Join me, Anders Varner, on this week's episode of Barbell Shrugged as we dive deep into the world of blood glucose with Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dan Garner. Discover the crucial markers in your blood work that can indicate if you're on the path to being pre-diabetic, and learn how to interpret these values to take control of your health. We explore the six ways glucose dysregulation can occur, both insulin and non-insulin based, and discuss the impact of inflammation and gut health on blood sugar. Tune in to gain valuable insights and practical tips to optimize your blood sugar levels.
Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we are talking about blood glucose. Yeah, that's right, your blood sugar and what it means for your overall health, what you can look for in your blood work and the potential that you are pre-pre-diabetic.
Now what that means, which you'll find out in this show, is very interesting because your boy, talking to you right now, me,
I got all my blood work done with Dan, who's on the show, obviously the co-host, and let me tell you, I was pre-pre-diabetic.
I didn't even know what that meant until he started talking to me about my blood glucose and how my levels are just slightly outside the normal range, but that slightly outside my normal range is actually a 6% increase in my potential to become pre-diabetic, and that is terrifying.
That's why we break this thing down in this week's show so you have the tools that you need when you get your blood work to know exactly where you're at because there's a good chance your doctor isn't even gonna talk to you about it until you're already considered pre-diabetic, and that is terrifying.
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And friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug, I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Smash, Dan Garner back in the house. Dude, Dan Garner, I wanna know, before we get into all things blood glucose, tell me about your marathon training.
You're in the middle of running around the Arctic and man, what are you doing out there? Why are you running so far?
Hey, fun fact, by the way, for the listeners, I am Canadian, yes. I'm not in the Arctic, I am in Canada.
Anything, I'm going to Northern Minnesota That's not true. and more than once my dad has called me and gone, get a driver.
I'm like, dad, I don't need a driver, they have interstates. He goes, get a driver. If your car breaks down, you're gonna be dead in 20 minutes. You will literally freeze from the inside out.
Anything above that is definitely the Arctic. Yeah, I lived actually out West, just North of Calgary before and it was very regular to see minus 40, minus 45 weather out there and you actually, it's smart to keep warm weather in your car because if you stall out on a back country road and no one's around, you can die.
It's that, that's extremely cold. That's why I don't know why you're running so far outside. Now I live in London, so let's circle back to my fun fact.
Now I live in London, Ontario, which is very Southern Ontario. The southernmost point of Ontario is actually Pelee Island and that runs parallel with Northern California.
That's, anybody can Google that. The southernmost part of Canada actually runs parallel with Northern California. So Anders, is Northern California the Arctic Circle?
If you are in San Francisco on the wrong day, it feels like it. Great, I'm with you, yes. It is.
San Francisco was the least favorite place I've ever lived and that was one of the reasons. I was like, I'm in California and I'm cold. Why, why?
California, I didn't realize that SoCal, everything up North actually, actually gets kind of chilly. I did not know that.
That is the fun fact. That is a very fun fact. Let's talk blood glucose and as a highest level of like, how we get this thing started, people are gonna be able to look at their blood work, see some sort of values.
What do those values mean? Sure, yeah. So to always travel and back to the conversation of blood work, I absolutely love the blood chemistry There's again, I'll say this every episode, that people can get.
that anything that's worth saying is worth repeating. Blood chemistry is one of the most important things anybody could ever get.
And in the world of glucose and glucose regulation, insulin, no matter how you wanna look at it or spin it, the typical progression of somebody looking into this will look a little bit something like this.
They're gonna run fasting glucose on pretty much everybody who comes their way. From a practitioner perspective, they'll run fasting glucose on everyone that comes their way.
And that is just an acute, small look at what your glucose was at that point in time. Then if anybody has high fasting glucose, then they start running something called hemoglobin A1c.
And hemoglobin A1c, where fasting glucose is like a quick look at your blood sugar control. Hemoglobin A1c is more of a long duration, big picture view of what your blood glucose control was like over the past few months.
But what happens is when you start ordering a lot of panels with hemoglobin A1c on them, you also start getting insulin on that panel as well. And then you start seeing things that confuse you, okay?
Because you can actually see someone with a normal fasting glucose and a normal hemoglobin A1c, but then a really high insulin value.
And you start thinking like, hey, what the heck is going on? And the answer to nearly all of these questions lies in a marker called C-peptide.
So to back up, I would really want people to get a comprehensive blood chemistry. This will always include insulin, fasting glucose, and hemoglobin A1c.
So instead of just getting fasting glucose, it's basically a useless marker in isolation. You wanna see it with hemoglobin A1c and insulin, but as an add-on.
So you would get a comprehensive blood chemistry, but then get an add-on called C-peptide. If you can get those four markers, C-peptide, fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1c, and insulin, whether they trend high or trend low will give you an enormously valuable insight on your total blood glucose control and insight as to where this possible issue in blood sugar status may be coming from.
Because although blood sugar can be dysregulated, the amount of ways in which it can be dysregulated are a lot wider than what most people give it respect for.
So that's kind of the high level view of what you should get. So what are the implications if you're trending high or trending low?
Both for the outcome that could potentially happen to you as far as a disease state and or how you would get there in the first place from a diet, nutrition, lifestyle perspective.
Okay, so how we would get there in the first place is basically, so how we get there in the first place basically impacts the outcome.
So I think that we should probably just talk about how we got there in the first place. There's really six ways that your glucose dysregulation can begin or occur or looking at it from a root cause perspective.
Three of the ways that they get dysregulated are insulin based. And the other three ways that they get dysregulated are non-insulin based.
So of course these two categories are things I basically use as a memory tool for the audience and also for myself.
But there's a lot of crossover, without getting into the weeds that there's always a ton of crossover. over in biology because everything connects to everything. They all impact each other. Which one do you guys want to start with? The insulin-based ways in which we could dysregulate our glucose or the non-insulin? I'm going with non-insulin. Non-insulin? Okay, cool. The non-insulin ways that we regulate glucose are low levels of hormones, an H. pylori infection, or inflammation.
Okay? Those are the three ways. And just think about it like, you know, two sets of three. Our insulin-based and our non-insulin-based. We're on the non-insulin-based right now. We got to remember three. H. pylori, inflammation, and low levels of hormones. I'll cover low levels of hormones first because it is the most simple in that we can cover it quickly here, but they kind of deserve a podcast on their own. And that if you have low cortisol, or low growth hormone, or low thyroid, that's always going to disrupt your blood sugar. So the question then isn't what supplements can I take to regulate blood sugar? It is why is cortisol low to begin with? Why was thyroid low to begin with? Or why was growth hormone low to begin with? Answer those at the root causal level, and then your regulation of blood sugar is simply going to get corrected as a downstream byproduct of attacking the root cause. So low hormones, that is absolutely a way in which we can dysregulate blood sugar because everything I just mentioned, growth hormone, thyroid, and cortisol, those bring up blood sugars. So a lot of people who get things like the shakes, or a rabid appetite, or feelings of weakness, frequent urinations, a big one, and hypoglycemic states, those can absolutely all be associated with lower levels of hormone.
So throw that one out there. The next one, I think is very cool, because it's something I don't think I've ever heard discussed on a podcast. And it's how inflammation can create glucose dysregulation.
So there's two big ways in which inflammation can create glucose dysregulation through something called interleukin-6, or IL-6. And there's also something called a lipopolysaccharide, or an LPS.
These are pretty cool, because IL-6 can be really high in states of overtraining or massive amounts of muscle damage. But IL-6 actually activates something called a toll receptor 4. And that increases another thing called glucagon-like peptide 1, which totally dysregulates blood sugar if overamplified. And lipopolysaccharides do the exact same thing. But the cool part here is lipopolysaccharides are actually high in states of gut infection. So someone may actually be, and this is really cool when you start seeing all this stuff laid out in front of you, is lipopolysaccharides are elevated in states of gut infection, but somebody may be asymptomatic to their gut infection. So that person might not have, say, bloating or tons of gas or diarrhea, but they may have blood sugar dysregulation. So the symptom of their gut infection isn't localized in the gut, but is rather seen in blood sugar dysregulation, because the inflammation residing from the gut infection is activating blood sugar dysregulation via glucagon-like peptide 1.
So how to regulate blood sugar in that scenario is actually finding the root of the inflammation and working backwards from there. So it's kind of cool.
That's a gut bacterial getting in and actually using supplements and nutrition to get rid of the gut bacteria, which then has downrange effects. Yeah. I also posted a study just a few days ago about how binge drinking increases lipopolysaccharides.
So binge drinking, it was four to five shots of alcohol taken very quickly. That increases lipopolysaccharides, which then in turn can create blood sugar dysregulation. So we're learning a lot more about how alcohol impacts blood sugar, but also just how gut health impacts blood sugar all by itself, because you could have somebody on a low-carb diet, but if they have a gut infection, well, then they're still going to activate GLP-1, and GLP-1 is going to be lowering glucose, even though glucose isn't present in the diet.
So this person is going to have massively low fasting glucose. They're going to have hypoglycemic symptoms, a ravenous appetite, and they don't know why. And they think, ah, this low-carb diet's not working. What else can I do? Their glucose can be totally messed up, even though they're on a low-carb diet, and it's simply through the gut infection.
What causes, for the layman, when you talk about gut infections, at the root cause, what causes humans to get a gut infection? Is it the way we eat?
Is it certain things we eat? Or is it just we're all going to get it no matter what? Shrug family, some very cool news coming out of Walmart. You didn't expect to hear that, I bet. Ageless Male Pro-T was selected as one of the very few products in the entire performance nutrition category. So the entire shelf with all of the supplements,
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No. Well, there's basically two big ways. There's straight up pathogens, or there's something known as endotoxins. So an endotoxin is something that's toxic, but actually belongs as part of a normal healthy gut bacteria, so long as we don't make too much of it. But if for whatever reason, that own bacterial colony, which belongs in a healthy state in the microbiome, because these things, although they are technically say unhealthy for us in controllable amounts, they actually create a hormetic effect. So they make our microbiome stronger, and they improve our health. But if they get too strong, then that becomes an endotoxin, something that's endogenously toxic to our body. So it's our own self. And those only get out of control in states of low immunity. So let's say Travis, you went for a long period of time with very little sleep. Your diet was also for that kind of getting a PhD, bud. Exactly. Getting a
PhD this, you know, if you want to talk about things that lower immunity, a bad diet, low sleep, high stress, still training. Watching you die every Monday when we record.
Right. So we're kind of look like the president at this point, we're like, you start out and then four years later, you're like, why would anybody want that job?
That's exactly why would anybody want to go back to school? Yeah. So is this, you know, sometimes people will say, you know, if you eat the same foods all the time, and you develop like an allergic reaction to it, you know, could it be like, because you eat something all the time, you're causing too much of a certain thing that that food provides.
So, so what happens here, if somebody is eating too much of the thing of the same thing all the time, it's not necessarily going to create a food sensitivity until that person has a bout of what most people know as leaky gut. This is known as intestinal permeability. So to gain a food sensitivity, a whole protein needs to pass through the intestinal wall and irritate the immune system.
So just think about it like this. And this was actually this, I'm glad you brought it up. So it's in that study that I just posted the other day, alcohol creates acute bouts of intestinal permeability. So increasing alcohol actually creates little holes within the gut for a very short period of time, and blood bacteria content increased one and a half times. So like the actual gut bacteria was leaking into our circulatory system, because alcohol damaged the gut. And that was just one bout of four to five shots of alcohol. I don't know about your guys' friends, but my boys will put away 10 to 15, and that's a regular thing.
Canadians, man, they can drink for sure. We know how to get it done. So from a food sensitivity perspective, you're only supposed to have amino acids or say peptide chains, small things in the circulatory system. But when a whole protein enters the circulatory system, your immune system says, holy crap, what's that? And then you can imagine that whole protein surrounded by white blood cells, almost like 10 golf balls engulfing a tennis ball. That's really what it looks like. And then when you have all these white blood cells attached to this piece of food, that whole piece of food, say a chicken, piece of chickens in your circulatory system, it's now covered in white blood cells. And when this happens, that's called an immune complex. And you can kind of think about it like the mafia.
The mafia says, I never forget a face. Well, that's what the immune system says to that piece of chicken, because now it sees it as an invader. And this happens even in the lumen, so inside the gut. That chicken doesn't even need to enter circulation anymore for the immune system to be pissed off about it, because it recognizes it each time it came through. It's got that molecular signature on it now, where that's a bad guy. So what happens with that food sensitivity generation is if you had a belt of intestinal permeability to the point where a protein enters circulation to where it created an inflammatory immune complex, that's what's going to signal the immune system to dislike that food, even in the future when it comes back, not even in circulation.
So that's really about how food sensitivities from a high perspective get created. But all of those things will absolutely disrupt blood sugar, again, to kind of get back here. IL-6 and LPS both activate glucagon-like peptide 1, which will tank blood sugar, it will drop it very, very, very low.
So if somebody's inflamed, and to always bring this back to blood chemistry, you can pick up things like C-reactive protein, or look at people's cholesterol profiles to see if they're inflamed, and then that'll tell you something about their blood sugar.
Awesome. All right. It's going to be, one of the things that comes up every time blood sugar is discussed is the glycemic index.
Is this something people should actually be concerned about in eating low glycemic index foods to regulate their blood sugar?
No. The glycemic index was OK in theory, but it's terrible in application. It has no impact on a realistic diet, because it's predicated upon 100 grams of a certain food eaten in a fasted state.
So it's like, I'm only going to eat 100 grams of sweet potatoes for this meal and nothing else. Or I'm only going to have 100 grams of glucose, or I'm only going to have 100 grams of rice and nothing else.
So although it's measuring the amount of time it takes for blood sugar to enter the bloodstream, it has nothing to do with what an actual meal looks like.
Also, the meal you ate before that meal can impact the glycemic index of that meal as well. Not to mention sleep and stress impact blood glucose control as well, which have nothing to do with the glycemic index.
So the glycemic index, it's insightful, but in terms of maybe the rapid absorption of a carb, it gives you kind of an insight on that.
But in terms of real life application, it is completely useless. And I do mean useless. For real.
All right. Lastly, in terms of the non-insulin-based things to regulate glucose control, a very cool one is actually H. pylori.
H. pylori is a gut infection that up to 40% of the world's population has. It resides within the stomach. It can actually survive in states of high acid, which a lot of bacteria can't.
But it absolutely hangs out in the stomach with no problem. And eradicating H. pylori, and this is actually, I've got a really cool study on this.
Helicobacter pylori-induced gastritis contributes to the occurrence of postprandial symptomatic hypoglycemia. Put in English, if anybody wants to read that paper, they can go read that paper.
But in English, H. pylori impacts after meal glucose levels. And in this study, and again, I'll just quote them right here, eradication of H. pylori gastritis showed a substantial improvement in blood sugar control symptoms.
So they didn't do anything. All they did was take away the bug, and blood sugar control began to correct itself. No changes to diet, no changes to anything.
They just simply removed the bug, and blood sugar corrected itself. So those are the three ways, and I really just wanted to provide the audience just some cool tips and tricks, but also ways in which to become a better detective.
Because if you ask somebody, hey, what do I do? My blood sugar's off. Most people are just like, lower your carbs. What should I do? But if you're not looking for IL-6, if you're not looking for lipopolysaccharides, if you're not looking for H. pylori, if you're not concerned with what cortisol, thyroid, and growth hormone are doing, then it's simply a guess.
And that's why I love lab work, because we just take the guesswork right out of it, and we just analyze the person, reverse engineer the strategy from there.
But these things that are seemingly not connected to blood glucose are absolutely impacting blood glucose to the point where it can become pathogenic.
So wait, did we cover all three of the non-insulin factors? Yes. There was H. pylori. What were the other two again? Inflammation, and then low levels of hormones.
And low hormones, that's right. Yeah, got all three. Cool. And all three of those could be their own hour. We're going over high level here, because I really just want to smash these out for everybody.
Yeah, when we get into the insulin side of things, how many we got?
How does insulin play into this? So yeah, there are three, just like there's three and three. Insulin? Three insulin mediated, three non-insulin mediated.
Insulin's a hormone. A lot of people, this is the one that they're familiar with. Insulin is secreted in response to blood glucose being in the bloodstream.
And its job is to lower blood glucose and dispose of it in different places in order to regulate blood glucose, because we don't want glucose chronically high or chronically
And that's kind of another thing a lot of people low. recognize, is that there's actually excellent research out there suggesting that low blood glucose is as predictive of all-cause mortality as high blood glucose.
So that's a huge myth that needs to die. A lot of people think the lower, the better. That is completely untrue, completely untrue. Why would having low glucose be just as dangerous?
We only hear about glucose, and then it just immediately turns into diabetes. So yeah, so low glucose being dangerous is still a hypothesis, still theorizing, still figuring everything out.
So you're simply looking at all-cause mortality and viewing people over many, many, many years. But glucose, I mean, it's the prime fuel of the brain. And it's one of the prime fuels the cells need to create ATP.
And ATP is the currency for anything in the body. If you want to make a hormone, if you want to make stomach acid, if you want to think, if you want neurotransmitters, if you want gastric motility, all of this stuff requires ATP.
And your cells want glucose to drive that process. So just think about, though, the body, right? We really only have one hormone to lower glucose, that's insulin.
But to raise glucose, we have epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, thyroid, growth hormone, glucagon. The list goes on and on and on and on.
So even from just a stepping back perspective, it's like, OK, the body's got a lot of emergency mechanisms to make sure glucose is at a certain level that it wants it to be.
So we just have to respect that. And when you look at optimal ranges in terms of what's truly optimal, it seems to be between 81 and 85 is your true optimal range for fasting glucose, that is.
And if you're in a different country, then that may be a little bit different for you. But that seems to be the true optimal range. You won't want to go too low beyond that.
And you don't want to go above 85 either. You were saying on a previous show, there was a percentage above 85.
For every point above 85, you're x percent more likely to have something. What were you saying the other day? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So for every one point above 85 results in a 6% increased chance of developing type 2 diabetes over the next decade.
So that's one point above 85. And lab ranges allow you to go all the way up to 99. So if somebody was at 95, just because I want to make the math easier on myself, they are 10 points over that noted point within the data.
So that's a 60% increased risk of type 2 diabetes over the course of the next decade. And yet, you're still considered in a normal range. And we've even seen research that points above 95 result in diabetic retinopathy.
And diabetic retinopathy is the actual degradation of your eye tissue. So somebody from 85 to 95 could have increased their risk of type 2 diabetes 60%.
And then from 95 to 99, be beginning to damage their actual eye tissue. But they're only considered abnormal once they hit 100. And that's absolutely insane to me, that these are problems we could have acted upon 10 years before they actually became a problem.
And that's something that I've seen so much in my career looking at labs is, pathology typically takes like a decade or more to actually manifest itself into a disease state.
It's something that lifestyle and habits and diets, they begin way before you pay the price for it. And there's a lot we can look at in labs in order to predict these things and act preventatively rather than reactively.
That's a big one. It looks like just in research this morning and preparing for the show, stress plays like such a massive role in this thing.
And anytime I see stress, people instead of focusing on pure, we're gonna mitigate stress, it's always easier to just go back and be like, well, let's focus on sleep a little bit better and see if we can start to increase those numbers.
Stress seems to get a lot better once we sleep. How does just sleep in general play into your glucose levels?
Obviously, more is better, but what is the relationship between those two? Well, if you get a poor night's sleep tonight, your next day levels of cortisol are higher compared to if you do not get a good night's sleep tonight.
And that's the primary driver of that. Your next day levels of cortisol are gonna be higher. Cortisol not only drives up blood glucose, but over time it increases inflammation and insulin resistance.
So you're not only getting higher levels of blood glucose, but your cells also aren't able to receive glucose as effectively because they become resistant to insulin.
And also that inflammation we already talked about. If we drive up inflammation, things like lipopolysaccharides, things like IL-6, we've also seen in research that cortisol by itself can create so much damage on the gut that it can lead to ulcers.
That stress alone, stress all by itself can create bleeding ulcers in people. So that gut damage is absolutely gonna result in lipopolysaccharide creation and then ultimately activate GLP-1 and really disrupt blood sugar.
So a lot of this can begin with poor sleep. If you poor sleep, you have chronically high cortisol. If you have chronically high cortisol, you're gonna be insulin resistant.
You're also gonna be pro-inflammed. Both of those things impact blood sugar. And when you actually look into the research on thyroid hormone, your body wants to convert inactive T4 into active T3 in order to burn glucose and utilize it for energy.
Cortisol inhibits T4 to T3 conversion. So not only are we pro-inflammed, not only are we insulin resistant, not only is blood glucose up, but we don't even have the thyroid hormone to effectively utilize it anyway.
Cortisol inhibits all of this stuff. And if you get a bad sleep, that's gonna just be the real kickoff to that. And it would also be my assumption that if somebody's sleeping really poorly, it's probably because of stress as well.
Yeah, like what, you have a four-month-old right now? Have you done your blood work and everything Yeah, she's just about three or four months. since you've had the baby?
And I have not done my blood. I'm so excited to see this Take the perfectly like blood work We've got all the data on you and then it's gonna go and then I had a baby and it looks like I'm dying
Like the lab show I'm dying now Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare because not only am I dying but I'm training for a marathon Yeah
Yeah, you know how actually you see in movies to zombies just don't get tired they can just keep running That's like what I'm gonna be. I'm just gonna be a dead man running
Yeah, how do I guess you know, there are just stages We we coach a ton of dads and like you're you just had your first baby. We all have too many kids What is obviously saying go to sleep eat a healthier diet, but a lot of these things just aren't the reality and when you start to
Paint the picture of we've got to get down into your gut to actually understand kind of like what bacterial infections are happening in there but obviously outside of
Calling us and saying how do I solve this and we go through all the labs and everything? what are some like general steps that people could take to start to You know, they've got their blood panel and they they've they followed the steps here and they they know that their their glucose levels are at
95 no doctors telling them they're sick at all They're actually getting giving them a clean bill of health, but they're headed in the wrong direction How do they start to right the ship on this? is there like a
Obviously sleeping more helps a lot but even even like over I don't want to say over training but Training too much on low sleep like all of these things start to to work against your body
How do people know that they're up against some sort of blood sugar type issue? they've got glucose problems and and then start to solve it on their own if Calling us and and us reading their labs isn't in the cards
So it basically you would do your you would address your visible stressors first before you looked at hidden stressors So we've talked about that in the past visible things are what are obviously impacting your current state of health
You don't need an expert to tell you that sleeping poorly recreational drug use alcohol emotional stress Psychological stress when you say recreational drugs. What does that mean?
Any party drugs? Does that mean like heavy drugs like cocaine heavier? Or is that like marijuana? Is that heroin? I never
Actual recreational drugs are because a lot of people like to have fun Yeah
I know not to do heroin. What can I can't I do is what yeah, I know not to do I know what drugs are you expecting me to endorse from the answer? I would I I'm not doing meth on a random Saturday night
But I may hear in there Saturday so I do meth I
Actually is is marijuana like a
Not a when it does that qualify in your recreational drug bucket
So man, it's so it depends on the person because are you using it for escapism if so, that's a problem, right? If you are using marijuana for escapism, that means you're probably
Unfulfilled in your life and if you're unfulfilled, you'd be producing a ton of cortisol if you're producing ours Oh, then you're definitely going to be in an unhealthy state Also, if smoking a lot of marijuana causes you to eat a ton of food and mess up your blood sugar
Well, then that's also an obvious thing that's gonna create a you know, very visible stressor creating obviously bad outcome I
Really wanted you to say was it's okay No for real there is a good side though because there is people who responsibly use it like there's this guy
You may have heard of he's kind of successful named Joe Rogan. Do you guys know I've heard of him? Yeah, you guys have heard of him I think he's kind of beat the odds by having a killer body composition a brilliant mind in a successful business and that's a whole
Lot of marijuana. So yeah, that's why I said it's context-specific If you're using it for escapism and massive cheat meals, then it's probably not good for you But if you can function optimally and you use it to just chill out the hell, yeah, man knock yourself out. Yeah
To your question Before you asked me about I know well I the record every time someone says recreational. I'm like, well, how far are we going here?
Go away. We're talking about visible versus hidden. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Are we going here? All right, so there's the obvious stressors that Anders is supposed to
Apply that that are things that you can work on before you come to us like getting lean Improving your body composition. Those are massively impact blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity
The huge major effect of the things that you can do simply getting lean will solve a lot of your problems Another thing is to strength train. So get on the mash method program because the greatest amount. Yeah the greatest amount of Glucose the biggest glucose warehouse in the body is your muscles and when you've got a lot of muscles
You can safely dispose of a lot of glucose. So resistance training getting lean sleeping better managing stress These are all things that you can do on the surface to improve your blood glucose control
And then there was actually a really fascinating study that came out not too long ago and it had all patients in
Eat the exact same meal But then they ate the same meal five times, but then changed the order at which they consumed Oh, yeah, sorry this yeah, they change the order at which they
Consume each macronutrient and if you eat your vegetables first and then your meat and then Finished with your rice you did that by itself
So all five meals were exact same macronutrients and exact same calories but if you change the order to vegetables meat rice your blood glucose control and overall markers of GLP-1 and insulin things we've already talked about on this podcast were way better than if you did rice vegetables meat
So just same calories same macronutrients different order of consumption Created a huge impact
Why? Why because when you front load the so things that regulate glucose are fat fiber and protein So you're simply front loading the meal with things that decrease glucose uptake
But if you start your meal with the fastest digesting carbohydrates Glucose uptake goes high and then in turn things like GLP-1 things like insulin have to compensate to try and get this back regulated exact same calories and macros and just a
Redistribution of order from vegetables meat rice had a massive statistically significant impact on blood glucose control So I think getting lean getting on a strength training program sleeping better and managing your stress
These things are easier said than done But they're the obvious things that you can do and then order of consumption when it comes to your meal You won't even have to even if you don't count your calories and macros, that'll still improve your blood glucose control
So I think those are all very obvious Visible things that you can do and then when if you're doing those and blood sugar is still dysregulated and this happens a lot, too people look
People will come to me and they're like Hey Dan, I believe that I'm doing everything right, but My blood glucose is still off. What's wrong? Or I think I'm doing everything right? What's going on? That happens a lot and
That's just I that's when I have to do labs and that's what over time It's just driven me to do labs in my career to truly uncover some of the root causes that I've been talking about today That have nothing to do with like glucose and insulin or nothing directly rather
I should say that I've had that I found through experience and research over the years. Actually, you're a professional You're talking about getting lean in graduate school
Getting lean it directly in relation to blood sugar control in graduate school. We were supposed to go find research participants that were
Undiagnosed pre-diabetic and I read that I was like if they're undiagnosed pre-diabetic, they're not gonna know they're pretty diabetic Like how do I know they're pre-diabetic and he was like, dude, I can't write go find fat people like on the sheet
Just just go find fat people. They're all undiagnosed pre-diabetic. I was like, ah, gotcha. Okay My advisor
When I did all my labs with you, I was actually the leanest I had been in a Very long time and I still came back with high high glucose levels
Not like clinically high or above the 99 that would pop at the normal doctor, but you I was at 90 and that still is like on
My way the wrong way and that was the last I had ever been because you're the perfect example Like yeah, yeah Yeah
You had a gut bacterial issue But it could have been many other things too like and that happens all the time people I've had super lean bodybuilders come to me Terrible blood glucose. They're super super lean. So it's just uncovering that root cause issue is is really big and
We went over the three non insulin. Do you guys want to go over the three insulin base? Yeah, or before we actually Go, I have one question on the non insulin ones
Okay, you mentioned That having low glucose levels is just as dangerous as having high ones because your body Needs glucose to to function your brain needs sugars to run if people are following a very low carb ketogenic type diet, I imagine your body's not transformer
Gluconeogenesis is not at a rate that your brain enjoys. So how? how does that play into where your glucose levels are and is
Should anybody follow the ketogenic diet like at all So I actually like the ketogenic diet But I use it for acute purposes. So like I a lot of times I sound like a keto hater or an intermittent fasting hater or whatever, I'm not. It's always just the right tool for the right job. So I like ketogenic diets for the purpose of lowering blood sugar.
So if somebody has elevated blood sugar, like the perfect candidate for a ketogenic diet is somebody who's overweight, and that's really trouble, a lot of trouble with appetite control, because ketogenic diets are quite good at regulating appetite simply because they remove carbs. But also since they remove carbs are pretty good at regulating blood sugar. So it brings it down. But then once this person is laying, I would want to reintroduce carbs to get fiber back in the diet to increase exercise performance to increase anabolism and anti catabolism to increase energy for a lot of people and also just increase the realistic consistency of the program. I mean, consistency beats intensity 10 times out of 10. You want a program you can follow forever and not just a program you can follow acutely. And it's been my experience that anybody who chooses extremes, they fall off the plan and they end up on a roller coaster approach. So if somebody's physiologic context matched, utilizing a ketogenic diet, then sure, I would use it in an acute sense.
But once we've normalized that type of situation, then it's for the in the interest of consistency in the interest of realistic lifetime transformation. So not just body transformation, but life transformation. And so in the interest of getting a more diverse range of nutrients,
I would absolutely want to introduce carbs back in. Beautiful. Let's talk insulin. Sure. Okay, so going through insulin, we went through our three non insulin. And now we're going through our three insulin. The three insulin are straight up insulin resistance.
The next one is micronutrients. And the third one is insulin auto antibodies. So we'll go over auto antibodies first, because that's a pretty cool one. I don't think I've ever heard it on another podcast. But there's over 20 papers now demonstrating that ALA increases insulin auto antibodies. So a lot of people supplement with ALA alpha lipoic acid super common to supplement with. But an auto antibody, what that is, is essentially your own body's immune system attacking the hormone insulin. And this creates a lot of insulin dysregulation. Because what happens if you eat a meal with carbohydrates in it, your body is going to increase insulin.
But then these insulin auto antibodies attach themselves to insulin and bind up insulin. So it can't be used properly. This takes the half life of insulin from four to six minutes to several hours. What happens is insulin stays alive for several, several, several hours, your body also needs to make way more insulin than what it's supposed to make in response to the size of this meal, because a lot of the insulin is being bound up. But then those antibodies degrade. And then you still have active insulin in the system. So then even three, four hours later, when you don't even have a lot of glucose in your system at all, then you have this huge influx of insulin suppressing blood sugar dramatically and taking blood sugar way down. And then the only way to get blood sugar back up is to have a massive increase in cortisol to try and get that blood sugar back up. So then you end up with this scenario where you've got huge increases in cortisol, way low amount of blood sugar, and it's due to insulin auto antibodies. And ALA is very well demonstrated to increase people who are susceptible to having auto antibodies of insulin.
But even garlic has been demonstrated to increase some some people who are sensitive to increasing auto antibodies of insulin as well. So that's a that's a one that immediately impacts insulin directly, which can impact blood sugar. A second one is something we've talked about micronutrients quite a bit on this show, many people are low in potassium and potassium is required to create insulin. So if you have low potassium status, which so many people do your pancreas, it's a rate limiting step, your pancreas literally can't make insulin. So that potassium is a major, major, major player in that. And that is on insulin secretion. But when it comes to yourselves, actually being able to use insulin, magnesium is one of the most effective nutrients in this category. And I've actually got a really cool study that I wanted to talk to you guys about.
It's called reactive hypoglycemia and magnesium. And it's fascinating that what what people don't know about micronutrients. So they had 22 reactive hypoglycemic individuals. So people with blood sugar dysregulation, this means hypoglycemia. So they have blood sugar was extremely low. These people, if you give them an oral glucose tolerance test, their blood sugar dropped 48. So in a huge drop afterwards of this test, and after only two weeks of magnesium, it only dropped five. So magnesium is that's a 9x improvement and blood sugar regulation after only two weeks of magnesium use. I said about magnesium, like, you know, there's there's now there's a company that the owner's really nice guy, but like, you know, they sell it to where, you know, where it rubs on, you know, like on the skin. So it's, it's thermal, I guess. And then they have it where you can put it in your bath. Can it, can you, can you magnesium be absorbed like that? Or is it something you have to take orally?
I'll do oral every single time. Yeah. Oral has the best research by far on it. I've done oral every single time. So, yeah. All right. Yeah. That's what I've heard, because can you even get it like that? You know, like, will that even work?
Not to my knowledge. No. Yeah. And a lot of people will actually say that too, about Epsom salt baths, about how you absorb magnesium from them. That's untrue as well.
You actually don't absorb magnesium from Epsom salt baths. So I, in, I can't think of a context where I wouldn't give oral magnesium. I can say that because the research is solid and people are going to absorb it. All right. So that's a micronutrient one. So, I mean, magnesium is huge for the acceptance of insulin, whereas potassium is huge for the secretion of insulin. And then lastly, and finally, you know, our last set of three here would be insulin resistance and insulin resistance. You know, the visible ones are, if you eat like an asshole or if you're really overweight, then insulin resistance is going to happen. So I'm not going to get too deep into that.
What I think is important to care about here is actually mitochondrial function, because there's actually great papers on that insulin resistance is actually a protective mechanism of that the cells utilize to not let glucose in that it cannot accept without creating a massive amount of oxidative stress. So insulin resistance, as research continues to come out, it seems to be a protective mechanism of the body, actually in two different ways.
One way in which the body wants to protect cells because the mitochondria aren't functioning properly. But a second way insulin resistance has been connected to being a protective mechanism of the body is that in states of infection, white blood cells utilize more glucose than normal.
So it seems to be a protective mechanism, the body to give white blood cells more glucose so that they can do what they need to do to manage and get rid of the infectious state. So very cool thing where insulin resistance, again, maybe associated with an infection, or maybe associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. But insulin resistance oftentimes is poor body composition. But these are other ways in which it can manifest itself in the absence of that.
All right, so just super, super quick recap, everybody, the non insulin mediated ways were inflammation, H pylori, and low hormones, whereas the insulin mediated ways are insulin resistance, autoantibodies and micronutrients.
People when they like exogenous or when they get prescribed insulin, what is kind of how does that I'm kind of I don't have any clients that take insulin, but I obviously see it all over the news for people with type two diabetes is how does that play into regulating their blood sugar? Is it it's obviously the most normal treatment that people are getting? What what actually is happening there?
So being prescribed insulin is just like a sledgehammer hammering through the door. That's what it is. Because the ways in which you can improve blood sugar control are either changing your diet, or improving insulin sensitivity, or providing the body so much insulin that it's able to just smash down the door of the cells and for glucose in there, because people are too lazy to change their diet, or look for hidden stressors or address insulin sensitivity issues. So it's basically and I understand why why the medical community prescribes it because a lot of people, they have no interest in lowering their stress, improving their sleep or changing their diet or even looking at any of these other hidden stressors that I've talked about here today. So it's way easier just to give them a sledgehammer so they can smash down the door and smash down the door of their cells and deposit that glucose so that it lowers overall glucose. It's such a permanent decision, though, because when you make that decision, the pancreas and will be done and like, it's such it's a big one that people just make without thinking but I guess maybe they know that they're so lazy, they're not going to do it. But or they who I said that everyone I'm not saying that everybody's lazy, but they're just saying they're not going to make the lifestyle changes. They know that. And so yeah, anyway, that's exactly it. I watched my grandfather do that very thing. It killed him. You know, so yeah, yeah, it's rough. It's like, because it just prolongs damage. Now you're taking insulin to lower blood glucose, but you still are just simply prolonging damage within the body because no root cause has been addressed or resolved in that people have no idea what they're saying when they make that decision instead of like, they have no idea what they're doing. They have no idea what they're doing to the immune system, like just the body's ability to repair its own self. It's just, it's a big decision when you make that when you make that decision.
100% Yeah, unless you're a type one diabetic, where obviously you need it because your pancreas is destroyed. But yeah, exactly. Yeah. So besides that, and what we talked about here today, these are all major categories that we could go deeper into, you know, like, there's so much to learn here, that you don't just need a drug to smash it all home.
That's where the reasons of America that need to hear this more than others like I'm from the mountains, you know, North Carolina and like, it's just ingrained the way that he is just cornbread gravy, it's just, it's what happens, and people get overweight and like, there's so many, there's so many, like, diseases that are so prevalent up there, more than anywhere else, and all of them, even like cancer is higher in Western North Carolina anywhere else in America, simply because of lifestyle choices is crazy.
For sure. And what's what's interesting in this category too, is we talked about insulin but metformin is kind of the same thing. Metformin is a way safer version because it increases insulin sensitivity. But here's the funny thing about metformin metformin, you can people can actually go to might might have been calm, it's it's a good exercise for everybody to do might have been calm, and you can type in any drug, and it'll show you the nutrient deficiencies that that drug creates.
Now when you when you take metformin over time, it actually depletes folic acid and vitamin B 12. We use that to prevent retinopathy. So it's this hilarious catch 22 where metformin if you don't replace the folic acid and B 12 that it depletes, you will run into diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy issues even quicker. So neuropathy that's like when you start seeing their discolored feet, and they could actually even get it. So that type of thing. Same with the retinopathy, but we need B 12 huge in this sense to prevent that and yet one of the primary things metformin depletes is B 12. So like if anybody's on metformin, yes, it's, you know, the safer option than insulin and it provides some of these other benefits that have been discussed in the past, but everything has a cost and physiology, and we need to ensure that we replace that.
And I've been meaning to tell you, like, in the sports nutrition class I took one of the stories is like a coach a gymnastics coach prescribed. I can't remember which one of the B vitamins but it was a vitamin B for something. And, you know, the person took it and took it in like, all of a sudden, she's doing her thing on the bars on the, I guess the parallel bars. Yeah. And she goes numb and falls and I breaks her back.
And it was because, you know, this, this coach who had no business prescribing any kind of micronutrient told her to take this, this B 12 that made her go like lose feeling in her hands and ruin her. Yes. So my point being is like, you know, before listening to some random coach and, you know, gymnastics coach are amazing. They could teach gymnastics really well. So they do is awesome.
But when they step over the line that gosh personal trainers, listen to me right now. Like, instead of when you read something in your little magazine, and you go out and you start telling all your clients to do this. Micro and macronutrients prescribing them without understanding, you know, chemistry is so dangerous. Go to someone like Dan, let them do it. And because there are repercussions of the simplest of micronutrients.
It's not just like, Oh, I'll just take extra multivitamin. No, you're not. It's like, it can kill. There are micronutrients that can kill you if you tap too much of it. So go to professional. I've been meaning to tell stories since the beginning, but yeah. Broke her back. You know, because of the B12 I have out next show, I'll make sure I have the exact what it was. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of why I like, you know, some people, you know, many of the listeners might be like, Holy man, this Dan Garner guy, he might be too comprehensive. This is, this is, this is really ridiculous. But this is why I do this stuff.
Because like so many people before listening to this show, they might've just said, ah, just lower carbs. That'll help clean up blood sugar. You know, that's, that's it. But now there's no, just anything. Biology is always more complex than that. And now they've got three tools, non-insulin based and three tools insulin based to massively improve their diagnostics at which they approach this. And they know the lab markers in order to look at, to see if there's an issue to begin with. So this, this is why I like to do these, these things is to just remove the simplicity and open people's eyes up to what they need to care about. Like with respect to how complex this stuff is staying in your lane and just having more tools at your disposal. Because a lot of people, they had, what's that old saying? If everything looks like a nail, you're only ever going to use a hammer. Like that's when people apply, okay, you've got high blood glucose, you need a ketogenic diet.
If you do that every time we talked about like 12 different things today that it could be, maybe they need the keto diet or maybe it's these other 11, one of these other 11 things that you're not even considering and your actions towards them may actually make them worse rather than better. Yeah, I'll actually even go as far as saying you probably have a problem. You most likely have something going on because I was what I thought at the healthiest, maybe not the healthiest, but it was definitely the leanest. And I thought that when I got my stuff back, that it would be, it would all come back very healthy. And five was whatever, 12, 13% body fat feeling great and came back.
I have high glucose levels. If you're 30 pounds overweight, which is most of our country, you got something going on. You need, you need to have like a real plan of attack on how to get out of that state because you're headed in the wrong direction. And unless there's like a massive intervention, you're just going to have a doctor just hand you insulin or they're going to hand you some sort of way that just covers up whatever problem really is going on. And until you do the work to find out like where the root causes are. And that's why I really wanted to have you on here because every time we get labs back from our clients and whatever it is, it's, it's like, it's so eyeopening to go, oh, that's the real problem.
Like no doctor. I, I haven't been to med school, but I've been going to doctors for 38 years now. And I don't think any of them understand the complexity that you present this at or, or like finding root causes of these problems because nobody's ever one told me the things on my blood work that you were able to find. And then actually being able to do all of the labs to be able to get to find out where these problems are. Like the skillset just doesn't exist. Mainly because I think it's really hard. Like you have to go do the work. And that's really, really many, many years where doctors go to school and they learn about medicine, which is also great. Just different.
People, people need to be aware that there's a different approach and, and how they can fight for themselves inside that room. Because your doctor, if you just nod your head and say, okay, I've got, I've got a problem, or they're not even finding the problem when it, when it's staring at them right in the face. So Dan Garner, where can people find you? At Dan Garner nutrition on Instagram.
Travis Mash. Mashly.com and go to Instagram Mashly performance. It's always fun having you on. I'm so glad you're co-host. I just got so many notes. I feel like I'm in class again. This is what I needed in another class. At least I'm not getting tested.
Right. You can go back and listen. It's not a one-time test, bud. Doug Larson. On my Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Mash, you got to go through the ultimate, ultimate nutrition mentorship. I'm going through Dan's course right now. I actually do feel like I'm in class when I'm, when I'm going through that course. It's awesome.
Let me get, let me get through this. Let me get, this is my last semester. Yeah, you need master's. Yeah. I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find that. I'm trying to find that story, but I'll get it to y'all next time. They hand these PhDs out to anybody.
Anybody. So easy. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barrel Shrugged, Barrel underscore Shrugged. Get over to dieseldadmentorship.com where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic. And make sure you head over to your local Walmart. 2200 Walmarts nationwide. My face is on the box. Agents Mail, Pro-T, Friends. We'll see you guys next week.
Now what that means, which you'll find out in this show, is very interesting because your boy, talking to you right now, me,
I got all my blood work done with Dan, who's on the show, obviously the co-host, and let me tell you, I was pre-pre-diabetic.
I didn't even know what that meant until he started talking to me about my blood glucose and how my levels are just slightly outside the normal range, but that slightly outside my normal range is actually a 6% increase in my potential to become pre-diabetic, and that is terrifying.
That's why we break this thing down in this week's show so you have the tools that you need when you get your blood work to know exactly where you're at because there's a good chance your doctor isn't even gonna talk to you about it until you're already considered pre-diabetic, and that is terrifying.
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And friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug, I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Smash, Dan Garner back in the house. Dude, Dan Garner, I wanna know, before we get into all things blood glucose, tell me about your marathon training.
You're in the middle of running around the Arctic and man, what are you doing out there? Why are you running so far?
Hey, fun fact, by the way, for the listeners, I am Canadian, yes. I'm not in the Arctic, I am in Canada.
Anything, I'm going to Northern Minnesota That's not true. and more than once my dad has called me and gone, get a driver.
I'm like, dad, I don't need a driver, they have interstates. He goes, get a driver. If your car breaks down, you're gonna be dead in 20 minutes. You will literally freeze from the inside out.
Anything above that is definitely the Arctic. Yeah, I lived actually out West, just North of Calgary before and it was very regular to see minus 40, minus 45 weather out there and you actually, it's smart to keep warm weather in your car because if you stall out on a back country road and no one's around, you can die.
It's that, that's extremely cold. That's why I don't know why you're running so far outside. Now I live in London, so let's circle back to my fun fact.
Now I live in London, Ontario, which is very Southern Ontario. The southernmost point of Ontario is actually Pelee Island and that runs parallel with Northern California.
That's, anybody can Google that. The southernmost part of Canada actually runs parallel with Northern California. So Anders, is Northern California the Arctic Circle?
If you are in San Francisco on the wrong day, it feels like it. Great, I'm with you, yes. It is.
San Francisco was the least favorite place I've ever lived and that was one of the reasons. I was like, I'm in California and I'm cold. Why, why?
California, I didn't realize that SoCal, everything up North actually, actually gets kind of chilly. I did not know that.
That is the fun fact. That is a very fun fact. Let's talk blood glucose and as a highest level of like, how we get this thing started, people are gonna be able to look at their blood work, see some sort of values.
What do those values mean? Sure, yeah. So to always travel and back to the conversation of blood work, I absolutely love the blood chemistry There's again, I'll say this every episode, that people can get.
that anything that's worth saying is worth repeating. Blood chemistry is one of the most important things anybody could ever get.
And in the world of glucose and glucose regulation, insulin, no matter how you wanna look at it or spin it, the typical progression of somebody looking into this will look a little bit something like this.
They're gonna run fasting glucose on pretty much everybody who comes their way. From a practitioner perspective, they'll run fasting glucose on everyone that comes their way.
And that is just an acute, small look at what your glucose was at that point in time. Then if anybody has high fasting glucose, then they start running something called hemoglobin A1c.
And hemoglobin A1c, where fasting glucose is like a quick look at your blood sugar control. Hemoglobin A1c is more of a long duration, big picture view of what your blood glucose control was like over the past few months.
But what happens is when you start ordering a lot of panels with hemoglobin A1c on them, you also start getting insulin on that panel as well. And then you start seeing things that confuse you, okay?
Because you can actually see someone with a normal fasting glucose and a normal hemoglobin A1c, but then a really high insulin value.
And you start thinking like, hey, what the heck is going on? And the answer to nearly all of these questions lies in a marker called C-peptide.
So to back up, I would really want people to get a comprehensive blood chemistry. This will always include insulin, fasting glucose, and hemoglobin A1c.
So instead of just getting fasting glucose, it's basically a useless marker in isolation. You wanna see it with hemoglobin A1c and insulin, but as an add-on.
So you would get a comprehensive blood chemistry, but then get an add-on called C-peptide. If you can get those four markers, C-peptide, fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1c, and insulin, whether they trend high or trend low will give you an enormously valuable insight on your total blood glucose control and insight as to where this possible issue in blood sugar status may be coming from.
Because although blood sugar can be dysregulated, the amount of ways in which it can be dysregulated are a lot wider than what most people give it respect for.
So that's kind of the high level view of what you should get. So what are the implications if you're trending high or trending low?
Both for the outcome that could potentially happen to you as far as a disease state and or how you would get there in the first place from a diet, nutrition, lifestyle perspective.
Okay, so how we would get there in the first place is basically, so how we get there in the first place basically impacts the outcome.
So I think that we should probably just talk about how we got there in the first place. There's really six ways that your glucose dysregulation can begin or occur or looking at it from a root cause perspective.
Three of the ways that they get dysregulated are insulin based. And the other three ways that they get dysregulated are non-insulin based.
So of course these two categories are things I basically use as a memory tool for the audience and also for myself.
But there's a lot of crossover, without getting into the weeds that there's always a ton of crossover. over in biology because everything connects to everything. They all impact each other. Which one do you guys want to start with? The insulin-based ways in which we could dysregulate our glucose or the non-insulin? I'm going with non-insulin. Non-insulin? Okay, cool. The non-insulin ways that we regulate glucose are low levels of hormones, an H. pylori infection, or inflammation.
Okay? Those are the three ways. And just think about it like, you know, two sets of three. Our insulin-based and our non-insulin-based. We're on the non-insulin-based right now. We got to remember three. H. pylori, inflammation, and low levels of hormones. I'll cover low levels of hormones first because it is the most simple in that we can cover it quickly here, but they kind of deserve a podcast on their own. And that if you have low cortisol, or low growth hormone, or low thyroid, that's always going to disrupt your blood sugar. So the question then isn't what supplements can I take to regulate blood sugar? It is why is cortisol low to begin with? Why was thyroid low to begin with? Or why was growth hormone low to begin with? Answer those at the root causal level, and then your regulation of blood sugar is simply going to get corrected as a downstream byproduct of attacking the root cause. So low hormones, that is absolutely a way in which we can dysregulate blood sugar because everything I just mentioned, growth hormone, thyroid, and cortisol, those bring up blood sugars. So a lot of people who get things like the shakes, or a rabid appetite, or feelings of weakness, frequent urinations, a big one, and hypoglycemic states, those can absolutely all be associated with lower levels of hormone.
So throw that one out there. The next one, I think is very cool, because it's something I don't think I've ever heard discussed on a podcast. And it's how inflammation can create glucose dysregulation.
So there's two big ways in which inflammation can create glucose dysregulation through something called interleukin-6, or IL-6. And there's also something called a lipopolysaccharide, or an LPS.
These are pretty cool, because IL-6 can be really high in states of overtraining or massive amounts of muscle damage. But IL-6 actually activates something called a toll receptor 4. And that increases another thing called glucagon-like peptide 1, which totally dysregulates blood sugar if overamplified. And lipopolysaccharides do the exact same thing. But the cool part here is lipopolysaccharides are actually high in states of gut infection. So someone may actually be, and this is really cool when you start seeing all this stuff laid out in front of you, is lipopolysaccharides are elevated in states of gut infection, but somebody may be asymptomatic to their gut infection. So that person might not have, say, bloating or tons of gas or diarrhea, but they may have blood sugar dysregulation. So the symptom of their gut infection isn't localized in the gut, but is rather seen in blood sugar dysregulation, because the inflammation residing from the gut infection is activating blood sugar dysregulation via glucagon-like peptide 1.
So how to regulate blood sugar in that scenario is actually finding the root of the inflammation and working backwards from there. So it's kind of cool.
That's a gut bacterial getting in and actually using supplements and nutrition to get rid of the gut bacteria, which then has downrange effects. Yeah. I also posted a study just a few days ago about how binge drinking increases lipopolysaccharides.
So binge drinking, it was four to five shots of alcohol taken very quickly. That increases lipopolysaccharides, which then in turn can create blood sugar dysregulation. So we're learning a lot more about how alcohol impacts blood sugar, but also just how gut health impacts blood sugar all by itself, because you could have somebody on a low-carb diet, but if they have a gut infection, well, then they're still going to activate GLP-1, and GLP-1 is going to be lowering glucose, even though glucose isn't present in the diet.
So this person is going to have massively low fasting glucose. They're going to have hypoglycemic symptoms, a ravenous appetite, and they don't know why. And they think, ah, this low-carb diet's not working. What else can I do? Their glucose can be totally messed up, even though they're on a low-carb diet, and it's simply through the gut infection.
What causes, for the layman, when you talk about gut infections, at the root cause, what causes humans to get a gut infection? Is it the way we eat?
Is it certain things we eat? Or is it just we're all going to get it no matter what? Shrug family, some very cool news coming out of Walmart. You didn't expect to hear that, I bet. Ageless Male Pro-T was selected as one of the very few products in the entire performance nutrition category. So the entire shelf with all of the supplements,
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No. Well, there's basically two big ways. There's straight up pathogens, or there's something known as endotoxins. So an endotoxin is something that's toxic, but actually belongs as part of a normal healthy gut bacteria, so long as we don't make too much of it. But if for whatever reason, that own bacterial colony, which belongs in a healthy state in the microbiome, because these things, although they are technically say unhealthy for us in controllable amounts, they actually create a hormetic effect. So they make our microbiome stronger, and they improve our health. But if they get too strong, then that becomes an endotoxin, something that's endogenously toxic to our body. So it's our own self. And those only get out of control in states of low immunity. So let's say Travis, you went for a long period of time with very little sleep. Your diet was also for that kind of getting a PhD, bud. Exactly. Getting a
PhD this, you know, if you want to talk about things that lower immunity, a bad diet, low sleep, high stress, still training. Watching you die every Monday when we record.
Right. So we're kind of look like the president at this point, we're like, you start out and then four years later, you're like, why would anybody want that job?
That's exactly why would anybody want to go back to school? Yeah. So is this, you know, sometimes people will say, you know, if you eat the same foods all the time, and you develop like an allergic reaction to it, you know, could it be like, because you eat something all the time, you're causing too much of a certain thing that that food provides.
So, so what happens here, if somebody is eating too much of the thing of the same thing all the time, it's not necessarily going to create a food sensitivity until that person has a bout of what most people know as leaky gut. This is known as intestinal permeability. So to gain a food sensitivity, a whole protein needs to pass through the intestinal wall and irritate the immune system.
So just think about it like this. And this was actually this, I'm glad you brought it up. So it's in that study that I just posted the other day, alcohol creates acute bouts of intestinal permeability. So increasing alcohol actually creates little holes within the gut for a very short period of time, and blood bacteria content increased one and a half times. So like the actual gut bacteria was leaking into our circulatory system, because alcohol damaged the gut. And that was just one bout of four to five shots of alcohol. I don't know about your guys' friends, but my boys will put away 10 to 15, and that's a regular thing.
Canadians, man, they can drink for sure. We know how to get it done. So from a food sensitivity perspective, you're only supposed to have amino acids or say peptide chains, small things in the circulatory system. But when a whole protein enters the circulatory system, your immune system says, holy crap, what's that? And then you can imagine that whole protein surrounded by white blood cells, almost like 10 golf balls engulfing a tennis ball. That's really what it looks like. And then when you have all these white blood cells attached to this piece of food, that whole piece of food, say a chicken, piece of chickens in your circulatory system, it's now covered in white blood cells. And when this happens, that's called an immune complex. And you can kind of think about it like the mafia.
The mafia says, I never forget a face. Well, that's what the immune system says to that piece of chicken, because now it sees it as an invader. And this happens even in the lumen, so inside the gut. That chicken doesn't even need to enter circulation anymore for the immune system to be pissed off about it, because it recognizes it each time it came through. It's got that molecular signature on it now, where that's a bad guy. So what happens with that food sensitivity generation is if you had a belt of intestinal permeability to the point where a protein enters circulation to where it created an inflammatory immune complex, that's what's going to signal the immune system to dislike that food, even in the future when it comes back, not even in circulation.
So that's really about how food sensitivities from a high perspective get created. But all of those things will absolutely disrupt blood sugar, again, to kind of get back here. IL-6 and LPS both activate glucagon-like peptide 1, which will tank blood sugar, it will drop it very, very, very low.
So if somebody's inflamed, and to always bring this back to blood chemistry, you can pick up things like C-reactive protein, or look at people's cholesterol profiles to see if they're inflamed, and then that'll tell you something about their blood sugar.
Awesome. All right. It's going to be, one of the things that comes up every time blood sugar is discussed is the glycemic index.
Is this something people should actually be concerned about in eating low glycemic index foods to regulate their blood sugar?
No. The glycemic index was OK in theory, but it's terrible in application. It has no impact on a realistic diet, because it's predicated upon 100 grams of a certain food eaten in a fasted state.
So it's like, I'm only going to eat 100 grams of sweet potatoes for this meal and nothing else. Or I'm only going to have 100 grams of glucose, or I'm only going to have 100 grams of rice and nothing else.
So although it's measuring the amount of time it takes for blood sugar to enter the bloodstream, it has nothing to do with what an actual meal looks like.
Also, the meal you ate before that meal can impact the glycemic index of that meal as well. Not to mention sleep and stress impact blood glucose control as well, which have nothing to do with the glycemic index.
So the glycemic index, it's insightful, but in terms of maybe the rapid absorption of a carb, it gives you kind of an insight on that.
But in terms of real life application, it is completely useless. And I do mean useless. For real.
All right. Lastly, in terms of the non-insulin-based things to regulate glucose control, a very cool one is actually H. pylori.
H. pylori is a gut infection that up to 40% of the world's population has. It resides within the stomach. It can actually survive in states of high acid, which a lot of bacteria can't.
But it absolutely hangs out in the stomach with no problem. And eradicating H. pylori, and this is actually, I've got a really cool study on this.
Helicobacter pylori-induced gastritis contributes to the occurrence of postprandial symptomatic hypoglycemia. Put in English, if anybody wants to read that paper, they can go read that paper.
But in English, H. pylori impacts after meal glucose levels. And in this study, and again, I'll just quote them right here, eradication of H. pylori gastritis showed a substantial improvement in blood sugar control symptoms.
So they didn't do anything. All they did was take away the bug, and blood sugar control began to correct itself. No changes to diet, no changes to anything.
They just simply removed the bug, and blood sugar corrected itself. So those are the three ways, and I really just wanted to provide the audience just some cool tips and tricks, but also ways in which to become a better detective.
Because if you ask somebody, hey, what do I do? My blood sugar's off. Most people are just like, lower your carbs. What should I do? But if you're not looking for IL-6, if you're not looking for lipopolysaccharides, if you're not looking for H. pylori, if you're not concerned with what cortisol, thyroid, and growth hormone are doing, then it's simply a guess.
And that's why I love lab work, because we just take the guesswork right out of it, and we just analyze the person, reverse engineer the strategy from there.
But these things that are seemingly not connected to blood glucose are absolutely impacting blood glucose to the point where it can become pathogenic.
So wait, did we cover all three of the non-insulin factors? Yes. There was H. pylori. What were the other two again? Inflammation, and then low levels of hormones.
And low hormones, that's right. Yeah, got all three. Cool. And all three of those could be their own hour. We're going over high level here, because I really just want to smash these out for everybody.
Yeah, when we get into the insulin side of things, how many we got?
How does insulin play into this? So yeah, there are three, just like there's three and three. Insulin? Three insulin mediated, three non-insulin mediated.
Insulin's a hormone. A lot of people, this is the one that they're familiar with. Insulin is secreted in response to blood glucose being in the bloodstream.
And its job is to lower blood glucose and dispose of it in different places in order to regulate blood glucose, because we don't want glucose chronically high or chronically
And that's kind of another thing a lot of people low. recognize, is that there's actually excellent research out there suggesting that low blood glucose is as predictive of all-cause mortality as high blood glucose.
So that's a huge myth that needs to die. A lot of people think the lower, the better. That is completely untrue, completely untrue. Why would having low glucose be just as dangerous?
We only hear about glucose, and then it just immediately turns into diabetes. So yeah, so low glucose being dangerous is still a hypothesis, still theorizing, still figuring everything out.
So you're simply looking at all-cause mortality and viewing people over many, many, many years. But glucose, I mean, it's the prime fuel of the brain. And it's one of the prime fuels the cells need to create ATP.
And ATP is the currency for anything in the body. If you want to make a hormone, if you want to make stomach acid, if you want to think, if you want neurotransmitters, if you want gastric motility, all of this stuff requires ATP.
And your cells want glucose to drive that process. So just think about, though, the body, right? We really only have one hormone to lower glucose, that's insulin.
But to raise glucose, we have epinephrine, norepinephrine, cortisol, thyroid, growth hormone, glucagon. The list goes on and on and on and on.
So even from just a stepping back perspective, it's like, OK, the body's got a lot of emergency mechanisms to make sure glucose is at a certain level that it wants it to be.
So we just have to respect that. And when you look at optimal ranges in terms of what's truly optimal, it seems to be between 81 and 85 is your true optimal range for fasting glucose, that is.
And if you're in a different country, then that may be a little bit different for you. But that seems to be the true optimal range. You won't want to go too low beyond that.
And you don't want to go above 85 either. You were saying on a previous show, there was a percentage above 85.
For every point above 85, you're x percent more likely to have something. What were you saying the other day? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So for every one point above 85 results in a 6% increased chance of developing type 2 diabetes over the next decade.
So that's one point above 85. And lab ranges allow you to go all the way up to 99. So if somebody was at 95, just because I want to make the math easier on myself, they are 10 points over that noted point within the data.
So that's a 60% increased risk of type 2 diabetes over the course of the next decade. And yet, you're still considered in a normal range. And we've even seen research that points above 95 result in diabetic retinopathy.
And diabetic retinopathy is the actual degradation of your eye tissue. So somebody from 85 to 95 could have increased their risk of type 2 diabetes 60%.
And then from 95 to 99, be beginning to damage their actual eye tissue. But they're only considered abnormal once they hit 100. And that's absolutely insane to me, that these are problems we could have acted upon 10 years before they actually became a problem.
And that's something that I've seen so much in my career looking at labs is, pathology typically takes like a decade or more to actually manifest itself into a disease state.
It's something that lifestyle and habits and diets, they begin way before you pay the price for it. And there's a lot we can look at in labs in order to predict these things and act preventatively rather than reactively.
That's a big one. It looks like just in research this morning and preparing for the show, stress plays like such a massive role in this thing.
And anytime I see stress, people instead of focusing on pure, we're gonna mitigate stress, it's always easier to just go back and be like, well, let's focus on sleep a little bit better and see if we can start to increase those numbers.
Stress seems to get a lot better once we sleep. How does just sleep in general play into your glucose levels?
Obviously, more is better, but what is the relationship between those two? Well, if you get a poor night's sleep tonight, your next day levels of cortisol are higher compared to if you do not get a good night's sleep tonight.
And that's the primary driver of that. Your next day levels of cortisol are gonna be higher. Cortisol not only drives up blood glucose, but over time it increases inflammation and insulin resistance.
So you're not only getting higher levels of blood glucose, but your cells also aren't able to receive glucose as effectively because they become resistant to insulin.
And also that inflammation we already talked about. If we drive up inflammation, things like lipopolysaccharides, things like IL-6, we've also seen in research that cortisol by itself can create so much damage on the gut that it can lead to ulcers.
That stress alone, stress all by itself can create bleeding ulcers in people. So that gut damage is absolutely gonna result in lipopolysaccharide creation and then ultimately activate GLP-1 and really disrupt blood sugar.
So a lot of this can begin with poor sleep. If you poor sleep, you have chronically high cortisol. If you have chronically high cortisol, you're gonna be insulin resistant.
You're also gonna be pro-inflammed. Both of those things impact blood sugar. And when you actually look into the research on thyroid hormone, your body wants to convert inactive T4 into active T3 in order to burn glucose and utilize it for energy.
Cortisol inhibits T4 to T3 conversion. So not only are we pro-inflammed, not only are we insulin resistant, not only is blood glucose up, but we don't even have the thyroid hormone to effectively utilize it anyway.
Cortisol inhibits all of this stuff. And if you get a bad sleep, that's gonna just be the real kickoff to that. And it would also be my assumption that if somebody's sleeping really poorly, it's probably because of stress as well.
Yeah, like what, you have a four-month-old right now? Have you done your blood work and everything Yeah, she's just about three or four months. since you've had the baby?
And I have not done my blood. I'm so excited to see this Take the perfectly like blood work We've got all the data on you and then it's gonna go and then I had a baby and it looks like I'm dying
Like the lab show I'm dying now Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare because not only am I dying but I'm training for a marathon Yeah
Yeah, you know how actually you see in movies to zombies just don't get tired they can just keep running That's like what I'm gonna be. I'm just gonna be a dead man running
Yeah, how do I guess you know, there are just stages We we coach a ton of dads and like you're you just had your first baby. We all have too many kids What is obviously saying go to sleep eat a healthier diet, but a lot of these things just aren't the reality and when you start to
Paint the picture of we've got to get down into your gut to actually understand kind of like what bacterial infections are happening in there but obviously outside of
Calling us and saying how do I solve this and we go through all the labs and everything? what are some like general steps that people could take to start to You know, they've got their blood panel and they they've they followed the steps here and they they know that their their glucose levels are at
95 no doctors telling them they're sick at all They're actually getting giving them a clean bill of health, but they're headed in the wrong direction How do they start to right the ship on this? is there like a
Obviously sleeping more helps a lot but even even like over I don't want to say over training but Training too much on low sleep like all of these things start to to work against your body
How do people know that they're up against some sort of blood sugar type issue? they've got glucose problems and and then start to solve it on their own if Calling us and and us reading their labs isn't in the cards
So it basically you would do your you would address your visible stressors first before you looked at hidden stressors So we've talked about that in the past visible things are what are obviously impacting your current state of health
You don't need an expert to tell you that sleeping poorly recreational drug use alcohol emotional stress Psychological stress when you say recreational drugs. What does that mean?
Any party drugs? Does that mean like heavy drugs like cocaine heavier? Or is that like marijuana? Is that heroin? I never
Actual recreational drugs are because a lot of people like to have fun Yeah
I know not to do heroin. What can I can't I do is what yeah, I know not to do I know what drugs are you expecting me to endorse from the answer? I would I I'm not doing meth on a random Saturday night
But I may hear in there Saturday so I do meth I
Actually is is marijuana like a
Not a when it does that qualify in your recreational drug bucket
So man, it's so it depends on the person because are you using it for escapism if so, that's a problem, right? If you are using marijuana for escapism, that means you're probably
Unfulfilled in your life and if you're unfulfilled, you'd be producing a ton of cortisol if you're producing ours Oh, then you're definitely going to be in an unhealthy state Also, if smoking a lot of marijuana causes you to eat a ton of food and mess up your blood sugar
Well, then that's also an obvious thing that's gonna create a you know, very visible stressor creating obviously bad outcome I
Really wanted you to say was it's okay No for real there is a good side though because there is people who responsibly use it like there's this guy
You may have heard of he's kind of successful named Joe Rogan. Do you guys know I've heard of him? Yeah, you guys have heard of him I think he's kind of beat the odds by having a killer body composition a brilliant mind in a successful business and that's a whole
Lot of marijuana. So yeah, that's why I said it's context-specific If you're using it for escapism and massive cheat meals, then it's probably not good for you But if you can function optimally and you use it to just chill out the hell, yeah, man knock yourself out. Yeah
To your question Before you asked me about I know well I the record every time someone says recreational. I'm like, well, how far are we going here?
Go away. We're talking about visible versus hidden. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Are we going here? All right, so there's the obvious stressors that Anders is supposed to
Apply that that are things that you can work on before you come to us like getting lean Improving your body composition. Those are massively impact blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity
The huge major effect of the things that you can do simply getting lean will solve a lot of your problems Another thing is to strength train. So get on the mash method program because the greatest amount. Yeah the greatest amount of Glucose the biggest glucose warehouse in the body is your muscles and when you've got a lot of muscles
You can safely dispose of a lot of glucose. So resistance training getting lean sleeping better managing stress These are all things that you can do on the surface to improve your blood glucose control
And then there was actually a really fascinating study that came out not too long ago and it had all patients in
Eat the exact same meal But then they ate the same meal five times, but then changed the order at which they consumed Oh, yeah, sorry this yeah, they change the order at which they
Consume each macronutrient and if you eat your vegetables first and then your meat and then Finished with your rice you did that by itself
So all five meals were exact same macronutrients and exact same calories but if you change the order to vegetables meat rice your blood glucose control and overall markers of GLP-1 and insulin things we've already talked about on this podcast were way better than if you did rice vegetables meat
So just same calories same macronutrients different order of consumption Created a huge impact
Why? Why because when you front load the so things that regulate glucose are fat fiber and protein So you're simply front loading the meal with things that decrease glucose uptake
But if you start your meal with the fastest digesting carbohydrates Glucose uptake goes high and then in turn things like GLP-1 things like insulin have to compensate to try and get this back regulated exact same calories and macros and just a
Redistribution of order from vegetables meat rice had a massive statistically significant impact on blood glucose control So I think getting lean getting on a strength training program sleeping better and managing your stress
These things are easier said than done But they're the obvious things that you can do and then order of consumption when it comes to your meal You won't even have to even if you don't count your calories and macros, that'll still improve your blood glucose control
So I think those are all very obvious Visible things that you can do and then when if you're doing those and blood sugar is still dysregulated and this happens a lot, too people look
People will come to me and they're like Hey Dan, I believe that I'm doing everything right, but My blood glucose is still off. What's wrong? Or I think I'm doing everything right? What's going on? That happens a lot and
That's just I that's when I have to do labs and that's what over time It's just driven me to do labs in my career to truly uncover some of the root causes that I've been talking about today That have nothing to do with like glucose and insulin or nothing directly rather
I should say that I've had that I found through experience and research over the years. Actually, you're a professional You're talking about getting lean in graduate school
Getting lean it directly in relation to blood sugar control in graduate school. We were supposed to go find research participants that were
Undiagnosed pre-diabetic and I read that I was like if they're undiagnosed pre-diabetic, they're not gonna know they're pretty diabetic Like how do I know they're pre-diabetic and he was like, dude, I can't write go find fat people like on the sheet
Just just go find fat people. They're all undiagnosed pre-diabetic. I was like, ah, gotcha. Okay My advisor
When I did all my labs with you, I was actually the leanest I had been in a Very long time and I still came back with high high glucose levels
Not like clinically high or above the 99 that would pop at the normal doctor, but you I was at 90 and that still is like on
My way the wrong way and that was the last I had ever been because you're the perfect example Like yeah, yeah Yeah
You had a gut bacterial issue But it could have been many other things too like and that happens all the time people I've had super lean bodybuilders come to me Terrible blood glucose. They're super super lean. So it's just uncovering that root cause issue is is really big and
We went over the three non insulin. Do you guys want to go over the three insulin base? Yeah, or before we actually Go, I have one question on the non insulin ones
Okay, you mentioned That having low glucose levels is just as dangerous as having high ones because your body Needs glucose to to function your brain needs sugars to run if people are following a very low carb ketogenic type diet, I imagine your body's not transformer
Gluconeogenesis is not at a rate that your brain enjoys. So how? how does that play into where your glucose levels are and is
Should anybody follow the ketogenic diet like at all So I actually like the ketogenic diet But I use it for acute purposes. So like I a lot of times I sound like a keto hater or an intermittent fasting hater or whatever, I'm not. It's always just the right tool for the right job. So I like ketogenic diets for the purpose of lowering blood sugar.
So if somebody has elevated blood sugar, like the perfect candidate for a ketogenic diet is somebody who's overweight, and that's really trouble, a lot of trouble with appetite control, because ketogenic diets are quite good at regulating appetite simply because they remove carbs. But also since they remove carbs are pretty good at regulating blood sugar. So it brings it down. But then once this person is laying, I would want to reintroduce carbs to get fiber back in the diet to increase exercise performance to increase anabolism and anti catabolism to increase energy for a lot of people and also just increase the realistic consistency of the program. I mean, consistency beats intensity 10 times out of 10. You want a program you can follow forever and not just a program you can follow acutely. And it's been my experience that anybody who chooses extremes, they fall off the plan and they end up on a roller coaster approach. So if somebody's physiologic context matched, utilizing a ketogenic diet, then sure, I would use it in an acute sense.
But once we've normalized that type of situation, then it's for the in the interest of consistency in the interest of realistic lifetime transformation. So not just body transformation, but life transformation. And so in the interest of getting a more diverse range of nutrients,
I would absolutely want to introduce carbs back in. Beautiful. Let's talk insulin. Sure. Okay, so going through insulin, we went through our three non insulin. And now we're going through our three insulin. The three insulin are straight up insulin resistance.
The next one is micronutrients. And the third one is insulin auto antibodies. So we'll go over auto antibodies first, because that's a pretty cool one. I don't think I've ever heard it on another podcast. But there's over 20 papers now demonstrating that ALA increases insulin auto antibodies. So a lot of people supplement with ALA alpha lipoic acid super common to supplement with. But an auto antibody, what that is, is essentially your own body's immune system attacking the hormone insulin. And this creates a lot of insulin dysregulation. Because what happens if you eat a meal with carbohydrates in it, your body is going to increase insulin.
But then these insulin auto antibodies attach themselves to insulin and bind up insulin. So it can't be used properly. This takes the half life of insulin from four to six minutes to several hours. What happens is insulin stays alive for several, several, several hours, your body also needs to make way more insulin than what it's supposed to make in response to the size of this meal, because a lot of the insulin is being bound up. But then those antibodies degrade. And then you still have active insulin in the system. So then even three, four hours later, when you don't even have a lot of glucose in your system at all, then you have this huge influx of insulin suppressing blood sugar dramatically and taking blood sugar way down. And then the only way to get blood sugar back up is to have a massive increase in cortisol to try and get that blood sugar back up. So then you end up with this scenario where you've got huge increases in cortisol, way low amount of blood sugar, and it's due to insulin auto antibodies. And ALA is very well demonstrated to increase people who are susceptible to having auto antibodies of insulin.
But even garlic has been demonstrated to increase some some people who are sensitive to increasing auto antibodies of insulin as well. So that's a that's a one that immediately impacts insulin directly, which can impact blood sugar. A second one is something we've talked about micronutrients quite a bit on this show, many people are low in potassium and potassium is required to create insulin. So if you have low potassium status, which so many people do your pancreas, it's a rate limiting step, your pancreas literally can't make insulin. So that potassium is a major, major, major player in that. And that is on insulin secretion. But when it comes to yourselves, actually being able to use insulin, magnesium is one of the most effective nutrients in this category. And I've actually got a really cool study that I wanted to talk to you guys about.
It's called reactive hypoglycemia and magnesium. And it's fascinating that what what people don't know about micronutrients. So they had 22 reactive hypoglycemic individuals. So people with blood sugar dysregulation, this means hypoglycemia. So they have blood sugar was extremely low. These people, if you give them an oral glucose tolerance test, their blood sugar dropped 48. So in a huge drop afterwards of this test, and after only two weeks of magnesium, it only dropped five. So magnesium is that's a 9x improvement and blood sugar regulation after only two weeks of magnesium use. I said about magnesium, like, you know, there's there's now there's a company that the owner's really nice guy, but like, you know, they sell it to where, you know, where it rubs on, you know, like on the skin. So it's, it's thermal, I guess. And then they have it where you can put it in your bath. Can it, can you, can you magnesium be absorbed like that? Or is it something you have to take orally?
I'll do oral every single time. Yeah. Oral has the best research by far on it. I've done oral every single time. So, yeah. All right. Yeah. That's what I've heard, because can you even get it like that? You know, like, will that even work?
Not to my knowledge. No. Yeah. And a lot of people will actually say that too, about Epsom salt baths, about how you absorb magnesium from them. That's untrue as well.
You actually don't absorb magnesium from Epsom salt baths. So I, in, I can't think of a context where I wouldn't give oral magnesium. I can say that because the research is solid and people are going to absorb it. All right. So that's a micronutrient one. So, I mean, magnesium is huge for the acceptance of insulin, whereas potassium is huge for the secretion of insulin. And then lastly, and finally, you know, our last set of three here would be insulin resistance and insulin resistance. You know, the visible ones are, if you eat like an asshole or if you're really overweight, then insulin resistance is going to happen. So I'm not going to get too deep into that.
What I think is important to care about here is actually mitochondrial function, because there's actually great papers on that insulin resistance is actually a protective mechanism of that the cells utilize to not let glucose in that it cannot accept without creating a massive amount of oxidative stress. So insulin resistance, as research continues to come out, it seems to be a protective mechanism of the body, actually in two different ways.
One way in which the body wants to protect cells because the mitochondria aren't functioning properly. But a second way insulin resistance has been connected to being a protective mechanism of the body is that in states of infection, white blood cells utilize more glucose than normal.
So it seems to be a protective mechanism, the body to give white blood cells more glucose so that they can do what they need to do to manage and get rid of the infectious state. So very cool thing where insulin resistance, again, maybe associated with an infection, or maybe associated with mitochondrial dysfunction. But insulin resistance oftentimes is poor body composition. But these are other ways in which it can manifest itself in the absence of that.
All right, so just super, super quick recap, everybody, the non insulin mediated ways were inflammation, H pylori, and low hormones, whereas the insulin mediated ways are insulin resistance, autoantibodies and micronutrients.
People when they like exogenous or when they get prescribed insulin, what is kind of how does that I'm kind of I don't have any clients that take insulin, but I obviously see it all over the news for people with type two diabetes is how does that play into regulating their blood sugar? Is it it's obviously the most normal treatment that people are getting? What what actually is happening there?
So being prescribed insulin is just like a sledgehammer hammering through the door. That's what it is. Because the ways in which you can improve blood sugar control are either changing your diet, or improving insulin sensitivity, or providing the body so much insulin that it's able to just smash down the door of the cells and for glucose in there, because people are too lazy to change their diet, or look for hidden stressors or address insulin sensitivity issues. So it's basically and I understand why why the medical community prescribes it because a lot of people, they have no interest in lowering their stress, improving their sleep or changing their diet or even looking at any of these other hidden stressors that I've talked about here today. So it's way easier just to give them a sledgehammer so they can smash down the door and smash down the door of their cells and deposit that glucose so that it lowers overall glucose. It's such a permanent decision, though, because when you make that decision, the pancreas and will be done and like, it's such it's a big one that people just make without thinking but I guess maybe they know that they're so lazy, they're not going to do it. But or they who I said that everyone I'm not saying that everybody's lazy, but they're just saying they're not going to make the lifestyle changes. They know that. And so yeah, anyway, that's exactly it. I watched my grandfather do that very thing. It killed him. You know, so yeah, yeah, it's rough. It's like, because it just prolongs damage. Now you're taking insulin to lower blood glucose, but you still are just simply prolonging damage within the body because no root cause has been addressed or resolved in that people have no idea what they're saying when they make that decision instead of like, they have no idea what they're doing. They have no idea what they're doing to the immune system, like just the body's ability to repair its own self. It's just, it's a big decision when you make that when you make that decision.
100% Yeah, unless you're a type one diabetic, where obviously you need it because your pancreas is destroyed. But yeah, exactly. Yeah. So besides that, and what we talked about here today, these are all major categories that we could go deeper into, you know, like, there's so much to learn here, that you don't just need a drug to smash it all home.
That's where the reasons of America that need to hear this more than others like I'm from the mountains, you know, North Carolina and like, it's just ingrained the way that he is just cornbread gravy, it's just, it's what happens, and people get overweight and like, there's so many, there's so many, like, diseases that are so prevalent up there, more than anywhere else, and all of them, even like cancer is higher in Western North Carolina anywhere else in America, simply because of lifestyle choices is crazy.
For sure. And what's what's interesting in this category too, is we talked about insulin but metformin is kind of the same thing. Metformin is a way safer version because it increases insulin sensitivity. But here's the funny thing about metformin metformin, you can people can actually go to might might have been calm, it's it's a good exercise for everybody to do might have been calm, and you can type in any drug, and it'll show you the nutrient deficiencies that that drug creates.
Now when you when you take metformin over time, it actually depletes folic acid and vitamin B 12. We use that to prevent retinopathy. So it's this hilarious catch 22 where metformin if you don't replace the folic acid and B 12 that it depletes, you will run into diabetic retinopathy and neuropathy issues even quicker. So neuropathy that's like when you start seeing their discolored feet, and they could actually even get it. So that type of thing. Same with the retinopathy, but we need B 12 huge in this sense to prevent that and yet one of the primary things metformin depletes is B 12. So like if anybody's on metformin, yes, it's, you know, the safer option than insulin and it provides some of these other benefits that have been discussed in the past, but everything has a cost and physiology, and we need to ensure that we replace that.
And I've been meaning to tell you, like, in the sports nutrition class I took one of the stories is like a coach a gymnastics coach prescribed. I can't remember which one of the B vitamins but it was a vitamin B for something. And, you know, the person took it and took it in like, all of a sudden, she's doing her thing on the bars on the, I guess the parallel bars. Yeah. And she goes numb and falls and I breaks her back.
And it was because, you know, this, this coach who had no business prescribing any kind of micronutrient told her to take this, this B 12 that made her go like lose feeling in her hands and ruin her. Yes. So my point being is like, you know, before listening to some random coach and, you know, gymnastics coach are amazing. They could teach gymnastics really well. So they do is awesome.
But when they step over the line that gosh personal trainers, listen to me right now. Like, instead of when you read something in your little magazine, and you go out and you start telling all your clients to do this. Micro and macronutrients prescribing them without understanding, you know, chemistry is so dangerous. Go to someone like Dan, let them do it. And because there are repercussions of the simplest of micronutrients.
It's not just like, Oh, I'll just take extra multivitamin. No, you're not. It's like, it can kill. There are micronutrients that can kill you if you tap too much of it. So go to professional. I've been meaning to tell stories since the beginning, but yeah. Broke her back. You know, because of the B12 I have out next show, I'll make sure I have the exact what it was. Yeah. And that's, that's kind of why I like, you know, some people, you know, many of the listeners might be like, Holy man, this Dan Garner guy, he might be too comprehensive. This is, this is, this is really ridiculous. But this is why I do this stuff.
Because like so many people before listening to this show, they might've just said, ah, just lower carbs. That'll help clean up blood sugar. You know, that's, that's it. But now there's no, just anything. Biology is always more complex than that. And now they've got three tools, non-insulin based and three tools insulin based to massively improve their diagnostics at which they approach this. And they know the lab markers in order to look at, to see if there's an issue to begin with. So this, this is why I like to do these, these things is to just remove the simplicity and open people's eyes up to what they need to care about. Like with respect to how complex this stuff is staying in your lane and just having more tools at your disposal. Because a lot of people, they had, what's that old saying? If everything looks like a nail, you're only ever going to use a hammer. Like that's when people apply, okay, you've got high blood glucose, you need a ketogenic diet.
If you do that every time we talked about like 12 different things today that it could be, maybe they need the keto diet or maybe it's these other 11, one of these other 11 things that you're not even considering and your actions towards them may actually make them worse rather than better. Yeah, I'll actually even go as far as saying you probably have a problem. You most likely have something going on because I was what I thought at the healthiest, maybe not the healthiest, but it was definitely the leanest. And I thought that when I got my stuff back, that it would be, it would all come back very healthy. And five was whatever, 12, 13% body fat feeling great and came back.
I have high glucose levels. If you're 30 pounds overweight, which is most of our country, you got something going on. You need, you need to have like a real plan of attack on how to get out of that state because you're headed in the wrong direction. And unless there's like a massive intervention, you're just going to have a doctor just hand you insulin or they're going to hand you some sort of way that just covers up whatever problem really is going on. And until you do the work to find out like where the root causes are. And that's why I really wanted to have you on here because every time we get labs back from our clients and whatever it is, it's, it's like, it's so eyeopening to go, oh, that's the real problem.
Like no doctor. I, I haven't been to med school, but I've been going to doctors for 38 years now. And I don't think any of them understand the complexity that you present this at or, or like finding root causes of these problems because nobody's ever one told me the things on my blood work that you were able to find. And then actually being able to do all of the labs to be able to get to find out where these problems are. Like the skillset just doesn't exist. Mainly because I think it's really hard. Like you have to go do the work. And that's really, really many, many years where doctors go to school and they learn about medicine, which is also great. Just different.
People, people need to be aware that there's a different approach and, and how they can fight for themselves inside that room. Because your doctor, if you just nod your head and say, okay, I've got, I've got a problem, or they're not even finding the problem when it, when it's staring at them right in the face. So Dan Garner, where can people find you? At Dan Garner nutrition on Instagram.
Travis Mash. Mashly.com and go to Instagram Mashly performance. It's always fun having you on. I'm so glad you're co-host. I just got so many notes. I feel like I'm in class again. This is what I needed in another class. At least I'm not getting tested.
Right. You can go back and listen. It's not a one-time test, bud. Doug Larson. On my Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Mash, you got to go through the ultimate, ultimate nutrition mentorship. I'm going through Dan's course right now. I actually do feel like I'm in class when I'm, when I'm going through that course. It's awesome.
Let me get, let me get through this. Let me get, this is my last semester. Yeah, you need master's. Yeah. I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find that. I'm trying to find that story, but I'll get it to y'all next time. They hand these PhDs out to anybody.
Anybody. So easy. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barrel Shrugged, Barrel underscore Shrugged. Get over to dieseldadmentorship.com where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic. And make sure you head over to your local Walmart. 2200 Walmarts nationwide. My face is on the box. Agents Mail, Pro-T, Friends. We'll see you guys next week.
