Top 10 Ways Sugar Addiction Actually Destroys Your Brain and Makes You Fat & Senile

Top 10 ways sugar ruins your health! Everybody knows by now that sugar is bad,

and yet we keep eating up to one third of our calories as added sugar. How can

that be? Well, for two reasons. First, sugar is a drug, and secondly, we typically

don't change our lifestyle until we have a health scare; until we have a symptom

that frightens us; until we have a big enough reason. Well I'm gonna give you

the reasons in this video. You will learn 10 mechanisms by which sugar does its

damage so that you'll know for sure why you will want to change before it's too

late. Coming right up!

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss

anything I want to start out with one of my

favorite quotes it's from Gary Taubes book the case against sugar and it says.

"We are, beyond question, the greatest sugar consumers in the world, and many of

our diseases may be attributed to too free a use of sweet food." When I first

read that quote I thought that makes a lot of sense we eat tons and tons of

sugar but then I read under the quote and it said published in the New York

Times on May 22nd 1857 so we think that this is a

modern problem and it's been going for a while but if they thought that it was a

problem already in 1857 when we ate 20 pounds per year and they thought already

it was contributing to a lot of disease then it certainly hasn't diminished by

now because we consume about 150 pounds of added sugar per year

so in this video we're not going to talk about every disease that you can get

from sugar because it's virtually every disease

there is there's thousands and thousands and thousands there's a list online that

Nancy Appleton she's been publishing books and she's been writing about sugar

for a while she has a hundred and forty six peer-reviewed sources of diseases

and cancer and so forth that are caused by sugar and I'm sure that the list is

growing but like I said it's pretty much every disease that you've ever heard of

that has some link so today we want to understand the mechanism why is sugar so

bad why does it do the things it does first of all reason number one sugar is

empty calories that means that when you eat food your body expects a certain

amount of nutrient it wants the fuel it wants the calories which comes from

carbohydrate or protein or fat but it also expects some vitamins and some

minerals and some essential fatty acids and some essential amino acids and some

enzymes and so forth and sugar has none of that it has absolutely zero of all

those things so this results in malnutrition and deficiencies and what

is the deficiency it means that in order for your body to perform its functions

it needs certain things if it doesn't get the things it needs it can't perform

the function that's what deficiency is and in extreme cases we get symptoms and

disease but long long long before that we have diminished function we have

diminished vitality diminished quality of life reason number two it causes

mineral depletion and this is kind of a triple whammy I think you've heard how

important minerals are by now but it does this three different ways it messes

with our minerals first it decreases the absorption secondly it increases the

excretion okay so first we take up less we get rid of

more but then the third reason comes back to the malnutrition that in order

for you to process in order for you to metabolize those calories you need

certain nutrients you need minerals like chromium copper zinc and magnesium and

if they don't come in the food in the sugar but the sugar provides a the sugar

creates a need for it then it depletes us of those minerals so it's a triple

whammy there's three different ways so for minerals sugar is a really bad idea

reason number three sugar decreases your immunity your immune function your

ability to resist infection because when blood glucose goes up the activity of

your white blood cells go down the white blood cells are the the cell based

immunity that the cells that fight off pathogens and foreign invaders and the

higher the glucose the less the activity of the white blood cells number four

sugar creates unstable blood sugar your body likes blood sugar to be stable

especially the brain the brain loves stable blood sugar when the sugar is

high that toxic to the brain when the blood sugar is low that is toxic to the

brain either one can result in a coma when it's really low it's called

hypoglycemia and when you eat something like protein or fat or vegetables with

fiber then your blood sugar stays very very stable but when you eat sugar blood

sugar starts going up and down up and down and this results in cravings if

blood sugar goes really high and then insulin pushes it down it will have a

tendency to go too low into hypoglycemia and now you have hunger cravings

irritability lack of focus because your brain doesn't have any fuel and then the

intuitive thing seems to be to eat more sugar because that's what the brain says

hey we're having a crisis give me some sugar and that's where you get cravings

but that's the worst thing you can do is to eat sugar because it just perpetuates

the pattern of that roller-coaster blood sugar so with unstable blood sugar with

a rollercoaster of glucose you're gonna have energy and no energy energy and no

energy and you're gonna have cravings and gonna have an overall greater hunger

but because glucose is also a drug it's gonna start affecting your mood you're

gonna have you're gonna feel good sugar stimulates serotonin which is a

feel-good hormone the brain has opioid receptors drug receptors for sugar so

when you eat some sugar you trigger more serotonin you feel good but again you're

setting yourself up for a roller coaster and then it's gonna drop and now you

feel terrible so your mood is gonna follow that roller coaster as well so

all ten of these mechanisms are profound they can be devastating for your health

but I still try to order them in the order of how profound their impact is

one on the degree of scariness and secondly on how many people are affected

how many people in the world are dying from this today so now we get to number

five and now we're getting to the really scary stuff cancer cancer doesn't like

an environment with low blood sugar so if you do something like a long-term

fast where your blood glucose goes really low and your ketones come up to a

level that's about equal to your glucose now cancer really doesn't like it cancer

really likes that high blood sugar because it's growing so fast and it

utilizes primarily glycolysis meaning its primary source of energy is to break

down sugar into energy most of your other cells in the body

like fat where they can use oxygen and sort of burn more slowly but cancer

loves to go really really fast and they thrive on what's called a glycolytic

metabolism so when you keep your sugars low and especially during along fast

with autophagy and high ketones then you will have one of your best tools to

inhibit cancer number six sugar causes a dysregulation of hormones and

neurotransmitters so basically hormones determine everything about how your body

does what it does your sex hormones your energy hormones etc and

neurotransmitters affect your immediate behavior how you feel and how signals

are transmitted in your body so the hormone side of things we have things

like PCOS polycystic ovary syndrome which is linked to tremendous menstrual

pains and infertility and it is very very strongly linked to hormones which

are upset by sugar and insulin in men it can create things like man boobs this is

a whole new concept moobs it hardly existed a few decades ago and

now it's becoming almost the norm as people's endocrine system as their

hormones are all over the place and sugar is probably at the root of that

other problems can be things like erectile dysfunction in men and

decreased libido in women because it dysregulates neurotransmitters we also have

sugar strongly linked to things like depression and anxiety attention deficit

disorder and in kids especially attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

number seven sugar causes inflammation it causes a low-grade chronic

inflammation and what's wrong with that low-grade chronic inflammation is linked

to every degenerative disease that we know of cardiovascular

disease stroke Alzheimer's you name it low-grade chronic inflammation is

involved in that disease process in that premature aging process and sugar is at

the root of that number eight non-alcoholic fatty liver disease used

to be almost unknown but it is increasing at an alarming rate along

with obesity diabetes and abdominal weight gain and it used to be associated

with people who got older who got into their 50s and 60s but today we're

starting to see this more and more even in teens or even preteens when we have

infant formula with high fructose corn syrup and when parents put coca-cola in

the baby bottle we're starting to abuse the system to such an enormous degree

right from the beginning of life that the body has no chance to withstand that

we break down early early on and why is fructose so critical in that because

sugar is 50% fructose 50% glucose in nature fructose and glucose occurs in

very very small amounts but when we concentrate it when we refine it when we

extract the sugar from wherever it was growing it's like we're refining a drug

poppy is a plant but we can take poppy and concentrate it and turn it into

opium or even heroin and then it becomes thousands or millions times more

addictive and that's how it works with sugar as well so in plants if you eat

broccoli or lettuce there's going to be some fructose and glucose and sucrose in

there but when you refine it you break all the rules you change everything so

if you eat a hundred grams of sugar which is less than the average person

eats in a day you're getting 50 grams of glucose that can be metabolized by every

cell in the body so I'm about 180 pounds so those 50 grams of glucose are spread

out over 180 pounds of cells but the fructose can only be absorbed and

processed and metabolized by the liver so now we have 50 grams of fructose the

same amount that was spread out over a hundred and eighty pounds of body weight

now has to be processed by three pounds of liver

so we're force-feeding the liver 60 times more sugar 60 times more

concentrated than the glucose in the rest of the body one comparison is in

foie gras which is the French word for liver pate and gras means fat and foie

means liver so it's basically a fatty liver that they're talking about and

this is a delicacy but it's quite barbaric in how they produce it because

they have to force feed the geese or the duck and normally animals in the wild

and humans who eat real food they have hunger to regulate how much they eat but

when you force-feed them you're overwhelm their metabolism you're

overwhelm their organs you're stuffing that liver full and it's kind of what

we're doing when we eat fructose is we're force feeding our liver when

you're stuffing that liver full of way more than it can handle and it results

in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which is one very large step toward

type-2 diabetes and again why is non-alcoholic fatty

liver disease such a big deal well think about the word liver the first four

letters in the wold liver is live all right it's kind of important so as if

that wasn't enough reasons we now get to the really big ones

number nine sugar feeds pathogens it feeds opportunistic pathogens it feeds

everything that you don't want in your body loves sugar so we're talking about

yeast bacteria fungus and parasites primarily and these guys are not

necessarily bad we have them in our bodies at all time we couldn't live

without them but they need to be maintained in

balance when we have a certain percentage of beneficial that offset a

certain number of pathogenic then we have the optimum health it's not like we

want zero of the pathogenic everything exists in a balance but when we eat

sugar we upset that balance we selectively feed the pathogenic ones and

they proliferate and they start producing toxins and now we have an

unbalanced gut flora that those toxins can lead to leaky gut and leaky gut is

one of the steps toward autoimmunity is one of the major components of

autoimmunity so now we're talking about hypothyroid we're talking about

cerebellar autoimmunity pancreatic autoimmunity type 1 diabetes possibly

and type 1.5 diabetes which is when you start off as a type 2 but then there's

an autoimmune process that takes you to type 1 as well and then of course we

have to throw in at the end here caries or cavities when your teeth get cavities

or they rot that used to be like the number one overwhelming overshadowing

reason to tell kids don't eat sweets don't eat sugar because you get cavities

well it is a real problem but it's sort of dwarfed in the in the enormity of all

the other things that that sugar does but sure enough cavities are result of

bacteria that feed on sugar and that create acid that destroy your teeth so

one more reason in number 10 not because it's the scariest because it doesn't

scare people enough but sugar promotes insulin resistance it does it in two

ways it does it through fructose and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

and then it does it through unstable blood sugar when we constantly put in a

lot of glucose a lot of blood sugar we trigger insulin and insulin overtime

high insulin over time creates insulin resistance so a combination of blood

glucose and fatty liver will produce insulin resistance which is tied to

virtually every degenerative condition that we know of so the obesity and the

weight gain epidemic the reason that weight can be so stubborn is because of

insulin resistance insulin resistance is synonymous it is the same thing as

type-2 diabetes insulin resistance and sugar will lead to a decreased HDL and

it will lead to an increased LDL and when we say increased LDL we're talking

about the harmful type of LDL the small and oxidized LDL so again there's not

really good or bad LDL there's just a good or bad balance and the balance

you're looking for is the opposite you're looking for high HDL and lower of

the small oxidized LDL and sugar pushes this in the wrong direction but

cholesterol isn't even as strong an indicator of heart disease as

triglycerides are and sugar will push triglycerides up why because when you're

insulin resistance and you eat carbohydrates your blood sugar goes up

your insulin goes up the insulin tries to get the sugar into the cell but the

cell doesn't want it now the high blood sugar is still a crisis the body has to

get it down but the cell doesn't want it so the only other thing the body can do

is to convert the glucose into triglycerides that's what insulin does

insulin promotes lipogenesis it takes excess sugar and turns it into fat and

now that fat is floating around in the bloodstream as

triglycerides and what people notice the very first thing when they go on a fast

or an ketogenic diet is that even though they eat tons and tons and tons of fat

the triglycerides the fat in the blood goes down because when insulin goes down

then the body can use the fat and there is no sugar that they have to turn into

triglycerides next we have what's called type 3 diabetes and this is a new

concept but it is known as Alzheimer's or dementia and the reason they call it

type 3 diabetes is that your brain also gets insulin resistant and when the

brain gets insulin resistant then it can't access the glucose it can't get

the fuel properly and there's such a strong link between insulin resistance

and dementia that they now call it type 3 diabetes insulin resistance also

promotes something called metabolic syndrome or syndrome X which is a

combination it's like a group name of all the different things we talked about

on this topic and the last one is the hypertension the people get high blood

pressure when they have metabolic syndrome and again it's the insulin

resistance that's driving it's the sugar that's driving this hypertension high

blood pressure and hypertension has been called the silent killer but if you

really want to find out what the silent killer is of course it is sugar it's

what we've been talking about here because you eat sugar and it feels good

and you think it's food and nobody tells you really how it works and in the end

you end up with all of this sugar is the silent killer so right here at the end

we're going to include two bonuses because so far we've talked about the

ten mechanisms by which sugar does its damage but even then it's sometimes not

strong enough a reason for people to change so we're going to go to the one

thing people care about the most which is how

they look and wrinkles all right so the first bonus this is called AGE which

stands for advanced glycation end-products and these are proteins and

fats that swim around with a lot of sugar in the bloodstream and they

combine they clump together and this end product is very very damaging and it has

been linked to all sorts of degeneration and inflammation but it also damages the

protein collagen and elastin and these are the proteins that maintain firmness

and elasticity of the skin so when sugar damages these two proteins through the

process of age now we get more saggy skin and more wrinkles so as we age this

is somewhat inevitable but by reducing the sugar you can ward it off as long as

possible and the last item on the list is that sugar is addictive okay if you

want to be in control of your life you don't want sugar sugar is the thing that

gives you the cravings it gives you the mood swings it makes you eat more

frequently it makes you eat too much sugar is one of the most addictive

substances that we know of so not only does it create all of these different

problems but it creates an increased need for itself it feeds itself in a

vicious cycle that's what drugs do the more you have the more you want and

they're even playing on this in the commercials but it is a serious problem

sugar is a drug and people have a different tendency to get addicted and

if you are really really strongly addicted then it's like an alcoholic you

can't have just a little bit but if you understand that it's a drug then you can

start doing something about and if you understand what the

mechanisms are how profound the damage can be now you'll have some motivation

to fuel you and make those changes I hope I've given you enough reasons to

understand that when it comes to health sugar is the root of all evil if you

enjoyed this video then make sure you check out that one thank you so much for

watching and I'll see you in the next video