What Sugar REALLY Does To You!

[Music] hello everyone uh today we're lucky enough to be joined by dr anthony shaffy who is a surgeon and also a nutritional researcher he's 100 carnivore and has a different take on nutrition than what you'll find in the mainstream doctor shafi is also an ex-professional athlete having played for america in rugby union um and you've also done a bit of mma i believe yeah yeah prior to that since i was about 14. yeah cool um all right so the topic for today is sugar um and i want to start off by asking um what don't we know about sugar dr schaefer what do we what don't we understand uh we first have to sort of distinguish what kind of sugars are we talking about when we say sugar generally we mean table sugar but obviously there are a lot of different carbohydrates that are called you know simple sugars the sugar that you want to watch out for is fructose specifically so that is obviously it comes with fruits and so forth but it's you know half of sucrose sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose and then you have high fructose corn syrup and that's been painted as this sort of evil monster and it is but it's almost identical to sucrose because it has very similar levels almost 50-50 percent fructose glucose but it's just a mixture of the two as opposed to being a bound form and then honey actually has more fructose than both of those yeah so the the problem with fructose is that is how it's metabolized in your body it's actually non-essential it's not something that you need in your body there are no biochemical processes in your body that require fructose that can't be done by something else so you don't need it at all a major problem is that it goes directly to your liver and then gets broken down from there into fatty droplets and other other sorts of byproducts the problem there is is that it actually gets broken down to the same byproducts as ethanol alcohol right so you get the same diseases and damage to your body from eating fructose as you do for me from drinking so you can get fatty liver disease from being alcoholic and from eating sugar exactly yeah so they actually it actually used to be you know very well known that only alcoholics got fatty liver disease and then in the 1990s we started increasing a lot of our sugar consumption putting sugar and everything because we got rid of the fat and different foods and everything tasted horrible and so we put sugar in everything and then all of a sudden you know 10 year olds were getting fatty liver disease and they were also getting adult onset diabetes type 2 diabetes used to be called adult onset diabetes because really only found in adults and generally they're alcoholics and that's because the alcohol really causes that and then all of a sudden 10 year olds are getting this and they're saying well wow what's going on here how can a 10 year old get adult onset diabetes they're not an adult and you know he's getting fatty liver disease but only alcoholics get fatty liver disease how can someone who's never drank alcohol get this so instead of actually looking into this and actually thinking for literally one second they just said you know what just we'll just rename it and so now it's non-alcoholic fatty liver disease right it's exactly the same thing yeah wow you mentioned something earlier about people adding more companies adding sugar to food because they remove the fat meaning it tastes terrible yeah yeah that you know you talk to any chef i'll tell you fat is flavor yeah butter yeah exactly and so you know when we're told that fats bad for you it's not it's actually really really good for you animal fat is vegetable oils and so forth are actually quite toxic for a number of reasons um when you take that out i mean it tastes very very bland and horrible like even steak like i love steak but like a lean steak you can only have so much of it before it's just sort of like yeah you know where's like a you know fatty steak because obviously you just keep going yeah um so you mentioned before fructose is one of the worst forms of sugar um so if if i'm eating fruit i feel like there's a limit to how much whole fruit i can eat i'm not gonna eat more than two apples yeah so is it is it dangerous or is it detrimental for people to be eating whole fruit so obviously you know it's better you know because it's dose dependent you know that's like saying you know i'm only doing two lines of coke instead of a whole bag you know so but yeah you're right it uh you know two apples is very different than two glasses of apple juice yes exactly you know like a glass of apple juice i you know have some like 10 apples you know worth of juice go into that it's gonna be a lot more sugar um it's also been shown that the fiber in in fruit and so forth when you eat that you know delays the absorption of fruit it delays absorption everything because you can't it's literally sawdust that's what that's what cellulose is that's what fiber is and they add sawdust into processed foods to up the fiber content you know there's tons of foods that meet that um and so what does that do it blocks you know the enzymes and so forth from getting at these different foods in your in your gut and it blocks them from actually hitting the you know the um you know the the villi and things like that in your small intestine and getting absorbed so it delays that stops that absorption then it gets into your colon and you know bacteria and so forth and you eliminate it so it does reduce some of the fructose in there but at the same time you are getting that stuff in so it is very important to be aware of that and you're also getting other things that you don't want as well fiber in and of itself actually causes damage to your gut lining causes micro abrasion causes increased mucus secretion inflammatory reaction and so forth and so people especially with autoimmune disorders chromosomes or clients they have a real hard time with fiber and so forth absolutely so where do you think the story of father being before us has come from how do you think oh yeah yeah i i mean i remember this when i was a kid so the the entire argument on why we should eat fiber and and vegetables in general is what everything was about fat fat craze in the 1980s it was like you know fat busters and all these sorts of things like diet size diets you know fat you are what you eat if you eat fat you get that that was a whole argument completely wrong yeah i ate a lot of fat i have 78 my calories in fat i generally maintain below 10 body fat even when i'm not working out and where do you get the fat from from steak generally yeah beef and things like that butter you know like i melt butter into my ribeye steaks um so in the 1980s well 1978 1977 1980 the usda declared unequivocally that cholesterol causes heart disease saturated fat creates cholesterol stop eating both of these things that's completely wrong it's going to be completely debunked but that changed how everyone viewed everything so the obesity rate in england after world war ii was six percent in 1983 when they adopted these same these same dietary models was still six percent now it's like over 24 you know same thing in america it was six percent and eight percent and then it you know tripled in a very short period of time um so everyone started getting fatty when started getting sick and they got even more crazed about not eating fat then they said you should eat vegetables because they don't have nutrition because they don't have calories and because they have they're bulky and they have fiber which you cannot absorb so it was never thought it was never actually argued at that time that this is nutritionally beneficial they said hey this isn't nutritionally beneficial so therefore you'll feel full so you can eat as much of it as you want and you'll get full and you won't you won't get any fat there was a celery diet but i said you can just you know it takes more calories to process the celery that you eat than you get from the celery so like oh just eat all the celery you want it's like well that's how much celery i want you know and they don't talk about all the other things in there as well which are very harmful toxic components that are in plants and vegetables and so forth that are that plant's way of defending itself against being eaten that people just aren't thinking about but that was the entire argument was that you can't break it down you can't get nutrition from it but it makes you feel full but it makes it feel full and you get the stress receptors and your body your body produces a bit of leptin your brain goes oh i'm full so forth um and it's nonsense people were getting fatter they're getting sicker they're getting them well this is when a lot of the eating disorders really took off you know bulimia anorexia and so forth people are starved for nutrients they need the fat you need the meat you need those things but if that makes you fat meat has a lot of fat oh my goodness stay away from it and then they're craving it and everything your body's like you need to eat this and so they'll binge and purge they'll eat it and then they'll go oh my god i can't believe i did that and they'll vomit it up or you get anorexics which one people have these problems growing a number of different issues this is just one of them that's theorized is that they aren't going to eat the the everything that their body's craving them to have because that's going to make them fat and they have a very strong aversion to all the vegetables and things like that because they don't make them feel good because of the poisons and so forth they just don't feel good they don't like it they don't taste good and so they just don't eat at all yeah and you get into a very pathological relationship with your food as opposed to being you eat food to you know give your body nutrition now you're eating for a lot of other different reasons yeah absolutely so if we go back to the effect that sugar has on your body so we talked about fatty liver disease how else is sugar affecting our bodies yeah so um professor robert lustig who's a professor emeritus at university of california san francisco medical school in pediatric neuroendocrinology so he deals with kids with bad diabetes and things like that he along with the biochemistry program at uc ucsf which is it's a i think last time i checked it was like the number six medical research institution in america so it's a very very top institution they show biochemically you know how fructose is broken down your body by your liver and so forth um and and it shows that all these different sorts of things and it also showed that it causes peripheral insulin resistance which is type 2 diabetes it's also in you know involved in atherosclerosis and so forth so you know heart disease we've actually had studies showing or suggesting anyway that sugar caused heart disease back in the 40s and 50s and it was actually then that the sugar companies got wind of this and they said like okay we need to cover this up that's bad that's it and so they they actually the general american medical association actually published this in 2015 actual internal memos from the sugar companies back then detailing how they paid off three harvard professors to falsify data and publish fraudulent studies to make it appears that cholesterol is causing heart disease when it was really sugar and then one of those professors would name head of the usda in 1965 and then all of a sudden usda just declares that this is happening and you know it's appealing to authority you know you know teacher says so you know says that cholesterol is bad therefore cholesterol is bad and it completely uh well you know ruined the reputations of everyone they're saying no no it's really sugar and really actually destroyed their careers and their livelihoods and so forth and they were then they were dead right the whole time so uh lustig show that show that this does the same damage your body as alcohol after after it's broken down obviously doesn't make you drunk and have the same central nervous uh effects but after it's broken down it has the same damage to your body and kids as well you know get them you know people don't realize how much sugar is around you know you'd never give a kid you know whiskey i hope you know and um but you probably give them you know orange juice yeah other choices right yeah well one 12-ounce glass of orange juice has as many grams of fructose as three shots of 40 whiskey have alcohol and does the same damage to their little body um so he was showing all sorts of things and he's written you know dozens of papers on the subject uh written books on a subject and so forth done tons and tons of talks as well they're avail readily available on youtube they're very interesting he just talks about fructose and how damaging this is and how it causes the same things as alcohol fatty liver disease cirrhosis diabetes even heart disease uh it's implicated in cancer certainly feeds cancer if not you know precipitating and causing cancer and and even has a strong correlation with alzheimer's alzheimer's is now referred to in some circles as type three diabetes and so oh there's these similar metabolic changes and effects that we're seeing in this disease process as with type 2 diabetes like well yeah no kidding they're they have the same cause or at least they have one of the same causes that's interesting i remember reading reports about uh elderly people who have alzheimer's being put onto a ketogenic high fat diet and the alzheimer's being prepared yeah well it was it's um there was quite large delays with that but the high-fat ketogenic diet they found was best it was a better treatment model than every alzheimer's drug that's ever been trialled you know um less profitable yeah probably yeah yeah but you know i mean that's the thing with with doctors now is is you know we're all we're usually for for thousands of years of medicine you know you had a disease that came up and or an injury or something and you've had a treatment for that thing um and so now we're looking at this now we have these chronic diseases ah this is a disease we need to treat this disease but the problem is it's not a disease these are toxicities these are these are poisoning coming and you know sometimes we recognize something as poisoning your lead poisoning this it was like the romans right back in the day they had they had lead pipes and they all had sort of low-grade lead poisoning for you know however long and they just thought well this is just how you age this is how you do and this is normal and it's like well no actually it's not normal something's happening something's making us sick they figured out it was lead pipes so we're living in that now we don't realize we're being poisoned but we're all being poisoned so like vegetables fruit you know bread sugar these sorts of things they're all our lead pipes and you know you have to have some outside looking and going like i can tell you that this is not normal that's a very interesting perspective i saw something on your instagram that i reposted yesterday where you were talking about things native americans living up to 120 years plus 120 years yeah uh whereas now it's rare to find someone in good health over 80. and over 17 is rare yeah and think about think about the native australian population um that generally quite poor health in in medicine here we just say whatever that whatever their age is just add 20 to it because that's metabolically okay yeah exactly yeah so if someone comes in at 35 you consider them like you would a 55 year old and then those sorts of you know you know considerations and and so forth at that time they're more at risk um the that's from eating the wrong thing we know as geneticists for decades now i think at least 20 years that chromosomally genetically the human animal should live 120 years wow right and and that's just if you just don't do anything special like if you just don't get in your own way you know you're not harming yourself you're not smoking you're not drinking you're not eating bad food you should live to 120 years and you're all dying in our 60s and 70s native populations are dying quicker than that but they didn't used to and there was actually a study here in australia that noticed that and said well you know this isn't what you guys don't don't normally eat onto a western diet you normally eat animals you find in the bush let's get you back on that diet see what happens it just reversed all their diseases reversed their obesity had gave them very very big health benefits you know in america there have been you know books written about exactly all sorts of things back hundreds of years um you know showing how these people were just pure carnivores and they had they lived great great age and people would be could be dismissive of that and say well they're probably just saying that they're probably just you know saying that because they put great weight in in longevity yeah oh he just says that well i mean that's your assumption but there's all these different native populations that all basically say oh i was born the year that volcano erupted and they're like that was like 120 years ago like that can't be and they just assume that they're lying but it's like but but every single time every single case in every single country and every single continent they're completely different from each other yeah i mean and you know maybe one culture you know puts great stock in that and you're like oh yeah well that's you know lazarus he lives a thousand years i'm like okay all right yeah exactly but you know every single time in every single culture on every single continent i don't think that would really hold water and we do know now that genetically we are supposed to live that long if we live naturally they're living naturally um uh dr j.h salisbury uh you know promised for the salisbury steak um he actually was a new york doctor in the 1800s who did a 30-year research project into the optimal nutrition for humans he you know went with the native americans saw their only meat only in buffalo and they were living in these great ages and there's actually quite a lot of documentation to support that and show that and he was saying he was showing they were so healthy they were just running around doing these things 110 115 and he was like that's crazy yeah salisbury jh salisbury yeah you wrote a book about all this stuff in the 1800s yeah yeah yeah so we've known about this for a long time he was you know he was fine the people that just long before sugar you know really became a problem and so it's just people eating plants and bread and all these sorts of things and he found that people who are eating plants and bread and so you know western diet yeah uh they were getting diseases other people simply weren't you know they were getting sicker easier they were more susceptible to tuberculosis they were getting rheumatoid arthritis crohn's ulcerative colitis gout all these sorts of things they found they put them on a pure red meat and water diet they would just go away so he was curing rheumatoid arthritis in 1800 years before any medications just goes away happens today there's quite a large population of people with autoimmune disorders crohn's ulcerative colitis rheumatoid arthritis and so forth they're just completely getting rid of their immunoimmune autoimmune disease diseases very famous one would be um kyla peterson jordan peterson's daughter she had horrible rheumatoid arthritis where she actually had yeah two of them two of them when she was a teenager and it's gone now yeah she's off all her horrible medications she's having kids now i mean she's she's doing great and that's really good to see um so yeah as far as like you know the native americans are concerned i remember hearing when i was a kid that when on a western diet native americans were four times as likely to get obesity heart disease diabetes cancer and so forth and i remember thinking at the time well doesn't that mean that the food is causing the disease you know because if they don't eat the food they don't get the disease and we eat the food and we get the disease just at a lower rate you know and then it was just like okay well what what's a western diet compared to a non-luster diet what's their diet what are they eating that we're not and vice versa well they didn't say it at the time because it was a pure carnivore diet generally generally ready then buffalo you know the inulus and so forth would be seal and polar bear and whale and things like that but exclusively neat you know there's so many explorer studies or um journals books and things like that written in australia in america that i've read and they always have a chapter something that they talk about like the diet of the native people and they marvel how they only eat meat how they're crazy healthy up north i remember reading one um this guy was just shocked that you know these people wouldn't wouldn't eat any plants at all ever or any bread ever and they didn't want it it was just like they'd offer them but no no thank you um and they were talking about you know the inuit specifically you know someone you know zoom in the north pole there's just no plants ever you know obviously yeah but some of them are coming across that yeah exactly yeah so you know one's more southerly um you know they're saying like okay well i understand nine months out of the year everything just packed with snow but for three months out of the year you know when the snow melts and this is in his words surely they could live off the bounty of the land and but they don't they don't want to and they they really wondered at that well that's why you know stuff's bad for you it's not very good you know you could you know different native populations would know what to eat uh in times of of starvation but if they didn't need to they didn't eat it and so that was the thing you know we used to call these things the diseases of the west because only like the western peoples eating a western diet would get them to experience them yeah yeah and so then you go to spaces like oh they don't get the disease of the west now we just call them getting older and that's normal and people don't realize how abnormal that is you know the the heart disease rate since 1980 tripled the obesity rate has tripled the stroke rate has tripled the cancer rate has tripled type 2 diabetes has gone up by 5.8 times yeah there's this sort of sense of like you compare yourself to the previous generation so we oh i find that you tend to we tend to compare ourselves to say our parents when you look at our parents it's like well i reckon like i'm in five years you know longer than my dad um and uh but now we have this modern modern medicine and the actual quality of the life might not be as high so it's it's really hard to have this perspective that you've got where you're looking at 1800 1700 native populations who've been you know living a certain way for thousands of years it's it's so easy to just look at here and now yeah and not actually zoom out um like you know but the work of western day price is similar yeah yeah dentist in the 1930s traveling around the world looking at these native populations who have incredible health but their children who are getting exposed to the western way of life they've got crowded teeth and just terrible health yeah well they found uh there was a reading a journal in dentistry and they were talking about how crooked teeth and small jaw size is not genetic that it's it's uh nutritional and it's generally a nutritional deficiency you know you you need k2 k1 calcium and vitamin d for proper jaw and teeth formation and straight teeth and so forth and these things don't really exist too readily in plants certainly k2 doesn't and so that's generally what we see is you know someone has like you know we made to be deficient in everything but generally almost you know a lot of people are deficient in k2 and so they have these you know crooked crowded teeth you know they're not their wisdom teeth aren't coming in like that that's a very new thing i actually feel like oh we're evolving like not in two generations dude yeah no i'm sorry yeah so i'm wondering about that so how can we all need to go to the dentist to get them taken out when you know what our ancestors have done not that yeah yeah well they don't need it yeah i mean you look at your cavemen skulls and so forth you know um you know before they i was just not actually talking to someone about this the other day apparently a paleontologist can tell the skull is before or after the agricultural revolution just by looking at their teeth and jaw size you know and the quality of their teeth they're having cavities and so forth because they just didn't happen before that think of animals in a while they don't have rotting teeth they're just hanging out of their mouth what they don't brush their teeth they don't go to the dentist how can that be well they're eating their natural their natural diet and their their body is able to accommodate that um you know you don't see animals in the wild with crooked teeth you know strange creepy jaws yeah yeah yeah you see a lot of people do that yeah absolutely well you get in the zoo sometimes they'll give them fruit i don't rot their teeth you know they'll be the only you know gorilla that eats bananas or cartoons and the zoo you know and while they generally don't do that that's not their that's not their stable diet and and their teeth work better for that yeah sure all right so we'll circle back to sugar avoid fructose so i'm guessing fruit juice a avoid like the black the honey absolutely yeah what other foods are people consuming that are plant and sugar that you know might be really damaging their health but they don't realize it um you mean apart from sugar well that's why it has sugar soft yeah anything anything that you didn't make probably has sugar in it because they add it to everything the sugar companies know full well that this stuff is addictive and it is addictive it gives a dopamine response to the addiction centers of your brain just like cocaine heroin and meth and there are mri studies showing that fructose kills the same areas of your brain as meth to the same extent as meth okay so um that's that's quite appalling it's it's an it's a very addictive drug i think that's the worst drug on earth specifically because you know we don't realize that it's a drug at all in everything and we get kids addicted to a good old but they like it yeah they probably like you know cigarettes and coke too you know once they got addicted to it it's it's very very harmful it you know is addictive like meth kills you know the the reward centers in your brain like meth and damages your body like alcohol how is this not you know an age restricted chemical um there was i forget the guy's name but he was a you know a very well-known doctor in amsterdam and you know he's been saying for quite some time as well that sugar is the worst drug on earth i absolutely agree with him and this guy is from amsterdam like they know about drugs there you know so all right well i think we'll leave it there cool doctor that was brilliant yeah thank you very much appreciate it thoughts on sugar thanks very much