A (30:55)
Oh, my God. Okay, so Oprah is making the rounds because she has released a new book about weight loss medications that she co wrote with Dr. I'm going to butcher this, and I'm sorry, Ania Jastreboff. So let's talk about Dr. Ania. Bottom line is this woman is intimately involved in researching, testing, and advocating for these weight loss drugs. She works for the drug companies who make these weight loss drugs. So I bring this up not because she's some sort of devil. She's potentially doing God's work. Right? If you're 400 pounds and you have advanced heart disease and type 2 diabetes and there are solutions like this out there for you that you can speak with your doctor about, that's wonderful. But what I'm pointing out, number one, is the inherent conflict of interest. On top of that, Oprah has a very complicated financial entanglement with these medications. She was previously the one of the top shareholders of Weight Watchers who purchased a telehealth medicine company called Sequence that sold these GLP1 drugs. And then she famously did this episode on her. I don't know what the heck show she's got nowadays. Some show where she pretended to be, you know, mind boggled about weight loss drugs, knowing that this was time to release after Weight Watchers, which she was a top shareholder of, purchase Sequence. And then when she was critiqued to all Hell, I, you know, being one of those people pointing those things out, she divested and was like, I'm gonna donate my shares. Well, after you made hundreds of millions of dollars, homie, after you did the ginormous cash out, do you not have enough money, girl? If it's not Maui, it's this. But we'll, we'll get back to that in a minute. Let's, let's talk about obesity for a second. So I have a lot of notes here, and I don't want to forget to talk to you about any of it. First thing, is what she said scientifically true? No. No, it's not. Let's begin with what is fat? Not. Not what does fat do in the body? That's a completely separate conversation. But essentially, for our intents and purposes right now, fat is stored energy, okay? A calorie is a unit of energy. So food has calories. Now, if I said to you what weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of diamonds? A pound is a pound, a calorie is a calorie. A calorie in an avocado is the same amount of energy as a calorie in a Twinkie. Now, if I said what's more valuable, you would say the diamonds, right? Well, same thing. The avocado over the Twinkie. But that's because what accompanies it is nutrients versus anti nutrients. So the avocado has vitamins and minerals, and it has macronutrients. Right? It has fiber, it has fat, all the things. And the Twinkie has nothing but garbage in it. It has anti nutrients. So where health and weight intersect, because you could be skinny, by the way, and exceptionally unhealthy. And that just means that as a skinny person, you're eating less Twinkies or you have a faster metabolism. But as I said, skinny people get type 2 diabetes and heart disease and all the things. So when it comes to bigger, smaller, there is no question that it is about eating too many calories. Now, Oprah doesn't actually try to deny that. She's like, well, I ate too many calories because I have a gene that says, eat calories. That's a lie. And we'll get to that in a second. There are numerous genetic markers for obesity. I have four of them. Take a look. Now, despite having four genetic markers for obesity and heart disease, I am not obese and I don't have heart disease. Why? Because genetics loads the gun and lifestyle pulls the trigger. So what that means is that while my son and my wife can eat whatever they want and not gain weight, I cannot and I have to function in a lower calorie allowance. Let's get back to calorie allowance for a second. This is not a question. It is the first law of thermodynamics. Energy, in this case, calories and fat is stored energy. That's what fat is. When you consume calories that you do not burn in a day, they get stored in your fat cells as fat. Calories in calories. Out. Energy is not created or destroyed in a vacuum. A closed system. Your body is not a closed system. You take energy in. When you have an energy call through activity, you burn stored fat. Okay? That's how this works. It's calories in, calories out. Having said that, if we go back to the 1970s, if we were to make the argument, oh, Jill's wrong, it's genetics. Where was obesity back in the 1970s? It was at 5% of adult Americans. Now it's at 74%. 74% of adult Americans are obese or overweight, but in the 70s, it was 5%. And childhood diabetes. Childhood diabetes, type 2 diabetes. It was actually called adult onset diabetes. We changed it to type 2 diabetes because kids started getting diabetes. There was no childhood obesity. It didn't exist. No one tracked it because it wasn't a thing. So genetics evolve over thousands of years, not over five decades. That would be a quantum leap for genetics. If you want to look at what happened. There's no question that the explosion of Americans, waistlines and chronic diseases. Because obesity is associated with 170 different comorbidities from erectile dysfunction, cognitive decline, heart disease, type 2 diabetes. The list is long and it's extensive. Well, what happened? You had an explosion of ultra processed foods. Now, people like my mom, who are boomers, they're like, well, I ate processed foods, too. Not the same. Her version of ketchup. Yeah, it's processed, mostly sugar, had like, I don't know, four ingredients. Our ketchup today has, like, 25. It has a host of chemicals that do disrupt your metabolic function. And I'll talk about big food in just a second. It's loaded with calories. But what these ultra processed foods do, they don't just make us sick because of all the garbage in them. They are designed to make us overeat. If we're looking for a villain, it is not your genetics. It's big food. Now, here's the thing. As I said, some of us can eat whatever we want and not gain weight. Arguably, those are the people who are outliers, those of us who can't eat whatever we want without gaining weight. That just means that you're genetically efficient. Because the reality is that as we evolved as human beings, there were periods of feast and periods of famine. So people who are more efficient at storing fat had ancestors that went through more periods of famine. You can even see this in the indigenous population of the Pima Indians. For example, when you look at the descendants of the great potato famine, they have slower metabolisms. But what that means is they've just become more proficient at fat storage for periods of famine. But we don't have periods of famine anymore. We have pizza and burgers and fries on every corner. Okay, Donut shops. When you look at the true villain, if we were to indict someone, it would absolutely be big food. And I'm not asking you to check your personal accountability at the door. Quite the opposite. But there is no question the system is rigged against you. These big food companies, they were bought by big tobacco in the early 1980s because tobacco was actually in free fall. It was working the campaign against big tobacco and far less people were smoking. And it caused the Philip Morris's of the world to buy the big food companies of the world and bring their playbook over to big food. They brought their team of multidisciplinary scientists and just to give you one example, they engineered something called the bliss point. So this was the perfect ratio of salt, sugar and fat that would create a state of bliss in your brain. One thing of a million things these guys did. How many times does the chip crunch? I mean, it's insane. All of the different things they did. I mean, your food is a science experiment. This ultra processed food, it's not food. But the design is to get you to eat more because it's profitable. That's the point. You've heard me say that you can't eat just one. It's not a slogan, it's a business model. So you're set up to fail. The food is hyper palatable and it blunts your satiety hormones. So what's gonna make somebody eat more or eat less? Your satiety hormones are supposed to say, yo, you're full. So we'll get to what the weight loss drugs are in a minute. But essentially they're mimetics of peptides and weight loss hormones. Think about GLP1 is a satiety, not a weight loss hormone is a satiety hormone. Okay, so does the body not make GLP1? That's what's in Ozempic. It's a replica of GLP1. Of course we do like. And what happened? Everybody's obese because we've had a GLP1 shortage. No, that's, that's not what happened. There was no GLP1. There were no weight loss drugs in the 70s. When you eat whole foods, protein, fat, fiber, the body releases GLP1, leptin, gip, all of these different satiety hormones to say, hey, you're good. Stop eating. Okay. Now, when you eat something like a soda or a Dorito, there's no fiber, there's no protein, there's no healthy fat in these foods. So not only are they not triggering the release of satiety hormones, they actually have so much sugar in them that the sugar gets dumped into your bloodstream and then your pancreas goes, oh my God, what do we do? And it releases a ton of insulin. Insulin's job is to get the sugar out of the blood and into the cells, right? And this is how you become insulin resistant, because over time, your body dumps so much insulin and the cells are like, nope, we're full, all done. And it keeps pumping out insulin, trying to hack the system. But that's different conversation. So when you dump all this insulin and you scrape all that sugar out of the blood so quickly, you now have low blood sugar again. And you're hungry again. Just again. One more mechanism to show you the ways in which these ultra processed foods trigger overeating. Now, let's look at the drugs for a second. I mentioned that they're memetics of satiety hormones. So let's leave out retatrutide. Maybe you've heard about this one. This is a new triple agonist weight loss drug that people are selling on the gray market. Don't want to get into that one. That is a real can of worms. But if we look at Ozempic or you look at Tirzepatide, wegovy, you've got GLP1 and GIP. What do these drugs do to facilitate weight loss? They help you eat less food. We're back to the conversation here of calories in, calories out. That's the mechanism by which they facilitate weight loss. Now, there's obviously some anecdotal concerns with this as well. You know, when food sits in your gut, there's unquestionably a relationship to things like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Is it messing up your microbiome conversation for a different day? The second mechanism that these drugs work on is the pleasure center of your brain, which is why some people, there's anecdotal reports of suicidal ideation, a general malaise, because think about it, if they're dampening that pleasure center in your brain, they work well on addiction, in particular food addiction, the food noise we're talking about. But they can also cause in some people, reports of depression, for example. Now what they do is they essentially block big food from establishing that bliss point. I mean, great, I guess so here's the question. When you have to have a pharmacological solution to an external problem, to chemical experiments with our food that cause us to overeat, we're never really getting to the root of the issue. What bothers me about what Oprah's saying is, is that she's exploiting your vulnerability and your psychology because people do feel ashamed when they're overweight. They shouldn't, but they do. There are a host of psychological issues associated with obesity. People utilize food as a defense structure, a coping mechanism. You know, I've given this example many times in the past, but it's the most obvious. If you're a sexual abuse survivor, maybe you're overeating to desexualize and put on a layer of protection. Right now you're not aware of it, but arguably that's one of the reasons people unconsciously overeat who've been assaulted. So if you're telling people, hey, listen, I know you feel ashamed. I know you feel powerless, it's not you. You're genetically screwed. Screwed. You've a, disempowered them. You've b, let Big Food off the hook and the solutions that we need to find with regard to the nefarious actions those companies are engaged in. And you've totally negated the psychological piece of this where many people who are obese need help. If you want to take these drugs, by all means, it's your body. Do what you feel is right for you. But it's imperative that you go into this with the understanding of how the body works. The fact that you are not genetically sentenced to obesity and disease. That is not true. That's a lie. That what's really messing you up and throwing you off are the ultra processed foods. You are addicted to ultra processed foods. So if you want to blame someone, that's definitely one of the culprits right there. And that would be one of the first things that you should tackle. If there's psychological trauma, you might want to get counseling. You might want to seek psychedelic therapy. I've heard incredible things about people utilizing psychedelic therapy for their overeating addiction. These drugs have side effects. They need to be done under a doctor's supervision. And understanding the science is an absolute imperative. So having said all of that, zero judgment here. Just want to make sure you go into these choices with your eyes wide open. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please, like, comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.
