Speaker 1 (00:00):
When researchers ask people which foods they struggle most to stop eating, the answers were remarkably consistent. Different people, different backgrounds, same results. So today I’m gonna walk you through five foods that consistently show up at the top of that list. And here’s what matters. These foods aren’t addictive because they’re bad. They’re addictive because of what’s built into them. So we’ll reveal each food one at a time and then open it up to show you the ingredients driving the craving. And along the way, I’ll share how I broke my own food additions, including eating a bag of M&Ms, a pound bag of M&Ms at a single sitting.

(01:01):
Let’s start. Number five. Now, this food shows up again and again when people talk about losing control. Cookies. Why? Well, sugar is in cookies and sugar that hits the bloodstream fast is a recipe for disaster. Let’s break it down. Sugar that’s absorbed rapidly spikes insulin levels. Insulin is pushed out by the pancreas to handle the sugar that appears in your blood. That sugar that appears in your blood is handled by that spike of insulin, which tries to remove that sugar from your blood by forcing it into your muscles. Unfortunately, if your muscles are full, and quite frankly, most of us, our muscles are full, the muscles have no room for that sugar. So insulin goes up higher and higher, trying to remove that sugar from the bloodstream. If it can’t get into the muscles, insulin is a fat storage hormone. And so that sugar, which can’t get into the muscles, is stored as fat.

(02:26):
Now, the second part of cookies is it uses refined flour. And anytime we take a whole food like wheat and we refine it into fine white particles, that food, like flour, behaves actually more powerfully than sugar itself. It actually has a higher glycemic index than table sugar. So we’ve got a one-two punch of sugar and sugar. The sugar actually stimulates a dopamine signal in our brain and makes you want more of that hit. That means you want it again and again. Now, interestingly, there’s been a lot of research that sugar, table sugar, is half glucose and half fructose, fruit sugar. It’s half and half. So the sugar in table sugar is called sucrose. Half glucose, half fructose. Here’s what is interesting. You could give humans or rats glucose, strictly glucose. And none of this happens. On the other hand, if you give them fructose, not only does all of what I’ve talked about happen in spades, but fructose feeds the demand in your brain for more of the same thing.

(04:09):
It actually stimulates hunger. And so it’s the perfect combination to give short-lived satisfaction, quick dopamine hit, but then the fructose in sugar drives the need for more and more of the exact same thing. And this has been repeated in human studies and animal studies. It’s actually the fructose in sugar. That’s the bad part. Now add to the fact that companies got smart and instead of using cane sugar, which is expensive, they realized that high fructose, corn sugar, corn syrup is whole lot cheaper to produce, has more fructose in the ratio of glucose to fructose, and is sweeter than cane sugar. So the company wins because it’s cheaper. You get more fructose that drives the urge for more, and it’s no wonder that I could consume a pound bag of M&M peanuts and still want more. So it’s the fructose that’s actually driving this loop. And one of the things that I realized once I learned this mechanism that this wasn’t a willpower problem on my part, these were chemical reactions that were driving my need to keep eating this stuff.

(05:55):
And again, once you understand that this chemical reaction, which is controllable by understanding what it’s going to do to you, that was one of the easiest things for me to stop eating. How about number four? Now, this one isn’t just about taste. It’s about how it makes you feel, and that’s chocolate. Chocolate is one of the just wonderful compounds. It’s sugar plus fat, plus compounds in cacao, cocoa, that actually affect mood and reward pathways. So you get comfort and stimulation at the exact same time. And this is why chocolate cravings often feel so emotional. Now, on the other hand, there are definite benefits of dark chocolate. They range from brain health, they range from heart health, they range from memory health. There’s a lot of good things about dark chocolate, but most of the chocolate in America has been treated with what’s called alkalinization or dutching to bind all the polyphenols that chocolate has benefits for.

(07:19):
So yeah, an ounce of chocolate is probably a good idea as long as it’s extra dark chocolate. Now, how do you stop at one ounce? Here’s my trick. You’re really looking for the sugar in chocolate, and the easiest way is keep cranking up the percentage of cacao in your chocolate bar. Start at a minimum of, like, 72% dark chocolate cacao, but work your way up. Go to 80. Go to 85. Go to 90. The higher you go, the less sugar, and quite frankly, the less sugary, wonderful flavor that you get. But the higher you go, the higher the benefit in polyphenols. It’s really difficult, even for me, to eat a lot of 90, 95% dark chocolate. There’s just no reward system involved. So kick up the percentage of cacao in your chocolate and you’ll be amazed at how it’ll ke- keep you under control. All right.

(08:35):
Number three in the survey, chips. Now, this probably doesn’t need much explanation. Chips are salt, fat, and refined starch. Now, salt amplifies pleasure. I hope everyone realizes that we are salt-seeking organisms. Salt is a very rare substance available on this earth. In fact, salt was so important that ancient currencies were actually based on the weight in salt. The expression, “He’s worth his weight in salt,” is actually true. Slaves were traded for salt, or salt was traded for slaves. Salt is very rare. We are one of the few organisms that sweats salt. And so we are always under evolutionary pressure to find salt because it’s so rare. So salt hits a pleasure center. Now, fat improves mouth feel. We also know that long ago, fat was a very good delivery device for fat soluble vitamins. So the combination of salt and fat hits so many evolutionary switches, it’s hard to stop.

(10:05):
The refined starches and chips … Again, when you eat a whole food, whole, breaking down the starches, let’s just take a potato, for example, takes a long time for our digestive enzymes to break down the starches in a whole potato. On the other hand, if you finally slice that potato into rapidly breaking down starch, it breaks down quickly, gives you a sugar hit, and so the salt doesn’t increase your fullness. The starch breaks down quickly. The fat improves the mouth fill, and like the famous ad for a potato chip company, bet you can’t just eat one. And that increases the reach back behavior to get more because evolutionary, this was a really good idea, not anymore. So how do you stop this? Well, quite frankly, the less salt you add to almost any food, the less likely you are to have that reach back factor.

(11:26):
The second thing, quite frankly, is the less you process, in these cases, starches, the less you will turn them into sugar rapidly, and the less you’ll crave of them. It’s one thing to eat a bag of potato chips, and quite another thing to eat two boiled potatoes without salt. Think how you would handle either of those two scenarios. Number two, it’s cold, it’s creamy, and it’s really hard to stop mid bite. Are you guessing what number two is? You’re right. It’s ice cream. Now, again, doesn’t have to take a lot of figuring out why this is so wonderful. Number one, you’ve got sugar, which hits your dopamine receptors fast. You’ve got fat, which stretches out the reward signal. Now, the texture actually delays these stop cues that you would get, and the reward lasts longer than the filling of fullness. So how do you personally give it up?

(12:49):
Number one, make your own at home. I have many recipes online on how to make healthy ice cream, using avocados, using extra dark chocolate, using alulose, a natural sugar that does not spike your sugar. In fact, it lowers sugar. So you can have your cake and eat it too. In this case, you can have those feelings, that pleasurable feeling that you want in your mouth, but that’s not going to undo your health. So make it at home, and it’s actually really easy to do. Ice cream makers that you can use at home are really cheap. You can find them at Target, you can find them online. They’re like 49 bucks. And quite frankly, if you’ve looked at the cost of a pine of ice cream recently, and for making it at homes, you’ve, you’ve done the job of what that ice cream maker did. All right.

(13:52):
Finally, take a guess what the number one most addicting food on surveys was. Yeah, you guessed it. Pizza. Why? Well, first of all, there’s oodles of sugar in the sauce. It may say tomato sauce, but let’s be realistic. Most tomato sauces have a lot of extra added sugar. There’s refined flour in the crust, which breaks down rapidly into sugar. There’s fat in the cheese. There’s salt everywhere. So you get this hit of fast energy, you get all the amplified reward signals, and sadly, you have delayed, I’m full signals. There is nothing that actually stimulates this feeling of, “I’m full.” One of the reasons for that, which I haven’t mentioned up until now, is that everything that we talked about preceding, none of these foods have any soluble or for that matter, insoluble fiber. And we have to realize that, again, our great-great-grandparents ate whole food, and they ate that food whole.

(15:18):
When we ate it like that, there was a lot of leftover, starches, soluble fibers that we couldn’t adjust, but the gut buddies that live down in our colon could. And so we gave them what they needed to eat, and they made signals, literally text messages that went to our brain and said, “Hey, our needs are met. We’re full. Thanks very much. You don’t have to keep eating.” And it’s called the gut-centric theory of hunger. And those of you are, who are fascinated by GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic, like Zepbound, should realize that it’s actually our gut bacteria that make GLP-1 that goes to your brain and says, “Hey, you’re full. Don’t have to eat anymore.” You don’t need to inject it to get that feeling. You just have to give your gut bacteria what they need to eat. And one of the best places to start is eating foods whole rather than broken down.

(16:32):
So make these things with better ingredients and better portions. The other thing that’s important to realize that breaking this pattern, you don’t have to think you are a undisciplined person. This is not about willpower. All of this is about repeated exposure to ingredient combinations designed to keep you eating. And you have to realize that food chemists study the dopamine responses in people’s brains. People undergo PET scans and MRIs when they are given these foods and they light up the pleasure centers like nothing, and you can design added ingredients that hit these pleasure centers even better. So once I realized this, my need for M&M’s disappeared, my diet Coke disappeared, not overnight, but permanently. I haven’t had a Diet Coke in over 30 years. I don’t think I’ve knowingly eaten an M&M, uh, since that time. Not that I probably could consume an entire bag of them, but when knowledge comes power.

(17:57):
And if I can do it, you can too. So those are the five worst troublemakers, and they all pretty much do the same thing to you. They did it to me, and it’s a new year, and let’s try to stay away from these troublemakers.

Speaker 2 (18:21):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.