ATHE_Transcript_Ep 525_Dr. Richard Johnson
JJ Virgin: [00:00:00] Hey, this is JJ Virgin. Welcome and thanks so much for joining me. This is Ask the Health Expert here. I put the Power of Health in your hands and give you access to the top people in health and wellness. In each episode, I share safe ways to get healthy, lose weight, heal your gut detox and lots more. So if you wanna get healthy and get off the dieting for life merry-go-round, I’ll give you strategies that will help you look and feel better fast.
So I went to a Bruno Mars concert I think it was like, mm. Maybe three or four years ago, and I remember in the middle of that concert going, holy smokes, I’ve gotta come back and see this guy as soon as possible. Now you’re wondering what that has [00:01:00] to do with anything. And here’s what it has to do with, I was interviewing Dr.
Richard Johnson. To the podcast a couple months ago and all I could think about as I was interviewing him as Holy Smokes, I have to get this guy back as soon as possible. So if you haven’t listened to the other podcast I did with him, you’d definitely wanna listen to it and these two will compliment each other.
But literally as I was interviewing him, I’m like, I gotta get him back now. Dr. Richard Johnson is honestly one of my heroes. When I was writing the Sugar Impact Diet, his work. On the sugar fix. And his work in fructose and fructose metabolism was like my go-to for the book. And so I think his team reached out because he wrote the book, nature Wants Us to Be Fat, and was like, Hey, I’d love to be on the podcast.
And I’m like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe my heroes coming on the podcast. So we had ’em on, we got through a teeny bit of what we needed to talk about and he’s back now and we are [00:02:00] digging into so much stuff. We are digging into the biological switch that is how, how you gain weight, how you gain fat.
So if you know how that’s happening, you can know how to not have that happen, which we talk about in depth. We’re gonna talk about dehydration and how dehydration. Makes you store and hold onto body fat, wild stuff there. The roll of salt in that how fructose can create gluten and peanut such issues, allergies, like just so much stuff.
So let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Richard Johnson before I bring him on. He’s a practicing physician. He has been a medical scientist for over 25 years, and again, he’s internationally recognized for. Work in fructose. And oh my gosh, I’m just so excited about the information he’s gonna share here.
He also has done a lot of work in uric acid as well, and metabolic syndrome. He is a [00:03:00] prolific scientist with research that’s been funded by the NIH since the 1980s. He’s published over 700 papers, lectured in over 45 countries. His work has been highly cited, and again, he wrote, wrote the sugar. The fat switch and nature wants us to be fat.
And he now is in Denver at the University of Colorado. And again, we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be jumping around a bunch, but we’re really focusing more on his nature wants us to be fat book and this idea of this biological switch. That could be leading to obesity and great stuff, so hang with me. I will be right back with Dr.
Richard Johnson.
Dr. Richard Johnson. I promise I will not fan girl. All over you again. You probably just recovered from the last podcast interview where I did , that you are literally my hero. My [00:04:00] hero. Oh, thank you. So for those of you listening, I have another podcast with Richard that you are gonna wanna listen to where we talk a lot about fructose, who’s book the sugar fix, which is what I really use to go deep in sugar impact diet.
And we are going to do a little overview. But we’re gonna go much more into nature Wants us to be fat. This idea of this biological switch, dehydration, so many cool things to talk about. I’m super excited and you’ve got some new stuff to share with us, so I’m very, very excited about that. But before we go there let’s, can you just give people just a brief overview of.
Fructose and why it’s so different than the other sugars and why it’s
Dr. Richard Johnson: problematic. Yes. So almost all foods we eat are used to make energy and when we eat the foods, we make energy. And the main energy we make is a t p, and that’s the energy we use to do things. And if we make extra energy, it’s stored as fat.
So the all foods, when we eat ’em, we kind of top off [00:05:00] our ATP levels to a certain level. We wanna have high atp and that gives us the energy to do what we want. Fructose is a nutrient that actually wants to help you store fat. So the way it works is it’s, it’s really unique. It’s the only nutrient that when you eat it, it actually makes.
but the energy is stored preferentially as fat as opposed to a t p and the way it does that is a real cool trick. What it does is it lowers the a t P in the cell, so it lowers your energy, which makes you hungry. and makes you feel like you’re at risk for starvation, but it does it purposely and, and then it blocks the ability of your fat to break down to replace the A t P.
So now you’re hungry and you’re eating this food, which is energy, but it is being preferentially converted to fat because [00:06:00] there’s a block. In producing the atp. So the energy’s short of shunted over to fat and, and you can continue to be hungry until eventually the ATP levels slowly come back up to normal.
So it’s a trick. It’s a trick to make you think that you’re you know, that you don’t have enough energy on board and that you need to eat. And and in fact, you’re, you’re true, your ATP levels are tend to be low. And so that also can correlate with, you know symptoms of low energy hunger.
Feeling a little bit tired, you know, things like that is what fructose purposefully does. And it was, it was developed in nature as a, a biologic pathway to help animals. To prepare for times when there was no food around. So so like hibernating animals like the bear you know, the way it beginning about eight weeks before it [00:07:00] hibernates, it will start really getting a lot of fat.
And it will be get hungry and it will, will just can’t control its appetite. And this goes on for about eight weeks until it hibernates. And what looks like, what triggers that biologic switch in? The bear is eating huge amounts of fruit now. Not the kind of fruit we’re eating where we’re eating one or two fruits a day.
Maybe three fruits that are, have only four or five grams of fructose. The bear. You know, 10,000 grapes in a day. And so it, it eats a huge amount of fructose and it’s really requires a fairly fair amount of exposure to fructose to really activate this switch. Well, what’s
JJ Virgin: a fair amount? Because I look at it and go, okay, what about the apple juice?
What about the, you know, agave syrup? What about the crystalline fructose they’re using in sweeteners?
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yes, exactly. You’re, you’re totally right. Those are all, all can [00:08:00] activate the switch. Soft drinks have so much fructose and an apple juice has, we’ve given apple juice to people and shown that you can activate the switch within minutes when you drink apple juice.
And it relates a little bit too, you know, it’s sort of interesting. It’s not just the amount of sugar, but the speed with which you ingest. . And so for example, we did a study. You, you, and the reason is it’s, it’s the way the switch is triggered. It’s triggered by the concentration of fructose that the liver sees.
And you, you must remember that when we eat it go, our food goes into the in stomach and then the intestine. And then it’s absorbed and it goes through the liver before it really hits the rest of the body. And the liver’s the big processing place. It’s the place which processes a lot of these nutrients.
So when you eat fructose, about the first four or five grams gets inactivated in the [00:09:00] intestine. It’s actually just degraded like a calorie. It’s just a regular calorie, but the fructose that gets through the intestine gets to the liver and that’s where the action occurs. And it is the concentration that a fructose that the liver reacts to.
So if the concentrations very high, you’ll get a big activation of the switch. If the concentration’s low, you may get a very mild activation of the switch. In other words, the a t p levels will come down a small amount versus a large amount. And, and the way this you works then is it’s not just the amount that you eat, but the speed with which you eat.
So if you drink a soft drink very fast. You’re gonna get a big slug of fructose all at once to the liver, especially if you do it on an empty stomach. But if you you know, if you sipped the, the drink over four hours, there wouldn’t be enough. No one does. Yeah, no one does. No one does . Yeah. It’s like the big, it’s the big [00:10:00] lie.
Yeah. Come on, drink this, eat this piece of cake in two hours. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I’m gonna take one little bite. No, what happens is everyone snarfs down the cake. Everyone guzzles the drinks and this is the problem. So the trouble is, is that, you know, a lot of sweet. You know, they have a lot of sugar and sugar contains fructose and high fructose corn syrup contains fructose.
Agave contains fructose. So the trouble is if you get a large slug of it and you, or you or you take it very rapidly, that’s how you do it. And the big, big, big breakthrough in our work was when we discovered that and it was already known in biology, but just no one really understood the importance of it is that the body can make fructose.
I did
JJ Virgin: not know this. Yes, I just saw this. I was, I was stalking you again. I’m, I’m okay. So you’re not, and then I saw that part and I’m like, holy smokes. So how does that happen?
Dr. Richard Johnson: Well, yeah, so this [00:11:00] was a pretty cool discovery. So it was, for a long time that fructose was made in the body and it was known that this occurs in diabetics.
So you can take a a di if you, if someone has poorly controlled diabetes and their blood sugars are high the, the glucose, when it’s high. Some of it gets converted to fructose. And so there is this way, it’s sort of interesting. The body can convert glucose to fructose and the body can convert fructose to glucose, and it’s very interesting.
If you’re starving and you eat sugar, the, the, I mean, if you’re truly starving, The fructose will be converted to glucose as instant energy. Cuz remember, fructose is not really an instant energy. But normally when you’re in a the, in the regular setting, if you eat fructose, the fructose is gonna stay as fructose.
But in with glucose, it’s a little bit different. When you eat foods [00:12:00] that have high glucose content like starch, starchy foods, breads rices, potato, corn. Yes, exactly. So when you eat that, the glucose. Levels go up in your blood. So it sort of mimics what is like in diabetes and when the glucose levels go up, they get converted and there’s now studies in people showing that we make, you know, five to 10 grams of fructose a day.
Just regularly. And if you eat a high glycemic diet, you can make a lot of fructose. So
JJ Virgin: if you, so is your body doing that in order to then store it as fat? Or why? Why wouldn’t it just, I thought it just took the glucose. Either com put it, convert it to glycogen, stored it in the muscles or the liver, or stored it as fat.
Is that the step to store as fat?
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah. So what, so glucose can be converted to fat, it can be converted to glycogen. So it’s a fuel that you know. So normally if you eat huge amounts of food, if you eat what we call a [00:13:00] hiker, caloric diet, so if I put anybody on a large diet where they’re eating a lot more calories than they need they will change some of that into fat, right.
But what happens is, normally, normally we people, it’s been shown that people tend to regulate their weight and and this, especially when you’re young, so if, if you, and it’s really been shown in animals in the wild. So in animals in the wild, if you overfeed ’em for like a week, they gain weight. But then if you.
Overfeeding them, they’ll go right back to the weight. They should. And you know, in very young people, they can eat huge amounts of food. As you know when you’re, when you’re like 18, 20 years old, you can go out and eat everything you want and you won’t gain weight because our weight regulates it.
But what happens is as we get older, we lose our ability to regulate our weight, and we start gaining weight fairly easily. What’s [00:14:00] been shown is that that is due to the, our body suddenly becoming resistant to a hormone called leptin. And leptin is the hormone that controls fullness, satiety, and you know, so when you eat, Normally leptin says, Hey, you know, you’ve eaten enough and if you eat too much because you just get excited, there’s a correction.
You know, the body corrects. And but what happens is as we get older, we start becoming resistant to leptin. The question is what causes the leptin resistance? And that’s what fructose does. So we showed it years ago. Fat doesn’t cause leptin resistance. Fructose does. And so fructose is what triggers the body to lose its control of appetite.
So when those, those bears suddenly they’ll eat twice what they normally eat. I mean, they’ll gain eight to 10 pounds a day. When they’re, when they’re in this, they call it hyperphagic phaging period. What, what, what it means is they just start [00:15:00] eating a lot and they can’t control their appetite, and that’s what fructose does.
When you give a large slug of fructose to an animal, they, they will lose their ability to control their appetite. Now, it’s really interesting in animals, it, there’s a, an immediate issue where they’ll eat more because the drop of the ATP makes them hungry, but it. About three, three or four weeks on a high fructose diet to make a, an animal leptin resistant.
So if I wanna make him leptin resistant, where he’s going to eat so much, or she’s going to eat much more than she should I, I have to feed them a high fructose diet for several weeks. In the, in the, in the mouse in people, you know, what’s happened is we’re eating high fructose all the time. And so, but it can take years to really turn this system on big, big time.
Some people can do it faster. So like if you’re, if you wanted to drew in Goose lept in resistance and [00:16:00] you were me, If we were drinking soft drinks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we’re gonna do it very quickly. You know, it’s gonna happen in, in weeks to months. We’re gonna suddenly, you know, lose our ability to control our weight.
But if it’s You know, if it’s just the, the high fructose corn syrup and the processed foods and things like this, it can take a while before this system really kicks in. And, and it, it also takes longer to induce if you’re really like an athlete or, or if you’re doing a lot of exercise, cuz you know, if you’re doing that, you can, you can last longer in the setting of a high sugar diet.
Without actually getting into trouble. But over time this thing works. And the way it works is it, it erodes those mitochondria, they, the ener, the, the, the little things that make energy are ATP and you know, we have millions of these
so of these mitochondria, so it but but that happens.
And so, you know, if you’re [00:17:00] a super athlete, I think you’re a super athlete and. You know your mitochondria is super strong and so you can weather it longer than others, but eventually it’ll look at everybody.
JJ Virgin: But that is not now a plug for you. Doing a lot of working out to go ahead and eat sugar. That was not what he said here,
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah,
JJ Virgin: exactly right. Too. Like this leptin resistance. It’s not like an. Switch. You become more and more and more leptin resistant. It’s not like the hibernating bear while all of a sudden three weeks in, he’s really hungry. Right. You probably become more hungry. More hungry. More hungry. More hungry. Yes. And you’re just creating this really challenging situation to get out of.
Yes. Because now you have to restore leptin sensitivity in order to That’s right. Be able to control your hunger. And I remember when they, the whole leptin thing first came out and they were injecting mice with leptin, thinking this was gonna fix things.
Dr. Richard Johnson: and, but yeah, it doesn’t, you, if you give leptin to an animal that’s leptin resistant, that’s how [00:18:00] we actually prove that they’re leptin resistant.
We give them leptin and nothing happens if you give leptin to a normal animal. They’ll quit, they’ll reduce their food intake. But here’s what’s really cool. If you can, like, if you go on a low carb diet, you know, and so that you’re, you’re now you’re blocking the fructose, you’re eating cuz fructose is a carb.
But also when you’re on a low carb diet, you’re on a low glucose diet. And so you’re not making, you not getting a lot of glucose. You can make glucose from protein and fat, but just, but it’s, it’s, it’s harder and you don’t make a lot. So most of the glucose we get is from our carbs. So if you go to low carb diet, you, you’re low on glucose and low on fructose, so you’re not making much fructose either.
And what happens is as you probably know, when you’re on a low carb diet, after a few weeks, you’re, you’re hunger. You know, initially you’re hungry for a while. I mean, it, it, but it takes about two weeks for the [00:19:00] leptin resistance to start wearing down. And, and like in mice or rats, you know, after two or three weeks they’ll be leptin sensitive again.
And so yeah. And, and at least in the, in the lab animal, you know, it hasn’t really been. Tested that well on people, but I do know that like people on low carb diets, they, they’re craving for sugar and everything. Their, their hunger tends to go down after a couple weeks.
JJ Virgin: And well, plus you would have to look at, like, if you were looking at all of this, you know, and, and cause I look at this, go.
All right, so how much fructose could someone really eat? Well, it depends on how much at one time and what, how much fiber is with. Right. Technically that’s the difference with an apple or apple juice. Yes. And then it really depends on muscle mass as well. Like how insulin sensitive are they? How much muscle mass do they have?
Right. You know? Yes. So that gives them a little, that’s super important. lee way too. So just in repairing all of this and repairing leptin resistance, I would think. Is part of it as [00:20:00] well. Like what’s going on with your overall, with your fitness level, your mitochondria, your cardio, your weight training.
And is why when you are helping someone, if you can add that stuff in, you just start to see the repair so much. Like if they’re sleeping well, they’ve got their stress. Yeah. You know, poor sleep. Now they’re insulin resistant and you know, if you get them walking after a meal, heck, did you see that, that research just on the soleus pushups.
Dr. Richard Johnson: No, I did not. Tell me what it, what they found this,
JJ Virgin: this thing, and I, I think what it really says is you standing desks this guy out of the UK discovered that if he had people doing what he’s calling a soleus pushup, basically when you’re sitting at your desk, for people that are sedentary that have to sit, can’t do a standing desk or a treadmill desk or anything else and are sitting most the day, if they just do heel lifts that it has a dramatic impact on their blood sugar Regulation.
Dr. Richard Johnson: You know, there’s this new data that’s showing that the lean body mass [00:21:00] in other words, how much muscle we have can have a big impact on weight regulation. And that if you can increase your lean body mass actually you can, it, you know, like there’s this, there’s this problem that when you try to lose weight you have to eat less to keep at that weight.
And this is like a trap. And and you know, so, but when you’re losing weight, you’re losing lean body mass as well. You do lose, not you not just losing fat, but your muscle mass will come down a little bit and, and the food intake actually correlates. The ener, the energy you need to stay in balance correlates with your muscle mass.
So if you can maintain your muscle mass, then you can eat more. You know, relatively to and, and stay in the same way.
JJ Virgin: Okay? What you don’t know is this is my next book. This is actually the whole premise of my next book is we gotta stop focusing on weight loss. That we’ve gotta [00:22:00] start focusing first on. In fact, I’m working on the percentages so that you can figure out how much fat free mass, you know, and I’m using fat free mass interchangeably, lean body mass.
I know they’re a little bit different. Yeah, no, but it’s impedance scales to fat free mass. How much? Because everyone’s focused on their body fat. I’m like, no. We need to focus on your fat-free mass and optit’s impedance scales to. You know, if you’ve got way too much mass, okay, you’re gonna lose all of it.
But you wanna preferentially lose a high percentage of body fat. But for most people that have 10, 20, 30 pounds to lose, if they first focused on getting really active muscle tissue, , yes. Right? You’re a hundred percent right, has anabolic resistance, and all of a sudden you’ve got this hungry muscle tissue that’s gonna give you a little bit more of a margin for error.
Like I recognized early on, here I am a woman, I went, wow, if I really build up my upper body, I can eat more. . Yes, I can. If I put on more
Dr. Richard Johnson: muscle, actually I can eat more . [00:23:00] Yes. And, and, and it’s good for you too, because the issue is the, you know, one of the problems is the reason the muscle mass gets less is insulin resistance actually.
Blocks the ability for the muscle to get the nutrition it really wants. So if we can reverse the insulin resistance, that will help also with improving the muscle mass. Yeah. And it’s the first thing we actually have happen. We actually have. But do, do you lift weights? I, I, I do, but I haven’t in the last few months.
So you caught me. Oh boy. So I need to, I need to do it cuz but I’ve just been busy. But
JJ Virgin: I won’t tell you. That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe
Dr. Richard Johnson: you’ve even just said something. I’m something like that. Next time you ask me, I’m gonna be able to tell you.
JJ Virgin: Yes. Yeah. And I wanna know what your fat free mass is and then you’re gonna make muscle.
Muscle. See, look at
Dr. Richard Johnson: this. Yeah, that’s, that’s good. Okay. Yeah. . I’m not
JJ Virgin: even gonna show mine . For those of you listening, I just showed my bicep to him I’m, I’m, yeah, that’s, I’m muscle shaming you a bit. Yes, you are. Okay.
Dr. Richard Johnson: All right. This but, but you know, that’s very interesting. We I haven’t published this yet, but I have a [00:24:00] grant from the National Institute of Health because I c.
We can show that this biologic switch that I’m talking about drives sarcopenia. Oh, goodness. And so when we take, we can take animals in kidney failure, that where the muscles are, they, they, they, they basically lose their muscle mass. They’re quite weak. And we, when we block or knock out part of this pathway, we can make the muscular and healthy, despite having kidney.
Wow. So, yeah, it’s pretty cool stuff. So this this pathway that we’re talking about, what it does is it, it wants, you know, so if, think about it this way, if you wanna survive, a a period where there’s no food around you. What you wanna do is you, you do wanna have sufficient muscle mass to forge for food, but what you wanna do is you wanna preserve energy for the brain and you wanna preserve as much fat as you can.
[00:25:00] So you can live as long as you can with no, when there’s no food around. And so it, it drops your energy metabolism, it slows down your mitochondria, it reduces the. Calories that the muscle uses and preserves it for the brain. But when you do this chronically, you end up being this, you are losing your muscle mass getting fat, developing high blood pressure, and all these terrible things.
So what was meant to be a savior for you? and it probably would be in it if you were, if you’re overweight, you’re gonna live longer when there’s no food around than a person who’s muscular but has no body fat, you know? So, but the
JJ Virgin: chancellor’s no food around is
Dr. Richard Johnson: pretty slim. And, and instead though, over time you’re gonna get heart disease and you’re gonna get hypertension, diabetes.
So it actually is not an advantage for us to activate the switch. And so what we wanna do is, you know try to figure. How, how to [00:26:00] avoid that one. One area that you and I were talking about earlier before before we actually started the show here, was the importance of dehydration and hydration. In the switch and maybe this is a good time.
JJ Virgin: This is a great time. Well, before we do that, I’m just gonna tease everybody. Yeah, yeah. We gotta take a short break. So we are gonna talk about dehydration. We also have to talk about the gluten and peanut situation, the situation there. So we have many more things. So hang with me. We will be right back.
We’re back. Let’s talk dehydration, because you definitely have me intrigued with this one.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yes. So you know, normally I mean if first off, if a person gets very dehydrated, they’re, they, they lose their, you know, they’re, they’re thirsty and, and often you lose your appetite. So if you’re severely dehydrated you know, it’s not a good setting.
And and animals in the desert. If they get severely dehydrated, they have, [00:27:00] a lot of them have a secret weapon, and the secret weapon is that they will carry fat. In some unusual location of their body. So in the desert, you don’t wanna have it on your body cuz it will insulate you and overheat you. But like a lot of these desert animals will carry extra fat in their tail or they’ll have a hump on their back or something, or they’ll store fat.
And what’s interesting is that fat can be a source of water. And when you break down fat, You, you actually produce water. It’s one of the products when you burn fat. So even though fat doesn’t contain water, when you burn it, it makes water. So animals use it as a source of water in the desert marine mammals, like the whale, gets about a third of its water from, from the fat that it burns.
And so, So it has fat, all over it’s body, cuz it does need the [00:28:00] insulation in the cold ocean. But but it will burn the fat as a source of water because it doesn’t drink sea water. So so anyway, so so there’s this really interesting thing that fat. Is is actually a source, not of just calories, but a source of water.
So what’s interesting is that this has a biology. So if, if you get, make an animal just mildly dehydrated, You can activate this switch and they will convert glucose to fructose in their body. And the easiest way to make an animal mildly dehydrated is to eat salt. And when you eat salt, the salt concentration goes up in your blood and it makes you thirsty and in its.
Basically creating mild dehydration. So we, we we’re looking at this and we realized that salt actually can activate the switch cuz it’s one of the ways the switch is activated is by high salt concentrations. And we said, oh, you know, maybe this is a mechanism [00:29:00] where if you’re mildly dehydrated, this switch gets turned on so that you can make fructose from carbs.
So what we we did is we gave salty foods. To animals and we found that over time it took longer time than with sugar, but they became enormously fat. and yeah, they got insulin resistant, diabetic, fatty liver, you know, the whole, the whole nine yards. And and so, and then if we blocked this fructose pathway using genetic, you know, interrupted this gene and so forth, we, we actually, the, the mice could eat the salt and they didn’t get fat.
So we knew that this was the mechanism. So we started looking at people. And others had too. And we found that that the, there’s all these studies that show that people who are overweight tend to be eating a lot of salt, not just sugar. And all this processed food has a lot of salt in it. And so and [00:30:00] french fries, you know, why is the salt, why are french fries so bad?
Because it’s the starch and you’ve got fat on it, and then you’ve got salt. And the salt is helping convert that glucose to fructose in your body. So so what we started to realize is that there, that a lot of people are eating a lot of salt and then we found, I, I, you know, it was in the literature, there’s like 10, 20 studies that showed that a if you eat a high salt diet, that it predicts the development of obesity and, and that people who are overweight are dehydrated like three to 12 times more than a lean person.
And the serum sodium of a very simple test that you guys can go out and just get when you get your blood work with your doc. Just look at your serum sodium. Normal is 1 38 to 1 45, but if your sodium is on the upper end of normal, like 1 44, 1 45. You are at risk of developing wow, obesity and diabetes.
And so,
JJ Virgin: so hold on a couple things like, cause I assume we tightly control in our blood, so that’s why it would still be in the normal [00:31:00] range, but at the high end of the normal range cuz your body is not gonna let it get crazy high. If it does, then you’re really in trouble, right? You are. You’re looking right at that range.
You
Dr. Richard Johnson: are a hundred percent right And that’s what happens. And so what happens is when the serum sodium goes up, if you’re not drinking enough, You stimulate a hormone from the brain called vasopressin, and this hormone gets secreted and it reduces the water loss through the kidney, so it makes the urine concentrated so the urine becomes dark and yellow because it’s all
JJ Virgin: concentrated.
That’s why would say do the P test unless you’re doing vitamin.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah, the The Pee test is a great way to, yeah. If you pee and you have dark yellow urine, Very likely you’re, you’re dehydrated. It should, the color you want is not clear. It’s like just the lightest
JJ Virgin: yellow. That’s, so I have a, a question though.
Like, so in listening to all of this, the first thing you said is, you know, camels, lizards, they’re out in the desert. They’ve got [00:32:00] fat stores so that they can burn fat to rehydrate. Correct? Correct. Well then that makes you think. . Okay, well if that’s the case, if I’m dehydrated, wouldn’t I? Then wouldn’t my body then burn fat to rehydrate?
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah. I mean, if you’re in serious life-threatening dehydration, you’re gonna be burning fat, but you don’t wanna do that, you know? Cause that really is, it’s a miserable, that’s like, it’s like yeah, starvation will let you lose weight too, but you don’t wanna be in a situation of starvation where your everything is breaking down.
So the, you know, but, but what happens is, if you, if it’s kind of the reverse, if you’re mildly dehydrate, , the, you actually store fat and if you’re severely dehydrated, you’ll burn
JJ Virgin: fat, which you’re never gonna get to severe, so you get to mild. Right. And then the other question is, like, with those tight controls in your blood wouldn’t that blood level of sodium [00:33:00] very like, you know, If you drank a bunch of water, you’d take it again, and then it would be back into a lower range.
Like how quickly does that one you? You know, like looking at fasting blood sugar in a hemoglobin a1c, you can see a hemoglobin a1c and see blood sugar over time, or the snapshot of fasting blood sugar. Is your sodium level the same, that it’s just a quick snapshot? So
Dr. Richard Johnson: here’s the, here’s the trick. The way that we correct the serum sodium is from this hormone vasopressin.
So when we release vasopressin, it will help bring the serum sodium back down and help correct it. Because what will do is it, it actually decreases our body temperature slightly so that we lose less water through our skin. And it decreases the loss of water vapor from the lung it looks like.
And, but its main action is to decrease the amount of water we excrete in our urine. But we realize that that [00:34:00] hormone might actually have a role in driving. Fat because if it’s trying to hold onto water, wouldn’t stimulating fat be a good way to do that? And so vasopressin is this hormone that, you know, everyone thought that its main action was on the kidney, but there were three receptors.
So hormones act on receptors. and then the receptor is what, what drives things. So, you know, you secrete thyroid hormone, it goes to the thyroid receptor and it, you know, does all the things that thyroid does. So Vasopressin has three receptors and one of them, no one knew what it really did. And it was called the V1B receptor.
And what we did is when we studied it, we actually proved that vasopressin drives obesity and it actually stimulates all these things that we talked about. The, the biologic switch is driven by vasopressin through the V1B receptor, so [00:35:00] there’s that actual hormone that drives obesity. So just like leptin is the hormone that helps control your appetite.
Vasopressin levels are high in people who are overweight and they’re high in people who are going to get overweight. It’s a actually very useful test. The blood test is called cottin. It’s not commercially available really, but it should be at some point because it will, if you measure it, it will tell you what your risk is for developing obesity and diabetes.
JJ Virgin: And so if your vasopressin levels are high Yes. Is the fixed just to the switch
Dr. Richard Johnson: is on? Yeah. ,
JJ Virgin: you know, like, like, Does this need drink water? Need
Dr. Richard Johnson: to drink more? Water it. Yeah, exactly. It’s that easy of a fix.
JJ Virgin: It’s that easy. A fix. Holy smoke. You know, here’s so funny. All these things that you hear about forever.
Right. You know, like drink more water. They’re actually, you come back to ’em later and the science proves it out.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah. You know, my specialty is that I’m a kidney doctor [00:36:00] and it was the kidney doctors that would say, Hey listen, this is a old tail. It’s not true that drinking water causes weight loss. It’s just a story because the kidneys can hold onto water for you.
And so that I was taught. But it turns out that we were wrong, that our specialty was wrong. And what, and that vasopressin, when it goes up, yes, it goes up to help hold onto water, but at the expense that it also is driving fat as a waste to hold onto water. Wow. That is wild. And, and so we, we did, is we took animals and put ’em on a Western diet, you know, so they’re eating high fat, high sugar.
And these animals get fat very quickly because the sugar makes them left and resistant. And then the fat is like the fuel. So the fat just dries the obesity because of this combination of fat and sugar. And when we started, then their vasopressin levels went up. And, you know, and so the, the whole thing was turned on.
So the [00:37:00] fructose also activates vasopressin directly. You don’t have to eat salty food. If you eat fructose, vasopressin goes up too. And so what we did is we put them on water. We just gave them extra water and we, we actually put water in the. We injected water into the chow. We made these things called hydro gels, but basically the, the chow was, kind of had water in it and they ate the chow.
Just as you know, they started off eating as just as much of the chow as the regular animals. But it over time as they got this water, They became more leptin sensitive and they started eating less chow and they, their weight stabilized and actually tended to go down and their insulin resistance actually really plateaued and then started to improve.
So it definitely helps. And and, and it’s like underrated. This is like underrated. I mean you know, if you go to a obesity or clinic, you know, they’ll tell you all the things [00:38:00] not to eat. Oftentimes, you know, they’ll say, yeah, stay well hydrated. But it’s not, it shouldn’t be. Like, who knows
JJ Virgin: what that means, , what does that mean?
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yeah. You know? Yeah. So you really, so I I will say that you know, there are there are diseases. Where you can hold onto water. So if you have heart failure and you drink a lot of water, you can dilute your serum sodium and get into trouble. And there’s, there’s diseases where this people can hold onto too much water.
So you should talk to your doctor if you think you have some kind of illness that might affect your ability to. You know, to, to, to drink lots of water. Let’s
JJ Virgin: see. Medical disclaimer folks. Exactly there. Right there.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Thank you, Dr. Exactly. And the other, the other two groups where people have got into trouble is marathon runners.
You, the teaching is to drink to thirst because people can over drink water in marathons. And likewise if you’ve had surgery, especially young women who have [00:39:00] gynecologic surgery in the first two or three days, they hold onto water. So, so basically, but normally I would say you should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.
And, and the, and the trick is to not make the urine look like water. You want the urine, have just the slightest yellow tint. And that’s the perfect place to be.
JJ Virgin: Okay. We are looking for perfect p this is another thing for everyone to know. The perfect pea. The perfect pee. I do wanna get into that.
The gluten peanut. Yes. Yes. You know, I have to know about this.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Yes. No, you do. So cuz , you know, so I went to a, a conference that was held by a, an allergist and you know, I like to go and listen to research that’s outside my area just because I, I get ideas and it’s really wonderful for me to, to get that exposure.
So Dr. Dreskin was Steve Dreskin was presenting his studies on what causes anaphylaxis or severe allergic reactions to food. [00:40:00] And as you probably know, there’s in the last 30 years, there’ve been a huge increase in the number of food allergies, and gluten is a famous one that causes allergies.
Peanuts is another famous one. Allergies and, and then of course there’s allergies to dairy. Although they’re, they’re usually not an anaphylactic one anyway but peanuts is probably one of the worst. And he was studying peanut allergies in animals. And what they found was that you had to have
an animal that was genetically predisposed to getting allergies. So they, you know, not all the animals would get allergies, but this, this particular strain could get allergies, really bad ones to like peanuts. So he was studying this one, but he found that in order for the animals to react to the peanuts, that they had to absorb the peanut proteins through the.
And so normally the proteins are degraded in the gut, and so he had to create a leaky gut. And so a [00:41:00] leaky gut is when, when you’re eating food like gluten and things like that, get across into the blood, and that’s what triggers celiac disease. And, and that’s what triggers allergies. So in order to have a food allergy, You have to have a leaky gut so that the proteins and so forth can get into the blood and trigger that allergic reaction.
So if you could block a leaky gut, you could block food allergies. So the way he was doing this is he was giving these animals peanuts, and then he was giving them a toxin to make the leaky gut. He was actually giving cholera toxin. You know, cholera is this terrible disease that causes terrible diarrhea.
Yeah, it’s pretty, pretty, pretty severe. And I happen to know from studying fructose and from doing studies with fructose, that I could create a leaky gut by just giving fructose because it actually causes a leaky gut. And and I always worried that children who are being given a lot [00:42:00] of fruit juice by parents that do that don’t know better.
And, and so they give them like plum juice or apple juice or juices like pear juice. And, and these juices are high in fructose that they would cause a leaky gut. And I was surprised to see that the, you know, that it was a leaky gut plus peanuts that made the allergy. So after his conference, I went up to him and I said, Hey, let’s collaborate and let’s do the same experiment, but instead of giving cholera toxin, let’s put them on a, on on soft drinks.
And so what we basically did is we put the mice on soft drinks and then when they got the peanuts, they, they anaphylaxis. . So so that was, we never published it. Actually. I wish we had, but
JJ Virgin: I would love to refer to that in my next, I actually, we can’t, in fact, last night I was doing a webinar and I’ve talked about like what’s gonna cause leaky gut and I’m like, fructose and gluten, you know?
Yeah. Fructose and gluten. Fructose is, yeah. But the the bigger the [00:43:00] thing now too is it’s probably causing leaky brain. , you know? Yes. It’s like, which is just
Dr. Richard Johnson: frightening. It’s back, right?
JJ Virgin: Yes.
Dr. Richard Johnson: So, yeah, there’s actually there is a real story between fructose and dementia that I, this, you know, it’s kind of scary.
So the, the first thing is, you know, the, you know, the main cause of dementia right now is Alzheimer’s disease and. You know, this is a disease where people lose their memory first and, and then they, they slowly lose everything and, and they often are wandering around and there’s this syndrome where they wander.
And and it’s a terrible disease. And they basically, the brain shrinks. And if you look in the brain, you see two characteristics, what thing called amyloid plaques and a, and another thing called tau protein. And so when people found those two things, they said, you know, that’s the cause [00:44:00] of Alzheimer’s is these amyloid plaques.
And so for the last 30 years the pharma industry’s been trying to find ways to block these amyloid plaques, andt proteins, as ways to treat Alzheimer’s. The trouble is that those therapies have generally failed. I mean, they’ve failed. I saw something like there had been 15 different drugs, tried for amyloid and they all failed.
Or maybe one just show tiny bit of of benefit. And so this has made people think that there must be another underlying cost and something that occurs maybe earlier in the process. And so when people started studying this, they realized that there were three things going on in the brain. One was.
That the energy factories, those mitochondria show up a signature of being damaged. And then the second thing is that there’s a little bit of inflammation and the, and the, and the third thing is that there’s, the brain develops insulin resistance. So [00:45:00] although much of the brain doesn’t use a lot of insulin, There are many, many areas in the brain that do use insulin and they become insulin resistant.
So what’s interesting is the, one of, some of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s turns out to be high sugar diets and high fructose corn syrup and, and high salty foods, and high glycemic carbs and obesity and diabetes. And I think you can see that they’re all linked with the switch. And if you give fructose to.
Guess what happens? They get those three changes in the brain. They get insulin resistance in the brain. They get the mitochondrial same bio signature, and then they they, they get the inflammation and they have trouble walking through mazes. And so that’s that’s pretty scary. And then there’s in, there’s then, so what’s now been done is people have actually looked at earlys Alzheimer’s disease, and you have to look at it early before the, the brain.
Gone. Basically as the brain, [00:46:00] slowly as you lose the neurons, you, you lose the evidence of what was going on there. So, but if you study it early, you find that people with Alzheimer’s have high fructose levels in their brain, five to six times higher. So it’s been, it was, it was published in a, there was a autopsy study where they looked at nine patients with Alzheimer’s and.
People without. And the, they measured the fructose levels in the various parts of the brain and and the fructose levels were high, five to six fold higher correlating. And there was one control that had it. And then in retrospect, they realized that that person actually was having developing early
JJ Virgin: Alzheimer’s.
You know, the big, the challenge here is, is by the time someone starts to really be aware of it, and I think a lot of it too is they don’t. , you know, they, if they ignore and avoid cuz it’s so scary. And by the time it finally gets there, it’s too late to do a lot of these things. So how do you [00:47:00] catch it before it gets to that point?
Like, you know, how do you know someone’s insulin resistant in the brain? How would you know, besides like doing an autopsy isn’t gonna, there’s a think, there’s
Dr. Richard Johnson: a thing called a pet. There’s a, it’s like a pet
JJ Virgin: scan. Like a spec where you
Dr. Richard Johnson: could see energy levels? Yeah. Well you can, you can. Glucose uptake in the brain.
Mm-hmm. . So there are these scans. There’s people are measuring spinal fluid, but there’s even some group that has looked for a peripheral marker and they found a mitochondrial marker that is actually the hallmark of fructose metabolism. But they found it in Alzheimer’s, in peripheral white cells.
So I, I think that there will be ways to do it. I, I think that the other thing. Turns out is that it’s not so it’s, you can get it from the sugar you eat, but it may be more linked with fructose being generated in, in the, in the brain, it looks like it’s more of a stimulation of fructose production in [00:48:00] the brain, which happens with high glycemic carbs, salty foods.
And so I think if we eat, healthier. I, I mean, it’s, it’s not, a
JJ Virgin: lot of stuff
Dr. Richard Johnson: gets fixed, you know? It’s, yes, a lot. A lot of stuff will get fixed and you’re exactly right. And it’s not like we can’t ever eat a potato or, you know, you can’t ever have a cake on your kid’s birthday. But what we really need to do is to just be aware that we’re eating too much of these.
These foods. And basically, I, I think that modest carb restriction, particularly with high glycemic carbs like the Mediterranean diet, I have a diet that I think is just as good, maybe a little you have a, a diet as well, you know, and, and a lot of these. We all kind of convene on the same pathway. Eat more natural foods, eat healthier foods, try not to eat processed foods.
JJ Virgin: There’s a lot of, well, and here’s the thing, Richard, that I’ve been noticing, and especially it goes along with this idea that. First of all, when people work out, a whole lot of things get fixed too. [00:49:00] Yes.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Right? Yes, absolutely. It
JJ Virgin: gives you, it gives you the margin for of error when you work out, so, so just working out, like you look at brain function.
Yes. I mean, the best drug for brain function is exercise. Look what it does with pnf. There’s nothing comes close. You know, I have a son with a severe traumatic brain injury, so I’ve been going through this process for 10 years. So like anything brain, What do we need to do? Yes, and clearly exercise is hands down the winter, but you know, if you look at all this and you go, all right, if we’re focusing on.
Not what you weigh, but what your weight’s made up of. And looking at muscle mass as such a key determinant of, you know, healthy aging. Yes, absolutely. Cause he wants to be old in a wheelchair. Well then the next thing you have to do is why do we look at our diet and all we ever talk about are fat carbs.
We never talk about protein. We underestimate how much protein people should eat. Exactly. When we villainize protein, when I’m pretty sure. That wild salmon or grass fed beef [00:50:00] you eat is not the thing that’s giving you… Absolutely. Right. I mean, it makes me crazy nuts because everyone gets afraid of it’s gonna hurt your kidneys.
I’m like, not if you don’t have kidney failure, you know it’s,
Dr. Richard Johnson: yeah. No, they ridiculous. Yeah, and I’m a kidney doc and I actually totally agree with you. The people are not eating enough protein. There is this, especially women protein, protein leverage effect, these protein sparing effects. There are actually some very good data that having a higher protein intake is beneficial.
You know, if you do have really bad kidney failure, you don’t wanna be eating red meat every night. That is for sure. But you know . But, but in general, protein is really important and exercise is absolutely critical. So let me tell you what, what we’ve learned about exercise from our work, and that is and it is gonna be completely consistent with what you’re saying.
What we’ve discovered is that this fructose pathway, that when you, it causes damage to those mitochondria and the [00:51:00] mitochondria are what’s critical for giving us the energy we. And it, the, initially it’s it’s a transient suppression of the mitochondria. So when you eat sugar, the mitochondrial function goes down and then it recovers.
But if you keep doing it, it causes damage to the mitochondria over time, and you can show that. And when the mitochondria get damaged now and they can’t repair you end up in a low energy state. And that’s just bad for your muscle. It’s bad for your brain. It’s bad for everything. So exercise is a fantastic.
Way to rejuvenate those mitochondria. It is the, by far, the best way we have to stimulate the mitochondria to come back to, to be strong again. And so exercise is great. And then also increasing your muscle mass will also help you so that you can eat the regular size meal you want to eat. So that combination of exercise to increase muscle [00:52:00] mass, but also exercise.
To improve your mitochondria. It’s not about burning calories as I think everyone realizes, cuz you it, you don’t really burn that many calories relative to the work that you’re doing, but it’s, it’s making you healthier by improving your muscle mass and improving your
JJ Virgin: right, your mit, so you’ll be more insulin sensitive, you’ll be able to burn.
When you’re sitting on your butt, which is when you burn more fat, you’ll be able to use more calories throughout the day. You know, early on, I started my life as an exercise physiologist, and early on I, everything that we were doing at school was, if you wanna lose weight, , you know, you know exactly what I’m gonna say.
You have to eat less, exercise more. You had to create a 50, a 500 calorie deficit to lose a pound a week or a thousand to lose two. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was, and I, and, and it wasn’t working with my clients like, so I was paying my way through graduate and doctoral school, and I’m doing this and I go, this is not working.
And I thought, Richard, they were cheating , [00:53:00] you know? And then I discovered, oh wait, a. You know, your body’s not a bank account. And one of the first things that I started to shift, because everything back then was don’t do any weight training till you’ve lost the weight. And I kept, and I was at Gold’s Gym in Venice, California training people.
I’d take ’em there on field trips, right? Yeah. And what I saw is people that would rarely ever do cardio, they were doing all resistance training. They looked like, I remember one woman turned around and I figured she must have been about 20, and she was like 70 years old, I would’ve killed for her body.
And I went, you know what? This is ridiculous. This is like changing the interest rate on your bank account. You can either go and spend all your money all the time, or you can just fix your interest rate and then you have money coming in. I’m going to teach them how to fix their interest rate by doing more resistance training.
Exactly. Now focus there first it all, and you get more insulin sensitive, you’re gonna burn more calories. Everyone wants to have this great metabolism. I’m like lift weights. So I love hearing. Because it is literally what I started to look at 30 years [00:54:00] ago, and I feel like I’m coming full circle now and you know, with this, but it is, it’s never been more important than now with the baby boomer aging.
Yeah. And exactly. Having, you know, like having the situation where you’re gonna have people who can’t balance on one leg, can’t get out of the chair,
Dr. Richard Johnson: you know, , it’s like, yeah, no, I, I, I lifted weights for probably 30
JJ Virgin: years. So, well, don’t say, don’t say in the past. Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna start again. We’re.
Dr. Richard Johnson: Tomorrow, when are we starting ? Yeah. You can’t stop this stuff. Exactly. It’s not like you can do it and you’re done. You’re totally better. You’re totally right.
JJ Virgin: You’re totally right. Holy smokes. I can’t believe it. Yeah. I’m, I’m totally busting you on this. Yeah,
Dr. Richard Johnson: no, you, you got me.
JJ Virgin: Okay, good. When are we starting this?
Dr. Richard Johnson: I will start, I will start tonight. I actually can do it. I can do it later, late afternoon. .
JJ Virgin: That is fantastic. Good.
Dr. Richard Johnson: I I, I’ll send, I feel better now too. I, I’ll,
JJ Virgin: I’ll be able to sleep tonight. . ,
Dr. Richard Johnson: I gotta keep you around. This is [00:55:00] selfish. I’ll send, I’ll send you a
JJ Virgin: photo. , it’s selfish behavior on my part because you’re like my, you know, favorite It’s researcher.
Dr. Richard Johnson: It’s so important. It’s, it is so important. I totally agree. All right.
JJ Virgin: Well, this has been amazing. Thank you so, so, so much. We went all over the place on so many important things. But boy, like, just listen to this. If you’ve listened to this, listen to it like 10 times over and you’ll go, okay, fructose.
Like, we’re going to just eat one to two, maybe three pieces of fruit. We gotta start working out. Do not go salting things like crazy and make sure you’re drinking a lot of water and you’ve got the pretty, what did wgo salting thingsd? The The perfect Pee . Highlights? Yes. Have the perfect
Dr. Richard Johnson: pee as we’re saying.
Nephrology, you’re in good hands. Aha, .
JJ Virgin: Thank you so much.
For more info on this and other health topics I cover or to rate and review, find me on [00:56:00] Instagram, Facebook, and my website jjvirgin.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to my show so you won’t miss a single episode. Go to subscribetojj.com. Thanks again for being with me this week.