Change Your Brain Every Day - Sugar: The Bitter Truth with Dr. Robert Lustig

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

Back in 1955, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, prompting a nationwide inquiry as to what was causing cardiovascular disease. The two camps of thinking centered around either fat or sugar as the culprit. Fat won out and was subsequently demonized. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, author Robert Lustig and Dr. Daniel Amen explain why this was the wrong decision, and the eventual fallout that resulted from this misconception.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back.

I'm here with Dr. Robert Lustig, professor at UC San Francisco in the Department of Pediatrics. He's a neuroendocrinologist. And on the Brain Warriors Way podcast, we've talked a lot about hormones because it's very important in our bright minds mnemonic. And one of the things I learned, I saw this study that factory and share cheesecake with my sweetheart, nobody's getting dessert when they get home because their torpedo is not going to be there. I was going to say, no one's getting anything. So let's talk about the sugar story and why fat became demonized and sugar became the darling that in many ways ruined our society. I couldn't agree more.

This is a very sordid story and was very specifically driven by the Sugar Association, a trade group of the industry from way back. Started back in 1943, but really sort of picked up steam in the 50s and 60s. Now, the thing that really turned the tide was 1955. Eisenhower had a heart attack, and everyone wanted to know why. And at that point, the data had started to amass that America was suffering from big time cardiovascular disease. Paul Dudley White at Mass General had demonstrated that the incidence of coronary disease in the United States had gone up something like sixfold over the previous five decades. So everyone wanted to know what caused heart disease because the president had a heart attack. And there were two camps. One camp, which was led by a British physiologist,

nutritionist, physician by the name of Dr. John Yudkin said that it was sugar that was driving this. And back then, Dr. Yudkin had correlation, not causation. Those studies remained to be done over the course of the next several decades. But he had studies that looked at the amount of sugar consumed and the amount of heart disease, diabetes, gout, several other chronic diseases. And he made that case. On the other side, there was a second camp, which unfortunately won out. And that camp was led by a Minnesota epidemiologist by the name of Ansel Keys. He was actually on the cover of Time Magazine as Scientist of the Year back in 1980.

And he did a study which was called the Seven Countries Study. And what he looked at was the percent of the diet as saturated fat versus the incidence of coronary heart disease in seven countries and showed this very linear relationship between the two. Here's the problem. It wasn't the seven country study. It was the 22 country study. He picked the seven that fit his line. The other 15 he left out. We only found that out later. In addition, there were three things that happened in the 1970s that sort of sealed the deal against Yudkin and Forkey's. We learned three things. The first thing we learned was that this molecule in our bloodstream called LDL, low-density lipoprotein. And we learned that LDL was a driver of cardiovascular disease because of these kids with genetic inability to clear LDL called familial hypercholesterolemia. And these would be the kids who would get heart attacks at age 18. The second thing we learned was that dietary fat raised your serum LDL, which is true.

As it turns out, there are two LDLs that raised one, not the other. And it's the one that didn't get raised that causes the heart disease. But when you measure it, you measure both. But we didn't know that people know ldl is often thought of as a particles and b particles a the big fluffy ones that are harmless right basically be the little demon ones that are like shards of glass yes that's right blood vessel damage exactly so we always say ldl is bad cholesterol. It turns out that LDL is actually probably neutral cholesterol for the most part. But this one particular species called small dense LDL, turns out that's what's driven by sugar, but we didn't know that back then.

And then finally, epidemiologic studies showed that LDL levels did correlate with coronary disease. So these three things, basically, if A leads to B and B leads to C, then A must lead to C, therefore no A, no C. Get rid of the fat, therefore get rid of the heart disease. And that sealed Yudkin's fate. He was thrown under the bus, left to the dustbin of history, and we went low low fat and we went whole hog low fat. The problem is when you take fat out of the food, it tastes like crap. Okay. I mean, it just does. Food industry knew that they had to do something to make the food palatable, to make the food worth eating, to make you want to eat it. So what'd they do?

Added sugar. So they took the fat out, put the sugar in. And you can prove this to yourselves right now. If you go to the store, do not buy them. Just look at the food label of Snackwell's. They were an invention of 1982. They are still with us. Two grams of fat down, 13 grams of carbohydrate up, four of which are sucrose, dietary sugar. And snack wells drive heart disease. I'm sure Nabisco will not be too happy about me saying that. But that is basically what happened. And it happened to our entire diet. My father got his heart attack eating Entenmann's fat-free cakes. So I have a vested interest in fixing this issue because my father got his heart attack from it. So I understand

this issue. My grandfather, who I'm named after, who was my best friend when I was a child, was a candy maker. And he had his first heart attack at 49 and his second heart attack in his 70s that took him away from me and so i'm genetically loaded for it but i don't have heart disease why because i don't eat sugar right because because you're not a candy maker and it was hard breaking up up with sugar was hard because it was attached to love when I was a child. And so often, and you see this, is we love children. We praise children.

We reward children. With sugar. We soothe children with sugar, which is just the wrong thing to do. I couldn't agree more. And if you're listening to this and you're a parent and you bring cupcakes for your kid's birthday at school, okay, you are the problem, okay? I'm telling you right now, I'm calling all of you out.

Stop it. Stop it right now. And if any other mother brings cupcakes for their kid's birthday, stop them. You're going to be a brain warrior general. Okay. I love that. That's decisive. Okay.

I mean, you know, why is it from Halloween to New Year's Day, we just are stupid as a society? I mean, why do we celebrate Christ's birth or Thanksgiving by hurting people? Excuse me. Valentine's Day, Memorial Day. Fourth of July, Easter. I mean, it's year round, okay? And it's daytime to nighttime, okay? Because what do you feed your kids out there? Breakfast cereal. Really? You want to take a look at that Nutrition Facts label again? The 17 most common breakfast cereals for children are all over 40% sugar.

40%. And the highest Kellogg's Honey Smacks is 56% sugar. You really want to feed your kid a breakfast cereal that is 56% sugar? I mean, like, who would do that? So let me just have a few more minutes with this one. What is happening to the brains of children who get that sugar burst in the morning? And it's not just cereal. It's also waffles and pancakes and syrup, which is just nothing but liquid sugar.

And orange juice. And orange juice. My dad hates us because he grows oranges. And I'm like, eat the oranges, don't juice them. Exactly. Eat the fruit fruit don't drink the juice and there's a reason for that but but what happens in their brains because i know if i because i used to do this uh and i'm apologize i used to go to winchell's on the way to work and

get two donuts and then i learned oh you can't do that because a half an hour later, my brain is mud. I just can't think because I get that insulin burst, which then drops my sugar level, and I can't think. So there are probably two different phenomena going on. There's one that's direct, and there's one that's indirect. We know more about the indirect one. That is what you just described. That is you get a big pancreatic insulin burst, which then drives your blood glucose down, making you relatively hypoglycemic. Your brain functions on glucose. And when you drop your serum glucose, which is usually around the three to four hour mark, you get a little fuzzy and you get a little irritable

and you end up wanting to eat something early in order to bring that blood glucose up. And that could change temperament. It could change cognitive function in school. That's one potential. Could it make kids look like they have ADD? Possibly. No one's proven that. There's some correlative, not causative data. That's a tough one. Also, the question is, are you talking about kids who don't have ADD, who act like they have

ADD, or kids who really have ADD, who just get worse ADD? There's complications in trying to study that. There's a little correlative data, but it's not for sure. It's not a slam dunk. That's the indirect effect. The direct effect may be even more pernicious. And that is fructose, this sweet molecule in sugar, normally gets metabolized by the liver. But when you eat too much of it, your liver gets overwhelmed.

You end up with a serum fructose level. Now, your brain is not designed to metabolize fructose. However, we now know that the astrocytes, not the neurons, the astrocytes, the supportive cells of the brain can take up fructose. And when they metabolize it, what it does is it depletes their ATP. And if it depletes their ATP, God knows what that's doing to neuronal function. And so it's conceivable that that fructose bolus that comes when you over consume sugar might have direct effects on cognitive function as well. We also know that insulin resistance, which occurs not from one sugar meal, but from multiple over time,

leads to brain shrinkage and cognitive decline in adolescents. This is work of Antonio Convit at NYU Medical Center, showing that adolescents with metabolic syndrome have bad brain. Yeah. And it goes with the work we've done on our studies that show as your weight goes up, the actual physical, functional size of your brain goes down, which should scare the fat off anyone. Stay with us.

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