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Main feature (6 minutes in): We’re in that time of year when animals hibernate. Before they started their long winter’s nap, they fattened up, so they can make it through the winter. According to CU Health Sciences researcher, Richard Johnson, we humans also evolved to put on weight to make it through leaner times. But for us, it’s not a change of seasons that gets the weight gain started. It’s a specific trigger, called, “Sugar.” Specifically a kind of sugar called fructose, found in honey, fruit juice, corn syrup, and even regular table sugar. In his new book, The Fat Switch, Johnson traces the increasing availability of this fructose sugar among humans and how it has now made people fat, and sick for thousands of years. For instance, you think the pharoahs were all buff, and skinny? Many mummies have lots of skin folds, which means that, as living humans, many were fat. Johnson also talks about kings who loved sugar so much, sometimes they made sugar statues . . . and ate them . . . leading many to be very fat and prone to modern diseases such as diabetes and heart attack and stroke. Now let’s listen in, as How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender talks with Dr. Richard Johnson, about how sugar affects children. They begin with how too much sugar can make a person’s body get stuck, storing the sugar as fat.

Hosts: Joel Parker and Susan Moran
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

Listen to the show:

The Fat Switch – Richard Johnson MD