How Sugar Wreaks Havoc on Your Health and Mind

Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's pharmacy, refined flour starch like wheat and white flour, which are basically ultra processed food staples, raise our blood sugar even more than table sugar. So below the neck, there's no difference between a bagel and a soda.

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Are you ready to prioritize wellness? Maybe you want to make more informed choices on the latest health trends or simply understand the science. I'm Doctor Mark Hyman. I'm a wellness expert and I want to welcome you to my podcast, Health hacks. In every episode, I'll provide guidance on how to live a longer, healthier life, helping you wade through all the health ads and the sound bites to bring you the science backed facts, along with practical tools and insights to make informed decisions.

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Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Doctor Mark Hyman and another episode of Health Bites, little juicy bits of information that are bite sized pieces that can help you live a better life. Today we're digging into a juicy topic that's near and dear to my heart that I've been shouting from the rooftops for years. The impact of added sugar consumption on our health and what you can do right now to break free from sugar addiction because it's everywhere. Sugar hides in almost every packaged food and drink on the grocery store shelves and is in large part driving our chronic disease and obesity epidemic.

You see, Americans consume a staggering 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour every single year. It's no wonder we're facing an epidemic of obesity and disease. With over 75% of adults and 40% of kids now overweight. It's no wonder that one in two Americans has prediabetes or type two diabetes. 90% don't know it.

And even worse, 93.2% of us are metabolically unhealthy. Which means you're somewhere on the continuum from insulin resistance to prediabetes to type two diabetes, or what I call diabesity. But heres the thing. Its not just about our physical health, its about our mental health too, because sugar is wreaking havoc on our brains, our mood, and our behavior. Research has linked sugar consumption to cognitive decline, depression, even Alzheimers disease.

So lets jump right into todays episode. Ive been rolling up my sleeves and getting to work in Congress with my Food fix campaign to make real change with the other white powder campaign, which highlights the severity of the sugar consumption crisis, aiming to provoke a shift in policy and public perception. Now our campaign seeks to engage policymakers and to mobilize grassroots support to address the harmful effects of sugar on health. I'm talking about bold policy reforms like explicit labeling on high sugar products, limits on sugar marketing and mandates for reformulating those sugary treats now were making strides in the right direction. But change doesnt happen overnight.

In the meantime, we have to do our part. Big food companies have hijacked our sweet tooth. Theyre bombarding us with sugar in so many different forms and disguises that its become nearly impossible to decipher whats in our food. And thats why education is so important. And today is all about learning how to detect hidden sources of sugar in our diet.

Now we can begin to take our power back, consciously make better food choices, and use functional medicine to fix our broken metabolism and reclaim our health. So where does sugar hide in our diet? Not just the table sugar, what you use to make cookies, candy, or add your coffee or tea. That's sucrose, which is a disaccharide, basically two saccharides or sugars, glucose and fructose. But there are many types of sugar lurking in our diets, and you may not even know they're there.

For example, refined flour, starch like wheat and white flour, which are basically ultra processed food staples, raise our blood sugar even more than table sugar. So below the neck, there's no difference between a bagel and a soda, right? Sugar goes by many different names, at least 60, probably more. They're constantly changing the name to protect the guilty. High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, agave nectar, rice syrup, beet syrup, invert sugar, fruit juice concentrate, malta, steectose, fructose, galactose, you name it, any kind of sugar, right?

Dehydrated cane juice. That's one of my favorites. Sounds healthy, right? And their common sources, obviously, are the ultra processed foods we're eating. Sandwich breads, buns, bagels, muffins, donuts, crackers, pretzels, cereal, chips, fast food, fried foods, blenders, drinks, coffees, teas, energy drinks, sugar sweetened beverages, soda, iced tea, lemonade, fruit juice package, candy.

I mean, you name it, it is all around us. We are living in a food carnival of toxic sugar sweetened foods. It's bad. Now, there are less common and well known sources that you might not know. Like, you know, if you're eating a dessert, you're getting sugar, right?

But what about salad dressing, ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce, packaged sauces, condiments, marinades, ready to make meals, soup, noodles, yogurt. It's like one of the worst. Pasta sauce. I mean, there's more sugar in a serving of prego pasta sauce than there are in two oreo cookies, for God's sake. Fruit cups, granola bars, restaurant food, sauces, condiments.

I mean, it's just everywhere. And all this sugar adds up. The average american consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, and kids 34 teaspoons of sugar a day. Like I said, it's 152 pounds of sugar per person per year and 133 pounds of flour. It's about a pound a day per person per year.

Now, I know I'm not having that much, guys, so you are having a lot more. Now, what impact does sugar have on our brains and our bodies? To understand the what is key here, what sugar does to our health? What's the risk for chronic disease? And if we need to look at that, we need to first understand the why and the how.

So how does sugar impact our bodies? When you eat foods containing a lot of sugar, your digestive system first breaks it down into glucose, a simple sugar that enters your bloodstream. Now, this signals the pancreas to release insulin, which is a hormone, also a peptide, actually, that plays a vital role in regulating our blood sugar levels. What happens to our body when we consume too much sugar? Well, consistently flooding the body with and your cells with sugar makes them less responsive to insulin, right?

So you need more and more insulin just to get the sugar in the cells. And this is called insulin resistance. I've talked about it forever. I've been talking about it for 30 years. It's the single biggest problem facing humanity today in terms of our health, its economic cost, and on down the line to every downstream impact that sugar has on our society, from how we grow the food and destroys the environment, the climate, the social impact, the cognitive impact.

I mean, the list goes on. Now, your body, when you. When you have too much sugar and you're making too much insulin, the body tries to overcompensate, right, by producing more and more insulin. And as this cycle continues, it leads to chronically elevated insulin levels, which make you store fat. Now, insulin makes you store fat.

It's a fat storage hormone. It locks the fat in the fat cells, it slows your metabolism down, it makes you hungry, and also eventually stops working. So you can't clear the blood sugar from your blood, and you end up with higher blood sugar. But having high blood sugar is a late stage phenomena. So if you see high blood sugar on your lab test, you're already way down the road, my friends.

Now, if not addressed, insulin resistance will progress over time to prediabetes and to type two diabetes. And ultimately the pancreas just bonks out and can't produce enough insulin to manage blood sugar levels, effectively. And this is happening to millions and millions of Americans all over the world. I mean, we've exported our sad diet, the standard american diet, and now seeing the impact globally, we've literally created the worst diet in the world and are exporting it to every country on the planet. There are now 537 million adults living with diabetes worldwide.

I think that's probably an underestimate. It's projected to be 643 million by 2020 and 783 million by 2045. Think about it. This is not just overweight. We're talking about almost a billion people having type two diabetes, a completely preventable and reversible condition that's caused by food.

We talk about food borne illness from salmonella. This, my friends, is a foodborne illness. And by the way, diabetes is the most expensive chronic condition in the US. We spend about a billion dollars a day on diabetes. About $327 billion.

And that's just direct costs. That's not the disability, that's not the loss of productivity, that's not all the other downstream consequences. It's basically one out of every four us healthcare dollars. And the global costs of diabetes and its consequences are going to increase to 2.1% trillion dollars by 2030. Imagine that money being used for other things that could make society better, like free education, free healthcare.

I mean, improving communities and any homelessness. I mean, you name it, that money would go a long way. But we're using it to treat a condition that's completely unnecessary and was a historical anomaly and rarity, you know, 150 years ago. I mean, it just didn't even exist. Except if you had type one diabetes and type two, and a few people who just gorge themselves on sugar and, you know, we're affluent and it was the disease of affluence.

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Now, insulin resistance is a driver of many problems, metabolic dysfunction, inflammation, every chronic disease you can think of, from heart disease to hypertension to fatty liver to obesity to metabolic syndrome to cancer, depression, mental health issues, and accelerated aging. It is the biggest driver of accelerated aging. So how does insulin resistance, for example, drive aging? Well, high insulin drives rapid and premature aging. Now, we've seen life expectancy go down for the first time in the history of humanity, and it's going down year after year for the first time ever.

And the 2021 Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet found a 1.6 year decline from 2019 to 21 due to COVID deaths, which is the elderly were probably responsible for most of that. And how many of these elderly had these comorbidities that were really lifestyle diseases? But even before COVID life expectancy had been going down year over year for the first time in history. And kids born today will live sicker, shorter lives than their parents. Now, what about the quality of life, right?

What about the quality of your years left? This is called your health span. Your lifespan is how many years you're alive. Your health span is how many years you're healthy. Now, the average American spends the last 20% of their life in poor health, right?

So imagine if you're this kind of ballpark, it lived to be 80. Maybe from your starting your sixties, you're starting to go downhill and the quality of your life decreases. And a lot of that has to do with this problem of insulin resistance. Diabetics, for example, on average, die six years younger than non diabetics. Well, if you have diabetes, you're twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke than someone who doesn't have diabetes.

How? Well, the high sugar levels damage your blood vessels and causes really bad types of cholesterol we call atherogenic dyslipidemia. So two thirds of all heart attacks are likely caused, based on the literature, and we can put this in the show notes, are caused by these weird types of cholesterol that are formed from eating a high sugar starch diet. Excess sugar impacts everything that has to do with aging, and it impacts all of the hallmarks of aging in a negative way. And I wrote a lot about this in my book, young forever.

Now, there are many hormone and nutrient signaling pathways that are regulated by sugar. And I wrote a lot about this in my book young forever. So, sugar inhibits longevity genes. It inhibits the activation of sirtuins, which are involved in DNA repair and one of the key hallmarks of aging. It inhibits AMPK.

We might have heard of metformin, the drug that people are talking about for longevity, but this is also a drug that affects Ampk. AMPK is really important for lowering inflammation, for repairing DNA, for improving energy production, reversing insulin resistance, regulating blood sugar, enhancing stress resilience, improving autophagy, reducing cancer. Right. So if you have problems with activating NPK because of all the sugar, you're not doing any of those things. And sugar messes all that up.

Sugar also activates one of the most important longevity switches that I call mtor. You might have heard about the mammalian target of rapamycin. There's a drug called rapamycin people are taking for longevity, and this is an ancient conserved metabolic pathway that when it's on all the time, is not good, right? When it's on all the time from sugar or too much food or too much protein, it drives cancer and rapid aging. Obviously, sugar is a huge driver of obesity.

Added sugars and ultra processed foods and sugar sweetened beverages are really high in calories. They're low in fiber and protein, and it makes them easy to overeat. High sugar intake, for example, leads to high blood sugar and high insulin levels. Now, insulin is a fat storage hormone. It makes you store excess calories from sugar as belly fat, even from fat, if you have excess free fatty acids.

Belly fat is called visceral fat. We've done a whole podcast on this. It's very dangerous. Belly fat that secretes a whole fire of inflammation, literally, think of it, fire in the belly. When you eat sugar, it makes your fat cells grow in your belly and, and you get a fire in the belly that creates inflammation throughout your whole body.

It's like a wildfire spreading through your body, creating havoc in every single organ and tissue. And it increases the risk for every single chronic disease, like cancer, for example. High insulin levels promote cancer cell growth. What's the mechanism? Well, cancer loves sugar, so sugar feeds tumor cells, it creates inflammation, and oxidative stress damages your tissues, it suppresses your immune system, like, sugar suppresses your immune system, folks, just headline news.

It suppresses something called killer t cells, which are scavengers that go out and hunt and destroy missions for cancer, so they don't work. It increases growth factors that are bad, like forming new blood vessels, angiogenesis. It provides the fuel and nutrient to tumors which boost cancer cell growth. In fact, sugars are the preferential food for cancer. And they don't run on fat, they run on sugar.

In fact, the way we test for cancer is we give you radioactive label sugar, and that sugar, like a homing pigeon, goes right to the cancer because it sucks up all the sugar. Kills me that doctors say, don't eat tofu for breast cancer, but they say, heaven help a milkshake, which is probably the worst possible advice, because tofu is not going to cause breast cancer. It's not really an estrogen. It's a phytochemical that modulates estrogen. So it's not bad.

And this constant sugar influx will also activate mtor, which you've heard a bit about for me and also I've written about in my book young forever. And when you activate mtor, you stop this process that you need, called autophagy or self cleaning repair and healing, to basically recycling that heals your body and extends life. Breast cancer, for example, has been very much linked to sugar. In a case control study in women under 45 who had sweets more than ten times per week had a significantly higher risk of breast cancer compared to those who consume less than three times a week of sugar. And there was no significant link between the risk of breast cancer and calorie or fat intake.

So independent of calories or fat, sugar was the main association here. In another study, a woman diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, who drank sugary sodas five times or more a week, were 85% more likely to die from breast cancer than those who rarely or never drink soda. I mean, just think about it, sugar feeds cancer. So what's the impact of sugar on the brain? Well, sugar is addicting, right?

We're hardwired to seek out sugar and energy dense foods, right, because our survival dependent on it. If we found a honeycomb or a bunch of berries, we'd suck them all down and store fat for the winter, right? But we just keep eating all winter. Sugar stimulates the brain's reward centers, the pleasure centers, right, through neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is exactly like other addictive drugs, right? Heroin, cocaine, nicotine.

Now this is a survival mechanism, but it's kind of backfired, right? Bears foraging for wild berries and storing excess sugar as fat for hibernation is a good thing. I mean they, they gain 500 pounds in the summer and then they go to sleep. Well, we just keep eating all winter, right? We have sugar at our fingertips all the time.

And when we consume sugar, it releases insulin to bring the glucose back into our cells, and any excess is stored in the fat tissue and your blood sugar drops within an hour or two, which then causes to crave more sugar. So youre on this roller coaster of sugar cravings and hunger, and actually eating more sugar makes you more hungry. So sugar is highly addictive because of the way its packaged and consumed, particularly in ultra processed foods, which by the way are scientifically designed by the food industry. And I've talked about this, they have taste institutes, they hire craving experts to find the bliss point of food, to create heavy users their own internal terms, which are designed really to hijack your brain. And they combine sugar and salt and fat, and these hyper palatable, easy to overeat foods that aren't really even food.

They're food, like science projects, and they do this to trick our biochemistry and to maximize the consumption of products. Remember, the commercial lays potato chips. I bet you can't eat just one. Well, that's true. I mean, who binges on a bag of avocados but a bag of potato chips or cookies?

Not so hard. Even a whole sheep cake, right. If you want to really cut the sugar and you really want to kind of do the best plan. And I'm not just saying this got creative. I've done this with thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and it really works.

I just literally did a retreat in Spain where I did a longevity retreat. But we put people on basically on a ten day detox diet from my book, the ten day detox diet. This really is a sugar detox diet. Helps break the addiction, helps balance your hormones, your metabolism, your brain chemistry, and it can be really powerful to just reset. And I just did it myself, actually.

I did it. And listen, I like sugar like anybody else. And I was in Spain and I was actually on a bike trip and I was probably eating more stuff and a little more wine and maybe a little dessert here and there. And I've come back from doing this just a week or not even six days of detox in Spain afterwards. And I'm like, normally, like, I want a little chocolate after dinner.

I don't want anything. Like, I just. It's like I have. I even have it in my cupboard. I have, like, chocolate covered almonds, which are my, like, healthy, you know, guilty pleasure, but I don't want them.

I just not even attracted to it. So your body will reset. Now, brain imaging scans, or mris, shows that high sugar foods work just like heroin, opium or morphine in the brain. Now, we know that, and we actually can see this in animals and human models, that there is literally sugar withdrawal when we stop sugar, like physiologic withdrawal, like they have from heroin or alcohol. Right?

And we know that sugar creates inflammation also in the body, and it's resistance, and it creates this in the brain, not just the body. And that brain inflammation is what's causing mental health crisis. It's causing increased depression, anxiety, behavioral issues, aggression, violence, and even memory and dementia. Doctors Richard Johnson, doctor Dale Bredesen, and Doctor David Perlmutter published a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition discussing the damaging effects of fructose, which is fruit sugar mostly found in soda and ultra processed food in the form of high fructose corn syrup, they, you looked at that on the brain's energy metabolism via brain glucose hypometabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammation, a lot of big medical words, but basically they looked at the brains to see what happened with metabolism, with their mitochondria, and with inflammation in the brain. And it was bad.

I'm just saying. Now, what's the impact of sugar on the economy and the quality of life? Well, people are living longer, although our life expectancy is going down, right? We're not living like up to 40, but, uh, there's way more disability, way shorter. Health.

A 2018 study of chronic disease in the US published in the International Journal of environmental research and public health, said that 75% of healthcare costs, 75%, I think it's probably more, are attributable to preventable conditions. And two thirds of all these deaths result from five chronic diseases. Heart disease, cancer, stroke, emphysema, and diabetes. And except for emphysema, which is primarily caused by smoking, all these are diet related and primarily sugar and starch related. Now, this is the kind of a scary statistic.

You know, we're seeing our government federal deficit go up. We're seeing trillions of dollars being spent on healthcare. And in Medicare, basically, $0.96 out of every dollar is spent on chronic disease. And for Medicaid, it's. Eighty three cents of every dollar spent on chronic disease, which is almost entirely preventable.

Chronic pain, depression, headache disorders, and many, many other things. Now, according to the World Economic Forum, health related productivity losses cost the us employers $530 billion every year. Now, globally, the cost of lost productivity is over $2 trillion. All right, so economy, bad. Money, bad.

Health, bad. What about our kids? Well, children are increasingly affected by this diabesity epidemic. One in five kids has obesity, 40% are overweight. 17% of kids who are aged between ten and 17 are obese.

And get this, folks, one out of every 425 percent of teenage boys are either diabetic or pre diabetic. And I'm not talking about juvenile diabetes. I'm talking about, we used to call adult onset diabetes, which is a diet related problem. Now, research suggests that up to 10% of kids have NAFLD, or fatty liver, and up to half of those have Nash, which is a more serious version with inflammation of the liver and liver damage that leads to liver transplants. There are now teenagers on the liver transplant list getting liver transplants from drinking soda.

I am not making this up. I went to an obesity conference that was focused on children one year, and I met this doctor there who was a gastroenterologist, and like, well, what are you doing here? And he was actually a liver specialist. I'm like, well, um, sadly, these kids are getting liver damage and they need liver transplants. I'm like, wow.

Uh, recent research also estimates that the incidence of prediabetes in children is about 10%, uh, which is a lot. Um, that's probably likely more, depending on how you define it. And we see twelve year old boys who have lived on soda for years getting liver transplants from having a fatty liver. And as we've seen today, the stakes really can't be higher. It's crippling our society, it's making us sick, it's making us overweight.

It's burning our economy. And the impact of sugar reaches deep in our society. It doesn't just affect our individual health, but the health of our children and even the sustainability of our healthcare system. We're just going to. And Medicare, we're just going to buckle under the weight of all this.

So, hopefully, now that you're armed with all this knowledge, I hope you feel empowered to make changes to transform your health and the health of those around you. And together, I hope we can create a world where our diets support health and longevity and happiness. So until next time, stay empowered and keep striving for your best health. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family.

Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on all social media channels. Aftermark Hyman and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. For more information on today's episode, please check out my new video and audio podcast, Health hacks. It airs every Tuesday and includes a more detailed breakdown of these Friday health bites episodes. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes and lots more.

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This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra 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 guest opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. 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.

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How Sugar Wreaks Havoc on Your Health and Mind

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1: Introduction

2: The Science of Sugar's Impact

3: Societal Impact

4: Solutions and Advocacy

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