Its a 3.5h video, but roughly sugar is as toxic as alcohol and the food industry is adding it to most products. In short if it has a label (like most processed foods with many ingredients) you should avoid, switch to the ones that don't have (like an apple).
This book is also great "The hacking of the American mind"
`While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover.
Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape.
With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.`
I haven't watched the talk here, but anything about medicine from Huberman should be considered with extreme skepticism, given his often reductionist/mechanistic or outright unsupported claims.
> By the way he goes on talking about diet soft drinks, and explain that they are also bad, you produce insulin anyway.
This is where I'd start to tune out on other stuff this person is saying. I looked into this a while back when my son sent me those studies/links (we've been in a constant bar-argument debate over if real Coca-Cola is better or worse for you than Diet Coke) and I recall that it was highly specific to individuals. Some displayed a slight insulin response, while others did not.
I hit my weight loss extremely aggressively in the past year, and as part of that wore a CGM. I drink far too more diet coke than I reasonably should, and I've never been able to correlate any blood sugar events (high or low) to my diet coke or coke zero consumption. You'd think there would at least be a small amount of data in the graphs to tease out given it's a daily thing for me.
Of course abstaining from both is the right answer - but there has been no clear repeatable data I've seen yet that shows detrimental health from the artificial sweeteners commonly used. A lot of the first studies that got traction were either extremely flawed, non-repeatable, or using dosing that never made sense to test with.
Check out the latest talk from Dr Robert Lustig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n28W4AmvMDE&pp=ygUGbHVzdGln
Its a 3.5h video, but roughly sugar is as toxic as alcohol and the food industry is adding it to most products. In short if it has a label (like most processed foods with many ingredients) you should avoid, switch to the ones that don't have (like an apple).
This book is also great "The hacking of the American mind"
`While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover.
Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape.
With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.`
https://robertlustig.com/hacking/