Dr. Bookless & Friends
Episode 5337
Topic: Sugar
Special Guest: Dr. Phillip Pepper
Dr. David G. Bouklas: Hi everybody. Today’s guest is Dr. Phillip Pepper.
Dr. Phillip Pepper: You can just call me Dr. PP for short. I have been practicing professional nutrition for fifteen years. Are you laughing?
David G. Bouklas: I’m so sorry. You have one of the funniest names I’ve ever seen. I get it. Both of your names were already taken. Can I just call you Dr. Pepper? And we’re here today to talk about sugar! I didn’t even really make the connection until now.
Dr. Pepper: My name was not a problem until I traveled to America. I do not like nor recommend soda and I do not wish to be associated with the cola brand. I was born in the backseat of a bus during the height of the Soviet Union. I was raised in Poland by two dairy farmers. We lived on a farm called the Pepper Farm in the small village of Ridge, Poland. Things were not always happy. Our cows were lost during the great rainstorm of 1974. My father was a gambler from Georgia. One day, soon after the rainstorm, he bet it all and lost, and the family could no longer afford to buy sweet cake from the local baker. It was during this period of time, a few months, where my mother discovered she was addicted to the sweet cakes. Truly, it was the sugar in the cake that she was addicted to. She almost wound up on the wrong end of a gun. It was a very hard time and I was forced to flee the country for many years, until after the fall of the Soviet Union. I am happy to say that they are both now fully recovered and living healthy lives, living well past their 100s, having been married for over 85 years.
David G. Bouklas: Incredible story, Dr. Pepper. Touching. Indeed, sugar may be the most abused substance in the world.
Dr. Pepper: My mother ate sweet cakes from the local baker every day after every meal. Each sweet cake may have had at least 500 grams of sugar, it is estimated. It wasn’t until our period of hardship that she became extremely irritable, and at first we thought it was due to losing the dairy cows, but in reality it was the lack of sweet cakes in her diet, and the lack of sugar therein, that brought her to much physical and emotional distress for a long period of time.
David G. Bouklas: Sugar is used in so much cooking now. It’s possible that like everybody is addicted to sugar and may not even realize.
Dr. Pepper: Well, I wouldn’t go nearly so far as to say everyone. But certainly, an alarmingly large percentage of the population consumes large quantities of sugar as part of their diet and subsequently develop sugar cravings. By the time my Polish family was able to afford sweet cakes again, my mother realized she could just put extra sugar into all of the cooking to alleviate her craving. It was around this time that my interest in nutrition began, and I eventually got my doctorate in Argentina studying nutrition. I married an Argentinian woman who now creates vegan pizza with no sugar. At first we were mocked by the community at large, and although we still face some ridicule from the traditional Argentinian pizza community, after some time people started to come around and now we run a very successful pizzeria business.
David G. Bouklas: Fascinating! For sure, the research on sugar does not show very friendly things.
Dr. Pepper: The way I see it is we are living in a world where a dangerous drug like sugar is put into nearly every big food product and most of the world’s population is addicted to it. It’s all by design.
David G. Bouklas: Well, it’s clearly evident that sugar is a heavy ingredient in many food products.
Dr. Pepper: It’s in everything. What may not be immediately apparent to most people is that sugar is an addictive drug. You need to start seeing sugar and drugs such as cocaine or heroin on a similar level. ‘Big Food’ companies started off by selling sugary sodas like Coca-Cola, etcetera…
David G. Bouklas: …and Dr. Pepper?
Dr. Pepper: Ok, this cola brand was never a thing in Poland, I didn’t learn this until much later, it seems to be only a joke for you Americans. Let it be known that I have no relation whatsoever to this so called cola brand – it is purely a coincidence.
David G. Bouklas: It’s hilarious.
Dr. Pepper: Excuse me, but I could never advocate consuming cola, at all. I am a serious doctor who wants to help people. You can just call me Dr. P.P., please.
David G. Bouklas: No way! I’m cracking up, dude!
Dr. Pepper: Anyway, to the point here: companies are pumping upwards of 38 grams of pure sucrose into a can and getting people hooked on the stuff early on in a person’s life. That may even be a conservative number. Let’s think back to some time ago, generations ago. Once a majority of the population is hooked, they slowly start adding sugar into packaged/canned food products. Even small amounts of sugar are enough for addicts to prefer one product over another. Next, they take on the dairy – they remove all the good natural dairy fats and replace it with copious amounts of sugar. Coming from a family of dairy farmers who truly treated our cows with respect and care, I find factory farming to be a horrifying practice which enslaves the animals and I would not advocate anyone buying milk or most milk products. My family no longer consumes milk products except from our dear friend Alberta who is literally a cow who roams around our small Argentinian mountain village and offers gifts of milk of her own volition, mooing gently and coming and going as she pleases. The local native tribes pray to Alberta, seeing her as a holy Brahmin spirit of the Gods. The milk is surely the best in the world. Another fascinating thing is that Alberta is over 52 years old and looks as young as a fresh little moo-ling, as I like to call them. Little moo-moos.
David G. Bouklas: Wow. I never really considered sugar being added to milk. Interesting.
Dr. Pepper: Due to the nature of how sugar works in the blood, when sugar level spike to toxic levels, insulin – which is a natural alarmed response of the body – kicks in to drop your glucose to much safer levels. That sudden drop causes a crash which, to the addict, feels like that it’s time for another fix. Appetites increase over time as your body craves real nutrition.
David G. Bouklas: Our body needs sugars to function, though.
Dr. Pepper: Well of course, but the market is completely saturated with products containing high levels of sugar which are pretty heavily advertised and consumed. Of course, it came out in research a long time ago that eating too much sugar directly causes weight gain. That was no good for business, so then we propagated this idea of calorie control by identifying sugar as a culprit for weight gain, but instead removing of the bad foods from our diet or those products ceasing to exist entirely, we now have a market begging for a solution, for sugar substitutes:
David G. Bouklas: We’re being sold fake sugar.
Dr. Pepper: Saccharin, Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Sucralose, Neotame, to name some of the bigger ones. Virtually all sugar-free food products contains one of these chemicals. Many of us don’t know what the long term affects of these chemicals are.
David G. Bouklas: I’ve read that Aspartame was discovered during experiments into mind control and I’d have to say it would be the perfect explanation why companies are pushing it out globally.
Dr. Pepper: I will not venture much into wild speculation without more research on my own behalf. But, I suppose I’ll try to explain what I can understand from my own learning and experience. ‘Big Food’ is on a war path to patent GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) crops, selling the idea that GMO foods are easier to grow and safer for farmers while running a hidden agenda to remove seeds from plants so that all that is left one day is laboratory-produced seeds which are genetically modified to the spec of ‘Big Food’. Coming from a family of Polish farmers who truly cared about our crops and animals, this makes me sad.
David G. Bouklas: There is something very dubious about trying to create a worldwide agricultural monopoly on seedless produce.
Dr. Pepper: One day we won’t be able to grow our own food, and the nutritional levels in GMOs will be controlled so consumption raises even further, filling the pockets of the food giants. Even though there’s been hundreds of studies pointing to GMO not showing any significant benefit over natural plants, the agenda is moving forward at full force.
David G. Bouklas: Some of that sounds too much like speculation, Dr. P.P. But okay, we can roll with it – Science shows the dangers of consuming too much sugar, and yet it’s virtually everywhere in cooking and in edible products. At the very least, sugar makes people fat.
Dr. Pepper: Genetics play a role, but evidence is clear that sugar can be a strong contributing factor toward weight gain. We are fat because they want us fat, in their eyes fat people are easier to control, easier to predict. When you control the food supply and their “drug” it is like having a 100 gram bag of heroin in your hand and waving it in front of a heroin addict; they will be your slave, nothing else matters but their fix. Morals and logic are the first to disappear.
David G. Bouklas: Who is ‘they’? I thought you said you were not going to speculate too much? This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Although I totally and completely get what you’re saying and I agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly.
Dr. Pepper: I know I sound crazy, but I’ve just helped my patient kick the sugar addiction. It has taken her four months of zero-sugar consumption to stop thinking that she needed to eat something sweet. I feel that two things could happen here. People can either finally wake up and realize how we’ve been poisoning ourselves for years or we can bury ourselves even further until we are mindless fat zombies walking around the streets staring at our black mirror phones unable to notice anything thats happening outside of our own personal bubbles we’ve been guided into.
David G. Bouklas: I suppose we could just eat fresh fruit instead and just never buy any packaged artificial food products ever again.
Dr. Pepper: Eating a healthy balance of fruit and vegetables is essential for healthy blood sugar levels. Eating too many sweets for a long period of time is a contributing factor to developing diabetes and obesity and other issues I won’t go into here.
David G. Bouklas: Indeed. Well, I’m actually out of time now, but it’s been really nice talking to you today, Phillip.
Dr. Pepper: Thank you for having me on your show! Take care, David.
Dr. Phillip Pepper is a Polish nutritionist currently based out of Argentina.
He co-manages a vegan pizza restaurant with his wife, three children, and their various cats, dogs, birds, pigs, horses, cows, chinchillas, and ferrets.