Auto-transcribed and lightly edited for readability; speaker labels added by LIV3. Timestamps follow the published episode. 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 Welcome and introductions

00:00Todd:One of the most difficult things I've ever done as a person, it's like going through a withdrawal process: sitting at the edge of the sofa, my head in my hands, thinking that the world was coming to an end.

00:11Todd:If you're a CEO, founder, physician, or someone responsible for serious outcomes, pressure isn't occasional, it's constant. People, capital, and consequences sit on your shoulders every day. While running a manufacturing company, I assumed discipline alone would carry me through that pressure. It didn't, and eventually I broke, suffering a multitude of serious health problems, because stress accumulates, and if your physiology can't buffer that load, performance eventually drops.

00:35Todd:I'm Todd Vande Hei, CEO of Stark. I've operated at scale where the margin for error was thin, and my health had to perform but didn't. If you carry a real responsibility, your health isn't a hobby, it's infrastructure. Here we talk about how high-performing leaders build optimal health that can handle the pressure of their lives' demands, so that when the stakes rise, their physiology rises with it.

00:54Todd:Quick note before we dive in: this podcast is for educational purposes only. It's not medical advice. Always work with your physician or qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your training, nutrition, medications, or health protocols.

01:06Todd:Today's guest is Chris Mearns, founder of LIV3 Health and creator of the Fructose Model, a systems-based framework that reframes how fructose metabolism influences cellular energy, insulin resistance, and chronic metabolic dysfunction. Chris spent years studying recurring patterns across some of today's most prevalent conditions: obesity, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, and kept finding the same thread running through all of them. His work connects fructose not just to sugar intake, but to a broader biological trigger that most people, and most physicians, are completely missing. He's also the creator of SugarShield, a science-based supplement built from the insights of the Fructose Model, and he's on a mission to change the conversation around metabolic health from calorie counting and restriction to understanding the actual mechanisms driving dysfunction.

02:22 Energy debt and the cellular bottleneck

02:22Todd:So let's get right into it. The first area of interest I have is this concept of energy debt. Most people view that as a calorie problem, but can you describe what you believe to be actually happening inside of the cell when fructose enters the picture?

02:41Chris:That's a really good question. Maybe just to rewind slightly: so much of what we're talking about now seems to circle back to this idea of cellular energy. Everyone's talking about mitochondria, we're talking about insulin resistance, which is really not getting energy into the cell when the cell needs more, and inflammation, which also causes energy stress in the cell. It's sort of like everything is starting to circulate around this concept of energy.

03:12Chris:There is a paradox, because the majority of us have excess weight, we have high glucose levels, so there's this fuel abundance inside of us. And yet we constantly have this signal that we are in an energy debt because we have cravings. We're all starting to appreciate that food noise is becoming a constant feature of our conversation, so there's a reason our body is continually trying to find more energy. Why do we have too much fuel and not enough energy? What's beginning to become the focus is that cellular energy issue inside the cell.

04:05Chris:If there is too much stress within the cell, your mitochondria become fragmented. They should happily be a network that works together and produces an efficient conversion of fuel into energy, but occasionally that can start to fragment, and then the ability to convert fuel into energy drops. So you effectively have a cell that's not producing the energy the body expects it to have.

04:39 Mitochondria in "economy mode"

04:39Chris:It's kind of running in an economy mode, a conserving kind of state. What you have is a bottleneck in the middle where you have all this fuel and not enough energy coming out. So it feeds itself: it sends the body a signal saying I don't have enough energy, and then you try to fill the bottle trying to solve that, but you never solve the bottleneck in the middle. That's really where fructose comes into the picture, because it appears that fructose is probably the primary way that bottleneck occurs.

05:14Todd:You mean the reason it occurs?

05:16Chris:The reason it occurs, exactly.

05:19 Fructokinase, ATP, and uric acid

05:19Chris:Mechanistically, what effectively happens is that fructose metabolism, not in your gut but when it has actually metabolized within the cellular area, the enzyme fructokinase converts your ATP, your energy, into eventually uric acid. Whereas ATP is typically able to be recharged, when your mitochondria consume it, it drops down to ADP, a triphosphate into a diphosphate, and then your mitochondria boost it back up again, like a little rechargeable battery. But the introduction of fructose into this equation effectively burns that battery. It degrades it all the way into AMP, a monophosphate, and eventually into uric acid, which then causes cellular stress.

06:13Chris:It causes inflammation within the cell, and that persistent stress eventually starts to fragment the mitochondrial network into this conserving state. It almost seems beautifully designed to cause this conserving posture. It's not killing your mitochondria, it's not killing your cell, it's basically adding friction into the system so that things slow down, so that little bottleneck occurs, which gives rise to the idea that maybe conserving is intentional in certain cases.

06:53Todd:It makes sense considering the history of Homo sapiens. We are designed to survive.

07:00Chris:Exactly, or all animals, for that matter. This is not unique to humans. In fact, humans just have a better-tuned version of it, but basically all animals have this. When you look closely enough, it appears there is this system at work in everybody, in everything. It kind of reframes uric acid as this key component that is well placed to cause this conserving posture.

07:40 Eco mode: the car analogy

07:33Chris:I like to look at it and ask: is conservation beneficial? Almost universally, it is. In our car, we hit the button so that we can go a little further with less gas. It's always a useful tool to have, but when you forget that it's on, even in your car, if you just drive in eco mode forever, eventually you can forget why you hit the gas and nothing happens. It almost seems like we're doing the same thing in our bodies: we're running in this low energy state and never actually getting ourselves up into what is effectively sport mode, running well.

08:12Chris:That's kind of that energy debt you were asking about. If all of our cells are running in this conserving place, then that's why your cells are always hungry. They want more because they're not running at their optimal performance level. It's built into everything. We have this built-in mechanism that makes us want to maximize the available fuel, and that makes a lot of sense because we live in a world that is typically difficult for animals in general.

09:20Chris:That's really the problem: we've gone from a place where we had a very cyclical ebb and flow of scarcity and abundance, and now we don't. Now we live in constant abundance. So if this is a survival signal, it's one that is meant to turn off, and we just don't do that anymore.

09:51 The body's own Ozempic factory

09:51Todd:You say that the body is its own Ozempic factory, which I think is quite an interesting perspective, but that fructose is blocking it. How does fructose suppress GLP-1 production, and what does that do to hunger signals?

10:10Chris:The GLP-1 is a peptide, but really it's just sending an instruction to tell your body to do something it already does. GLP-1 is secreted within the gut, which means that if you have a healthy gut, you should also be producing this yourself, and that's probably part of your satiety signaling, saying, okay, I'm full, I'm done.

10:43 Fructans, not gluten

10:43Chris:If we look at the way that gut health works, I keep coming back to the fact that there's a large amount of people that complain about gluten intolerance, and from what I've seen, it appears that a lot of that is people misdiagnosing themselves. It's not actually gluten intolerance, but it seems that fructans, which are actually chains of fructose, are more of the root cause there. Fructose metabolism occurs in many different tissues in the body, primarily the liver, but it also exists in your gut cells, and that seems to be the very first line of defense for where fructose is going to have an impact.

11:51Chris:If you're causing this energy debt within your gut cells, it would make sense that those cells would become more fragile, because that fragility is going to occur no matter where it happens. A single cell could be fine in a conserving state, but when it scales into the system, things start to not work as well in your body. If your entire gut is starting to have this energy debt, then it would make sense that it would become a little more permeable, a little more challenged when it comes to doing the work it's supposed to do.

12:45Chris:I actually believe that fructose intolerance, which is fructose digestion rather than metabolism, is probably a result of that friction fructose metabolism causes within the gut. That's just the first line of defense, but of course, if that's where your GLP-1 is being naturally secreted, it's probably going to affect that as well.

13:14 Where fructose actually comes from

13:14Todd:Most people think fructose is from fruit and from sugary treats and drinks like soda, but you're saying that the body actually makes its own. Walk us through the sources for that.

13:29Chris:I don't want to villainize fruit, because fruit is highly complex. It's incredible and it's balanced. It starts as being full of fat-burning compounds like fiber, water, and polyphenols, and then it slowly morphs into a more fructose-heavy fruit where it brightens its colors, the smell gets better, it sweetens, and the fiber drops off. Even while the same fruit sits on your countertop, it changes dramatically, not to mention different species and everything else. So I don't want to villainize fruit, because it's complex.

14:13Chris:Where fructose becomes a problem is when it's in simply sugar, because half of sucrose, table sugar, is fructose. High-fructose corn syrup is going to basically have a more bioavailable hit of it, even though it's roughly 55% rather than 50%. Sugar is the main issue, for sure.

14:37 The polyol pathway

14:37Chris:But the body also does produce fructose, and the way it does that is through a pathway called the polyol pathway. We've known about that for decades, because it's very applicable to diabetics. Basically, when we have a high blood glucose measurement, some of that glucose can be shuttled into fructose. What effectively happens is it uses aldose reductase to activate glucose being converted into sorbitol, and then sorbitol into fructose.

15:15Chris:This is relevant because everyone's very focused on glucose, but some research was done, and I thought this was fascinating: if you give a fructose metabolism inhibitor to an animal and then give them a huge load of glucose, they don't actually develop the same metabolic consequences as what would happen otherwise. So it's almost saying that glucose itself isn't the problem, but the fructose, this energy debt signaling, this conserving signal that comes from it, is actually the problem.

15:57Todd:It comes from the actual fructose, you're saying?

15:59Chris:If you think of it logically, if you have too much fuel in your car, that's not usually the problem. But if you leave that fuel too long, if it just sits there and becomes rancid and degrades, maybe there's a logical conclusion that could cause a problem in your engine. Glucose itself, we know our brain runs on it, our muscles run on it, it is our body's preferred fuel. If you were to block glucose, with the exception of ketones, you probably wouldn't last very long. We need it, it's our body's fuel.

16:49Chris:So why are we blaming glucose as a major contributor to metabolic dysfunction? This seems to resolve it: if you actually stop fructose metabolism, so that little conversion of glucose into fructose doesn't happen, you don't have the same metabolic consequences. It almost seems to make more logical sense that maybe it's just this excess of glucose going bad, effectively, and that's where the problems are coming in.

17:18Todd:So if someone eliminated all added sugars and still had metabolic dysfunction, which happens, insulin resistance, fatigue, stubborn fat, where should they be looking?

17:32Chris:We need to open up the conversation into the ways that polyol pathway works to really understand this. Converting glucose into fructose requires high glucose levels, or at least a spike, so that shifts the focus away from sugar only, to now we're talking about high glycemic carbohydrates too, because a huge bowl of pasta is going to make you feel lethargic. Does that sound like the energy debt thing? High glycemic carbs will become a problem.

18:15 Alcohol, dehydration, and salt as triggers

18:15Chris:Alcohol also, we're starting to appreciate, has a very similar role to fructose. There was research on this ages ago, I think the paper was called "fructose by another name" or something like that, basically saying that alcohol is effectively doing the same pathway. It was only maybe six months ago that there was research put out that identified it's because of how alcohol activates fructose metabolism. So it causes a dehydration signal, and that moves us to the next one, because dehydration is also an activator of fructose metabolism.

19:01Chris:Osmolality in the blood, which is effectively the relative saltiness of your blood, is what activates fructose metabolism. Osmolality is like making a sauce on the stove: if I add water, the relative saltiness goes down, if I boil it off or add salt, the saltiness goes up. That's effectively the same signal that happens within our blood. Our blood reads the relative saltiness, and when it reads our blood as salty, it assumes it's thick and will want to constrict your vascular system to preserve blood flow.

20:00Chris:When fructose metabolism activates, along that pathway of causing inflammation within the cell, nitric oxide also goes down, which allows the endothelial cells to start constricting. That makes an argument for why we develop hypertension: it's an adaptive response to this perception of our hydration level within our blood. It's trying to help us, but if we leave it on too long, it becomes problematic.

20:35Chris:If we are dehydrated and we have glucose available, the body can push some of that into the system, and if the body starts conserving at that state, it's going to try to hang on to metabolic water and increase fat stores. You start binding water and glucose together with glycogen, you create fat stores, and basically you start holding on to water because the body thinks it's dehydrated.

21:17 A redundant survival system

21:17Chris:There's a lot to unpack around endogenous fructose. Hypoxia is another one: it's a stressor, and if we don't have enough oxygen, the body will start to produce fructose. So there's high glycemic carbs, there's alcohol, there's osmolality, whether it's eating salty foods or just not drinking enough water, and there's hypoxia. There are all of these different states, which starts to make sense if this is a survival system: it would make sense it has multiple redundancies, just like any good alarm system, triggering from various directions.

22:01Chris:If you think about nature's intention here, fruit ripens right before a season of scarcity, like winter or the dry season, so maybe nature is trying to help us prepare by helping us conserve before a lean time. Then you flip it, and now you've got stressors like not enough water or not enough oxygen. A stress state would make sense also as a conservation state, because now the animal is going through a hard time and needs to survive it. If both of them are getting switched on, it's just that homeostatic middle where it's like, okay, I'm safe. There's an argument for this actually working as a really elegant and redundant survival system.

22:55Todd:That's so interesting. I've never heard this perspective. It's crazy.

23:01Todd:You make the case that the idea of cutting out fructose is not only wrong, but potentially counterproductive, which I remember from before all of the currently existing diets. As we started learning more about nutrition, fruit was for a period of time considered to be problematic for the health of humans. I just want to clarify, you said cutting out fructose is problematic, I'm not sure, fruit?

23:35Chris:Fruit, yes. I'm going back 15 years now.

23:40Todd:Got it, okay. And it's not really relevant to that anymore.

23:44Todd:And presently, it's not really considered quite as such, but what would you suggest if someone were to go on an elimination diet? How would they approach the fructose concept?

24:01 Cutting sugar: where to start

24:01Chris:Ah, that's a great question. Okay, so cutting sugar is obviously what I would focus on, because 50% of that table sugar molecule is fructose. So you're delivering fuel and you're delivering a fuel conservation signal at the same time. Maybe six weeks ago, there was a review that went out that basically reclassified fructose as a signaling molecule, separate from its role as a calorie: it's actually a metabolic regulator, and it does that by regulating cellular energy.

24:43Chris:So you're delivering a fuel and a fuel conservation signal at the same time, and that's a really smart pairing if you think about it from the survival perspective, because you want to hang on to as much of that fuel as possible. If you reduce your usage as you bring it in, that's great. Now, if you want to cut sugar, which I do recommend, the problem is you're cutting your fuel while you're improving that fuel conservation.

25:17Chris:So you're opening up that bottleneck, you're making your cells hungrier, and taking away what they're using at the same time. That's why cravings get worse initially: you've taken away the fuel the system is depending on, you're increasing your fuel needs and taking the fuel away. So if you want to cut sugar, which is probably the best thing because you're trying to get rid of as much of this conserving signal as possible, you have to start with sugar.

25:48Chris:Then what I'd recommend is you cut the sugar but increase, at least temporarily, complex carbohydrates, so you have a nice slow increase of available glucose to support the fact that you're opening up that bottleneck and have a higher need for glucose. Eventually your cells will start to lose that conserving posture. The mitochondria will start activating in a higher-performing way, they'll create more energy, and that energy signal will shut off the emergency alarm that's saying the cell is starving. So then cravings drop.

26:38Chris:That's effectively what we're seeing whether people are cutting sugar effectively or targeting fructose metabolism in other ways. It's the same thing: you're opening up that bottleneck, everything starts converting better, and that food noise goes away. Then you can start making better decisions about the choices you make. At that point maybe you drop carbohydrates again, because your body is going to start using available glycogen and other means of having readily available fuel.

27:19Chris:So that's the place to start. Then if you wanted to layer it up, it's like, okay, I've got to make sure I'm hydrating so I'm not activating that dehydrating state. Maybe I've got to drop my alcohol, because that's also activating it. I'd be a little more careful with high glycemic carbs, because spiking my glucose levels will cause fructose synthesis. It probably becomes obvious at a certain point that these are all the same strategies we've talked about for decades: don't eat too much salt, drop your high glycemic carbs, don't eat so much sugar, get your exercise and good sleep. All of it starts to sound very familiar. The problem is, if these are all redundancies of the same survival system, then cutting one might not turn the whole signal off.

28:15 Todd's own experience, and reframing cravings as biology

28:15Todd:So you're saying there's a way to cut food noise by going through this process of moving away from sugar. I've been through that process before, and I've gone through periods of time where I completely eliminated sugar, and when I say sugar, I mean not just table sugar but things like white rice. My personal experience with it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done as a person. It's like going through a withdrawal process.

28:54Todd:I remember getting home, well, any moment in time where there's a gap in doing something, and there's not a lot of that today because of technology. Back when I did this, sitting at a traffic light, it would immediately pop into my head that I needed to eat some ice cream. Getting home, sitting at the edge of the sofa with my head in my hands, thinking that the world was coming to an end, and realizing, oh, it's because I stopped eating sugar. Because it's my vocation, I have a lot of purpose or meaning behind exploring these things, but most people don't have that.

29:31Todd:How do they navigate it more effectively, because it's so easy to snap back to your previous self and go eat the ice cream or the cookies or the rice, since the consequences, compared to something like an actual drug addiction, are small, at least in the moment? Over time the consequences can be massive. How do you help people through that process?

30:04Chris:There's a lot to unpack there, because you're absolutely right, the consequences are insane, but you're right that they have a much longer timeline. If cellular energy is at the root of this, there are metabolic models that suggest that's the actual problem here. It resolves issues with the caloric model, the insulin hormone model, and so on. I believe it's a cellular energy model that is the true model, because if you kill the cell's energy, it starts to behave in a protective, conserving way, like it's trying to survive, and eventually that scales within the vascular system, the liver, the brain.

31:14Chris:That's why we see metabolic issues cluster: the same cellular energy deficit seems to be in place way before we diagnose it as a disease. The consequences are massive, but they might be decades out, and you're right that cutting sugar is brutally difficult. I'm part of a community on Reddit with close to 200,000 people, and it feels like a willpower problem, like maybe it's a dopamine thing, like I'm addicted and have to shake this thing. The word addiction gets thrown out so much, but I don't think it's an addiction.

31:58Chris:I think it's a cellular energy alarm system. Of course we like sweet food, of course we like savory food. I believe part of the reason we have a preference toward those things is because of this survival pathway: if it's going to help me as an animal survive a little longer, I'm going to develop a preference for those kinds of foods. That's maybe why we don't have a preference for bitter foods, because those are typically associated with polyphenols, things that would increase your metabolism, that conversion of energy, and work against that survival goal.

32:56Chris:So we like salty foods, savory foods, high glycemic carbs, sweet foods, all of it. If it's basically an alarm system, that explains why the cravings happen. When you cut sugar, if you're creating a bigger energy debt because you also took away available glucose, your body's going to freak out. It went from an energy debt to an energy crisis, because you took away a major source of fuel, the glucose that's hiding in the sugar.

33:36Chris:So I don't believe, I believe we need to reframe this and say it is not a willpower problem. It is biology. It's simply how our bodies work. We have a real biological need for energy, and sugar is restricting access to it, so you're going to go through a harder time trying to cut sugar, but eventually it goes away because that cell stress gets released.

34:06Todd:I felt that. But like most humans, I love sugar, and I've come back to it. I go for periods of time without simple sugar or simple carbohydrates, but it's five days, not 30 days or a year. Restrictive diets are so hard.

34:30Chris:If you think about it, we have a biological preference for survival foods, and that's not going to go away. Even if you shut this system off, you're still going to like those things as an animal. It's part of our culture, it's wired into us. So even when you shut this off and have really powerful mitochondria that don't have this deficit, and you turn the food noise off, it doesn't change the fact that a strawberry is delicious, or that you might love a drink every once in a while. That's part of who we are.

35:16Chris:But it becomes a slippery slope, because we've manufactured our modern environment to have so much access that a restrictive diet is just a huge ask. I have so much respect for people who can pull it off longer than a few weeks, into months and years, because if cellular energy is at the root of this, it does need to be a lifetime change. But that's a big ask, especially when we're not just talking about sugar anymore, now we're talking about alcohol and high glycemic carbs and everything else. We're obsessed with our health, that's why we're having this conversation. We recognize there's a major uphill battle here.

36:14 The lynch pin, and essential fructosuria

36:14Chris:But I'll simplify it. Let's put it this way: if everything is coming to this little lynch pin of fructose metabolism, can we target fructose metabolism instead? I think that's where the eventual answer will become, because if it's sugar, if it's high glycemic carbs, if it's alcohol, if it's dehydration, high salt, hypoxia, whatever it might happen to be, if it's all coming into this little lynch pin where fructose is not going to convert my ATP into uric acid and drop my cellular energy, if I can shut that off, then maybe I'll get rid of the food noise and have agency over the choices I make about food. It seems to be where this whole system hangs.

37:09Chris:I'd say there's a layer on top of that I don't often talk about. There's a portion of our population that has a benign genetic condition where they don't have that enzyme, fructokinase. It's called essential fructosuria, and basically what that means in Latin is you pee out the fructose, fructose in the urine. That's the only reason they ever find people with it, because they're healthy, but then it shows up on a urine test where there's a high amount of fructose, which is kind of strange.

37:49Chris:Here's the crazy part: they don't have that enzyme, and they almost universally don't get metabolic problems.

37:56Todd:Do they end up with things like urinary tract infections and stuff?

37:59Chris:No, I don't believe so. It's basically a benign thing. And that's the cool part: if you get rid of this enzyme, it doesn't really have any noticeably bad effects. You'd think that if you disrupted an enzyme, something would back up, there would be a problem, how would you get rid of the fructose? But apparently the body has gentle systems for eliminating it in urine rather than metabolizing it. So maybe this is a disposable system that's just not suited to modern life anymore. And if you want to put this in perspective, Pfizer and Eli Lilly and other major pharmaceutical companies are diving into this because there appears to be something there.

38:50Todd:What percentage of the population has that?

38:54Chris:It's super tiny. It's really hard to find people with this. I think that's the main problem: it's studied, but it's not studied well enough, because the population data is really small.

39:12 GLP-1s, SugarShield, and closing thoughts

39:10Todd:We just have a few more minutes, so I wanted to wrap this up by asking you about your product called SugarShield. It's not the purpose of the podcast, but I'm personally interested in it. With GLP-1s, as you know, you can use them in small doses to cut food noise and not crave the cookie at eight o'clock at night. But you're saying you have a product that's not as aggressive as a GLP-1 that does something similar, or maybe I don't understand it.

39:44Chris:That's a good question. Let's put it this way, I think GLP-1s are amazing because they're saving lives in big ways. I think it's huge, and I expected all of these side indications for them about five years ago. I thought we'd find out about this pretty soon, and it keeps coming up, because if you think about it, back to that car analogy, if you're putting more and more fuel into your system, at a certain point you've got this little economy car trying to drag a trailer of fuel around. My argument is that the problem is in the engine.

40:23Chris:That's your mitochondria, it's not performing well, it's in an eco mode. So cutting fuel, which is what a GLP-1 will do, is going to help, it's going to take pressure off the entire system, it's less of a load, but it's not going to solve what's happening in the engine necessarily, that'll be a side effect of it, if at all. So it makes sense why more recent research saying if people go off GLP-1s they regain the weight within two years, very reliably, maybe answers part of that question.

41:01Chris:So what our supplement aims to do is focus on fructose metabolism. If fructose metabolism is why your engine is underperforming, and we get rid of that signal, the linchpin in this whole system, the signal that tells your engine to conserve, then if you get rid of that conserving signal, you put your engine back in sport mode and everything starts running well. There are pharmaceutical companies working on this, but there's also preclinical research showing that certain polyphenols also inhibit fructose metabolism, and the one that seems most promising is luteolin.

41:51Chris:It's a polyphenol found in many foods, mostly plants, like parsley and thyme and green peppers. There's preclinical research that shows it blocks fructokinase so that step doesn't happen, so fructose doesn't get converted into what causes that cellular stress. That's basically where the research led us to say, okay, let's try this as a product and see if it helps people, observationally. We're not saying this successfully inhibits fructokinase in humans, we don't have randomized control trials saying that.

42:39Chris:However, there are randomized control trials on luteolin as an ingredient that show, I think, a 22% drop in liver fat, a 43% drop in insulin resistance, and changes in waist circumference and cholesterol numbers. So there's something here, and the preclinical data suggests maybe it's because of this. What our supplement does is deliver a high dose liposomal form of luteolin, which needs to be liposomal because it has poor bioavailability without it.

43:17Chris:We also pair it with tart cherry extract, because if fructose metabolism is causing the production of uric acid, tart cherry has been researched to help clear uric acid. So hopefully it's changing a lot of what's happening in the middle. Observationally, I'll say it's climbing to numbers of about 80% or so who notice a dramatic shift in energy and cravings within about the first month, which is exciting to see.

43:54Chris:For me, when I started taking it, I had this moment of euphoria when I woke up one day, it was super weird, like why do I feel so good, and it felt like my energy came back online. Over the next six months or so, I lost about 25 pounds without really trying to. So there's something there. I have a strong belief that this is hopefully doing what we're intending it to do, and that's the exciting part.

44:26Todd:That's so interesting. Be sure to send over a spec sheet or whatever you have on your product, we'd love to take a closer look at it, or some samples if you're willing, we'd love to try this out. I'm always fascinated by the idea of cutting food noise without using an actual drug, because it's just something that like me, or like all humans, sort of follows me around. And it'd be nice to not have to have that struggle.

44:54Todd:So, fascinating story. I love what you're doing. If our listeners would like to learn more about you, how can they find you?

45:01Chris:Our website is liv3health.com. And I have a little YouTube channel I've been starting called The Fructose Model, because this starts to branch into so many different pieces of metabolism, since everything seems to hang on cellular energy, and it appears fructose is the major drag that's been sitting there in the background on cellular energy. It's been fun to explore this. Our Instagram is @tryliv3.

45:44Todd:Okay. And for our listeners, if you like today's topic, go ahead and click like and subscribe. And if you'd like to learn more about Stark, you can find us at stark.health.

45:54Chris:Thank you so much for having me.