Andrew Huberman
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024–2026
3:29:21 · 5.1M views · Dec 18, 2023
A long Huberman Lab podcast episode with Dr. Robert Lustig on the calories-in, calories-out model and how sugar, fructose, fiber and processed foods affect insulin, liver and metabolic health.
HN mentions it mostly as a source for the argument that sugar is toxic, though some commenters push back on claims like fructose being addictive.
3 comments from Hacker News
Sugar is poison. Check out the latest talk from Dr Robert Lustig this video 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 unpr
This explains how sugars and fast carbs can be healthy this video Tldr; highly processed food looses vitamins(micro nutrient starvation) and starch/fiber are needed to slow absorption until it gets to bacteria producing drugs(barbiturate and precursors to neuromediators including), and give signals over vagus nerve to head. May be summary of few books from me too. Do not recall. Add on top chewing fibery food takes time, feeling full starts earlier of being full, and saliva ferments help to digest either.
this video 22:31 - "fructose is addictive" No. [LINK] [LINK] 25:14 - "the fiber is what mitigates the absorption ... that fructose wasn't for you" Not how that works. You absorb the same fructose whether or not it's co-located with fiber. 33:40 - "this whole calories in / calories out makes no sense ... there's no study that actually shows that cutting calories makes a difference" Completely wrong and against the literature. [LINK] 1:00:17 - "fructose causes leaky gut; that causes inflammation of the liver and ultimately systemic inflammation" No. [LINK] 1:31:10 - Asked to explain trend towards obesity over the past 20 years if not the transition away from trans fats. "It's the increase in sugar." No. Sugar consumption has fallen steadily since about 1999, while obesity continues to rise. [LINK] 2:03:40 - "The mean increase in lifespan from being on a statin is 4 days." No. They have a huge positive impact on mortality and CVD events. [LINK] 2:05:10 - "LDL is not really the problem, there are two LDLs: large buoyant, small dense. Large buoyant is irrelevant, cardiovascularly neutral." No. [LINK] (small particles do penetrate easier, but large particles have more apoB; they're both bad) 2:26:39 - "when people go on diet sweeteners ... are they reducing the fat? no." Wrong again. There's a wealth of literature on this. [LINK] Directly following that, he goes on to totally misrepresent a 2011 study in which groups were assigned diet soda, water, milk, or full sugar soda; the study