The Highwire with Del Bigtree - SUGAR, NOT GENES: THE HIDDEN DRIVER OF CHRONIC DISEASE?

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

The narrative surrounding the chronic disease epidemic in the US is shifting, as a recent study exposed how environmental factors play a larger part in aging and mortality than genetics do. Most importantly, the effects of early introduction to sugar as an infant on the immune system, contradictory to the USDA’s recommended baby formulas which are loaded with harmful sugars.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Anybody paying attention over this last month particularly knows that business as usual is out when it comes to the medical space and the public health space. This is we're looking at revolutionary changes in every direction and the media reporting is going to obviously be pushing their buttons that they always push. But I think what the really big picture is here is it's we're looking at health through a different lens now. We're looking at it through and public health as well through the lens of the increasing chronic disease epidemic in the United States. changes the whole narrative, changes the whole picture, and it changes how people are going to be reporting on things. And I'm noticing it in the literature now, in the scientific literature, that you see studies that look like this. This is a study that looking at proteomics and genetics. Proteomics is just a study of proteins in people's bodies down to that granular space there

and integrating the environmental and genetic architectures of aging and mortality. So they looked at both environmental exposures and genetics to see what plays a role in our aging and our mortality. And, you know, it's interesting because a lot of the times when you see reporting, they'll say, well, you know, children just get autism because it's the parents' genetics. It's kind of, it's kind of your fault because you have bad genes. And that's just, this is just how it happens. But this study looks at a lot of different things. And so they're looking at blood chemistry, the proteins in the body, biomarkers. And then they also looked at the common disease risk factors that people were engaged in throughout their life and incidents of disease. And this is what they

found. We go to Science Daily for kind of just an overview. And it says lifestyle and environmental factors affect health and aging more than our genes. It goes on to say environmental factors explain 17% of the variation in risk of death compared to less than 2% explained by genetic predisposition as far as we understand it. So right there, it's environment. This study is saying it is your environment, not your gene. Less than 2% is actually what you're born with. So this is actually a positive study because as it goes on to say, it says, of the 12, 25 independent environmental factors identified smoking, socioeconomic status, physical activity, and living conditions had the most impact on mortality and biological aging.

Smoking was associated with 21 diseases. Social economic factors such as household income, homeownership, and employment status were associated with 19 diseases. Wow. Physical activity was associated with 17 diseases. But here's the cool part. 23 of the factors identified are modifiable. So you can do something about your environment to affect your job. genes to inform your genes how to express themselves. This is a really cool study. Very interesting.

And it goes into, you know, when people are reading this, they're going, okay, I'm an adult. I can maybe, you know, make sure my job's going well. I can not smoke. But this goes all the way back to the moment where we're really conceived and we're born. So let's go back to infants. Let's talk about infants because this is this is entire lifestyle we're talking about. So we go to the USDA dietary guidelines. Every five years, they produce these. So this is their five-year update. And we look at infants.

So infants and young children, there's a part in here, it's really interesting because when you look at this, it gives the dietary guidelines, and it says one thing, infants really should be avoiding, and it's not smoking, it's not drug use, it's sugar. And it says in this update, avoid added sugar. It says infants and young children have virtually no room in their diet for added sugars. taste preferences are being formed during this time period. Infants and young children may develop preferences for overly sweet foods if introduced to very sweet foods during this time frame.

So it's really wiring their brain at that point. And what's interesting is we look at the U.S. market. So with that in mind, literally the USDA is saying it is contraindicated for infants to have sugar. So let's look at infant formula that's on the market. There's a study. The study, it's an analysis. They looked at 73 infant formulas. available in the U.S. market right now.

And what did they conclude? They said this, most U.S. infant formulas contain primarily added sugars. However, the presence of five formulas containing primarily naturally occurring lactose demonstrates that such formulations are feasible to produce, such formulas should be made more widely available to promote infant health. Wow. So only five. They said, look, you guys can produce them clearly because there's five out there.

Why aren't you doing it for the other? because there's 73 of them we looked at, and only five of them can cut this grade, and you're going against the USDA guidelines here. And so why is that a problem? Well, there's a really interesting natural study. So during World War II, the UK, and a lot of our countries as well, including the U.S., we did food rationing, and the UK rationed sugar. And so we have a natural experiment during the time of World War II to 1953 was the actual

official end of the sugar rationing, and it came back very quickly. So it was right back into the population after that. So there's this natural experiment that there was no sugar during that time for children born before, during, and after. So this study looks at what happened when infants were deprived of sugars. Remember, the USDA is saying you really shouldn't give kid sugar. Well, why is that? So we look at this study here, and it says exposure to sugar rationing in the first 1,000 days of life protected against chronic disease. Goes on to say this, using an event study design with the UK Biobank Data,

bearing adults conceived just before or after rationing ended. We found that early life rationing reduced type 2 diabetes and hypertension risk by 35 and 20% in delayed disease onset by four and two years respectively. Wow. These are big, big sweeping numbers here just by reducing sugar. And it goes on, it's not just chronic disease, not just hypertension diabetes. We have this study here. This is a study review looking at a lot of the literature.

harmful effects of high amounts of glucose on the immune system. So it even goes down to your actual immune system. It says the infiltration of a high amount of glucose into the immune cells may have a worse effect on the immune system and related signaling pathways, which ultimately leads to pro-inflammatory cytokine production. You do not want that. This may lead to impaired function of the immune system and trigger pathological conditions or disease conditions at that point.

So we're talking about sugar. And I know a lot of people out there are saying, if we're talking about environmental factors, there's one big one here. So I'm going to hit this right for I end in this segment. Here is an informed consent action network produced picture. This is the placebo pyramid scheme. And these are, this is all of the vaccines on the childhood schedule. And you notice not a single placebo-controlled trial was relied upon to license any of these vaccines.

Safety studies were very minimal. So when you were looking at all environmental factors, this is a hope, obviously, that people brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in and the others that are coming in here to look, really look at the safety data, really look at this against a placebo, a true placebo, to see what the health, the chronic disease conditions that may arise from these vaccines, stacking them on top of each other. Yeah, amazing. I mean, right. And that's what we've been saying all along and what the whole Maha movement is saying is clearly we have talks. Our food is toxic, our water is toxic, our air is toxic. Somewhere in there we've got to look at what is causing this incredible chronic disease epidemic.