Why Your Plate Is Your Fate With Dr. Steve Hughlett

For decades, Dr. Steve Hughlett worked as a hospital pharmacist, helping patients manage chronic disease with medications. Then a deep dive into the nutrition research changed the course of his career. What he discovered convinced him that many of the chronic illnesses filling hospitals today have more to do with what people eat than with a lack of prescription drugs.

In this episode, Dr. Hughlett explains why he believes insulin—not blood sugar—is one of the most important markers of metabolic health and why understanding its role can change the way we think about type 2 diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease, and many other chronic conditions. He discusses how modern eating patterns keep insulin chronically elevated, why processed foods are designed to keep us coming back for more, and how real, nutrient-dense foods can help restore metabolic health.

The conversation also explores how definitions of chronic disease have changed over time, the difference between treating symptoms and addressing root causes, why childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes have become increasingly common, and practical steps anyone can take to begin improving their health through food.

Whether you’re looking to better understand metabolic health or are simply curious about the relationship between nutrition and chronic disease, this episode offers a thought-provoking perspective from a pharmacist who chose to dedicate his career to prevention rather than prescriptions.

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To learn more about Dr. Steve Hughlett, visit https://www.drstevehughlett.com/

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Kendall Nelson and the regular text is Dr. Steve Hughlett.

Most healthcare professionals spend their careers learning how to diagnose disease and prescribe medications. Far fewer stop to ask whether many of the conditions filling hospitals every day might be prevented or even improved by something as fundamental as food. This is episode 592, and our guest is Dr. Steve Hughlett.

Dr. Hughlett is a doctor of pharmacy who spent nearly three decades working in hospital pharmacy, specializing in pediatrics. After being asked to prepare a lecture on childhood obesity, he began reading the nutrition literature and discovered research that completely challenged what he’d been taught throughout his education and career. That experience ultimately led him to retire early from pharmacy, write the book, Your Plate is Your Fate, and devote his work to helping people better understand the relationship between food and chronic disease.

In this episode, Dr. Hughlett explains why he believes insulin, not simply blood sugar, deserves far more attention when discussing metabolic health. We explore why rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes continue to rise, how processed foods may be contributing to that trend, and why he believes our healthcare system often focuses more on managing disease than preventing it. We also discuss childhood obesity, insulin resistance, fasting insulin, and the simple dietary changes he believes can dramatically improve metabolic health.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to tell you about the Weston A. Price Foundation. The Weston A. Price Foundation is a member-supported organization. In other words, we can only do education, research, and activism with your help. There’s no other way, so please become a member. Go to the Weston A. Price Foundation website and click on the Member Yet? button. Use the code POD10 to join for $30 for the year. That’s code POD10. Thanks in advance, and welcome to the Weston A. Price family. Now, let’s welcome Dr. Steve Hughlett.

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Dr. Hughlett, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me on here.

I want to start by asking you. You were a doctor of pharmacy for over 30 years in the hospital setting. I assume that means that you were a pharmacist who specialized in giving medications. The title of your book is called Your Plate is Your Fate: A Simple Guide to Understanding How Food Choices Lead to More and More Medications. I’m curious. How did you make the shift towards nutrition-based wellness? Was there a disheartening trend that you were seeing?

Rethinking Modern Pharmacy And Root Cause Health

No. It happened pretty quickly. My specialty is pediatrics. I’ve got a doctor of pharmacy with a pediatric specialty. I did my residency back in 1991. After that, I worked at the hospital, mainly in pediatrics, for the first half of the time I was there. I was there for 29 years. In the last half, I switched over and became the supervisor of the 2nd and 3rd shift.

During the first part, when I was a pediatric pharmacist, we had an annual pediatric seminar that we’d bring all the medical personnel from all around the area in. All day long, we would teach about pediatric issues. I had talked at probably 3 or 4 of those annual events, but once I switched to supervisor, I didn’t speak again until a couple of years ago.

At that time, I got a phone call or an email from the people who put on the event, and they asked me if I would speak at the upcoming pediatric seminar. I said, “I’d love to do that.” I asked what topic, and they said, “A talk on childhood obesity.” I thought, “I’ll do that.” I put together this whole slide presentation with a food pyramid, and how if you want to lose weight, you have to decrease calories, exercise more, and all this stuff that makes no sense now that I know.

I thought, “Before I come up and give this talk, I better go to the nutrition literature and see if there’s anything new out there.” My eyes were opened wide to all this literature that has been out there. I didn’t know anything about it. All these diseases that I’ve always been told were progressive, chronic, and irreversible, like Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and all these diseases. All these people were being cured from this. They were being reversed and cured from this, and all with nutrition.

Targeting Insulin Over Blood Sugar

I learned what was happening. Let’s take diabetes as an example. That’s the first one that I learned about. I went to school for twelve years. I practiced for, at that time, 29 years. I was always taught that diabetes is about having too high blood sugar. Everybody focused on how to get that blood sugar down. I’ve been reading all kinds of books and everything, but I found that Type 2 diabetes is insulin resistant. It’s due to having too high insulin for too long, and high blood glucose is a symptom.

I didn’t realize it, but the drug companies had brainwashed me the entire time. We’re all trying to get that glucose down. The whole problem is that diabetic drugs work by either making your pancreas produce more insulin or making your cells more sensitive to insulin. By using diabetic medications, you’re making Type 2 diabetes worse. That’s why they say it’s chronic, progressive, and irreversible.

If you’re using medications, that’s true because you’re constantly making the root cause of high insulin worse. They knew this because, before the mid-1980s, there were only two classes of diabetic drugs, and that had kept us on seven different medications. From the mid-1980s to 2000, they never made another diabetic drug because they said there were not enough Type 2 diabetics to make it worth their while. They also found that bringing glucose down had no effect on health, cardiovascular disease, or anything else.

Wise Traditions - Kendall Nelson | Dr. Steve Hughlett | Metabolic Health Insulin — Metabolic Health Insulin: Ultra-processed food additives and formulas train young palates to crave glucose, leading to early metabolic challenges.

After 2000, the last time I looked, there have been 25 new diabetic drugs and four new classes of drugs. That’s an average of one new diabetic drug every single year after going fifteen years without making one. That’s why we are making more diabetics. What’s even worse is they’re using the A1C to do it. They’re taking the A1C that used to be anything below eight was fine, and then they lowered it to anything below seven. They keep dropping it down to 6.4. They came with a pre-diabetes of 5.8 to 6.4.

The reason that’s important is that as they keep saying, “This is the healthy range,” and they drop it, if you’re outside of that healthy range, they can put you on Type 2 diabetic medications, which means they’re making more Type 2 diabetics. They’re making millions of new Type 2 diabetics every single year. The same thing they do with blood pressure. They keep lowering the amount of what a healthy blood pressure is, because as they lower it, they can put more people on blood pressure medications.

There’s all kinds of proof for all of this. They’re doing the same thing with statins and everything. Once I learned this, I honestly felt sick walking into work. I couldn’t go into a system that I knew we were propagating or making more patients so the drug companies could make more money. I didn’t know it. None of us know that. Your physicians do not know this. I guarantee you. Unless you’ve got somebody who, for some reason, read the nutritional literature, we did not know this. Once I did, I took early retirement.

I took early retirement about eight years prior to when I was planning on taking retirement so I could try to get the word out to as many people as I could. That’s why I wrote the book. That’s why I started a podcast. That’s why we have a weekly newsletter and have come up with courses. I’m speaking on stages at different conferences around the United States. I do anything I can possibly do to get the word out to people that if you are diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes or anything like that, that is not a life sentence.

There are only two reasons why your blood glucose goes up. Everybody’s worried about bringing the blood glucose down. People are like, “How do you get this down? Do this, and you’ll get the blood glucose down. Do this and do that to get it down.” Nobody’s asking the other side of the equation. Why is your blood glucose going up in the first place? That is the key. That is the main thing.

There are only two ways that your blood glucose goes up. It takes it out of your storage, so that’s only a little bit. Ten percent of your liver, which is about 400 calories. That’s all there is. One percent of each of your skeletal muscles contains glycogen, which is the glucose stored for us. We have little glucose bricks called glycogen. In your skeletal muscles, it’s only good for that one skeletal muscle.

Fueling The Body With Fat Instead Of Glucose

If you add all of it together, it’s about 400 calories in your liver of stored glucose and about 2,000 in your muscles of stored glucose. All the glucose that you have is about 2,400 calories. If you take all the glucose out of your bloodstream, it comes to about two teaspoons of sugar. It is not very much glucose at all. That’s about enough energy. If you slept for 24 hours and didn’t do anything, with your basal metabolic rate, you would burn about 2,400 calories. That proves God never meant for us to use glucose as an energy source. God meant for fat to be our energy source.

What they’ve done is they’ve got their anchors with the food companies where all they put in their food is glucose, fructose, seed oils, and chemicals. Every single thing in a box, bottle, bag, and can with all these long labels on it. Everything on your grocery store shelves is toxic to our bodies. It especially keeps you hungry so you’re eating it all the time. It’s devised to do that. The whole thing is they’re trying to feed us all this stuff that makes our glucose go up, which makes our insulin levels go up. We do it all throughout the day so our insulin stays up.

When your insulin levels are high, all you can do is force fat into your fat cells. That’s what insulin does. When your insulin levels are low, that forces you to burn your fat out of your fat cells. The whole key to health is to keep your insulin levels low. If you keep your insulin levels low, you’ll be eating the fat out of your fat cells. You’ll eat the fat out from around your organs because that’s what people have. They’ve stuffed their fat cells so full that now they have fat all around their organs.

Storage means you’re in stress. That’s how you take it out of storage. You’re in stress mode. You’re in fight or flight mode. Whether it’s stress from getting a thorn in your foot, breaking a leg, or having pneumonia or a viral infection, or you see a child getting ready to run down the street, whatever causes stress doesn’t matter. That makes your glucose go up. In general, that’s acute stress. You should be able to let your stress come back down, let your insulin come back down, and start burning your fat again.

Chronic stress is a different thing. If you’re stressed because you hate your job, your relationships are in trouble, your finances are in trouble, if there’s some kind of stressor like that, that’s chronic stress. It still does the same thing. It’s still constantly stimulating you to break the glucose out of your storage, but you’re going to have to learn how to deal with that stressor on your own. Other than stress or other than fight or flight, the only other way your blood glucose goes up is because you eat it.

People are eating glucose all through the day, every single day. There are only three macronutrients. There’s protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Your intestine is the only thing that sees the food that you eat. In your stomach and your intestines, you have bacteria there, sitting and breaking all this food down with enzymes. They break this food down to the basic building blocks, and the building blocks are what get into the bloodstream and get all around the blood.

Your bloodstream and your organs only see the building blocks. With protein, the basic building blocks are amino acids. With fat, the basic building block is fatty acids. With carbohydrates, the basic building block is glucose. All carbohydrates, which means all plant-based foods and all laboratory-made foods, contain glucose in different amounts. We use fat and cholesterol for our energy source. Plants use glucose as their energy source.

If you’re talking about plants that grow below the ground, like potatoes or sweet potatoes, those have starch in them. Starch has long chains of glucose. If you have glucose issues, you might want to stay away from the plants that grow below the ground until you get that under control. The plants above the ground, like lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and all that stuff, still have glucose, but they don’t have that much. That’s not the problem.

You have to be careful with fruit. It’s a plant, so it does have glucose. Fruits also have fructose, and that’s what sugar is. It’s glucose and fructose together. People think they’re getting away from sugar when they eat fruits all day long and find out that it’s no different when you do it that way. You need to eat your food seasonally. Don’t eat it unless it’s growing at that time. That’s the deal.

Can chronic disease be reversed with real food instead of prescriptions? Dr. Steve Hughlett explains his shift from pharmacy to wellness.

There’s man-made food, and there’s God-made food. God-made food is real fruits, real vegetables, and real meat. That’s God-made food. Man-made food is all the stuff made in the laboratory. If you want to get your glucose down, stay away from that. Keep the glucose down so your blood glucose doesn’t go up. If that doesn’t go up, then your insulin isn’t going to go up. You keep all your columns down as far as your health. That’s when you start reversing all the diseases.

Let’s back up a tiny bit. You talked about how you couldn’t continue with your doctor of pharmacy degree, and you couldn’t continue to go to work because it didn’t feel right now that you know what you know nutrition-wise. You also have a story about your own path that started many years ago. It involved your six-year-old son. Can you describe to me what happened?

It’s the same as everybody. You go through life. When you’re young, you don’t think that much about your health in general, so you eat all these things that taste so good. You don’t realize that you’re getting big. You’re with yourself every single day, all through the day, so you don’t notice the change. It was right around 1999 or 2000, right around then. I remember I was in my closet, and I was looking for a shirt to wear.

My little six-year-old son was up there. He came up, looked at me, patted me on the belly, and said, “Daddy, you’re fat.” It floored me. I thought, “What do you mean I’m fat?” That got me and my wife talking. We’d been married 40 years. By that time, we’d only been married for probably thirteen years. We were looking at our health and our weight, and we were like, “Oh my gosh.” She went out. She was at the grocery store, and she found a magazine. She came home and said, “This is great.”

That’s when I first started thinking about food in a different way. There was a guy who had an article in there. We came to find out he had a book, so we got the book. We started doing what the book said. I know that was silly. We did lose weight, but we were exercising six times a week. You don’t have to exercise to lose weight.

If you’re using glucose for your energy source when exercising, you’re never going to get to your fat cells. If you’re using fat for your energy source, then you will eventually get to it. Back then, all we did was we had a portion of protein, a portion of carbs, and a portion of vegetables. Back then, I didn’t realize vegetables were carbs. That’s all we had. My wife and I talked about that. We’re like, “Why did we do this?” We were eating 5 to 6 times a day back then.

That’s what they were telling us to do. That’s what everybody was telling us to do. It’s like, “Why were we eating 5 to 6 times a day, keeping our insulin levels high, and we still lost quite a bit of weight?” I don’t think it’s because of what we were eating. I think it’s because we decreased our portions to one portion of carbohydrates. For most people, their plate is nothing but carbs and has a little sliver of protein.

The other thing is it stopped us from eating everything in the box or a can. I used to drink Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper all the time. We’d go to Chinese buffets, pizza buffets, and all these buffets. In my mind, we lost weight not because of what we were doing, but what we stopped doing. Once we stopped doing that, we realized that eating 5 to 6 times a day isn’t the way to do it.

Now, we know what the nutrients are. The whole thing that we do when we eat is think, “Is this going to make my insulin levels go up, or is it going to keep my insulin levels low?” If it’s a carbohydrate, if it’s plant-based, it’s going to go up. How much? It depends on how much you eat and what types you eat. That was the main thing. My son is 33 years old. He’s doing great. He learned from it because both our sons are in great shape. I’m so proud of them.

Our kids can certainly set us straight, can’t they? Let’s talk a little bit about insulin itself. Can you describe what the job of insulin is? We’re talking a lot about how we don’t want this to be too high, but it’s there for a reason. Let’s talk about what the job of insulin is.

It’s a stored hormone. That’s how you can think of it. It’s stimulated by carbohydrates or glucose. If you see a product that says there are 50 grams of carbohydrates in it, that means there are 50 grams of glucose. It’s two different names for the same thing. You don’t even have to eat it. You don’t even have to put it in your mouth. If it’s making you salivate, that means your body’s getting ready for it.

If you look at stuff like that, and in your mind, you have the thoughts like, “I bet that tastes wonderful. Look at that. I bet that tastes great.” Once you start that thing in your mind, you’re getting your body prepared. 1) You start salivating, and 2) It starts raising your insulin levels. That’s the same thing with artificial sweeteners. If you do artificial sweeteners, you can swish it around your mouth, spit it out, and your insulin levels will still go up. It’s called the cephalic phase of insulin.

What happens is your body is getting ready to have glucose, and so your insulin levels start to go up. When you eat the carbohydrate, it gets broken into glucose in the intestines. Your glucose levels go up, and so your insulin levels go up. When your insulin levels go up, there are three main things that it does. You do not want a high blood glucose level. That is true. Glucose attaches to all proteins called glycation. It damages the proteins. That’s what an A1C is. That’s glucose attaching to the red blood cells, damaging them. It’s attached to the hemoglobin of the red blood cell, which is a protein. That’s why it’s called a hemoglobin A1C.

What you do is eat it. The body is trying to get rid of it, so it secretes insulin. The first thing insulin does to get rid of the glucose is it uses it for whatever energy you’re doing right at that time, so about a half hour to an hour after you eat. If you eat some carbs, and then you go for a walk, you can bring your glucose down a little bit. If you go play ball, play something, get out, move around, and expend energy right after you eat, that will help bring the glucose down a little bit. Most people don’t. Most people eat, sit at the desk, the table, the couch, or the chair.

The second thing it does is it replenishes the glucose stores. There’s only 10% of your liver and 1% of each skeletal muscle. Most people eat glucose all through the day, so you never empty those cells. You may put in a little bit, but the majority of the glucose that you eat goes straight to the liver and gets turned straight into triglycerides or fat. That’s how your body gets rid of it. Back in 1965, the average amount of sugar that people ate was two teaspoons of sugar per person per day. That is the same amount that’s in your bloodstream.

Fast forward to 2015, it was estimated that it went up to 65 teaspoons of sugar per person per day. It went from 2 to 65. I guarantee it’s higher now because they’ve got everybody convinced that all this food in the box, bottle, bag, and can in the grocery stores is food. It’s not. It’s not giving your body any nutrients. Almost all the glucose you eat is getting turned straight into triglycerides. When they get circulated in the body, it’s causing your high insulin levels, so it’s forcing your body to take all those triglycerides and store those as fat.

That’s why people are getting more obese. Every single year, we’re more obese. The problem with that is people who are born after the 2000s, when they look around, they see that almost everybody around them is obese, so they think this is a natural thing. They’re like, “As you get older, you get more obese, get sick, and get put on medications.” They weren’t, for us. I was born in 1962. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, people weren’t obese.

We know there’s a difference, but the new people don’t know the difference. Most people don’t care about it until they start having a heart attack, get put on dialysis, or have fatty liver. That’s the path. When you use glucose for your energy source, you’re on your path to multi-organ failure. That’s where genetics comes in. How many organs? Which organ? It all varies because diabetes is an umbrella disease. If you have Type 2 diabetes, that means you’re damaging every single organ in your body. It’s not just a single disease. That’s why it’s so important.

One of the main things I’ve got to let people know is that they don’t even realize how sick they are. They think, “I’m big, but fat is beautiful. I should love myself.” This has nothing to do with how you look. That’s between you and God. Everybody is beautiful. That’s God’s eyes. It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with what’s going on inside your body.

If it’s okay for me to say, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. If you are a Christian, is this the temple that you want your Holy Spirit to live in? That’s what I go by. Are you feeding your temple nutrients that it can use to revive itself, or are you feeding a bunch of toxins that are making it worse? It truly is that easy. Every single thing you have on your floor is either a toxin or a nutrient. Most people don’t even know what nutrients are anymore, which is the other thing. I explain to people what nutrients are.

Before we leave the topic of what insulin is, you have a good analogy about being on a subway. I want you to give me that analogy regarding insulin, and then we’re going to go a little bit more in-depth with diabetes.

Visualizing Insulin Resistance With The Subway Analogy

The whole thing is insulin resistance. Everybody is like, “What is insulin resistance?” Think of a subway. You’ve got this big, narrow subway. The subway cars are the cells of your body. Those are your fat cells. The people are glucose. Usually, what happens is you go down, and you’re waiting in whatever they call the place where you wait for a subway train. I live in Missouri. We don’t have those. That’s the glucose sitting there and waiting.

The train will stop, the doors will open, and the people will get on, and then it goes to its destination. That’s the way it should be. You eat a little bit of glucose and put it in your fat cells. You have times that you’re not eating it, so it comes back out of the fat cells. When it gets to the next stop, it comes back out. Everything flows fine until all of a sudden, you eat.

It’s rush hour, and you have all these people coming down. There are people everywhere. There’s glucose everywhere in this subway station. What happens is everybody’s trying to get on the subway, but there are so many people that you can’t get them all on there. The subway conductors, which are like insulin, are coming down into the subway and saying, “It’s fire code. Get out of this hallway. You’ve got to get on the trains.”

They start pushing everybody into this train. As insulin does, it’s pushing all this fat into your fat cells. Remember, I say fat because that’s what glucose gets turned into. You push them all in there and try to get them in there as much as possible. It works for a little bit, but then all of a sudden, there’s another rush hour.

There are more cars, and all these cars are stuffed. You have the conductors, the insulin, that says, “I need more conductors. I can’t do this on my own. There are too many people.” They start pushing these people into the subway cars because it’s so full. They can’t do it anymore. That’s what insulin does. It takes more insulin to push more inside there.

There’s nothing wrong with the subway car. There’s nothing wrong with the conductors. There’s nothing wrong with the cell. There’s nothing wrong with the insulin. There’s nothing wrong with the pancreas that’s producing the insulin. The fact is, the cars, your fat cells, are too full. You can’t do it. All of a sudden, there comes a time when you can’t put any more, so you have all this fat floating around in the blood.

It can’t get in the fat cells, so what does it do? It goes to your organs and starts storing all this fat around the places that would never have stored fat in the first place. That’s when you get fatty liver disease, fatty pancreas, fatty heart, fatty brain, and fatty kidney. Everything. It’s the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with the insulin. It’s that our fat cells are too full. That’s what insulin resistance is.

Prediabetes is not what they say. Prediabetes is not a glucose of 5.7 to 6.4. What prediabetes means is your insulin levels are high, but your glucose levels are normal. This happens for about 10, 20, to 30 years before you ever see high glucose. What happens is when you’re healthy, you eat glucose, and your body increases the insulin. It gets rid of the glucose, goes back down, and then your insulin levels come back down to normal. That’s health.

What happens when you start eating glucose all day long, every single day? You’re snacking. No nutrients. It’s nothing but glucose, fructose, seed oils, and chemicals. That’s all that stuff is. Every bit of that is toxic. When you do that all the time, it starts taking more and more insulin to keep your glucose normal. One cell that gets stuffed is insulin resistant, so it starts filling up another cell. You have fat cells all over your body. It takes decades to start filling up all these fat cells, or it used to.

Your body wasn’t designed to burn glucose all day. Learn why keeping insulin low unlocks your natural fat-burning energy.

Once you’re all full, you’re insulin resistant. This is when your blood glucose goes up. For 10, 20, to 30 years, when your insulin level is high and your glucose is normal, you are pre-diabetic. The only way you’re going to know that is if you get your fasting insulin level checked. Doctors do not check insulin levels. In fact, if you ask yours, chances are, they don’t even know why you’re asking. They’d be like, “Why would you even want to know that?” That’s the problem. They’re only focused on glucose.

Your insulin level has been high for 20 to 30 years, and you can’t do it anymore. All your fat cells are stuffed. There’s nowhere else to put fat, so your glucose levels start to rise. That’s when the doctor comes in and says, “You are pre-diabetic because your glucose is starting to come up. I need to give you a medication that raises your insulin levels.” You made the root cause even worse. That’s not what you need to do. The deal is you need to stop eating glucose and let that insulin come back down. That will solve everything.

You can answer all health questions in one sentence. Keep your insulin levels low. If you do that, that means you’re not eating man-made food, which is causing the three pillars of disease, which are high insulin levels, inflammation throughout the body, and high glucose levels. Those first two, high insulin and inflammation, happen decades before, but it gets even worse because they’re putting the same toxic stuff in our infant formulas. We’re getting our babies addicted to glucose right off the bat. They’re going to tell everybody that this is as good as mother’s milk.

We are lied to constantly, and people are starting to become more aware. They’re like, “They’re trying to make money off us.” They do. There’s a ton of money to be made off sick people. All you have to do is stop eating the products. The sugar industry supplies the food. The chemical industry supplies the food. You have your big ag with corn, soy, and wheat. Those all supply the food company. Once you get sick with that food, you’re going to be supplying the drug company.

All you have to do is vote with your dollars. You can either buy this stuff and keep all those companies rich, or quit eating it and let them all go broke. You can do that by going to your local farmers. You vote with your money. Give it to the local farmers. If you’re eating fruits and vegetables, it’s seasonal. Talk to your farmers.

Make sure they’re not spraying all the chemicals that the food companies do. Buy a side of beef or whatever. It’s a lot cheaper. It’s a lot healthier, and it tastes so much better. The answer is so simple, and yet it’s so hard to get that, too, because you’re going against trillion-dollar corporations that are making sure that we do not get that information out.

You mentioned babies. We’re talking about obesity. In your book, you write that six-month-old babies are becoming overweight or even becoming obese. That floored me. I had to read that twice. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why is that happening?

It’s called the five As. They knew this. R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris used to be over at the cigarette company. They were telling everybody cigarettes were healthy. They taught the cigarette companies how to get people addicted to their stuff. All the marketing and everything said, “Smoking is great. There’s nothing wrong with smoking.” All of a sudden, the word came out. Everybody found out and were like, “There is something wrong with smoking.”

Breaking The Cycle Of Early Childhood Food Addiction

R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris went over and got over the food companies. They bought some of the food companies. They started telling them about the five As of addiction. If I remember them, the way you can get people addicted is availability, where you have it everywhere. Affordability, where everybody can afford it, and advertising, where you make sure everybody knows. The other one is age. The sooner you can get people addicted, the more you’re going to be able to make sure they stay addicted.

With cigarette companies, they weren’t allowed to do all their advertising to people less than eleven years old, something like that. With food companies, because everybody thinks it’s food, and it’s not, they’re starting to give it to babies immediately. One, they’re feeding the mom, so they’re getting the stuff in utero as well. If the mom’s eating this stuff, the baby is getting all this stuff, too.

They come out and give an infant formula instead of healthy breast milk. They start getting these kids addicted right off the bat. It does the exact same thing. You’re overloading them with all this sugar. Some of these infant formulas have up to 50% high fructose corn syrup. It’s ridiculous. They get them addicted to all this stuff. They got them earlier.

My specialty is pediatrics. In my first fifteen years in practice, we did not see Type 2. There was one girl, Rebecca. She was Type 2 diabetic. She’s the only one we had. Nobody else was. By the time I retired, fourteen years later, we were seeing Type 2 diabetics all the time as children. We saw pediatric Type 2 diabetics and people who were in their teens who were Type 2 diabetic because we’re starting them young. We’re getting them fed all this glucose.

That’s why there’s a pandemic of obese six-month-olds, because we start them so young, and we keep them going. Since we’re doing that, they become insulin resistant so much quicker because they’re filling up all their fat cells. It’s easier because they’re smaller, so they don’t have as many fat cells as someone who grows up, and they have fat cells all over them. It’s easier to get them to be Type 2 diabetic. There go the drugs again.

You were mentioning fat cells. Another thing I had to read twice in your book was that you said that some people have a finite amount of fat cells, and some people are able to make more fat cells. That’s the first I had ever heard of that. How is that possible?

Understanding Thin Outside, Fat Inside Dynamics

That’s it. That’s genetics, and that’s the problem. That’s a big question. If this is all true, and it’s all about stuffed fat cells, why is it that you can see thin people that are Type 2 diabetic, and then why can you see extremely obese people that are not Type 2 diabetic? That’s the reason why, and that’s what I found out. If you have a finite set of cells, and you don’t have very much in your subcutaneous tissue, then those cells can get full pretty quickly.

All of a sudden, they’re full. There’s nowhere else to put the fat, so you start storing it around the organs. These people call it TOFI. It’s Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside. They may look like they’re healthy, but that’s because the fat cells that they do have are full. They don’t have enough. That’s why you can be thin and still Type 2 diabetic. You’re still filling up your fat cells. You don’t have enough.

There’s a type where their cells can make more cells. As that fat cell starts to expand, it breaks off and makes another cell. The individual cells never get full. They keep making more cells. Those are the people who get bigger. You still have all the trouble you have with obesity. You still have all the joint problems, the ankle problems, the pain, and everything else that comes with extreme obesity. You still have that, but you don’t have Type 2 diabetes. That’s because you keep making more cells.

Everything I’m telling you is all new stuff that I’ve learned in the last couple of years. I read because I can’t get enough of this. It’s so fascinating and extremely irritating at the same time, thinking that I have been hoodwinked for my entire career. All I wanted to do was help people. It’s all I wanted to do. Now, I found out that what I was doing was doing the exact opposite. I was making people worse, so I had to get out of the medical system. That’s why I’m trying to educate people this way. My God-given passion is still the same thing it’s always been, which is to help people with their health, but I have different ways of doing it now.

I’ve heard you say that we almost can’t blame the doctors. People are pushing their insulin levels so high, and they’re getting diabetes and all of these ailments. When they do that, the only thing the doctor can do when they go to see them is to prescribe insulin. I almost wonder if that’s a fair statement. It frustrates me. Doctors are smart people.

In nutrition, they’re not.

Why is there an excuse? You went the extra mile. You looked at the literature. You went down the right rabbit hole. Why are doctors not doing that? It seems inexcusable to me that they would keep prescribing more insulin because we have a medication that can help with diabetes. Why is that even allowed?

Through pre-med, med school, the whole time, they probably won’t even get a semester, but a few weeks of nutrition. That’s all they get. The same with me. We do not realize that the drug companies are the ones who educate the doctors. From the time you get in school, they’re the ones who are paying for the books. They’re the ones who pay for the stuff that goes in the books. They’re the ones who pay for the conferences. When you go to conferences, they’re the ones who pay for the speakers, so the speakers tell you.

They’re the ones who pay for the studies, in which nobody is allowed to see the data unless they’re being sued. They pay for the studies, write them up, pay the journals to put the studies in the journals, and then pay the peer reviews to review the studies. They pay the drug reps to go around and talk to the doctors. Everything is run by the drug companies.

When you’re in the system, you don’t realize it. You think, “I’m keeping up on everything because I’m reading primary literature.” Not realizing that almost everything is coming from the drug companies. They’re a business. They’re there to make money. They are there for their shareholders. They’re not there for the people. It’s obvious by the things that they’re doing.

The doctors don’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t even realize this was out here. You think, “That’s food.” You think of it like everybody else. You don’t know anything about it. The only reason I switched was because I was asked to give a talk about nutrition, and I didn’t know anything about it. That’s why I went to the nutrition library. There are thousands of doctors out there who have gone the exact same path that I am. That’s why I love to go to these conferences like Weston A. Price.

When you go to these conferences, you see all these medical professionals where the lights come on. They figured out that they’ve been hoodwinked, and they’re sick of it. They’ve also quit their practice, or they’ve changed their practice so they can start helping people the right way. Most physicians do not know that, so this is not your physician’s fault that they prescribe insulin. When I was going to school, when I first started practicing, Type 1 diabetes was called insulin-dependent diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes was called non-insulin dependent diabetes. Type 1 diabetes was called childhood obesity or childhood diabetes. That’s usually when you wipe out your pancreas because of a virus that’s set in your childhood. Type 2 is called adult-onset diabetes. You never saw adults with Type 2 diabetes because it takes decades to get there. They’ve changed this, and they’re telling everybody that they should be eating 5 to 6 times a day.

What they’re doing is they’re giving insulin to these non-insulin-dependent diabetics, and it’s making their diabetes worse. Drug companies get away with it because they make all the physicians, all the studies, all the educational systems, and everybody think that diabetes is a glucose problem. They’re like, “Get that glucose down, however you can get that glucose down.” That’s not what to do because the only way you do that is by raising the insulin levels, so you make it worse.

That’s why I say it’s not the physician’s fault. There are people who are trying to attack it from the upper end and trying to educate the physicians. That’s why you’re starting to see so many more. I’m trying to attack it from the lower end. I get people on diabetic medications. I’ve done it over and over again. You don’t need medication to bring your glucose down. If you stop eating glucose and keep your glucose levels down easily within 30 days, you can be off all your diabetic medications. It does not mean that you’ve reversed Type 2 diabetes yet, but you are on that path.

If you stop eating glucose, what you’re doing is you’re switching your body from using glucose as your energy source over to using fat for your energy source, as God designed us to do. Once you use fat for your energy source, you’ve changed the path of your future health. Instead of glucose, where you’re causing all this organ damage from your body trying to figure out where to store all this fat. You’re using fat for your energy source. If you’re burning your fat for your energy source, you’re going to lose weight. Everybody does.

Why childhood obesity rates are climbing and how processed ingredients create early addiction patterns.

I could say, “Do you want me to help you with your blood pressure? Do you want me to help you with your Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, or dementia?” It doesn’t matter what you say that you would like for me to help you with. The answer is going to be the same. Keep the glucose out of your mouth and change your body from using glucose as your energy source to using fat as your energy source. You will change the trajectory of your life.

My own clients have reversed atrial fib, congestive heart failure, rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, and Crohn’s disease. They reversed all these things that I’ve always been taught were strictly something that happens. They always say it’s genetic. When they don’t know, they’re like, “It must be genetic.” That’s not true. That’s like if you’re going with an infection, and they draw the blood out. If it doesn’t grow out bacteria, they’re like, “It must be a virus.” It could be that you’re putting toxins in your body all the time, and it’s trying to handle it.

You’ve mentioned burning fat as your energy source. I’d like you to tell us the difference between dining in and dining out.

The reason I like those terms is that the whole thing is about what you use for your energy source. When you use glucose for your energy source, that means that you’re eating from outside the body. You’re dining out. When your glucose levels go low, you get hungry. You don’t have your fat-burning machine going yet, so all you can do is reach for more glucose, which means you’re reaching for the same stuff that got you sick in the first place. That’s dining out. You have to use glucose.

Distinguishing Between Dining In and Dining Out

That’s the path that leads you to multi-organ failure, disease, doctor’s bills, and everything else. When you have fat for your energy source, what you do is dining in. The fat that you already have on your body, you’re using that. That is called dining in. That’s why you can go for long periods of time without eating because you’re giving your body the nutrients that it needs.

When you’re dining out, you’re not giving your body any nutrients, so your body stays hungry the whole time. That’s the quickest way to say it. When you are dining in, you use your own fat cells, which also makes you lose weight and get the fat off your organs. When you are dining out, you’re eating manmade products and getting ready to head towards organ damage. You need to try to switch to dining in.

It’s such good advice. You are such a wealth of information. I wish I could keep you on the show all day long. As we wrap up here, I’m going to ask you one final question, and that would be if the reader can do one thing to improve their health, what would you suggest that be?

There are a lot of people who are truly sick, and they don’t even realize it yet. The best way to find out is to see what your fasting insulin level is. That’s going to tell you. If your fasting insulin level is low, when I say low, I mean less than five. Don’t go by the laboratory sheet because they mess with those numbers also. They may say less than twenty is fine, and that’s not true. You want your insulin to be less than five.

If your insulin level is low and your fasting glucose is low, then you’re healthy. If your fasting insulin is high and your glucose is normal, that’s pre-diabetic. If your fasting insulin is high and your glucose is high, that’s full-blown diabetes. Diabetes isn’t one disease. Diabetes is an overall umbrella. Meaning, you’re damaging every organ in your body.

The way you get a fasting insulin level is you can ask your physician if you want to, but chances are, they’re going to have no idea what you’re talking about. You can go on your own computer and go to Own Your Labs. It will have a list of all these different labs that you can choose. Choose fasting insulin. It’s only $15. They will send you an email with a sheet that you can take to a blood draw place.

There’s LabCorp or Quest. Those are two lab draw places, and they know exactly what to do with it. You show them that sheet, and they’ll draw your labs. You’ll get an email with your fasting insulin and your fasting glucose if you want your fasting glucose also. I would recommend that because you need the comparison of the two to know where you are.

It’s only $15. My wife did it, and hers came back 3.5. I was so proud of her. It came back within the week. You don’t need your physician’s approval. You don’t need anything. You do this on your own. However, once you find out, you might want to inform your physician, because the only way they’re going to start learning is if the patients start teaching them.

You’ve inspired me. I’m going to go get my fasting glucose or fasting insulin level, or both. It’s been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you. I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much. I truly appreciate this.

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Our guest was Dr. Steve Hughlett. To learn more about his work, his book, Your Plate is Your Fate, and his podcast, Nutrition Prescription: Wellness Versus Medications, visit Dr. Steve Hughlett. This conversation challenged many of the conventional ideas surrounding chronic disease and metabolic health. We explored the role of insulin in the body, the growing prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and why Dr. Hughlett believes that many of the chronic diseases are rooted in the modern food environment.

He also encouraged us to look beyond calories and ask deeper questions about the foods we eat, how often we eat them, and whether we’re nourishing our bodies with real, nutrient-dense foods or relying on highly processed products that may be working against us. If you’re enjoying the show, we’d be grateful if you’d take a moment to leave a rating or review wherever you tune in. Your feedback helps others discover the show and become part of this growing community. Thank you for spending this time with us. Be well, be nourished, and be free.

About Dr. Steve Hughlett

Dr. of Pharmacy for 35 years found out only 5 years ago that I have been brainwashed by the drug companies that diabetes is a problem of too high blood glucose. Now I know it is a problem of too high insulin for too long. All of our diabetic mediations work by INCREASING insulin or making the cells more sensitive to insulin. Both make diabetes WORSE. I found the same with statins. They do not help anything and kill every cell in our body. Now I want to get the word out to all the diabetics and all the people on statins.