The Hunger Code: Reset Your Fat Thermostat To Reduce Cravings and Turn Up Fat Burning with Dr Jason Fung"

There's all these different tricks that the food companies do. And you need to know about this because if you don't, you're going to say, hey, that's the same number of calories. It's sort of like the whole diet soda argument, right? And everybody's like diet soda doesn't cause obesity because there's no calories. That's not the problem. The problem is what does it do to your hunger? Because if that diet soda with its sweet chemical is making you more hungry, then that is going to make you gain weight. Well, welcome back to the podcast. Great topic today and great guest, Dr. Jason Fung, New York Times best selling author of the obesity code. He's got a new book. It's The Hunger Code and we're going to talk about the fat thermostat that drives hunger, cravings, fat burning and weight loss. You guys are in for a treat. We're going to talk about the three types of hunger that you may experience and how that drives behavioral patterns when it comes to eating, when it comes to foods that you might crave or, you know, it comes to accomplishing your health, your health goals, whether it's losing weight, having more energy, better brain function. And we're going to talk all about that. We're going to talk about key hormones that are involved in hunger cravings, weight gain, fat burning and weight loss. So you guys are really in for a treat here. A little bit about Dr. Jason Fung. He completed medical school at the University of Toronto and fellowship and nephrology, so kidney medicine at the University of California. He's the co-founder of the fasting method, a program that helps patients lose weight and reverse their type two diabetes naturally. And in 2016, Dr. Fung published one of the first popular science books to recommend intermittent fasting for weight loss. It was called The Obesity Code, which went on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide. Next, he published the diabetes code, which lays out his foundational approach, type two diabetes prevention or reversal. And as a New York Times bestselling author, he's written and contributed to numerous other books on disease prevention, including the PCOS plan, Life in the Fasting Lane, The Cancer Code, and his new book that's coming out now, it's called The Hunger Code. You guys can get that at any bookseller, amazon.com. It's called The Hunger Code, really great book. I've been diving into it and excited for this conversation with Dr. Jason Fung. You can find his website, doctor. So you got to spell out doctor, D-O-C-T-O-R, Jason Fung.com. That is his website. And of course, you can find his books on amazon.com as well. Thanks so much for joining us on this podcast. Guys, if you're looking for great health information or health coaching, always check out DrJockers.com. And we've got great long distance health coaches, Dr. Yvonne and Tara that work with people all over the world. So make sure you take advantage of that. You can just email us at info at DrJockers.com. If you're interested in personalized health coaching, working with one of our great health coaches that can look at your labs and help personalize a health coaching program for you. So reach out to us at info at DrJockers.com. Of course, leave a five star review on the podcast and be sure to share this with somebody else that you know and that you care about. Thanks again for being a part of our podcast community. God bless you. And let's go into this interview with Dr. Jason Fung. Well, I love listening to podcasts. And one of my favorites is the Dr. Josh Axe show hosted by my good friend Dr. Josh Axe. Every week, he shares how to balance your hormones, restore your gut, boost your energy and slow aging without relying on harsh medications or quick fixes. He shares both ancient biblical practices and the latest breakthroughs in nutrition, herbal remedies and lifestyle medicine. And he sits down with world renowned experts to have real unfiltered conversations he won't hear anywhere else. So if you're ready to take control of your health, renew your energy and transform your mind, body and spirit, tune in to the Dr. Josh Axe show every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Well, here I am with New York Times bestselling author Dr. Jason Fung. Many of you guys have probably read his first book, The Obesity Code, phenomenal book. And he's come out with the book that basically comes right after that. And you kind of have to understand this to really understand the obesity epidemic we're dealing with in our society. This is called The Hunger Code. And in this interview, we're going to talk a lot about the fat, thermostat, different types of hunger, a lot of these key topics that Dr. Fung outlines in his book. And we're going to talk about the role of hormones and how those impact hunger, cravings, and fat gain or fat loss. And so really key stuff. Dr. Fung, another phenomenal book. And so what was your inspiration here with writing this? I think that it was because there's a lot of recent data looking at things like ultra-processed foods and food addictions. And sort of there's a couple of interesting studies on the socioeconomic implications of obesity and so on. Why does it correlate to poverty and so on? So I think some of that new research really inspired me to take a deeper look into it. And the more I looked, the more interesting it was because this whole idea that I was brought up with, that it's all about calories, count your calories. It's so spectacularly unsuccessful that it boggles my mind that anybody still just relies on that. So that was one of the things that really got me interested because something like ultra-processed foods, for example, it's not about the calories. It's about the processing. That's what's important. And more and more data shows that, yeah, there's something interesting there that we really need to dive into. And that's what this book is about. So the idea is that if you think about calories, and that's the amount of energy. Calories is a unit of energy. It's how many, when you burn it in a bomb calorimeter, how much it comes out. But see, the thing is that it's such an incomplete measure of what happens to our body. So the thing is that if you want to understand a problem, you have to really get to the root cause, not the sort of shallow, proximate cause. And there's a concept in logic called the three whys. So if you want to really understand something, you have to ask the question, why? Sort of three times. So for example, if you say, why did the Titanic sink? You might say, well, because it hit an iceberg. Well, it's technically correct. It's not the right answer. And you might say, that's ridiculous, right? Of course it's hit, hit an iceberg. And that's what it's saying. But if you think about the deeper reasoning, it's because if you simply stop thinking and say, okay, the Titanic sank, we kind of hit an iceberg. What advice would you give to future sea captains? Well, don't hit icebergs. That's just crazy, stupid advice. It's so simplistic. It's so obvious. It's, it's moronic advice. So what you have to do is go sort of two levels deeper. So you say, okay, the Titanic hit an iceberg. Yes. But why did it hit an iceberg? Well, because the captain couldn't avoid it. Now, the third why would be why couldn't the captain avoid this iceberg? And it's because it was going too fast. Now, that's where you get into the meat of the matter. That is to say, if you want to avoid future catastrophes, you would tell captains, slow down. That's good advice. Just like if your car flew off the highway on an icy, you know, December day, why did it crash? Well, because you skid it on ice. Well, don't skid on ice. That's terrible advice. Better advice, slow down. So it's the same thing with calories. So if you say that body fat is increasing, you might say, why? Well, because calories in is greater than calories out. So the simple, the simplistic sort of non-thinking advice is if you're calories, that's the don't hit icebergs example, right? It's crazy ineffective. So the problem with that is that say, so you have calories, for example, and you have hunger. What happens if you simply restrict calories? Well, your calories goes down, hunger goes up. Now you're constantly fighting yourself, right? Because your body says eat more and you're not eating. And then what happens, of course, is that your body ramps down its metabolic rate so that you still gain fat. That's a separate issue. But the point is that you're constantly fighting yourself. If instead you ramp down hunger, then calories will also drop, but notice you're not fighting yourself. Right? So now if you get back to the three why's, you say, well, why did body fat increase? Because calories in is greater than calories out, right? So that's the simplistic first order thinking. That's where a lot of people get stuck. And that's where people say, well, if you don't talk about calories, you're not scientific. I am scientific. Nobody's breaking any laws of thermodynamics. You have to ask the deeper question, why is calories in greater than calories out? And the answer is because you're hungry. So that's the problem. The overeating problem is just the symptom of the over hunger problem. And then you have to ask the question, why are you hungry? And that's the really interesting part because it gets into the homeostatic hunger, which is this idea of the body fat thermostat that you adjusted based on certain hormones, for example. So for example, if you give somebody insulin, they gain body fat, right? It's because calories in greater than calories out. But again, why did that insulin cause calories in to be greater than calories out? It's because it increased the hunger, right? And that's the homeostatic hunger. But it goes further than that because it's not just homeostatic hunger. That's not the only reason we eat. There's also eating for pleasure, which is hedonic hunger. And there's also eating because of our social environment, which is conditioned hunger. If everybody else is eating around you, you will too, right? How many times have we not been that hungry but because we're going out for dinner with friends or a bar with friends, we ate. You weren't hungry. You just ate anyway because it's the social conditioning, right? And that's important because what you're trying to figure out now is eating behavior. Because if you're thinking that it's all about the diet, you've already lost. It's about eating behavior. And we have a whole area of behavioral psychology that deals with behavior and behavior change. So that's the idea. That's sort of why, as I sort of delve deeper into the question of this obesity epidemic, why are we so not successful? I realized that it went much further than where I went in the obesity code, which of course at the time was also a bit of a, you know, you know, really went in the face of sort of conventional medicine and conventional calories and calories out thinking. It's not that calories and calories out is incorrect. It's too shallow. It's just not, you're not getting to a deep enough level. And that's where I always think that if somebody's just insist on talking about calories, and that's the end all and be all, well, they just haven't thought through the problem very much. Because the more you realize it, the more you understand, hey, there's a lot of other issues here. Yeah, it's a really good explanation. So basically the calories in you have to, you have to burn more calories than you're consuming. So that's the ultimate result. But we have to ask, why are you consuming more calories on a regular basis? Why are you having trouble consuming less calories than you are burning? And so that's where you, you know, went with this hunger code. And you talked about this idea of the fat thermostat. Let's talk about that, that idea. Yeah. So there's this idea in medicine that, so there's a concept called homeostasis. Okay. So homeostasis in medicine is simply where your body wants to maintain a sort of normal sort of internal working sort of thing. So it's like a room thermostat. So if you set your room thermostat to room temperature, which is say 72 degrees, if it gets too hot, the thermostat will activate the air conditioning. If it gets too cold, it's activate the heat, right? So therefore you're always going to maintain that normal body level. That's called homeostasis. And it's true for everything. So it's the same for, for example, for body heat, if you live in the Sahara desert, you're going to sweat and this is going to cool you down. If you live in the North Pole, you're going to shiver, you're going to warm up and it's going to heat up. If you drink lots of water, you're going to pee it out. If you drink a little water, you're not going to pee it out. If you eat a lot of salt, you're going to pee out a lot of salt and so on, right? So everything in our body works on homeostasis and so does body fat percentage. So the whole, the whole idea is that there's all these people that say body fat percentage is not regulated. It's basically whatever you eat and then the excess calories gets dumped into body fat, like a sack of doorknobs sort of thing, right? Oh, I have two extra doorknobs, throw them in the sack, right? But it's crazy because it's obviously not true for any, any sort of animal living in the natural world. Why? Because if you did that, you'd simply die, right? If you had too much body fat, you're either going to get eaten by predators or if you are a predator, you'd never catch the deer. If you're overweight, morbidly, morbidly obese lion, how are you going to catch that deer? You will never do it. You're going to die. So if you're morbidly obese deer, you're going to die, right? Yeah, the lion's going to kill you. If you are too skinny, then you're also going to die because the minute there's no food, you're going to die. You have no stores of calories that are stored on your body. So everything is regulated by this homeostasis. So how much body fat you consume? If you look at bears, they gain a lot of body fat during the winter. Why? It's not because they ate more. It's because their body is trying to gain that fat for the winter. It's going to happen no matter how much or how little they eat. Obviously, if they don't have enough, they can't. But they're obviously driven to eat more, right? Because it's not random. They're not eating this much in the springtime, right? They're only eating that much in the fall. So obviously, the amount of body fat we carry is also regulated by hormones. It's like a thermostat. If you gain too much body fat, then your body tries to burn it off. And that's been shown time and again. So if you force feed people and you take them and force feed them 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day, they will gain body fat because you've overwhelmed that homeostatic mechanism. But what happens when you stop force feeding them is that they stop eating basically for like a month. And then their body weight goes down to zero. It goes back to normal. So even though you force fed them and they gain that weight, they can easily lose it because their body fat thermostat had sensed that. They didn't, you didn't change that thermostat setting. And the thing is that there are certain hormones that raise your body fat threshold and there are certain hormones that lower it. So insulin will raise that body weight threshold. We know that because if you give somebody insulin, okay? So if I gave you insulin, like lots of insulin, right? I started injecting you with insulin and so on, you'd get fat. And it doesn't matter that you're a healthy guy. You have a lot of willpower, you exercise. You're still going to get fat. Why? Because I told your body to get fat because I raised your body fat thermostat with the insulin. How does it do that? It does it by making you hungry, right? So that's how it, the mechanism by which you, you gain that weight. If you still don't eat because you have a lot of willpower, you're not going to eat that much. What's going to happen is that your body is going to ramp down how, how much calories you burn so that you still gain that body fat. That's just what happens. So you take, give somebody insulin, they gain fat. We know that. So the reason you got fat was not because you ate too much. It's because you told your body to gain fat. You raised that thermostat, which then told you to eat more, right? So everybody gets it mixed up because there's like saying, you ate more and that's why you got fat. No, no, no, no. You raise that threshold and that's why you ate more, right? It's the hunger that's the underlying cause. You take away insulin. So you have type one diabetes. You don't have enough insulin. Your body weight is going to fall. In fact, untreated type one diabetes, they lose weight until they die. A starvation basically, right? That's how bad it is. Well, it's not because you didn't eat. They could eat as much as they want. They're still going to lose weight and then die. Why? Because you lowered that body weight threshold. So it's the hormones that control it. So cortisol does the same. You give cortisol, they gain weight. You take away cortisol, they lose weight. You give GLP1, GIP, like Osempic. What happens? You lose weight. You notice that from Osempic, there are no calories. It's not the calories that it's controlling. It's the hunger that it's controlling. When it kills your hunger, you're going to eat less and that's why you can lose weight. But the idea, everybody says, oh, it's about the calories. No, it's about the hunger. That's the deeper second, third level order of understanding to say why is calories in greater than calories out? Not that calories in are greater than calories out. Everybody confuses it and says, oh, I'm arguing that. It's not that calories in is greater than calories out. It's not that. It's why. It's the underlying reason why. So that's, you know, and the hormonal systems in this homeostatic mechanism are, there's tons. There's peptide, why, why. There's colocysticinin. There's insulin. There's cortisol. There's leptin. There's, you know, GLP1. There's GIP. There's baroreceptors in the stomach. There's the vagus nerve. There's a sympathetic tone. So for example. Relin. Yep. Yeah. There's tons. There's tons. So you have to understand how are am I affecting it? If you don't sleep, if you don't get enough sleep, you gain weight. That's well documented. Why? Lack of sleep does not carry calories. So why? Why? Because the cortisol went up. The cortisol went up because you're under stress. You're not getting enough sleep, which is telling your body to gain fat, which makes you hungry and then you eat. So understanding that says, oh, I need to take care of this underlying problem, which is lack of sleep. Get more sleep. Reduce my cortisol. Reduce my hunger. But see, the problem is that all these people who say, it's all calories and calories and calories and calories. So like to the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. So if your problem with gaining weight is lack of sleep, they're like, eat fewer calories. It's like, no, that's not the solution. The solution is to get more sleep. If your problem is you're eating too many refined carbohydrates and you're spiking your insulin, the solution is to eat fewer cow, eat fewer carbohydrates or fine carbohydrates, not eat fewer calories. If your problem is food addiction, which is affecting your hedonic hunger, treat the food addiction, not eat fewer calories. So every single problem that can cause overweight, say, you know, lack of sleep and, and, and, and, you know, these are all sort of well documented, a lot of refined carbohydrates. Everything is eat fewer calories, eat fewer calories, exercise. Well, how does that affect your cortisol? If you're under stress and you're, you're eating because of the stress, or if you have emotional eating because you're depressed and you're eating and you're emotionally eating, the solution is not eat fewer calories. The solution is to deal with that emotional eating, right? And whether that's through counseling or whether that's through different foods or the, you know, it doesn't matter, but you have to identify the problem. This whole eat fewer calories is basically symptomatic treatment. It's, it's, and that's why it's so unsuccessful, right? And that's, that's your, what you're advocating for is a personalized approach, kind of figuring out rather than just kind of this mechanistic one size fits all, everybody needs to eat less calories. It's a personal, it's a personalized approach. What is driving you to eat more calories and let's affect the actual root cause what's driving that. And that's that personalized approach that people need to really get results. Absolutely. So even if you look at homeostatic hunger, I list in the book like 10 different hormonal systems, 10 different things that affect digestion, 10 different things that affect absorption, because it doesn't go from calories to weight gain. It goes from the foods, which contain calories, which then is affected by the process of digestion. And there's 10 different things that affect the speed of digestion. Then it gets absorbed into the, into the bloodstream. And there's like 10 different things that affect that, which affect your hormones. And there's like 10 different hormones, right? There's 30 different factors that are at play here that then lead to weight gain, right? And the calories people are like, Oh, it's all a single factor. It's like, no, nothing in human physiology works like that. Nothing, right? There's nothing that is like, do one thing and that's it, right? That causes all of weight gain. And you expect us to expect that weight gain, which is this complex physiologic mechanism that's under tight homeostatic control, you think it's all controlled by that single one thing that you ate a few more calories than usual. See, the whole thing is just crazy stupid because you know, think about this. Suppose you eat 800 calories of steak and eggs in the morning, you're going to affect your hormones in a certain way. Insulin's not going to go up. So you're not going to store a lot of those calories. So those calories stay out so you can use them and you stay full. Because insulin sends a big message to stop burning fat, sugar for fuel. So glycolic. And store it. Yeah. Store it. And then it starts to only have a certain amount of sugar in the bloodstream. And so as that blood sugar starts dropping, that's when you start getting the hunger and the cravings. So pretty quickly afterwards. Exactly. So that's the thing is that insulin's not a evil hormone. It's just doing its job. But if you eat a food that massively stimulates your insulin, you're going to tell your body, store all these calories as fat, which leaves no calories for you to use for energy, which means in an hour, you're starving and looking for more food. You're hungry because of the insulin. But see, if you take the 800 calories of steak and eggs, it increases, it doesn't increase insulin, but increases GLP1, GIP, Peptin, you know, Colicistakinin, PeptideYY, you get full. You're full until lunch or even dinner. Now you eat, you drink 800 calories of Frappuccino. In an hour, you want something to eat. Well, it's the same 800 calories. So how is it that the calories was the issue? The issue was that those two foods stimulated completely different hormones and affected your homeostatic hunger in a completely different way. And that's why you want to go eat after that 800 calorie Frappuccino. But the calories people say, see, you're eating more calories. No, it's because you're hungry. Like don't confuse the issue. Get to the deeper cause. Yeah, and it plays a role with energy as well. So like I've always been lean, but when I was growing up in high school, my breakfast was, you know, what was considered super healthy, which was a boleturios, right? Skin milk because we didn't want the fat, had a banana in there, maybe some orange juice, all those things spiked my blood sugar insulin through the roof. So then I'm, you know, sitting 10am, I'm in my English class and I can't keep my eyes open, right? I'm sleeping. I'm super thirsty. My, you know, my blood sugar's going up and down. I've got reactive hypoglycemia and I can't concentrate, right? And I couldn't get a form well in school. So it affects people in a lot of different ways. And for many people, it's going to cause that weight gain. But for others, you know, different body types, there's going to have a zero energy brain fog, right? Yeah. Trouble concentrating, ADHD, right? Absolutely. From the spike. And then what happens, of course, is then some well meaning person tells you, oh, go get a snack. You need to snack. That's the solution, right? No, the solution was to fix the foods that you're eating, right? And that's the whole problem. And I always think that it's such a crazy thing that people gain weight because they, you know, because they've been failed by our system that that sort of obsesses about calorie counts, right? Instead of the foods that we're eating, right? You've got to look at the foods. Are they natural foods? What's happening to the hormone systems in our body, right? That's what's important, not the number of calories. Remember, if you look at the energy balance equation, the energy balance equation says body fat equals calories and minus calories out. Okay, that's always true. If you simply rewrite that and say calories in and solve this simple algebra, so you can write it as calories in equals body fat plus calories out. In other words, for every calorie you eat, you can either store it or burn it. But which one does your body do? It all depends on the hormones. When you ate your breakfast of Cheerios and skim milk, you spiked your insulin, you told your body store all these calories as fat, right? So calories in equals, you know, you can store it or burn it. You store it all of it. Well, you had nothing to burn. Couldn't stay awake at 10 a.m. Now you go get yourself a muffin. Same thing. You spike your insulin, all those calories go into body fat and then there's nothing to burn. You're ravenous by lunchtime. Then as you gain weight, those calories people blame you. They turn around and blame you. They say you didn't want it enough. You're so lazy. You have no willpower. But it wasn't true. It was that the foods you ate were not the right foods for you. But that all stems from this lack of understanding of the whole process of sort of digestion, absorption, hormones, weight gain. It's a complex system. I get it. 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So you on diet and lifestyle strategies are going to help optimize, like you mentioned, cortisol, your insulin, all these for fat burning or fat storage hormones. So you know something I always talk about is like an insulin friendly diet or a blood sugar stabilizing diet. Right. And that's going to be really easy on your stress hormones. That's going to allow you to produce hormones that are going to help you burn fat more effectively and keep your insulin nobles down. Yeah. And then you know that's that's the homeostatic hunger. That's not even the whole story, which is actually fascinating to me because there's a whole story in there with all these different hormones and yet that's only like a third of the actual picture because there's this whole other side, which is hedonic hunger. That is you don't eat simply because you're hungry, physically hungry. There's this emotional hunger. That is food can make you feel good. We all know that. That's why you celebrate with feasts and you know birthday cake and all this sort of stuff. It's like dessert. Nobody eats dessert because they're physically hungry. You just ate a full dinner. You eat it because it makes you feel good and it tastes good. Right. Which means that it can be prone to stimulating excess eating because of the hedonic hunger and that's where the ultra processed foods really starts to take a toll on us because the ultra processed foods have been engineered basically to maximize this hedonic hunger and sometimes tipping over into food addiction and the other thing is that they minimize satiety. So, if you think about ultra processed foods, their goal food companies goal and they're not evil but they want to make a lot of money. You make a lot of money by selling a lot of food. If you want to sell a lot of food, the people can't be getting full on your food because then they're not going to eat as much. You want a food that they can keep eating and not feel full. So, if you think about ultra processed food, Cheetos or cookies, I can easily go through a whole bag of cookies. It's not that hard. Like, I could do it. I could eat a whole bag of chips if I wanted to. I don't get full but I couldn't eat 30 hamburgers. I like hamburgers. I love hamburger, I love fish. I just can't keep eating steak. It's impossible. Everybody knows that because they have those restaurants that say eat 60 ounces of steak in an hour and you'll get it for free. They're not giving a lot of away, a lot of free steaks. Why? Because those natural foods stimulate natural satiety hormones that tell you to stop eating and they're very powerful. You get nauseated basically, right? If you're start trying to eat those, you know, that 30th hot dog, like, you know, those hot dog eating competitions and stuff. You know, I can't do it because I can't overcome my that that sort of satiety. I'll get full after a couple and I'll have to stop. I can't do it, right? But the whole point is that it can sometimes tip into so the ultra processed foods, that's where it becomes extra dangerous because you're minimizing homeostatic satiety. You're you're maximizing homeostatic hunger. At the same time, you're maximizing hedonic hunger because you're adding all these chemicals. You're refining all these things and it sometimes tips into food addiction which is such an interesting topic because there's more and more interest in food addictions and you know, some people say, well, you know, food is different because you can't not eat food. I'm like, that's not the point, right? You just want to avoid ultra processed foods. Nobody gets addicted to natural foods like I like beef. I like, you know, steak. I'm not addicted to steak. People do say they're addicted to pizza. They're addicted to chocolate. They're addicted to sweets. They're addicted to bread. Absolutely. They're onto something here and the thing about addiction is that you need to treat it like an addiction, right? You can't say to somebody, okay, you know, I'm addicted to refined carbohydrates. Everything in moderation. It's like, what if I said I'm addicted to heroin and you said heroin in moderation? I'd say you're the stupidest therapist I've ever met. I'm addicted to alcohol. I'm an alcoholic. Oh, make sure you take it in moderation. No, you'd be the worst therapist ever. If you're addicted to alcohol, you need to abstain from alcohol. That one drink puts you back on the wagon, right? You fall off the wagon. The whole thing is that if it's an addiction, you need to take it that seriously and it's not that you have to not eat food. You have to not eat the foods you're addicted to. If you're addicted to alcohol, I don't say don't drink green tea. Why would I say that? That's stupid, right? Yet these same people say, well, food addiction is not real because you have to eat food. Yeah, but I'm not addicted. Like, who's it? Who ever says I'm addicted to salmon? I'm addicted to eggplant. I love salmon. I love eggplant. I'm not addicted to it in any way. Right. But I could easily see that some people are addicted to ultra processed foods because they maximize the sadonic hunger. They have no satiety. If you ever watch those shows like, you know, my thousand pound life or whatever, you know, those ones on TLC. You can see those people are addicted. It's obvious. They cannot stop eating even though they know it is killing them. Same thing you see in heroin. Same thing you see in alcoholics. Alcoholics aren't stupid. They know it's killing them. They still can't stop. So are the drug addicts. They know it's killing them. They're drug addicts. They're not idiots. They know it's killing them. They still can't stop. Same thing you see on these shows. Those people are addicted to ultra processed foods. They're eating pizzas like you see what they're eating. French fries and pizzas and chips and all this sort of stuff. Right. How many times do you see somebody like that eating large bowls of salad and three eggs? Right. Never. I've never seen that. And you know, one of the issues when they do eat that, say they eat a healthier meal, they still have the hedonic hunger oftentimes because it hasn't been long enough, right? They haven't withdrawn long enough. And so then they are, oh, looking over at their pantry. Oh, maybe just maybe just a few cookies, right? Exactly. And that's where knowing that it's an addiction is important because you say no, you cannot have those cookies the same way you tell an alcoholic. No, you can't have that one drink because that's going to significantly set you back, right? Yet when it's a cookie and people are addicted to cookies, oh, hey, two cookies is not so bad. It's like, what are you stupid? No, if they're addicted, you need to treat it seriously like an addiction. And it becomes clear from the research that there's a good percentage of people, you know, 20, 30% of overweight people who are actually addicted. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, well, you know, food addiction and just eating, overeating in general, it's kind of like the acceptable, I guess you could say the acceptable addiction in our society. Yeah, right. And it happens with ultra processed foods because you can compare the United States where 70% of the diet is ultra processed to Italy where it's about 20, 25%. Italians love their food. Everybody knows that. It's like they love their pasta, they love their pizza, they love their focaccia. So it's not like they don't love food. They absolutely love food, but they love real food. And you look at their obesity rates, it's one of the lowest in Europe. It's much, much lower than the United States. And why? It's not the calories. Because some of those foods are carbs. It's not even necessarily the carbs. It's the processing of those carbs because it affects the way that our body processes the foods, right? So if you process food, our body handles it differently. The hormones that are released are quite different, much more insulin and not just the insulin, but how quickly it goes up is the problem. So if you think about addictions and stuff, when you spike that glucose and insulin really quickly, that's a problem because think about tobacco smoking. You smoke it because you get the nicotine directly into the blood vessels through the lungs. You don't eat it, right? Because then the absorption is much slower. So instead of this massive spike like this, which gives you this massive high, you get this slow rise. That's why you use nicotine gum when you're trying to wean yourself off. Heroin addicts, they inject it directly into their veins. It's not because injection is fun. It's hard to do it. They have needle tracks. It's all these problems with injection. Why? Because it gives them this massive high like that. Or you switch them to methadone, which is this thing we use for treatment of addiction, where you get this much slower rise, right? So it couldn't be the same total amount, but the insulin rise, the the nicotine rise, how quickly it goes up plays a huge role. And that's where the processing makes a difference because our body absorbs it and digests it so quickly that you get this massive spike. So all those, you know, refined carbohydrates, a lot of those breakfast cereals, they just give you this massive spike as opposed to if you're eating natural carbohydrates, you get this sort of slow rise and slow fall, which our body can handle. What our body can't handle is the processing of that. Yeah, and you talked about this great study here too. I was actually just reading this this morning, I read in my my sauna every morning and I was going through this study. It's this 2019 cell metabolism study. It had let's see both diets. So basically these 20 participants ate either minimally processed food or ultra processed foods. Both diets contain the same nutrients, the same amount of sugar, fat, protein, sodium, carbohydrates and fiber. And they were allowed to eat as much or as little as they liked. And the people eating the ultra processed food diet ate about 500 calories more per day, about 40% faster. So they were eating their food faster, probably related to that kind of hedonic dopamine hip. They ate more carbs and fats and about the same level of protein. They ended up gaining three pounds more weight. They showed increased insulin as measured by C peptide showed increased respiratory quotient, meaning that they were burning carbs and they burned they also they're actually started burning more calories 171 extra calories but again, they were eating 500 more calories. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting because again, you have to go beyond the calories and say it's the processing. By processing it, they eat it faster, right? Because it's softer, it's texturized and all this sort of stuff, right? So you can eat it faster, which gives you this sort of big hit in terms of hedonic pleasure. And then you're going to want more because it also hasn't reduced your hunger to the same extent. So it's a very interesting study and set off a lot of interest in the ultra processed foods and how processing changes things. And I said out in the hunger code, a lot of the reasons the ultra processing is bad for you is because when you look at the homeostatic hunger, all the hormonal sort of pieces of that, what you've done is almost the exact opposite of what you want if you're trying to maintain your body weight. And that's not that's not by accident. It's by design because again, food companies, their goal is to make more money. They make more money when you buy more food, you buy more food when you eat more food, you eat more food if the food does not make you full, right? And you think that follow these two because if you're if you walk down that aisle and you're thinking you may have gone into that grocery store fully satiated, but you walk down that aisle and you smell that you know the Cheetos or whatever it is and you just get this feeling like your dopamine already starts going up a little bit, right? Or the anticipatory dopamine, you're going to buy a couple bags of that. Exactly. I mean, that's exactly, you know, that's why Costco used to give out so many samples and stuff, right? Because get a little bit and then boom, you've bought it, right? And the whole the whole system is almost set up against us. And this is important because it doesn't happen in other countries. I mean, I think the argument's so crazy, like so, you know, how food looks also plays a role. So in the United States, the fruit lutes or whatever use these lead based food dyes to make them bright and colorful so that kids will eat them. And then finally, I think this year they banned them. It's like, um, duh, that's like no brainer. Is it not like every other country in the world practically has banned these stupid food dyes that make your food look good. So you'll eat more of this unhealthy food. And in the United States, they're like, okay, in 2025, now that we've got, you know, now we're gonna do it. Oh my God, like structure is to sell more and create more addictive quality foods rather than, hey, let's create the healthiest foods are going to nourish our society. Yeah. And I think that's that's part of the problem. I mean, people like to blame the individual, but it's not the individual. The system is stacked against you. Like the United States allows all this ultra processed food in his diet without speaking up, right? Until now, honestly, right? So that's why I'm sort of happy that people are talking about this because other countries have, they're vehemently against these ultra processed foods like Italy, Japan, they have very low rates that you try and introduce these, you know, highly processed foods. They're like, yuck, that is not food. Food looks like this and they'll, you know, put on a slab of fish or something like that, right? You go watch these shows in Spain, they're like, oh, we get it fresh from the sea. This is what you eat and it's all this, you know, fresh seafood and it's delicious, obviously. It looks delicious. It's like, but it's real food. Your body knows how to handle it. It's not going to go haywire on you. And the reason our body or hormones go haywire in that homeostatic hunger is because you've messed with the food by adding all these chemicals. There's MSG, there's texturizers, there's emulsifiers, there's stuff for mouthfeel, there's, you know, they remove the fat so that it doesn't spur, they remove the protein so you can eat it faster. There's all these different tricks that the food companies do. Yeah. And you need to know about this because if you don't, you're going to say, hey, that's the same number of calories. It's sort of like the whole diet soda argument, right? And everybody's like diet soda doesn't cause obesity because there's no calories. That's not the problem. The problem is what does it do to your hunger? Right. Because if that diet soda with its sweet chemical is making you more hungry, then that is going to make you gain weight. It's not the calories. It's the hunger. Same with the ozempic. Ozempic has no calories. It doesn't block you from eating calories. It reduces your hunger. That's the lesson that we should take. You got to focus on it. So you got to focus on GLP one, GIP protein, for example, is one of the biggest stimulants of GLP one. And now everybody's focused on eating protein. Good idea. Good idea. Eat less of the refined carbohydrates. Eat less of the processed foods. Eat more of the natural proteins because that is what's going to increase your GLP one temporarily because if that's what it's supposed to do and make you full, everybody knows that you eat, you know, steak and eggs and breakfast, tons of protein, you're full. You don't want to eat at 10 o'clock. You'll be like, no, thank you. When I help people with intermittent fasting, for example, one of the things I tell them to do is drink water either between meals or in the morning when they first make up. Most people are naturally dehydrated early in the day. Anyways, you drink water, it stretches out your stomach receptors, it suppresses ghrelin, your hunger hormone release, right? And you naturally feel more satiated. You know, that's another thing that how bulky a food is impacts your satiety. Why? Because if you eat vegetables, which are very bulky, right? They're bulky for the amount of calories they have, but they basically fill up your stomach, they stretch your stomach, you activate stretch receptors in the stomach, which are called baroreceptors, which signal to your brain, you're full. Stop eating, right? So the point is that if you take away all that fiber, if you take away all that bulk, which is what ultra processed foods do, then you're reducing one further mechanism of that homeostatic system, right? Now, if you eat salad all day, broccoli and cauliflower and these big bulky vegetables, you're going to be full. You're going to be full because you've activated those systems, but it's not the calories that's the difference. It's the bulk that's the difference. But there's a lot of things that you have to know about and that's where I think that's where it is. The intermittent fasting is a fascinating sort of topic because you know, the fasting itself, everybody thinks that they're going, their hunger is just going to go through the roof, right? And it's actually the opposite as people get used to fasting longer and longer. What happens is that the body finds it easier to pull those calories out of storage. That's why you have calories in storage, right? When you eat, you store calories as body fat. It's just a store of calories. When you don't eat, you're going to pull them out. As you fast, you're going to make it easier for your body to pull those those calories back out because you're doing it more frequently. So people come back to me and they say, you know what, I can't eat that much anymore. And I'm like, perfect. If you don't want to eat so much anymore, then you're working with your body to lose weight, not against your body. That's why these calorie restriction diets are so unsuccessful. And the actual stats are are incredible. Like if you look at the success rate of these calorie restricted diets, and they've done these and you know, large databases of hundreds of thousands of people, the likelihood of getting to a normal body weight, if you're obese, is something like, you know, the zik 0.2% or something like that. It's like a 99.7% failure rate. So every doctor knows this, you tell somebody to restrict their calories, you know, they're not going to lose weight. So why would you tell them that advice? It's crazy. And the trainers that do get some success with it, it's not necessarily the calorie restriction, which they probably think it is, it's because they switched them to more whole foods and typically higher protein, higher protein, whole foods. So when you even if you're eating carbohydrates like beans and stuff, right, they're bulky, they fill you up and then the exercise itself, I mean, exercise is a relatively inefficient way. But you got to understand that exercise also does raise your sympathetic tone. So you actually reduce hunger while you're exercising. So there is some small effect of that and some people get a large effect of that. So it does affect things in in many different ways. Walking after a meal, for example, reduces that insulin spike significantly, like 30% or something like that. So therefore, that extra little bit of exercise that you're getting isn't just that you're burning calories, it's also affecting your hormones that tell your body to leave those calories out there for you to use. Don't store as many, right? That's what happens when you sort of lower that insulin spike. It's telling your body to leave some of that out there for you to use and therefore you're going to stay full and not going to want to snack, you know, at 11pm. And that's how you get that fat thermostat down. So if your insulin levels are high, that you're going to have a higher fat thermostat. And if you want to lose 10 pounds, whatever it is, you got to lower the fat thermostat. One of the keys there is to get that insulin down on a higher basis. Yeah. One of the things that's so interesting is that even if you go back 50, 60 years, you see people have known about this fat thermostat, right? So they've studied this and I remember reading papers from the 60s where they're talking about if you get somebody who's normal weight, then they become obese because you force feed them, they find it very, very easy to go back down to their normal weight. But you take somebody who's normally overweight or obese, get them down to that same weight. They have real trouble. Their metabolic rate like just plummets. And it's because it's where that sort of fat thermostat. So they already knew about this 70 years ago. It makes total sense. Certain things will raise your fat thermostat, certain things will lower it, but you need to know what raises and what lowers it if you want to be successful. It's sort of like if you go in, the whole calories and calories out thing is such a distraction because it's like if you go into a room and it's really hot, do you go, huh, it's all about heat in minus heat out. So let me see where the heat is going up too high. Or do you say the thermostat is too high? Let me adjust the thermostat down. Because this whole idea, if you go into a room that's too hot and you say, heat in minus heat out, let me bring in a little portable air conditioner. I'll turn it on and that's going to fix the problem. But it doesn't. Why? Because as you cool the room, the thermostat is going to sense it, bump up the heat and you're going to lose, right? You need to turn down the thermostat. You don't want to just bring in like a portable heater or portable air conditioner because that's not going to work. And that's exactly the approach that we've taken with this calorie restriction diet. It's so unsuccessful. It's not like nobody's ever tried calorie restriction. Like everybody's tried it and it just doesn't work. It's not. You got it. Got it. And it oftentimes just leads people to have kind of a a defeatist mentality because I've tried that. Right. It was too restrictive. I couldn't do it. I felt terrible doing it. And you know, this is why I highly recommend you guys go out and get this book, The Hunger Code, because it's really a more personalized approach. And you give so many great tips on things that help balance these hormones, help slow down the way, you know, gastric demigliding, for example, like where food sits in your stomach a little bit longer, which is what the GLP ones, the semi-glutides, the ozempics, that's actually what they do. And so you give so many tips on that, like eating the protein, like for example, taking vinegar before meals, tips like taking a walk after meals, so many great strategies to help stabilize your blood sugar, stabilize your hormones so you can burn fat for fuel and reduce hunger and cravings, right, which is going to allow you to ultimately get the results that you want. Absolutely. Yeah. I've tried to make this a little bit more actionable. So I included sort of three golden rules, which are sort of the most important rules, and then sort of 50 tips for weight loss to try and sort of adjust the that sort of homeostatic thing, try to deal with the hedonic hunger and then also the conditioned hunger, which is the social. So it's not just, you know, a physical hunger, but it's the emotional hunger and it's the social hunger that all three of them can be very important for you. And that's that's where, you know, that's that's where, you know, I think we need to evolve too, in order for people to really understand what's driving their own weight gain, but also the weight gain of the nation, right? It's like, we need to understand that all of these factors are important. So putting into place, you know, strategies for yourself or for, you know, your family or your friends is really, really important because it's not nobody lives in a vacuum, right? You're influenced by your circle of friends, your circle of family and the people you listen to. So if you have the right friends and family, it actually makes a massive difference to your own success rate. Why? Because if people around you are eating salad, you're gonna eat salad, right? If people around you are eating french fries, you're gonna eat french fries. That's the natural tendency. So you need to know that so that everybody can sort of succeed together. Yeah, great, great stuff. Dr. Jason Fung, thanks again so much for your time. The book is called The Hunger Code. Go out and check it out today. Also a great gift for anybody that you know and that hear that you care about that's struggling with hunger that wants to lose weight and do it a sustainable way. It's a great book to get them as well. Thanks again, Dr. Fung. Everybody thanks. Thanks so much, David. Well, that's all for this show and I want to thank you again for spending your valuable time with me today. And if there was something you heard in this interview that you have questions on or you want to dive into deeper, then DrJockers.com is the best place to go. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider taking just a quick moment and giving us a great review. Your reviews help us influence more people and transform more lives. And if you took something valuable away from this episode, then please share it with someone in your life. You know it can help. We'll see you soon on our future podcast. Be blessed, everybody.