In this episode of The Thermo Diet Podcast Jayton Miller sits down and talks about some of the common misconceptions around carbohydrates, blood sugar regulation, and more with none other than Jay Feldman. Check it out and let us know what you think!
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Full Transcript
Jayton Miller:
Welcome back to the Thermo Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Jayton Miller. And today I'm with Mr. Jay Feldman. How are you doing today, Jay?
Jay Feldman:
I'm doing good, Jayton? How are you? I'm doing well, man. Good start, right?
Jayton Miller:
Yeah. So can you kind of tell us your background story and how you got here?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah, yeah. So my story, I mean starts my own health journey really, where I was always interested in health, basically trying to optimize my health. And so I was in a lot of sports and I was at the gym all the time and then of course, nutrition came with that and very much fell into this idea that, we have to eat less and exercise more. Now we have to kind of be fighting against these cravings and, eat only these foods that don't really taste too good and that are supposedly healthy for us. And that took me down this path of all sorts of different diets that didn't really work out too well. And I decided to go to school around this time to study medicine and become a doctor. And while I was studying, I found that not only were a lot of the diets that I was told were healthy, not working out for me, but the current medical system that you know is supposed to be working to really support everybody's health wasn't doing that either.
Jay Feldman:
And so I kind of decided to shift my approach. And as I was learning about different diets, different nutritional principles, different medical principles and different views of the body, I kind of came across a view that focuses more on energy, also called a bioenergetic view. And that's kind of where I built my foundation off of and then decided that this is really the best way to help support people, help people get their health back, recover from all sorts of chronic health conditions or lose fat in a healthy way, put on muscle in a healthy way, all of those things. So, that kind of brought me to where I am now.
Jayton Miller:
Sweet. So can you kind of give the people who don't know the definition of the bioenergetic view of health? Can you kind of explain that form a little bit?
Jay Feldman:
So the way that I see it is that we're basically looking at health through the lens of our cellular energy systems and that the availability of energy in the cell is really what dictates our health. And so that's what dictates our immune function, the function of our various organs, whether it's our brain or our liver health or whatever it is, that all of this comes down to the availability of energy and that when we have more energy that leads to better health and vice versa. So that's really kind of the broader framework that I use to look at then all sorts of different interventions. So whether it's different nutritional ideas or a supplement or medication, typically I find that when you look at it on the energetic level, it really allows you to determine the way that it actually affects our health.
Jayton Miller:
Awesome. And so one of the things that you kind of talk about is this perspective shift from fighting against your body to working with it. And one of the ways that I kind of see that is getting your body out of this sense of scarcity and allowing it to enter into a state of abundance. So can you kind of elaborate on that?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah. I mean, I think that that's a great way to put it. This mindset that is really everywhere, I mean, I think the most common example is the idea of eating less and exercising more or a low calorie diet where the idea is that the foods that our body naturally wants to eat or the things that our bodies naturally want to do actually hurt our health. So if something tastes good, it must be bad for us. And so along with that are these ideas that we have these genes that lead to all sorts of diseases. And that the only way that we get to be healthy is by fighting against these things, we have to fight against our cravings. We have to fight against these genes that have programmed us to be unhealthy. And then if we fight against all those things, then, that's how we, how we reached this point of health.
Jay Feldman:
But what I found is not only is that not the case, but that's the exact opposite of what we want to be doing. And that when we actually learn to work with our bodies and give our bodies what they need nutritionally, but also outside of nutrition, whether that's sunlight or movement, which again, movement and exercise is another area where I would say that the fighting against our bodies idea here is that you need to be in the gym for several hours a day, and that you just need to work off all of these bad foods that you're eating, as opposed to the working with your body idea of giving your body, or allowing it to move in a way that it's naturally meant to. And so that when we work with our bodies in these ways, that's what actually leads to health.
Jay Feldman:
And yeah, I mean, that's kind of, again, one of these principles that was really such a mind shift for me and I think completely changed the way that I live my life because, instead of having to rely on willpower and force yourself to eat foods that don't taste great or just eat very little or whatever it is, it's the exact opposite. And it feels immensely better, there's really no comparison. I know that you've talked about that too. So, yeah, that's really where that shift this come from for me, is the shift from fighting against your body to working with it.
Jayton Miller:
Okay. So what are some of the fallacies that you came across whenever you were kind of discovering this and truths that you at once thought were true and no longer see that way?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah. So the first one, which I know I've already mentioned a couple of times is just this idea of calories in, calories out. And that the goal is just either eat fewer calories or work them all off. So that way you can lose weight. But instead what that actually does, that fighting against our bodies, it puts bodies into a state of scarcity. As you said, it puts our bodies in the stress state that does the exact opposite and ends up slowing down all of our body's functions. It slows down the energy production and the energy availability that I was talking about, it dampens our thyroid function. And while you may lose weight in the short term, in the longterm, you end up with a much slower metabolism and often gaining all that weight back, if not more, which is that classic yo-yo dieting cycle that you see.
Jay Feldman:
So I'd say that's probably the biggest one, but then the same thing was mirrored with carbohydrates. So I've been on all sorts of low carb diets, ketogenic, intermittent fasting type things, cyclical ketogenic diets, I never did carnivore, because that hadn't really come around at the time that I was experimenting with all these things. But that's, again, the same idea that it's almost like we've mixed this religious ideology of gluttony and this idea that, if you give into what your body naturally wants, that's like ethically wrong and that's kind of a whole other topic, but again, same thing with carbohydrates where obviously these things taste good and we have such cravings for them. So I did all sorts of various diets to avoid carbohydrates, and it definitely did not help my health.
Jay Feldman:
I had very little energy when I was doing that, I did not want to go to the gym, libido was not there, my mental clarity was not there and above all, I was hungry all the time and I constantly had cravings for carbohydrates. I was obsessed with food, every second of the day I was looking forward to the next meal I would have. And I'd be thinking about that as opposed to food, just being a part of your life when you need it. So, yeah, that was a big shift to starting to eat more calories, starting to eat more carbohydrates. I mean, it's a night and day difference.
Jayton Miller:
Awesome. So what are some of the things that people can begin to listen to whenever it comes to kind of listening to their body and seeing what it wants?
Jay Feldman:
So cravings and hunger, I think are oftentimes some of the best indicators, but we definitely need to lay out some caveats there because the development of these systems, which relates to our tastes and our smell and our general hunger systems, obviously weren't built when we had all of the foods that we have available today. So a donut obviously tastes really good, but that isn't something that our cravings and hunger have been tuned to. And that's because we have these industrial flours in there, we have the polyunsaturated fat, the seed oils that are in there, which, the processing that goes into creating a seed oil is really extensive. I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen, if you think of corn kernels that aren't pops, imagine trying to get enough oil out of there to cook something in that oil.
Jay Feldman:
It's obviously not natural if you want to put it that way. So our cravings and hunger can be really great indicators. We just have to be careful when we're talking about foods that are so distorted from what they naturally would be, but as far as if you want to call it whole foods go, so fruits and meat and seafood, and you could say vegetables too, are another actually really good example here, where if you tune into your cravings and what you actually like to eat, you'll find that you might not be eating salads or you might not be eating raw vegetables and I would say that that's probably steering you in the right direction. And the foods that you would be eating would, supply you with the nutrients that your body needs, and also just tuning into your hunger and allowing that to dictate how much you eat will make a huge difference too.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So, what are some of the reasons that we wouldn't naturally tend to crave these different kinds of vegetables and things like that?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah, so vegetables are for the most part, and we'd have to kind of define vegetables, but as far as like the leafy vegetables go with seed type, or pitt type vegetables, [inaudible 00:09:58] stems, they're typically very fibrous and have a lot of anti-nutrients in them. And the reason for that is because they are parts of the plants that the plants don't want us to be eating. And so in order to protect the plant, the plant creates these defensive compounds and has them throughout the plant in all the places that they don't want you to eat them. So that's why in fruit, you don't have these sorts of anti-nutrients and that's why fruits a really great option as far as food goes.
Jay Feldman:
But the anti-nutrients needs in these vegetables and how fibers they are and their lack of available nutrition. So their lack of carbohydrates or fats or protein, really, and then also their lack of available nutrients, all of those are inputs that our body's recognizing. And that's why we typically don't crave those foods. Unless we add something like salad dressing to it, or butter or salt or something like that, that basically we're taking this food that our body doesn't really want, and we're adding these things that it potentially does want. And so we really just only want those other things. And that can change when you cook vegetables or, when you're talking about different types of vegetables, but as a principal, I think that's typically how it goes.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So, whenever it comes to kind of picking the right foods and things like that, is there a certain kind of way to eat to kind of optimize the effect that they have on the body?
Jay Feldman:
When you say way to eat, do you mean the actual eating of them or?
Jayton Miller:
So the ripened fruit is a big one and then also, the consistency of eating throughout the day versus fasting and things like that.
Jay Feldman:
Again, if you tune into your hunger and cravings, a lot of times that can be enough to kind of dictate when we should be eating and how we should be eating, but there are definitely some principles that I think are really important to tune into. So basically our body is always being fueled by the nutrients that we're taking in, typically it's either carbohydrates or fats, and we have these signals in place so that when we're running low on fuel, our hunger kicks in. And the main way that that happens is through our blood sugar. So when basically, especially our brain uses a ton of glucose as a fuel, our muscles use it too for being active, but as our blood sugar drops, which it's constantly dropping throughout the day as we use that fuel, once it drops below a certain thresholds, we start to release stress hormones.
Jay Feldman:
And so those stress hormones would be for the most part, glucagon and epinephrine or adrenaline and cortisol. And so those different stress hormones have different mechanisms to bring our blood sugar back up. And one of those mechanisms is to stimulate our appetite so that we actually eat. So that's one of the reasons why if you don't eat for a while, when your blood sugar drops, you then feel hungry to eat again. And it's these sorts of natural mechanisms that if we tune into them, they allow us to kind of dictate our eating in a way that leads to optimal health. And in this case, it's because it keeps the stress hormones low because it allows us to supply this constant amount of fuel that allows our body to produce the energy that it needs to function.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So why would we not want to kind of feed off of those stress hormones and use that as a fuel?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah, so the stress hormones are basically this backup adaptive system. So ideally we would have the supply of carbohydrates that's mainly transported through the blood and that would supply the brain and our muscles and all of our organs that need them. And we have some fat going around as well. And that's normal. I mean, our body's always gonna be using some amount of fat as a fuel in addition to carbohydrates, assuming that you're at least eating some carbohydrates. And so typically that's a normal process. And then if we were to eat some amount of carbohydrates, every couple of hours, we would typically keep our blood sugar relatively steady, and that would keep the stress hormones low. And that would allow us to have this steady supply of fuel that keeps our energy production basically at its peak.
Jay Feldman:
But when we don't eat those carbohydrates, let's say we ate at 8:00 in the morning, and then we don't eat again until dinner at 6:00 PM. In the meantime, our body still needs fuel. So if our blood sugar were to drop too low, our brain would not have enough fuel and we would actually die. So this is a pretty tightly record regulated system. And so what happens is when our fuel drops down a little bit, the stress hormones will be released and basically that'll kick in these backup systems. And so that helps to bring our blood sugar up in a few different ways. One of them is it releases glycogen from the liver. Another one is that if that is not enough to bring our blood sugar up, then cortisol starts to break down protein, whether it's from our muscles or other tissues and convert that into sugar, through a process called gluconeogenesis.
Jay Feldman:
So that'll bring our blood sugar up. And then the other thing that'll happen is the stress hormones start to shift our body towards relying more on fat and less on carbohydrates. And so that also is another way that we spare carbohydrates, but all of these different effects have a cost. So just because we have these adaptive systems doesn't mean we want to be using them regularly. Of course, it's better that we have them than if we didn't, because again, we would just die if our blood sugar dropped too low, but they do have a cost. So for one, the cost of running more on fats than carbohydrates is, and this is potentially a deeper topic, but fats essentially prevent us from producing as much energy as carbohydrates. And this has to do with how we produce energy in our mitochondria, where when we use fats, there are these different braking mechanisms that slow down the speed of respiration.
Jay Feldman:
And so a lot of times people will talk about the fact that fats have a higher amount of potential ACP per molecule or per gram compared to carbohydrates, which is true and that's why fats are a really good storage compounder molecule or macronutrient, but that isn't as relevant to how our mitochondria actually respirate and how they produce energy, because it's really the speed of the breakdown of these fats or carbohydrates and the speed of the energy production that matters. So assuming that you have a substrate like carbohydrates that oxidizes faster and is more ideal for respiration, you could essentially use greater amounts of that substrate and produce more ATP than fats, even though per molecule, you have more ATP or potential ATP and fats. So just kind of a caveat there, but yeah, so you have this cost of reducing carbohydrate utilization and increasing fat utilization.
Jay Feldman:
And so that reduces our energy availability. The other thing is that when we activate these stresses systems, in the short term, we do drive energy production. So these, glucagon, epinephrin, cortisol, we know that these drive our energy systems in the short term. So that's why when we're exercising, we use these stress hormones in order to continue to exercise and continue to basically release substrate, release fuel so that we can burn it. But in the long-term they have the opposite effect. So in the long-term they have some direct effects where they actually block the processes that produce energy, directly in the mitochondria, but they also have kind of indirect effects. So they end up slowing down thyroid hormone production, and the conversion from T4 to T3. So T3 is the active thyroid hormone, the T4 is the inactive.
Jay Feldman:
And so the stress hormones block that conversion so you basically have less active thyroid hormone circulating in your body, which again means less energy availability. And then they also block our reproductive hormones. So that would be mostly testosterone for men or progesterone for a woman. And these are, again, some of our main energy regulators. And all of this makes sense. The whole purpose of these stress hormones is to allow us to adapt to these situations of less energy availability. And so it makes sense that we want to be burning through our stores slower. We want to reduce our reproductive function. They also have depressive effects on the digestive system and on the immune system. So, which again, makes sense when we don't have a lot of energy, we want to conserve our fuel and basically dampen our function so that we don't run out of fuel and die, our survival matters more.
Jay Feldman:
So again, like that scarcity mindset you were talking about earlier is that it puts our bodies in the stress state where they're just trying to survive, but they dampen all of our higher level functions. And so that also includes our brain function to our cognitive function, which happens even just when your blood sugar drops. So just to kind of circle back a little bit, when our blood sugar drops typically, I mean, that's a feeling that a lot of people know, but they might not just be aware of that, where they start to feel irritable. Some people will call it feeling hangry, when you're hungry and angry at the same time, which again is pretty common. You'll start to get those really big cravings for food. You typically can't think as clearly, might get some brain fog, you might feel weak, fatigued.
Jay Feldman:
So those are feelings that we all get throughout the day. We all have those dips. And if we respond to those by supplying fuel, then we don't have this whole cascade of the adaptive stress hormones that dampens all of our metabolic functions, which of course is pretty harmful. So yeah, it's really a huge feature of eating and of our health. And again, if we're working with our bodies in this way, it helps to keep our stress hormones as low as possible and support the higher metabolic function, higher thyroid hormones, higher reproductive hormones. Another side effect just while we're talking about stress hormones is they cause weight gain. So that's pretty well known that cortisol will especially because people to gain weight around their midsection, which obviously is something most people want to avoid.
Jay Feldman:
(silence)
Jay Feldman:
Yeah, yeah. So autophagy itself is a necessary process, just like most in our body. And so we don't necessarily not want, autophagy, like it is helpful, it's a way of kind of recycling things and there is evidence that in certain chronic conditions, this whole process of autophagy is damaged. It doesn't work properly. And so because of that, this idea came about, I mean, it's a much broader idea, but at least within autophagy, this idea came out that, if in these chronic conditions, the system is dysregulated what we really want to do is be increasing autophagy, which it's kind of like looking at a symptom rather than the root because. And so we don't want to address that symptom, which in this case is autophagy. We want to figure out why it's dysregulated in the first place, this process. But what it's led to is this idea that we just want to be doing things that increase autophagy and fasting is one of them.
Jay Feldman:
So is any sort of stress, really, whether that's fasting, caloric restriction, any sort of environmental stress, all of those things have been shown to drive this process of autophagy. And it's also been shown that along with this dysregulation, is that in certain chronic conditions, autophagy is increased. So you could also say that this is just a symptom of this kind of dysregulation or dysfunction. And yeah, so again, it's not that autophagy itself is harmful. I mean, there are benefits to it, but when we start to reduce anything that we do to just one output in this case, autophagy, we end up with some backwards advice, backwards recommendations, which is what I was talking about earlier. When you look at it on the energetic level what's happening is that any of these stresses are reducing our energy availability. You have this whole cascade of stress, which is signaled through reactive oxygen species and all these different pathways in ourselves.
Jay Feldman:
It also involves the stress hormones and those things do lead to, again, this adaptive response, which sometimes includes autophagy, but it definitely doesn't mean that the adaptive response is beneficial just because it's causing this one outcome that even if it is beneficial, we need to make sure we're considering why it's happening and why it's occurring because you could, I'm trying to think of another good example, but I'm sure one will come to me. I mean, weight loss, even so you can say, oh, weight loss is good, but that doesn't mean that anything that leads to weight loss is beneficial. Obviously there's a lot of ways that we can really destroy ourselves and also happen to lose weight. I mean, cancer is a pretty good example that comes to mind. Excessive exercise would be another one, but that's a little bit more convoluted, but as far as cancer goes, obviously people lose a lot of weight. And obviously it's not a good thing, but if we're just looking at things in terms of weight loss, we might recommend somebody get cancer and it's, you're almost doing the same thing with autophagy.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So what are some of the biggest tips that you could give people to, kind of regulate their blood sugar throughout the day to make sure that they're mitigating these stress hormones, and kind of getting back into that abundant state of the body rather than the scarcity state?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah. Yeah. So as far as that blood sugar regulation goes, first and foremost, we need to make sure that we're supplying carbohydrates throughout the day. And so that will definitely look different between individuals, because some people do really well with having their meals a little bit more spaced out, and that can mean that they're using glucose more efficiently or that their liver function is better or just their general metabolic health is better. And so in that case, some people might be able to get by on just three meals a day that include carbohydrates. But a lot of people, especially who have metabolic health, that isn't as good, they need to be having these carbohydrates more frequently in order to prevent that drop in stress hormones. And so, I mean, one way you can measure this would be if you had a glucometer, but for most people just using your symptoms, and how you feel a pretty good indicator of when you would want to make sure that you're having some carbohydrates.
Jay Feldman:
So if you start to feel irritable, if you start to feel that hunger, if you start to feel like you can't focus as well, rather than fighting against those things and saying, oh, I'm not supposed to eat right now. That's probably a good sign that you want to be getting some carbohydrates, so you can supply the blood sugar and keep it more stable and prevent the use of stress hormones to do that. Because if you just use stress hormones, it will be stable, but you're causing a lot of damage in the meantime. So that would be kind of the first important point, a couple other important points there are that, protein and fat can also be important. So for somebody who again is in pretty good metabolic health, they might be fine just having plain carbohydrates on their own, but for a lot of other people that can be too much at once and it can lead to a spike in blood sugar, basically because the body isn't using it as efficiently or using it as well.
Jay Feldman:
So in that case, making sure that you always have fats with the carbohydrates and proteins with the carbohydrates will help to typically slow the digestion so that the release a little bit slower, and will also allow you to last longer between meals without your blood sugar dropping. And so part of that's because of the digestion, the other part of that is because your body will use some of those fats as fuel, which is fine, as long as we're sparing those carbohydrates with the places that need it the most like our brain, our brains can't use fat as a fuel and that's because of fats' inefficiency as a fuel. So as long as we're supplying enough carbohydrates for those more important functions, having some fat as secondary fuel can also help so that we're not essentially wasting the carbohydrates too quickly between meals and that especially happens if you're not using the carbohydrates efficiently.
Jay Feldman:
So that's where fats can come in. As far as protein goes, it can help to slow the digestion as well. If you're having a complete meal. The other thing to consider is that protein actually drops our blood sugar by stimulating insulin. And so this is part of the reason why people consider protein as a stabilizer of blood sugar. It's kind of this misnomer. I think because the assumption is that more blood sugar is better and protein lowers blood sugar, but in reality it means is that if we don't want to increase stress hormones, we want to make sure that we're having enough carbohydrates every time we have protein. Because if we just have the protein alone, we'll drop our blood sugar and increase the release of the stress hormones. So I typically recommend a two to one ratio of carbs to protein in a meal or in a snack if you're having a protein, in either meal or snack, but if you're just having carbohydrates, of course, that's fine too, if you do well with that.
Jay Feldman:
So yeah, as a whole, this can look different for different people. It can look, like five or six small meals that are all balanced with carbs, fats and proteins. It can be three main meals and then a couple of snacks that are some carbs and fats, or even just carbs. Maybe it's fruit, maybe it's fruit and cheese, it could be some starches as well, which typically means starches. We have fats with them anyways. So, that would be kind of the basics. But I would say that as long as you're tuning into your symptoms related to blood sugar, that typically will lead you in the right direction and experiment that. I mean, some people will find, I think most people find that if they do have some more fat with their meals, they can have that stable blood sugar from hunger. So I do think that's typically important. But yeah, I mean, listen to your cravings and your hunger, those are pretty good indicators.
Jayton Miller:
Yeah. And so in general, typically don't women need to focus on eating more frequently than men, just because they have less of the ability to store glycogen within the liver, where their liver is just not as large?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah. I don't know. I'm not sure about their liver just not being as large. I mean, that might be true. I just, it's not something I've come across, but, typically I do think that's the case. It seems like that's a way that when tend to present symptoms more is that they do seem to have more liver issues, more liver dysfunction. So, yeah. In that case, a lot of times women might do better with more frequent eating. And I think that's also, they do seem to be more sensitive to fasting as well. I know in the fasting space, they do talk about being a little bit more careful with women because, sometimes it can affect them, I think reproductively or just, they don't respond as well to the fasting and yeah, I think that's why.
Jayton Miller:
Okay. So what does a day in the life of eating with Jay Feldman look like?
Jay Feldman:
That's a good question. It does vary a decent amount day to day. And, I do want to preface this by saying too, that this looks very different from me then all the people I work with and a lot of other people in this space too, I know everyone's got their own preferences and their own way of eating that works for them. And so I don't want anybody to use this as like, "Oh, this is what I'm exactly what I'm supposed to do." And again, I want to preface, same thing with the clients that I work with or that I coach, their diets all look very different from each other and they look different from mine too. So just with that disclaimer out of the way, I normally start off my morning with a pretty big glass of orange juice and that's before I eat anything.
Jay Feldman:
So I'll have that pretty much right when I wake up, when I first started eating this way, I was starving all the time. And so at that point it was like, I woke up and I needed to have it right away. Right now I don't feel that way as much anymore. A lot of people go through a kind of refeeding where, when they first kind of let their guard down and they say, "Okay, I'm allowed to eat. I'm allowed to eat carbs." I mean, I remember having as much as 800 grams of carbs a day at that point. Well over 4,000 calories because I just couldn't get enough. So just again, I'm not at that point right now, so I'll start off with orange juice. And then after probably about 30 minutes, I'll have my breakfast meal, which is typically the same as my dinners.
Jay Feldman:
Not necessarily the same foods, but the same types of foods. So I'll make one meal for the week. Maybe it's this week, it was a pot roast. So, chuck roast with some potatoes and carrots in there. So that would be my breakfast, then a little while after that maybe a couple hours on, have coffee with milk and I do goat milk. I just do the best with that and added sugar in there too. And I'll normally have some fruit around that time too. So that might be oranges or bananas or I'll do banana chips sometimes, which I just fry in coconut oil, it gets a little more fat in there. And then lunch I'll have a little bit later and recently I've been doing eggs and beef bacon. That's been my lunch. It's been really good. Sometimes I'll fry up some potatoes with that, if I'm wanting more starch, but normally I'll do fruit and then some more fruit juice throughout the day.
Jay Feldman:
So whenever I'm, and there's no kind of controlled amount here. I used to track it more closely, but now that there's [inaudible 00:30:35] or even hungry, but wanting some carbs, I'll just have a glass of juice here and there. I mostly stick to orange juice, but I also do grape juice and pineapple juice. So then again, between lunch and dinner, I might have some, some fruit as a snack, kind of the same ones I mentioned earlier. We're not in summer right now. So, as far as high quality fruit, it's pretty limited, but in the summers I do like watermelon a lot. I'll get [inaudible 00:31:03] when I have them available, which is rare down here in Florida. But yeah, I like cherries and grapes a lot too, again, when they're available and they're ripe and fresh. And then yeah, so dinner will be similar to my breakfast. So sometimes it'll be liver, sometimes it'll be shrimp, or other muscles where sometimes there'll be meat and occasionally I'll do some sort of sweet potato or potatoes, but oftentimes I don't.
Jay Feldman:
And then, with that I might have some juice after that I'll have some juice or before. And yeah, through the evening I'll kind of snack. So I like chocolate a lot, so I don't have chocolate throughout the day. I'm trying to think of other snacks. Sometimes I'll do potato chips fried in coconut oil that I buy out myself, I'll do cheese and fruit sometimes. Then sometimes in the evening I'll do ice cream. I kind of oscillate and sometimes I'll do something like that. I'll make desserts time to time. I'll make creme brulee or something along those lines. But again, there's a lot of variation there.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. So, someone that might be listening to this would be like, that is a lot of fructose and that could lead to fatty liver in some cases, what are some of the things that you would kind of counter that perspective with?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people would say that. I would say that, a couple of years ago. Maybe not a couple, but many years ago, I definitely would've said that same thing. I remember listening to Dr. Lustig's The Bitter Truth. He had an hour lecture talking about the dangers of fructose. I did a paper on it in high school and, it was talking about how I never drank soda and telling everyone how bad fructose was, which a lot of people are still in that position now, so I totally get it. And as we learn, that's how we grow. So yeah, it's a really fascinating subject for me. Something I've kind of dove into a lot. Yeah. So the general idea from the mainstream as far as fructose goes, is that fructose, we eat it, it goes directly to our livers and then our liver convert it to fat.
Jay Feldman:
We ended up with fatty liver and then we end up with insulin resistance and all sorts of other issues down the road. And the part of that that's true is that when we eat fructose, it does go to our livers, everything after that is not necessarily true. So, what can happen? So what happens is our livers will then use that fructose for a few things. It'll use it directly as an energy source, and convert it basically to part of the glucose pathway and convert that to energy or it'll convert it to glycogen and store that. And our livers have a pretty incredible capacity to store glycogen. I think as much as over 1,000 grams of glucose. That was in athletes who are doing extremely high carb diets, but just worth mentioning. So that's a kilogram or more of, glycogen in the liver, which is a lot.
Jay Feldman:
And even just for reference, I mean, that's the amount of sugar that's in, let's see, 50 cans of sugars or cans of soda that can't be right. No, five times 25, because it's about 40 grams of sugar in a can of soda. So 25 cans, that'd be a thousand grams of sugar. So if all that sugar went directly to glycogen, then you've got 25 cans of soda storage in your liver. Of course, at that point they were having some metabolic issues, not issues, but they were producing a lot of hepatic fat, liver fat at that point. But yeah, so our livers will store a lot of it as glycogen, it'll use some of it as fuel and then they'll convert some of it to lactate and then send that throughout the body where our muscles can use that. So our liver does a pretty good job of repackaging this fructose as needed.
Jay Feldman:
And then if there's any leftover, it will store that as fat. But the amount that we as humans stores fat is really tiny. At most it's at about 5%, but that would still be only on the high end if you were having a ton of fructose and your liver wasn't using it very well or your body wasn't using carbs very well. Typically our livers are actually very ineffective at converting fructose to fat and the issue and the reason why there's these misconceptions around fructose is a lot of the research has done in rats. And rats' liver function differently from ours because they don't have big brains that rely on glucose and they don't have livers need to store that glucose for the brain. Their livers don't work as well with fructose as ours. So they'll store much higher amounts of fructose as fat.
Jay Feldman:
And that's again, where this research is coming from showing that the fructose in rats is causing fatty liver. Another thing to consider too, though, is other nutrients. So polyunsaturated fats for example, have been shown to contribute to the mishandling of fructose in the liver in rats. And so when rats don't consume polyunsaturated fats, or when the breakdown products that polyunsaturated fats are blocked, and even when rats have fructose, they still don't have the same inflammatory processes that they say that they do. So, A, you're looking at rats, B there's, other nutrients involved, and other foods and so if you're not eating a lot of polyunsaturated fats, your liver's gonna able to handle fructose even more. And then the last thing too, is a lot of the research is looking at fructose on its own. So if humans consuming fructose on their own, basically when we digest and absorb fructose, it's absorbed a much better if we have glucose with it.
Jay Feldman:
And anywhere that you find fructose in nature, it has glucose with it typically in about equal amounts, it can vary between different types of carbohydrates, but that's kind of how we're meant to absorb fructose. And so when we eat fructose on its own, if you really don't absorb it very well. And so it's been shown that even pretty small amounts of fructose taken another own can be malabsorbed. And that means that instead of being absorbed into our system and eventually getting into the liver, the fructose continues down our digestive tract. And then it feeds a potentially pathogenic bacteria, which then produce pathogenic toxins, like endotoxin, which is LPS or lipopolysaccharide and that then causes fatty liver and directly inhibit our metabolic function. It's a pretty damaging compound. So that's kind of the third part where the research is kind of off or the interpretation of the research is off. is that consuming fructose alone is not relevant to how we eat fructose and consuming fructose alone will lead to all these issues because we don't absorb it very well. And that leads to this toxin production. But if you're eating fructose with glucose and you don't have to worry about that.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. Have you looked into anything regarding choline deficiency as well?
Jayton Miller:
(silence)
Jayton Miller:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes. So, 90-95% of Westerners at least are deficient in choline. And so that usually leads to the buildup of fat in the liver because they can't export it properly without the choline. And so that's one thing that I've seen very consistently as I've been kind of poking around.
Jay Feldman:
Okay. Yeah. I haven't looked at that as much. I mean, another component there too, as far as fats go, I know I mentioned polyunsaturated fats earlier, but saturated fats are also shown to be very protective against, fatty liver disease. So is taurine and various other micronutrients, amino acids, choline, as you mentioned, I mean, again, to reduce fructose's effects as just being stored as fat in the liver is again, kind of like focusing on autophagy, it's we need to look at it in the greater context, on the greater picture in order to understand what's actually going on. And when you do you find out that fructose is not the poison that's made out to be.
Jayton Miller:
Definitely. Well, honestly, I can't think of any more questions to pick your brain with. Is there anything else that you'd kind of like to talk about?
Jay Feldman:
I don't know. Nothing's coming to mind.
Jayton Miller:
All right. Sounds good. Well, there you have it guys, straight from Mr. Jay Feldman, where can people reach you?
Jay Feldman:
Yeah, so my website is jayfeldmanwellness.com and that's J-A-Y all spelled out. I've got a podcast that you can get to from there. I've got a bunch of articles talking about sugar and fructose like we talked about today, also talking about autophagy and [inaudible 00:39:48] and that whole idea and where it kind of went wrong. So you can find all that information there. I do do one-on-one coaching and things too if you head over to the services tab, you can find that
Jayton Miller:
Sweet. Awesome. Well, thanks for tuning in guys. Make sure to subscribe if you haven't already. Make sure to get into the Facebook group, if you haven't, we have a bunch of people in there killing it constantly, and I'll talk to you next time. Next time. Next time. Next time.
