The Dr. Hyman Show - Depressed or Anxious? You May Never Eat Sugar Again After Listening To This

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Excess sugar consumption is one of the deadliest drugs of our time, and it’s virtually ubiquitous in our modern-day industrialized food system. Everywhere you turn, there’s sugar—from blended coffees to protein bars, drinks, dressings, snacks, and everything in between. Even seemingly “healthy” packaged foods often contain heaps of added sugar, and its impact has proven catastrophic for our mental and metabolic health. As the other white powder, sugar hijacks our brain chemistry, making us addicted, inflamed, sick, and depressed. But the good news is that most of the health issues that arise from eating too much sugar can be completely reversed in as little as 14 days. In today’s Health Bites episode, we’re exploring the research connecting sugar addiction to poor mental health and what you can do to clean up the excess sugar to reclaim your health and feel better, and more energized. In this episode, I discuss: The prevalence of sugar in our diet and its impact on mental health (2:00) Hidden sources of sugar in our diets (7:27) How sugar affects our mood and brain function (11:42) How insulin resistance leads to systemic inflammation and changes in mood (16:16) Strategies to reduce sugar intake for better mental health (20:41) The role of supplements, exercise, stress, and sleep in blood sugar management (26:40) This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Fatty 15. Right now, you can save 40% when you upgrade to Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to CozyEarth.com and use code DRHYMAN. Fatty15 contains pure, award-winning C15:0 in a bioavailable form. Get an exclusive 10% off a 90-day starter kit subscription. Just visit Fatty15.com and use code DRHYMAN10 to get started.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Sugar is the other white powder. It acts in the body in all sorts of nefarious ways to hijack our brain chemistry, our hormones, our metabolism, and more. And excess sugar consumption is one of the deadliest drugs. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. Sleep is foundational for health.

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where we take a deeper bite into juicy topics. And today we're talking about sugar. We all love it. Some crave it. Some will do anything to get it. Even rats will work eight times harder to get sugar than cocaine, or they'll continue to eat the sugar even if they're getting electric shocks. For me, it's Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey Ice Cream. That's my kryptonite. So I stay away. Now, for years, you've heard me talk about the dangers of sugar. But what happens to your body when you quit sugar for 14 days?

All sorts of stuff can happen, right? Maybe you have issues you didn't even know were fixable by quitting sugar. Maybe you're dealing with chronic stress responses and inflammation or anxiety, panic attacks, maybe hormone imbalances. Maybe you have acne or maybe you're just tired and lethargic and have brain fog or joint pain or digestive issues, cravings, food retention, and this goes on and on and on. Now, these are all warning signs that sugar may be harming you or worse, that you're addicted to sugar. In fact, studies show that 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria for food addiction. And just for comparison's sake, about 14% of the total population has alcohol addiction.

So it's about the same, and if you get a cat and the kids, it's worse. Now, the good news is that most of the health issues from eating sugar can be completely reversed, and you can break the cycle of addiction in as little as 14 days or less. Everywhere you look, there's added sugar. From blended coffees to protein bars, drinks, dressing, salad dressing, sauces, ketchup, you name it, sugar is lurking everywhere in our diet, even in seemingly healthy foods. Now we eat today in the modern world about 22 teaspoons a day. Historically as hunter gatherers, we ate 22 teaspoons a year and kids now eat about 34 teaspoons a day. That's almost 150 pounds per person of sugar. That's a lot of sugar. Aside from making us inflamed and causing

us to gain weight by spiking insulin, which is the fat storage hormone, consuming too much sugar is also at the root of many health problems, including mental health problems. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Mood swings, anxiety, depression, and various metabolic diseases are all consequences of eating a high glycemic or also known as a high sugar and starch diet. Now in today's Health Byte episode, we're diving into the research linking sugar addiction to poor mental health and how you can detoxify from excess sugar in your diet in as little as 14 days. Now, once you clean up excess sugar and you clean up the refined carbs in your diet,

your brain's gonna work better, your mental health is gonna improve, and as a bonus, your skin's gonna clear up and your hormones get back in balance and a whole host of other things. Now, I've done this with thousands of people and I wrote about how to do this in my book, The 10-Day Detox Diet, and I've seen profound results. In fact, there's an average reduction of 70% from all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days, plus an average weight loss of seven pounds and a significant drop in blood pressure and blood sugar. So now let's dive deeper into the data about sugar.

How do we reset our body to its original factory settings? All right, so why is sugar consumption so out of control in the United States? Well, 60% of American calories come from ultra-processed foods. And what are ultra-processed foods? Well, essentially anything comes in a bag or a box or a package, something with a long ingredient list. These are typically energy-dense foods that are high in calories but have minimal

nutrition value. So they're basically high-calorie, low-nutrient. That's not good. They're high in sugar, like high-fructose corn syrup, dext syrup dextrose cane sugar fructose any millions of kinds of names of sugar that we have they're high in refined grains from enriched wheat flour sometimes corn and these are the commodity crops that are put in all these ultra processed foods and they act just like sugar in the body i mean below the neck your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of sugar and a bowl of corn flakes. Now, the US dietary guidelines recommended six servings of grains per day, which is a lot, half of which must be whole grains. That means the other half can be basically what amounts to sugar. That's crazy. But 74% of Americans exceed that limit for refined grains. So we're way over in terms of what we're eating. Crackers, pretzels, cakes,

cookies, pancakes, breakfast cereals, bread, tortilla, pasta, rice, all of it is just stuff that's causing our blood sugar to spike and it's the majority of our diet. Now, 65% of our calories and 92% of added sugar in the US comes from ultra processed foods. So the one big thing you can do to really drop your sugar content is just get rid of all that stuff that's made in the factory, right? Factory-made foods. We call that a plant-based diet. If it's made in a plant, don't eat it, basically. Added sugars make up about 14% of kids' total energy intake, meaning they're eating a lot of sugar. About one in every seven calories comes from sugar. Now, school lunches is another huge issue. I mean, it's crazy that we allow sugar in school lunches. That should not be allowed. And in fact, it's allowed a lot.

And the USDA report, 69% of school lunches and 92% of school breakfast, meaning this is food we're feeding our kids in school, funded by the government. They exceed the limit of the 10% total energy intake that's been set by the dietary guidelines for Americans, meaning they're eating way over that. The average American consumes 17 added teaspoons of sugar or 22. So it's a lot. And sugar-sweetened beverages and coffees and teas actually may contribute up to 40% of the daily intake of added sugar. So think about it. You're going to get a coffee, you're going to get tea, you're having all this stuff you think is okay to drink, but it's not. It's just a sugar

bomb. I think Starbucks should just be recognized for what it is. It's a sugar dispensing factory, not a coffee shop. Now, 30% of the sugar we eat comes from desserts, sweet snacks, candies, sweet and breakfast cereals, but 70% comes from just regular food. It's in everything, right? When we're just eating so much, people don't realize it. You wouldn't put like 16 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee, but if you drink a 20-ounce bottle of soda, that's what you're getting. That's 64 grams of sugar, which is a lot. The average medium-sized blended coffee contains about 50 grams of added sugar. Again, that's about 14 teaspoons of sugar, 13 teaspoons of sugar.

That's nuts, right? You don't put that in your coffee, but that would be what you'd find in a blended coffee drink. An average serving of flavored yogurt contains 16 grams of added sugar. So you're eating yogurt, you're getting healthy probiotics. But the truth is that per ounce, most of your sweetened yogurts have more sugar per ounce than Coca-Cola, right? The average serving of packaged salad dressing, get this, has six grams of added sugar.

That means you're eating over a teaspoon, about a teaspoon and a half of sugar in your salad dressing. Like why should you put sugar on your lettuce? Studies that link excess sugar to poor mental health are really abundant. This is not just my opinion. Again, all the things I'm talking about in this health bite, in all the health bites are from the peer literature. All the references are included in the show notes. Have a look yourself if you don't believe me. It's pretty scary out there, but what I'm saying is actually based in science. Now, here's a study that looked at a large group of people. It was a meta-analysis of observational studies. So it wasn't cause and effect, but it was a pretty impressive study. So it gives you things that point in the right direction. They looked at 37,000 people with

depression, and they found that sugar-sweetened beverage consumption was dramatically increasing the risk for depression. Those who drank the most soda had a 31% increased risk for depression compared to those who drank the least. So basically, if you're a big soda drinker, you're more likely to be depressed. Compared to those who did not drink sugar-sweetened beverages, those who drink two cups of soda per day, about 45 grams of sugar, which is 11 teaspoons of sugar, increase the risk by about 5% for depression. Those who drink three cans, right? So you look at the dose response on these studies. So the one can bad is two cans worse or three cans. So you kind of can

see where the trend's going, but those who drink three cans of soda a day, which is 98 grams of sugar, which is like, I don't know, almost 25 teaspoons of sugar, increased their risk by 25% for getting depressed. Another study, a prospective cohort study out of Spain, 15,000 Spanish university graduates, showed that those in the highest quartile of added sugar intake had an increased risk of depression, meaning those who had the most sugar in their diet. Those who consumed the highest amounts of sugar had a 35% higher risk of depression. Comparing it to those who had the highest intake of high quality carbs from whole grains, high in fiber, low glycemic diet, those people had the opposite. They had a 30% lower risk

of depression, right? So more sugar, more depression, less sugar, less depression. Seems like a trend. Another large prospective cohort study of 70,000 women, post-menopausal women published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. So they looked at a glycemic Another large prospective cohort study of 70,000 women, postmenopausal women, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. So they looked at a glycemic index, and the highest glycemic index, I mean, the higher the likelihood of food was to spike your sugar, there was a 22% increased risk of depression. If you had added sugars, right, the added sugars that are added to the food, there was a 23% higher risk of depression.

And refined grains, even wheat, right, flour, that also was associated with depression. And if you had higher amounts of fiber or fruit or veggies or even lactose, it was significantly associated with a lower risk of depression. So sugar and flour, higher risk. Whole foods, lower risk. Not surprising. All right, so let's talk about the why.

Why does this happen? We're seeing the correlation. We're seeing the connection. People know, you know, you get the sugar blues, you know, people understand that mood and sugar are very connected even through their own experience. But what's the science behind how sugar affects our brain health, affects our mood, and obviously other things. But you've heard me talk a lot about other things, but we're gonna talk about sugar and the mood and brain function today. So one is you get reactive hypoglycemia, and we'll talk about what that is,

but essentially it's where you get a spike in sugar followed by a spike in insulin that then causes your sugar to crash, and then what happens is you overshoot and you get low blood sugar. Now, what happens when you get low blood sugar is you get a spike in cortisol, spike in adrenaline, and it helps bring the blood sugar back up, but it also increases the activity of the amygdala. So cortisol will increase amygdala activity, which is our emotional anxious brain. And it's interesting, the symptoms are pretty obvious for

people who have this, but you get cravings for carbs and sugar just a few hours after eating. That's kind of a mild symptom. You can have like really serious feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, irritability, panic attacks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I mean, people heard of being hangry, right? I get that a little. Heart palpitations, shakiness, shortness of breath, feeling you're going to faint, like you're going to die, brain fog, fatigue, headaches. And so what happens is when blood sugar drops, it's a life-threatening emergency. You got to find food right away. And I just tell you a quick story of a guy who told me that he was having these panic attacks. And he was like, yeah, every day, the afternoon, I start getting this overwhelming feeling of anxiety. I start sweating. I can't breathe. My heart's racing. I just feel like I'm

going to die. I said, what happens? Well, I drink a can of Coke and it goes away. I think most people don't even connect the dots between what they're doing and how they feel. Now, what happens if you continue to do this, you get insulin resistance. If you keep having sugar over time and it'll drive your sugar up, your insulin up, and high levels of insulin resistance has a really significant negative effect on mood and mental health. And the data is really clear on this. We'll go through the research. But essentially what happens with insulin resistance, you get inflammation in the body.

And anything that causes inflammation will cause depression or anxiety or mood disorders. So what is the kind of link between insulin and metabolic dysfunction and mood disorders like depression, anxiety? Well, our researchers from Stanford, they looked at a nine-year study over time in the Netherlands, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry. And they found that those who got prediabetes during the first two years of the study

were more than two times as likely to have major depression versus those who had normal blood sugar. So in other words, when they followed people over a long period of time, if you were more likely to have prediabetes, you're going to get more depression, right? So you don't even have to have diabetes.

Now, they measured sort of the degree or severity of insulin resistance, and they used something called the triglyceride-HGL ratio, which, by the way, is available on everyone's test. Your ratio should ideally be one to one. If it's more than two to one for triglycerides to HGL, you're starting to get into trouble. But if they had a higher ratio of triglycerides to HGL, there was an 89% increase in new cases of major depression. Think about that. For every five centimeters of belly fat,

just around your waist, right, if you take a tape measure, then that was associated with 11% higher risk of depression. And every slight increase in this one unit increase in their ratio of triglyceride to HDL, and for every bump in fasting glucose, that was linked to a 37% higher risk of depression. So as your sugar goes up, your insulin goes up, more depression. Conservatively, at least one in three people have insulin resistance, but I think it's a lot more. If you look at the data, one in two people have either prediabetes or type 2 diabetes by very conservative measurements.

If you open up those measurements a little bit and don't just look at deviations from the worst level, right? Like if your blood sugar's over 100 and you're prediabetic, well, maybe you don't even have to have 100 to actually have insulin resistance. And so that goes to the 93.2% who are metabolically healthy. So maybe even 90 plus percent have some degree of this, right? One in five adults on top of that have a mental health issue, right? That's a lot. That's 20% of the population. If you have diabetes, you're 20% more likely to have anxiety and you also have more depression. So how does this work? Well, low-grade systemic

inflammation from any source, and mostly in our case, it's the diet and sugar is the biggest driver of inflammation because sugar is like pouring gasoline on the fire. So the problem with insulin resistance is that it causes low-grade systemic inflammation everywhere in the body and the brain. And that causes dysregulation of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, dysregulates what we call the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, regulating all sorts of things that mood. It screws up neurotransmitter signaling when you have too much sugar, like serotonin and dopamine. It leads to energy problems in the cell, which you need good energy to have good mood,

right? So actually this friend of mine, Casey Means, she wrote a book called Good Energy, all about metabolic function and mitochondrial function and how that relates to our health and mood. Now the brain relies mostly on glucose as its primary source of energy, but it's extremely energy efficient. It only needs about 60 grams a day to do its job. And flooding the brain with too much glucose creates a lot of inflammation, oxidative stress, and insulin resistance. And it leads to depression and mental health issues and even things like Alzheimer's, which now they're calling type 3 diabetes. So when you have too much sugar, it screws up your ability to make energy and it causes

mitochondrial dysfunction. Mitochondria are really important for neurotransmitter function and production and the release of neurotransmitters in the body. When you have sugar, it also does something really bad. It activates stress responses in the body. So when you look at the data on this, it's pretty clear. David Ludwig, my friend at Harvard, has done a lot of work on this.

And he basically showed that feeding kids isocaloric, meaning same calories of, let's say, oatmeal, which basically turns into sugar in your body, or same calories of, let's say, oatmeal, which basically turns into sugar in your body, or eggs, that the ones who had the oatmeal had higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline because their bodies were having this perceived stress of eating too much sugar. Now, that's kind of scary. We know that independent of your mental state, that your diet can make you stressed, right? Can increase stress hormones. And that is bad for your brain. Insulin also helps regulate neurotransmitters

like serotonin and dopamine and also something called BDNF. And when you have too much insulin resistance, which is what most of America is suffering from, it impairs dopamine signaling, which means you don't get the pleasure sensation, which means you want more sugar and create more carbs. And it's a vicious cycle.

Also stress itself will increase cortisol, just emotional stress, and that can cause issues. So it can be that the sugar causes stress or that actually literally stress causes stress. And that stress will spike your cortisol. And what does that normally do? Well, when you have a stressful situation, like you're being chased by a tiger,

you want to increase your blood sugar. You want to have all the fuel available so you can run as fast as tiger, you want to increase your blood sugar. You want to have all the fuel available so you can run as fast as you can. So that's a good thing. You want to have more adrenaline, but not chronically. And so you have chronically elevated cortisol in your body from chronic psychological stress that increases your blood sugar, it increases insulin resistance, and it's a vicious cycle. So if you give someone prednisone, for example, for an autoimmune disease, they can develop diabetes and they can develop high blood pressure just from the stress hormone that they're giving as a pill. And also stress really messes up your gut. And gut is another factor that is

influenced by our diet and particularly sugar. Now we've talked a lot about the microbiome and mental health in the podcast. I've written about this a long time ago in my book, The Ultra Mind Solution. Again, the data has been there for a long time. It's mostly been ignored, but I think I'm glad people are talking about it now. There's a whole department of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard where they're talking about metabolic health and the gut health and mood health. And Uma Naidoo has been on the podcast. We'll link to the show notes there. But just to get into this around mood, when you have a high sugar starch diet, it has a really bad impact on your microbiome. So it changes the composition of bacteria in there to be bad bugs. And those bad bugs reduce the abundance of good

bugs, which do good things, and the bad bugs do bad things. And that creates inflammation, leaky gut, yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth. All that can lead to mood swings, irritability, depression. There's something called the bacterial endotoxin. So when you have too many bad bugs, it produces the toxins that basically get into your system through a leaky gut. And that triggers your immune system to create an inflammatory response.

And that impacts the brain. It also makes you more insulin resistant. So it creates a vicious cycle. So gut health is extremely important for brain health and for mood health. And when you look at the data on this, it's very compelling. Leaky gut, which we used to get laughed at for talking about,

is now well-recognized increased intestinal permeability. But it's been linked to things like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and lots of other mental illnesses. And it's actually fixable. Okay, so we know that we're all eating too much sugar. We know that sugar is linked to mental health issues. We know that the mechanism is to mental health issues. We know that the mechanism is there through inflammation and some resistance and gut dysbiosis and mitochondrial

function. Great. Now what? Well, you can do a sugar detox. That's what. You don't have to take my word for it. You don't have to listen to me. Your body's the smartest doctor in the room. It'll tell you what's working, what's not working, and listen to your body. It's very smart. And listen to how you feel. I encourage everybody to do this. It's why I wrote my book, The 10-Day Detox Diet. I think 14 days is a little longer, and I encourage you to do that a little longer just to see what happens. But let's talk about how to do it. The first thing is you've got to get rid of all the flour and sugar, right? Get rid of all the high glycemic foods. Get rid of all the added sugar. Get rid of ultra-processed food. Stop all the flour and sugar, right? Get rid of all the high glycemic foods. Get rid of all the added sugar. Get rid of ultra processed food. Stop all the refined flours, you know, refined wheat flour, gluten, all those things. Get rid of those. My joke for bread is if you can stand on a dozen

smush, you can eat it. I was in Germany and they had these meat slicers in the house. I'm like, what is that for? He says, well, just slice the bread because it's so dense. It's made from whole grains. It's not made from flour. It's made from actual rye and grains. So you have to cut it with a meat slicer, like a deli meat slicer. I encourage also people to get rid of all the liquid sugar calories. Those are the worst. Sugar-sweetened beverages, teas, coffees, energy drinks, you name it, juices, just eliminate all of that. And what do you eat? Well, real whole food. What I've been talking about for years, you can do the 10-day detox, which is a little more extreme, but essentially they're blood sugar balancing foods. And the way to do that is start with protein at every meal.

Not a huge amount, but about a palm-sized portion, depending on how big you are. It's a different size, right? If you're Shaquille O'Neal, it's different than if you're Natty Comaneci, who you probably don't know who that is, but she was a very famous gymnast in the 70s. She was very little, like 4'11 or 10 or something. But basically, you want to eat a palm-sized portion of protein every meal, usually about 46 ounces. You want to aim to eat about your body weight in grams of protein, depending on how active you are,

anywhere from half to one gram of protein per ideal body weight. You want to get really good quality protein, so regeneratively raised meats. I use Force of Nature. I love them. You can get bison, elk, venison, even beef. Pasture-raised chickens and eggs. Certain fish can be great. If they're small fish, you know the smash fish for me is salmon, mackerel, anchovies, herring, and sardines. Of course, people don't like those, but it could be good. Also, you want to eat a lot of fiber.

Fiber basically is a sponge for sugar. In fact, last night I had shirataki miracle noodles, which were so good. They're essentially made from cognac root. Cognac root is a Japanese food, but it actually has zero calories and it absorbs all this water and it slows the absorption of sugar. And you can actually take it as a supplement called PGX,

but you can actually just buy the noodles too. So we had these delicious noodles last night. You don't have to feel guilty for eating noodles. So lots of fiber, lots of good fats. Fat's really important because fat also slows the spiking sugar. So olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds. For breakfast, really important to have fat and protein. If you want to cut your cravings, you cannot start the day with sugar. If you want to detox from sugar, you've got to start the day with protein and fat and no sugar. That's going to set you up from having balanced blood sugar. It's going to avoid the swings that I talked about. It's going to avoid the spikes in insulin. It's going to avoid the hypoglycemia, avoid the cravings. So you'll see. Also get on slow burning carbs that

are high in fiber and that reduce blood sugar spikes that are rich in polyphenols that promote the growth of good gut bacteria. So all the veggies, right? These are what I'm talking about. Carbs, broccoli's a carb, right? Asparagus is a carb. Green beans are a carb. Mushrooms are protein and carbs. And so you can get a lot of foods that are delicious to eat that are high in beneficial compounds that help reduce inflammation, support gut bacteria, help your mitochondria, reduce oxidative stress. And all these foods, what they do is they help in the gut particularly because they have a lot of benefits, but they increase something called short chain fatty acids. So when you eat a lot of fiber, you feed the good

bugs, right? And it creates byproduct that is really essential for your health called butyrate, or this is a short chain fatty acid, and it's very anti-inflammatory. And that gets used by the body as a regulator of all sorts of functions, including cancer. You also want to eat a wide variety of low glycemic plant foods, right? 75% of your plate should be non-starchy, colorful veggies like leafy greens, cauliflower, dandelion greens, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, cabbage, bok choy, broccoli rabe, collards, unlimited. You can eat as much as you want. So if you want five pounds of broccoli, go ahead. Low glycemic fruit is fine. Berries, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries, that's fine. Stone fruit can be helpful. No more than a few pieces a day of apples and pears. Lots of whole grains that can be good. You have to be

careful about what you're eating, but you want the low glycemic, phytonutrient-rich grains. I like black rice, for example, red rice, quinoa, buckwheat, teff. All these are great. Certain legumes can be helpful. Lentils, chickpeas, split peas, edamame, adzuki beans, buckwheat, teff, all these are great. Certain legumes can be helpful, lentils, chickpeas, split peas, edamame, adzuki beans, black navy beans, lopini beans, all these can be part of your healthy diet. If you want to really go extreme on the blood sugar stuff, you can cut out grains and beans for the first few weeks, but you don't have to, but I would for sure cut out gluten. Lots of fats, so one or two servings of healthy fats. You can pour olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, macadamia oil, olives, avocados, fatty fish,

lots of nuts and seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews, pecan, all that's fine. It's really essential. Nuts are really great for you and also help you feel full and it's a great snack. Limit starchy vegetables. So you can have some, but don't be eating sweet potatoes all the time or tons of potatoes and so forth. Eat your foods in the right order, right? To lower the glycemic load. So if you have protein and fat before the carbs, it slows the absorption and you don't end up getting these spikes. Don't eat carbs alone, right? So for example, if you're eating an apple, throw a little nut butter on there or a handful of nuts. Or if you have sweet potato, make sure you have it with like say a piece of chicken or

non-starchy veggies. So you sort of create a mixture of the meal. It's called the glycemic load, basically how the overall composition of the meal affects your blood sugar. So you can offset effects of some carbs by eating them in the right order or with protein and fat. Lots of spices are good too. Cinnamon is amazing. This helps blood sugar, green tea, and also supplements can be really important. So a high quality multivitamin and mineral, vitamin D, omega-3 fats, and certain things are really important for blood sugar, like glycoic acid, but B vitamins. Certain herbs are great that I use,

cinnamon, green tea, chromium minerals like magnesium, also great. Fenugreek has been used a lot in Ayurvedic medicine, great for blood sugar. Exercise, obviously, I mean, I always talk about that, but resistance and aerobic exercise, about 150 minutes a week. Muscle is critical and improves instant sensitivity.

Here's a simple hack is take a half an hour walk or even 15 minutes after eating your dinner. It's going to dramatically blunt the sugar spikes and insulin. So your body's going to suck that up. Sleep, also really important. We know that lack of sleep causes more sugar cravings, more carb cravings. I've had it. I felt that.

I used to work at the ER in Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I would sometimes get the night shift and it was two in the morning. The only thing open was McDonald's and I would go in and get the sort of apple turnover because it was the only thing that you could get. I mean, I didn't want a burger and I craved the carbs. I felt it. I knew it, even though I knew better, really important to get enough sleep. So try to set a regular bedtime, stick to it. Try not to eat at least three hours before bed. Get rid of all

late night snacking. Give yourself at least a 12 hour overnight fast. So dinner at six, eat breakfast at six. Or if you want to do 14, you can eat breakfast at eight if you eat dinner at six. So not that hard, but giving yourself that break will help improve your insulin sensitivity. What else can you do to help your sugar and manage it? Well, get your stress under control. And it's more up here. Stress is defined as the real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a lion chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego. Like you think your wife is an hour late coming back from something and you think she's having an affair or something. So that could be totally fabricated in your head, but the end

result in your body is the same. And this chronic levels of stress we all have are really driving a lot of health issues, including insulin resistance, diabetes, and depression, anxiety, and much more. So how do you do that? Well, you kind of have to actively reduce stress, exercise, journaling, meditation, yoga, all this helps. I've got this new app I use called NuCalm. It uses binaural beats. So I put on my headphones, I go into a zone and kind of go into a deep state of relaxation.

So there's lots of ways to do it. No magic to it, but you just have to find what works for you. So lastly, I just kind of want to summarize by saying we know that sugar plays a big role in our mood and our health. We know how much sugar we're eating. We know the mechanisms by which it causes a problem, right? Through inflammation and some resistance, changes to our microbiome, our stress response, all that leads to the mental health issues we're seeing. And we also know we can do something about it, that we know how to regulate blood sugar. It's not rocket science.

It's just simple practices that we've talked about today. So hopefully you found this exploration of sugar's pervasive role in our diets good. We now understand its profound implications on mental health. It's very concerning. It's very revealing. And based on the evidence that we shared today, it's really clear that the pervasiveness of sugar in our diets is not just about our physical health and diabetes and weight, but it's really linked to our mental well-being. And these high glycemic foods, these ultra-processed foods, these sugar drinks, they definitely increase our risk for mood disorders from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and more. They make us less resilient. They affect our overall well-being as a society, our productivity, affecting us on an individual level and also on a population level. But the good news is that

using this framework of functional medicine, it allows us to understand the biology here, get to the root cause of our suffering, and how to learn how to fix that, fix the root causes by getting on a real food diet that's nutrient dense, get rid of all the extra sugar and refined carbs that basically are the mainstay of our standard American diet or SAD diet. And if we do that, we can really take back our mood and mental health in really just a few weeks. So I encourage you all to try it. Let us know in the comments what you've done, how it's worked, what you felt. We'd really love to hear from you. Thanks for listening today.

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you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's drhyman.com forward slash Mark's Picks. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Health and Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only.

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