Dr David Perlmutter
Drop Acid doctor warns of evolutionary mismatch
R
"We can't effectively change our genome but we sure as heck can change factors in our environment that will take us back and rekindle a better relationship with the gift or our inheritance."
obbins: David, your new book is titled 'Drop Acid' but it has nothing to do with taking LSD.1 It's about the importance, the really critical importance, it turns out, of reducing our uric acid levels. Now, most people have never heard of uric acid. In Western medicine, it's widely recognized that when there is too much uric acid in our bodies, crystals of uric acid can form, and then these crystals can settle in our joints and cause gout or settle in our kidneys and form kidney stones. But other than those two conditions, gout and kidney stones, the medical profession as a whole tends to think of uric acid as a harmless waste product that's normally excreted in the urine. What I hear you saying in your book, though, is that this view is wrong. Because high uric acid levels, in fact, contribute substantially to a host of problems as diverse as obesity and diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's disease. The list is very long. In fact, you call uric acid 'the hidden connection' linking our modern ailments. This is a huge topic, what do you hope that your book accomplishes? Dr Perlmutter: Let me first take a step back and look at the notion that the number one cause of death on planet earth right now is not some virus we might catch. The number one category of issues that threaten us is what we call chronic degenerative conditions. Things like, coronary artery disease, Alzheimer's, various forms of cancer, type 2 diabetes. These are the most threatening to us. What is important about these issues, and others, is that they are at their core the manifestation of metabolic mayhem, metabolic disturbances. When we talk about metabolism, we often talk about something called metabolic syndrome. I'd like to open up that term a little because it is strictly defined as being characterized by five things: elevated blood sugar, elevated body fat (BMI), dyslipidemia, problems with high blood pressure, and elevated triglycerides. So each of those is a problem in and of itself. In the aggregate, they form something called metabolic syndrome. To indicate how pervasive these issues are here in America: 88% of adults have at least one of these components, meaning that only one in eight American adults is metabolically intact.2 Being metabolically compromised, as in seven of eight American adults, sets the stage for those chronic degenerative conditions — the number one cause of death on our planet.
10 wholefoodliving.life | Winter 2022
This article is a partly abridged account of an indepth interview conducted by Ocean Robins and podcast on The Food Revolution Summit, 2022. Dr David Perlmutter discusses the dangers we face from high uric acid levels and explains why, unlike humming birds, we're no longer genetically equiped to cope with them. Dr Perlmutter is a board certified neurologist and six-time New York Times best selling author whose books have been translated into 32 languages. In 2016, a study came out which was titled, “Uric Acid in Metabolic Syndrome: From an Innocent Bystander to a Central Player.”3 What it describes is the fact that for many years, we've seen that patients with diabetes, with obesity, with hypertension, have, in addition, interestingly, high uric acid. Until fairly recently, we've looked upon that and said, “Well, isn't that interesting? Maybe they have an increased risk for gout. No big deal.” But we've come to understand that uric acid which we are seeing elevated in these and other problems, is actually playing a role in their genesis. It's playing a mechanistic role. One very large study came out in 2009 and looked at 90,000 people — 42,000 men, 49,000 women — and it followed them for eight years.4 What they found was that in people who had a uric acid level that was elevated, meaning in their case above seven milligrams per deciliter, in these people who originally at the beginning of the eight-year study had an elevated uric acid — their risk of death after the study was completed, of having died during those eight years for any reason whatsoever (we call that all-cause mortality) was increased by 16 percent. The risk of death from cardiovascular disease was increased by close to 40 percent. The risk of death from stroke increased 35 percent. And even more fascinating was the finding that for every one-point elevation of the uric acid level above seven, there was an increased risk of 8–13 percent of dying from any cause whatsoever, and that was additive with every point above seven.
