Episode 102
I want to apologize to all of my listeners. Some things were mentioned on the podcast that I did not vet properly. I also incorporated some of my own bias and agenda into the podcast’s early episodes, which resulted in information being presented that was not scientifically accurate. This episode is my apology, where I dive into some of the issues I know I got wrong on previous podcast episodes. Thank you for your continued support, and God Bless.
Episode Transcript
Dr. Richard Harris MD 00:00
On this episode of The strive for great health podcast is about the things I didn’t get right. And yes, I’m human, I make mistakes. And there are some reasons for that. We’ll dive into that on the episode. But I wanted to clear the air and make sure that I’m bringing the most evidence based podcast that I can possibly bring. And so we’ve got some things that we have to correct. Are you ready to boost your health, EQ and IQ? Cue the music?
Dr. Richard Harris MD 00:38
Join me Dr. Richard Harris as we strive to unlock the secret to the human body. Strive for Wellness strive for great health. Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google and Android.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 01:04
Welcome to the strive for great health podcast with your host, Dr. Richard Harris. And this episode is about things that I didn’t get right. And firstly, I want to apologize to all of my listeners for this. And when I started the podcast, I was not applying the same scientific rigor that I am applying now, I have been more cognizant of studies or the human studies or the animal studies. And really diving into multiple studies, whenever I do a podcast, it’s one of the reasons why I’m not recording as much anymore, like the brain derived neurotrophic factor episode and the HPA Axis episode. Both of those were about 10 hours of research that went into the episodes. And one of the things I found out is a lot of other people who have these types of podcasts, they pay research teams to do the research for them. I don’t do that I do all the research myself. And in addition to all the other things that I do, the businesses, Scripps Health and Nimbus in 40 acres, our investment firm, my time is limited. So I still will podcast that’ll probably once or twice a month. And it’s going to have much more scientific rigor attached to it. Another issue that I had was the people that I first followed on this journey, I didn’t fact check them. And that was a mistake. Because what I realized is some of the things that they said, I didn’t do what I told you guys to do I tell you guys all the time to go back and look at the literature. I didn’t do that. And then when I actually did look at the literature, from what they’re saying, I realized that they were drawing conclusions based off of mechanistic studies or rat studies. And that’s not the kind of evidence that I would like to make conclusions on. It’s a proof of concept really. But really, we need to be looking at human trials, made analyses, which are the highest level of evidence. And so I have gone back to the foundation of applying much more scientific rigor to the podcast and to my talks. So again, I’m sorry, but if I remember things or people bring things up, I have no problem coming in and correcting things. So first thing I want to talk about is I’ve recently changed my routine. And something actually snuck up on me. I gained weight, I gained central body fat. And it just happened kind of insidiously, I wasn’t really paying as much attention to what I was eating in the quantities that I was eating, I was often over eating, instead of cutting myself off when I know I didn’t really need it. And what happened was I got some blood work. And that really woke me up my agency what the 5.7 from usually like 5.2. So that was a big increase. My fasting glucose is usually around 78 went to 98. My LDL almost doubled, they went from 70 to 123. And then my LDL particle count before was like 500 or 600. And it was up to 1100. So this is something that I saw and I was like I need to change and I looked at myself in the mirror and I could tell like I grown a little baby gut, you could still see ABS but like they were protruding. And I was like this is not me. But I wasn’t feeling good. I was feeling pretty heavy when I was playing basketball. And so looking at all of those numbers, I really decided I need to do something. I was eating a lot of fattier cuts of meat, and I’m not anti animal fat, but it has a lot of calories. It’s more calorie dense than protein or carbohydrates. And so what I did was okay, I said I need to go back and count calories again. I hadn’t counted for several years. But I said I needed to cut some body fat I need to get these labs in order. I need to pay attention to what I’m doing. So what I’m doing right now Now, as I’m eating to my resting metabolic rate I hadn’t actually measured before and my resting metabolic rate is about 1900. So, most people what they do in this situation is they use their total daily energy expenditure, which is the resting metabolic rate plus what we call it neat non exercise Activity Thermogenesis this is like walking and fidgeting. And then we have exercise Activity Thermogenesis, which is exercise. And then we have the thermic effect of food. Most of this is our resting metabolic rate, about 60 to 70% of our total energy expenditure is our resting metabolic rate. And so in order to make sure, I 100% that I’m in a deficit, I’m eating to my RMR. Now it’s getting me at about a 30% deficit, which is as aggressive as I would go, I wouldn’t go any more aggressive than 30%.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 05:57
But I also changed around my macros a little bit, what I’m doing is I’m eating more protein, and more lean meats, because there’s less calories, if the meat is leaner, because you don’t have as much fat so I can eat more protein per serving for the same amount of calories,
Dr. Richard Harris MD 06:19
if that makes sense.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 06:21
So what I’m trying to do now is I’m doing a 4030 30 split. So 40% carbs, 30% fats, 30% protein, and I’m still doing my fasting, I do 24 hours on Sundays, and I do a 48 hour fast every quarter. And then one of the things I’m going to start doing when I finish this cut, when I get to where I want to be, I’m going to start incorporating a rule where I only eat till I’m about 80% full, and then I’m gonna be more mindful of what I’m doing, because they can sneak up on anybody it snuck up on me. But luckily, I was paying attention to the labs, I was paying attention to some other measures, I’m gonna go get a DEXA scan next month, then keep an eye on it. Because what happened during COVID is I got out of the habit of doing my DEXA scans, I used to do them every six months.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 07:15
And so this is how this snuck up on me before I could detect changes in my body fat and muscle. But since I stopped doing that, it snuck up on me my eating habits snuck up on me, my lab snuck up on me. And this is why we’re always saying what isn’t measured isn’t done, I stopped measuring, I stopped paying attention to things, I stopped using these tracking measures that I would use for my body composition. And it snuck up on me. So I’m not going to let that happen again, especially as I turned 40, this is very important to me to maintain my lean mass, keep my body fat percentage at a healthy, sustainable number. And if I see things start to fluctuate, I’ll do a mini cut. Or if I see I’m good, maybe I’ll try to add a little bit more muscle mass and just kind of tinker with it that way. The first thing I want to talk about is glyphosate. And glyphosate is a herbicide that’s used to kill weeds. How it works is it works by disrupting a pathway that isn’t present in animals. It’s present in plants and some fungi, it basically binds manganese, and that’s used to make certain amino acids and plants. But like I said, humans don’t have this pathway. But we’ll we’ll get to that in a minute. I’m skipping ahead. So we had talked about glyphosate being a carcinogen. And if you look at animal studies it is. But there’s lots of epidemiological studies, lots of studies done by the EPA showing that it is not a carcinogen, and the EPA has looked at this extensively. So going forward, one of the things I mentioned earlier is I’m going to do my best to let you know, when I’m talking about stuff from an animal trial versus a human trial, an animal studies do not always have replication in human studies. And the reason for that is a lot of reasons for it. Number one, we’re not rats. Number two, the doses that they use are often higher, their metabolism and their lifecycle is different. So a lot of times rat studies are useful for mechanistic type things to say, okay, maybe this is something worth studying in a human study. But we often find that what happens in rat studies, we can’t replicate in human studies. And that can be due to numerous factors. A lot of it is the dosages and the exposure levels are a lot higher than what you’d see humans exposed to and the allowable daily intake of glyphosate is one milligram per kilogram, which is much higher than the levels found in people. Now, studies do show it can be found in large segments of the population. One study was about 93% of people had glyphosate in their urine, but the assays that they use for this are very sensitive, and it’s way below we’re talking micrograms amounts. So way below what you would find for the allowable daily intake. And another thing about endocrine disruption, there’s no human studies that show it as an endocrine disruptor. There is a paper that says it meets, I think it was nine out of the 10 criteria of being an endocrine disruptor. But we don’t have any human data pointing to that. As of yet. If I find any human data, I’ll be the first to come in here and talk about it. Occupational exposure, so people who are working in farms or fields where they are exposed to this may increase allergies and asthma and possibly kidney disease, occupational exposures, usually around 10 times greater than environmental exposure, environmental exposures, what you get from water, or eating foods that have been sprayed with this herbicide. environmental exposure from foods usually comes from soybean crops, but also from corn crops. So if you want to limit your exposure, those would be the two things that you would want to limit. There’s also epidemiological studies on neurotoxicity. So brain toxicity and fertility, these are mixed with no strong association. So you cannot say at this time that they can cause brain toxicity or alter fertility. There are some studies that show it can alter the ecosystems. There are studies showing that animals can be affected by this. But that’s not my area of expertise. Ecology is definitely not my area of expertise.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 11:44
My main concerns are the microbiome. We talked about how this pathway that it works on isn’t in humans, but it’s in things like fungi, which are in our microbiome, and also bacteria, so it may affect bacteria, it may affect fungi, I couldn’t find any human studies showing this, but this is something to keep an eye on. Going forward. Animal studies also show that it causes oxidative stress. We’ve talked about oxidative stress, I couldn’t find any human studies documenting this. So this is an area that we’re going to keep an eye on. If we can find human studies showing impact to the microbiome, and oxidative stress the bottom line, I still think it’s a good idea to avoid pesticides as much as possible. There’s meta analysis showing a link between pesticide exposure to metabolic syndrome diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease, the good news is that eating organic can lower exposure, one study found a 91% reduction in exposure to pesticides, by eating primarily organic. Another thing I wanted to talk about was obesity. And previously, I had mentioned something called the CI M the carbohydrate insulin model of obesity, and said that that model was better at predicting obesity. And that is not true. The more I’ve dug on this, I am now in line with the energy balance model of obesity, basically, energy intake and energy expenditure. So if your energy intake is higher than your energy expenditure, you’ll gain weight. And there are numerous things that can control these. And I’m going to do a podcast talking about some of the myths related to this. I’m not going to go into it. But one of the things that we had mentioned was that hormones aren’t accounted for in the energy balance model, but they are and then we did a dive on okay, what are the effects of hormones and the hormones that people talk about the most in this situation are thyroid, insulin, testosterone and estrogen. The thyroid can have an effect thyroid hormones are very important for our metabolic rate. People who are hypothyroid can have their resting metabolic rate reduced by as much as 25%. From what I’ve seen in the literature. The good news is we can do a lot of things to help the thyroid including supplementing with thyroid hormone, insulin resistance, people often say, Oh, well, insulin resistance can lead to weight gain. And that insulin resistance affects your metabolic rate, meaning they think that slows it down. Well, actually, diabetics have a higher metabolic rate. In one study, it was about 120 calories more per day that they were burning. So in general, Multiple studies have shown that people who are insulin resistant actually have a higher metabolic rate. And this is probably because their bodies need to make more glucose. They’re not efficiently moving glucose into the cells. So they become very gluconeogenic. That’s a metabolism process. They need to make that sugar that’s going to require energy it takes energy Eat to make energy, testosterone, testosterone doesn’t seem to appear to affect our metabolic rate, our resting metabolic rate. Now, these hormones can affect some other things like our mood, how we’re feeling, they can affect some times the calories that we choose to eat and satiety. But that’s different parts of the equation. They’re not actually affecting our metabolic rate. There’s a suppression study where they gave people a drug that blocks the brain signal to tell the testes to make testosterone. And then they gave them testosterone replacement. And they showed no difference in metabolic rate, they did the same thing with estrogen, the short term study in the long term study where they blocked it, and then they gave them an estrogen rescue. And one study that was a week long, they showed about a 36 calorie reduction. And metabolic rate, a long term study of about five months of suppression showed about a 54 Calorie difference between the groups. So not really significantly different at all. But again, these hormones can affect things in the energy balance equation by affecting mood, how you feel motivation, and then that can affect energy intake, or energy expenditure, without actually messing with the metabolic rate. One of the things that happens is often we’re just really bad at accurately recording calories, because I’ve seen people say I was in a calorie deficit, and I didn’t lose weight. Well, that’s not possible. There are actually starvation studies where they had people eat very, very low amounts of calories, like the Minnesota starvation studies, and these people continue to lose weight, or where you have people who are on medically induced 800 calorie diets, and these people continue to lose weight. We’ll talk about that more in a minute. I kind of just skipped ahead. But you know, that’s how I do. People when asked tend to overestimate calories burned by exercise, up to 72% In one study, and underestimate calories eaten, depending on the study between 20 to 50%. Even dieticians, under reported calorie intake in one study by 223 calories. So most of the time when people are trying to track and they’re not using the right tools, we’re just not very accurate. Also with exercise, we have a tendency to reduce energy expenditure afterwards. It’s called the constrained energy model. And so what happens is you’ll exercise and then your body will try to burn less calories throughout the day not by affecting the metabolic rate, but by affecting that meet that non exercise Activity Thermogenesis. And this can be on average about 30% up to 50% with obese people. So the compensation doesn’t happen in the metabolic rate the compensation happens is you tend to move less throughout the day. And then also with exercise, what we tend to do as it increases appetite and craving for hyper palatable foods. This is why it’s important when you’re trying to undergo fat loss that you have adequate protein and fiber, both of which can increase satiety. The other thing is that many people don’t factor in meat. There are studies that show that obese people sit for about 2.5 more hours per day. And if they replaced that by standing, then they could increase their energy expenditure by 350 calories approximately more per day. So that’s very important. So that’s why you can hear people say these things, but based upon this, it’s really that they weren’t accurately measuring both sides of the equation. One of the things I’m trying to do right now and I stand up when I do these podcasts is increase my neat. Neat is a great way to increase calorie expenditure and if you’re working out and if you’re trying to lose weight, you need to pay attention to your need because your body is naturally going to want to try to decrease that. So for example, when compared to lying down sitting increases expenditure by 4%. If you sit and fidget it increases it by 54%. And it’s really interesting. We get told that fidgeting is bad. Like when I was a kid I used to fidget a lot and I will get hit for it. You know you get your legs slapped Stop fidgeting. We know that fidgeting people who do tend to have better metabolic health because they tend to burn more calories. They tend to be less overweight. Also, people who fidget when asked say it helps improve their concentration in their attention. So parents if you have kids out there and they’re fidgeting don’t stop them from doing it. Sitting and fidgeting increases energy expenditure by 54%. Compared to line standing increases energy expenditure by 13% compared to lying and standing and fidgeting by 94%. So these are just little ways that you can increase your knee walking at his pace of about one mile per Our increases energy expenditure by 154% compared to line, that’s why we say get that 8000 to 10,000 Steps overall just for general health, but also if you’re trying to change your body composition, because that can be a significant source of additional calorie expenditure. And studies meet expenditure difference between people can vary by up to 2000 or more calories per day. So that’s a significant change significant, and it’s something that you have to account for. The interesting thing about Ni is if you overfeed, so let’s say you eat too many calories one day, and if you gain weight, you increase knee. One study showed about 10% Weight Gain resulted in an increase in NEET by about 520 calories. So what happens is, this is the body’s mechanism of trying to compensate. So the body says, Oh, there’s more energy intake coming in, I’m going to try to move a little bit more to maintain weight in obese individuals as well, they increase NEET by 689 calories, with a 10% weight gain. So that’s pretty significant in the body’s trying to compensate. And the same thing happens with underfeeding. So a 10% body weight reduction reduces NEET by about 262 calories, a 20% reduction by about 500 calories. So you have to be aware of this when you’re trying to lose weight.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 21:28
Or if you’re gaining weight, what’s wrong in the equation? Where do you need to put your time and your energy? Just a cool aside here, the most energy hungry organs by weight are the brain 240 calories per kilogram per day your heart 440 calories per kilogram per day, kidneys 440 in the liver 200. So those are really the organs that are driving a lot of that resting metabolic rate, muscles only burned about 13 calories per kilogram per day. And that’s at rest we’re not talking about during exercise, and adipose tissue about 4.5. So you can actually get a net increase in your resting metabolic rate by replacing fat with muscle light. We talked about how blue light is this boogey man. And blue light is just the color the wavelength of the light that does have the most stimulation out of the visible light spectrum. But it’s not as important as the intensity of the light. So one of the things that we’re doing now in our household is when the sun goes down, we try to turn off the overhead lights and turn on floor lights. And that’s because the cells that help set your circadian clock and look for the light that to tell us to stay awake or at the bottom of the eyes. So they look up to those floor lights don’t have an impact in the brain of trying to tell you to stay up because there’s light for dose. This is something that we got wrong and we talked about high fructose corn syrup. Now I’m not saying go out and eat a bunch of added sugar because it’s calories that you’re not really getting any nutrients from. High fructose corn syrup contains as much fructose as regular sugar or honey, but it’s derived from corn syrup the high comes from there’s higher amounts of the fructose than there are in corn. When compared in calories, and equal amounts. Fructose is not worse than the other sugars for causing fatty liver disease or metabolic health. There are studies that show this. Actually overconsumption of saturated fat is much worse for causing fatty liver disease. High fructose corn syrup is not sweeter than table sugar, sucrose, this is a myth. And when calories are equated, it is no worse for our metabolic health. The problem is it pops up a lot of processed foods. We’ve actually dropped our sugar consumptions over the years, but it’s still estimated about 13%, or about 270 calories a day come from added sugar. Now the bottom line here is it’s a good idea to reduce the intake of added sugar Reduce the intake of processed foods, I like to go for an 8020 rule is what I recommend 80% of your calories that you need should be from Whole Foods. 20% can be from things that you like, but be careful because the things that you like are usually hyper palatable, calorie dense and nutrient poor. So if you’re not paying attention, or if you haven’t even looked at the serving sizes of the things you’re eating, you should look at him and pay attention because 1200 1500 calories can sneak up on you. starvation mode. This is something that I’ve said before. This is also called adaptive thermogenesis or metabolic adaptation. So what you’ll hear is you’ll say, Oh, if your calories are too low, what happens is your body goes into starvation mode and drops its metabolic rate to whatever those calories are. This is something I’ve said on the podcast before But that doesn’t actually happen. There’s studies like the Minnesota starvation experiments. And then there’s studies where people eat like 800 calories a day for medical bollock health reasons. These are Doctor protocols. I’m not saying go and eat 800 calories a day. These are studies that were monitored by physicians. There are actually physicians that will prescribe an 800 calorie a day nutrition plan to people but they’re being monitored very closely, they’re supplementing to make sure they don’t get nutrient deficiencies is not something you want to do on your own.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 25:33
But basically, there’s a theory that with adaptive thermogenesis, or metabolic adaptation, you get a drop in calorie expenditure more than what is expected with weight loss. So your body mass determines a lot of your metabolic rate. We talked about the amount per organ earlier. And so we talked about muscle and fat. So if you have more fat tissue, your metabolic rate is going to be higher, because fat does actually metabolize, it does require energy to do some of the things it does. So the more mass you have, the higher the metabolic rate. And so what happens is, as you lose body fat, your metabolic rate does go down. And obese people have a higher metabolic rate because they have more body mass. And so this whole idea of metabolic adaption, or adaptive thermogenesis is you get a decrease in the metabolic rate greater than what’s expected based upon the weight loss alone.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 26:34
Now, there is a meta analysis that was done on this. And what it showed that is adaptive thermogenesis is very small, unlikely not significant, unless there are eating disorders, or you have a massive weight loss for example, 130 pound weight loss will reduce calories by about 300 per day. So it takes a significant amount of weight loss to even begin to have some type of adaptive thermogenesis. But for most people, it’s not significant. So the whole starvation mode. That’s a myth. And that’s a myth that I unfortunately propagated. That’s what we’re talking about in this podcast, because I got it wrong probiotics. Probiotics used to be part of what I told people that take. Now I just recommend getting adequate fiber and using fermented foods. And if you’re taking probiotics, it has to be strain specific. So you need to look at the literature for what you’re trying to do. For example, for mental health, certain species of bacillus, make dopamine, lactobacillus make GABA, lactobacillus ruderal makes oxytocin and dopamine and then Bifidobacterium are associated with GABA. So these are things that are been used in randomized controlled trials to show improvement with mental health. But don’t just take some random probiotic for some random reason and expect it to work for you. You’ll actually have to get with someone who’s looked at this literature. It can help you pick out a strain specific probiotic to what you’re doing. But if you just want to be healthy, increase your fiber intake. Taking fermented foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, Canna, Bucha, those types of things, yogurt, that’s where I get most of mine from most of mine’s from yogurt and Kim Bucha. artificial sugars. This is a hot button topic. And by artificial sugars, I mean things like sucralose and saccharin and aspartame. Overall, the category is called NS non nutritive sweeteners, but those include the plant based ones like stevia and monk fruit. Now me personally, I look for products that has stevia, and monk fruit. We use a little bit of earth or tall or xylitol as well. The reason is, I don’t think that sucralose and saccharin and aspartame are bad. I used to say they’re Bennett. I don’t think that anymore when I actually looked at the literature. The reason I avoid them is they cause GI upset in me. So I am intolerant to them, and anybody can be intolerant to anything. I have a good friend who was having horrible acid reflux. She ate clean, she exercised and we did a allergy panel on her. And it showed that she was allergic to strawberries, and she ate strawberries every day. She loves strawberries, but it was causing her GI upset. And I don’t think anybody who knows anything about nutrition is going to tell you strawberries are bad for you. But we’re all different. So I am very intolerant to sucralose and saccharin. It just does not do well with my GI tract, other people can take them just fine. So there’s a lot of myths associated with artificial sugars that people will say they change your taste perceptions or cravings. I’ve said that they actually don’t. There’s there’s no increase in consumption. kind of hyper palatable foods or things like that with artificial sugars and clinical studies. What happens is that there were some observational studies that showed that these artificial sugars and diet sodas were associated with more weight gain. But what it really is, is that people who drink the most of them have the unhealthiest habit set. So we have to be very careful with observational studies, because that you’ll see things like that. And when we dive into actual randomized controlled trials, it doesn’t show that they don’t trick the brain into craving more food or more sugar, because if they did, then randomised controlled trials would show that people would gain weight because they were eating more they don’t.
Dr. Richard Harris MD 30:44
Newer randomized controlled trials and meta analyses show that replacing sugar sweetened beverages with these in an se non nutritive sweeteners can lead to weight loss. One study even showed that people lost more weight with a non nutritive sweetener beverage than when they drank water. Now, I’m not saying go and pop 20 Diet Cokes a day you need to drink enough water you need to get enough electrolytes sodium, potassium, magnesium to maintain adequate blood volume. But if you’re having a diet soda with your lunch, there’s no harm in that. And so why is it that people would drink these non nutritive sweetener beverage and lose more weight in this study than with water? It was likely because the sugar substitute was hitting their sweet craving so they didn’t go and consume additional calories afterwards. One of the things you’ll hear people talk about is insulin resistance is that these sugars cause insulin resistance and that these sugars change the microbiome. They do change the microbiome, everything that we eat changes your microbiome, your microbiome is very dependent on the types of food that you eat. But it doesn’t mean that it negatively changes the microbiome. We’ll talk about that. So there’s two studies that came out recently that I wanted to talk about. The first one is called 10 weeks sucralose consumption induces gut dysbiosis and altered glucose and insulin levels in healthy young adults. That sounds terrible. But when you dive into the study, it doesn’t actually prove that they looked at sucralose in healthy adults, normal BMI, no insulin resistance at baseline and gave them 48 milligrams of sucralose or water. 48 milligrams is about 15% of the acceptable daily intake, but they gave it to them all at once, instead of spreading it out throughout the day. So that doesn’t really mimic a lot of what people do. What they found was one species of Bauhinia, toxicities increased 300%, and lactobacillus relative abundance decreased 66%. And this is where they said, Oh my gosh, that causes dysbiosis. But that bacteria, the bloodiest species, and there are multiple trials that show that that is associated with lower visceral abdominal fat and other beneficial metabolic changes. So increasing blood to according to these other studies is a good thing. Bloody produces butyrate. It’s less prominent in diabetic patients, it’s less prominent in diseases like cirrhosis and liver cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis. So what this study claimed was a negative other studies claim is a positive. And that’s just because just because it changes the microbiome, doesn’t mean it’s a negative change. The authors also claimed that there were negative changes to insulin, what they did find was that there was a 32% increase in insulin levels within the first 30 minutes. And this is due to this a phallic response, I think we’ve talked about the cephalic response, but you can get an increase in insulin secretion with the anticipation or the taste of something sweet. And so the non nutritive sweeteners are sweet. However, the total AUC area under the curve, this is basically concentration over time was not different. So the total concentration over time was not different between the two groups. They also claimed that the glucose a you see increase, but what they did was they compared the sucralose beginning
Dr. Richard Harris MD 34:11
group, to the sucralose in group and not the control. So
Dr. Richard Harris MD 34:19
what you’re supposed to do in this situation, is you measure the control group at the beginning of the surplus group at the beginning, and then measure the control group at the end and the Superlift group at the end, and you measure the sucralose group at the end to the control group at the end, but they didn’t do that. They said, Oh, the Circulus group at the end, and the sucralose group at the beginning had this difference. But when you compare them, the sucralose in the control at the end, there was no different there’s also no difference in the glucose AUc and the insulin AUC and there’s no change in hemoglobin a one C bodyweight Homa IR which is a marker of insulin resistance and blood pressure. So the main take Way from the study is do these changed the microbiome? Yes, is it changes negative. We don’t have any evidence of that yet, until this next study. So this is a study that was just recently published. It’s called Personalized microbiome driven effects of non nutritive sweeteners on human glucose tolerance. This study, they had six groups, about 20 people in each group, they gave participants these little sandwiches containing glucose as a bulking agent. And then they got two to three searches a day, corresponding to 8% of the acceptable daily intake of aspartame, 20% of saccharin, 34%, of sucralose and 75% of stevia, and there was a control group that was just a glucose bulking agent in a six arm, that was nothing, they had seven days to measure various metabolic and microbiome parameters. And then 14 days of exposure, and then seven days of additional follow up, they used a continuous glucose monitor to monitor glucose. And they also measured what we call anthropometrics. These are things like BMI and waist circumference and all of that height. And then they also did blood work on zero, 14 and 28 days, they challenged them with an oral glucose load, and they looked at how long it took to clear it. The problem was this was not monitored. So it was done at home, we don’t really know how or if they completed all of it, we just taking people at their word. The other issue is that they chose people who had not had any exposure to non nutritive sweeteners before, which is really, really hard to never even be exposed to something like stevia. So you could assume that these people were avoiding these products because they thought they were bad. And if they thought they were bad, then taking them in the study could cause a stress response. And that could increase glucose. Now that people don’t know, you know which one they got, right. But even so if there’s a free determined bias, that can be a problem, what they found was that there was an increase in blood glucose was sucralose and saccharin, but not an increase in insulin or GLP. One, the sucralose group also had higher butyrate, which is interesting, because butyrate is usually something that’s very beneficial. They also found some people who are responders and others who are non responders, and this is where things get interesting. What they did was they transplanted before the study the microbiome to mice. And they also found that the mice had a similar glucose response the responders in the sucralose group, when they transported the microbiome to the mice, the mice also responded, meaning they had a glucose response, there was an increase in the mice, blood glucose. But the non responders in the study, the mice that got their microbiome were also non responders. So this may mean that there are a subset of people who may get an impaired glucose response. And what determines that could be the microbiome. Now, this is an area that’s going to need a lot more research to go down. But it’s really fascinating to me, because this is personalized medicine. This is the thought that because a population based study says it’s okay doesn’t mean it’s necessarily okay for everyone. And how do we figure out how each one of our individual bodies responds. And so I would say at this point,
Dr. Richard Harris MD 38:41
if you are consuming a lot of these, just check your glucose response and
Dr. Richard Harris MD 38:46
consume it normally, for a while. Check your glucose response. See if you’re getting a glucose spike, stop consuming them. And then see if you’re getting the same levels or see if you’re getting reduced glucose levels. If you’re getting reduced, then you know that these sugars are affecting you in a certain way. But overall, long term data shows improvement in metabolic health, and overall health when substituting non nutritive sweeteners for sugar. But again, what I’m taking away from this study is this may be person specific. So if you’re someone who has elevated blood sugars, be your own scientists and test your glucose response. Okay, that’s it for this episode of the podcast. If I think of anything else I did wrong. There’ll be another one. But I’m sure there will be other ones because science changes. So some of the studies in the papers and things that I’ve quoted before, there may be papers in the future that refute them, and we’ll talk
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about it. Alright guys, thanks for your attention. Thanks for listening. Strive
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for great health podcast. Have a blessed day. Thank you for listening in to strive for great health podcast with your host Dr. Richard Harris. It’s our mission and goal at the podcast to impact as many lives as possible to empower individuals to take control of their Wealth and live a life full of joy and purpose. You may help us achieve this mission by leaving a five star rating and review on your preferred podcast platform. And by sharing this podcast with anyone you think it may help, you can also support the podcast by making a donation to your favorite charity. If you do so, and send us an email, we’ll give you a shout out on the podcast because here’s the strive for great health podcasts. We’re all about charitable giving and making the world a better place. Thank you for listening and God bless