Know Thyself - E208 - Dr. Robert Lustig: What Modern Food Is Doing to Your Sense of Self

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Dr. Robert Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, pediatrician, and bestselling author who has spent 45 years watching children get sicker despite his best efforts to stop it. His work connects the dots between ultra-processed food, mitochondrial dysfunction, dopamine hijacking, and the chronic stress epidemic in a way that is impossible to dismiss. In this conversation, we explore what he calls the hostage brain, what happens to a nervous system under sustained biochemical assault, and why so much of what we call personal failure is actually a systems problem.What We Dive Into:1. When chronic pain, emotional or physical, goes unresolved, the brain reaches for anything that spikes dopamine to quiet it. Over time, tolerance builds and neurons die. Lustig's point is that this is not a personal weakness. The food, the screens, and the stress have conspired to put nearly all of us in some version of this state.2. Dopamine drives wanting. Serotonin drives contentment. The loneliness epidemic is not simply a social problem but a neurochemical one. Cortisol reduces serotonin, dopamine antagonizes it, and ultra-processed food depletes the tryptophan needed to make it. 3. Lustig draws a clear line between primary needs, love, sleep, real food, and secondary desires, status, power, accumulation. Meeting the basics first is both the simplest and most radical act available.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyselfUse code KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewidehttps://www.oneskin.co/KNOWTHYSELF Use code KNOWTHYSELF for 15% off OneSkin___________00:00 Intro02:02 What Is Hostage Brain?04:47 The Loss of Stress Resilience09:15 Dopamine, Tolerance, and the Addicted Brain11:26 The Five Causes of Hijacked Biology13:08 The Amygdala: Fear Center, Air Traffic Controller, Buckshot16:07 The Four Brakes on the Amygdala and Why They're Failing22:13 From Real Food to Ultra-Processed Food: The Five Changes23:51 Sugar: The Big Kahuna29:57 Mitochondria, Body Temperature, and the Energy Crisis32:33 The Corporate Machine: Big Food, Big Pharma, and the Atlas Network36:26 Does Big Food Collude with Big Pharma?40:51 Children Getting Sicker: The Systemic Failure46:10 "Personal Responsibility" Is a Tobacco Industry Invention51:44 Freedom of Choice Is Really Freedom to Blame53:11 Loneliness vs. Solitude: The Serotonin Distinction56:52 You Can't Love with an Inflamed Brain57:25 The Gut-Brain Axis and the Light of Tryptophan1:03:13 Orange vs. Orange Juice: Why Fiber Is the Point1:07:44 BioLumen and Making Ultra-Processed Food Healthy1:16:14 Insulin, the Three Fat Depots, and Thin Outside Fat Inside1:25:10 How to Reduce Liver Fat1:26:19 Sugar, ADHD, and the Prefrontal Cortex1:26:41 Practical Steps: Phones, Plastics, and Environmental Toxins1:33:18 The Four C's: Connect, Contribute, Cope, Cook1:41:29 Community Questions: ATP, Cognition, and the Biological Basis of Consciousness1:45:27 What Gives Dr. Lustig Hope1:47:38 Closing Message: Tend to Yourself First___________✨MORE FROM DR. ROBERT LUSTIG↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrRobertLustig/↳Metabolical Book: https://metabolical.com↳https://robertlustig.comSTUDIES MENTIONED:↳https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41880620/↳https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/504/↳https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306987726001544📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Depression, rain fog, irritability, anxiousness. And that level of pain is going on all the time. So when you're in pain, you reach for the cocaine, alcohol, the sugar, or the shopping, or the gambling, or the social media. All of those are dopamine. They mollify the pain you're feeling. That's not a big problem unless you keep doing it. I worked in a neurointensive care unit for 45 years.

Watching people get sick, we're all in it. It's no question that this goes from personal responsibility. level to you. Let me stop you there. Personal responsibility. Yeah. Where's it come from? Came from the tobacco industry, but it's not the only problem. Sugar's been added to all of our food. On purpose, buy the food industry because they know when they add it, you buy more. The food industry knows what they're doing. The pharma industry knows what they're doing. They're very well may be collusion. Freedom of choice is really freedom to blame. And we'll talk about that. What do you make of that? Children are getting increasingly sicker despite the fact that you've

devoted your life to getting them better. Tell me. For every kid I treated, 10 more would show up on my doorstep. This sticks in my craw. That this is not getting better. We have been told that our problems are somewhere else. They're not.

Only you can fix them. There are four ways to do that, and all of them are free. The first one is... Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know That Self podcast. Our guest today is a neuroendocrinologist, pediatrician.

He's a best-selling author and widely one of the most viewed health educators on the entire planet. He articulates incredibly well how our food systems have hijacked our biology, our brain, and even our capacity for happiness itself. This is going to be less of a nutrition lecture and more of what happens when we examine how much of our sense of self and agency is shaped by the foods we eat. Dr. Robert Lustig, thank you for being here. Oh, thank you very much for having me, Andrew. Pleasure. What is the hostage brain?

When you use that term, what are you referring to? So let's start a little further back, and we'll sort of build up and get there. I'm a neuroendocrinologist. One of the things I study is stress, its role in systemic health and its role in mental health. What I've realized is that stress plays a major role also in societal health and also in planetary health. And we have a systemic health, mental health, societal health, and planetary health crisis, all going on all at the same time. Coincidence or related? Related.

Okay. That's my pick. Through what mechanism? through a multifactoral situation that we got going on? Well, indeed, there are many factors, and I don't argue that, there are loads of factors. The question is, are those factors upstream or downstream, causing the problem? And I would argue that those are factors that we normally, routinely identify, for instance, food. pollution,

screens, ideologues, I would argue that those are actually downstream, not upstream. And what I've learned in my 45 years of practice

is that if you're going to fix a problem, you have to fix it upstream, if it's going to actually solve the problem. Fixing the problem downstream only fixes the result, doesn't fix the problem. Kind of like what Desmond Tutu used to say.

You know, he would be at the side of a river and he'd be seeing, you know, people basically, you know, being carried down the river, you know, and then he'd go jump in and rescue him and bring him to shore. And then another one would be coming down the river and he'd jump in and rescue them. And, you know, after doing this many times,

he has to start asking, why are these people falling in in the first place? maybe go upstream and find out. That's kind of where this is. So the question is, what's the upstream driver of this? And I would argue that basically we as a species used to have the capacity of stress resilience. And now we don't. So what does that mean?

Once upon a time, when you were three years old, you put your hand on a hot stove and you went, never doing that again. All right. So what happened there? You experienced a moment of uncertainty, a moment of fear, a moment of pain, and you developed a new neural circuit in your amygdala.

and we'll talk about what the amygdala is in a minute. Okay, and that circuit has served you well ever since. What I'm arguing is that that circuit is now not working. That what you have now is a society of chronic toxic stress, where that learning and adaptation has now basically given way to a loss of reality and a loss of sense of self and a true inability to manage the uncertainty. And in the process of doing that,

that has led to physiologic changes in our brains and our bodies, that have led to the systemic health crisis, that have led to the mental health crisis, and ultimately, as a conglomerate, led to the societal health crisis because all of this is happening all the time, not just to the individual, but to the collective, and finally, ultimately to the planetary health crisis.

And that this loss of stress resilience is actually at the heart of... what ails us as a society and as a planet today. Now, that switch from management of uncertainty to chronic toxic stress, I call pain brain. You ask me, what is hostage brain? Hostage brain is basically aversion, a detour, a detour. away from pain brain. Because pain brain is so painful,

and by the way, emotional pain and physical pain use the same pathways in the brain and are just as painful. You know, I mean, breaking up with your ex is like having your arm, you know, cut off. Okay? It's virtually identical, and no one wants to manage that level of pain.

And that level of pain is going on all the time, because whenever there's uncertainty, there's pain. And so we reach for methods to mollify the pain, to distract from the pain, to reduce the pain, to basically deep-six the pain. And all of those are dopamine. All of those are basically methods for deriving mollification. of pain. Dopamine is the pleasure neurotransmitter.

This feels good. I want more. So when you're in pain, you reach for the cocaine or the heroin or the nicotine to calm you down or the alcohol to calm you down or buzz you up depending, or the sugar or the shopping or the gambling or the internet gaming or the social media or the pornography. All of those are dopamine. All of those basically mollify the pain you're feeling. They distract you from the pain.

Now, in and of itself, that's not a big problem unless you keep doing it. Because dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter. Every time dopamine is released, the next neuron is excited. Never inhibits. Always excites. There are five dopamine receptors. When dopamine binds to any one of those five, that neuron gets excited. Now, neurons like to be excited.

That's why they have receptors in the first place. But neurons like to be tickled, not bludgeoned. Chronic overstimulation of any neuron leads to neuronal cell death. Neurons like to fire, and then they like to work. rest. And when they keep firing, they die. And we know this because I worked in a neurointensive care unit for 45 years, watching kids with status epilepticus nonstop seizures, lose their neurons if we didn't stop their seizures. So chronic overstimulation of a neuron leads to neuronal cell death. Well, the neuron doesn't want to die. So it's got a plan B. It's got a fail,

It's got a defense mechanism. It downregulates the dopamine receptor. So there are fewer receptors. So a stray dopamine molecule has less chance of finding a receptor to mine too. Well, what that means is that the response to the dopamine is going to be attenuated. It's going to be lessened. So what you end up with is more and more for less and less, okay, the law of diminishing returns, the concept of tolerance.

That's what tolerance is. Then when the neurons do start to die, that's actually cold addiction. Hostage brain is the addicted brain, the addicted to dopamine to mollify the pain brain. And we're all in it. That's hostage brain. What do you see as the most prevalent causes

that are hijacking our brain to be in that state? Oh, where do you want to start? Let's give the high-level overview, and then we can double down on some. Food, ultra-processed food, you know, that's kind of what brought me to the dance, as it were. Screens and technology, sleep deprivation, drugs, ideologues, if you will.

Okay. ideologies that, shall we say, drive inconsistency, in part because of the fear. There's always fear associated with the reward. There's cortisol and dopamine at the same time. Fear and reward together. Kind of like Wall Street.

So I would say that those are the big ones. Yeah. So you said foods, so to speak, brought you to the dance. and I've heard you quote Schopenhauer that you are allowed to do what you want but you are not allowed to want what you want. You're a good student. And we have,

in many ways that you've described a food system that literally hijacks our biology and our sense of self that we are all walking around with that we want to protect this idea of ourselves and that we think these ideas and emotions are intrinsically connected to who we are. We start to chip away at that notion

the more we see that the ultra-processed foods and sugar and so many of these additives directly shape our sense of self. Indeed. So the question is how? How does that work? How does that happen? The amygdala, okay? I believe that the problem is in the amygdala,

except actually it's not. The amygdala is actually doing its job. So what is the amygdala, okay, for your audience, you know, Like, you know, they've heard of it, maybe. Maybe they've heard of it. All right. So some people think the amygdala is the fear center of your brain. And it is.

That's about 10% of what it does. Some people say, well, it's the 24-hour century scanning for threat. And it's that too. That's probably about 30% of what it does. Some people say the amygdala is like the point guard on your basketball team. Okay, so basically surveying the entire court. looking at the offense and the defense in real time and figuring out best way to score.

And it's that too. That's about 30% of what it does. That leaves about 30% left over. Okay. Some people would say the amygdala is like your air traffic controller. So what does an air traffic controller do? Well, it has to let the planes take off. It has to land the planes.

All of those are relatively mundane processes. Yes? except when they're not, right? When there's an emergency, okay? Whether it's, you know, a, you know, a wheel coming off or a, you know, a door, you know, a, a door, you know, being flown off. Or maybe a UFO or an intercontinental ballistic missile or, you know, or a drone or who knows what. Okay. So really what the amygdala's job is to do is to sort mundane from novel, and then within novel, sort threat from reward.

And it does that pretty effectively, I would argue. Okay. And it's been doing that for us for zillions of years. And that's basically how we survive. is our amygdala is our first responder, if you will. And when your amygdala is working, you can basically survive a threat. That's its job, keep you alive.

The problem is, in the same way that there are two ways to fire a gun, you can fire it with a bullet, or you can fire it with buckshot. Okay? The bullet is much more, shall we say, surgical. The buckshot is, you know, basically, you know, not as effective and does a whole lot of damage. Okay.

Amygdos like buckshot. And you want to rein it in as much as possible. So there are four control systems on the amygdala. And I'll name them for you. the prefrontal cortex reasoning, the hippocampus memory, the affront vagus nerve, interception, intuition, gut feelings, and finally oxytocin, safety. Those four breaks on the amygdala, keep it under wraps from going off hogwild, from turning that bullet into buckshot. Every one of those four breaks today is under threat.

Every one of them is now dysfunctional. Every one of them has lost its capacity to keep the amygdala quiet. Now, different reasons for each of those, but they all relate back to the changes in our current environment that have occurred over the last 50 years. So, for instance, prefrontal cortex, what damage is that? Well, dopamine and cortisol. Okay, and when your prefrontal cortex goes, basically,

you can't stop doing stupid things because your prefrontal cortex is the jimony cricket of your brain. It's the part of your brain that basically rains you in and keeps you from, you know, saying or doing something you're going to regret later, like buckshot. Hippocampus, memory. So if you've previously experienced a threat and you survived it, you can recall that and say, oh, that's not so bad, I know I can do that. But when your hippocampus is not doing its job, that threat looks anew.

the aphron-vegas okay and what causes the hippocampus to go cortisol the aphron-vegas okay so that's transmitting information from the gut

up to the brain and what is that information well it's coming from the microbiome it's coming from your food it's coming from the bacteria that chew up your food and ascending it via neurotransmitters

like for instance serotonum that, you know, 90% of the serotonin in your body is in your gut. And that information is making its way up to the brain in order to basically tell your brain that things are okay inside. And when you don't get that information, you've lost intuition. Well, we've lost intuition. And that's because of the food we eat.

And finally, oxytocin. So oxytocin is, of course, the reproduction neurotransmitter, the love neurotransmitter, the parturition neurotransmitter, the lactation neurotransmitter, the bonding neurotransmitter, all those,

but it's really the safety neurotransmitter, is what it is. And it's been shown that if you are exposed to early childhood trauma, what we call adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, that oxytocin receptor

that normally buys the oxytocin, oxytocin gets methylated, now doesn't bind the oxytocin. And so things that were safety are now threat. And so if you see the world as threat, you can't rain in your amygdala. And so these four systems within our brain are responding to our current environment in a very negative fashion,

basically causing our amygdala to bud, luckshot our entire lives. And that's leading to systemic health problems, mental health problems. And since it's happening to everyone, societal health problems and ultimately planetary health problems. So this is all about fear. We have lost control of our fear. So let's see if I have this right. It's no question that we are living in an epidemic of loneliness and anxiety. Indeed. To examine the mechanism, the way that you just said, when cortisol happens, there's the

methylation of the oxytocin receptor, which correlates with the serotonin depletion, which correlates and causes this feeling of lack of safety and contentness. And so when you say that your gut feelings and intuition are undermined and that I've heard you say you can't love in a brain that's inflamed, you know? You've done your homework. I have said that. I think it's just so important to double-click on this because so much of what we perceive as existential problems that need existential answers are have oftentimes, and I want to hear

your thoughts on the simple remedies to be able to return to our natural state and not have our amygdala be hijacked. Indeed. And that's, I think, like, health has become largely due to so many of the podcasts out there, so many different conflicting ideas on diet and advice of what people are to do. But when you examine on the mechanism of literally how our sense of agency is actually removed from us, I think it's a really important reminder to double click on. So you mentioned the food systems being one of the biggest.

It's affecting all of us all at the same time. So the question is, what about the food? I mean, food used to work, and now it doesn't. And what happened to it? And many things have happened to it. In, you know, 10 words or less, okay, we went from real food to ultra-processed food. Okay, what's ultra-processed food? Well, real food is food that came out of the ground or animals that ate food

that came out of the ground. That's real food. Ultra-processed food is food that basically a man or human, a woman, too, human, okay, did something to before it got to you, you know, from the ground or the animal, right? That's ultra-processed food. So what did they do? You know, basically, nature got it right and man gets it wrong. That's how to look at it.

And what are the changes? changes. I would basically argue that there are many changes, but there are five that matter. Here are the five. Too much sugar, too little fiber, not enough omega-3s, too many emulsifiers, and then some petroleum dies like RFK is worried about. I actually put that pretty darn low on the list to deal with the other four first. All right.

why? What about those things? Sugar. I've, you know, sugar's, you know, what brummed me to the dance. Yeah, you went viral for sugar. Yeah, yeah. Back in 2009, Sugar the Bitter Truth, you know, 25 million views. What's wrong with sugar? It tastes good. It makes celebrations. All true. Okay. But what is wrong with sugar? So, first of all, sugar is two molecules. Not one. Two. Two. One's called glucose, one's called fructose. They are not the same. Glucose is a six-membered ring. Fructose is a five-membered ring.

They are not the same. Glucose is not very sweet. Fructose is very, very sweet. Starchy carbs versus your Pop-Tart? Well, glucose can be in sugar, like table sugar, or it can be in starch, which is polymerized glucose. Right? Fructose is only in

sucrose, which is just glucose fructose bound together, or high fructose corn syrup, which is glucose fructose not bound together, or in maple syrup or honey or agave. Taste sweet in the mouth. Taste sweet in the mouth. Does many other things, though, aside from just tasting sweet in the mouth. Go figure. Turns out it inhibits mitochondrial function. Fructose acts like alcohol.

in inhibiting mitochondrial function. Fructose acts like ethanol. Everywhere throughout your body. Our livers have an innate, finite, limited capacity to metabolize alcohol. And when you go over that, you get drunk and you get sick. So one drink, one glass of wine, line, it's okay.

Two, depends if you're a male, female. Because, you know, males break it down faster and are bigger, so there's greater volume of distribution. Three, you're getting tipsy. Four, don't drive. And five, you're a friggin' alcoholic. All right? You get the idea.

It's a dose thing. And it's a crinicity thing. turns out fructose and alcohol are metabolized in mitochondria exactly the same way we our livers have a limited capacity to metabolize fructose in the same way that we have a limited capacity to metabolize alcohol and while it does not cause you to be tipsy it does reduce ATP levels energy levels in the liver in the intestine, in the heart, and in the brain. And when you reduce ATP levels in the brain, how do you feel? Like shit. Tired.

Brain fog, irritability, anxiousness, ultimately depression, and cognitive decline. All from... ATP depletion. Well, fructose depletes ATP. Alcohol depletes ATP. Perclust and alcohol?

Same problem. And the reason is because they're metabolized exactly the same way and caused the same problems inside cells. So sugar is the big one. And sugar's been added to all of our food on purpose by the food industry because it's good for them,

because they know when they add it, you buy more, because it's addictive. In the same way, alcohol is addictive. It's a legal addiction. And they can give it to kids. They can give it to two-year-olds. They can give it to six-month-olds. They can give it to friggin' newborns. We have an epidemic of newborn obesity in this country.

Newborn obesity. Newborn obesity. Newborn obesity. They don't diet or exercise. Neonatal obesity. Neonatal obesity. Obesity. So four studies from around the world, Russia, South Africa, United States, Israel, okay? Over the last 25 years, there's been an increase in birth weight by 200 grams, a half a pound. So babies born in those four countries weigh a half a pound more today than they

did 25 years ago. Now, some people might say that's good, you know, not malnutrition. except, of course, you know, these, you know, we're not talking about malnourished babies here. When you stick these babies in a scanner, that's a scanner, turns out those 200 grams is all fat. So we have obese newborns. Why? To that point, a study came out about six years ago,

looking at body temperature for the last 150 years from the Civil War all the way to today. Average body temperature? Average body temperature. And it doesn't matter if you're white or black, male or female, young or old. There has been a 1.6 degree Fahrenheit reduction

in basal body temperature across the board over 150 years. Now, your basal body temperature is the heat that your mitochondria can't capture when your food is metabolized. That is what basal body temperature is. Your mitochondria can capture between 35 and 40% of the inherent heat in the food you eat.

Okay? So if your body temperature is going down, that means your mitochondria are not capturing. That means there's something going on. and it correlates with the change in adiposity. So you're diverting energy away from mitochondria and toward adipose tissue. And it's because of mitochondrial dysfunction.

So your mitochondria, the little powerhouses of your cell. Everybody knows that from 10th grade, or they remember it, you know, barely from 10th grade. But that's basically what they do. They turn the chemical energy and food into the chemical energy of your cells. they turn food, amino acids, you know, carbohydrates, fats into ATP, adenosine triphosphate.

That's their, that's mitochondria's job. And then the ATP is used by all of the processes in the cell to power all the things that need to be done, like make new proteins, like make new membranes, like, you know, contract, you know, muscles and think and action potentials in the brain. et cetera, et cetera. Okay? Neuoplasticity. Big one, we'll talk about that in a minute.

Okay? Very energy intensive. And it comes from the food. Can't come from anywhere else. Got to come from the food. And the mitochondria are how it gets there. So if your body temperatures going down, it means your mitochondria are not working as well.

So we have proof positive that our mitochondria are under assault. The question is, what's the assault? Well, ionizing radiation, air pollution, microplastics, PFS, BPA, phthalates, chlorpherophos, you know, insecticide, glyphosate, okay, and sugar. All of them. Well, that's everything. That's our environment.

Okay? So sugar's not the only cost, but it's kind of the big cahuna. It's also the one we could fix tomorrow if we wanted. You can't fix the air pollution. You can't fix the ionizing radiation. You can't fix the microplastics. You can't fix the BPA or the PFS or any of these other things. They're baked into the cake now.

But you could fix the sugar. And that's why I spend most of my time talking about that. And yet the profit from so many corporations, their existence is on defending that the sugar doesn't come out. That's right. So we've seen sugar go from a treat every once in a while to nearly in every ingredient on every shelf. And we've seen obesity, triple in Americans, obesity increase in newborns, diabetes almost over double. Now, we know that health has gone. terribly wrong over the past 50 years. And no wonder why, obviously, as the introduction of these

ultra-processed foods and increased sugar has happened simultaneously. Now, you said we could change it over at night. And yet we could. We live in an oligarchy where these big corporations are profiting. That's true. That is true. And the oligarchs who are in charge of our food supply don't want it to change because this is their money machine. Right. You know, this is their gravy train. This is, you know, what brought them to the dance.

You know, the average percent margin on the food industry prior to 1975 was 1% per year. Well, the increase in population was 1% per year. In other words, the food industry made more money because they sold the same amount a food per person to more people. After 1975, that percent margin went to five percent. But our actual

population increase actually, in terms of rate, went down. Okay. So we weren't increasing by 1 percent per year. That's when, you know, people started not having babies and the infertility, you know, problems started, et cetera. Okay. It was around that time. So, in fact, we're not growing the population by the 1% per year. So that means they're making more money by selling more food to fewer people. So what's the driver of that? Well, something addictive, because that's the only way to override your body's society system is to basically give it something addictive

that depletes ATP. So you think you need more. So they have basically found a legal addiction that depletes our energy, and we love it. Hey, fam. One thing that brings me a lot of joy in the morning reliably is having a warm and nourishing drink

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What are your thoughts there? That's a really good question. And it's a question I've spent a lot of time on and a lot of brain power on. Here's the problem. We do not have the smoking gun for this. We do not have the document that says food industry, form industry. we're in cahoots together and

we want you food industry to make people sick so that we pharma industry can sell more drugs so that basically we're in collusion and it's a conspiracy. We do not have that document.

We have a lot of documents though. We have a boatload of documents. At UCSF, my home institution, we have something called the industry documents library. And it has data and documents on five industries. Petroleum, opioids, alcohol, tobacco, ultra-process food.

Okay, and they're all digitized and curated. And anyone, by the way, can go online and look at these documents. It's free to the public. IDL. UCS.U-S.F. that edgy. And please do. And we have written many, many papers on what we find in those documents. We have been looking for the tie between them. And we don't actually see a document that basically is the smoking gun. That we don't have. Having said that, we definitely have documents that show

that the food industry knows what they're doing, the pharma industry knows what they're doing, the ultra-processed food industry knows what they're doing, the tobacco industry knows what they're doing. We have that. And actually, just this past March, we published a article in the New England Journal of Medicine called Corporations as vectors of chronic disease

using the industry documents library. So basically we liken corporations to mosquitoes in this paper. And it's a very good paper, and I suggest everyone take a look at it and read it. We'll link it down below. So each of those industries, we have their telltale sign

and their raison d'est, already elaborated. what we don't have is the cross-talk between them saying that one's helping the other in a colluding fashion. That we don't have. Having said that, there is a professor of public health and history at Duke University. Her name is Nancy McKiernan, and she wrote a book, and I'm trying to remember the name. I think it's called Democracy Unchained. and the book is about a stealth organization that you may or may not have heard of.

It's definitely not in the news. And the name of the organization is the Atlas Network. And the Atlas Network is run by one person group organization, the Koch brothers. And she has information. that suggests that all of these industries are basically being, shall we say, funneled through this Atlas network. And I suggest everybody take a look at that. So they're very well maybe collusion.

What do you make of that and the fact that our children are getting increasingly sicker despite the fact that you've devoted your life to getting them better? And you've watched that happen over time. Yeah. Tell me. You know, it's really kind of a problem. You know, I was a pediatrician for 40 years. I graduated med school in 80, you know,

and I was a pediatrician all the way through, you know, 2020. I'm retired now. I mean, still a pediatrician, but am I seeing patients? But, you know, for every kid I treated, 10 more would show up on my doorstep. And, you know, that's why I wrote books, was to try to get more kids better. And the fact of the matter is,

despite all of my work, kids have continued to get sick. So, you know, this sticks in my craw, that this is, you know, not getting better. The question is, why? And the answer is fear. Fear on the part of the industry. In terms of, you know, making money and, you know, loss of resources,

fear on the part of the, you know, populace that, you know, this is their, you know, salve, this is their, you know, the thing that mollifies their pain. Don't take that away from me, you know. Perfect example. I testified in front of the House Appropriations, and the Agriculture Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in May of 2024, about getting soda off snap and the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program food stamps. Because if sugar is so bad and soda is so bad, which it is,

why are we subsidizing something that's killing our populace and making things worse and hurting people and driving health care costs through the roof. Why are we doing that? And so I testified, you know, there were 15 congressmen on this committee on the dais, nine Republicans and six Democrats. And what I will say is that there were two Republicans, Andy Harris and guy named Newhouse from Washington. in the state who got it, who understood it.

The other seven Republicans were useless, worse than useless. But I was really surprised at the Democrats. There was one Democrat named Marcy Kaptur from Ohio who didn't quite get it, but sort of said maybe there's something here that we should investigate, maybe there's a way to work together. The other five Democrats, basically, they had prepared speeches. that they gave with their five minutes didn't ask any questions

and then left the room and didn't even stick around for the questioning of the witnesses like myself. And I came to realize why that was and the reason was because their constituents don't want so to remove from step.

Why not? because this is the mollification of their pain. This is their opiate. So how do you get past that? Pretty hard. Hey, fam. A quick share about our skin. Healthy skin, I think, is largely driven by lifestyle,

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of political funding comes from donors of these companies. Of course. Yeah. Absolutely. They want the status quo. They don't want to see a change. They're worried. Their fear is that if they actually did the right thing, that their market share would go down.

And so they'll do anything they can to prop it up. It's fascinating to see what happens as the narrative and belief system of a nation gets changed over time. We've seen this obviously through prohibition with alcohol change over time. We know now that alcohol is not good for us. We still have this programming deeply that not to the same degree with sugar. I think you've spent so much of your life helping actually shed light on that, but when you first did in showing the toxicity of sugar, you were vilified. Indeed. Yeah. For quite a while. You know, they were looking to discredit me because I was a threat. you know, I had a, you know, target on my back for a while.

Now it's so well known, and, you know, there are so many people who are on board with this, and we've really turned, you know, the academic establishment around on this issue, which is, you know, I find very heartening that we can do that. But it took a while. You know, if something happened to be, it wouldn't change the pace of, progress. But the thing that's changing the pace of progress are the dark forces that basically don't want to change. And so my job is to both work with them and work against them all at the same time. And, you know, the food industry is mad at me. You know, they say I'm their enemy.

I'm actually not. I'm their conscience. But, you know, they don't want a conscience because they're pretty sociopathic. So I think most of us really feel the weight of what we're talking about. Maybe we can shift it a little bit to the empowering lens on the personal level. I mean, it's no question that this goes from one on a personal responsibility level to a health, a global health care issue. Let me stop you there. Okay. You said, you know, the magic word and the duck just came down. Right, great. Okay. Personal responsibility. Yeah. I know a lot about personal responsibility. I've written an entire chapter on it and several pieces of a book on it.

What is personal responsibility? What is that? Where's it come from? Is it in the Constitution? No. Is it in the Declaration of Independence? Is it in the Magna Carta? Is it in any state legislate?

The tobacco industry? Where did it come? Yes. It came from the tobacco industry. Exactly right, Andre. Well done. came from the tobacco industry. 1962.

Because they were getting killed on the science, and they had to invent another reason for you to smoke. Well, nobody put that cigarette in your, between your lips. Nobody lit it for you. Okay. Assumption of risk, which turned into personal responsibility. Okay. Personal responsibility reached its peak in 1982 in the face of the Ligot lawsuit.

Okay, that was kind of the last of its kind of personal lawsuits against the tobacco industry for lung cancer. And basically personal responsibility kind of took over because it's, you know, seems very libertarian, you know, take your own chances, suffer the consequences, you know, seems very American. It's not anywhere in our history, but, you know, they basically appropriated it and turned it into this thing. I would argue that personal responsibility is actually a form of agnotology. Agnotology.

Now, what's that? Have you heard of agnotology? No. New word. Have you heard of agnostic? Yes. Okay. Agnotology has the same derivation.

Agnetology is the science and the study of ignorance. Now, there's two kinds of ignorance. There's the lack of knowledge ignorance, and then there's willful ignorance. I don't want to know something. I don't want to learn to do something. Well, there's another kind of agnithology. There's emotional agnitology.

I don't want to feel something. because feeling something means pain. And I don't want the emotional pain. It's got a name. It's called Alexithymia. Yeah. Colorblindness to your internal experience. Kind of sort of, yeah. Yeah.

A lot like that, yes. Okay. That's where personal responsibility came from. Is this concept of alexathymia. I don't want to understand and I don't want to empathize. So, therefore, if someone gets sick, their problem. Okay, it's basically a societal version of Shadenfreude. Okay.

Deriving pleasure from the misery of others. Enabling toxic behavior, rebranding it as freedom of choice. Exactly. But really, freedom of choice is really freedom to blame. Okay, blame the victim. And we have an entire, you know, culture now of blaming the victim. victim. Just open up the newspaper every friggin' day. But what that is is just another manifestation of this mollifying of emotional pain, which lives, you know, at a collective level as alexothymia

personal responsibility. It's a, it's an ideology. It is not biology. Whether life serves you an or an unexpected backhand. The high-protein yogurt, Oikos Pro, is there to feed your strength and help you turn every challenge into a smash. Oikos Pro helps build strong muscles and support muscle recovery with high protein and contains no added sugar. Because true strength isn't about being able to take the hits. It's about being able to bounce back. Oikos Pro Feed your Strength. Visit oikos.Ca for more details. Yeah, we're seeing this strongly in the young male demographic too that become a lexathymic

and what I say, colorblindness to their own internal emotional experience. It feels like living a simulacrum, a simulation of your own life. Indeed. Very similar. And when you do that, you withdraw and you're alone. Now, there are two ways to be alone. There's being alone and being okay. with it and there's being alone and being miserable with it. Okay. So, Andre, you smart guy.

Ready? Quiz. Quiz time. Quiz time. Quiz time. Back to school. Okay. What is the difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is simply being alone and perhaps enjoying your own company. Loneliness is you're alone, but you're in bad company. You feel. You feel. the separation and the anxiety correlated with that. Indeed. So what's the difference? The perception. One word.

Serotonin. Uh-huh. Loneliness is serotonin deficiency. Solitude is serotonin, sufficiency. When your brain has enough serotonin, being alone is okay because you're content. In addition, you recognize, even though you're alone, you're not really alone because the world is with you

a collective if you will it's kind of what religion is based on you feel the collective you experience it in whatever way you experience it it's why religion is successful I would also say that I feel like there is a big distinction

people that are lonely feel like it's happening to them as if almost you know one of the worst sentences is solitary confinement, your willingness is taken away from you and you're put in isolation as opposed to the willing choice to go into an

empty room and be there. And it's happening because you feel like you have agency over it. That's right. Indeed. Sherry Turkle, famous media watcher from MIT, you know, famously coined the term alone together. We're all alone

together, but we're alone. Yeah. And the question is, how'd that happen? Okay, the slapping of serotonin. And how did that happen? Well, I just told you. All right. Screens are a big one.

Turns out cortisol reduces serotonin. Dopamine antagonizes serotonin. Lack of tryptophan in your diet means serotonin depletion. Okay? So all the things that I said that the 50 years of, you know, change in our environment all have conspired. to make us alone and feel alone and feel lonely. That's something that just calling attention to it isn't going to fix. So you brought up something I had said to Vivek Murthy,

several, about a year ago at a meeting. We were in London together, and I like Vivik, he's a nice guy. Okay? And he talks about loneliness as being a major affliction of the American population, which it absolutely is. And so I take nothing away from, you know, nothing away from him in terms of him identifying the issue and the problem. But he doesn't have an answer to it. He has identified the problem, but there's no answer to it. What are you going to do about it?

And so he and I have known each other for like 12 years. and he basically has poo-poohed me for a long time. And so I was at this meeting in London with him at the Integrative and Personalized Medicine Congress. He was one of the keynotes. I was one of the other keynotes. We actually met King Charles together. It was kind of cool.

And I said to him, I said, Vivick, you can't love if your brain is inflamed. You can't be, you can't have solitude if your brain is inflamed. And the reason is because brain inflammation reduces serotonum. So I kept telling him that the food was part of the problem of loneliness. I'm not sure he ever got it.

But anyway, bottom line, we got to fix the food too. One thing that I want to ask, because you mentioned it earlier, was the abundance of serotonin that's generated in the gut and the afferent vagus nerve that is correlated with gut feelings, intuition, part of individual suffering is like we're disconnected from ourselves and the greater hole that you're talking to. Indeed. So talk to me about that mechanism a bit more

because I think a lot of people can relate to when they're feeling healthy and vital, their sense of direction and choice and intuition is like online and when it's not. They feel worse. It's worse. Yes, absolutely. Now, I will tell you, this is a very hard area to study. Yeah.

Okay. and we don't have good ways of assessing the vagus nerve. But we now have things like vagal nerve stimulators and ways to sort of perturb the vagus nerve to try to get into that. We also have things that alter the microbiome in order to try to improve microbial diversity in order to reduce gut inflammation

in order to be able to send that serotonin signal up the vagus nerve. Something I learned just last year, really fascinating. I'm waiting to see more. data on it, but I'm just going to bring it up to your audience as a possible, really, really important issue. Years and years and years and years ago, a study at the University of Virginia on circadian rhythms, what they did was they blinded a bunch of rats, and then they put a light, and they fixed a light to the skull. Okay? So there was no information coming from the

eyes because they blinded them. But there was a light coming from the bone above, and these animals would still entrain because of the light that they experienced through the skull. It was still entrained, meaning what? You know, the various hormones patterns like, you know, circadian rhythms and, you know, and cortisol going up and down during the day like it normally does. Meaning circadian rhythm is not modulated simply through our visual system, but actually our biology. Correct.

And the question is, what about that light led to this issue? Okay. That was the nugget of truth back in the 1990s when they did this. And this has been rolling around in the back of my head for 30-some-odd years. And this ought to be something really important here. Okay. Why is this? Well, this paper came out last year.

First off, there's Babcock. And it was in a physics journal. Like physics journal. They showed that tryptophanine, the precursor to serotonin, the amino acid, that is the precursor to serotonin. Made in the gut? Well, triptophan has to be ingested. You have to like it from the food. Okay.

is the rarest amino acid of all the 20 amino acids involved in protein synthesis. It is found in, you know, eggs, fish, poultry, not exactly ultra-processed food. Trptophanine, because of the two moieties, there's a benzene moiety and an amidazole moiety put together. It resonates. Okay. The double bonds in the benzene. and the amygazole resonate and it gives off light. It fluoresces.

And they showed... Wait, what is it exactly that's giving off light? The molecule itself is giving off light. The electrons, as they buzz around the two rings, the benzene ring and the amytozol ring, are giving off photons are giving off light. Imperceptible to the human eye, but... Totally interperceptible to the human eye.

But at a microscopic level, you could see. Correct. Interesting. Absolutely. And they showed that that light via the vagus nerve was transmitting information to the brain. So it might not even be through neurotransmission, standard neurotransmission, you know, through neurotransmitters, but it might actually be the tryptophanine sending light up to the brain. And that would make sense with the, you know, this study from 30 years ago. You know, that light somehow has its own effects. It's like, whoa.

It's a trip. Now, I don't know yet. Right. I mean, this is too early. Yeah. And I'm not saying, oh, I've got the answer or anything. But it's like, you know, we think we understand stuff, but, you know, you find out new stuff all the time. We've got to figure out how this all works.

And the potential to take home there is the importance of tributfan. Well, the importance of food. Morentz of food in general, yeah. Yeah, the importance of food. I wouldn't specifically say importance of triptefe. the importance of food. You know, food has basically been relegated, you know, to a side gig. And what I'm saying is, no, I think it's the main gig.

Yeah. It's the medicine. Yeah. Baccharty's. If you will. Okay, man, so many exciting tangents to dive. Well, you know, you wanted to talk about know thyself, Alan. Here we are.

Here we are. One thing because we may or may not revisit it, just because we talked about sugar, there's clearly a difference that I would like you to articulate between an orange and orange juice. Oh, okay. Because sugar is like a catch-all term, but, you know, different. So people rail me all the time.

Are you telling me that fruit is no good? Fruit has fructose. Yeah, fruit has fructose. Okay. It also has fiber. Okay. Fruit juice does not. It has soluble fiber.

It doesn't have insoluble fiber. So, I mean, it's different. Okay? It's not just that it's one solid, one's liquid, but the fiber actually is the important part of the fruit. Okay, the juice is nature's way of getting you to eat your fiber. Now, why is fiber important? My good friend and colleague and erstwhile co-author,

Gary Taubbs famously said, you know, fiber is what makes you poop. And that's what we believed for, you know, I would say, 100 years, fiber was what makes you poop. Because fiber is not absorbed in the gut, goes out in the stool. That is absolutely true. And it does make you poop. That's why a lot of laxatives are various components of fiber. I agree with that, too.

But it does so much more than that. Yes, it makes you poop. That's true. It does a whole bunch more. What fiber does, insoluble and insoluble, I need both. And real food has both. And processed food either has none or just soluble. Like fiber one bars is soluble fiber like inulin.

You need both. The insoluble fibers like the cellulose, like the stringy stuff in celery. The soluble fiber is the pectin or the inylin, like what holds jelly together. They're both fiber. You don't absorb either of them. They both go out in your poop. But the two together actually have synergistic effects on the intestine that are absolutely essential to good metabolic and gut health. Here's what happens.

Imagine you have a spaghetti colander, no bowl holes. You run the water. Water runs right through. Okay. Now take a blob of petroleum jelly. throw it into the center of the colander. Run the water. Still runs right through.

Bounces off the jelly. Now, rub your finger all the way around the inside of that colander, spreading the jelly. Now run the water. Now it doesn't run right through. You've blocked it. You've created a secondary barrier. You needed the colander, you needed the jelly, and you needed the geometry. but you have changed the mechanics,

the fluid dynamics of that system, right? Okay, same thing is going on in your intestine. The insoluble fiber, the cellulose, acts like a latticework, like a fishnet, like the colander. makes a structure with holes. The soluble fiber globular, they plug the holes in that lattice work. And together, they form a secondary barrier. And that secondary barrier

prevents the absorption of glucose, fructose, sucroseptos, simple starches, making them unavailable for early absorption. Insulin spikes. So it reduces the glucose response, so therefore it reduces the insulin spike. That protects your liver, keeps your liver healthy, and because you didn't absorb it,

goes further down the intestine where the microbiome will chew it up, so you have fed the gut. And in the process, you've increased microbial diversity, you've also increased intestinal transit, reduced transit time, increased transit rate in order to get the satiety signal sooner. and the colonic bacteria will turn that fiber into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, which are anti-inflammatory, preventing things like irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease,

leaky gut, Alzheimer's disease, and the cellulose, the insoluble fiber will act like little scrubbies on the inside of the colon, getting rid of the colon cancer cells. So, yeah, it makes you poop, but it did all those other things, too. In fact, it did six things and it recapitulates the effects of eating the fruit by consuming the fiber. Okay? Now, when you squeeze it and freeze it, you lose that. You've lost that capacity because you don't have the insoluble fiber anymore. It's gone down the garbage.

Even just freezing it. Well, so the food industry knows that if they first, freeze an orange, you know, it turns to mush, and so they can't sell it. So, you know, they squeeze it and freeze it, and therefore it became frozen concentrated orange juice. They turned a food of an orange into a commodity, frozen concentrated orange juice. With decreased depreciation, they can sell it for longer. They can sell it on the commodities exchange. They can increase their profit because they've decreased their depreciation. The problem is they've also ruined your health. So it's their profit against your health. Now, here's the problem. Real food has fiber.

Process food doesn't. But ultra-processed food is baked into the cake. You know, we're not going to get rid of it. And I'm not even sure we want to get rid of it because we've got to feed 10 billion people by the year 2050. And we're not going to have enough land and ocean to do it. So we actually have to rely on ultra-processed food to have reduced spoilage to be able to freeze it. Because we've got to feed a lot of people. So this is a problem. So now we've got a tension between the food we're eating and our health. and the profit that the food industry is making all at the same time, and it's going to get worse.

So we have to ultimately come to peace with ultra-processed food. We have to figure out a way to make ultra-process food healthy. So I want to tell you about two things I'm involved in that are related to this. One is a company that I am actually the co-founder of and chief medical officer, so full disclosure. and the other is I'm an advisor to another company that is actually trying to make ultra-process food healthy in the Middle East. Not here, not yet.

We're going to bring it here eventually, but not yet. Okay, so let me tell you about the company that I'm involved in. It's called Biolumen, B-I-O-L-U-M-E-N, and it is a proprietary fiber. It is a combination of soluble, insoluble, fiber. It is cellulose plus some proprietary hydrogels, all parts of food. What it does, you swallow it, hits your stomach, expands 70-fold over its original size, like a sponge, like that. Oh, gee it that in your gut. Like a chip with your gut, yeah, in a way, yes. Okay.

And when it does that, you get a feeling of fullness, but more importantly, the nooks and the crannies in the sponge become obvious. and impregnated in the nooks and the crannies are these proprietary hydrogels, soluble fiber that are chosen specifically to sequester, absorb, soak up glucose, fructose, sucrose, simple starches, rendering them unavailable for early absorption. In other words, it recapitulates the effects of fiber on the food that the food industry took out. It's fiber replacement therapy. And we have double-blind placebo-controlled data that shows. shows improvements in lipids, improvements in insulin response, improvements in gut health.

So I was really shocked. I was in a good way. Nobody in our double-blind placebo-control trial stopped the fiber because they all felt better. If they had diarrhea on our product, they didn't. if they had constipation on our product, they didn't. If they had bloating on our product, they didn't. If they had pain on our product, they didn't. Is it a powder or a pill?

It's a powder. Okay. It's a powder. Just add to smoothies. Add it to, we're adding it to chocolate. We're making a protein bar. So the product is called munch, munch. Munch.

Munch. I did not make this out of it. Munch, munch. But it's available online. You can go to munchmanch. com and purchase it, okay? And we're starting to put it into foods. We also have a soluble version of munch munch

that we can put into juice to soak up the sugar. And that would work. And that would work too. And so that, we think, is going to be the biggest seller. Yeah. Because we're going to be able to make juice healthy again. Fibre is certainly having its heyday. I think it just surpassed protein in terms of

Google searches. Fibre is the new protein. So they say, it's pretty funny. So that's one thing we're doing, and I'm very excited about that, and it's available to anyone right now if they want. And the other thing we're doing is working with a concern in the Middle East.

It's a food company. It's a processed food company. It's called Kuwaiti Danish Dairy, KD. They are like the Nestle of the Middle East. And they make all sorts of, you know, flavored milks, yogurt, flavored yogurt and frozen yogurt. They came to me six years ago and said, we know we're a problem. We want to be the solution. We know that Kuwait, where they're located, has an 18% diabetes rate and an 80% obesity rate.

And we know we're part of the cause. We don't want to be. Can you help us make processed food healthy? So I convened a scientific advisory team of five people. We worked two hours at a time, two days a week for three years. We looked at every ingredient, we looked at every vendor, we looked at every process, we looked at every product. And we basically figured out what was going on with the food, and we developed a set of tiers criteria. to advance any one of their products from poison to healthy,

you know, from Tier 3 to Tier 1. Okay. And we ultimately came up with a simple rubric. Nine words. Three clauses. Here they are. Protect the liver. Feed the gut.

Support the brain. Nine words. We call them the GLBs. Not the GLPs, the GLBs, gut liver brain. Any food that, that does all three is healthy, whether it's ultra-processed or not. Any food that does none of the three is poison, whether it's ultra-processed or not. And we now have a tool to help figure that out, which is online called Perfect.

You can find it online at perfect.com. And you can actually determine what your diet looks like and whether or not it works to keep you healthy or not. and I'm hoping that, you know, the American food industry will take this as an example. And so then the question is, well, that must reduce their sales. So they've looked at that, hasn't touched their sales. They're making just as much money as they ever did. Okay, the one thing that mattered, they didn't tell the public.

Because if you tell the public, then they're going to say, ah, it doesn't taste. Yeah, I don't want the healthy stuff. Don't want the healthy stuff. Okay? And that's our own, you know, fear. That's a different fear. All right? But ultimately, this can be done.

Yeah. And we're working toward it. Amazing. So you've shared that insulin is the bad guy in nearly every disease and can be. We have the data for that. Insulin is good and bad. Okay? It's good if you have type 1 diabetes.

That's bad. if you have anything else. All right? I mean, insulin takes energy you're not burning and puts it into storage. Insulin's the energy storage hormone. So insulin makes fat. More insulin, more fat.

Now, there are three different types of fat and one correlated with most diseases. Indeed. Well, two correlate with disease. Okay, yeah, visceral and liver. and liver fat. Now, two people, one thin person, one obese person could be metabolically the same, right? Absolutely.

Thin outside, fat inside. That's right. Oh, boy. You have been studying. Yeah, I mean, I tried to prep a bit. You sure did. But that's important because people would assume that, oh, the obese person is clearly more unhealthy on the inside in regards to the fat. Not necessarily.

Right. You would think so, but not necessarily. Yeah, that people would think. that. And that's not necessarily the case. So the way to think of it is there are three fat depots. Okay. And they contribute differently to disease. Okay. So the first fat depot is the one you can see what we call the subcutaneous fat depot or the big butt fat depot. As in the, does this bathing suit make me look fat, fat, fat, that fat. Okay? And never answer that question. I promise. bad idea

it turns out subcutaneous fat is actually metabolically neutral it's where your body wants to put the excess energy it's your spare tire okay the spare tire is not hurting your car

okay if you put energy into subcutaneous fat it's actually protective and the reason we know that is because there are diseases where the cells don't make subcutaneous fat. It's called lipidistrophy.

And when that happens, then the fat goes to the visceral or the liver fat. And that's when you get sick as hell. In fact, lipodistrophy patients are the sickest people on the planet. And they don't respond to insulin because they don't have subcutaneous fat. So we know that subcutaneous fat is actually protective. Now, if you grow that subcutaneous fat enormously, eventually individual fat cells will break down and that will release cytokines, which will then call into macrophages into the picture, to mop up the grease, which will then cause chronic metabolic disease.

So there's a limit. There's a level of the bucket that if you overflow it, you'll get into trouble. So I'm not suggesting that any amount of subcutaneous fat is okay, but this is where your body wants to put it. Now, the second fat depot is called your visceral fat, a big belly fat. Now, big belly fat has nothing to do with food. Big belly fat has to do with stress, has to do with cortisol,

has to do with your adrenergic nervous system. But when you say it has nothing to do with food, surely there's a correlation to the amount of stress, holes and the amount of food they feel they need. Well, that's true. But that's because visceral fat and subcutaneous fat are often related. So, in fact, people who are stressed to reduce the pain, eat more. So I'm not arguing that.

And they do go together. It's not like subcutaneous fat and visceral fat are completely separate. They overlap. but visceral fat can go up even when subcutaneous fat goes down. Example of that, endogenous depression. So, major depressive disorder, catatonic depression. Is there exogenous depression? Is it endogenous depression?

Yeah, there is exogenous depression. There's anxiety. We're going to talk about that. Gotcha, good. Okay. But let's take somebody who has to be hospitalized to keep them from hurting themselves. Yeah. Okay.

Suicidal depression. Okay. They don't eat. Sorry. They don't eat. Yeah. They're an hedonic. They don't derive any pleasure from food.

They don't eat. They would wither away and die. But if you stick them in a scanner, they have increased visceral fat. They've lost their subcutaneous fat because they're not eating, but they've gained visceral fat because their cortisol is high. So the relationship between the two has been broken. And you can make increased visceral fat without increasing subcutaneous fat. Often you do them together, but not necessarily, you can do them separately. And it turns out that visceral fat is having a major effect on metabolic health. and then finally the third fat, liver fat.

So the fat made right in the liver, which has nothing to do with the visceral or the subcutaneous, but the liver fat. And so now we have this epidemic of fatty liver disease. 45% of Americans have fatty liver. Which people have likely heard from alcohol use. Exactly. And it goes back to...

Used to be alcohol. Right. Now it's sugar. Yeah. Okay. Exactly right. And you can have liver fat. fat without visceral or subcutaneous fat.

And do you know who has that the most Southeast Asians? So they actually are thin because they don't have subcutaneous fat, but they have very high liver fat. Why is that? Sugar and alcohol. Oh, they're just more prevalent over there? Yeah. Gotcha. So, bottom line, three different fat depots, three different causes.

ultimately three different dispositions. And so when people stand on a scale, you're really only measuring the subcue fat compartment. And that's not really the one we even care about. So it's the one people care about because of the bathing suit. Yeah. But it's actually not the one that's related to health. Now, what would you do that get a dexta scan,

or how do you check the fatter on your liver? So there are a couple of ways to do it. The cheapest way is the free way is just a tape measure because your waist circumference and your liver fat are correlated together with about an R value of about 0.7. So that's pretty good. But then you say someone could be thin. Yes, absolutely.

So that's why the R value is only 0.7. One. The next best way is to draw a blood test called an ALT, alanine amino transferase, part of a standard chem panel. Okay. What's the marker there that people would look at a blood panel? It's called ALT. ALT.

ALT. ALT. Okay. AST is aspartate amino transferase related, but that's in a, it talks about acute liver toxicity, whereas ALT talks about chronic liver toxicity. So an ALT. And if your ALT is up, chances are you have liver fat. Okay, and now the question is how high does the ALT have to be?

Now, if you look at the lab slip, it'll tell you that anything above 40 is too high. That's wrong. Anything above 25 is too high. Why do I say above 25, and they all say above 40? And the answer is because over the past 50 years, the curve has shifted to the right. Because the way you determine a normal range is you take 100,000, you know, thousand, quote, normal people. I think, and you measure their LT, and you develop a bell-shaped curve.

The problem is, most of those people have liver fats, it's skewed the curve. I think J. Krishna-Merti is quoted saying, it's no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. I'll accept that. So, if someone, how would you get rid of liver fat?

Is it hard? hard. So the best way is stop feeding it. Right. Stop growing up making it worse. Okay, sugar and alcohol. And so this is how we took care of kids in my obesity clinic for 17 years is basically we got the sugar out of their diet. And guess what? Their liver fat disappeared. And we've actually have, you know, shown that and published on it. That's the easiest way. Um, uh, time, uh, restricted eating. intermittent fasting is another way to do that. There are ways to do it. Have I heard you correlate this with ADHD and children?

Not that. Just sugar in general? Yeah, sugar and ADHD do go together. And probably the reason is because sugar depletes ATP. And ADHD is a manifestation of ATP depletion in the brain. Gotcha. Because your prefrontal cortex is not working. And so if your prefrontal cortex is not working, you basically are enormously impulsive.

Because remember, the prefrontal cortex is your jimony cricket of your brain. Could you give me your highest leverage behavior changes for anybody who's listening right now? We double down on sugar, but you mentioned microplastics, you mentioned air pollution. For somebody who wants to protect their environment to at least be 80% conducive more towards health than the 20%, you go out and eat, you live in a city, is like you're exposed to toxins, whether you like it or not. But what can we do to help prevent the spikes of cortisol that then go to the methylation of oxytocin and depletion of serotonin and all that? Well, the way to do that is take that thing in your pocket and throw it in the garbage.

But I like it. But I like it. Yeah, well, that's part of the problem because you like it. that's probably the source of most of the cortisol. Yeah. Right there. Okay. That's one of the reasons why people are now starting to realize

that we need to, like, keep cell phones out of schools, you know, until age 16 to 18. Like Australia and France have done now. Yeah. What's a really practical behavior change? Obviously, like, throw it in the trash is like a quick hand. Well, a good way to do it is to basically, only let it ping once a day. Answer your emails once a day.

And otherwise, leave it alone. The best thing would be actually a flip phone. Yeah. I mean, you need a phone. And I, you know, I mean, look, I'm a parent. I mean, I sent my kids to school with a flip phone. Okay, on purpose. Until they ultimately needed the cell phone,

not because I wanted to give it to them, but because the teacher demanded it of them, which I think is horrible. Yeah. Just horrible. But, you know, I don't want my kids to actually be losing out. I think the way we're teaching kids in school is the biggest problem. I've certainly romanticized what it's like,

would it be like to go back to the flip phone? Where I've landed is like charging phone in a separate bedroom, no tech before, an hour before bed or an hour after waking up. Yes. And then mindful use throughout the day. Use, that's the hard part. It's hard because it hijacks your attention. Indeed.

And that's the problem. Right. Because it hijacks your tension, okay? It makes you look at it more, which then hijacks your attention. And so it becomes a vicious cycle. Yeah, that hedonic dopaminergic treadmill. That's right. Basically variable reward.

The reason cell phones are so bad is because they are variable reward. Now, there are some things on your cell phone. phone that are not variable reward. Hopefully this podcast. Hopefully this podcast. My colleague Tristan Harris, who's the head of the Center for Humane Technology. I'm an advisor.

Great. We did a study years ago looking at the 15 happiest apps and the 15 unhappiest apps. Okay. And it turned out the 15 happiest apps, your engagement was basically two to three minutes a day. The unhappiest apps, the engagement was two to three hours a day. Okay.

And they were unhappy. Okay. So the happy apps, you know, GPS, you know. Notes. Notes. Right. Things like that. And the unhappy apps are, you know, candy crush.

And, you know, I can't even remember all of them. All the TikToks and the... Right, exactly. Okay, and the reason is because of social media, because social media is cortisol. It's dopamine and cortisol together is really what it is. And so it's fueling that pain brain and mollifying it at the same time.

And so cell phones really sort of took hostage brain to a new level. It's the single, big... biggest perpetrator in our current exposome, in our current environment. Is it true that our brain is like one-two-hundredth plastic, something around there? So I've heard that, and then I talked with a person who actually knows something about microplastics, and they said, no, that's not true. Okay. There was one paper that came out that said that, and it got a lot of attention.

and I have since been disavowed of that by people who know. Nonetheless. Leonardo Trosande at the NYU Medical Center is like the guru on this. And he said, no, it's not true. But it made good copy, that's for sure. For sure.

And it sure raised everyone's cortisol. But in regards to protecting your environment that directly shapes you, Yeah. Remove the plastics. Well, if you can, the question is how. The one thing that you should never do is heat plastic in a microwave. Okay, that is the single worst thing you can do.

Okay. If you have plastic storage vessels, Tupperware, Tupperware, and you keep them in the refrigerator, there's not going to be a lot of leaching. But the minute those get warm, now you get a problem. And I think the biggest issue are these very thin plastic water bottles that sit out in the sun,

and they've been shown to actually leach plastic much greater. So there's different kinds of plastic. Polycarbonate, you know, is virtually indestructible. and does not leach anything. So polycarbon is not a problem, but it's very expensive.

You know, these very cheap plastics that you throw in the garbage after you've drunk the water, they're actually the biggest problem. Seems just ubiquitous. It's just everywhere in our environment. Even I've heard some of the... Oh, by the way, black plastic.

Like from the Chinese restaurants. Yeah. Never, ever heat those. Yeah, yeah. I've even heard some, like, metal water bottles because the lids are made out of plastic every time you open it, like small amounts of microplastics.

I have heard that too. There was one study that said that. The lid was the biggest problem. Yeah. I've heard that. What are the four Cs? You give some to the antidote, you know, because this can all get quite depressing,

but ultimately I think it's awareness is empowering. Right. Unless you don't do anything with it. Indeed. But, yeah. So in my book, Hacking of the American Mind, wrote in 2017, I argue that what you need to do is you need to get your dopamine and cortisol down

and you need to get your serotonin up. That's what you need to do. And so how do you do that? And it turns out there are four ways to do that and all of them are free. None of them require any machine or supplement or medicine. or anything else. And they're all things your mother taught you, but you forgot.

Okay? And they're actually very simple. And they contribute to happiness. And here they are. They're the four Cs. The first one is connect. Now, connect does not mean Facebook. Digital connection is not connection.

That's how Sherry Turkle found that we were alone together. Connection is what you and I are doing right now. I to eye, face to face. And the reason is because I am reading the facial expressions that you are emanating right now. And I am turning that information in my occipital lobe into serotonin. Okay? So you are actually contributing to my serotonin right now, just from our conversation. And it does not work with a two-dimensional, you know, chicklet on Zoom.

Okay? it only happens in person. And so our loss of in person, you know, which started before the pandemic, but, you know, accelerated and turbocharged by the pandemic. And now everybody's online like all the time, has absolutely contributed to our serotonin depletion for that reason. So connect. Number two, contribute. And contribute does not mean to your 401K. It means contribute to others.

okay because contributing to others actually increases serotonin okay because purpose provides purpose so whether you do that through church you know like the purpose driven life or warren or you know uh through your work you know or you know through your hobbies or whatever doesn't matter but contribute contribute outside of yourself that's a big serotonin booster. Number three, cope. And cope means three things. Okay. It's mindfulness, exercise, sleep. Okay? Multitasking is the single dirtiest word in the English language, because no one can do it. Only two and a half percent of the U.S. population can actually multitask. The rest of us are serially unitasking, and we're switching from one task to another. And every time we do that,

we get a corsole bump, and it takes 23 minutes to acclimate to the new task. So this notion that we can multitask and that our employers demanded of us is actually how we got into this mess in the first place. So tell your employer to F off. Okay, I'll get it done. Okay. So unitasking. That's the mindfulness. Okay, one task at a time.

So in my new book, which is not yet written called Freeing the Hostage Brain, I will talk about the role of neuroplasticity. Turns out neuroplasticity only occurs when you're not spending ATP on anything else. As long as there's an ATP drain, neuroplasticity can't occur. And so the more cortisol, the more fiber, rate, the less neuroplasticity. Yeah, you can't make use of what you don't have. That's right.

Yeah. So that's mindfulness. Exercise. Exercise increases BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps with neuroplasticity. And finally, sleep, which is necessary for autophagy to get rid of the protein aggregates and lipid proxidation products to get them out. Because basically sleep is garbage night for the brain. So autophagy.

Okay, which basically allows you to then build new circuits. Neuoplasticity is a requirement for healthy living. And if you don't engage in it, you will be depressed and you'll get Alzheimer's. And then finally, number four, cook. Why? Because number one, real food. Number two, triptophan. Number three, socialization.

Because you cook with people. You eat with your family or your friends. You share a meal. And you know what went into it. And it wasn't sugar. So that's it. Connect, contribute, cook. They're all free.

It's actually so refreshing. It maps on, we have our own four Cs. We like do retreats and stuff. We're starting with the podcast. And I didn't clock the, correlation because they kind of map on very similarly, there's some differences for sure, but the connection,

contemplation, which kind of goes hand in hand with mindfulness and those practices. Contribution is the third, and then celebration, play, the essential aspect of, at least in the retreat setting is like this work can feel

kind of heavy at times, you know? Yeah, it doesn't have to be over serious. For sure. But I love that. And those are things that we don't realize often how empty your cup is until we actually connect with a person in person, or we share you and we cook. And so those are important reminders.

That's right. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. We've covered some ground. I think we have. I really appreciate your passion and the energy that you bring to this. Well, Andre, there's science here.

Okay? A lot of people, you know, they blow it off. They say, yeah, yeah, I don't need to do that. I can manage it. The science here. We're humans. We have physiologic flaws,

and we have to basically protect against them. The only way. Right now we are deep-sixing all of our, all the good stuff about being human in favor of this thing, you know, called our bank account, and it's hurting us. You spent a lot of your career taking inpatients, helping them make new choices. Yeah, we touched on earlier that Schopenhauer quote, and I've heard you wrote a little bit around free will and without diving into a whole new philosophical podcast.

Yeah. Oh, we can have a whole podcast on free will. Yeah. I'll go there. Yeah. Not today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to me, to whatever degree we have choice or agency or the illusion thereof,

all the reminders you gave today really bring that back, that possibility back into our life. And so thank you for the work that you're doing. It's my job. Yeah. It's a great job. Debatable. Most of meados. We have a couple closing questions that our community sent in. Okay.

So the first, from the Know Thyself Collective, shout out to y'all. First question from Anais, Hage. How does efficient energy metabolism support cognition and perception, and what can extreme metabolic dysfunction teach us about the biological basis of consciousness? Oh, boy. You want to give us the TLZR on that one? All right. let me talk about ATP.

Neurons are gas guzzlers. They do five things that other cells don't, and they all cost energy. And if you don't have the energy, you can't engage in them. Now, it has always been assumed, always been assumed, that because neurons have so many mitochondria,

that you're getting all the ATP you need to make your brain work. That's a lie. That's a mistake. The reason we have so many mitochondria is because those neurons are such gas guzzlers, and they're easily perturbed. That's what we didn't know, is that mitochondria are fragile. Mitochondria can go downhill really fast, and there are a lot of things that can take them down.

And I mentioned a whole bunch when we started. started. And they're all at work on our brains right now. So we are not making the ATP we need. That's putting us at risk to start with. Second, cortisol. Cortisol increases neural firing rate. Now, action potentials, the actual depolarization of a neuron does not require energy. The repolarization, bringing it back to baseline. does. And so if you don't have enough ATP, you can't repolarize, so you can't be ready for the next action potential, and that's actually what puts the neuron at risk. So increased ATP utilization from cortisol, from stress, from threat is basically putting our neurons at risk too. So now you have inadequate ATP generation, increased ATP utilization. Now you got an energy. Now you've got an

energy crisis. Now you got ATP depletion. Well, you need the ATP to fold proteins. You need the ATP to engage in neurotransmission. You need the ATP for neuroplasticity, which is the most energy expensive process that goes on in the body. Well, you don't have enough. And if you don't engage in neuroplasticity. Those synapses, those gap junctions, those connections between neurons, start falling away. And that will manifest itself as brain fog, irritability, depression, cognitive decline, and in the extreme, Alzheimer's. I think that fits neatly with the descriptions you gave earlier to the effect of our cognition,

that the cortisol and the effects with the ATP. Indeed. Okay, great. Well, next question. And consciousness, I don't even want to go there. Yeah. Consciousness, I mean, you know, all respect to your audience. Okay, consciousness is kind of above my pay grade.

Yeah, I think certainly within the realms of consciousness, experience, I think you spoke directly to perception and cognition, and I think that speaks to the question. Stephanie Parker, after a lifetime slash career spent trying to contribute in a meaningful way to fixing a system you've called engineered against us, what gives you the most hope right now? What would you want a child born today to be able to say decades from now that your life's work made possible for them? Oh, good question. I have a lot of hope. I do. At first, I thought I didn't have any, but I actually have a lot of hope. And part of the reason for the hope is the education of the public.

They're getting it. People are getting it. In fact, the people are listening to you. They're getting it. They're listening to me. They're getting it. They recognize there's something more that, you know, this notion of the American dream is in some ways illusory. Okay? Not that there's anything wrong with making money. Not that there's anything wrong with having a nice house. Not that there's anything wrong with having a bank account to be secure.

I'm not against any of those things. And not that there's anything wrong with capitalism per se. But there is something wrong with abandoning primary needs for secondary desires. That's, there is something wrong with. Primary needs, love, sleep, sleep, food. you know, and abandoning those for power, pleasure, you know, anger. That's the problem. Okay, so you want your secondary desires?

Hey, just make sure your primary needs are met first. We can have both. We can't. But not when we're under the onslaught of our current. capitalist directive. So would you say then that the desire for you in terms of the life

that your work would make possible for the youth that are coming into humanity right now is that reminder? I think so. Yeah. If there's one message I want to get out there is tend to yourself first.

Stop sacrificing your primary needs for secondary desires. Yeah. some mic drop very last question if you had 60 seconds to share one message with humanity especially to the mother

who's perusing down the grocery aisle trying to make the right choices for her children and the many different parents that are trying to do the best with the knowledge they have what's one message that you feel like they all need to hear right now

if it's in the grocery store Sure. Okay. Let's start there. If a package has a label, it's a warning label. Because that means something was done to the food. That means a human was involved, which means something went wrong. Okay, real food doesn't have a label. There's no label on a broccoli.

There's no label on a radish. Okay, there's no label on an orange. Because there doesn't need to be, because they didn't do anything to it. So if you see a label, it's a label. warning label, something happened to it. The question is what? And is it relevant and is it a problem? That's why we developed this tool that I mentioned, perfect, is to basically help you navigate the grocery store in a way that is meaningful. If it protects your liver, fees your gut, supports your brain, hey, you're good to go. But how are you going to figure that out?

So that would be my suggestion. Great. Is there anything else you want to share before we close out? Oh, boy. All right. You can't solve a problem if you don't know what the problem is. And we, for decades, have been told that our problems are somewhere else. That they are external to us.

They're not. When you understand the problem, you can fix the problem. but only you can fix the problem, but you need to understand it. Your work is really helping us understand it. I feel like I've been educated in so many different regards in this conversation, and I can only imagine as an extension,

the audience that's tuned in. So thank you, sincerely, for the work that you're doing. My pleasure. And it's been a pleasure to connect. And we'll leave links down in the description for people to stay connected with you, your work, the initiatives, the research, the companies, all the things you're collaborating on.

Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Until next time, be well.