533: The Hidden Cause of Flu Season

Is flu season really just sugar season? In this eye-opening episode of the Learn True Health podcast, Ashley James uncovers the shocking effects of sugar on our immune system, metabolism, and overall well-being. From hidden sugars in processed foods to how a single tablespoon can suppress immune function for hours, she breaks down the science behind why sugar is at the root of many chronic health issues.

Ashley also shares her personal journey of overcoming illness through holistic nutrition and challenges listeners to go 30 days without processed sugar to experience a true health transformation. If you’re ready to reclaim your energy, boost your immunity, and break free from sugar addiction, this episode is a must-listen!

Highlights:

• Ashley challenges the concept of “flu season,” linking it to increased sugar consumption during holidays.
• Consuming sugar suppresses immune function for 4–6 hours, making the body more vulnerable to infections.
• Hidden sugars in processed foods contribute to chronic illness, including diabetes, hormonal imbalances, and gut issues.
• Childhood exposure to sugar can lead to long-term health problems and increased reliance on medications.
• Cutting out sugar for 30 days can significantly improve energy, sleep, immune function, and mental clarity.
• Sugar triggers addiction pathways in the brain, leading to cravings and overconsumption.
• Many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular issues and neuroinflammation, are linked to excessive sugar intake.
• Ashley shares personal experiences of reversing health issues through holistic nutrition and eliminating processed sugar.
• She encourages listeners to take control of their health by reading labels, reducing sugar, and prioritizing whole foods.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is Episode 533.

Hello, Truth Seeker. Happy Halloween.

It's the start of sugar season. They say it's flu season. Well, I'm here to tell you that I think I have a sneaking suspicion that the term flu season was made up by, and I could be wrong. I could be wrong. I just have this feeling that flu season was a PR campaign to sell flu shots, and here's why. You can get the flu any time of year, and I happen to know people that got sick this summer who were pretty upset about it because it's like, hey, they're ruining my summer vacation.

There is something that happens though, right around halloween. I don't know if you saw going into offices, hanging out, even the chiropractor there's bowls of candy that start to appear in the public. Anywhere you go, there's bowls of candy. Somewhere around October, it starts, and it doesn't stop until after January. We've got Halloween, we have Thanksgiving, and it's in the opposite order. If you're from Canada, Thanksgiving happens in October, but still, it's sugar season nonetheless. So we come into a period in the north, for us in America and Canada and all across Europe, where we're having less sunlight, less vitamin D. Many people spend less time outside, so there's less physical activity, and then there's more sugar, more processed sugar, and we call it flu season.

Something really interesting happens, and I experienced this firsthand. When we consume even a tablespoon of sugar, we have white blood cells that essentially go to sleep for between four and six hours. It creates this window where our body is very vulnerable to infection. I don't know if the word is ironic, but people were really, really stressed out about getting sick the last four years. People were wearing plastic bags on their heads. They were wearing giant plastic get-up garb so they could hug grandma. Triple masks, wearing a face shield and masks, wearing gloves. Everyone had multiple containers of hand sanitizer. They were so cautious. Social distancing, spending time away from friends and family, isolation, six feet apart, and yet there's not much stress or focus on what we can do to support our body's ability to fight off infection.

What negatively hurts our immune system? The number one culprit is processed sugar.

When I was 13 years old, I was actually really healthy between the ages of 6 and 13 because my mom, when I was six years old, took me to a naturopath. This was Dr. D'Adamo, the man who wrote Eat Right for Your Blood Type. He had a center in Toronto, that's where I grew up, and he looked into my eyes and my ears, took my blood, examined me, and said, “You are allergic to milk, yeast, wheat, and sugar. Stay away from them.”

I was told I was O blood type and had to eat the O blood type diet, which is a lot like paleo. Minimal grains, lean meats, lots of vegetables, and no processed food. From the ages of 6 to 13, I also took supplements daily. I had to learn how to swallow pills because they weren't like fun liquid supplements like TakeYourSupplements.com has. They tasted pretty gross. I tried opening the capsules of supplements and taking them, and that was like B vitamins, raw B vitamins. They're disgusting, especially for a 6-year-old.

So, from the age of 6 to 13, I ate super clean, no processed food. The only time I got to have processed food was on my birthday. I chose pizza and ice cream, and then, of course, I got extremely sick because I never ate it. But that was it. That was it.

I was eating really clean, super healthy, and my mom was so strict, though this is the problem. She was so strict that I ended up rebelling, and I remember my mom did something. I mean, I'm sure I did something. I was being a teenage brat. I was 13, and I said something, she said something. She said, you're grounded, or whatever, and somehow I convinced her to let me go trick-or-treating one last time with my friends because I'm 13 and probably never going to do it again. So all my friends went out, and we had a blast that night. But I had this intention of doing something I knew she wouldn't want me to do, and that little defiant teenager lives in all of us. We really need to do a little come-to-Jesus talk with ourselves sometimes and catch ourselves and go, am I making the best choice right now, or is that little defiant teenager just wanting to eat what it wants when it wants or drink what it wants when it wants and kind of screw the consequences?

That's exactly what I did.

I was 13 years old, and I ate pretty much all my Halloween candy. It wasn't a ton because actually, a lot of houses turned us down. They were like, you're too old to do this. But I came home with a good stash, a good bowl of candy, and I pretty much ate it within less than a week. I finished that off. Now, what you don't know about me is I had never been on a single drug my entire 13 years. I had never once been on a prescription. I had never been on an antibiotic, and I got so sick from eating that Halloween candy. I ended up with an infection that lasted from just after Halloween. The infection was so bad that by Thanksgiving, I had to get on antibiotics for the first time in my life, and I stayed on antibiotics until after Christmas. The infection kept traveling from different parts of my body to different parts of my body.

Now, remember, for the first 14 years of my life, I was pretty healthy, and this was my first real run-in with the mainstream medical system and being sick. I did it to myself, and I didn't learn. Then, at that very moment, I did not learn my lesson. I continued to eat unhealthy food because I had access to food at the cafeteria, so one out of three meals a day was complete garbage. I began to deteriorate my own health, and as a result, by the time I was 19, I had blood sugar dysregulation. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, infertility, and then into my 20s, I developed type 2 diabetes, chronic adrenal fatigue, and constant infections, for which I was on antibiotics constantly.

It wasn't until 2008.

I wasn't eating garbage at every meal, but I was definitely letting sugar sneak in. Sugar was in the processed bread, the pasta, lots of processed food. If you don't read labels, just go to the grocery store and grab any random tomato sauce. If you don't read labels and just grab one, I would bet you there's sugar in it. Because without reading labels, most of the cans of food and processed food are going to have some form of sugar. I was eating the standard American diet.

I was eating out a lot, and I just continued to get sick and sicker and sicker until I was done being sick. Then I started going to doctors, and they didn't have anything for me. They had drugs. That was very scary because I was in my 20s. In your 20s, you're supposed to be healthy and vibrant, and I felt every day like I was dying. I was trapped in a sick body.

You might have heard my story, but my husband and I started watching health documentaries and talking to functional medicine practitioners, eventually finding some naturopaths. As a result, I was able to reverse all those health issues. I was told I'd never have kids, and we were able to conceive naturally. Wonderful. We're so blessed.

That's why I do the podcast, because I learned from so many holistic practitioners how to use holistic lifestyle medicine.

Your food is your medicine, and supplements are the mortar. Food is the bricks. But our food system has been compromised. We're really missing a lot of the minerals. If you're missing chromium, vanadium—these are trace elements or minerals. There are 60 essential minerals. If you have less than what you need for those, you actually have insulin dysregulation. You have blood sugar dysregulation when you don't have those.

I have many interviews about magnesium. Magnesium is the most needed mineral in the body. It's required for 1,800 enzymatic processes, and zinc is required for 800. Calcium is not even in the top two of the most important minerals or elements your body needs. They're all important, they're all needed, and they're not in our food anymore at the levels that we need because of the farming practices of the last hundred years, and especially more recently with hydroponic farming, the chemicals they use, and the way they till the soil. Everything they do depletes the soil of minerals, and they do not add the 60 minerals back.

Even if you eat super clean and lots of vegetables, you can accidentally get the 16 vitamins and the 12 amino acids. A lot of times, you can even accidentally get the two essential fatty acids a lot of times, but it's really hard to secure the 60 minerals.

That's why I highly recommend going to TakeYourSupplements.com, because the supplements they sell and the protocols were developed by the naturopath who helped me to reverse all my health issues. He designed them, and they're liquid, they're delicious, they're bioavailable, they're plant-derived, and they turned my life around.

What I noticed is that I didn't get sick anymore.

Well, I also cut out sugar. That's why I wanted to do this quick episode for you. I wanted to share because right now we're going into sugar season. No longer shall it be referred to as flu season. That is the fear-mongering propaganda that they use to try to tell you that flu shots will make you healthy. Please explore and dive deeper into that. I'm not here to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. I just want to give you the information because that information is power for you.

So if you're sick of getting sick every year, if you're sick of your whole family, the bug, the flu bug going around or getting colds and flus and coughing and sniffling and all that, if you're sick of that and sore throats, consider doing no sugar. Now, for some people, that is just like blasphemy. Would you rather have a moment of bliss from that sugar? Would you rather have an entire winter season with zero health problems? It is that big of a deal.

When I went sugar-free, I challenged myself a few years ago to 30 days with no processed sugar, and I could not believe it. I began to read all the labels. I just could not believe that sugar really is hidden in everything and that there's all different names for sugar. It's not always obvious. It doesn't always say just cane sugar. But I invite you to explore this concept of going sugar-free. That doesn't mean you eat artificially sweetened things either because I'd say, if you ate an apple or a banana or some sweet potatoes, they're very sweet, especially if you stop putting sugar in your beverages like coffee.

If you gave up caffeinated bubbly drinks like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, that kind of thing, and instead cracked open a LaCroix, cracked open a Spindrift, something that has some flavor to it, some bubbles to it, but has no added sugar, try that. Give yourself a challenge to say no.

Because as you go deeper into this, you will see that within the first five minutes of eating sugar—so the Halloween candy that is available to all of us right now—your taste and reward centers become activated. Your taste buds, the reward centers, trigger in the limbic system of the brain and the nucleus accumbens.

Dopamine floods your brain and the pleasure centers, and it creates a strong urge for more. More addictive substances as well. People who notice that they crave more unhealthy things after consuming an evening of these chocolatey goodies, whatever your kids bring home or whatever you bought for Halloween, have a negative effect, immediately, within five minutes of eating it, you get a blood sugar spike. Within 10 to 20 minutes, your pancreas responds. You have an insulin surge. 

We want insulin. Insulin is a good thing, but when we have high surges of it, it becomes unhealthy. It's a metabolic tug of war. Your cells are bombarded with glucose, especially if you've eaten processed sugar. It's just way too much. It's a flood. The body has to put it somewhere, and it will turn it to glycogen and store it in your liver and your muscles, which is good at first. But then there's an excess because this isn't naturally occurring sugar. So the body converts the excess and stores it as fat, and chronic sugar intake can gradually lead to insulin resistance and can lead to fatty liver disease. This is non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

But if you're like, oh, I'm just going to eat on Halloween, okay, but in one to two hours, your brain is actually cognitively disrupted, especially in children. You'll see the crash in children. You're going to see in the next few days children's behavior. If you're around children, their behavior will be dismal.

They'll be having little tantrums over spilt milk, and they'll be tired and wired. They'll have problems with sleeping. The high sugar intake can impair their neurotransmitter function, particularly acetylcholine, which is vital for learning and memory. So jacking up your kids with basically legal cocaine and then shipping them off to school—you've not set them up for a healthy learning environment.

The immune system suppression I talked about is noticeable, particularly in neutrophils. For up to five hours, I said like four to six. It really just depends on how much sugar and the way the body processes it. But studies show that sugar suppresses the immune system by reducing neutrophil phagocytic capacity. Suppresses the immune system by reducing neutrophil phagocytic capacity. That means the immune system cells become lazy at attacking pathogens. They basically fall asleep. This is something that was described to me by one of my naturopathic mentors is that the immune system just falls asleep. You can see it. You can see it in. They take blood and they watch the different white blood cells and they see that the white blood cells that are there to attack it and control infections just go to sleep, and so your opportunistic infections are more likely to take over as well.

Now, within four to six hours of eating that Halloween candy, you have cellular damage and oxidative stress. The advanced glycation. Glycation is where blood sugar is caramelizing the proteins in our body. The glycation, the excess sugar in the bloodstream will bind to the proteins and these compounds accelerate cellular aging and damaged tissue, especially blood vessels. So over time, this can lead to heart disease and other chronic diseases that are affected by blood vessels, by blood vessels aging rapidly. I’ve had cardiologists on the show that have shared that children younger and younger and younger are experiencing cardiovascular disease.

This just makes sense because think back, now I’m in my 40s. I think back to when I was a kid and yes, of course, we had access to sugar. It was in a much more limited capacity. Now sugar is readily available and we can see this. Just Google how much sugar do kids eat now versus the 80s kind of thing, and there’ll be all kinds of charts and you can see it. Our children are developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes and inflammatory issues at a younger and younger age due to the amount of constant oxidative stress from the sugar in their diet.

Now the mitochondria are the energy factories of our cells and there’s a mitochondrial strain that happens when we have high glucose. It’s because it has to respond quickly to the large amount of energy production. This process generates reactive oxygen species (ROS) as byproducts, causing oxidative stress and more cellular damage if the body doesn’t have enough antioxidants to squelch the fire that basically sugar causes in the cells. Now the highest concentration of mitochondria is in your brain, is in your nervous tissue. So we’re lighting the brain on fire by eating the high amounts of sugar that comes from sugar season, no longer calling it flu season, sugar season.

Now, within six to 12 hours, your gut microbiome is disrupted. This reminds me that back when I was almost about to give birth to our son, he came at the end of March and this was six weeks before. I was so good the whole pregnancy at eating super clean, and on Valentine’s Day, which is which Valentine’s Day is part of sugar season, right? So we’ve got Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Valentine’s Day, and it’s just like sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar that whole season. So it was the end of sugar season. I almost made it through sugar season without eating one candy that whole pregnancy, and my husband brought home a big box of chocolates because, you know, he was being sweet, and he was saying how much he loved me, and he didn’t think he should eat. He should bring home like carob or some kind of like dark chocolate with no sugar in it. That would have been nice. Him and I sat there, and we ate that whole box, and you want to know what happened? I was so upset at myself, so I just want to share my lesson so hopefully you don’t go through it.

But pretty soon after that, I developed a UTI, and I tried to mitigate it with homeopathy and with all the other good stuff that you can throw at UTIs, but it was a rager, and unfortunately, I had to get on an antibiotic during my pregnancy. Luckily, it was a safe antibiotic for pregnancy because I have a great doctor. But there really isn’t any safe drug out there. There are effects. We call it side effects, which kind of sounds innocent. We’re like, oh, it may or may not happen, but there are effects. 100% of the time, when you take an antibiotic, it wipes out your good microbiome. This is fact. We do not dispute this. So if I had just learned my lesson back when I was 13.

But I want to pass this knowledge on to you because when you eat the sugar, within six to 12 hours, you have that disruption, that window, that immune window where you become more susceptible and your microbial imbalance shifts. Think about it. We’ve got the gut microbiome, but we also have microbiomes throughout our whole body. The microbiome that we want to keep in check is candida, for example, and it loves sugar. It ends up overgrowing fairly quickly. There are other microbes, yeasts, and bacteria that we really want to keep in check, and when they go way out of proportion, it’s called dysbiosis. That can lead to further inflammation, cardiac inflammation, leaky gut, and mood swings. It’s something that we want to keep in balance because our microbiome helps us keep everything in check. It’s part of our immune system, and it also helps digest and absorb our nutrients. So when we consume anything during sugar season, starting with Halloween candy, we’re throwing off our microbial balance.

The next thing that happens between six and 12 hours is we have inflammatory cytokine release. You’ve probably heard of the cytokine storm that happened when people experienced COVID. Well, this also happens when we eat sugar. The immune system releases pro-inflammatory cytokines in response to this gut imbalance and the advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that are created from consuming sugar. This inflammation isn’t just isolated—it’s systemic, meaning it affects the whole body, setting the stage for chronic inflammation.

If sugar intake becomes habitual—which it tends to, because sugar begets more sugar—you say, oh, I’m just going to do this for Halloween. I challenge you to write down every single time you consume processed sugar, even if it’s a teaspoon. That Starbucks drink, that Coca-Cola, that processed bread, that pasta sauce—it doesn’t have to be savory or sweet, but processed sugar is processed sugar. Even just a teaspoon is enough to create negative effects in the body. We have to be careful, but usually, we go overboard. Usually, we downplay it.

I’ve got a great book for you. Oh my gosh, I’m still in the middle of reading this book. It’s so packed full of awesome information. I interviewed Dr. Greger a few years ago. He wrote the book, How Not to Die, and he has a whole section on this and how, studying human behavior, we really do downplay the negative things in our diet. We overemphasize, like, “I ate a kale salad, look how great I am,” and then we really downplay, like, “but I drank six Coca-Colas this week.” We really downplay unhealthy things and behaviors. So I challenge you to be honest with yourself. Write down, take notes in your phone every single time you have even a teaspoon of processed sugar, and just look at how often it sneaks into your diet. That cytokine release, that cytokine storm, can actually be happening more times than you think.

I can’t tell you how many people come to me and say, “I really want to heal my gut. I have gut dysbiosis. I just don’t understand.” Then when we examine their diet, they thought only about 30% of their meals were processed food, but it turns out it’s more like 80%. So it’s really good to be honest with yourself and to write it out, take note, and track it. Take inventory, just like you take inventory of your credit cards and your bank statements. Take inventory of what you’re consuming over a week and really look at it.

Now, within 24 hours, the long-term implications begin. The 24 hours of consuming that sugar that you maybe decided to consume either every day or just on these holidays, your liver fat storage goes up especially if sugar becomes more frequent, these sugar rushes. Liver begins converting excess glucose into fat, and over time, that leads to fatty liver, which we discussed a little bit. But it also impairs the effectiveness of the liver’s ability to detoxify the body, making it vulnerable to toxins and increasing the risk of insulin resistance even further.

Now here’s the scary part. I think this is scary. So, woo, spooky, scary—it’s Halloween! Here we go, bringing in some spooky Halloween health information. Sugar, after 24 hours of consuming it, starts to alter gene expressions.

Studies show that high sugar intake can lead to epigenetic changes, turning certain genes on and off, especially upregulating genes that increase inflammation and downregulating those in fat metabolism, glucose regulation, and even affecting cancer gene expression. So downplaying the immune system to be able to fight off things like cancer and genes that turn on or make us more likely to create tumors. So this is very scary. We're aging the body, we're increasing inflammation, we're disrupting the gut, we're disrupting the brain. Why do we need that five seconds of pleasure? Really, consider it is a drug. Would you give your children cocaine? Why, when we can create pleasure in other ways, especially because what you're doing is you're tearing your health down for a long period of time for only moments of pleasure. Isn't that the same as drugs? If you think about it. Over time, it creates dependency and addiction.

Now, the people who are truly addicted probably aren't listening anymore. Coming from someone who's battled food addiction, and right now, I feel like I'm winning, but for me, this is a lifelong understanding of how my brain works in addiction. Your brain will not let you take this information, and it will justify the behavior. It will say, well, I don’t want to take away from my children. I don’t want them to feel weird or not feel like they’re having a good childhood or whatever. Whatever the dependency or the addiction needs to say in order to continue doing that bad behavior. But I just want you to imagine that instead of handing your children candy, you're handing them little packets of cocaine or methamphetamines. You wouldn’t do that. There's a line in the sand eventually. You're not going to hand your kids bags of drugs, but we are because we understand the negative impact it has.

Now, there are a lot of healthy options. This is a thing. You can get healthier candies. You have to look for them, but stuff that doesn’t contain high amounts of sugar and processed sugar. Overall, think about other things you can do other than consuming sugar. What I do with my son, and this might not work for all kids, but I feel so grateful that I’ve had really open conversations for his whole life, he’s nine, turning ten, and we have a deal that I buy back his candy, and he’s like, cool, money. That’s awesome. I also found some healthier candy. So he’s not going to get zero candy, but he’s definitely not eating the amount that the average child does. It’s definitely a lifestyle change. That is what holistic lifestyle medicine is.

The first step, though, is awareness. I want you to be aware that there are other options out there. If you have felt resistance as I’m talking because this sounds too hard, I was there. I know exactly what that feels like. The resistance should be a red light for you because if there’s any part of your brain that’s justifying eating sugar, knowing what it does to the body, then that is the addiction. That’s the dopamine-seeking behavior. Just like asking someone to go completely off of alcohol, 50% of people are like, no problem, I could take it or leave it, I don’t really care. If you say, okay, go totally alcohol-free for a month, they’re like, no problem, don’t care. Then there are people that go, wait, I can’t. No, no, no, I need to have it. Do you? Do you need it? That’s when we start having the hard conversations with ourselves. Ask yourself, why can’t I go sugar-free?

When I say sugar-free, I don’t mean going for processed, fake sugar. I mean completely sugar-free. Your life will still be sweet. I promise you. Eat more fruit. For me, half the time, apples are too sweet. I have to put cinnamon on them, and it makes them less sweet to my taste buds. But you can still feel wonderful feelings eating sweet things, sweet foods that are whole foods, so they don’t have the same impact. Eating a fruit does not have the same impact as eating processed sugar like we’ve discussed.

Over time, your metabolic flexibility declines when sugar is part of your daily life. This means that your ability to switch between burning carbohydrates and burning fats diminishes. People tend to gain weight over time, even if you’re just drinking one Coca-Cola a day or one Pepsi or Sprite or whatever it is. I’ve known people who’ve lost 50 to 80 pounds, and I said, how’d you do it? They’re like, all I did was cut out sugar. All I did was stop drinking. I just traded out my alcohol, my sugary drinks, and my Starbucks. I traded all that for water, and it all just came off. I didn’t really make that big of a change other than that. If all it takes is making that one choice and you get this great outcome, that’s amazing.

We talked about how it causes chronic inflammation. What's interesting, though, is that it increases subclinical hypoglycemia. Subclinical meaning, with MDs, when you get blood work, it's like, oh, it's not bad enough for me to put you on drugs yet, but it's still not great. So people with subclinical hypoglycemia can still notice that they have energy crashes, irritability, cravings for more sugary or refined carbs, and that they often will reach, and I remember that when I was in my early 20s, I remember needing caffeine in the morning with sugar, needing, right, like quote, unquote, needing.

I didn't actually need it, but this is what I told myself. Then falling asleep around 2 pm in class and going to the store to get some kind of sugar, some kind of chocolate bar or something to pick me up, to get an energy boost. That is unfortunately the cycle that we go through. We do caffeine in the morning to artificially wake us up, especially there's a lot of times they include sugar in that. I know diabetics who will drink straight-up black coffee from Starbucks and they get a sugar spike from it, but not other companies, and they say there's something in the coffee at Starbucks they feel is like there's some kind of sugar they add to it. I mean, I haven't verified that, but I've heard it from enough people. But people will jack themselves up and then they'll crash and then they'll jack themselves up again in the afternoon with some kind of sugar. It might be a pastry, muffin, or sugary drink. Then they come home and they're tired, wired, and they hit the alcohol to kind of calm their nervous system.

They're self-medicating all the time throughout the day, and the body's going through everything we discussed—liver fat accumulation, the disrupted gut-brain axis, which I didn't discuss a lot, but we discussed the disruption of the yeast, the candida, the bacteria, the dysbiosis. That doesn't just stay in the gut, that actually affects how the brain works as well. Lowered cognitive sharpness, and then at night we have a disrupted circadian rhythm. Especially I can see this in children. But we don't realize just how much sugar impacts our sleep. As adults, we often get poorer quality sleep, and if you go sugar-free, seven days of being sugar-free, come back to me and tell me how you feel and tell me how you sleep. I bet you sleep like a baby.

Just make sure that you really listen to your energy, because when people go sugar-free, especially if they go sugar-free and caffeine-free, they go, wow, I'm tired all the time. I'm like, okay, you're actually, you're not medicating anymore. So now you're feeling your health. Your health might be a four out of 10, but you've been medicating so you thought it was an eight out of 10. Eventually, that's going to catch up to you if you keep medicating. So then we build you back up holistically with nutrition to the point where like me, I used to be that sick all the time. I used to feel terrible all the time. Now I wake up and I have energy throughout the day, and I don't need those pick-me-ups, and I want that for you as well.

On a vein level, sugar ages the skin rapidly, so you'll see more visible fine lines and wrinkles and your skin will become dull. For teenagers, sugar feeds the bacteria that create acne. You get rid of sugar, acne most of the time clears up. Sugar and cow dairy are the two biggest things that contribute to acne and cystic acne. Remove those from your diet and watch your skin clear up. Most of the time, that is all it takes, and I have interviews with skin experts and doctors. You can look up on my website, learntruehealth.com, so that you can learn more, because obviously, there's more to it, but start there. Start by removing those two things and just watch. If you have acne, watch it go away or significantly improve.

Overtime, we end up having diminished cellular repair and longevity. The self-cleaning mechanism in the body called autophagy really is stunted when we have the continuous exposure to sugar. Plus, we have increased oxidative stress and mitochondrial dysfunction as we talked about, and of course, it's weakening the body's energy factories. So the entire cellular repair is diminished and our ability to handle stress diminishes as well. For some people, they experience hormonal disruption, which I shared. I had hormonal disruption as part of it, but everywhere, from leptin resistance to weight gain to your stress hormone cortisol being out of whack, your insulin being out of whack, your sex hormones being out of whack, cognitive and emotional blunting.

Over time, moderate sugar intake can also contribute to dementia by way of neuroinflammation, chronic low-grade inflammation in the brain that is strongly now associated with cognitive decline. So I have a lot of people come to me with brain fog. This is like, how long have you had brain fog? Really think back. It could be years, but over time, that's causing Alzheimer's.

I studied with an amazing guy, Dr. Daniel Amen, and he does studies with the brain. He's done that for over 30 years, I believe, and he does these scans where he sees these pockets of low activity or low oxygen to the brain, and he calls it Swiss cheese brain, because it really does look like a brain with Swiss cheese. It looks like just these holes. Have you ever seen Swiss cheese? You know, there are holes like bubbles, right? He'll take someone and get them on a diet that is no processed sugar, lots of great supplements to supplement, so they're filling in the nutrient gaps, really clean diet, a diet that is healthy for the heart because it increases oxygen and healthy blood flow to the brain, also decreasing stress, getting enough sleep, getting enough movement every day. Then he has them come back years later and do the scans, and he will show that he reverses the age of your brain. That Swiss cheese brain goes away. Those holes in the brain go away.

He's had people even as early as in their 40s come to him with early-stage dementia, and they're able to reverse it. But he looks at the brain and goes, you have the brain of an 80-year-old, you're 40, and look, your brain is twice your age. The good news is we can reverse it. But it's going to take something radical. It's going to take you going against the common thing that everyone does.

If you want to be a statistic, look around you. Look at what people are suffering from. 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription medication. 40% of Americans are on multiple medications. Medication means, for the most part, for most people, medication means, that they are so sick that they're trying to force their body to do something that it's not doing. Being on medication, and of course, there are exceptions to the rules always. I'd rather someone be alive and be on medication, like antipsychotics, of course.

So this isn't an absolute. There are no absolutes in life, but most of the time, most medications—I really feel like we're an overly medicated population because we don't have a medication deficiency. Let's just put it that way. The body is missing what it needs. We're giving it what it doesn't need. We're not giving it what it needs. We're really getting in our own way, and we are highly medicated. We are not healthy. We are not healthy as a nation, as a world.

There are these outliers, and I want you to be an outlier. I want you to go against the grain. I want you to be the black sheep. I want you to be the salmon going upstream when all the other fish are going the opposite direction. Look around you. How many people are sick and suffering, and they're eating the way most people are eating? So say no. Say no to processed food, say no to sugar, say no to alcohol. Significantly reduce those and say yes to whole foods.

Eat whole foods, lots of plants, lots of leafy greens. I love Dr. Joel Fuhrman. I had him on the show, and he talks about the G-BOMBS, right? Greens, berries, seeds, beans, mushrooms, onions. He wants to see you eat lots of leafy greens. Get more plants, get more fiber. I have great interviews where we talk about fiber. Just type in “fiber” at learntruehealth.com. The goal is to get 50 grams of fiber or more a day from a variety of sources.

Drink more water and less sugar and notice your health improve. I made a health change back in July. I changed one thing and I cut my triglycerides in half. I had my blood work taken and I had my blood work just recently taken. So for three months, I did this one health change and I cut my triglycerides in half. I was really impressed. I did not expect it to be. I thought it would definitely, I'd see some improvement in my blood work, but that just goes to show, like, you make one change and stick with it and then notice over time how things go.

I'm going to say the last thing I'm going to say is, the most important thing to do is to keep track because you will forget how, when you start feeling really good, you'll forget how bad you felt and then you'll eventually go back next sugar season. It happens every year. The sugar season comes every year, and you need something to remind you how good you feel when you're off sugar because the brain wants to. The brain wants what the brain wants. Everyone's got this little rascal inside them that wants what it wants. What we need to do is stay grounded in the health that we want to build long-term. So stay focused and grounded in the results you get by making these changes.

Challenge yourself, do a 30-day no-sugar challenge, and take notes on it. If you want, I have a symptom inventory checklist in my book, LearnTrueHealth.com/AddictedToWellness. Please get it. LearnTrueHealth.com/AddictedToWellness. Please get it. If you'd like me to just email you the symptom inventory checklist, I can. Just email me, Ashley@LearnTrueHealth.com. You can also set up a free phone call with me. I'd love to talk to you. I love talking to my listeners and helping you. I do health coaching. If you want to hire me, I'd love to work with you. I also do blood sugar coaching.

I have helped many, many people to get so healthy that their doctor takes them off their medication. That's my goal, as long as it's your goal. I had one client that's like, my goal isn't to get off meds. I'm like, okay, you tell me what your goal is. My goal is always to get people so healthy they don't need meds. I've met one person in my life who didn't want to get off meds, but she wanted to be healthy. I'm like, all right, you're in charge, you're the client. But my goal is to get you so healthy that you don't need medication and or you need a reduced dose, just depending on the issue.

But if you want to talk, I can. You can set up a free phone call with me, 15-20 minute phone call, and I can give you some resources. So you can go to LearnTrueHealth.com. In the menu, it says “Work with Ashley James,” and you can select the free chat with me. I'd love to help you. I can point you in the direction of some great stuff, some great books, some great supplements, some great devices that can help you. If you have health questions, let me know.

This is such a big thing, doing this challenge, going sugar-free. This is actually a whole chapter in my book, the Addicted to Wellness book. I'd love for you to get it. LearnTrueHealth.com/AddictedToWellness. It's a wonderful book, and it'll help you to get to where you want to go because you're listening to this show. Clearly, you're not where you want to be, and I'm sure you've been on a health journey for a while, but if you're not happy with something, with some aspect of your health, let's get you there. You can, and I can't believe I did. That's where I'm turning around, and that's why I do the podcast because I was sick for years. Then, when I learned how to get better, I just immediately went, oh my gosh, I have to help others who are sick and suffering.

So please share this episode with those you care about so we can help as many people as possible to learn true health. Have a happy Halloween and a very, not-so-sweet sugar season.

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