AMA #18: Deep dive: sugar and sugar substitutes

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey, everyone, welcome to a sneak peek, Ask Me Anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full, along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode.
Welcome to Ask Me Anything episode number 18 Once again, joined by my head of research, Bob Kaplan. In today's episode, we talk exclusively about sugar and sugar substitutes. There have been a lot of questions posed about so many aspects of this. So questions that are follow ups to the, what is it about sugar that's so bad? Is sucrose worse than high fructose corn syrup? Those types of questions.
What about naturally occurring sugars? So we sort of tackle a bunch of those questions.
And then the other half of the episode gets into all the substitutes for sugar, which are largely broken down into three categories, the non-nutritive versions. Those are things like aspartame and stevia, which again, you could further subdivide as naturally occurring versus synthetic, the alcohol sugars, and then actual sugars that are not sugar, such as allulose. And that's a question that has come up specifically. So I think that anyone who's interested in allulose, which I've talked about in the past, will find this episode very interesting. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 18

**Bob Kaplan** (1:46)
Hey, Peter, how you doing?

**Peter Attia** (1:48)
Doing awesome, man.

**Bob Kaplan** (1:49)
Unfortunately, I didn't get a name to put up. I was going to put on Kleon Daskalakis as my username for this one, for this AMA, keeping with the thread of 80s goalies.

**Peter Attia** (1:59)
That one stumps me, man.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:01)
Backup goaltender for the Boston Bruins. I want to say mid-80s, 84, 86 He might have played double-digit games.
I think he's from Boston, went to Boston University, I remember, and backed up either both these people. Pete Peters and Doug Keans.

**Peter Attia** (2:15)
Of course.

**Bob Kaplan** (2:16)
Yeah, prior to the Bill Ranford and Andy Moog days, the sloppy seconds from the Edmonton Oilers.

**Peter Attia** (2:23)
Well, we've got a pretty good one here for today, Bob. We're going to talk about sugar and probably do so in a way that, I'm guessing most people aren't prepared for the depth we're going to go into on both sugar and artificial sweeteners. Because we have just been getting so many questions on this topic that I think we decided collectively, don't scatter this information too broadly and do it in sort of a half-baked way. Like let's put together kind of the all singing, all dancing place for it to exist, both in audio form and also with show notes. And the team's been working pretty hard on assembling this. So where do you want to start this discussion around artificial sweeteners, sugars? What do you think is the best way into this?

**Bob Kaplan** (3:05)
Probably talk about sugar in general. I think a lot of the questions were, one was on allylose in particular, but really, and some of them were on safety. Are these non-nutritive sweeteners safe?
Are all sweeteners basically the same? Are they more or less, are they all created equal? So it's probably makes sense to back up and talk about sugar and what that term actually means.

**Peter Attia** (3:25)
Yeah, and we actually had a Sunday email that kind of covered this topic because as we were putting our thoughts together for this AMA, we realized that we should also at least put some of those together in the Sunday email. So yeah, let's take this step back and talk about sugar. And this is a, as you know, Bob, you've known me for, I don't know, 10 years. This is a sore spot for me. I hate inaccurate nomenclature.
It really, really grinds my gears.
So unfortunately, the word sugar just upsets me. It gives me a little bit of chest pain, tons of consternation. I don't like it. I don't like talking about it, but I'm gonna explain why that's the case. The reason I'm frustrated by this terminology is it means a lot of different things. And all of those things can be true. Glucose is a sugar. Galactose is a sugar.
Fructose is a sugar. Sucrose is a sugar. As you mentioned, allulose is a sugar. Now, to lump all of those things in one category is unhelpful. So what I instead wanna do is get folks to sort of think about these things through the lens of molecules and less through their names. In other words, it's sort of like if you were trying to evaluate a hockey team, it wouldn't be very helpful if you only thought of them as, hey, that's Bob, that's Peter, that's Richard, that's Nick. It would be more helpful if you could think, that's a goalie, he's pretty good, he sort of does this, he does that, that's a defenseman, he plays this way, he shoots this way. In other words, think of them through their basic attributes and not through the most generic nomenclature of their existence.