I get a team.
It's Harps, it's Gilasoper's, it's cook, it's us, it's the bloody you project. TIFs just over there at typ Central, drinking her own body weight in protein shaken. She gave David and Either brief That wouldn't have been a very pleasant experience for any of us if we didn't let her consume some calories before we press the go button.
You do have, you do have a very short light.
There's a very short timeline between when you go, oh, I think, I'm I'm hungry and now I'm a complete fucking lunatic and i want to punch someone.
That's not a big gap.
Is it.
When I worked in hospitality all those years ago, we used to put an order into the kitchen for food, and then when we went on break, someone would come and cover us. If my food came out, was placed in front of me, and a customer walked in, I can't tell you the level of self control and emotional turmoil it took me to just keep that in and and serve the people that were standing between me and my lunch items.
It seems like the spiritual revolution that was had in India is long gone. I don't want to point out, but it just seems like that might be a thing of the past.
As long as I've got a bit of food in my belly, I'm good.
So I don't think you can have like caveats on your spell. It's long as except when I'm punching people in the face. Then I'm pretty much the deli lama.
Oh well, oh well, are you a big eater?
Gillespoh not particularly, No, just normally I think I don't think I have chiffs appetite, and I certainly don't have So you've met my son James. He spends more time in the gym than I suspect you do. So heats like like there's no tomorrow. But I certainly don't eat that much.
My days of eating what I just want to eat whenever I want to eat their long gone.
Pity. They were good times, but it didn't work.
How wellgo the Moniker Jumbo? All through school I gave it a good crack, though I could have eaten for Australia. At one stage I was world class, world class glutton. Speaking of all things food, let's talk about sugar, and let's talk about whether or not sugar might be responsible for ADHD in kids?
Where did that?
Where did that research come from, or where did this idea come from?
Oh, look, it's been around for a long time, probably since the seventies. Really, there were a few early studies in the seventies that suggested that if you gave kids sugar, they'd start climbing the walls and bouncing off the ceiling fans and things like that, and that sort of caught on because it matches what a lot of parents will tell you. I mean, most friends will say, oh, yeah,
you can't. You can't give little Tristan, you know, a can of full strength coke or you're you know, you'll be cleaning up the place for the next month.
You know.
And and that's certainly how most people perceive it. They say, right, sugar, give kids sugar. There they suddenly become hyper And so it wasn't too far to draw the bow from there and say, okay, well then, since hyperactivity and ADHD pretty much mean the same thing to a lot of people, obviously sugar causes ADHD. So that it's been around for
a while. It's based more on myth than science, and when they eventually did get around to doing the science on this, and you can imagine it's not a high priority. You know, you're trying to kill cancer and you know all that sort of stuff. Finding out whether or not sugar makes kids crazy when everyone already knows the answer is not a high priority for funding. But when they actually I eventually did do the science, they found a
couple of things. Is that when they did placebo controlled trials where you know, they were feeding kids things that were sugar free as you know, given sweetness and so on, rather than sugar, and cross matching those against kids who were being given sugar, there was no discernible difference in
their behavior. The interesting thing was that if you told the parents of either group that their child their group was the one consuming the sugar, they would immediately spot the signs of hyperactivity if they thought their child had been given sugar. So we're entirely suggestible. And the kids themselves too, if you told them that they were given sugar, they would often act more hyperactive than if they weren't. So it was really more about saying, okay, people believe this.
They deeply believe this, parents included, and they believe it to the extent that if you do studies on this and tell people the wrong piece of information, they believe it anyway and start seeing what they believe. So I guess it's more of a commentary on a sort of a placebo effect than anything else.
That's so interesting because it is it's like I was going to say, it's like plus.
Ebo adhd you know.
And we've we've spoken before about plus ebos and no cibos, And we had a I don't know if I've ever told you this, we had a dud on called Professor Jeffrey Reddicker from Harvard Medical School.
Who's a a.
Like a PhD research and plus a doctor, plus a psychiatrist. And yeah, he talks about you know this stuff a lot. Obviously talks from a healer. Well not obviously because I haven't told you this, but he talks generally from a healing and a health point of view.
But it is pretty.
Amazing what manifests based on what we think think is happening rather than what is actually happening.
Well, we're designed. Evolution has designed us to recognize patterns. Patterns keep us alive. Spotting a pattern in a series of unrelated events is how we predict the behavior of other humans. And the behavior of animals and danger all around, and so we are optimized for pattern recognition, and often we can be convinced that a pattern exists where there
is no pattern. So, you know, the classic example of you know, you might spot you might notice that ice cream sales go up at exactly the same rate and at the same time as shark attacks, and you'll say, obviously, obviously ice cream causes shark attacks, or shark attack caused ice cream consumption. Clearly that's not the case, and that's one of the classic examples given for correlation does an
equal causation. But what often can be the case is that something else is causing both, So you know, and in that case, it might be that when the temperature goes up, people buy more ice cream and people swim more, so there's more shark attacks and more ice cream consumption. But obviously the shark attacks are not causing the ice cream consumption, and vice versa. But we spot those patterns and we start to attribute menning. I mean, this is all you studied this for years, Greig. I mean, this
is what psychology is. It's spotting patterns and making up bs stories about them.
You can it's Okay, no, no, I can't.
I don't want to offend Tiff. You know, she's easily offended, So.
Speaking offensive, I had a lady who's been following me for ten years who sent me a message the other day, totally within her rights and full respect from me, and she said, you used the sea the sea word. And apparently I was on the pod with two ladies, so Tiff must have been one of them, and she said, I can't follow you anymore. Okay, okay, that's not the first time. You must to the other episodes, but it is.
Here's an interesting factory about that word. So I spent I lived in Germany for a while as an exchangsion, and there's a word. The word for that in German is so rarely used that most women don't know it. So if you were to use it, you wouldn't offend most of the women around because they wouldn't know what you're talking about. So it's that extreme a rarity to use that word.
Well, and I think also, and I'm not I'm not saying it's okay everyone, and I'm not justifying, and I don't use it very often, but it's like when I say that word I'm not talking about anyone's anatomy. It's just I'm talking about something else, you know. But it's like, well, I get it, I get it anyway.
Well, it's like the word moist.
You probably that's way more offensive.
What is that?
It's funny that word because there's a show called eight out of Ten Cats does count Down?
Have you ever seen that show?
Yes?
And so the lady who is that I forget what's her actual proper title, But anyway, she does all the words.
She's a wordsmith.
She's the dictionary lady.
Yeah, the dictionary lady.
She she cannot cope with that word.
A lot of people can't cope with that word.
What's the trigger for you?
Get into it?
No?
All right, I just looking at TIFF's face, I get the feeling she doesn't want to talk about it.
Well, well without saying anything inappropriate. Is it just that it what to me? It doesn't do any It's like it could be a cake, a moist cake.
I see. But I think it's even just the sound of the word is like the I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but stop it.
Well, but it rhymes with hoist and joist and like, it's not if I say I'm going to hoist a bag over my shoulder, you're not cringing. But if I say I'm going to hoist a moist bag, I know what is that?
Why it does that?
But it's just.
There's probably some bre psychological explanation for it.
Just like there is.
I was talking, as I told you, I know we've gone off track, but fuck it is there a track.
Let's be honest.
We will get back to this because this has an interesting ending, but we will get back to it, all right.
Yeah.
I was doing a talk today, as I told you before, I won't say the organization, big organization, and that A lady was asking me some questions about, you know, just some psych stuff and I went, look and it you sprung to mind. Halfway through a corporate presentation, I thought to you, and I went, look, to be honest, psychology is one of the one of the crappier sciences. You know, It's not it's exactly it's not an exact science.
In the sense that astrology is a science.
Yeah, come on, come on, all right, So what does sugar cause ADHD? It appears not, so what is the insight to come out of this article.
Well, it appears that it actually does, but not in the way that people think it does. So the reality is that if you give a genuinely ADHD person sugar, it's likely to calm them down, not make them more excited. So remembering what ADHD actually is, it's a state of the brain, a chemical state of the brain which is created by addiction or stress or both where you become dopamine tolerant. And what that means is that you need more dopamine to get the same result as a normal person.
And so if someone is ADHD, it means that most of the time they do not have an enough dopamine to properly focus because their brain has become dopamine tolerant, so they need more of it than the average person, so most of the time they don't have enough. So the solution to that is ADHD drugs, which are stimulants in much the same way that cocaine is a stimulant or nicotine is a stimulant. You give that to a person with ADHD, it gives them a spike of dopamine.
It allows them to focus in that suddenly they have enough dopamine to hit that threshold the rest of us have all the time, and then they can focus. And people with ADHD tell you that when they take those drugs it allows them to feel normal. Suddenly their brain isn't going all over the place at a million miles an hour. They can just focus on the things they
need to focus on and get stuff done. And when they first accidentally notice that this is the way those drugs worked, they believed it to be a miracle because they gave it to kids who were ADHD because they were from an extremely stressful environment, ridden during the depression in the United States, and kids that couldn't focus and were a complete disaster in the classroom suddenly could get a lot done and did really, really well. So that's what the drugs do. But it's also what any addictive
substance does. And sugar is an addictive substance that produces a dopamine spike. So giving a person who has ADHD something like sugar should actually help them focus more than if you didn't give it to them. So paradoxically, in
the immediate thing giving them sugar actually helps them. The paradox there is that the thing that causes them to not be able to focus in the first place is getting too much stimulation, and so what you're actually doing is building in a long term hardening of that so that the person is actually worse when it comes to long term state of their brain in that that extra hit of dopamine stimulation makes them more dopamine tolerant for the next time, so it becomes harder and harder and
harder for them to feel normal from a hit of dopamine. So they've observed this in the drugs for a long time, which is that you can't just give people ADHD medication for the rest of their lives. Eventually they become get to the point where they're tolerant of it, and the same thing would happen here. So what that means coming back to that does sugar give you ADHD story is yes,
it does, but not immediately. Doesn't make a kid act hyperactively, which is why when the studies were done properly, there was no real obvious difference between the kids given the sugar and the ones not except when you told the parents that they'd been given sugar. So that's why you don't see it acutely in those studies, which is all they ever studied. But if you look at the mechanics
of it. The reality is that someone on a diet, a high sugar diet, is more likely to have ADHD than someone who isn't, simply because they're continuously receiving stimulation from the sugar.
So I know you're this is none of this is advice, anyone. None of this is medical advice. This is just two blokes and tiff chatting periodically. So when somebody is put on meds for ADHD and they build a tolerance, what typically happens. Do they just up the dose? Do they take them off it for a while, do they change the medication?
Initially? They initially they up the dose and then eventually they stop giving it to them. So it's and this is the same with many stimula and not don't just forget about ADHD, but any anything where a person is being give a stimulating drug. So for example, a method owned programs where people are being given a stimulant to try and bring them off something like heroin. Eventually they
become tolerant of it and it loses its effectiveness. And that's because the mechanism of addiction is that tolerance is the more you the more hits you get. The more you want, the more tolerant you become.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know.
I have a story to telling them to be careful how I tell, But I think I created an addict.
Not even being funny.
So I've shared on this show that every now and then, probably once a month, I will have a a nicorette. A two milligram nicorette tastes exactly like chewing gum. Right, and a friend of mine, we were talking about it and I told them, you know, and They're like, I'm going to give it a go. I'm like, no, well I go unless you I go. Not recommending anyway, they did it, and they rang me to dude. He's like, oh my god, how good is this. He goes, I've got so like, I'm so focused, blah blah blah. Again
everyone not a recommendation. And then I saw him about three weeks ago and he goes, I need to stop using nicorette now. I have maybe one two milligram a month, not even that now, and it just kind of it's like a new tropick. It just kind of cranks up my brain a bit. It's like having a strong coffee. Maybe he's having ten a day, ten a day. Yeah, he's like, if I take one, it doesn't do anything. I've got to take two or three at a time. And he does that three or four times a days.
And that is exactly the tolerance that we're talking about.
I'm like, you've got to stop. You've got to stop.
I'm like, what, Like, I never told him to it, even when he said I'm going to give it a go, I said, I wouldn't recommend it. I don't introduce something you don't need. And anyway, yeah, I feel bad. But yeah, he's like, he used to take one and it was amazing, and now two or three just begins to do something. But then he's got to depending on his day, he's got to light up again.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that's a beautiful example of what we've been talking about, which is the brain adjusts to that, to that addictive substance infusion, which is a nicotine. It's the addictive part of cigarettes, and the brain adjusts to that by moving up a marker in the brain called delta foss B that says how much don't mean you need
to get an effect. So your one a month is not having any effect at all because it takes you know, it surely it bumps it up, but then it decays down again by the time you know you have another one. But if you're having one a day and then that turns into two a day, or three a day, or four day or ten a day, then what you're doing is pushing that up higher and higher and higher and higher to the point where you are an addict, and stopping doing it is going to be extremely difficult because
the cravings will be very intense. You probably don't experience serious cravings for your nicorette because it sounds more like it's gotten into the realm of habit rather than by a chemical craving. So you just think, oh, I wouldn't mind this because I'll feel better, And as long as it stays at that low level, it probably isn't having any real effect on the addictive mechanism. And it's the
same thing goes here with sugar. So if we're looking at sugar, say the only sugar you know little Tristan got was once a year at his birthday party, then it's probably having no serious effect on him. But if the load he's getting at the birthday party is just twice as much as he gets every other day, of the year, which is very likely in Australia today because the average Australian is consuming about forty tea spoons of
sugar a day. And you know, as I said to you before, most people when I say that say, well, you know TIFFs have in mind because I'm not, you know, consuming forty tea spoons of sugar. No wha, I don't even add sugar to my tea. But the reality is, have a bowl of nutri grain in the morning and a glass of orange juice. You're at twenty tea spoons before you push back from breakfast, let alone go anywhere
near a mars bar or a coke. Yes, so if a kid is consuming forty teaspoons of sugar a day, then they are definitely on a pathway that would rewire their brain for addiction.
I think when you save forty tea spoons, I think people they they don't understand how much sugar is in how many foods that you would not think had a lot of sugar, right, And so we're not talking about teaspoons of sugar, well the equivalent, but yeah, this is
not necessarily added sugar. This is just high sugar foods that and what is interesting about this, and we've spoken about the lack of credibility and value of these ticks, these Foundation ticks that gets some kind of fucking nutritional seal of approval from some pretend organization that gets paid. Is that, like a lot of those you know, recommended and endorsed products are super high and sugar also.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean there was for a very long time there. I mean a tiff. I don't remember this because it happened, you know, more than a decade ago when she was a little girl, But Craig, you might remember it, maybe just you might remember. The Heart Foundation used to give ticks to McDonald's. Yeah, so McDonald's was proudly displaying its Heart Foundation tick menu, and many of the things on that tick menu had really shockingly high
levels of sugar in them. And when I asked the Heart Foundation how that could possibly be the case, the answer I got back was that sugar was not part of what they measured as part of their tick program. So the product could in fact be a bag of sugar. And because it had no other particularly fat, which was a thing they're so concerned with him. Because it had
no fat in it, it deserved a Heart Foundation tick. Now, I don't think any manufacturer everywhere ever went to the point of getting a Heart Foundation tick on a bag of marshmallows. But they could have, because if you looked at the criteria they were using, sugar didn't matter, and there's very little else in a bag of marshmallows, so you could have got the tick.
So ridiculous that there's not even in an organization like the Heart Foundation, you go, surely there's one employee that is at least smart enough to go, hey, fellas or ladies or whatever.
It is, has anyone thought this through?
But it wasn't obvious. So that's the interesting thing you had to ask. There was nowhere anywhere where they were publishing how they calculated whether or not a food received a tick. And the only reason I asked is I noticed that foods that just were mind blowing in him out of sugar. Like there was one food sold at the time called roll ups or something so like a compressed fruit fruit that you're supposed to put in your kid's lunch box and a little snack for them, and
it's all fruits, so it must be good. Was seventy eight percent sugar had a heart foundation tick, so mum and the supermarket. I was looking at it and say, oh, what'll I give you a little jeremy for school lunch. Oh this thing here, it's all fruit and it's got a heart foundation tick must be okay. But you couldn't have given him that much sugar, even if you'd given him a diet of pure Mars bars.
I love.
I remember now that they're just diabetes in a wrapper and rotten teeth. I remember one of my clients one hundred years ago used to her go to was dried apricots and nuts, and I'm like, so and so I got her in my office and I looked up. I said, anyway, the bottom line is one hundred grams of this is memory, So I think it's, if not exact, very close. One hundred grams of fresh apricot forty calories, one hundred grams of dried apricot two hundred and forty calories, so six
times the calories. And I would think six times give or take the sugar, because all it's been taken out is the water, so you just got left sugar.
Yeah. Well, you look at those, you know, the little little boxes of sultanas that they give kids at school. So if you were to expand them back to their original grapiness, it's about half a kilo of grapes. Yes, Now, no kid is going to be able to sit down, you know, and knock over half a kilold grapes and then eat their little lunch. But those sultanas absolutely, and so it's a really really fast way to give a kid a lot of sugar.
And you know, the other thing about sultanas that I remember reading, I don't know if it's still the same tip you could check, but on the side of a box the rest the ingredients said grapes and vegetable oil. There's soaked in oil. I'm right, So we're putting sugar in oil.
Yep, sugar in seed oil, which is a whole level of danger. So even it wasn't for sugar, you wouldn't want to eat it.
And it's like, not only is this shit terrible for you, people actually think it's a great choice. It's like, I'm a responsible parent, I'm giving my kids sultanas for lunch.
But why do they think that because the Hart Foundation's got a tick on the thing.
Well, I mean, yeah, it's like I just think one of the simplest things that mums and dads can do. And I'm not not hating on anyone or judging, but just learn how to read food labels, like learn how to understand like the ingredients. If the number one ingredient is sugar, then that's what most of it's made of. Like it goes in order of volume from first thing
to last thing on the list. And you know, read the tiny box on the back with the breakdown of per hundred grams sodium and sugar and protein and all the other stuff, because you can save yourself a lot of heartache.
But remember on the front, it's not information.
The front is an ad. It's not information. It's just trying to get you to buy whatever it is they're trying to sell.
You know.
Yeah, you see that a lot with olive oil products. So you'll particularly saying margarine. So you'll see the product described as olive oil margarine or something like that on the front of the you turn it over and read the label, you'll see whilst there is some olive oil in there for flavoring purposes, you know, most of the fat in that comes from something like sunflower oil or canola oil. Yeah, just like every other Margarine.
We spoke on this show once a year ago. I took a photo and I'd posted it. I was trying to get an on your recommendation. I thank you very much. I actually got real mayo made with eggs, and that's probably precipitated that. But I was at the supermarket. I was trying to find mayo that's actually mayo, not made out of vegetable oil or seed.
Oil like with that. Well bullshit, Yeah no I didn't.
You told me. You told me what to get. And what's amazing is normal mays like four or five bucks a jar. The real shit's like twenty and I gladly pay the twenty, right, but yeah, and it said whole egg mayonnaise.
I'm like, yeah, giddy up. And then I looked it's ninety.
Seven percent not egg, that's right, not egg, Like ninety seven percent of what's in this jar is not egg. And when you look at the front, there's a picture of an egg and it's got whole egg mayonnaise. So you think, oh, the whole thing's made of egg.
No, well it it probably shouldn't be called mayonnaise anyway, because mayonnaise, you know, is based on an actual traditional recipe which developed by the French, and it consists of olive oil and an egg. It's an emulsion. So calling anything that isn't made that way mayonnaise, I think is a bit out there. Anyway, whether it's whole egg or not, it should be labeled imitation mayonnaise.
Yeah, yeah, just jumping back quickly. I know we've got to let you go. But Tiff, do you remember you've had Mick Call on your show, right? I don't know if you remember this, but we were talking about, you know how you were talking, David about people who don't produce as much dopamine as other people and so they've got to, you know, take something to kind of reached their normal or what is. So we've had this guy in a bunch, his name's mickol and his in recovery
addict alcoholic. He talks about this freely and openly, spent lots of time in the Big House, you know, very interesting life blah blah blah. And he told his story on this show, and I'm sure yours, Tiff, where when he started drinking at twelve, right, and the first thing he drank was port and he said it was fucking disgusting. But the moment that I started that he started to get drunk, he's like, oh my god, life is good.
And it's like, I think he said something like, but the first time in my life, I felt normal, Like the anxiety went away, all of these symptoms in inverted commas went away. And then he basically started drinking whenever and wherever he could at twelve, not because he enjoyed the drinking, but because he enjoyed how it made him feel, and it was like for him an escape, you know.
So most addicts will give you that answer if you ask them. Most addicts. If you say to an addict, you know, why do you keep doing this when it is causing you harm? And I'm talking about anything, whether it's smoking or alcohol or opioids, Yeah, And they will say, I don't want to keep doing it, but I feel normal when I do do it. You ask any smoker, why do you smoke? You know it's doing terrible things, as photos all over the box telling you all awful
things it's doing to you. Why do you smoke? And they will say, I don't want to smoke, and I know all that stuff, but the only way I can feel normal is when I'm smoking, And that's exactly the effect we're talking about, where where in order to get the required dopamine hit, you have to be doing or going through an addictive behavior. So it's about feeling normal, and that's really really hard to stop, really really hard to ask someone to stop doing the one thing that
makes them feel normal. Now, alcohol is the most insidious of them all, and we'll talk about it some other time, because it actually has a mechanism of action that impairs your ability to feel normal for life. So even when you stop drinking, which is something that most other drugs don't do. But let's get into that some other time. There was a bit of detail in it.
Yeah, cool mate, We appreciate you will say goodbye fare but as always fascinating and tif thank god you had some calories before we started.
I know you're welcome.