569. The Father of Modern Medicine’s Take on Sugar

THE DOCTOR IS IN Podcast


A recent headline from the FDA recommends the daily dose of sugar is 50 grams. One teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams, so that’s over 12 teaspoons of sugar! Any sugar in our bloodstream is toxic and our bodies know this.

Dr. Martin connects this headline to the father of modern medicine, Canadian physician Sir William Osler (1849-1919). Osler revolutionized the way in which medical education was taught during his tenure at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

He was the first physician to identify the cause of gout as that of high absorption of sugar and fructose, not because of red meat. Even in the 1800s, doctors knew that sugar played a role in many of our diseases!

Dr. Martin also discusses a second headline, “Stop Eating After Sunset.” The benefits of not eating after dinner include decreases in fat mass, blood pressure, triglycerides, and oxidative damage, as well as a decline of inflammation. Start a good habit, and stop eating at night!

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well, good morning everyone. Once again, welcome to another live. Hope you're having a great start to your day. So here we go. We're going to look this morning at a couple of studies. I want to give you the headline here about the FDA, okay? So the Food and Drug Administration. They say that the daily dose for sugar should be about 50 grams, okay? So one teaspoon, about four grams. So I mean, that's a lot of sugar. When you think, okay, so 50 grams, it's crazy that they would even recommend that. I'm going to give you a little bit of context about that, but as I've reminded you many, many times, your body is smarter than the world. It's certainly smarter than the FDA, okay? 

It's smarter than the FDA because your body will keep your blood sugar in very, very, very tight regulation. The reason is because your body knows how toxic sugar is. Your body knows that. If you got five liters of blood, you're going to get about four grams of sugar in five liters of blood, because it's tightly regulated. Sugar left in your bloodstream is extremely toxic. Sugar is toxic. Now, I want to bring you to someone who was a Canadian physician, Sir William Osler. Now, I remember studying about him because he was a Canadian physician, but was one of the founders of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was light years ahead of his time, okay?

So here's a couple of things that he said. The good physician treats the disease, okay? Because that's modern medicine today. Here's what he said in the 1800s. He died in 1919. He was born in 1849, Canadian physician, and he said that, "The good physician treats disease, but the great physician treats the patient who has the disease." It's a big problem in medicine today because medicine waits till people get sick. All of medicine pretty well, there's so little prevention and they're into detection and early detection. Now, listen, I'm not against that.

One of the things we've been talking about in COVID and actually there's a headline, let me see if I can get it for you, this came out yesterday. It was talking about, again, I've said this since last March probably a thousand times, the unintended consequences, but this came from, let me just see here, here's the headline, COVID's collateral damage. What happens when Canadians with other illnesses miss out on medical treatment? The Globe and Mail. That's what it was, The Globe and Mail. So if I go to the headlines here and I can actually read the article, what happens when Canadians with other illnesses miss out on medical care? The pandemic has left healthcare with a mammoth backlog that may be felt for years and the full scale of which we do not yet know. Okay, that's in the Canadian newspaper, Globe and Mail, okay? It's online. It's the unintended consequences. 

Well, we've been saying that for a long time, because when you look at medicine and this is what William Osler was saying is that you shouldn't look at just the condition, holistically look at the whole shooting works, okay? Now listen, this guy operated in the 1800s, okay? Oh, here's another quote. Let me just say the other quote then I'll tell you what he did. "One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine." It's not the first thing in a physician's life, and he was a guy that I actually took... I was just reading a little bit more history of him and he actually was the first guy to take medical students at Johns Hopkins University and bring them out of the classroom into the hospitals so that they could see real people. 

That started this whole thing of being an intern, right? I guess they didn't do that before William Osler. Look, you need to see real people, real conditions and whatever. But here's something that he said, at the end of the day, I wanted to bring this up, okay, that in the 1890s, William Osler said this, he talked about the link between the wealthy getting gout. If you go Google gout, I guarantee you, you're going to read about purines. Don't eat red meat. It's the king's disease. He was eating too much red meat. William Osler, the father of modern medicine said, "No, that's not true." He said, "Wealthy people eat too much sugar and sweet fruits and drinking a lot of alcohol is the link to gout," and this is what we've been seeing. 

As a matter of fact, this came much later is when I get a patient with high levels of uric acid that don't clear their uric acid, one of the things I tell them to do is to cut their sugars, read every label, read every label, cut their fruits down to almost nothing, certainly don't drink any fruit drinks, okay? You guys know that, but I've been saying that a long time. The last thing on God's earth that you want to drink is a sugary fruit drink. It's still the number one choice for North Americans is orange juice. Man, you might as well have two Pepsis. There's so much sugar in them. Ah, Dr. Martin, it's Tropicana. I don't care what kind of fruit juice it is. It is terrible for you. But in order to avoid gout, I often would tell my patients, "Look, you get 15 grams of total sugars, okay?" I'm not talking carbohydrates, is I'm talking about extra sugar. So you got to count all fruit. 

If you're having one banana, you're probably getting how many grams of sugar in a banana, 10? If you're a person or you know someone in your family or loved one that gets gout, they can't have a banana. Oh, I should post this. I'll probably post that after. They give them a banana to a diabetic and then they test their sugar. Actually, have a graph that I could put on the private Facebook group that sugar takes off like crazy. It's because the FDA and others were recommending, have a banana if you're a diabetic. The last thing you want is fruit juice or a banana if you're a diabetic. Man, you're just going to spike your blood sugar like nobody's business. So that's the last thing. 

So it was kind of interesting, the original founder of Johns Hopkins University, a Canadian physician, was light years ahead of his time. It's funny, it sort of got buried about gout because some people have been asking me about that and what do we do about that. I'm telling you guys that you got to lay off the sugars, especially fructose, especially fructose. Fructose, I know it sounds great, but especially in this day and age when we have the antichrist of sugars, the antichrist of sugars, and that is high fructose corn syrup. Almost everything in the grocery store has that sugar in it. If you see any sugar added to anything, from peanut butter even, if any sugar has been added, I'm telling you it's high fructose corn syrup. That is the choice of the food industry. It's a terrible thing. Terrible thing for you. Terrible thing for elevating uric acid. It's a terrible thing for elevating your blood sugar, okay? So William Osler, okay?

Now let me bring you another study. There've been a couple of really good ones. I'm going to do probably tomorrow a deep dive on vitamin D again, because a new study came out and we'll talk about this probably looking at doing it tomorrow morning. So we talked about William Osler and let me give you another eating tip. Now, we've talked about intermittent fasting. I think you guys understand that some of the advantages of it, it's in the reset book and I talk about it, but guys, here's something that came out in the last few days, okay? Stop eating after sunset. That's the headline. Stop eating after sunset. 

Here's another unintended consequence of the virus. Okay, here's another thing and this has been well-documented, guys, is that people are spending, and you can't blame them, they're spending so much more time on they call it the Netflix syndrome. The Netflix syndrome, right? People, look, you couldn't go out. You couldn't do this. You couldn't do that. No more sports. Sports is back on TV now, and people have gotten into a habit much more than before being sedentary, and in quarantine or whatever, but even in the province of Quebec, for example, there was a curfew for months. There was a curfew. Couldn't go out at what was it? After 8:00 at night or whatever. To me, that's a way overreaction, but I'm not even talking about the virus. I'm talking about the unintended consequences. 

We read one this morning where even in The Globe and Mail, which is a major publication in Canada, it talked about down the road. I mean, people that don't get that early detection of cancer, but even cardiovascular disease and all that, because the... Man oh man. Then I often talked about man, imagine people dying alone. A friend of mine had a heart procedure done and he was one month, no one, not even his wife could visit him in the hospital. Guys, I just don't get that. When you look at mental health, when you look at... Imagine even, how many people have lost loved ones, they died and they died alone. I can't get that. That bothers me. 

Anyway, but this study is saying stop eating at night. I've told you that many a times for what? For people that get acid reflux, people that have a hiatus hernia, people that have GERDs. Don't eat at night. Try and stop 5:00, 6:00, no more eating, stop eating. Here's what the study showed if you don't eat at night. This is not even taking into account intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is at least 14 hours of not eating. That's what it is, okay? So intermittent fasting is 14 hours of not eating. But listen to what I'm saying here. Stop eating after sunset. Here's the headline of the study. Why? Why would you want to stop eating after supper? It decreases fat mass. Okay. That's a good thing. It decreases fat mass.

Well, that's great. It decreases your blood pressure. According to this study, when you don't eat at night, you decrease your blood pressure. These are all good news, guys. Because this is all metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome decreases your blood pressure, decreases your triglycerides. How many times have I had to talk about triglycerides? We don't care about decreasing your cholesterol. We want to get to the truth of the matter and that is you want to decrease your triglycerides, and you not eating at night, okay, this is what it's saying, this is what the study is saying, if you don't eat at night, you are lowering not only your blood pressure, which is a sign of metabolic syndrome, which is a sign that you have insulin resistance. Imagine blood pressure, yeah? 

It's ain't the salt. It's the sugar. William Osler is right because he was talking about uric acid and uric acid has a factor in elevating your blood pressure, even without gout, because too many people think of uric acid is only gout. It isn't gout. Well, as a matter of fact, most of the people who have high levels of uric acid don't get gout at all, but they often get high blood pressure. Remember what William Osler said, he said, it's sugar back in 1890 as he was observing people who had more money, I guess sugar must have been expensive in those days. He was saying the wealthy are eating more sugar and he equated the alcohol they were drinking and the wine they were drinking, the fructose. Boy oh boy, smart guy.

Okay. So stop eating after sunset, the headline says why, it decreases your fat mass. Not number one, it burns fat. It burns fat, okay? Now listen, you can't out-exercise a bad diet. I've said that many, many a time. You can't out-fast a bad diet. You can't. That's just telling you the truth, okay? You need to clean up your diet. But one of the best habits you can get into is not eating at night. If you can just be religious about it, I'm not going to eat at night. It's so good for your digestive tract, which I've talked to you about, especially the upper. People that have a lot of acid reflux and things like that and hiatal hernias and this, stop eating them.

You got gallbladder problems? You got a gallbladder problems? Stop eating at night. I've often said, "Look, if you can avoid getting your gallbladder removed and if you can save your gallbladder," and by the way, gallbladder is use it or lose it, ladies, because it's about 90% women that ever have trouble with their gallbladder. The biggest reasons is because they don't use it. They're not eating enough fat. They bought the lie of the fat-free and low fat diet. So three things so far, stop eating after sunset because it decreases your fat mass. It decreases your blood pressure. It decreases your triglyceride.

Guys, we talked about this yesterday. Triglyceride is not only for heart. High triglycerides are extremely dangerous for your heart, for heart attack, for stroke. Three fat balls, triglycerides, and extremely dangerous cognitively. We showed you that yesterday, cognitively, because remember, if you at night, you're not eating and you're decreasing your triglycerides, what goes up? When one goes down, what's the other one that goes up? I want you thinking you should have this answer. You should know this by all the teaching I've been doing on it. If triglycerides are going down while you're not eating that night, don't eat at night, don't eat after supper, okay? This is science, guys. If triglycerides are going down, what's going up? Teeter-totter, remember, I said that. 

So if your triglycerides are high, your HDL is low. That is your cholesterol. It goes down. If your triglycerides are high, your HDL goes down. If your triglycerides go down, whoop, your HDL goes up. You see, they work together. This is why when you want to send me your blood work, so I give you my two pennies worth of opinion on it, I want to see your triglycerides. I want to see your HDL. Tells me a massive story, it does. When I just look at that, because I can tell the state of your liver when I look at your triglycerides. The vast majority of people are upside down. They got high triglycerides and low HDL. Why is that? Because they are carboholics, and plus they eat at night. That's the new research. Eating that night is not good. It's the worst time to eat. It's the worst time to eat is eating at night.

Here's another thing. When you stop eating after sunset, you get less often oxidative damage. That's free radical damage. You will not get as much oxidative damage. Imagine the timing of your food has a big bearing even on aging, because remember, aging is oxidative damage. It's free radical. That's how we age. Our cells rust out. Yesterday, I was looking at pictures of my three older brothers playing hockey. They were all good hockey players, my three older brothers. I was looking at pictures when they played when they were, I guess, the ages would have been from about 15 to probably about 16 or 17 years old, my three older brothers, okay, David, Mitch, and Peter. 

I was looking at them. Guys, I love looking at old pictures, by the way, but all by word, I remember my little grandson, he's my youngest one. He's 10 today. But he was younger then. We were just sort of fooling around playing hockey in the basement. I might've told you this story before, but he was looking at a picture, my graduation picture, okay, in 1974, my graduation picture. We had it in the basement. Lots of pictures down there. But my grandson said, "Grandpa, who's that?" I said, "That's me." He was five years old. He looked at me and then he looked at that picture and he looked at me again and he said, "That's not you, grandpa." I said, "Yes, it is." He said, "Well, it doesn't look like you." But that's what free radical damage is, guys. That's oxidative damage. 

It says if you don't eat at night... Look, it's like the reset guys. It's like the reset. It's simple, eggs, meat, and cheese, right? It's simple, eggs, meat, and cheese, but it's very difficult, okay? Because we're carboholic, to switch like that. But it's easy to understand. Don't eat at night. Okay, that's easy. It's easy to understand, but it's not easy to do because these are habits, guys. I talk about this all the time. It takes three weeks to form a habit. Can you form a habit? Yes, you can, of not eating at night. Not eating at night, oxidative stress is better. You get less oxidative damage if you don't eat at night, okay?

So we talked about fat mass. It's a fat burner. Blood pressure, triglycerides, HDL. I put them together because they work together. Free radical damage or oxidative damage. Then the last one, this is the last one it showed, these are benefits, brand new study benefits of lowering your inflammation. Now, I'm going to tell you something. Everything that I just mentioned happens on the reset, everything I just mentioned. You're burning fat as fuel. You're emptying your liver, but even not eating that night helps. Isn't that fascinating that you read a study like that? Again, it's amazing to me. Here's what's amazing to me. Why isn't this being broadcast from the mountaintops? Hello. Don't eat at night.

But you see, the pharmaceutical companies who make Pepto-Bismol and eat whatever you feel like and then have a Tums and have a big snack before you go to bed and then take the purple pill for your acid reflux. Guys, Nexium, yeah. Stop eating at night. It will do the same thing. Three weeks to form a habit, three weeks to form a habit. Isn't that interesting? So this morning we had a little bit of William Osler, the father of modern medicine, okay? Not the father of medicine, because that was Hippocrates who said that all disease begins in the gut. You know what, new study came out on probiotics. I'll bring that to you too. I mean, there's some really good stuff that I've flagged that you will find very, very interesting. 

But isn't that something about sugar? They knew it in the 1890s that sugar was the biggest factor, and fructose metabolism, the biggest factor in uric acid, and secondly, don't eat at night. What a great habit to get into. You know what, whatever they say, like Netflix, people are eating, they got the Netflix syndrome now and that doesn't have to be Netflix per se. You know what I'm saying, is that people, they sit down and they want to eat. You're watching a movie or you're watching a TV series or whatever, and you want to eat. It's comfort food. It's part of the unintended consequences of the state in which we live.

It bugs me, and I'll just finish with this. It bugs me and I've been screaming and you guys know me, so I've been saying this right from the beginning of the virus. We need to move. We need to exercise. The worse place in the universe that they ever closed down was first of all telling people... Well, they sort of told people at first... You know that if you get quarantined in Canada right now, you're not to leave your house. That is the stupidest thing that I've ever heard in my life. That is the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. You want to get outside. The virus outside, you think it's going to jump up from the hedges and bite you? Guys, get out in the sun. But you know what, they're so focused on stupidity in my mind. You want to move, exercise, one of the best thing. When they closed the gyms, I was livid about that.

The gyms, you want to get exercise. Your immune system, nobody seemed to be talking about immunity. I can't stand it. It's so un-holistic. We got to look at all... The virus is there, I get it. But you want your body to be in good shape. You want your body... There'll always be viruses. There is always going to be bacteria. You need to build the immune system. One of the things is vitamin E, exercise, and vitamin O, outdoors. Well, that's really vitamin D, the sun. But even when it's not sunny, you want to get outside. I'd take a deep breath. Okay. Okay. Like I said, we got some great studies. We'd just continue on with these. 

Friday is question and answer. I didn't even answer half the questions last week because I, what was I doing, pontificating again? Probably. Got some great studies the rest of the week. If you're not part of the Martin Clinic Facebook group, please, please, please join the Martin Clinic Facebook group. What a community. Okay, so invite your friends, invite your family. They can become part of that Facebook group. It's so good. Half the time I don't have to answer things. You guys are answering people that have questions and our staff is so good. Okay. Love you guys. Talk to you soon.

Announcer:  You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!

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