Interviewer: From your experience, what sort of things did you learn, or how did you change some of the things that you research or that you study based on what you went through.
Dr. Hans Kugler: At first, a little bit of background. Originally, I'm from Germany. I got my undergraduate degree at University of Munich Medical School in physiology, under Nobel laureate Butenandt. I came over to the U.S., heard about Stony Brook, the famous Stony Brook of New York. Got my graduate assistantship there; got my Ph.D. there. I was the assistant professor for a while, and always interested in what's going on inside the body, metabolic pathways, how things are metabolized. For example, if you knew about that you could tell why, as of today, the biggest problem in America, why people are so fat, overweight, out of shape, heart disease and so on, guess what? Fructose. The high fructose corn syrup and all this junk they're selling us. Studying and knowing about metabolism, I started some aging research at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We published the data, and my lifelong mentor at that time, Prof. Emanuel Cheraskin, from Alabama University School of Medicine, he sort of took me under his wings. He passed away in the meantime, but what a magnificent guy.
He defined lifelong health as a state of homeostasis achieved by doing about 30-50 variables correctly. The 30-50 variables can be summarized as health practices. The more health practices you do correctly, the better is your overall state of health, the better is your immune system, the better is your resistance against disease, the slower is your rate of aging. They all connect. In the meantime, telomere research confirmed that we are on the right track. Telomere researched confirmed, for example, that exercise is the strongest telomere lengthening. Stress is the strongest telomere shortening. Overall health practices are very good. For example, there was a study in Germany, a very international study, the study at Salon University in Germany, they studied the Danish twins and published in an American journal. They looked at twins, measured their telomeres, and whenever one of them died, they found it was always the one with the shorter telomeres. It was always the shorter telomeres corresponded to health practices that were not really that good.
All of this has not confirmed that health practices are true anti-aging modalities. Putting those together, we have the number one modality is exercise. Number two, we used to say nutrition. Well, definitely not. Guess what it is? It's detoxing. We have so many toxic chemicals in our body. For the detoxing there's a special program, again, that we can do, and we use a non-flushing niacin for that as a key and then sit in the sauna after a while. That brings some of the toxic chemicals into the bloodstream, and when we sit in a sauna, your skin is your second kidneys, and you sweat it out.
Then we have nutrition. Nutrition used be very simple. Low fat diet and so on. Well, guess what? When you take the fat out of the diet, and you eat the food, it takes like horrible. So what do they do? They put salt in, and sweeteners. The biggest problem with the sweeteners is fructose, high fructose corn syrup. Guess where it was discovered? Actually, in Japan. Some people say it's the Japanese revenge to WWII. They gave us this stuff. And then in the U.S., with our agriculture capacities, it is so inexpensive as a sweetener. It is the definite number one cause now for aging, bad health, overweight, heart disease risk factors, and so on. There were actually three very famous orthodox medicine people on CBS 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, and basically they were saying that fructose is addictive, it's poison. It's a cancer/heart disease risk factor, and in the excesses at which we consume it, it is the number one problem we have.
That's what I really suggest everybody, you should, at home, take all the foods that you eat, read the label and throw all the foods out that contain high fructose corn syrup, or fructose as a sweetener. Why would I say that? Fructose is just another sugar, right? It's a natural. No, it really isn't. Natural arsenic is natural, too. Mercury poisoning; mercury is natural, and so on and so on. All these things, oh, it's just natural. This doesn't really jive.
A key point here is, again, when you look at metabolic charts, you will see how your body metabolizes these substances differently. Like glucose, it's the basic fuel our body runs on. Every cell in our body can metabolize glucose and get energy out of it. How about fructose? Oh no, definitely not. The only way you can really metabolize fructose is the liver. If you take it in excess, and an excess is just a little bit, maybe 100 calories for women and 150 for men, anything above that in terms of fructose or sugar in general, becomes poisonous. The liver will metabolize it into fat, LDL, the cancer/heart disease risk factor, the bad LDL. It causes uric acid, and it affects NOS. What's NOS? NOS is nitric oxide synthase, an enzyme that keeps your blood sugar low, and that other healthy sexual thing up.