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.

00:00 Cold open and introductions

00:00Mark:In today's episode, researcher Chris Mearns brings a fascinating perspective that challenges conventional thinking about metabolism. He believes that fructose isn't simply a sugar. You want to tune into this episode, especially if you're having cravings, you're storing too much fat, your cellular energy is down, and he's going to tell you exactly why you feel metabolically stuck and what to do about it.

00:24Kelli:Well said, let's get to it. Welcome to the Fit Over 50 Life Podcast. Our show features engaging, thought-provoking, and inspiring conversations with experts, influencers, and thought leaders in health, fitness, longevity, mindset, and personal growth. For those of us over 50.

00:53Mark:Welcome to the Fit Over 50 Life Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Patrick. You'll hear from my co-host, Kelli Calabrese, in a second. We've got a great guest today. Chris Mearns is going to share with you some phenomenal information. First and foremost, if you could all do us a big favor, just like, follow, and subscribe so that we can grow our audience, wake up the algorithms, and be able to serve more people. Our promise to you is this. If you're able to do that, we're promised to help you optimize your life at 50 and above so you could feel great in your own skin again. Anything from mindset to longevity, we're here to do it all and bring you the best guests, and we have a great show for you today. Kelli, would you mind taking over for me and introducing Chris, and then we'll dive into Chris's backstory and all that good stuff. Go for it.

01:43Kelli:Happy to do it. Yes, our guest today is Chris Mearns. He's the founder of Liv3 Health. He's a metabolic researcher, and he is the creator of the Fructose Model. Chris has really been dedicated to exploring one of the most overlooked questions in metabolic health, and that's why are people struggling with low energy, constant hunger, inflammation, stubborn weight gain, despite eating better, exercising more, and trying harder. Chris is going to expose some research about fructose, and it's not simply a dietary sugar, but it's a biological survival signal, so we're going to find out all about that. His work is really challenging conventional thinking and opening new conversations about weight loss, cellular energy, healthy aging, and metabolic resilience. Chris, welcome to Fit Over 50 Life.

02:35Chris:Thank you both for having me. It's great to be here.

02:37Mark:Hey, can you share a little bit of a backstory about yourself, where you came from, all this, what got you involved in this real quick before we dive into exactly what you do for people?

02:50 From VR research to fatherhood: how Chris found fructose

02:48Chris:For sure. Yeah, so I don't come from a medical background, so you can just stop listening right now. I'm just kidding. So I actually came from a tech background working in user research, working in VR headsets and crazy things like that. I was always interested in trying to find simple solutions based on complex problems. I feel like when you look deep enough, sometimes the question becomes the most exciting part, whether you're trying to discover the right question at the root of something.

03:28Chris:Basically what happened was I was in that for a long time and doing some interesting things. I always wanted to try and help people. Why is a VR headset useful? Does it have a purpose? All those kind of things. At the end of the day, I became a father and started thinking I needed to be responsible and making sure that my health was good enough because I was a little bit older than maybe some would be when they're becoming parents and taking a look at my health.

03:55Chris:I ended up falling down a deep rabbit hole of something that seems very unknown still, and that is the role of fructose in our lives. Because every child will tell you that I'm not supposed to eat too much sugar, very few can actually explain why. Most of them, if they would, would go down a track of talking about glucose. But that didn't hold enough water to me, because glucose is our body's fuel, it's our preferred fuel. If we don't have glucose, our brain won't work, we'll die.

04:36Chris:The other half of sugar, 50%, the other half, is fructose. It's been largely ignored in comparison, just thinking, okay, it doesn't really spike my insulin that much, it's just a little calorie, almost like it was this inert side of it. The deeper I went into the research, the more I discovered that it actually has a signaling purpose in the body. Even there was research maybe about six weeks ago that effectively reclassified it as not just a calorie, but as a metabolic signal that, and I quote, regulates metabolic health and disease. That's a huge deal. This is now saying it's a signal that controls whether you get disease and controls your metabolic health. This has been five years of digging into this research, and in doing so, it's basically resolved so many different facets of metabolic health that it's a story that needs to be told.

05:36Kelli:Interesting. Yeah, I'm interested in hearing this story, because I'm kind of on the other perspective of this, where fructose without fiber can have a lot of problems in the body. I'm hoping that you could debunk some of the things involved in that, and we could go through why people should be doing this. You became a dad, and as a dad, you wanted to be a responsible dad, and that kind of got you involved in this. You like to simplify things, which I love that concept here. Let's talk about maybe the, like me, I have a misconception possibly about fructose. Maybe there's new research on it. Maybe it doesn't lead to non-alcohol fatty liver disease, like some of the studies show. What am I missing? What's new? What is it that you found that's profound knowledge that we could share with our audience that maybe can be very good for them?

06:32Chris:So where would you like to start?

06:34 Why fructose is damaging without being a toxin

06:34Chris:No, no, no, you're bang on. Fructose might be the most important misunderstood factor in human health, and it is a negative. It is damaging to the body. It's not a toxin, but it seems to influence cellular energy to such an extent that it looks like it's upstream of every metabolic dysfunction. So to simplify that, like when our cells lose energy, they don't function as well. They don't support the systems that they're supposed to, whether that's in your liver or in your vascular system, wherever it might happen to be. And so to have a fragile cell eventually will cascade into a fragile system, and then you start seeing disease come out of it.

07:24Chris:Fructose directly drops your cellular energy, and it does so by creating inflammation in the cell. And in doing so, it also gives a very solid reason why insulin resistance would develop. So it sits almost at this root where it's like, this is probably the biggest negative influence in our downstream effects of chronic disease. And so understanding how that mechanism works and why it would lead there is really important because most of the time, if anyone's heard of fructose, then they either think high fructose corn syrup, which is bad, or they think of fruit, which is good. And it's like, well, then there's a misunderstanding of really its role in our diet and really in the natural world as well.

08:19 Sweet as Lies and a family history of liver disease

08:19Chris:So a couple of years ago, I did some research. My quick backstory, I wrote a book called Sweet as Lies that was basically covering most of your artificial sweeteners. I spent about a year and a half and two researchers. The reason why I covered it and as a topic is both my grandfather and my father died of liver-related diseases. One died of liver cancer. And when I started really looking into the culprit, it was non-alcohol fatty liver disease. And the fructose is one of the ingredients that was at the front of the line.

08:57Kelli:So let's talk about what non-alcohol fatty liver disease is because most people aren't even familiar with it. How does fructose in the diet affect that? Then maybe we could touch the difference between why is fructose okay when there's fiber attached to it because that's a little bit different metabolic process in our body. But ultimately, you're sure, man. So we're just here to highlight some of these things so that we could share it with our audience so they could learn and be empowered and live healthier lifestyles. So these are some of the topics that I think I would love to hear you talk about here, but you're welcome to talk about anything, man.

09:39 How fructose degrades cellular energy into uric acid

09:39Chris:No, you're bang on. So we're starting to resolve that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and fatty liver that's coming from alcohol. It's the same thing. It's basically being reclassified now. And there was research that came out last fall that basically showed that alcohol and fructose do the same thing. You can use alcohol to trigger your body to make fructose. And so whereas there was research maybe 10 years ago that I think the headline was something like fructose by another name is what alcohol really is, it's resolving that it's causing the same thing.

09:49Chris:But what's happening is your body eats fructose. And then through the portal vein, it ends up in your liver. And your liver is where you have the highest affinity for fructose metabolism. So it'll process like 80%, at least of your dietary fructose. And in doing so, the question has to be what is fructose metabolism do? What process does it accomplish? And it basically causes your cellular energy to be degraded into a waste product, uric acid.

10:57Chris:And so without getting too complicated, your cellular energy ATP is like a little rechargeable battery. It's a triphosphate, the TP. It'll drop to a duophosphate, ADP, and then even further. But typically your mitochondria will recharge it. It'll drop from an ADP and then back to an ATP. But what happens when you introduce fructose metabolism to this is it degrades further until it burns the rechargeable battery basically. And it transfers it into uric acid in the cell. And the uric acid causes inflammation, which then reduces the effectiveness, the capacity of your mitochondria. So now your mitochondria aren't making energy anymore. And not only do you have this little transient drop in energy, but you've reduced your operating capacity of your cellular energy in total over time.

12:00Chris:And so basically what happens is you have this fragile, low energy cell. And the cell says, I'm starving. What your brain reads as, oh my goodness, I need to eat more food. And so then you consume more and you introduce more into this front of this. So I start seeing it like a bottleneck, right? Where it's like, you've got fuel trying to come into the cell. You've got pinched conversion of energy with your mitochondria. And then you've got this signal coming out on the other end where you start developing cravings. And so the cravings turn into a loop. You introduce more into the funnel and less goes out. And eventually that's going to cause too much fuel and more storage and less and less energy.

12:42Chris:So if you think about it in the liver, suddenly you're going to develop fatty liver because you've got all this excess energy, all this, which is in the form of glucose and eventually it'll get stored as fat. So then the liver becomes kind of overburdened with low energy and fat around it. And then we start seeing fatty liver develop.

13:02Mark:Which makes it difficult to lose weight because you got to get the, you got to kind of clean out the liver, get that bile and some of that release before you actually can start losing weight. And I don't think people realize how many people this affects.

13:20Chris:Yeah, it's massive.

13:22Mark:It's a quiet thing that happens under the surface.

13:25Chris:Exactly.

13:26 DEXA scans and the hidden signs of fatty liver

13:26Mark:Has there been any tests other than ultrasound at this point? I was actually, I think I was actually, I don't know if I was on chat GPT or Google or asking Siri this morning in preparation for this to see if there was any new tests that you can actually do like an at home test to find out if you have a fatty liver. Do you know anything or no?

13:49Chris:A home test? I'm not so sure. A DEXA scan is a really smart one because it literally images what your, what your, like your, your visceral fat is going to do. And if you have fat around the abdomen, it's going to be surrounding your organs and that's really where things go wrong. It's not, it's not the fat under your skin. That's the problem. It's the fat that's kind of burdening your organs. So that's probably the biggest one.

14:16 Sugar is half fructose, and how much is too much

14:16Kelli:So where are the hidden causes of fructose in our diet that people aren't even paying attention to that are affecting things?

14:24Chris:I don't think people realize enough that it's in sugar, like it's just regular sugar. It's 50% of your sugar. And so like I said before, like we focus on the fact that sugar is, I don't know, fuel. I mean, in the fifties, like you said, hey, it's good for you and like all that. And now we don't, we recognize, smoking was good for you in the fifties.

14:46Mark:Exactly.

14:47Chris:Exactly. We've learned a lot. But it's, I mean, even kids will recognize that, hey, I got it. My mom says I'm not supposed to eat too much sugar, right? We all know that we got to limit this, but if you look at it this way, the two halves of sugar, one half is glucose and one half is fructose. They're split 50/50, glucose is your body's fuel. Easy. Your brain will not run on if you don't have it. Fructose appears to be a moderator of that fuel. It's like a fuel regulator.

15:21Chris:So if you introduce, and it's interesting that it would run in parallel because if it starts to make sense from a survival signal where it's like, I've got fuel and now I want to make sure I can hang on to as much of it as possible. So I'm going to reduce my fuel needs. I'm going to take advantage of this season of plenty so that I can store more of the fuel that's currently available to me. And then it kind of runs in parallel where it's like, okay, now every time I eat sugar, I'm going to be storing more, hanging on to more, eating more, and it'll encourage me to eat more as well. And the problem really becomes that we're just doing this all the time because we can.

16:05Mark:I know you're in Canada and I don't know the statistics up there, but the average American is consuming about 17 teaspoons or 71 grams of added sugar a day. So it's about 57 pounds a year of added sugar. Is there a dose amount or at what point does it become a problem?

16:25Chris:Wow, that's hard. Your gut can handle a little bit of it. It's really about flux. So it's like if you introduce too much at once, then it will make it to the liver. The gut can handle it alone. Personally, I don't really even want my gut to handle it because that will also cause the same cellular depleting effects in your gut system, but at least it's not reaching liver fat and whatnot.

16:55Chris:But it's a challenge because in the form of fruit, it's hard to abuse it. Whole fruit is going to be something that, because it's packed with fiber and water and polyphenols and everything else, it's not really going to cause much of a problem. But if you start juicing it, the research is pretty clear, like juicing, drying fruit, processing it allows you to eat more and increases the flux, so that you're like, I could eat maybe two or three apricots at once or I can eat like 20, 25 if I eat them dry. It effectively becomes candy and that's just going to hit a stronger flux, which is going to reach your liver and cause that depleting effect there. So it becomes a challenge.

17:41 Eco mode: fructose as a conservation signal

17:41Mark:Is there a safe amount?

17:44Chris:I mean, I think you have to think of it more as a signal where it's like, how much do I want to be giving my body a conservation signal? Because that's really what it is, is telling my body, hang on to what you have, slow down. It's like I think of it like putting your car in eco mode. Everybody's got an eco mode button where it's like it's going to reduce the performance of my engine so that I can conserve fuel. This is sort of the same principle where it's like I'm going to tell my body not to be in sport mode, not to be like have vitality and energy and like really run in a high performance way. I want to slow it down because I want to make sure I'm utilizing as much of my diet as I possibly can.

18:30 Gut health, GLP-1, and sucralose

18:30Mark:Now, you mentioned the gut. How does fructose affect your microbiome? Leaky gut syndrome, things like that. What's your thoughts on that based on your research?

18:41Chris:So the gut lining is also an energy sensitive tissue that allows fructose metabolism to occur. So anywhere in the body that fructose metabolism happens, it causes this drop in ATP, into uric acid, your mitochondria slow down, everything else. So then if you think about that in the gut, if I'm giving this kind of a depleting signal to my gut lining, it would sort of make sense that the tissues would eventually become more fragile, more inflammatory. They would have trouble doing their job of digesting and everything else.

19:22Chris:You know, another interesting thing is that's where your body secretes its natural GLP1. So if you're losing that resilience in your gut lining, then even that will start to drop, the natural way your body is doing that. So it causes this conservation signal wherever it interacts with fructose metabolism. And if your GLP1 levels drop, then your ghrelin levels increase. So if your ghrelin levels increase, your hunger is going to increase. So it's one of those things that never satisfies you.

19:52Mark:It's probably now, what about sucralose? I think a lot of people are familiar with fructose, but all your energy drinks, most of your, maybe today they're starting to get a little bit better. Most of your protein powders today and protein drinks have sucralose in them. I've kind of poo-pooed on this for the last 20 years that it's probably the worst thing you could put into your diet. Is sucralose worse, better? Some fructose, why don't you elaborate on that a little bit?

20:23Chris:My focus really is on fructose metabolism. So I don't have, I know that many alternative sugars can be suspect. It's like, can they have these effects? Have they slightly toxic? Are they overly processed? All that kind of thing. I'm not afraid of them because I'm more concerned with the conservation signal that comes from fructose. So like some sugar alcohols will still enable fructose metabolism to happen, even if they don't have fructose specifically.

21:01Chris:But on the whole, like sorbitol, for example, is going to theoretically be a problem. But on the whole, I think that sugar alternatives are going to allow some of that burden to get lifted, where you're not causing quite so much of that cellular stress that's going to cause your mitochondria to slow down. And to me, that's the most important thing. In my personal opinion, some of the worries around some of those alternative sugars are noise in comparison to the effects of fructose metabolism.

21:32Mark:I remember being in college over 35 years ago and just looking at all the different names of sugar and identified over 50. Maybe you can explain to our listeners just kind of what am I looking for when I, how do I even read a food label? Because some people don't even know how ingredients are listed or the hidden names that they might see for sugar.

21:55Chris:Yeah, there's so many. I think just, I personally prefer to focus just on sugar itself, table sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Those are the big ones. The rest, there might be some problems here and there, but it's not quite as much to focus on. Those are the big ones. And most natural sugars will still fit into that, like coconut sugar and beet sugar and whatnot. It's still sucrose. It's still going to have fructose in it, even if it's organic and everything else.

22:27Chris:And so this conversation could sort of turn into even talking about fruit, because fruit still has fructose, honey has fructose. And it's not saying that they're bad. It's just appreciating the signal that's coming out of it is telling your body to conserve. It's not a toxin. It's not going to kill your cells. It's not going to kill your mitochondria, but it will slow everything down. And that I think is where the biggest problem really is. So if your mitochondria is slowing down, you're not producing ATP, adenosine triphosphate, your energy levels get much lower. Inflammation gets much higher there. So you're going to feel like garbage. And let's say you go on a diet. You want to lose weight. You want to exercise. If you have mitochondria downregulation, you're going to have no energy to do the things you want to go out there and do.

23:18 Why cutting sugar cold turkey backfires before it helps

23:18Mark:Now, are people addicted to this or not just sugar?

23:24Chris:It feels like it. It really feels like it, because think about what happens. It's like if I'm going to say, okay, I've got to cut my sugar back, so many can't even last like three days. But you can resolve this if you think about what it's doing, because glucose is fuel and fructose is the fuel regulator. So it's like if I'm going to cut sugar, I'm cutting both at the same time. That means I'm taking fuel out of the equation, which is what the cell is hungry for, because it's low on fuel. It's low on energy. And then I'm also increasing the energy conversion in my cell, because I'm taking fructose out of it. And so it makes sense that in the short term, those cravings are going to go nuts, because you've taken the fuel away and you've increased the conversion of energy. You've made the cell more hungry.

24:22Chris:And so I personally think that the smart thing to do there is to cut fructose, to really focus on fructose, because that's the bottleneck in your cell. And maybe for the first while, increase glucose in the form of complex carbohydrates, not the solid hit of high glycemic carbs, but fill that demanding cell with what it's looking for, with glucose. I think that the cravings that we're feeling are really just an alarm system that our cells are struggling with not enough energy. And so it feels like an addiction, because your cell is really, really, really hungry. You're constantly giving it the signal that it's not going to have enough fuel.

25:05Chris:And I think it confuses us, because we start thinking, okay, it's a dopamine thing where it's the sweet flavor and all of this. That's what's causing me to go back to it. But it's fascinating to see that when you do focus on fructose, that turns off really surprisingly quickly, within a few weeks for most people.

25:26Kelli:Is there anything that you can do to create an environment like where, let's say for the most part, your diet is fairly sugar free, but you're in Italy and you want some gelato. When that hits your system, is there anything you do to be optimized that your body can just handle that, or are you just going to pay for it for a little bit?

25:47Chris:That's really where our research has gone, is asking that question of, can we do something about this without radically causing a restricted diet for the rest of my life? And it is, yes, I believe that the answer is yes. But just to explain how complicated this is, the body has a process called the polyol pathway that allows us to create our own fructose inside.

26:09 The polyol pathway and the tongue's sweetness receptors

26:09Chris:And it's activated in so many of the common ways that we already are concerned about. So we've talked about sugar. We've talked about high glycemic carbs. We've talked a little bit about alcohol. Those are all important. But high glycemic carbohydrates are glucose. Those shouldn't be a problem by this argument, except for the fact that this process allows glucose to be converted into fructose.

26:45Chris:Added on top of that, you've got salty foods, because that's another trigger of fructose metabolism. Hypoxia, dehydration. So suddenly, it starts to sound like the same old story, where it's like all of these different things I need to be careful with and restrict. If they're all a path to fructose metabolism, then I can't restrict everything I enjoy eating for the rest of my life. And that's really where our research has gone. I was like, okay, then. This bottleneck, there's a particular enzyme at the center of this whole story. And that's where your ATP gets degraded into uric acid. If that doesn't happen, then you don't have that cellular burden to deal with.

27:33Chris:And that's where pharma is looking. And that's really where we're looking on a natural process to see, can we influence that, because it simplifies this so much, where it's like, I can do whatever I want to as far as controlling my diet. They don't have to be obsessive about it like we currently are.

27:51Chris:So in doing research for the book, there was a group of cells inside your tongue called the TAS1R. And from the research, and I would love to hear if you're familiar with this or you have any comments on it, is, sorry, I have a raccoon outside my door here who's wanting to be on our podcast here. It's early, dude. You're supposed to come back on the 15th. Go back to bed. Yeah, really, so he's looking for his food here. He's pretty good, better than me.

28:26Chris:That being said, a person who has a BMI of 29 or higher literally is addicted to the sweetness that they feel in their tongue. The minute they found out in studies that a person falls below that BMI of 29, it starts decreasing the sweet cravings that a person may have there. So I'm curious that if you were familiar with that research and what were your thoughts on that?

29:52Kelli:I'm not, but that's very interesting.

29:54Chris:So in many of the different tracks that we've done when it comes to looking at a reduction in dietary sugar or using polyphenols to interrupt fructose metabolism, it's really amazing to see that tastes change. Like I've been doing this for about three years now and within maybe the first couple of months, I started to notice that I didn't like sweet foods as much. It became unpalatable, it was too sweet. And then on the other hand, a strawberry was like, holy cow, was that amazing? It just tastes phenomenal.

30:31Chris:So I do believe that you're right. I think that our tastes start to shift, but some of the researchers behind this have argued that our taste preferences perhaps developed because of the system. Because if you think about it, we like sweet foods, we like salty foods, we like savory foods. We don't like bitter foods. And those tastes all map to fructose metabolism. Bitter does not. And so perhaps this tracks to a survival signal where it's like, I want to have a preference for the foods that will allow me to conserve as much energy as possible, because I'm going to survive longer that way. The bitter foods on the other hand, would typically be more associated with polyphenols and things that may help offset that equation. It might push us more towards sour as well, more towards fat burning than conserving. And so you start to see this balance even in what we enjoy eating, where maybe there's a reason.

32:50 Where sugar hides, and 175 years of rising intake

32:50Kelli:I think people are sometimes naive to all the places that sugar appears. There's the obvious ones, sweet beverages and desserts and snacks. There's also a lot of hidden places that people might not be aware of, whether it's condiments or the creamer in your coffee. Any places that you think our listeners would be surprised where the sugar's coming from?

33:15Chris:There's so many. I mean, I think yogurt is a big one. We eat yogurt in the morning thinking that it's a healthy choice. And I'm not saying probiotics aren't good for you, but most yogurts are full of sugar. So it's crazy, we basically choose to start our day with something very close to ice cream and pastries. And we call it a healthy breakfast. It's kind of wild. It's going to be really challenging in reality. And hopefully we eat some protein with it, but not everyone enjoys eggs or bacon.

33:57Chris:So it's interesting to see, it's hidden within our diet all over.

34:00Mark:You're right, sauces, ketchups, so many different things. It's hard to make healthy choices.

34:09Chris:But I've actually started to recognize that the path of how our diet changed over the last 125 years or more is pretty significant. You can trace it pretty easily too. So back in 1851, I believe it was, the London World Fair happened, and it was right after there were a bunch of tariffs that shifted regarding sugar. So before that, it was like the East India Trading Company had a monopoly on sugar everywhere, and then suddenly at this World Fair, it was like, here, we're introducing sugar to the world. Everyone gets to enjoy this now.

34:47Chris:And it's wild to see that as our consumption of sugar grew, metabolic decline followed. It was a perfect leading indicator. As that consumption grew, so did our getting sick. And then we introduced in the early 1900s, the supermarkets, like the Piggly Wiggly and everything else, and we started basically being able to eat whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it. And we drank more alcohol, and then we introduced high fructose corn syrup and started processing all of our food.

35:20Chris:So all of these different things, if you think about the high glycemic carbs, the salty food, the alcohol, the exposure to sugar, all of this is just adding layer upon layer of this same survival signal. And if our bodies are just locked into this conserving state, it makes perfect sense why we're seeing metabolic decline. We're just pushing ourselves towards fragility every day.

35:47Chris:Now the sugar intake is absolutely associated with obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, high triglycerides, metabolic syndrome, tooth decay. I mean, I see these young children, babies, just before they even get their full set of adult teeth in, they've rotted their teeth out. We're just starting them so early.

36:07Kelli:So can you give us some hope to our listeners if they find themselves addicted to sugar, they're overweight, they're in this cycle, where can they start?

36:18Chris:I think what I would recommend is try to cut sugar out of your diet and just pay attention to what your body does, because it will be hard. And it's a really strong signal to see the effect that it's having on your body, because sugar is not a macronutrient, your body does not need it. Your body needs glucose if you're not fat adapted, if you don't have ketones easily available, but you do need glucose.

36:35Chris:And so if this is eliminated from your diet, you're probably going to recognize very quickly that cravings are right there at the window, demanding to get in. And I think cravings, the very existence of them should be recognized as a signal, where it's like, if I eat dinner, I am not hungry in any way two hours later. So why in the world am I going and rummaging the cupboard for chips or cereal late at night? There is no reason for that. That's actually a signal that your cells don't have the energy that they need.

36:49Chris:And so now understanding that story, it really says that fructose is depleting your cellular energy. If you want to carry that through your lifetime, that's a scary thought because that means that eventually metabolic dysfunction is going to happen. That's why like 70% of death has a metabolic origin today. It's insane how high it is. We all know people in our families that we are worried about here.

36:52 Fructose, salt, and the brain

36:52Mark:What about this leading to dementia or Alzheimer's?

36:59Chris:Good question. So the brain, fructose does not cross the blood brain barrier, but fructose metabolism is highly active in the brain. Which then turns the story to that pathway of allowing glucose to be converted into fructose, the polyol pathway. That has a very strong prevalence in the brain.

37:30Chris:And not only that, it's highly targeted, which is really interesting. So within the brain, there's certain areas that I would say are going to be survival mechanisms. If you lose your vision, if you lose your motor control, then you will probably not be able to eat as an animal. So that's important to preserve. However, reproduction, short-term memory, those areas might not be so critical. Those might be more like easy to turn off if you want to survive.

38:00Chris:So what I see is happening is that fructose metabolism is being used to triage energy in the brain and it's targeted. And so the very areas of the brain that are targeted with Alzheimer's disease and cognitive dysfunction and all of that are the same areas of the brain where fructose metabolism is most active. And it appears that this could be how the brain is triaging energy. So when it reads the environment is unstable, it uses fructose to dial down certain areas of the brain to preserve others.

38:35Mark:Interesting. I think it was last August there was a study that came out on aspartame. What's in, was it in diet drinks for the most part? And they said that it leads to inflammation in the brain. So to me, inflammation in the brain is type two, or type three diabetes, which is Alzheimer's and dementia. So I think one day they're going to look back and say all these different forms of artificial sweeteners along with a gene predisposition of really what's caused this epidemic and what's taken place in our country. Not Canada, it doesn't cross over to Canada. It stops at the border.

39:23Chris:It's really important to remember that fructose metabolism causes inflammation, very directly. That degrading ATP into uric acid is probably the primary source of uric acid that we have to worry about. So people with gout worry about uric acid, they think it's from purines, and I'm not saying it's not, but that's serum uric acid. It's really hard to measure intracellular uric acid.

39:51Chris:And this is what fructose metabolism is doing, it's actually creating uric acid in the cell and that's causing mitochondrial stress. And so when you look across metabolic disease, you see inflammation, you see low cellular energy, you see mitochondrial dysfunction, you see reactive oxygen, you see insulin resistance, fructose metabolism does all of that, directly. And so, whereas I do think that we need to pay attention to toxins and environment and genetics and everything like that, because I think they all drag on cellular energy to some level, I think fructose metabolism is just adding this massive layer of the same thing on top. And that's why it's so significant. Everybody is exposed to fructose, even if they don't eat it.

40:46Mark:So you mentioned something about salt leading to this and I meant to ask you the question, salty foods. Can you elaborate on that?

40:55Chris:Sure, so I'll try not to get too technical here, but yeah.

41:00Mark:Because when you were talking about sweets, I really don't eat much sweets. Kelli, you have to eat more sweet, right? Kelli, you don't.

41:05Kelli:Yeah, if I'm going to treat myself, I'll always have a meal first. I don't just grab something. I'll have some salmon and some vegetables and maybe some berries, and then I might have a chocolate covered cashew or strawberry or something as a treat, not on the regular, but I do enjoy it.

41:20Mark:Good dark chocolate covered in food or nut or something. That would be my go-to.

41:26Kelli:That's awesome.

41:28Mark:But one day, I'm a salty savory type of guy. That's where I get my go-to from, so.

41:33Chris:Sure. So then you started mentioning salt, then I paid attention, so, okay. All right, so you spoke in my language. So how does that affect things? I'll try and keep it simple because this one gets a little complicated.

41:53Chris:Basically, your blood, think of your blood like a sauce on the stove. If you reduce the sauce, it gets relatively more salty, right? Or if you add salt to it, it's more salty. Either one is going to do the same thing. It's saltier. So your blood, there's something called osmolality within your blood, and it's just the relative saltiness of your blood. And that is read by the body as a signal because if your blood, it basically is telling your body your blood is thick. And then that means that it needs to constrict your blood vessels to preserve blood flow.

42:30Chris:So if that's the case, then what happens is that it starts to activate fructose metabolism because when you do that within your vascular system, that whole process, and that conversion with uric acid and all that, it drops the nitric oxide within the cell as well. So then that enables the vascular system to constrict better. We all know that that's related to hypertension. And so this process of actually enabling that to happen, it's involved with the same ingredients of the polyol pathway, where all those reductase goes up, sorbitol, glucose gets converted into sorbitol, sorbitol into fructose, and then suddenly it's like that little bit of drop in cellular energy in your vascular system enables it to tighten up.

42:59Chris:Now that sounds great temporarily because it's trying to preserve blood flow. But when we leave it on like that, then of course we know that hypertension can be a result because you can't live like that forever.

43:35Mark:Yeah, well, we did a show a couple of weeks ago on hypertension, high blood pressure. I mean, what is it, 30 some percent of the people will have high blood pressure also, or taking a statin too, which also affects your GLP1 levels. So crazy stuff. Kelli, you're gonna jump in?

43:56 Supplements, mitochondria, and taking back agency

43:56Kelli:Yeah, I was just thinking for the person who is addicted to sugar, and they've been in this cycle for a long time, other than just, hey, stop it. Are there practically things? Because it is more addictive than cocaine. Any support, supplements, anything that can help them in the process of cutting sugar out. And I wanna add to that, Chris, before you answer that. So is the answer getting your body and your mitochondria working more efficiently at this point, is that the answer? Or is that just too simple?

44:25Chris:It's more than that. Yes, straight up. If your mitochondria are producing sufficient energy, then the signal that you're telling your brain that your body is starving on a cellular level will shut off. And then that is nice because then you stop cravings. And then you get agency over your food. You stop snacking all the time. You stop over-consuming. And then you start dropping body weight. And then everything else starts to get a little bit better. So it's like this linchpin right at the center of everything, where now everything starts to open up again and breathe. It's like hitting the sport mode button.

45:08Chris:So yes, it's cellular energy. Absolutely, I think so. I think that this is the critical piece that will help us to understand metabolic dysfunction on the whole. I think that, for example, the caloric model says that the reason that we have metabolic dysfunction is we over-consume, but it doesn't tell you why you over-consume. This does. It's not saying the caloric model is wrong. It's saying, hey, there's something there, but this explains why we're over-consuming. The insulin hormone model says that insulin resistance is the root, but this explains why insulin resistance might develop.

46:07Chris:Because if the cell can't have the capacity for more fuel because the mitochondria are pinched, then what would happen if you put more fuel into the cell? It would actually become toxic. It would kill the cell. Too much substrate would basically destroy it. So then maybe insulin resistance is an adaptation saying, I can't handle any more, stop trying to shove fuel into me. And so it becomes an adaptation. And there are so many little things where it seems to resolve a lot of the questions that we've had for so long. And basically it seems to suggest that if we focus on fructose metabolism itself, then we have hope because we can turn down all these downstream effects.

47:39Mark:So what are some of the things that you teach people to optimize their life, their health, their mitochondria?

47:49Chris:I think we could restate everything that has come before and it all applies. Get enough sleep, make sure you drink enough water, reduce your sugar, try and eat whole foods, resistance training, zone two training, we've been talking about this forever and this doesn't discredit any of it. It is saying absolutely all of it's important, but I'll put it this way.

48:20Chris:All of those things are filling the bucket when it comes to trying to get your cellular energy back up again. The problem is that there's a hole in the bucket and really that's what fructose metabolism appears to be, we're doing all this good work and yet we're letting it all drain out the bottom because we also have a burden in the form of fructose metabolism in our life. So I think plugging that hole is the most significant thing that we probably can do. Everyone should be taking vitamin C but vitamin C is filling the bucket. I actually think that correcting this might be more important than even vitamin C.

48:52Chris:And so if we want to talk about how, we could do all those different things and have a restricted diet for the rest of our life, but I think the conversation needs to turn to, can we moderate the enzyme itself? And there is a portion of our population that does this naturally. They have a genetic condition that's totally benign called essential fructosuria and they don't have the fructose kinase enzyme.

48:52 Fructokinase and the essential fructosuria clue

49:04Chris:And just by the name of that condition, they pee out the fructose, fructosuria. So what's basically happening, and the amazing thing is that they don't get sick. They don't get metabolic illness. And so it gives us this perfect natural experiment where it's like, if you don't have the enzyme and you don't get sick and it's a disposable enzyme because the body just eliminates fructose, then maybe that's where we should be paying attention.

49:20Chris:And so far, all of the research is showing that that is a pretty amazing linchpin at the entire center of this. So we can pay attention to all those different inputs or we can just address this itself. And that's basically where the research is going. So there are major pharma companies that are looking at fructose kinase inhibitors, but I also found in the research that there are polyphenols that we can be taking every day that also do a similar job of inhibiting fructose kinase.

50:30Mark:Would you mind sharing some of those with our audience?

50:33Chris:So not all of them are easily available, but luteolin is. That is the one that is definitely, I think, needs the most attention. Luteolin is very similar to quercetin, it's just a polyphenol, but it has been found to be a strong fructose kinase inhibitor. It sits right in that linchpin where you want it to, where you don't do as much fructose metabolism and the body just gets rid of it.

51:02Mark:How do you spell that, Chris, for our audience?

51:04Chris:L-U-T-E-O-L-I-N.

51:41 Luteolin and GLP-1 drugs through the fructose lens

51:41Chris:So it's pretty amazing because there's been ingredient trials on it and I've seen results like a 43% drop in insulin resistance, HOMA-IR, a 22% drop in liver fat, huge shifts in triglycerides and waist circumference and everything. So it's definitely doing good work, and while we don't have human data to say this is a strong fructose kinase inhibitor, there's lots of lab work to basically show that this is definitely worth paying attention to.

52:32Chris:I would challenge anyone to give it a try. At least once a year I will go 60 days with zero sugar, not even a raisin, I mean nothing. And your body's just firing so well, you sleep better, you digest better, your brain is better, you lean out, your workouts are great. And then somehow it'll creep in a little bit, not only a lot of sugar, but I go strict 60 days a year with not even a bite of a raisin and the body feels great, it's so worth doing. So I challenge our listeners, if you're having any doubts if this is true, give yourself, start with one day and then just keep tacking on days and your body's so amazing, just notice how it responds.

53:41Kelli:So Kelli, is that when you go to Italy, you don't have any sweets during that 60 days or some of those trips?

53:48Kelli:The last two times I went to Italy I did not have gelato, go ahead Chris.

53:53Chris:Good for you, so I'd love to know what that looks like for you. So say three weeks in or so, do you notice a change in energy? Do you notice a change in cravings?

54:03Kelli:It's interesting because I always feel great. I'm about to be 57, I feel like I'm 27. I feel great all of the time. So when people say, let me try this supplement or try this, I feel great. But when I do that, my sleep is deeper, I can just feel the digestion happening, your clothes instantly just start feeling better, you're strong in your workouts, you lean out, your brain is sharper.

54:28Kelli:So I definitely, at the end of 60 days, people are noticing. They're like, okay, what have you done? You really dialed something in, you can just see your body composition change. So yeah, I can go back to my phone and look at the pictures at the end of the 60 days and I'm like, that looks.

54:38Chris:Yeah, it's true, like the little bit of puffiness, like the moon face or whatever starts dropping off, skin clears up. I'm part of a community on Reddit that does this and they take a dietary approach to it, they just hardline sugar restriction and they struggle so hard, but they also see amazing results. After like four days, you're like, I got this.

55:09Chris:You just decide and I do it with intermittent fasting. So I'll do two meals a day and it's about four or five ounces of protein, four or five ounces of vegetables and then I will have berries. So a combination mix of berries and two of those meals like that a day and that's what I do. No nuts, I don't even do a lot of fats when I do those 60 days, I'll do maybe an avocado.

55:34Kelli:Good for you, that's amazing.

55:35Chris:It is not that easy for many people though and I think really it has to do with that cellular energy debt because if you've got a long history of metabolic burden then kind of getting that energy back up to a proper state is going to be challenging because that's when energy improves, you feel it, and that's when cravings shut off. So you've got to get all the way up to that to really feel that benefit and that can be a big challenge.

54:38Kelli:Where do the GLP-1s, twos, or threes fall into the category of fixing this, even though it's fixing it from a peptide or medical question? How does it address this? I know the Retatrutide type definitely works on the liver fat like crazy, it's literally like a Pac-Man gobbling up visceral fat and sucking out inflammation, so what's your thoughts on that and why is it maybe good, why is it not good? I know we have that in our notes here.

55:40Chris:No, that's smart. So I think the easiest way to understand this is probably with a metaphor. So if you think of what fructose is doing to the body, if that's perhaps the cause of the problem, it's sort of like telling your car to run with a really, really poor performing engine, like an eco car, and the problem with that is that we're always giving our body the signal that we need more fuel because we're not performing well, so we start packing on, we start filling the tank as much as we possibly can, probably to the point where it's like, now we're pulling a fuel trailer behind us and we're this little eco car.

56:20Chris:Now, a GLP-1 is basically turning off that signal to refuel, or a GLP-2, GLP-3. So it's sort of forcing restriction where you're going to take some of the burden off. It's not going to necessarily fix what's happening in the engine. If it does, then it's just sort of helping in a side effect sort of way. But it starts to resolve maybe why when people go off those medications, it's really well-documented that within two years you're going to regain the weight. It's pretty rough. So I would argue that it's doing everything I thought it would. It's taking that metabolic burden away, it's going to help with cognitive function, it's going to help with liver fat, it's going to help with visceral fat, all of those things.

56:14Chris:Absolutely, I think this goes a layer deeper in saying this is why you're struggling in the first place. And if you can actually open up that bottleneck in the engine, then you're actually going to be consuming more of that stored fuel as much as you possibly can, as well as turning off the signal to refuel.

56:35Mark:Well, the other thing is when you're taking these GLP-1s, or what's called GLPs, you're renting your weight loss. 70%, according to JAMA, okay, you all can Google it, 70% of the people gain the weight back, like you said, because they never get to the root cause of what causes these metabolic functions, what's down-regulating their mitochondria, what are the belief system, the values, the identity that they're carrying around, unresolved trauma. But I think those things are a good crutch, provided they go in. Well, what does Dr. Gladden say? Don't go into this without an exit strategy.

57:23Chris:Yeah, and too many people go on these. I think they're amazing. I think they're saving lives. But I also think that it's treating a symptom rather than the root. And I think, really, I think fructose is the root. I think that's the problem we need to be paying attention to. So that's why I really want to focus on luteolin.

58:37 What Chris noticed in himself, and SugarShield

57:41Chris:For example, I've been using liposomal luteolin. We ended up developing one because of all of this research. We're like, okay, we've got to start experimenting and playing around with it. And it got to the point where it was like, this needs to be a product dedicated to this because no one's doing this. And so we ended up developing SugarShield as a result of that. But really, what we're seeing as a result is that it's the exact same reports that Kelli reported, where people are seeing a drop in cravings, improved energy, their skin changes, their body composition changes. It is identical from what I've seen to actually achieving a truly sugar restrictive diet. And the cool thing is that it also allows you to enjoy some of those foods without fear.

58:37Chris:And so I've been living that way for like three years now. And for my own, what I found, and this was before SugarShield, long before that, I found that about a month in, I woke up with a feeling of euphoria. It was like energy switched on. I was like, whoa, I feel good. I've never felt good like this before. And right around the same time, my cravings just dropped off like nothing.

58:56Chris:I remember sitting there with my wife and we're like, should we have a cocktail? It seems like one of those nice moments. And both of us were like, no, I'm okay. And the night cravings and all that shut off right at the same time. And then I dropped like 25 pounds over the next six months or so, without really trying.

59:18Mark:That's a good point. You brought up that alcohol, how much does alcohol cravings hide as fructose cravings?

59:26Chris:It is, so the research that came out last fall basically showed that the reason that alcohol and fructose have so much in common is osmolality. So we talked about that dehydrating state in your blood. Alcohol does that. And so basically if you combine alcohol and carbs together, you have the perfect pattern for synthesizing fructose inside your body. So I would say if you're going to drink, don't eat carbs.

59:55Mark:So you can't have pizza and beer and a bowl? What the hell? You're taking all the joy of life here, Chris.

59:59Chris:Yeah, exactly, exactly.

60:02 Closing thoughts and where to find Chris

60:02Mark:Chris, this has been a great conversation. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you to find out about SugarShield? And you can share any website, any of your socials.

60:13Chris:Yeah, our website is liv3health.com, so L-I-V-3-health.com. And we've got all sorts of resources to help make this really simple. And I've also got a fledgling YouTube channel, The Fructose Model, where we kind of dive into the many different ways that this stretches into metabolic health. Because if this really does sit upstream, like we're talking about cellular energy, maybe being like the upstream thing, and this is the major drag on cellular energy, then this should affect everything. Hormones, neurodegeneration, fatty liver, of course. It stretches into all of these different fields.

60:59Mark:I'm sorry, Chris, I didn't mean to speak over you. What was the name of that product, Sugar What?

61:01Chris:SugarShield?

61:02Mark:Is that on your website?

61:03Chris:Yeah, it is, it is.

61:05Mark:When I Googled it quick while we were talking here, there was a couple other versions of SugarShield there. So can you hold that up so everybody knows what it looks like here?

61:12Chris:Yeah, we're working on that. Everybody listening can see, can you all see this? So that's why you've got to watch it on YouTube here, okay. We're just a baby company, so it's Liv3 SugarShield, or Liv3 Health SugarShield.

61:32Chris:So it's a liposomal luteolin, which we included because of the research that shows that luteolin inhibits fructose kinase, and it also includes tart cherry extract because tart cherry is well researched to help clear uric acid. So this is our current best shot at really targeting this pathway, where it's going to try to stop as much of fructose metabolism as possible and flush out the byproduct that is going to cause cellular stress so that your cellular energy can wake up. And I think a lot of people are familiar with uric acid because of gout, right?

62:10Mark:Exactly. And that's literally where you feel like you're walking around with ankle weights all day long, so.

62:15Chris:Yeah, and if you want to think about that for a half a second, you go back, that is an ancient disease, but it was always the disease of kings. It was the disease of the wealthy that could afford sugar, afford to eat whatever they want, drink anything they want. It just sounds like a precursor to modern metabolic disease and the pattern fits perfectly.

62:38Mark:Well, of course, I love how you took a pretty complex subject and if you're listening and you're like, oh, this is biology or chemistry, this is too much for me, Chris made it really simple. You just need to cut out sugar. If you just take one thing away, cut out those sugars.

62:56Chris:I appreciate that. And I don't think fructose should be feared. I think it needs to be understood because this is something that probably every animal on the planet, every species on the planet, uses as a survival aid. We just don't need it in our modern life because we've kind of hacked our way into eating whatever we want whenever we want it. So if we recognize that it's a signal that allows the body to conserve and just ask, do I want to tell my body that? Probably not. I want to run in sport mode, not eco mode. It's sort of as simple as that.

63:35Mark:That's a good way to think about it. Did you hear Chris just told everybody not to go to the Cheesecake Factory? Man, that was terrible. I'm in trouble.

63:48Mark:You know, we have some of these podcasts and some people, it's like time's so darn slow. This podcast, we went by in an hour and I could still do another hour with you, Chris. You have a really unique delivery system of explaining things, chunking it down. So it's simple.

64:04Chris:I really appreciate that, Mark. You really walk the walk, talk the talk. If you've seen some of our other podcasts, I don't blow smoke up people's, you know what. So if I don't like it, I don't agree with it. That's why when you first came out, I'm like, is he pro fructose? At first, I wasn't sure. It's going to be interesting, I said, Kelli, you better do all the talking, because I'm going to put my foot in my mouth here, but very good.

64:28Mark:Kelli, you usually have a wrap up before I do my wrap up with Chris.

64:31Kelli:Yeah, Chris, thank you for challenging us to think differently for just bringing some clarity into this conversation about metabolism and sugar and fructose. And we hope that our listeners make a commitment to cut the sugar out. The simple sugars especially, start there and we're here to support you any way we can. Chris, thank you so much. We will post all of your contact information in the notes, so we hope people get in touch with you. What's the website one more time, Chris?

65:02Chris:Love it, thank you. Liv3 Health, L-I-V-3-health.com. Pretty easy, guys, you could knock that out.

65:09Mark:Hey, if anybody's listening or watching this thing, you always know that I say this, your intuition got you here. Take your intuition. Just don't be a person who goes here, learn something, get your dopamine fixed off of learning. Go make some transformational moves there. Go to the website, go get some information, Chris. Go follow him on social media. Go start digesting some of his content here. If you like what you hear, drop some of his products, start living a healthier lifestyle.

65:35Mark:Outside of that, Chris, you walk the walk, talk the talk, man. Appreciate you coming on the show. You really took a very complicated subject and simplified it. And I've been in this 30 years where I sat there and go, now I understand why this is the way this is when it comes to, we all know that sugar's bad, but why is it bad? What it does, so excellent job, man. So outside of that, that's a wrap. Hopefully you all got something out of this that you can apply to your life and live a healthier lifestyle in the meantime. Thanks for tuning in. We will see you all on the next episode. Bye bye.