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 introduction

00:00Chris:This drop in cellular energy could be the root of metabolic dysfunction. There's a very strong argument to be made for an energetic model of metabolic dysfunction. And if that's true, then that means that fructose could be the major driver of it. But if we're all layering on top of it a signal to conserve that energy relentlessly, then it might actually be that this is the major player in what shifted our health.

00:31Anthony:That was Chris Mearns. And you've landed on the Me and My Health Up podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Hartcher, your clinical nutritionist lifestyle medicine specialist, and the purpose of this podcast is to enhance and enlighten your wellbeing. I've brought Chris Mearns on the show to talk about fructose metabolism, and you're probably wondering, fructose metabolism, haven't heard much about that. Neither had I until I spoke with Chris. He enlightened me on this subject and how it can be driven by many other factors, not just by eating fruit. I thought initially, okay, do we eat excess fruit? Some people do, some people don't. Is it a problem? I don't know. But we convert glucose to fructose, and that is a challenge for us.

01:24Anthony:Also, if we have high salt diets, we have a lot of stress in our lives, we're not sleeping, then we're going to enable this pathway, which will essentially create uric acid. And it down regulates energy production. So we have low energy. We then create uric acid, which can result in gout. So if you are a gout sufferer, this might be driving it. It might be a high carbohydrate diet or a high glycemic diet, or alcohol is another contributing factor. So I was thinking in terms of my clients, I was thinking my perimenopause clients could be experiencing this fructose metabolism effect, which is low energy, weight gain, blood sugar dysregulation, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease potentially, and other implicating factors. We can also drive inflammation in the body due to this excess fructose metabolism. So I have this insightful conversation with Chris on fructose metabolism and what we can do about it from a food and lifestyle medicine perspective. So without much further ado, I'd love to welcome you into this conversation I'm having with Chris Mearns.

02:45Anthony:Welcome on the Me and My Health Up podcast. How are you, Chris?

02:47Chris:Great. Nice to meet you, Anthony. Thanks for having me.

02:52Anthony:You're welcome. Great to have you on the show. Really looking forward to tackling this subject matter around fructose and how it can be really detrimental in terms of metabolism, particularly around weight management. So I really look forward to diving into that conversation with you. But before we get into it, I would really love you to bring the listeners up to speed with how you've arrived at what you're doing today.

03:17 From UX research to the fructose model

03:17Chris:That's a good question, because I didn't start out in this at all. I actually came from a totally different background. I worked in user experience for a long time, even in user research, and not at all in medicine or academia, that kind of thing. Basically what happened was I always wanted to understand how to solve deep problems. I had this systems thinking mindset and I was applying it to things like VR headsets and beta versions of those kind of products. But then when I became a father, I started taking my health more seriously and gradually became interested in nutrition and chronic disease, because of course I felt the responsibility to be healthy for my family.

03:44Chris:And it started pulling on that deeper systems level thinking that I ended up falling into. One thing kept standing out, and it was basically this question of why does reducing sugar seem to improve everything? It doesn't matter what the condition is, it feels like every doctor will recommend it, no matter what the chronic condition might happen to be. That kind of stuck in my brain. I was like, there has to be something there that we're not quite catching. And eventually that led me into the biology of fructose metabolism, and even further than that, a broader energy regulation model that really is the foundation of what we've been digging into now.

04:52Anthony:And so what was the revealing factor around the sugar side of things, and particularly this side of fructose?

05:27 What fructose actually does inside the cell

05:02Chris:Well, basically we know what glucose does. We've got glucose monitors, we pay close attention to that, and we have for decades. We understand how it works in our body as well. We appreciate that glucose is fuel for the most part, every system in our body runs on it, uses it as its preferential fuel. The brain pretty much would not exist if it didn't have glucose. But the other side of table sugar, the other 50%, is fructose. We've kind of ignored it almost because it doesn't spike insulin in the same way, it doesn't spike your glucose levels. So it almost seemed like it was inert, and because of that I think we haven't paid as much attention to it. But to really put things in perspective, about a month ago there was a major review done on fructose metabolism. And what it identified very clearly is that beyond just a caloric source, fructose was classified as a regulator of metabolic health and disease. So it's saying fructose is less a calorie and more a signaling molecule, one that directly impacts our health.

06:19Anthony:Really intriguing. I'm keen to find out more about this signaling molecule in our body. What's it telling the body?

06:25Chris:Basically what it seems to be doing is influencing how cells can access energy. So if glucose is fuel, then fructose is a fuel regulator, effectively. Without getting too heavy into the biochemistry, metabolizing fructose, which happens in your cells, not in your gut, turns your available energy, your ATP, into a waste product. Typically your ATP can be recharged, it's a triphosphate, it drops down to a diphosphate, and then your mitochondria boost it back up into energy again. But when fructose metabolism happens, it degrades ATP all the way into uric acid. It's like burning a rechargeable battery inside your cell. And when that happens, that uric acid then causes stress on your mitochondria, and over time it restructures the mitochondria into a conserving posture.

07:14Chris:So whereas mitochondria could always be producing more ATP and keeping your cells recharged, and we all know mitochondria are like the power plants of our cells, effectively this is like turning down the power in your power plants. It's saying that the cell is now going to run in a slow posture. It's not going to be consuming and outputting as much energy as it would otherwise.

07:57Anthony:And why does the body need that signaling molecule? Everything around us is there for a purpose and reason, we don't have anything redundant, otherwise it becomes extinct. So what is the purpose of this fructose signaling to the mitochondria, to sort of down regulate?

08:13 The eco mode analogy

08:13Chris:I love that question. In pretty much every system, and I'm not just talking biology now, a conservation system makes a lot of sense. Take your car, for example, it has an eco button on it typically, and what that does is rate limit the engine performance so you can go a little further with it. It's very useful to think of this signaling molecule doing the same thing in your cells: it's reducing your engine performance, your mitochondria, in order to create a conservation signal so you can hopefully last a little longer. If you think about this in the wild, this is so beneficial. Every animal outside your window finds it difficult to get the resources it needs, water, food, you give any pet the offer of a treat and they go nuts.

08:56Chris:Effectively, biologically, we have this drive within us because life is tough. And it starts to connect back to when did we encounter fructose in the wild. Typically it's in fruit, and when does that happen? Fruit ripens right before winter time or before the dry season, when resources become more challenging. So it would make sense to tune your body to be in a conservation state in preparation for a period of scarcity.

09:49Anthony:Wow, it's incredible how nature works. I often think about how a lot of our problems today are associated with health and the environment around convenience. We chase convenience, or the path of least resistance, which makes sense because we're wired that way too, because we need to preserve energy. We don't want to take the long cut when we can take a shortcut. We've got all these modern conveniences popping up all the time, which essentially take us further away from being healthy in a sense. And it's the same with the environment, we get all these convenient things into our lives that cost the environment or accelerate environmental damage.

10:32Anthony:I see what nature's trying to do here is obviously help us survive a time during famine essentially, or when things become scarce, and it's down regulating things to preserve us to get us through that tough period. However, in today's world, we don't experience that tough period, right? Not even slightly.

11:08 How the food environment changed

11:08Chris:I totally agree with you. It feels like we've tuned our environment perfectly to get as much food and everything that we could possibly want, and it's wild to really think about how we've done this. If you trace the history, it was sort of in the mid 1850s that the sugar tariffs dropped off and we started adding sugar into our diet, and the consumption just skyrockets. And it's wild to see that metabolic dysfunction was like a lagging indicator of that, it just followed 15, 20 years later. It went from nothing to all of a sudden being a significant part of our world.

11:52Chris:Then you fast forward and it's like we invented the supermarkets in the early 1900s, where suddenly you didn't have to go to all sorts of different places, you could have as many different foods as you want, easily accessible. Then we started introducing higher caloric foods with the invention of high fructose corn syrup, where suddenly we're packing everything not just full of sugar but also full of salt, and alcohol became widely available. That didn't used to be that way. All of these things we love to eat, it almost makes you wonder if maybe we love to eat them because it would help us survive. And now suddenly we've manufactured a world that allows us to access all of those foods that were really only intended for a brief period, and instead we're just sending this constant signal to our bodies that we need to prepare because hardship is on its way.

12:52Anthony:A hundred percent. I'm just thinking, a common thing that's suggested in the nutritional world is to eat seasonally, and it's sort of what you're sharing puts that in a way that makes sense, that in summer, particularly towards the end, there's an abundance of fruit, and then it becomes very low, there's not much around. So it's certainly preparing us well. But then we have, as you said, supermarkets that can source this fruit all year round.

13:21 The body makes its own fructose

13:21Chris:Right, exactly. It's crazy. So just to open this up a little bit more, fructose is of course part of added sugar, we appreciate it's in fruit, but most people don't appreciate yet that the body actually makes fructose as well. The ways it does that become really familiar once you hear them. There's a system inside the body called the polyol pathway, and what it does is convert glucose into fructose, and it seems to be triggered when your blood glucose is high. So suddenly glucose becomes part of this conversation, because if you've already got high glucose levels, or you're spiking it with high glycemic carbs, then some of that will be converted into fructose, which then sends this conservation signal.

14:14Chris:The other side of it is that high salt diets do this, alcohol does this, dehydrated states do this. So suddenly all of these different ideas that we've circled around the different diet camps over the last number of decades, they all seem to trace back to this signaling molecule of fructose. And if you want to go really deep down the rabbit hole, there are researchers that have fed rodent models high glucose diets, not fructose, but high glucose diets, and in doing so also gave them a fructokinase inhibitor to block fructose metabolism. The amazing thing was those animals didn't develop metabolic problems, which infers that glucose is not really the problem, it's actually fructose underneath that layer, one layer deeper, that's causing the problem, because you're layering in this conservation signal where suddenly you've got a fragile, low-energy cell.

15:21Anthony:And of course, you leave those on too long, they're going to scale into the whole system. You can see that cycle would feed in a sense, that you're consuming high amounts of glucose or a high glycemic diet, lots of energy, you feel good, but then the body is doing its regulation by turning some of that into fructose, which is then slowing you down into that conservation state. But then you're thinking, I'm feeling flat again, I need to get more energy, so we eat more. That, I guess, could drive a cycle in that sense.

16:03 Food noise and the craving loop

16:03Chris:Yeah, and it's good that you mentioned it as a cycle, because if you think of what happens then, you create this low-energy cell. And what is that going to do? It actually sends a signal to the brain that effectively your cell is starving, so then it seems very related to ghrelin and leptin, making us crave food and become less satiated when we eat it. This whole craving thing, this whole food noise thing that has popped up over the last number of years, seems to be driven by this whole system. And then it becomes a loop, because it sends this deficit signal, this starvation signal on a cellular level, and the brain says, okay, I need to go and eat more. So you do eat more, but ironically you probably eat more of the same things that caused the signal in the first place.

16:55Chris:So then what happens is you just layer it up and layer it up, and as the cells become less and less able to handle fuel, that fuel is going to go into storage. We end up compounding the problem while thinking we're trying to feed ourselves, because in reality we're not actually hungry, or rather, we're in this overfed and overfuelled state, but we just can't access the energy we're holding onto.

17:28Anthony:It's incredible how the fast food companies have manipulated this system. They're essentially providing food that's high glycemic with high sugar, and as you know, that drives this fructose production, which drives these hunger signals. So you want to eat more of it. It drives this cycle of wanting to eat more junk food.

17:54Chris:It's so true. At the same time, the more I dig into this, the more I realize this is probably where a lot of taste preferences came from. As much as these companies are driven by profits and everyone else just wants people to buy their products, I also look at the grandma who just wants to cook you a nice pasta or a cake because she loves you. At a certain level it's a similar thing, we eat these foods because we can and because we enjoy them, and that creates the market itself. As much as I'd love to see the world change, I don't think our biology is going to allow it. I don't think on a world scale we can choose to completely restrict ourselves away from this signal.

18:46Anthony:Well, we're wired this way, aren't we?

18:49Chris:Exactly, right? Yeah, it's our primitive wiring that's not going away anytime soon.

19:28 Where to start: cutting dietary fructose

18:55Anthony:So given that we're surrounded by high salt, high glycemic diets in abundance everywhere, high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks, it's all around us, and this is driving this fructose metabolism, which is turning down our energy systems, what are some ways in which the listeners can really help support themselves in terms of better managing this pathway to support weight management and energy levels?

19:28Chris:That's a fantastic question, because as you said, it sounds pretty bleak at a certain point. So we need an action plan. I know many people who have tried to tackle this with diet, and it is a very good idea, it's also very hard, but I'll talk through it because it's the place to start. What that would really mean is reducing dietary fructose first of all, so that would probably mean cutting sugar. To be clear, we don't need it, it is expendable in our diet, fructose is not important to our biology whatsoever, it just sends this signal. If you want to cut added sugar, many people find that within two or three days they can't handle it, and they start to think that they're addicted to it.

20:24Chris:I would argue it's not actually an addiction in the way most people think. What it's doing is sending that energy deficit ramping up, because when you're cutting fructose in added sugar, you're also cutting glucose, which means you've cut the fuel source as well. Unless you compensate that fuel source, you're probably going to end up in that short term being even more of a deficit. If you can supplement cutting sugar with adding complex carbohydrates, that might balance it out and help you get over that first initial bump. But the cool thing is that once you start doing that, many people within about three to four weeks start to find that their food noise drops off completely, or at least to a significant degree, because without that fructose signal happening, your mitochondria start being able to recover some of their capacity, and then they start producing more energy, and that craving signal turns off.

21:39Chris:It's remarkably consistent that many people around a month in will start to see a major change. If you want to go further with it, you should hydrate really well, and once you're over that hump you might think about reducing high glycemic carbohydrates and alcohol and stuff like that. So all of that will play a big role.

22:00Anthony:And the salt, you'll want to watch.

22:02 When eco mode won't switch off

22:02Chris:Yes, yeah, exactly, salty food. The other side of it is that this is great as a start, but if I'm completely honest, I don't see it making a dramatic change, because restrictive diets are so hard, especially when the argument is that you need to do this for the rest of your life. I do think that's an important thing, because we live in a world that is saturated with this signal. So I want to talk about the end state for a moment. If you have a fragile cell that's low in energy, that fragile cell can then very easily scale into a fragile system. If that system happens to be your liver, then it makes sense why fatty liver appears. Or if it happens to be your vascular system, then it makes sense why hypertension appears. Or if that low-energy signal is in your brain, then you start feeling brain fog, and it can eventually scale further.

23:11Chris:So it starts to show a similar pattern across our entire system. From the research I'm seeing, it is very likely that this drop in cellular energy could be the root of metabolic dysfunction. There's a very strong argument to be made for an energetic model of metabolic dysfunction, and if that's true, then fructose could be a major driver of it. Obviously we've got toxins, environment, viral infections, and everything else that will drag on our cellular energy. But if we're all layering on top of it a signal to conserve that energy relentlessly, then it might actually be that this is the major player in what shifted our health.

23:59Anthony:Wow. Certainly, in terms of the research I'm reading, it's oriented around that powerhouse of the cell, the mitochondria, and as you said, this is a major brake on the mitochondria in terms of regulating and down-regulating its function, and hence we're feeling flat and lethargic. That can then tie into systems-related issues, because if the liver hasn't got energy, it can't do what it needs to do, so toxins are circulating the body more, we've got more inflammation, and this could be a driving factor behind further sugar dysregulation.

24:41Anthony:So this mitochondrial dysfunction is a contributing factor from fructose generated by high glucose diets and some other factors you mentioned. What about sleep? Have you looked at sleep and stress and how they implicate this conversion of glucose to fructose, or other contributing factors?

26:14 Fructokinase and essential fructosuria

25:09Chris:Totally. There are so many compounding factors on this, because even if it's not necessarily fructose, if you're causing your body stress, it's very likely you're causing an energetic drag on your body, and it's going to send the same signal. It's going to cause inflammation in your cells just like uric acid does, like fructose does. It's going to drag on your mitochondria, and your cells get hungry, and the loop starts again. It makes all of this sound kind of bleak, as I said. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, because a lot of the research being done on this is suggesting that if fructose metabolism is the problem, then we can target that.

26:14Chris:Because if glucose is being converted into fructose and fructose is becoming the problem, it's that initial step. There's an enzyme called fructokinase where this all starts, that's when ATP gets degraded into uric acid, it depends on this enzyme. If we've got alcohol, salt, high glycemic carbs, sugar, and even poor sleep dragging on this entire process, then that enzyme appears to be the linchpin in the entire thing. It's exciting because researchers working on this identified that there is a portion of our population that don't have that enzyme, and amazingly they stay super healthy and don't get metabolic disease, which suggests they don't even know they're lacking it. It just shows up in their lab work one day, because it's called essential fructosuria.

27:12Chris:Basically there's a lot of fructose in their urine, and it's like, what's that about? The body doesn't use it, it has a separate pathway to just eliminate it. So suddenly it's like, maybe this is the ticket. That's where a lot of attention is turning now: can we modulate this enzyme, not just with a pharmaceutical, because there are trials out there for that too, but is there something we can do with a natural ingredient that helps buffer all of this that we're relentlessly adding onto our system? And how can we best support that enzymatic reaction, what sort of lifestyle nutrition helps support that pathway? Well, I think the way I see it is like you're picturing yourself in front of a big sound board, like a sound engineer, and you've got all these different inputs.

27:57Chris:It's like, I'm going to dial down sugar, dial down alcohol, dial down high glycemic carbs, dial down salty foods, dial up hydration, dial up sleep, and make sure I don't have hypoxia from sleep apnea. You've got all these different things you're trying to control, and it makes sense why we've seen benefit in all of those, but then it plateaus, it doesn't really get you all the way to health. If you've got all of those in front of you, yes, do them, they're great, but that's a lot to control. And the same sound board in front of you actually has a gain on the amplifier, and that appears to be where this enzyme can influence, where you just turn down the whole system, because that's really what this enzyme is looking at.

29:21 Finding luteolin and solving bioavailability

29:00Chris:From the research we've done, what really turned the page for us, because I saw this for two or three years and thought, this is great information, but I don't know what to do with it besides trying to do all the same things I've been doing for a long time. Then I came across some researchers looking into this who discovered that certain plant flavonoids actually influence fructokinase. The most promising one appears to be called luteolin, which is not well known but is very closely related to quercetin. Probably the reason we haven't heard of it is that it doesn't have high bioavailability, only about 7%. But if you look at the research on it, they've been digging into this in the lab for a long time, there's so much research on it, and it seems to work great across the board for most flavonoids, this one perhaps even more.

30:09Chris:But basically, once we solve liposomes, we solve bioavailability, and that 7% ramps up to as high as 80% in some cases. Suddenly this becomes a viable way of theoretically controlling fructose metabolism, or at least giving us a bit of a buffer against this difficult world we live in today.

30:31Anthony:And in terms of the foods we consume today, I mean as you said there's low bioavailability, it's like the iron bioavailability in vegetables or fruit. What typically, some of the fruits, vegetables, and herbs that contain it?

30:57Chris:Yeah. Thyme is one of them, celery leaves, chamomile, I believe, there's quite a few. There's a certain species of artichoke as well, but the trouble is it's quite low in its natural form, you might see maybe two milligrams a day, and it's typically still bound to a structure that needs to be broken down by the gut, so even then the bioavailability is fairly low. It does seem to be something that supplementation helps with, and not just a regular raw form, we really do need a bioavailability improvement, like a liposome, to get it to a place that starts to match what they were seeing in the lab, where it can actually influence the reaction of what's happening in the body with fructose metabolism.

31:57Anthony:And just for the listeners' sake, this liposome obviously improves bioavailability, but help them understand what it's doing in the body.

32:07Chris:Yeah, sure. Liposomes are kind of the next big thing with supplements. Effectively what it does is take a raw ingredient and wrap it in a little pocket of fat, like olive oil, or a phospholipid of some kind. What that does is protect it through the digestive system, so it actually reaches your bloodstream, where that raw ingredient can be useful across the system. A lot of the research on luteolin was done by injection, and we're not going to do that, but this kind of solves that, you can take it orally and it will still reach the systems you want it to.

32:49Anthony:And this will be fantastic in terms of the adaptation phase the body needs when you start changing your lifestyle, your alcohol consumption, your glucose consumption, reducing salt, getting better sleep, and managing stress. As you said, there's like a month there where it's challenging, and your energy systems are becoming adaptive. So this supplement could be really helpful through that month, until the lifestyle factors take over. It's not something you need for life, like a drug, it's something that can help you through a transition, and maybe if you slip up further down the track it might help get you back on track. So it's really helpful in terms of what you've discovered, to help people make the changes they need to make long term.

33:43Chris:Totally, I see it as a buffer. It's really interesting because, observationally, this is not clinical research, but observationally we're seeing pretty much the identical signal as what people report when they go hardline on sugar and actually achieve that freedom from fructose. About three to four weeks in, sometimes even sooner, they notice food noise drops off and energy increases simultaneously, which makes sense, because if mitochondria have been crushed and aren't producing energy, once they're unlocked from this influence of fructose, energy comes back, and the craving signal turns off.

34:21Chris:So it maps out completely, and then it's sort of up to you what you want to do with that, because if it turns off food noise, I know for myself, I lost about 25 pounds in the first six months or so without really trying anything different. In the same way many people report with GLP-1 medications, the food noise goes away, so the drive to consume drops off, your caloric excess drops off, and the weight starts to follow without trying very hard. Then there's this nice thing where you have agency again, where you can choose to keep taking it and enjoy a treat once in a while without feeling like you're going to fall off the rails, or use the freedom it gives you to pursue a more restrictive diet and make sure you don't get enslaved to sugar again. It gives you so many more choices, that's the exciting part.

35:37Anthony:A hundred percent, particularly around the addictive nature we can find with sugar. That change is hard, really difficult, and it's why people need something in addition to lifestyle changes, just to give them the encouragement to see that they're feeling a bit more energetic today, they can move around a bit more. Then they start noticing the scales have changed, and it gives them positive momentum, because I find with clients that unless they see results, and during that three to four weeks you mentioned they can see nothing, that's when people give up. So what I really like about what you've offered here around a supplement is that it just helps them get over that hump and gives them some momentum and belief.

36:34Chris:Because it's like, I tell people all the time, this is a chance to not start with diet, not start with the hard stuff, just try and make a habit of taking this, and you might see that other stuff starts happening naturally. That's the cool part, it takes the pressure off. Whereas before we're doing all this really hard work to try to get control of our willpower, and really what we're doing when we try to control that is control our biology, which is sending a very real signal that our body is in a deficit of energy. Treating it like an addiction is actually going to make it worse in a certain way, it's not going to make it easier on you. You have to appreciate that there is a very real biological mechanism telling your body to have this response, and if you address it, then you can work with that.

37:37Anthony:I love it, I'm already thinking of some clients that have come to mind during this discussion who could really benefit from what you've shared today, particularly around the supplementation. So really keen to understand that better in terms of the supplement you offer, because I'd love to recommend it to some of my clients who are struggling with this sugar addiction, who realize sugar is what they need to change but it's just so hard to change.

38:00 SugarShield and closing thoughts

38:00Chris:Totally, and I want to be super clear, we created our product, which is called SugarShield, because of this, not the other way around. Luteolin is unknown, it's not a popular supplement, and it's the only thing we sell. We've just doubled down because we think this is going to be amazing, because the research is there, that's what led us to it. But at the end of the day what we're really trying to focus on is the education around this, because no one's going to buy anything if they don't understand what's actually happening. So the research is the focus, and it's really empowering people, whether they're just focusing on what they're learning, or whether they're saying, I'll give it a shot and see what happens. And then suddenly they call me back in three weeks and say, my cravings are gone, it's amazing.

39:00Anthony:Absolutely. And I'm sure they're wanting to know how they can find out more about your SugarShield and where they can find it and get it. So please share the details with the listeners.

39:16Chris:Yeah, totally. So you can find our website at liv3health.com. We've put together some free resources that help explain this model in a simple, visual way. If you want to go deeper, because if something like this is true, it should also connect obesity, cravings, fatigue, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, and cardiovascular disease, and I think it does, then you can check out my YouTube channel, The Fructose Model, on YouTube. And of course, if you want to experiment with whether luteolin will make a difference, you'll find SugarShield on our website as well, it's the supplement we've developed in response to all of this research.

40:12Anthony:Thanks for sharing the details, Chris. Listeners, you'll find all those links Chris has mentioned in the show notes, so just scroll down and click on the link relevant for you. Really want to thank you, Chris, for coming on the show and educating the listeners around fructose metabolism, the potential problems it's causing their health, and what they can do about it. Really appreciate your time, it's been a great discussion, really enlightening, I've learned a lot. So thank you.

40:39Chris:Thank you, Anthony. It was great to be here, really appreciate it.

40:43Anthony:You're welcome. And to the listeners, please share it with others you believe could really benefit from Chris's words around fructose metabolism and the implications it could be causing their health, something to look into. Please share it far and wide with others who could benefit. Thank you for tuning into another insightful episode of the Me and My Health Up podcast.