Photo by Roberto Candia
In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L., the New York Times bestselling author of several books about the problems caused by sugar, processed food and the health conditions of obesity, shares his expertise and research about metabolic health.
He addresses nutrition, food science, and global health, and explains how by focusing on real food we can reverse chronic disease and promote longevity. He also challenges the current healthcare paradigm and the influence of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government.
Dr. Lustig is a pediatric neuroendocrinologist who’s spent his 40-plus year career treating and finding ways to prevent obesity and diabetes. He’s emeritus professor of pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology and member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.
He’s authored 130 peer-reviewed articles, 80 academic chapters and reviews, and dozens of op-eds for the public. He now has a new book to explain the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic disease and document how processed food has impacted our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years.
“So all these medicines that we currently throw at these various chronic diseases, they are treating the symptoms of the disease but they are not treating the underlying pathology,” Dr. Lustig says. “The disease is still there.”
The eight pathologies we discuss include glycation, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, insulin resistance, membrane instability, inflammation, epigenetics, and autophagy.
“It’s not about obesity, it never was,” Dr. Lustig says. “The key to the kingdom is that it is not about obesity, it is about metabolic dysfunction and anyone can get it, and that’s what makes it a public health crisis, because obesity is a result of the problem, not the cause. I never want to hear any of you talk about the obesity epidemic ever again, because that is the food industry’s mantra, that is what they use to obfuscate the truth, and you play right into it when you talk about it.”
In his new book, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine,” Dr. Lustig proposes a strategy to cure both us and the planet.
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Links/Resources
Website: robertlustig.com
Book: “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine”
Facebook: www.facebook.com/DrRobertLustig/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/robertlustigmd/
Twitter: twitter.com/RobertLustigMD
YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/RobertLustigMD/featured
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/robert-lustig-8904245/
Key Notes
- Dr Lustig‘s newest book is looking at eight pathologies that underlie everything that happens with chronic disease. – 1:01
- Growth hormone deficient kids have fat depots in places they shouldn’t have fat depots. – 2:02
- Alzheimer’s and type II diabetes are virtually identical in terms of what the mitochondria in either your liver or your brain are doing. – 4:33
- You can reverse type II diabetes, and you can certainly reverse pre-diabetes, if you ate right. – 7:05
- What does protecting the liver really mean? – 7:54
- So all of these diseases that we are seeing increasing in frequency over the course of the last 50 years, commensurate with the advent of processed food in our diet. – 11:23
- What are the three things that are the worst at poking holes in the gut that people could start paying attention to? – 11:58
- The problem is, when you take the fiber out of food, whether it be the soluble fiber or the insoluble fiber or both, you now basically have put your liver at risk. – 16:18
- The point is, know what you’re doing and do it right. Because it’s very easy to do veganism wrong. And to be honest with you, you can do keto wrong also. – 20:15
- No one’s figured out how to put insoluble fiber back into food. It’s not miscible. So the processed food industry can’t seem to do it. Soluble fiber, that’s easy. – 25:26
- Listen carefully, audience. I am for desert, for desert. I am not for desert for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. – 26:22
- Real food works, processed food doesn’t, for all the reasons I’ve discussed, because of these eight pathologies. – 26:50
- All these medicines that we currently throw at these various chronic diseases, they are treating the symptoms of the disease but they are not treating the underlying pathology. – 28:58
- Keep the glucose down. Keep the insulin down. You got to do both. – 33:49
- When you say Omega-3s, you’re taking about EPA and DHA? – 34:49
- And then finally, number eight, the big one that I think is really, really important and has been ignored thus far in the medical literature, autophagy. – 36:58
- What’s in the food is what the food industry put into the food. But ultimately what’s been done to the food is way more important. – 42:25
- Another person who tried to do this was Denise Morrison. She was the CEO of Campbell’s soup. And so she tried to actually do something about the salt in Campbell’s soup. – 47:31
- The countries that spend more of their GDP on food are way healthier than we are. The three worst countries, in terms of percent GDP spent on food, are the U.S., the UK, and Australia. And we are the three with the highest diabetes rate. – 51:24
- He took British prisoners and he did a randomized, double blind, placebo controlled trial where he gave half the prisoners a multivitamin supplement for a year and the other got control. – 56:43
- Labeling is the problem, and that’s the point I make in the book is that what you need to know about the food is not on the food label. – 59:23
- It’s not what the cows eat, it’s what we did to the cows. It’s the antibiotics we gave to the cows which destroyed their gut microbiome and allowed the methanogens to take over so now every cow produces four times the amount of methane than they used to. – 1:01:53
- I actually describe how the medical establishment moved toward pharma as it’s go-to. I talk about John D. Rockefeller. He was the original OG drug kingpin. – 1:04:49
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