I get a team. It's David Gillespie, Tiffany and Cook. It's me, Fatty Harps. It's the Youth Project, he high Harps. You've just been complimented by the great man who likes you in your glasses? Are you thirty percent smarter with those on?
I definitely, I definitely feel thirty percent smarter, And I'm just basking in the compliments.
Are you long or short sighted or something else?
I don't know.
I don't know, like middle mid range blurriness, that's what I get.
Wow, So like if you're like sixty centimeters or thirty centimeters away from the screen, is it blurry?
Nah? Further like a longer design. The only time I notice it is when I'm out, maybe at the gym or at an event, and I'm kind of interacting with people across the room and I'm like, I can't really see your face.
Contact. That's a good get out of jail free card. That is nice.
It's not nice because I feel like really isolated in those moments because I'm not sure if I'm in the.
Room with people, you know, it's your ghosting. Excuse why'd you ghost me? Tiff I couldn't see you in my middle distance vision thing. Think you hear it was on the podcast.
I think also it's got to do with how much light is in the room. Don't you like when it's daylight? It seems it's much like brighter daylight versus semi lit rooms. When it's when it's not great light, I find it really hard to see people.
I don't like driving at night either. Might wear them at night, Probably should wear them at night.
Probably should. You're probably probably breaking the law by not doing it. Hey you Giles boy? What's news?
Yeah, all sorts of things. We're going to talk about gout today, aren't we just really change?
I saw that, I saw your article and I thought, oh, that's a good old fashioned condition.
Well, i'll tell you why I wrote about it, because I didn't put it in the article. But I like watching I think we've talked about this before, but I like watching that SPS show alone, which is basically, you know, people starving to death and who starves to death the
last is the winner. And one of the blokes on that, I think, one of the blokes who's in the final four at the moment, had this really bad attack of gout and they were pointing out probably the reason is because he's been subsisting on eels, which is just about the only thing he can catch. And it reminded me about the story of gout and how it originally was, you know, a rich man's disease, and people who could afford access to eels and swans and things were the only people who got it.
Ones.
Oh, the Royal diet. You know, swans the protected species. Only kings can eat the swans in the UK.
I thought it was too much beer.
No, well, maybe a bit of alcohol is definitely implicated in it, but the big like, it's an interesting thing because it's been around since since we first started noticing things in medicine. The people have had this kind of acute attacks of arthritis. So it's not like normal arthritis where it sort of builds over time and just gets worse and worse and worse. Gout is something that you have acute attacks of and when you have the attack,
it's unbelievably painful. So the fellow on the Loan Show who had it, he said it felt like someone had broken his ankle it and then he showed his foot and it was swollen up. You know, to sort of the width of his leg, you know, around his ankle and his foot, and it looked horrifically painful. And that's what gout's like, you know, for the curious amongst your listeners. I've actually put a photo of what it looks like in the article, so you just, I guess, warning if.
You don't like warning, Robinson warning.
Yeah, so so gow. It's been around a while. It was noticed, yeah, pretty much by the earliest people who looked at medicine, even old Hippocrates and so on. Notice there was this thing. But the other thing he noticed was it affected only really two classes of people, men and women who had who had gone past menophorse, and in both cases only if they were particularly wealthy. So
it seemed like a really weird disease. So there's this disease that can really give you extremely painful attacks in usually in your lower extremities, although sometimes in your hands as well, so in your ankles, your feet, your big toe, and so on, really really debilitating, but only seemed to affect rich people, and then only men or women who've
gone past menopause. So it was a bit mysterious. But because it only really affected rich people, no one cared much because it wasn't a large percentage of the population, and even with the rich people, it was sort of felt like, well, they deserved what they got. It was
pretty quickly diagnosed as being a result of an affluent lifestyle. Obviously, something about you know, the way those people were living was causing this thing, but they didn't really nail it down much more than that until I think it was about the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, mid eighteen hundreds when people started experimenting and seeing, well, you know, can we get to the bottom of this and the reason why they were starting to worry about it in the mid eighteen hundreds,
starting to not just be a rich people disease. So nobody really much cared if King Henry the Eighth had gout. I guess he cared, and probably the people who were required to treat him cared, but no one else much
cared that he had gout and he did so. But once it started to be a problem that affected a lot of people, which it really was starting to be by the eighteen fifties, people started looking at it and saying, well, what is this disease, what is causing this, and what exactly about rich people's lifestyles and now increasingly more and more of the middle class is causing this. So they went looking and fortunately the mid eighteen hundreds was sort
of the dawn of medical science. They did things like experiments, and there was one particular chap by the name of Sir Alfred Bearing Garrett. It's a nice, nice set of names he's got there. He thought, I'll do some experiments here and see if I can figure it out. What he figured out was that there was a difference in the blood of people who had gout and people who didn't have gout, and he proved this using a piece
of string. Surprisingly, so what he would do is put string, like just leave a piece of string in the blood plasma of people who had gout versus people who didn't. I don't know how it came up with the idea of a piece of string, but it was actually pretty clever because what happened with the people who had gout is that crystals formed on the piece of string, and what happened on people who didn't there's nothing. So the string just got bloody and wet, but there were no crystals.
For me. He then analyzed, what are these crystals that are forming and found out that they came from some a chemical which by then they knew was in our bloodstream called uric acid. Now, uric acid is something that's produced as a normal part of being human and eliminated by the kidneys as a normal part of being human. But for some reason some people had a lot more of it in their bloodstream than others. So they said, well, what do we know about uric acid? Where does it
come from? The answer was it comes from meat. So if you have a good, steady supply of access to meat and seafood, and particularly some of the more exotic seafoods like eels, then you would have a fair amount of something called purines in your diet, and purines are metabolized to uric acid. Now, as I say, if you've got a good function in kidneys and not overdoing it
on the meat front, it probably didn't matter. But if you were King Henry the eighth and you know, sitting down to a feast every night and eating more meat than the average punter saw in a year, then you
might be in a bit of trouble. So that helped to explain in one go, there you go, obvious answer this is why this thing was only really a disease of the rich, and you know, was starting to become more prevalent in society because access to meat was starting to be more of a thing by the mid eighteen hundreds. So four people prior to that really subsisted on vegetables. There were vegetarians without even trying to be, and probably didn't want to be, And so they were eating the
vegetables because they didn't get access to meat. And the rich people were eating the meat because the last thing in the world they were going to do was eat vegetables. That was what poor people eat. So it's an interesting version, by the way, just sidetrack the interesting version about bread. So back those times, the rich people ate the white bread because that was the expensive to make bread to get that good, and the poor people ate the stuff
that was full of grains and crap. And then you fast forward to today and it's completely inverted anyway, and.
The one that's full of grains and crap is ten times is.
Ten times the price of the white bread. That's right anyway, So they thought, okay, job done, We've solved gout, we know what causes it. Here we go, don't eat meat. They also found that alcohol did have an effect, and they also subsequently discovered that eating drinking alcohol out of lead crystal made it even worse because there was a different kind of type of gout that was associated with the lead poisoning in the crystal because it damage the kidneys,
et cetera. Et cetera. Don't need to worry too much about that. They had it nailed perfect theory, one wrong, but we didn't figure it out for a good one hundred years, well, actually more like two hundred years after that. It's not that it was completely wrong, one hundred percent wrong. It was probably unfair. There is a way to produce
excess uric acid by consuming too much meat. It's just that doctors running around in the nineteen sixties and nineties, seventies and ninety eighties and ninety nineties and telling people, well, the reason you're getting gout is because you're eating too much meat was just nonsense, because what was happening in those decades is gout was going from nothing very important at all that affected a few old, rich people to
suddenly it's affecting very large percentage of the population. So if you look at some of the numbers in the UK. It went up sevenfold in fifty years from nineteen sixty, so nineteen sixty to twenty ten, sevenfold increase in gout. It is now ad epidemic proportions. It is the most common form of arthritis in Western society. It is growing extremely rapidly. So we're all having too many steak dians
and lobster thermidors. No, so our access to meat, if anything, has declined in the last one hundred years, you know, because of the obsession about eating too much saturated fat blah blah blah blah blah. So we're eating a lot less red meat, a lot less things like lobster and frauns. It's on that are also sources of this. So how on earth would we be getting an epidemic if those
things were the cause. Answer is, you know, when facts meat theory facts win and siders started looking at this in sort of around two thousand and seven, two thousand and six and discovered there was a much more interesting correlation in the data when they started looking closely at it, and that is it was a straight line between sugar and gout. Of course, the total or sugar consumption of
the person exactly predicted their chance of having gout. And in fact, if you had if you compared men who So they first studied men because they're the important ones.
And oken and authorized by David Gillespie.
So forty six thousand men. They looked at the data on that had lifelong data from these forty six out they're all health professionals, so nurses and doctors, and found if you compared a bloke who was having two or more sugary drinks a day with a blow who was having one or less, he'd have an eighty five percent
higher chance of having gout, so double the risk. In other words, just by doubling the amount of sugar you were consuming, and the trend stuck, you could predict exactly whether a person was likely to have gout or not, just by knowing how much sugar they were consuming. So there goes the old eating too much steak and lobster. And now we have the real culprit, which is sugar. Now at that point they hadn't identified the mechanism, but now we know a little bit more about sugar, it
was pretty clear. So sugar is as we've talked about before, it's half fructose, half glucose, the fructose half of sugar gets metabolized by the liver essentially in such a fashion that it directly produces uric acid. So it's almost as if you said, you know, look, I just want to invent a chemical process that manufactures uric acid on demand. The answer would be consume a lot of fructose. Well,
and that's what's going on. So we know that for absolute certain that's what's behind the massive growth in gout. It's why such more people in the population have it now than have ever had it before in humankind's history, and it's why it's gone from a large new relevant rich men's disease a few hundred years ago to affecting really large percentages of the population. Now, did you say, it's the fastest growing format, the most most prevalent form
of arthritis in the population. So it is at epidemic proportions and still accelerating. So, by the way, in that same study, they also just to make sure it wasn't either know, the bobbles or whatever in the fizzy drinks causing this. Compared people who had diet drinks and they didn't have gout, zero chance of gout for them, They also compared people who had fruit juice instead of soft drink. They got gout because fruit juices, of course, So it's
been definitively nail. It's not in doubt at all. The bizarre thing is that even to this day, I mean that study, massive landmark study was put out I think around two thousand and eight in the British Medical Journal. Even to this day you'll have people saying that their doctor told them that they've got gout because they're eating too much meat. And this is why I looked at it again, because that's exactly what the bloke on alone said and he was wondering, well, I haven't really been
getting access to any stakes. Yeah, why is my gaup playing up because he's fifty days into starving to deat So I thought that was really interesting. I guess the takeaway from all of this is that doubt is a canary in the sense that it's the first thing to happen to you when you consume too much fructose, aside from getting fat. Oh, by the way, interesting story if you go back then and look at the earlier studies about.
Not allowed us say that anymore, David, I'm sorry.
Allowed us say people get that.
That's I'll be hearing from someone very soon.
Under height, not overweight.
There you go much better. Glad you tided that up.
That's right. Yeah, So if people get underhyight, if you go back and compare England in the mid eighteen hundreds and when they were looking at this and worrying about it, and look at the sugar consumption, and look at the incidents of gout, and compare England to France. Now, England had control of all of the colonies that were producing sugar, the Caribbean, et cetera, et cetera. They had a lot more sugar in their diet than the French did, who had no access to any of this. The French also
had no gout. Yeah, so that's an interesting They didn't notice that at the time. But now that we know the answer, we can go back and look at some of that data. But the important thing from the perspective here is, I mean, yes, gout is horrible and painful, but it's not going to kill you. The important thing here is it's a warning if you if your body is in a position where it is producing too much uric acid by consuming fractos, then it is also destroying
your liver. It is also destroying your kidney. It is also likely making you overweight, sorry, under.
Height and much better.
Yes, so that's the warning. You know, pay attention if you've got gout, because gout is not the real problem. It's just the symptom.
Wow wow, And you think about like, isn't it interesting that And again this is not a slam on doctors, because there are great doctors and not so great doctors, but that there are probably still you know, doctors getting around and other medical professionals or health professionals telling people that that their gout is about excessive meat.
Still, well, if they went to medical school before two thousand and eight, they wouldn't have learnt anything else. And if they haven't been keeping up with their eating and which most doctors don't have the time to do that, they're not going to hear a different story. So you know, if your doctor was trained before two thousand and eight, he thinks get out is caused by meat consumption. And I guess that leads us to the other question, which is the stopping eating sugar cure it? And the answer
is yes, it does. But and this is always the butt with sugar. It depends how badly you've wrecked things in the meantime, So doubt causes damage to structures in tendon's muscles, et cetera, in the foot, if they've been irreparably damaged, then even though cutting back on the sugar, well, removing the sugar will certainly help and ensure that you are significantly reducing uric acid production, it isn't going to rep the damage for that something. You know, something else
might be required, some other forms of medication, et cetera. So, and that's the answer you get in pretty much everything to do with sugar, which is will this cure my fati liver? Well, yes it will, but it depends how much damage has been done to the liver, like has scar tissued been created or not, Because stopping sugar will stop more being formed, but it's not going to fix the stuff that's already been scarred.
Yeah, yeah, and I think it's still still people still hold like dried fruit and fruit juice up as healthy foods.
Yeah, which they're not.
My dad's a diabetic and you know, not a visit or two ago when I was up there, he is eating fruit. What are you doing? You know? Like that is just the worst thing that you can eat.
Well, you go. Standard dietetic practice at the moment is still to give people fruit juice even though they're diabetic. So you go into a hospital ward where there are diabetic patients, they'll be being fed food that's you know, fruit juice and fruit and dried fruit. And I'm not saying exclusively that, but there's no account taken of the fact that the cause of this disease is over consumption of fractose. And that's a problem because, as I said,
gout is at epidemic proportions. But it's just the effect we can see, you know, we can't see the kidney disease. We can't see the fatty liver disease until it gets to a point where it is really really dangerous.
Have you ever I'm going to digress for a moment, But I've watched alone, like the American version a bit. I think I watched some of the Swedish version last week, some of the Australian I just look at those people. I feel like, whatever it is that they might win, it's not worth it. They're just killing their health.
It's just I'm like, but I know some of them are losing a fair bit of Wait, you know, it could be a fairly extreme diet.
Starting point. I guess if you go in there and you're in relatively good shape, as.
In oh no, then you toast.
No, you're fucked, You're fucked. I was talking to well, Tiff and I were talking to Tammy van Whistler. You may not know who she is, but she's arguably well, she's definitely one of Australia's best ever ultra endurance swimmers. She swam, you know, she's won a million things and world records and she swum, among other things, she swum lockness. And I wouldn't believe this, but this was recorded. So in a nine hour and six minute swim she lost ten kilograms swimming in lockness.
Well, it is cold, it is like, so.
That was the coldest swim she's ever done. And I'm not lying, am I? Tif ten K's right.
Yeah yeah, And the is a zempi.
Oh yeah, yeah, zeb's gone. Well at the moment, isn't it no better there at all?
It'll well except for the blindness thing, and yeah, but you know, we can probably talk about that another time. But look, the problem with the way we work as a society here. I'm just getting my just pulling my soap box out here to get here.
Just stand right up and talk up. Yep.
That's is that we are always looking for the quick fix, and a zeenpeic provides the quick fix. And there's nothing quick or painless about swimming. How far did you say you sweb ten k's no, it's actually forty k's forty ks to lose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's yeah, And no one's interested in that, And even less people are interested in not eating sugar for the rest of their lives, which to a lot of people sounds like a death sentence because sugar's addict and people if you say to people, I want you to stop doing something that you're addicted to for the rest of your life, most people will say sure, I could do that, and then find they can't.
Yeah. Yeah, well yeah, And I mean a lot of things that would be good for us, would be optimal for our health, are hard, and people don't like hard like people like easy, people like quick fixes, people like convenient.
You know, this is not the interesting thing about the sugar thing. There's nothing easy about going to the gym for the rest of your life. But with the sugar thing, there is actually once you break the addiction, it is deadly easy to do. You don't have to do anything, You just have to not eat anything that tastes sweet and people. The only reason people find that hard is because it is addictive. But like any addictive substance, once
you get through that. And I think I wrote an article of few weeks ago that we haven't talked about at all, but you wanted to talk about last time, about what happens in your brain and how do you change that when you quit?
Well maybe it we'll do that next week. Yeah. I was just reminded of the very current Australian sprint champion Gout. Gout. He's getting good pun intended, pun intended, always good chatting to you? How do you reckon? You'd go on a loan mate? Would you? How are your survival skills?
I think i'd probably last or ten fifteen minutes?
Yeah?
Yeah, I can't see the point of it honestly, other than to entertain people on television.
To undergrand that's the point or whatever it is.
Yeah, But to do that, you've got to be prepared to not eat what do they normally take sixty seventy
days it and survive in a subsistence environment. And the bit that I always find ironic is they usually chuck a few vegetarians in there as well, who instantly ceased becoming being vegetarians when it gets down to I've just got to eat, And I guess from that perspective, it's a it's an interesting insight into how man behaves when there really are no choices and you really just need calories the fastest way you can get them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well, I think when it comes down to you know, life and death, people like you know, I know that this is this is my ethical kind of you know, value system. But fuck, I'm hungry. Give me a fish.
Yeah, when you haven't eaten for six days and you catch a fish, you're suddenly not so worried about it.
Yeah, like, sorry mate, but I'm going to hitch on the head nature.
Yeah. Yeah, we've just once again offended a fair chunk of your audience, who probably are vegetarian. But that's the way.
Well, you know, I think people are going to eat whatever they're going to eat if it's that's right, you know, it just happens. Make we appreciate you. Thank you as always. Well, we'll see you in a.
Week, yeah, well or two weeks, even a week. You're not paying me enough to come back in a week.
We'll see you. I want to talk to you off there for a moment, but for now mate.
Thanks, thank you,