I had a patient mention to me, she had spoken to her family doctor about doing the cleanse. And, her doctor told her, "That's ridiculous. We have a liver and some kidneys and their job is to detoxify us, and you don't need to take a bunch of pills for them to do their job. It's what they do."
I've heard that before. It's a common discussion that happens. Generally... I have a truck that's designed to drive around and get me to work and back, but if I don't put gas in it, it can't do that. If I don't have oil in it, if it doesn't have transmission fluid or coolant in it, if the battery's not charged. There are a lot of things that need to be in place for that vehicle to do its job the way it was intended.
So, our liver and our kidneys are not all that different. They need certain nutrients, they need certain processes to work the way they're supposed to and to be supplied with lots of things.
Now, if we don't have, like magnesium, for example. Magnesium binds to certain...
So I had another patient I wanted to talk about, another interesting case. This one also has to do with blood sugar management, type 2 diabetes, that kind of stuff. So I just posted another one kind of in that genre. I figured I'd stick with the trend and throw another one of these up here.
This is an older gentleman. We've been working with him for a while. He does have a cancer history, and blood sugar is not well managed. We're running fasting blood sugars in the 150s, 140s most of the time, and that's pretty much with diet. Triglycerides tend to run in the 165, kind of 170 range. I like it below 100, so definitely not saying this is good blood sugar management. But we had seen worse on him. Hemoglobin A1C had been running in the upper sevens. Again, not where I'd like to see it, but better than it's been. We didn't have a fasting insulin, partly because I wasn't the one that ran the previous blood work, but that's kind of where we were.
Now, he had gone in for a...
Another common question that came up is, how do you swallow supplements? Some people have trouble swallowing pills. And so I give this advice quite a bit at the office. It usually works very well. The two things I point out to people, one is, "You swallow chunks of food larger than those pills on a very regular basis." If you were to take a bite of something, chew it up, and right before you swallow it, spit it out and look at it, don't do this in public, it's bigger than you think. And you swallow that stuff all the time without an issue. So a lot of times it's your brain getting in the way, making you tense, making you think you're going to choke, and it keeps you from doing that. So be aware, you swallow bigger things all the time.
The second important note to make is that pills and capsules behave differently when you swallow them or when you put them in your mouth. So if I were to put water in my mouth and then drop a solid tablet in my mouth, that tablet is going...
So a question I get regularly from patients is, can they get their family practice doctor, or gynecologist, or endocrinologist, whomever, to run our lab panels instead of us running them? Which I don't mind. I tell the patients regularly, I don't care who orders it. As long as it's got the components that I need, it'll work for us. So that comes up regularly.
Well, there are several reasons why we've had very little success getting other doctors to run our lab panels. So I just want to run through this real quickly. It's, again, something I answer pretty regularly during an average week at the office.
So number one, understand that I do functional medicine, and the lab panels that we've put together are specifically geared toward finding underlying mechanisms. Looking for problems before they are so far down the road that they're diagnosable. Looking for indications that there's dysfunction even if there's not disease at this point.
That's, to a large...
To me, there are five main supplements that, that I kind of call my foundational five that almost everybody would benefit from taking. Now I say almost everybody, so understand real quick disclaimer, I'm not giving you medical advice. I don't know your specific situation, so take notes on what I'm gonna say and know that these are generally good for everybody, but there may be some special circumstances for you. So discuss that with your functional medicine doctor or your clinician practitioner who's knowledgeable about nutrition and supplementation. Your regular family practice doctor might not know much of anything about supplementation and they're not always the best, um, resource for whether or not you should or can be taking something, find someone knowledgeable about supplementation. So that being said, the foundational five for me, uh, it's gonna consist of number one, a multivitamin of some sort, fish oil, probiotics, vitamin D, and magnesium.
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So you can't really go anywhere without hearing somebody talking about a low carbohydrate diet. There's whole 30, keto, low-carb paleo, diets that prioritize protein, fasting mimicking diets, fasting, intermittent fasting, keto, carnivore. We could go on all day with different diets that accentuate protein, or in the case of keto, protein and fat, at the expense of carbohydrate. I don't have a big issue with that. I think in many people, that's beneficial. But I want you to understand that whichever one of those you choose or whichever one of those is recommended to you or whatever, they all share a very common goal, a very similar goal. They go about it a little bit differently, but the goal is to expose you to a lot less insulin than you've been doing already. So I'm going to talk you through real briefly two or three different things to explain what insulin does and how it becomes a problem because we need it.
Why would you want less of it? So we're...
So I had a patient ask me a couple of questions just a day or two ago about lab-grown meat being approved for human consumption. Now, I'm not going to get into the fact that I'm not a big fan of that. I'm not going to go into detail on the problems with it, but most of you, if you're listening to this, you probably already get that part of it. But I wanted to talk a little bit about how I see this playing out over the next few months.
So the first thing they had to do was get lab-grown meat approved for human consumption. So that they've done. That first step they've done. Number two, what they're going to have to do is go back and make the argument that lab-grown meat is so substantially similar to naturally raised meat that they shouldn't have to label it as lab-grown meat or bioengineered or whatever term they're going to use. So number one, get it approved for humans. Number two, go back and convince them, the government, the agencies, that it's so...
(00:01): I had a question come up from a patient. She reached out to me. She doesn't live in the state of Texas anymore. And of course we feel sorry for her for that, but she was a patient of mine back when I first started, so it was nice to connect with her again. She has a son who's in his mid-teens and wants to put on some muscle mass. That's not an uncommon question in my office, so I figured I'd handle it in this format. They could benefit from it. And so could anybody else who's got a son early to mid-teens who feels the need to add some muscle mass. So I'm gonna kind of rapid fire, go through some important points, or a question was specifically about like an eating approach or a dietary pattern that would be beneficial for this.
(00:45): Um, but I'm gonna kind of broaden it out a little bit and that way it works better in this forum. So first of all, why would, why would someone that age want to add muscle? Obviously, aesthetics is, is a common goal, right? You wanna look a...
Back in 2015, not too long ago, in a medical journal called Diabetes…aptly named. There was a research article that just recently came across my desk. The lead author's last name was Nolan and N-O-L-A-N if you want to look it up. The article was basically discussing what they present as a new concept that maybe with type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance, maybe the insulin resistance itself is not the enemy. That's a pretty new concept in conventional medicine. So what they lay out is for the worst cases of type 2 diabetes, the ones that don't respond well to medications, they're obese, they've got substantial insulin resistance...in those cases, maybe we should rethink focusing on insulin resistance as the enemy. So let me find a way to describe this to you that will make some sense. Basically in type 2 diabetes, we have sugar entering the body, then sugar gets in the bloodstream than sugar has to go from the bloodstream into the cells.
There's this cell...
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