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Jan. 15, 2025 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:54
Your Guide to Quitting Sugar with Dr. Joel Fuhrman | Dr. Oz | S7 | Ep 131 | Full Episode
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Time Text
We love sugar, but hate what it does to our bodies.
He says that removing toxic foods like sugar from your diet makes it almost impossible to have a heart attack.
A brand new approach to getting healthy.
Scaling back your sugar habit by just 200 calories a day could help drop your weight by about 10 pounds.
How to shake your sugar habit and still enjoy sweets.
Here's a way you can make desserts taste delicious.
coming up next.
We'll save lives today.
We'll save lives today.
You guys ready to get healthy?
For everybody out there who has tried and failed before today, a brand new approach to quitting sugar.
This one is for real people in the real world.
Now, we know it feels impossible.
But quitting sugar doesn't have to make you mean, grumpy, and antisocial.
There is a way to have sweetness in your life without undermining your health goals.
Today, the man who has helped millions quit sugar and transform their lives, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, is here to show you how.
And that is not all.
For one of the most popular shows on TV, the hosts of Brain Games, Jason Silva, is here to give you the scientific secret to improve your memory.
Plus, the eye-opening results of one mother's investigation into whether video games and smartphones are harming our children's brains and what you can do about it.
But first, to give you the Sugar Quitter's Guide to Life, please welcome my friend, med school classmate, Joel Fuhrman.
Joel has always been a little different.
But I'm going to quote you on this.
He says that removing toxic foods like sugar from your diet makes it, I'm going to quote him, almost impossible to have a heart attack.
That's a pretty bold statement.
That is.
You know, and it's critical that people know that they don't have to have a heart attack and don't have to have a stroke.
You don't have to.
You know, I just published a study in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine on 443 people with high blood pressure.
They normalized their LDL cholesterol.
They dropped their blood pressure 26 points.
And you know, There are isolated populations around the world where they don't have exposure to commercial foods.
Like the Catawba study.
People into their 80s and 90s.
No heart attacks.
No chest pain.
No high blood pressure.
In other words, when you eat right, heart disease is not the inevitable consequence of aging.
It's not mostly genetic.
It's mostly what we're putting in our mouth.
And these people, they're from Catawba?
Catawba is the island that's off the coast of Papua New Guinea.
It's a small island that was isolated.
And there's no heart disease.
Zero.
Not one recorded case.
So let's walk through the reasons why Dr. Fuhrman feels so passionately about sugar.
If you're going to quit sugar, and your dependence is tight but can be lost today if you follow along with us, this is what's going to happen to your body off that sugar.
Now, you may notice some simple changes a little while down the road, but initially, once the withdrawal is over, you'll notice improvements, clearing actually, of your skin.
That pain that looks out to the world will be much nicer.
Your body will begin to do a total about face.
And then the part you're going to notice the most, and so will other people, sustained weight loss.
It's going to keep dropping and dropping and dropping.
Probably the best way to lose weight of all is to get rid of that sugar.
Scaling back your sugar habit by just 200 calories a day could help drop your weight by about 10 pounds within half a year.
That's a big difference.
And then your heart's job gets a whole lot easier, to Joel's point, because your blood pressure will begin to drop.
And within a few weeks of decreasing your sugar, you're also going to see a decrease in your LDL, that lousy cholesterol that causes heart disease.
In fact, cutting sugars from your diet will reduce your risk of dying from heart-related issues by about three times.
It plummets threefold.
There's no drug that does that that I'm aware of.
So today we're going to give you, I'll be right back, Joel.
The Sugar Quitter's Guide to Life.
We are giving everyone today this guide.
It's the best place to start because it's for real people and it's a real plan that's going to work in the real world.
I've got three of our viewers here.
Stacey, Melanie, and Michelle have tried to quit sugar in the past, but they say they have failed.
So we asked them to each write down the obstacle that got in their way because I think their obstacles will be like your obstacles.
So Stacey, take it away.
What is your obstacle, my dear?
I have to have dessert.
You want dessert every day?
Every day.
Actually, a year and a half ago, I had a heart attack, and that was the one thing that my doctor said, take the sugar out.
So I took away the candy and the sodas and the things like that, but the dessert couldn't go.
Is your heart okay?
Yes, it's getting better.
Day by day, it gets better and better, but I still, I eat ice cream every day.
For lunch, for breakfast, for dinner.
Yeah.
That's an addiction, right?
My goodness.
If you had a heart attack eating dessert, I mean, I love ice cream too, but I'd probably give it up.
Well, I gave everything else up, you know, one thing at a time.
We'll get to that last thing today.
Melanie, take it away.
What's your deal?
Intense sugar cravings.
I have sugar with every meal.
I actually build my, my meals are built around what sugar I can eat.
I will have less substantial foods to have more sugar because I want to have more, the calories are more in the sugar than the good foods.
Sure, of course they are.
That's the reason you have sugar cravings.
We're going to get to that in a minute.
And Michelle, what's your problem?
Dr. Oz, if I don't have sugar, I don't know what to eat.
I try to take all your advice.
I eat healthy.
I exercise.
I do all the right things.
Yet I'm constantly snacking.
I keep dark chocolate chips around all the time.
I go to bake cookies one day and they're all gone because they've been my midnight snack.
Alright, so we're going to address each of these problems.
We're going to go one by one.
You're going to stay with us if you don't mind.
I'm going back to Joel because this is exactly what he sees in his practice.
It is actually...
The reasons we can't stop in our sugars.
And they're big problems.
Listen, I was being a little light with you earlier, but literally, if you have a heart attack and your life is at risk, the fact that it's hard to give up desserts is a demonstration of how powerfully these things have got us around the neck.
And you deserve better than that.
So stick with us, we'll be right back.
So let's first just go over the dessert everyday issue because Joel's got a solution for it.
In fact, Joel, he calls this thing, it's very interesting, the Sweet Six.
Now, Joe's always been good with numbers.
He always was when we were in medical school together.
But I want you to explain, if you don't mind, to people what the sweet sticks are and how they might help with these dessert cravings.
Right.
Well, first of all, you can eat desserts.
And desserts are delicious and they're satisfying.
But they have to be made with high-fiber, natural foods, full of phytochemicals, full of nutrients.
Otherwise, you're going to be craving food all the time.
You can't stop eating all the time because you're going to be feeling irritable without those foods.
But here's a way you can make desserts taste delicious.
They're healthy for you.
All right, so we can actually satisfy people and get them away from the ice cream and the like.
Absolutely.
Give them delicious ice cream that's sweetened with a date, or here's an apricot ice cream or a mango ice cream, sweetened with real fruit.
Make some chocolate ice cream.
Put some cocoa beans in it.
You have a chocolate-flavored ice cream or a cake made with beans and cocoa beans and vanilla.
Healthy food can taste fantastic.
We will put desserts made with these magical six ingredients up on DrRoz.com.
Joel has them in his books as well.
This is an interesting way to tantalize those taste buds, and it actually works.
All right, let's move on to the second big issue, which is cravings.
For anybody out there, like Melanie, who has cravings, you actually argue, Joel, that a lot of it has to do with micronutrients that they don't have.
So explain for the average person how they're going to get those micronutrients into their diets.
I'm going to put some screens up here.
Does this work?
Vegetables?
That's right.
The first thing is, vegetables are the richest source of micronutrients.
They're the food with the highest micronutrient density per calorie.
And one of my mantras is, you have to make the salad the main dish at least once a day and eat raw vegetables.
Alright, so vegetables we know are good.
Beans are going to work as a source of protein.
And that's what I love in seeds.
Again, deal with the cravings because they're giving us the minerals.
They're going to become plants.
They make sense.
They're secret.
They're the secret to your success.
You eat the fat from these foods instead of oil and animal fats.
And you know what they do?
They increase stool fat.
These are anti...
The fats are anti-fat.
So in theory, if you eat a lot of these, your poop should float because fat floats.
That's right.
You increase stool fat, which means all the fat calories are not biologically accessible to the body.
All the calories aren't absorbed by the body.
What do you think, Melanie?
Does your poop float right now?
No.
Not yet.
We're going to fix that.
All right.
Finally, what separates this plan from the rest, you argue, is that you say we should eat a minimum of three servings of fruit a day.
I was a bit surprised by this because there's lots of sugar in fruits.
Absolutely.
Fruits are rich in phytochemicals.
They're linked to low risk of heart disease, low risk of stroke, lower rate of cancer.
Fruits are favorable foods to eat regularly.
Well, Joe, I mean, I talk about fruit in a positive way generally, but a lot of folks say, I gain weight on fruit.
I don't want to eat fruit.
We actually limit it sometimes because we don't want people to have too much of that sugar.
Right.
You disagree?
Well, it's very hard to eat this in the context of a nutritarian diet because the diet itself is so high in fiber, and the fruit is high fiber too, and the fiber blunts the absorption of glucose into the body.
It comes into the body slowly because the fiber holds it like a magnet in the digestive tract.
All right, so I have a donut, right?
Right.
I get pure sugar into my bloodstream in a fairly aggressive way.
It ran into your bloodstream within minutes, from your lips to your hips, right onto your body, because you just put the pure sugar in minutes.
It's absorbed, spikes a big insulin response, and the insulin stays circulating for hours, and that's a fat storage hormone.
You created fat on your body, you promoted atherosclerosis, you raised your cholesterol level.
All right, now, sugar is in fruit also.
What happens there?
Well, here you put a little bit of sugar in fruit.
Let's say you have 10 grams of sugar, but you put in 20 grams of fiber with it.
The fiber went over that, that's right, the fiber covered up that sugar.
The sugar can't get through into the bloodstream, and all this fiber promotes the growth of bacteria, too.
So it blunts the effect, and you have a horse of a different animal.
Now, the body doesn't view it the same way.
What do you guys think?
Definitely makes sense.
All right, now I'm going to transition us, because Joel's famous for helping people lose hundreds of pounds.
This woman, take a look at her.
She says Dr. Fuhrman changed her life because she lost, watch carefully, 90 pounds.
In fact, she says, I was fat until I started doing this one thing.
This is one thing.
Find out what that is next.
Next, her health was in crisis until she found Dr. Fuhrman.
On his plan, not only did she shed pounds, she lowered her blood pressure and anxiety.
She shares the one thing she did to finally lose the weight.
I was just desperate.
I didn't think I would ever eat this way.
Next.
We're on a mission to fix the sleep crisis in America.
This is a global movement.
Ariana Huffington shows you how to transform your life one night at a time.
Plus, Lauren Conrad tries out the hottest weight loss trends so you don't have to.
All new Oz.
That's coming up tomorrow.
We are back with Dr. Joel Fuhrman who has millions of devoted followers and patients who swear by his methods to shed the pounds and reverse disease.
Now, recently we heard from one of them, and she said, I was fat until I started doing this.
Don't you want to know what this is?
Makes me curious.
They're not my words.
They do belong to Darcy.
She lost 90 pounds.
So if you all want to know what she did, are you curious?
Well, here she is to tell us herself.
Darcy, come on out.
Oh, no, nice to meet you.
Thank you.
I know who you really want to meet is Joel.
Thank you so much.
You saved my life.
Thank you.
That's terrific.
So many of Joel's followers have never met him before.
You've not met before, I guess.
No, today's the first day.
I know it's been a dream of yours.
So what do you have?
He's all yours.
Take him away.
Before I started following you, before I found you, I was sick.
I had hypertension.
And I was...
Too young to be ready for a heart attack.
And I found you at the bottom.
I saw you on TV. I got the book.
And I committed for six weeks, and it changed my life forever.
And most importantly, it's not just about weight loss.
It's about you were in pain, and you had medical problems, and now you're well again.
So that's so great to see you well.
They seem so different from each other, those symptoms.
And yet, getting rid of sugar...
Help with all of them in your case.
It wouldn't work like that for everybody, but it's remarkable that we have that many problems and we can't possibly think of a way out of them.
And we do once in a while find simple solutions that work reproducibly.
I think it was the sugar and I think it was everything.
It's flooding the body with all those nutrients.
Yeah, it makes such a difference.
Everyone is out there baitedly awaiting the end of that sentence I showed at the beginning.
What is the one thing you did that allowed you to lose a 90 pounds to get past all these medical issues that have been hindering you?
The biggest thing besides making a short-term commitment, which is how the long-term commitment came about, because I didn't think I would ever eat this way.
And I was just desperate.
And eating salads, eating all the vegetables.
Salads.
That's the answer.
Yes.
I lost weight very quickly by eating that way.
Joe, why do you make salads the foundation of your plan?
Well, I always say the salad is the main dish, at least once a day.
Number one, they're about 100 calories a pound, and the stomach only holds a liter of food.
So it's like having natural gastric bypass surgery.
Because volume and fiber play a huge role in how many calories you choose to consume each day.
Let's show it to everybody.
We're going to do this together.
Let's just take the typical stomach, and we made it represented in these little boxes.
So I'll be the standard American diet, which we call SAD, because it is the standard American diet.
So I put my muffin in there, and notice it doesn't do very much, does it?
Doesn't take up a lot of room.
It goes up maybe a third of your stomach if you're lucky.
If you eat eggs, which we tell people to eat, lots of protein.
It tastes good.
It tastes good.
It's a good start.
And we put them in there and what happens?
A couple sneak in with muffins.
But the rest of them, when they go where they're supposed to go, you end up with a stomach that's going to be, I don't know, half full, two-thirds full.
You've still got a lot of space in there.
And then we got one of your...
Breakfast salads, Darcy.
Yes.
Is this about what you would do?
Big?
I kid you not, and I have witnesses to prove it, my salads are just about that size.
All right.
For one meal.
And we fool your stomach.
It's a lot of salad.
It's a lot of salad.
I don't even eat a salad that big.
Is this how full you feel?
Yeah, it is.
I mean, there are times where I might not eat the whole thing.
I may have leftovers with my breakfast.
I like salads.
I do eat them for breakfast more often than not.
For breakfast?
Yeah.
Breakfast then.
Most people don't do that, but you like them so much.
I really do.
I have had weeks where I would start to maybe eat a little bit of oatmeal or just my fruit and nuts, but I find that the weeks that I start my day with the vegetables and the fruit mixed in, that I just feel better.
I'm happy for no reason.
So this is your typical breakfast, I'm told.
It's a fair amount of food.
Yes.
And I didn't know you could make so many different things out of beans and vegetables until I ate this way.
I'm very proud of you.
I'm happy you lost the weight, but I'm especially happy you found your help.
Thank you.
Well, my friend, thank you very much.
The prize can be on DrRoz.com for more recipes.
She got Dr. Furman's new book, The End of Heart Disease.
It is out now.
Everybody in my audience is going home with a copy.
Enjoy it, my friends.
We'll be right back.
This is pretty cool.
Next, your kids spend way too much time on devices?
Are video games and smartphones harming our children's brains?
It's the biggest parenting issue of our time.
This doctor says they could be addicted.
Her search to find out how it's impacting their development is next.
So the biggest fight in my home is how much screen time my kids spend on their devices.
In fact, it's the only thing we seem to fight about and argue about these days in my house.
This is probably true in your home as well.
It's uncharted territory because this is the first generation growing up with smartphones and other high-tech devices.
But it's left me and other medical experts wondering, are video games and smartphones actually harming our children's brains?
One woman made it her mission to find out.
It all started with one question.
What new phone to get my daughter?
I knew what Tessa wanted wasn't really a phone, but a smartphone.
In her new documentary, Screen Agers, Dr. Delaney Rustin explores how much access our children should have to technology and how the abundance of screen time exposure may be affecting their development.
As a doctor, I decided I needed to understand the impact of all this screen time on kids.
And as a mom, I needed to know what to do.
Dr. Rustin tackles smartphone use in schools.
You're not accomplishing that work if you're on Facebook.
Your mind is taken elsewhere.
I'm so distracted by my phone, so it's hard to listen to a teacher and actually understand what they're saying.
She also addresses boys' addiction to video games.
The desire for social media approval among girls.
Every girl in the picture is locked into her phone.
And what all this is doing to our children's brains.
The brain actually isn't capable of multitasking.
The young, nimble, adolescent brain can oscillate back and forth very, very quickly.
But it comes at a cost.
Today, Dr. Rustin shares her internet addiction insights and what you need to teach your kids about technology.
And Dr. Delaney Rustin.
So, this is our honest question.
Did you write this as a medical researcher interested in learning more about kids or as a frustrated mom on the brink?
Absolutely, as a frustrated mom on the brink.
I was completely struggling with my son who wanted more video games and my daughter who wanted more social media.
But it's true, as a physician, I was seeing all these kids completely distracted and completely engaged in just their screen.
And so I wanted to know, as a physician, What's the impact of all this screen time?
And as a mom, what are the solutions to help them find balance?
With all this homework you've done as a mom and as a professional, what surprised you the most?
Well, really the science.
I became very much aware that this is not just a psychological draw, but a physiologic one.
It's not just in the brain, but it's the entire body.
It's the biggest parenting issue of our time.
What concerns me is actually the kid's brain.
So come on up.
Let's show everybody what we're worried about as physicians.
Because these devices are problematic because kids' brains are prone to addiction.
That's why they get addicted to drugs and cigarettes.
But it's possible the devices may actually be changing the kids' brains as well.
So here's the scan of a five-year-old.
Now, let me point something out.
This is where the eyesight is in the back of the brain.
See how it's nice and blue?
It's mature because kids have to see.
But look at the front of the brain.
It's all yellow and green.
Not mature.
The front of the brain needs to develop.
We evolve our brain from the back to the front.
These are the higher functions, the executive functions.
You don't expect a five-year-old to make important, rational decisions.
They're five.
But let's go forward.
By the time you're eight, nine years of age, now that back area is starting to get a little bluer, moving forward, but notice the front, the decision-making area, not so good.
You get into a little later in life, now your early teen years, right?
Kids think they've got it, but they're still mostly green and yellow up front here, not mature yet.
And by the time they get into their late teens, like we all felt when we were teenagers, we know everything.
We certainly know more than our parents do.
But watch, watch.
Lots of green, lots of green.
Not developed.
And by the time you're in your early 20s, you're still not all the way evolved.
You haven't fully developed this self-control center in the front.
That's the problem.
We're not ready yet, even by the time we're in our early 20s, to deal with the ramifications of addictive behaviors.
And that's a concern for me because when I watched your video, I don't know if you probably noticed it as well, every time I saw a kid, they're looking down.
They were never looking up.
They're always looking down.
Well, your daughter was one of the reasons, and your son, you were trying to negotiate here.
What was your biggest fear about giving in and getting them technology that every other child in their class probably had?
Well, with my daughter in particular, I was really worried that she was going to want this so much we were going to have constant fights.
And the other thing I was worried about is when she's out in the world, is she always going to defer to it as opposed to be talking and looking at people?
And in fact, she said to me when she was begging for the phone, she said, I want to be able to look busy in awkward situations.
Ooh.
Scared me.
How insightful of her.
Yeah.
So before we go to break, I want everyone at home to do something for me.
Look down right now at your hands.
You are probably holding something, like a cell phone or a tablet as you watch a show.
I want you to put it down for a second.
Listen carefully.
I know kids being on the devices bothers us as parents.
But here's the question I'm asking today.
Is it actually permanently damaging our kids' brains?
Find out when we return.
Next, is all this overstimulation compromising your child's brain?
And what effect does it have on their learning and social skills?
The more screen time kids have, attention spans are going down.
How to help our children develop balanced relationships with their technology.
Next.
We're on a mission to fix the sleep crisis in America.
This is a global movement.
Ariana Huffington shows you how to transform your life one night at a time.
All to us.
That's coming up tomorrow.
Over-stimulation tires the brain and it tends to function not as well.
We wanted to know how does the rapid stimulation affect the brain.
We exposed young mice to switching sounds and lights to mimic the situation that children face when they switch from one screen to the other.
Afterwards, we looked at the effect on learning and found that the ability of these young mice to learn new things was very much compromised.
It took them three times longer or more to learn how to go through a maze than the non-exposed young mice.
The next step was to look at the brain of these mice and what we found is that the structure that controls learning and memory had less nerve cells compared to those that were not stimulated.
But what really surprised us is that once we stopped exposing the young mice to the screens, the reduction in the nerve cell persisted throughout their lives.
The changes were permanent.
We're exposing a whole generation of children to these rapid-paced media, and we have no clue what it does to the brain.
And if it's the same as we see in the mice, then this is a very shocking news.
That is a scary clip from the provocative new documentary, Screen Agers.
It's made by a mom who also happens to be a doctor, Delaney Rustin.
Here's the question.
If brain mice, the brain cells of mice, can be permanently changed?
By these flashing lights and sounds.
It's the same thing that happens to kids when they're exposed to their cell phones and video games.
So do you think there's something similar happening in kids' brains as they have proven happen in mice brains?
Well, the reality is we can't look at kids' brains in the same microscopic way that we can in mice brains.
But I can tell you that these studies are showing some concerning results.
For example, if you put kids in front of similar situations in many screens like that, and then you compare them to kids who are just playing with crayons on tests that look at their academic abilities, the kids who played with crayons do a lot better.
Also, there's correlations with the more screen time kids have, attention spans are going down.
We see that firsthand in our own kids.
So, the thing that makes this documentary so provocative for me is that Dr. Rustin got kids to open up about technology like I have never seen before.
She talks to me and then she goes back for like five minutes, then she talks to me, then she goes back, then she talks to me, then she goes back.
And what do you think about that?
Well...
Maybe she could spend a little bit less time on it.
I do try.
I do try to get off the phone.
I guess technology kind of like gives everyone some competition.
It's like how pretty you are, like what the guys think of you.
It's like a competition.
That you can't win.
There's no finish line.
If it gets a lot of likes too, sometimes it makes you feel good.
You're so used to getting all these likes and you put a photo with like three likes.
And like, oh my gosh, delete.
Yeah.
Technology these days, who's there to catch you at home?
Your mom?
I mean, you can outsmart her easily.
No offense.
Yeah, mom, it's a really hard math thing.
I love this part.
Happens to me too.
Simon Sinek.
He's been part of Dr. Rustin's investigation into how technology affects kids' brains.
He's also a New York Times bestselling author and has one of the most watched TED Talks of all time, which my wife has forced me to watch several times because it is so darn good.
So what is the biggest concern you have about kids and the amount of time they're looking at screens?
When we're very young, the only approval we need is from our parents.
And as we go through adolescence, we make this change where we now need approval from our peers.
It's a time of great stress and anxiety.
And we're supposed to learn to rely on our friends.
My fear is that if kids aren't going through this adolescence and this anxiety, they're actually not learning the coping skills that they need throughout life.
They're not learning to form these deep, meaningful relationships.
So, are we tricking ourselves?
We're focusing on addictive risks like drugs and alcohol, cigarettes.
Are we missing the biggest addiction that's being formed right in front of our eyes?
Without a doubt.
There's a chemical called dopamine in our brain.
It's responsible for pleasure.
It's the feeling we get when we cross something off our to-do list or find our keys or win the game, that sort of nice little feeling.
We know that dopamine is released when we have texts or engage with social media.
Dopamine is the same chemical behind alcohol, nicotine, and gambling.
Now, we have age restrictions on alcohol, cigarettes, and gambling because we know that an immature brain cannot deal with all of this, you know, stimulation, and we wait until people are old enough to do those things.
But we have no such restrictions on the other dopamine-producing device that is social media and our phones.
Just imagine these kids going through this anxiety of adolescence.
It's as if parents are throwing open the liquor cabinet and inviting them.
You know, I know adolescence is really stressful.
Try the vodka.
It works really well.
That's kind of what we're doing with cell phones.
And at the end of the day, like all addiction, we're pushing away the people who are closest to us.
Dr. Rustin, your daughter, she's here.
Tessa's in the audience.
And she got out of school today.
Congratulations.
Nice job.
So you've got a smartphone now, I understand.
Are you happier now?
Was it worth the battle?
Definitely.
I think there's a lot of upsides to it and a lot of excitement being able to be connected with my friends.
And, I mean, there are some times when I'm not as happy.
Now I'm, like, seeing this whole other world.
I'm, like, comparing myself to others a lot more.
But it's still a lot of upsides.
So I understand you developed an interesting compromise with Tessa.
In order to allow her to enjoy her cell phone, and the pluses are going to go along with that, but still try to avoid some of the addictive risks that Simon spoke about.
I did it.
I did it incorrectly at first, I have to confess.
The first thing I did was to write out a four-page contract for her.
A contract?
Yes.
And it was so much about talking to her, about finding compromises about when she should be off of her phone that we came up together.
And all of these things are really about helping her to find balance in her life with all this technology.
Well, listen, I think you did a wonderful job with this.
Let me offer some final thoughts.
Stopping kids from using tech like smartphones, video games, actually, it's not going to prepare them for the real world anyway.
So it's not really a rational thing to do.
But I do love this idea of creating a different kind of relationship with technology in general.
So if you're looking for some simple ways to do this, I'll share what I have done, which sort of overlaps.
I didn't have the kids sign a contract.
Maybe I'll do that now.
We don't let the kids have the cell phones in the bedrooms.
I'd rather they be next to me if they're going to be doing anything anyway.
So force them out of their bedrooms.
Chase them out.
Set a screen time curfew, and there's no technology ever allowed at our dinner table.
It's the one time I want to allow that vulnerability that Simon spoke of to really sing forward so we can truly connect.
It's training for life.
You go to drhours.com to find out how to watch a screening of Dr. Russell's documentary, Screen Agers in Your Area.
I'll be right back.
Next, is there really a scientific secret to improve your memory and ward off disease?
Novelty seems to be really good for your brain.
Host of Matt Gio's Brain Games, Jason Silva, helps us to find out.
We put our heads to the test.
Can we really sharpen our brains?
Find out next.
Brain Fitness has become a billion-dollar industry, and it's only gaining in population.
But is there really a scientific secret to improve your memory and ward off disease?
I invited the host of Nat Geo's Brain Games, Jason Silva, to find out.
But first, take a look and listen closely to one of his brain games.
Pay attention to the directions we give you between the British Museum and Buckingham Palace.
There are multiple routes.
But remember the specific route we point out.
We're going to ask you about it later.
Here we go.
From the museum, make a left onto Bloomsbury Way.
Hang a right at Kingsway.
Make a left on Aldwych.
Make a right onto the Strand.
Now at the roundabout in Trafalgar Square, take the third exit straight through onto the Mall.
And at the end of them all, that's Buckingham Palace, straight ahead.
Did you all get that?
Well, some of you maybe, most of you not.
All right, we're going to find out.
Please welcome the master of mental and memory mischief, Jason Silva, to find out.
Welcome to the show.
Oh, nice to see you.
Thank you for having me back.
All right, so I watched it carefully.
Did you pay attention, yeah?
I tried to pay attention.
I don't know any of those roads, by the way.
Right.
Like most of us, I was just trying to keep the numbers of times I'm turning right and left.
Yeah, sure, sure.
Is that the whole game, just trying to figure out which way you turn?
Well, if you can retrace your steps, basically.
Go back to the beginning of those instructions and list them for me.
We're not going backwards, we're going forwards.
Right, from the beginning.
All right, so the first thing we did was take a left on that Bloomsbury, whatever it was.
Let's see.
Yes.
Great work.
And then?
Then we took a right.
All surgeons are visual.
Amazing.
So left, we took a right after that on the King's thing, something else.
Let's see.
King's wave, right?
Right on King's wave.
Great job.
Wow.
So impressive.
You can help me if you want.
You should be hosting Brain Game.
Please.
I flunk.
I have a terrible memory.
Left again.
Okay.
I don't remember the name of that road.
But it was a left.
A left for sure.
So you're about halfway.
Let's see if you're halfway right.
Yeah.
Left on Aldwych.
Pretty good.
And I knew that I took two laps and I took two rights.
The next one's a right.
Next one's a right.
A right.
Okay.
You don't know where.
No.
It was heading to Trafalgar Square.
Something.
Trafalgar Square?
No, it was before Trafalgar.
It takes us to Trafalgar.
But it's right.
Yes, take a right.
Let's see.
It's a strand.
Right on the strand.
Okay.
You're good.
I mean, at least you remember which direction.
And then I remember the last one.
You go to Trafalgar Square and you take the third right.
Third right.
The third turn off.
All right, let's see.
Let's see.
The third exit.
Wow!
Third exit.
Oh!
I'm impressed.
I feel good about this.
Brain games.
Good memory.
The reason I wanted to bring you out, we're going to play some games with folks who train their brain, but please help us with this big debate that I hear raging in the scientific community.
Do these brain games really help our brains avoid things like dementia, etc.?
So there is opinion on both sides, but what I can tell you is that any time you challenge your brain, right, you put yourself out of the box, whether it's a new hobby, a new language, travel, novelty seems to be really good for your brain because it forces you to make new neural connections, right?
Stimuli.
Dopamine, new maps for your brain.
That's got to be good for you.
That's what I would say.
I share that bias as well.
It's sometimes hard to prove, but I like it.
But you've got to wait 30 years to figure it out.
But it worked.
Well, exactly.
Start today.
All right, so we're going to try out some brain games.
Great.
We have the Roche family and the Tobias family.
All right, excellent.
They're both here.
All right.
They happen to be neighbors.
Neighbors.
For now, anyway, they're joining us to play brain games.
Welcome, Tobias's and Bosch's.
Hi, guys.
No fisticuffs.
I'm in a nice, even, fair fight.
We're going to give you some brain games.
You're going to need your eyes and your ears, everybody, at home.
So put down what you're doing for a second.
Pay attention.
You're going to love this.
If you're in the kitchen, come in the TV room, just watch.
Put your cell phones down for one second.
We're first going to do the false memory recall.
How do you play this?
All right, so here's how it's going to work.
We're going to pull up a list of words on the screen one by one.
You're going to try to recall those words as best as possible.
Afterwards, we're going to pull up a grid of a bunch of words and have you identify which ones were not on the original list.
All right.
Come back here.
All right.
All right.
How good is our recall?
Are you ready?
All right.
All right.
Take it away.
So, Jason.
Pull the list first up, the list of words.
List of words and quickly memorize these.
Right.
As best as you can.
Kale, blueberries, strawberries, cucumbers, carrots.
Yes.
Kiwis are fast.
Bananas, spinach, celery.
Grapefruit.
Keep going.
Lettuce.
Tomato.
Sweet potatoes.
Brussels sprouts.
All right.
That's it.
That's it?
That's it?
I'm not going to ask you to recall all those words.
What we're going to do is we're going to pull up a grid of several words and have you identify which ones were not on the original list.
Are you guys with us so far?
Yes.
So far, so good.
Yes.
All right.
We haven't done anything yet.
So let's pull up the grid.
Let's pull up the grid and then discuss amongst yourself and tell me which ones were not on the original list.
Cheeseburger!
Cheeseburger's out.
Watermelon!
French fries!
Watermelon, french fries, tomato.
Those are the four that weren't.
Blackberry.
You said blackberry's not on?
No, blackberry's not on there.
Please focus on the, I love this, the blackberry question.
This is how witnesses the trials get messed up.
So we have a yes blackberry, no blackberry.
You're also on the same list.
Okay.
So, you immediately identified that cheeseburger was not on the original list.
You guys immediately identified that french fries were not on the original list.
Because those are thematically unrelated to everything that was on the original list.
There's controversy about blackberries.
You said it was, right?
In fact, it was not.
Blueberries and strawberries were.
And this is what's going on in your brain.
Because blueberries...
Right.
You saw berries, and your brain is making a thematic connection.
But again, what's interesting is that your brain is playing a trick on you.
Because there's a thematic connection, it's using that shortcut and making you call for something that actually wasn't there.
This next game is called the One Word Memory Pit.
Right.
Walk us back.
All right.
Let's do this.
How do you play this game?
This is a word association game, and you guys are going to love this.
So essentially, we're going to pull three words on the screen, and then you have to come up with another word that will add on to each of those three words to change their meaning.
All right, that will work for all those three.
Here's the first one.
Are you ready?
So we pull up the words print, berry, and bird.
Blue.
Nice work.
Nice work.
Blue was great.
Why'd you tell me this time?
Blue print.
Blue berry.
Blue bird.
But no blackberries.
That was amazing.
Before we go to break, I want everyone to take a look at this image on your screen right now.
Take a look at this picture.
Look carefully.
Do the patterns look like they are moving?
Look very carefully.
Focus in the middle.
Find that why when we come back.
Next, Jason does a little experiment to see how our brains work when we are multitasking.
Have a green towel.
Sunscreen.
Find that his number one trick to train our brains to be better at getting more done, no matter what your age.
Coming up next.
We're on a mission to fix the sleep crisis in America.
This is a global movement.
Ariana Huffington shows you how to transform your life one night at a time.
That's coming up tomorrow.
Do the snaking patterns woven into this illustration look like they're moving?
Well, they're not moving.
But thanks to your brainstem, tiny involuntary eye movements called saccades constantly take in the world around you.
In this case, your saccadic eye movements fool your brain into seeing motion where there is none.
Pretty cool, huh?
This is very cool.
That's a clip from the hit show Brain Gains.
I'm here with host Jason Silva.
What's the number one thing folks ask about their brain?
Yeah, they always want to know how do we get more things done, right?
Like people are after this multitasking idea.
That seems to be the number one thing.
So you took the challenge on.
Jason did a little experiment to see how our brain works when we are multitasking.
We've taken over this beach shop to see how well our volunteers can handle performing multiple tasks at the same time.
We've recruited three different people of three different ages to help rent two beach necessities, towels and sunblock, on a hot, sunny day.
Our contestants have to sell towels in three colors and three kinds of stripes, and the sunscreen, plus orange towels and beach balls, and everything's a different price.
Got all that?
Alright, on your marks, get set, go!
When multitasking overloads the halo of your working memory, a few simple tasks that would be easy to accomplish on their own feel impossible all at once.
Anthony and Gary are struggling with the heavier task load, but Max seems to be finally pulling away.
All right, hold on.
Two beach balls.
All right, guys.
Time!
I gotta say, I'm biased.
But that older gentleman reminds me of me.
Okay.
So what were the results?
How did the folks feel?
Yeah, the actual winner was the guy in the middle.
20 to 30-year-olds tend to do better at this stuff.
Yep.
Give him a round of applause.
Why is that?
They seem to be able to hold more items at once in their working memory.
So give us an idea that we can all use right now to help our brain.
To optimize that?
Optimize the concept of multitasking.
Right.
So the phrase that people use to describe what's really going on is time-sharing.
So you're switching rapidly between tasks.
And one thing that you can do is keep a to-do list around, little post-it notes around you, things that will trigger reminders of what needs to get done.
And then you can just switch from one to the other.
Maybe have a room that triggers one idea.
You go to the kitchen, you're like, oh, I need to do this, and certain things like that.
You know, after you finish medical school...
Yeah.
So, in theory, you're pretty good at studying stuff.
Yeah.
The first thing they teach you, your first day of internship, when you're taking care of real people, is how to make a to-do list.
Well, there you go.
That's how critical it is.
There you go.
Because I don't care how smart you are, this idea of quickly shifting up, you know, being with multitasking, you've got to have paper to make it happen.
Absolutely.
It's a real pleasure to have you.
Hey, thank you for having me again.
You can catch Jason Silva on Brain Games Sundays at 9 p.m.
on Nat Geo.
We'll be right back.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Alzheimer's starts 20 to 30 years before the first symptom.
The at-home test that may determine your risk.
Then, Kimberly Williams-Paisley opens up about her mother's battle with dementia.
Or the first signs that something wasn't right.
All new Oz.
That's coming up on Wednesday.
Today, Dr. Furman gave us a real-world plan to quit sugar, but some of you are trying to cut down on the other white stuff, salt.
In his new book, The End of Heart Disease, he talks about excessive levels of salt that Americans consume.
So why does this worry you so much?
It's extremely concerning, because if we could wipe out people eating all the salt, we'd save millions of people's deaths from heart attacks and strokes.
So, give us a real-world example.
What do you do now?
And you've got a little surprise for us.
This is a pantry solution, right?
Okay.
Are you ready?
Reveal it all.
And what do you love?
Well, herbs and spices is the point.
Food can taste great.
We're talking about oregano and dill and ginger and parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, like Simon and Garfunkel sings in that song, right?
And then, there's this mace.
This stuff, this is incredible.
But people use mace to keep other people away from it.
Why do we eat mace?
It's made from the hull of a nutmeg, and it has a nutmeg, pepper, light pepper type flavor.
When you use these seeds, the mace themselves It's like zinc, but they also have hydrochemicals that have anti-inflammatory effect.
When you use zinc, when you use gin, when you use mace, when you use these things, those have additional benefits against your elasticities and euthanasia.
How much do you put on a pot?
Is that about the right amount?
Yeah, that's good.
That's it.
Instead of salt, what do you put on there?
I love caramel yeast, a little bit of ground packs with some mace mixed together.
I toss that.
I might with a little bit of some kind of Take the moisture, make it...
Then I'll bring that to...
Homemade popcorn with...
To a movie theater?
Mace to a movie theater.
No, I... I love this.
This is why you're going to love...
I seasoned it first.
That's true.
Correct, you already said it.
But it's a pleasure to have it.
Thank you.
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