to digest it and take it in. And I encourage you, I urge you to force yourself through the initial discomfort of maybe not understanding how this all works together and plays into your world.
Because what he's saying is giving us the key here, giving us the key, and it's a, it's a key that we don't wanna accept. because it requires us to make some pretty serious changes in our diet. But the, the reason why I think it's so important for you to understand it from Dr. Lustig's perspective is because our doctors, our gynecologists, our primary care physicians, they frequently just tell us to lose weight.
And that is a blame game. And. Yeah, please go ahead.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Losing weight, I mean, telling patients to lose weight never works. I mean, you know, we've got decades of casualties because of that. And the reason is because you can't lose weight if you can't get your insulin down and you can't get your insulin down if you're eating the same food you were before.
And people don't understand that. It's not what's in the. . It's what's been done to the food that matters. So when you look at the food label, oh, you know it's got lower calorie, who cares? Cuz it's not about calories. It never was about calories. But you say, wait, I have to lose weight. I have to eat fewer calories.
No, you don't. You actually don't. , that's the mistake. But that's not what's taught in medical school. And I know because I went to medical school, part of the reason that I'm so incensed and so annoyed with this, you know, uh, phenomenon, what's going on in modern medicine, to the point where I had to write a book saying the lure and the lies of processed food, nutrition, and modern medicine.
Right.
Carol: Calling your colleagues
Dr. Robert Lustig: out. Yeah, absolutely is. I learned all this in college. I majored in nutritional biochemistry at M I T and they taught me pretty well that different food stuffs different. You know, macronutrients were metabolized in different ways with different biochemical pathways and led to different metabolic results.
And then I went to medical school and they told me, oh, none of that's very important. We, we just do calorie. Oh,
Carol: my hair is on fire.
Dr. Robert Lustig: And that was at Cornell Medical College, which had one of the biggest names in nutrition who actually wrote the textbook, Maurice Shields, and that's what they were teaching.
And who am I? I'm, you know, I'm a first year medical student. Am I gonna like, you know, raise holy hell, and, and, and, and challenge people? I, you know, look, these are the gurus. You know, they, they take care of patients. You know, I'm, I'm paying tuition, you know, to learn how to do this. So I did what they said.
And for the first 20 years in my practice, none of my patients got better. And then I started doing research in the field and. I had moved to Memphis, Tennessee, uh, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and there I found a cadre of about 40 children who had survived their brain tumors only to become massively obese.
After the therapy, and this is a well known phenomenon called hypothalamic obesity, and we didn't know what caused it, but we knew that damage to the brain, damage to the area of, uh, energy metabolism, hypothalamus, the control center, the ground zero for hormone brain interactions. Okay. Kind of like right beneath your brain, right above your pituitary gland, one square inch, um, damage to that caused massive obesity in animals and in humans.
We also knew that these patients had extremely ex exorbitantly high levels of insulin, and we knew there was a connection between the brain and the pancreas through the vagus nerve. Well, leptin had just been discover. Leptin is a hormone that goes from your fat cell to your brain and tells your brain you've eaten enough.
So I assumed that these patients couldn't see their leptin because that area of the brain was dead, and that's where the leptin receptors were. So they could not see their leptin. Therefore, their brain thought they were starving. Therefore, their brain was sending a message to the pancreas, release more insulin to store more energy, and that was the reason why.
Getting so fat. I said, well, I can't fix a brain. I can't stop the signal. I can't cut a vagus nerve. Is there anything I can do? And the answer is, yeah, I can suppress the insulin release at the level of the pancreas with a drug. And so we gave a drug that specifically inhibits insulin release. It's called octreotide.
It was well known to be used for growth hormones, secreting tumors. Well, you can use it to suppress insulin. And so we took eight kids and we gave him this drug, and lo and behold, I started losing weight. But something even more remarkable happened. They started exercising spontaneously. I didn't tell 'em to do it, they just did it.
Wow. One kid became a competitive swimmer. Two kids started lifting weights at home. One kid became the manager of his high school basketball team. And all the basketballs, I mean, these were kids who sat on the couch, ate Doritos and slept, and now they're active and the parents are saying, oh my God, I got my kid back.
And the kid's saying, this is the first time my head hasn't been in the clouds since the tumor. . I said, wow, this is really amazing. We ended up doing a double blind placebo control trial showing indeed this is the case, and then we did it in adults. And turned out not every adult responded. Only 20% of the cohort that we tested responded, but that 20% same thing happened, and what we noticed was that their insulin levels fell like a.
and if their insulin levels fell like a stone, these patients got better and they lost weight and they started exercising. Now, the other 80% did not lose weight, did not lower their insulin levels, and did not change their behavior. So we actually found a subset of obesity due to insulin release at the level of the pancreas, and it's still true.
So the question is, okay, that's great for 20%. What about the other 80%? And the other 80% all have chronic metabolic disease, and that's where the patients with the P C O S are in that 80%. They also have hyperinsulinemia. They just don't have it because of a problem between the brain and the pancreas.
They have it because of a problem at the mitochondria. They have a mitochondrial dys. Their mitochondria can't make enough energy because their mitochondria are being poisoned, and what are they being poisoned with? Sugar. The fructose molecule inhibits the enzymes that make those mitochondria work, and so when you have mitochondria dysfunction, you end up with a host of problematic diseases in particular P C O.
And so the goal is unstick, you know, un poison your mitochondria, get your insulin down and you'll do better. But you can't do that eating your regular diet because it was your regular diet that poisoned your mitochondria in the first place.
Carol: Right? So on whole food, we wouldn't have gone down this path. There's sugar in, you know, an orange, right? But it's not the same as what we get in fruit loop.
Dr. Robert Lustig: The point is that fruit is okay because fruit has the fiber, and the fiber is the treatment for the bacteria, okay? To keep that microbiome happy. All right? And it turns out that the fructose in fruit. It doesn't get absorbed.
A fiber soluble in the insoluble fiber together form a gel on the inside of the intestinal, uh, the duo, and it acts as a secondary barrier, like that mucin layer, except more. And so it inhibits the transport of glucose, fructose, sucrose, starches from the gut into the bloodstream so that the liver never see.
So the glucose rise is lower, the insulin rise is lower, and that then protects your liver, and then the fiber helps move the food through the intestine, and then the microbiome gets to chew it up for its purposes. So you fed your gut. So even though you consumed it, even though it pasted your lips, you didn't get it because it never got absorbed again.
This is why the whole calorie thing is useless. because if you ate your calories with the fiber that came with the food in the first place, those calories weren't for you. They were for your bacteria, and you have, and you have to feed your gut or your gut will feed on you. So understanding the relationship between the food, your metabolic status and disease production is essential to in terms of mitigating that. and so you have to change your diet. If you have P C O S, if you have fibroids, if you have anything that is driven by insulin, and that's a lot of things, then the only way to fix it is fix the food.
Carol: Can we also say driven by insulin and estrogen, or how? How does estrogen play into this?
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, P C O S. Means less estrogen. So as I'm sure your audience knows, well the ovary has many different kinds of cells in it, but two in particular that are hormone producing has the granulosa and the feca cells. Now the feca cells are where the androgen is made, the testosterone is made cuz you know, women have testosterone and pubic hair, they have auxiliary hair, they have underarm hair.
They sometimes get facial hair when the androgen levels get too. . Both sexes make both hormones androgen and estrogen. It's a question of the ratio. Males make way more testosterone women about equal amounts of testosterone and estrogen. All right, so the feca cells make the androgen, and then the androgen goes across to the granulosis cells, and then the granulosis cells have an enzyme called aase that turns the androgen into est.
Well, insulin makes those thika cells work harder, so raising the androgen and it also suppresses pituitary hormone F S H. That tells the granulosis cell to work. So you end up with the buildup of androgen and no place to put it. , and that's why you get all the symptoms, uh, of P C O S. The way to fix that is to get the insulin down.
Carol: Coming right back to it. It's, it is, it's the key
Dr. Robert Lustig: things that do work for P C O S. All get the insulin down, okay? From a drug standpoint, for instance, Metformin. So Metformin is an adjunct for P C O S management. I'm not gonna tell you, it's a panacea. It's not a the be all and end all because Metformin can't fix your diet.
your diet can fix your diet, but metformin can be an adjunct to improve and improve the health and the number of mitochondria because it stimulates the fuel gauge on the liver cell and on the ovarian cell called a M P kinase. Now, a m P kinase is an enzyme that basically senses energy in the cell and decides whether or not more mitochondria are.
and that's a good thing to have. Okay. It's a, it's, it's the fuel gauge. Now the problem is metformin will increase the number of mitochondria, but if those mitochondria being poisoned too, what's the difference? .
Carol: Right. It almost seems like the, the more things in the body or cells in the body that are being poisoned and challenged and damaged, the bigger the problem.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, yeah. There's no pill for that, right? There's no pill to undo the mitochondrial dysfunction. There's only food. This is not druggable, but it is suitable because none of our medicines get to the mit. So Metformin will build more mitochondria and newer mitochondria and that's good, but those mitochondria then have to work and they can't work in our current food environment, right?
So it all comes back to fixing the food. And people don't wanna fix the food cuz you know what? They're addicted to sugar or real foods too expensive or I don't have time for it, or it doesn't taste good enough or whatever. But you know, so everyone's got their own excuse. Ultimately, if you want to get better, that's how you start fix the.
Carol: Yeah, and you know, I, I feel like everybody has an excuse, but a lot of the times it has to do with missing a piece of the puzzle, you know, because it goes back to that conversation that they've had where a doctor says lose weight, and they give them a pamphlet that, you know, just really basically covers calories, fats, sodium, sugar, et cetera.
But, but there isn't this. Come to Jesus moment. And, and that's what I feel like you bring to the table because again, I, I think this was before we, we started recording and I said to Dr. Lustig that after reading the book, there were changes that I made in my diet. And I swear to God, they were practically unconscious.
Uh, I made these changes because to not do so would be. Running into a burning building. I, I just, it just all clicked and it was like, whoa. And some of them are things like, not specific to the food itself, but, you know, not using, not getting takeaway right. And not having my food placed into a container that isn't, you know, isn't even recyclable because of the chemical composition of it.
And for the first 30 minutes of. Boer, it's like a big love fest in there. And now I'm, what I, I thought was tiki masalas, tiki masala slash insert, toxic chemical , you know? And, and I just, I just instantly stopped. And I'm telling you, I'm not like, I'm not one of those people that can easily factor in changes.
I'm a fairly stubborn sweet. So it, it, it is so important to have you speak about this because I do believe that it will absolutely have people connect the dots and then make
Dr. Robert Lustig: the change. I hate to tell you, but 95% of the population are mainly stubborn sweets, , .
Carol: Yeah. We're, you don't even have to be Swedish to be a stubborn sweet
Dr. Robert Lustig: That's exactly, uh, and that's indeed what people are, and you know, the way I look at it is you can't fix a problem if you don't know what the problem. Okay. And you have to work upstream of the problem, not downstream of the problem in order to fix a problem. Example, it's the first sentence in the book.
You find a wasp buzzing around your attic. What are you gonna do? Kill the wasp or.
Carol: Well, after I've read the book, I'm gonna say, no . It's fine. It's next. Exactly. Yeah. Get to the root
Dr. Robert Lustig: cause. Get to the root cause. The root cause of chronic metabolic disease, and I don't care which disease. You can pick your disease.
Type two, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease, those eight diseases. Currently cost 75% of healthcare dollars in America, and that's a lot of money. Okay? Cause we are spending 3.9 trillion on healthcare. Okay? And 75% of it is preventable.
Okay? So that's 3 trillion a year going down a frigging rat hole. Pick your disease. Okay? Insulin's the driver. And of those eight diseases that I just mentioned, none of them have. None of them really have treatments. Oh, we can treat the symptoms, you know, so like for cardiovascular disease, we can give statins.
Yeah, the statins are lowering the L ldl, but the LDL is not the problem. The LDL is the symptom of the problem. The problem is still there. Oh, we can give insulin or oral hypoglycemic to type two diabetics and lower their glucose, but they die just the same cuz they die of the coronary artery disease, which is not related to the glucose.
Same with hypertension. You know, you can lower the blood pressure, but the problem. The defective nitric oxide production and fatty liver disease, same thing. And ultimately polycystic ovarian disease, same thing. So you gotta work upstream of the problem. And in each case, what's upstream of the problem is hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.
So you have to fix that. Well, the only way to fix that is to stop the inflammation. Let your gut. And the way to heal it is real food and let your mitochondria work and stop giving it the toxin that's interfering with its fun with their function. And that's called sugar. So, That to me is sort of everything I know wrapped up in, you know, in a tight little bow.
Carol: Yeah. But perfectly s stated and just so much to consider. And I hon it just game changing, just seriously, game changing. Um, and may, and maybe it's just me. I don't think it's just me. I've learned to understand. That the word diet is meaningless. We're complicating the out of everything, and, and we just need to reflect back on this consistent theme in our universe, which is everything is in a state of perfect exquisite balance until we screw with it.
And when we screw with it, we sh we should not be shocked, , to see like instantaneous and rampant disrupt. Right in our bodies, in our climate, in everything. And, and what infuriates me is that we allow this to happen. It makes me nuts. Before we talk about where are the food police, I want, I wanna get your perspective on two things.
One, if you could just speak, speak to how companies hide sugar .
Dr. Robert Lustig: Um, once upon a time I wrote an e. Cold Sugar has 56 names, A Shopper's guide. Well, I was wrong because there are 262 names for sugar and they're all on the adage Sugar Repository, which you can reach through my website or through the Hypoglycemia Support Foundation's website.
Um, 262 names. Now, do you think you know 'em all?
Carol: Definitely not. And by names you mean chemical compositions that are sugar,
Dr. Robert Lustig: chemical compositions and sometimes, uh, you know, just funky names like, Che like Dara, you know, and of course you know my favorite evaporated cane juice.
Carol: You know what mine is? Sugar alcohol. I love that
Dr. Robert Lustig: one. Well, sugar alcohols aren't actually sugar and they don't necessarily get absorbed, but that's actually the problem because they're osmo lytes and they hold onto water, and so they can make you really bloated and really sick.
Carol: Really sick. I learned that the hard way.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Yep. Um, you know, if you eat a piece of chocolate with sugar alcohols in it, um, you may not do it again.
Carol: Yeah, yeah. And so when you see sugar free on the label and then you turn it over and you see sugar and it says zero grams, and then it says, beneath that, sugar alcohol, seven grams.
Dr. Robert Lustig: There is no safe sweetener. There are some sweeteners that are safer than others, but no safe sweetener,
Carol: we gotta change our taste buds.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Have to Well, and we can, yeah. And we can, but sugar desensitizes the taste receptors. This is work of Monica Deuce at University of Michigan has actually shown what enzymes are involved in, how the receptors change their, uh, modulate taste. Uh, and it takes about three weeks for your taste buds to come back.
So if you go sugar free, you know, I mean sweet free, I should say, you know, and, and diet soda free, et cetera, for three weeks, and then you put a grape in your mouth, it will absolutely taste like it was candy.
Carol: Blow your mind like ambrosia that I I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do that cuz I wanna have that experience.
Cuz that what you point out in that is, you know, again, like this idea of like, we're complicating things so much and we're also robbing ourselves of like pure delight and we're replacing it with this manufactured thing that is just literally making us sick. So, That's your perspective on sugar. There's over 200 names for it.
It's, it's hidden everywhere. And, and are the processed foods, like is there a percentage that you would safely state is the average percentage of sugar is the lead ingredient in So in, in pick a category of processed food.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Um, I can't do that per se. What I can say is that ultra processed food accounts for 62% of our sugar consumption.
So, you know, if, if sugar is one of the first three ingredients in any given food, it's dessert.
Carol: Yeah. And dessert shouldn't have a positive connotation. Yeah.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Yogurt is dessert. Okay. Um, Chinese chicken salad is dessert. Thank you
Carol: for saying that. That's how you have to look at it. Thank you for saying that. And you mentioned the, the term ultra processed food.
I was kind of smacked when I saw the definition of whole food, processed food and ultra processed food and that processed food. Uh, an example of that could be a baked potato, right? We take a potato and then we process it. Just through the process of cooking it, I was surprised to make that connection
Dr. Robert Lustig: So, uh, a colleague of mine, uh, at the University of Sao Paulo, uh, his name's Carlos Montero, professor of Public Health, did something really useful for the field.
He developed a classification system based on the degree of processing called the NOVA System, and you can find it online. And he basically has four classes of processing. So the easiest way to explain this is to take a sample, uh, uh, food. Let's take an. So class one would be an apple picked off the tree.
Class two would be apple slices, destem, dece, possibly deskinned. Class three would be apple sauce. Macerated cooked with sugar added usually, and class four would be a McDonald's apple pie. Okay. Turns out only the class four. Foods are associated with chronic metabolic disease.
Carol: Wow. So not, so I was gonna ask you, based on your description at the top of the show, my, my thought was we need to eat the whole apple because we need to provide the The fiber with the sugar.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, we do. But you're saying even applesauce where it's been skinned and cooked is still sufficient. Well, let's put this way. It's not gonna be beneficial, but it probably won't be dangerous. It'll probably be neutral, but only the Class four foods, uh, have been, uh, associated with metabolic derangement, morbidity, and mortality.
Carol: You know, I had to shed a tear because you knocked out one of my favorite, you know, I don't eat them every day, but now I don't eat them at all. Um, but one of my favorite things as a, as a person with celiac disease, potato chips, are, Nevana, especially with tuna fish. Yeah, that's what I think is so wild because I think most people would, would recognize the fact that Lego, it's because it's fried, it has fat, but that's not the real problem.
Right?
Dr. Robert Lustig: No, that's not the problem. Well, it, it has fat, but fat's. The, you know, boogeyman that everybody made it out to be. First of all, there is this thing called saturated fat that everybody thinks is bad. Turns out number one, there's not one saturated fat. There are two. There's even chain fatty acid, saturated fat, which is red meat, saturated fat, and then there's odd chain.
Fatty acids with a specific phospho lipid signature, which is dairy saturated fat. Everybody throws saturated fat into one big pile. Red meat, dairy, all the same. Not true. Turns out red meat is car. Uh, the, the saturated fat from red meat is cardiovascularly neutral. It's not good. Not bad. , whereas the dairy saturated fat is actually protective against heart disease and diabetes, that phospholipid signature is actually helpful.
It's a good thing. But of course, we took the fat out of the milk and what did we do? We put the chocolate and the strawberry in for the kids. To make them drink it. So we took something good out and put something bad in. Right. You know, that's how some we're,
Carol: I know and we're, thank you for saying it.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Dumb.
Uh, and we, and we've done that a lot of, uh, you know, with a lot of, uh, foods, that's one, one issue. The other issue is, you know, ev I'm not here to tell people red meat is good bread meat's not. But people think red meat is bad because of the saturated fat. Turns out no. The, the, the saturated fat issue in red meat is again, cardiovascularly neutral.
When you actually look at the multivariate linear regression analysis, when you factor out all the other things, That are driving red meat being a problem. Turns out the saturated fats used to almost nonexistent as a player. So what about red meat is bad? Well, the iron, the heme, cuz that's an oxidative stress causes rusting inside our bodies.
How about that? Yeah. number two, the branch chain amino acids. Leucine, isoleucine, valine. So these are. Essential amino acids, you need them. Um, they are 20% of muscle. And if you're a body builder, you know that's what's in protein powder. And so they take scoops of protein powder and add 'em to their smoothie shakes, you know, and yes, if you're building muscle, you can't build the muscle without 'em.
Okay, but what if you taken too many of them? What if you're a mere mortal like me and you eat a corn fed? And corn's very high in those branch chain amino acids. Okay, leucine Isoleucine Bailey. Turns out your liver takes the excess, takes the amino group off de amate it, turns it from an amino acid into an organic acid, and then tries to s shunt it through the mitochondria.
The mitochondria get overwhelmed, can't deal with it, throw it off as citrate, and then the uh, liver cell has to turn it into fat. And that fat is the bad fat. That's trig. And then that will either precipitate in the liver causing fatty liver disease, or it'll be exported out where it can be substrate for heart disease and obesity.
Alright, and then finally turns out red meat is of course muscle, and muscle is very high in choline. Choline is necessary. It's a vitamin. It's vitamin B four. It's necessary for atill choline, which is a neurotransmitter in your brain. It's necessary for phospho tial choline, which is a lipid transporter around your body.
Um, you know, it's part of Apo B 100, so you need choline, but it turns out if you take in excess choline, the bacteria in your intestine will turn that choline into trimethyl. TM A, which then gets absorbed and it goes to your liver, and your liver oxidizes it. Now it's T M A O, trimethylamine oxide, which has been shown to be the stickiest substance that the body produces, and it lines your arteries and your liver.
This is work from Stanley Hazen at the Cleveland Clinic, so red meat might be a problem. but not cuz of the saturated fat. Right. .
Carol: My mind is blown. I So and you specifically said corn fed you, you meant that if you are eating piece of red meat that is from an animal that has been fed on corn. Right.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Right. That which is. , which is, uh, you know, our US beef supply
Carol: Exactly. Vast majority. Even if, even if you're buying organic meat or you're being like, you know, pasture raised, look for where they say finished on grain, you know? And, and that I think is so important because there's if for people to understand that what someone, someone being a cow is eating.
Is actually impacting us after we consume the meat of that cow. And, and so then I also wanna paint another picture, which is what we eat as humans is also going to affect our system. And then the pregnancies. That we carry, right? So like we may not understand all the words and all the nuances and understand the pathway.
That's why the book Metabolical should be on your bookshelf. But you can understand it from a common sense perspective, which is we can't, we can't sustain eating this crap. And we, and, and it's just so at its most basic. because I'm not a scientist and I have a fairly basic brain, I always come back to the fact that evolution happens really slowly and there's been like a thousand new chemicals in the last year alone.
And our bodies just, our bodies are like, are you kidding me? ? What the hell?
Dr. Robert Lustig: Indeed. And you know, the E p A can't keep up with them either, and the FDA certainly can't keep up with them and they actually privatized the generally recognized as safe. When they generally recognized the safe list was first formulated in 1958, there were 170 items on the list, so there were 170 items that the F D A said, were safe for you to consume at any level and would not hurt you.
Today there are 10,000.
Carol: Oh my gosh. You really? I could just,
Dr. Robert Lustig: ok, so there are 10,000 things you can put in your body that won't hurt you, really.
Carol: Right. I mean, they would have to say that we discovered these in natural environments. That's the only way is if they, they, they somehow miraculously discovered 10,000 new things in natural environments that we can consume.
Which is not what you're talking about. Right.
Dr. Robert Lustig: So, you know, we have to really, you know, think about government's role in this, you know? Absolutely. Cause they made and embedded, which is, you know, part of why I wrote the book.
Carol: It's, it's almost as if you're looking at my show notes and, and you're reading my mind because that's exactly where I wanna go next.
I think things that I, I honestly don't even think are really that productive. And here's an example. It is. Boggling to me that companies create toxic products and they have employees that manufacturers said toxic products. And then we as customers slash potentially employees get in line to hand over our money to buy the toxic products.
And at some point that whole super screwed up system has to crack. And I'm seeing three cracks and, and. One is the e p A, they're in December. They were sued by a variety of organizations for not researching chemicals as directed by Congress some 20 plus years ago in the Food Safety Quality Act. I forget the exact name, in the time that they were directed to investigate those chemicals.
And today they have started testing on 50 of the chemicals. They've completed testing on 30 some odd of the chemicals and, and they've approved. Like another 450 chemicals that haven't even been tested. Where is the epa? And I don't mean geographically .
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, they, they've been out to lunch for a very long time, and part of it is their own fault.
Part of it I think is, you know, Congress and the past administration, they rolled back a lot of, of e p A guidelines, so I'm not going to, you know, shall we say take them to task per se. I know some e p a officials, and it's not like they're the evil empire , right? They, they're, they're trying to do their job, but, you know, politics gets in.
Carol: Politics and, and perhaps being directed to consider industry as their boss rather than the citizens that they're supposed to protect as their boss.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, there are several captured agencies. The FDA is captured by pharma. The U SDA is captured by food, the EPA captured by big oil. You know, it's a, uh, it's a round robin When you look at who sits, uh, at the top of these, uh, organizations, and then where do they go after they're done?
It's, uh, it, it's a problem and it's a problem at a lot of levels. It's also a problem in the financial service. Space as well. Where does US Treasury always come from, comes from Goldman Sachs. You know, this is, this is not the way we should be doing business. Yeah.
Carol: And it's, it's not something that, you know, we feel that we can really have an impact on.
But I still wanna ask the question aside from, The absolute flea that I am making, which is to alter your diet and focus on whole foods and turn yourself into a person that feels sick when they look at something that's processed, put that aside, and then we wanna do something proactive to speak to this.
But we look at an organization like the EPA and we're just a taxpayer and you know, they don't care. How can we actually affect.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Well, , it's not easy. I'm, I'm doing my best. Uh, it, it, it's hard, you know, because industry's got a lot of money and, you know, they're lined up on the other side to, you know, to keep, keep the status quo.
Cause the status quo works for them. So what you have to do is you have to help yourself first. So, number one, eat real food. Number two, it's really good to know what your insulin is. Now you can get a fasting insulin level at your doctor, you know? But they have to know why, because a lot of doctors won't draw fasting insulin cuz they don't know how to interpret it.
So you have to ride them. Okay? And if you need fire power, you know, ammunition to get your doctor to do the right thing, buy metabolical and hand it to your doctor and say, read this frigging thing. Yeah, you all about fasting insulin. You, you know. You know what? Okay, please.
Carol: Continue. Yes,
Dr. Robert Lustig: . It's one thing you can do. It's also, um, glucose is a proxy for insulin, so knowing your glucose response to individual foods is valuable because the higher the glucose goes, the higher the insulin goes. And we can measure glucose. So we have continuous glucose monitoring, and there are companies that are helping people figure out what those glucose curves mean.
Full disclosure, I am a advisor to a company called Levels Health. And what they do is they help you mitigate the glucose response, and that would be very, very good for people with polycystic ovarian syndrome. Very
Carol: cool. We're gonna check that out. And it's called
Dr. Robert Lustig: Levels, levels health.com. And you know, this is a way to basically get your glucose under control because if you get your glucose under.
90%. You've gotten your insulin under control
Carol: too. Now, when someone, I have just two more quick questions. When someone begins this process, how quickly can the system reregulate itself?
Dr. Robert Lustig: We showed in children that. We could take the added sugar out of their diet and substitute starch. So not like good food.
We gave 'em crappy food, . But it was, we took the fructose out, we put the glucose in, and we were able to see massive, massive improvements in their metabo, cardiometabolic functioning, and also their fatty liver in nine days.
Carol: Holy cow. And when you say starch, can you give us an example of what you.
Dr. Robert Lustig: So basically we took the ba, the, the pastries out.
We put the bagels in. Oh, so So a bagel. Yeah. We took the sweetened yogurt out. We put the baked potato chips in. We took the chicken teriyaki out where you put the Turkey hot dogs in. So we didn't give 'em good food. We gave 'em crappy food. We gave 'em kid food, food, kids. But it was no added sugar food.
Nine
Carol: days. Nine days. People Nine. Nine days. Nine days. I am so motivated
Dr. Robert Lustig: my colleagues in adult medicine locked people up on their clinical research center. And either fed them a high refined car, uh, high complex carbohydrate diet or a high sugar diet, same number of calories, two weeks each, and showed that on the high sugar diet, liver fat went up 38% in those two weeks.
Carol: Holy cow.
Dr. Robert Lustig: In two weeks. And when you take the, uh, sugar out, the liver fat goes.
Carol: Amazing. Again, I, you know, the, I think it, for me it's been a combination of becoming, um, sort of like falling in love with being curious about my system because let's be real like this, we marvel over our iPhones and stuff, but the thing that we walk around in all day long is ludicrously thrilling.
And, and so when you factor that and then, then you say like, okay, well then maybe I. You know, understand how to operate it. , you know,
Dr. Robert Lustig: well, unfortunately, they don't give parents a user's manual when they, when they have kids.
Carol: I know, I know. It's just we're, and we're also just so enamored with how cute they are and everything.
So it's just like a, but this is so, so important. Um, now last question I have for you, little bit of a hot topic out on social media, and I'm curious about your take on it. Ozempic for weight loss for o ozempic.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Yeah, I knew it was coming.
Carol: You knew it was coming,
Dr. Robert Lustig: knew it was coming. It's fine. I actually, uh, I did a, a piece for, uh, today.com, which we can find, so it sort of summarize
Carol: Excellent. We'll post that.
Dr. Robert Lustig: So the american Academy of Pediatrics redid their obesity recommendations and basically I said obesity is not going away. Pediatricians should not ignore it. And they should do intensive interventions, including medications and surgery. And the reason is because telling people to lose weight doesn't work.
The question is, is your next jump to medication? And the answer is no. Right? No. Okay. There's something in between. Okay. Yeah. It's fix the food environment. Telling people to lose weight does not fix the food environment. In order to make this go away, you have to fix the food environment. Now, doctors don't know how to fix the food environment, so they don't understand.
My feeling is that ozempic wago, you know, pick your GLP one analog has a place. Okay. I used them when I was taking care of patients. I'm, you know, clinically retired now, but I used them. We used medication. I'm not saying we didn't, we also sent kids to surgery, so I'm not saying that's off the table either.
But first you have to fix the food, and if the fixing the food doesn't work, then we can talk about medication. But to just have your doctor write a prescription for Ozempic or Wego, first of all, as soon as you. Weight comes roaring back because you haven't fixed the food environment. Duh. Right. Number one.
Number two, okay. It's not like those medications don't have side effects. They do. And number three, if everybody in America. Who qualified for Ozempic or Wago. Got it. That would be 2.1 trillion extra to the healthcare system. So instead of spending 2.1 trillion to put everybody on ozempic, how about we get rid of food subsidies, reduce the amount of sugar in our food and save 3.9 trillion while people get healthy on.
Carol: That's brilliant. I mean, and I'm so glad you brought up food subsidies. I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but from a layperson's perspective, it really feels like everybody's conspiring against us to keep us just a little sick so they can keep medicating us and indeed.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Indeed, and that's why I wrote the book.
Carol: I'm so glad you did. It has made a massive impact on me and I don't think I'll stop talking about it for probably a decade or until at least you write your very next book. And I, I want to, um, thank you for writing it in a style that is just a delight to read. It's just phenomenal. How can we follow you and follow your work?
Dr. Robert Lustig: I'm easy to find, uh, robert lustig.com, metabolical.com. Uh, I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and uh, I don't know if I'm on Twitter right today. I'm on Twitter. Uh, but if Elon doesn't, uh, uh, step down, I'm getting off Twitter. Yes.
Carol: Same. I actually slid on over to TikTok, and I gotta tell you, it's really, uh, it, it's really a pretty thrilling platform.
Dr. Robert Lustig: Um, I'm not into it, . I don't have time for that.
Carol: I know there's plenty of places to find you, and I really appreciate the fact that you came out of medicine and you could have gone to, you know, like the azos and kicked back and grow your own food and stuff, but instead you, oh, my salary, you , you. Stuck around.
Actually, it's really inexpensive to live there. Don't look into it though, because we need you. You stuck around and you gave us something that out of all of the help books out there, and I would not describe this really as a help book, I would, I would describe it as almost like a human bible. That you gave us actionable stuff that doesn't feel bse and it doesn't feel like you, you are not BSing us, you are not manipulating us into some sort of box like do the keto or it, it's none of that.
It's just this basic foundational science about our bodies that we all. And if we don't understand how these beautiful systems work, then it's very easy to mistreat them. But once you understand how they work, I mean, would you pour Pepsi in your car gasoline tank? You wouldn't because you understand how it works.
So, I, I can't thank you enough. It's made a massive impact on me.
Dr. Robert Lustig: I appreciate that. Thank you for saying that, Carol.
Carol: I, I hope that we can have another conversation someday. And until that time, Dr. Robert Leig, you can find him@robertlustig.com. L U S T I g. Seek him out, seek this book out. I'm gonna be posting about it. You're gonna be seeing it. Thank you.
Dr. Robert Lustig: My pleasure. Thank you.
Carol: We'll be right back with ending on a high note.
We're gonna close today's podcast by alerting you all to a free offer@uterinekind.com to help those who have been impacted by the chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, in the surrounding region. We are. Happy to offer free use of the Uterine Kind app for symptoms recording, which is evidence of how your body is impacted by the exposure, if at all.
And you can fill out a quick form that just asks for your name and your zip code over@uterinekind.com and download the app. You can use it on any device. It's as they say, device agnostic, so you can use it on your desktop. You can use it on smartphones. Tell your family and friends about it. It's really important that you gather detailed daily symptoms of your experience since this horrific disaster in order to protect yourself and advocate for yourself, both in doctor's offices and in the court.
I'm sorry that this happened to you. I'm sorry. That the e p A and our government doesn't take more seriously the need to, to really look at the safety of transporting chemicals and just our overall chemical and exposure. But hopefully the work that we're doing here at Uterine Kind and the work that other groups are doing, like the environmental working group and others, um, will, will ultimately affect some change and help protect us because we.
Hey, thank you all at Uterine Kind for getting that offer up and running so fast. And to Angela and Maryelle for producing the Hello Uterus podcast and to you for spending this time with us. You can download Uterine kind@uterinekind.com and the app has been submitted to both stores, so hopefully this week it will be available.
Keep you posted over on TikTok and Instagram where you can follow us at Uterine Kind. Till next week be well, be cool. Be kind.
The hello uterus podcast is for informational use only. The content shared here is not used to diagnose or treat any medical condition. Please ask your physician about your health and call 9 1 1 if it's an emergency. And thank you uterine kind for listening.