When we take a global bird's eye view of diets around the world, it’s clear that the Western diet makes humans sick. Any nation that has acquired our habits of eating highly-processed foods, rich in refined carbohydrates, fructose, and inflammatory fats, ends up metabolically unhealthy. Metabolic health is much more than just maintaining a healthy weight. It’s the sum of our cardiovascular, mitochondrial, liver, gut, and hormone function—and a poor diet impacts all of these systems for the worse.
Today, I’m excited to talk to my friend and a physician who is an inspiration to me, Dr. Robert Lustig, all about fixing our metabolic health. Type II diabetes used to be called “adult-onset diabetes” and fatty liver disease was formely only associated with alcoholism. Now, these are diseases we see in some very young children, and a processed diet high in sugar is to blame. Dr. Lustig and I dive into the sad state of metabolic health in our country, as well as in other countries that now eat like us. He explains how sugar and alcohol act similarly within the liver, harming our metabolic health in the process. He also breaks down the problem with fructose and how the body processes and responds to it differently than glucose.
Dr. Lustig shares some empowering details on using nutritional interventions to improve metabolic health. By reducing the percentage of calories from sugar in children’s diets and replacing it with other foods, they were able to reverse metabolic syndrome without any change in weight or overall caloric intake. The real issue they discovered was liver fat, created by high-sugar diets. There are certain tests that can be extremely helpful in identifying our level of metabolic health, one of them being fasting insulin. Unfortunately, this test is often left off metabolic panels at the doctor's office.
Dr. Lustig and I talk about why you should get it, why it’s normally ignored, and share examples of how it’s dramatically helped our patients over the years. And we discuss other markers of liver health and interpretation issues to be aware of. We also get into the topic of uric acid, why salt isn’t the culprit for high blood pressure, and the eight subcellular pathologies that underlie all metabolic diseases. With 93% of the population suffering with poor metabolic health, this episode could definitely help you or someone you love.