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April 28, 2025 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:40
Are Hidden Additives in No-Calorie Waters Causing Weight Gain? | Dr. Oz | S10 | Ep 21 | Full Episode
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Time Text
Now with zero calories.
Fun fruit flavors.
A healthy hydrator.
Available now.
You've seen headlines.
Flavored no calorie water.
Just how natural are the natural flavors inside?
And are these hidden additives causing you to gain weight?
What's in your flavored water?
Our investigation uncovers startling new information.
Plus, the health guru who eats 5,000 calories in just one meal.
Coming up next.
Oh, oh, oh.
Y 'all ready for season 10?
Yeah!
I love you Becca!
*music*
Over the last 10 years, we've been investigating artificial sweeteners and weight gain.
And you, as the smartest audience in television, switched from sodas and dye sodas to drinking more of these clear-flavored waters.
They look so pure!
But could what's in them actually be crashing your diet?
Today, the truth about no calorie flavored waters.
Are the additives in them making you gain weight?
Plus, the biggest food mystery out there.
What are the natural flavors inside these drinks?
Now, no-calorie flavored waters, you know, you've heard of them all, right?
They come in all kinds of flavors.
There's lemon, there's limes, there's mangoes.
From carbonated to still versions.
And we spend more than $2 billion on these drinks a year.
That's what we spent last year.
So who here is obsessed with these no-calorie flavored beverages?
Oh, you got some hands up here.
Why do you like them so much?
They taste good.
I hate water.
It's boring, isn't it?
Yeah, that one makes me feel good, too.
Who thinks water's boring?
Enough people.
What do you love about them?
Yeah, so I used to drink a lot of diet soda.
Like, diet soda was my crutch.
So I decided to try flavored water, thinking it was a better alternative, not knowing, you know, how unhealthy it could possibly be.
Is anyone here worried about the issue of the flavor?
How do they make this thing taste like passion fruit?
I mean, without any calories, because if I ate the passion fruit, there'd be calories in it.
Well, I love water, so I decided, let me try some flavored water.
My favorite is watermelon flavored water.
But I'm thinking, how is watermelon flavored water actually have zero calories?
How is that?
That shouldn't be dawning on all of us as a major concern, because when it's too good to be true, it often is.
To help me investigate these drinks, Kellyanne Petrucci, that's a present for you.
These drinks are zero calories, but that doesn't mean they have zero effect on your health.
No, it doesn't.
Just because it says zero calories does not give you a free pass.
Now, I know that we're using a lot of these drinks and consuming them because they're healthier than some of the alternatives.
And in some cases, they are.
But here's what we have to watch for.
There's a lot of hidden additives in these.
So it's a way of getting things in your diet that you don't want and you don't even know it.
So we have to be careful and watch this.
You all would be on this?
As anxious as you might be, as we're learning about this.
My med team and Kellyanne scoured the market, analyzed it.
No calorie flavored water is out there.
One of the surprising ingredients we uncovered were artificial sweeteners.
Some of them were the same ones you find in diet soda, which is the exact opposite of why people are switching to these.
You know, the med team and I expected to find things like aspartame, maybe a little of that.
But what we were blown away to find is there's artificial sweeteners all over these drinks.
And that's just like, you know, drinking diet soda or anything else that we're really trying to switch to healthier options.
So then I'll create it equal.
I like the move in general.
Yes.
But artificial sweeteners, like sucralose, right, are hot topics in the world of nutrition.
And we ought to know about this before we make our choices.
And if we don't like what we're hearing, buy something else that doesn't have that in there.
So what's the deal with sucralose and weight gain and these other artificial sweeteners?
Yeah, so this is a really interesting and evolving topic.
Because you think, okay, zero calories, we know it's going to show a correlation to weight loss.
But not all the studies do.
Some of them show a correlation actually to weight gain.
And we have to think about this really intelligently.
And here's how.
Our bodies are really smart.
It's very hard to outsmart the body.
So if we're getting this intense hit of sweetness and no calories to back it up, that confuses the brain and it confuses the body.
And that's never a good thing.
Let me a little animation to see how this plays out.
Thank you very much.
In real life, this is what ends up happening.
You're sitting there, you're enjoying yourself, and normally...
You see something that's got sugar in it, right?
Like, for example, the chocolates you love or the donut you enjoy in the morning.
And your brain knows when you've had enough of this real sugar, right?
And it shuts off your sweet tooth.
That's how it's supposed to work.
But when you consume drinks with artificial sweeteners in them, your brain doesn't seem to get the right signal that you've had enough.
Of the sugar you want.
Your tongue tastes the sweetness, but your brain knows better.
It's too smart.
It knows and can sense that it's a different feeling, right?
It's not the same satiety that it gets with real sugar.
So it sends you out there looking, foraging for more of these sweets, high and low.
And soon you're surrounded by them.
So we love to test things out here on the show.
So we did our own little social experiment.
I think you'll enjoy.
Could the artificial sweeteners in these drinks actually be increasing your cravings?
That was the question.
So for two days, right?
This little social experiment on no-calorie-flavored waters was conducted, and for the first two days, we asked people to drink plain water, and they just added their own lemon, right?
Simple, easy, and pretty inexpensive.
The following two days, we asked them to drink a no-calorie lemon-flavored water, like you might go out and buy in a store, right?
Each day, they rated their cravings on a scale from one to five, right?
Five being the most intense cravings, and one, I don't even care anymore, right?
So we want to see if the number stayed low or high with these two options.
So let's bring in Alexis.
How are you, Alexis?
Hi.
You were one of our experimentees.
Yes.
So you did it the way we actually do it for four days.
Yes.
Okay, are you curious about this?
Very.
Here are the results.
Again, we're just looking to see whether we're getting a good deal for this move.
First off, when people in the first two days just had water with lemon, their craving intensity, remember, one means I don't care, five is I gotta have something, was a two.
For the second two days, when you switched to a lemon-flavored water, your craving intensity went up.
The 3.5 went all the way up to a number that's much more concerning to me because you probably were experiencing more cravings.
I don't know.
Did you sense this in your own life?
100%.
When I was doing just the water with pure actual lemon, it was very satisfying, the flavor itself.
I found myself not snacking as much, sticking to three meals a day.
And then as soon as I went over and did the lemon-flavored water, I was...
I was snacking everywhere.
I was ravenous.
I was looking for sweet and salty and all that different stuff.
In my own personal life, I found this as well.
And, you know, lemon water is an old treatment in Ayurvedic medicine, thousands of years old.
This is not thousands of years old.
And I'm not against all of these.
I think there's some probably reasonable products out there, and I know it's convenient.
But there's one other little thing I've got to get to.
When you do look at the ingredients, you see carbonated water and then this thing.
Natural flavors.
What does that mean to you, Alexis?
Well, I hope that it means that everything in it is derived naturally.
We're going to find out, because up next, the biggest food mystery lighting up the internet.
What's in your flavored water that makes it taste like a lemon or a lime?
Stick around.
Eye drops.
They seem harmless enough.
But did one woman use them as the ultimate murder weapon?
You won't believe your eyes.
A true crime investigation.
All new ours.
That's coming up tomorrow.
We've been investigating the truth about the no-calorie flavored waters that are all over the place.
No matter if it's grapefruit or raspberry or lemon or lime, you won't find fruit on the ingredient label.
But what you will find is a mystery ingredient.
Natural flavors.
Now I, along with everyone else online, was curious to know what that means.
So we asked a food scientist to uncover the science behind natural flavors.
But first, we've got some audience members here.
Come on in, guys.
I want them to talk about their favorite low-calorie waters.
Melody, what do you enjoy drinking?
Grapefruit, absolutely.
Isn't this cool?
And Tanya, what do you enjoy?
My favorite is passion fruit.
So grapefruit and passion fruit, right?
Now these have calories in them, right?
Shoshana, do you ever wonder how this beautiful passion fruit gets into that passion fruit, no calorie water without any calories getting in there?
I do.
I always think about that and I'm always wondering what's the healthier options, what's the more natural alternatives, so I'm interested to find out.
See, I always figure if you just squirt a little bit in there, you might get five calories.
At least you know what you're dealing with.
Yeah.
But having this pre-made for you with zero calories is attractive.
So pay attention.
You'll enjoy this.
Food scientists Taylor Wallace and nutritionist Kellyanne Petrucci are here to tell us what they uncovered about natural flavors.
And remember, these no-calorie drinks aren't using fruit juice, right?
There's no fruit juice in the ingredients label.
So how do they get the taste there?
So when they say natural flavors, they actually do come from a natural source, but it's a process.
And it begins in a lab.
And so here's what happens.
The food scientists will take a natural food, like this fruit, and they'll put it in a big machine.
And I have to tell you, it's called a still.
And this is a big whopper.
A huge machine.
They'll put it at a certain temperature, prescribed temperature, for a certain period of time.
And at the end of that, it comes out like you see here.
And this end product is actually really concentrated and all of the nutrition has been stripped away.
So you can clearly feel that this is probably not going to taste good at this point.
So what they do is they add in some extra flavor, maybe some herb or a bark or another fruit essence.
They add that in here so you get the taste you want.
So the point being, if you are drinking some kind of drink that's supposed to be grapefruit flavored, it may not actually come from a grapefruit, not fully.
Not fully.
Martell, you experimented with some of these natural flavors in your food science lab.
So show me what you uncovered here.
This is a pretty concrete example of how this would be done in the laboratory.
Absolutely.
So most companies aren't going to tell you exactly what's in their natural flavor because they have their own recipes.
So I took a flashback.
To graduate school, Dr. Oz.
And I put on my food chemistry hat, went into the lab, and made us a couple of examples.
Now, the goal here is to really make the flavors pop in your mouth, right?
We want to give you that experience of biting into the orange.
But we don't do that with just one flavor.
So the first drink that I'm going to show you, you can take a sip, just has that one orange flavor in it.
And as you'll see, it's very subtle, right?
I mean, the word "bland" comes to mind.
Right?
It's like water when someone dripped a couple of droplets of orange juice in there.
Exactly.
For the second drink, what I did is I extracted some flavors from the orange peel, the oils that are naturally in the orange, and then I added a little bit of phosphoric acid to give it a little tang and really kick those flavors up a notch.
This is fantastic.
Yeah, right?
Really, really good.
See, you invite me and Kellyanne to your Christmas party, and I'll bring the eggnog.
Well, call it both.
I'll bring the alcohol.
So back to the issue about these natural flavors and why it's this grab bag term.
Is it purely because it's a secret recipe that they don't publish it?
Well, so there's a number of reasons why we don't label it on the food label.
One is food scientists, we want to keep the label as clean as possible.
So, like Kellyanne said, we want you to focus on the amount of calories or the amount of sugar that's actually in products.
The second reason is because flavorists, like my friend Stacy, travel all over the world to find the newest, exciting, exotic flavor so that they can go back in the lab and blend them and make the next...
Creative innovation of flavored waters for you.
They don't want somebody stealing that and knocking it off.
So therefore, because it's all from natural products, the FDA just requires that you label it as natural flavor.
So let me cut to the chase.
Are they safe?
Absolutely.
In fact, they're used in such small quantities, they don't make an impact on any type of health outcome.
Now, here's what's interesting about natural flavors.
Natural really does mean natural.
So they can come from a fruit, a vegetable, an herb, or a spice.
My favorite vanilla natural extract actually comes from beaver anal glands.
Beaver anal glands.
And it actually tastes really great.
What do you guys think about that?
Beaver anal glands.
Even if it tastes great.
And so you can actually mix that with other flavors and actually get a raspberry flavor out of that.
For most of you all who are really grossed out with that, we don't actually sell a lot of those products on the grocery store shelf because, one, it's expensive to do, and two, we don't really have a lot of beavers, you know, just kind of hanging out around here.
What a terrible job to have.
I harvest beaver anal glands.
All right, come on over here.
So, Killian.
What do we pay attention to when we're buying these flavored waters that have no calories in them?
There's just one word we all have to keep in mind.
The big buzzword, I want this to be so prominent in everyone's brain when they're looking for these, natural flavors.
That's why.
We don't want to get any of the artificial stuff.
It's simple.
These are natural flavors.
It actually works for this.
Now, Taylor, if you prefer unflavored seltzer, you've got a little tool for it, a little hack.
Absolutely.
Because I actually...
If I had my druthers, I would only drink that.
But I get that you get bored of just a plain old water.
So help me bump it up a little bit.
Hack it for me.
Okay, well, let's bring a little food chemistry into your own household.
You can take those oranges, maybe a little bit of mint or lime, and muddle those together because, again, you want to let those oils escape from the food.
Like a mojito.
Yeah, and you can even actually cook them on top of the stove for, you know, one or two minutes to help bring those flavors out again.
Then add more water, dilute it out, let it set overnight.
The next day, you can filter it through a coffee filter to get rid of all the solids, and voila, it's your first step to becoming a food scientist.
Who wants to taste this?
Who's up for this?
Here you go.
Give it a shot.
This is my little gift to you.
This is how we ought to be doing it if you want to avoid anything, but at least you know what to look for.
You can share it down the aisle.
Up next, can you really eat 5,000 calories of junk food in one meal?
And lose weight?
It's not about whether you can do it.
Can you actually do it and lose weight?
Think about that.
We'll be right back.
Woo! Woo!
Woo! Woo!
Now, you know how much I love yogurt, but did you know just how much sugar--Ooh--could be added to just one cup?
All Nuance.
That's coming up on Wednesday.
This meal is super filling.
That was actually chicken gravy mash, and that's not all.
Imagine eating all these epic meals.
These are real meals as eaten.
Giant fries, onion ring sandwich, right?
A three-pound pastry, right?
That's pretty large.
And a ginormous mac and cheese steak.
So it looks like this thing I got behind me.
It got close above it there.
Look at that.
But yet, despite that, this Instagram sensation has gone viral for his health.
So you get to losing more than 60 pounds.
That's him before and that's after.
And that's really his physique.
Blake Horton says he eats 5,000 calories in one meal just once a day.
It's not just a fitness fanatic trick, guys.
There are women who are trying this as well more and more.
Today we're investigating this new extreme form of internet, rather intermittent fasting that's all over the internet.
Can you really eat all those calories in one sitting and lose weight?
And here's the other question.
Is it even healthy?
Please welcome Blake.
I gotta say, you have captured the nation's attention.
Half a million people watch you eat every night.
I've witnessed this myself.
Why are you so passionate about how you eat your food?
When I figured out how to eat what seems like a cheat meal every night before bed and lose weight and get all your daily nutrients at the same time, there's no reason not to be hooked.
And also, no longer get hungry.
We're going to get into all these bits because it's so different from what any of us thought was possible.
But how did you learn about it?
Who taught you you could even try this?
I was losing weight eating small meals spread out throughout the day, which I was miserable.
When you understand your caloric budget and you're counting calories, and you try to spread it out over three, four, five meals, shakes, snacks, you're calorically broke.
You have no budget.
And when you shrink that down, I read about intermittent fasting, and it said you can eat fewer meals, same daily caloric allowance, reduce hunger, go to bed happy and full with a giant food baby,
and continue the same progress.
I decided to test it out and I took it to, everything I do is like to an extreme.
I'm sensing that.
Yeah.
So I got really creative with it and I reduced it to one meal a day, which I didn't know anybody at the time, like who was doing that.
So the longer you wait to eat, once you get used to it, you no longer get hungry.
If you eat in like a four hour time period, all your calories, all your nutrients in a four hour time period, you're not going to be hungry.
Not nearly as much as if you did three meals.
Or four, five, six?
Let's kick the tires on this.
We're going to investigate, first of all, what Blake's eating to lose weight.
So walk me through your meal plan and just bring everyone up to speed of why you would eat this.
And just to be clear, okay, this is what it actually looks like on the Instagram feed.
But all of these things went into this.
So take your time, explain what this is.
And this is about 5,000 calories we calculated.
This is a little bit higher calorie.
I believe mine was around 4,000 calories.
But I do see a lot of oil here, which I didn't have on mine.
Oh, okay.
Here, I'll fix it.
You could just, yeah.
There we are.
Okay, it's 4,000 calories.
So this is all 4,000 calories in here.
There you go.
Yeah, I didn't recognize that.
What did we have?
We had some...
Salad and vegetables.
Yeah, we had about four pounds of vegetables.
Everybody asks if I eat fruits and vegetables.
Most of my meals have like four pounds of vegetables.
Or like three pounds of fruit.
But everyone sees the cheese sauce, the dressing.
And this, it's some low-calorie cheese sauce.
What about the French fries?
They're not the health food normally.
Fries.
I mean, they are potatoes.
They're not like deep-fried, fried, like for hours.
I mean, the fries I used are probably between like...
Two to three grams of fat per three-ounce serving of fries.
So you're very thoughtful about the cheat foods?
I count all my nutrients.
And what time do you normally eat?
I normally eat usually around like 1 to 2 a.m.
I thought that was the case.
I figured it's impossible.
Why at that hour?
Because I go live on Instagram and everybody's like, why are you live in the middle of the night?
My schedule is just packed.
Like, I like eating at the end of the day because, I mean, biologically we were meant to feast and fast.
When we feast, we go to sleep.
You digest while resting.
A lot of people have heartburn, indigestion, acid reflux.
I mean, I'm sure plenty of people here have had it.
I've had it in the past, too.
But when we go out to eat a lunch, and then you try to walk off your big lunch, or you go try to run it off or go to the gym after eating, and your body's trying to digest all this food while moving, that can cause a lot of those issues.
I eat all my food, and yes, I look like I have a huge baby, but I digest while resting.
See, I'll be honest.
If I ate at 1 in the morning, I wouldn't be able to sleep all night.
That would keep you from sleeping?
Yeah, for sure.
That would throw me off.
And, you know, this doesn't look so healthy to me.
And this, for sure, is a little bit petrifying as a doctor.
That's right.
I'm surprised they recreated this.
We took a long time.
We had to push people up.
So let me go back to this.
Come on over here for a second.
I'm going to walk you through how I analyze the food a little bit.
So this is one meal you had, right?
It doesn't look as healthy as some other meals.
I could imagine you eating.
Is that a big hamburger?
Yeah, it's a giant cheeseburger.
It's a cheeseburger, believe me.
Look over here.
Calorie content for that, pretty significant.
3,385.
So it's less than the 5,000 I said.
Less than the 4,000 even that you might have said.
Fat was almost 90 grams.
And carbs, 391 grams.
Here's another one.
This is some pizza.
This is a pretty big size of pizza.
It's bigger than your torso.
Here we had...
3,974 calories, sugar, 123 grams, sodium, 8,046.
Well, that was for two of these slices of pizza, not just one.
How many did you eat?
Two.
The total was for two slices.
Sure, sodium's a little bit high, but...
A little bit high?
8,000?
Yeah, for me, I mean, it's almost double the recommended amount, or a little bit over double the recommended amount, but I keep my potassium in check.
I'm sure you've heard about the sodium-potassium balance.
I'm also into fitness, so, I mean, I flush out the sodium.
Can I see your abs?
This is what I'm talking about.
I want to know how he eats...
That food, that pizza, it has this.
All right.
So part of the reason I wanted you to come on, if you don't mind, is I actually know that women are following you and are losing weight on the program.
So because they're off on social media and they're looking at what you're doing and imitating it and getting success, I got curious.
So I've got Kathy here with us.
How are you, Kathy?
I'm good.
How are you?
If I get it correctly, come join us.
Kathy's lost 50 pounds in six months.
By the way, before you even start to go, is that unusual for people who are following you?
Do you hear these stories?
I have my own diet.
It's the Blake Diet, and plenty of people have watched my how-to videos, my tutorials, and I have over 1,300 people now.
1,300?
Over.
All right, so you're one of the over 1,300 people.
Yes.
Tell me your story.
Okay, so we found Blake on the Internet, my fiancé and I, Jamie.
He's here today.
He found him on YouTube, and we decided to watch him.
He decided to start the diet.
He's like, oh, I'll give it a try.
I saw his success.
The first week or two weeks, he lost like 15 pounds.
Did it make you mad?
A little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I was just like, you know what?
I'm going to give it a try.
I mean, I have nothing else to lose.
I mean, I've done the whole traditional dieting, and it didn't really work for me.
And I was never a breakfast person.
I could never eat breakfast.
So this diet was just perfect.
Where is he hiding?
We'll pull him up there.
There's Jamie.
So Jamie looks skinny too.
He is.
He lost 85 pounds.
He lost 85 pounds?
Yeah.
And are you eating the same kinds of food as Blake is?
For the most part, yeah.
Scaled down into my calorie intake, my burn.
And your fiancée is also?
Yes.
Did I say fiancée or boyfriend?
Fiancée.
Fiancée, just making sure.
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
And it's the same kind of food.
And you say that you lost the weight, but you had other benefits also.
Yeah, I had more energy.
I didn't feel so sluggish.
I felt better.
My skin cleared up.
My hair felt better.
And at what time of day are you eating?
I eat at midnight.
You also eat at midnight.
Yes, I do.
What is going on here?
It's the face of everything we're talking about.
Here, come on over here.
So I'm going to take you to the truth tube.
Blake, get on over there.
I'm going to put you in the truth tube.
Now, you know what this is, right?
We've talked about intermittent fasting before.
And part of the challenge here, and just to be honest, I've never seen anyone eat the portion sizes that you're speaking about, Blake, or that you're enjoying, or your fiancé is either, who looks so healthy on the outside.
But I'm actually more concerned about what's going on inside of you.
So you allowed us to audit you.
To put you through a full examination, right?
We have all your blood tests.
When we come back, we got Blake's test results.
Is the diet that's blowing up the internet really healthy in the long term?
That's the real question I'm asking.
Is it something you ought to try?
Stick around.
Eye drops.
They seem harmless enough.
But did one woman use them as the ultimate murder weapon?
All new Oz.
That's coming up tomorrow.
We're back with the question, is the internet's new diet obsession of fasting and feasting on junk food something you ought to be trying?
Now, you may get to eat thousands of calories and shed pounds, but what's it doing to your insides?
Blake Horton, who started this new trend, is back.
We tested his cholesterol and his blood sugar before the show, and I asked him to keep track of his sleep patterns, and the results are in.
Are you ready, Blake?
I am ready.
You're ready.
All right.
Are you confident?
I'm confident.
Okay.
Total cholesterol should be under 200.
Blake's?
118.
I'm not quite sure how this is all working, but I gotta say that number's nice.
The blood sugars ought to be less than 100, between 70 and 99, ideally.
Yours?
84. Smack dab in the middle.
I was surprised.
These are just two of the lab results.
I looked at all your lab results.
Literally every single one was in the optimal range.
So I'm a little trying to figure out, get my footing back.
But I have to say, at least on the insides of you, you look as good as you do on the outside.
But then I did one more thing.
I wanted to know whether eating that late at night was messing with your sleep at all.
Do you think of yourself as a good sleeper?
If I get the time to sleep, I sleep like a rock.
But with my schedule, I'm basically like a long napper.
All right.
Well, long napping is a good way to describe it because on average, you are getting two hours and 45 minutes of sleep.
Which is, you know, as your sleep score, there's a little scoring system we have.
Your sleep score was 46. Let me show you the actual chart.
There's the 46. And look, you know, you fell asleep immediately like a rock.
Told you, right.
But you weren't asleep very long.
You didn't get deep sleep.
You didn't dream.
Do you remember dreaming at all?
Depends.
Very rarely.
Yeah, 18 minutes, you're not dreaming.
So, usually.
So, this is not surprising, I guess, because you're not giving yourself time.
If you gave yourself time, would it be better than this?
One of my goals in 2019 is to set my schedule where I can get a good night's sleep.
All right.
So, I have to acknowledge I'm shocked.
I've never seen anyone look as good as you'd look eating what you've been eating.
So, I asked my medical unit to dive into you a little bit.
What makes you different?
What makes you special?
And one issue in the back of my mind is you do work out.
And I wanted to figure out how many calories do you really burn a day?
So I had the menu to calculate it out.
They think that your calories burned in a day because you have a lean muscle looking at your weight and everything else, all the other variables.
3,850 calories a day of burning of calories.
That's part of the answer.
So if you're not burning 3,850 calories, don't eat 4,000 calorie meals.
It's not going to work so well.
That's correct, yeah.
Okay, so that doesn't explain everything.
Let's get back to this intermittent fasting issue because people are losing a lot of weight.
Who don't burn 3,850 calories.
And I want to understand what's going down with them.
So let's just go through the average American and how we all think about weight loss.
The average person starts eating their breakfast at 7 a.m. and they've done their dinner or whatever they're going to eat by 10 p.m.
That's about 15 hours.
We used to think calories in, calories out.
And when you eat like this, that might be the case.
Because if you're going to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snacks in between, it takes a long time.
It's a big, long eating window.
Your metabolism is going to want to deal with it as it can piecemeal.
What you're arguing is eat it all at once.
Get up at 7, go to bed whenever you're going to go to bed, and eat one meal, whatever it happens to be.
Well, the data seems to suggest that if we shorten the window when we eat, you might be better off.
You can eat the same number of calories in a short period of time as you would over the whole day, and you lose weight compared to what you would be eating.
Now think about that.
And they did a study actually shortening it down to just a four-hour window of eating and demonstrated results like yours.
So I don't know how many of you are thinking about this, but that combined with the idea that you're not hungry because you're not thinking about food, not tempting yourself all day long, might make it work.
The one issue that I've got is what kind of food you're eating.
So the one beef would be you're eating junk food.
You're arguing you're having fruits and veggies, but what do you have to say to folks at home who think they want to copy you?
To the untrained human eye, if you just assume what you are seeing on the screen, you're wrong.
Any of my meals that I make personally, if you would go to order it out at a restaurant, it would be twice the calories, probably more.
So I'm using healthier versions of everything, lower calorie versions.
My foods are higher protein, lower fat.
My meals, I'm weighing all my ingredients.
My meals are like, it's like I'm a scientist in a lab, a mad scientist, making my meal to fit my daily needs.
The macronutrients work for you?
Macro and micro.
And micro.
Across the board, you're doing your homework.
If people want to jumpstart their way towards doing what you're doing, what's the best way to start?
On a very basic level, to just skip your first meal of the day.
If that's breakfast, some people go out, they eat a 500-calorie breakfast.
They don't really know, or eat one at home to start their day.
If they would just save those 500 calories, 500 calories times 7 days a week is 3,500 calories.
That's one pound of body weight.
And if you're looking to lose a pound a week and you're maintaining, and you cut out that 500 calorie breakfast, you're going to lose a pound a week just like that.
Blake, you're intriguing to me.
Congratulations.
Appreciate it.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
Up next, constipation confessions.
Could you have a mega colon?
Plus, top experts revealed the surprising food, the guest thing is moving along again.
Alright, let's face it, let's face it.
We have all struggled with constipation before.
Am I right?
Right?
Once in a life at least, sometimes a lot more than that.
But a shocking new headline is opening my eyes to a whole new level of being, well, backed up.
There are reports of a man whose colon expanded to seven inches and actually burst because he was so constipated.
So many of my friends and family have been asking me about it that even I've gotten curious.
So today, do you have a megacolon?
And could your constipation be deadly?
For the first time ever, I'm going to show you what a real megacolon looks like.
Think about the word megacolon.
My first sisters-in-law, Kristen and Carrie, are here.
They say they are obsessed with talking about their bathroom schedules.
So I've got to say first, you're very brave to be here.
What kinds of things do you talk about, Kristen?
I'm pretty regular, so I don't have much to say on the topic.
So Carrie, what do you complain about when you get constipated?
What to do to fix it.
And it comes up a fair amount?
Fair enough.
Are you worried about megacolon?
Now I am.
I've got an expert, so pay attention to this.
Gastroenterologist at the Rashidi Raj.
He's been investigating this story, which was ripped from the headlines.
So you've got the details.
So just several on the same page.
What actually happened with this case?
So this was a 24-year-old young man who had chronic constipation for about four years.
But then for about two weeks, it was much more severe.
He had severe abdominal pain, a lot of bloating and distention of his abdomen.
So he went to the ER, and this is what they found.
So this is a...
Imagine that I'm standing like this, and you cut me in half this way, right?
So you actually cut half my body.
And this is the line of his colon.
Way bigger than it's supposed to be.
That's the spine, by the way, in the back.
So basically, from his spine to his belly button, which is about here, he's got a colon, filling up the whole space.
You go to the bathroom down here, the rectum's down here.
It's your pelvic bone.
So this is a long distance.
Right, seven inches, which is much, much larger than you want your colon to be, and you're going to feel it.
Now they sent him home with some laxatives, some enemas, but he showed up again two days later, even worse pain, and this is what they found.
We call this free air in the abdomen.
This means the colon has burst.
There's a perforation, a tear in the colon.
This is actually a life-threatening emergency because you can get an overwhelming infection of your entire body.
So again, this is the colon in here.
The area that we had the, you know, air in before, this is all air that's now inside the belly, but outside the intestinal system.
That is a surgical catastrophe.
Emergency, it's a big problem.
So let's show everybody how this actually happens, how a colon becomes a megacolon.
So we pulled together a little animation, and I'm going to walk you through it, so to speak.
So right here next to me is your colon.
When you eat food, fecal material, waste traveling through, starts to move up the colon.
And then it travels across the colon over here, right?
And then I'll step over here.
It comes down the descending colon.
And then this is pretty typical.
If you have constipation, it'll get stuck here.
You all see this?
This is regular constipation.
But here's the problem.
When this colon starts to dilate up, get really big and stretch out.
That's the term we use in medicine for a megacolon.
And it can distend severely for a bunch of cases, but chronic constipation is one of the things, if it's untreated for a long time, that worries us.
And a megacolon can lead to perforation because it gets so big, it pops.
And that's a surgical emergency that we were showing you with those x-rays earlier.
And that can also lead to sepsis and a bad infection.
So Dr. Raj, you actually found a picture of a megacolon.
This is unique.
It's displayed in a museum.
Yeah, I mean, look at this.
This actually dates back to 1892, and this is a museum in Philadelphia where a 29-year-old man, lifelong constipation, actually was unfortunately and sadly found dead in his bathroom.
He died while trying to have a bowel movement, severely distended megacolon.
They call it the giant megacolon.
So I've never seen one in person.
But for the first time in 10 years, we have a megacolon to show the audience.
Carrie is back.
She's been whining to her sister-in-law about this.
Are you ready to see a megacolon?
I am.
You are.
She says it with great trepidation and not a lot of confidence.
Okay.
So first of all, a healthy colon.
Looks like this.
All right?
This colon is not gargantuan.
I've shown you colons before.
This is about the right size.
But this...
It's what a megacolon looks like.
Compare these together.
Do you see how much larger that is?
Compare this colon to this colon.
I mean, it's a lot bigger.
And this is the difference between a regular colon with constipation and a colon that's gotten large from chronic problems.
It's, you know, less than half the size of the megacolon.
Thoughts on this?
It's pretty gross and pretty big, and I never want to That to happen to me.
Does this want you to take your constipation a bit more seriously?
Definitely.
Alright, that's a good idea.
Because Dr. Raj, it's not just about drinking a little more water.
Or a tiny bit more fiber.
What are the reasons you get a megacolon?
So, getting a megacolon, it's a rare complication of constipation, but there are also people who are lacking the nerve cells in the lining of their colon that help move things along, so they might develop megacolon.
People with Crohn's disease or colitis, if it's untreated, they can get a severe distention, which leads to what we call toxic megacolon.
For most people with constipation, their colon is still going to look like this.
It's going to have the normal diameter, but you want to keep an eye on it.
If you feel after...
Several weeks that you're not moving your bowels, you're starting to get pain or discomfort, you may be down this road and you want to do things not just drinking water, but increasing your exercise intake, your fiber intake, and speaking to your doctor about other measures so you don't go from this normal size to this megacolon.
Stay here and guard the megacolon.
I will do my best.
There are that many of them.
Never had one before.
Let me ask Dr. Raj an important question.
How do you know if you're chronic constipation?
Yeah.
Which Carrie and many others are suffering from, has become more of a medical emergency, whether it's become a megacolon.
So a megacolon is going to give you, first of all, severe abdominal pain.
You might even get fever or what we call sepsis, so other signs of real infection.
But the hallmark is that distended, hard, like a drum abdomen.
And to kind of diagnose yourself, you can really tap.
On your abdomen, we do it with the two fingers, and it's going to sound kind of like it would if you did a drum or a balloon.
So you want to know, is this full of air, a really distended colon that at some point could actually rupture?
Just think about that.
I mean, literally, that's what it's going to feel like a little bit, and that's how we diagnose the problem just on physical examination.
That's right, yeah.
Up next, what can you do to prevent constipation?
revealing constipation confessions, the top ways health experts get rid of their own constipation.
show.
We've been asking the question, do you have a mega colon?
And now it's time for the biggest constipation confessions.
My go-to health experts are spilling the beans and what they really do when they get backed up.
They're revealing the most common constipation situations and what you can do to get things moving again.
Joining us is nutritionist Tanya Zuckerberg.
We're going to start with the stress constipation.
Tell us about this title.
So I have found that when my clients get stressed that they often complain about constipation.
And I believe it's due to two factors.
When people get stressed, they don't drink enough water.
They don't stop to drink.
And therefore, the lack of fluid hardens the stool.
The other thing that happens is when people are stressed, we tend to eat emotionally.
And we eat things such as cookies and cakes and refined carbs that lack fiber.
So they don't have the stool bulk that would normally be present to increase the stool so they could pass it.
Now personally, when I get stressed out, I have the opposite problem.
But we'll get to that later.
Fiber and magnesium smoothie is your solution.
Yes.
So we have combined these two nutrients using two foods.
We're going to get fiber by using a high-fiber cereal.
We have them here.
And we have raspberries, which contain fiber and magnesium.
And because we want this to be...
You add them directly to the beginning.
Yep, put them in the smoothie.
And because we are recommending this at breakfast, we want to make sure that the meal is complete.
So we added some Greek yogurt or protein and some almond milk.
But you can use traditional milk.
Any milk works.
You want the liquid there, really, for the smoothness of it.
I have to go already.
It's that effective.
It's perfect.
So, Trinesha, come over here.
So, Trinesha, you actually tried this out for a little bit for your stress constipation.
The taste, I think you'll agree, is pretty good.
Very good.
How did it work for you?
It really worked, Dr. Oz.
For some reason, I've been constipated from working so much and the kids, and so to have something that tastes good and that's affordable, it was, like, really quick to make, and I actually incorporated it into my diet because I want to move on the road.
Come, move on me over here.
We've got another great idea.
This is the Away From Home.
You can go over here if you want.
Away from home constipation, Dr. Raj, you actually have confessed that this is a problem you sometimes experience.
You're not alone, by the way.
Exactly.
I get it.
Many of my patients get it.
My friends.
Now, when you're traveling, a lot of things can throw off your system.
What I do, my go-to trick, is to bring some golden raisins with me.
This is something I eat pretty much every day.
It's a great source of fiber.
It gets things moving.
I just prefer the golden.
You can use regular raisins as well.
They're delicious, and it's just like a nice little treat that helps you move.
So Tanya over there who made this little smoothie, she's also called the queen of fiber.
Listen, I love Tanya.
So give her some other fiber hacks.
So women should aim for 35 grams of fiber a day, and it's easier to get than most people realize.
Starting at breakfast, you saw we used the cereal in the smoothie, but just have a bowl of a high-fiber cereal.
Look for one with at least 10 grams of fiber or more.
There are plenty on the marketplace.
For lunch, as we enter into the winter months, you want something warm.
So have a bean soup, lentil, split pea.
Both of these will give you approximately 8 grams of fiber.
And then when it comes to dinner, Bulk up on what we call cruciferous vegetables.
Broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus.
These are going to have more fiber than things like potatoes.
So always serve two cruciferous vegetables and you'll get at least six grams of fiber with your dinner.
Keep the megacolon away.
Yes.
Tanya, by the way, has got the F-Factor Diet.
You check it out.
It's a wonderful book.
And you've got lots of constipation remedies on DrRoz.com.
Check them out.
Just spread them with your friends.
And we'll put some photos up there of the megacolon, which you can scare your family and friends with as well.
We'll be right back.
Eye drops.
They seem harmless enough, but did one woman use them as the ultimate murder weapon?
All new Oz.
That's coming up tomorrow.
That's coming up tomorrow.
At 18 years old, Cheryl Hunter set off for Europe to become a model.
What she thought would be a trip to make her dreams come true would become a nightmare she couldn't escape.
No sooner did we land in France than a man wearing a camera around his neck approached me.
He asked me if I was a model.
Told me he could make me one if I were to just go off with he and his friend standing over there.
That is how easy it is to become a model in France.
They drugged me.
They took me to an abandoned construction site and beat me mercilessly.
They drugged me again and raped me repeatedly.
They dumped me in a park in Nice three days later.
Sure.
After surviving the trauma of her attack, Cheryl set forth on a mission as an author and speaker to connect one another through painful experiences and help those find peace and forgiveness in life-changing moments that we didn't choose for ourselves.
After hearing her speak, I knew I needed to hear more of her story.
So I invited her as a guest on my podcast so she can share more of her survival story with you.
So listen, download the Dr. Oz podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's free.
Share it with your friends as well.
Together, change is happening, everybody.
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