Dhru Purohit Show - An Honest Conversation About the Pros and Cons of Ozempic for Adults with Dr. Tyna Moore

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Lifeforce, and Lumebox.  The conversation around GLP-1 agonists has often been one-sided and biased by mainstream media, leading to myths about who should use these drugs, how they should be prescribed, and their side effects. Today’s guest offers a more comprehensive perspective on these medications and discusses her nuanced approach to using them to promote overall health and longevity. Today, on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Tyna Moore to delve deep into GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic. Dr. Moore breaks down the research surrounding these drugs and offers a fresh perspective on their prescription and management. She discusses the criticisms skeptics have, myths about their proper use, and the lesser-known benefits of micro-dosing. Additionally, she explores the concept of GLP-1 deficiency and explains her motivation for creating an educational course on these drugs for both laypeople and practitioners. Dr. Tyna Moore is a board-certified naturopathic and chiropractic physician and the founder and owner of Core Wellness Clinic in Portland, Oregon. She specializes in non-surgical pain management, natural pain solutions, and regenerative injection therapies for orthopedic and musculoskeletal conditions. Moore has a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine (N.D.) from the Western States Chiropractic College and a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) from the National College of Naturopathic Medicine.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Tyna Moore dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The lies and myths we are being told about Ozempic (00:00:16 / 00:00:16) Dr. Tyna’s mission to set the record straight (3:50 / 3:50) What the skeptics say about Ozempic (10:53 / 7:40) Where the GLP-1 agonist medications originated from (17:58 / 14:45) Benefits of taking the medications (26:32 / 21:32) Are people suffering from a GLP-1 deficiency (34:40/ 29:40) More than just calories in and out (52:30 / 47:30) Dr. Moore’s story on micro-dosing GLP-1s and the benefits she experienced (1:01:50 / 56:50) Concerns or myths about stopping these medications (1:07:40 / 1:02:40) Dr. Tyna’s education courses for laypersons and practitioners (1:20:00 / 1:15:00) Concerns about the obesity epidemic and lack of education (1:28:30 / 1:23:30) A national effort to address the childhood obesity crisis (1:40:10 / 1:35:10) Final Thoughts (1:45:30 / 1:40:30) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Tyna’s Podcast Dr. Tyna’s course For more on Dr. Moore, follow her on Instagram, YouTube, or her website. This episode is brought to you by LMNT, Lifeforce, and Lumebox.  Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. Head over to DrinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress; go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  Lumebox is offering my community $260 off their FDA-registered portable Red Light device! That's over 50% off! Go to thelumebox.com/dhru and get your Red Light device. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Tina, you feel pretty strongly that we are being lied to about the side effects of drugs like Ozempic and the place and role that they have in helping people truly get healthy. So I'd love to start off big picture. What are some of those lies that we're all hearing? And more importantly, why do you think we're being lied to? Number one, I think the biggest lie I'm hearing that I'm really done with is it induces muscle mass loss. That is a misnomer. The amount, the percentage of muscle lost is right in sync with any calorically restricted diet. It's right in sync with bariatric surgery. Anytime you put

somebody into a malnourished state, you don't protect their muscle by prioritizing their protein macros, by having them strength train. You're going to see muscle mass loss. The interesting part of that, to go one step further, is that they're actually looking at lean mass loss. And lean mass is all of your soft tissues, that's the number they're reporting. Muscle is part of your lean mass loss, but there are fatty infiltrates in the liver, in the pancreas, in the muscles, in folks who are metabolically unsound or suffering with obesity and or. And when they lose that with the use of GLP1 agonists, they're measuring that loss too.

So it's a more in-depth conversation that we're not really getting fleshed out in the studies. So I think that's the biggest one. The other one that I think has been put to bed recently is the thyroid cancer risk. The studies coming out on that have been correlative, not causative. They're looking at patients who are already having the struggles with type 2 diabetes already diagnosed with obesity, and then they are being put on a GLP 1 agonist. They're looking at their medical records.

That group of folks are already at high risk for thyroid cancer at a higher risk than their lean counterparts. But even then, it's correlative, not causative. And the interesting thing about the black box warning is that it was done on rats. If you actually go in and look at it, it was done on rats. These rats were given incredibly high doses. And what they don't tell you is that the control group of rats also developed this very rare form of medullary thyroid cancer. It's very rare in humans. It's very common in rats.

They develop it spontaneously. And so it's kind of comparing apples to oranges, but they slapped a big black box warning on. and the media really likes to run with that narrative. And then I would say the third big one is the gastroporesis. The headlines are very sensationalized and making it sound like gastropreasis is permanent and these folks' stomachs are paralyzed forever and they're doomed. That is not true. The data shows that when the GLP 1 is discontinued and it gets out of the system over the

course of a few weeks, gastrointestinal motility returns to normal. The other part they're not telling you is that folks who are suffering with type 2 diabetes and obesity are also. at risk, well, I should say more type 2 diabetes usually have some obesity with it, they're already struggling with gastropresis. Their vagus nerve is being sugared up by the hyperglycemia that they're suffering with through the diabetic process, and it's actually destroying the vagus nerve, which is causing gastric motility to stall. And so they're not really being diagnosed in the early stages. They're being told, oh, you have GER, you have reflux. Here's

some Pepsid. And then they get thrust on this super high dose of GLP1 agonis. Their stomach shuts down temporarily. And then we hear all about it all over the clickbait headlines. So I would say those are the big three. So let's be clear. This episode isn't being sponsored by Big Pharma. You don't work for Big Pharma. You're not on the payroll of Novo Nordisk. Why are you out there setting the story straight from your perspective about the potential of these drugs? What's your why? Well, first of all, I am in the world of naturopathic medicine. I am licensed in the state of Oregon to prescribe. I have full prescribing rights here. And I've always used compounding pharmacies. And so I knew that these were available in compounding pharmacies, which gives us the luxury of playing with a dose. And I initially

started studying these for very personal reasons. I personally was struggling with this sort of like middle aged chronic stress situation that was happening. My cognition was getting compromised. I was noticing it significantly. And I was starting to have a pretty significant flare in my psoriotic arthritis. I have access to things that most humans don't. I am in the world of regenerative medicine. That's my background. That's where I spent 20 years of medicine.

And everything I knew was not working. And so I kept looking and looking further. And it was actually my podcast producer. He wanted me to do an episode on Ozempic. And I was like, okay, well, let me research these. And the first thing I realized was that it is a peptide. It's not a drug. It's a peptide.

Peptides are just strings of amino acids that insert themselves where they need to go and they heal tissues. They're regenerative. They're usually anti-inflammatory and they're healing. That was very familiar for me in the regenerative medicine space. They just happen to get co-opted by big pharma. So I'm not even talking about the big pharma versions. I'm generally speaking about the compounded versions when I talk about this.

And I got to thinking, well, what do they do in the body? Like what is the mechanism outside of this weight loss conversation we're having? because I knew that they'd been on the scene, this family of drugs, if you will, has been in use for 20 years with safety and efficacy behind it, millions of prescriptions. It wasn't until the last few years that the weight loss conversation came up and everybody started losing their minds. And so I started looking, you know, that raised an eyebrow. Like when everybody runs in one direction, I'm like, hmm, this smells of propaganda.

So immediately I had to dig in because I love that stuff. And I found data that was just not at all what we were. being told. So of course I had to keep going. I initially did a podcast about it because I found neuroregenerative, neuroinflammatory protection, decreases in pain, musculoskeletal. That's my world. So that's the first place I started looking. And when I found that data, I was like, this is not adding up with what the mainstream media is feeding us right now. And this was last summer when it was like at the full height, the full frenzy. And I was watching all of the functional medicine community get involved too with the propagandized narrative. And I was like, this is so weird. What is going on?

This was like a social phenomenon. So I launched a podcast about it on my show and people lost their minds. And that's when I knew there's something going on here. So I kept digging. I kept finding data supporting its binding to receptors in different parts of the body and having these incredible healing impacts and really good data to support this in animals and in. And in, humans. And that's kind of where this all started for me. So I started using them. I'm my own guinea pig, got really profound benefits. And I started using them in my patients and in my family. And I'm talking tiny doses, not the standard dosing that folks are getting from the brand name. And the results across the board for various uses, only one person I put on it for weight loss.

Everybody else was for various different reasons. And the results have been incredible. So I'm beating this drum because I really want people to understand that there are other uses, of diabetes and weight loss that these peptides can impact positively. You mentioned some of the lies from mainstream media, but you also mentioned how your own community, which is made up of people that are into organic and wellness and holistic, who come from all sides of beliefs in the political aisle, that they revolted against this idea, that how dare you talk about Ozympic, semi-glutite, and these GLP-1 agonists. in a positive light. If you would summarize a lot of the views that they have adopted, which many of

my community might still have, how would you summarize those views? I don't want to put words in people's mouths. I feel like one, it's popular to jump on it. You know how the social media world is. When one narrative starts going and it's a big, speaking point, everybody has to make a piece about it. So everybody had to do something. Everybody had to jump in and say their two cents about OZemPEC. But I feel like they all jumped prematurely and they all sounded like they were parodying each other. And they all sounded like they were parodying mainstream media. So that's really what raised my hackles.

I was like, this is, this doesn't make sense. These are smart people. These are thinking people. These are people who, you know, I pushed back pretty hard over the past few years against the going narrative. And these are folks who were on my side during that. So these are people who believe in, you know, medical autonomy and take care of yourself. you know, you really have to prioritize your health first, probably very much like your audience. And so that was interesting. And I think the other part was that people have something to sell

and they have either a weight loss program to sell or they have a way of eating to sell. You know, it's this tribalism in the nutrition space. And everybody had something to sell or maybe they had a nature's ozempic to sell as a supplement. And so I don't know, maybe it was impacting their bottom line or they thought it was going to be. And so I didn't didn't have any conflicts with sharing the truth. Like my whole purpose on this planet is to save humanity. I think humanity is really in a pickle. I think our fertility rates are crashing. I believe metabolic health is, or I should say metabolic dysfunction is driving the whole process. And so I've been beaten this drum for a long time and popular or not, I will tell the truth at whatever expense

comes to me. And so I just started dropping data points. Like here's the study I found. Here's this study I found, and they lost their minds. And what I kept hearing over and over, like clockwork, was even if I would share out a post about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's prevention with GLP ones, I wouldn't mention weight loss. All I kept hearing was, you just need to eat less and exercise more. This is a lazy way of getting it done. That seems to be the going mindset. And that's really interesting to me, because if anyone's been paying attention to obesity medicine, that's not accurate. The whole eat less and exercise more thing is only but one piece of the obesity puzzle. So I don't know. It was sort of one of those like show me you don't actually know what you're

talking about without telling me situations. It was very telling. And so I don't know. And I have no problem. I'm not trying to be popular. I'm not trying to be everyone's best friend. I'm not trying to be the most popular girl on social media. And so I just kept coming up with more information as I dug deeper. And it seemed to be falling away though. I've noticed a lot of influencers there's coming around and changing their stance and actually referencing me and saying, you know, I listened to Dr. Tina's podcast series. I've changed my mind. Here's what I do know now.

And I think that's very exciting. Those are open-minded people. They're thinkers because at the end of the day, I'm just here to try to help the person in front of me feel better. And I've gotten countless messages from followers, countless saying, I was terrified to start these. I was overweight. I was dealing with diabetes or I was walking into diabetes.

And my doctor had been recommending them, but I had been scared away by the mainstream. I'd been scared away by the news and everything else and some of the influencers and your information has been so educational. So I started them. And these folks are now like three, six, nine months in. And they're messaging me incredible before and afters, incredible life-changing stories that would just melt your heart that has so little to do with only just weight loss, like just profound shifts in their health overall.

And that's why I keep going with it because it doesn't matter what the propagandized media is telling us. That story is not true, as we have seen in the past few years. They don't always tell the truth. But more importantly, I think that the truth will find a way as long as people continue to be brave and push it out. So thank you for having me on your show to do that. Well, thank you for being here. And we wanted to have you here because you've been very open with your own journey that you started off being quite skeptical about these. And if I would put my hat into the ring as well, too, I as just an individual who was skeptical, of, you know, just big pharma in general, but would always talk about it in a very nuanced way.

You know, I'm on a prescription drug that I'm very open with my audience about. As I sort of manage my APOB levels, I decided to start a Zetamide. Okay, we have to understand that, you know, there's some, there's good and there's bad in all aspects of stuff, but we can question things. But I had a natural skepticism, and if I would add my skepticism through the lens of somebody who I know you know very well, Dr. Casey means, it's the general idea of, Wow, especially out of this entire, you know, sort of global event, I'm not going to say the word so that we don't get suppressed on YouTube, but at this global event where we all were being told we had to be taking some medication to get through it. And a lot of us had questions about it. Being told that the only solution to the weight loss epidemic that we're having is to start kids from a very young age and have adults throughout their entire adult life on this drug that if we're looking at a lot of.

of the stats that are out there, people were saying was going to potentially be bankrupting us. Now, I always tell my audience, I don't have a degree in health. I'm not trained clinically. I get to be a host and have experts on like you. But that raised my sort of spidey senses of we're being told that this drug is the solution to something. And that's where I think a lot of my audience also felt that, okay, we're being told this is the answer. And then also it kind of feels like cheating, you know, being honest that there's a lot of us that felt that way. Sure, celebrities are getting results and they can pay for it and other things like that, but is this something that's going to be working for everybody? And so a combination of those views and then

you add in the last item, which were the side effects that you've already addressed, that led to what I would say was my uninformed layperson view. And what actually opened me up, we were chitch chatting a little bit beforehand, is that I had clinicians on the podcast, Dr. Gavri's Real Lion was one of the first and JJ Virgin, who's a nutritionist, who are very open. And I asked them, as I asked a lot of people, and I said, hey, what do you feel about this topic? And they both said, separately, the answer that I'm going to share with you is not going to be something that you're going to like, but I'm going to tell you the truth about it. I said, hey, listen, I'm asking you because I want to know the answer. And they opened up my eyes to the nuances. And I'm hoping that now

that I've found out about your work, that we can do the same thing for our audience here, and you've already started us down this journey. So let's set the groundwork a little bit in this process. So just give us a big picture overview of where these medications came from. They're focused on obesity, but more importantly, how you want to take the conversation beyond the topic of just addressing our obesity epidemic. So it started with a gillomaster. That's where this, that's where they discovered this compound in Gillomonsters. And they synthesized it. The OZempec is not Gillomaster venom, which is a narrative going around. It's a, it's a myth. But they found that when they looked at this GLP one agonist that it is made naturally in the body, it is made in the

cells. It's produced in the L cells of the gut. And it's also produced in the brain. Some doctors are going around saying that it's produced in the gut and it's getting to the brain. It's actually produced in the brain. That's what caught my interest. If it's produced in the brain and there's receptors all over the brain for it, it must be doing something beyond just, you know, appetite suppression, although it's a big player in appetite suppression. But it started out as a type two diabetic drug and the old versions of it, exenitide and then on up, they were not as compliant friendly. You know, you've got to do injections every day. People don't like that. People aren't as compliant.

They had more severe side effects. The nausea and vomiting side effects are real. We can talk about this as we move through. the episode, but my real argument here that what got me interested was what if we just apply small doses, not the standard dose. What if we start people on significantly lower doses? What would happen then? And we can only do that with compounded medications. As I mentioned earlier, that was the world I was familiar with. The compounded version of these peptides is really inexpensive. It's really very reasonable, especially if somebody is a good candidate for the lower dosing or the

microdosing, as I call it, I'm talking 30 bucks a month and being able to do away with a ton of other pharmaceuticals in their life. So that's where I was coming from. I'm not really here to defend its use in obesity, although there, that could be a whole other podcast. It really is transformational and life changing for people because many of the benefits that are happening, if people would look at the data, they are independent of weight loss. So the cardiovascular benefits that they found in the select study recently at the end of last year in 20, end of 2023, really profound cardiovascular protection in overweight individuals in their middle age. But then they've recently reanalyzed the data and they followed these people.

These benefits were independent of weight loss. It's not just about weight loss, right? It's not just about the type 2 diabetes. And I think there's nuance. Like you use the word nuance and that's exactly what this is. There's a nuanced conversation. And for some reason there's these dividing lines where people are like, it's all or nothing. So we're either using it in the brand name version. It's very expensive. I can

understand that there's access issues. Folks are waiting until, you know, they're arguing that only the severely obese should have it, only the diabetic should have it. I'm over here arguing that there's a whole host of other benefits that are preventative. And I'm in the world of preventative medicine. That's what I do as an atropathic physician. So my interest lies in how do we keep people from getting over here? Why are we not addressing issues early on? and using all the tools that we have available, there's no lack of semaclutide in the compounded version. There's no lack of terz appetite. It was actually Gabrielle Lyon. I had a conversation with her. I called her and I was like, I was scared too. I was hesitant. I was scared. And she's like,

do it. Just keep going with this line of thinking because I'm seeing really profound impacts on my patients. So that really got me going thinking we are using these only in very extreme cases at very high doses and I don't think this is a one size fits all. These are at the end of the day a hormone. Why would we give somebody a massive dose of a hormone and expect good things to happen, right? We're sending people into this far extreme version. We're crushing their appetites. They're going into malnourishment. We're only hearing about and seeing these really extreme side effects, which I don't discount. The nausea and vomiting is real. The potential for gallbladder issues is real. The potential of developing a gallstone and throwing it into the pancreatitis, and creating pancreatitis.

is real, but that's only at very high doses or if the patient isn't being managed closely. And I'm over here in the world of nuance, which is huge and uncomfortable for people. As we saw in the past few years, people don't like nuance. They want it to be very clear cut. It's the same tribalism with diets. Do I go carnivore or do I go vegan? What's the answer, Doc? I need to know.

That's not how it works. And so my interest in it was getting the word out because the plethora of benefits may not only be regenerative and healing and anti-inflammatory and life-changing for people, but it also opens the door to them not needing a whole slew of other pharmaceuticals, which that's the conversation that I'm trying to have because folks are put on these lifestyle medications like high blood pressure, statin drugs, all these drugs, and they're like, okay, doc, I'll be on these forever. No one says boo. And nobody would wait until someone had a heart attack before they'd give them a blood pressure

medication. And yet we're handling Ozempic very much like that. Unless you're extremely over here, you don't get a habit. And then if you do use it for any of those reasons, let's talk about the people who lose the weight and are still on it. They're messaging me telling me they're getting dirty looks from their pharmacist because their pharmacist is like, you don't need this. You're thin.

Well, she didn't used to be. She used to be 150 pounds overweight. But I don't think we need to wait until people are 150 pounds overweight. That's really what brought me to this conversation. And I just think it's a different conversation. Unfortunately, in medicine, things have gotten really. black and white and divisive, and then people pick camps because we've been trained that way over the past couple years. So I don't know if that answers the question, but that's where I'm at with it.

You mentioned the benefits. And we're going to go deeper into your story here in a little bit. You've actually been using these compounded peptides, as you like to refer to them, right? Because that's what they are. You've been using them on yourself. You've been using it on your family members. In fact, your daughter had a really interesting experience being on them as well, too. We're going to talk about that in a second and why you decided to use it with them and what their benefits were. But just big picture again, you mentioned benefits separate from obesity, which obviously that's a big one. You know, you mentioned Dr. Gabriel Lyne. She was on this podcast saying, sure, even if there are some side effects that are there, which there will always be

side effects with drugs, you have to also understand that heavy side effects, there's nothing more dangerous than being severely obese when it comes to your risk of cancer. when it comes to your risk of heart disease and many other chronic conditions. So that's been well established. So let's put obesity to the side. What have you seen from your patients that you've been microdosing with when it comes to the list of the benefits, especially women that you've been working with that are around that same age range that you're in where they're dealing and they're navigating through perimenopause

or they're firmly in menopause and they're struggling with some of the challenges in their own health journey? The really interesting thing to me is that my job, is to optimize patient's health. That's it. I optimize their health. I'm a regenerative medicine doc. I'm a longevity medicine doc. When a patient presents to clinic, especially a middle-aged woman, who we know is going through hormonal shifts, and she says, I literally just put on 15, 20 pounds out of nowhere. And I don't know what happened. I didn't change anything. And I know these women. They're lifting weights. They're going for walks. They're minding their sleep. They have their circadian

rhythm on point. They're doing all the things. That raises an eyebrow. That's actually the point to intervene at because if we let these women continue on, the next step is going to be high blood pressure and then they're going to need a high blood pressure medication. And then the next step beyond that is going to be perhaps a statin drug. This is if they're in the allopathic system. And then the next step beyond that is they're going to wait. You know, diabetes is a 15, 20 year process. That's what nobody's talking about. And the bulk of my patients, even 20 years ago, when I would run labs on people, the bulk of them would have some level of metabolic dysfunction, even if it was just a glimmer. And so I've always,

taking that very seriously. That's always what my platform has been about is getting people's metabolic health in order. I mean, I was telling people to lift weights and eat steak a long time ago when the big health influencers were telling them to go vegan and do yoga. I was not popular. I was not popular then. It's, you know, it still tends to not be popular. But that is a red flag to me. That weight induction. That means that insulin resistance is starting. That's the beginning of metabolic dysfunction. And there's a whole slew of downstream effects that happen that are not good. And the end of that trail is type 2 diabetes. But for some reason, in medicine, we wait until they get there before we do anything.

And that's, again, a 15, 20 year destructive process. They're having cardiovascular changes. They're having capillary changes. They're having retinal changes. Kidney changes. All the same impacts of type 2 diabetes is happening when they're on that spectrum. And then suddenly they hit the magic number of type 2 diabetes. That's where everybody's headed in the United States.

2018 data showed that roughly 94% of, of U.S. adults had cardiometabolic dysfunction. That's probably gotten worse since 2018, since lockdowns and, you know, what have you. So this is an emergency, in my opinion. It is driving our fertility crisis. It is driving so many issues. And I firmly believe it drove the poor outcomes of the past few years. And so if there's a tool in there that I, a lever I can pull to shift that and to get people into a more metabolically sound state, I'm going to pull it as early as humanly possible. And that's what I'm trying to talk about with these. They're peptides. So they are strings of amino acids that form peptides with peptide bonds. Strings of peptides form proteins. So in its most

simplistic sense, that's what these are. Samaclyotide is bio-identical to our own endogenous GLP1, except it's been tweaked with a little extra lipid to make the half-life longer. So there's a longer half-life in the body. None of my patients are getting side effects, not even nausea. We're not even dosing them to nausea to side effects. There's no point in that. And we're still having really profound changes. I got a video today from my mom. So my dad is the only one that I've got on this for weight loss, for like real frank weight loss. And he's the only one I'm dosing into regular dosages. And he's still not very high up. And we've gone very slow with it. So slow and low is the motto. And my mom sends me a video today of him in his skinny jeans. I mean, this guy was like

chair bound, housebound, hasn't been out to my home here in the past four years that I've lived here, five years, really living a hermit's life so obese, he can't walk around, falling down a lot, having a lot of cognitive issues, following a stroke, like just really one foot in the grave, if not both of them. And we just were at the point where like, he's not going to make it to Christmas. So I put him on Simacluetide, very low dose, very slow. Like I said, And my mom sends me a video today. And I'm not joking. If anyone wants to know where I get my sass from, it's my dad.

He's like shaking his booty and his jeans. His lights are on. He's making jokes. He's lost, I think only like 40 pounds. And he's still got a ways to go. But he's happy and he's excited. Like he has hope in his eyes and in his heart. My mom is on it because she has Crohn's disease.

And so she has chronic joint pain, tip to toe. Chronic joint pain has had it my whole life really, really incapacitating. She doesn't complain. She just chucks on. And I've got her on the tiniest dose. All of her joint pain's gone. Her lights are on. So I'm using it in both of them to stave off dementia and to keep their brain sharp. My daughter has PCOS pretty severely. She's had it since she was a child. I found it on labs when she was like six years old. And this is a kid that grew up in a naturopathic home. So you know she was being fed well. It's just this is kind of where we are as a species at this point. A lot of young women are dealing with PCOS unbeknownst to them. and they're walking into young womanhood and they're dealing with infertility and nobody's told them they've been rocking PCOS for a long time here. So hers was a really big turnaround. She's a bit neurodivergent. She's also very much homebound, suffers from a lot of depression and anxiety.

And the results with her have just been incredible. All of her cystic acne cleared. Her PCOS symptoms went away. Her mency's regulated. She's out in the world. She's got friends. She's got a boyfriend. She's like living life like a normal young woman should be.

It's just been completely remarkable. Like it makes me, it makes me want to. Like when I see her now, she's just so beautiful and she's, she's functioning. She's beyond functioning. She's participating in the world where she was not before. My husband, I've got him on it for cardioprotective reasons because his parents were adopted, both of them and they both have cardiovascular issues. His dad dropped out of a heart attack.

So we've got him on it for that reason. Also smoking cessation. it seems to work well on. Alcohol cessation, it seems to work well on. So these are all reasons that have nothing to do with weight loss that I'm seeing really, really significant turnarounds. For myself, massive improvements in mental outlook, mood, anti-anxiety, anti-depressive, significantly improving my autoimmune symptoms, significantly reducing my pain, my psoriasis.

This is all independent of weight loss. There is the bonus of a little bit of weight loss. has enjoyed a little bit of a kind of a layer of fluff coming off, but that's not what we're doing it for. And we're not cranking anybody into moving past their set point. Everybody's just sort of dropped whatever access they had on them, you know, sort of regulated out at their, what I call their fight and weight where they're just, you know, I am where I was in 2019 before all the stress. And it's just been remarkable that way. So I think used appropriately, they can be done. I mean, yeah, we want to optimize everyone's metabolic health. So that's helping everybody.

But not everybody needs weight loss. But for those who do, that is, I think, a viable tool, if done correctly. However, we've got a whole subset of humans over here who also could benefit that have just a plethora of different conditions that they're dealing with. You know, one of the criticisms that we heard from a lot of the people in the holistic, functional space was a line that sounded like this, which was, hey, depression doesn't exist because of a prozact. deficiency. Heart disease is not a deficiency of statins. And so on and so on. But where it's a little bit nuanced here, and you correct me if I got this wrong, is that you actually do feel that one of the primary ways these drugs work and why you are listing off a whole host of things that actually sound very attractive to a lot of our audience is you actually do feel that there is a GLP1 deficiency

that we're going through in society today. Number one, did I get that right? And number two, why do you feel that way? That is correct. And I want to clarify, because I had an obesity dot question me on this on social media recently, and I want to clarify, there's frank deficiencies that are congenital, there's deficiencies due to genetic reasons, you know, people come out not making enough of something. There's also functional deficiencies. And in the world of functional medicine, which I know a lot of the allopathic community wants to snub their nose at, This is not anything woo-woo. If a system is out of alignment and the hormonal system is being driven down or some other

production system in the body is being driven down because of an individual's poor health, that's a functional deficiency. We can correct that by supplying the necessary hormone or the necessary peptide while we correct their overall health. So it's not one or the other. It's not just crank the peptide and hope for the best. And I'll give you an example, thyroid. When somebody's really stressed out, when their adrenals are pulling on them, when maybe they've been encountering toxicity, what have you.

Maybe let's say a hairstylist. That's a classic, you know, they're up in chemicals all day. They will have a functional thyroid deficiency. I give them thyroid hormone. I don't give them crazy high doses, but I give them physiologic dosing to get their symptoms to abate to get them where they feel better. Now, an endocrinologist would say, well, your labs are normal. You don't have any issues. You don't need any thyroid hormone.

But I'm telling you profound changes in their health. their migraines go away. The weight starts coming off of them. Their cognition returns. That is an example of a functional deficiency where I'm going to apply a hormone at a physiologic dose. And so that got me thinking with this, what's going on here? So I dug into the data and we see with obesity, with diabetes, and with fatty liver that

these folks definitely have a GLP1 deficiency. But what's driving that? I do think it's the metabolic dysfunction. I do think it's the obesity. I do think that is driving that. And then I went one step further. Elevated insulin due to insulin resistance will induce a GLP1 deficiency. It'll drive GLP1 down.

That's how they work in concert. So it's a functional deficiency. I don't know necessarily if we're talking about genetic deficiencies, although I've had a few colleagues tell me that there are genes that code for GLP1. We don't have any good tests for GLP1, so it's hard to say where people are at. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to supply the peptide that they need. right? Does it make sense? Did I explain it well enough there? Yeah, you did. Okay. So I'm going to give them a little bit of something, something to make them feel better. And does that mean they need it forever? No,

but we want to correct the deficiency. And I think a lot of people are walking around with that, not just folks in that category that I just described. I think there's a lot of us for various reasons. Here's a great example of a functional deficiency. Since GLP1 is secreted from the L cells in the gut, how many folks do you know that have gut issues? Pretty much everyone, right? Leaking. gut, gut dysbiosis, IBS. Some folks have inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. Those people's guts are smoked. And I don't know if their L cells are working so well. There's also just age. Age will atrophy the gut lining over time. There's a lot of things that will mess up the gut lining over time. And that's going to impact the cells that secrete what they

need to secrete. So that's a functional deficiency that I want to correct. And that's more what I'm talking about here is that why are we not even considering that? I realize it's not easy to test for, but I think we can look at a symptom picture or we can even apply something experimentally at such a low dose. I'm talking such low doses in many cases that there's no risk of danger to see if the person feels better. And then we go from there. That's how we proceed in a functional medicine perspective is like we got to test and we got to try it out and we got to see how they do. and that's how we find out where, you know, what they're missing, what's, what's happening. I might give somebody a little progesterone without even testing them just because their symptom

picture adds up and I give them a little touch of progesterone and their whole lives change. So that was the outlook I was having with GLP ones. I was like, what if we just apply a physiologic dose and that's going to be different for everyone? What if we apply that based on what I know of the person and the individual sitting in front of me? Let's see what happens. And that's when I was, I've just been blown away. So yes, some people do have an ozempic deficiency straight up.

And we have tons of data to support that. But there's also probably a whole subset of people who are having GLP1 low levels. I guess we could call it a deficiency, a functional deficiency. And they might be in need of a little bit of this peptide too. That's my opinion. So on one side of the coin, you see this potential of this peptide at microdoses with a clinician who cares. Being able to give people a boost with all the dietary and lifestyle components that you've always been a big fan of.

Focusing on, obviously, a lot of people need to focus on their lean muscle mass and adding to that, especially as they age. Making sure we get adequate levels of protein, exercise, stress reduction, all the things that you've always talked about. And like I started off with, you see these GLP1 agonist as being able to give people. a boost that's there. And on the other side, so that's very clear. And on the, and on the other side, there's also this recognition, if I'm understanding correctly, that, hey, listen, our modern world is set up in a way where something is going on. Food is highly addictive. We have so many environmental toxins. People's parents are unhealthy than ever, and they're sort of born into an environment and a little bit of a, you know, a womb that is

unhealthier generations as we go on. And while we get to the root of figuring out how to get microplastic out of our balls and ovaries, that doesn't mean that we can't use targeted tools to help people actually have less of an appetite in some cases, less craving, less sense of depression and all these other benefits that you mentioned. So you recognize both sides of the coins. You're explaining that they both exist. You don't have all the answers in the world to deal with everything, but you're highlighting and letting people know that, hey, just like we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as we did with hormonal replacement therapy for women for many years, we don't want to miss out at the potential therapeutic benefits

of some of these drugs that early results are showing many people are benefiting from, even if you step away from the severe obesity conversation. Is that an accurate portrayal? Yes, that was very well put. I need to write that in a book. That was perfect. Well, so the way I was trained was as a licensed naturopathic physician. There are a lot of fake NDs out there.

And I understand why there's confusion with the general public. And I apologize for that. There's not much I can do, but I went to real medical school. I have a naturopathic degree in naturopathic license. I took board exams and I can prescribe and I'm not afraid to use that ability. So if a patient comes in and they're on a ton of pharmaceuticals and their lifestyles just kind of down here in the pits, my job is to ramp this up. I'm not going to take all their drugs away.

I'm not a purist. I just want to be really clear about that. I'm not being sponsored by big pharma and I'm not a purist. Like I am not afraid to use pharmaceuticals as needed. But the goal is to use them in the tiniest amounts necessary. So I was microdosing Prozac, for instance, 10 years ago or over 10 years ago. Like, I've been microdosing statins with people. This is not a new concept for me.

My goal is to get their need for the pharmaceutical as low as possible or to get them off. But that doesn't mean that my goal is to take them off as I elevate their lifestyle. As they put in the work and I'm the cheerleader and we get their health in order and their homeostasis in order and we elevate their health overall in their lifestyle, we don't need as many drugs or we don't need as high of doses. But if they need a little bit of an antidepressant, I'm not taking them off of it. If that helps them get through the day, that's fine. There's purists that say, you don't need any of that poison. I argue otherwise, and that's fine.

We don't have to agree. But going back to the hormones, I think it's been a really interesting time lately because when that women's health initiative study came out over 20 years ago, I was in practice and I just started in practice. And they were like, oh, hormones are dangerous. And I had been studying intimately bioidentical hormone replacement with a massive. I had spent a year precepting with her. And so I was really excited to use hormones.

And I had seen profound changes in women. I mean, she was treating breast cancer patients actively. You know, they were an inactive breast cancer. And she was applying estrogen in safe ways. And I was like, this is not what we're hearing. So anyway, that study comes out. Everyone gets scared of hormones. Those of us in the know knew it was a flawed study.

They were applying progestins, not progesterone. So we were like, well, this is bogus. We're going to keep giving hormones. And we're going to just be prudent and careful and keep track of our patients. and monitor them and test them and make sure we're not driving them down any bad pathways. And so we never stopped using them. And then just recently they came out and said, we reevaluated that data 20 years later and it's flawed.

And actually, it's really dangerous to not go on hormones because you may very well end up with dementia and other issues if you don't get the estrogen in there early. And I was like, yeah, no shit, right? Like it takes a while. It takes decades sometimes. But if I had listened to that and gone by the book, I would have countless patients suffering. So many women have suffered over the past 20 years. I mean, that's, some women entered menopause when that happened and they're not, now I believe, dead because they did not get

the hormones they needed. So it's a miserable existence to not have what you need on board. So I'm all for applying whatever the patient needs. And if it's a little bit of a pharmaceutical, even if it's a little bit of an antibiotic or whatnot. I mean, these same folks that were blasting Ozempic last summer or who maybe still are, they had no issue with some of the other pharmaceuticals that were popular over the past few years. They were fighting for them to be included, right? You know what I mean? Like the one that starts with an I and the one that starts with an H.

Those were, those are drugs that were very beneficial for a certain condition that were being vilified. And they were over there fighting for them. And this is the same group, you know, really just trashing on OZMPIC. And looking at that global picture, even the national level, like it's going to bankrupt the country. It is not. There is plenty of this product in the compounding pharmacies, but also. So these are going to, there's more of them coming down the shoot. These companies, I believe, are going to be forced to bring their prices down because they're

going to have so much competition. Right now, Eli, Lilly, and Novo Nordisk have no competition. But there's several of these JLP1 agonists coming out on the market from other companies. And so I think it's actually going to become more affordable, more readily available, more insurance companies are going to cover it. I don't see it being this big, ominous disaster that is brooding. I actually think that we're going to see a healthier United States population. We're going to see snack food companies go bankrupt.

We're going to see fast food joints go out of business or get less business. I mean, there's a lot of industries that are very concerned about these peptides right now. So we can talk about that if you want. But I speculate that there's a lot of big industries that have been profiting off of obesity and type 2 diabetes for a long time. It's a very profitable conditions for a lot of different companies and industries. I think those are going to be the ones that are struggling and going bankrupt. Well, it's not all rose color glasses. There are some major problems that are there.

And one of the biggest problems is there's actually not that many clinicians that are out there that are trained in this, that are practicing, that know how to microdose. You're working on that. We're going to talk about them a little bit. You have an awesome course. We're going to link to the show notes. But let's just continue and make sure, again, we lay a little bit of the land that's there. So you talked about this sort of global GLP1. deficiency that exist right now because of our environment, the world that were brought up in,

pest sides, gut help, all these things. Lack of sunlight, they're all playing a role in this. And we're going to continue to learn more about it. But ultimately, if your family members and your patients have benefited from a lot of things they benefited from, I'm understanding you're saying that they approved their metabolic health. It's not that these drugs did something magical for them, for dementia, for PCOS, for, you know, depression. Ultimately, their cravings had been reduced to a level at their hunger or their addiction to certain types of things that are there. Whatever was all going on, and I'm not a clinician, so you'll explain it better than I. ultimately that all played a role in improving their metabolic health.

And so them getting healthy is a byproduct of the drugs sort of giving them a little bit of a boost along with the lifestyle recommendations you make, diet, exercise, etc. That allowed them to step into a place of not having disease. Is that accurate? I think that's really fair to say, yeah. You know, in environmental medicine, when we're looking at toxicity levels, it's great to say get an air filter, get a water filter, do this detox, do all these different things to rid yourself of the toxins. But the first rule of thumb in environmental medicine is exposure,

avoiding exposure, right? And so you make a good point here because avoiding all that garbage going into people's mouths in the first place is going to be really profoundly beneficial on the tail end. It plays on doponergic pathways in our brain on reward circuitry. And so the desire to actually even consume these things just goes by the wayside. So but interestingly, people still, if you dose them low enough, they still want to eat. So they want to eat healthy food. People are making better food choices. They actually crave better food choices.

I've actually recently read something about how it's improving taste. So interesting. It's improving taste in those who are using it. So they're able to taste better. And one of the cardinal symptoms of poor health is that you start to become so mineral depleted because you're not eating enough good nutrient-dense food. A lot of obese folks are malnourished and overfed. They're getting a ton of ultra-processed carbs in their body, but they're not, and this is not everybody who is in the obese state, but generally speaking, eating a lot of

poor nutrient-dense foods whilst being malnourished from proper minerals, nutrients, macronutrients, micronutrients, protein, et cetera. And if they can taste better, because they're actually eating better. I think it's they're becoming more mineral replete. When you get people eating more healthy, especially some, you know, specific vegetables, they'll get the minerals they need and then they can start tasting their food better. So just a long way to say there's impacts that are happening that I don't even think we know that we don't even understand, right?

And we're seeing all these little nuances come out that are leading people down the pathway at better health. But more importantly, they actually heal the metabolism. they make the cells more insulin sensitive. They heal the metabolic pathways. They get insulin signaling corrected. They make insulin reception better so that the glute 4 receptor can come up on the cell membrane and it can bring in the sugar like it needs to.

I mean, it starts to correct these pathological broken pathways that so many people are in. Well, like I said, 94% of U.S. adults are in some version of that on that trajectory. And so it's just really exciting. It's not a Band-Aid that way. It's healing. I suspect that I'm going to be able to get off of these and only need to use them infrequently if my autoimmune disease flares. And I suspect I'm going to be able to get my patients off of them, but it's a timeline thing.

I think folks need to be on them for a period of time to heal up the mess that they had gotten into for whatever reason, right? Toxicity, stress, what have you. With someone who is more diabetic or has more weight to lose, they probably need to be on them indefinitely. but I don't keep anybody on anything all the time. I cycle, I rotate. I have different strategies that I teach.

And that's the same way I do hormones. And so I think that this whole, like, they're going to have to be on high doses for the rest of their life thing. That's just a bad way of doing it. But I don't know any woman who has an issue with being on her hormones for the rest of her life. You know, if you were needing some testosterone at some point, Drew, you're not going to be like, I think I'll stop this.

You know, if you feel good on a hormone, you're going to want to stay on that. if you're using physiologic doses for longevity purposes. It's just a very different way of looking at things. We're talking longevity medicine versus pathologic medicine. Most doctors are hung up over here. They're dealing with pathology. I'm not. I'm just trying to keep healthy people healthy or help people get to that place and then

maintain it. It's a different way of doing things. You mentioned something in the earlier part of the interview. You said, you know, calories in, calories out is not the full part of the story. And I just wanted to return to that for a. second because obviously so much of the appeal and the controversy around these drugs in the beginning was around the weight loss component. And as you mentioned, a lot of your clients and family members, even if they didn't have or were not on a weight loss journey, they returned back to

their sort of fighting weight, their normal weight that they would have had before, maybe some of these before they were really suffering with the metabolic dysfunction. Now, on the calories in and on the calories out, I'd love to sort of explain that a little bit more and have you explain it. From my understanding that ultimately, if people lose weight, they will be end up, they're going to do that because they're going to be eating less. They're going to have less energy intake. But as I understand from you, your feeling is that these drugs and the potential that they bring, they're impacting satiety, dopamine, this complex sort of relationship inside of the body of hunger and where hunger comes from.

So they are reducing the craving, which will ultimately end up, and the reward system, which will ultimately end up leading you to eat less calories, intake less energy, and that's how you end up losing weight. It's not that the drug is doing something magical, that it's burning fat on its own. You ultimately have to consume less calories to lose weight. Is that incorrect? Correct? Where would you like to clarify that?

I think it's a little bit incorrect, and I'll tell you why. So I did not change the amount I was eating at all and I lost weight. And that is because the peptide improved my insulin sensitivity. And so when folks are insulin resistant, that's a long explanation. But basically modern humans are generally across the globe moving towards insulin resistance. And when that happens, you are swimming in insulin that is not being uptaken into your cells appropriately. And you need insulin to signal the cell to bring the receptor. up to the membrane to get the sugar in the cell. The sugar is the fuel of the cell. In the insulin

resistant state, which is where most folks are, that's when they're walking into pre-diabetes and then into Frank diabetes, that insulin is pro-grow. And insulin is, it is a sabotager of your body fat. It will start to preferentially take any calorie that you eat, whether it comes from protein or fat or carbohydrate, and it will move it into your fat cells. Preferentially, and it puts it in a form that's very difficult for the cell to burn as fuel. So we do not want high levels of insulin and we do not want screwed up insulin signaling. We don't want insulin resistance. There's also leptin resistance, which is a whole other conversation of that's a signal

from your fat cells in the most generic terms. Your fat cells secrete leptin. It goes to the brain. It tells the brain that you're full. It's a signaler of how much energy is in the system. And then there's grelin, which is secreted from your stomach. And it tells you whether you're hungry or not. When your stomach's empty, Grelin goes gur in the brain, and it tells the brain that it is hungry.

So all of these play in harmony and they need each other to work. They don't signal in isolation. They all work together. And insulin's in there as well with GLP1s. And so that whole orchestra working better and more efficiently is going to lead to fat loss. And I think it has nothing to do with taking in calories or not. Also, all calories are not the same, right? this whole if it fits in my macros.

They think, you know, if I'm only eating X amount of calories and it's all from French fries and ho-hoes, it's fine. That is not how this works. Your food is information. Your food, depending on what form it's in. I mean, even the difference between a chewy steak and a minced steak or a ground beef is going to give a different signal to the body. And so, and it's both beef, right?

It's just coming in different forms. One's a little bit more processed. Food is information and how that food is metast. metabolized in the body is not just about the caloric load of it. And I think that these gLP ones are helping the whole orchestra work better. And so signaling is going to improve, and it's not just less calories. It's the healing of that insulin sensitivity and the signaling. And there's other signaling pathways there at work that I think it's playing on, including dopamine. And so it's not just less calories, less food, intake, weight loss. I think

it's more complicated. Plus, there's the whole hormonal conversation, and we don't entirely know what it's doing, but I suspect it's playing a little bit with some of our sex hormones as well. And for instance, when estrogen drops in middle age and the middle age woman, she becomes more insulin resistant. So she gets fatter and she starts putting fat specifically around the midsection in that belly fat. That's an estrogen issue. That's not a calories issue. That's a middle age issue. It's not a slowing of the metabolism necessarily, but yes, the thyroid will start to slow down, so you will start to get cellular, metabolic slowing. And so all of these things work together. And I believe that GLP-1s are playing on all of these and improving them. And so they're going

to work better, which is going to lead to less fat deposition and potentially more fat burning. Is that, did I say it simply enough for everyone? It's a big, big topic. It's a big topic. It's a controversial topic and even people in our own space have a lot of different opinions, you know, on it. You know, I've asked some of the individuals that I mentioned earlier, like JJ Virgin and Gabriel Lyon and other individuals and generally the consensus and I don't want to harbor on this, but why I do want to talk about it, I want you to have your, you know, how you think about it, how you view it.

Why I think it's important for our audience to go into and cover from the different experts like yourself that I have on is that let's say your view that you've shared over here, that's very similar to like the hormone insulin model, right? Would you say that accurately, right? So it's a hormone insulin model we've had on Dr. Jason Fung, Robert Lostig, different individuals that sort of feel that component. And then there's other people that feel that those things, those hormones, they play a big role in satiety, in hunger, they can cause overeating.

But when controlled exclusively for calories, although in a real world, you know, nobody's measuring their calories to the tea, we wouldn't tell anybody that, oh, you can gain weight. Like if somebody was underweight and they needed to gain weight, we wouldn't tell them, you can do that just by manipulating your hormones and actually not eating any additional calories that are there. Would you say that that's true? Like if somebody need to gain weight, would we manipulate their hormones without asking them to actually consume more calories?

Well, I have seen patients put on muscle with just the addition of testosterone and not really ramping up their calories. I mean, we can't. Again, you can't know for sure. But when you get somebody into an anabolic state, muscle will pack on. It's, I mean, it's nuanced. I don't think anybody really knows. I don't discount the calories. It's part of the equation.

I think all of these things are part of the equation for sure. And so I have found, well, I'll tell you about GLP1s, all of my super fit friends, my people who, are really dialed in with good muscle mass. There's a lot of people taking GLP ones now since I started talking about these and they're microdosing them and I talk to them and some of these are big influencers. And they have all said the same thing. They're like, it kind of feels anabolic. And I was like, what do you mean? And they're like, I am like it feels anabolic like when I take testosterone. And I was like, really, I had a similar experience because I have taken testosterone. This is anecdotal. But I find this really interesting because in a really metabolic, this is my high.

hypothesis in a really metabolically sound body, I think that these peptides have profound, almost anabolic-like properties. We know that they actually help bring in more amino acids into the muscle. So they work, actually, there's a paper that has the word anabolic in it in the title, along with GLP1, there's anabolic-like process that happens, more profusion of blood flow into the muscle, and then bringing in more amino acids, which is anabolic. So I don't know. I don't know necessarily.

And I don't think that it's just not all calories. It is not as simple as saying they are having their appetite suppressed. They are not eating as much. Therefore, they're losing weight. That's it. I don't think that's it. I think there's more to it. Great.

Awesome. You know, I want to go back to your story here for a second. You know, you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that you actually had a podcast producer say, you know, hey, would you want to explore with this? Would you want to try it? you talked a little bit about your experience, but you didn't go into too much detail. So give us a little bit of the background of your health and why you feel you responded pretty well to these drugs when you started to microdose them for yourself.

Yeah, perfect. Oh, I want to add one thing, though, on the question you just asked me prior, ketosis, I have, this is anecdotal as well. I have a couple friends who are constantly testing to see if they're in ketosis. They're really into ketosis. and they were having struggles maintaining ketosis or getting into ketosis despite their best efforts, despite the strength training, despite being really, I mean, these folks are really careful with their food, far more careful than I am.

And they, I have heard the same story multiple times now where a small dose of GLP1, even just for a few weeks, and that's it, then discontinued, drop them right into ketosis and they've been able to maintain it. I have no idea what that's about. I'm just sharing it here for the first time because yesterday another person told me and I was like, I'll be darned. That is really interesting to me. And these, again, these are really metabolically sound bodies. These are not people who are in any kind of pathology metabolically. So, but they are women who are aging. So that's one thing they had in common. Okay. So for me, so my podcast producer

is so cute. He's like, you have to do an episode on Ozzypic. And I was like, no, no, no. I don't, I don't like talking about weight loss. I just don't. I don't like talking about it on my platform. I find it really uninteresting. I think if specifically women, is who follow me if they were to strength train and take really good care of themselves. For the most part, that part corrects for the most part. But then I found myself in middle age and I was that lady who was walking into my clinic, which I used to kind of think, oh, well, that really sucks for them. They would walk in and be like, I just gained 15 pounds out of nowhere.

And it's all in the midsection. What the heck is going on? And they had their hormones dialed in and they had everything dialed. And I was like, I don't know, but that sucks for them. And we would work and work and work. And I now know if I had GLP once as a tool, I would have been using them back then and probably getting great results. I was that woman.

There I was last summer. And I was trying harder. I was really listening. You know, Gabriel Lyon's book came out. I was, I'm friends with her. And I was like, I just have to try harder. And I mean, because she's such a tough babe, you know? And I was like, I just got to toughen up.

And I got to get in the gym more. And I was doing that. And I was just blowing up, Drew. Like, I was just, you can see videos of me. My face is just going like, I was just getting bigger. And I was like, what the heck? So I was like, all right, I'll study these. And like I said, I started researching the brain, the pain, all that jazz to see what was happening and just blown away by what I was finding.

And I thought that's good enough for me because those are my cardinal symptoms. And I mean, forget the weight loss. I just wanted my pain down and I wanted my brain function back. And so I started using them myself. And it correlated with the time. I actually did my first podcast about it. I wasn't on them yet. And then I started using them in a small dose. I had a bunch of girlfriends. I called up. I called up everyone that I thought would be a good candidate, whether I was their doctor or not. I said, hey, you know, these were all clinicians with license to prescribe. And I was like, I want to tell you what I'm finding. It sounds like it would be something helpful for you of what I know of you. So they all started. And I won't name names, but a lot of

people started going on low doses, very low doses of GLP1. Everybody was playing with different doses, different timelines, different cycles. And I kept track of them over the past year. The results were really, really profound. My spine went from fusing to being much more pliable. I immediately felt like moving more. Immediately. That's one thing I noticed with people. They immediately feel like moving more.

So that is what I don't know if that's weight loss or not. Who cares? I think it's the immunologic impact. I think it's driving down autoimmune disease and inflammation and they want to move again. And so people who had been moving and then stopped moving and feeling really terrible want to start moving again. I'm seeing this with mold patients. I'm seeing this with people with more severe, you know, chronic illness. illnesses. And when you start moving again, you start feeling better. So it's kind of that chicken and

egg feed forward mechanism, right? Is it the GOP one? I don't know. Is it the fact that they're moving more? Great. Everything's moving in the right direction. That's what I care about. People are making better food choices. Cravings are going down. Sleep is improving in most cases. I will say some people get insomnia from it and that sucks. Some people actually have an elevation and heart rate and they can't tolerate it, even at very low doses. And that sucks. Some people are reporting. a lowering of heart rate variability. We don't want that. That sucks.

My heart rate variability went up and my heart rate went down. So it's a mixed bag. I'm not saying this is for everyone, but I have noticed in general really profound positive benefits. And some people are having such a profound antidepressant effect from it that they're able to go off all their other antidepressants. And for them, it's worth maybe having a little bit revved up of a heart rate.

And so we're working that out. What is the mechanism there? I'm not sure. can we improve other aspects of their health to bring that down perhaps but you know again it's nuanced it's not a one size fits all it's not a blanket approach it's not a blanket dosing strategy it's working intimately with the patients and seeing you know what makes them tick and what helps them and for some people so the nausea thing we have receptors in our brain there's a nausea center in our brain and it it has a bed of glp1 receptors in it i think some people might have a richer bed of receptors than others so i think

this peptide might make some people more nauseous than others. And some people just don't tolerate it well at all, but they do great on terse appetite. So it's been kind of across the board, but I played with all of them myself personally, going back to your question, and I have gotten a little too high of a dose on myself. I'm my own guinea pig, and I, that's not fun. I get it why people get scared and their stomach is in terrible pain. I understand. I do think with the compounded, a lot of these come very concentrated, unfortunately, and you can pull up a little bit too much. And a little too much can be way too much in a really metabolically sound body. And so you've got to be careful. I understand why some folks are ending up in the ER. But I'll tell you what I just had happened this morning. I was talking

to an ER nurse. She had me on her podcast. She said, you know, originally I was very much against these. And now after watching all of your content, I've changed my mind. And she's now on them herself, which I thought was, and she's having great results. But what she said was she cannot walk into the without there being a patient in the ER who has had some kind of overdose and is in terrible horrific pain or they're vomiting profusely and they can't slow it down. There's like nothing that will touch it. It just has to play out. They got to put an IV in their arm and let it play out.

And she said after listening to me, she started looking at their charts and she noticed what I say all the time, which is the dose makes the poison. And she found that in all cases these people were on very high doses. So that's interesting and also anecdotal, but it's corresponding to what I think. think is happening. I think a lot of folks are just taking really high doses, getting cranked up too fast, too high, and we're seeing it play out in a really negative way. And I just think there's a more elegant way to do it that doesn't have any of that involved. One of the big concerns that a lot of people had was what happens when I decide to get off or if I want to get off? And you

mentioned that you actually have intentions of wanting to get off. So for those in our audience that are listening or watching today, can you first summarize, even if you don't believe it, what some of the early concerns were that people were saying about people who get off of these drugs, Ozempic, Wagovi, all these drugs that are there. What was a lot of what you saw in the media? What are the things that you're thinking about as you think about potentially getting off of them? And why would you want to get off if you've listed all these incredible benefits that our audience is hearing, why wouldn't you want to stay on it forever? That is a good question.

So first of all, I always think about receptor sensitivity, and I do think we're going to see a problem in the near future with folks who are on very high doses. Their receptors are going to get flooded to the point where the cell starts pulling back receptors. And so the amount they're using isn't going to work anymore. And I'm already hearing this from compounding pharmacist friends that folks are calling and saying, I need to go up. And the high end dose is 2.4 milligrams.

And they're asking for three milligrams because it's just not one. working anymore for them. They're probably not doing all the other things, though. They're probably just using, I'm guessing, I mean, why would you have anyone at that high of dose? I don't know, but that's what's happening in the world. And I think that's going to happen to the general public at large that's being put on these Mamsy Pamsy and not doing all the other lifestyle modifications. I would go off only to cycle because I want my receptors to stay really robust. And so I don't ever stay on any hormone all the time. I even go off thyroid for a little while to let my receptors clear and come back online. So I rotate hormones. And that's just how I've always done it. We call it a

hormone holiday, if you will. So I would like to be able to cycle these. I probably think they're going to be in my arsenal forever because they have such a profound impact on my immune system that I don't want to go for long periods of time, but I don't stay on testosterone forever. I don't really stay on anything forever. I just sort of rotate and cycle through. I think what was the first part of your question again? What were some of the headlines around people coming off of it that were so scary that prevented a lot of people for not even wanting to try it in the first place? Well, so I think when you get dose high and heavy, you are going to run into the nausea and potentially vomiting, although the rates are much lower than I'm seeing some people talk about

on different podcasts. There's certain people going around different podcasts sharing out really, really high, Scott, you know, 80% of people with severe nausea. That is incorrect. The nausea, even just mild, is more around 20 to 25%. That's what several studies have shown over and over. So I think folks are going off it for a variety of reasons. One is probably cost because they are exorbitantly expensive.

A study just came out showing that it only costs like $5 to manufacture, but they're charging Americans close to $1,000 a month, which is insane. The same drug is being sold in Germany for like $60 a month. So we're 75. It's just ridiculous. They're price gouging Americans. So I think people go off it for that because the insurance game on this one is lame. They usually only give people like six months worth of coverage.

So people are going off it for that. People are going off of it like I said probably because they're having some severe gastrointestinal side effects that are not fun. I'm hearing from a lot of my followers. They're like, I'm trying your microdosing strategy. And it turns out they're actually just going on the lowest dose possible from the pens, the pre-filled pens. And it's way too high and they feel awful. So I get why they're going off of it. the concern is that all the weight's going to come back. And the studies actually show that. So

really high rates of weight recurrence, of weight gain recurrence. But there's newer studies showing that those who exercise during, there's a whole subset of people that they've studied, that exercise was not part of the program. So those who are exercising regularly, any kind of exercise, really, they didn't really specify, just getting 150 minutes a week. Those who are tapered down, so slow increments down. And I even saw some doctors out of Italy talking about how they're just using it low. Their version of low is different than my version, but they're calling it individualized dosing. And meaning you just take the patient up to where they're getting symptom relief and they're getting the results they want. And you don't have to crank it up into the sky high level. So I think

we're going to see more of that in the allopathic community even at large. I think doctors are going to realize like, oh, I don't have to go to this 2.4 milligrams just because that's what the studies show. We can actually just take people up to, you know, if they're good at one milligram or if they're good at half milligram, whatever it may be that they can bring people. And that's still much higher than I dose, but they can bring people up there and they don't have to bring them into skyrocketing levels. So you can titrate them lower. Some people are just on a maintenance dose, a very low dose. And that might be, you know, spread out over a couple weeks. So there's different varieties of dosing strategies that are happening that are allowing people to maintain the weight loss. And I've heard from several

people of my following say, I was on it. I'm doing all the things that you preach. I do all the lifestyle. I'm in the gym. I'm doing the stuff. And I went off of it and I've maintained the weight loss. And like I told you about my friends that got themselves into ketosis and then just discontinued for whatever reason, they've maintained it. They lost weight. They went into ketosis. So I'm not really sure, but I feel like there's a lever being pulled in the body. And the goal of the physician is to figure out how to pull that lever at the lowest dose possible. That's my strategy. That's really the message I'm trying to bring is how can we kind of reset the circuit? It's almost I felt it myself. And this is what I kept telling my husband before I went on them.

He's an electrician. I said, you know, like when the breaker blows in the house and you have to go reset it? He said, yeah, I go, that's what my brain feels like. I feel like I just need someone to come in and like reset the breaker. And I now have been on them for, I guess, 10 months. And that's exactly how it feels. It feels like somebody reset the breaker. And I go extended periods off of it now. I'm going longer and longer periods off of it when I'm in my off cycle. And it's just been awesome. So I don't think it's a forever drug, but in some people it might be. People who truly have the disease of obesity, not everyone who's obese has the disease, but the people who really do have the disease of obesity, and there's different reasons for that. There's genetic components. There is a reality here that we

aren't discussing in the functional medicine community that I wish they would appreciate more. But for those folks, they might need to be on it forever. And I think that there's a way to do it elegantly so that that is sustainable. You know, taking a moment here to recap some of the key points that our audience has taken away before I go into our next section, there's in your view, and you're making the case for it, there is a lot of potential here. If that potential is going to be unlocked, it's really about for a lot of our listeners that are generally, a lot healthier than the general population, but are still suffering from many of the things that you mentioned that you or your family members were suffering for and your patients.

If that potential is going to be unlocked, it's got to be a hyper-personalized dosing that's there, that's monitored, which requires a clinician to prescribe it and monitor it. You know, we can't get these, you know, over the counter. You can't go to compounding farmers yourself and try to pick one up unless you're, you know, a clinician yourself. And then those things are combined with all the beautiful lifestyle changes that are there. And the combination of all those and the momentum that somebody feels when they start to see that their body's making progress, when they start to see their addiction and their hunger levels change, there is this compounded effect where people start to

be able to capture a lot of the potential that these drugs offer. But it has to be the combination of those and then again monitored over a period of time right is that accurate yes and i want to add one point that i haven't talked about neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to be plastic to learn things to rewire neurons and so if you're constantly in a mode you will wire hard into that mode but that is changeable and flexible and it gets harder and harder as we age these peptides are protective to the brain, they reduce neuroinflammation, and they in many ways help with neuroregeneration. And so when a person is on them, it is a window of opportunity to take advantage of that neuroplasticity that I believe they are inducing. So what that means is if you take that time

to relearn new habits to really get into aspects of lifestyle that maybe you haven't mastered before, maybe it's your nutrition, getting that on point, maybe it's getting your exercise dialed in and becoming a non-negotiable in your life and your schedule. Whatever it may be, maybe it's really just honoring your stress levels and working to lower them, which the peptide, I will say, is like an anxiolytic. I take it and I'm within 10 minutes. I'm like, ha, I'm so much calmer. So there's different aspects here, but using that window of opportunity when patients are on it

to rewire their brain and to really drive in and hardwire these new lifestyle habits, that's something that no one's talking about. And I think that plays into the last question of like, do they have to be on them forever? That's where I think that people are missing the boat is that time on these peptides matters, not only because the healing may take some time, but also we really want to take advantage of that neuroplasticity. And the folks that I have on it who aren't doing the lifestyle things, although I will say, like I mentioned, that people start wanting to do better.

They just inherently want to. But if they're not, if they're not strength training, if they're not taking this window of opportunity to really drive in new lifestyle habits, I'll pull the prescription because we are playing with something that's really potentially very powerful and we don't want to just hardwire in terrible habits and eat less. You know, that's not the goal here. The goal is to take the time to use the peptide to put the person back in the driver's seat. There's really an onus of control that comes over folks when they're on them and they really feel like they have control of the ship again and they feel much more normal. That's the word people keep saying. I feel normal. My

appetite's normal. My drive for whatever vices they were having has normalized. And so using them in a strategic way to get folks dialed in whilst on them, I think is the name of the game. I just wanted to add that. Thank you for adding that. That was awesome. You know, many people in the audience, after hearing you, being on all the podcasts that you've been on recently and speaking on Instagram and your own podcast as well, too, that we'll link to in the show notes below. You can see the beautiful logo for it in the background as well. Sorry. Your YouTube channel.

I love it. Don't say sorry. I want to plug you as much as possible. Thank you. I was going to take it down, but I was like, oh, it's heavy. I don't want to miss it. Don't you dare. Don't you dare take it down.

You need to shout from the rooftop as to who you are and how people can follow you because you're an important voice that is part of this discussion. And you always have been, even with your COVID. commentary and other aspects. So as you've been out there more, many individuals, I even had this experience myself. I emailed you personally and I said, hey, I know we have a podcast coming on and I have a friend that's looking for somebody who's a doctor like you that's based in this area of the world that they could work with. And you replied back, if you wouldn't mind sharing. Yeah, that's a hard one. That's a hard. I, well, I say that because

I closed my practice in 2018 and it was very difficult to refer my patients out. They just didn't. I mean, I gladly did, but everyone I referred them to, many people came back. It was two years of patients coming back being like, they're not, they don't think like you. They don't, they don't prescribe like you. They don't do it like you. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I just have my own unique set of skills that I honed through time. And it is hard. But I, if I'm going to guess your question is how do people find someone? Is that? Yeah. How do people find someone and more importantly, because I know the answer to that a little bit is that what are you doing to educate more individuals and practitioners? You have an amazing course. I'm actually kind of going through it right now. So I'd love to plug that and have you

chat about that as well too. Oh, thank you. What are you doing to raise awareness so that this becomes more accessible? Because in an honest way and in a nice way, we are bursting people's bubbles a little bit after getting them hyped on all the therapeutic benefits of these peptides at micro doses combined with the lifestyle factors. But really the missing piece of the puzzle is you need, at least right now, you need a clinician who's open-minded, who's wellness first to be paying attention to you, see how you do, and personalize your dosage and get you on these microdosage that's out there. Otherwise, if you don't.

And you just look up all these direct-to-consumer companies that are online and there's plenty of them. And you start there, you run the risk of starting off with a higher dosage and doing a lot of the things that you have said are some of the challenges that people have experienced with OZempic. So I'll let you get a chance to chime in on that. Thank you. Well, education is primary. And so my goal with coming on all these podcasts and trying to get the message out is just getting people educated. And I've got a cohort of people who say, I don't want to take your class. I don't want to take your course because it seems like it's just for doctors.

And I'm like, no, it's for everybody because something that I learned, I was honored to take over my mentor's practice. He died of cancer. And he was a brilliant doctor. And he was really great with regenerative medicine and hormones. And I had so many of his patients teach me about hormones. They were these guys in their 70s and 80s. They had been bodybuilders or ex-athletes. and they were still incredibly fit and, you know, just, just oozed vitality.

And they taught me how to do a lot of this medicine that I ended up doing in my practice with many of my patients because they taught me about hormone cycling and they taught me all these nuances. Getting educated and knowing what it is that you're after is nine-tenths of the equation. An open-minded doctor who is interested in learning, if you come to them kindly and you say, look, I have all this literature. I'm interested in trying this. And here's actually the strategy that I would like to use. I was very open to that as a physician. And I know many would be. In fact, I'm hearing back from people in my course saying, my doctor was pleasantly surprised to know that I

just wanted a very small dose. You know, like most doctors are not opposed to dosing as low as possible on a drug. And so even the starting dose of the brand names, the pens, might be low enough for many people, especially if they've got extra weight to lose. And so inside my program, I have a whole module on how to find a practitioner, how to find somebody to help you, you know, step by step. And it's working. I'm getting feedback from people saying, you know what? My doctor said yes, or I went outside of my traditional primary doctor because you probably are going to have to find somebody. And you might have to pay out of pocket, probably, to find somebody who's going to work with you on this. But finding somebody who's open-minded in the longevity space or the functional

medicine space. Some people are sending their doctors into buy the course, which I think is very cool and they're doing it. And it's been great. The other piece is that if you're educated and you're empowered and you know what it is that you're looking for, you actually know what side effects are. You know what side of because part of this puzzle is the biogenic hormone replacement too. And a lot of people need one of those hormones that I talk about in there. You know, maybe it's adrenal, maybe it's thyroid at the very least. Just knowing what you're doing and knowing what the symptoms are, knowing what the side effects are, knowing just kind of how to navigate the landscape. It's so empowering. And so that's what I'm trying to do with this course. I wanted to put my

clinical reasoning for helping patients optimize their metabolic health somewhere affordable and put it all in one place. And I'm not done building it out yet. I've still got a few modules to add. And it's it's becoming a little bit of a beast, but it is so good in my, I have to say, I don't, I don't know what you think, but I am so proud of what I put in there because it's the culmination of decades of clinical experience and not only mine, but my mentor is on top of that 20 years. So I just want folks to empower themselves through knowledge because when you know better, you do better and blindly trusting a doctor to apply a therapy to you that you know nothing about. I mean, we saw where that got us the past few years. I'm not a fan. I've never been a

fan of that strategy. I inside my course, the way that I teach the lessons, the way that I talk on my podcast is exactly how I talk to my patients. And the way I'm talking to you, today. Like I want people to have the knowledge that they need, even if it's more than they think they need, so that they can go in just armed with education. And that way, and data, I have 20-some pages of all the studies that I'm finding. My assistant puts them in every week. And it's, it's just a library of studies in there. So that basically, and it's organized by condition. So if you are struggling with a certain condition, then you can go to that data and look through it. And hopefully it teaches people to take the bull by the horns and learn to Google things

themselves too. I mean, that's part of this is like, I want to teach people how to think and how to start looking and how to start researching because we saw in the past couple years that blindly following, you know, three letter agencies and what have you is just, you know, it was not the way. That's not the way. We are, we are living in a landscape where if you don't have a basic knowledge of nutrition, health, strength training, just how to take care of yourself, then I think you're a sitting duck. So I'm really trying hard to put a comprehensive amount of knowledge. It's not just about GLP ones into one place. And that's my course. And if that's not your cup of tea, I have the four-part video series, which is free. And I have

multiple podcast episodes about it, which are all free. And those have gotten a lot of people very far. They started with that. They found a practitioner just based on that. They never bought anything. And they're messaging me too saying, you have profoundly changed my life. Thank you so much. Like here's a before and after picture of me. Here's where I was. Here's where I am now. And it was just because they watched a few hours of free video content.

So I'm trying to provide something for everyone to get people started. And I'm really passionate about this because I think done correctly, this peptide has the potential to really impact the human species in a positive way. Well, one thing everybody can do. And we still have a few more questions here. If you have time, of course. Yeah, go for it. One thing everybody can do, we're going to link to in the show notes, but I just want to share

the screen over here for those that are following on YouTube. Your four-part video series is called OZempic Uncovered, and you can go to your website, Dr. Tina.com, obviously spelled with the T-Y-N-A, and they can go, we'll link to in the show notes, OZempick Uncovered, and they can sign up for free over there, and they can go part of this four-part module. And it's a fantastic overview going deeper into a lot of the topics that we covered here in today's podcast episodes. You can find a link for that in the show notes on YouTube as well as on the audio side of it to Apple and Spotify. Thank you. And we're adding to that. My team and I met

yesterday and we're going to add a few more videos to that and a bit more education just because since launching that in February, I've gotten so many questions and a few questions are coming through on a theme. And so we want to make sure to address that in there too because we really just want people to, again, just be able to even share that free video series out with their physician just to maybe start getting them thinking about what it is that I'm trying to lay down here. Yeah. And one thing that I've found very helpful, it's just even my process of helping a friend who was looking for somebody to be a doctor that would go on the journey with them, is I even just sent them one of your podcast episodes. And that doctor listened. They had an

open mind about it. And they were, okay, you know, this is not an area that we've, you know, I'm in other aspects, peptides, et cetera. But I haven't done a lot here. But let's learn to and let's go on this journey together. And I think that's a beautiful thing. That's kind of like the early days of medicine and they're talking to other people and they're getting more education themselves. So I love this. Yeah.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do. I love this. Thank you. Yeah. Is there any part of you that if there is something that does at all worry you or occasionally keep you up at night about this area, this conversation as a whole, a Zempig is part of it, but really just our larger. obesity epidemic, what would that be? You know, what are some of the things that still

weigh on you about the concerns of if we don't navigate this epidemic, right? If we don't navigate the medication dispersal right, you know, these are the potential consequences to humanity. Yes, I've been thinking about this for decades and really, you know, I'm 50 years old and I watched our species move into obesity. There was like one or two obese kids in our whole school when I was growing up and they had true glandular issues. And so I've watched this evolve over the many decades and it's it's greatly concerning because I also know the fertility impact that obesity and type 2 diabetes has on the mother, the offspring, the epigenetic coding to the offspring. So these babies are coming out having been bathing in insulin for nine months. And then even the breast

milk in the mothers who are in a metabolically compromised state are, is contributing to this. And these kids are pretty much flagged epigenetically for a life of obesity and diabetes themselves. And we're a couple generations into this. So that really weighs heavy on me. And I do think that the blanket application of these GLP-1s at high doses without proper counseling, without proper education, without a comprehensive program in place, I mean,

I think doctors need to be having group coaching programs. They need to be having nutritional therapists on staff, registered dietitians. There needs to be, or maybe the hospitals can launch these programs. But we've seen this with diet. We've seen it work with diabetes, with other conditions. When you have a comprehensive program, especially something that brings in group coaching, the results are really profound. And so done right, remarkable, miraculous outcomes are possible.

Done badly, what's going to happen is these folks who go into this metabolically busted. They've already got pathologic muscle. Dr. Gabriel Lyon talks about that a lot. You know, not all muscle is the same. So they've already got pathologic muscle. It's marbled. It's not good, strong, well-trained skeletal muscle. It's not signaling correctly because it's really an organ of endocrine action, too, you know.

So it's fat. And so they go into this. They start cranking the peptide at high doses. And then they're not given any proper counseling or maybe their compliance is not great. Maybe they're not taking it seriously. So they're still eating junk food. They're just eating less of it. I hear about this a lot.

This is, I'm not judging anyone. is true stories. They end up on the other side with a ton of muscle loss because they weren't protecting their muscle. They are still nutritionally void. So they're still malnourished. Now they're more malnourished because they're just eating less of the malnourishing food. And now their metabolic health is devastated and super brittle. So if they go off these peptides, which they inevitably will because insurance will run out or the peptide will stop working because like I said, the receptors get flooded and start to cleave off, this is a disaster on the other side. So I think the way that it's being done in the allopathic system, and I'm not saying every

I really don't love dogging MDs. I think the medical industry over there has many of those doctors have great intentions. We don't give up half of our lives and go $500,000 in debt because we don't want to help people, right? It's not just about getting rich. Trust me, there's an easier ways to get rich. I think that they're just kind of following protocol. And in many cases they don't have the time to spend with patients, or maybe, again, patients aren't being compliant and they're going to end up just really metabolically devastated. So that is a big concern to me. The other concern is that something this is happening because many people listen to my podcast,

they started dinking around with their own dosages. They started going on it. Now these are friends. They're messaging me. And I'm like, you maybe don't need to be on it anymore. Or maybe you should consider a much lower dose because the half life of GLP1 in our body is very short. And these peptides make it very long.

And I do have concerns over swimming in GLP1 all day, especially if it's too high of a dose for somebody. So my concern is that that become, and that's going to be a module in my program is like, how do you bring somebody back from these? How do you titrate them off? Because I think it's important to recognize that we don't need to be swimming in this stuff 24-7, you know, 365 days a year. And then the third piece is very much what Casey means is. sharing out and and callie means which i am concerned about too if we blanket dose everybody on these

and this becomes the band-aid and it becomes it's monotherapy it's high dose and it's the only way if it's viewed as the only way and people take it as a free ride or they don't take the opportunity to do anything else in their lifestyle then they're going to end up on the other side like i said just metabolically devastated and that weighs heavy on me because i don't want people to think well dr tina said these are great and then they go you know swimming in them for years on end and come out the other side like a ghost shadow of themselves we don't want that either and then i think the other part is there's room for abuse in with any peptide or drug or any substance and as a former anorexic the allure of being very thin is very inviting it's something i've had to be careful of i could crank

this peptide up and get really really thin i don't want to because i don't want to go back to that world I don't want to go back to the place where I don't feel like eating and, you know, I just shut down all my dopamine circuitry. So, or override it. So I think that the, and we're seeing that with some of the famous people. You know, we're seeing some of these actors. And, of course, they get all the headlines, like look at them. They look like a skeleton. It's very alluring.

When you, being skinny is kind of a downward spiral because you can only get so skinny before you're in terrible health and you're malnourished and you're looking at horn. hormonal depletion and all the other terrible things that come with at osteoporosis. This is a really bad place for older women to be in. We don't want to be too skinny as women as we age. Ladies, listen to me, you lose all the weight, your face is going to sag, your butt's going to sag, whether you have Ozempic on board or not, but I'm more concerned with their bones. We do not want people breaking hips and fracturing hips. And so having adequate muscle mass, but having body weight on us in the form of some adipose

tissue is important too because that's where we store our hormones. So anyway, I know it's a long answer, but I do think about this. stuff. I think that there's an elegant way to do this and I think that there's a way that is probably more mainstream is happening and it's not great. So I want people to hear me when I say that I'm not supporting that. That's not the end all be all. But if we could get away from that, because I think that is going to lead to consequences. If we could get away from that, there's this other beautiful world that you and I just spent the last hour or so discussing of potential benefits where folks get off of a lot of other pharmaceuticals that they're on.

And they really just come into a level of health maybe they weren't experiencing before. I didn't know it was possible. I'm hearing that a lot. I mean, even just going back to weight loss, you know, like women messaging me saying, I got on a plane to go to do something amazing with my family that I wasn't able to do before. And I was able to sit on rides at amusement parks. And, you know, I'm able to fit in an airplane with one seatbelt. I mean, people get made fun of for that when they're on the plane.

Everyone glares at them, right? It's like they don't want to feel like that. So these people are in jail in their own bodies. And there's got to be a place in the middle where like Casey means and myself, because I love her and everything she says in her book is 100% true. But I feel like there's a place where we can meet in the middle because we're both physicians and we both understand nuance and we both have treated patients. And I don't think we have to, you know, I'm not, I'm not on.

I'm in complete agreeance with them both, actually. It was really hard to debate Casey on, or Callie on Mark Hyman's podcast because I'm like, I agree with almost everything you're saying, but we just got to get some of the facts straight. So I don't know. There's a world of nuance. I wish people would embrace. Well, one of the ways that we get there is more conversation, not less. And you are bringing, you know, a new perspective into this conversation.

And as you mentioned, you're a fan of Casey and Callie. I'm really close friends with them. I'm an investor in both of their companies. And I appreciate what they're bringing to the table. And the hope is that we all get to discuss that the audience hears the conversation and they see us all grow together and learn more. Because ultimately, it's the consumer and the layperson, the person who's struggling with their health that ends up finding better solutions because that's what we all want. You know, you mentioned some of your concerns that are there. And one last concern that a lot of people have been talking about, including the two individuals you mentioned, is that we're in this place where the focus and the emphasis, and I think you would agree with this.

Please cut me off if you don't. Is that the focus and emphasis as this is a blanket tool for everybody's, in particular for kids, is a big distraction on the fact that America has a history as a country that when we really need to get. to the root of something that we've had that American resolve, which feels to be something that's missing right now and needs to be sort of re-energized. And we've done incredible, incredible things. In his book, not about America, but talking about how other countries have tackled obesity, Johan Hari in his book, Magic Pill, talks about Japan. I'm sure you know all about this for a little bit of recap for the audience. it was around 2000s 2007 or eight Japan saw an uptick in their obesity by a very small percentage.

I think it was like 3.5% to like 4% obesity, which is still very low as a country compared to America, which is way higher that. We're like in the 40% for obesity. And when that happened, there was a national outcry and there was a bunch of equivalent of parliament congressional action that took place and one of the first things that came out of that was that they made a decision that processed food was banned from schools and that every school had to have an on-site nutritionist and all meals had to be made from scratch at the school and served the kids fresh every single day and that's something that came out of that there was also these series of metabolo laws that were passed that said that

companies, big corporate conglomerates, were actually had to be involved with the health of their employees and that they had to, very controversial, but it worked, they had to be involved in the health and they had to actually track the weight of their employees and make sure they gave them tools and resources to address their weight if there was an uptick. The reason is I brought this up, and I know you're familiar with this, and you've read the book and are familiar with Johan's work, is some of the criticism says that, you know, maybe we can't do everything that Japan did, but there are some lessons that they got serious about it, even with a much smaller obesity uptick, you know, that's the national level intervention that we need over here. And I know

you have a lot of thoughts about that. And I'd love for you to chime in. Could you ever see something like that, right? It's a whole spectrum of things, but can you see something like that being implemented here in America, land of the free, home of the brave? It's so hard because we as Americans are I'll take it back to COVID. I was watching a Swedish, I don't know if he was a medical doctor, but he was a Swedish scientist early on after we had kind of gone. through that first wave of COVID and Sweden was winning. Like, Sweden was doing great. Like, they kept everything open and they'd come out the other side.

And we were all still in the throes of it. Like, we were just walking into the worst part. And they were like, we're good. And he said that the way that they handled it would never fly in a democratic country, like America, because Americans don't like being told what to do. And we saw that in New York, right, when they tried to put the tax many years ago. Giuliani tried to put a tax on soda. Remember that?

and New Yorkers like revolted. It was a big thing. It was a big. I mean, they like protested with signs. It was a big thing. So I am all for, we have got to get soda machines and vending machines out of the schools, period. I do not understand how soda machines made their way into elementary schools. I think the school lunches have been atrocious since, I mean, since I was in high school.

And that was in the 90s. My daughter was born in 2000. She was in school. I couldn't believe what they were trying to feed her. in school. So, and that was 20 some year, you know, she's 24 now. So I can't imagine it's gotten better. It's probably gotten significantly worse. I think we have to start where we can start. And I do think that I'm seeing bigger corporations incentivize their workers with, you know, health perks. But I saw a guy on the plane the other day. I was sitting next to him, really interesting

fellow who was an engineer. And he had on his Fitbit. And he was sitting there going like this with his hands. And for those who can't see me, he was just shaking his hands. And I looked at him and I was like, Are you okay? Because I'm a doctor. Like, do you need anything? And he goes, oh, my company bonuses me if I get X amount of steps in. But since I'm not getting them in, I usually just shake my hands. And that makes my Fitbit think that I'm getting my steps in.

So we've got some work to do. And also, as we saw with the thing that we shall not be named, the real risk of death still did not get people to take action into getting their metabolic health dialed. Like we literally went through and I couldn't believe I was seeing it in my lifetime. The real risk of death, like those who were metabolically sound pretty much whizzed through that virus. But no matter how much I tried to talk about it, people would get so mad at me because the idea that they had some control over it, which would require work, was enraging to them.

It was very interesting to watch this phenomenon. So I don't know how much hope I have for that actually happened. in my lifetime, I think I'll be dead or humans will go extinct before then to be totally, I'm not trying to be grim, but like we are a few generations out. If you look at the data from not being able to reproduce ourselves, I think by 2050, 97% of countries, I believe it is, 95 or 97% of countries will not have the capacity to repopulate themselves. I mean, we are in a downward trajectory as a species. And so yes, ideally in an ideal world, yes. But also if the houses on fire, do we not bring out the fire extinguisher? Right? Like, we can, we can, if a house is prone to

burning up, we can change the paint or we can change the drywall or we can change the roof materials, we can change the materials it's built with. Maybe we need to examine the foundation. Maybe we need to do something with the windows. I don't know. I'm not a house builder. But we also need to put the fire out when the fire is blazing. And so that's my argument. Like, ideally, yes, people should be getting their shit together. There is, the only way out is through and no one's coming to save you. I've been saying that for, I don't even know how long, but also, and yes, the schools do not have your best intent.

Schools are, in my opinion, just places to go to get brainwashed. Like, I'm not a fan of public school anymore. I have taken some different strong stances since raising a child in all of it. But that said, we have to do something to help people and meet them where they're at. And so if I have tools available and I can pull levers to do so, I'm going to pull them. And that's really my stance is we need to do both. But I'm not going to vilify any one thing.

Even the folks who wanted to get the intervention during the past few years, I never told anyone not to do that. I was just like know your, you have to have an actual informed consent. And then everything comes down to risk tolerance, right? Risk reward ratio, risk tolerance. This peptide, if done right, has a very high reward ratio and a very low risk, if done appropriately. And so I think that there is a place for it. It's just not being handled ideally. And I see where the concern is, but also I'm going to pull the fire extinguisher out and use it

when I need to. Incredible. Dr. Tina, this has been fantastic. How does our audience follow along with you to continue the conversation? Where are you most active? Where do you want to send them? Yeah, so I think Instagram is my main platform. It's at Dr. Tina, D-R-T-Y-N-A. My podcast is really, really information-rich. I'm, I'm quite literally trying to download my brain into the internet in case anything ever happens to me. I was mentored up by an incredible mentor for decades, and I feel really honored to have had that experience, and I have that legacy. And so I am trying to just get my brain into my podcast, and I have incredible guests on as well. And that's all on YouTube also, and I'm going to be more active on there soon. So YouTube, it's all at Dr. Tina. And you can find everything at my website at

Dr. Tina.com plus the video series you shared out and then my courses are there. One thing I noticed on your YouTube channel that I want to acknowledge you for is, I believe the subheading of your YouTube channel is helping you avoid the zombie apocalypse or helping you navigate the zombie apocalypse. Survive. Survive. Actually, that's even the better word. Helping you survive the zombie apocalypse. You know, I've always been fans of zombie. movie, zombie shows. And in a crazy way, there's a recognition that many of us have, like you had, like a lot of our audience had, is that while there are so many incredibly beautiful, beautiful things

in this world, so much goodness, way more beauty and way more goodness than the bad that's out there, if we don't wake up, start to have open-minded conversations, let people speak on all sides of the spectrum and actually get people healthy, if we don't do those things, we're going to end up in a place and we're already ending up in some cities that you, you know, I live here in Los Angeles, you go to some parts of this, you know, city and some other cities are out there, very unfortunately, between the homeless epidemic that's out there, the drug epidemic, the mental health epidemic, The metabolic dysfunction epidemic that's out there, it feels like we're already on our way to ending up in a quote unquote zombie-like situation. So the fact that you're coming on here talking about tools and resources that people have to not only get themselves healthy, but hopefully create a healthier world in this sort of toxic and addictive environment that we're all in, that just means the world.

And I'm such a huge fan of what you're doing. And I just want to acknowledge you for the incredible work that you've not only done on this topic, but over the years to help your audience learn and grow and ultimately invest in yourself. So thank you so much. Thank you. That means the world to me. I'm such a huge fan of yours. And I think you bring such a great nuance to every conversation.

And you have great conversations with your guests. So I appreciate the work you're doing as well. And thank you for having me on. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening. listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me.

And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter. And it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole-body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.