Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 434 - Future of Glucose Monitoring ft. Dan Zavorotny & Kara Collier

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Dan Zavorotny is the founder and COO of NutriSense. Dan and his company are on a mission to personalize nutrition by leveraging Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Machine Learning. Kara Collier is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Certified Nutrition Support Clinician who specializes in glucose control and metabolism. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: https://drinklmnt.com/powerproject Purchase 3 boxes and receive one free, plus free shipping! No code required! ➢Freeze Sleeve: https://freezesleeve.com/ Use Code "POWER25" for 25% off plus FREE Shipping on all domestic orders! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Element Electrolytes. You know, the cool thing is that Mark told me about Element last year. He told me how he was using it before workouts, and he does a lot of workouts fasted too, so he suggested it to me. And in the past, because I do a lot of lifting, a lot of performance stuff outside the gym, I thought towards the end of a workout when I'd cramp, it's kind of normal. Maybe I wasn't adequately hydrated, I didn't have adequate nutrition, so I'd just drink workout when I'd cramp, it's kind of normal. Maybe I didn't wasn't adequately hydrated.

I didn't have adequate nutrition. So I just drink more water, eat more food, hope everything was OK. And cramping was normal. After I started grabbing Element, I started using the electrolytes and they have thousand milligrams of sodium, 200 potassium, 60 magnesium, all the electrolytes you need. I'd use them pre-workout, fasted. And I s*** you not. I don't cramp up anymore it's crazy and it's like the workouts all go really well even though I don't have food in my system it's really really crazy the cool

thing about element is that they have a lot of great flavors my personal favorite is raspberry and you can just put a packet in water drink it do your workout it's easy it's simple it's it's just, it works. Okay. So make sure that you're not just drinking a lot of water to get yourself hydrated. You're getting enough electrolytes in your system before you train. It will make a massive difference to your performance. Yes. You guys got to take your workouts to the next level by picking up some element electrolytes right now, head over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject. Make sure you guys check out the bundles

because when you buy three, you essentially get one free. I blame the Natty Professor for everything. Everything? Makes it easier. Who is that guy? Oh, wait. I have you muted.

You switched. Oh, man. Switch. That's a vaguely familiar name, the Natty Professor. I don't remember who that is. You used to go to this gym, right? You used to train. I will always call you Natty Professor.

I love that nickname. I think that's great. I like that nickname, too. Especially because I love the movie. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a huge fan of the movie. Just saw it not too long ago, too.

We showed Jasmine. She loved it. Still makes me nearly pee my pants. Yeah, I need to rewatch it. I haven't seen any years eddie murphy yeah eddie murphy's unbelievable i think we talked about but you got to watch his like old school stand-up it's oh vulgar stuff you remember it yeah it is the most vulgar stand-up. That's where I learned a lot of words from back in the day. Yeah. From seeing Eddie Murphy raw. Yep.

Raw was a good one. He used... I didn't know what he was talking about half the time. Yeah. But he has that whole ice cream sketch. Oh, yeah. I got my eyes. Yeah.

Yeah. He's like insanely talented. He is. Like when he would make facial expressions or when he would sing or when he would do anything he's like he was like really good at it it made the whole act that much better yeah and they say that like when he had when he hosts like a house party or something or just we has guests over he'll just sit there in like the living room and just kill it like just he's just so he's still still just hilarious he's like that all the time and i guess it's like like oh you're bragging that you're the funniest person at a house party but i guess like the people he's surrounded by they're just like

dude if he jumps on stage and just does what he does at home like he'll be the funniest comedian like you know available or out there crushing everybody yeah well if our comedy shows open again are they still doing like the drive-in thing so in la what they're doing is they're just uh they're saying you can come have a dinner right and everyone comes to the dinner but there happens to be somebody with a mic doing comedy that's legit what they're doing in la because comedy still isn't allowed so it's like come come come to this place come to this spot and we'll have a dinner. This comedy club and have a dinner because they can't market it as comedy show.

Hmm. Ways around the world. They have to like make it sound weird or whatever. Yeah. Today will be interesting. We got a guy named Dan on the show. I'm not sure how to say his last name. Me neither.

How do we tackle that last name? That's a tough one. Zavrotny. Yeah. There we go. That probably is not right at all. Let's go with it. I probably put a little bit too much.

He's somebody I got in touch with through some of our carnivore friends. And he has a continued glucose monitor machine that he helps promote and sells and stuff. But when I got on the phone with him and I was talking to him about that kind of shortly, he was saying like, hey, you know, all these things that we think are true that like spike or glucose and do all these things. He's like, it's only true to a certain extent. And he's like, and I can't tell you what it's going to do when you try it out. I can't tell somebody else what it's going to do when they try it out. He's like, for some people, blueberries will spike their glucose levels through the roof.

For another person, you won't see it a blip at all. Some people will have whey protein and they might see a spike in their glucose. And so it was just interesting. And then, you know, what does it mean to like spike your glucose? And is it even, is it bad? Is it good? It's probably somewhere in between. It's probably good sometimes and probably not great to do all the time. As we see with the standard American diet, people's glucose and insulin levels are

through the roof and something that doesn't really get brought up enough. And I got to credit Lane Norton for mentioning this everyone's against carbs all the time not everyone but you hear people say stuff about carbs but most of the things that we're referring to that have carbohydrates in them in excessive amounts a lot of times they are accompanied by more fat calories than they have carbohydrate calories so something like a big mac or something like that, French fries would be like a good example where you're the amount of fat calories is the amount of calories overall is just too much to overcome. It's not necessarily the fact that it has carbs in it that makes it bad. I mean, it's not helpful. It's not necessarily helpful at that point,

but it's just that you ate way too much. And we've had other guests on the show before. John. Is it John? Heck, that helps out Jessica and Smokey. Yeah. Yeah. What the heck? Yeah.

Yeah. With diet and stuff like that. And I think that he's got a pretty damn good grasp of things when he tells people to carve up. He's like, you can carve up and you can kind of eat what you want, but it has have under 10 grams of fat per meal and it's like oh shit that messes me up because now now what are my options you can still find some good stuff you can get creative with it and have some like rice crispy treats and stuff like that but it does make it tough yeah it does it really does here we go. Hello. Hi. Great to have you on the show today.

Thank you so much for coming on the show and helping us get to the bottom of some of this glucose type stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to be here. Looks like Dan's joining right now. There he is. Hey, how's it going? Great. Great to have both you guys on the show.

Would you guys mind kind of just to kind of kick things off here, just kind of talk about the company that you guys are working with and maybe how you got into it? Sure. I'd love to. My name is Dan Zavarotny. I actually come from a background of healthcare consulting where I was consulting some of the major health insurance companies in the U.S., medical device manufacturers, as well as hospitals. And the goal was to basically figure out how to optimize profitability for these organizations.

I quickly realized that there is a very negative correlation between profit of these organizations and actual patient outcomes. A lot of times what, you know, hospitals are doing the best are not the ones that are providing the most value. I try to figure out how do we change this, and I came across these devices called continuous glucose monitors, these devices that you put in your arm, and they track your glucose in real time. And this helps you really understand how your metabolic flexibility is and how your body responds to

different things like stress, food, sleep, and exercise. And it helps us truly understand how to take preventative measures in our health. And, you know, me and Kara partnered up and we have another person on our team who helped us really figure out how do we streamline this and bring to the masses? Very cool. Yeah. So, yeah. So I'm Kara. I'm a registered dietitian and I came from the clinical world. So I was working in the hospitals, mostly in ICUs throughout the country and also quickly realized that most of the people coming into the ICUs were not there because of trauma

or a gunshot wound, but they're there because of complications of a lifestyle-related disease. And it was just the pattern over and over. And it was really frustrating because I couldn't actually make the meaningful change I was hoping to make in the current healthcare system. So partnered up with Dan, and then we're using these continuous glucose monitors, as you mentioned, for the masses and not just diabetics like they're traditionally used, because we believe being able to see what's happening inside of your body at all times is really the key to preventing getting into the ICU and having these chronic conditions. Do we see some major differences between

men and women when it comes to how they respond to, I guess, certain macronutrients, certain foods? Yeah, there are big gender differences, definitely. The biggest is with carbohydrates. So women on average tend to be less carbohydrate sensitive than men. This could be due to a wide variety of factors. One is that the more muscle mass you have, the more carbohydrate sensitive you tend to be because you have more glucose storage space. So glycogen is a glucose storage space, and that can be put either in your liver, which only has so much room, or your skeletal muscle, which has a lot more potential space. And men, on average, tend to have more muscle mass than women. And

that's one potential reason that women tend to be less carbohydrate sensitive and just have higher glucose spikes to the same amount of carbohydrates. The other is just hormonal changes that women experience that men aren't traditionally experiencing. So it's very common for during, you know, regular monthly menstrual cycle to have significantly higher glucose values in those last two weeks during what's the luteal phase. So this is just due to the shift in hormones. So when you have lower estrogen levels, you're not as insulin sensitive. And women might have average glucose values 10 to 20 points higher, especially to carbohydrates, but to all foods just because of the shifts in hormones.

So we see big differences between men and women. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all personalized. Some women might not really see this effect as much as other women, but there's definitely gender differences. What about just like flat out stress? differences. What about just like flat out stress? Like, I guess it'd be hard to maybe have a direct correlation, but we know the impact of sleep and we can get into that a little bit later. But what about just stress in general? Just like if we're more stressed, do we tolerate carbohydrates differently? Yeah, absolutely. So when thinking about the connection between glucose and stress, we think about just our natural stress response. So what's happening in this moment when we have

acute or chronic stress is that we're triggering certain hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, and this stimulates the liver to create more glucose. And it also dampens our response to insulin so that that glucose is available to fuel our stressors. So normally from like an evolutionary perspective, when we're under acute stress, it's because we need extra energy to fuel that stress. So it's like you're getting chased by something and you need extra glucose. But unfortunately, in modern environments, these acute stressors that we're facing, we don't usually need extra glucose. So if you're in the stress state or even eat a small amount of carbohydrates we're going to see an exacerbated glucose response this is almost with everybody we see this and even if you're not eating you might see this giant glucose spike to that acute

stress moment and so this is probably the one thing we're talking about the most with our clients actually is the impact of stress. You know, I think right now in the times we're in, a lot of people are under more stress than normal. But I also think we're just a culture of chronic stress overworking. So it's something we're talking about all the time because it tends to also be the driver that's increasing our fasting glucose values. So if you think about glucose, when you wake up in the morning or while you're sleeping, what's driving that traditionally is normal homeostasis in the liver. So the liver is like, you need more glucose, you need less glucose. They're regulating that because you're not eating, it's not coming from food.

And so if glucose is high in a fasted state, it's almost always that we can point back to cortisol because it's driving that glucose production in the liver. So if somebody is waking up with a fasting glucose value of 110, which would be considered like pre-diabetic diabetic levels, first thing we want to ask about is stress. And, you know, are you under this cortisol response? And so it's a major factor that can impact our glucose. And I think an important point to mention here is a lot of times we're so used to being stressed, chronic stress. We don't realize that something's wrong because it become part of our norm. So, you know, you do something for 20 years, you think it's normal. And only until you see objectively a number that is given to your body and you know, this is not right, then you realize, okay, this is not how I'm supposed to feel. And then when you start

working out and figuring out how to improve your stress response and lower that down, and you start seeing this new pattern of behavior that lowers the glucose and you start seeing, okay, well, I feel very different now. And people will do 20, 30 years of certain life. And then they change certain habits. And then instantly they realize, wow, this is such different feeling that I'm getting. I can't believe I could feel this way, which is fascinating. You know, let's dig into this a little bit more. I'm actually curious about that because Kara, I saw you post on your Instagram about like you had your continuous glucose monitor and it you had a track when you were sleeping and your your glucose was high when you were asleep on one day.

Right. And then on another day when you weren't as stressed, you were you saw like a dip when you were asleep and then it came up through the day like it usually should. So I'm curious, what habits do you guys have individuals apply if they are facing a lot of lifestyle stress? individuals apply if they are facing a lot of lifestyle stress? Yeah, that's a great question. So it depends on the person. Some people respond very well to like a traditional meditation. And so maybe if they're just getting started, we might recommend a few like apps like Headspace or some of the similar apps that somebody can use to get started. But there's always people who meditation just doesn't click with them. They're having a hard time sticking with that.

So instead, what we like to talk about is just dealing with stress in the moment. And so you can do a few things. One is to literally visualize your physical trigger points so often when we're stressed we can feel it in our face our chest and our stomach and so if you can visualize like you're having a stress moment like you know you can tell like I'm getting worked up at work or you know in your car and your stress you can physically relax your face and physically relax your chest and then like let your belly out is what we say, like just breathe and physically relax that. And that trains that vagus nerve to relax. And so sometimes connecting those physical moments to

the harder to quantify things like stress can help a lot of people. So we talked about just going through that five second checklist of those three areas and relaxing that. And the other big one that helps for people who are having a hard time sticking with meditation is breathing exercises. So a common one is four, seven, eight. So you breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of seven, and then breathe out for a count of four, hold for a count of seven, and then breathe out at a count of eight. And that unique breathing pattern is helps to train that parasympathetic system as well, and also strengthen our diaphragm. So just like we train other muscles, we rarely train our diaphragm, which is what helps dictate breathing and oxygenation.

And so we talk about people who are maybe more in like the fitness crowd and they're having a hard time resonating with dealing with stress. We talk about training that diaphragm muscle and that breathing technique throughout the day really helps to strengthen that and also put us in a calmer state. really helps to strengthen that and also put us in a calmer state. I think a good visual for that is when a child is really, really like overly upset and they can't talk and they're trying to tell you what happened to them and they keep going, they keep doing that. And it's all, but like we're doing that kind of on the daily, just not even maybe recognizing it. And something I've heard other people mention in terms of the style of breathing that you're

searching for is like an alligator breathing. You know, you've seen an alligator like expand and contract and stuff like that. And so that's what we're after. And that's what we're trying to work on. And it can be a difficult thing to work on. But if you can kind of remember to get back to your breath here and there, I've found it to be really helpful. Another good example is a dog. You know, sometimes a dog will just like lay down and they go.

And they just kind of naturally let out a good sigh. And we do it as well, but we probably don't take the time to do it maybe as much as we need to. I love what you guys are talking about here here because I think that it's about optimization. You know, it's about trying to be more optimal. And even athletes and even people that are trying to be healthy, we're really just, it's a lot of guesswork. You know, you look lean, you look in shape, but we don't know what's going on in the inside and we don't know how stressed you are or you aren't.

But we don't know what's going on on the inside and we don't know how stressed you are or you aren't. With the amount of people that you guys have run through with this continued glucose monitoring, what are some things that were maybe shocking that you found where you're like, whoa, like I just didn't know that we were going to. Obviously, with some heavier people and some things like that, it would be fairly clear that that they would maybe have some bad eating habits and some bad lifestyle habits that led them to have high glucose levels throughout the day that maybe led to disease and led to some other things. But what were some things that maybe you guys were like, I never expected some of this stuff to be happening like this? Yeah, I would say one of the big ones is just how unique our glucose responses can be just between each other. So we, you know, if you think about the glycemic index, it's supposed to predict that something like white rice is going to have a higher glucose spike than something like, you know, sweet potatoes. And it's this varying scale of how much is your glucose gonna spike

in response to a carbohydrate. And that's taken in the general population and then it's averaged into the scale. And something we realized very quickly is that everyone's not following in that average. And what might be a low glycemic index vegetable or fruit for you could be totally high for somebody else. So we have these very, very unique responses to food.

I mean, just as an example between Dan and I, like when Dan first started and we were trying to clean up his diet a little bit, he was eating like two bananas in the morning and having spikes into the 200s, which is like diabetic levels just from a banana. But when I eat a banana, it's my lowest glucose spike of all fruits. So I only move about 10 points, where something like an apple is almost doubled at. I've tried just about every fruit just to see how I respond. And it's all different than everybody else. And so this has been really interesting to me because as a dietician, before I started actually measuring this, I was, you know, eating mostly starchy vegetables as my carbohydrates and like quinoa was my grain that I was using most of the

time. And those two happened to be the vegetables and grains that spiked me the most. So I actually have a lower glucose response to white rice in comparison to quinoa. And then with starchy vegetables, they pretty much all give me much higher spikes than any grain or fruits or legumes. So I just stay away from starchy vegetables for the most part, unless it's like a special occasion, you know, there's always room for wiggling around in that. But that's one of the big things where it's just been such a surprise where people are like not expecting to have certain response that they're having, because it's not matching up with our expectations and what we're putting out there. So almost everyone's gonna have a spike from something like soda, you know, or a cookie. But when it comes to

whole food carbohydrate sources, it's really unique, and it's going to be a flip of the coin of how you might respond. So that to me is one of those things that you don't realize until you actually start seeing real data from so many people. That was a huge surprise. I thought coffee was really interesting too. We've seen people drink coffee and some people, glucose goes up. Some people doesn't affect at all. Some people actually increase or decrease glucose. So their glucose gets better drinking coffee. And you just can't predict that, right? It's a, we just have this weird tolerance to coffee and all of us are completely unique. I was completely shocked when I've seen this kind of data.

It's really 33% across the spectrum of how it affects you. You know, I think some people, I'm really curious about this because some people are probably listening and they're wondering, why do I really need to care about what's going on with my glucose? Like, this is really cool, but if it goes up and it goes down, why am I concerned? And I think that, like, can you help us clear that up a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So there's quite a few reasons why we might want to care. So there's quite a few reasons why we might want to care.

But one is that glucose is very predictive of potential insulin resistance. And so 88% of the population are estimated to have suboptimal metabolic health and at risk for insulin resistance. So pretty much everybody is potentially at risk or has some metabolic dysfunction. And one of the best ways to catch this really early is with this continuous glucose data. Because something like, you know, if you go to the doctor and you get a fasting glucose or hemoglobin A1C, that's just giving you a little bit of information. Just what's happening in the fasted state or your average glucose. And they're very lagging indicators of insulin resistance. You know, there's research that it's almost 10 to 20 years of damage going on in the background before those lab values start to become

abnormal. But we can catch that very easily on something like a CGM by seeing how high you're spiking, what it looks like when you're sleeping. So the first reason is that it's a very early indicator for insulin resistance, which is tied to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, chronic kidney disease. Basically, all of your chronic conditions have a link to insulin resistance. The other thing is before insulin resistance even comes into the picture, we can think about what's happening on a zoomed in view when our glucose levels go higher. So every time we have a big glucose spike, even if it's coming back down to normal and we're insulin sensitive, this is putting stress on our mitochondria because these are the batteries that have to process all this energy coming in.

And when we have a big glucose load coming in and the mitochondria have to deal with all of this, it's producing free radicals and oxidative damage and some background inflammation in order to deal with that glucose spike. And so, you know, if we're having repetitive glucose spikes, then we're building up oxidative damage and inflammation and this can impair recovery and this can dampen our immune response. And this can lead to a whole host of unwanted consequences because you're in this chronic inflammation state. So each of these spikes is causing those problems, even if you're not insulin resistant. And the glucose spikes are also damaging the blood vessels. So if you think about it, the body likes to keep glucose in a very tight range. And when it goes above that, it's this concept of glucotoxicity, where too much glucose in the bloodstream, even for a short amount of time, is toxic to those blood vessels. So it can cause damage to the cells that line our blood vessels, which again, stimulates this inflammatory process as different inflammatory

cytokines have to clean up the damage. And if that's repeated over and over, that's when we get things like atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. So if we're looking at that zoomed in level, it's all about inflammation and disease risk. Yeah. And I think one thing I'll throw in there, and if we look at even micro scale of like now, it's really, if you're able to control your glucose at a certain level, you can immediately see improvements in your sleep quality as well as energy levels. A lot of times we, we have these energy boosts and then we have this crash, whether it's during lunch or in evenings after big dinner.

And then we feel like we didn't sleep well. The moment you're able to figure this out, dramatically your sleep increases. And this isn't like one of those things where it takes months to figure out. You do this and within a day or two, things improve, which is fascinating, right? Those are the kind of things

that I've noticed improvements immediately. And that's what what i started changing the way not only what i eat but also the when time window of when i eat it when i eat what um and after the like do i eat protein first or do i eat carb first or what is the process do i eat before workout or after workout timing that out has been very helpful for me so this must be uh why've heard, we've had hundreds of guests on this show. We've talked to many, many people that are very intelligent when it comes to nutrition. And we've had some of them swear by the fact that a nice amount of carbohydrates before bed helped them sleep. We've had other people say that they shut down eating three or four hours before they

go to bed. We've had other people say, you know, after, I don't know, 4 p.m. or so, they just don't eat carbohydrates to try to keep their blood sugar levels, I guess, you know, moderate. And so this must be part of the reason why is there's such variation in between each individual, because when we're on this, where, you know, we're like, well, which one is it? You know know do you eat carbs you not eat carbs and it's probably just depends right yeah absolutely it depends it's really personal and it's something we've noticed with sleep is i would say maybe a majority do better with no carbohydrates in the evening and cutting that eating window earlier because a lot of people will see either that bigger dinner meal or carbohydrates in the evening will lead to higher glucose values while they're sleeping and impaired deep sleep.

So a lot of our customers are also wearing like Oura rings or sleep trackers and they can correlate that data. And we're seeing when I have that big carb meal, I'm not sleeping as well. And that's fairly common. But then there's also maybe a quarter of people where it's the total opposite. And what's happening for them usually is that they're actually getting a little hypoglycemic while they're sleeping. And we can see that in their data. They're getting into levels of 50 and 60, and then they're waking up and they're not feeling rested.

And one of the best ways is like, let's try a little bit of carbohydrates before you go to bed. And then it's stable and they're sleeping like a baby. So there's many different reasons that you might have those dips while you're sleeping. And sometimes carbs fix it. And sometimes, you know, it's a deeper reason. And we have to look at like thyroid and all these other factors that can affect your hypoglycemia. But you can at least identify that with the CGM.

And often it's as simple as eating some carbohydrates at dinner that helps these people yeah and it's fascinating so the folks you're talking about these people sometimes take months or years to figure this out like what works for them here within a day or two you can see it uh which is fascinating just the speed it it's really a speed of figuring out what works it doesn't work for you right so if yeah it's all about building that that refinement process faster. You're always experimenting with diet and things that work. You can speed that up in much faster time. Yeah. So, if somebody does learn and they identify some of the foods that

don't cause an insulin spike, is that sort of a way to kind of hack their diet to eat more of those foods? Or does it always come back to the amount of calories that they're intaking for the entire day, or even week in regards to either maintaining weight or losing weight? Yeah, it's not just about calories, we'll definitely see like you might have a food that you respond really well to. But if you eat 2000 calories of it, you might still have a spike, but there's going to be these foods that you respond better to. And then you can lean towards more of those foods and less of the foods that are giving you a spike and then meet, you know, your calorie needs with those foods that work better for you. I mean, you know, maybe you're in a calorie deficit or maybe you're surplus for

whatever your goals are, but you can adjust those types of foods based on what you're responding better to. That makes sense. Yeah. And when it comes to things like insulin resistance, it's going to be compounded by eating too much food. But normally the foods that you eat under normal circumstances, I understand we're also talking about things spiking your glucose levels that are kind of unexpected, you know, but for your average person, you know, they're not really worried about broccoli, you know, having a massive negative impact on their nutrition. Right. And so I think what happens is over a period of time, you know, you have these foods that are kind of offensive to your metabolism. They're throwing a nice monkey wrench into everything that you're trying to do. And your, your insulin resistance starts to build up. Your body is supposed to make insulin. When you have a glucose spike, you have a

surplus of carbohydrates and your body's like, yo, we need to figure out what to do with this extra energy. And so therefore to kind of counteract that, and you guys can correct me if I'm off on any of this, but, you know, to counteract that your insulin levels will go up. But over a period of time, when you do that over and over again, you start to actually your cells become resistant to that insulin. And you producing the same amount of insulin doesn't have the same impact as it did when you were young. Maybe when you were young, you could slurp down, you know, a big slurpee from 7-Eleven and have, you know, 100 grams of sugar and have it have almost zero impact. As we get older, the metabolism, quote unquote, slows down and that will have a negative impact.

And the insulin helps to kind of store glycogen. Insulin kind of helps to regulate where this extra energy is going to go. But at a certain point, the body becomes basically kind of toxic with the amount of energy that you're taking in. It says, hey, we checked all the storage. There's really nowhere else for us to put anything. We've cranked up the insulin as much as we possibly could. There's nothing left to do there. And now it's just going to end up in your fat cells or it's

going to end up in calcification of the heart or it's going to end up somewhere. This extra energy is going to go somewhere, you know, because matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So it's got to do something. And it usually ends up being bad news. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I always describe insulin resistance as like the boy who cried wolf. So insulin is always yelling. It's like, Oh, we've got tons of glucose. Like we need to do something about this. And if you just cry every once in a while, the cells are like, okay, I'll respond to that and do what I need to do. But if you're crying all day long, the cells are just like, stop it. And they start to resist the effects of that signal.

Because what hormones are, insulin is a hormone, is they're trying to produce signals and communicating all the different parts of the body to work together. And so they start to ignore that message because they're hearing it all the time. And like along with what you said, insulin is an anabolic hormone. Sometimes people call it anti-catabolic and is that maybe it's helping to prevent muscle breakdown or, you know, prevent fat breakdown, but at the end of the day, it's helping for growth activities. And so for always having this insulin circulating, because the cells no longer responding to it, it's figuring out where it can put these different growth patterns. And a lot of times that's fat

accumulation in the wrong areas, which is where we don't want, or it's a difficult time tapping into those fat stores. We always have glucose high. We always have insulin high. The body never needs to go into our long-term energy stores which is fat, because it's got immediate energy available. So this idea of oxidative priority, we're going to use the quick, easy energy first. So if you have high levels circulating glucose, I'm going to use that because it's really easy to tap into. I always compare like glucose and fat as our energy sources as like money in a wallet versus a bank. If you have money in a wallet, quick to access, really easy to get out, but there's only so much room. And that's like glucose where the bank is like your fat stores. You can store infinite amount of fat,

but it's harder to tap into. So you always have this glucose present, never going to need to go to the bank because I always have some immediate energy available. I think something that makes some of this frustrating sometimes is we just hear so many different things from so many different resources. And I think everybody's well-meaning. I think everybody wishes that everyone to be healthier, everyone to be more fit, everyone to be in better shape. better shape. But when you mentioned that only 12% of the population kind of has full access to what their metabolism is supposed to do, that leads me to believe that the calories in calories out thing gets a little skewed, at least at the very least gets a little bit skewed because these people, their body is not functioning the way that it's supposed to. And so calories in

calories out may work great for you, may work great for me. But for people that aren't exercising, that aren't out in front of it, their body is damaged. It's not working correctly. And they're going to have to probably figure out something a little different. They're probably going to have to figure out what are the main problems here other than just overeating, because it probably started with overeating. But as we know, when people gain more and more body fat, their metabolism seems to be slower and slower. And for the amount of calories that they have to start to reduce ends up being so great that they're so hungry all the time that it gets to be really difficult for them to kind

of follow on a path like that. Like, I'm not going to say that the calories don't matter, but it seems to it seems to maybe be that they are more accurate of an account for some and less accurate of an account for others. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I would agree exactly with what you said, that calories in calories out works really well in an insulin sensitive person. So probably somebody like you, somebody like me, like I can follow calories in calories out and I'm going to be OK. I might still be having some glucose spikes and that and that might cause some downstream effects eventually. And then I might become insulin resistant and then maybe calories in calories out doesn't work as well. So many times if somebody is insulin resistant, the first thing we need to do is remove some of those carbohydrates. I don't inherently believe that carbohydrates cause insulin resistance,

but if it's there, I think we need to remove it or at least reduce it significantly in order for you to start retraining your metabolic system and using alternative fuel sources like ketones or something besides glucose 24-7. So in an insulin resistant state, we have to really tweak macros and make sure you're not adding more glucose into the system with things like stress and sleep. I've seen many people where we just address stress and sleep and then they start losing weight and we didn't adjust calories at all because they're always in this fight or flight. they're always in elevated glucose levels, because they're constantly stressed. And so sometimes it has nothing to do with the nutrition at all, or how much you're eating, and it has to do with hormones or all these other effects that

could be going on. So it's never as simple as just like one solution for anything. And that's when, you know, I do think people are well intended in their recommendations. But whenever I hear someone say like, this is the one thing that will fix insulin resistance or the one thing that will make you, you know, skinny, it's like, that's just not how it works. Our bodies are so complex. Like that's an immediate red flag moment of it's just, it's never one thing. It's always more complicated than that, which I know is not like the sexy thing and it doesn't sell as well, but it's just the truth is that our bodies are complex and they're also adaptable.

So if we have something wrong going on, it's going to have all these other effects that affect all of our different systems. So it's never just one thing, but calories in calories out certainly can work if you're insulin sensitive, but many people are not, which is the problem. And I think an important thing to mention as well as we always talk about carbs or simple sugars as increasing your glucose. There are people who consume extreme, very strong diets and protein and protein can also convert to glucose in body and care can kind of talk about that a little bit as well yeah so there's there's definitely people where they're not consuming any carbohydrates at all but they might have a glucose spike to a really high

protein meal and so this is the idea that we don't really have an energy storage form of protein. It's going to muscle synthesis, you know, enzyme creation, all these other functions, but we have a certain cap at how much we can take before then it's converted to other usable energy sources like glucose or fat. And so sometimes, you know, if people are just eating one meal a day and they're doing keto or just carnivore then they might sit down and have 36 ounces of steak for dinner and we see a glucose spike because a lot of that protein is getting converted which is not inherently a bad thing you know it's just that it's getting transferred into a way that we can actually store that energy. You know, it's going to glucose and then maybe that's used for energy or stored that as glycogen. It's not inherently a bad thing as long as eventually you're using that energy and you're still maintaining and it's not just added on top of everything you're already doing.

So it can get converted into glucose, though, and we can see a glucose bump from something just like protein. We rarely see it just from fat that rarely stimulates a glucose response, but see it more often with protein. Is it true that the gluconeogenesis, the protein turning into sugar is only driven by need and not necessarily by supply? Or what are your thoughts on that? I think it could be both. So for just an example, like if you were to eat 100 grams of protein, the theory is that that doesn't necessarily convert into sugar unless the body actually needs dietary sugar or needs sugar for the body.

Yeah. And I think that's absolutely true. If you are competing and you're burning through a bunch of muscle breakdown and you need extra muscle synthesis and you eat 100 grams of protein, you might see no glucose response at all because all of that is going to muscle synthesis. And so it does depend on, you know, need and what's going on inside of the body. It's not we hit this beast. I think there used to be like old rules out there that was like you can only have like 30 grams of protein at a meal before your body just can't do anything with it.

And again, that's research that was done on a population level. Most people aren't really working out that much. And so for most people, maybe 30 grams of protein is all they really need at a meal in order to fuel these different protein needs. And so if you're somebody who is bodybuilding or training, you probably tolerate a lot more than 30 grams and have that actually go to protein use and not need to be transferred to glucose. So the exact number is going to be probably hard to figure out, but you can at least see it on a glucose meter and see maybe I'm getting a spike, probably wasn't using all of that protein just for protein synthesis. And some of it's going to be transferred into glucose. You know, I'd like to backtrack a little bit real quick because there's something

that I was curious about when you were talking about how everybody has different responses to different types of food, like coffee, blueberries, et cetera. With the amount of people that you guys have used the glucose monitors on, have you noticed any trend in terms of potentially different types of races being sensitive to certain things? Like, I'm just wondering about like people that are descended from different areas of the world. Is there any trend there? And then also there's something that I've seen. It's catching fire a little bit with people doing these blood type diets, right? There's like, there's a book like eat right for your blood type. And I haven't done any like looking into it, but it just sounds a little bit off to me. But since you guys may have

some of this data, have you noticed maybe anything when it comes to an individual's blood type and their glucose response to certain types of foods? Yeah, I haven't, we're not asking people their blood type, but maybe we'll start doing it just to see if there's a correlation there. That's really interesting. But I have researched this to see what, how much legitimacy there is around the blood type diet. And I haven't found it to be very legitimate. So I'm not convinced there's a connection there, but you never know. I'm always open to, there might be a connection.

We never know. Science is always changing. So we're not gathering that from our customers, which would be interesting to know nonetheless. But related to like ethnicity or background, there's certainly different like specifically Southeast Asians tend to be more susceptible to insulin resistance. So we have seen this where just in general, not as carbohydrate tolerant, which is interesting. So specifically like India, like Malaysia, Philippines, that area tends to be, for whatever reason, genetics more susceptible to insulin resistance and not as carbohydrate sensitive. I haven't noticed specific discrepancies between like very specific foods like blueberries not doing well for one type of person. That would be really interesting, but I haven't noticed to that level of granularity.

It's my understanding that Americans have a pretty high like maximum fat threshold, which is kind of a funny, a funny term. And that might explain why some other ethnicities end up with diabetes, maybe faster than than others, because like in America, people can get pretty darn big before they really run into some massive problems. And then it seems like in other cultures, even though they're smaller, their body fat percentage is kind of high. They don't weigh a lot, but they're running into some issues maybe earlier than you would suspect. Something that I noticed is that it seems that most things boil down to not necessarily just the race.

I'm sure the race and the genetics are probably a major factor in a lot of this, but the environment seems to be the thing that really pulls and pushes everything. You know, I think the actual foods that you consume and your behaviors from the time you're a kid and seeing what mom and dad do, maybe mom and dad are always outside. Maybe they're always doing something and maybe you're getting sunlight. Maybe you're getting vitamin D. And maybe when you're young, you play a sport and so on. And I think all these things are just, I think they'll outweigh the genetics in the long run, because what you do on a daily basis, I think is probably just a larger factor in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Like genetics are not your destiny at all.

They might predispose you to something, but for these chronic conditions, it's never that that genetic predisposition is gonna mean you're gonna end up with diabetes or Alzheimer's. I think environment plays a much more crucial role and also epigenetics. So the things that your parents were doing is going to

have an effect on you then. So we have lots of people who are also doing their genetic tests and coming to us and like, I'm predisposed for diabetes. I'm really, really concerned, but they're doing everything right. And it looks amazing. And they're going to be okay. Like that person is not necessarily going to get diabetes just because they're at risk. But that does mean that maybe you want to pay more attention to the things you're doing. I don't know how much you guys have talked about the ApoE gene on your show, but that's a very common genetic sniff that a lot of people are worried about. Essentially, ApoE is a fat taxi.

So it taxis around fat in our bloodstream. And we have three different genetic variants to it. You can have an APOE 2, 3, or 4. And you get two, you get one from your mom and you get one from your dad. So you can have APOE 4, 4, APOE 3, 4, you know, two different combinations. And it turns out that APOE4 puts you at significant risk for neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia, and then also cardiovascular disease. So this huge bucket of increased risk. And a lot of people are very concerned about this. And I happen to be an ApoE4-4, which is why I'm so interested in this topic. But 30% of the population have at least one four,

and then only about like 2% of the population have two fours. But if you have this genetic risk, you're at a 20% increased risk of having Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease. But what dug into this research very deep, and the number one thing you can do to compensate for this genetic predisposition is preventing insulin resistance and doing all of the things that we're talking about. And then these people don't get dementia, they don't get Alzheimer's. And so there's lots of things you can do. And I'm 100% confident that lifestyle and environment is the most important thing you can do,

especially if you're at a genetic risk. So if you have a family history of disease or you have some of these genetic snips, it's more important for you to do certain lifestyle behaviors and take care of yourself as opposed to somebody who just wins like the genetic lottery. And, you know, there's always the examples of people who live to 120 and they smoke every day. You know, they're eating like candy every day. They just won the genetic lottery. Like their lifestyle decisions don't make as much of an impact.

They're lucky. But for people who have predisposition, you need to be more mindful about these lifestyle decisions because they play a huge role for everybody. Tell us a little bit more about the glucose monitor itself. And like, we didn't really talk about

it a whole lot in the beginning. Like what, what kind of feedback is it giving you? Is it giving you anything else other than just the glucose? And then how are you guys, how are you guys making plans for people moving forward once you start to gain some of that data? some of that data? Yeah. So the glucose monitor is like a little disc and it goes on the back of your arm. I like to describe the application as like an easy button. You do it at home and it comes in this little applicator and you just push the button like an easy button and then it's in the back of your arm and it stays there for two full weeks so for two full weeks you get 24 7 glucose data it's actually in your in your arm right it's actually in your arm yes all right so it's in your arm so there is a small i know you're looking scared but i promise you it doesn't hurt

there's a small needle for insertion like when you're putting it on but the needle doesn't stay in your arm it's just to secure it and there's this little microfilament that goes just below the surface of the skin. So it's not even going to the depth of blood. It's just right below the skin level. And then there's an adhesive that makes it like stick there. So it's very, very painless. If you ever check your glucose on like a glucometer, that hurts much more. And so it just stays there. You can shower with it, work out with it to do all your normal activities and it just stays on. And then the device itself is only measuring glucose. And so with the app, you can scan the device and see your glucose for, you know, the whole day you wake up, scan it, see what happened

while you were sleeping, getting this 24-7 data. And then with our app, we're also allowing you to combine other metrics to get a more holistic view of your health. So we do automatic sync with Keto-Mojo from their ketone data. So if you're using that Keto Monitor, it goes right to our device. You can do nutrition macro tracker to see and compare, you know, if you're tweaking macros, how's that affecting glucose statistics. And then you can also, we do automatic sync with like Apple watch and different activity levels. So that data is just going right in there and you can compare your exercise to your glucose.

Then you can log things like stress and sleep. So right now we're allowing people to log or automatically sync these other metrics to get a holistic view of what's going on. But the device itself is just measuring glucose. But really our future goal is to be a metabolic health company. So we want to have other lab work available in the app that you can easily measure, order from home type of labs and have it all in that database so you can compare everything in one localized place and then this is where we are now in the future there are sensors right now in test that will come out in the near future hope depends on FDA regulation but

approval process but they will track not just, but also ketones and lactic acid. So I think that gets super interesting when it comes to athletic performance or trying to build muscle faster and recovery, having a data in real time all the time. You go to the gym and you will be able to figure out, Hey, should I keep working out or should I stop? Because right now you, you know, you kind of stop because you think you're done or, and maybe you should have kept going longer or you should have stopped earlier. But you don't know, you're done or, and maybe you should have kept going longer or you should have stopped earlier. Uh, but you don't know, you're just guessing, right. But having that data will help. It just takes a little bit while for the, you know, the government FDA to catch up to technology. Um, I was looking at your website and it showed that you had to get it replaced every two weeks

or am I tripping about that? Yeah. So the devices are like a one-time use. So you have it in there for two weeks at a time, and then you pull it off just like a Band-Aid. And then if you want to continue, we offer two different options. So one is just the one CGM for 14 days, no commitment. If you're just wanting to double-check your meal plans and make sure it's where you're at, tweak a few things, then it's just the two weeks. But if you sign up for our monthly subscription, you'll get two sensors every month. So once the one ends, you just put the next one on and you can keep going. So what is the need? I'm just curious, what's the need for the constant replacement of devices?

Like, is there any way that you could make a device that you can just leave in there for a long period of time until you want it removed? That's a great question. So it's just mostly about FDA regulation. These devices used to last one day. They became four, seven, 10. Now they're 14. And over time, they're going to get longer and longer. So it gets to 60, 90 days, but it just takes time. They have to constantly go through the approval process and get approved by the FDA and make sure it's okay. And then life can extend because it it's actually not the device that dies it's a battery inside that's automatically turned off on purpose uh from the legal perspective uh but they will get better there are some people who get injectables like you actually go to the doctor they inject

in you and it gets anywhere from six to uh 12 months that's a little bit too much even for me and i love this kind of stuff uh so i'm assuming most people don't want that um so there are those and it gets anywhere from six to 12 months, that's a little bit too much even for me. And I love this kind of stuff. So I'm assuming most people don't want that. So there are those options, but that's, I think, taking it to the next level. It's probably few and far between. We're more excited about the ones that are even more on top of the skin

that measure sweat levels. That's kind of the future going where it doesn't penetrate the skin at all. And that's really where I think it's going, where it's not penetrating the skin at all. And that's really where I think it's going, where it's not penetrating skin at all. There's no filament, just it's a micro needle. I think it'd be amazing, you know, when these trackers can kind of assist you throughout the day, you know, like maybe it says like, hey, what's up?

No 10 minute walk. You know, like it maybe encourages you to walk or you take a picture of your food and it gives you feedback. Dan, you were mentioning a little bit, something about that. There are some apps now I think, or maybe you were mentioning you were working on something I couldn't remember really, but you can maybe take a picture of your food and get the macronutrients and the calorie count for it. Yeah. So right now you could take pictures of food and you already get the macro breakdown.

We're trying to go to the next step of that's what we're working on now. Instead of you having it, you know, the goal here is to make this as easy as possible. So most apps right now make you track things and that's where we are as well. The next stage of our ability that we're trying to develop is we don't want you to track. We want you to just, we want to send to you and say, we saw you at a glucose response. What did you eat? And if you ate something that's fine, that's fine. You don't need to tell us. But when you see these things that are not inherently not good for you,

we want to ask you. So it's less in your life. It doesn't really interfere with your life because a lot of times when you track things, it's a conscious effort. It's an extra thing you have to do every day and it bothers them, right? So we want to take the opposite approach where we ask you, we reach out to you when we see something and then you communicate with us instead of you having to put an effort to track things all the time. Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty cool. And, and with that, will it give you like an overall calorie amount or would it just kind of assume that you know how would it work so right now uh right now it's you do have to take pictures uh and that will give you calorie your macro micronutrient breakdown and glucose

response to that food so that's the point now in the future uh it will be stepwise one is just us asking you and then later on over time uh it also as you populate what you ate that'll also give you more breakdowns but that's a little bit further out in technology world um so not there yet completely how did you get like how did you get this kind of thing off the ground because this is a big deal to be able to you know have people you, walking around with kind of a needle in their arm and in talking to other people, um, your company was mentioned many, many times as being superior. Like people were like, yeah, that's, you got to go to Dan.

He's got the best product out there. I mean, how did you, it's tough. So you can have a technology piece and then they have a medical technology piece, just another giant pain in the ass. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, one thing i'll tell you is it's kind of where these advice actually kind of cool i've it's like conversation starter you know you're at the gym where does people come up and ask you all the time like what is that uh so people sometimes are afraid that people are going to judge them but it's been the opposite where it's just i get a lot more questions a lot make a lot more friends now even during pandemic probably than i ever did before uh because it's just, I get a lot more questions, I make a lot more friends now, even during pandemic probably, than I ever did before.

Because it's interesting, like what are you wearing in your arm? And then when you tell people, get excited. First, you have to overcome the burden of what is glucose? Because most people don't know. Even though it's the main source of energy a lot of times. But in regards to starting this,

it was really a perfect storm. As I was working in some of these hospitals, I saw these rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease going up dramatically over 50, 60 years. Yet we were spending more on healthcare every single year. And I just didn't understand why. And my sister was a type one diabetic. So she's actually been wearing these devices for a decade. But they used to cost $2,000 a month. And the prices started going down dramatically. And since I had this access to all these healthcare professionals, I started asking people, what's going on with these sensors?

How are they going to go in price? And the manufacturer is talking about how they're just decreasing dramatically. Just like iPhones were really expensive or smartphones when they first came out. And now all of us have smartphones. So these devices will get to a point where they're going to be $5, $10 a month. And the price just keeps dwindling. So I knew this was the place I wanted to get into. Funny enough, I was in San Francisco and I was meeting my friend Alex.

And he happened to be wearing one. And I was like, why are you wearing this? You're not diabetic. And he said, I'm biohacking. And he happened to be a software engineer who just sold a company in the tech space and um i said hey is there a way to develop something for this it's not just for type 1 diabetics and he said yeah i would love to do that so i took care of the operational side of getting this uh from a legal perspective because you have to write medical prescriptions

for this in every single state uh trying to get that going and then he took care of building the software of combining the glucose data with all these other points that we talked about track and combining your sleep data your stress your exercise your fitness tracking everything you can imagine all one place so it's a lot harder than i thought that legal part ended being harder than actually the software part, which is interesting. That's kind of how we brought it together. I was curious because we talked about what you guys would suggest to individuals when they have stress issues. And an obvious thing is like when individuals exercise or maybe they exercise before they have their typical meals of the day, their glucose responses are better.

Along with exercise, if you guys can talk about that, what other lifestyle interventions do you think are pretty solid? Like does an individual getting sunlight, because that's something that people miss out on a lot now because of their daily life, does that make a difference in terms of their glucose responses? What other lifestyle habits do you think are key for this to be of benefit? Yeah, absolutely. I think the sunlight is a really great example. And that's another thing we utilize when people are under a lot of stress. Even if you're not under stress, it's a good daily habit to get in the routine of is when you first wake up,

get outside and get a little bit of sunshine. And if you're able to, you know, take your shoes off, get your feet in the grass, that is very, very helpful for dampening that stress response. And that definitely makes a difference. A big one that's extremely simple is just making sure you're getting in movement throughout the day. So like you said, if there's an automatic alert of like, you haven't moved in a while, like get up. Those are the type of things that we're saying to clients is like, just move a little bit.

And it's so simple. And that's the type of recommendation, you know, you read in like a blog where it's like top five things to do for glucose control. And it's like, is it actually worth it? So the motivation isn't there if you're not really sure if it's making a difference or not, but it definitely is. And even just a 10 minute walk after meals or breaking up sitting, you're sitting for two hours doing a little bit of activity, it makes significant differences just as much as like actually working out or doing something

to that extent, just a 10 minute walk is just as impactful. And so that's another reason the biggest benefit a lot of people tell us is that it helps drive behavior change and keep them accountable to these habits because you see that it's actually working. You get this immediate feedback and that's extremely powerful for behavior change and habit building is actually having a reward for your behavior right away. And not 10 years from now, where you're like, was my walk every day actually making any sort of difference? Instead, I can see it right now. Like, oh, my dinner spike is 20 points lower because I've moved for 10 minutes afterwards. So that's a big one that I see a lot. Another that's very simple is just

the order of your macronutrients at meals. So if you're eating, you know, a mixed macro meal, maybe a steak and white rice, eating that steak first, or at least half of the steak, a few bites of that steak before you dig into the white rice is going to make a very significant impact. And that's something that's super, super simple. So we're all about the low hanging fruits, what can we do that's easy and going to make a very meaningful impact. And that's things like moving and the order of your macros, getting out getting a little bit of sunshine. So things like that are very simple and even standing after meals. So if people are working from home, find a setup where you can stand a little bit where you can prop your laptop up and stand. It looks like you guys are standing right now. I'm not really sure. It makes a big difference.

Make sure we're not just in a seated position all day long. This actually impacts glucose. So it can be really simple things. Another one is just making sure we don't have any nutrient deficiencies. So there's a few key nutrients that if we're falling short on that, it impacts our ability to metabolize carbohydrates and glucose and keep optimal ranges. The biggest one is vitamin D, which also comes with the sunshine. So if we're not getting that adequate vitamin D levels, and even if you are, you might still need supplementation, making sure you're measuring this annually. That's a big one that can have a massive impact on glucose metabolism. Zinc, chromium, magnesium, and vitamin are the other big ones that we want to pay attention

to. So just making sure you're getting a nutrient-d dense diet and trying to see if there's any areas you might be falling short is something that we can look at and pay attention to as well. I will tell you that one of the things I've discovered is, is that muscle just people always argue is it better to go for a run or is it better to build muscle and building muscle is significantly better for you from a glucose control response because you're creating a bigger tank to put the gas into versus there's only so much glucose you can burn when you run. Here, you're just creating more and more opportunity for you to digest more glucose and carbohydrates. So building muscle is an extremely good way to improve your metabolic health.

And number two is I found a fascinating, I used to go run all the time and Carrie's tell me, but I would sit, I would eat and I would sit and work, work, work. And I'd run like five miles at night. And that run was giving me less benefit than just walking 10 minutes after three meals. So I found that interesting because I thought, Hey, I'm burning all these calories. I'm running, I'm doing way more movement, but it was just once a day versus now I don't even run. I just go on my 10, 15-minute walk after every single meal three times a day. And it's easier.

It's easier to make that as a habit for most common folks. And also, they're a good benefit health-wise, which is fascinating. I'm so surprised by that. I think one of the major things when you think about that, you know, if we were to think about, you know, what exercise can you burn the most calories with? You know, like what can we do in the gym that could burn the most amount of calories? Well, you could say, I don't know, maybe like a clean and jerk or or maybe if you're talking about body weight, maybe a burpee. Right. Like cost you a lot of energy. I've even seen people do burpees into like a pull up. Like that's a lot of movement. I've even seen people do burpees into, like, a pull-up. Like, that's a lot of movement.

But how long can you do that for? You know, and that's where you start to peel things back, and you're like, oh, yeah, that's why people have been talking about jumping rope since the beginning of time. You know, that's why people have been talking about jumping jacks. That's why people have been talking about walking. I mean, how much walking? You walk three times every day for 15 minutes, that might be further than the one three mile run that you do that you get hyped up about

on that one day. Cause you just watched David Goggins video. You're all pumped up and excited, but then you're really sore. And then, you know, the next day, a bunch of crap happens and you don't get to it and so on. And so you're only kind of getting it like once a week, we're going to throw out a lot of excuses to ourselves, but a walk is so easy to convince yourself of like, come on dude, like just go. And we do the same thing with weights,

you know, we'll just say, all right, we'll just go in there for about 10, 15 minutes and do some like biceps or shoulders or whatever the exercises are that you enjoy, that you like do those kind of of low hanging fruit type things that that you're going to find some enjoyment from. And then normally, once you're in there, you're

going to talk yourself into doing a little bit more because you're not going to probably go to the gym and just do like three sets of something and leave. You'll probably want to do a little bit more than that. We found that to be really helpful for us as well. What have you guys seen when it comes to, let's say, you're going to have, I don't know, some rice, but you had, you know, a supplement with it, like some fish oil or some berberine or alpha lipoic acid, or have you seen any of these kind of quote unquote glucose disposal agents be of any value to help assist in the carbohydrates ending up in the right spot? What do you notice with any of that? Yeah, I would say out of all of the supplements, berberine definitely works the best. This works for many people very well. For most people, it tends to have a cumulative effect.

And so it's like if you're taking it daily, after a couple weeks, you start to see glucose levels go down. Those post those after meal spikes go down and your average values go down. So sometimes people will take it like every once in a while randomly with meals. And we might not see as much of an effect as if you're taking it consistently. But it definitely does work. And it seems to be very low risk. There's not many potential downsides, except for maybe some GI distress, which if you take it with a meal should take care of that. So that works really, really well. It has similar mechanisms as metformin, which is the most commonly prescribed oral medication for

diabetes. So they actually work in very similar ways. Alpha lipoic acid definitely also has a lot of evidence. A lot of the research is done and like IV administration, which is not really accessible to most people, but we have had people take oral supplementation. Usually I think like 600 milligrams a day is enough to make an effect. Other than that, the two supplements that seem to have fairly good success are chromium and bitter melon. So those both seem to work as well. And there's actually quite a few supplements on the market that combine all of these things as like a glucose optimizer. And they seem to work pretty well. But berberine is our go-to recommendation for most people.

And metformin works through a mechanism almost as if your body exercised a little bit. Is that correct or am I way off on that? Yeah. So it stimulates AMPK, which is also stimulated when you're working out. And so there's a research study that came out recently because a lot of people were taking metformin for longevity reasons. No glucose issues and just taking it to maximize lifespan. And there was a research study that came out suggesting that metformin might actually blunt the beneficial effects of exercise because it's mimicking this. And so potentially

to be on the safer side, you're taking metformin or also berberine that has these similar mechanisms, taking it at opposite times as your workout to make sure you're not blunting that effect. It doesn't seem to have an effect in diabetics who are traditionally taking metformin because the benefit of the glucose regulation probably outweighs that blunting. But this effect is seen in like healthy individuals. So with berberine and metformin to play it on the safe side, we recommend taking it like as far apart from your workout as possible. So berberine isn't necessarily,

is it taken, you said taken with meals, but like if you're going to work out in the evening, you would take berberine in the morning. Is that kind of how you would suggest people do it? Yeah, pretty much. And so for the most point, like 500 to a thousand milligrams a day, and just taking it with meals if you have GI distress. So if you're working out early in the morning, you want to take it as far away and late at night and you're not eating later at night, it's most likely fine on an empty stomach. It doesn't affect absorption or the mechanisms. It's just if you're having that GI distress.

But I would separate it. Yeah, if you're working out in the evening, I would take the berberine in the morning. And then you mentioned something when you were talking about lifestyle habits as far as eating protein or like you use the example of steak and rice and starting with the steak and like mark has mentioned that too eating protein is the first part of the meal partially because it makes you full and you end up eating less overall but if if calories are equated, right, it's like a 10, 1000 calorie meal. Um, and, uh, one of those meals has a lot of heavy carbohydrates, very minimal protein. And one of those meals is more protein, lower carbohydrates. Uh, is that generally like, is that just kind of a rule of thumb that

you will kind of want to go for in those meals? Like always have protein first. Is it because of the calories? Is it because of the satiation? Are there other things going on there that we don't know? It's because we tend to have a more dramatic glucose response to carbohydrates on an empty stomach. So especially first thing in the morning, if your first meal of the day is having carbohydrates in it, I would especially recommend eating the protein first then, because there's nothing in your system to slow down the digestion of those carbohydrates. So if you're eating carbohydrates on an empty stomach, you see that immediate spike because it's quick digestion, especially if it's a more refined carbohydrate. And the protein and fat works as well, But protein seems to work a little bit better, just slows down that digestion and blunts that glucose response. So you're not seeing as high

of a peak. And so if you just ate an hour before, it probably doesn't matter that much if you eat your protein first, because you have some food in your system. But especially like at that first meal of the day, or if you're doing like longer stretches in between your meals, I would highly recommend always eating some protein or carbohydrates for protein or fat first. We have a lot of people who are always like, while I'm cooking, I'm kind of like snacking on things. So they're like, I had like five grapes while I was cooking and I had this huge glucose spike. And they're like, what was going on? My meal was just protein. I was like, it's probably just the grapes.

Try eating those five grapes at the end of your meal. And then there's no glucose response at all. So that's rather common. A lot of things we're snacking on tend to be carbohydrate rich. So it's like crackers, chips, like fruit that's easily accessible. And that's just a simple thing that could have a pretty detrimental effect that we just swap that around and it makes a big difference. and that's just a simple thing that could have a pretty detrimental effect that we just swap that around and it makes a big difference i threw down a protein shake before i went and got sushi

last night perfect yeah worked out great that's why i'm so jacked today when it comes to the different uh types of whey protein you know you got like a whey protein isolate a hydrolyzed whey a caseinin protein. Have you guys noticed any differences with how these might potentially spike your glucose levels? And if so, is there a negative side effect of that? Yeah, I haven't seen between the specific types of whey or protein supplements a difference in glucose levels unless you're crossing that threshold of need and you start to see that gluconeogenesis there's definitely and i'm sure you're aware of this plenty of research indicating that whey is more insulinogenic meaning it produces a higher

insulin response than other types of protein but insulin and glucose usually match up but they don't always perfectly match up. And this is one of those instances where you might be seeing steady glucose values, but insulin could be spiking in the background from something like just pure whey protein. So I don't usually see a nuance in glucose at that level. So my situation with having a protein shake like uh like say if i'm gonna have one this morning if i don't have something else with it like even just a small piece of bread or something my stomach gets very upset um in my head and you guys will probably think it's funny

but it just makes sense to me that like if i have a protein shake too fast my body doesn't know what the heck's happening. But if I throw a slice of bread in there to soak it up, it's like, oh, let's break this down. Does that make any sense to you guys? It could be related to the fact that the protein shake is just in a liquid form, which is just so easy to digest. So that could be just flooding it straight to your GI system. It doesn't need to do any work in the stomach to slow down that digestion. And so sometimes if we have a liquid form of anything, whether it's protein or like carbohydrates in a smoothie, that can pull

different types of like osmosis. So it might pull water if you're moving too quickly through the GI system, which could cause some gastro distress. So that would be my hypothesis is just the fact that it's liquid, not necessarily the fact that it's protein. Kind of on this topic, we talk a lot about fasting on this podcast. And, you know, you kind of mentioned if you if your stomach's empty, it's probably a good idea to have protein first before you have, you you have your other foods. But outside of that, is there anything that you guys have noticed that's beneficial as far as time-restricted feeding is concerned? Or potentially detrimental as far as your glucose is concerned when doing that?

Yeah, so I would say overall, it's a very good practice to be doing time restricted eating for almost everybody. So this generally has a very positive effect. And for the most part, that early time restricted eating works better for most folks. So as we kind of discussed earlier, it's it's not everybody, but I would say at least 75% of people do not tolerate food and especially carbohydrates as well later in the evening as when they do during the day. So this is the concept of chrononutrition, which is basically all of these processes are working on a circadian rhythm, just like our sleep-wake cycle is a circadian rhythm.

on a circadian rhythm, just like, you know, our sleep-wake cycle is a circadian rhythm. So insulin tends to be most produced and most, our cells are most insulin sensitive during daylight hours. And we have the least insulin sensitivity in the middle of the night because that's not a time traditionally where we're eating and need to be in a fed state. And so for a lot of people, earlier time restricted eating window results in significantly better glucose values than if it shifted later, or if you're just kind of grazing all day long, if we're grazing in between meals, then we're never getting back down into normal fasting glucose levels, we're never getting into that fasted state. And instead, we're just having

these like high floating average glucose values. And that can be really detrimental. So far as a general rule of thumb, we recommend at least the like 16, eight, if you can do it where, you know, you're eating just in an eight hour window. And if we're seeing those higher glucose values while you're sleeping, we try shifting that earlier, if possible. Some people, you know, schedules don't allow it. And if you're going to have that later night meal, being more conscious about it, being low carb is really helpful for a lot of people. If you have insulin resistance, honestly, the most beneficial thing we have found to bringing those glucose levels down is playing around with extended fast. So I don't inherently think you need to do it if you're insulin sensitive and everything's good to go.

But if you're insulin resistant, it's the most powerful tool that we've seen for actually reversing that insulin resistance and getting glucose values back down into normal is doing extended fast. So we rely on that pretty heavy if we're seeing like more extreme insulin resistance. And I think here gender differences actually play a big role for extended fast. And it's not something you want to talk about, Kara, a little bit. Yeah, that's another discrepancy we've seen with gender, which we weren't expecting. And the research is really muddy. You know, you always hear people that are like, women shouldn't fast, like, it's bad for women. And it was kind of this gray area. And now we've seen thousands of people and certain patterns have become apparent. One is that the 16-8 normal daily intermittent fasting works really well for almost everybody, women included. So unless you're pregnant and breastfeeding or struggling with an eating disorder or really,

really underweight, I'm pretty comfortable recommending the 16-8 to everybody, women included. So feel much more confident about that now. But the discrepancy came with the extended fasting, particularly the people who are doing extended fasting are the people who probably don't need to be doing it. So the people who are want to be like on top of everything, and they're really lean, they're exercising for two hours a day, you know, they're already calorie restricting, and then they're doing a four day fast once a month. And during that, you know, 24 hour mark,

we should see glucose in that fasting range 70 to 90. And it's starting to creep up, getting up to 100. And at day three, we're like at 120. And it's like, this is a stress response, your body is sending signals that you're under too much stress because you have all these other hormetic stressors going on and the extended fast is just too much. But we never see that effect in men. So this is something where even if a male is really healthy, all these other hormetic stressors going on, they almost always tolerate these extended fast pretty well. And the discrepancy is specifically with women, starting with like an OMAD style of eating and then onto extended fast. But if you have insulin

resistance, if you're overweight, if you're not exercising a lot, then the extended fast works really, really well for both male and female. You know, along with that, I was wondering about like as you become healthier, right, as you become more insulin sensitive, your response to these certain foods gets better, I'd assume. But is it possible to, like you mentioned, I think, I don't know if it was you, that you get a massive spike from blueberries. Is it possible over months of eating more and more blueberries that you would get a lesser response or do you just you just avoid that food altogether yeah can't we evolve can't we just eat more of the same food like is that possible um i'm not sure i think there's probably just foods we just don't tolerate as well for whatever reason a lot of it points to maybe the microbiome of maybe there's some sort of you know like species going on that aren't tolerating or breaking down

this type of food as well but i know a lot of customers will have her like my favorite carb in the world is you know this thing maybe it's butternut squash or whatever they're like i eat it every single day i love it and then they try with the cgm and it's liketernut squash or whatever. They're like, I eat it every single day. I love it. And then they try with the CGM and it's like the one thing they spike to. And it's like, but they've been eating it for so much that I'm like, I don't really know if they, maybe it was way higher at one point in time

and now it's just in like normal high range. But I think there's just certain foods we don't respond as well too. But of course, if you do have insulin resistance and you become more insulin sensitive, you're gonna be able to tolerate some of these foods better than you might have originally. But if you're already insulin sensitive, there might just be the foods that don't work as well. And you can still have them and we can hack them a little bit. Maybe you take a supplement with

that food or you eat it in a smaller portion or right after a workout is the best time. If you have a food you spike to and you just absolutely love it, eating it after a workout is going to be your best option because it's when you're most insulin sensitive, you're going to have the most blunted glucose response. So there's ways to hack it a little bit. If you're like, I still want to include this in my diet. Like, how do I do this in the best way possible? We can play with it. But I think at the end of the day, there's just foods. We can tolerate differently. And there's something really fascinating about that. We actually, the foods that are good and bad for us change over time. So if you are a normal woman and then you have a pregnancy,

afterward, during pregnancy and after the pregnancy, the food that you might have been good for you might not be so good anymore and vice versa. Also, your microbiome changes. As you eat certain things over your lifetime, your microbiome changes. Maybe now you eat a lot more probiotics and prebiotics. That will affect your microbiome. So again, the things that were considered that might have caused you to spike a lot may not and vice versa, which is fascinating, right? So today I can be eating blueberries and they're terrible. Five years down the line, they're actually fine for me. Based on how the environment and things I have been eating over a long time have changed the way a body responds to them. What about a post-workout? What have you guys seen, you know, be the most

effective for some people that you have that might be athletes that want to try to recover from the workout? And what is happening post-workout? Like, you know, why are we encouraged to eat, you know, more carbohydrates and have like a protein shake post-workout? Where do some of those recommendations come from? And what have you guys seen? Yeah. So during a workout, most likely you're burning through some of those glycogen stores. So if you're doing something higher intensity, so heavy strength training or like a HIIT workout, sprints, you're most likely fueling it with glucose.

So it's glycolytic workout, you might even see a spike in your glucose while you're doing that workout. And that's perfectly okay, and perfectly normal, because it's just the glucose fueling the workout. But if you see that spike, that most likely meant that you depleted some of your glucose stores. And so if you want to then be able to have that storage form of glucose ready and available to fuel your next workout, you might want to replenish it afterwards. And we're most insulin sensitive and we're most able to replenish that glycogen at a fast rate right after the workout. So often if you're doing these higher intensity exercises, we want some of that carbohydrates and some of that protein right after the meal. And this is something where I think it's again, personal and differs between

people, but it's really interesting for a lot of our athletes to toy with is the best refueling strategy, depending on what workout they did and what foods they respond better to. Because you can see really quickly if you're overshooting your carbohydrate needs and, you know, overestimating how many carbohydrates you might need after that meal and seeing a spike in return, you should see, you know, pretty gradual glucose response after that meal. If you just burned through all that glucose, it should be going straight into immediate need. And so sometimes a little goes a long way for some people. So we can see like, are you tanking? Is your glucose continuing to go down and you're having an energy crash? Maybe you're not refueling enough, or maybe you're seeing a huge glucose spike and you're overdoing it. So we can kind of tweak on

the best refueling strategy for somebody. But for most people doing like strength training and HIIT workouts, any type of high intensity where you want something right after that workout. I think data here is really key. We have a lot of people who are ultra marathon runners. They ride bikes long distance, 30, 40, 50 miles. And a lot of times what they're doing now is they ride, ride, ride, and all of a sudden they have this bomb because they just crash. And they just have a big goo gel. All it is is spiking their glucose so they get energy again.

Now they're able to say, oh, this is going to happen an hour from now or 30 minutes from now. They're able to time it so they never have the crash in the first place, which is fascinating, I think. And it helps them perform at a higher level. You know, Dan, at the beginning we just go ahead sorry we just had like one of our customers was the first person to do an ultra marathon on carnivore diet and he felt comfortable doing it because he was wearing the cgm and he was like i can see if you know i'm actually having a fuel available even though he wasn't taking any carbohydrates in.

And you could see, am I actually fat adapted enough where I'm not going to bonk anymore like he was in the beginning of training? So I thought that was really interesting that he used that tool, not just to fine tune his performance, but also feel confident that he was going to be able to execute on what he was trying to do. Is there any trend in terms of like seeing where your glucose levels are and knowing you are ready to perform? Like, can you like, you know, you mentioned that they can tell right before they're going to bonk. So they know when they need to

refuel during their ride, but is there a way to see, okay, when I'm at this level, I'm pretty good to perform here or is there really no correlation there yeah and if it's something that is like a glycolytic activity like a heavy strength training or something like that you could you know you could see like i just ate something and i'm timing when it's going at its peak for when i'm gonna have the most available immediate energy uh you could certainly do that it would be a little like nuanced and probably like exact. Like, I don't know how practical that is. Yeah, you certainly could do it, especially if you're like, you know, competing at a high level. And those little nuances make a difference. It's possible for sure.

What is what about alcohol? What is alcohol? Do what have you guys seen with that? You know, you got this monitor on and you're probably trying to be good, but you have it on for two weeks and you probably start to mess up a little bit here and there. What's the impact of alcohol? Yeah, alcohol is interesting. It depends on the type of alcohol. So if you're consuming something like a heavy beer or a cocktail, you're going to see a glucose spike because it's mostly carbohydrates. But for something like dry wine or liquor, often in the moment, people actually see a glucose dip, so a decrease in glucose. And this is because, again, back to oxidative priority, if there's alcohol in your system, the first thing your body wants to do is metabolize and get rid of that alcohol because it's a toxin.

And so normally the liver is regulating what's going on in our glucose. But if you have glucose come in that doesn't have any carbohydrates in it, the liver prioritizes that and we see a glucose dip. But then often we'll see the next day and this differs for everyone. Some people see this with one glass only. And some people see this after like four glasses of wine or maybe shots of liquor that they'll see the next day they're fasting and average glucose levels are higher. And this just comes back to the impairment the alcohol is having on your liver and its ability to maintain normal glucose levels the next day. So for some people, you know, maybe a glass of wine at dinner leads to a nice little decrease and actually blunts some of the response of their dinner, and they see no effect the next day.

And then for some people, just one glass of wine can kind of cause detriments the next day. So it's a little bit variable, but multiple glasses is definitely going to have an effect the next day on your glucose level for everybody. And then what about sleep? When your sleep is impaired, what kind of impact does this have on our glucose? Have you guys seen? Yeah.

So sleep would be considered a chronic stressor is how I describe it to people. So just like if you have chronic psychological stress, this is causing your body to pump out more glucose and also reduce its insulin sensitivity. So we see this in two different ways. One is if you're not getting enough deep sleep. So maybe you were in bed for eight hours, but it was disrupted sleep. You have a baby or construction or something going on, you're waking up a lot. These people are going to have poor glucose values the next day. So, you know, normally maybe you respond perfectly well to oatmeal, you might have twice as high of a glucose spike if you had a bad night of sleep. So a lot of people have it's like, if we're not

sleeping well, we might want to compensate the next day by having lower carbohydrates, or making sure we make it to the gym for eating an easy exercise movement. You might want to compensate for some of these things. The other one is just shortened sleep. So you could get really deep, amazing sleep, but if you're only sleeping for four hours, it's going to have the same effect as the interrupted sleep. And it goes both directions as well. So poor night of sleep means worse glucose values the next day. But also, if you have higher glucose values going into the night, you're going to get worse quality sleep.

So it seems that these higher glucose values interrupt our ability to get into that deep level of sleep. And it's kind of almost like putting us in this fight or flight mode. And we're just in this lighter level of sleep if we're going to bed with higher glucose values. So bidirectional effects there. And about like, how long does it take for somebody to catch up on a bad night of sleep? Like, have you guys monitored anything like that where it's like, okay, this person had, you know, on Tuesday, they had a bad night of sleep and it wasn't until like Saturday till their glucose and everything was back on track. Yeah.

For an insulin sensitive person, if you have one bad night of sleep and then you have a good night of sleep, the next day could be fixed the next day. So it can be very immediate where you had a terrible glucose day because you slept awful, but then we're good to go once you're back on track. So it seems to be quite reversible. If you're insulin resistant, it's a little more lagging because the body's just kind of struggling to main glucose in the first place. But it can be a quick fix. If you have a bad night of sleep, you can be back to normal if you fix that rather quickly. The hard part becomes if

you're a new parent and you always have a bad night of sleep. So that's when we have to pull on other levers. You know, we have a lot of customers like that. The truth is you're not gonna get good sleep for a while, right? And so we have to pull on these other levers and like be more meticulous about your diet and be more meticulous about fasting and things like that

because unfortunately the sleep is not going to improve anytime soon so those are factors where we just have to compensate in other ways does the cgm track heart rate too while you're asleep or no no it does not but a lot of people who are wearing devices that track heart rate heart rate we can that and correlate that. So a lot of people are stacking that on top of each other and we're seeing interesting observations. And that's where it's like, people are like, okay, I knew when I had a glass of tequila before bed that my heart rate got messed up, but I was ignoring that. And now I also see that my glucose rises to it. And it's just another data point where it's like, okay, this is not working very well for me, but they're certainly correlated.

And in the beginning of the podcast, you guys mentioned the idea of like metabolic flexibility. When most people hear that, they just think, oh, I can eat a bunch of different foods and feel great. But what exactly does that mean as far as your definition is concerned? And is metabolic flexibility something that people want to aim for or does it really matter? Yeah, that's a great question. So metabolic flexibility at its core is just the capability of an organism or even a single cell to adapt what fuel you're burning based on what fuel is available. So if you're giving it fat, can burn fat perfectly fine, everything's good to go. If you're giving it glucose, can burn carbs, glucose, we're good to go. And be able to easily switch between these fuel sources.

I like to describe it as like our body is like a car and gasoline, you know, it's like the glucose and that's our primary energy source. But if you're metabolically flexible, it's like a hybrid car. If we're going at low speeds where we're as much energy efficient as possible. And if we're going up on the highway, we're switching fuels to be as energy efficient as possible. And so I believe that metabolic flexibility is the ultimate goal. And that's what I'm really trying to work on with a lot of these people is being able to switch between fuel sources easily, because all metabolic disorders are characterized by an inability to do this process, this quick switching. Americans are so carbohydrate dependent and glucose dependent that they have a very, very hard time utilizing fuel as an efficient or utilizing fat as an efficient fuel source. So most of the time in traditional standard American diet, that's the problem we're working on, which then maybe let's try cutting back the carbs. Let's try becoming, you know, fat adapted, working on

generating ketones, And then we can switch between fuel sources more easily in the future. But I also see the opposite problem start to occur where somebody has become so keto obsessed that they've been doing strict keto for four years, and they've never utilized glucose as a fuel source in that timeframe that they now have become unable to metabolize glucose as a fuel. So these people I would consider metabolically inflexible to carbohydrates. And if you gave them a bunch of carbohydrates, they're going to have a massive glucose spike because their body no longer is used to processing this.

So sometimes we're working on the opposite direction is maybe like a cyclical keto or some some carb up days or intermittent ketosis, depending on you know, their goals and their lifestyle. But I really believe it's it's the ultimate goal because then it allows flexibility, you know, if you are mostly keto most of the time, but you want to go have sushi or you want to go have birthday cake, you can do that. And it's not going to like totally destroy everything that's going on. So I think it allows flexibility in lifestyle, but it also is at the core of preventing some of these metabolic conditions because they're all characterized by this poor crosstalk and poor energy utilization.

Thank you guys so much for your time today. Where can people find out more about the continued glucose monitoring? Thanks, Mark. They can go to NutriSense.io. That's N-U-T-R-I-S-E-N-S-E.io. Thank you for your time, guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, guys. Yeah, thanks. Have a great rest of your day.

Thank you guys so much. That was awesome. That was great. I like that it's, you know, I like that the information is just, it's black and white, right? Like you, you're not, because sometimes like if you get something tracked, you don't know. Like I know for myself, I was tracking my sleep. It actually made me feel more tired because I don't really get great sleep often. But this piece actually seems like it would be great for me to line up with my sleep because then I would be able to say, OK, well, you know, when I'm having bad nights of sleep, it's negatively impacting me this way. And I can clearly see it.

It's not just a feeling, right? It's an actual thing. And I think, you know, I think that's, you know, kind of the key factor is that you're going to want to deal with metrics, you know, rather than trying to just say, oh, yeah, I feel this or I feel that. Or we say it all the time, right? Like, oh, I don't or I feel that. Or we say it all the time, right? Like, oh, I don't respond well to that. And we don't really know. I mean, I guess maybe we sort of know, but we kind of don't know. I mean, what you mentioned about the protein, that's really interesting, because what if

you just mix your protein with less water? Maybe you don't end up with the same problem. Yeah. So lately, what I've been doing, actually,, is like, I'll mix it with, um, some protein, a little bit of a PB to some oatmeal and some blueberries. And I have that as like my pre-workout meal. It's been great. Like I feel freaking awesome when I have it. So that's not what I'm going to keep doing. But I think what she said, I think you've said it before too. It's like, it's probably just cause you're having too much protein too fast. Right? Like where in nature are you going to have, you know, whatever,

25 grams of protein in four seconds. Right. Okay. I guess I won't, you know, like, so that makes a lot of sense. And yeah, just having something there just to solidify it to me just feels better. But what she said is like, Oh, you're probably just digesting it slower. Makes, makes a lot of sense. Cause that's kind of how I've been feeling. Yeah, I think anybody that's going to drink a protein shake, I think you should drink it as if you were eating a protein bar. You know, have it take a little bit of time. Like, you know, it doesn't have to be really slow, but just have it. Like each drink is like a bite, right?

Yeah, just have it take a couple minutes. I mean, you don't want to just nail it, you know. And I think same thing with carbohydrate drinks and stuff like that, too. I mean, I don't think there's probably really nothing wrong with drinking orange juice, you know. Like, literally, there's really nothing. You know, their glucose monitor would show that it would spike a lot. But what if you were to drink it over the course of three minutes or five minutes rather than just to, you know, slam it, which you want to do because it tastes really good, right? Yeah, do it with some crushed ice, do because it tastes really good, right? Yeah.

Do it with some crushed ice, though. That's a lot of fun. And then I just got a message. So the day that this episode releases, October 15th, we are having a 20% off all powerlifting Federation approved gear at MarkBellSlingShot.com. Yeah. So that's knee sleeves, wrist wraps, singlets, and much, much more. Plus free worldwide shipping.

So sorry, Mark. I don't think you approved that one, but we went. You're trying to give shit away. We went behind your back and decided to give everyone 20% off today and today only. That sale ends at midnight today, October 15th. You went behind my back, in front of my back. You reached around. Did the whole reach around.

I said something the other day and my wife, she's like, yeah, that's a reach around. And I was like, no, I'm like, wait, I'm like, I'm like, no. What's the context? I can't, I can't even, I can't even remember. But like she just, she was like,

no, that's, but we weren't talking about I can't even remember. But like, she just, she was like, no, that's it. But we weren't talking about anything like that at all. And so she's like, yeah, that's a reach around. I'm like, I don't think that you understand what you're saying. My,

my, no, I do. I was like, one of my absolute favorite, like a scenes in a movie is from 40 year old version when they're just, they're going back and forth. Like,

you know how I know you're gay. You know how I know you're gay. back and forth like you know how i know you're gay you know how i know you're gay he's like you know how i know you're gay he's like why because you did a reach around as you mounted me i just ended it right there right what it's so funny to me how do we always get here how does it happen oh man it's such an intelligent conversation. This is literally like three minutes after it ended. Three minutes after it ended, we're talking about a reach around. Oh, we're left alone. How do we do this? And they're watching this, trying to share it out with their families.

And they're like, oh, now I got to tell them that these guys are kind of stupid. And just to ignore the end. Hey, like at around, I don't know, an hour and and a half in just go ahead and just hit stop like don't even bother this was youtube by the way you guys noticed that but you bring it out you bring it out in this though yeah i have fun with it too it's all right yeah yeah but this device is actually super powerful let's bring it back real quick it's really great how like you can have a meal and literally like open up your phone and you can see how much it's spiking right and and like the effects that it has on your sleep like this is way better than

what a like a whoop will give you some information your apple watch gives you some information but nothing like this no this is crazy and then like ketone ketone monitoring in the future um the lactic acid thing yeah that. That's going to be huge. That's, that's crazy. That's really, really cool. I mean,

they're learning, like they're, they continue to learn a lot more about lactic acid. And I remember going to a seminar a long time ago and the guy that ran the seminar was like lactic acid, you know, isn't what people think it is at the moment. He's like,

you watch, it'll be a supplement someday. And I, and everyone was like, what's he talking about? Like lactic acid hurts, you know, but, uh, I guess lactic, I don't know much about it. So I'm not even going to say, but I just thought that that was interesting. And then now we're starting to hear more about the like beneficial effects of lactic acid and what it can actually do. So it's just, I don't know, all this stuff is really interesting.

just, I don't know, all this stuff is really interesting. I like that Dan and Kara were very, they weren't dogmatic, you could tell in what they were saying. They weren't like, hey, you spike glucose, you're getting fat. You spike glucose, you're getting disease. What they were saying is, hey, this is what we're seeing, and this could potentially be dangerous if you do it over a long period of time. And I know we touched upon calories for a minute there. And we I want to make it clear that we're not saying that calories don't matter. The overall amount of food you eat, it's always going to have an impact. And but I think what happens, though, is some people they get behind. They might be heavy from the time they're a child.

though, is some people they get behind, they might be heavy from the time they're a child. And then maybe as they get older, maybe they're 18, 19 years old, they start to run into trouble with sleeping. They, you know, maybe just have bad dietary habits in general. And then they're like, hey, I'm going to I'm going to work on losing some weight. And so they exercise and they try to find a caloric deficit and they just really struggle. And maybe they're not going low enough to get to the caloric deficit. But what happens is I think their metabolism is so screwed up that they have to get to an amount of food that's just not achievable for them at the moment. And so it's going to take a long time for them to swing all that back around. But if you can monitor something with a glucose monitor or if you can start to strength train to build a little bit of muscle mass to do some of the stuff they mentioned, the 10 minute walks.

Maybe you do cut back on carbohydrates so you can allow your metabolism to start swinging in a different direction. Then you'll probably be able to eat more at a certain point and still lose weight consistently over a period of time. So I just I find all that to be really fascinating because I know there's a lot of people that want to make changes and they're trying to make changes, but they're like, they try for seven days or eight days, which I know isn't a long time, but it feels like you're in fucking prison when you're trying for the first time and you don't have experience doing it. And you're like, I can't go any lower than 1200 calories. I don't know what else to do. Yeah. And then the effects of vitamin D it's even like, like the fact that that was the

number one supplement, I think that they mentioned, um, that's, that's huge. Like we've been hearing way more about vitamin D and like the gut and all that type of stuff. And it's, it's crazy how much more people are learning about how beneficial that is. And it's cheap. And it's, it's crazy how much more people are learning about how beneficial that is. And it's cheap. And it's the correlation with the coronavirus and stuff too. D three. I mean, there's, there's not enough evidence to really pull it all together.

I don't think at the moment, but I mean, it also just appears that people have higher vitamin D or just healthier in general. So it makes sense that they're going to be able to fight off viruses and cold and things like that. But yeah, what if just getting in the sun and maybe supplementing with a little bit of vitamin D here and there? Like, you know, what if that's a major, major factor in your body composition, in your overall health?

Is it like that much to ask that you go on Amazon or grab some vitamin D3 on your way out of Costco or something like that. Like it just doesn't seem, it just doesn't seem like that big of an ask. It doesn't seem like that, that tough of a thing to do. Yeah. And those, those gel caps are so small. They're tiny. They're so easy to take. I hear people, I can't take vitamins.

Like, okay, you're a child, but these ones are super easy. I just get frustrated with one person in particular she's she's on top of her game but she's like oh i don't like taking vitamins like well i think you know when it comes to uh supplements too you can also look up you know you can go online you can look up like what foods have these vitamins oh right yeah you know and so um i don't know all the different stuff that has vitamin D in it, but I believe that dairy is a pretty good source of vitamin D. But it might be a little tricky. You might need raw dairy.

I don't know. But that's always a good way. If you need more calcium or if you need more whatever it is, usually the way you absorb it through your nutrition is going to be superior anyway, uh, than, uh, than just taking a supplement, but the supplements can help sometimes. So you might want to try to look into both. Yeah. I was curious. I wanted to follow up on when she said, um, when Kara said about stepping outside barefoot,

like I've, I've heard of that before, but earthing grounding. Yeah. That that's what it is. Just, I don't know. It's just just it hits different when somebody's like this knowledgeable and like oh okay like i think it was like dave asprey was big on it and then when you know him and joe rogan had their falling out is like everything he says i'm gonna listen to but i'll have skeptical hippo eyes instead of falling out uh they just got into

like a battle on the show yeah no because uh they were selling bulletproof coffee on it, like the whole thing. And then it just, it got weird. I don't remember exactly what happened. You know, Dave Asprey claimed that he like invented it and then he didn't because, I mean, buttered coffee's been around a while. Yeah. And again, this is all off of a very cloudy memory, off of the best night asprey is uh very uh opinionated and from what i recall they kind of they kind of got into an argument like on the show and uh asprey was saying that his coffee is the only coffee that doesn't have like mold in it and stuff like that yes because it was single origin coffee and rogan

was kind of like dude that's kind of bullshit you know and they're just going back and forth and asprey was i thought it was great because dave asprey most people would be like hey i'm on joe rogan's show like i'm just gonna chill and he didn't he was like no this is what it was just because that's how strong his beliefs were and i think that's i think that's kind of cool but dave asprey is a tough guy to get a read on sometimes because he is so smart and he says some crazy stuff where you're like, is he just trying to sell me on something or is he speaking? And I don't think he needs to sell you on anything any further. I mean, he's he's got, you know, multiple multimillion dollar businesses. So, you know, that can't be the heart of what I've had great conversations with him.

He shared a lot of information with me before. so it's i just think he's just different you know he's uh he's got that musk like yeah he's like elon musk of like nutrition or something like that right and i really enjoy that uh that bulletproof coffee restaurant place oh that place right around the corner from gold's yeah i know yeah how cool would that be if there was one down the street oh yeah i'd be there every day i just got done kind of not bashing, but like not speaking highly of them, but I'd be there right now. That place is good.

And, uh, what about Dutch bros going up down the street? So I got to know exactly where it is. Yeah. Wow. I'm really pumped for that. I'm actually very excited.

We need Sean to open up like food places too, right? Man, we need to get him on that. Are you inside like drive through drive through poke places or something really dope are you supplementing burberry right now i am do you like that's something you do commonly can you tell maybe uh you know um gabrielle uh pointed it out to me a while back and then um i recommended it to my mother-in-law and then when I was looking up,

cause she's diabetic, but when I was looking it up more, um, I was like, Oh, maybe that would help. Cause I want to start to eat more carbs. And I was like, and then as I looked into it, I was like, well, it doesn't seem like it hurts anything. Um, berberine is pretty strong though too. So, um, you know, trying to get the right dosage, I think, is important. But I think it usually comes in like 500 milligrams, like 500 milligrams two or three times a day should be, you know, would be more than enough. But Tony Huge also makes a product, which is just a supplement.

And it's called Slin, but that has some Burberry in it. And it has a bunch of other stuff that helps uh helps you to kind of i guess it's a absorb carbohydrates i guess you'd say call it like officially like a carb partitioner yeah and then when you i like the product a lot me too i like it a lot when you were talking about um lactic acid lactic acid being a supplement and how like no we actually want more of it. He also has the arachidonic acid, which if you're not careful, it'll make you sore. Controversial, yeah.

Yeah. What does it do? It just makes you more inflamed. But where you want to have it though. If your muscles are sore and they don't get inflamed, they're not going really repair and grow yeah so is it something you take post you can do post but i mean you can do pre or post i will always say take it post because i don't know i get in my own head and i'm like oh i'm getting tired so the acid from a muscle standpoint i believe that what she was pointing out on the show she was saying that metformin kind of mimics exercise in a way, but it might have a negative impact on growth.

From the things I've heard and the things that I've looked into, berberine wouldn't have that same impact. It wouldn't have that same negative impact because it's controlling your glucose, I think, through a slightly different mechanism. that same negative impact because it's controlling your glucose, I think through a slightly different mechanism. So I don't know. I don't believe that there's anything to worry about in terms of like taking it like around your workout. I don't think there's a much concern with that. That's, and this from like Ron and Tony huge who, you know, I would refer to more for like specific lifting stuff, but, uh, yeah, I've been utilizing, um, I've been having some carbohydrates in my workouts. I've been having some like liquid carbs, like during the training session. You know, I get I get maybe halfway through a workout and I'll have a little bit of carbohydrates during the training session.

If I don't have carbohydrates, I might have some EAs, some essential amino acids during the training session. And, you know, I don't know if it's, I'm not sure if it's the aminos. I'm not sure if it's the carbs. I'm not sure if it's, you know, just the fact that there's like sodium and potassium and electrolytes and a lot of these things. And I'm using the element and stuff like that. I don't know if it's that, but I just feel great in the workout, like midway through the workout.

I'm like, oh, here we go. Like, this is, this is kind of right where I need to be sometimes right where you're like, I just kind of want to get out of here. I start to feel a little bit more like, Oh, this is perfect. Like I want to just, I want to just keep going. The other day I was doing some legs and I got up to like six plates on the belt squat and I was pushing that pretty hard. And I was like, Oh, and just, I don't feel like adding any more weight to this belt squat. And I was pushing that pretty hard. And I was like, Oh, and just,

I don't feel like adding any more weight to this belt squat. So I was like, I'm just going to end here. I did like 45 reps. I did like 20 with kind of a close stance or moderate stance. And I did another 20 with like a wider stance and then just kind of pushed it for a couple extra reps. And everybody was like, how many reps did you do?

I was like, I don't know. The other guy was like, I counted. He's like, I think you do like 45 reps. Damn. Wow. I was like, shit. But I think, you know, some of that is helping. You know, it's just giving you that little extra.

I mean, I like to train that way anyway. I like to kill myself a little bit here and there. But just giving that little extra push during your training session. Do you notice that you get more vascular when you take Element electrolytes, like mid-workout? Oh, salt. Yeah. You know, any salt. But yeah, that helps a lot.

I just, I don't know. It just feels like you got more behind you. There's no other way to describe it. But I feel like you got a little extra. A little extra. Yeah, a little extra junk in the trunk. Yeah, it's crazy because it it's just it just seems like it's salt it doesn't make sense but yeah it kind of fuels it fuels you and pushes you a little bit

harder yeah it's crazy no it's it's great i love this stuff yeah speaking of today yeah this episode is the first time that they're sponsoring a full episode oh yeah, nice. DrinkLMNT.com slash PowerProject. Make sure you guys check out the value bundles because that's like buying three boxes and getting a fourth one for free. Again, that's at DrinkLMNT.com slash PowerProject. Shout out to them and a huge thank you.

Make sure you guys show support for them. What else you guys got going on today? By the way, just real short, I like to dump the chocolate into my protein or into my coffee that's what i had in this coffee today it's really good i got a grass in that it's really good you might want to try half at first because it is salty so it might add too much salt for your liking but i enjoy it yeah um the first time i tried it i did it with protein and the element chocolate flavor. And I think I just did it.

It was a little bit too much for me. I got to throw. I have a glucose monitor from those guys. I need to throw that damn thing. I've been wanting to, but I just keep kind of forgetting. It's been just sitting in my pantry and I need to just commit to putting the damn thing on. Tell me how that installation process is. Because as they were telling me about it, I was getting a little squeamish.

That stuff kind of creeps me out. I was going to tease them a little bit, but I was like, ah, it was better. But I was going to be like, oh, yeah, you just insert it into your tricep, and then it just crawls up the back of your neck and goes into your brain and controls you. It taps into your spine and controls you. The only thing that I'd be concerned about like not so much because even she said it's like it doesn't really go deep like under the surface or anything but like if i like put on a shirt and like i just like like kind of yeah hooks on or something i don't

i wonder if like i don't think it does any of that i think it's like i think it's as if i think it's as if you had a band-aid on okay i think it's like that do you put something like I have to look at it I'm wondering if something's over because like I'm thinking about like using it and then going into jujitsu like with all that friction and all that going over I wonder I just wonder I guess we'll have to see one day yeah jujitsu is weird because like you know I've heard people talk about like heart rate monitors and stuff for that and it's like you can't figure out where the hell to put anything because everything gets rubbed on or chafed or moved around or shuffled around and right i mean you're rolling on top of each other and everything yeah speaking of uh there was an alien that choked out in sema yesterday

yeah that's kind of weird right yeah took somebody from another planet to choke you out gave me an rnc and then i woke up in my bed this morning drove to the podcast kind of weird my butt felt kind of weird i don't know what's going on i've seen that on south park i still haven't seen their uh their, their newest one with the Corona. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. I haven't seen it.

I have to watch it too. Yeah. We'll save it for another show. I guess so. All right. I want to take us out of here, Andrew. I will.

Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. And again, a huge shout out and thank you to element for jumping on board with us. We're really excited to partner up with them. Uh, you guys have heard us talk about them on the podcast in the past, so it only made sense that we'd team up with them. Again, head over to drinklmnt.com slash powerproject.

I like the citrus salt and Seema likes raspberry. Raspberry. Yeah, yeah, that's the good stuff there. Mark likes them all. And please make sure you follow the podcast at MarkBell's Power Project on Instagram, uh, please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Bell's power project on Instagram at MB power project on Twitter. Uh, if you guys, anything stood out to you guys in today's episode, let us know down in the comments or hit us up on any of those social media platforms. Let's get a conversation going. Uh, love hearing from you

guys. And again, if you guys are listening to us and you screenshot that thing, or you take a picture of wherever the heck you are listening to it. I'll always reshare them. I really like seeing those. So thank you guys who have been doing that. Thank you again to everybody that's been reviewing the podcast on iTunes. That helps us out a ton. And then, of course, right here on YouTube, hit that thumbs up button because that also helps the channel quite a bit. And if you guys want, you can follow me at IamAndrewZ.

And Seema, where are you at? At InsimaYinYang on Instagram and YouTube. At InsimaYinYang on Twitter. Mark? I think you guys got some great advice today. I think that eating that protein first, I think, is just something that I don't see why you can't implement it. Sounds easy enough. And oddly enough, I like doing it mainly just from a food preference standpoint, from like a taste perspective, if I had steak and rice,

let's say I had like a New York strip or I got a Piedmontese steak. That's pretty lean. I want to eat most of that so that I can enjoy like a good amount of the steak with the rice in combination. Cause like you, I think you guys know what I'm trying to say here is that like you need a certain amount of like veggies or rice to help you get the protein down like easier. Right.

And so if you ate about half the steak, then when you go to eat the steak and rice together, it seems like you have kind of more, more, more rice than you really got. Even like with, you know, just a cup or half a cup of rice, you can kind of go a long way and help you eat it a little bit better. So I recommend it. Give it, give it a shot. You know, have your protein, you know, before you go out to eat or have your protein before you shop. It will help kind of curb your appetite. And then I think from a perspective of helping to manage your glucose,

it will assist with that as well. So give that a shot. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you all later.