Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts
This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interrogations many experts on a variety of health concerns. To learn more professional interviews, click here.
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has written a number of excellent books about state. His latest, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine” travels penetrating into the details of how changes in our food supply have damaged our metabolic state.( The started word “metabolical” is actually a portmanteau of the words “metabolic” and “diabolical.”)
“I wrote it because nothing else has worked, ” Lustig says. “Part of the trouble is this is such a complicated issue. There are too many stakeholders and you have to find a technique for making everyone happy. Until you do, you can’t solve it.
There is a way to actually solve this,[ but] every stakeholder, whether it be the patient, the doctor, the menu fellowship, the insurance manufacture, the medical profession, Wall Street and Congress … should be aware the same thing. They all have to be working off the same set of information. You investigate what happens when you don’t work off the same set of happenings.
So, my job was to positioned all of this in one volume so that everyone had access to the same intelligence, and then we can go from there. I lay out in the book what the debate for deposit the part food system is, and how everyone can benefit from it, even the meat industry.”
The Two Primary Keys
In summary, it simmers down to two primary key issues or problems. The first is that the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know that medications were never planned or designed to treat the foundational cause of chronic disease. They simply discuss the symptoms.
“In the book, I make it very clear that modern medicine has two cliques, two paradigms, ” Lustig says. “One is medication of acute disease, and for the most part, they’ve gotten it reasonably right. I comes within the framework of that system for 40 times and was comfortable within it.
But for chronic disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid troubles, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia , nonalcoholic fatty liver illnes, polycystic ovarian infection — all of who the hell is chronic metabolic illness, all of who the hell is mitochondrial cankers — we don’t have anything. We have symptomatic easing exclusively.
So, we have LDL lowering operators — and if LDL were the problem, that would be fine — except LDL is NOT the problem. LDL is a symptom of the question. It is a manifestation of the metabolic dysfunction. Same thing with hyperglycemia.
Same thing with hypertension. Same thing with osteoporosis. Same thing with autoimmune disease. All of these, we have symptomatic medicines. We don’t cure or alter the disease; we just treat the symptoms. And so the malady gets worse.
The way I describe it in the book is, it’s like granting an aspirin to a patient with a intelligence tumor because they have a headache. It might work today, but it’s not going to solve the problem. And that’s what modern medicine is propelling at people with chronic disease, and it is, of course, violating the bank.”
The other question is that the food manufacture doesn’t want you to know that virtually all nutrients are intrinsically are you all right until they’re processed, and processed foods make up a majority of the menus beings feed.
Food is remedy, but processed food is lethal, and there’s no drug that can undo the damage of processed food.~ Dr. Robert Lustig
As was mentioned by Lustig 😛 TAGEND
“The point I establish in the book is that really since they are call it processed food, doesn’t make it food. Calling it a processed food has indicated that it is a subset of nutrient. Michael Pollan[ calls it] appetizing food-like elements. The detail of its consideration of this matter is, processed food is lethal. Food is medicine, but processed food is deadly, and there’s no medication that can reverse the damage of processed food.”
Indeed, once you are familiar with the molecular pathways, when you are familiar with the transcription influences and the actual mechanisms of action of various diseases, and the various treats be applicable to treat them, you can easily see that they do not treat the underlying problem. And that’s why people don’t get well.
“What I’m trying to do in this book is to separate nutrient from processed food and explaining that processed food is the problem, and we will not solve the health care crisis or the environmental crisis until we solve processed food, ” Lustig says.
The History of Medicine
In his work, Lustig does an excellent job of presenting the history of our food and medical organizations, and the various distress that extended us down the road leading to where we are today. For example, a significant part of why medical doctors are so clueless about state today is because Big Pharma was placed in charge of educational opportunities. The remedy industry, in turn, was a distinct profit-making intrigue from its inception.
In 1910, Abraham Flexner, an schoolteacher, wrote the Flexner Report, which turned out to be a turning point in areas of creating evidence-based modern remedy, while simultaneously eliminating countless health-related ingredients, including nutrition and preventive medicine. His brother, Simon Flexner, a pathologist and pharmacist, was the first president of Rockefeller University.
One of the reasons the Flexner Report eliminated certain aspects of medicine was because John D. Rockefeller, chairwoman of Standard Oil, was also in the pharmaceutical business. He was trying to sell coal tar, a byproduct of lubricant refining, as a medicine for a range of ailments.
So, Rockefeller was seeking new benefit streets. “He mostly said we have to get treats and especially coal tar into the paws of physicians who can prescribe it, ” Lustig says. The only way to do that was by overtake the medical organization and changing the focus to pharmaceuticals.
“So that was the start of Big Pharma. That’s not the legend they want to tell, but that is in fact the bag, ” Lustig says. “Same thing with dentistry. Weston Price, perhaps the most famous of all dentists, knew this back in the 1920 s and ‘3 0s and actually said that sugar was the primary driver of chronic oral sicknes, whether it be periodontitis or dental caries.
Everything was going in that direction until 1945 with the onset of fluoride, and then swiftly everything Weston Price had developed up to that time went deep-sixed. In fact, the dentists even said that if we got rid of dental caries, how are we going to make money? So, his occupation was mostly forgotten.
The same thing in dietetics. It turns out that Lenna Cooper, co-founder of the American Dietetic Association, back in 1917, was the apprentice of John Harvey Kellogg. She didn’t even have a dietary severity … Kellogg was very much against meat. He was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and it turned out that the American Dietetic Association adopted the part Seventh-Day Adventist religious paradigm.
To this day, we still see it in terms of vegan foods. So, parties talk about vegan diets being appropriate for health, and they are able to, but they are not by any means exclusive. They too talk about it being important for environmental health to try to reduce the methane from the moo-cows.
It turns out the moo-cows didn’t spew methane until we started giving them antibiotics, because we killed off the good bacteria in their bowels and now they have quadruple the amount of methane compared to what they did in 1968 before the animal antibiotic manium went started. So, it’s not the moo-cows, it’s what we do to the cows. All meat is inherently good. It’s what we do to the meat that’s not, and that’s what I show in the book.”
The adulteration of our menu can actually be traced back to around 1850. In Great Britain, the industrial revolt was a turning point where two things happened at the same time.
One, beings in sweatshops acted long periods and didn’t have time to cook proper meals, so they terminated up dining processed cookies laden with sugar, which had become available from other British settlements like Barbados. This undernourished them in terms of antioxidants, fatty acids and other important nutrients. The second large-hearted dietary deepen was canning, which disclosed people to lead poisoning as the cans were made of lead.
Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Food Labels
By now, you’ve probably civilized yourself diligently to read food names. The problem is that the label will not tell you what’s been done to the food. “This is one of the reasons why nobody’s getting better because there’s nothing to learn from the label that will actually help you, ” Lustig says. According to Lustig, a nutrient is healthy if it quenches two criteria 😛 TAGEND
It protects your liver
It feeds your intestine
A food that does neither is lethal, and any menu that does exclusively one or another, but not both, is somewhere in the middle. Real food, because it has fiber, protects your liver and nourishes your intestine. Managed food is fiberless, and the reason for this is because fiber abates shelf life. By removing the fiber from the food, it frustrates it from croaking rancid, but it also constructs it inherently unhealthy.
Essentially, “in an attempt to try to increase availability, decline wastage, we turned our entire food supply on its head in order to create commodities rather than meet meat accessible, ” Lustig says.
Then, in the 1970 s, Richard Nixon told the U.S. agriculture secretary, Earl Butts, to come up with a plan to reduction menu costs, as fluctuating meat prices were starting political discontent. The solution was the start of monoculture and chemical-driven farming.
“Now, we have nitrogen runoff destroy environmental matters and antibiotics in the feed in order to keep the animals alive, but mostly killing off their own bacteria and ours, and likewise organizing chronic disease and destroying the environment as well.
It’s basically built into our Western food system. And we’re not going to solve health care, we’re not going to solve chronic disease, we’re not going to solve the economics[ or] the environmental problems until we recognize what their own problems is, ” Lustig says.
Refinement Builds Everything Worse
While Lustig argues that the refinement of carbohydrates is the primary criminal that fixes processed food so bad for your health, I believe handled fatties may be an even bigger help.
Omega-6 linoleic battery-acid( LA ), including, is a damaging metabolic lethal. In 1850, the LA in the average diet was about 2% of total calories. Today, it’s between 20% and 30%. While we do need some omega-6, since your mas is not make it, the point is we need nowhere near the amount we’re now get.
“I agree that omega-6s are a problem, ” Lustig says. “No. 1, they’re proinflammatory by themselves and No. 2, they have enough unsaturated doubled bonds so that if you heat them sufficiently high, you flip them and be brought to an end drawing trans overweights. That’s the problem of all of these polyunsaturated overweights. They’re not meant to be heated beyond their smoking extent, and we do.”
In addition to those issues, polyunsaturated flabs such as LA are highly prone to oxidation, and as the fatty oxidizes, it breaks down into harmful sub-components such as advanced lipid oxidation end products( ALES) and oxidized LA metabolites( OXLAMS ). These ALES and OXLAMS too cause damage.
One type of advanced lipid oxidation end product( ALE) is 4HNE, a mutagen known to begin DNA damage. Studies have shown there’s a definite correlation between elevated levels of 4HNE and heart failure. LA breaks down into 4HNE even faster when the lubricant is heated, which is why cardiologists recommend scaping fried foods. LA intake and the subsequent ALES and OXLAMS made also frisk a significant role in cancer.
HNE and other ALES are remarkably pernicious even in enormously small quantities. While excess sugar is certainly bad for your health and should often should be restricted to 25 grams per day or less, I repute LA is far more damaging overall. As asked by Lustig 😛 TAGEND
“We have a metabolic headache of reactive oxygen categories( ROS) that are doing damage if you can’t quench them. That’s why we have antioxidants in our figure — glutathione, vitamin E –[ they’re] mostly the capsize for those reactive oxygen categories. The happening of the matter is our mitochondria are stirring ROS every single hour of every single day.
It is a normal byproduct of metabolism. The quality is we’re supposed to be able to slake them. You can only quench them if you get the antioxidants into you.
The problem is as soon as you’ve taken the germ out of the cereal seed, you’ve mostly reduced your antioxidant consumption by tenfold. So, we are antioxidant deficient because of food processing, which then leaves us vulnerable to the ruins of ROS from multiple sources including our own mitochondria.”
Real Food Is the Answer
The key, then, is to eat whole food, which is naturally rich in fiber and low in carbohydrate. On a back observe, free radicals are not all bad. They’re likewise biological signaling molecules, and if you arbitrarily suppress them, which is the danger you run into when using very high sums of antioxidant adds-on, it can backfire.
The best way is to get your antioxidants from your menu, and real meat not only equips antioxidants, but likewise doesn’t procreate excessive ROS, so you get help from both outcomes, as it were. As for the type of diet you choose, any diet can work, furnished it’s right for your metabolism. The only diet that does not work for anyone is a processed menu nutrition.
Solutions, Solutions
Now that you know the root questions, what mixtures does Lustig propose? For starters, education alone is not enough, he says. We need education plus implementation. And that requires a different societal response.
“The way I describe it is that there’s personal intervention, which for the lack of a better term we can call rehab, and societal intervention, which for lack of a better message we can call statutes. Rehab and principles for everything that is a hedonic element — it is necessary to both.”
The first step of personal intervention is figuring out if you’re sick. “And don’t ask your doctor because they don’t know how it works to figure it out, ” Lustig says. In Chapter 9 of his record, he lists evidences that can help you self-diagnose.
In terms of taking into consideration your health problems, your primary “treatment” will be to stimulate, possibly significant, changes to how you shop and feed. As a general, easy-to-follow rule, if it has a label, don’t buy it. Real food is not have part names. Lustig’s book also includes guidance on how to read food labels in cases where you might not have an option.
“We likewise need societal intervention. The problem is the food industry doesn’t want any societal involvement because this is their gravy train. So, the question is, how do you do this?
Normally we would get it on through legislation, but the food industry has totally co-opted the part legislative diverge; 338 out of 535 congressmen make coin from the American Legislative Exchange Council( ALEC ), and agriculture is their fourth[ largest] donor after petroleum, tobacco and pharma.”
Barring legislative success, we’re left with case. Already, there are a number of lawsuits in the works, various of which Lustig is a part of. Ultimately, we must restructure the entire food system so that all stakeholders benefit. “And we have to demonstrate to them how they can benefit, ” Lustig says.
Subsidies Are the Biggest Hindrance to Change
Can the food industry make money selling real meat? Lustig conceives the answer is yes, and in his notebook, he details how real menu clears both monetary and ecological sense. The key is to remove subsidies, which currently grease the wheels of the processed food industry.
“The gives are the single biggest blockade, ” Lustig says. “They’re the single biggest obstacle to being able to fix the food supply because that’s what’s meeting processed food cheap. The Giannini Foundation at UC Berkeley did a back of envelope calculation several years ago.
What would the price of food look like if we got rid of all meat gives? It is about to change that the price of food would not change. People say it would go up. No, it wouldn’t. It would not change except for two entries. Two pieces would go up: Sugar and corn[ used for high-fructose corn syrup ]. So, basically, that would reduce consumption of the primary poison in our food that’s cause the most disturbance …
The food industry … can originate more fund doing the right thing added we get rid of the subsidies or spawn the subsidies for real food so that they can make money selling the right thing. This involves authority. There’s no way around it. That’s why this record is complete. It’s laid out for all the stakeholders, including government, as to what has to happen and why.
I wrote this notebook for everyone to understand the same principles all at once, so that we can actually have an argument and a debate and hopefully come to the table about the facts, because until we do that, there will be no solving this difficulty. If everyone comes to the table, honestly, and acknowledges to what the issue is, what their own problems is, we are able to, in fact, solve it.”
To learn more, is secure to pick up a transcript of Lustig’s book, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine.” You are also welcome to find a prosperity of reporting on his website, RobertLustig.com, including media looks, audio recordings, video chides, diaries, essays and upcoming phenomena where you can hear him speak.
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