Auto-transcribed and lightly edited for readability; speaker labels added by LIV3. Timestamps follow the player above. The views expressed are the speakers' own. Individual experiences described in the conversation are anecdotal, are not typical results, and have not been evaluated by the FDA.

01:17 Fructose, glucose, and sucrose: what's actually different

01:17Jerry:So Chris, I want to thank you for being a guest on the Confidence Through Health podcast.

01:21Chris:Thank you so much for having me, Jerry. Looking forward to it.

01:24Jerry:So one of the things that, and we talked a little bit before we started recording, but one of the reasons why I want to have you on is because of the research that you've done and you've developed a product around it. But the difference between fructose, glucose, and sucrose, a lot of people hear that and go, well, I've been told there's no difference, right? But there is a difference. So let's just start there with a basic knowledge base for people: what are we talking about when we talk about those three things?

01:59Chris:Okay, awesome, let's do that. So sucrose, or table sugar, is made up of two parts, and I don't want to take that for granted because most people don't really recognize that. Half of it is glucose and half of it is fructose. High fructose corn syrup sounds scary, but really that just bumps it to about 55% fructose. Glucose is best thought of as fuel. Our brain would effectively die very, very quickly if we don't have its primary fuel, which is glucose, and really the rest of our body runs on it as well. Of course, there are ketones and everything else that can bump up as a hybrid fuel system, but in reality, we survive on glucose.

03:08 The car analogy and fructose as a signal

03:08Chris:So it's kind of funny that so much of the health and wellness industry is saying we have too much glucose. I'm not saying that's wrong, but I always look at it like a car. It's like saying the problem with my car is I have too much fuel in it. The logic doesn't really hold, something's wrong there. So we'll get back to that. Now, the other half of sugar is fructose, and fructose has largely been ignored for much of our history with research because it doesn't spike insulin in the same way glucose does. It's not really a fuel in the same way glucose is, so it's almost like this soft, inert side of sugar.

03:51Chris:And sure, the other half of it is that fructose is primarily what we see in fruit, and everybody knows fruit is healthy. So then why would we say fructose is bad for us if that's where this story is going? But really, the result we're seeing in the last few years is that fructose, although it is a calorie, is more of a signaling molecule. There was a research paper that came out maybe a month ago that really highlighted that: it regulates metabolic health and disease. So here's this dramatic shift that not enough people are paying attention to, but effectively what it's saying is that fructose is sending a signal to our body to conserve. And that's a big deal, because if our goal is weight loss or anything like that, then sending a signal that our body should hang on to energy and fat stores means we're directly working against our goals.

05:04Jerry:Right, so is it okay to say that fructose is signaling the body, okay, we're going to expend energy at some point in the future, and fructose is saying I'm going to spend energy right now?

05:21Chris:Yeah, pretty much. I love to think about why it's packaged together in nature. Why would you have fuel and a fuel conservation signal together? In reality, that's super elegant from an animal's perspective that wants to survive hardship, and that's really what this traces back to: fructose is looking like a survival signal. It's saying, okay, you've got fuel, you've got glucose, and now you've got a way to hang on to that for longer, and that's going to help you live through a period of scarcity, whether it's wintertime or a dry season or a little bit of a drought. You've got this season of plenty, and you're going to hang on to that. Glucose is fuel and fructose is a fuel regulator. Put them together and you've got a really elegant survival system.

06:20 Survival biology and the modern food environment

06:20Jerry:And so you've said survival a couple of times. What I think about, and try to explain to people, is that the brain is still trying to catch up to the fact that we've got a refrigerator with everything we want, a grocery store we can go to. Most people have access to food at a moment's notice. But the brain, as far as controlling the body subconsciously, is still in that survival mode: I don't know when the next meal is coming, so yes, I'm going to use some energy, but I'm going to store some energy too, because 300, 400 years ago we weren't eating every six hours.

07:11Chris:Exactly, exactly. Our biology is not designed for this. Our biology is designed for a world that is tough, it's as simple as that. I'm always baffled: you go for a hike in the desert in California, and there are animals running around out there, and I've got three water bottles just for a two hour hike. Our biology is really tuned for hardship, and it almost makes sense that the dominant species on the planet would have a better tuned system for that, because we have done better than others. We really have the ability to tap into the survival system in a way that's special and allows us to conserve and survive hardship, and we live in a world that isn't prepared for that anymore.

08:12Chris:We basically hacked our diet. 150, 175 years ago, sugar wasn't just available for the wealthy who suffered with gout. Now everyone is enjoying sugar and caloric excess as much as they want, and it just might be that we're triggering this survival pathway from multiple angles.

08:43Jerry:And so is it fair to say that we're working against ourselves, because that survival programming hasn't changed. Part of what we've created is taste bud driven.

09:04Chris:Exactly. Some of the researchers behind this have actually asked, why do we like the foods we like? And it all traces back to the fructose pathway, not all as sugar, but the body actually creates it, and those tastes all map to that. Sweet tastes, of course, but also savory tastes and umami flavors. There are so many different pathways that trace back to perhaps triggering the survival system, because why would they develop otherwise? It's like saying this is going to help me survive a little bit longer, so I'm going to develop a taste for it.

09:57Jerry:And so what have we done with our food system? Just tried to get access to all the delicious stuff we want, which makes it really, really challenging to say, now I'm going to fight that.

10:14Chris:Well, especially now with advertising available to everybody and the for-profit companies out there. Everybody's got to make a buck, and there are people out there saying, if I can hook you, then you're there, because they've got the research people on their side telling them this hooks people, this triggers that side of them so they'll keep coming back for more. I'm kind of careful not to villainize even the big corporations, because ultimately they just want to make some money and that's how they're going to do it. But you've also got grandma baking you delicious stuff because she loves you. It's the same thing. Food is part of our culture across the world. Everyone loves delicious food, it's the spice of life, it makes life enjoyable, and it's just crazy that it maps back to survival biology.

11:31Chris:This is how we're going to do a little bit better, except for the fact that if you never switch it off. You go back a few hundred years and fasting was a very common part of many cultures, and we've kind of lost it. Now we're driven by not just three meals a day but five, six, seven, because we find ourselves snacking all the time and we can.

12:09Jerry:Yeah, and it's easier, right? So when we've got fructose driving that storage piece, how is that connected to insulin resistance? Is there a connection between stored energy and insulin resistance, or is it strictly glucose driven and immediate?

12:29 Insulin resistance and the cellular mechanism

12:29Chris:It is absolutely connected, and it's crazy, going down this road kind of started to reveal very deep connections to metabolic dysfunction in a causal way. A lot of the research says fructose has a causal role in metabolic dysfunction, so let me map it out as simply as I can.

13:06Chris:Basically, when your cells encounter fructose and it's metabolized, we're not talking in the gut, we're talking in your cells, it uses ATP and degrades it into uric acid. ATP is your cellular energy, and typically you can recharge it: it drops down to ADP, like a triphosphate to a diphosphate, and then the mitochondria can boost it back up again, like a little rechargeable battery. But when it encounters fructose, it doesn't just drop to ADP, it drops to a monophosphate and then further, until eventually it becomes uric acid, and we're still talking in the cell, not serum uric acid. That causes a stress signal within your cell, where reactive oxygen species and oxidative stress start building up, and it eventually causes a structural change to your mitochondria so they can't produce as much energy. It doesn't kill the cell, it isn't a toxin, but it restructures the cell into a dim, cellular energy conserving state, and it's pretty cool in a way, because it's like it switched into eco mode.

14:37Chris:That makes sense for that whole conserving posture it's trying to create. But then think about the reaction the body has: if you've got a very dim energy cell, it's going to tell your body energy is scarce, even though it might be plentiful. So now it's saying we're starving on a cellular level. Your brain reads that as an emergency state and it upramps cravings, and so now you go and grab more food any way you can.

15:03Chris:It's very likely where this whole food noise thing came from: I know I'm not hungry, I just ate an hour ago, but here I go, I can't stop thinking about what's in the car, and so we fuel up more. But because you've effectively created a bottleneck in energy conversion in your cell, the cell can't use it, so you've got all this excess coming in, but the cell is literally tapped out, and eventually it will push back and say, I can't use any more fuel. And that's really where this adaptive argument for insulin resistance comes from: we've got this bottleneck where we can't use that fuel, and if the cell let the fuel in, it would only cause more reactive oxygen species and more oxidative stress. So it kind of explains cravings, it explains caloric excess, it explains a predisposition toward gaining fat, it explains inflammation in the cell, and it explains insulin resistance and why it might develop. It's this whole loop, and meanwhile, the more you eat, the more you're sending that conserving signal, so it just ramps up and up and up, until that fragility inside a single cell increases until the entire organ, the entire system, is running in this conserving, low energy state. And all that fragility makes sense as to why disease might start emerging.

17:17 Cravings, mitochondria, and metabolic dysfunction

17:17Jerry:Well, the way you explained that, light bulbs went off in my head. Because it's so true. So many times I've heard people say things like, I just ate, why am I hungry again? And the obvious question from a health coaching mindset is, okay, well, what did you eat, because obviously it wasn't the right thing your body wanted or needed or could use. But then the other piece could be that your body wasn't in a state where it needed to eat.

18:00Chris:That makes sense.

18:01Jerry:Yeah, maybe you just didn't need to eat, but you did anyway, and now that loop is continuing: wait, but I just ate, but now I'm hungry again, because you're forcing too much stuff in there and the signals are getting confused and messed up.

18:13Chris:And the last thing your cell wants to do is something that's going to cause more damage to itself. It doesn't want to kill itself off, it wants to survive, and it knows oxidative stress is one of the things that's going to kill it. So it's like, how do I prevent oxidative stress? And that's why people have heard the term mitochondrial dysfunction, because it's becoming more and more popular, and it leads into metabolic dysfunction, because they're all connected.

19:22Jerry:Yeah, exactly, that's what's coming out. And if you're not taking care of your mitochondria, then your cells, your energy output, this loop of feeling bad and not getting the results you want from a health standpoint and gaining weight is not just going to start, it's going to gain so much traction and snowball.

19:44Chris:Yeah, and it makes sense as to why the body would want that. That's the most interesting part to me, it's doing exactly what it's programmed to do. It's reading, we've got a season of plenty right now, I better take advantage of that because it's not going to last forever. In the wild, that would mean winter's coming or the dry season's coming, so we're going to prepare, and that's great, because you switch that off and now you're going to tap into your fat stores, and that's why a bear can survive six months without eating or drinking. Then they wake up healthy and lean and get to work. The biology works well.

20:17 Hydration, performance, and eco mode versus sport mode

20:17Jerry:And it's interesting, because one of the things, I was actually coaching some athletes the other day, and it's getting to be summertime, so it's getting warmer, and we're saying make sure you're drinking, make sure you're getting your electrolytes, because otherwise you're going to start cramping, you're going to have issues, you're going to sleep poorly, all of these things are going to trickle. And one of them said, okay, well, what about watermelon, is watermelon good?

20:45Chris:Yeah, watermelon is great, and there's a reason it's in season as the temperature gets hotter and the days get longer. It's got so much good stuff in it: it's giving you the fluid you need, the hydration, and other things, so it can actually be soaked up, versus just drinking a bunch of straight water, which research is showing isn't necessarily the best way to hydrate, because your body can only use so much and then it just says, I'm in overload, I don't have the right stuff in the water to actually use it.

21:26Jerry:Yeah, totally. So it's neat how all that stuff, the timing of it, but like we talked about earlier, we've lost that timing when the grocery store is open 24-7.

21:37Chris:It's good to think about this from an athlete's perspective, and I know a lot of your audience are big workout buffs. If you think about what's happening on a cellular level, if you're sending a signal to your cell to conserve, that means its ability to convert glucose into fuel is reduced. Reverse it, if you get rid of fructose, your cells are actually going to use more fuel, which means your glucose utilization goes up, your performance goes up, the inflammation in your cells drops off, and you're burning more fat. So it makes so much sense from a performance standpoint, not just for weight loss goals.

22:27Chris:I love using the idea that it's like the eco mode button in your car, where having that ability to conserve is super useful across everything you can think of. But when you don't realize the mode is there, and you're hitting the gas and your car doesn't go anywhere, that's not very helpful. Sport mode is also very helpful when you want it turned on, and this is sort of that switch: from what I've seen, fructose is basically the closest thing to a switch for metabolism that I've found. I'm going to be in sport mode and do all this awesome stuff, and then I'm going to switch back and conserve, because times might be tough.

23:19 How much fructose is too much, and the case for whole fruit

23:19Jerry:So you mentioned high fructose corn syrup earlier, which a lot of people know has been demonized. Is there a difference between levels of fructose, like a level where once you go over this amount, now you're in a danger zone, or is it more quantity versus density?

23:53Chris:That's a good question. A lot of the research talks about a bolus of fructose, a big load, and it matters, because fructose metabolism is unregulated. Unlike glucose, where your cells will say, no, I'm done, I've got all I can use, that doesn't happen with fructose. The cell will take in as much as you can possibly give it, so the more you eat, the more you insult your cells with fructose, the more of a drag it creates on mitochondrial energy.

24:24Chris:If we're talking about fruit, for example, you want to take advantage of the way it's provided in nature, because fructose in fruit comes with water, fiber, and polyphenols that actually counter the effects of fructose on that energy state, and that's very beneficial in managing the amount of load that ends up passing through your gut and into your liver and other systems. The general guideline I've seen in the research is somewhere around eight grams of fructose per hour is about where you want to stay. You don't want to go too far over that, because then it will start reaching your liver, where these things can start happening.

25:37Chris:But I'd love to talk about fruit for a second, because fruit is healthy, we all know that, but there's a nuance there that tells this story in a really amazing way.

26:06Chris:Fruit is the plant's ability to reproduce: it wants an animal to eat it so it will take the seeds and send them off into the world. Now, those seeds aren't ready until a certain point, so if the fruit was eaten too soon, that wouldn't happen. So the plant starts the fruit off in a very fibrous, bitter, unpleasant state, because it doesn't want the animal to eat it too soon. But when that time arises, it brightens the colors, sweetens the fruit with fructose, and starts dropping off the fiber, and suddenly that signal arrives for the animal: it's time, I'm going to eat it now.

26:48Chris:Now, think of it from the animal's perspective: the animal doesn't want a high polyphenol, fibrous plant, because it would send more of a fat burning signal than a fat storage signal. So from the perspective of us, we want to eat the fruit that's bright and colorful and sweet, and from the survival perspective, that's going to help us survive a little bit longer. So then you see the bear eating hundreds of thousands of Oregon grape berries before winter, packing on weight like nothing else, and this balance in nature is elegant, where the survival needs of both plant and animal are perfectly balanced so reproduction and survival can occur.

27:57Chris:From the perspective of us in a modern world, we got rid of the season in fruit, because we can have it whenever we want, we prefer to eat it when it's ripe, and we juice it, dry it, and process it, and in doing so we get rid of a lot of the built-in safeguards that are still there when the fruit is ripe. So the chances of a fructose bolus increase, and the elegance of the whole fruit kind of gets lost. It makes sense, because the literature says the further you go from a whole fruit to a processed fruit, the more likely metabolic dysfunction can be a result.

29:06Chris:And it's interesting, because it's not just a single little piece of fructose, it's this persistent drag of overload where the problem is. If you look at some of the research, you give an animal a huge amount of fructose for a month, and nothing happened. But then you do the same experiment over a much longer period, and it's very dramatic, the difference. It's not just that initial drop in ATP, it's the progressive restructuring of the cell toward conserving that is where the problems start to come. It's a cellular energy problem rather than even just that blip in fructose.

30:01Jerry:Which I would assume is, from a survival standpoint, we've got plentiful, let's load up, because in two months there's going to be nothing because of the cycle of the world. But in our current world, we can continue on, so we're reprogramming the cells in the wrong way.

30:29Chris:Exactly, from a health standpoint. And to go back to the fruit, one of the things I always tell people, because I've had people say their doctor told them to stop eating fruit entirely, is: is it bad for you in this initial short term period because you're trying to do something with your health, or is it bad for you period, don't ever eat it again? I've had a couple of people say don't ever eat it again, and I say, let's unpack this, why. It comes from, I believe, looking at it and saying fructose is bad, but not getting the understanding that it's balanced by fiber and polyphenols. Can you overdo fruit and continue to be in a bad situation? Absolutely. But I don't think eating an apple or a pint of blueberries a day is going to be a bad thing for anybody.

31:40Jerry:No, I agree with you, I certainly don't want to villainize fruit. I think it's how we should be eating sugar. But we do need to be careful, because most of the time it's not just fruit, it's fruit plus sugar, plus high glycemic carbs, plus alcohol, plus not drinking enough water, and it's all of these things compounding.

32:08 The polyol pathway: how the body makes its own fructose

32:08Chris:Right, and I think that's an important next layer of this: the body makes fructose, and it's all of the same ways we already know we need to be careful with our health. The body has a pathway called the polyol pathway, which previously people only thought applied to diabetics, but what it does is convert glucose into sorbitol and then sorbitol into fructose, so a high glucose level can be converted into fructose.

32:49Chris:It's amazing that some researchers have used fructose metabolism inhibitors to experiment with this: what if you give an animal a high amount of glucose but block the fructose pathway, what happens? Effectively, what you're saying there is I'm going to keep that glucose only as fuel and not activate this conserving energy signal, and what happens is those animals are not getting metabolic dysfunction. To me, that's huge, because we've got glucose monitors, we're so consumed with our glucose levels, but what if the problem with glucose is it becoming fructose? Then that logic doesn't hold, where it's like, I've got all this fuel in my car, that's why my car sucks. What makes more logical sense is having too much fuel and some of that fuel going bad, and that holds more logic. This almost fits: we've got all this glucose, and it's not all being used as fuel anymore, it's part of the signal.

34:11Chris:So then we start looking at all the different ways the body produces fructose. High glycemic carbs are a big one, and we all know we need to be careful with that. Dehydration and high salt levels allow the body to make fructose as well, by the osmolality of the blood. Basically, the way I think of it is like if you're cooking a sauce and you reduce it so it's thicker, it also becomes saltier, that's sort of the way that works. The body uses that same concept to read the saltiness of our blood, and as the blood gets thicker, saltiness increases, and the body says, I'm going to create fructose then. It has to do with the flexibility of our blood vessels and all that.

35:19Chris:So we know we're not supposed to eat high glycemic carbs, we know we're supposed to moderate our salt and salt-potassium balance. The other one, alcohol, also triggers fructose metabolism, and it's combined in there because the reason it does that is because it dehydrates. And even umami foods, which are high in uric acid, if you remember, fructose is converting ATP into uric acid, so it's the same signal. Uric acid is in a way the crux of this story: we're creating uric acid because it drags on our cells and creates that conserving state. So suddenly everything we like to eat becomes part of this story.

36:11Jerry:Yeah, right, and we all know we're supposed to moderate all this stuff: don't eat high glycemic carbs, be careful with salt, hydrate well, don't eat too much high umami food.

36:25Chris:Like too much shellfish, it gives you gout or whatever it might be. All of these things suddenly become part of the same story of survival signals, and guess what, I love all of those foods. So then what ends up happening is, I'm going to cut sugar, but I'm not going to do any of those other ones, and unless we're cutting all of them, it's like this alarm signal being triggered by multiple states, which makes a lot of sense for a survival system. You want redundancies.

36:58Jerry:And so it all fits this narrative. It's fascinating how the body is protecting itself for the future, because that's essentially what it's doing, saying I've got these different ways to make sure I'm storing energy for whenever I need it. And that's one of the reasons why I tell people who are trying to change their behavioral habits around food: take out the moments associated with celebrations, that's a separate thing, leave that alone, that can still be a part of life. But the rest is like, eat for what you're going to be doing in the next four to six hours. If you're sitting at your desk, you don't need a massive lunch. If you're going to sleep for the next eight hours, your dinner doesn't need to be huge. It's about eating for what you're getting ready to do. Whereas if you're getting ready to hike through the desert, the days before that you probably want to eat to where you've got the right amount of stored energy.

38:44Jerry:It's fascinating how it's all survival, driving ourselves to make sure we've got the energy and sources of things we need for the next week, two weeks, however long the body thinks we may be without.

39:00 Willpower, food noise, and GLP-1 drugs

39:00Chris:It's true, I agree with you. The only trouble is that it kind of goes into this idea of willpower, and that's troublesome, because we don't have the ability to control this like we should. It fascinates me how you'll have this really high disciplined person, highly successful in business, absolutely disciplined, and yet they can't resist a snack, and that food noise is still there. It begs the question, is there something else? You look at animals outside, and they don't possess the ability to moderate things like we do. Try and offer your dog a treat and he goes mental, he's so excited, every animal's like that. You feed a fish and suddenly they're jumping for it.

40:01Chris:So why do we have to have this incredible discipline over our choices? I think a lot of this traces back to this concept of food noise. We're seeing GLP-1 inhibitor agonists suddenly drop food noise for people, they're recognizing, hey, I have agency over this choice, I'm going to say no, and it's amazing for people. But I think it actually traces back to this pathway we're talking about, because if your cell is getting the signal that it's low in energy and sending that signal to your brain, that's a biological mechanism, we're not going to have a whole lot of control over that. So that compulsion to keep snacking, because it thinks we're starving to death, makes perfect sense. But if you exert a little bit of control and dial back that signal, suddenly you have control over your cravings, and that makes a huge difference. That's the amazing part: people who cut sugar often see that result in about three weeks, suddenly the food noise is gone.

41:47Jerry:Well, and the GLP-1, I've seen this in a couple of different articles, but I also work with a couple of doctors to help them with their health, so I get straight knowledge from them talking with their patients, and multiple times I've heard the GLP-1s are helping with the food noise, but as soon as they come off it, the food noise comes right back.

41:53Chris:Yes.

41:55Jerry:So it's not training the body to get rid of it, it's masking it at the moment, which is good in the moment, but it's still something that's got to be dealt with and retrained. And it's not a willpower behavior, it's internal, what's going on at the cell, and because it's not a conscious thing, it's extremely hard to deal with.

42:26 Why the weight comes back, and cellular energy as the root

42:26Chris:Yeah, so let's talk about that. That signal is basically, if we relate it to the car analogy again, if we've got excess weight, dropping that excess weight is going to help, it's going to take load off the system. It's like, I've got all this extra fuel in my fuel tank, or maybe I've even got a fuel trailer I'm trying to drag around with my little economy car, because my engine's running in eco mode. Getting rid of the weight is going to take pressure off the system, everything's going to perform a little better, but did you fix the engine?

43:05Chris:And that's the big problem: maybe getting rid of the excess glucose means not as much is going to be converted into fructose, and you're not going to have as much load on the engine, but the research is pretty clear that people regain the weight reliably within about two years. It makes sense, we didn't fix the actual problem, we just unloaded some of the burden. So I think that's why this is more exciting, it's going a layer deeper: why did we get that excess weight in the first place? It's because we've crippled our engine's performance, that's why we're trying to constantly feed it. So maybe fixing that is the better way to turn off the food noise, and then we naturally start moderating our diet, we drop the calories because we can, we say no to sugary foods because they don't hold as much appeal anymore. None of that changes the fact that sweet food is delicious and we will always like it, that's separate from food noise, but at least we have the ability to say no.

44:18Jerry:Well, and I can say for myself, because I cut out different levels of processed foods and sweet foods over seven, eight years ago, as a guy who loved Starburst and jelly beans, even to the point where my mother-in-law would ask what I wanted as a gift and get me a big family-sized bag of jelly beans. It was interesting when I first said I don't want that anymore, and she took it as a love language, as a giver, she was taken aback. But now if I were to have some after years of not, the sweetness level is so massive.

44:59Chris:Oh, I love that you said that, that's awesome.

45:07Jerry:And I eat fruit, I eat grapes, things that are sweet naturally, but because I'm not keeping my taste buds used to that level of sweetness in processed candies, it's off the charts.

45:34Chris:Yeah, and doesn't fruit just taste unbelievably better than it used to? That's the crazy part, I'm the same way, I can't eat sugary stuff anymore, if it's good I'll still enjoy a little, but some of the stuff I used to eat just tastes terrible now, it's so sweet I can't handle it. And meanwhile I'll have a strawberry and it knocks your socks off, it's fabulous. It's amazing that as you do this, your taste preferences recalibrate, and it almost seems like the way it should be, it's wonderful.

46:12Jerry:Yeah, but again, it's a piece of that puzzle where your taste buds are part of what's driving the whole ship in the wrong direction. And so making that shift back, okay, it's not willpower, so what are the tips or tricks or things we can do to start moving this and know it's going to be successful, versus, I know probably everybody out there, especially people dealing with weight, has been like, I tried that, it didn't work, I tried that, it didn't work.

46:47Chris:Yeah, okay, let's talk about that, because this is all theoretical until we apply it. I think the most obvious thing is to cut sugar, because sugar is the primary way we're getting that fructose bolus and overloading our bodies with it. That's hard, people who cut sugar, some of them don't last three days, it's really hard, especially because if your body is sending that signal that I'm starving, it's going to be constantly giving you that food noise, and the most satisfying way to solve it is with that kind of food.

47:32Chris:What I suggest is recognize the difference between glucose and fructose, because if fructose is sending that conserving signal and glucose is fuel, then you start to see which is the thing you need to be cutting. If you cut sugar, you're cutting fuel, and you've made the signal stronger in the short term, because you have that drive to eat already, and now you're cutting off the fuel source before you've been able to recalibrate the cell to be more efficient. So what I recommend is cut sugar, yes, but replace it with complex carbohydrates, because your body is used to that level of glucose and needs it. For a while, not forever, that will allow your body to recalibrate to this lower fructose state.

48:37Chris:Then you can layer it up. Maybe after a few weeks, feeling okay, I can handle this, then you can think about your hydration, of course you should think about that anyway, you can think about lowering salt, and at that point maybe lowering carbs, especially the high glycemic ones that allow that spike in glucose, because that can be converted into fructose. So you layer this up progressively over time, but that said, it's hard to live in a restrictive way, most people fail at that. And it's not to say that forever you're not going to eat sugar, you're going to avoid high glycemic carbs, salty foods, alcohol, it's like, yeah, I'm tapped out, forget that. Maybe it'll last a month, but that month you'll hardly start to see the benefit.

49:56 Cellular energetics as the root of metabolic dysfunction

49:56Chris:And if the research we're seeing is that if you go up a layer, it appears that cellular energetics might be the root of metabolic dysfunction, I'll explain that. This system works in all of the tissues and systems susceptible to metabolic dysfunction. In our liver, we get liver fat, in our kidneys, we can get kidney dysfunction, in our vascular system, our endothelial cells can tighten and we know cardiovascular disease comes out of that, in the brain, which is highly energy sensitive, we start to see brain fog, and eventually it can cascade into things like Alzheimer's disease. All of these are highly energetic systems, and all of them show evidence of being vulnerable to fructose metabolism. Your red blood cells don't have the same kind of thing, they don't care as much, but all of these energetic systems really do.

51:03Chris:And if fructose has an influence on all of them and cellular energy drops, it makes sense as to why dysfunction might come out of that. I'm not saying fructose is the only cause of low cellular energy, of course there are others, even COVID is one of them. But if we're constantly throwing sugar at our systems, then it layers on top of everything we're already predisposed to, whether it's genetics, toxins, or environment, and we're throwing all this extra layer of cellular energy stress on our systems. So it starts to appear that cellular energy might be the root of chronic metabolic dysfunction.

52:01Chris:So back to your question of what do we do about this: here's the problem, if we continue to insult and layer on that energetic stress for the rest of our life, how does that end? We know how that ends, we've got family members struggling with this stuff, and it's devastating. And I don't see us being able to legislate that on a global level and say we're going to root sugar out of our diet as a species. Good luck, we've been trying, forget it. So we need some stronger plans for sure.

52:41Jerry:Yeah, so your explanation with the stress, to go back to the car analogy of the fuel and everything: if that's happening at the fructose and signaling level across all those pathways, and you're adding that onto other stresses you've already got, like low inflated tires and other things going on, your fuel economy, your ability to get where you want to go, is going to be impacted dramatically, because the fuel and the tire levels don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, but they're compounding stress on your body.

53:29 How organs compound: liver, brain, and PCOS

53:29Jerry:And I can see, and I'm sure it was sort of unintentional because you've talked about this so many times and lived it so much, but the way you explained those different organs is basically the way I see organ failure happening as it goes through your body, because all these things are compounding, and it makes perfect sense with the four things that are creating fructose in our body, why the liver is so impacted by our diet and our habits. Because it's a storage place, an energy storage place, and I know from an athletic standpoint, if my muscles are tapped out, they're going to go to the liver, and that's the one that lasts so long, and then the body says, you're done, refuel or I'm shutting down. I've lived a shutdown pass out at the end of a race before, and I try to make sure everybody I coach avoids that, because it's not pretty, and your body doesn't want you to go there either. So I can see where it says, let's just keep storing and storing, and we'll get a fatty liver, and then this is going to start impacting that, this is going to start impacting this, and the cascade effect is that it shows up at the doctor's office as a diagnosis, just because that was already the weakest link in the process, and so that showed up first.

55:04Chris:Yeah, the liver is definitely the major signal, and it makes sense, because the liver will soak up about 80% of the fructose that passes through the portal vein, so you eat it and the liver gets hit first. It also explains why these chronic diseases cluster. We've been talking about the gut brain axis for so long now, and if the brain is susceptible to fructose metabolism, it kind of makes sense why some of these things would start to happen. If the liver soaks up 80%, then what about the kidneys and the vascular system and the brain? Maybe endogenous fructose is more relevant to those, or the dehydrated state, or the oxidative stress level in the brain.

55:57Chris:That's the interesting one: fructose doesn't pass through the blood brain barrier, but the brain runs on glucose, we know that, and the energy signaling doesn't happen in the same way in the brain, I don't think insulin works in the brain in the same way, if at all. So what is the brain going to do if it experiences an energy disruption? What it appears to do is triage. If you start thinking of the different things your brain can do as having different priority levels, this starts to make sense: from a survival perspective, if I lose motor control or vision, I'm going to die, I will not survive as an animal, but if I turn off reproduction, or short term memory, those become less important.

57:07Chris:And it's amazing how this maps out. What do we see in, say, PCOS? We see hormone dysregulation, because what I think is happening is that certain neurons that control our hormone systems are basically being down-regulated by fructose metabolism, saying, we don't need to reproduce right now, we're going to focus on survival. And what happens with a woman? Her testosterone goes up, her androgens increase, which also helps survival, because it protects muscle mass and weight a little better, and that syncs up with insulin resistance and everything else connected to fructose metabolism. Or look at it for a man, and the same neurons are down-regulated, and because his hormone control is different, testosterone drops, because again, it's down-regulating reproduction to survive. So the same system runs very elegantly across all of these different things, and there's a survival story behind it.

58:24Chris:And then you leave it on too long, and we know what loss of short term memory looks like in pathology. You look at Alzheimer's disease, and there is evidence of low cellular energy across that. It just might be the end state, unfortunately.

58:47 Fasting, fat as backup energy, and hormonal shutdown

58:47Jerry:Well, and one of the things I've said multiple times with people is, if you give the body what it wants, it can heal itself, things can turn back on, if you're not past whatever that point is for whatever that organ is. But yeah, this explains so much about how that actually happens, because you've basically put yourself in hibernation mode from an energy standpoint, and then if you change that, they're going to go, okay, let's start working again, let's boost everything back up. And I mean, it totally makes sense. And one of the things I tell people is, if another animal can hibernate for six months, I'm not saying we can go without food for six months, but maybe we could if we stored up the right way and didn't do anything for six months, slept the whole time, there's ways the body would actually adjust to that. And if you come back out the other side healthy, then it would make sense that if you change the things you're doing, turn those symptoms back on, health is going to return.

60:14Chris:Yeah, right, I love to think of it from that perspective, because fat is not dangerous, it plays a valuable role, it's sort of like your backup energy system, and most of us just don't ever turn it on. You're walking around with a battery in your cell phone, but you never want to unplug it, you never use the battery. It's funny you mention that, there was a man, I think his name was Anthony Barbieri, back in the 70s or so, who did a fast for, I think it was 382 days, a medically supervised fast, and he lost an astounding amount of weight. He was massively overweight and basically lived healthy for the rest of his life. It's amazing to think our bodies can do that.

61:14Chris:And then you flip the tables, and it's like, I think Gandhi fasted for five days at one point and almost died, because he had no fat to lose. And we saw that even in COVID, I have a friend who owns a gym, he's a machine, but he got really close to the edge during COVID because his body did not have those reserves, he was too lean. It's amazing to think about, we see the same thing, someone hugely overweight has the exact same symptoms as someone underweight: if your body fat drops too low, the same symptoms appear, hormonal dysfunction, mood disorder, all sorts, it's so similar. So fat plays an important role here.

62:05Jerry:Yeah, well, that's one of the things I deal with a lot with distance runners and endurance people, especially the younger girls, teenage girls. I've had this conversation multiple times with parents, because they're like, okay, they're running this much, and they haven't had their cycle. I had one girl who hadn't had her cycle in over a year, and she went to the doctor for her annual physical, and the doctor said, I've got concerns, I've got issues, and mom calls me up and asks, is this running related? And I say, look at your daughter, she's super thin, she exercises all the time, the body says I don't have enough fat to run the systems, so I'm going to shut it down. When she decides, she's 16, 17 years old, I ask, you're not expecting her to get pregnant anytime soon, are you? And she says no. So I say, okay, she's fine, when she gets to the point where she wants to, she's going to have to gain some fat, systems will turn back on and she'll be fine. And you see that with female distance runners and other endurance sports too, they'll pause training for six months, get pregnant, and then once they have the child, they'll come back and start training again, because their body was saying, shut it down. And it's interesting that if you're overweight, the body's doing the same systems and same things as far as shutting things down to preserve itself.

63:51Chris:Yeah, it's like an intelligent triage, it's got to make priorities, and it makes sense as to why we've got those systems built in.

63:59Jerry:So, yeah, I think it's awesome, I think it's challenging for people to try to approach this change with diet alone.

64:15Chris:Yeah, we do need to think of this long term, because if this can have such a dramatic end result, then we want to protect it as much as possible. And doing it with diet alone is like playing whack-a-mole, you've got too many different layers to try to control. Even fruit itself, the same fruit goes from an unripe banana on your countertop to almost alcohol when you let it ripen, the same thing, but it actually changes the state in which the signal it gives your body changes over the course of that ripening process. So it's really hard, not to mention different fruits, it's really hard to understand the nuance behind all of this. And that's why our team has really tried to focus on the signal itself, because if all roads lead to fructose metabolism, whether it's dehydration, alcohol, high glycemic carbs, or sugar itself, if it all leads to that same one enzyme called fructokinase, then maybe that's where we should be looking, and that's where the research is really leading.

65:31 The target enzyme, luteolin research, and SugarShield

65:31Chris:There's actually, Pfizer even ran a phase two trial on a fructokinase inhibitor, and I think they saw about a 22% drop in liver fat, it was huge, not to mention many other metabolic markers. So this is something pharma will be looking at, I'm confident in it, I don't know when that's going to happen, but it's nice to know that's on the horizon. In the meantime, that's why we're trying to pay attention to ways we can move this lever naturally, because trying to chase all those inputs is so hard.

66:09Jerry:So tell us how people can follow along with what you're doing at LIV3 Health.

66:15Chris:So my YouTube channel is The Fructose Model, it's just starting out, and our website is liv3health.com. What we're trying to do is spread this education, because it's super important, but we're also trying to shine a light on the fact that natural fructose metabolism inhibitors are already undergoing research. There's preclinical research, and actually random control human trials, that show the ingredients we're focusing on do the same things those pharmaceutical trials are showing. So the primary polyphenol we're paying attention to is luteolin. Most people have never heard of it, but there's preclinical evidence that says it's a strong fructokinase inhibitor, and there are random control trials, not that we ran, but ingredient trials, that showed a 43% drop in insulin resistance markers, so HOMA-IR, not to mention about a 19% drop in liver fat, and drops in waist circumference and cholesterol markers. It was very broad, it was pretty cool to see. So we saw all of this and thought, well, it looks like it's doing the same thing. Even if we don't have exact mechanistic research that says this inhibits fructokinase, it's worth paying attention to.

68:01Chris:So that's effectively how we developed SugarShield, we're trying to find ways to move this lever, and it has luteolin, it has tart cherry extract, which is fairly well known for reducing uric acid, which is the fructose byproduct that slows down the cell. So that's what we're really focusing on. And the cool part is that observationally it's bonkers, the reports we're getting from people are just crazy: food noise basically disappearing within about a month, if not sooner. I've had people tell me that on day one, because they were already healthy, they noticed an impact day one, and for people with a bigger metabolic drag, it takes longer, but it would make sense that it takes longer, because it's trying to restore some of that lost cellular energy. Then, once energy comes up and cravings drop, people start naturally moderating their diet better. I've had people call me up after three months and say they've lost 30 pounds, or 25 in the first six months, and say they didn't really do anything different, they just listened to what their body wanted. It's exciting to see it appears to be pulling on the same systems we've found in the research.

69:32Jerry:Yeah, well, and so one last thing on that car analogy that just popped in my head as you said that: depending on where your starting point is, like you've got all this stuff, you're all ready to go, but for somebody in Texas trying to get to Los Angeles, it's going to take them longer than somebody in Phoenix. Your starting point is going to be a big dictator into how that process actually plays out, but the process is still going to be the same as far as fixing everything and getting you to the destination. Just don't give up on yourself because you don't see results in two days, that's like with everything in life, don't give up on yourself because it didn't happen instantly.

70:20Chris:Yeah, it's true, it's true. But it's encouraging that for the most part, we're seeing about three weeks is the timeline to see that food noise drop, which is so cool, it's a really strong signal. And it's cool to see the parallels within the rest of the world: when people really hard line sugar, the same thing happens. It's hard, it's hard to live in a restricted way, but should you? Sure, it's going to make that difference. And then there's research that basically shows diet can make an impactable difference on Alzheimer's patients, these things can be restored, there are signs of it. And that's the part that's exciting, that we don't have to live in a declining state of health for the last 10, 15 years of our life, just living on medicine to keep us going. It's encouraging, because we all want that long health span, not just lifespan but health span, we want to live as well as we possibly can. It's cool to see that we seem to be narrowing in on a lever that will have a big difference on that.

71:53Jerry:That's awesome. Well, Chris, I want to thank you so much for being a guest, this has been hugely educational, and I'll put the links for LIV3 Health and your YouTube channel in the show notes, and suggest everybody follow along with what you're doing, because it definitely sounds like you're on the right path for creating something that's going to help people short term and long term.

72:17Chris:I hope so, and I don't take credit for any of this, I'm just a fan, I think the researchers who have been studying this stuff for 20 years and more are doing amazing work, and I hope we see this become more mainstream as time goes on, because it seems to be pulling on root level stuff, which is so exciting.

72:41Jerry:It's so exciting, because we all just want to feel good and honestly not be so consumed with our health. As much as we're having this conversation, and it's part of our entertainment world now, having these conversations about our loved ones suffering every time we meet up with friends is so sad. It'd be nice if we were more in line with the wild animal running around that doesn't even think about this stuff.

73:09Chris:Right, yeah, exactly, it just goes about and has a fun day.

73:13Jerry:That's right, great. Awesome, well, thank you so much, Chris.

73:17Chris:It's a pleasure, Jerry, thank you so much for having me.