Dr. Mark Hyman:
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy. Sugar is the other white powder. It acts in the body in all sorts of nefarious ways to hijack our brain chemistry, our hormones, our metabolism and more. And excess sugar consumption is one of the deadliest drugs. Welcome to another episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy and to another episode of Health Bites where we take a deeper bite into juicy topics. And today we’re talking about sugar. We all love it. Some crave it, some will do anything to get it. Even rats will work eight times harder to get sugar than cocaine, or they’ll continue to eat the sugar even if they’re getting electric shocks. For me, it’s Ben and Jerry’s chunky monkey ice cream. That’s my kryptonite. So I stay away. Now for years, you’ve heard me talk about the dangers of sugar, but what happens to your body when you quit sugar for 14 days?
All sorts of stuff can happen, right? Maybe you have issues you didn’t even know were fixable by quitting sugar. Maybe you’re dealing with chronic stress responses and inflammation or anxiety, panic attacks, maybe hormone imbalances. Maybe you have acne or maybe you’re just tired and lethargic and have brain fog or joint pain or digestive issues, cravings, fluid retention. This goes on and on and on. Now, these are all warning signs that sugar may be harming you or worse that you’re addicted to sugar. In fact, studies show that 14% of adults and 12% of kids meet the criteria for food addiction. And just for comparison’s sake, about 14% of the total population has alcohol addiction. So it’s about the same in the cat and the kids. It’s worse now, the good news is that most of the health issues from eating sugar can be completely reversed, and you can break the cycle of addiction in as little as 14 days or less.
Everywhere you look, there’s added sugar from blended coffees to protein bars, drinks, dressing, salad dressing, sauces, ketchup, you name it. Sugar is lurking everywhere in our diet, even in seemingly healthy foods. Now, we eat today in the modern world about 22 teaspoons a day. Historically, as Hunter gathers, we ate 22 teaspoons a year and kids now eat about 34 teaspoons a day. That’s almost 150 pounds per person of sugar. That’s a lot of sugar. Aside from making us inflamed and causing us to gain weight by spiking insulin, which is the fat storage hormone. Consuming too much sugar is also at the root of many health problems, including mental health problems. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Mood swings, anxiety, depression, and various metabolic diseases are all consequences of meaning. A high glycemic are also known as a high sugar and starch diet.
Now, in today’s health bite episode, we’re diving into the research linking sugar addiction to poor mental health and how you can detoxify from excess sugar in your diet as little as 14 days. Now, once you clean up excess sugar and you clean up the refined carbs in your diet, your brain’s going to work better, your mental health is going to improve, and as a bonus, your skin’s going to clear up your hormones, get back in balance, and a whole host of other things. Now, I’ve done this with thousands of people and I wrote about how to do this in my book, the 10 Day Detox Diet, and I’ve seen profound results. In fact, there’s an average reduction of 70% from all symptoms from all diseases in just 10 days plus an average weight loss of seven pounds and a significant drop in blood pressure and blood sugar.
So now let’s dive deeper into the data about sugar. How do we reset our body to its original factory settings? Alright, so why is sugar consumption so out of control in the United States? Well, 60% of American calories come from ultra processed foods. And what are ultra processed foods? Well, essentially anything comes in a bag or a box or package, something with a long ingredient list. These are typically energy dense foods that are high in calories but have minimal nutrition value. So they’re basically high calorie low nutrient. That’s not good. They’re high in sugar, like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose cane, sugar fructose, any millions of the kinds of names of sugar that we have. They’re high in refined grains from enriched wheat flour, sometimes corn. And these are the commodity crops that are put in all these ultra processed foods and they act just like sugar in the body.
I mean below the neck, your body can’t tell the difference between a bowl of sugar and a bowl of corn flakes. Now, the US dietary guidelines recommended six servings of grains per day, which is a lot, half of which must be whole grains. That means the other half can be basically what amounts to sugar. That’s crazy. But 74% of Americans exceed that limit for refined grains. So we’re way over in terms of what we’re eating. Crackers, pretzels, cakes, cookies, pancakes, breakfast cereals, bread, tortilla pasta, rice, all of it is just stuff that’s causing our blood sugar to spike. And it’s the majority of our diet. Now, 65% of our calories at 92% of added sugar in the US comes from ultra processed foods. So the one big thing you can do to really drop your sugar content is just get rid of all that stuff that’s made in a factory, right?
Factory made foods, we call that a plant-based diet. If it’s made in a plant, don’t eat it. Basically, added sugars make up about 14% of kids. Total energy intake, meaning they’re eating a lot of sugar, about one in every seven calories comes from sugar. Now, school lunches is another huge issue. I mean, it’s crazy that we allow sugar in school lunches that should not be allowed. And in fact, it’s allowed a lot. And the USDA report, 69% of school lunches and 92% of school breakfast, meaning this is food, we’re feeding our kids in school, funded by the government, they exceed the limit of the 10% total energy intake that’s been set by the dietary guidelines for Americans, meaning they’re eating way over that the average American consumes 17 added teaspoons of sugar or 22. So it’s a lot. And sugar sweetened beverages and coffees and teas actually may contribute up to 40% of the dealing intake of added sugar.
So think about it. You’re going to get a coffee, you’re going to get tea. You’re having all this stuff you think is okay to drink, but it’s not. It’s just a sugar bomb. I think Starbucks should just be recognized for what it is. It’s a sugar dispensing factory, not a coffee shop. Now, 30% of the sugar we comes from desserts, sweet snacks, candies, sweet and breakfast cereals. But 70% comes from just regular food. It’s in everything right? When we’re just eating so much, people don’t realize it. And you wouldn’t put 16 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee, but if you drink a 20 ounce bottle of soda, that’s what you’re getting. That’s 64 grams of sugar, which is a lot. The average medium-sized blended coffee contains about 50 grams of added sugar. Again, that’s about 14 teaspoons of sugar, 13 teaspoons of sugar. That’s nuts, right?
You don’t put that in your coffee, but that would be what you’d find in a blended coffee drink. Now, an average serving of flavored yogurt contains 16 grams of added sugar. So you think you’re eating yogurt, you’re can eat healthy probiotics, but the truth is that per ounce, most of your sweetened yogurts have more sugar per ounce than Coca-Cola. The average serving of packaged salad dressing get this has six grams of added sugar. That means you’re eating over a teaspoon, about a teaspoon and a half of sugar in your salad dressing. Why should you put sugar on your lettuce? Studies that link excess sugar to poor mental health are really abundant. This is not just my opinion. Again, all the things I’m talking about in this health bite and all the health bytes are from the peer review literature. All the references are including in the show notes.
Have a look yourself. If you don’t believe me, it’s pretty scary out there. But what I’m saying is actually based in science. And here’s a study looked at a large group of people. It was a meta-analysis of observational studies, so it was in cause and effect, but it was pretty impressive study. So it gives you things that point in the right direction. They looked at 37,000 people with depression and they found that sugar sweetened beverage consumption was dramatically increasing the risk for depression. Those who drank the most soda had a 31% increased risk for depression compared to those who drank the least. So basically, if you’re a big soda drinker, you’re more likely to be depressed compared to those who did not drink sugar and beverages. Those who drink two cups of soda per day, about 45 grams of sugar, which is 11 teaspoons of sugar, increase the risk by about 5% for depression.
Those who drink three cans. So you look at the dose response on these studies. So one can bad, it’s two cans worse, there’s three cans, so you kind of can see where the trend’s going. But those who drank three cans of soda today, which is 98 grams of sugar, which is like, I dunno, almost 25 teaspoons of sugar, increased their risk by 25% for getting depressed. Another study prospectives cohort study out of Spain, 15,000 Spanish university graduates, show that those in the highest quartile of added sugar intake had an increased risk of depression, meaning those who had the most sugar in their diet, those who consumed the highest amounts of sugar had a 35% higher risk of depression comparing it to those who had the highest intake of high quality carbs from whole grains, high in fiber, local glycemic diet. Those people had the opposite.
They had a 30% lower risk of depression. So more sugar, more depression, less sugar, less depression, seems like a tread. Another large prospective cohort study of 70,000 women postmenopausal women published in the American Journal of Clinical Attrition. So they looked at a glycemic index and the highest glycemic index mean the higher the likelihood of food was to spike your sugar. There was a 22% increased risk of depression if you had added sugars, the added sugars that are added to the food, there was a 23% high risk of depression and refined grains, even wheat flour that also was associated with depression. And if you had higher amounts of fiber or fruit or veggies or even lactose, it was significantly associated with a lower risk of depression. So sugar and flour, higher risk, whole foods lower risk, not surprising. Alright, so let’s talk about the why does this happen?
We’re seeing the correlation. We’re seeing the connection. People know you get the sugar blues, people understand that mood and sugar are very connected even through their own experience, but what’s the science behind how sugar affects our brain? Health affects our mood and obviously other things. But you’ve heard me talk a lot about other things, but we’re going to talk about sugar and the mood and brain function today. So one is you get reactive hypoglycemia and we’ll talk about what that is. But essentially it’s where you get a spike in sugar followed by a spike in insulin that then causes your sugar to crash. And then what happens is you overshoot and you get low blood sugar. Now what happens when you get low blood sugar is you get a spike in cortisol, spike in adrenaline, and it helps bring the blood sugar back up, but it also increases the activity of the amygdala.
So cortisol will increase amygdala activity, which is our emotional anxious brain. And it’s interesting, the symptoms are pretty obvious for people who have this, but you get cravings for carbs and sugar just a few hours after eating. That’s kind of a mild symptom. You can have really serious feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, durability, panic attacks, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. I mean people heard of being hangry, right? I get that a little heart palpitations, shakiness, shortness of breath, feeling you’re going to faint like you’re going to die. Brain fog, fatigue, headaches. And so what happens is when blood sugar drops, it’s a life-threatening emergency. You got to find food right away. And I saw a quick story of a guy who told me that he was having these panic attacks and he was like, yeah, every day the afternoon I start getting this overwhelming feeling of anxiety.
I start sweating. I can’t breathe. My heart’s racing. I just feel like I’m going to die. I said, and what happens? Well, I drink a can of coke and it goes away. So I think most people don’t even connect the dots between what they’re doing and how they feel. So now what happens if you continue to do this? You get insulin resistance if you keep having sugar over time and it’ll drive your sugar up, your insulin up. And high levels of insulin resistance has a really significant negative effect on mood and mental health. And the data’s really clear on this. We’ll go through the research, but essentially what happens with the insulin resistance, you get inflammation in the body and anything that causes inflammation will cause depression or anxiety or mood disorders. So what is the kind of link between insulin and metabolic dysfunction and mood disorders like depression, anxiety?
Well, our researchers from Stanford, they looked at a nine year study over time in the Netherlands, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and they found that those who got pre-diabetes during the first two years of the study were more than two times as likely to have major depression versus those who had normal blood sugar. So in other words, when they follow people over a long period of time, if you were more likely to have pre-diabetes, you’re going to get more depression. So you don’t even have to have diabetes. Now they measured the degree or severity, even insulin resistance, and they use something called the triglyceride HGL ratio, which by the way is available on everyone’s test. Your ratio should ideally be one-to-one, if it’s more than two to one for triglycerides to HGL L, you’re starting to get into trouble. But if they had a higher ratio of triglycerides to HGL L, there was an 89% increase in new cases of major depression.
Think about that. For every five centimeters of belly fat just around your waist, if you take a tape measure, then that was associated with 11% higher risk of depression. And every slight increase in this one unit, increase in the ratio of triglyceride HDL. And for every bump in fasting glucose, that was linked to a 37% higher risk of depression. So as your sugar goes up, your insulin goes up, more depression conservatively, at least one in three people have insulin resistance. But I think it’s a lot more, I mean, if you look at the data, one in two people have either pre-diabetes or type two diabetes by very conservative measurements. If you open up those measurements a little bit and don’t just look at deviations from the worst level, if your blood sugar’s over a hundred, well maybe you don’t even have to have a hundred to actually have insulin resistance.
And so that goes to the 93.2% who are metabolically healthy. So maybe even 90 plus percent have some degree of this, right? One in five adults on top of that have a mental health issue. That’s a lot. That’s 20% of the population. If you have diabetes, you’re 20% more likely to have anxiety and you also have more depression. So how does this work? Well, low grade systemic inflammation from any source, and mostly in our case, it’s the diet and sugar is the biggest driver of inflammation because sugar is like pouring gasoline on the fire. So the problem with insulin resistance is that it causes low grade systemic inflammation everywhere in the body and the brain, and that causes dysregulation of cortisol, which is the stress hormone disregulates, what we call the HPA axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis regulating all sorts of things.
That mood, it screws up neurotransmitter signaling. When you have too much sugar like serotonin and dopamine, it leads to energy problems in the cell, which you need good energy to have good mood. So actually this friend of mine, Casey, me, she wrote a book called Good Energy all about metabolic function and mitochondrial function and how that relates to our health and mood. Now, the brain relies mostly on glucose as its primary source of energy, but it’s extremely energy efficient. It only needs about 60 grams a day to do its job. And flooding the brain with too much glucose creates a lot of inflammation, oxidative stress and insulin resistance, and it leads to depression and mental health issues, and even things like Alzheimer’s, which now they’re calling type three diabetes. So when you have too much sugar, it screws up your ability to make energy and it causes mitochondrial dysfunction.
Mitochondrial really important for neurotransmitter function and production and the release of neurotransmitters in the body. When you have sugar, it also does something really bad. It activates stress responses in the body. So when you look at the data on this, it’s pretty clear. David Ludwig, my friend at Harvard’s, done a lot of work on this, and he basically showed that feeding kids isocaloric, meaning same calories of let’s say oatmeal, which basically turns into sugar in your body or eggs, that the ones who add the oatmeal had higher levels of cortisol and adrenaline because their bodies were having this perceived stress of eating too much sugar. Now, that’s kind of scary. We know that independent of your mental state, that your diet can make you stressed, can increase stress hormones, and that is bad for your brain. Insulin also helps regulate neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, and also something called BDNF.
And when you have too much insulin resistance, which is what most of America’s suffering from, it impairs dopamine signaling, which means you don’t get the pleasure sensation, which means you want more sugar and create more carbs and some vicious cycle. Also, stress itself will increase cortisol, just emotional stress, and that can cause issues. So it can be that the sugar causes stress or that actually literally stress causes stress and that stress will spike your cortisol. And what does that normally do? Well, you have a stressful situation like you’re being chased by a tiger. You want to increase your blood sugar, you want to have all the fuel available so you can run as fast as you can. So that’s a good thing. You want to have more adrenaline but not chronically. And so you have chronically elevated cortisol in your body from chronic psychological stress that increases your blood sugar, it increases insulin resistance, and it’s a vicious cycle.
So if you give someone Prednisone, for example, for an autoimmune disease, they can develop diabetes and they can develop high blood pressure just from the stress hormone that they’re giving as a pill. And also stress really messes up your gut. And gut is another factor that is influenced by our diet and particularly sugar. Now, we’ve talked a lot about the microbiome and mental health in the podcast. I’ve written about this a long time ago in my book, the Ultra Mind Solution. Again, the data has been there for a long time. It’s mostly been ignored, but I think I’m glad people are talking about it. Now. There’s a whole department of nutritional psychiatry at Harvard where they’re talking about metabolic health and the gut health and mood health and Uma night who’s been on the podcast, we’ll link to the show notes there, but just to get into this around mood, when you have a high sugar starch diet, it has a really bad impact on your microbiome.
So it changes the composition of bacteria in there to be bad bugs. And those bad bugs reduce the abundance of good bugs, which do good things, and the bad bugs do bad things, and that creates inflammation, leaky gut, yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, all that can lead to mood swings, irritability, depression, something called the bacterial endotoxin. So when you have too many bad bugs, it produces the toxins that basically get into your system through a leaky gut, and that triggers your immune system to create an inflammatory response, and that impacts the brain. It also makes you more insulin resistant, so it creates a vicious cycle. So gut health is extremely important for brain health and for mood health, and when you look at the data on this, it’s very compelling. Leaky gut, which we used to get laughed effort talking about is now, well-recognized increased intestinal permeability, but it is been linked to things like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and lots of other mental illnesses, and it’s actually fixable.
Okay? So we know that we’re all eating too much sugar. We know that sugar is linked to mental health issues. We know that the mechanism is there through inflammation and some resistance and gut dysbiosis and mitochondrial function. Great. Now what? Well, you can do a sugar detox. That’s what, you don’t have to take my word for it. You don’t have to listen to me. Your body’s the smartest doctor in the room. It’ll tell you what’s working, what’s not working, and listen to your body. It’s very smart, and listen to how you feel. I encourage everybody to do this. It’s why I wrote my book, the 10 Day Detox Diet. I think 14 days is a little longer, and I encourage you to do that a little longer just to see what happens. But let’s talk about how to do it. The first thing is you’ve got to get rid of all the flour and sugar, right?
Get rid of all the high glycemic foods, get rid of all the added sugar, get rid of ultra processed food, stop all the refined flour, refined wheat flour, gluten, all those things. Get rid of those. My joke for bread is if you can stand on a dozen smush, you can eat it. It was in Germany and they had these meat slicers in the house. I’m like, what is that for? He says, well, just slice the bread. It’s so dense. It’s made from whole grains. It’s not made from flour. It’s made from actual rye and grains, so you have to cut it with a meat slicer, like a deli meat slicer. I encourage also people to get rid of all the liquid sugar calories. Those are the worst sugar sweetened beverages, teas, coffees, energy, drinks, you name it, juices. Just eliminate all of that. And what do you eat?
Well, real whole food, what I’ve been talking about for years, you can do the 10 day detox, which is a little more extreme, but essentially their blood sugar balancing fruits. And the way to do that is start with protein at every meal a bit, not a huge amount, but about a size portion. And depending how big you are, it’s a different size, right? If you’re a Shaquille O’Neal, it’s different than if you’re Naty Kochi, who you probably don’t know who that is, but she was a very famous gymnast in the seventies. She was very little like four 11 or 10 or something. But basically, you want to eat the palm size portion of protein every meal, usually about four, six ounces. You want to aim about your body weight and grams of protein, depending on how active you are, anywhere from half to one gram of protein per ideal body weight.
You want get really good quality protein. So re regeneratively raised meats. I use force of nature. I love them. You can get bison, elk, venison, even beef pasture raised chickens and eggs. Certain fish can be great if they’re small fish, you’d know the smash. Fish for me is a salmon, Mac and chilis, herring and sardines. Of course, people don’t like those, but it could be good. Also, you want to eat a lot of fiber. Fiber basically is a sponge for sugar. In fact, last night I had shiitake miracle noodles, which were so good. They’re essentially made from cognac root. Cognac root is Japanese food, but it actually has zero calories, and it absorbs all this water and it slows the absorption of sugar, and you can actually take it as a supplement called PGX, but you can actually just buy the noodles too. So we had this delicious noodles last night.
You don’t have to feel guilty for eating noodles. So lots of fiber, lots of good fats. Fats are really important because fat also slows the spiking sugar. So olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds for breakfast. Really important. Have fat and protein. If you want to cut your cravings, you cannot start the day with sugar. If you want to detox some sugar, you’ve got to start the day with protein and fat and no sugar. That’s going to set you up from having balanced blood sugar. It’s going to avoid the swings that I talked about. It’s going to avoid the spikes in insulin. It’s going to avoid the hypoglycemia, avoid the cravings. So you’ll see also get on slow burning carbs that are high in fiber that reduce blood sugar spikes that are rich in polyphenols that promote the growth of good gut bacteria. So all the veggies, right?
These are what I’m talking about. Carbs. Broccoli is a carb, right? Asparagus, a carb green beans or carb, mushrooms or protein and carbs. And so you can get a lot of foods that are delicious to eat that are high in beneficial compounds that help reduce inflammation, support gut bacteria, help your mitochondria reduce oxidative stress and all these foods, what they do is they help in the gut, particularly because they have a lot of benefits, but they increase something called short chain fatty acids. So when you eat a lot of fiber, you feed the good bugs and it creates byproduct that is really essential for your health called butyrate or this is a short chain fatty acid, and it’s very anti-inflammatory, and that gets used by the body as a regulator of all sorts of functions, including cancer. You also want to eat a wide variety of low glycemic plant foods, right?
75% of your plate should be non-starchy, colorful veggies like leafy greens, cauliflower, daling greens, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, cabbage, bok choy, broccoli, raw collards, unlimited. You can use as much as you want. So you want five pounds of broccoli. Go ahead. Low-glycemic fruit is fine. Berries, cherries, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries, that’s fine. Stone fruit can be helpful. No more than a few piece a day of apples and pears, lots of whole grains that can be good. So you have to be careful about what you’re eating. But you want the low-glycemic, phytonutrient rich grains. I love black rice, for example, red rice, quinoa, buck, weed, taf, all these are great. Certain legumes can be helpful. Lentils, chickpeas, split peas, ami, doki beans, black Navy beans, lupini beans, all these can be part of your healthy diet. If you want to really go extreme on the blood sugar stuff, you can cut out grains and beans for the first few weeks, but you don’t have to.
But I would for sure cut out gluten, lots of fats. So one or two servings of healthy fats. You can pour olive oil, coconut oil, ghee, macadamia oil, olives, avocados, fatty fish, lots of nuts and seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds, hemp seeds, hazelnuts, walnuts, cashews. Peak has all that’s fine. Really essential. Nuts are really great for you and also help you feel full. And it’s a great snack limits, starchy vegetables. So you can have some, but don’t be eating sweet potatoes all the time or tons of potatoes and so forth. Eat your foods in the right order to lower the glycemic load. So if you have protein and fat before the carbs, it slows the absorption and you don’t end up getting these spikes. Don’t eat carbs alone, right? So for example, if you’re eating apple, throw a little nut butter on there or a handful of nuts, or if you have sweet potato, make sure you have it with say, a piece of chicken or non-starchy veggies.
So you sort of create a mixture of the meal. It’s called the glycemic load. Basically how the overall composition of the meal affects your blood sugar. So you can offset effects of some carbs by eating them in the right order or with protein and fat. Lots of spices are good too. Cinnamon is amazing. That helps blood sugar, green tea. Then also supplements can be really important. So high quality multivitamin and mineral vitamin D, omega fats and certain things are really important for blood sugar, like lipoic acid, but B vitamins, certain herbs are great that I use. Cinnamon, green tea, chromium minerals like magnesium also great fenig Greek has been used a lot in Ayurvedic medicine. Great for blood sugar exercise, obviously I’m going to always talk about that. But resistance and aerobic exercise, about 150 minutes a week muscle is critical and improves in instant sensitivity.
Here’s a simple hack is take a half an hour walk or even 15 minutes after eating your dinner, it’s going to dramatically blunt the sugar spikes and insulin, so your body’s going to suck that up. Sleep also really important. We know that lack of sleep causes more sugar cravings, more carb cravings. I’ve had it. I felt that. I used to work at the ER in Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I would sometimes get the night shift and it was two in the morning. The only thing open was McDonald’s and I would go in and get the sort of apple turnover. It was the only thing that you could get. I mean, I didn’t want a burger and I craved the carbs. I felt it. I knew it even though I knew better. Really important to get enough sleep. So try to set a regular bedtime stick to it.
Try not to eat at least three hours before bed. Get all late night snacking. Give yourself at least a 12 hour overnight fast. So dinner at six, eat breakfast at six. Or if you want to do 14, you can eat breakfast at eight if you dinner at six. So it’s not that hard, but giving yourself that break will help improve your insulin sensitivity. What else can you do to help your sugar and manage it will get your stress under control. And it’s more up here. Stress is defined as the real or imagine threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a lion chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife is an hour late coming back from something and you think she’s having an affair or something.
So that could be totally fabricated in your head, but the end result in your body is the same. And this chronic levels of stress we all have are really driving a lot of health issues, including insulin resistance, diabetes and depression, anxiety, and much more. So how do you do that? Well, you kind of have to actively reduce stress, exercise, journaling, meditation, yoga, all this helps. I’ve got this new app I use called Nu Calm. I use it by normal beats. So I put on my headphones, I go into the zone and kind of go into a deep state of relaxation. So there’s lots of ways to do it, known magic to it, but you just have to find what works for you. So lastly, I just want to summarize by saying we know that sugar plays a big role in our mood and our health.
We know how much sugar we’re eating. We know the mechanisms by which it causes a problem, right? Through inflammation and some resistance changes to our microbiome, our stress response, all that leads to the mental health issues we’re seeing, and we also know we can do something about it, that we know how to regulate blood sugar. It’s not rocket science. It’s just simple practices that we talked about today. So hopefully you found this exploration of sugar’s pervasive role in our diets. Good. We now understand it’s profound implications on mental health. It’s very concerning, it’s very revealing, and based on the evidence that we shared today, it’s really clear that the pervasive of sugar in our diets is not just about our physical health and diabetes and weight, but it’s really linked to our mental wellbeing and these high glycemic foods, these ultra processed foods, these sugar drinks, they definitely increase our risk for mood disorders from anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and more.
They make us less resilient. They affect our overall wellbeing as a society, our productivity affecting us on an individual level and also on a population level. But the good news is that using this framework of functional medicine, it allows us to understand the biology here and get to the root cause of our suffering and how to learn, how to fix that, fix the root causes by getting on a real food diet that’s nutrient dense. Get rid of all the extra sugar and refined carbs that basically are the mainstay of our standard American diet or sad diet. And if we do that, we can really take back our mood and mental health and really just a few weeks. So I encourage you all to try it. Let us know in the comments what you’ve done, how it’s worked, what you felt. We’d really love to hear from you.
Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Marks Picks [email protected] slash marks picks. I promise I’ll only email you once a week on Fridays, and I’ll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey, and I hope they’ll help you too. Again, that’s dr hyman.com/marks picks. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.
This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorse the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lennox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultra wellness center.com. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifm.org and search. Find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to express gratitude to the sponsors that made today’s podcast possible.
