109. Dr. Tyna Moore: The Hidden Metabolic Crisis Affecting Healthy People

Speaker 1 Obese children come from obese parents. We could say it's all the foods, the lifestyle, but it's both.

Speaker 1 Their risk and rates of obesity and metabolic compromise are so high compared to a child who's born of a mom who's metabolically sound.

Speaker 2 Metabolic dysfunction is the root cause of essentially every disease that we have.

Speaker 1 People don't realize when they hit type 2 diabetes, that's decades of damage. It's really a terrible place to be, and yet we so casually are like, Welcome to the club.

Speaker 2 You have a chronic condition and your physician isn't at least bringing up to you dietary and lifestyle changes, then they're really not getting to the root cause of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not doing their job. We have to do it all.
People want to say, Oh, it's this, or there's this magic bullet, or there's this magic shot, and it's not, it's the work.

Speaker 2 Why is metabolic syndrome creeping down into younger and younger ages?

Speaker 1 I think for children, especially, it's a double-pronged problem because

Speaker 2 Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Breca, where we go down the road of everything: biohacking, anti-aging, longevity, and everything in between.

Speaker 2 And today's guest is actually somebody I spotted on my own

Speaker 2 on the internet. I actually really loved her interview on Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett.
I've been on that podcast a few times myself. He's an amazing interviewer.

Speaker 2 And I was just like, wow, this doctor has a story to tell. And I forget how we actually came together but luckily for you guys today dr.

Speaker 1 Tina Moore is on the ultimate human welcome to the ultimate human thank you I'm so excited to be here I'm such a fan of yours so this is oh really that makes me feel better yes well I'm a biologist too so you know in my heart so I think we'll have a really fun conversation now I'm a human biologist I am

Speaker 2 you know I've I fell in love uh with science.

Speaker 2 I just found it fascinating. And I also found that it made a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 A lot of things in school didn't make a lot of sense to me. English, you know, philosophy didn't make a lot of sense.
But for some reason, you know, biology just made a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 2 And I've luckily been able to make a career out of it. But you're a naturopathic doctor.
I am. And a chiropractor.
I actually went to chiropractic school. You did? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I went to National College of Chiropractic. Amazing.
In Lombard.

Speaker 1 Where did you go to chiropractic school? I went to Western States in Portland. Okay.
So kind of the sister school. Did you go to naturopathic school there too? I did.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I did them concurrently, which is crazy.

Speaker 1 Wow. That's tough.
Yeah. I don't know what I was thinking, but here we are.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 I remember watching your interview with Stephen. I know a lot of people might not fully understand what a naturopathic doctor is.
I mean, the name sort of tells you a lot about it.

Speaker 2 So enlighten us a little bit on what that entails in terms of training.

Speaker 1 It is. It's a four-year medical program.
And in the state of Oregon, we're considered primary care physicians. We have a full license to prescribe, full scope.
Wow.

Speaker 1 It's not this case in every state, though. Not every state's licensed.

Speaker 1 And really, the way that I think about it is when people tend to understand functional medicine, we are the grandmother of functional medicine.

Speaker 1 Functional medicine was really appropriated out of naturopathic medicine, and it's truly the root cause medicine.

Speaker 1 And it is the idea that we utilize nature and the body's innate healing abilities, which jives with chiropractic as well, that the body can naturally, innately heal itself.

Speaker 1 The cool part about my training was I was blessed to have an incredible mentor who taught me really the art and science of blending allopathic medicine with naturopathic medicine.

Speaker 1 So I always say, you know, I have a license to prescribe and I'm not afraid to use it because

Speaker 1 the goal is really the way I describe it is. If a patient comes in in a litany of pharmaceutical drugs, it's my job to improve lifestyle and function

Speaker 1 and help them get a leg up so that they can start implementing some of these lifestyle strategies because it's not that easy.

Speaker 1 It's not as simple as saying, here, do all of these things that are super overwhelming and good luck. And then we can hopefully get the medications down to a dull roar or out.

Speaker 1 But, you know, I think that there's a way to utilize both and do so in a really elegant manner.

Speaker 2 I love how you say

Speaker 2 address their lifestyle

Speaker 2 because I think that

Speaker 2 that's the missing link, in my opinion, in all of our approach to modern medicine. And

Speaker 2 I don't say that to necessarily attack modern medicine. I just think that if your physician's not talking to you and you have a chronic condition, or

Speaker 2 you're obese, or you're struggling with some kind of chronic disease, or you're struggling with an autoimmune condition, and your physician isn't at least bringing up to you dietary and lifestyle changes.

Speaker 2 then they're really not getting to the root cause of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're not doing their job. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We have to do it all.

Speaker 1 You know, people want to say, oh, it's this, or there's this magic bullet, or there's this magic shot, or there's this magic, whatever it is. And it's not, it's the work.

Speaker 1 You have to put the work in every day. Yep.
And you have to optimize your wellness the best you can. And we're all different.
We all come in with a different story behind us.

Speaker 1 We all have different levels of toxicity. We have different levels of abuse and trauma.
We have a whole story that we bring. you know, to the to the visit.

Speaker 1 And it's not my job to judge how the patient got there. I'm just trying to help them untangle it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, I've listened to a lot of your interviews, and I think there's a common theme actually to a lot of my podcasts.

Speaker 2 If you've ever watched a series of Ultimate Human podcasts, I think that the people that have solved a problem in their life or had a painful journey and emerged from that, maybe it was drug and alcohol addiction, maybe it was a relationship, and maybe it was they had Lyme disease and they went on a journey of their own and they figured out this solution.

Speaker 2 You know, know, these are the most passionate, purpose-driven people that I find make the biggest impact in the world.

Speaker 2 And almost everybody that's sat in that seat on the Ultimate Human podcast has had a journey like that. And

Speaker 2 I heard you talk about your journey with your mother.

Speaker 2 And it was very compelling to me because I think it's very typical of.

Speaker 2 you know, like the dentist always has the cavity and like the contractor always has the drywall that needs to be repaired.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you talked about how,

Speaker 2 you know, here you were, this functional medicine practitioner, emerging functional medicine practitioner, and your, and your mother

Speaker 2 was suffering from a chronic autoimmune disease. And I wonder if you might talk a little bit about that because

Speaker 2 I feel

Speaker 2 like that is probably a large part of your drive and your commitment to your craft.

Speaker 1 Well, it my mom, actually, I was telling you earlier that I specialized in prolotherapy years and years long before it was cool, decades before it was cool.

Speaker 2 It's finally becoming non-woo-woo scientist.

Speaker 1 I hope. I feel like we're losing it.
I feel like people are not doing it as often. But I first became interested in that because I began working for my mentor, Dr.

Speaker 1 Rick Marinelli, who was doing what I thought was magic in his clinic. And

Speaker 1 he told me that there was a way to regenerate joints. And I was like, what? Because

Speaker 1 my mom had had a really

Speaker 1 long history of hip issues, lots of surgeries as a child. And her other hip was of my utmost concern.
I'm like, we got to keep mom's other hip good.

Speaker 1 So that kind of started me into really taking the path down. That's why I got my naturopathic license was so I can inject people.

Speaker 1 I mean, it was like, I needed to be able to inject and also prescribe more importantly, so I could take people off their pharmaceuticals. If you can prescribe them, you can unprescribe them.

Speaker 1 And then I spent 10 years in clinical practice, really busy regenerative medicine practice. And I, like you, had so many gadgets in my clinic and doing IVs and ozone and all of that.

Speaker 1 And then I actually left clinical practice in 2018 and started shutting it down because I was hitting pretty severe burnout.

Speaker 1 And then in 2019, my mom just got taken down with Crohn's disease and I was not paying attention. I was.

Speaker 2 It was sort of happening before your eyes, but you were not.

Speaker 1 I was not paying attention.

Speaker 1 And she kept telling me she didn't feel good. And my mom never complains.
My mom is a tough little gal. I call her my little mama.
She comes up to hear on me.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, when I hug her, I put my head on her, my chin on her head. And she was struggling and wasting in front of me.

Speaker 1 And I have this weird clairvoyance where I can kind of see the reaper after people. And I'm usually spot on.
And she was in my apartment and she came out of the bathroom.

Speaker 1 And I looked at her and I was like, oh, no.

Speaker 1 Like she was in black and white. You know, I was telling you, we were talking about vitality earlier.
I see people in color.

Speaker 1 Like an aura. Yeah.
There's like various shades of vitality. And there's some people that just beam sunshine and they're so healthy and they glow and it comes booming at them.

Speaker 1 And then there's other people that start to go into grayscale, and that's how I can gauge how healthy they are, how hard I can hit them with a therapy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it really depends on what that vibration of their vitality is, which I know sounds woo, but I know you understand. Not at all.

Speaker 2 You know, I and I don't really mean to cut you off, but I mean, I think some of the oldest medicine in the world, Ayurvedic medicine, for example, is based on observation. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's so funny how we want to, you know, Eastern medicine wants to poo-poo Western medicine and because,

Speaker 2 but, but it's got centuries of data.

Speaker 1 I think it's because they can't see it. People who can't see it want to poo-poo it.
And anyway, she was in grayscale and that's not good. Not good.

Speaker 1 My mentor was in grayscale when I found out he had cancer. Like I just, I can see the, you know, the looming reaper.
And I looked at her and I said, oh, no.

Speaker 1 And then I had to pull out all the stops, the exosomes, the stem cells. I mean, thank God I had the tools that I had available to me, but we threw them all at her.

Speaker 1 And I pulled her out of this tailspin.

Speaker 1 And then I handed her off to my favorite naturopathic doctor because I don't want to manage my patient, my family's chronic health issues. That's not, you know, that's a bit of an ethical dilemma.

Speaker 1 So got her in good hands, but she was needing pharmaceuticals from Canada that were really expensive. And

Speaker 1 we kind of got her okay, okay. And then I stumbled upon the GLP-1 data

Speaker 1 and just started

Speaker 1 playing with everyone who was willing. I was like, here is a clinical indication.
Here's the data to support it. Would you be willing to try this? And put her on like a minuscule dose and just

Speaker 1 remarkable. Like her pain reduction, she had full body.

Speaker 1 Yep. Full body pain for as long as I can remember her whole life.

Speaker 1 And just to have her out of pain. Yeah.
And just to have proper gut function and she can actually go out and eat with us and just little things that we don't realize.

Speaker 1 You know, and then my dad, my dad's morbidly obese and diabetic. My dad is on a more traditional standard dose, but we went very slow and low, different from the traditional dosing protocol.

Speaker 1 And I got my dad back. My dad is back.
I mean, he's not 100%. And there's a lot of damage done that he self-inflicted along the way.
But

Speaker 1 I just, I'll die on this hill when people want to vilify it because I'm like, no, no, no, no, it's just not being done right. Yeah.
No, I love that.

Speaker 2 I was really fascinated by that approach because I pride myself on trying not to be too dogmatic about because I did find myself going down that opposite road. And then I was like, you know what?

Speaker 2 Are you really just parroting what you're hearing out there?

Speaker 1 Good for you. Or

Speaker 2 are you seeing this? And because I'm a partner in a functional medicine clinic as well, and with real functional medicine practitioners treating thousands of patients.

Speaker 2 So are you taking data that you're really seeing or are you just listening to sort of the parrots that and some very well-known parrots that are sort of, oh, you had two-thirds of the weight that you lose is lean body mass.

Speaker 2 And then immediately you think lean body mass, well, you're just losing all this muscle. Well, I don't want to waste away and be skinny fat.

Speaker 2 And of course, that's going to happen if you lose weight and you don't strength train and you don't keep your protein content up and other things anyway.

Speaker 2 But just to back up for a second, for the folks that

Speaker 2 don't know what GLP-1 is or what a GLP-1 agonist is, can you describe a little bit what, you know, what is the glucose-like polypeptide? What is the GLP in the body?

Speaker 1 So it is a peptide that our body makes endogenously in our guts and in our brains. That's really what got me excited.
I was like, it's made in the brain. There must be impact in the brain.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Important impact beyond just appetite suppression. It does work in the brain to reduce kind of the food hunger and appetite suppression at high enough doses.

Speaker 1 But I think there's also just an onus of control that it is impacting.

Speaker 1 There's some dopamine circuitry, serotonin circuitry that it is impacting and not in a way that is completely turning people into zombies.

Speaker 1 There's, you know, there's talk going around on some of these podcasts where people say, oh, it takes all of your drive away. It takes all of your pleasure away.
I think that's a dosing problem.

Speaker 1 So that was really interesting to see what it was doing in the brain, neuroregenerative properties, studies happening on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Speaker 1 That's what got me excited in the first place. I was like, this is really fascinating.

Speaker 1 And then in the body, there's receptors all over the body in different organ systems, and it's doing different things all over.

Speaker 1 We know it as it just happened to get utilized for type 2 diabetes because it has an impact on our blood sugar, on our insulin signaling.

Speaker 1 I think that there's pathways happening that they don't even appreciate that I'm digging up where just the whole insulin pathway, I mean, just metabolic pathways in general that are being impacted by GLP-1 favorably.

Speaker 1 So it heals metabolism as much as it controls appetite. I mean, there's impacts on AMPK and CERT1.
Like there's just,

Speaker 1 I think long enough, when a patient's on it for long enough, because it's a peptide, they're healing, they're regenerative, and they're anti-inflammatory.

Speaker 1 And I think that they're, if it's done properly and the person is doing all the lifestyle pieces, there's a healing impact on these metabolisms that are completely busted because some people really are, it's too far gone.

Speaker 1 We can do all the lifestyle intervention. We can do the diet and exercise, but they have gone so far into mitochondrial dysfunction and so far down to metabolic dysfunction.

Speaker 1 People don't realize when they hit type 2 diabetes, that's decades of damage. Yeah, that's the end of the road, right? It's really, really, yes, it's really a terrible place to be.

Speaker 1 And yet we so casually are like, oh, now you have fatty liver and type 2 diabetes. Welcome to the club, right? Like welcome to where most Americans are sitting.

Speaker 1 And people don't realize the just devastating impact of that. And my mentor taught me decades ago to watch people's metabolic health, watch their waist circumference.

Speaker 1 Like those are the most important variables. Watch their muscle mass as a vital sign.
And my

Speaker 1 colleagues were giving me shit way back when, like, oh, Dr. Tina thinks everybody has metabolic dysfunction.
And I'm like, everybody does have metabolic dysfunction.

Speaker 1 I saw it happening and I was like, why does every patient have, and this is 20 years ago, you know, why does every patient have metabolic dysfunction?

Speaker 1 So anyway, GLP1s work in a myriad of ways, but we know them to suppress appetite, slow gastric motility, have pancreatic impact, and that's kind of it.

Speaker 1 And I even see obesity docs keeping it that kindergarten. And I'm like, no, no, no.
They do so many more things in the body.

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Speaker 2 Because if the process is faulty, we won't get the correctly made protein, collagen, fibrin, or the red blood cells in our bloodstream or our muscles.

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Yeah. And I think,

Speaker 2 too, you get,

Speaker 2 you pointed out something that I've been screaming from the rooftops that, you know, they talk about medullary thyroid cancer.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 Ozempic was first, you know, launched, our clinic director, Dr. Sarda, who's a board-certified OBGYN, she was the one that was determining whether or not we would use it in our patients.

Speaker 2 And she was looking through all the research, and I was looking through the research. And I said, you know, the medullary thyroid cancer was really only in the rat studies.

Speaker 2 It didn't actually happen in the human trial.

Speaker 2 And you're the only other person that I've ever heard point that out.

Speaker 2 And then also, it's, it's, you know, there's, there's a difference between causation, right?

Speaker 2 And, you know, when something is actually directly related, but when you have a toxic biome, you know, somebody who has advanced metabolic syndrome and they've got type 2 diabetes or they have hyperinsulinemia or, you know, they're morbidly obese,

Speaker 1 that's the high-risk category to begin with right it wasn't the introduction of the glp1 that boosted them to um you know having thyroid cancer it wasn't causative yeah it wasn't causative it's correlative at best and even even i think recently they've looked at so many meta-analysis and long-term data and they're like we just don't see the link of it causing thyroid cancer in humans or causing pancreatic you know cancer in humans even the select trial that concluded at the end of 2023

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 the uh placebo group had a higher rate rate of pancreatic cancer than

Speaker 1 or pancreatitis than the treatment group. So

Speaker 1 it's just, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, yes, I think if you shove somebody hard, though, because you were talking about cofactors and how you have to have systems in place before, you know, metabolic systems and nutrient status has to be in place before you start slamming people with treatment.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 So I do think when you take a group that's already metabolically compromised, already sitting on the edge of some of these pathologies, the thyroid cancer, the gastroparesis, all of those things are more common in those who are diabetic and obese.

Speaker 1 And then you slam them with something that's going to just shove those metabolic pathways. Right.

Speaker 1 And you've got low muscle mass and high inflammatory fat and possibly other pathogens and other things going on. It's just like, yeah, what's going to happen?

Speaker 1 I think really you can send people over the edge. So my theory is always slow and low and just nudge them along.

Speaker 2 I love that because we've learned the slow and low theory by design,

Speaker 2 by mistake.

Speaker 1 We've all done that.

Speaker 2 I've seen our clinical teams in the best interest of the patient say, oh, wow, you've got heavy metal toxicity, or you've got high viral loads, or you have

Speaker 2 chronic mycotoxin or mold spore, even a low-grade viral infection, or even parasitic infection. And then you hit them too hard to get rid of that pathogen.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, parasitic die-off or, you know, aggressive heavy metal detox, which we were talking about

Speaker 2 with your husband before we came in.

Speaker 2 You know, those things can make the patient sicker than what they had when they started. Yep.
Right. Like heavy chelation therapy or,

Speaker 2 you know, I actually have a

Speaker 2 staff member of ours that found out on a test that she had certain parasite in her bowel and then went on a heavy parasitic detox and ended up in the emergency room.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 And made herself

Speaker 1 sick.

Speaker 1 The thing I think with the GLP1s and the gastric issues, I wonder, and I, I, this this makes a lot of sense to me, it shifts the microbiome to a more favorable, less pathogenic microbiome.

Speaker 1 But I'm betting a lot of the initial experience that people are having, the side effects, is not necessarily due to the mechanism of action of the GLP-1, but maybe from the die-off when that biome shifts and it's being shifted too aggressively and too fast and furious.

Speaker 1 And maybe they're still pounding the foods that... You know, you eat what your bugs want.
Right.

Speaker 1 So they're eating the foods preferential to those pathogenic organisms and then they're having a shift and they're probably having a die-off reaction in many cases. I agree.

Speaker 1 You have to prepare people and you have to prepare people for weight loss. You can't just drop people into extreme weight loss.
Like there's so much toxicity in your fat cells.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of reasons here why I think that a more personalized, slow approach is probably a better approach for most everybody because.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, these can be very effective and therapeutic and like truly therapeutic, not just a band-aid. Right.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 like anything, you know, they, it's like all the doctors got their hands on it and they're going by the recommended dosages, which I understand, but like you were saying, we can use things off-label.

Speaker 1 Yes. And we can do a more personalized, patient-centered approach to dosing.
I do that with all the medications I prescribe.

Speaker 2 I'm so happy to hear that. That's so great.

Speaker 1 Like everything, like even antidepressants, statin drugs, all the different drugs that I prescribe. I do a personalized approach.
It's never the same for two people. It's not an algorithm.

Speaker 1 It's like, how much, how old is this person? What gender are they? What age are they? What's their vitality status? How much muscle do they have? How much fat? What's their toxic burden?

Speaker 1 Like, that's going to dictate whether it's prednisone or an antibiotic or, I mean, it's all a hormone replacement therapy. Like, it's never one thing.

Speaker 2 It's always individualized. And, you know, that was even during the pandemic when, when,

Speaker 2 and, and, and I'm not saying I'm pro- or anti-vaccine, but I remember when the vaccine was first being promulgated, I was like, well, I, you know, I sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, some of our members are like former nose tackles for, you know, NFL teams. And so, you know, these guys would come in and they're 6'5, 6'6,

Speaker 2 320 pounds. And I have a, I have a, um, a five-year-old niece, and she's 47 pounds.
And I was like, okay, this guy's coming into my unit. He's ducking under the door jams.

Speaker 2 And my five-year-old niece is hanging out too at 47 pounds.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, he'll never convince me that these two people get the exact same dose of the exact same thing and have the exact same reaction.

Speaker 2 I mean, this this guy looks like he ate a water buffalo for lunch.

Speaker 1 And she's like, you know what I mean? She's five. She's five.

Speaker 2 And like, I can't, I, I just, I can't get my, and maybe there's scientific evidence to refute that, but it, that was my initial hesitation is like, that doesn't make sense to me.

Speaker 2 Um, and and very often, you know, dosages in in pharmaceuticals or naturopathic medicines, um, um, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, those things also make sense to be done according to the patient.

Speaker 2 But I want to back up for a second because

Speaker 2 you're touching on one of my favorite subjects, and I think it just gets glossed over.

Speaker 2 And we use a lot of these terms like metabolic health, metabolic dysfunction, and a lot of people don't know what we're referring to.

Speaker 2 And I've heard people that I hold in very high regard, which I happen to agree with,

Speaker 1 Dr.

Speaker 2 Casey Means,

Speaker 2 Callie Means, her brother, and several others that have been on my podcast will say, you know, metabolic dysfunction is the root cause of essentially every disease that we have yeah and when you say metabolic dysfunction um and metabolic syndrome i just wonder if you could speak on that for a minute so you know so that my audience could understand when you're talking about metabolic dysfunction or metabolic syndrome what what are you referring to

Speaker 1 So a more traditional definition would be, you know, the foods that we ingest and the way that our body breaks them down to be utilized as fuel. That would be your metabolism.

Speaker 1 And how do we process, how do we cellularly process the carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that we're eating? And do they go to the right places and get utilized the right way?

Speaker 1 Are the right pathways being turned on? These are pathways that run our mitochondria, rev our mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of our cells.

Speaker 1 But the way I explain it to patients is, you know, something has gone wrong in the environment when I tell them that they're metabolically busted. And that's really it.

Speaker 1 To me, it's like machinery is going, eeek! You know, something is wrong. The engine isn't running correctly.

Speaker 2 In the community, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. And we're spewing out things that we don't want and we're not processing things the way we do.
And this is all contingent on the person's overall health, their age, their muscle mass.

Speaker 1 Again, their toxicity burden, how they came into the picture. It's contingent on their microbiome, their gut health, their hormonal balance and health.
There's all of these factors that play in.

Speaker 1 But at the end of the day, a lot of it we do have control over. And that would be our muscle mass.
That would be the foods we're choosing to put in our mouth.

Speaker 1 That would be the sleep that we're choosing to optimize or not. You know, people really kind of fuck around and find out with their sleep.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's not good.

Speaker 1 I love that you said that. Fuck around and find out with your sleep.
We can say that on, I think, on YouTube. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that, that,

Speaker 1 all of those things, your stress level is really important when it comes to your metabolic machinery and how your cells are handling.

Speaker 1 And your cells are a little, you know, microcosm in and of themselves. And your mitochondria are actually bacteria and they're symbiotic.
And so, we're living with these organisms in our body.

Speaker 1 And that all of that adds up to how our body takes in these foods and processes them into fuel and is used as fuel. So, there's problems on the intake, there's problems on the outtake.

Speaker 1 And my job really is just to get people at least doing the non-negotiables, the lifestyle factors. These are non-negotiables for everyone.

Speaker 1 So, I was telling people to eat steak and deadlift like a long time before. It was cool.
We ate steak right before we came on our bike.

Speaker 1 But, you know, that back when the health influencers were telling them to go vegan and do yoga, I was like, okay, that's nice, but you need animal protein and you need muscle.

Speaker 1 And I'm really glad it's catching on. And, you know, women weren't into it.
Nobody wanted to hear it. It was not sexy, but it's the not sexy stuff.

Speaker 1 It's, I mean, the biohacking stuff is cool and fun too. But at the end of the day, if you're not doing the basics and putting in the work, then you will be metabolically compromised.

Speaker 1 And then that's on a spectrum. And over here, we have, you know, pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome, as they call it.
They used to call it Syndrome Syndrome X.

Speaker 1 That's what my mom was diagnosed with when she was right when I met my mentor and went to work for him. She was in her 40s.
She had gained a tremendous amount of weight. Menopause was kicking her ass.

Speaker 1 And I didn't know my mom for a minute. I was like, who is this woman that has taken over this body? And I think a lot of women can relate to that.

Speaker 1 Or a lot of all of us probably saw a woman in our lives go through menopause and we were like, what is happening to this poor woman?

Speaker 1 And she gained a bunch of weight. And this is back when they called it Syndrome X.

Speaker 1 Do you remember those days before it was, and my mentor rick diagnosed her with syndrome x and told her to go lift weights and to you know stop eating white foods and yeah don't worry about cardio go build muscle and this was back in the early 90s oh good friends and so we were like do what we're not supposed to go elliptical ourselves into oblivion so i watched it progress for her though and i watched it really derail her health and that for me was very eye-opening and i did not want that for myself and my whole family on both sides is a bunch of little apple-shaped diabetics at the end of the day, you know.

Speaker 1 And it's, I just,

Speaker 1 I know, I hit, I hit 40, and I was like, I, that is not going to be my fate. I'm not.
Right. I'm going to listen to what Rick told me to do.
I wasn't listening. And I didn't listen for a decade.

Speaker 1 And I was like, okay, I'm going to do it now.

Speaker 2 So, well, I, I, I, I love what you're saying because, you know, I often talk about that too. You know, the, the longevity and optimal health is not found in the exotics.

Speaker 2 It's really found in the basics. Um, I mean, I have a sincere belief that sleep is our human superpower.

Speaker 2 I mean, I really think sleep is our superpower.

Speaker 2 I really focus on sleep. I schedule all of my meetings and travel around sleep and exercise.
And when I made that shift, it had made a dramatic change in my life.

Speaker 2 And I've learned to bookend my sleep with

Speaker 2 a routine to go to sleep and a routine to wake up. And I do it religiously.
I've done it every day for probably 40 years.

Speaker 1 I want to know what it is. 15 months.
I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's pretty simple. I mean, it's very portable.
And I post about it all the time. Like

Speaker 2 I'll do these intense travel schedules, you know, like nine cities in 11 days. And some of the cities will be on opposite sides of the world.

Speaker 2 So I change time zones a lot, you know, from Miami, LA to New York to Dubai, um, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, back to New York. And, and I'll post sleep scores, and I, um, and I like to do that.

Speaker 2 And sometimes I'll say the night before, then I'm going to post them the next morning. And then I get nervous.

Speaker 1 I'm like, dude, what if my, what if my sleep score really sucks tonight?

Speaker 2 But, um, but I think so few people have a routine for their sleep. And when you ask them, how do you go to sleep? They just go, well, I go to bed.

Speaker 2 And i'm like what time do you go to bed well whenever i'm done my workday or whenever i'm finished dinner or whenever i'm done watching tv and i think sleep has a tendency to really get bullied in our schedule it's like you know it's like the stepchild of our schedule and um so i just have a simple routine um it's i call it contrast therapy and and when i'm at the house i'll do 20 minutes on a dry sauna and then a one minute cold plunge not trying to cool myself down too much but when i'm traveling i'll just do um a contrast shower like uh um i'll start with a warm shower and and then I'll turn the water as hot as I can get it on my spine.

Speaker 2 And I'll stand there for about a minute and a half. And then I'll step out of that water stream, turn it as cold as it'll go.

Speaker 2 And I step into that stream of water and then I just deal with it for a minute.

Speaker 2 And then I turn the water off and it breaks that catecholamine cycle. I find out that whatever I'm thinking about, I stop thinking about that

Speaker 2 because I'm mildly miserable for a period of time.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 So if I was like, hey, did I get everything on my grocery list today? Did my belt match my shoes? What time am I speaking tomorrow?

Speaker 2 you know it just blows those catecholamines out um i take this uh i take a sleep mask with me everywhere i go just a six dollar soft sleep mask that goes around my head um very simple but it has there is zero light getting through yes because andrew huberman was the one that turned me on to how little candle wattage it actually takes through the eyes to raise cortisol yep um

Speaker 2 and you know if you if you shut the lights off in a in an average you know commercial hotel room, even at the Ritz-Carlton, you know, there's light coming through the blinds.

Speaker 2 There's an LED clock on the, on, you know, on the, on the nightstand, and then there's five other lights on around the room. And then the bathroom light never really goes off.

Speaker 2 And so I use a mask and I, I sleep with the, the room kind of obnoxiously cold, which my wife doesn't love.

Speaker 2 But she's learned, she's learned to sleep in it too. So I drop the temperature another two degrees.

Speaker 2 And then I have a breath work technique that I do in, in, in bed. And if I'm going to be on my phone, I'm on my phone before I get into bed.

Speaker 2 And then when I get into bed, I put the eye mask on and i just do this breathing technique long slow and through the nose about a three second pause and then out through a straw and i and i imagine it sounds really corny but i imagine taking all the thoughts from my head and breathing them into my lungs and then breathing them out oh i love that so i actually focus on that i'm like okay all these things that i'm thinking about okay what time am i going to be on stage tomorrow i'm going to take that thought and i just

Speaker 2 pull it into my lungs and i just

Speaker 2 breathe it out i i'm telling you if if i make it through 10 rounds of that

Speaker 2 something's wrong. And I, and I've been tracking on my sleep aid how long it takes me to fall asleep.
And it's been less than five minutes for almost 31 days now.

Speaker 2 And sleep, of course, are usually between like 98 and 100%.

Speaker 2 And then in the morning, within 30 minutes of waking, I do breath work and find the sun.

Speaker 1 And that's- Yeah, go find the sun. That's that's, I know.
You got to get outside.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so those are the little bookends that I use for sleep. And I'm just telling you, like my body knows that if I'm doing breath work, it's within 30 minutes of waking.

Speaker 2 If I'm doing a contrast shower, we're about to go to bed, right? When things get really, really dark, it's time to go to sleep.

Speaker 2 And definitely, if I'm doing the breathwork and something about giving my body that routine so it's relied on it, that's that's my sleep pack. And it costs you zero, except for the sleep $6 mask.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, that's the only expense.

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Speaker 1 I have a weighted sleep mask.

Speaker 2 I've seen those.

Speaker 1 So nice. And then the earplugs.
And it's got to be. Oh, you're going next level.
It's got to be like blackout, like a tomb in the room.

Speaker 2 I'm, yeah, that's a big thing. You see Hubby snore over there?

Speaker 1 He snores. Oh, he does.

Speaker 1 We'll work on that next. A little bit.
A little bit, but it's cute.

Speaker 1 No joke, though. We met in 2019, and I was at the point where I was like, I will not date someone that's going to mess up my sleep.
So you've got to be a good sleeper.

Speaker 1 And there were men that I was like, I like you, but you are a terrible sleeve. And I'm not messing with you.
You're a terrible sleeper. I will not mess with my sleep.

Speaker 1 I will not have it compromised because it's everything.

Speaker 1 And your metabolic health, it takes what, like two nights of poor sleep to have your metabolic health shift in the wrong direction and you become transiently insulin resistant.

Speaker 1 And that's, I think, so many people's problems.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Sleep deprivation.
I never

Speaker 2 knew about the link between sleep deprivation and insulin resistance. And so many of

Speaker 1 nearly all of our sleep deprived patients are

Speaker 2 insulin resistant and pre-diabetic.

Speaker 2 And these are fit-looking people.

Speaker 2 You know, they, they, it doesn't look like somebody who would have typical metabolic syndrome, which I want to go back to that for a second, too, because I think that, you know, we're hearing and seeing now metabolic syndrome in younger and younger ages.

Speaker 2 And I've heard you talk about the toxic soup that we're bathing our cellular biology in. And I've also heard you talk about the

Speaker 2 importance of muscle.

Speaker 2 And I think Dr. Gabrielle Lyon's doing a great job of getting this message out.
I love her. I've amplified her message.

Speaker 2 You know, she

Speaker 2 wrote a great book,

Speaker 2 you know, on muscle and longevity. But what are your thoughts about that? Why is metabolic syndrome creeping down into younger and younger ages?

Speaker 2 And what could somebody that's listening to this podcast do about it? And what would they look for to find out if they have it?

Speaker 1 I think it's, I think for children, especially, it's a double prong.

Speaker 1 problem

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 we are a few generations into this problem.

Speaker 1 And we're like, do you know who pottinger was do you know about pottinger's cats no pottinger weston price do you know weston price was okay so pottinger was around that same time period and pottinger was doing uh veterinary i think he was a veterinarian he was looking at cats and he found that if he fed them a particular diet that really all he did was pasteurize the milk and cook the meat that's all he did to alter the food this is back in the 30s i believe that these cats became their their livers enlarged their intestines got boggy and they became infertile very quickly.

Speaker 2 Just from cooking the meat and pasteurizing the milk.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wow.
I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing similar age. 54.
I don't mind. We are.
I'm out there. I'm 50.
We are Pottinger's cats, our generation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And it took many generations to get them back to fertility. and back to health.
So we're looking at that. I know we're not cats, we're humans, but we are looking at that right now.

Speaker 1 And so these kids are coming out of metabolically compromised moms. Like I was skin and bones and had PCOS way back in 1995, 96.
My mentor diagnosed me with it.

Speaker 1 So we're looking at moms who are metabolically compromised swimming in insulin. They've got babies in a placenta swimming in insulin.
This is for real.

Speaker 1 And these children are coming out epigenetically marked. So they're epigenetically marked.
Their rates, their risk and rates of obesity and metabolic compromise are so high.

Speaker 1 compared to a child who's born of a mom who's metabolically sound.

Speaker 2 So wow.

Speaker 1 They're already set. The stage is already set.
This is where I know that.

Speaker 2 The deck is already stocked against.

Speaker 1 I know that a lot of people are out there saying, like, no Ozempic for children.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, I also think that maybe there's a time and a place where we can dose it differently and apply it differently as part of a comprehensive treatment plan because these kids metabolically are already, they come out the shoot compromised.

Speaker 1 Right. And my daughter's 24, and her whole generation is that group.
I'm seeing those, all those girls have PCOS, even the thin ones.

Speaker 1 So then on the other side, we've got obese parents. Our age cohort is truly, I'm not judging anyone, but it's a hot mess.
I mean, Gen X is a mess right now. Trust me, I see it.

Speaker 1 I feel like I am obligated to save Gen X because I'm like, I have answers. You got to.

Speaker 2 I went to my high school reunion the other day. I mean, it was like,

Speaker 2 I thought it was like aliens.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I

Speaker 1 thought I walked in the wrong room. I didn't go because this sounds so bad.
I was like, I don't need to see how

Speaker 1 everyone's become diabetic and obese. Like, I just knew it was going to be a mess so anyway

Speaker 1 when we're talking about children who are metabolically compromised nine times out of 10 truly those are the stats their parents are metabolically compromised and or obese obese children come from obese parents and we could say it's all the household the foods the lifestyle but it's both yeah we've got these kids who are epigenetically compromised and we've got a situation that they're living in where they're eating, you know, clearly, I mean, the school lunches are garbage.

Speaker 1 The education around nutrition is garbage. I am all for the make America healthy again, but why are we trading out fruit loops for fruit loops? Like, why are we just not eating fruit loops?

Speaker 1 How about nobody?

Speaker 1 How about nobody feed the kids fruit loops? Like, I'm not going to argue with Kellogg. I'm just going to boycott Kellogg.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't care. Like, just don't buy that crap and put it in your kids' mouth.

Speaker 1 Like, let's talk about education. Let's talk about school lunches.
Let's talk about all of these things that we really can have impact on because we have to educate the parents. So that is a pickle.

Speaker 1 And so it's both. I think this is where we're seeing younger and younger generations because epigenetically and genetically, they're marked.

Speaker 1 And then on the tail end, lifestyle and environment is dictating what they're putting in their mouths. And we can say all day that let's blame the parents.
I've had a child.

Speaker 1 I have a child who she had PCOS at six years old.

Speaker 1 She was raised in a naturopathic household.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 The markers on her labs were already showing the glimmers. She had polycystic appearance.
She had the markers showing. They were coming.
It was, I was like, this is coming, you guys.

Speaker 1 And I was trying to tell her dad and I was trying to tell my mom and I was trying to tell everybody and nobody wanted to listen to me. And here we are, here she is as an adult, full-blown PCOS.

Speaker 1 And it's like, and again, the samaglutide completely turning that ship around. And it's just miraculous.
So there's.

Speaker 2 So low-dose samaglutide. And over what period of time, what kind of markers were you looking at to see whether or not the PCS was PCOS was resolving?

Speaker 2 Cause there is a vast portion of my female audience that has grappled with PCOS.

Speaker 1 I think just looking, I'm always looking at symptomology first. So how are, how's their skin? How's their hair? How's their hair growth? How's, you know, I mean, often we'll see acne clearing up when

Speaker 1 we're moving in the right direction out of PCOS. Acne starts to clear, the hertuism and, you know, the dark hair growth starts to recover.
You'll see. You'll see other conditions.

Speaker 1 You'll see fibrocystic breasts. You'll see, there's just a variety of like hormones gone wrong kind of symptomology, heavy periods, difficult periods.

Speaker 1 Irregular periods. Yeah, irregular periods.
So all of that starts to shift in a more favorable way and things start to become more normalized.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I hate to use that term normal, but in a healthier way, we start to see things shift. The lights come back on, the skin clears, and the waist comes back.

Speaker 1 You know, we go from the tube shape to more of the hourglass shape, more of that.

Speaker 1 When we start to see in young women, in menopausal women, when women go from that gynoid, you know, curvy hourglass figure over to that android shape where they turn more into it's more of a male shape,

Speaker 1 We, that's where we start to see all the disease processes.

Speaker 2 And so, especially if the abdominal circumference,

Speaker 1 all of that, right? My mentor was always like, keep that waist circumference in check. That's everything.
Really?

Speaker 1 So, he taught me that if your patients aren't strength training, their blood pressure is high or elevated, and their waist circumference is elevated, they have metabolic syndrome, period.

Speaker 2 And I think classically, it also had to have like

Speaker 2 you know, elevated insulin, high triglyceride, hypertension.

Speaker 2 But I think, you know, what we've noticed in our clinical practice is if you take, you know, all of those as individual processes like elevated hemoglobin A1C, hyperinsulinemia, hypertriglyceride emia,

Speaker 2 and waist circumference

Speaker 2 and hypertension. Right.

Speaker 2 You know, people think if they only have one or two of those, they don't have metabolic syndrome, but that's the foundation starting to crack.

Speaker 1 Those are the early glimmers. Yeah.
So I'm looking at patients and sometimes they're the hardest to convince because their labs don't add up to anything that looks horrific. Right.

Speaker 1 But when you put it together in a functional way, it's like, I'm telling you the story that's coming. Yeah.
I'm telling you what chapter 11 is. You're on chapter three.
Here's what's coming.

Speaker 1 You stay on this path. It's going to get worse.
It's not going to get better.

Speaker 1 And you will end up here. And then there's the extreme version of that, but people don't seem to, I mean, longevity is such a trendy word, but people don't really seem to have any future casting.

Speaker 1 You tell skinny female Caucasian, you know, skinny white girl disease. That's osteoporosis.
You tell these very thin, light-haired, light-eyed, very thin women.

Speaker 1 I'm seeing them all over Miami, very thin women. And I'm like, honey, you're going to break a hip in 20 years.
Yeah. And that's not a fun game.
Like, that's the end of the road.

Speaker 1 And you're lucky if you live through that.

Speaker 1 And if you do, you know, you often will end up with pneumonia in the hospital, or you've got a very high increased risk for death over the next two to five years. It's huge, up to 10 years.

Speaker 1 And they're not looking at that. They're like, how thin can I stay for how long? Right.
When you're 40, you don't want to be real thin. Like you need to have muscle on you at the very least.

Speaker 1 And then there is a protective mechanism, I believe, to a little bit of fat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I couldn't, couldn't agree with you more. And, you know, when

Speaker 2 I was in the mortality space,

Speaker 2 I mean, that was the femoral neck break was the kiss of death. And so many people thought that, you know, well, grandma fell and broke her hip, but the truth is that her hip broke.

Speaker 1 And then grandma's hip broke and then she fell.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because that osteoporotic section, you know, went to the femoral neck and she would be, you know, standing there doing dishes and crack the hip breaks and she'd fall.

Speaker 2 And they were like, oh my gosh, this fall caused this fracture. And we were like, well, no, actually, the fracture caused the fall.
And this is just indicative of how far progressed that condition is.

Speaker 2 And I think that's why it's actually not the fact that you have a fracture in an older age. I think it's the fact that the skeletal system can't support itself.
So now.

Speaker 2 you know, everything's gone downhill.

Speaker 1 And osteoporosis really at the end of the day is diabetes of the bones. And osteoarthritis is diabetes of the joints.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's metabolic dysfunction of those regions and the bones and the joints and the muscles are all BFF. So if you've got no muscle mass, you've got no bone mass.
Yes.

Speaker 1 And you've got terrible joints or they're coming. It's all happening, you know, and malnutrition is a huge driver of that.
And I was...

Speaker 1 full admission, I was anorexic for a long time. Were you really? And if you look at my cartilage under ultrasound, it is thin.

Speaker 1 So I'm always trying to do whatever I can to beef things up because I'm paying the price for, you know, an anorexic teenage years. I mean, it was a, I was very malnourished, purposely.

Speaker 1 I was very purposely malnourished. And I look back on it and I'm like, oh my God.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by purposely malnourished?

Speaker 1 Well, I went vegan. Okay.

Speaker 1 You know why? My dad actually.

Speaker 2 I thought your husband was vegan when he came in because he was the only one that didn't eat the meat.

Speaker 1 Are you vegan? I don't know. He's fat.
He seems to be fasting today.

Speaker 2 Oh, you just eat before he came. Okay.
So I was like, in my mind, I was like, I wonder if he's vegetarian.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't marry him. Okay, good.
I'd like to hear that. I wouldn't marry him.
You look like a snake guy to me. So I didn't want to offend you.

Speaker 1 He raises cattle. No, we don't.
Oh, do you?

Speaker 1 Now we're best friends. He's a farmer.
He's okay.

Speaker 1 We don't. I wouldn't marry him.
I wouldn't.

Speaker 1 They have to sleep and eat meat and like dogs. That's

Speaker 1 pre-rectected.

Speaker 2 He's a sleep hygiene, too. Yeah, it was a pre-recting.

Speaker 1 He made it to the being with me. The golf.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 no, my dad actually, it's funny. My dad was a food salesman.
Like, he did food sales, a food broker.

Speaker 1 And he was one of the biggest meat distributors of or one of the biggest distributors of beef in the pacific northwest and i was a disgruntled teen so my way of rebelling just to ultimately piss him off

Speaker 1 was to go vegan and then i put like a meat is murder bumper sticker on the truck i remember those in the 80s they were popular we just had a huge blowout and it was always just me trying to like piss off my dad.

Speaker 1 So I destroyed my health in the process during key hormonal growth years and development. But here we are.
Did you piss your dad off though? Oh, yeah. Okay, so that was a success.

Speaker 1 You know, all these years later, we've come around. We're on the same team now.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 He's like, you know, I think we all kind of grow and realize our parents were wiser. You're like, damn it, dad, you were right.

Speaker 1 I probably almost gave him a heart attack, but we're on the same team now. We're at the end of the day, throughout the pandemic, we all rallied on the same team.
So we're good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I'm going to get back to muscle and the importance of muscle and longevity. And I think there are a lot of prominent speakers in this arena.
You know,

Speaker 2 Dr. Ortia and his book, Outlive, and Dr.
Gabriel Lyon,

Speaker 2 starting to talk about muscle as an, thinking of it as an organ. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the organ of longevity.

Speaker 2 I've even heard, you know,

Speaker 2 Dr. Lyons use that term.
You know, muscles are an organ of longevity. We don't even think about our muscles being an organ.

Speaker 2 And so, especially for the women out there, talk a little bit about the importance of muscle mass because I think women associate with being muscular with being manly, meaning man-like physique.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be bulky. Um,

Speaker 2 and it's hard, I think, for women to put on enough muscle to be bulky.

Speaker 1 I can't even, I don't even look like I lift, and I work really hard at it.

Speaker 1 It's hard,

Speaker 1 it's hard to put it on.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, the first time I met Gabrielle was at a conference, and she walks into the gym and she's on her cell phone, and she's talking to somebody, and she just kind of blows into the gym.

Speaker 1 She grabs the pull-up bar, cranks out a bunch of pull-ups, and then saunters out of the gym. And I was like, who is this woman?

Speaker 1 We must be friends this is like mr we must be friends yes we must be friends um it so i went into muscle because i wasn't listening to my mentor and actually he was dying of cancer sadly and i know myself and when i am

Speaker 1 grieving i waste i mean left to my own devices i will waste away and i knew what it was coming and i it was like two i took over his practice it was like two years of watching this demise and it was really painful uh emotionally for me and so i started training for it and i went to him and I was like, okay, I know this is it, but like, what do I got to do?

Speaker 1 And he's like, you need to put some muscle on. So he's like, you're not going to waste away on me.
So

Speaker 1 I went into the gym and I was so thin at this point. I was so underweight.
And I looked at the trainer and I was like, I need to learn how to deadlift and squat.

Speaker 1 And he goes, well, do you want to do body composition? I'm like, dude, look at me. I was like frail and I was, I was in my 30s and I felt like if I fell down, I was going to shatter.

Speaker 1 I was so underweight and it was so many decades of under eating.

Speaker 1 And I said, I have to put on some, some, some, I got to put a, I got to put a, you know, slab of meat on this, on this meat suit. And so he helped me just learn to deadlift and squat.

Speaker 1 And then I could not believe the transition in my mental health, in my well-being, in my career, in my, just my onus of power. My whole world changed.
And I was addicted.

Speaker 1 And so I was going to every medical conference I could to talk about this. And I was getting heckled by MDs.
I was getting heckled by naturopathic doctors.

Speaker 1 Everybody was like, the best exercise is the one the patient wants to do. And I'm like, no, they need to freaking pick up heavy shit,

Speaker 1 carry it and put it down. Like, trust me, because the more that it was completely changing my life, the more I studied it.
And the more I found out, I learned about myokines.

Speaker 1 Myokines, we know about cytokines being these pro-inflammatory. molecules in our body, but the same molecules are produced by the muscle and they're anti-inflammatory.
They're myokines.

Speaker 1 We get hung up on insulin resistance. That's just one way to take glucose into the cell.
Yeah, Yeah, it's a sponge.

Speaker 1 To get glute four receptors to the, to translocate to the membrane, you can also do that by just squeezing muscles.

Speaker 1 So exercise and activating the AMPK and SERT1 pathways and also just literally squeezing your muscles will get that glute four receptor to the membrane to bring glucose into the cell to be used as fuel.

Speaker 1 It also spurs up those same pathways that get your mitochondria revved. So, and then you think about how can we put more mitochondria in the body?

Speaker 1 Because some of us, like, I got dosed with Cipro, like it was going out of style when I was in college. That was the big thing in the 90s, right? It was like, oh, you have a UTI, here's some Cipro.

Speaker 1 Let's kill your mitochondria. Right.
And so, this mitochondrial fatigue that so many of us are dealing with, and this mitochondrial compromise, you can add muscle.

Speaker 1 It's the only organ I know you can literally build by yourself without any special anything. You just go to the gym or body weight or whatever, and you can add mitochondria to your meat suit.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you can make an anti-inflammatory mitochondria mitochondria meat suit

Speaker 1 that you build. I like that.
That's how I think of it. I would wear that.
That meat suit. Your hormones behave better.
This whole movement online of like hormone balance.

Speaker 1 I'm watching metabolically compromised women, smart women, smart doctors, friends of mine talk about hormonal balance. And I'm like, you can't have hormonal balance without optimal muscles.

Speaker 1 You just, it's just an illusion.

Speaker 1 Putting.

Speaker 1 HRT into a body that's inflamed and metabolically compromised, especially if there's a lot of inflammatory adipose tissue, fat tissue, those hormones go rogue and go in directions we don't necessarily want.

Speaker 1 And so adding HRT to a metabolically compromised woman to me is like playing Russian roulette.

Speaker 1 This is where I think GLP1s are really beautiful because you can clean up that terrain. It literally cleans up the terrain, right?

Speaker 1 And then we can get the HRT into these bodies that so desperately need it.

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Speaker 2 Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast.

Speaker 2 So you like the, you like low doses over a certain period of time to sort of clean up the, you know, the metabolic terrain, as you call it, and then maybe re-looking at the balance of the hormones.

Speaker 2 Because

Speaker 2 I think you're right. You know, what's astounding is, you know, very often we see that you put people on a functional training program

Speaker 2 and a whole food diet, not raw food. I almost said raw food, I meant whole food diet,

Speaker 2 and just that alone, pull blood work eight or 10 weeks later, and then see what's really wrong.

Speaker 2 You get a real accurate picture of, well, maybe there is some hormonal hypo function,

Speaker 2 or maybe there is some pituitary hypo function. But the truth is it's massed when you have this metabolic syndrome and you have all of these other things

Speaker 2 in the way.

Speaker 2 So are you a a fan of

Speaker 2 what markers are you kind of looking at in the, in, in the blood? What do you think it's important to monitor? You look at C-reactive protein as a general marker of inflammation? Do you look at

Speaker 1 some basics, you know, C-reactive protein,

Speaker 1 hemoglobin A1C.

Speaker 1 Vitamin D, just because I think it's good to have that optimized always. Huge.

Speaker 1 You know, we can look at, I like a comp metabolic panel because we can see what the liver is doing and is it being taxed, right? Is it working too hard?

Speaker 1 I think running hormones, I just assume though, I really look at hormones from, again, from a symptom standpoint.

Speaker 1 If a woman's walking into middle age, especially any woman over 40, I think is probably, or men too, is probably looking at a potential candidate for thyroid support just for longevity reasons.

Speaker 1 Again, very tiny doses are sometimes all it takes to totally change

Speaker 1 their life, right? And just completely change the brain.

Speaker 2 Are you a big fan of natural dissected thyroid?

Speaker 1 Desiccated.

Speaker 1 Desicated. I'm just a big fan of good old armor thyroid when we can get it, you know, or NP thyroid.
And then I'm old school. Like, that's how my mentor taught me.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, obviously supporting the adrenals just so people have a leg up.

Speaker 1 Anytime I can get someone a leg up, this is also where I think GLP1s are amazing because it does something to the neurochemistry. It decreases inflammation in the brain.

Speaker 1 And when we can calm the microglial cells down and we can calm the inflammation down and we can get the lights turned on and then we can get those those reward pathways actually working in a more favorable way.

Speaker 1 People feel like they have control of their life back and they want to do the thing. So sometimes it takes a few months, especially if they're really metabolically compromised.

Speaker 1 It might take three plus months before they say, you know, I want to exercise now. I mean, my dad literally was on

Speaker 1 Ozempic for nine months and he finally started walking. Yeah.
This man was living in a lazy boy night and day.

Speaker 2 I mean, it was for nine months.

Speaker 2 And we don't need to talk about dosing on the, on, on the show, but when you, when you say he was on it for nine months, a low dose over a prolonged period of time because the typical zempic dosing is you know that it doubles every four weeks right until you get to pretty substantial doses at cruising altitude and then essentially you're meant to stay there for life i think it's important to mention that really low doses are

Speaker 1 much better uh for metabolically healthy people. This is not a strategy for people who are really metabolically compromised.
Right.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean we need to go fast and heavy. So he definitely is on more standard dosing and he has had no side effects, even at doses that would make me fall over and end up in the ER.
So

Speaker 1 folks who are really metabolically healthy can handle these tiny, tiny doses because they have good muscle mass.

Speaker 1 And maybe like you were saying, like these people don't look like they have blood sugar dysregulation, but they do.

Speaker 1 Or maybe they have cardiovascular disease risk or maybe they have cognitive issues or maybe they've had, you know, and I'm thinking in terms of like traumatic head injuries, life of massive stress, like what's happening to their brains.

Speaker 1 And so I'm using it in a neuroprotective, cardiovascular protective way. But those who are metabolically compromised have more weight to lose.

Speaker 1 They definitely are looking probably at more traditional dosing.

Speaker 1 I'm still a fan of going slow and low. And I think that the medical establishment is catching on.
I'm looking at data that different groups, medical groups are sharing.

Speaker 1 This one group out of Italy was talking about personalized dosing. And while they were still using higher doses, they went much slower and really just meeting the patient where they're at.

Speaker 1 We don't have to dose people. Do you have a frequency?

Speaker 2 Do you change the frequency? Because most of these are dosed in weekly.

Speaker 1 It kind of depends on the person and what we're going for. So I know of people who are doing it, you know,

Speaker 1 much less often, and it's just for smoking cessation because there's data. They're doing studies on alcohol cessation, smoking cessation, opioid cessation.

Speaker 2 I don't have any personal experience with opioid or

Speaker 2 nicotine, but alcohol for sure. I mean, the vast majority of the patients in our clinic system,

Speaker 2 I would say they go, I just don't feel like drinking.

Speaker 1 I don't want it anymore.

Speaker 2 They literally have no impetus for it. And I mean, do they know what that mechanism is? I mean, it's maybe, maybe it's the satiation mechanism.

Speaker 1 Some of the mean pathways, I think it's the reward pathways in the brain, but I think you can go too far. So you can give somebody a, it really depends.

Speaker 1 It's so individualized because a little too much can be a lot too much in the right body. And you might send somebody over into a place where they're like, I don't even want to prepare food.

Speaker 1 I don't want to drink, but I also don't want to have sex. And I also need you.
And

Speaker 1 yeah, the lust for life is kind of leaving the room. So we don't need, we don't need to go there.
I think that that's the problem that we're seeing. We're hearing about that.

Speaker 1 That's what's being sensationalized is like, oh, the suicidal ideology. That is not true.
Actually,

Speaker 1 it's been shown to really have a strong impact on anxiety and low mood. It's, it's a huge mood booster.
And we have the data on that. And that link has been disproven as well.

Speaker 1 There's just not, there was one study that came out.

Speaker 1 They took World Health Organization data. It was just published recently.
I think it was in JAMA. And everybody on the internet ran with it and said, see, Ozempic causes suicide.

Speaker 1 And if you look at the study,

Speaker 1 it was

Speaker 1 an exorbitant, I think it was over 3 million people. They were just looking at chart notes.
So it was just correlative again.

Speaker 1 And they had a signal of like 107 people, I think, or 127 people on samaclutite who had suicidal ideation out of millions. Right.

Speaker 1 And those people, when you broke it down, those people were on benzos and antidepressants, a large portion of them. So even the authors of the study, the limitation section was like this long.

Speaker 1 And they were like, do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Speaker 1 This is simply a signal that we should probably talk to her, like any good physician, talk to your patients about their mood and their overall affect and like their suicidal ideation before they start, because maybe they came into it that way.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot to unpack there. And there's also the idea that I think a lot of people

Speaker 1 come into obesity, not to take it down that pathway, but I do know women, many women who've come into obesity in their own lives as a protective mechanism after traumas, after being too visible.

Speaker 1 I know many women who were sort of hypersexualized and just too incredibly beautiful as young women. Yeah.
So much attention, the kind of woman that walks in a room and everybody stops and turns.

Speaker 1 And it was very uncomfortable for them. And they literally kind of ate themselves into a place where they were a little less visible.
Wow. So there's so many reasons why people end up in that place.

Speaker 1 And it's not my job to judge how they got there, but I do think that sometimes food is that comfort and it's the way they know how to get their dopamine up and it's their way to stress relieve.

Speaker 1 And then all of a sudden they're getting hit with a high dose of a GLP-1 and their appetite's gone. Yeah.
So what do they use? Right.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, there's a discussion there to be had for sure, but you know what I'm saying?

Speaker 2 I think the lifestyle, you know, it was your first opener when you said, you know,

Speaker 2 it's my role to bring lifestyle interventions. And I love that lifestyle interventions to the table because we should be talking about

Speaker 2 you reaching your goals in a holistic way. Like, you know,

Speaker 2 whenever I talk to a client, I say, you know, what are your goals in working with me?

Speaker 2 And they've already spoken to our clinical team. And

Speaker 2 then you have to be realistic about what.

Speaker 2 You have to repeat back to them. Well, if this is your goal, then these are the lifestyle interventions that you're just going to have to get comfortable with.

Speaker 2 And if you're not comfortable with these, then we need to readjust the call.

Speaker 2 You know, if there's, here's some non-negotiables that need to happen.

Speaker 2 And here's some non-negotiables in your schedule that need to happen. And I go right to work on sleep and right to work on morning routine.

Speaker 2 But the ones that say that they can't do that or can't commit to that and say, okay, well, then we need to readjust your calls.

Speaker 1 That's a nice way to put it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it's just unrealistic otherwise.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just unrealistic otherwise. And

Speaker 2 I really love the way that you're, you're, you've really reframed the way that I think of

Speaker 2 GLP-1s because, you know, I mean, I was buying into a little bit of the hype that was going on in the marketplace. I may have been even guilty of repeating some of that hype.

Speaker 2 But, you know, when I think back on it,

Speaker 2 those were in those superphysiologic doses that were for, you know, the morbidly obese type 2 diabetic, which in their case could be life-saving, but you can't apply those same things to somebody who's, you know, mildly metabolically off, maybe doesn't have full-blown metabolic syndrome.

Speaker 2 But someone like my wife, who's lean and muscular, but tiny,

Speaker 2 and when she doesn't get good sleep over a prolonged period of time, like she had an L5S1 fusion. And

Speaker 2 so we noticed that over a prolonged period of time when her sleep was really, really poor because she was tossing and turning and up all night.

Speaker 2 And she wasn't supposed to sleep on her stomach and then she would roll on her stomach and then her back would flare up.

Speaker 1 And so it was.

Speaker 1 I have that dance too. I know that dance.
Oh, you know that dance? Okay. So you know the L5S1 problem.

Speaker 2 It would really identify with you. And,

Speaker 2 you know, we, we, her labs are usually perfect. And, and for me, it was,

Speaker 2 it was like the light switch that I couldn't figure out because, you know, and I get really frustrated when I can't make sense out of something.

Speaker 2 And I start going deep down the rabbit hole and I call all my colleagues.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 she became

Speaker 2 pre-diabetic.

Speaker 1 And I was like, and she's tiny. I've seen pictures.
Yeah, she's very lean.

Speaker 2 She's tiny and very lean

Speaker 2 and muscular. And she's active and she eats super clean.
Yeah. And she is like, I don't even put sugar in my coffee.
I don't even put spon in my coffee.

Speaker 1 You know, this is very common. And I know many people who've come out

Speaker 1 privately to me in the online health space who are like,

Speaker 1 well, you look at my labs, what do you think about me?

Speaker 1 What do you think about me trying some GLP1? Because like the same thing, like, what, you know, abs, six-pack abs, the whole thing. And, but there are blood sugar markers.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, all bets are off when you hit 50 like things just start going sideways and I'm so glad you're bringing this up because

Speaker 1 everyone keeps saying well this is reserved for those who are severely obese and meta you know really metabolically compromised type two and I'm like when a woman comes to you and she's 50-ish and she says you know what doc i didn't do anything different and i they're eating cleaner than i am and they are living it to a t yeah and i just put 15 pounds on my midsection i'm like that's insulin resistance that's

Speaker 1 the beginning of this journey. And this journey doesn't get better.
Yep. So, what can we do? Because there's nothing else left to dial in.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 Your wife

Speaker 1 has ever appreciated that tool available. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, she's got the red beds and the sauna and the steam and the cold plunge and the whole bit and gym. And she's very, you know, like I say, she's very active and ultra, ultra clean.

Speaker 2 I mean, we get all of our food from an Amish farm.

Speaker 2 And so there wasn't anything processed in her diet. And we eventually traced it back to

Speaker 2 her sleep. You know, we were looking at her sleep scores and they were an absolute disaster.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she was relying heavily on caffeine throughout the day. And it was just sort of something we didn't really notice because we spent a lot of time in our unit.

Speaker 2 And she would just go back and forth to the coffee maker.

Speaker 1 And I was like, babe, how many cups of coffee have you had today?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so then we just really started to focus on dialing into sleep and everything changed.

Speaker 1 Oh, for sure.

Speaker 2 Like, really, it was like the sunrose for the first time, you know, and the pre-diabetes went down. And she was like very thankful of that.

Speaker 2 But we notice, like, when, um, you know, when our travel schedule is heavy or her back starts flaring up, or she spends too much time on her stomach, you know, it's, it, it's incredible how connected all these things are.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 1 so I know. I'm glad.
I'm glad she's better.

Speaker 2 Um, so I know we're, um, uh, you, you've got, you've got a heart out here, but I, I wanted to, uh, well, first of all, all, I wanted to thank you for coming on the Ultimate Human podcast.

Speaker 2 This is amazing, and I'm definitely going to have you back.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 2 But I, um, I always ask my guests that, you know, the same question. If you're watching my podcast, I end all my podcasts with the same question.

Speaker 2 Um, and it is, um, you know, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

Speaker 1 It makes me tear up. My

Speaker 1 mentor taught me

Speaker 1 how precious our health is and how to

Speaker 1 take the gift that God gave me and be the best healer that I could be and really optimize it.

Speaker 1 And I feel, I firmly believe that God put me in his office to become his receptionist all those decades ago so that I could ultimately end up here and have the opportunity to sit on stages like this and have access to huge audiences so I could share the same information he taught me.

Speaker 1 And I wake up every day and I think, how can I be of service? And how can I best do that? And I personally have been so plagued with chronic pain and health issues myself. And so I live it.

Speaker 1 I understand it. Like this was built.
This is sustained every day through a lot of hard work because of that pain and that, and that, and that illness.

Speaker 1 So for me, it's just being healthy enough to be able to continue to pay it forward. Yeah.
You know, and speak the truth and continue to be brave and resilient.

Speaker 1 That, and I have to have my health intact. I have to be an ultimate human so that I can do that every day.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Dr. Tina Moore, you're amazing.

Speaker 2 I really feel like your message is very authentic. You know, I thank you.
I've had hundreds of guests on the podcast. I've had hundreds of these conversations.

Speaker 2 I can just tell the authenticity that you have and how much you care and how curious you are, which I think is likely the most attractive characteristic in a person is when they have that intellectual curiosity to just want to learn and

Speaker 2 figure out more and then share it with the world. So thank you for coming on the Ultimate Human podcast.
And I'm definitely going to have you back again.

Speaker 1 Thank you. It was such a pleasure.

Speaker 2 And as always, guys, that's just science.