Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Cyrus Khambatta & Robby Barbaro on the Plant-Based Path to Mastering Diabetes EP 279

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Do you want to achieve long-term health with diabetes and even reverse it? I am joined on Passion Struck by Cyrus Khambatta and Robby Barbaro, who share the solution - how to conquer diabetes with a plant-based, low-fat diet and regular physical activity - to help you do just that! We discuss their book Mastering Diabetes:  The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently in Type 1, Type 1.5, Type 2, Prediabetes, and Gestational Diabetes. Cyrus Khambatta and Robby Barbaro Discuss Their Mastering Diabetes Approach to Reversing Insulin Resistance This episode offers valuable guidance and motivation for individuals with diabetes who are looking to make lifestyle modifications to improve their health. As authors of the book Mastering Diabetes, Cyrus and Robby are dedicated to helping people understand the importance of a holistic approach to diabetes management and the power of taking control of one's health through informed decisions. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/cyrus-khambatta-robby-barbaro-mastering-diabetes/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview:  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Gaia Bernstein on how to overcome tech addiction: https://passionstruck.com/gaia-bernstein-fix-the-tech-addiction-crisis/  Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/   

Coming up next on passion struck. The truth is that if you take a look at the sort of marketing about diabetes, the marketing also reinforces this concept that, you know, it's a genetic condition and that it's going to happen to you at some point, right? So what I want people to understand is that there are chronic diseases that have a strong genetic association and chronic diseases that have a weak genetic association. It turns out that the diseases that affect most people, including number one, obesity, number two, pre-diabetes, number three, type two diabetes, number four

hypertension, number five, high cholesterol, all of these have a very weak genetic association. Welcome to PassionStrock. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest ranging

from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 279 of PassionStruck. Right by Apple is one of the top 20 health, and thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the

world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, where you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode sturder packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes, that we organize and convenient topics to give any new listener, a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. I'd go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash Sturderpacks to get started. In case you missed it, earlier this week I interviewed Laurie Gottlieb, who's a psychotherapist

and New York Times best-selling author of the book Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, which is being adapted for TV with Eva Lungoria. In addition to her clinical practice, Lori writes, the Atlantic's Dear Therapist Advice Column and is often featured in The New York Times. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued support of the show. Your ratings and reviews go such a long way

in bringing more people into the passion-struck movement where we can help so many by giving them weekly doses of hope, inspiration, meaning, and connection. Thank you so much for your support, and I know our guests also love to hear from you. Now let's talk about today's episode. There are many different approaches to nutrition and blood sugar management for people dealing with diabetes. Some people swear by low carb or ketogenic diets.

Some prefer more well-balanced diets with macronutrients, while others are strictly vegan. All of these diets work, and we don't advocate for one particular nutritional approach here on PassionStruct. Instead, we want you to know about the different options, so that you can make an informed choice for what works for you, your body, as well as your diabetes. Today, we will take a look at the very fascinating, high-carb, plant-based approach from the newly released book, Mastering Diabetes. Cyrus, Cumbata, and Robbie Barbaro, the guys behind the Mastering Diabetes approach both live with diabetes, and they teach an approach that focuses on eating a plant-based diet consisting of plenty of herbal hydrates and very limited fats.

Cyrus Cumbata and Robbie Barbaro are co-authors of the New York Times' best selling book, Mastering Diabetes and the co-founders of Mastering Diabetes, a coaching program that teaches people how to reverse insulin resistance, be a low fat, plant-based, whole-food nutrition. Cyrus has been living with type one diabetes since 2002 and has an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in

Nutritional Biochemistry from University, California, Berkeley. Robbie was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2000 and has been living on a plant-based diet since 2006. He worked at Forks Over Nives for six years and earned a Master's in Public Health in 2019. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so ecstatic today to welcome New York Times best-selling authors, Cyrus Cavada and Robby Barbaro, to PassionStrike Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here with you today, John. I'm really excited. I always love to show the book, it's best-selling book of years, by the way. I know that this has been out now for a little bit, but it has sure taken the world by storm, so congratulations to both of you. Thank you, thank you.

Appreciate it. So when it comes to the topic of diabetes, it affects millions and millions of people. But what's interesting is people wonder how to approach it. And someone may be wondering, how would the two of you be best positions as authors to write this book and know how to actually, as we'll talk about today, be able to reverse some forms of type 2 diabetes, but overall address all

forms of diabetes. Maybe I'll start with you, Cyrus. Yeah. Okay. So, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Very kind of you, and we're looking forward to have a great discussion about diabetes and all the tentacles of diabetes and adding as much value as possible. So I was diagnosed with actually three autoimmune conditions when I was 22 years old. So I was a senior. I was trying to graduate from

Stanford University and just move on with my life, I was studying mechanical engineering and within a very short period of time within about a six month period, I got diagnosed with the first one was Hashimoto's Hypofiberism. The second one was Alopecia Universalis, which is just a fancy way of saying complete hair loss. And then the third one was type one diabetes. And I did not know at that time what was causing me to develop not just one, but three autoimmune conditions simultaneously. I couldn't answer that question. I still cannot answer that question today. And my doctors at that time also were flabbergasted.

They even told me, they said, we have literally never seen a single human being who has this presentation of three autoimmune diseases. How do you feel about us talking about you in our next team Huddl? And I was like, okay, you can do whatever you want, but you're not giving me very much confidence that you know how to advise me on what I can do.

So the one thing that they did tell me at that time was that I should eat a low carbohydrate diet because a low carbohydrate diet was the prescription that was going to give me two promises. Promise number one was that it would keep my blood glucose low, aka well-controlled. And number two, it would also keep my insulin use low. And it would prevent me from using more and more insulin over the course of time, which usually happens in the case of many people living with type one. So they said, eat a low carbohydrate diet, your glucose will stay low, your insulin use

will stay low. And those are both good things because they're going to improve your overall health and they're going to keep your ability to manage your blood glucose much simpler and it'll add quality to your life. And I said, okay, great. You're telling a 22 year old guy to go eat more meat, cheese, chicken, fish, peanut butter, turkey burgers, dairy products like, are you kidding me? Of course, I'll do that. No problem at all.

Right. So I did that for the first year and what I found was no matter how low carb my diet was, my blood glucose just was not controllable. So it was supposed to stay nice and low in the fasting state and nice and low after a meal and low in between meals. But on any given day, I would check my blood glucose and it would be anywhere between a 40, which is considered a hypoglycemic like a low blood glucose. And then it could be north of 400, right? So anywhere from between four and 400, 40 and 400, which is a huge variation. And that volatility in blood glucose can be very problematic. And it can also just drain you physically and emotionally. So I went through that process for about a year and then I

decided that I had to find another way. Because not only was my glucose hard to control, but my insulin use doubled in the first year. I went from using about 25 units of insulin per day to upwards of 50 units of insulin per day. My energy levels went down. It was very hard for me to use my body and exercise and I grew up as an athlete and I love playing soccer. I loved going to the gym. I love bike riding my bike. I love swimming. I love running. I love hiking. You name it. And I just found that those things were hard to do. So I switched over to eating a plant-based diet. And at this time, this is the year 2003, I wasn't looking for a plant-based diet. I wasn't seeking information about a plant-based diet.

I literally was just presented with this concept of eating a more plant-focused diet, and I said, great, I'll do anything. Just please help me feel better. And so under the guidance of a gentleman named Dr. Doug Graham, who went on to write a book called the 801010 diet, he taught me how to transition to eating a 100% plant-based diet. And by not only eating a plant-based diet, but actually eating a plant-based diet that was low in total fat. And so I said, okay, great, this is going to be interesting. Let's see what happens. I was expecting that my glucose would become more uncontrollable because the world of diabetes told me that when I eat things called carbs,

that my blood glucose would go high. And so if I'm eating more fruits, whether they're bananas or mangos or dates or papaya or kiwis, any combination of fruits, those are all carbohydrate rich foods. And so if I was eating more of those, then my glucose was likely to go high. So I was nervous going to happen. But under his supervision for the first week, when I transitioned to eating a high carbohydrate low fat diet, I went for meeting approximately 100 grams of carbohydrate per day to 600 grams of carbohydrate in the first week. So 600 grams of carbohydrate per day in the first week. My glucose levels fell so quickly that I had to start backing off on the amount of insulin I gave myself.

So 50 units became 40, 40 units became 41, became 39, became 36, became 31, became 28. Before I knew it, I was using 23 units of insulin per day, and that happened in the first week. So what was fascinating about this was that I was doing an experiment where I was six folding my carbohydrate intake and I had cut my insulin use by almost 50 percent. And it is blue my mind because I couldn't explain it from a biological perspective. I didn't have the tools and the knowledge and very few people I knew could also explain what was happening from a biochemical perspective. So I decided that I wanted to put

myself back to graduate school to go get a graduate degree in the nutritional biochemistry. So I then enrolled to go get a PhD. I studied UC Berkeley for five years and I got a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, which is basically super nerd nutrition, if you think about it that way. So while I was there, I got to learn everything I possibly could learn about what causes blood glucose variability, right? How do you induce diabetes?

How do you reverse diabetes using either your diet or movement patterns or non pharmaceutical techniques? And those were five years were just mind-bogglingly fascinating because we performed experiments in human beings, we performed experiments in laboratory animals. And I read thousands of papers about what is diabetes, and how do you create it, and how do you reverse it? And when I graduated in the year 2012, I ended up meeting Robbie somewhere along the way,

and both of us had the same mission, and the same mission was to teach real people, real human beings, how to implement this knowledge so that they could improve their overall health and say goodbye to type two diabetes and prediabetes and using their food as medicine. While I was at UC Berkeley, I studied diabetes, but I studied actually another condition called insulin resistance, which we can geek out on in a little bit. But insulin resistance is the condition that causes blood glucose variability.

So I got to study that. I got to figure out what causes it, what reverses it. And so we created the world's first program that is designed to completely reverse insulin resistance using your food as medicine. And you do it using a plant focused diet. So it's been five years since we created Mastering Dives and we've helped hundreds of thousands of people indirectly and we've helped more than 10,000 people who have come through our coaching program and I love it because I wake up in the morning every day.

I'm jazzed about what I do. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to help so many people and truth be told, I feel like I'm a puppet. I literally am a puppet that was designed to get type one diabetes at a young age and designed to figure out how I can help people with type one and pre-divities and type two and gestational diabetes and beyond and prevent present solutions so that we can better humankind. So here we are today and I'm a pretty happy camper. Well, I've heard you do that before and it took you about 25 minutes.

So in other interviews, so that was a great, more succinct version of that. Robbie, I'm going to turn it over to you to hear you fill in the blanks on your journey. And we're a little bit more on how the two of you met. For sure, absolutely. So it's one echo. It's sad. I'm really glad to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. And I really appreciate this question. Why are we in a good position to write this book? And that insinuates that we are in a good position. I really believe we are based on our not just our personal stories, but the experience we gained through working with so many clients

and the research we've done reading peer-reviewed journals and bringing that to people. So just I'm just grateful to be doing all this. But for me, it started when I was 12 years old, just about the turn 13, and I told my mom, I said, mom, I think I have type 1 diabetes, just like Steve, my older brother. And she said, no, obviously you don't have diabetes. I said, okay, fine, no problem. So I just kept on living my life. Couple of weeks go by. My mom's out of town.

We were living in Minnesota at the time. My parents were in Florida, looking for the place we were gonna move to. And she called the check in and say, hey, how are things going? How's it going? I'm like, well, I couldn't sleep last night. I was cramping all night long.

She said, okay, go upstairs, use your brother's blog because meter and test yourself. And I was well over 400, a non diabetic really shouldn't be over 140 at any really point during the day. So my brother said right then and there, you have type one diabetes, pack your bag. You're gonna be in the hospital for a few nights. So we did all the regular things you do went to the doctor and got the official diagnosis. Now I remember my parents coming

back the next day and my dad just saying, look, this is just an inconvenience. It's okay, you can do it every one in life. And that's really the way I was raised with living with type one diabetes as an adolescent. And I also benefited from the fact that my older brother had it first. So my parents weren't really shocked. They knew what to do and they wanted to make sure we had the best medical care. So they took us to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and I had a team there. I had a mental oncologist, a nutritionist. I had a mental health coach there, like a psychologist and their really main mission for a 12 year old was just to make sure I was feeling normal. Hey, you know what, like you get to eat all the foods

you're friends eat, just learn how to take the right insulin. Here's the food pyramid, make sure to get like some fruit in your diet, some trying to follow the whole pyramid. And I remember the fruit serving was my mom, she's followed the guidelines. She's like, look, if they said you're supposed to have some fruit within her, like, I'm going to make sure you get fruit. For me, it was Mandarinarin oranges in a can with

high fructose currents are up. If it was strawberries, it had powdered sugar on top, like, we didn't know any better. Like, she wasn't really told to do anything different. Like, we were just following the general guidelines. And I ended up developing some pretty standard American symptoms. So as a teenager, I had cystic acne, which was really frustrating. I did everything you possibly could have taken care of that. I went to the dermatologist, got creams and pills and laser treatments. Eventually, they put me on acutane, which is one of the most serious drugs you can possibly take for acne. My mom actually had to sign a waiver because people had committed suicide in that drug. So that was serious. I had constant allergies year round. I was sick,

even though I took nasonacic claritone, I would still get sick. And as a competitive tennis player, I was struggling with plantar fasciitis, which was really frustrating, and I wore these big blue boots at night, which did some passive stretching. So this diet led to some really standard symptoms. So over the course of time, my dad was into a little bit more of a healthy eating lifestyle, and he got into selling supplements. And that was the beginning of me starting to think, okay, wait a minute, maybe there's something else I can do to that can prove my health. And I just started learning little things. Oh, maybe MSG's not so good. Okay, try and avoid that or hey, have for those currants, try and avoid that organic

bread would be better than just some regular conventional wonder bread. It was just like little things here there. And eventually I came across this book, which I do not recommend. Okay, this book is called Kevin Trudeau's Natural Cures. They don't want you to know about, all right? Some of your listeners might remember this guy. He had infomercials, very handsome guy with a purple book. He sold millions of copies through his infomercials, blending with a jail for some fraud.

It's just like not a good story. But the book did change my life and it planted a seed in my mind that maybe if I did everything I could to heal from the inside out, I could get my beta cells to work again. So people living with type 1 diabetes, our beta cells have been damaged.

We do not produce enough insulin. So we have to inject insulin to survive. And so I went on this mission to do anything and everything I possibly could to try and heal from the inside out. To this day, I would say I'm still considered that I'm inspired by Roger Bannister. He was the first person to ever run a four-minute mile.

And at the time, before he did that, the smartest people in the world said, you can't do that. That's not possible. Your heart's going to explode. And then he did it. And now people run a four-minute mile, it's quite common.

So I believe it's possible, we will figure this out, but I just will do anything. And I tried a lot of different things. I tried a West and a Price Foundation diet. So that was eating a lot of grass fed beef. It was raw milk. So I would go to the market and buy milk that was sold to cats because you can't sell raw milk to humans.

So it was milk for cats, but I was consuming it. So I did a lot of crazy things. I tried this crazy tea that my dad had basically sourced from an alternative healer in California. We flew all the way there to meet him. And I just tried a lot of different things. The last thing I tried before I found what we're working on, what we use now was a plant-based ketogenic diet. So I ate a lot of greens, but my calories are coming from nuts and seeds and oils, and I couldn't have too many things like bell peppers or carrots, because they have too many carbs in them to stay on the ketogenic diet. So I had that experience, and then I ended up coming across Doug Graham, the same person who taught Cyrus on a podcast, which

is always funny to say that on another podcast, right? So hopefully this changes somebody's life and they go pick up our book and they get the same sort of experience that we had because our goal with the book was to basically give everybody everything you need. Just like what we wish we had in the beginning, just bypass all the BS and just go straight to what you need to succeed. So hopefully that happens for some listeners. But I learned from Doug, I picked up his book. I signed up for coaching with him.

He emailed me every single day for 90 days straight. I emailed him every single day like we stayed in touch. And I learned this very quickly. And my insulin sensitivity changed by 900%. So as a person living with type 1 diabetes, we can objectively measure this. We have that piece of data that people who are not living with insulin-dependent diabetes don't have.

We know how many carbohydrates we're consuming because we count them. I know my blood glucose, because I wear a continuous glucose monitor. So I get a new reading every five minutes. And I know how much insulin I need to metabolize the food that I'm injecting. That's the piece of data that most people are missing, right?

You don't know how much insulin your pancreas is secreting on a meal by meal basis. All of us type ones, anybody living with any form of insulin-dependent diabetes, we do know that. So we can objectively see what lifestyle choices are making as more insulin-sensitive or less insulin-sensitive. And this approach made just like Cyrus was saying, I had the same experience like it may be incredibly insulin sensitive. So as a person living with

type one diabetes, I now eat well over 700 grams of total carbohydrate per day and inject on average about 30 units, which is a physiologically normal amount of insulin. So if you're living with type one, your goal is to inject the same amount of insulin, your healthy, pancreas would have normally secreted. And that's the right word on that with that number. So that feels good. So I'm meeting 70 times more carbohydrate than the American Diabetes Association or any organization would recommend. Yeah, I'm still taking the proper amount of insulin. And as a matter of fact, the less insulin, the most people will diabetes because they're insulin resistant, which I obviously talk about today. But my skin cleared up. The Pension of Feshitis went away. I don't take any allergy medications. I feel

like a brand new person. My A1C is 5.3% and my time and range on my Dexcom G6 is averaging about 90% over the course of a 90 day period, which shows that my very solid A1C is a type one is not because I'm going low all the time. If I had the time in range with all I have like 10% lows, 12% lows, then it's like, oh, well, that's an artificially low A1C. If you're just balancing out a bunch of highs, that's not what's happening. This approach leads to excellent blog glucose control. We see it in ourselves. My transformation led me to go read the papers and find out that this topic of following a low-fat diet has been documented in the research

from the time that insulin was discovered. It was discovered in 1921, first used in humans in 1922, and as a paper in 1926, talking about how a low-fat diet improved insulin sensitivity. That's the first time we even know about insulin. This is in the research and then decade to decade consistently saying the same thing. So just became really passionate about what was happening

in my body was also founded in the research and then we started to help a lot more people and that's been a lot of fun. But the way we met is we were speaking at a conference together. It was actually in the Bay area and we were both doing our own thing. We had our own individual brands and we were helping people and coaching people. I was working at a company called Forks Over Nights at the time and helped launch that brand

and feel really proud about everything we did there and the continue to do. So we were doing this individually, we decided, you know what, like it'd be fun to work together. So we were doing this individually. We decided, you know what? Like, it'd be fun to work together. So we kind of like dated a little bit. Like, oh, let's just like do some coaching together. Let's do a retreat together.

And it worked really well. We had a lot of fun, a lot of success, and said, you know what? Let's join forces. Let's create one offering, one resource, one brand for people to come and learn about how to reverse insulin resistance. And that was in 2017.

That's when we created mastering diabetes. We focused on that one website, our social media handles and we have our own podcasts and started building this out. And the intention being, if you have any form of diabetes and you want to figure out, okay, I want to master this. Like, I really want to take care of this. We got you covered on every single level. There are a lot of nuances and a lot of details.

And that's what we're really passionate about our coaching, helping people. How do you know what medication is to reduce? How do you know how to reduce them? How do you know what foods to eat? Why am I seeing a spike here? Why am I hearing this from the keto crowd? Like, is a lot of confusing stuff around diabetes? And we sent out to have a mission

to make it very clear evidence-based information and we've been having a lot of fun doing it. Okay, so I thought it would be good to level set the audience and I think it's very helpful that you both gave those explanations of your journeys because I think it showcases everything that you went through attempted along the way to better your circumstances and led you to this methodology that you've come up with. As we've talked about, as we were arranging the show, diabetes is something

that has impacted many people in my life from one of my best friends who got his diagnosis at about the same time, Robbie, that you got yours. I remember him getting it right around the early part of middle school and he kept cramping up as we were playing basketball and other things on the playground. And then he disappeared for about a week, came back and we found out he had diabetes. But I've also had great aunts who have died because of type 2. I've got a parent who's got type 2. I myself have suffered from plantar facytis for most of my life. So I got this all down in my family history. But for those of you who are listening and I think a lot

of people have heard about diabetes, know someone who's diabetic, but what I wanted to ask is, why is diabetes currently one of the fastest growing chronic diseases around the world, and it's even been labeled a pandemic? And I'm gonna direct this to you, Cyrus, and then what are the main causes for this,

based on your research? Okay, that was a great question. So let's go back to your particular situation. You said that you have multiple family members who have been diagnosed with diabetes and or another chronic disease. And so you tell me, do you in the back of your head is there a feeling like diabetes

is going to get you at some point? For me personally, not really. And I think it's because of the diet and health choices that I make on a regular day basis because I intermittent fast, I eat a very clean diet, I exercise and have for over 30 years on a daily basis plus other things. So I'm not as much worried about myself,

but I can tell you from my extended family, it is a major concern and I know my parent who has it is very concerned about the three of us kids so we don't develop it. For sure. Okay, so the reason I ask you that question is because you're a needle in a haystack and that's a good thing because you are making conscious decisions about your lifestyle,

and you are confident in the way that you live your life, that decreases your anxiety about developing acronic disease, especially diabetes into the future, which is awesome. That's exactly what I want your listeners to have that same mindset. I want people to be very confident that what they're doing in their life today is not gonna result in chronic disease in the future. But the truth is that there's so many people who have this underlying fear

and this underlying anxiety that kinda talks to them all day long every day, that because their mom had diabetes, because their grandfather had type 2 diabetes, because their dad is developing pre-diabetes. That at some point it's going to get them. It's because it's quote-unquote in their genes.

They were born with the genetic material that predisposes them to some form of diabetes and it's just a matter of time. It's not a question of if they're going to develop diabetes. It's a question of when. That's the pervasive methodology. And the truth is that if you take a look at the sort of marketing about diabetes, the marketing also reinforces this concept that, you know, it's a genetic condition and that it's going to happen to you at some point, right?

So what I want people to understand is that there are chronic diseases that have a strong genetic can association and chronic disease that have a weak genetic association and chronic disease that have a weak genetic association. It turns out that the diseases that affect most people, including number one, obesity, number two, pre-diabetes, number three, type two diabetes, number four hypertension, number five, high cholesterol, all of these have a very weak genetic association, meaning that, sure, you could be born with a genetic material that predisposes you towards prediabetes. You might be born with a genetic material that predisposes you towards high

cholesterol, but your lifestyle is the collection of choices that you make about what you're going to eat, when you're going to eat, how often you're going to eat, when you're going to exercise, how much you're going to eat, when you're going to exercise, how much you're going to exercise, whether you're going to drink alcohol, whether you're going to smoke cigarettes, whether you're going to live in a high stress environment and beyond, and by making conscious decisions about each one of those things,

you can strongly stack the cards in your favor to the point where chronic disease becomes almost impossible to affect you. Okay? So, your question is, well, what causes diabetes? Why is it such a big deal in today's world? And why is it considered a pandemic? So, from a numbers perspective, there's approximately 32 million people that have been diagnosed

with some form of diabetes. That's either type one or type two. Okay, so the 32 million, it one tenth of the US population. But then in addition to that, there's also an extra 85 million people who are living with prediabetes and most of them have no idea, literally no idea, right? So they are at risk for the development of type two diabetes, but they're living in an unaware state,

maybe they haven't visited their doctor in a while, maybe they have and they're not taking any perv, any evasive action. And as a result of that, the combination of 32 plus 85 business approximately called 115 million people, which is now one third of the US population, that either is living with some form of diabetes or is at risk for the development of type of diabetes in the future. So that's why people refer to this as a pandemic because it's affecting one out of every three people. People who are living with pre-divis but don't know it. If they recognized it, it would completely change the healthcare landscape in a really

negative way. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money to help those people, right? So point being is that the numbers justify from a statistical perspective that this is a very large problem. Now, what causes it? Well, there's many things that can predispose you towards a lifestyle that increases your risk for prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. But the thing that causes prediabetes is called insulin resistance. And insulin resistance is a condition that increases your risk for

prediabetes. And then if prediabetes isn't corrected, that will then develop into type 2 diabetes. And then if prediabetes isn't corrected, that will then develop into type 2 diabetes. Okay, the beauty is even if you got at the point of living with type 2 diabetes, you can take a invasive action and you can actually live an insulin sensitive lifestyle and go from type 2 back to prediabetes. And then for prediabetes back to insulin resistant and then from insulin resistant back to completely non-diabetic. And that's why we refer to type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes as being reversible conditions, because it's a two way street. You can either move towards disease or you can move away from it. And it's mainly dependent on your lifestyle. Okay. So the thing that causes insulin resistance is a diet that contains a significant quantity of dietary fat.

And especially if that dietary fat comes from saturated sources. Now I know that there's a lot of people who are listening to this podcast right now who are gonna stop and they're gonna say, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Right, there's a lot of people who do not want to hear that the message that dietary fat predisposes you towards insulin resistance and it actually causes the development of insulin resistance.

And I totally understand I used to be that person myself. But as I've read more and more and as I've interacted with top level scientists, I've opened my mind to the idea that insulin resistance is actually a lipid metabolism disorder, not a glucose metabolism disorder. So here's how it happens. When you consume dietary fat from the outside world, generally speaking, you consume dietary fat in the form of what's called a triglyceride.

A triglyceride is basically a molecule that has a glycerol backbone with three fatty acids attached to it. So the name triglyceride comes from the fact that there's three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone with three fatty acids attached to it. Okay, so the name triglyceride comes from the fact that there's three fatty acids attached to a glycerol. So you consume the triglyceride. The triglyceride comes from either red meat, white meat, dairy products, fish. It can come from oils. It can also come from plant-based sources, such as nuts, seeds, avocados, olives, coconuts. Okay? So you're consuming triglyceride from the outside world, either from the plant-based world or from the animal world. The triglyceride enters your mouth. It travels down your esophagus. It gets into your stomach.

Inside of your stomach is, it's basically an acid reactor. So there's a collection of hydrochloric acid, which is secreted by the walls of your stomach. The triglyceride molecule begins to get a little bit unfolded and the protein that also comes present inside of your meal begins to become unfolded. That compartment then passes that food material into your small intestine. Your small intestine is really the sort of prize in intestine in your digestive tract because in your small intestine, that's where the bulk of all nutrient digestion occurs. Your small intestine is a fascinating organ because it produces its own digestive enzymes, but it also receives digestive enzymes from your pancreas and from your liver. So your pancreas, your liver, and your small intestine all contribute to creating

these things referred to as digestive enzymes, which are proteins with a very specific function, and that function is to take large molecules and break them into smaller molecules, literally cut them into smaller pieces. Those digestive enzymes are things like lipases and proteases and carbohydrates and elastases and ribonucleases. They all have the last name ACE and ACE basically refers to an enzyme and an enzyme has a biological function. So you take material that you consume from the outside world, carbohydrate, fat, protein, fiber, and beyond, and that material starts to get digested by all these digestive enzymes inside of your small intestine. So the fatty acids that come from that triglyceride molecule, they get absorbed through the wall of your small intestine. Inside, they basically get dropped into these little spaceships called

chylomicron particles. Okay, so chylomicrons, I'm just going to pick up this little card in front of me. Imagine I have this SD card sitting in front of me. Okay, this is a chile of micron particle and this chile of micron particle contains mainly fatty acids plus cholesterol. So the cholesterol and fatty acids that came from your food get absorbed through the walls of your stomach and they get put into these chile of micron particles and there's billions of these chile of micron particles that are In circulation. So they're floating through your circulatory system and they can access every single tissue any tissue that has access to blood Kyle and my crons can go to that includes your brain your thyroid gland your liver your kidneys your muscle tissue your heart tissue You name it now these kind of micro particles have one mission and that one mission is to offload their cargo

Their goal is to offload their cargo somewhere that's safe. Their cargo, again, fatty acids and cholesterol. So what they're looking to do is offload their fatty acids and cholesterol to a tissue or collection of tissues where it's going to create a metabolic state. So the first place that those chalamicron particles offload their cargo is to the adipose tissue or your fat tissue. That's a perfectly safe place to put it because your fat tissue is specifically designed to absorb large quantities of fatty acids when they're present inside of the calomacron particles and hold on to those fatty acids for long periods of time. Okay. So your fat tissue can receive fatty acids from the calomacrons and hold on to it

for either hours or days or weeks or even years. It just depends on a whole collection of factors. But it's a safe place to put that stuff. Now, the chalamicron particles, they go and they deposit fatty acids inside of your adipose tissue. But in addition to that, they also drop fatty acids into your liver and into your muscle. So here's where the problem starts. Okay. There's a spillover effect. And the spillover means that some of the fatty acids that didn't get inside of your outer post tissue, they go to your liver, they go to your muscle.

Your liver muscle say, you know what, listen, I'm cool with that. I can only store small amounts of triglycer. I can only store small amounts of fatty acids as triglyceride, and it's okay if you give me a little bit. But the problem is that when you're consuming a high fat diet and you get a high fat meal for breakfast and or for lunch and for dinner,

and then you repeat that the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. Within a short period of time, there's so much spillover going into your liver and into your muscle that both of those tissues become overwhelmed with fatty acids and they become therefore overwhelmed with triglyceride and as a result of that,

the lipid droplet inside of both of those tissues begins to grow and grow and grow and grow. So now, effectively, both of you liver and muscle have accumulated excess fatty acids. And that's a huge problem because those two tissues aren't biologically designed to store large quantities of fatty acids. And as a result of that, they now have to initiate a self-defense mechanism to try and block more energy from coming into the tissue. They want to block fatty acids from coming in. They also want to block amino acids and they also want to block glucose because there's simply too much energy, period end of story.

So the way that you can effectively block energy from coming into tissue, the simplest thing that you can do is you can basically tell insulin to go away. You can decrease your ability to communicate with insulin. So that's what insulin resistance is. It's literally a self-defense mechanism that your liver and muscle initiate to protect themselves against too much lipid from your blood. And so when they initiate this insulin resistance or insulin rejection, then what ends up happening is that the next time you eat something that's carbohydrate rich, okay, it could be a banana, it could be a mango, it could be a bowl of black beans, it could be a bowl of quinoa, it

could be some crackers or a piece of bread, anything that contains carbohydrate, energy, the glucose from that carbohydrate will try and circulate inside of your blood and get inside of your liver and muscle. And in order to do that insulin goes knock, I got glucose in the blood, would you like to take it up? And your liver and muscle in this context, they go, you know what insulin? I can't do it right now. I can't do it right now because I have so much lipid that's already beat you to the punch. There's so much stuff inside of me. I have to get rid of this stuff first.

I am playing insulin resistance, go away, I'm not open for business. So insulin is trying to knock on the door, trying to knock onto its cell receptor and trying to initiate glucose to get inside of tissues, but both of those tissues are saying, no, don't even dock. I'm not even going to give you the opportunity to dock on the cell receptor because I am going to pull that cell receptor inside and I'm going to make it dysfunctional. And so as a result of that insulin cannot communicate with those tissues as effectively. So your insulin level begins to rise and you become what's called hyperinsulinemic, too much insulin in your blood. And then as a result of that, because there's the insulin effectively gets trapped, glucose cannot get inside of those tissues and glucose gets trapped.

So you become hyperinsulinemic and you also become hyperglycemic at the same time, meaning too much glucose. So classic insulin resistance, classic pre-diabetes, so you go to the doctor. The doctor takes your blood glucose value, you'll do a comprehensive metabolic panel. And one of the tests they administer is called an A1C, and then they also test your blood glucose, and they may test a fasting insulin. And what they're likely to find is that number one, your A1C, which is an average marker of your average blood glucose, that number is elevated. That indicates that your blood glucose is creeping up. Number two,

they will find that your fasting blood glucose is likely high. Number three, they will find that your fasting insulin is likely high. And this right here is all evidence that there's a metabolic traffic jam happening inside of your liver and inside of your muscle. So if you can clear that metabolic traffic jam that initiated with too much saturated fat, then you can clear the traffic jam. You can then enable insulin signaling to happen once again inside of your liver and muscle. And when you do it that way, then your glucose level starts to come down and your insulin level both start to come down simultaneously.

And that's a good thing because it restores normal glucose metabolism once again. Am I making any sense at all? Yeah, you're making a lot of sense. And you covered a ton of stuff and many different areas I was going to dive into, especially on how insulin is produced and how it impacts you. I wanted to just reiterate a couple points for the audience. One is I've had some of the world's most leading behavioral scientist on this podcast. One of them was Dr. Katie Melkman at U Pen. And if you remember from our discussion, she put out that 40% of mortality in the United States and globally are preventable by her choices. It's because of choices that we're making

to do things as Cyrus was explaining to eat the standard American diet to continue to put these satirated bats in her body to not exercise, not do other things that is leading to this. And then I had Dr. Kareff, it's Gerald on who wrote a great book this year called Younger You, How to Reduce your biological age. And she pointed out that 67% of Americans by the time they reach 60 years old have a chronic disease. By the time that they're 70, the number becomes 55%. I think have two chronic diseases. And all of it comes back to the lifestyle choices that we're talking about here. So I'm going to jump from that back to Robbie because you brought up something important and that is that we've known about the positive impacts of plant-based diets for decades.

And in fact, in 2006, as you guys point out in the book, American Diabetes Association published surprising findings that plant-based diets were three times more effective at improving blood sugar control compared to conventional diets. If that has been out there for so long, why hasn't diet, and especially this diet, been widely recommended by doctors and the overall medical. It's the billion trillion dollar question. Like why? I don't think anybody knows exactly why. I think we can make some guesses. One thing for certain is that diet beauty is in particular is one of the most confusing chronic conditions because it's one of the few conditions you can self monitor.

So if you have heart disease or you have kidney disease and you eat one meal, you don't have a test you could do immediately to decide did that meal make my condition worse or to make it better. Whereas with diabetes, you can you could eat a meal, you can prick yourself, you can test yourself on a blog with those meters, which is easily available quite inexpensive these days. And you can see, okay, I think this improved or my diabetes has gotten worse.

And so you hear a lot of people in the diabetes community say, I eat by my meter, the meter just tells me. And this presents a lot of confusion because if you're insulin resistance and you have eaten yourself into a state of glucose intolerance, when you try and eat something like a baked potato, when you try and have a banana, you eat a bowl of quinoa, you have an apple, a small amount of carbohydrate could make your bug glucose go very high could go above 200 above 250 especially for those who are already living with diabetes and You're like wow. I just ate this apple and my bug glucose is above 200

How can you say that the apple is not the problem and so they're like okay? You know what I'm just not gonna eat apples. I'm just not going to eat carbs. And when I do that, my bug at Coast Day is pretty steady. And that is true. And we wrote about this in detail. Chapter seven of our book is the longest chapter, or the chapter with the most citations, comparing a ketogenic diet to a plant-based diet. And this is confusing. What's happening is you are not actually addressing the root cause. You're not addressing in some resistance. You're just removing the carbohydrates. Let's say you're a really bed driver. Every time you get in the car,

you get an accident, you get some speed and tickets, and we take away your driver's license. Okay, well, you don't get any more tickets, you don't get any more access, but did you become a better driver? The answer is no, you didn't solve the problem. You just stop driving. And the moment you go start driving again,

actually you're probably gonna be worse because you weren't practicing, you weren't getting better, you weren't improving your skills. That's what happens on the ketogenic diet. They eat a low carb, ketogenic diet. This is like the main stream is what people are doing. You go eat carbs, you're like, you see even worse excursion in your blogger coast levels. And that's because you've actually made yourself more insulin resistant.

You might see some short-term results. We acknowledge that, of course, everybody listening, you have to be denied the testimonials and the results. You can lower your insulin use on our low carb diet. You can lose weight. You can see improvements in your cholesterol numbers. But these are short-term metrics. You reach a plateau and there is not sufficient data to show that this is going to be a good long-term solution. As a matter of fact, the data we have shows that it's concerning, whereas if you look at a predominantly plant-based diet, we have a large amount of evidence showing that actually for the long term, this is your best solution. And I always like to tell people that the benefits you receive during a ketogenic diet, you can receive the same

benefits during a low-fat plant-based, whole-food diet, and have the added benefit of you are now glucose tolerant. You can now eat carbohydrates, and have the added benefit of you are now glucose tolerant. You can now eat carbohydrates, and you have longevity on your side. And so that's something we like to explain to people and teach them, and how do you get the best results in the short term? So everybody wants to avoid those initial spikes, those initial high readings, when transitioning to a more plant-based, higher carbohydrate lower fat diet. And in our coaching program in our book,

we go into this in the detail on how to do that. You can't just tomorrow just start eating piles of bangles and bananas like siresnaher doing. You know, all the potatoes you want have a whole couple of cans of chickpeas, right? There's a transition period. There's things you have to do. You have to simultaneously lower your fat intake while adding in non-sarchy vegetables in addition to whole carbohydrate rich foods and you can transition in a slow, steady way and begin to see your medications

being reduced. But back to your original question, it was like, why has this not caught on? One of our mentors, John McDougal, loves to say that people like to hear good news about their bad habits. So you see a lot of confusing research, oh yeah, you can have all the red meats. That's right, it's fast, not a problem. There's so much confusion out there.

So I think when people hear that news and they think they can get away with it, then they're addicted to a certain extent. And a lot, I think our population in general is looking for medications to solve our problems and not actually take responsibility and address root cause. But there certainly is a subset of the population who is ready to do that and those are the people that we serve in our coaching program, the Dr. Berterell and probably listen to this podcast. You pointed down in the book with diet is that as many of these medical professionals

are getting these degrees, the whole diet aspect isn't ho-hoheartedly emphasized as much as other parts, which I think to your guys' point contributes to it. And then there's another interesting thing, my girlfriend happens to be a PCP, and when she was working in a large practice, one of the things that she told me that really blew me away was that once a patient entered their clinic and was determined to have type 2 diabetes, was determined to have type 2 diabetes.

They were labeled from that point forward as having type 2 diabetes, and therefore the office could charge more to the insurance company because of that, and then they would get more support from the drug companies and other things. But she was quick to point out to me that it's a fallacy for the patients to think that if they have diabetes that the disease is only gonna progress,

that it's never goes away and that it never gets better. In fact, she has seen many people be able to turn around their type two diabetes and pre-diabetes, which is something that your program is meant to do, but it can also drastically reduce, as it has for both of you, the symptoms and how you're living your life with type 1 diabetes. So my question for you both is, how can someone with prediabetes or non-insulin dependent type 2 diabetes use your program to reverse

both conditions using food as you describe it as a medicine. For sure. So your question is how can somebody who is living with non-insulin dependent type 2 diabetes reverse it using food as medicine? Is that right? Well, I guess one thing I would ask before that is do you agree with my premise that this is a fallacy that you can improve your condition? Because a lot of people think as they age, this is just going to progress and get worse.

And I think the whole premise of your book is just the opposite of that. Yeah, okay. So if you look at the scientific research and go backwards in time to as early as the early 1920s, like Robbie was alluding to and read that research and then read research that came out in the 1930s by JP Himswear and then you take a look at the research by Indersing and then you take a look at the research that came out in the 1950s by a most forgetting his name from Duke University. Captain.. Camper, thank you. Walter Camper. And then you take a look at information from the 1970s by James W. Anderson.

And then you look at Neil Barnard and you look at information from Cornell University. And you see the same story over and over and over again, which is that if you've developed a glucose metabolism disorder, you can change your diet. You can change your macronutrient ratio. You can change the diet, you can change your macro nutrient ratio, you can change the amount of saturated fat that you're eating, you can decrease that, you can significantly increase your carbohydrate intake, you can also increase your fiber intake,

and as a result of doing just that with no added exercise, zero minutes of added exercise, not that I'm recommending that, but I'm saying independent of exercise, you can get profound improvements in glucose metabolism. So this isn't just my recommendation. It isn't just that I want diet to be a solution for type 2 diabetes. This has been proven in the medical research over and over and over again. And the fact that in today's world, doctors still don't have this information on their fingertips is just the sign of the times. I think it's just a little frustrating. Okay, your average doctor gets something like 20 hours of nutrition education in medical school

and they spend 10,000 plus hours in medical school. So we're talking about a fraction of a percent actually studying nutrition. And then when they study nutrition, they don't even study nutrition. They just look at some biochemical pathway that may or may not have anything to do with real food. Right. So it's a frustrating situation. Doctors are just not equipped. They're just not equipped. They don't have the tools to be able to talk nutrition. And again, it's not their fault. They were trained

in a medical school system that prioritizes pharmaceutical medication. And just like you're saying, the standard of care is now driven by money. So if a patient presents with hypertension or a patient presents with prediabetes or a patient presents with high cholesterol, there is a formulaic way in which you treat that patient. If you deviate from that formula, your medical license gets called into question. Right, and it's a frustrating situation. So that's why doctors are not the ones to blame. And I commend all doctors that are now moving into the lifestyle medicine world because they

have the opportunity to change the way that they help people. And they're seeing profound differences that they never would have been able to achieve using just pharmaceutical medication. So it's really rapidly evolving world. Now, when it comes to living with pre-divities and type two diabetes, nobody knows the actual answer to this, but something like 85 to 90% of all cases are reversible, fully reversible. So you can go from living with high blood glucose, to high A1C, a high fasting glucose, a high fasting insulin. You make these changes like we're suggesting

by eating number one, a low fat diet that contains less than 15% of total calories is fat. Yeah, that's what we refer to as a low fat diet. Number two, it is a plant-based diet. Okay, you don't have to be a cum fully vegan, you don't have to become fully vegetarian, don't put any of those labels on yourself,

just eat a large quantity of plant-based material on a daily basis. Okay, and number three, you eat whole foods. We strongly recommend eating real foods that do not come from packages or bottles or cans that do not come from the freezer section that come from the produce section that are minimally processed or not processed at all.

Low fat, plant-based, whole foods. If you live by that mantra and you adopt this way of life, in 85 plus percent of all cases pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes wiped away off of your medical record and it can happen within months Okay, the only people who cannot Reverse Pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes or gestational diabetes are people that are living with what's referred to as a low CPAPTIED value. A CPAPTIED is just a blood test that you can go and you can ask your doctor to give you. You go to the doctor, you get a CPAPTIED blood test, and that's just a marker.

It's an indicator of how much insulin your pancreas can secrete. So if you have low insulin production because your pancreas has burned out over the course of time, or because you have a pancreatic insulin secretory problem, then reversing diabetes using your diet is going to be more challenging. It's not impossible, but it's going to be much more challenging. But most people living with prediabetes and type 2 diabetes have plenty of insulin production. Insulin is not the problem. Insulin production is not the problem. Insulin production is not the problem. It's again, we what we talked about earlier, it's utilizing insulin at the site of action in your liver and muscle. That's the problem. So if you eat a low fat plant based whole food diet, you can clear that metabolic traffic jam at your liver and at your muscle, then your liver and muscle become very

receptive to insulin. So if you're already manufacturing enough insulin and you have a medium or high CPAP value, then you fall into the 85% of all people who can make this reversal and wipe it off your medical record for good. The last thing I'll say here is for people who have type one diabetes or type 1.5 diabetes, both of these are autoimmune conditions, with meaning that your immune system has initiated an attack on the beta cells inside of your own pancreas. People with type one diabetes generally are fully insulin dependent.

I mean, they have to inject insulin from an insulin pump, from an insulin pen, or from a syringe. So we have to be the administrators of 100% of all the insulin that we are using on a daily basis. People who are living with type 1.5 diabetes have effectively a slow progressing version of type one that sets on after the age of 30.

So it's like slow progressing adult onset type one diabetes. In both of those scenarios, the goal is not to completely reverse. You cannot reverse those two conditions, but what you can do is eat a low fat plant-based whole food diet like we're suggesting, and that can do a number of things for you. Number one, it can lower your average blood glucose,

which lowers your A1C. It can lower your glycemic variability. In other words, it can lower the sort of the fluctuations that happen on a daily basis. And that in turn can help you use less insulin, less oral medication. It can help you lose weight and it can help you normalize many other metabolic functions

that affect your cardiovascular health at the same time. So there's so many positive advantages of eating a low-fat plant-based whole-through diet. We've seen it over and over again. It's written in the research, and as far as I'm concerned, at this point, it shouldn't even be up for question. Like, this is fact at this point, and I would love for the medical community to begin to understand it as much as we do. Okay, and we've covered a lot today about the diet aspect of this, but that's just one component of the mastering diabetes method, and I was hoping you could lay out the other steps that are in it. Yeah, well, I appreciate you saying that because it is a key

component of what makes our work and what we've done different, right? There's a lot of giants who shoulders we stand upon who inspired us, we've read a lot of their research. But when we put together in this book, it is the Master diabetes method. There are four components and all of them are important. So number one is the low fat plant-based health food diet sideers just covered that. Number two is the use of intermittent fasting

and there's appropriate ways to do that as appropriate places to do that. There's appropriate places to do that. And sometimes it could be just even eating your dinner earlier to have a larger window of time between your last meal and your first meal. Like there's a lot of different ways to do that. But that's a whole another podcast. Then we have daily movement.

And then we have that's huge. That's a whole specific chapter in the book, right? And then we have decision trees, which is our form of a diabetes log book. And we are really proud of this. It's a very, very powerful tool, which helps people understand the relationship between their lifestyle choices and their medication requirements. And when you use the tool, it's very simple. Like, it's just a documentation process. But it's something that we had not seen anybody else put together. Nobody really

found a system that's very simple to document where you can see the direct relationship. So everything Cyrus was explaining about the excess fat consumption. And again, diabetes being such an objective condition where you can see the numbers so clearly and quite rapidly as well. This decision tree really paints that picture very clearly. It helps people understand exactly why is their blog because level higher in the morning when they thought it shouldn't have been that way. And you can really see that direct correlation through this documentation. So all four steps are important.

And I know Cyrus loves to talk about exercise. So I'll throw it back to Cyrus maybe you can say a few things about that. I think it's important that you brought up the documentation because one thing that you guys heavily emphasize in the book is that the starting point of doing this behavioral change because it's really changing your habits is treating this one meal at a time. With any habit that you have, if you start and then don't find ways to sustain it, you're going to stop. And so I think that's something I just wanted to bring up because that documentation is a great aid in helping you to keep those habits and trigger that repeatable

cycle of doing it again and again. But you want to come in on that too, that's fine, but I'll let you jump to exercise. I will come in on that too, that's fine, but I'll let you jump to exercise. I will come in on that real quick, and then I'll throw it back to the side of the exercise. And I'm glad you brought that up, you pointed it out. And through the act of doing a little bit of documentation, which we walk you through in the book, but it is an eye-opening experience

to truly understand what you are putting in your body. Most people listen to the show today, do not know how many grams of fat they consumed yesterday, or they do not know the percent of calories in their diet that are coming from fat on a day-by-day basis. And once you take the time to figure that out, it becomes a learning lesson that you carry with you for the rest of your life. We are not advocating that everybody has to document and enter their food and fill out decisions for the rest of their life. It's a tool which gives you an incredible amount of insight forever. Like insight you did not have prior and you know on that for life and it's very powerful. So I'm glad you brought that up and I'll throw Dr. Sarah's.

Okay, so it's funny you guys bring this up about documentation and exercise because last week I started a strength training program at the CrossFit Gym that I've been going to for the last five years. And the strength training program is very specific about exactly what exercise you perform at what weight,

how many times on what day and beyond. So it gives you an instruction manual and says this, but it's onus is on you to do it and then to record it. And then that way, the next time you're asked to do it, you can take a look at your previous results and you can gauge your improvement over the course of time. So the reason I'm bringing this up is because I haven't been writing things down for the past week,

because why? I'm just trying to be lazy. I don't, I didn't buy a book. I don't have a pen and then I, it's just dumb excuse. But I'm sitting there this morning, I was thinking to myself, I'm like, what am I doing? I'm not writing this stuff down. I'm just asking myself to remember what I did. That's dumb. That's not going to work. Right. So as a result of that, I am now going to do this documentation process, which is very similar to what we are recommending here, right? It's not supposed to be. Getting a Tasty U from the medicine Cyrus.

Exactly right. And I'm going to basically teach myself the thing that I teach other people to do, which is take two minutes and write stuff down because when you write stuff down, it becomes real, right? So when it comes to exercise, we have a very simple prescription. We teach people that your body is meant to move. Okay, we sit a lot in chairs in today's world, whether in chairs or couches, I'm not the first person to say that. It's a true statement. So we teach people that moving your body

for a minimum of 30 minutes per day, not it doesn't even have to be really strange to exercise, it can be medium intensity or slightly higher intensity exercise, can have a profound effect on your glucose metabolism, profound effect. So the mastering diabetes method effectively has three different pieces in it, if you will, and each one of them acts as an insulin sensitizing thing.

The first one is a low fat plant-based whole food diet, like we've been talking about. The second one is exercise. The third one is intermittent fasting. All three of them, independent of the other two, are very powerful at sensitizing you to insulin and reversing the insulin resistance process. So if you exercise for 30 to 45 minutes a day, 30 to 60 minutes per day, something in that time range, and you do it in a pace where your heart rate gets elevated, you incorporate some cardiovascular movement, you incorporate a little bit of resistance movement,

and you just exercise at a pace where it's just hard to talk, right, because you don't have enough breath, you're just having to gasp out oxygen. That right there, that's all you need, that's literally all you need. If you want to take it to the next level and go a little bit higher and harder, you're welcome to do that and evolve into that. Totally fine, but the base level requirement is just to move your body

every single day. And when you do that, the insulin sensitizing power of that exercise is so powerful and so effective that your glucose will come down. Your A1C will come down. Your blood pressure will come down. Your cholesterol will come down. And your metabolic function will improve independent of anything else that you've done. So we're huge fans to say the least. Well, one thing you're not a fan of, and I'm going to go back to this, is the keto diet.

Right. I'm going to be sensitive to my audience here because we've had on a couple of the most esteemed doctors in the world who are huge advocates of the keto diet. One of my most popular episodes I've ever had was with the Dr. Dominic Dachestino and also I recently had one with Dr. Chris Palmer whose shown it can have huge positive impacts for mental health illnesses and disorders.

But from your perspectives, what are the problems with the keto diet? I'm glad we talked about this up because a keto diet is a very popular dietary trend about this up because a key to diet is it's a very popular dietary trend. And there's a lot of research that's evolving over the course of time because it's relatively new in the world of scientific research. And you write as far as the cognitive benefits are concerned, as far as the brain affects our concern, a ketogenic diet was first discovered in the 1970s to be

a tool that researchers use for intractable epilepsy. Right. So kids that were having frequent seizures were given a ketogenic diet and it's significantly calm down seizure activity. And that's a really good thing because it didn't have a much more normal life. And there have been other research studies that have demonstrated that a ketogenic diet can have profound impacts on your brain to moderate neurological activity, to reduce anxiety and to reduce suppression, and to make you feel like you're living a more normal life, which is awesome.

So I'm not gonna take any of that research away, okay? What we did in our book, Mastering Diabetes, is we wrote an entire chapter devoted to ketogenic diet, because the ketogenic diet is a very popular tool in the world of diabetes and in the world of weight loss. And there's a lot of questions about, is it safe, is it safe?

Is it not safe? Should I do it? Should I not do it? You say yes. Somebody else says no. What am I supposed to do? I don't really know. So this chapter basically has over 150 references and we basically go through step by step

to try and understand what is a ketogenic diet. How can you implement it? What effects does it have on glucose metabolism? How does it affect your glucose? How does it affect your insulin? And what does the research say about its use in the short term and the long term? And to summarize that chapter in our book, which I highly recommend reading, is what I'll say is that a ketogenic diet is a very powerful tool for promoting rapid weight loss. You've probably seen this online. You've probably talked to other people that have gone through this before. You've probably talked to maybe a lot of your listeners are in the same situation. We start to eat a ketogenic diet and significantly lower your carbohydrate intake.

You eat what's known as a VLCD, a very low carbohydrate diet, okay, less than 30 grams of net carbohydrate per day. And when you do that, you end up inducing a calorie-rest calorie restricted state without even trying. So you end up actually consuming less calories on a daily basis than you were in your previous diet. And as a result of that, that then starts the weight loss process. So people who eat a low carbohydrate diet or ketogenic diet end up demonstrating within the first week that they lost four pounds, six pounds.

The first four to six to 10 pounds usually is mainly water, which is totally fine, because the water is attached to glycogen. Glycogen is a storage form of glucose inside of your liver and muscles. It's very hygroscopic, meaning that one glycogen molecule attracts three moles of water. So therefore, it's a very highly absorbent material.

So when you shed that glycogen because you're not consuming carbohydrate, then you end up shedding three times as much water and that promotes weight loss in the short term. But then as you continue onwards, people end up losing two pounds per week, three pounds per week, four pounds per week. Before you know it, people who have been on a ketogenic diet for three months or six months end up losing 50 pounds, 60 pounds, 75 pounds. I've talked to people who have lost 200 pounds eating ketogenic diet. And I would never deny that's a true statement. I'm not going to deny that in any way, shape of form, because it's true, but it happens, right? But what I want people

to understand is that just because you're losing weight does not necessarily mean that the thing that you're doing is actually going to benefit you in the long term. Okay. And what I mean by that is a ketogenic diet induces a state of calorie restriction that then induces weight loss. And that's a good thing because when you lose weight in the short term, what you're likely to see is number one, reduce fasting blood glucose. Number two, reduce fasting blood pressure.

Number three, reduce fasting insulin. Number four, you're likely to see reduced triglycerides. That's a good thing. Number five, weight loss. Number six, reduced A1C value. All of these markers of your basal metabolic function go up. So on a piece of paper, if you look at it, you know, at time equals zero and time equals three months, you're like, huh, blood pressure improved cholesterol improved triglycercerides improved, A1C improved, fasting insulin improved, darn, you are doing a great job, whatever you're doing, just keep it up. That's what doctors like to say over and on. But if you fast forward and you look at what happens over the course of time, okay, time is a vague statement in this context. Time could be six months,

it could be a year, it could be two years, it could be five years. But if we fast forward to some point in the future, what the research demonstrates is that people who eat a diet that contains more protein or like us, a significant amount of protein greater than 25 to 30% of their calories as protein, and people who eat a significant quantity of dietary fat, especially saturated fat, which is very common on the kidney-gen genoc diet, have

a higher chronic disease risk. I'll say that one more time. People who increase their protein intake and people who increase their dietary fat intake end up increasing their chronic disease risk over the course of time. And that's what I want people to understand is that the stuff that happens in the short term looks good and it's fantastic and it shows that there's significant metabolic improvement. But in the long term, eating a diet that contains a significant amount of protein, especially animal protein,

and especially a significant amount of saturated fat can end up causing profound alterations to your glucose metabolism and profound alterations to your cardiovascular metabolism that can end up increasing your risk for many chronic diseases. And I don't want that and you don't want that. So that's the sort of short-winded way of me saying, I'm not a huge fan of kidney genocid diets, even though they do promote short-term benefits. Okay, well, thank you for that explanation and Robbie, I'm just going to ask you this

question in the book. You say that your diabetes is you and you are your diabetes. And my question is, why is embracing the demon inside you one of the most important steps that you have to take? Well, from my perspective, when this supplies for anything, right, it's not just diabetes.

For us, it just happened, right? We didn't cause type one diabetes, and even when you type two diabetes comes long time, you didn't try to call it. You didn't try, like, oh, wow, I'm going to eat these foods so I can get type two diabetes. It just happened, right? If you came a reality and you could just embrace, this is the reality. This is where I'm at. This is what's happening.

This is what's happening to me. Okay. I accept that. I am now going to is what's happening. This is what's happening to me. Okay, I accept that. I am not going to do something about it. What can I do? What actions can I take? What is under my control?

And when you shift your mentality like that, it per me, it's every area of your life. The work we do with our clients and our coaching program, like we're focused on diabetes, and food, and all these little things. But really, at the end of the day, this is an improvement in your quality of life. This is so people can begin to spend more time

with their partner, to actually have energy when they're with their partner, to be able to be the parent you want for your kids, to just live the life that you want. It's not gonna happen when you have a chronic disease We talk about it's all times kind of cliche, but like there's a matter how much money you have There's a matter of how successful you are at your job. There's none of this stuff matters if you don't have your health You have nothing so it's really about embracing the now and okay

What actions can I take one day at a time one step at a time to move towards a better result? And for us we both talk about this. It's been a blessing. Type 1 diabetes is a blessing. We both genuinely believe we are healthier human beings now than like likely would have happened if we didn't get the stiagnosis and we didn't wake up and we didn't have a reason to go look into these other options and learn about this stuff. Who knows what we would be eating?

Who knows what chronic diseases would be developing in our bodies right now? And we're really excited to show the longevity in our own lives over time and seeing that in our clients. And so really it's just about embracing the reality of what's happened and moving forward and you can choose to see it as a blessing. And for again, for a lot of people, type 2 diabetes, pre-dibies, like Cyrus said, and

vast majority of cases can be completely reversed. This can be the best wake-up call you've ever had. And now that you're listening to this show, you got your hands on our book. You learn, okay, you know what? I now have the information to either prevent a reverse, the number one cause of death in this country, which is heart disease. So for people living with diabetes, all forms of diabetes, the number one cause of death is heart disease. It's not high blood glucose readings. It's the underlying insulin resistance. It's

underlying habits people are doing on a day by day basis to put their cardiovascular system in a disease state. And we can turn that around. We have a whole section in the book about heart disease because again, when you reverse insulin resistance, we don't really talk about it today, but insulin resistance is the central nodes, what we like to say here, for a laundry list of conditions. Heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Alzheimer's, also known as type three diabetes, retinopathy, neuropathy, like the list goes on on fatty liver disease, chronic kidney disease, when you address insulin resistance, which is the core of what we do, it's the core of what the

whole book is about, you are like psyracellar to the long term, reducing your chronic disease risk and really taking full charge of your health for the rest of your life. Okay, and psyracell'll end with you on this question. For someone today who's listening or someone who picks up your book, what is the most important thing that the two of you want them to take away from either today's episode or the book?

Great question, I would say. The thing that I want people to understand is that you have the power in your hands. So in the same way that when I asked you, are you concerned about the development of diabetes because it's in your family and you emphatically said, nope, I'm not because I make very conscious decisions on a daily basis and I live a lifestyle that I strongly believe in and has improved my health and continues to improve my health, I want people to understand that they have that power as well. You're no different than those people, you know different than me, you're no different than Robbie. We're all in the same game together and we're all trying to minimize our risk for chronic diseases and truth be told infectious diseases simultaneously. And eating a, a in our opinion and all of our

experience eating a plant-based diet that again contains low fat plant-based whole foods is a only powerful way to lower your overall chronic disease risk and either reverse pre-existing chronic diseases or prevent their development in the first place. Okay, and then Robbie, what is the best way if a listener wants to learn more about you to get to all things Cyrus and Robbie? The best place to go would be mastering diabetes.org. Our website will lead you to every other resource you would need. Our website has an insulin resistance quiz, which you can access pretty easily. And we can give you a link to put in the bio of the show,

but you can take this short quiz and you can figure out how insulin resistant are you and you can decide what action to take there. The book is available everywhere you can find books. So we read our own audio book, which was super fun. So that's unaudible. We added some extra sections in there, which weren't able to get in the printed version.

So that was fun as well. We are on all the social media platforms, Instagram, app, mastering diabetes, TikTok, app, mastering diabetes, YouTube, Twitter. So you can find us there. And we also have our own podcast. So you just type in mastering diabetes into any podcast platform.

You will find our show. But really the best place to get started and take action would be to take the insulin resistance quiz and then pick up a copy of the book. Great, well thank you both for coming on the show and sharing mastering diabetes with this audience, which as you explain so many of the listeners are either facing this themselves,

no someone who's facing it, or Cyrus as you brought up, may themselves, if they have a relative or a family member who has this, feeling stressed about it. So I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing this with the passion start community. I love it. Thank you, John. This has been a pleasure and I truly do hope people's minds get open to the idea

that they have the power and that they can make significant impact positive impact on their metabolic health and that chronic disease is something that they don't they just don't have to settle for don't have to live with it and powers really in your hands. So so thank you so much for what you do and for helping millions of people around the world change their lives. So it's you're doing a great job and we really appreciate it. Thank you very much. you're doing a great job and we really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Cyrus and Robbie. And I wanted to thank Cyrus, Robbie, Avery, and Brooke Craven for the privilege and honor of having them here on the show. All things Cyrus and Robbie will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase

any of the books that we feature from the guests on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John Armeyles and our clips channel at Passion Struck Clips. Advertiser deals and discount codes in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Armeyles on both Twitter and Instagram where I'm very active and you can get daily doses at John Armyles on both Twitter and Instagram where I'm very active,

and you can get daily doses of hope, connection, and meaning. Please check it out and please reach out to me. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStark podcast that I did with Dr. Gabriela Rosenkellerman, who has held multiple high-level positions in companies such as BetterUp as the chief product officer and chief innovation officer, as well as the head of Better Up Labs. She is also the founding CEO of Lifelink. We discuss her debut book, written with the one and only Martin Seligman, the renowned founder of Positive Psychology. The book is titled Tomorrow Mind,

Riving at Work with Resilience, Creativity and Connection, now and in an uncertain future. I think that's one of the greatest organizational and managerial challenges today, is how do you preserve engagement in an environment where we're constantly pivoting and constantly adjusting our strategy. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something interesting or useful. If you know someone who is dealing with diabetes, please definitely share today's episode with them.

The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you care and love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. Until next time, live life, passion struck.