Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L.
is Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology, with an emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. His research and clinical practice has focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lustig holds a Bachelor’s in Science from MIT, a Doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University. Medical College, and a Master’s of Studies in Law from U.C. Hastings College of the Law.
Dr. Lustig has fostered a global discussion of metabolic health and nutrition, exposing some of the leading myths that underlie the current pandemic of diet-related disease. He believes the food business, by pushing processed food loaded with sugar, has hacked our bodies and minds to pursue pleasure instead of happiness; fostering today’s epidemics of addiction and depression. Yet by focusing on real food, we can beat the odds against sugar, processed food, obesity, and disease.
Dr. Lustig speaks all over the world. Click here for more information about booking Dr. Lustig to speak at your event.
Dr. Lustig’s latest book is
Metabolical
The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine.
You’ve heard of the ‘fog of war’? What about the ‘fog of food’? Can you wade through the flood of the soft drinks aisle? Or through the tundra of the frozen food aisle? Can you extricate yourself from the debris in the chips aisle? We lost 50,000 lives in Vietnam. But we lose hundreds of thousands every year from the damage done in the supermarket.
Sugar is now the most ubiquitous foodstuff worldwide, and has been added to virtually every processed food, limiting consumer choice and the ability to avoid it. Approximately 80 percent of the 6,000,000 consumer packaged foods in the United States have added caloric sweeteners.
Sugar’s not dangerous because of its calories, or because it makes you fat. Sugar is dangerous because it’s sugar. It’s not nutrition. When consumed in excess, it’s a toxin. And it’s addictive.
There is nothing that will improve your health, your well-being, your achievement, your sense of accomplishment, your sense of community, and the health and happiness of your family as much as cooking yourself and enjoying a meal with others.
Every substance and behavior that drives up your reward triggers will just as quickly drive down your reward receptors.
Prevention is not just better than cure, prevention IS the cure.
What’s the difference between marketing and propaganda?
The truth.
The food industry has propagandized the last 40 years of nutritional information.
They got rich, and we got sick.
Time to embrace the real science of real food.
The six cellular pathways to longevity are the same pathways to chronic metabolic disease:
- Glycation
- Oxidative stress
- Inflammation
- Mitochondrial dysfunction
- Insulin resistance
- Membrane instability
And none of these pathways are druggable, except maybe inflammation, and that may be downstream of the other five.
Two inconvenient truths:
1. There is no medicalized prevention for chronic metabolic disease. There’s just long-term treatment.
2. You can’t fix healthcare until you fix health. You can’t fix health until you fix diet. And, you can’t fix diet until you know what the hell is wrong.
It’s not about obesity, it never was.
The key to the kingdom is that it is not about obesity, it is about metabolic dysfunction and anyone can get it, and that’s what makes it a public health crisis, because obesity is a result of the problem, not the cause.
I never want to hear any of you talk about the obesity epidemic ever again, because that is the food industry’s mantra, that is what they use to obfuscate the truth, and you play right into it when you talk about it.
All roads lead to metabolism.
You are not what you eat. You are what you metabolize.
Modern Medicine is not the solution to the problem, Modern Medicine IS the problem.
You don’t die of obesity; you die of the diseases that “travel” with it. It’s these metabolic decompensations that make obesity the scourge that it is. Diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, and dementia–the things that kill you under the concept of “metabolic syndrome.
The key to the chronic disease kingdom is that there are not four separate problems (nutrition, metabolism, inflammation, immunity); there’s only one and they are all related. Screw up one and you screw up the other three.
