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BITESIZE | How To Break The Sugar Cycle, Cut Cravings & Get Your Energy Back | Dr Mark Hyman #621
00:24:33
Is your ‘healthy’ breakfast actually dessert in disguise? Why is it that so many of us are struggling these days with our metabolic health?
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Today's bite sized episode is sponsored by the Way Meditation app. Now you probably heard me talk about this app over the past few months and that is because I absolutely love it. Meditation has so many benefits for our physical health and mental well being, but only if we do it. And that's one of the reasons I love the Way so much. It makes it really easy to to establish a meditation practice that sticks. One of the most unique things about the Way is that it is a meditation app with no choice. They understand that too much choice is stressful and can lead to procrastination and indecision. And so with the Way, you only ever have one choice, which makes things really easy. Just open the app, follow the path and your transformation will unfold. The creator of the app is Henry Schuchman, a Zen master with the most wonderful, relaxing voice. And to get you started with your practice, the Way is offering my podcast listeners 30 free sessions to take advantage. All you have to do is go to thewayapp.com livemore welcome to feel Better Live More bite size, your weekly dose.
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Of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend.
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Today's clip is from episode 545 with medical doctor and best selling author Dr. Mark Hyman. For many years, Mark has been leading a global health revolution around using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mood and happiness. In this clip, he shares practical evidence based ways to improve your metabolic health, starting with what's on your plate. We live in a world where it's pretty normal to only consider things like cereal, muffins and bagels as our traditional breakfast foods.
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C
That's right.
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How would you have us rethink about breakfast so that we can optimize our metabolic health, our gut health and our longevity?
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C
Great question. I mean, I'm put intermittent fasting or time restricted eating aside, because it doesn't really matter if you do 12 hour fast, 14, 16 hour, whatever, your first meal is matters. And you're 100% right. Essentially the world is eating dessert for breakfast. Most cereals are 75% sugar. It shouldn't be called breakfast, it should be called dessert. And whether it's that or it's a Frappuccino from Starbucks, or a bagel or a muffin, or pancakes or French toast or waffles, or just even worse things like Pop Tarts and things that kids eat for breakfast. Popping that. I used to eat Pop Tarts for breakfast when I was a kid. It's absolutely the worst thing we can do because when you start your day with sugar for breakfast, instead of protein and fat for breakfast, a whole cascade gets tipped off that is going to ultimately cause you to end up gaining weight and feeling like crap, potentially lead to diabetes, and for sure probably pre diabetes. And the reason is when our first meal is sugar or something that turns into sugar, because anything that's flour is equivalent below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of sugar and a bowl of cornflakes, or a bowl of sugar and a couple of pieces of toast. It's exactly the same when it hence your body. In fact, the bread is probably worse because it's got a higher glycemic index and it raises your insulin more. Although sugar is fructose and glucose, so it's a little bit of a different molecule, but it's still bad. So what happens is you kick into this cascade where you drive up insulin. That's the fat storage hormone. You store belly fat, you partition the fat, which means it gets locked in there like a one way turnstile on the underground, where basically you can get in but you can't get out. So the fat gets locked in there, it slows your metabolism and it makes you hungry. So if you have oatmeal for breakfast, which we think is a healthy breakfast, it's kind of the least unhealthy of the unhealthy breakfast. It's not as bad as sugary cereals or a muffin, but it still raises your insulin, raises your adrenaline, raises your cortisol, raises your blood sugar, raises your triglycerides, and it then causes this spike in insulin and then a crash in your blood sugar and that leads to this kind of up and down craving cycle that we all experience and we end up eating more. So if you have, for example, looking at a study from Dr. Ludwig, it was a brilliant study, he gave people an omelet, steel cut oats or instant oatmeal. Three breakfasts, same calories. So identical calories. They were overweight young kids and they then put them in a room and they said, okay, eat these breakfasts and then whenever you're hungry, hit the button, tell us, we'll bring you more food. The kids who added the oatmeal ate 86% more food in that day than the kids who ate the omelet and the kids who ate the steel kudos ate 56% more more food than the kids who ate the omelette. So whether it's steel coat oats, I mean, you can modify ST oats and put nuts in there. You can put butter in there, you can put flax seeds in there, you can put fiber in there, you can change the composition. But at the end of the day, the glycemic load of your meal matters the most. And you want to start the day with protein and ideally fat. So it could be a protein shake with some MCT oil in it, it could be an omelette with avocados and tomatoes, olive oil. It could be a nutshake that I talked about in my 10 day detox diet, which essentially you put seeds and nuts and good fats in there with protein and fiber and some frozen berries. It can be delicious. It doesn't have to be bad, but what it's going to prevent you from doing is ending up on this roller coaster of blood sugar swings, of cravings, of overeating, of eating too much sugar and starch, craving carbs, of gaining weight, of getting belly fat, of getting in this cascade of metabolic dysfunction, which is terrible. In America, it's 93% of us are somewhere in that continuum. I don't know what it's in the uk, but you guys are probably not far behind us. And so it's pretty bad. And so the best thing you can do for yourself for breakfast is to start the day with protein and fat.
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A
It's interesting that both you and I are very passionate about root cause medicine. We're always thinking, well, how do we get to the root cause of this problem instead of just suppressing symptoms, often with medications. But if we think about breakfast, it's looking at root cause through a slightly different lens. It's almost like a root cause behavior that if we don't get right, has multiple downstream implications for the rest of our day. Do you know what I mean? It's like quite similar.
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C
Absolutely, absolutely. It's a slippery slope. When you start your breakfast with sugar in any form that we talked about, it's gonna create a day where you're gonna end up in a metabolic cascade that is, is undermining your health, it's making you hungrier, it's making you crave more carbs and sugar, it's making you eat more food in general. And ultimately, day after day after day, what's going to happen? You're going to gain a lot of weight and you're going to gain belly fat and you're going to get into this metabolic crisis which we see so much of the world in today, which is the spectrum of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes.
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When you were talking about all the consequences of starting the day with sugar. Two of the things you mentioned were adrenaline and cortisol. That's really interesting, isn't it? Because people, yeah, they might go, yeah, belly fat and triglycerides, which is a harmful form of cholesterol. But adrenaline and cortisol are stress hormones. So what's the relationship between our breakfast and our stress levels?
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C
Great question. So Dr. Ludwig, in this study, he hooked these kids up to an IV and he would draw their blood very frequently, and he could see the response in their blood of all these biomarkers. Your blood sugar, your insulin, your adrenaline, your cortisol, or your triglycerides and other things that change quickly. And what he found was that the kids who ate sugar for breakfast, and when I say sugar for breakfast, I mean oatmeal and steel cut oats, which isn't half as bad as most kids are eating. What happened was the cortisol went up. So when you eat sugar and starch, it's like a stress on your body. The body perceives it as a physiological stress. It's not a mental stress, like where someone's yelling at you or. Or you're in a fight, or you almost, you know, get an accident. You feel this rush of cortisol and adrenaline. It's a physiological response to eating a food that creates higher levels of these stress hormones in your body. And again, that's bad because when you have higher levels of cortisol over time, one, you gain more belly fat, you get high blood pressure, you get diabetes, you lose muscle, you lose bone density, you cause cognitive impairment. It can lead to dementia over time. When you see high cortisol levels and we see this, it shrinks the hippocampus, the memory center in the brain. And so you end up in this horrible kind of snowball effect. And it's not just the sugar, it's also the cortisol. So you want to eat a diet that doesn't stress you out?
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Basically, yeah. I mean, that's crazy, isn't it? To think about this idea that our breakfast can literally stress our body out. Again, it's just broadening the lens through which we look at food. Food is not just calories, it's not just energy. As you've said for many, many years, food is information. And in fact, if I have it here in your last book, for me, there was a real magic in that book that I really enjoyed. And one of the things you wrote in that book was the single biggest input to your biology is what you eat every day. And the information in that food is changing your biology in real time. That's what you're talking about, isn't it?
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100%. Because remember what I said about this study, they were identical calories. So even though there was the same amount of energy in the food, the information in the food was different. And how that information was translated into biological signals was different depending on the quality and the type of food that we're eating. So the information is changing your hormones, it's changing your brain chemistry, it's changing your microbiome, it's changing your immune system and many, many other things. Your mitochondrial function, your stress hormones, your insulin hormones, your sex hormones, all of that's affected by what you're eating. And people don't understand that. They think, oh, it's just calories in, calories out. You want to lose weight, eat less, exercise more. Unfortunately, that blames the victim. And it's not such a simplistic view. Yes, energy matters and energy calories matter, but you have to understand it's the quality of the calories that matter. So when you focus on what you eat, you don't have to worry so much about how much you eat. And there's been many, many trials by David Ludman and others looking at basically unlimited calories, but changing the composition of the diet so that the information is different. So you can do a calorie restricted diet, for example, low fat versus a low starch sugar diet, that's unrestricted calories. And the group that has the unrestricted calories will eat less and be less, less hungry and way less at the end of the study and have better metabolic health.
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A
Yeah, Mark, I want to make sure that everyone listening or watching really understands the gravity of what you're saying. Okay, now there's a few things you mentioned. You mentioned bread sometimes is worse than sugary cereal. You mentioned oats meal, which a lot of people consider to be a healthy breakfast. So let me just zoom out a minute and go, if, if 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, and let's say it's probably not quite as high, but comparable in the UK and in many other countries around the world now, is it that these foods are particularly problematic on the backdrop of poor metabolic health? That is, if you went to a population somewhere where they were in exceptional metabolic health and they were exquisitely insulin sensitive, do you think they could eat those foods like bread and oatmeal without it having those negative consequences?
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C
Yes, but, yes, but, yes. Maybe for a few days, but after a few days, what starts to happen is you start to adapt to this different diet. I mean, look, there were populations that were exquisitely metabolically sensitive, like the Pima Indians in Southwest America, where there was zero diabetes, zero obesity, zero heart disease, zero metabolic dysfunction at the turn of the 1900s, and now 80% have diabetes by the time they're 30. They're the second most obese population in the world after the Samoans. Why? Because the government of the United States gave them government surplus food, which consisted of three main things. Flour, white flour, white sugar, and white fat, otherwise known as crisco for shortening. And those three things really were the death of this population. So even though they were exquisitely insulin sensitive, over time, if you feed someone who's metabolically healthy, metabolically unhealthy food, they will become metabolically unhealthy. Even myself. I mean, if I'm fit and I'm healthy and my insulin level is low, and my A1C is really low, and my blood sugar's good, and my blood pressure's good, and my triglycerides are low, and my HDL is high, all that could change if I just started a diet of the average American person, which was 60% processed food and 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour a year. So if I ate that much of that stuff, I guarantee you I would not be looking like I do now.
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It's the key thing there, Mark, whether the food is highly processed or not. And the reason I say that is because there are some populations, aren't there, around the world, who are having quite high carb diets? But the carbs are sweet potatoes. They are, you know, whole food, carbohydrates, and they seem to still be in good health. So what I'm wondering is, in your view, is it, do we have like the perfect storm at the moment where it's all of this ultra processed food and we've got a metabolically unhealthy population and we're not moving enough and we're overly stressed and we're under slept. You put all these things together, and would you even say that some of us are unable to tolerate even whole food carbs, or is it just the ultra processed carbs that are the main issue?
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C
It depends how busted your metabolism is. So if you're, if you're a generally healthy person, you want to chew on sugar cane, great. You want to eat wheat berries, no problem. But when you start consuming larger amounts of flour and refined sugars, because these are refined foods, they're not, they're highly processed. Now they may not be ultra processed in the sense of deconstructed and put in strange forms and had all kinds of food additives and what we call ultra processed food, but even so, they're highly refined foods and they're quickly metabolized and absorbed. And we didn't even have refined flour until like the 120, 30, 40, 50 years ago when they invented the, the flour mill and the electric flour mill. And we got, you know, industrial revolution, you know, because you had to grind stuff pretty hard. I remember living in China for a while and I went to this remote village and there were these two guys with these two giant stones with sticks in them that were grinding flour by walking around in circles like mules for like hours to grind their flour. I guarantee you that's never going to get to be like what we see in America where they completely remove the grain from the bran and the germ, which are the fiber and the nutrient containing components. So I think, I think if you're looking at populations, for example, like we were visiting the Hadza, they eat a lot of tubers and they eat starchy vegetables, but they eat also 150 grams of fiber. So if you took a Coca Cola and you put in like two or three tablespoons of Metamucil, it's going to have a different impact on your biology because you're adding fiber to it. And I'm not suggesting you do that, but it's really about the composition of the whole diet, not just one food. And we call this dietary patterns, and we call this, particularly around sugar, the glycemic load of the meal. So how much is the total load? So if you have oatmeal by itself, that's a problem. But if you add fat and you add protein and you add more fiber, it's gonna change the load of that meal so that it doesn't spike your blood sugar as much. So the key here is what are the foods that are spiking blood sugar and insulin the most? And if you're susceptible, and there's probably 75% of the world's population is susceptible to this because we were hunter gatherers, cause we were in adaptive diets, sugar starch diets, we're going to end up in trouble. Now, certain populations are much worse. If you look at the Native American population in the U.S. indigenous populations, if you look at Pacific Islanders, the East Indians like yourself, even at lower weights, you're going to get metabolic dysfunction. That's why there's such high rates of diabetes and heart disease in India. If you look at African Americans, Asians, even at lower weights, will become metabolically dysfunctional when they eat a diet that's high in slight sugar. And you can say, oh, look, the Chinese ate so much rice. They did. But I, again, I traveled and live in China. I speak Chinese, I understand the culture. And, you know, you go see these Chinese, skinny Chinese, giant bowls of white rice. But what you also had to understand was that they were out there in the rice fields 12 hours a day working their butt off. So they burned it all off.
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Yeah, it's interesting. We're seeing more and more endurance athletes, competitive athletes, you know, winning triathlons for years and, you know, all kinds of things coming out now with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, which is really shaking things up for people because these guys are considered healthy. They're exercising loads, they're competing at a high level. I'm not saying everyone, but many of them are having these highly processed high carb diets because they've been told that this is necessary to fuel them. But for some of them, it's coming at quite a serious consequence. Yes, maybe a gold medal, but at the same time, 20, 30 years of living with type 2 diabetes. Right. And then you've gotta go, well, is this a good trade? Might there be another way of doing this? And I know Professor Tim Noakes is doing a lot of work on this and trying to show that maybe there are other ways to have elite performance which don't necessarily require these high carb diets.
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Exactly. Yeah.
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You keep saying sugar and starch. For someone who doesn't know what you mean by that, because of course, fruits has sugar in it as well. Could you just clarify what you mean by sugar and starch?
- [18:56]
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Sugar and sugar. Sugar, just like a rose, is, but a rose by any other name. So it can be white sugar, it can be high fructose corn syrup, it can be honey, it can be maple syrup, it can be all the hidden sugars and ultra processed food like maltodextrin or dextrose and so forth. There's a million names for sugar, and you can literally, I think there's 50 different names for sugar that the food industry has come up with, because at least in America, you have to put the major ingredient first and then all the following ingredients after in an order of quantity. And so if you come up with five different kinds of sugar, then you don't have to have sugar as the number one ingredient of food, which most Food is the number one ingredient. So sugar is basically sugar. Flour is basically what I'm talking about when I talk about starch, refined flour, and it can be rice flour, it can be whole wheat flour, it can be white flour, but flour for the most part, unless it's whole grain bread like they have in Germany where you need a meat slicer to cut it, it's pretty much quickly absorbed starches, it's broken down, it's pulverized and it's, and it's not needing digestion in order to be absorbed and it just quickly spikes your blood sugar. That's what I mean by starch and sugar. Now sweet potatoes are starch. You can have for example, a big starchy white potato, probably not a good idea, but a small little tiny red potatoes or purple potatoes that they have. Like in South America. They never had diabetes down there. They weren't obese, they ate potatoes, but they were a different kind of potatoes. They're called fingerling potatoes.
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Yeah.
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So that's kind of what I mean by starch and sugar. Now fruit does have sugar, but it's in a complex matrix so it's not quickly absorbed. So when you have something that's in a complex matrix, it takes a while for your body to break it down. It comes under things like fiber, it's got phytochemicals in there, anti inflammatory compounds. It doesn't spike your blood sugar as much. So whole fruit is fine. I mean people are not going to eat 10 Origins. They can drink a glass of orange juice, which contains oranges very quickly.
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Right.
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So you want to be careful of that. So juice is not the same as eating the fruit. But that again, that's just as bad. And it's kind of like soda with a few extra vitamins and minerals and fiber maybe in it.
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A
It's very clear to me, as I'm sure it is to you, that most people, I would say, simply do not know how good they could feel. They're so used to feeling the way that they are feeling, they think that's normal. And still to this day, I've rarely found something as powerful as encouraging them to have, you know, 10 days or two weeks where they have completely a whole food diet. They take away everything else. They just do that for so many people. It's life changes to go, oh, oh, I didn't realize my mood could be better, my energy could be better, my sleep could be better, all, all these kind of things. And this is the message that you have been, I think for maybe three decades now you've been trying to spread this message with the world. Right. And it seems as though something is changing where people seem to be more receptive to this message, I believe, than ever before.
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C
I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. It's going to tell you what you need if you listen to it. Most of us have just tuned it out.
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Yeah.
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Or we don't connect the dots. And it's amazing. I don't know how many people who I've seen who are super smart, like top executives, leaders in the world who have not made the connection between what they eat and how they feel.
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A
Mark, for someone who's stumbled across our conversation and they're thinking that, you know what, I really need to do something now with my health. You know, I've neglected it for far too long. What are those take home points that you would say to that person?
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C
You know, steady wins the race. I think, you know, for me, I've never gone into shape and out of shape. I mean, I've had moments where I've had more or less, but I've always eaten well, I've always exercised, I've always focused on the basics and the dividend pays dividends. And if you invest, you know, you know, $10 when you're born, it's going to end up being a lot of money even if you don't add any more money to it by the time you're 65. And so it's really about, you know, starting as soon as you can, starting to invest little bits every day, whatever. What is. Slight improvements in your diet, little bits of exercise, stress management practices and trying to kind of move your body and do all the things you write about in your books and that you do so beautifully and elegantly. So. And then as you get more inspired, you want to do more, then do more. But I think, you know, if you're struggling, you know, you've just got to start where you are and take the first step and listen to your body. What happens when you take out the crap and you put in the good stuff? Your body will be smarter than any one of us and telling you what to do. And then you listen or not. And they say, well, you know, like I know, for example, if I have a glass of wine, I'm not going to sleep as well, but I'll know that and I'll make that conscious choice. But I would say now that I know that information, I do it probably a lot less, you know, maybe once a month, every few months. So it's really now a conscious choice to do something where I know it might impact me, like have some ice cream or whatever. I'll make that choice, but it's with the knowledge of how it's going to impact me.
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Yeah, Mark, I love that. Hope you enjoyed that Bite sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this.
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Episode with your friends and family.
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And if you want more, why not.
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Go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite sized Friday email. It's called the Friday five and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good. To get you ready for the weekend.
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You can sign up for it free.
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Of charge@doctor check chatterjee.com Friday 5 Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.