STOP EATING These Foods To Burn Belly (Visceral) Fat TODAY! | Mark Hyman

Sugar and starch and this belly fat is the number one cause of aging and age-related diseases so if you want to die early get a belly fat and we're going to jump right in with two two of the top foods or food categories that we can stop eating or be more mindful around or limit or minimize when it comes to their role of increasing belly fat so mark what are These two categories and what do you want to say about them well we're gonna we're gonna learn a lot about belly fat on this podcast but

the truth is it's the most dangerous thing in your body if you have belly fat it is a risk factor for every single age-related disease period so it is forget about smoking this is the killer one of the two things that are the worst one Is liquid calories well liquid calorie i don't mean like a protein smoothie what i mean is soda juices even nut milks which you think are healthy can be spiking your sugar sweetened coffee sweetened teas energy drinks you know we are living in a sea of liquid sugar and it's Different it's

really different than regular sugar i mean regular sugar is bad enough but this seems to just accelerate the development of belly fat by being quickly absorbed spiking blood sugar spiking insulin and that just leads this whole cascaded belly fat it's really bad so if you can do a single thing to dramatically improve your health is get rid of liquid sugar calories the second is flour which is everywhere And it turns out that flour is worse than table sugar when it comes to raising your blood sugar which when you raise your blood sugar you raise insulin

you raise insulin you you sweep all the fuel out of your bloodstream and throw it into your belly fat cells it's basically what happens so it's like insulin basically opens the gates all the fuel fat sugar carbs everything goes flooding into your fat cells and then the gate closes like a one-way Turnstile in the subway you can't get back out so it's really it's really bad so flour and sugar now do i eat flour occasionally yes do i try to eat flowers that are better yes i'll have coarsely grained flour or i'll have flowers that

are full of extra fiber lignans all have buckwheat flour himalayan buckwheat flour which is actually full of phytochemicals and low glycemic load and high protein high minerals and Microbiome enriching fiber so there's ways to cut quote hack it coconut flour almond flour those are all fine i'm talking about wheat flour or grain flour even brown rice flour all these healthy quote and gluten-free snacks they're actually often worse than regular flour because they're just so highly processed and it quickly absorbs so those are also huge things and you know it's different eating a whole grain versus

whole grain flour even if you eat whole wheat bread It's still a problem so i would stay away from flour and sugar except on occasion as a treat and make sure you have a meal that includes protein and fat and fiber so you actually can mitigate the effects of the flour on your blood sugar so mark let's break down the basics what is belly fat and what are we learning about why it's so problematic for our long-term health so you know Most of us were taught that you know fat is just fat it's like this

inert thing you know it's just they're holding up your pants it doesn't really do much not good to be fat or have fat on your body too much but it's not a thing really that's how it was when i was in medical school but now we've learned that the fat cells in the belly we call visceral fat or belly fat it's essentially the fat around your organs around your liver kidneys Intestines all this fat is very different qualitatively and when you see someone with a big belly or even who's skinny with a little bit little

belly that is a sign that they're accumulating with belly fat and what these cells are are a whole another organ they produce cytokines you've heard of the cytokine storm why is it that people with obesity are at the highest risk of hospitalization and death because their Belly fat cells produce what we call adipose cytokines one in particular called interleukin-6 or il-6 is one of the key cytokines that's driving the cytokine storm in cobit so why that's why we're seeing this problem is because of belly fat why people are dying from covalent is because of belly

fat that is important understand if everybody in america was thin and had no belly fat really to speak of This would cover would be like a non-issue right unless you're really old or have a chronic disease or something terrible but 88 of us have some degree of belly fat that's driving this problem so that's that's one issue they also produce all kinds of hormones so you see all kinds of changes in people's bodies for example women when they have a lot of belly fat will get acne they'll get facial hair they'll lose the hair on

their heads Men will the opposite will happen they'll get high estrogen levels because the fat converts testosterone estrogen they'll get breasts they'll lose all the hair on their body they'll get soft skin you know like a woman so these are real things that happen they also change your brain chemistry and they affect your hormones and your mood and your appetite there's literally hundreds of molecules That are being produced by these fat cells they're not just storage units for extra calories they're literally organs that are dangerous organs that are producing inflammation showing up your hormones screwing

up your brain chemistry and making you sick and causing all the diseases of aging so mark talk about how actually belly fat and fat as a whole but specifically belly fat might have been used as a survival mechanism but now It's kind of gotten completely out of whack in the way that it's around with this 24 7. yeah well you know drew we we evolved in a sea of scarcity now we live in a sea of abundance and our genes are adapted to scarcity very well so we are very good at accumulating and storing any

excess calories so i remember going to alaska a few years ago with my daughter And we were watching this grizzly bears hunt the salmon in the early part of the summer and we were told by the guy that you know they eat the salmon they do fine but they don't really gain a lot of weight and then they go up into the mountains in the end of the summer and they eat berries and they will gain 500 pounds of fat by eating sugar essentially And they gain all that weight and then what do they do

then they hibernate so they lose all the way through the winter that's why they don't get high blood pressure and diabetes and it's just continuing other problems we just keep eating all winter that's the problem you know and and i think the the the challenge with our modern diet is the absolute excess of calories the absolute excess of sugar and starch in our diet and the and the endless ability to Overeat we we're producing between 500 700 more calories a day per person in america than we did in when i was born so i i

think we have to really take a good serious look at the the way our bodies are adapted which is to store as much fat as possible as quickly as possible when we have an excess of calories or we have an excess of sugar calories that's that's a good thing in the context of these feast famine Events that happen throughout human history the problem now we just keep eating so we have we have to actually stop this process of of of overeating and eating the wrong foods that's driving us belly fat because it is the single

biggest thing that's driving disease so at one point it was an adaptive mechanism now it's a maladaptive mechanism yeah there's a great new book out and you're doing an instagram live with the Author and i believe the book is called nature wants us to be fat and it's dr richard johnson and he's one of the top researchers in the space of uric acid and belly fat and he uh through his investigations in hypertension discovered that um you know the theory is that millions of years ago human beings developed this ability to basically use uh fruit

uh high amounts of fruits just like you're talking about Other animals like bears to pack on all that fat and survive the winter it's a fascinating instagram live you know we're going to tune in to to watch it and the book is really interesting as well well think about it the fruit trees all come in at the same time so we're going to do i mean they didn't have canning they didn't have like freeze drying like they just had to eat as much as they could while they could get it and that's Basically what we're

designed to do and then the more you want the more you eat it the more you want it so that's how it works so your body is triggered into overeating when there's an abundance of sugar it's just how your body's set up and designed it's not a design flaw it's actually a good thing except it's only a flaw when we have a highly processed industrial food system talk a little bit more about liquid sugar why is it that liquid calories Specifically liquid sugars again sodas large amounts and frequent use of fruit juices especially on an

empty stomach first thing in the day like the classic american orange juice energy drinks uh over sweetened and highly sweetened you know coffees and lattes that people are getting from places like starbucks why are they so problematic and how is it that they produce so much more belly fat than other foods that people are consuming So so as i said earlier sugar calories are bad and liquid sugar calories are worse and the reason is they're unpacked from the matrix of food that they're in they're not in a matrix of fiber or protein of fat they're

just pure sugar and often it's pure fructose which is you know when you meet fruit juice or if we have for example uh high fructose corn syrup that's up to 75 fructose in the sodas what those liquid calories do is they get quickly absorbed because There's not anything buffering their absorption they spike your blood sugar that creates a spike in insulin and that creates the flood of all the available fuel that's in your bloodstream into your cells so it goes right into your belly fat cells it doesn't go in your butt or arm or your

earlobe it goes right into your belly fat and that is why the liquid sugar calories are the single biggest correlate with obesity in America if you look at one of the things that people do that are most linked to obesity is liquid sugar calories and people are clueless about the amount of sugar they're consuming most people don't know that for example they have their starbucks mocha frappuccino latte or whatever it's got up to twice as many sugar calories as a cola as a can of soda so and you think oh i'm eating something healthy or

it's got milk or it's got Whatever it's definitely bad news so i think there's a single biggest thing you can do to improve the quality of your health is get rid of liquid sugar calories occasionally glass of wine is fine beer not so much i mean occasional beer is fine but not a staple a shot of alcoholic tequila okay but one more research is coming out that alcohol may not be really that great for us so i think we have to really be cautious about it but those tend to be less of a Problem but

but they're still they're still bad so i'm gonna pull one of the studies that our team member melanie uh listed for us that are on this topic and i'll just ask you to maybe expand on you know what the connection might be there so here's a study out of the european journal of preventative cardiology coronary heart disease incidents in women by waist circumference within categories of body Mass index and the study which looked at hundreds of thousands of women found that waist circumference which is part of belly fat increased the risk of coronary heart disease

looked at over a period of 20 years how could that be possible how is that your waist circumference and belly fat could be connected to heart disease oh that's easy so this is what i've been spending my whole life doing so thank You for that easy question um you know some people say how do i know if i have this or not what do i do well i always joke i said you could do the mirror test is where you jump up and down in front of a mirror without your shirt on if your stomach

jiggles you have it okay it's basically that you can take a tape measure and you can measure around your belly button around the widest point in your hips and you divide your waist by Your hip and if it's over point nine if you're a man over 0.8 if you're a woman you're in trouble if your waist is bigger than your hips that's bad if your hips are bigger than your waist that's good it's just obvious now why is it a problem well as i said when you have this belly fat it's driving insulin resistance inflammation

in the body and also what we call atherogenic dyslipidemia which is a medical word for Really crappy lipid or cholesterol profile that's causing heart disease what causes this profile which what is this profile it's small cholesterol particles it's small hdl small ldl a lot of particles and a large fluffy triglycerides that are full of fat which is not good and it leads to this this horrible problem of high triglycerides low hdl small particles Which is the big driver of heart disease if your cholesterol is 300 and your hdl is 100 and your ldl 70 or

even let's say your h your ldl is 150 i'm not that worried and your triglycerides are normal if you're if your cholesterol is 150 and your triglycerides are 300 and your hdl is 30 like that's terrible i'm really worried about you even though one cholesterol is 150 one is 300 i'm much more worried about the 150. so you have to look at The quality of the cholesterol you talked about your nmr profile your lipid profile this is really key so we have to look at the right type of cholesterol and when you have this belly

fat it causes the wrong type of cholesterol the second thing is that it drives inflammation which we know is that the root cause of heart disease and without inflammation you don't get heart disease the third thing it does is it makes your Blood clot so if you if you have too much sugar and starch it makes your blood thick and it leads to this increased clotting risk and a heart attack is a blood clot in the heart a stroke is a blood clot in the brain so basically that's why you don't want to have belly

fat and it's why it's so bad to eat these liquid sugar calories or anything that's going to cause belly fat and by the way it's a linear correlation so it's like this the More your waist to hip ratio goes up the more your risk of heart attacks and death powerful powerful reminder let's take another category that people are familiar with and that is dementia cognitive decline and there is a study that we'll link here in the show notes and the title of study in the journal of neurology is central obesity and increased risk of dementia

more than three decades later and i'll read out The conclusion for you and you can expand on it central obesity and midlife increases risk of dementia independent of diabetes and cardiovascular comorbidities 50 of adults have central obesity therefore the mechanisms linking central obesity to dementia need to be unveiled why would something like belly fat be connected to dementia well basically the bottom line is bigger belly smaller brain The bigger your belly is the smaller the hippocampus is it literally shrinks which is the memory center in the brain and the reason this happens is you get

a phenomena we call diabetes of the brain type three diabetes we're calling alzheimer's now or insulin resistance in the brain and this can happen independent of cardiovascular disease so we know that as i said earlier that sugar and starch and this belly fat is the number one cause of aging and Age-related diseases so if you want to die early get a belly fat if you want a heart attack get belly fat if you want a stroke if you want cancer if you want alzheimer's if you don't high blood pressure belly fat is your ticket so

you don't want that going on in your body because it leads to all these metabolic changes so this is this whole phenomenon of insulin resistance or diabetes in the brain is what's driving this problem so It's not just about heart disease it's not just about high blood pressure it's not just about you know diabetes or being a little overweight it's really about the quality of your life and what's going to happen to you as you grow older and and often people don't understand that this is a 100 reversible problem 100 mark i'd love you to

talk about and you've been talking about this for years But i'd love for you to talk about it in the context of this podcast you know you have a few articles on the internet saying that when it comes to belly fat there are two aspects number one we have to understand that it's not your fault and for the people that are listening or watching on youtube i'd love you to explain what do you mean by that that it's not your fault and then along with that there's so much that's in your control that you can

do let's start with The first piece of it why is it not your fault if you are carrying a ton of belly fat or excess fat from a medical standpoint well from a medical standpoint and from a scientific standpoint from a nutrition standpoint the dogma is really clear calories in calories out the reason you're overweight you're bringing up belly fat is because you eat too much and you don't exercise enough hashtag you're lazy glutton Okay that is just a bunch of malarkey and here's why we know that all calories are the same in a laboratory

so oh you say all calories are not are not the same dr hyman who are you to say that this is you know the first law of thermodynamics is all energy is conserved and so calories in calories out this is the way it is this is just science and i'm like well yes you're right In a vacuum so what what the first law of thermodynamics says for those of you who not up on your physics is it says that energy is conserved quote in a system meaning a closed system like a vacuum when you drop

a pound of feathers and a pound of lead off a bridge the feathers float through the air and the lead goes crashing down if you drop them in a vacuum they drop at the same Exact rate why well they don't have to contend with air the feathers have to continue with air when you eat food it has to go through your metabolic processes it has to deal with your microbiome it has to deal with your genetics it has to deal with your hormones it has to be your brain chemistry it's interacting all with that all

the time so if you eat a thousand calories of broccoli Or drink a thousand calories of soda they're gonna have very different effects on your body versus if you burn them in the laboratory they release the same amount of energy i mean a calorie is defined as basically the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one liter of of water one degree centigrade that's it right so yes in a lab they're the same so the message that It's about eating less and exercising more misses the central science which has overturned that that theory

that that all calories are the same and this is what we call the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis and the key proponent of this has been dr david lidwig who's a colleague and friend of mine who's one of the most published researched and esteemed scientists in the field of nutrition today from harvard medical school And he's written you know really in depth about this you can read his articles on medium you can go to pubmed and find his work he wrote a very extensive review of this called the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis and essentially shows through the science

that when you eat a carbohydrate-rich diet if you are genetically susceptible which is most of us on the planet okay some aren't but but probably 80 percent of us are You are carbohydrate intolerant and when you eat x amount of carbohydrate in the form of sugar or starch not talking broccoli carbohydrates here it raises your insulin more than someone for example like me who doesn't have that problem so it's it's really important to understand that if you are consuming starch and sugar in any form that you are driving this this this Pathway of weight gain

central weight gain inflammation oxidative stress blood clotting hormonal dysregulation brain chemistry changes and it's it's really based on the information in the food because food is not just calories it's information it's instructions it's code it can upregulate your genes in or downregulate them it changes your microbiome it changes your immune system it changes your hormones your brain Chemistry we have tremendous power to understand now the quality of our food determines the quality of our health the quality of the information the food is what changes the messages that get turned on or off in your body

that regulate everything not just your weight so it's so important people understand that when they're eating food not only are they eating calories but they're eating information the second Thing around it's not your fault your fat is we live in a toxic nutritional landscape it's almost impossible to go out there and hunt and gather in america and find stuff that's not going to kill you right i mean i travel i go to airports i mean they've gotten better for sure but i never travel without my emergency food pack in my in my bag i carry

protein and fat in my bag For at least a day's worth of food so i don't have to get stuck in a food emergency but it's rough out there in america and and we are living in a toxic nutritional landscape where the easy choice is the wrong choice and the hard choice uh is the good choice this is such an important reminder for everybody who's watching because i think there's so many individuals and mark i'm sure you've had patience and i'd love to talk about a case study there's one that Comes to mind somebody who

suffered tremendously with excess weight and specifically belly fat and what they did to get better but there's so many people that carry around the guilt because they've been told their whole life through the media maybe even their doctor their well-intentioned doctor who's just repeating what they learned that they need to finally get some willpower And get their life together and so many of these people have tried so hard they tried so hard and they tried so many different things but because they are trying the standard vice which is just eat less and exercise more uh

which is the same advice that they gave to the people on the show the biggest loser i'd love you for you to talk about that and what we've found out from uh that experiment They feel like it's it's not it's not working so talk a little bit about the biggest loser and then we'll go into a case study well the biggest loser was a problem because people were you know motivated by money they were given extremely low calorie diets they were pushed beyond their limits in exercise and they were able to achieve some significant weight

loss which you will do and the problem is when you do that You know it's your body is in a state of crisis and as soon as you stop it's going to rebound and you're going to gain back that weight and often more because often when you lose fat you lose fat and muscle when you gain back you just gain back fat so you could be basically the same way as you were when you started your diet and actually burning less calories that happens to people and you see all The people who are really overweight

or struggle with yo-yo dieting their whole life they go i don't really eat that much i don't know what's going on and they're right they're right their metabolism has slowed down so much because they've lost so much muscle and they've screwed up their metabolism so you know if you lose weight you have to work on your muscle mass which is important and that has to do with the quality of the food you're eating But the the whole idea that you can go on these crash diets and i mean i never put people on a calorie-restricted

diet never i never say count your calories cut your calories don't eat too many calories i don't even say the word calories like i know this is so irrelevant and i've had people lose hundreds of pounds uh and and it works because when you when you use science not willpower it's easy people aren't hungry they feel Nourished they feel satisfied they don't feel deprived it's sustainable they want to continue it they feel good you've got to use science not crazy crazy amounts of of external force like or internal force like willpower to actually get you

to do it so mark let's get into that case study and is there somebody in mind that you want to talk about and what they did to radically reduce the amount of belly fat which then Besides looking better and everybody cares about looks it actually reduced their risk of many of the chronic diseases that we talked about earlier well this is this is a great example drew because it illustrates all the bad crap that can happen to you if you eat sugar and start your whole life really and then it illustrates how quickly it turns

around if you change because you know think about it we spend 40 50 years getting sick it can take a few months to get better which people don't realize it's really dramatic so you know it takes a while for food to kind of screw you up but it can take very quickly for you to get fixed by it and this woman was named janet she came to csx cleveland clinic she was 65 years old and she had every kind of chronic disease except cancer and dementia she had high blood pressure She had pretty bad heart

disease with needing stents and all kinds of procedures she had heart failure because her heart muscle was damaged she had type 2 diabetes on insulin her kidneys were starting to fail she was getting fatty liver so pretty much her whole body was starting to shut down and she came in pretty desperate and she was a fairly well-educated woman but her family just had no food sense and They grew up on junk and she thought this is just what you eat processed food she never knew how to cook or do anything and so within within three

days and she was on insulin for 10 years within three days of changing her diet to a whole foods anti-inflammatory phytonutrient-rich high-fiber high-quality fat diet essentially the 10-day detox diet which i wrote a book about in 2014. essentially within three days she was Off insulin in three months she was off all her medication her heart medication her blood pressure medication her diabetes medication and her numbers normalized her blood sugar went from way out of control a1c of 11.4 i think to 5.6 so just to put in perspective if a drug causes a one point drop

it's a blockbuster benefit like wow this is amazing this drug new drug lowered a1c By one point like that's how of a sensitive scale it's what we call logarithmic scale so it's not a linear scale it's like exponential scale she went down from 11 to 5.6 you don't see that with medication there's no drug that can do that second her her blood pressure normally she got her blood pressure pills her heart failure which we measured on a echocardiogram reversed which you never see like you Just don't see that in traditional medicine unless you get a

heart transplant her kidneys got better her liver got better and she lost like 45 pounds in three months and then she went on to lose 116 pounds and looks like a completely different person and she was on her way to the graveyard by way of a heart transplant and a kidney transplant and then she avoided all that and it's doing amazing and back to being a powerful contributing member Of her community so that's the power of food when you understand that and she had this giant massive belly and you can see her face before and

after it was just red and inflamed and that inflammation is what's driving all the obesity and everything else and if anybody wants to see a photo of janice with her approval and also how her numbers improved over time we have the link to that inside of the show notes that dr hyman has put together so Mark let's go into the portion of the podcast where we take some audience questions some questions from your community here's the first question what about belly fat after menopause is there a difference and is it more dangerous i don't think

it's different but it gets more dangerous as you get older for sure so often women are in a hormonal chaos in that time of their life they get thyroid dysfunction adrenal Dysfunction from too much stress their blood sugar and insulin are often more deranged because they're more stressed they're in that sandwich generation between like getting their kids launched and their parents getting older and very busy career time and it's just a disaster and you see this terrible triad of sex hormone dysregulation insulin resistance thyroid or four things insulin resistance and adrenal dysfunction and that leads

to Increased belly fat and metabolic issues it's not inevitable there are many 50 year old women or 55 or women who manage it and who eat well and exercise and take care of themselves in ways that actually prevent this but you have to be more vigilant you have to be more careful and you'll be more on top of it like i'm you know 62 years old so i have to pay way more attention to my health than i did when i was 32 or 42. 42 just to be able to do the same thing so

If i go for a couple weeks without exercising it's a lot worse now than it was when i was 25 it takes me a little more time to get back to where i was so really important to understand that you need more inputs as you get older but you can still maintain vigorous health and strength and they've shown that with the research that actually you can stay vital in health and help them fit very very long into your later life all right next question what's the Challenge with eating late at night regularly having dinner at

9 00 p.m 10 p.m or even eating late night snack at 11 or midnight maybe even 30 minutes 10 minutes before people go to bed one of my first books ultra metabolism i wrote about what we call the sumo wrestler diet and basically the sumo wrestlers the way they gain weight because you've got these little japanese people who are not genetically prone to Being obese and how do they get them to be those huge sumo wrestlers well they basically wake them up they do their routine of exercise and training and then they eat a humongous

meal called chunko nabe which is basically like it's really actually healthy stuff but it's a massive amount of food and protein and fat and rice and it's like this massive meal i Love it actually i love to eat it um but it just makes them gain a lot of weight so they basically had this giant lunch and then they go to sleep and take a nap and then do the same thing after the afternoon they may wake up a little exercise big big dinner go to bed and and and sleep with a big full stomach

that will make you gain weight why because you when you're sleeping your body's in repair storage mode see all these hormones change from day to night And the hormones at night are storage hormones so you're going to store all that food as belly fat so you don't want to eat before bed three hours at least i mean occasionally if you go out to dinner or whatever it's fine but like if you're on a regular schedule like i eat you know five six o'clock bed you know nine ten o'clock give myself three hours to digest my

meal and don't Have snacks it's i mean snacking first of all is the worst invention of humanity it's you know we we was like we all of a sudden got six seven hundred extra calories a day per person and the food insurance what do you do with that well that's making all these fun snacks and convince america they need to snack and never be hungry it's like it's the worst thing so snacking is terrible and and you should really eat a shorter time window you Should definitely not eat before bed and if you do i

promise you you're going to gain weight yeah one other thing that the summer wrestlers do is they drink a big pint of beer in addition to that meal i was watching a documentary on sumo wrestlers oh yeah yeah yeah i was talking about this with dr richard johnson we mentioned earlier you're saying yup that flood of uh uric acid that comes in and that's signed to store Up the belly fat so yep don't live like a sumer sumo wrestler is the moral story unless you want to look like one that was basically out from ultra

metabolism way back when here's another question from our community if insulin drives weight why are diabetics put on insulin great freaking question here's the thing most doctors know this most average people don't know this when you have a diabetic and you put Them on insulin what happens do you know they gain weight their blood sugar goes down but they gain weight their blood pressure goes up and their cholesterol gets screwy so it's like a whack-a-mole yes it keeps the sugar down but what you actually learned and that this was a huge study was called the

accord study of 10 000 diabetics who were in aggressive blood pressure management in Other words they like let's get these people's sugar as close to normal as possible let's give them lots of insulin lots of drugs let's let's drive their sugar down and let's see how they do and you think oh well if sugar is the problem with diabetes if they got their sugar normal they'd be fine turned out the opposite was true the lower their blood sugar the worse they wear the more heart attacks the more deaths why because they use a Lot of

insulin and insulin makes you die it makes you fat it kills you it's it's the worst thing when it's in excess so if you and i often by the way drew i see type 1 and type type 1 diabetics often getting double diabetes in other words they are have type 1 but then they get type 2. so here's how that works normally you should make about 20 units of insulin 15 20 units of insulin a day to manage your blood sugar that's the average person What happens if you're a diabetic type one if you let's

say you want to eat cake and ice cream and cookies and whatever you can do it and you can keep your blood sugar but you need to give yourself more insulin and so they keep giving cells more and more insulin and they get insulin resistant which means they need more and more insulin just to keep their sugar normal so they might be using 50 60 100 Units of insulin that's terrible so you can get double diabetes by by eating too much crap and using insulin to manage your blood sugar so the key is to keep

your blood sugar as low as possible and and a friend of mine is a type 1 diabetic and she uses a ketogenic diet and and she basically uses one or two units of insulin a day which is like ridiculously low because if you you fat you eat fat you don't need you don't Need insulin and that's why ketogenic diets work so well for type 2 diabetes where they cured 60 of people or 95 or 100 got the main medication over 90 get off their insulin or reduce it dramatically it leads to the most weight loss

of any study i've ever seen which is about 12 percent which doesn't sound like a lot but most studies get five percent everybody's jumping up and down and super happy so it's it's more than double what you see with a normal weight Loss study right and there's a way to do cleaner versions of keto and there's ways to do dirty versions we're obviously talking about the clear cleaner ones that are plant forward plant rich at the base of it to get all that we don't want to just be eating bacon all day and uh no

olive oil avocados nuts and seeds there's plenty of ways to do keto in a clean way all right couple more questions here before we wrap up today's Podcast on belly fat why is it so important to practice stress management techniques to help with losing belly fat is there a connection between the mind and the body when it comes to belly fat well yes stress makes you fat relaxing makes you thin okay it's that simple here's how i actually i had a patient i learned this from her uh she was a woman who had a daughter

living in israel and it was during the time of like maybe 15 years ago whenever They had the infant out it was really bad and she was terrified for her daughter and she was so stressed and she could not lose weight she was like 40 pounds overweight and she struggled struggle her daughter moved back to america 40 pounds went away and and what happens when you're stressed you make cortisol and you send all sorts of signals through the vagus nerve and the sympathetic parasympathetic nervous System to your fat cells so so basically every cell in

your body is wired to your nervous system so you're what you're you're eating and you're trying to metabolize your food your fat cells are listening to your signals from your brain and they're telling it what to do and it turns out that the wiring that goes to your fat cells when you're under stress tells the fat cells to store fat And that's wow okay so you never want to eat a meal if you're stressed you want to stop take a breath you know why do people say grace have a prayer take a moment it's to

reset your nervous system and i i think there's a simple practice called take five that you can do before you eat where you take five breaths five seconds in five seconds out five times just like that you know through your nose ideally but just five deep breaths and You'll see your body will change your physiology will change your ph will change your brain chemistry will change and your body will be more in a state of relaxation that receives eating also you can actually absorb nutrients as well when you're stressed so there's a lot a lot

of issues around stress but between the innervation of the fat cells that makes them store fat and the high levels of cortisol by the way cortisol is is a drug also that we use called prednisone Or steroids your body makes it and you need it it's there but when it's in excess uh when people are taking it for example what happens to them so there's a there's a actually a word for it's called cushing oid they get they get looking like cushions patients which are people who have a tumor that's making too much cortisol so

they'll get really big bellies and belly fat they'll get skinny arms and legs they'll lose They'll get high blood pressure they'll get diabetes they'll get all the things that we see from people who have too much sugar but it's from the cortisol that raises blood sugar raises insulin and has all these secondary effects because you want that right if you're running from a tiger you want your blood sugar to be as high as possible so you don't run out of gas if you're running from the tiger do you want to know my secret for living

A long and happy and healthy life well all you have to do is check out my weekly newsletter mark's picks where i share my favorite tips for health longevity well-being and lots more check it out and the link below all right last question that we have here mark and then we'll do a little bit of a recap for today's episode what is the role of fasting or intermittent fasting when it comes to losing our belly fat and are there Techniques or resources that dr hyman has to make it fasting easier or less scary is what

i'm reading into the question yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so yes so so time restricted eating intermittent fasting uh fasting mimicking diets ketogenic diets they all do the same thing they basically give your body a break a period of non-eating or or appearance of not eating right if You're if you're eating keto you're not eating carbs but you're still eating but the body doesn't register it as as anything that's driving insulin so so if you could drink a liter of olive oil on an empty stomach your insulin will not rise one bit even if

it's a million calories it just doesn't go up right but if you eat that fat with sugar it's a problem so the key to fixing the belly fat is to lower the insulin and to turn on all the other Signals that make you burn fat and the way to do that is and there's a lot of ways to do that but the the one of the ways to do that is to do time-restricted eating so you eat within an eight-hour window so let's say you eat dinner at six you can eat the next morning at

10. it's not that terrible i mean if you eat at eight you can't eat till 12 whatever but you really need you really need a break from eating and if you really have a lot of belly fat the Eight-hour window to eat is really effective and it turns on all the signals that repair your body reduce insulin resistance get rid of belly fat build muscle reduce inflammation increase your antioxidant enzymes improve your brain function and cognitive awareness so it's really beneficial you can also do periodic fast like a day fast 24 hours 36 hours you

can also do other things like fasting mimicking Diets where you restrict your calories for five days like uh walter longo has talked about and it's been on the podcast talking about that or you can go on a ketogenic diet which you know basically you can do with time restriction or not but that also does the same thing so when you think it's scary it's because you think you'll be hungry but the truth is if you if you learn how to eat with the right Composition and information the food it will make you feel full satisfied

you won't be hungry and there's hacks you can drink a lot of fluids you can sometimes use a mct oil because that won't kick you out of ketosis um so you can really you know use a lot of techniques but it's very safe it's very effective and it's actually not that scary because it's not that hard for most of us now if You're really underweight if you've got cancer just some you know stuff like stuff like that you don't want to be doing the too much of restricted eating i mean i know for me i

can do i can do 16 hours if i go more than that i'm in trouble like i i get in trouble so i i just you know i'm very low body fat and i'm um i'm probably too stressed but i don't really feel stressed but i think my adrenals have beat up over my life but i've been trying to recover from my Life but the truth is you know your body usually does really well if you have any visceral fat doing time restricted eating intermittent fasting or ketogenic diets hey youtube if you like this video

you're gonna love the next one now deep belly fat is really inflammatory what we realized is that deep belly fat produces all sorts of inflammatory markers um interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor so it actually results in increased inflammation in the body and it it is Associated with increased insulin resistance and that high level of insulin and the high level of inflammation those two things and there's i'm sure there's more are really drivers for all of these processes to get out of whack in the body for the cholesterol to get out of whack for your

for your uh inflammation and your arteries to get out of whack for for for cancer to like to grow Um and so inflammation drives all that deep absolutely absolutely and so and that and that deep fat is not just hanging out it's it is metabolically active as we've talked about before and if you always like to talk about it's metabolically active it's not just sort of sitting there it's really do you're just holding up your pants endocrine it's doing no right it's actually doing things it's And it's producing all these chemicals and and and hormones

and it's increasing the inflammation in your body and so if there's one thing that people can focus on like if you're you know you kind of sometimes people get overwhelmed with all these messages in in health right like oh my goodness what do i do what diet do i follow what what should i work on where do i focus and sometimes people get overwhelmed and they almost give up we see that all the time and And and this is like the basic thing that everybody can focus on you know i even for myself like i'm

like you know i do i do a lot of these self-care things right i try to all the time right but you know this is an area that we can all focus on that can improve our health if we just pay attention to what's our waist circumference and what's our waist to hip ratio because that's telling us how much belly fat we have Yeah so so i i think that's right i i often joke and say there's a simple test you can do to figure out if you have this problem it's called the mirror test

you take up your shirt you look in the mirror you jump up and down and your stomach jiggles you probably have it and the truth is 88 of americans have it it's a metabolic not healthy that's because they have this visceral fat that's making them unhealthy and causing all these other problems that we see as Separate right oh i have high blood pressure oh i have high cholesterol why am i blood sugar but they're all the same problem or i have low sex drive or low testosterone or i have you know pimples and poor periods

and sleep apnea and whatever the things are that we're suffering from we see them as all separate but they're all connected by this and with with cobot now the vulnerability of this population with Visceral fat is just it's just been highlighted you know 63 percent of hospitalizations could have been prevented if people had poor better amount of metabolic health and ate better food so the real question is one you know let's talk we're going to talk to him about what causes it uh and how we start to diagnose it um but what are the ways

we can diagnose it properly what you mentioned the waste hip ratio that's a simple test Uh tell us about that and then let's talk about some of the blood tests that you'd see it may seem like other stuff but are clues to you having bigger belly fat yeah you know the waist tape ratio is a great measurement that we can all do and repeat on our own so what you do is you get your waist circumference and to find the right place for your waist circumference it's in between you know you find your lowest rib

And you find your upper hip bone and then you put this you put the tape measure in between and that's considered your waist circumference so if you find that lowest your last rib and your hip bone and go in between the two that's considered your waist circumference it's like your belly pretty much yeah you know some people's belly button hangs down or is in a different place so it's it's not always the belly button But it's it is around that area yeah and then and then the hip circumference is they you know it's considered over

the greater trochanter but if you don't know where that is i always say to people go over the largest part of your hip because that just makes your number look bit better so you want to you know get the biggest hip circumferences you can have not that you want it you know you want to be you know way overweight but it's you Pick the biggest hip circumference to to determine your waist hip ratio if you can't figure out where that greater trochanter is yeah so for for the the goal for caucasian people for caucasians is

to have a waist circumference less than 35 inches for women and less than 40 inches for men for asian and indian ethnicities it's it's stricter less than 31 inches for women and less than 37 inches for men and that waist to hip Ratio is a great measurement to do so for women you want to be less than 0.8 and for men less than 0.9 is the waist hip ratio you want to have so you want you know a smaller waist than hip of course and um and the neat thing this is a really simple test

you can do and something you can check every month you know you can redo your waste tip ratio every month and watch your progress and say okay what am i doing what do i need to do And um it's a really inexpensive way to figure out is this a problem for me yeah that's really huge and i think i think it's also important what you said in that people who of indian or asian descent uh can have significant visceral fat and all the complications from it at much lower weights so they may if you look

at their weight they might weight might be perfect it might be less than 25 23 Their body mass index which 25 or more is overweight but they may be full of this visceral fat and they can be diabetic it can be thin and they look thin we'll call them skinny fat so they have the same issues as someone who is overweight but they're just over fat yes or tofi right thin on the outside fat on the inside so so you know if you are a smaller person um then then that's where also that waist hip

ratio can be Really helpful and and you're right you're right none no test is ever perfect for so for some people the waist circumference or the waist hip ratio isn't isn't giving us all of the information there's a lot of other biomarkers that of course tell us that somebody has too much visceral adiposity that somebody is carrying too much weight around the belly you know if we see a high c-reactive protein or marker for Inflammation it makes us wonder okay do they have metabolic syndrome insulin resistance visceral adiposity if we see that fasting insulin greater

than five that's when we say okay that's this is something we have to pay attention to if we see too many small dense ldl cholesterol particles we've spoken about that before you know that's a sign that somebody has insulin resistance or visceral adiposity if we see um We also check for things like oxidative stress too many free radicals being produced that's a sign um if their liver function tests are high or they have signs of fatty liver that can also be because of this visceral adiposity or gout high uric acid that can also be because

of this um you know or that pattern in cholesterol the high triglycerides low hdl all of these things can give us a sign you know give us information and say okay this person Is struggling with metabox syndrome insulin resistance or probably because of visceral adiposity and you often notice all these things abnormal at the same time right so you see a pattern and it's really pretty easy to diagnose when you know what to look for so you get inflammation you get more inflammation high blood sugar high insulin lots of oxidative stress your liver i mean

these Are these are all things that seem seemingly are treated like separate problems but they're all connected to this visceral fat and what's amazing is to watch them improve when we make shifts or changes in somebody's lifestyle you know or you know there's lots of things that can contribute to this from toxins in the environment to shifts in the microbiome to poor diet you know having a nutrient Poor diet um eating too many refined carbohydrates and simple sugars not getting enough exercise poor sleep too much stress can all contribute to it but what we when

we shift somebody's lifestyle and when we when we make shifts in in these issues that they're dealing with we see these these markers these biomarkers improve significantly so it's really fun to watch we see it improve all the time hey Everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning in to the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is

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share with you my favorite stuff that i use to Enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer now back to this week's episode so so i'm gonna get into you know the causes a little more deeply in a minute but there is another test that we often do which i like a lot and it's sort of the gold standard it's called the dexa body composition test and it's like a x-ray a very low-dose x-ray i mean you have to basically take 50 of these to equal one flight across the country from

new york To california in terms of radiation and it measures the compartments of your body your arms your legs your belly and can tell you what the fat is where it is and and it's pretty compelling there's also mri technology that does the ct technology uh liver fat measurements so there's a lot of ways to look at this but it is really the central problem of our time and and there are many causes but the major cause Is our ultra processed high start sugar diet that's the biggest cause because that drives insulin and insulin drives

all the available fuel that you've eaten into your bat cells in your belly and then it keeps the fat there prevents this breakdown process called lipolysis of your fat and it produces all these inflammatory compounds and it screws up your hormones and it makes you hungry All the time and it slows your metabolism so it's the worst possible thing and it's really driven predominantly by that so so we know that a a high carbohydrate in the sense of starch and sugar diet because you know vegetables are carbohydrates so you can use much those you want

is the biggest driver of this but there are other causes right let's and you mentioned a few of them um so let's kind Of go through some of the unusual things that might be driving us whether it's a microbiome toxins and other things that drive inflammation you know i i always just in the terms of the the the most common cause right i get so concerned when i i see you know a a young child maybe like eight or nine and their parents are buying them a you know a muffin and a sugary coffee drink

or sugary you know beverage for breakfast and i'm like oh no you know It's just a setup it's a setup for them to have problems for their whole life you know and and i think that that it's it's it's important that people take care of those those basics like you mentioned but we always look for you know sometimes sometimes people are doing or they feel like they're doing everything right and there's there's hidden reasons for why they start to develop visceral adiposity and that belly fat when When when they're really doing a lot of things

correctly and one of the things that i find that people don't realize is what what happens when they start to lose lean muscle mass as they get older so you know you know we might be exercising a good amount every day but if we're not working really hard to maintain that good lean muscle mass what happens after the age of 25 is we slowly lose lean muscle mass and And then it's just so much easier for the body to put on excessive fat and we know that having good lean muscle mass and exercising really keeps

our insulin sensitive and so that's one thing that people that slowly catches up with people and they become more insulin resistant over time and and you mentioned toxins you know unfortunately there's been multiple multiple toxins associated with this visceral adiposity so the way i want to Understand i want to underscore what you just said i want liz i want to i want to underscore what you just said yeah because you basically said something really important absolutely around muscle loss when you get older and and muscle loss is really um to be thought of as replacing

muscle with fat so you could be the same weight at 65 then you are 25 maybe twice as fat and that fat in your muscles it's not Not just in your belly is also this poor metabolic fat and it leads to this increasing phenomena with all the consequences that we see of disease so i feel like this is a really important thing that people understand so exercise basically strength training building muscle and aerobic exercise even interval training will help improve metabolic function and help keep this insulin resistance at bay as we age because it is

something that affects Almost everybody as you age unless you do something actively about it so let's talk about toxins you do you do have to work really hard at it you know i mean it's like so easy to maintain well i don't know if it's so easy but it's so much easier when you're younger to maintain your lean muscle mass and as you get older it's really work you know people are like i do go for a walk every day and i'm like you know it's just it's not it's not enough For you right now

and getting in two days a week where you really are working on resistance type exercise there's so many ways you can do that um that you know every you know that really can make a big difference so yes so toxins you know bpa is a toxin that's been unfortunately associated with with with visceral adiposity fatty liver metabolic syndrome and bpa bisphenol a is that hard plastic that is pervasive Unfortunately aren't in our environment and has been associated with you know breast cancer but it's also been associated with insulin resistance so so i think it's important

that we recognize that there are a lot of toxins out there that are impacting our insulin sensitivity and and possibly through how it damages our mitochondria and you know it's just really it there's more to it sometimes than than just our food intake and we always really have to Dig out for that when we're working with our patients for sure we call these things obesogens you know they're petrochemical toxins they're even heavy metals i've seen so so we really have to be alert to people are not losing weight and they're not successful doing the basics

stuff of diet and lifestyle change what else is there and there are other things like the microbiome so maybe we can share a little bit about that and what we're Learning oh the microbiome i think is so fascinating right i mean there's there's so much information there that we're learning and i don't and there's going to be so much more that we're going to learn over time and i don't think we have it obviously all figured out but we know that there's certain bacteria in our digestive system that are associated with less inflammation and a

healthier weight and There's certain bacteria in our digestive system that are associated with more inflammation in the body and having an easier time with weight gain so um it's so it's it's fascinating the association between the microbiome and this whole process of insulin resistance and so you know when somebody comes in and we're trying to figure out what's going on with them we want to work on all angles here and you know we want to ask those questions of what's going on In your digestive system and is you know how are your bowel movements and

how do you feel after you eat and are there foods that you're not tolerating because because we could work to manipulate that um to help improve somebody's metabolism yeah and also you know anything that causes inflammation right could cause weight gain so people might be having an sensitivities that are causing it or they're exposed to mold in their environment or they have latent Infections yeah because any time there's inflammation it drives in some resistance independent of the cause so the biggest cause just you know not to get too down for that rabbit hole of these

things the biggest cause obviously sugar and starch those are the two biggest things that are driving inflammation but there are a lot of other things that people need to think about uh that also do it Now people listening might be going okay yada yada okay all this great science about belly fat what it does and why it's bad and how to test for it and you know what causes it but how do i get rid of it is the big question how do you actually get rid of it and and um i think it's it's

so it's it's so gratifying practicing functional medicine and at the ultra wellness Center where we work it's so it's so gratifying seeing this because this is one of those kind of slam dunk idiot-proof things for most people and it happens so quickly and it's so striking because people are always struggling with this i'm like well if you understand biology and how the body works how it functions which is really the foundation of functional medicine which is understanding how to work with The body rather than against it you can drive these biological changes really quickly and

and really change the quality of the fat dramatically and the fat and just give you a quick example and then we'll go into what to do about it these are my favorite studies that i've read recently is a study looking at gastric bypass surgery basically they said well you know gastric bypass works because it causes All these you know amazing changes in hormones and appetite blah blah blah blah blah so there's all these theories about why it works well somebody decided maybe we should test this theory so they took a bunch of people who are

really overweight and they gave me gastric bypass on half of them the other half just ate the diet that the gastric bypass people ate after they had the surgery and there was no difference But very quickly within days of changing their diet their quality of their fat changed and it went from being inflammatory fat that's driving all these problems to really shifting that and so it can happen pretty quick even if you're still a little overweight you can still have the metabolic and health benefits and of course you still need to get the weight down

but i think it's just an interesting phenomenon so i kind of love That study um so let's talk about you know what what do you guys do and some case studies that you've had that really sort of illustrate the ways in which um we can use this strategy of of function and science functional medicine and the science to drive uh real change for these patients in their not only their their belly fat but all the other biomarkers and health issues and consequences that come from having this belly fat absolutely like we were Talking about the

visceral adiposity that belly fat is associated with high levels of insulin in the body and insulin resistance and that means that the body isn't listening to its insulin as well as it used to and so that high level of insulin as you mentioned earlier causes us to store calories and to just gain weight it makes it it makes us more hungry but it also makes it much harder to lose weight So one of the things we really we when you were talking about okay how do we we really work with our physiology is we want

to prevent insulin spikes because we know that higher levels of insulin are what's really driving us to gain this visceral adiposity and so as you mentioned it's those refined carbohydrates and sugars that drive up insulin levels in the body and we know that if we just ate just fat we wouldn't secrete a lot Of insulin and protein we secrete some insulin but not as much as with carbohydrates so what's really important is bringing down the percentage of calories that somebody's getting from carbohydrates especially the refined and processed carbohydrates that cause that insulin spike and so

i always talk to people about that having that balance of the you know good healthy fat and some and lots of fiber and some protein at every meal and Just pulling away the simple sugars and refined carbohydrates because that brings the insulin down and makes us less likely to hold on to that weight around our belly if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here we're seeing uh rampant increases in autism and neurodegenerative diseases so we we have to grapple with this problem on brain health and in a

more focused way Because it is the thing that we need to operate in our lives to be happy to