Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Sugar is the LEAST of Your Problems | The Major Cause of Disease
186 Plays1 year ago
Do you need help with your health? Would you like to increase your longevity while addressing existing health issues?
Request your FREE Metabolic Function Assessment session with me here: https://www.livelongerformula.com/
During this 45-minute consultation we’ll take a deep dive into critical areas of your metabolism and understand what is out of balance.
From gut health and hormone function to adrenal health and blood sugar regulation, even a small imbalance in any of these (or other) areas can lead to poor health in the future and diminished longevity…but the sad fact is that a large majority of people over 40 have multiple imbalances in multiple areas of their metabolism…
The key is to identify and address these swiftly, so that you can thrive for decades to come without worrying that “something’s brewing under the surface.”
Request your Metabolic Function Assessment session here and let's get you thriving for decades to come: https://www.livelongerformula.com/
---
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Book Recommendation
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, Christian Jourdanov here. I'm a functional health practitioner, author, and my latest book is How to Actually Live Longer Volume 1. Quick reminder about that. If you haven't got yourself a copy, I'd highly recommend that you get it if you're into the topic of longevity, which a lot of people are.
Low-Carb Diets and Longevity
00:00:23
Speaker
And in there, chapter four, which is about one fifth of the book,
00:00:30
Speaker
I discuss why low-carb and ketogenic diets are not conducive to longevity and I explain why that is the case and why we need carbohydrates in order to not just survive but to thrive.
00:00:49
Speaker
If you listen to low-carb proponents, they'll tell you there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate because the body can make glucose. But the way it makes glucose is through increasing cortisol and so on. And these are stress hormones, basically.
00:01:12
Speaker
It's a stress pathway. It's a survival pathway. It's a backup emergency system like burning fat and creating ketones is a backup system.
The Necessity of Glucose
00:01:27
Speaker
So if you want to have plenty of energy to be in a relatively low stress state, physiologically speaking, nevermind your psychological stressors for now,
00:01:42
Speaker
And you want to live a long time, you want to run on the more optimal system, which is burning glucose, because as you may know, the brain requires about five, six grams of glucose per hour. So over the course of a 24 hour period, that is, let's say,
00:02:07
Speaker
120 grams of glucose. So if you eat, let's say, 100 grams of carbohydrates in the day, and you're moving around doing other stuff, you have your other organs, right, so on, you are going to be at a glucose deficit that will get made up, it has to be made up, because you're not in ketosis. So you are going to be
00:02:32
Speaker
breaking down your tissue or deaminating your amino acids from your protein to make that deficit up. And that is driven by stress hormones. It's possible to do it. We're good at it. We can survive for decades doing this, but it is not optimal.
00:02:53
Speaker
And it's most certainly is not optimal if you're trying to reverse a serious health condition because that you were, if you're doing low, if thinking low carb or keto is gonna reverse XYZ condition is very
00:03:11
Speaker
naive because we know that stress causes disease. So why would you, how can you put yourself in a state of stress by reducing your carbohydrate intake, thinking that that could actually be good for your health, right? But I'm not blaming you for if you believe these things because it took me
Sugar vs. Seed Oils
00:03:35
Speaker
quite a while to unbrainwash myself from the very serious propaganda out there which it seems to be a lot a lot of it's coming from kind of the low-carb keto paleo community but in general
00:03:55
Speaker
It is my ardent belief that sugar is at the moment being used as a very convenient scapegoat to take people's attention away from the true cause, the true major cause of disease.
00:04:12
Speaker
which is the seed oils that have permeated our food supply. And you might say, I don't buy seed oils, I don't cook with seed oils, but so many people tell me that when we start working together, but then when we dive deeper down into their nutrition, into the food diaries if they decide to keep one for a while.
00:04:35
Speaker
invariably, they're eating way, way, way too many polyunsaturated fats. And these are extremely, um, uncondusive to optimal human health. Maybe other organisms can, can thrive on them.
00:04:53
Speaker
But humans with our high metabolism, well, should be high anyway. Not for many people nowadays, because again, the slow-carb stuff and under-eating and dieting sort of stuff going on. But we have a very high temperature, 37 degrees Celsius almost. So that these Omega-6s and Omega-3s, they are very prone to damage to oxidation or peroxidation.
00:05:21
Speaker
In the human body because they they even in the fridge they will spontaneously Go rancid these oils. So imagine when you are when they're incorporated into your own tissue So this is the big driver of disease that people's attention is being taken away from and a big reason for this I believe is also because the seed oils or rather the yeah the the whole
00:05:43
Speaker
big agricultural sector that is producing seed oils is Government subsidized in many not just in the US but in many countries so they definitely if they if the government bodies like the what's it the USDA and The FDA and all these other bodies if they start
00:06:07
Speaker
telling people you have to be extremely careful about your seed oil consumption, people are going to be like, whoa, aren't these the heart healthy oils that you were telling us in the 50s, 60s, all through the 60s, 70s, 80s, whatever, that these are going to lower our cholesterol and are much better for us than the animal fat sources and cholesterol and
The Sugar Narrative
00:06:35
Speaker
saturated fats so they can't go 180 on that so they're well invested and on top of that big pharma is loving that because it all the disease this high polyunsaturated fat intake causes all that disease can be very well monetized not just by selling drugs but then there's the insurance industry there's a big part of it so there's a massive
00:07:04
Speaker
There is a massive money-making machine behind all of this and sugar is not that there is a big industry behind sugar, it's just that these other things are a lot more profitable.
00:07:19
Speaker
and there's a lot more money to be made and sugar is sometimes you have to have a fall guy in your whole big scam to take the fall and sugar seems like that is the scapegoat.
00:07:37
Speaker
I just saw an article today that I'm going to share it below. It's from medical news today, which is a mainstream medical news website, right? And it's called, I think they have a series on this. It's called medical myths.
00:07:58
Speaker
the series, it appears. And they have one all about sugar. And in this episode of medical myths, they discuss some of the many misunderstanding surrounding one of the sweetest nutritional topics, sugar, right? So fact checked by a PhD. So this is fact checked. I'm not sucking things out of my thumb here, but listen to this now. So they basically
00:08:24
Speaker
debunk six myths around sugar. So the first one, sugar is addictive. I'll have the study in the show notes so you can go and read it yourself. But this is very telling because a lot of people
00:08:44
Speaker
believe a lot of the myths in this article. So first of all, that sugar is addictive. Basically, a lot of the research is done in animals, pretty much all of it. And there's a review that they cite here in 2017, it was published, that states animal data has shown significant overlap between the consumption of added sugars and drug-like effects, including
00:09:08
Speaker
binging craving tolerance withdraw cross sensitization cross tolerance cross dependence and reward and opioid effects. Big old word salad but what the.
00:09:19
Speaker
What they're debunking here is that that review focuses on animal studies. And as the authors of another review explained, there is a methodological challenge in translating this work because humans rarely consume sugar in isolation. Okay. The thing about it is, right, so
00:09:42
Speaker
It's true that, so here's what I like to kind of, the way I like to frame it with my clients, right? Oh, sorry. Just one more quote. So this is a quote from that other review. There is not currently scientific evidence that sugar is addictive. Although we know that sugar has
00:10:05
Speaker
psychological effects, including producing pleasure. And these are almost certainly mediated via brain reward systems. Right. But there's no evidence that it is addictive. And here's the thing. So this is kind of what I like to the way I like to frame it to people. So I'm not saying you should go and buy like sugar and eat sugar and put sugar in your coffee and stuff like that. But
00:10:34
Speaker
sugar, and a lot of people are like, okay, sugar in the form of fruit and honey is fine. And I'm definitely one of those people, right? But when you then break it down, right? So what is sugar? Sugar is sucrose, which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose, right? And honey is not 50-50, but it's a combination
00:11:04
Speaker
in varying degrees depending on the honey you get between glucose and fructose. Similarly, fructose is in fruit and there is some glucose in fruit and other sugars here and there. So when you think about it,
00:11:20
Speaker
At the end of the digestion process in the gut, the carbohydrates are broken down and eventually they will be broken down to the monosaccharides. The monosaccharides, the major ones that we're talking about here, are glucose and fructose. They get absorbed.
00:11:42
Speaker
and then they go to the liver, and then they can be used to replenish liver glycogen, then the liver can dull the glucose out to the rest of the body, drip feeds the brain, so it keeps the brain alive. It keeps your blood sugar stable in between meals and while you're sleeping. So this is something that we have to
Carbohydrate Metabolism
00:12:06
Speaker
understand. So sugar,
00:12:09
Speaker
whether it's in the form or rather let me say it this way, carbohydrate, whether it starts as grains,
00:12:18
Speaker
let's say rice, starches, potatoes, fruit, fruit juice, granulated sugar, honey, maple syrup. It can start as those things but eventually it will end as glucose in your bloodstream or fructose in your bloodstream going to the liver and then the liver will do with it what the body requires. So
00:12:42
Speaker
That is it, right? So when you're eating just white rice, that turns directly to glucose. When you are eating potato, that turns to glucose. Sugar is glucose and fructose. When you're eating fruit, that's fructose and glucose. So metabolically speaking, if one carbohydrate is good for you, quote unquote,
00:13:06
Speaker
Do you understand the photologic where this specific carbohydrate is bad? At the end of the day, it's all glucose or fructose that most of it becomes. Never mind milk, never mind lactose and stuff like that.
00:13:24
Speaker
What's the point? Carbs are carbs except that if you're getting your carbs from shitty grains, seeds, you're not getting just carbs.
00:13:40
Speaker
But you're getting a lot of the fiber, a lot of anti-nutrients, oxalates, phytic acid, like in oats, for example. There's a ton of different compounds that come along with it where if you get it just in the form of honey,
00:13:57
Speaker
or maple syrup or white rice or potato. There's a lot less of these other things, right? So that's kind of the difference. So we can call those cleaner carbs. So organic white rice, maple syrup, honey, fruit. Now fruit will have some fiber and other minerals and vitamins and stuff like that. So you're getting a lot of good stuff.
00:14:22
Speaker
with fruit, you're getting also water in a good form. So that's kind of the distinction. So it's not that the whole grain carbs, there's nothing special about the carbohydrate aspect of them because they become glucose.
Clean vs. Dirty Carbs
00:14:41
Speaker
In fact, they can be, most of those have a higher glycemic index than sugar, which is about 60, I think.
00:14:49
Speaker
And honey would be similar, depending on how much fructose it has. Fructose, this is glycemic index, is something like 19. It's a very slow glycemic index. It doesn't raise the blood sugar, so it doesn't really mess with the blood sugar so much. Actually, grains and starches can mess with the blood sugar a lot more in terms of spiking it high, and then you have
00:15:13
Speaker
the insulin increase that then lowers the blood sugar and then that can cause cortisol to go up. So you have this kind of reactive hypoglycemia, which is actually a lot more, it's easier to get into those states when you are eating just starches or just, let's say, white rice or something like that. It's easier to get into those states where if you were prone to that kind of stuff,
00:15:38
Speaker
I generally recommend to clients to stick with the honey and the fruit, which there's more of a mix between glucose and fructose. So it slows down that sort of glycemic impact. So that's kind of the thing. Again, just to reiterate, this is so important to understand. So
00:15:58
Speaker
When I say clean carbs and I say the shitty carbs, like the grains, cereals, these things, they're shitty because they have a lot of fiber and other indigestible crap and or toxins that come with them. And if they're not organic, then you're also getting the glyphosate and the pesticides and the herbicides, right?
00:16:24
Speaker
So we always have to try to get clean organic food no matter what weed but just with the grains like think about think of a grain of wheat or rice or Bean, let's just use beans for an example. How how many hours you have to boil that bean to make it barely sort of digestible if you just eat that thing Raw what is it gonna do to you? Right? So that's kind of the
00:16:53
Speaker
When you think about it, how much we have to process these things to make them safe to eat, right? So that's kind of what I'm talking about. Whereas white rice, you can just boil it for eight to 10 minutes. Potato, you could do a similar thing. Most fruit, you can eat raw. Honey, you can eat raw. So when you think about how much processing a food takes to make it safe to eat, that is another sign, should we be... Not that should we or shouldn't we eat that food, but
00:17:21
Speaker
Is that an optimal food to eat right because at the end of the day meet meet milk these things you can eat them wrong and generally you'll be fine as well so the more.
00:17:33
Speaker
Just sorry, I don't want to belabor the point here, but the more processing of food requires to make it edible, that's a big red flag, right? So even I don't even eat potatoes and rice every day. I try to eat more sort of things that are directly, nature has them directly edible, if you know what I mean. But that's just preference. You can definitely have
00:18:00
Speaker
The occasional let's say if you like pizza or bread you can get some good high-quality organic bread or whatever I'm not saying you shouldn't I'm not telling you anything what to do because you know Like you're not you're not paying me to tell you what to do or to give you advice. I'm just kind of explaining that sugar in the form of these natural foods
00:18:24
Speaker
is no different than eating whole grains or whatever. At the end of the day, it's one or the other. It's glucose or fructose or both that we're getting through these foods.
Sugar Myths Debunked
00:18:34
Speaker
Now, the other point in this article is that the myth is that sugar makes kids hyperactive. And there's a 1995 meta-analysis in JAMA.
00:18:45
Speaker
Journal of the American Medical Association, combined data from 23 experiments across 16 scientific papers. They concluded this meta-analysis of the reported studies to date found that sugar, mainly sucrose, does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children.
00:19:06
Speaker
So, but that's not to say, that's not to say, again, I want to restate my position. So I'm not recommending sugar in the form of crap, like Snickers and stuff like that, because usually
00:19:26
Speaker
In those products, there's a 10, 20 chemicals and other ingredients and so on that themselves are actually a lot more harmful than sugar. For example, the emulsifiers that can cause intestinal permeability. Some of these chemicals can damage the microbiota. They can damage the intestinal lining that can cause inflammation, that can cause immune activation, blah, blah, blah. We can go on and on and on.
00:19:55
Speaker
There was a study in my first book on autism, one or two studies where the food dyes, I think it was the food dyes or the food colors, one of the two that were correlated with hyperactivity. So there's a lot of
00:20:14
Speaker
When you buy a product in a box, like cookies and stuff, there's a lot of other stuff and a lot of them often will have sunflower oil or in the USA they'll have soybean oil. So you're getting a lot of other stuff other than the sugar. But I also don't recommend
00:20:31
Speaker
granulated sugar because generally if you're using granulated sugar, you're making something and if you're making cookies or something like that, you're invariably going to be using seeds, flour, whatever, almond flour, wheat flour. So that then makes that food very incompatible with optimal health, long-term health and restoring health. So I'm not recommending using just granulated sugar, but
00:20:58
Speaker
honey you know some cheese some days I will literally eat a half kilogram of honey like more than a pound seriously I've done that some days in the last this year I've done that and I have zero problem with it I can start the day with like easily four five six tablespoons of honey easily
00:21:22
Speaker
And my blood sugar doesn't drop because, again, it's a very low, relatively speaking, it's a low glycemic food, like 50, 60. So if I do that with rice, definitely my blood sugar will spike. That will cause an insulin spike that would then may cause a drop in blood sugar, which will have to be compensated for by cortisol. And that will, I noticed myself, especially
00:21:51
Speaker
If the meal doesn't have a lot of protein and fat to balance the white rice, I notice that I do feel this drop in blood sugar, this hypoglycemia an hour or two later. But you have to learn yourself what you can tolerate. So for example, if it's a smaller amount, let's say it's a first meal of the day and you're waking up and your liver
00:22:21
Speaker
glycogen is still fairly sort of depleted. You could eat 100 grams of rice in terms of dry weight, which is maybe 70, 80 grams of carbs. And that will top up, most of that will probably top up your liver glycogen. And then some of that will be used just for the next hour or two to kind of, you know, feed the brain and fuel your muscles and replenish glycogen there if needs be. And you should be fine.
00:22:50
Speaker
But then if you eat, let's say later, if your glycogen is topped up in your liver and then you eat, let's say, 150, 200 grams of rice, that, because you're already topped up, it's going to go directly to the bloodstream for the most part. The liver will sort of kind of dole it out faster.
00:23:10
Speaker
And then that will require a bigger incident spike, which could potentially cause that reactive hypoglycemia. It also depends on how much fat is circulating in bloodstream, how metabolically healthy you are, how much
00:23:27
Speaker
of a capacity your muscles have to store glycogen, which is related to fitness and exercise levels. There's a lot of different things there, but metabolic health is a big factor of how you would respond. So you have to gauge yourself
00:23:42
Speaker
Is a little bit of carbohydrate every few hours better or is it two, three bigger meals? You will learn that as you go. But the important thing is to understand that we need carbohydrates to feed the brain. We have 60% of our energy
00:24:05
Speaker
consumption through the day. So the energy that we create during the day, during one 24 hour period, 60% of that is created in order to feed the brain.
00:24:20
Speaker
deliver the heart and the kidneys, right? So physical activity is only 30% of our daily energy expenditure, right? So a lot of people don't eat carbohydrates with dinner or eat very low carb,
00:24:38
Speaker
thinking it will get stored as fat but it won't get stored as fat necessarily because you continue to live when you go to bed. You need to keep your brain alive, you need to drip feed in terms of glucose, the liver needs energy, the heart.
00:25:01
Speaker
People were not getting fat because of necessarily just the high carbohydrate consumption.
Dietary Changes and Obesity
00:25:09
Speaker
I talk about this in my book, How to Actually Live Longer. The seed oils really wreck your metabolism and they predispose you to gaining weight. That's the biggest issue. Think about it this way. We were eating
00:25:26
Speaker
sugar for a thousand years is a society, let's say humanity was. So we've had grains for like 10,000 years, 10, 12,000 years, depending on where you look and who you ask. So in this 10 millennia, we didn't have a big problem of obesity. And then in the last millennium, the last thousand or more years,
00:25:55
Speaker
where we had sugar, we didn't have a problem of obesity and just chronic disease in general. So it's clear that over the last 100 years or so something changed, something was added on top of our, yes, our sugar intake did increase.
00:26:14
Speaker
But sugar intake has been high for like 300 years. It's what basically fueled the Industrial Revolution. And then if you look at all the advancements in society,
00:26:30
Speaker
they actually correlate with sugar increases like in the diet, right? So you know what I mean? Like if you actually tease away some of these details and then you start looking at, okay, what other factors in the last 100 years increased other than sugar and carbohydrate consumption that could be contributing
00:26:55
Speaker
to the chronic disease crisis and boom, seed oils is the big one. But not just seed oils, we also have
00:27:03
Speaker
air pollution, we have radiation in terms of stronger and more signals, Wi-Fi, GSM, 5G, you know, all these things before it used to be. It used to be at one point just telegraph, you know, before that. So the point being is there's a lot of different factors then. We also have
00:27:31
Speaker
more blue light. I mean just if you start teasing these things apart and looking at them, if you zoom out on the bigger picture, sugar and carbohydrates are not the reason. And if you really kind of are
00:27:48
Speaker
push to say what one thing, or if I were pushed to say what's the one thing that's the biggest contributor, it's the fact that everything almost that you eat nowadays in the Western world has been processed with seed oils, right? So you go to the restaurant, you're getting seed oils, you eat out,
00:28:12
Speaker
or you eat takeout or you buy processed foods, you are going to be eating seed oils.
Impact of Polyunsaturated Fats
00:28:16
Speaker
And I will tell you for a hundred dollars, we can do a fatty acid analysis and you can also get this is direct to consumer as well, by the way, this test. So.
00:28:30
Speaker
You can get this test yourself and you will see it's a little blood spot test that you ship off to the lab and they will tell you how much omega-6 fatty acids you have in your blood and how much omega-3 and saturated fats and monounsaturated fats, right? And if your number of omega-6s is between 30 and 40%, you're in trouble.
00:29:01
Speaker
And then if you have health issues, that's a big reason why. It's because you have way, way, way too many Omega-6s. I've had on some of my clients,
00:29:12
Speaker
we've seen as high as 40% Omega-6s, a big proportion of that being a linoleic acid, which is the most abundant Omega-6 in seed oils, right? So that's one issue. People think, oh, but I don't eat seed oils, but for how long have you not been eating them? For five years? You know, two years? Some people just got the memo last year. You know, few people,
00:29:40
Speaker
have been living a low polyunsaturated fat life. So, geez, I remember when I was as young as I remember, we were, I was chomping down basically French fries cooked in sunflower oil.
00:30:03
Speaker
as a kid growing up, we would cook the meatballs in them, our parents and grandparents would put it in the salads, everything, everything had sunflower oil in it, my grandma's pastries and so on and so forth, right? So we are all, all of our lives, most of us, 99.99% of us have been exposed to the seed oil. So you stopped eating them even 10 years ago,
00:30:31
Speaker
Well, okay, 10 years ago is a different story. But if it was two years ago that you stopped these things, these polyunsaturated fats, they are part of you, your brain, your heart, etc, etc. So they, they take years to get replaced. So during this time, you have them circulating in the blood and they are known to
00:30:51
Speaker
to mess with thyroid metabolism or thyroid hormones that can slow down the metabolism. They are known to animals that hibernate are known to munch down on Omega-6s like nuts and whatever seeds in order to enter this sort of torpor state, which is akin to hibernation state. So if you eat a lot of seeds and nuts, which is another thing being promoted as very healthful,
00:31:21
Speaker
you're getting a lot of polyunsaturated fats as well. Despite you not eating seed oils, remember, these seed oils are coming from nuts and seeds. So there is, and I discussed this in the book, there is no beneficial oil from a seed that you will ever buy. And then people were like, what about my hazelnut oil? What about my walnut oil? What about this oil? I'm like, no.
00:31:50
Speaker
I don't care if a holy man blessed it than your favorite influencer on Instagram swears by it and it was cold extracted and you keep it in the fridge. None of that matters, right? Because at the end of the day, these things oxidize and peroxidize just by virtue of being exposed to air.
00:32:12
Speaker
So imagine if they're in your body with your higher temperature, relatively speaking, and then if you have some kind of stressful thing happen to you, which could be infection or sunburn, any number of things that they can damage these very fragile fatty acids in your body.
00:32:38
Speaker
And when one of them gets damaged, it causes a chain reaction and damages others around it. And what that does is it needs to be terminated by an antioxidant or an enzyme.
00:32:51
Speaker
a terminal antioxidant such as vitamin E. So you will get your vitamin E levels depleted very quickly. And if you don't supplement yourself with vitamin E, that is causing premature aging of your tissues and premature degeneration and it's accelerating disease processes in the body. So the issue is not sugar.
00:33:17
Speaker
The issue is way too much of our bodies made up still of these Omega-6s. And if you stop eating all of them today, you're still going to have them for the next few years. So there's a lot of things you have to do right and live a very low inflammation lifestyle in order to protect them from getting oxidized, peroxidized and causing the damage I just described.
00:33:42
Speaker
and that's what I teach my clients what to do I also discuss it in the book of course you can get the book as well so going back to the myths here there another myth that sugar causes diabetes oh my god this is just this is the biggest one I think probably this is just oh it grinds my gears but again I cannot
00:34:12
Speaker
I cannot judge. I'm not judging. It's just I'm kind of going blue in the face, explaining it to people. But here's the thing. So sugar.
Sugar and Metabolic Health
00:34:23
Speaker
does, so carbohydrates, they can increase the blood sugar level, but if you're metabolically healthy, i.e., you don't have a lot of these omega-6 polyunsaturated fats swimming around your bloodstream causing damage to your vascular endothelium or your blood vessel lining and your organs and messing with your cells and creating inflammation, then you eat the carbs, insulin goes up,
00:34:52
Speaker
The carbs are partitioned in the cells and everything is dandy. But because most people, especially in the USA and so on, they have all of these omega-6 circulating, that creates metabolic issues. Big one being if you have a lot of fat circulating, it can inhibit the
00:35:14
Speaker
uptake and use of glucose by the cells. So that is a mechanism of insulin resistance. And we're told that insulin resistance happens because we eat too many carbs and then more and more insulin is getting secreted to deal with them. And then the cells become deaf to the insulin signal, but that's not really the case. And here's the thing. If you just eat a stick of butter,
00:35:41
Speaker
Or if you drink a cup of oil now and you start measuring your blood sugar with like a stick or whatever, your blood sugar will rise because all that fat that is going to start circulating in your body will inhibit the uptake and utilization of sugar. So it will build up in the bloodstream. Right. So you can.
00:36:06
Speaker
you can give yourself, quote unquote, diabetes by eating only fat, right? And here's the thing. Here's the thing. This one, I talk about this one in my book. It's kind of a trick question, but when researchers want to give an animal diabetes, like a rat, let's say, what do you think they use? Do they use a high carb diet or a high fat diet? And when I ask people without telling them it's a trick question,
00:36:36
Speaker
absolutely every single person has said they use a high carb diet. But no, it's not, no. When researchers want to give lab rats diabetes, they give them a 60%. I mean, they give them a high fat diet. 60% fat is enough to do it. Sometimes they do more as well, but they give them a high fat diet. Now,
00:37:07
Speaker
There's a lot of Omega-6s supporting saturated fats in those diets, so that's probably contributing to the issue. But the point there is that they're not using carbs, they're not using sugar, they're using freaking fats, right? So how about them apples? Like to anyone that's like sugar causes diabetes, how about them fucking apples? You know what I mean? So here's the thing, it's very well known in the
00:37:37
Speaker
scientific literature that certain corticosteroid medications, so the anti-inflammatory drugs, glucocorticoids, they're also known. So because they mimic cortisol, they have similar effects in the body. So it's very well known that steroid induced diabetes
00:38:02
Speaker
can occur in a person where they become diabetic just by taking the drug so completely independently of what they eat, right? So that's very well recognized in the scientific literature. So what does that tell us? Well, cortisol's primary function in the body is to raise your blood sugar if it drops too low.
00:38:26
Speaker
It's a stress hormone and the reason it's raising the blood sugar is because it wants to help you mobilize energy so you can fight or flee and so on. So if you're chronically stressed, that alone can keep your blood sugar high because your stress hormones are elevated, your adrenaline and your cortisol and norepinephrine and a few others.
00:38:54
Speaker
This is completely independent of what you eat. So you could be on a low carb diet. You could be on a high carb diet. And if you're very stressed, your blood sugar will be elevated because of the high cortisol. So this is a much more nuanced discussion than sugar bad, sugar causes diabetes, right? In fact, sugar or carbohydrates, if you're smart,
00:39:22
Speaker
If you read my book or if you work with me, I can, of course, teach you the ins and outs of it, but it's very simple. You can use carbohydrates strategically through the day to make sure that you don't enter the stress hormone mode or the stress mode, as I call it in the book. And then you can run on fuel as opposed to on stress hormones or cortisol. So you start the day with some carbohydrates, some honey or something like that.
00:39:53
Speaker
you end the day with a little bit of honey just to top you up so you have more of a reserve in the liver so you can go longer without having to kick into higher cortisol mode to stimulate blood sugar production by breaking down your body, right? So these are kind of the main ones, but there was one more in this article is that
Sugar and Cancer Myths
00:40:17
Speaker
the myth that sugar causes cancer. And this is what they state in this medical news today article. Despite the rumors, most experts do not believe sugar directly causes cancer or fuels its spread. Cancer cells divide rapidly, meaning they require a great deal of energy, which sugar can provide. This perhaps is the root of this myth. However, all cells need sugar, and cancer cells also require other nutrients to survive.
00:40:47
Speaker
such as amino acids and fats. So it's not all about sugar. And then according to Cancer Research UK, there's no evidence that following a sugar-free diet lowers the risk of getting cancer or boosts the chances of surviving if you are diagnosed. As with diabetes, there is a twist.
00:41:07
Speaker
Increased sugar intake has links with weight gain while overweight and obesity are linked with increased cancer risk. But here is again where it becomes a lot more nuanced. So we know that estrogen excess can contribute to cancer, cortisol is high in cancer, and even serotonin can be a driver of fibrosis in cancer.
00:41:35
Speaker
If a person becomes overweight or obese, increased sugar intake has links with weight gain. But think about it this way, a lot of people that are overweight or obese, they got there not by munching on a lot of sugar, but generally probably eating maybe 50 to 100 grams of polyunsaturated fats.
00:42:03
Speaker
daily for decades. That's probably the bigger contributor and culprit because, like I said already, these Omega-6s, they slow down the metabolism. But what they also do is they suppress the immune system, which is what cancer loves. Not that it loves it, but it's just a suppressed immune system will predispose an individual to increase cancer growth. And then
00:42:33
Speaker
If you have a lot of fat, you have a pro-estrogenic environment because fat cells contain the enzyme aromatase, which can make estrogen E1 or estrone. So again, it's very nuanced. It's highly unlikely that in an overweight person, the increased risk of cancer
00:42:58
Speaker
is because of the sugar that got them there. It's much more likely due to the omega-6 polyunsaturated fat, the body weight, the extra fat, creating more of a potential for estrogen to be created and a number of other metabolic derangements that being overweight includes or comes with. But the point is they state here that
00:43:29
Speaker
sugar, there's no evidence that following a sugar-free diet lowers the risk of getting cancer or boosts the chances of surviving if you're diagnosed. So if anything, sugar, let's say honey, clean carbohydrates, like I explained, they can lower cortisol so they can actually reduce some of the stress hormone milieu that seems to be a driver of cancer or an exacerbator of cancer.
00:43:54
Speaker
So that's that's kind of what I wanted to discuss. Obviously this discussion is a little bit deeper
00:44:02
Speaker
because there's a lot of propaganda out there. And the thing is, a lot of these guys, and I like some of the influencers in the keto carnivore space, low carb space. I do actually think that there's plenty of genuinely nice guys. But I think that they believe they're right.
Dietary Beliefs and Misconceptions
00:44:22
Speaker
They believe it's a belief.
00:44:26
Speaker
It's not so much aligned with reality. They're saying that we were evolutionarily designed to do this. And these are very sort of unverifiable things. You have to believe that a million years ago things were this way. Four million years ago things were another way.
00:44:52
Speaker
We have no idea what we were and how we ate a million years ago. We don't even know for sure what happened a thousand years ago. So there's a leap of faith
00:45:08
Speaker
that they're operating on. And then some of them are stating carbon stable isotope studies. Listen, come on stable. So you're basing your entire sort of dietary and belief system based on carbon or stable isotope studies. Right. So you are believing those, right.
00:45:34
Speaker
It is kind of like a religion though. It's like if you talk to someone that's fully plant-based or vegan and you start giving them evidence and data that all of these, you know, dozen or more nutrients
00:45:50
Speaker
that we require in the human body do not exist in plant foods. They do not believe that they're looking. They might say they're reading the papers or the evidence or whatever. They're listening. I guess they're hearing, but they're not listening. They're not really comprehending what you're saying. So you cannot change a belief
00:46:12
Speaker
very easily and this is an unfortunate thing that many of us believe that sugar is poison but at the same time we have a blood glucose level that is very much guarded by the body has to be quite
00:46:32
Speaker
quite a certain range. Yes, it's true that there's not a lot of glucose in the blood at any given point in time, something like four grams. But we have a lot of different ways to make sugar by glucose, by breaking down certain things, by certain mechanisms, using amino acids, using parts of triglycerides, and so on and so forth. So we have so many ways of doing it, which is an indicator that it's so damn important
00:47:00
Speaker
That we have multiple ways of making it so it does seem like.
Ketogenic Diet Critique
00:47:06
Speaker
they're believing that we were in a ketogenic state most of the time. But even in a ketogenic state, you continue to make glucose. Even if you're starving, let's say two weeks into fasting or starvation, you will be in very deep ketosis, but you will still be making some glucose daily. So this need is never removed by changing your diet or eating a lot of fat. I would recommend if you haven't read the book,
00:47:35
Speaker
Read chapter four of the book. I go on into why
00:47:40
Speaker
The keto diet is not always cracked up to be how it will decrease your metabolic rate over time. How the stuff about the Inuit is kind of BS because the Inuit, their life expectancy is something like 10, 15 years shorter than the average Canadian. There's so many little wangles and nuances here that I can't explore today.
00:48:06
Speaker
But i probably will in future episodes there are some previous episodes of discuss this topic but the moral of the story is.
Carbohydrate Intake for Health
00:48:17
Speaker
Most people need two hundred to two hundred fifty grams of carbohydrates.
00:48:23
Speaker
per day spaced out evenly. Generally, you will feel better, do better. And most people, not most people, but a lot of people can do well with even more. And sugar is not the problem.
00:48:39
Speaker
The other things are the problem, all the toxins in the food, the processed chemical garbage, pesticides, herbicides, prepared food from restaurants with all the other cheapest quality ingredients that most restaurants use, most takeout places. So there's a thousand other factors that are much more important to focus on than, oh,
00:49:07
Speaker
I don't want to eat too much fruit or too much honey because that's too much sugar. So what if it's too much sugar? God forbid you give your body, you give your cells the preferred energy source, the preferred fuel to make energy and then to repair themselves more and to feed your brain. And I'll tell you, when I started increasing my carbohydrates, I swear to God, my eyesight improved.
00:49:38
Speaker
It improved, and it turns out that we have cells in the body that don't have mitochondria or have very few mitochondria, so they can mostly run on this glycolysis, which is kind of the first step in breaking down and making energy from glucose. So there's cells in the eyes that have, I think, no mitochondria, the blood cells,
00:50:06
Speaker
red blood cells, they can only run glucose. And, um, I think in the testes, there's some cells, the male testes that only run, I think on glucose as well, because they have very few mitochondria. So when you think about it also, a lot of people become hypothyroid and or infertile on these low carb diets. It's not, it's not very well publicized, but that's a fact.
00:50:36
Speaker
So could it be because of the low glucose? Because there's not enough glucose for everything, for all the functions. So the functions that are given priority will be the brain central nervous system and so on, heart and obviously muscles. Because a lot of folks, especially dudes that are attracted to these low-carb paleo-keto diets, they're kind of in their 20s and early 30s or 30s in general.
00:51:04
Speaker
They're also brainwashed that they have to hit the gym like five, six times a week. And so all of that extreme effort, um, uh, soaks up a lot of the glucose that they're making on these low carb diets. So not enough is left for quote unquote, nice to have functions like.
00:51:24
Speaker
being in a good mood, higher thought, future planning, being fertile, and so on. So just something to think about. I really think that's a big factor now in the plummeting male fertility rates
Low-Carb Diets and Fertility
00:51:40
Speaker
nowadays. That and all the toxins and the fact that guys are keeping their phones next to their sack multiple hours per day. But that's not the topic of today's discussion. I just wanted to kind of
00:51:56
Speaker
have this that I can give to my clients when they ask about, isn't this too much sugar? And what about sugar this? What about sugar that I can give them something to listen to so I don't have to go blue in the face every single time. And also the podcast listeners can get some value out of it. So if you need help,
00:52:16
Speaker
In terms of restoring your health from a complex or chronic health challenge, you can go to my website to schedule a free consultation with me. It's a free call where we get together. I can learn about what's going on with you, explain how if and how I can help you if we're a good fit to work together. And then if you would like to work with me, we can take it from there. But I just want to say a lot of people
00:52:43
Speaker
Suffer for years literally years sometimes for a decade or more and I'm like How how why are you? Why it's it's not right. It's not right. You know, the help is there if you need the help Please seek out the help
00:53:03
Speaker
Because the help is there you don't have to just live your life in Suffering it's I really think that's it's not okay. I was talking to some women in the last week telling me about their depression anxiety insomnia type stuff and Having insomnia for two years that is not okay You know or being like in an anxious state for multiple years and and just doing not doing nothing about it But like not being able to resolve it that is not okay. I really think that
00:53:32
Speaker
the these things are not overly difficult to resolve in most cases so if you need help please reach out the help is there you just have to take the first step or two you know anyway hope you got value out of this uh and i'll see you on the next one