Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Blood Sugar] The Most Optimal Way to Control Blood Sugar w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: What to look for in lab work about your glucose levels What Doctors will not tell you about your glucose levels How to know if you are pre-pre-diabetic Why normal range for your glucose levels could be a bad thing How to regulate blood glucose and why it is important Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram  

Shrug Family this week on Barbell Shrug. Physiology Friday's back. Today we're talking about blood sugar. It's like the thing that is at the very top of your blood analysis, your blood work every single time you see it. And who knows what it actually means? Outside of there being some sugar in your blood, what are the downrange effects, how do you fix it,

and a little bit of the knowledge that your doctor's not going to tell you in the seven minutes that he's allowed to talk to you. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. That is where Dan Garner, Dr. Andy Galpenter, or do it a free lab, lifestyle, and performance analysis. And you can access that free report over at rapid health report.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug.

I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson, Coach Travis Smash, Dan Garner, back in the house. Dude, Dan Garner, I want to 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. That's not true. Anything, I'm going to Northern Minnesota, 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 going to be dead in 20 minutes. You will literally freeze from the inside out. Anything above that is definitely the Arctic. yeah we i lived actually out west uh just north of calgary before and uh it was you know very regular to see minus 40 minus 45 weather out there and you actually like it's 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 couldn't die it's that that's that's that's extremely cold but now i don't know

why you're running so far outside now i live in london so let's circle back Back to my fun fact. Now, I live in London, Ontario, which is very southern Ontario. The southern most point of Ontario is actually Peeley Island, and that runs parallel with Northern California. That 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. I'm with you. Yes.

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 is, I didn't realize that's SoCal. Everything up north 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 how we get this thing started, people are going to be able to look at their blood work. see some sort of values. What do those values mean? Sure. Yeah. So to always traveling back to the conversation of blood work, I absolutely love the blood chemistry that people can get. There's, again, I'll say this every episode, 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 want to look at it or spin it,

the typical progression of somebody looking into this will look a little bit, something like this. They're going to 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 of you 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 want to 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 like the outcome that could potentially happen to you as far as like a disease state and or like how you would get there in the first place from like 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 disresolution. regulated are insulin-based. And the other three ways that get disregulated 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, you know, without getting into the weeds, that there's always a ton of crossover 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 or glucose or the non-insulin? I'm going with non-insulin. Yeah. 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 base. We're on the non-insulin base right now. We've got to remember three. age 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 rabbit appetite or feelings of weakness, frequent urination is a big one in hypochlycemic states. Those are all 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 glucacon-like peptide 1, which totally disregulates blood sugar if over-amplified 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 one. So the 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. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garland

and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Artae is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre-imposed pictures. Artee is something completely different. Aratee is incredibly comprehensive

and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Artae isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best,

physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit Arteelab.com. That's A-R-E-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. 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 GLP1, and GLP1 is going to be lowering glucose, even though glucose isn't present in the diet. So this person's going to have massively low fasting glucose. They're going to have hypoglycemic symptoms, the ravenous appetite, and they don't know why. And they think, ah, you know, this low carb diet's not working. You know, well, 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, you know, for the layman, like when you talk about like gut infections, is it, you know, like at the root cause, like what causes humans to get like a gut infection? Is it the way we eat? Is it the certain things we eat? Or is it just we're all going to get it no matter what? No. So, 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 hermetic 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, 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 thing. Like getting a PhD, bud. Yeah. Exactly. Getting a PhD, this, the, you know, if you want to talk about things that lower immunity, a bad diet, low sleep, high stress, still training. Awesome. I'm doing all that. It's But you're watching you die every Monday when we record. That's right.

You're right. You kind of look like the president at this point where like you start out and then four years later, you're like, why would anybody want that job? Exactly. Why would anybody want to go back to school for a year? Yeah. So, like, is this, you know how 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. you eat something all the time, you're causing too much of a certain thing that that food provides.

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 intestine. wall and irritate the immune system. So just think about it like this. And this was actually, I'm glad you brought it up. So it was 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, you know, 10 to 15.

And that's a regular thing. Canadians, man, they can drink. 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 a 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, you know, 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's a whole piece of food, it's like a chicken. A 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. So even in, and this happens even in the, yeah, it 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 permeate, ability to the point where a protein entered 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. But I-L-6 and LPS, both activate glucagon-like peptide 1, which will tank blood sugar, 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 sugars discussed is the glycemic index. Is this something people should actually be concerned about

and eating low glycemic index foods to regulate their blood sugar? No. The glycemic index was okay 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 it in terms of maybe the rapid absorption of a carb it gives you kind of an insight on that but uh in terms of real life application it is completely useless and i do mean useless for real all right so and lastly in terms of the non-insulin based things to regulate glucose control a very cool one's actually h pylori h pylori is a gut infection that up to 40 percent 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. Helicopacter pylori-induced gastritis contributes to the occurrence of post-pranial symptomatic hypoglycemia. So 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, H. Pylori gastritis showed us, sorry, 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. What should I do? Most people are just like lower your carbs. But if you're not looking for IL-6, if you're not looking for life of polysaccharides, if you're not looking for H. Pylori, if you're not concerned with what cortisol, thyroid, and growth hormone are doing, then, then, you know, your guess is, 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 did we cover all three of the non-insulin factors? There was H. Piolori, where were the other two again? Inflammation, and then low levels of hormones. And low hormones, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, got all three. And all three of those could be their own hour. We're going over a high level here because I really just want to smash these out for everybody. yeah when we when we get into the the insulin side of things how many we got where how does insulin play into this insulin so yeah there are three just like there's three and three three insulin mediated three non-insulin mediated insulin is a hormone a lot of people this is the one that they're familiar with right 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 in different

places in order to regulate blood glucose because we don't want glucose chronically high or chronically low. And that's kind of another thing a lot of people don't 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. Why is, why would having low glucose be just as dangerous. We only hear about kind of like 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 because we'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. And when you think about, 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 epinepren, norephenephrine, 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, okay, 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 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. We don't want to go too low beyond that. and you don't want to go above 85 either. Yeah. 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 easy on myself, that 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 just like pure we're going to mitigate stress it's always easier to kind of 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 your glucose levels obviously more is better but what is the relationship between those two uh well if you get a poor night sleep tonight your next

day levels of cortisol are higher compared to if you do not get a good night sleep tonight. And that's the primary driver of that. Your next day levels of cortisol are going to be higher. Cortisol not only drives that 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 going to result in lipopolysaccharide creation and then ultimately activate GLP1 and really disrupt blood sugar. So a lot of this can begin with poor sleep. If you pour sleep, you have chronically high cortisol. If you have chronically high cortisol, you're going to be insulin resistant. You're also going to be pro-inflamed.

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-inflamed, 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 going to 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. You have a four-month-old right now? Yeah. Have you done your blood work and everything since? you've had the baby? I have not done my blood work. Oh, I'm so excited to see this.

I might be able to see it. Take the perfectly like blood work. We've got all the data on you. And then it's going to 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 going to be a bit of a nightmare because not only am I dying, but I'm training for a marathon. All right. Yeah. Good timing. Yeah. You know how actually. you see in movies too zombies just don't get tired they can just keep running that's like what

i'm going to be i'm just going to be a dead man running this marathon 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 uh we all have too many kids um 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 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 can take to start to, you know, they've got their

blood panel and they've followed the steps here and they know that their glucose levels are at 95. No doctors telling them they're sick at all. They're actually giving them a clean bill of health, but they're headed in the wrong direction. How do they start to write 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 overtraining 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 us reading their labs isn't in the cards. So basically you would address your visible stressors first before you

looked at hidden stressors. We 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 really wanted what actual recreational drugs are because a lot of people like to have fun yeah you ask i basically want you to give me the i know not to do heroin what can i can't i do is what you just ask i know not to do what drugs are you expecting me to endorse from this answer i would i i'm not doing meth on a random

Saturday night, but I may smoke meat here and there. Saturday. It's cheat day. So I do meth. Does it. Right? Yeah. In North Carolina, everyone does.

Yeah. I actually, is marijuana like a, not a, does that qualify in your recreational drug bucket? So, man, 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 a dinosaur, 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 going to create, you know, a very visible stressor creating obviously bad outcome. And let's talk about the good side of it.

Stop all the bad things. Sure, man. But there is a good side. All I really wanted you to say was, it's okay. He missed that note that we sent up. Yeah. I didn't read the show notes. I'm sorry.

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 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 then hell yeah man knock yourself out yeah that would be my answer to your drug question where was i asked before you

asked me about drugs, by the way. Every time someone says recreational, I'm like, well, how far are we going here? Oh, wait. We're talking about visible versus hidden. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. How far are we going here? All right. So there's the obvious stressors that Anders is supposed to in a time in stuff in his life that are things that you can work on before you come to us, like getting lean and improving your body composition. Those will massively impact blood sugar control and insulin sensitivity. A 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 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 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. I saw you post this. Yeah, they changed the order at which they consumed each macronutrient. And if you eat your vegetables first and then your meat and then finished with your rice, you 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 glp1 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 maconutrients different order of consumption that a lot has created a huge impact. Why, I wonder. 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 carbohydrate, like right, glucose

uptake goes high. And then in turn, things like GLP1, things like insulin have to compensate to try and get this back regulated. But it's exact same calories and macros and just a redistribution 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 if you're doing those and blood sugar is still dysregulated, and this happens a lot too. 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, 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 found through experience and research over the years.

Actually, you were, specifically to that point. You're talking about getting lean in graduate school, getting lean directly in relation to blood sugar control. In graduate school, we were supposed to go find research participants that. that were undiagnosed pre-diabetic. And I read that and I was like, if they're undiagnosed pre-diabetic, they're not going to know they're pre-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 go find fat people. They're all undiagnosed pre-diabetic. I was like, ah, got you. Okay. You said that. You're my advisor.

Oh, you're nice. 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 um not like clinically high or above the 99 um 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 latest i had ever been because of the gut bacteria 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 that that happens all the time people i've had super

lean bodybuilders come to me with terrible blood glucose. They're super, super, super lean. So it's just uncovering that root cause issue is really big. And we went over the three non-insulin. Do you guys want to go over the three insulin based before we actually... I have one question on the non-insulin ones. You mentioned that having low glucose levels is just as dangerous as having high once because your body needs glucose 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 transform or gluconeogenesis is not at a rate that your brain enjoys. So 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 i a lot of times i sound like i'm a keto hater or an intermittent fasting hater or whatever i'm not um it's always just 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 has 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 lean, I would want to reintroduce carbs to get fiber back in the diet to increase exercise performance, to increase animalism 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 rollercoaster 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,

it's 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 is 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's 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 people who are sensitive to

increasing auto-antibodies of insulin as well. So 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 your cells 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, 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, blood sugar, was extremely low. These people, if you give them an oral glucose tolerance test, their blood sugar dropped 48. So 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 the question about magnesium like you know 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 and so you know like on the skin so it's um trans thermal i guess and then they have it where you can put it in your bath can it can you Can 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. I agree. 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 actually say that too about Epsom Salt Bass. about how you absorb magnesium from them. That's that's untrue as well. You actually don't absorb magnesium from Epsom salt baths. So 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 micronutriate 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 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, auto-antibodies, and micronutrients.

Fantastic. 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 2 diabetes. How does that like play into regulating their blood sugar? Is it, it's obviously the most normal treatment that people are getting? What actually is happening there? So being prescribed insulin is just like a sludge hammer 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 force 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 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.

and 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, because when you make that decision, the pancreas 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 hate to say that everyone out I'm not seeing that everybody's lazy but

they're just saying they're not going to make the lifestyle changes they know that and so yeah that's exactly it I watched my grandfather do that very thing and it killed it 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 situation. 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 soon. A hundred percent. Yeah, unless you're

a type one diabetic where obviously you need it because your pancreas is destroyed. But besides yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So besides that, uh, 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. I swear, like, there's regions 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 they eat is just cornbread, gravy. It's just, it's what happens. And people get overweight and, like, type two, 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, it's higher in Western North Carolina, anywhere else in America, simply because of lifestyle choices. It's crazy. For sure. And what's interesting in this category, too, is we talk about insulin, but metformin's kind of the same thing. Metformin's a way safer version because it increases insulin sensitivity. But here's the funny thing about metformin.

Metformin, people can actually go to might-formin. ivin.com. It's a good exercise for everybody to do, mytivin.com. 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 B12. We use that to prevent retinopathy. So it's this hilarious catch-22 where metformin, if you don't replace the folic acid in 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 in.

So that type of thing. Amputated, yeah. Same with the retinopathy. But we need B12, huge in this sense, to prevent that. And yet one of the primary things, Metformin depletes is B12. 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 in physiology, and we need to ensure that we replace

that cost. 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, and, like, all of a sudden, she's doing her thing on the bars, on the, I guess, the parallel bars, yeah. she goes numb, it falls, and like breaks her back. And it was because, you know, this coach who had no business prescribing any kind of

micronutrient, told her to take this B12 that made her go, like, lose feeling in her hands. And it ruined 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. The stuff they do is awesome. But when they step over the line, man, 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, it's dangerous.

Micro and macronutrients, prescribing them without understanding, you know, chemistry is so dangerous. Go to someone like, Dan, let them do it. Because there are repercussions of the simplest of micronutrients. It's not just like, oh, I'll just take extra. multivitamin. No, you will not. It's like it can kill it. There are micronutrientia that can kill you if you take too much of it. So go too professional. I've been meeting to tell stories since the beginning, but yeah, broke her back, you know, because of the B12. I have, next show, I'll make sure I have exact what it was. Yeah. And that's kind of why I like,

you know, some people, you know, many of the listeners might be like, holy man, this dangarner guy, he might be too comprehensive. 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 have 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. No, 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 is why I like to do 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, 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 kutthos, 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 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, I, I thought that when I got my stuff back, that it would be, it would all come back very healthy.

And if I was, whatever, 12, 13% body fat, feeling great, and came back. And I have high glucose levels. If you're 30 pounds overweight, which is most of our country, you got something going on. 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 eye-opening 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 skill set 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, it's many years where doctors go to school and they learn about medicine, which is also great, just different.

People need to be aware that there's a different approach 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 a problem or they're not even finding the problem when it's staring at them right in the face. So, Dan Gardner, where can people find you? Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. Travis Mash. Mathly.com and go to Instagram, Mashleet Performance. It's always fun having you on.

I'm so glad you're co-host. I just got so many notes. I'm in class again. Just what I needed another class. Right. 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've got to go through the ultimate nutrition mentorship. I'm going through dance 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 this is my last semester of yeah you need

stuff yeah you're not even trying to find i'm trying to find that i'm trying to find that story but i'll get it to you all next time they hand these phds out to anybody anybody yeah so easy i am anders warner at and we are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged and make sure you get over to aretaylab.com. That is the signature program inside rapid health optimization where you can go and experience all the lab lifestyle performance testing analysis and coaching to help you optimize your health and performance. And you can access all of that over at artaelab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.