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Hi, everyone. I had a patient question the other day, yesterday, as a matter of fact, about what I do, or what my family does, for cold and flu season. They made the comment, "You never seem to get sick. What do you do for cold and flu season?" (Check out last year's flu season post here!)

I wouldn't say that we never get sick. We get sick, hopefully not as often as we used to, but my wife's an elementary school teacher, my son's in junior high, and I'm in a practice where I see sick patients from time to time. So we're exposed. No way around that. So every once in a while we get something. It usually doesn't last long, it's pretty mild, and we get past it. But I thought it was a really valid question. I answered it for the patient, but I figured I'd answer it for everybody here.

What do I do? Now I'm not saying that what we do is right for everybody, so don't misunderstand me. But I am going to talk a little bit about what we do at our house. We start "cold and flu season", fall...

Hi everyone. I Want to take a minute and talk to you today about insulin resistance. This is a blood sugar issue. If you're not familiar with what insulin is, first of all, I'm going to go over basics of blood sugar. When we eat something, especially something that has a significant carbohydrate content, or a significant refined carbohydrate content, or we just have something with sugar in it, like we drink a soft drink or something, then our blood sugar goes up. We digest that, it gets absorbed into our bloodstream and then our blood sugar starts to come up. Normal fasting blood sugar's probably going to be, about 75 to 90 maybe, somewhere in that range. Depending on who you talk to, it's 70 to 90, or 70 to 85, or 75 to 95. It varies a little bit, but it's in that range; below 90 and above 70, probably.

But when we eat something or drink something that has sugar in it, that blood sugar number's going to go up dramatically. When it does, our pancreas creates insulin to take some of...

This is part 2, find part 1 HERE.

 Last week's blog post was on intermittent and episodic fasting. It went over well, but I got lots of questions, and I kind of figured I would. That's why I asked for questions, and that's why we do the blog posts.

Today, I'm going to go over some of those questions to get them answered, a part two to last week's blog post. I'm just going to jump right in.

First question I got ... I'm grouping these. I got four main questions, but they were all phrased different ways by different people, so I think if I answer these four, it'll pretty much cover what I got. When to do intermittent versus episodic fasting. That was a pretty common question in some way, shape, or form.

I guess I gave the impression that you only need to do episodic fasting if you're having trouble with intermittent fasting, if intermittent fasting isn't working for you. It can work that way. It can certainly help you become ... Episodic fasting can certainly help you become more...

Hi everyone! I you want to tell you a little bit about intermittent fasting versus episodic fasting.  You may not have heard of episodic fasting, but we'll talk about it in just a minute. Intermittent fasting is a paradigm, or a plan in which you eat all your food for the day within about an eight hour eating window. Now, that time can vary depending on your situation, but for our purposes here, we're going to talk about an eight hour eating window. That would mean that there's a 16 hour window where you don't eat. You can have plenty of water and you can have maybe some herbal tea, bone broth, something like that. But generally you don't need anything, just a few clear liquids, nothing that would raise insulin levels. That's an important part of it.

So the idea here is we're supposed to have a mechanism by which we eat, or overeat, and we take the extra and store it as body fat.  Then in times of need, when we don't have enough to eat, we can pull back out of the body fat...

Hi everyone. As you can tell today I'm going to be talking about magnesium. Magnesium is a very important mineral for us. A lot of people are hearing more about it lately. I've had lots of questions come in about magnesium, thought I'd make a blog post and hopefully clear some things up for you. So magnesium, abbreviated Mg, as you can see here. Why should you care about magnesium? Why am I even bothering to make this blog post all about magnesium? Well, there is a large amount of magnesium deficiency in the US. Right now, it's considered a shortfall nutrient, meaning that roughly 80% of the population is likely deficient in magnesium. It's also very difficult for us to get because our soils are becoming much more depleted in magnesium and other minerals as time goes on. We continue to just apply chemical fertilizers to the soil and not rebuild the topsoil and take care of the microorganisms in the soil like we're supposed to.

Magnesium doesn't get taken up into the plant like it's...

I wanted to take a few minutes, it's the end of the day here, and excuse the bare walls behind me, I'm in my new office, and we haven't had time to quite finish settling yet. First video from the new office so I guess that's a milestone.

                                           I've had a couple patients come in the past, probably two weeks, where they've had ... well, the patients haven't necessarily had questions about a full thyroid panel, but their other doctors have had questions about, why are we ordering all this lab work? Why would want all this lab work? What are you trying to prove? What are you looking for? What's the relevance of this?

...

All right, so I'm home on a snow day, so you notice the different office here, but I didn't want you to miss ... Hold on. Let me get rid of something here, but I didn't want you to miss today's video because I think it's an important one for you. Let me just shut that down so it doesn't make any noise.

       Okay, so today, we're talking about what's been termed "clean meat." I'm going to call it "test tube meat" or "Petri dish meat." I guess the question at hand and coming more quickly than we thought is, "Are you ready to eat meat that was grown in a Petri dish in a lab versus grown on an animal?"

         You're starting to see articles come out and announcements be made that we're progressing in that direction, that we're making progress in this, and that we're starting to be able to create animal muscle tissue basically in a Petri dish. They take a small sample of muscle tissue from an animal. They start to grow it in a Petri dish....

All right. Happy Monday. Wanted to go over an article I read recently. This one is about vitamin D and calcium supplementation in elderly population in what I would call nursing homes. They call them community dwelling older adults. So I guess the new PC way to say that, so we want to be sensitive. So association between calcium and vitamin D supplementation and fracture incidence in community dwelling older adults. This was in the Journal of American Medical Association, 2017, it looks like December 26th, so pretty recent.

        Interesting article, interesting take home message from it but I kind of think they missed the mark on the way they did this. So here's what they did. They were looking to find out whether or not vitamin D and calcium supplementation either individually or together made any difference in fracture rates in elderly individuals that were not living in their home pretty much. But the way they went about it is they went back through lots of...

All right. Today, happy Tuesday, by the way. By this time next week, Christmas will be done. I have a hard time believing that we're actually that close to Christmas. It's 70-something degrees and dreary here in Houston and just doesn't feel at all like Christmas, but Merry almost Christmas.

       Today, I'm going to talk a little bit, as you can tell from the title, about blood sugar and hypothyroidism. Article came out in the January/February issue of the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. The code for it, if you want to look it up on PubMed, the PMC code is 5240076. In this article, they do a good job explaining it. It's a long article, but the actual takeaway from it is fairly short. They took a bunch of people, random, through some testing and basically found that people with a lower thyroid hormone level, people that qualified has hypothyroid, had higher hemoglobin A1cs.

       Let me talk to you a minute about what a...

Hey there. All right. Let me get things set up here. Okay. So today we're going to talk a little bit about low fat diets, as you can tell from the topic of this. Recently read an article from Dr. Jill Carnahan. C-A-R-N-A-H-A-N. I saw it published on functionalmedicineuniversity.com. I believe Dr. Carnahan also had the article on her own website so you can find it there was well. But this is all referencing back to a study that was fairly recently completed called The Pure P-U-R-E Study.

         And this was looking at a large number of people, I think 135,000 people in 18 countries and looking at their intake of foods. They looked at fat versus carbohydrate intake and comparing, over a period of about seven and a half years, low fat diets with higher carbohydrate components to higher fat diets with lower carbohydrate components. And then looking at cardiovascular disease, stroke, all cause mortality, which is where they're not really saying that a high fat...