The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Break Your Sugar Addiction And Improve Your Overall Health

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

How To Break Your Sugar Addiction And Improve Your Overall Health | This episode is sponsored by Starseed Sugar is the core ingredient used by the food industry to make bad ingredients (processed flour and chemicals) taste good. It is also the root cause of why so many of us are sick. We become stuck in a vicious cycle of cravings; eating sugary foods that spike our blood sugar, thereby lighting up our brain’s pleasure center. This triggers more cravings, and we become powerless against our brain’s hardwired response to seek pleasure. It’s no wonder so many people feel trapped! In this mini-episode, we revisit Dr. Hyman’s conversation with actors Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper in which they discuss how they broke free from sugar addiction by becoming their own advocates, reading food labels, and choosing real, whole foods. Keegan Allen is an American actor, musician, photographer, and author. He’s known for his main role as Toby Cavanaugh on the Freeform series Pretty Little Liars.  Tom Hopper is an English actor. He has appeared as Sir Percival in Merlin, Billy Bones in Black Sails, Dickon Tarly in Game of Thrones, and Luther Hargreeves in Netflix’s new show The Umbrella Academy.  This episode is sponsored by Starseed. Save 20% on your Starseed order at Amazon.com/Starseed by using the code 20MARKHYMAN at checkout. Be sure to try their seeds, Omega oil, and butters. Find Dr. Hyman’s full length conversation with Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper, “How To Overcome Sugar Addiction,” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/KeeganAllenTomHopper/

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I started off just being trying to avoid sugar. Yeah. And then I looked at everything else. I was like, what is that? I can't even pronounce that, let alone like put it in my body and think it's actually going to do anything good. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Save 20% on your order at amazon.com forward slash Starseed by using the code 20 Mark Hyman at checkout. That's 20 Mark Hyman, M-A-R-K-H-Y-M-A-N. That's me. And I hope you'll take advantage of this amazing offer from Starseed and try their seeds, oils, and butters. Now let's get back to today's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We are all programmed to like sugar, and having a sugar addiction is not a moral failing, nor is it due to lack of willpower. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which your hormones, taste buds, and brain chemistry have

been hijacked by the food industry, and it's making us sick. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman sat down with actors Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper, who each overcame their own health and weight issues by breaking their sugar addictions. I had a friend who worked in the Obama administration in charge of the food programs and the food labeling. He's like, the food companies don't want to have sugar listed as the number one ingredient on the label. So they'll put five different kinds of sugar because the list of ingredients is in order of the amount. But if you have, let's say, you know, wheat as the first ingredient, and then you have like five kinds of sugar.

Actually, sugar is the most predominant ingredient. They just, because they don't call it, you know, sugar. Yeah. Or they don't have the same kinds of sugar. It's just a loophole in the law that allows the food companies to get away with bamboozling us. And it's pretty bad. And then I was shopping the other day.

I was in CVS and getting something. I don't know what. And I looked over and I saw this big freezer of Haagen-Dazs ice cream. And I have a weakness for Haagen-Dazs ice cream, but I don't eat that often. And they said it's non-dairy Haagen-Dazs. I'm like, oh, cool. And I walked over and I pull it out.

It says plant-based, gluten-free, dairy-free. And I'm like, like oh this is health food right turn the label over and it's like high fructose corn syrup and processed ingredients and I'm like what is this but this is one thing I wanted to ask you then as a doctor someone that does this as an advocate goes around and travels and talks to everybody what would you say to the younger generation if they want to start somewhere what's the first step to really recognizing, not just like reading labels, but what is the real first step that can be a tangible first step for someone who maybe lives in rural America? I mean, Lenox, I've been to Lenox before.

I've been there. I know what that place is like. I'm surprised that you came out of Lenox and you're like, you know what, I'm going to do this and bring it to the world. What was it in your journey that was the first step well I used to be vegetarian too and I uh and I loved sugar and starch and bread and pasta you know I bought into the whole low fat and you were doing it for health reasons you were vegetarian because you thought it was healthier health reasons yes um and I thought this was the way to go. And, you know, it's interesting now that I've sort of cleaned up my diet and got rid of the starch and the sugar for the most part.

You know, if I look at pictures of myself without a shirt when I'm 30, I'm like way scrawnier and like kind of flabbier than I was, than I am today at 60. Right, yeah, yeah. And I don't do that much exercise. You know, like if I'm in the gym like five times a month weightlifting that's a lot right you know i do yoga i'll do other stuff but i just you know just because i'm busy i'm planning on doing more but yeah it's tough yeah i'll get you to help me

you look like you know what you're doing uh and i and i uh um then i got very sick and i started to sort of look at what i was doing and had to sort of shift. And as the science changed, I began to sort of look at, you know, because ideology is so problematic in nutrition. There are all these diet wars. There are always people in conflict with each other, paleo, vegan, this, that. And it's kind of crazy because… A lot of little religions, aren't they?

It is. But, you know, I said, let's get away from that because, you know, I came up with this term, pegan, which is a joke. It was like paleo vegan. And I just published this book, Food Fix, and it was number one in paleo and number one in vegan books. And I thought, this is good.

Because we have far more in common with each other than with the standard American processed diet. So you can be a chips and soda vegan, right? Or you can be a cheeseburger, whatever, bacon paleo, but that's not necessarily either of them are good, right? It's more going towards whole foods. So your question was, what would I say to people? I think it's really easy to just sort of start simply.

If you're eating industrial food like stop doing that right if you look at the ingredients and you see refined flour soybean oil or high fructose corn syrup just don't eat it if you can the next step would be look for non-gmo certified foods right not because gmo we know is that bad for you it may be it may not be there's a lot of controversy about that but it's a form of agriculture that's destructive to the environment and there's often other things in there like glyphosate which is roundup which they spray on 70 different crops from canola to corn to wheat to soy and that is definitely harmful for our microbiome it destroys our gut bacteria, which affects everything.

And it's linked to cancer. And there was a $2 billion lawsuit that got a settlement, a judgment about Roundup or glyphosate or weed killer. And so just be aware that if you just stop those things, the quality of your diet is going to be. You're already making a huge difference to your body. Yeah, whatever you do. And so those are really simple things we can do. And then already making a huge difference yeah whatever you do

and so those are really simple things we can do and then if you can try to you know look at what you're eating is it is it whole food i mean is it something you can recognize like an almond or almond butter it's like not that many steps of processing because most food gets processed in some way we cook it or yeah it's all got some kind of man intervention yeah yeah but if you know most of the time i just eat stuff that looks like what it is you know broccoli is a broccoli you know yeah it's a fish a piece of fish grass-fed meat well i always call it what i said to him when when we first started when when he was a pretty diabetic vegan sick man in australia um i i call it the uh the of the earth diet yeah so if you're eating stuff that the earth naturally provides,

then you're never really in harm's way. Right. You know, if it's not- How many steps did it take to get from the field to the fork? Yeah, exactly. If you can trace them all, okay. But if you don't know how it got like that- Yeah, then we've got a problem.

Yeah. The ingredients list is your ingredient, right? A sweet potato is a sweet potato. A piece of chicken breast is chicken breast is a piece of chicken breast there's no ingredient list on that yeah exactly right it is what it is right and and i think the the other thing i found as well which is important thing to talk about i think is how people who do make the shift they have to go through a process themselves like i know went through a process where I kept going back. I kept going, oh, I want that. That addiction to that kind of food

doesn't just disappear. I didn't do it overnight. My wife always says this to me. She was like, you know, when I'm talking to people saying, you just do this, you just do that. She's like, Tom, you have to remember that you took two years probably

to just not eat any of this stuff anymore. So your taste buds have to change you have to give your taste buds time to to make that change and really know what things taste like again like broccoli can taste freaking awesome right it's so true when people get off that for a week even and then they have blueberries they go my god this is you know like candy right and i i think people don't understand how how hard it is because of the biology of sugar yeah it's not a moral failing right it's not that you're weak-willed but you cannot overcome your biology with willpower it will fail every time yeah so you have to use science and the science of sugar is fascinating because it it

not only drives uh mechanisms that make you gain weight because it produces more insulin so it stores belly fat yeah it makes you hungry it slows your metabolism and it locks the fat in the fat cell so it can't get out it's like a one-way turnstile like in a subway can't get out and and when you look at the biology on the brain it's even scarier so in really well-controlled studies they've shown that by looking at brain imaging and blood tests eating the exact amount of calories, protein, fat, carbs, and fiber in a shake like a milkshake they just swapped out the level of the kind of carbohydrate so that one raises your blood sugar a lot and one doesn't. It's like a slowly digested starch.

When they did that, they found that the brain imaging showed that the addiction center, which is stimulated by heroin or cocaine or whatever, gets lit up like crazy by the sugar, and their insulin goes up, their blood sugar goes up, their adrenaline goes up. So sugar causes your adrenaline to go up, your cortisol, which is the stress hormone, so it literally creates a biologic stress. The interesting that i wanted to add to volley this back to you then with with your immune system sugar is not the only culprit to lowering your immune system there's these are there are canola oils there are what what other lifestyle as well like i find you know

like stress and stuff stress and fatigue and lack of sleep are ones that can drop it for sure. That's that cycle. If you eat sugar, if you eat processed foods, then you don't really sleep that well. They don't really move that well. Well, the other part about eating a diet of processed food and sugar is it depletes your nutrients. It actually doesn't have the vitamins and minerals and nutrients you need to metabolize stuff. So the people who are often the most nutritionally deficient are the most obese, which is kind of surprising because how can you be malnourished and obese at the same time? The nutritional density

of our food is so important and processed food sure just doesn't have it and sugar depletes our nutrients like B vitamins. And so when you have low levels of zinc and you have low levels of vitamin D and low levels of omega-3 fats and low levels of iron and vitamin A, your immune system can't function. So in the developing world, we know very clearly that the kids who die from diarrhea or respiratory infections or measles, it's because they're malnourished. If a kid gets measles who's well-nourished in America,

they're not going to die from it usually. But in the developing world, these kids die all the time from basic disease because they're so malnourished. And I think we are a malnourished country. 90% of us are deficient. And so the best way to build your immune system is to eat whole food, cut out the sugar,

make sure you take your vitamins, get enough sleep, like you said, deal with stress as a huge factor and i think you know i i i think something simple like just meditation yeah it's so powerful yeah yeah it's the thing that doesn't have to be woo woo but it works we just don't talk about that enough people just understand and the fact that we eat about 152 pounds of sugar per person yeah that's almost half a pound a day yes sugar well it's hidden in every single thing that you could pick up when we were at the gym yeah we go to the bar at the gym they have like a smoothie or something yeah oh my god yeah everything that is laid out that says healthy organic gluten free is so

counterproductive at the gym and you know that all everything you see in there there's like signs for for coca-cola in some gyms and stuff and there's like awful you can those like green smoothie things and you look at the label it has more sugar than a can of coke yeah i mean that's just insane yeah and then people become addicted to it because they're like well i'm eating healthy i'm drinking this healthy juice but what they're doing is they're spiking their insulin levels they're they're becoming addicted to this fruit fructose almost. I'm sure that some of it maybe even as a hidden, there's so many different names for hidden sugars now.

Um, it's like 200 names for sugar. If you Google names for sugar, you'll see it'll come on the list of like 200 different things that you don't even know are sugar. Yeah. That's it. I mean, that's one of the things that started me on, on a list of like 200 different things that you don't even know are sugar yeah that's i mean that's one of the things that started me on on the journey of like i'm just not going to eat anything that isn't whole food because i remember thinking well there's all this other stuff in there now like i started off just being trying to avoid sugar yeah and then i looked at everything

else i was like what is that i can't even pronounce that let alone like put it in my body and think it's actually going to do anything good so i just i started to just go no i can't i can't put that in anymore i mean the average american eats three to five pounds of additives every year yeah i mean and it's really deliberate and the and the the biology of addiction in the food is not it's not like an emotional response it's not because you have no willpower it really is hijacking your brain chemistry and your metabolism in ways that we don't really understand and so i i've seen people within a very short time really transform that the the food is medicine theory there's so much in that and i think people

can really take the the the steps forward in terms of a mindset because that's the thing changing mindset is the is the first thing like you you're mindset because that's the thing changing mindset is the is the first thing like you you saying this you know like you took a while from you and me chatting back and forth to really go no there is actually something in this and changing that mindset so once you change that mindset and and just keep driving that through of food is medicine food is medicine you'll see the difference. Simple as that. It's so easy, really, when you get down the road,

but you've got to put the steps in place to actually get there. And that's not easy. Yeah, that's something I teach all the time, is that food isn't just calories, it's information. And so are you upgrading your biology or downgrading it with every bite? And it affects everything, your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system, your microbiome. And every aspect of your health is controlled by what you're eating. And it's literally like code. So it's like you're putting in malware

into your biology. Yeah, that's what it is. Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you'd like to hear more about the specifics of Keegan Allen and Tom Hopper's personal health struggles and how they overcame them, I'd encourage you to check out the full-length version of this interview. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing with your friends or family and leaving us a comment with your feedback. Until next time. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not

constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.