Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Immune System] The Single System In Charge of Building Muscle, Losing Fat, and Reducing Stress w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: Why the immune system matters Immune system and stress Immune system and fat loss Immune system muscle building How to Optimize Your Immune System  Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram  

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged Physiology Friday, we're back. Dan Garner today talking about blood sugar, blood glucose. The first biomarker that is at the top of your yearly checkup, whether you get the 40 biomarkers that your PCP gives you, or you're getting the most comprehensive blood work that the world has ever seen in every single potential biomarker that could be tested, blood glucose is always right at the top. And you're going to see those ranges, And hopefully it's not in the yellow and definitely

hopefully it's not in the red. And we're going to tell you today what all of those numbers mean, how it relates to pre-diabetic conditions, diabetes, the things that you can do about it on the lifestyle intervention side, as well as what's going on with the internal health and physiology side of it. So as always, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where you can learn about all the lab lifestyle performance, testing analysis, and protocols that we will be building for you when you come and work with us inside Rapid Health Optimization. You can access all of that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged i'm andrews

varner 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 uh you're in the middle of running around the the arctic and, 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. 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, I lived actually out west, just north of Calgary before. And it was very regular to see minus 40 40 minus 45 weather out there. And you actually like 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 extremely cold.

But 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, I live in London, Ontario, which is very Southern Ontario. The Southern most point of Ontario is actually Pelee Island. And that runs parallel with Northern California. That 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 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 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 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 that 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,

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 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 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 in 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 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 1. 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. 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's 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, 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, 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 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 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 thing. Like getting a PhD, bud. Exactly. Getting a PhD. If you want to talk about things that lower immunity, a bad diet, low sleep, high stress, still training. I'm doing all that. It's good.

I'm dying. It's great. Killing myself. We're watching you die every Monday when we record. It's fantastic. That's right. You're right. You kind of look like the president at this point.

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 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 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 intestinal 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 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 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, 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 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. So even in this happens, even in. Yeah now it sees it as an invader. So even in this happens even in, 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 bout of intestinal permeability 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. IL-6 and LPS both activate glucagon like peptide one, 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 sugar is 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 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. 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 a, 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? What my blood sugar is 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 lipopolysaccharides, if you're not looking for H. pylori, if you're not concerned with what cortisol, thyroid and growth hormone are doing, then 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. Yeah. And so did we cover all three of the non-insulin factors? There was H. pylori. What 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 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 um 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 uh three non-insulin mediated insulin is a hormone a 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 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, 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 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, 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. You won'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 two diabetes over the next decade. So that's one point above 85 and lab, 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, 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 is 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 such a massive role in this thing. Anytime I see stress, people, instead of focusing on just pure, we're going to 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

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 going to 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 going to 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 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 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. 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 since I had the baby. Oh, I'm so excited to see this. I might be able to see this. Take the perfectly 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

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 gonna be i'm just gonna be a dead man running this marathon uh 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. 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've 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 write the ship on this? Um, is there like a, uh, obviously sleeping more helps a lot. Um, 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 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'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 really wondered 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 yeah i know not to do heroin i know 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 here and there saturday it's cheat day so i do meth does it right yeah i mean north carolina everyone does yeah yeah i actually is is marijuana

like a uh uh not a when does that qualify in your recreational drug bucket um i 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 lot of cortisol 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 a very visible stressor, creating an obviously bad outcome.

And let's talk about the good side of it. Stop all the bad things. Chill, 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 out. 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 him? 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 question where was i at 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 oh wait we're talking about visible versus hidden yeah that's what we're

sorry yeah yeah okay so how far are we going here? All right. So there's the obvious stressors that Anders is supposed to be talking about in his life that are things that you can work on before you come to us like getting lean, improving your body composition, those will 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 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 uh 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 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. Wow. 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

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. But it's 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 will, 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 should say, that I've found through experience

and research over the years. Actually, you're a professional. 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 were undiagnosed pre-diabetic. And I read that and I was like, if they're undiagnosed pre-diabetic and i read that and i was like if they're undiagnosed pre-diabetic they're not gonna 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 just go find fat people they're all undiagnosed pre-diabetic i was like ah gotcha okay you said that my advisor oh yeah when i My advisor. Oh, you're good. 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 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 leanest I had ever been because of the gut bacteria. You're the perfect example. Like, yeah, yeah. You had a gut bacterial issue, but it could have been many other things too. Like that happens all the time. People I've had super lean bodybuilders come to me with terrible blood glucose. They're super, super lean. So it's just uncovering that root cause issue is, is really big. And, uh, we went over the three non-insulin. Do you guys want to go over the three insulin base before, before we actually, uh, uh, go, I have one question on, on, uh, the non-insulin ones.

Um, you mentioned, uh, that having low glucose levels is just as dangerous as having high ones 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 transformed or gluconeogenesis is not at a rate that your brain enjoys. So how does that play into where your glucose levels are? And should anybody follow the ketogenic diet 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 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 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 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 autoantibodies. So we'll go over autoantibodies 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 autoantibodies. So a lot of people supplement with ALA, alpha lipoic acid, super common to supplement with, but an autoantibody, 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 autoantibodies 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 autoantibodies. 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 that what people don't know about micronutrients. So they had 22 reactive hypoglycemic individuals. So people with blood sugar dysregulation, this means hypoglycemia. So their 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, that's a 9x improvement in 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 a 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 transdermal, I guess. And then they have it where you can put it in your bath. 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 the best research by far on it i've i've done oral every

single time so yeah all right i agree yeah that's what i've heard because can you even get it like that you know like will that even work not to knowledge, no. Yeah, and a lot of people 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. You don't. 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 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, may be associated with an infection or may be 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. Fantastic.

This is so good. 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. 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 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 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 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 will be done. 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. I hate to say that everyone else, 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 anyway, that's exactly it. I watched my grandfather do that very thing and 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 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. Just the body's ability to repair its own self. It's a big decision when you make that decision.

100%. Yeah. Unless you're that decision soon 100 yeah unless you're a type 1 diabetic where obviously you need it because your pancreas is destroyed but 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 um that you don't just need a drug to smash it all home that's where like there's reasons in america that need to hear this more than others like i'm 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 2 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. It's crazy. For sure. And, uh, what's, what's interesting in this category too, is we talk 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, people can actually go to mitavin.com. It's a good exercise for everybody to do, mitavin.com. And you can type in any drug and it'll show you the nutrient deficiencies that that drug creates. Now, 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 and B12 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 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. And she goes numb, it falls and that breaks her back. And it was because, you know, this this this coach who had no business prescribing any kind of micronutrient told her to take this 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 can teach gymnastics really well and 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 you 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. And 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. There are micronutrients that can kill you if you take too much of it. So go to a professional. I've been meaning to tell stories since the beginning, but yeah, broke her back because of the B12. Next show, I'll make sure I have exact what it was. Yeah. And that's kind of why I like some people, 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, 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 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 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 the doctor 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 like, it's so eyeopening to go, oh, that's the real problem. Like no doctor, 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. 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 Garner, where can people find you? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. Travis Mash.

Mashlead.com and go to Instagram, Mashlead 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. 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 got to go through the Ultimate Nutrition Mentorship. I'm going through Dan's course right now. I actually do feel like I'm in class when I'm going through that course. It's awesome. Let me get through this. This is my last semester.

Yeah, you need more stuff. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So easy. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged to Barbell 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. 2,200 Walmarts nationwide. My face is on the box.

Agents Mail, Pro-T, friends. We'll see you guys next week.