The Ozempic Expert: Ozempic Transforms Your Gut Microbiome! People Are Being Overdosed On Ozempic!

This is not what they're telling us. We can start to heal some of these chronic lifestyle conditions that are so rampant with tiny doses of this. It's like opening a window of opportunity for somebody to completely change their life. Dr. Tina Moore is a distinguished naturopathic physician whose groundbreaking work is leading the way in combating some of the biggest diseases and medical conditions that our modern world currently faces. Everyone's saying that Ozempic is evil, this is the worst thing ever, but a lot of people are being overdosed for weight loss and this leads to a very high risk for side effects. But Ozempic done correctly has all these other benefits that have nothing to do with weight loss and they are just mind-blowing. Healing and reversing type 1 diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. We've got studies showing really positive impacts on depression and anxiety and potentially reducing cancer risk. It shifts your gut microbiome to a more favorable microbiome and then my daughter's PCOS symptoms reversed which is probably one of the number one drivers of infertility in young women. I mean, holy sh and I've seen it with my patients and I've seen it with myself cuz I lived with chronic pain my whole life. And I remember by the end of 2021 thinking, if this doesn't get better, I think I'm going to kill myself. But I started myself at a tiny little dose and the destruction fell away. Dr. Tina Moore, what would you scream to the world right now? We are eating a chemical storm of a food supply. Young women are bathing in toxic chemicals through their beauty habits. Microbiome disruption from all the antibiotics. I joke that humans are going extinct, but I think it's really happening if we don't right this ship. But there's things we can do that are non-negotiable that have nothing to do with drugs. Your six pillars for a pain-free life. Yes. First of all, I would Congratulations Diary of a CEO gang, we've made some progress. 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button. It helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guest get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Dr. Tina Moore. Who are you by profession and what is the mission that you're on? So I'm a naturopathic physician and a chiropractor. I don't know if you have naturopathic physicians here in the UK. We are trained formally in a four-year medical program and we take national board exams, North American, I should say. And we are taught root cause medicine. So the functional medicine community basically appropriated our medicine many years ago. If you've heard of functional I'm you've had doctors on their functional medicine practitioners. And it's the idea that the body can heal itself. We are looking to restore homeostasis in the individual. So why are things awry? I'm less interested in someone's diagnosis as much as I am why are they presenting with that symptom picture? What's going on? And I was mentored up by one of the finest naturopathic physicians in our profession over the past many decades and he died of cancer in 2013 and I took over his practice. He was a force to be reckoned with. So I carry that flag with me and he was a truth teller and he was often ostracized by our profession for being ahead of the game and, you know, being ahead of the story usually and I learned so much from him about metabolic health and how metabolic health was really the root cause driver of so many diseases, lifestyle induced diseases that we're seeing in and on a worldwide level. Can you give me just a bit of a glimpse in it for someone that's never heard the term naturopathic physician before? Which which I guess means naturopathic doctor. Mhm. Right. What is the difference between like a normal doctor and a naturopathic doctor? So a traditional allopathic physician is what you're going to be familiar with with an MD. They're trained in a system where algorithmically they are taught to find disease processes and then they have a standard care that they follow which is to prescribe X, Y and Z Yeah. for the standard of care and that's not how they always were. Naturopathic medicine was born out of old-timey European MDs. So back in Germany and, you know, long time ago when we didn't have all the fancy lab tests and we didn't have all the fancy pharmaceuticals, we were treating people to bolster their health, really. You know, it's taking you as an individual, finding out what makes you tick and then how can we optimize your health overall? Symptoms and illness falls away when you treat the body, when you treat the individual in front of you. So I don't treat diseases, I treat people. That's the difference. Whereas in allopathic medicine, they are very obsessed with the diagnosis and then what pills do we apply to that diagnosis? Which is different than why is this person presenting this way and what can we do to help them along the journey of optimizing their health so the symptoms fall away. And you you said you took over a clinic there. Yeah. What kind of patients do you see in that practice? Did you see in that practice and what was the sort of variety of illness or disorder or disease that you came across? So his practice was predominantly musculoskeletal medicine. So it was chronic joint dysfunction and he did a specialized type of medicine called prolotherapy and regenerative injection therapies. The modern version of that is stem cells. You've probably heard of stem cell injections. I'm sure everyone has by this point. Platelet-rich plasma is another one. And that's what he specialized in, but it's not just about shooting fancy substances into people's joints. You have to get the person into a healing state first. So you need them optimized so that they want to heal. So that means hormones, that means nutrition, that means lifestyle. Those things are far more critical to get lined up than it is to start shooting fancy substances into their joints. Even if those substances come from their own body. Even if we're sucking out their own stem cells and we're sucking out their own blood and we're using those. It's far more important that you get the person in an optimized state so that they want to heal. So I would I you know, I'd ask patients, if you cut your fingertip off or just sliced yourself terribly, do you heal well? And if they said yes, they were a wonderful candidate for those types of injections. If they did not, then they weren't because they weren't in a good healing state at that point. So my job was to get them in a healing state and then to apply the treatments. What is a healing state? It's when you fall down and you don't fall apart. It's when you get sick with something and you get over it. It's when you cut yourself and you heal readily and you don't, you know, succumb to terrible infections. And I think we've ended up as a society where the norm has become to be somewhat immunocompromised. I think a lot of people are walking around, not not you younger folks, but at least in the US, a lot of people are walking around in this sort of semi-immunocompromised state. Much of it is due to metabolic dysfunction which is something he was always drilling into me. What is metabolic dysfunction? It is when your metabolic health at its core is the ability to take in the foods that you eat and assimilate them properly. So if you were to eat proteins and fats and carbohydrates, you would turn them into the fuel that they need to be. You would turn them into the proteins in your body that they need to be. When that goes awry which is almost 100% of US adults at this point from what the data is showing, things don't go so well and so what that leads to, this metabolic dysfunctional pattern leads to insulin resistance which is essentially prediabetes which is the long game into type 2 diabetes. And we've completely normalized that process at least during my lifetime. I've watched that happen. I'm 50 years old so I've watched this happen especially since I got into medicine working for my mentor Dr. Rick watching folks go down this pathway of normalization into type 2 diabetes and it's not until they get there that the doctor says, "Oop, you have type 2 diabetes, we got to do something about it. Here's your pills." And there's 15 to 20 years of legwork that can be done before that happens and that's where I think naturopathic medicine really shines and where preventative functional medicine, all of us are in the same camp. We're all doing the same thing. We're really trying to just help the patient in front of us, not so much the disease process. We're trying to make sure that the person's optimized so that they can become more resilient, so that their immune system works properly, so that the foods that they eat are assimilated properly and they don't end up in a cellular milieu of disaster. Is is there like a fundamental belief that you have about human beings, how we heal, how to be healthy um and the body, I guess, that you think is in contrast or conflict with the current system? Like a set of fundamental underlying beliefs cuz we all have like a set of sunglasses on, our lens of how we see the world. Yes. And what I've obviously learned from doing this podcast is everyone seems to be wearing slightly different lenses. Mhm. You know, as to their view on health, the the health care system, humans healing, society. What are those sort of fundamental underlying beliefs that you have? It's a great question. I think that in traditional naturopathic medicine, the purest would tell you that there's no room for pharmaceuticals and that you must only go with nature, the healing power of nature, stoke the individual's vitality. That's very important in naturopathic medicine. We're looking at the vitality of an individual. Some would call that an aura. I think that's a little too esoteric. It is when you look at someone, are they are they glowing vitality? Do they look healthy? You can see it. I know you can everyone can see it when you actually point it out to people. Do they look healthy or are they sort of walking around in gray scale? Right? And I think a lot of people these days are unfortunately walking around in gray scale cuz they've sort of you know, we've all been listening to the mainstream narrative and the food supply is busted. This has been going on for decades. My mentor was talking about this decades ago and nobody was listening and now people I think are starting to get hip to it because we've got the internet, we've got podcasts like yours and mine and where we're trying to get the, you know, the information out. And it's the inherent ability of the body to heal. However, I do think there's a place for pharmaceuticals and I have a license to prescribe in the state of Oregon and I'm not afraid to use it because in my mind and the way that my mentor taught me is somebody comes in and they're on this many pharmaceuticals. I mean, I'm 50, the average person my age is on five different pharmaceuticals at this point which is crazy to me and I don't know what the stats are in the UK, but I can't imagine they're tremendously better. So, they come in on all these drugs and their lifestyle is in somewhat of shambles. And so my job is to optimize lifestyle so that I can get these down to the lowest or to nil. Ideally, we could get them off, but if they need a little something then great. I was also taught by him to implement longevity medicine which is hormones and making sure that people are able to maintain physiological levels of optimal hormone function as we age which is really important to aging well. And so it's just kind of a mix of using the best of nature and that science has to offer and treating the person in front of you. Of all the case studies that you have in your mind, experience and in your past, is there one that you are most proud of? It was 2019. My career was really taking off and my mom kept telling me that she didn't feel good. And I was like, my mom is a rock. My mom's My mom's like comes up to here on me. I call her my little mama and she just chugs along and I was like, oh, she'll be fine. She's like, no, I really don't feel good and I kept blowing her off because I was too busy and I was on planes all the time and traveling all the time and I was never home. And my mom came to visit me at my house and she came out of the bathroom and she said she's like, I like I can't hold my bowels. Like I I can't. I'm so sick. And so I immediately started testing her and she had Crohn's disease and my grandmother had died of Crohn's disease and several people in her side of the family had died of Crohn's disease and I just hadn't put two and two together that my mom may have had, but she had all the symptoms. Like growing up, she had all the symptoms and I just never put it together. And it was hitting her. It It rears its ugly head when folks hit their elder years, like in their 70s. They call it you know, colitis of the elderly and people basically get it and die. They just [ __ ] themselves to death. And so my mom was in it and I was like, oh, no. And I pulled out everything I had and I have access to some incredible regenerative substances that, you know, most people don't and I can use them off-label in ways that you know, in most people don't even think to do and I threw everything I had at her because I knew if I had sent her into the allopathic system, they were going to do a colonoscopy on her and what that does is they flush you out before they do the colonoscopy and if I if her flora were to get flushed out of her gut at that point, I don't think she would have come out of the hospital because they end up getting secondary infections. And so I I pulled her out of it. I got her out of the really acute phase and then I immediately referred her to my colleague who is a brilliant physician, naturopathic physician and I was like, take over. I'm not I don't want to manage my mom. But I needed to get her I I I knew that it was the skill set that I had in particular that was going to pull her out of that and so we did it and she came to me one day after she was better and she was stabilized and she said, you saved my life. And at the time I was really bitching about my half a million dollars of student loan debt that was just compounding and compounding and compounding and I was really frustrated by the fact that I couldn't get on top of it and I had at that point spent like a hundred thousand dollars paying off my loans and they were still at the same level. I mean, it's just criminal that system. And she said, you saved my life. It was worth every penny, you know. And then my daughter turned around who had just gone through a very difficult time herself and she said, you saved my life too, Mom, this year and I was like well, if that was what it cost to gain the knowledge that I gained to save my daughter and my mother and then my dad was like, you saved my life you bailed me out many times and I was like, okay, that's So, it was kind of um it was just kind of ironic that was the end of my big clinical career, you know, when I had my big brick and mortar with the high volume patient base and all of that. I still see patients, but not at that level and so that was really I was like, thank God I had the knowledge and the tools and the know-how to and the fearlessness to apply some of the therapies that I applied the way I did to In terms of before and after what sort of picture of health would I observe if I saw her on that day when she walked out of the toilet versus you know, after the the variety of different therapies that you applied? Well, this is a good story because she was super gray and super thin. My mom has always been kind of, you know, hippie and curvy and I mean, she's we're built different. She's she's the more, you know, she's the curvy one and she was just rail thin and gray and all of her hair was falling out. I mean, she just I can't believe I missed it. I can't believe it went on that long that I didn't see it and I I still carry guilt to this day and I always apologize to her for being too busy to I can't believe I let my stress level get so high that I didn't see it, you know. And then she ended up on a slew of pharmaceuticals that were too expensive to get in the United States, so she had to get them from Canada. So, her naturopathic physician is managing her. So, she's getting medication, very expensive medication from Canada and she's doing okay. And then in the last nine months, I put her on the tiniest droplet of semaglutide which is Ozempic. And she is phenomenal. All of her joint pain's gone. Her gut's completely regulated and normalized. She is down on a minimal dose of this medication that she's getting from Canada. She's still taking it, but it's a tiny dose. Her cognition has improved significantly because through this process she was starting to get low-grade dementia whether she realizes it or not. My daughter and I were noticing it. We were like, is Grandma okay? And so when people come at me for talking about microdosing Ozempic, I will not back down because my mom is solid and it's the tiniest amount and she even said to me just the other day before I was coming on the show. I was telling her I was stressed. I was trying to get ready for the trip, you know, overseas and she said, you know, I was so stressed out before you put me on semaglutide because my dad's health is very poor and she said I was so stressed that I really felt like it was going to do me in. Like I was at capacity and you put me on the semaglutide and all of the anxiety and stress just dropped away. And I was like that's cuz it's calming to neuroinflammation which is secondary to chronic gastrointestinal diseases. When the gut is inflamed, the brain's inflamed. So, she was dealing with all this chronic brain inflammation, all this gut inflammation and she's on this tiny little dose of Ozempic and she's very solid and she's her color's back. She's filled in again. She's curvy again. She's eating normally. She doesn't I mean, she couldn't eat hardly anything ever for years and so now she's back to eating very normally. She's still got to watch what she eats, but you know, it's not a free-for-all, but she is she's back. The other I guess glaringly obvious case study for your work, but also I think many of the things we're going to talk about like microdosing Ozempic is you. Yeah. Because as I read through your story from your childhood years through your teenage years and even in university um and then even later into your career and I guess also now cuz you mentioned that you you still deal with chronic pain you are your own case study. I am. Can you give me a view of of the struggles you've been through in terms of your health um and really where that started. What was the sort of first first instance where you experienced the pain, the trauma, etc., etc.? So, I always had stomach aches. Always. Since I was a child, always and was hit with really pretty severe anxiety. I didn't know what it was at the time, but it was anxiety and I started getting chronic pain in my teenage years and I out of nowhere when I was about 15, the lights went out on me. I just became extremely suicidal and depressed out of nowhere. I mean, it was like somebody just switched a lever. I had moved to Oregon from Southern California. I do believe that the lack of light was massive. I think that people really I'm really starting to appreciate it's taken me all these decades, but light deficiency is a huge issue that we're not no one's talking about. A few people are, but You're talking about like vitamin D production as well right there cuz there's Oh, that was huge. So, that took years. You know, nobody was talking about that. It was not until decades later I was sitting in naturopathic medicine school. I was in college and um I think I was in year three of that program and this doctor, Dr. Alex Vasquez came to lecture at grand rounds and he started talking about vitamin D and sunlight deficiency and I had been kind of low-grade looking into sunlight deficiency because it turns out the hospitals of yore really would optimize sunlight and they would have sun porches. I don't know if you've seen the photos. They would roll all the kids out and all of the convalescing ill people out. I mean, that's how people survived the 1918 flu was the ones who got sunlight and the ones who were able to go to these hospitals and they would build the hospitals to optimize light exposure inside the ward cuz they knew it kept the bacteria counts down and I mean, even if they didn't know what bacteria was or what was happening, they knew that when sunlight penetrated, people were you know, healthier and things were cleaner and infections didn't seem to spread and so I hit my 20s and long story short, I was rocking psoriatic arthritis for decades before I ever figured it out and it really culminated for me I went through a lot of chronic pain. I went through a lot of misery. I went through a lot of autoimmune issues and then I got everything dialed in. I thought I had it handled. Interestingly, autoimmune disease will flare and will recede and flare and recede and it's kind of on cue. Like you'll see it around 10 to 11 years old, especially with things like Crohn's disease, you'll see these little glimmers pop up for kids and then it goes away. And then you'll see them present in their teenage years and often they'll present with you know, mental emotional issues and not so much the gastrointestinal issues, but it's the same process going on in the body. And then it'll go away and then it might flare again postpartum because of that big hormone surge that happens with childbirth and then it'll go away and then it'll come back with a vengeance in menopause as the hormones again shift majorly and that's what was happening for me and then all of the stress of pushing back against the narrative really caught up with me and I was I nothing that I knew to do was working. So the whole protocol I put my mother through was not working for me. Nothing was touching it and that is how I came to start studying GLP-1 agonists. I started I was researching anything that would calm neural inflammation because at the end of the day diseases down here are coming from here. And when the brain's on fire and the brain's inflamed the immune system gets sent completely sideways and the downstream processes culminate in autoimmune disease, pain, hormonal disruption, you name it. And so I that's how I ended up I literally put into Google GLP-1 and neural inflammation and all these studies showed up and that's what got me going. Two questions there. So GLP-1 is Ozempic? So it's yes, it's the peptide that the body makes naturally. We make it in the brain and we make it in the gut. But if somebody's had a life of chronic gut inflammation, I don't think they're making it so well in the gut. And Ozempic is just a it's several versions down in the generational line of these peptides called incretins. They're um they're a whole family that started way back 20 some years ago and they've just gotten a little bit nicer with less side effects and longer half-life as we go along the journey. So the last decent one was liraglutide, although compliance was low because it made people feel really terrible and they had to inject it too frequently. I think it was daily or I think that's how it is still. And then semaglutide is a newer generation, tirzepatide is a newer generation and so they're they're just getting a little more potent and I don't mean potent in a pharmaceutical way. I mean they're starting to realize how these work and they're they're getting craftier with not only keeping them in the body for the time that they need. So the half-life gets longer, but they're finding in the suite of signaling peptide hormones that are involved with appetite and with metabolic health and insulin secretion and insulin sensitivity, they're finding better and better ways to combine these to get optimal function with the least amount of side effects. Okay. And at that moment in your life where you started Googling GLP-1 and inflammation etc. If I was a fly on the wall in your life at that moment what would I've what would I've seen? What was the sort of picture of desperation or you know? So 2021 I spent most of that year on my back cuz I was in so much pain. It was crazy. And my husband when he met me, he met me in 2019 and we got married in 2020. And I told him I had chronic pain and I told him I had a funny immune system, but he had never seen it. Like he'd never seen it full force and he got to see it that year. He was like, wow, so this is what chronic pain looks like. I mean it's it was devastating and my spine was fusing and I'm active. Like I do Pilates and I dance a lot and I hula hoop and I roller skate and I lift weights and I'm you know, I'm moving and shaking. I was not moving and shaking in 2021. I was 2021 I was flat on my back on the couch and I remember by the end of 2021 thinking if this doesn't get better I think I'm going to kill myself. Like I couldn't do it anymore. Like I just couldn't live with that level of pain and my spine was fusing and I could feel it and I kept trying to tell everyone something is wrong. And my chiropractor friends were great, but they knew musculoskeletal medicine and my naturopathic friends were great, but they knew systemic medicine and I I needed me. I needed my brain on the case. Like someone who had both, right? And I just couldn't get on top of it and then finally I I don't know how or why I I went kind of into the story. Oh, I know what it was. I broke out with psoriasis. I broke out with psoriasis all over my scalp. And I was like, oh, this is what this is. This is psoriatic arthritis, which turns out to be one of the most painful musculoskeletal autoimmune conditions you can have. It it's worse than rheumatoid arthritis on the pain scale from what the studies show. So I was like, okay, now that I know what I'm dealing with, what can I do? So I started pulling out all the stops and all the things I knew to do, low-dose naltrexone, exosomes, you name it. I was doing everything. It really wasn't bringing it down or it would work for a minute and it would it would it would wear off. And so I was getting desperate and my pod I have a podcast and my podcast producer said, you got to do an episode on Ozempic. And I was like, I don't I don't like talking about weight loss. I really don't like talking about weight loss. It people get so emotionally triggered and it's a big topic and it's nuanced and it's not as simple as people want to make it be. And in my functional medicine world, people want to make it so simplistic, just exercise more and eat less and take these supplements and it'll go carnivore and it'll all go away. It's not that simple. There's genetic components, there's brain components, there's epigenetic components and it was like the Pandora's Box I didn't want to open. And so finally I was like, okay, fine. I'm going to start researching these and I was sitting I was laying on the couch on my back. And it's 2023 at this point, but I'm still having to take frequent breaks, right? On my back. So I'd go exercise and I'd have to lay down for 3 hours. So I'm Googling and I look up GLP-1 and neural inflammation cuz I always start there. I always start with pain, neuroinflammation and immune activation. I always want to know what any substance does in those cuz that's my world, right? Cuz that's what I did in clinical practice. And I Googled that and my husband's in the kitchen and I was like holy [ __ ] And I turned the phone around and I was like, look at this. And he's like, I don't know what that means, babe. And I was like this is not what they're telling us. Like this is not what cuz that was at the height of mainstream media and all the clickbait headlines and you know, mom is overdosing on Ozempic and people's stomachs are paralyzed forever and I was like so then I started of course looking at all that. Like is that for real? Like are they really getting gastroparesis forever? No. So I start going into all the data and I just that was it. It was like the rabbit hole and it that was May of 2023 and I've been knee-deep in it ever since just consumed by any and all informa and then of course everybody start I started doing podcast about it on my show and everyone's sending me all the information and hundreds of people are reaching out to me telling me these really profound stories and changes in their health that have nothing to do with weight loss or diabetes and so that was it. I was like, I got I got bit by some kind of um well, you know, I don't like propaganda. I don't like when I hear everybody saying the same thing. It makes me suspicious, you know, when everyone's running in one direction screaming this is evil. This is this is this is you know, the worst thing ever. I was like I don't know this has been around for 20 some years, not semaglutide, but this version of medication, this family of medication and so I don't know. I was like, I'm not buying this. I'm going to find out what the truth is. And so I called every doctor I knew that might use it. I called every pharmacist I knew that might use it. Nobody was seeing any of these horrific side effects. Like the stories you were seeing on the media currently, what was that? Summer That was really it it came to like full height summer of 2023. I think that was when everybody was losing their minds about it. The minute they started talking about weight loss people started losing their minds about it, which I find very interesting. And what I was finding in the literature was not at all adding up to what I was hearing. And then there were all of these other benefits that were just mind-blowing. You know, benefits on healing and reversing type 1 diabetes. Healing and reversing neurocognitive conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Efficacy with alcohol cessation. People who were you know, alcohol abuse syndrome, using it for that. People who also had the this type of it's HLA-B27. It's a genetic propensity towards these um spondyloarthritises like psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, those kinds of things. Having showing efficacy for that. And as I started speaking out about it, I was getting messages back from people telling me their stories. Hundreds and hundreds of people telling me their stories and I and then seeing what was happening with my patients. So I started applying it to everyone I was treating for different reasons. At different doses. Very tiny doses though, very little bits. And just seeing really profound changes in people. And I it's not what we're hearing. And I don't think that the way also that it's being done in the standard model is ideal for everyone. I think a lot of people are being dosed too high, too fast and I think a lot of people are being overdosed cuz at the end of the day it's a hormone. It's a peptide signaling hormone and so people are being cranked up on doses very quickly. There's a 16-week escalation and they go from this amount to this amount very quickly and in the journey, many people are reporting horrific gastrointestinal side effects, which are real. But it's not the peptide's fault. It's the it's a peptide at the end of the day as well, which is I can explain what that is. Yeah, if you had to explain what Ozempic is or what go over your, you know, this this compound is just to a 10-year-old. Yeah, okay. How would you explain it? So, you eat amino acids, you eat protein and it breaks down into amino acids. Yeah. And amino acids link up with peptide bonds into chains called peptides. And then peptides What's a peptide bond? Uh, it's just a simplistic bond that binds two amino acids together. So, it can be broken pretty readily with different enzymes. And that's in my body, the peptide bond is in my body. Yeah, so your body has all these enzymes present and the amino acids link up very simplistically into different chains. And then those chains of amino acids are called peptides. And peptides link up to form proteins and your body is made of proteins, your whole body. All of your tissue is made out of proteins. And your cellular receptors are made out of proteins, everything's made out of proteins. So, if you go backwards, those smaller versions are the amino acids, I'm sorry, or peptides and the smaller versions of that yet are the amino acids. Mhm. So, we eat protein, we break it down into amino acids and we reconstruct it into more protein. Mhm. And so, peptides are these chains of amino acids that we've got all different types of therapeutic peptides and they insert themselves where they need to go to do what they need to do. Mhm. So, that's it at the end of the day. And what so, what's a Zempic in that? Is is Zempic is a peptide? It's a peptide. And it's made in our L cells of our gut, which line from the most proximal to the distal small intestine and it secrete these cells secrete GLP-1 in the presence of glucose, which is sugar when we eat sugary foods or food well, all carbohydrates break down into glucose. So, whenever we eat glucose and they respond actually when a bolus of food so, the mechanism of a blob of food going through our guts actually gets these cells to trigger. Mhm. However, I have tested thousands of people's guts in my clinical practice in my clinical lifetime and people's guts are a mess. Most people have compromised digestion. So, I don't think their L cells are working optimally in many cases. And we also have literature, good solid science to show that those who are suffering with obesity, type 2 diabetes and fatty liver and that whole metabolic syndrome, you know, groupage, those folks are GLP-1 deficient. So, when I take a Zempic, it's causing my gut, basically, my body to release GLP-1. No, it is the GLP-1. Oh, it is the GLP-1. Yep, so we're not causing the gut to do anything, we are mimicking the actual peptide. Ah, okay, so it's got the same sort of atomic structure. Is it GLP-1? So, my body thinks it's GLP-1. I guess it is GLP-1 as far as things are concerned. And then the GLP-1 is doing what to me? Well, so it's semaglutide, for instance, is bioidentical to the GLP-1 that our body secretes. So, it's the same except it's been tweaked with a little bit, they've added some lipids to it to make the half-life longer. So, it lasts longer. So, normally GLP-1 would be secreted from our cells, it's also secreted from our brain, which we got to get into cuz that's where I got really excited. It's secreted from our body and it's broken down very quickly. And so, these newer versions of these incretin hormones or incretin peptides are broken down at a slower pace. Okay, and then what does GLP-1 do? It does all kinds of cool things. So, it most notably what it's known for is to decrease appetite. Mhm. And that happens centrally in the brain. Yeah. It slows gastric motility, so it slows things down so you feel fuller for longer. That's at higher doses, that doesn't always need to happen. And that is what it is known for and it also has induction of it it plays with the cells of your pancreas and it gets them to secrete insulin at the right time. And so, most folks are walking around in some degree of insulin resistance as they age and that is the beginning glimmers of type 2 diabetes. And so, GLP-1's help that process, it helps sensitize the cells to the insulin and it helps secrete the insulin when needed. And when you were struggling in 2023, Yeah. you started taking a Zempic, semaglutide, one of these brands. Yeah. What impact did it have on you? So, I got a compounded version because I thought that the starting dose let's back up. The brand name, the prescription that most people are familiar with are these little pre-filled pens. Yeah. And the pens only come in certain doses. You can't control the dosage. You start at the lowest dose that they offer and then you have to escalate from there. Or if your doctor's cool, they won't make you escalate too much, but either way, you don't get to go lower than the dose that it starts and it starts at 0.25 mg. I thought that that was way too high, especially for someone like myself. I'm very metabolically optimized. I have good muscle mass, I have very good bone density, I have my labs look beautiful, I'm hormonally optimized, I'm on bioidentical hormone replacement, I'm very active, I exercise often, my sleep is good. And I thought my thinking was, I wonder if some of us are actually a little GLP-1 deficient from whether a life of not because we have obesity, diabetes and fatty liver, there's different reasons why those folks would be deficient. Insulin at high levels itself will actually induce some GLP-1 deficiency, it'll it'll decrease in GLP-1 signaling. My thinking was, I wonder if folks are just genetically or maybe we got ourselves there through chronic illness, whatever it may be, I wonder if there's a little bit of a deficiency. What if I supplement this peptide like I would a hormone, which the way I do that is I give people the lowest dose necessary to achieve a physiologic impact that's favorable and then I cap it. So, if you need a little bit of thyroid, the standard model would have you take, well, you know, the algorithm says you have hypothyroidism, so we're going to give you this much and we're going to give you this exact drug. In my world, we compound what we need, maybe you need a little more T3 than T4, maybe you need a tiny dose, maybe we titrate you up until you start getting a little symptomatic and we're like, oh, let's back it down a little. So, my thinking was to use it that way. So, I asked everyone I knew, are you using this for anything other than appetite suppression or weight loss or diabetes? And they all said no, nobody really was. None of my colleagues were anyway. And they were all starting at a dose that I still thought was too high. So, I started myself at a tiny little dose and my first impact was brain clarity. Within days, my brain cleared. I can't even explain it. Um, brain fog was definitely starting to happen. I think it was the psoriatic arthritis and I think it was the I think it was post-COVID, you know, I think our brains all got hit pretty hard by that and I think it was chronic stress and I think it was menopause and I was sort of in this I'm a high-functioning kind of boss babe and I couldn't get my work done and my team was going crazy cuz I couldn't remember what I told them and you know, they're calling me and they're like, we already did this, we already had this conversation, what is wrong with you? So, I was like, damn it, this isn't going to work for me. I can't be rolling the way I'm rolling and trying to run all my businesses and have brain fog like this. So, that was the first thing I noticed was clarity of thought, brain fog went away, anxiety immediately dropped, which I didn't even realize I had. It's just a calmness took over me, which was so amazing. And within two weeks, my pain was down significantly, significantly. And what I noticed was everything was starting to move and pop again. So, I was getting mobility back. And by week two, I wanted to move again. So, this version of me that just wanted to like go do my workout, go to my work and then lay down on my back, I wasn't that doing that anymore and I immediately like signed back up for Pilates and I found myself dancing and hula hooping around the house again and I found myself just being much more active. And slowly but surely, the destruction sort of fell away cuz I had been in a pretty destructive immune process for a couple years there and it just has it's taken me I think it's been almost a year now and it's just slowly but surely dropped away. I also noticed a little bit of weight loss, which I had gained some weight over the past couple years. I think it was chronic stress was doing a number on my metabolism. And you know, you hit that 50-year-old mark and things get tough. So, I had some weight loss fall away. I got right back down to my fighting weight. I'm like literally the size I was in 2019 going into all of this. And so, I quickly started putting people on it and very similar responses. Um, all of them had a little bit of fluff, but nobody was on it for weight loss. Everyone had a little bit of weight, fell right off, got back down to a good weight. My mom, I was particularly concerned about cuz I didn't want her to waste away again. I didn't want her vomiting. I didn't want her having any gastrointestinal symptoms. I wanted all of those to resolve. It shifts your gut microbiome to a more favorable microbiome if you do it right. And so, and we have the data on that. So, I was very slow and cautious with her. I don't want her losing any muscle mass and everybody just had these profound impacts. My daughter's skin cystic acne. I mean, a decade of severe cystic acne to the point where she did not enjoy her teenage years and she was suicidal from it. I mean, just hiding behind her hair for for years. Her skin I remember seeing her after three weeks on it and I was like, your skin is porcelain, what happened? All of her PCOS symptoms reversed. Um, my husband didn't want to drink anymore. The guy is a known alcoholic. He was like, not interested in alcohol. His blood pressure regulated out. I mean, just all of these little things started happening and I started seeing similar effects in my patients. And then I at the same time I was posting about it and talking about it on my podcast and people were messaging me telling me these profound stories. They were like, I went on it for weight loss or I went on it for metabolic dysfunction or our 2 diabetes, but here's all the other things that started happening. And then people started telling me they were getting pregnant on it. And you know, when they had been infertile and gone through rounds of IVF that were not working and just all of these amazing stories. And so of course I keep I have to research that and do more information on that. And it's just been I've just been unwinding. I I feel like I'm unwinding a story that isn't being told. So, what is that story? To summarize, what is that story that's not being told that you've come to believe? These peptides are healing. They are anti-inflammatory and they are regenerative. And they have a profound impact on our immune system in a positive way. And they don't just cover up and mask the insulin resistance and the metabolic dysfunction that leads to type 2 diabetes. They actually heal it. How do you know that? Well, interestingly, as this year has gone on, more and more studies have come out and we're starting to see it. So many of the hypotheses I had about it are starting to show themselves in good clinical data, in good studies. And I've seen it with my patients and I've seen it with myself. So I am now able to go off of it. At first I could only go off of it for a short amount of time and my psoriasis would come back. That was the first symptoms. I would start getting skin issues and I usually get it around my scalp line. Little itchies. That would come back within 7 to 10 days. I am now able to go a month without it and absolutely no symptoms. And the second I start to get brain fog or a little bit of pain, I go back on. I cycle it like I would any other hormone. I don't know if you've had any guests on talking about hormones, but they're done best when you cycle them because receptors get saturated. And when you saturate a receptor with a hormone or after a while the cell will stop listening. And so you don't want to just keep flooding a cell or a body with a hormone. You want to take it away and let those receptors pop back up. And so I think done correctly and done in an elegant way that's just reasonable, clinically reasonable, I think that we can actually start to heal some of these chronic lifestyle diseases that are so rampant. And it makes me wonder if we would need less and less and less of the common pharmaceuticals that are being handed out like candy. The lifelong pharmaceuticals. People go on statin drugs or they go on blood pressure medications and no one says boo. They're on it for life. Oh, here's your metformin for your type 2 diabetes. You're on it for life. I think done correctly and also the neuroregenerative process that these induce in the brain. They actually regenerate neurons. Neuroplasticity is this concept where when the brain when you do something enough, your brain will hardwire into that. And so any habit, good or bad, that you consistently do or any thought process you consistently have, if you're chronically depressed or you're chronically negative or you're you know, I mean you know this. You're you you're self-optimizing yourself all the time and growing and trying to grow and be better, you're plasticizing your brain and hardwiring that circuitry. So it's getting easier for you and you continue to seek knowledge. These peptides offer people a window of opportunity of not only giving them the onus of control back cuz there are some mechanisms in the brain and the dopaminergic pathways that are giving people the they're back in the driver's seat. They're back in control of what they're doing, but it's also inducing this neuroplasticity. So if they are to implement really positive lifestyle habits during the period of time that they're on it, they will hardwire that into their brain. So it's like opening a window of opportunity for somebody to completely change their life. You mentioned some studies though that have really supported your thesis that a Zempic is more than just a weight loss drug and that it has these other sort of regenerative properties and these healing properties. What are some of the studies? You've got some something in front of you there that you brought with you. What are some of these studies that highlight this in your view? Well, so there's one study in particular that I don't have the title of it written down where they looked at all of the data on all of the GLP-1 agonists that are out there, the different versions that I mentioned. And they went back through all of the studies and they looked at it system by system by system. And I gave your team a link to that. And what they found is, I mean going from tip to toe, neuroregeneration and anti-inflammation in the brain. They showed improvements in cardiovascular tissue. We just had a study come out at the end of 2023 called the select trial. It was a big one. Yes, it was sponsored by Novo Nordisk who's the manufacturer of semaglutide of of I should say of a Zempic. And so people say, oh, don't believe those studies. It was a well-done study. It looked at individuals in their 40s who were overweight but did not have type 2 diabetes and it showed a 20% reduction in severe cardiovascular events. So stroke and heart attack and and others. And so then people argued once that came out and said, oh, well, that poof, you know, Novo Nordisk did it and that would happen if people lost weight anyway, right? You'd you'd have improvements in cardiovascular disease. Well, they just looked at the data again and realized that those benefits were independent of weight loss. Whether people lost weight or not, they still had significant improvement in cardiovascular outcomes, which there's just nothing we don't have anything out there that does that. I found data showing regeneration of pancreatic tissue, beta cells in type 1 diabetics if given early enough. So if a person is the type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition where the pancreas becomes destroyed by the immune system. It's different than type 2. We don't have anything to help those people. It used to be called juvenile diabetes and then type 2 was adult onset, but now kids, many many children are dealing with type 2. So it's a big mishmash, but they're very two different processes. They shouldn't even have the same name. Anyway, done early um reversal of that pancreatic damage to the point where people didn't need to go on insulin and were able to have pancreatic healing. We don't have anything that does that except stem cells. They at the end of 2023 they had to stop the flow trial because this was a chronic kidney disease trial. Um They had to stop it because the control group they needed to be able to ethically give the control group the substance because it was so effective. It was so effective at reversing chronic kidney disease and kidney failure that they needed to be able to offer it to the control group ethically and not let them continue on their journey of kidney damage. So we've got this mishmash of studies and then they've done little studies here and there looking at muscle for instance. It's regenerative to muscle. It's regenerative to bone. It's regenerative to our joints. Some of this is in mice, some of it's in humans. It's regenerative to the testes and to sperm production and motility. When you say regenerative to say muscle, when people talk about a Zempic, one of the big concerns is that you lose a lot of muscle. Right. It's not true. I mean, it is true. I should let me let me Okay. Let me rephrase that. Any dietary intervention or bariatric surgery that induces a severe caloric restriction will lead to about 20 to 35% muscle mass or I should say lean mass loss. So this is a little bit of a nuanced conversation. If you basically put somebody into a self-starvation mode, they will lose 20 to 35% of their lean mass. Lean mass is all the soft tissue in your body. So that could be your tendons and your ligaments and your brain and they they clump it all into one and they're looking at that and saying it's all muscle. Muscle is a percentage of that. Muscle isn't all of your lean mass, right? And so that kind of makes the thing this the studies look bad there, I think. The other thing that they don't consider in that is pathologic muscle due to metabolic dysfunction will be marbled with fat. What does that mean, sorry? Well, it's like uh foie gras. When you induce metabolic dysfunction in an animal, which is what they do in feedlots for cows often and they do it to geese to get their liver fatty, you will end up with this fatty infiltrate in the muscle. So the muscle goes from being this lovely striated linear beautiful pattern to marbled with with fat. Mhm. And that fatty infiltrate becomes very pathologic to the muscle and it puts the muscle itself into an insulin resistant state. So once the marbling occurs in the muscle, it's sort of a chicken and egg downhill situation for the muscle. And I do believe very strongly, and I've been preaching this for decades, that once that process starts, and it most often starts in the thighs. You've probably seen the pictures of the cross-section of like this is an 80-year-old triathlete and his muscle looks really beautiful and linear. And then here's, you know, the average 80-year-old and it's really marbled and the bone loss is significant and the fatty layer on the outside is thicker. But what's most important in that photo is the marbling of the muscle. We don't want marbled muscle. That's the beginning of the end. You also end up with fatty liver and you end up with fatty pancreas when you're in this metabolic dysfunction state, this downhill journey that culminates in type 2 diabetes. And so one of the first things that happens when metabolic health improves, whether this is through dietary interventions, lifestyle, strength training, you name it, is that fatty infiltrate starts to dissolve. These GLP-1 agonists induce that process of the fat dissolving. And so I think that's part of the lean mass loss that they're measuring. They're just measuring it as lean mass loss, but we're also decreasing muscle size because we're having the fatty infiltrate start to burn itself up. GLP-1s have also been shown to perfuse the muscle with angiogenesis so we get a vascular supply so that more amino acids are available to the muscle. So when they looked at aging muscle in a human and they gave them GLP-1 agonists, their muscle became healthier and less pathological because it started to actually get better blood supply and be infused with the amino acids they were eating in the form of protein. So, it's And then there's pathways that are impacted as well that are inducing muscle protein synthesis. So, GLP-1s actually induce muscle protein synthesis. They don't cause muscle wasting. It's the caloric restriction that's causing the wasting. And they're measuring it somewhat aberrantly. Does that make sense? That's That's the story I'm trying to weave here. Yeah, so but how how do I how can I avoid the caloric restriction if I'm taking the GLP-1 agonist like semaglutide or Ozempic? You don't dose it too high. So, you don't crush the appetite. So, the whole goal is to keep people at a dose where they still have an appetite. You don't have to crush their appetite with it. The way it's being dosed traditionally is they're ramping it up really fast and they're just devastating people's appetite with it. And so, people go from hungry and starving to I don't want to eat anything and so, they don't and then they often will eat less healthy version I'm sorry, they'll eat less volume of a poor of a poor diet. So, they will continue to eat junk food only less of it. They will continue to eat the crappy foods they're used to eating only less of it. And I've heard Johann Hari on your show talk about this and he beautiful book that he wrote, his magic pill book. He talks about that. He found himself about 5 or 6 months in and he was still just eating the same crap. He was just eating less of it. And what needs to happen when anybody's on this at any dose is they need to be protecting their muscle with all their might. They need to be strength training and they need to be prioritizing their protein macros. Like those are the two non-negotiables. I don't think doctors are always talking about that and I don't think patients are compliant with that. If I start microdosing there, what you know, won't I see less of the reward? I see less of the cost, but I won't I won't I not also get less of the reward, the the positive upsides that you've described? Not if you're doing all the other lifestyle things. So, like I said, it opens this window of opportunity where people feel much more in control because there's impacts on the brain that allow people to be much more in control of their choices and of their thought processes and of their even of their obsessions. It's very interesting how it works. And so, people are able to make better choices and I think given that window of opportunity and introducing these lifestyle interventions, they're going to be much more open to it. So, we get them exercising. We get them eating better. We get them doing all the things you know, we get them optimizing their sleep. We get them going on walks and meditating and mitigating their stress. All of those things are going to improve their metabolic health. So, it's a two-pronged approach and we don't have to crank the dose. We can do this slow and low and some people may need more and some people may need less, but the point is is the way it's being done traditionally where it's like you get your scripts and you walk out of your office and you don't get any counseling, you don't get any support. This is where people are falling into, I believe, the terrible pits of despair. So, this is where the we're seeing the problems and it can be done differently where we're doing a holistic comprehensive approach with the patient. I was reading a 2024 study by Lindsey Wang that found diabetic patients taking Ozempic with 50% less likely to develop bowel cancer compared to those on insulin. What does this say and highlight about Ozempic's role in staving off cancer? Well, that's an interesting study because insulin is pro-grow. So, insulin is also a signaling peptide hormone very much like GLP-1 and it is pro-grow when you give it to someone. So, someone being on insulin, I believe, will inherently potentially make them more vulnerable to cancer. I don't want to say certainly because I don't want to scare everybody because there's a lot of people out there on insulin, but it is a pro-grow hormone. Now, it's pro-grow in that we get surges of it after we work out, which is awesome. We want that, right? We want that anabolic response, but in your average person who's not working out and who's not really using their insulin the way they need to, they're already swimming in it due to insulin resistance and now they're taking insulin cuz their pancreas is pooped out. That's a mess. That's a soup of of things we don't necessarily want happening growing in the body. And so, that study looked at insulin versus GLP-1s. It's not entirely fair cuz it's not a it's not a true control group, but they there are other data sets coming out that haven't been published yet showing really good really hopeful and positive impacts on potentially reducing cancer risk. And they're correlative, not causative, so we can't put our finger on it and say these these these reduce cancer, but they looked at a you know, over a million people that were type 2 diabetics that were on semaglutide and they found a significant reduction in different types of cancer that are obesity related in comparison to the folks who were not taking GLP-1s. And those were the cancers you don't want, the ovarian, the pancreatic, the colon, the types of cancers that are you know, you don't come back from readily. And so, that's very exciting. It's not getting a lot of play and it's really really new information, so I'm excited just to watch it, but it makes sense to me because these sit on your immune cells as well. There's GLP-1 receptors throughout our entire body. That's why we're getting the impacts throughout the entire body and I think that the impact that it's having on the overall immunologic milieu of an individual is potentially very anti-cancer. I mean, that study that you cited there, I know nothing about um Ozempic and GLP-1s really, but in my even in my sort of, you know, chimp brain, I go, yeah, cuz if they lose weight, they're less likely to get cancer. Right. No, that's totally fair and I think it's both because the way that these are working mechanistically in the body and many of the studies that I've looked at are showing results independent of weight loss. Even if they don't lose weight, then their cancer risk reduces. Well, they're the healing and regenerative and anti-inflammatory impacts are there regardless of weight loss or not. And then you add in weight loss and you add in insulin sensitivity, you add in this this healing of the metabolic dysfunction and you're going to significantly reduce risk for everything as well. I mean, that's a really good point actually cuz if has that has anyone done a study where they give someone Ozempic and even if they don't lose weight, inflammation goes down? Well, that's what the SELECT study this trial showed. That that cardiovascular trial I just shared with you, they just re-looked at that information and realized that even independent of weight cuz that was the big argument everyone had is, well, of course the cardiovascular benefits will stay or will improve because they're losing weight, but they found that even in those who didn't lose weight, they still had really good cardiovascular outcomes. So, yes, it that's what that's what we're starting to see and so, I think they need to start looking at these things more readily, but they weren't, right? They were just looking at like, here's morbidly obese people and here's type 2 diabetics and we're going to crank up the doses and we're going to see what we see, but we're starting to get longitudinal data now. So, that cancer one for instance was looking at patient records going way back. And so, they had over a million you know, people in there that they're Again, it's correlative, it's not causative, but it's showing trends. It's starting to show positive trends and so, I think that's what we have to look at and we have to start to flesh that out. What about mental health, things like depression? Um and sort of anxiety and these kinds of things. You maybe have heard that these are inducing suicidal ideation and people are, you know, getting severely depressed on them and the EU opened a whole research into it and people are very concerned about this and yet we've got studies showing really positive impacts on depression and anxiety. And the thing I will say about that is I'm not saying that people on Ozempic are not having suicidal ideation, but that is a little more nuanced of a conversation because number one, when you lose a significant amount of weight very quickly, all kinds of things can go wrong. You can end up with pancreatitis. You can end up with gallstones. You can end up with severe depression. Your fat stores your hormones. And so, you lose your hormones very quickly. I've had patients who got tummy tucks and came in a few months later and were losing their minds cuz they literally just had all of their hormonal depots sucked out of their stomach. And so, there's concern there that this rapid weight loss, which again, I am not a fan of. I'm not a fan of doing it that way, but if you drop somebody's weight significantly, you may end up with a very depressed mood state. We've also got a bit further to go with that in that many people are using food as their dopamine source and as their crutch or as their coping mechanism. And I'm not judging. I just understand that to be true. You know, we all have our vice and if you take that away from someone because they suddenly don't want to eat cuz we crushed their appetite with too high a dose, then I think that we could end up with a very depressed person in front of us. However, done correctly and what I'm seeing clinically is people are having really profound benefits in their anxiety and their depression and their moods and their cognition. Um I'm seeing neurodivergent folks taking it who are becoming much more functional in the in their everyday day-to-day. I'm seeing people who are more of a hermit who don't want to go out in the world suddenly venturing out, being more social. So, there is an impact on the brain and I think it's the anti-inflammatory mechanism. I think it's the dopaminergic system, the dopamine pathways being impacted. And again, if we're not cranking the dose up, I think that we can use these effectively to bolster mood, to improve cognition, to improve brain clarity and all of that leads, you know, an inflamed brain is a depressed brain. At the end of the day, we have to get that point really clear. Depression is a brain inflammation issue. You've mentioned sort of sexual health a few times and fertility in passing talking about Ozempic. Women's sexual health, male fertility, what is the the impact in your view of an an Ozempic intervention on these kinds of things? Well, the fertility conversation is really daunting and it's kind of a long one, but we are looking we are a few generations into a major fertility crisis. And they say, what is it by 2100? 2100. By 2000 by 2100 97% of countries in the world will not be reproducing at a rate to repopulate themselves. We are looking at a population crisis. By 20 by the mid-2040s, they say sperm rates are going to be at zero. And again, that's multifactorial, but my firm belief at the root of this is metabolic dysfunction. I I I firmly believe that metabolic dysfunction is probably the biggest driver. If I could press a button and fix it, I would put my finger on the metabolic dysfunction button. And GLP-1s heal metabolic dysfunction. And so we're seeing reversal in PCOS, which is probably one of the number one drivers of infertility in young women, period, which is really at the end of the day just metabolic dysfunction. It's just presenting in women with high androgens. The The clinical picture PCOS isn't doesn't always involve um cysts on the ovaries. It's just this I don't even know why it's called that anymore. It's a clinical picture where they have metabolic dysfunction, they have high testosterone, they have low progesterone, their estrogen gets converted readily into testosterone. They end up with hair growth, they end up infertile. It's a disaster. Many, many young women. Many women in your age cohort have this condition. Many women in your Many couples in your age cohort are not able to get pregnant without IVF at this point. People are not getting pregnant. I don't know How old are you? 31. Yes. People in their 30s are not getting pregnant. And when I ask my friends in their 30s all over the world, I say, "What's Like how's How's the pregnancy going with Like how how's it going with your friends?" And they're like, "Everybody's on IVF." It's I don't know what you're hearing, but it like that's crazy to me that 30-year-olds are having to do IVF. Healthy-looking 30-year-olds are having to do IVF. So we've got sperm issues and we've got egg issues. It's both. It's not just the female's fault, it's not just the male's issue. Um we've got sperm health, we've got sperm volume, we've got sperm motility issues, we've got metabolic dysfunction in both groups. And what happens when we do have a successful pregnancy is that that offspring is being epigenetically flagged if the mother is obese and dealing with metabolic dysfunction, and even if the father is, that fetus ends up bathed in insulin in utero. And they come out epigenetically marked for much more severe risk of metabolic dysfunction and obesity in their own lives. And that cycle just goes into perpetuity. That's where we're at. We're several generations into this as a as a species. And so I'm worried. Like I'm legitimately I I joke that humans are going extinct. It's not funny. And it I think it's really happening and I I do believe it will happen in the next few generations if we don't right this ship. And at the root of it is this overarching metabolic dysfunction. 2018 data out of the US that was published in 2021 showed that only 6.8% of US adults are metabolically healthy. 6.8. That So that's 93 94% of US adults are cardiometabolically busted. That's And that was pre-lockdowns. Why? That's a great question. You know, you talked about PCOS and this sort of infertility crisis, and then you talked about it being about metabolic dysfunction. Yeah. Where is the metabolic dysfunction coming from? What is the thing furthest upstream if we were to attack it at its source? Yeah. The food supply was significantly adulterated in the past few generations. So it's starting with my parents, the boomers. You know, they got their convenient food. Their everything was about convenience. That's when we got you know, disposable diapers and fancy microwaves and dishwashers and all that jazz. Well, food became very convenient as well. In the '90s, I watched this happen in my lifetime. In the '90s, the food supply was significantly adulterated and terrifyingly so. And they found the bliss point, right? The perfect emulsion of sugar, fat, and salt to hit those neurotransmitters in the brain to make you want to come back for more. Toxicity is a huge issue. I believe toxicity in general, not just environmental toxicity, but it's the chemicals in our food, um what we're doing to ourselves. So many young women today are bathing themselves in toxic chemicals through their beauty habits. I mean, the nails and the hair and the skin care and it's it's really, really severe. So it's this sort of multifactorial thing. Humans are actually eating the same amount or less calories than they were 30 years ago. It's not the caloric intake. It's not that people are sloths and they're lazy and they need to do better. It's that we are swimming in a toxic soup. We are eating a very adulterated, mineral-deficient, protein-deficient, chemical shitstorm of a food supply. And then you throw in the mass I mean, to be totally honest with you, the massive uptick in vaccines in infants when they come out, I mean, that's a whole different ballgame than it was even when my daughter was an infant. It's significantly different than when I was an infant. So we've just We've got a lot of things coming at these young people. And it culminates, you know, and it adds up. And I think people don't realize we have a toxic bucket. We all have an individual toxic bucket. And that bucket will become full for whatever reason. Maybe we've got mold exposure. Maybe we've got too much stress. It's It's multifactorial, but that bucket will fill up and overflow. And metabolic dysfunction is a result of that and also a driver of that. So it's it's very hard to put my finger on why or the chicken and egg, what's what's leading to what. I know that there's things we can do that are non-negotiable to help right the ship as best we can that have nothing to do with drugs and have nothing to do with peptides. And I've been talking about this for decades. We must be strength training and optimizing our muscle. We must be walking every day like human beings do. Humans were made to walk and lift heavy [ __ ] right? We are meant to be in community. We're not meant to be isolated. We're meant to be around others. We are meant to share our microbiomes. We are meant to have healthy microbiomes, not these super sterilized microbiomes. The abundance of microbiome disruption from all the antibiotics. I mean, that alone causes lifelong issues for people. And so it You stack all this up and people are sitting at home, they're alone. Loneliness is an epidemic. They're eating food that comes from Uber Eats or I don't know what you have here, but they're ordering in. They're eating processed foods for most meals. They're not getting out. Here in London, I'm so happy everybody's walking, but back in the US, everyone just drives everywhere. Maybe in New York they walk, but any anywhere else you go, you know, it's like get up, go from the bed to the couch to the car to the desk back to the car to the couch to the bed. People are not exercising, people are not paying attention to nutritionally dense food, they're not getting sunlight, they're not in community. I think COVID really squelched community just in so many different ways, you know, a lot of churches are sort of disbanding, communities are disbanding, they shut the gyms down. So there's just all of these factors that culminate into a human being that isn't a healthy human being. Just on that point of PCOS, if I was a young woman, I was 31 years old and I came to you with PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, and it was impacting my fertility, you could see I had the uh you know, high testosterone levels, I had slightly hairier arms, I was maybe putting on some weight. What would you aim at? What would you do? I would prioritize protein, first of all. Yeah. I would go for 30 g of protein three meals a day as best that you can. I don't even care if it's grass-fed fancy protein. I just want them eating animal protein if they will do it. I want them immediately cutting out as many of the chemicals that they're applying to their skin and their bodies. So they're not getting their hair done, they're not shooting the Botox, they're not putting the nails on, they're not I mean, it's just a chemical What's coming at young women is crazy when it comes to their beauty routines at this point. I would have them walking three times a day for 10 minutes each. So three 10-minute walks outside, preferably. Getting up and seeing the sunlight. So we set the circadian rhythm. So it's really important that you get up and outside first thing in the morning to get natural sunlight in your eyes. And it's really important that you see it in the afternoon as the sun is waning. That sort of golden hour, you know, as the sun starts to wane in the sky and the sky gets golden. Go outside then. That really helps you with sleep. Sleep is critical. Cut the blue light. Put the you know, amber blue light blockers on at night. Stop staring at the phone and the TV until 10:00 at night. Get that [ __ ] out of there because that is jacking up people's rhythm, which is jacking up their fertility and their hormones. Um strength training is non-negotiable. We have to protect our muscle, we have to build it. I'm a skinny girl and I lift more than you would believe. And I don't look at I can't hold it. But I try. So really optimizing muscle, that alone would be a game-changer. Like if they didn't even cut out I wouldn't even pull foods away from them. I would just say focus on eating getting the protein in and the other foods will start to fall away. And when you start to do all the other things that are good for you, you start to make better choices. When you feel better, you do better. I have reversed so much PCOS in women like that. Next, I would add in some progesterone, which is available over the counter, but obviously do that under the care of someone who knows what they're doing so you don't take too much progesterone, but progesterone's a very important player in there. It's actually a neurohormone. It's It's very safe and effective. And I would get them eating as much of a whole food diet as I could. Could you Can you reverse PCOS? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there So you know, genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. So they came out with some bad epigenetic flags, but that doesn't mean that that's their fate. None of us It is not my fate to die a miserable death from psoriatic arthritis. I will do everything I can to make sure I keep that at bay. And that's something that medical doctors don't tell you. You go in, they say, you have this there's nothing we can do. And I'm like, could I take a multivitamin? Could my Is changing my diet going to do anything? And back when I was growing up, there was like, there's nothing you can do. Good luck. At least now doctors are starting to get a little more savvy and realizing it's more nuanced. And I'm I'm starting to see the professions come together more and realize like diet actually matters. And I'm starting to see it in the headlines of the medical journals like diet actually matters, lifestyle matters, light matters, you know? But all of these things What what I tell patients is I'm not going to cure you. You are genetically and epigenetically primed, but we're going to try to keep that as quiet as possible. We're going to try to keep you optimized so that this over here doesn't rear its ugly head. But you know, throw in a bad viral infection or throw in a big stressor or throw in, you know, something major like a birth, childbirth, and you might get off kilter again. But that doesn't mean you don't have all the control in the world to help mitigate that. I have to say, you know, as someone that comes from I'm going to try and pronounce it again, naturopathic medicine, it is quite surprising to hear you talk about microdosing on Ozempic. I know. Because, you know, I think naturopathic medicine, you'd imagine they were very much against microdosing or dosing any sort of chemical pharmaceutical. Right. So, how do you square the circle there? Because it's a peptide and it's been appropriated by the pharmaceutical industry because of its delivery system. But there's many other peptides that are available over the counter for instance in supplement form like BPC-157, which is a regenerative peptide. It's also anti-inflammatory. All of these peptides generally are regenerative, anti-inflammatory, and healing. They all just kind of have their special skill set. So, we've got a variety of different peptides that were pulled by the FDA because they work, is my opinion. But we also have ones that are available over the counter that are in sprays, that are in pills. If you go get hurt, you can order them online. It's legal. I'm not talking any black market. This These are reputable companies in a supplement form and you can induce phenomenal healing in your body. These are available. People just don't know about them and they don't know how to use them. And they are a bit expensive. This is just another peptide. It just happens to be held over here and it's being used in a way by brand name pharmaceutical big pharma companies in a way that I just don't think is appropriate for peptide use. You've used that phrase "done correctly" a few times when you're talking about the microdosing of Ozempic. And you've also highlighted there, but also previously in this conversation, that people are using it wrong. So, I or using it in too high of a dose. So, I am I brought with me today some little science lab which I've got over there in the corner cuz I would like you to show me when we talk about microdosing A, what microdosing is as a term. What does that mean? But also, could you show me the comparative difference in how you would and you are giving your patients Ozempic, what dose you're giving them at comparatively to how it's typically being administered in what dosage for the sort of weight loss effects that we've talked about and that most people know it for? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, let me bring over the Ozempic. Okay. So, this is what they start people on. And then every month, every 4 weeks in the traditional model with the brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy and Mounjaro, they double This is This would be specifically for semaglutide. Okay. So, let me back up here just so I've got my um science with me. So, typically when they administer Ozempic and semaglutide, semaglutide, they do it in a pen which you kind of self-inject, which is at a controlled dose. Yes. So, you can't give yourself whatever quantity you like. It's kind of like a set dose. You go and it injects into you. Yep. Okay. Okay. So, they start them here. With with that much in it. So, for people that are can't see cuz they're listening on audio, it's 0.25 mg. Okay. And then every month they double the dose about. Over 16 weeks, they double the dose until they get folks generally Now, smart docs will stop people where they need to stop, but the standard is to get them up to about here. per week. per month. Oh, I'm sorry, per week. Yes, per week. They do this per week. They get them up to here. This is what the studies have been done on and so this is how it's traditionally dosed. And if you're severely diabetic or obese, I could see the rationale. I'm arguing I still don't think that's necessary when you have the appropriate lifestyle interventions. Okay. If you're treating someone comprehensively using other peptides, using hormones, getting people to do the healthy lifestyle changes, I don't think this is necessary and I think this leads to a very high risk for side effects. So, we went from What was it? 0.25 to 2.5 basically. times more. Yeah. Over the space of X amount of weeks. 16 weeks. 16 weeks. Okay. So, they 10x the dosage over 16 weeks. Yep. Um which looks like which is a lot. So, you're taking that much injected into you, self-injected every every week. Okay. And you do that you're theoretically supposed to be on that dosage forever. Yes. And they don't ever stop. They don't take breaks. They're not concerned about receptor sensitivity. It's just they just go. It's just you're on this and you're on it for life. Now, some there are really good weight loss docs out there and they are helping their patients get off of them. And actually the more recent data is showing that when folks are exercising, just it doesn't even matter what kind of exercise. When folks are exercising in addition to, they can come off more successfully and maintain the weight loss. So, that's promising. However, my argument is in somebody who's metabolically optimized. Now, this isn't everyone. This isn't your severely obese patient. But in somebody who's metabolically optimized, I give them a fraction of this. And that differs by person, but I actually have to use an insulin syringe so that I can do a fraction of the starting dose. And I may never elevate it. I may never ramp it up. So, compared to the 2.5 mg in there, you're giving out how much? I'm giving a fraction of 0.25. I'm giving a fraction of this. So, you might be giving 0.0 It depends. It depends on the patient. And without getting into detail because whenever I do, people start playing with their dosage themselves. And I've heard seen crazy things in the comment section of my posts on Instagram. So, I don't want to tell people exactly how to dose. Um but it depends. It depends on what they're going. And this is a bigger conversation because I don't ever do semaglutide as a monotherapy. I never do it by itself. I never just crank people on semaglutide and hope for the best. If that is the only geo If the I'm sorry, if that's the only peptide they're using, they likely will have to keep going up. And so, I have one patient who is obese and has some weight to lose and I have taken 9 months to get him to here. Which is roughly one. 1 mg? That's 1 mg. So, he's on 1 mg and I really don't want to raise it. I really want him doing more of the lifestyle interventions to start to heal the metabolism as well. So, I It's a multi-pronged approach. I'm trying to heal the metabolism at the end of the day. This is one tool, but there are other tools. But this is a pretty potent tool. So, in the case of someone that is microdosing, how frequently are they taking that small dose in the small sort of petri dish in front of you? It depends. So, give me give me a case study of the typical person. Well, it depends on what I'm going for, what my short-term goals are, what my long-term goals are. So, for myself, I was having to do a fraction of this droplet here, not this, this, once a week. As people heal and improve, they're able to space that out. Some people can space it out 2 weeks. So, some people are dosing every 2 weeks. Some people are dosing once a month. It really depends. Some people are There's a lot of folks thinking they're microdosing, but they're actually just barely going below that 0.25. They're still almost right at it. So, they're still doing a large percentage of this. And that's not really microdosing, but they're getting results. And so, my goal is always just to dose people just below symptoms. I never want them symptomatic. I never want them saying I'm nauseous or I'm throwing up or having any of that. There's no need for any of that. I want them just below symptoms and I want them continually improving and getting the results I'm looking for. That might be lowering of blood pressure. It might be, you know, continuing clearing of their skin lesions. It depends on what we're going for. And then my goal is to cycle this. So, I will try to get them off for as long as I can and I will try to try to take breaks for as long as I can because I want the cells to resensitize. So, that might be, like I said, 2 weeks. It might be a month. Some folks might just do this a couple times a year. They may not be on it continuously. They might just do what we call a cycle. This is You might be familiar with this if you've interviewed anyone on testosterone therapy. Often it's a cycle. And so, they'll do a few months, maybe 90 days on, and then they'll take some time off. It totally depends on the patient and what I'm going for though. And it depends on again, what am I trying to accomplish short-term and what am I trying to accomplish long-term and how compliant are they being with the rest of the treatment plan? So, give me a case study then of someone who has microdosed with you successfully and they've gone from ill health in some form to healthy. So, my mom is a great example. She started on a tiny little bit cuz I said she's older and she's a bit frail and she was going into it with gut issues already. So, a very tiny little bit. She actually ramped herself up. I'm not sure why. She ramped herself up a bit. She got a bit symptomatic. So, she was still at well below this droplet amount. And I've recently It's been maybe 9 months. I've recently brought her back down to a droplet and I'm trying to keep her there and she's still doing it once a week and we're starting to play with how long can she go off of it before we start to see symptoms. I don't want the symptoms to come back full bore because then we know tissue destruction's happening. I'm trying to heal people in the process of treating people if that makes sense. I want both to happen but she also needs to be compliant with all the things and so something I'm hearing about a lot which is a great case example is many of my colleagues who I have a program where I teach people how to do this and many of my colleagues are thinking they're microdosing and they're not and then they start calling me and they're like they're either running into symptoms or they're hitting a wall and their patients are plateauing. They say it's not working anymore. I'm like, well, what are you going for? If they're going for weight loss, they are going to plateau if they're not cuz they haven't implemented the strength training yet or they haven't implemented maybe some of the other bioidentical hormone replacement or whatever it may be, you know, they're not doing the they're not taking care of all of it holistically and so they're running into some barriers. What is what is the role it's playing if if you're doing it at such low doses, what is the role that it would play for someone with for example chronic pain or some form of inflammation in their body? Well, why is such a small dose im- important in the bigger picture you described there of getting their health back in shape? Is it because of you said earlier about the brain fog and getting them to a state where they can make better decisions or I think it's actually also in the brain. So, GLP-1 is secreted in the brain. Something that most people think is that it's secreted in the gut and then it makes its way to the brain. There's actually different regions of the brain where GLP-1 is produced and there's receptors all over the brain to receive the GLP-1. So, I think something very important is happening in the brain that we really are only just starting to understand and I believe that the downstream impact of that of healing that, like I said at the beginning, if we heal the brain, we heal the immune system, we heal everything downstream. And so, I'm really trying to have a cognitive impact and so that's it becomes more critical then to do all the lifestyle interventions that reduce neuroinflammation. We want to make sure they're taking supplements that are supportive for brain health. We want to make sure that their lifestyle habits are supportive to brain health. They're not continuing to drink a bunch of alcohol although this makes most people not want to drink even at tiny doses. Most people just want to stop drinking. It's really phenomenal. They want to kind of stop doing all their bad habits. They want to stop chronically shopping. They want to stop all the dopamine chasing habits that they have which is is Now, if you go too high though, you start to impact reward systems and I can see where they start to get depressed. So, I'm trying to have a positive healing regenerative impact on the brain and the immune system to ultimately heal them up and hopefully I can take them off of them or maybe they might have to revisit it if there's a flare. If something comes up in their life that sort of set like I said, you kind of get set back over the edge, we might have to bring it on board for a minute but I'm ultimately doing an initial healing phase and then I'm doing a maintenance phase. You mentioned alcoholism and you mentioned your husband earlier as well. Oh, how what is there research to show the impact that it has on addictions? They're studying it but people want to stop smoking. People want to stop doing cocaine. People want to stop doing all kinds of things and it's very interesting and they Johann actually talks about this in his book and he he does a nice job of breaking down the science there on it. They looked at rats and they thought, okay, well, if this is just crushing the reward system, then it would crush all the reward systems but it's not crushing libido for people and it's not crushing some of the other reward seeking behaviors. It just seems to be crushing many of the ones that are pathologic or not so great for our health in long run and he actually talks about a study that I've read as well where they took rats and they gave them sort of that like yummy emulsion of that sweet sugar salty deliciousness and then they gave them rat chow and when they put them on semaglutide, they stopped seeking out the yummy devas- I mean, that's the that emulsion is what makes you become very metabolically you know, compromised. And they still ate the rat chow. They still went for they went for the healthy food. Well, I don't know how healthy rat chow is. That's debatable but they went for the more nutritionally dense food and they actually stopped seeking out the pleasure food. And I I'm seeing that across the board with all kinds of behaviors. I got a message from a lady. She said, I had no idea I had such a severe online shopping habit. Like I would just fill the cart up and purchase and then she started filling the cart up and not purchasing and now she's not even online shopping. She's not even like going in to make the to have the experience. It's really interesting. What's going on in the brain there in your opinion? It plays on the hypothalamic pituitary axis to some degree and it is impacting dopaminergic pathways and at the end of the day, the dopaminergic pathways are dopamine seeking system is in a simplistic way to describe it is our addiction system. So, we chase that dopamine dragon. That dopamine dragon might be sex. It might be gambling. It might be cigarettes. It might be whatever it is. Whatever that thing is that gives us that hit. And interestingly about dopamine and why it becomes such a process, I mean, I think a lot of it is the cell phones. It's this quick we've got a very quick reward system society. You know, back when I was a kid, we had to like wait outside in the freezing cold all night to buy concert tickets and now you guys are like, well, I'm just going to buy whatever I can afford to get the best seat. It's a very different world, you know? And everything's right at our fingertips and it's very it's very quick response and so our dopamine circuitry is really screwed up. Dopamine is healthiest in signaling best when we're seeking out the challenge. It's not when we get to the it's not when we win. Have you ever wanted something really badly and then you succeeded and you got there and you were like, I'm just not feel it just wasn't what I It's because it was the journey there. It was the conquest of getting the thing of achieving the goal. That's what gave you the dopamine. It's not as much getting the thing at the end of the day and this is playing somewhere in that system and people are just not having the reward seeking behaviors they were. I have had so many people reach out to me and say, when it came to food in particular, this must be what normal people's brains feel like. I don't wake up obsessed thinking about food. I don't go throughout my day obsessed thinking about food. I can actually think about other things. So, really what we're saying here then is that hunger is much more than a desire for food. Hunger is a much broader sort of psychological phenomenon that's about dopamine and reward and all these things. So, when we attack so, GLP-1's role isn't just in hunger, it's in this bigger psychological sort of incentive structure. I it was weird cuz I was as you're saying that this morning I didn't eat, right? Because I didn't have breakfast and I didn't have lunch cuz I was doing my annual health check. So, they say you got to fast beforehand. So, I didn't have anything and my first meal per se was about 2:00 p.m. You can see my little jab in my arm if you want. They got you. The little cannula thing that they put in my arm. Um and I got to about 3:00 p.m. and I hadn't eaten. And I have this drawer in my car that you car we typically pick up guests in and it's got some like less healthy snacks in. I try to stay out of it. But because I hadn't eaten for some reason, I was like, I need to go in the drawer and eat food. I need to go and eat the sugary stuff. So, as you were talking, I was thinking, is the administration of GLP-1 and Ozempic just bringing down that noise a little bit to the point that I no longer want the sugary snack drawer? Because I was thinking to myself this morning, if I if that was the start of the day when I was less hungry, I wouldn't have been thinking about that snack drawer. But because the day went on and I became more hungrier, I had a greater pull on dopamine. So, there's people living tip- you know, their everyday lives with this kind of greater demand for dopamine for whatever reason and it's coming from gambling or porn addiction or what or shopping addiction and what GLP-1 is doing is it's just bringing not just the the I need food that that that the hunger down, it's bringing the sort of dopamine pathway down in terms of volume. It's quieting the noise. That's a really good way to put it and that's how people describe it as they call it the you know, the the the food noise or the hedonic urges. It it quiets the noise down and that's why I was saying earlier that it gives people this wonderful window of opportunity to be back in the driver's seat. They sometimes for the first time in their life have full control over what they're choosing to eat, when they're choosing to eat, what they're putting in their mouth and some people didn't have that control before and it's not just dopamine. We've got leptin. We've got ghrelin. We've got these different appetite they're also peptide signaling hormones and they all play together and they don't play well if GLP-1's not in there. So, if leptin is happening and ghrelin is happening and we can go into the details of that if you want. If GLP-1's not there, the orchestra doesn't work and there's a lot of folks sitting around with leptin resistance, insulin resistance. They're not responding to ghrelin. This even the cell receptors getting to the edge of the membrane is sometimes GLP-1 contingent and so, my argument is that sometimes the tiniest little amount might be what that person needs to kind of harmonize the orchestra. Maybe, you know, we can't have and this is the other reason I don't love it in monotherapy. Imagine a jazz band and you just had one big bass drum. That would be ridiculous. It would sound terrible, right? Like the nuance in the jazz drummer is what makes jazz so cool. A lot of folks are using this at this dose, right? This huge dose and that's the big old bass drum and they're just crushing the whole brain circuitry to suppress hunger period and they're ending up with all these downstream side effects which are not fun. My argument is if we just harmonize the orchestra. But sometimes we need a little estrogen or a little progesterone or we need a little bit of this or that. We need to do some lifestyle things to get the leptin resistance to reset and the insulin resistance to reset but we might need a little bit of GLP-1 on board. Every single time you eat, you have an opportunity to improve your health. And that's why I love Zoe, because Zoe helps me to make the smartest food choices for me and my body. And as you guys will know by now, Zoe is a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company. And if you haven't tried Zoe, I highly recommend you do because Zoe combines my health data with Zoe's world-class science. And using those two things, Zoe guides me to better health every single time I make a food choice and eat. Which means that I have more energy, better sleep, better mood, and I'm less hungry. And the most important thing is Zoe actually works. It's backed by their recent clinical trial, something called the method study, which is the gold standard of scientific research. I started Zoe just over a year ago now and I've been able to track my progress week after week, so I can learn how to be even smarter the following week. And if you haven't joined Zoe yet, I'm giving you 10% off when you join Zoe now. Just use the code CEO10 at checkout. What if someone says that we haven't got clinical studies yet to prove that microdosing is safe over the long term and it could be doing long-term damage because these you know compounds have only been around for what, a couple of years now and in terms of people really using them en masse. Well, I think we would be far more concerned with high doses and that's what most people are on or on high doses and we're really not seeing the safety signal blowing off the way that people are concerned about. In fact, we're seeing the opposite of that. Some really good data's come out refuting many of the studies that were so concerning in the past few months even and some of it's just being presented at different conferences, so it's not being published yet, but I keep up with all of it and it's very exciting. We're not seeing a signal on pancreatitis. We're not seeing bowel obstruction. Um gastroparesis, I think it's fair to say that the highest risk group for gastroparesis is type 2 diabetics. It's because they are sugaring up their vagus nerve. The high blood sugar is actually destroying the vagus nerve, which is causing low-grade gastroparesis. So, they're already sitting on the edge of it in many cases and then they're being franked into these crazy high doses and getting thrown over the edge. A real concern is biliary disease, so gallstones. When you go on a very severely calorically restricted diet, your bile sludges up in your gallbladder. So, a gallbladder is already very often compromised in an obese individual and it's already sludgy and it maybe already has some stones forming and then they go on a caloric restriction, that lack of food going through the digestive tract will cause the bile to sludge up. They'll throw a stone into the pancreas. The number one cause of pancreatitis is fatty pancreas, which people with metabolic dysfunction already have. The num- the second cause is a gallstone and the third cause really is excessive severe weight loss done too quickly. So, we're taking people and thrusting them up on these high doses. They're often already sitting on the edge of many of these conditions and then they're getting thrown over the edge. It's like, well yeah, no wonder. When I started looking at the terrible side effects, I was like, well of course. I mean, anybody who is severely diabetic or severely obese is already sitting on the edge of that and so my argument is why are we throwing people on these high doses and sending them over the edge? I don't think taking a tiny amount of something is nearly as concerning as the high doses, but the rates that you're hearing in the media are not the rates that are showing up in the studies, even of these terrible side effects I just mentioned. I have always believed that there's no such thing as a free lunch. That's fair. In life and you know, whenever someone tells me that something is good for me, um it always comes with a cost. You know, like it that just seems to be the way that life works. And I like that life has that balance to it where there is no you know, anything that's worthwhile, whether it's starting a business, having a great marriage or relationship, raising kids. Right. There's so much of an upside and there's so much of a cost, you know? And so, as it relates to microdosing as Empatic, my brain is going there's got to be a cost. If there is any reward, there is got to be a cost. That's fair. We have to think about the risk-reward ratio. And that's something that we don't talk about in medicine. I think COVID really showed that. You know, you have the risk of COVID, the real risk of COVID, whatever that looked like depending on the scale of susceptibility you had for poor outcomes. So, if you were 65 or older, you were in poor health, there was a real risk. And then you have the reward. Uh we have to look at what lockdowns did. We have to I mean, 146% increased risk of suicidal ideation. All kinds of I mean, I get the stats on that. I don't even want that like makes me sick when I start thinking about what happened. Um I was just driving over here and the Uber driver was telling me how nobody goes to church anymore and all the bars are the pubs are closing cuz the culture the pub culture is going away, not because of drinking, but because of just people join- like gathering in community, you know, like he said it was COVID was the end of so much of London that he saw and he's been driving for uh in some form or another for 15 years through London. And so, we have to look at risk-reward ratio and the risk of walking around in a chronically inflamed state for somebody who say has psoriatic arthritis. I have thought about about this and I'm like, you know what? The risk that I'm seeing in the data from high doses of this is probably not nearly the risk of a tiny dose of it and it certainly is better than the clinical outcomes of walking around with raging psoriatic arthritis for the next 30, 40 years, which is dementia, my spine fusing, lack of movement, muscle wasting, chronic pain, uh so on and so forth. The real risk of obesity is tremendous and something that a lot of people don't appreciate is when we start to gain weight in middle age, that's a low-grade insulin resistance happening. And so, a woman will gain, you know, somewhere between 45 and 50, she might gain 10 lb. Okay, we get a little thicker as we get a little older. Okay. Maybe the next 5 years she gains another 10 lb. And we just sort of accept it as a society. Like all our moms kind of get bigger, right? All moms just get bigger and they all end up looking like they you know, the whole the moms, the grandmas, everyone ends up in my family round by the end of it. Well, now my family's starting to drop dead of heart attacks. They're all on lifestyle medications. They're on statins and blood pressure medications and all of these things and my thinking is what if that process never even started? What if I was able to intervene with not just GLP-1s, but all the other tools I had available to me that I didn't have when they started. I wasn't out of school yet. I didn't know what I know now. What if I was able to intervene and give them decades more of a high-quality life? And that's what longevity medicine is. That's what hormones are. That's what bioidentical hormone replacement is and what these other peptides are that we've been using for a long time in clinical decades in clinical practice and I don't know if you you probably don't, but the Women's Health Initiative 20 plus years ago came out with data showing estrogen and progesterone replacement therapy is dangerous and all women were immediately ceased. Doctors got scared. Everybody got taken off their hormones. We just destroyed an entire generation of women over the past 20 years. Doctors that were smart, like myself and my colleagues, we read the data and we realized that they were giving them progestin and not progesterone and there was nothing unsafe about what they were getting and so we kept everybody on their hormones. And I'm like, well, here's informed consent. I would tell the patients, this is the data, this is what we're going to do. They agreed or didn't agree. That's called informed consent. Here's your risk-reward ratio and they've just reanalyzed the data in the past few months and decided that they were wrong. It was bad data. They shouldn't have taken all these women off of hormones. The amount of dementia and cardiac disease and bone fractures and on and on and on that happened because those women were starved of hormones is devastating to me. So, it comes down to understanding the mechanism of action of how these things work, sharing that as best as you can with your patients and then having a conversation and letting the patient decide. So, but in the case of the microdosing, you're going to tell me the upsides in that informed consent scenario. What would you tell me the downsides might be? I would tell you the downsides that we see in the data with the high doses. Okay, but you would extrapolate from there that you would have those downsides men- but in smaller frequency. Much, much smaller potential. But also, you keep a sharp eye on your patient. You don't just send somebody out with a prescription and say, "See you. Good luck." You know, it's close monitoring. You're making sure to keep track of things. We're running labs. We're checking in. We're making sure symptom pictures aren't showing up and it's upside versus downside. People are going to listen to this and they're going to think, "Okay, so I should be microdosing as Empatic." And what might happen is people will go online and they'll try and buy Empatic and then they'll at home start I don't know, putting it in their tea or whatever. Oh, no. That's not a good idea. I would I don't know what the situation is in the UK, but I know in the United States we have longevity doctors. We have smart functional medicine doctors. We have doctors that have access to compounding pharmacies. And I'm hearing at least in certain parts of Canada, there are compounding pharmacies. I don't know what the situation is in the UK. I believe there are. Compounding pharmacies are being driven out by big pharma because they're pretty punk rock. They're doing individualized medicine for patients. They create medications for a patient at the dose that's tolerable for the patient. And I highly encourage folks to do their research and find a doctor who's willing to work with them and at the very least consider the starting dose that is in the pre-filled pens and talk to your doctor about not escalating so quickly and making sure that you implement the other lifestyle factors aggressively so that you don't have to increase the dosage. And I'm hearing from people in my program that are doing quite well that way. They don't have access to compounding pharmacist. They don't even have access to like a longevity doctor. I understand that's not available for everyone. And there's there's economic issues. I get all that. So they're finding great success in that 0.25 mg and they're being really diligent about all the other lifestyle interventions and they're doing awesome. And so I don't know any doctor that would want to crank up a dose of any medication. If a patient came to me and said, "Doc, I want to start on this you know, the standard is this dose. I want to start on this dose and I don't want to go up." I'd be like, "Hallelujah." Cuz anytime you increase the dose of anything you're going to get side effects. Are you seeing the weight loss benefits in people that are microdosing? If they're metabolically optimized and or they really start working on it. So if somebody walks in and they've got 30 40 lb to lose, I have seen them successfully microdosing so long as they take that opportunity to do all the things. They cannot sit on their ass and eat junk food. All the things. What are all the things? So strength training couple times a week lifting something heavy. That might just mean filling up water jugs and picking them up and walking across your room. It might mean picking up your cat and doing some squats every night. Just starting to use the muscle and Why strength training? Because muscle is the currency of metabolic health. Like we need muscle mass in order for our cells to be optimally insulin sensitive. It's just how it works. We gobble up our blood sugar and we regenerate our mitochondria predominantly in the muscle. So we need muscle. It's a very important organ system. It's not just a mover. You know, we don't just move our our bones around with it. You've got to have got Dr. Gabrielle Lyon on and she'll give you the whole muscle the conversation. But muscle is absolutely non-negotiable. And so strength training man, woman, I don't care what age they are. It's something we have to focus on. It might be push-ups. It might be I saw some cool stuff around the parks around here. You guys have you it's way better here than it in the US it's like not even emphasized. So my husband's like that's like a sit-up thing and that you know, it was like some blocks of wood with some metal on it. But it was set up as a little exercise area in one of the parks. So making sure that's dialed in, prioritizing protein. Making sure the food you choose to put in your mouth is nutritionally dense. What's the bang for your buck? Is it brightly colored? Is it coming from a lab or coming from a factory in a package with a hundred ingredients in it or is it a whole food, right? Is it is it food that came off the farm? Is it food that looks like how God made it? However you want to think of it. Simplistic. So I'm going to start lifting weights. I'm going to um Yeah, I'm going to start lifting weights and then I'm going to start eating lots of protein. Yes. And what else we need to do? Make sure that you eat a variety of colorful foods, right? So just just focus there. I hate taking foods away from people. Start there. You'll fill up. And then you don't need the rest, right? You're going to get up and go for three walks a day like I mentioned. Three 10-minute walks. And I think ideally morning cuz you're getting your morning sunlight. Go out at noon so you're high noon light. You're going to do wonderful things for your leptin and for your circadian rhythm if you hit the light at three times a day. And then you're going to go for that late afternoon walk. So that might just be going out with your dog. It might be going out with a friend. Whatever. Might be going out at lunch break. Whatever. Just go around the block. These are are these these sound very similar to your six pillars for a pain-free life which you write about in your book Pain Free and Strong. Yeah. So we covered a few of them here. We've covered the strength training one. And I had some really awesome stats that I found um in one study 186 people with type two diabetes were split into three training programs. One was one group was strength training. The next was moderate cardio training. And the third is a combination of both. And the strength training only group lost the most fat, gained the most strength and lean body mass and had the biggest decrease in is insulin resistance. And that was in Women's Health. And you know, I think one of the things that I we've always assumed and I've certainly assumed it is that as I get older I'm just going to lose muscle and that's just what it is. Yeah, it's not true. No, it's we even have studies showing that folks in their 70s can maintain and build muscle. Even if we maintain it, right? Even if we can just maintain it. So it's critical. This is non-negotiable. I have a 24-year-old daughter who is starting to understand this. So she's starting to get it, right? And she's like, "Okay, Mom, what do I do?" And I'm like, "Just pick up your dog." She's got two different dogs that are two different sizes. I'm like, "Just do squats with your dogs. Start doing push-ups off the side of your couch. You can do this at home, right? There's so many opportunities online now. Everything's out there and it's free. You just have to actually put in the time. We've covered movement there. We've covered strength. We've covered the the the food and gut. The four others you've got in this pillar. One of them is um sleep. Sleep. So sleep can be elusive for folks especially if they've got hormonal issues and or they've got insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction which drives the hormonal issues. So it's really important that you you have to prioritize your sleep but you have to protect your sleep. And when I say protect it, I mean are you sleeping with a husband who's snoring all night long? Are you in a really noisy environment? Do you have to add earplugs in? Is it too bright in your room? Do you have to put eye mask on? Like what's basic sleep hygiene? Get the TV out of the room. The TV is not helping you. The bedroom is for sex and sleep. It is Get the husband out of the room? Maybe. Well, you know what? People snore when they're metabolically unsound and they're overweight, too. So if we can get the husband involved in the activities then hopefully everybody gets better and the snoring goes down. So yes. You'll get a new husband, I guess. Well, yeah. When I was dating it was a big deal actually. I was like how I would ask them on the first date, "How's your sleep?" And if they said it was not good, I'm like that's not agreeable to me. I'm not messing with this. So just really often going to bed at the same like be an adult. Be a grown-up. We put our kids to bed at a normal time every day. We have a rhythm with them, right? They go to bed. They get up the same time every day. We have to do that with adults. Stop sleeping with your phone by your head. Stop sleeping with it in the room. I really don't What about sleeping pills? I don't love sleeping pills. I have used them clinically. I don't love Ambien or any of those types of drugs. But there are other options to help people get to sleep. We can use herbs I think pretty well, too. But we have got to we've got to do what we've got to do to reset the sleep. But I'll tell you number one, if your sleep is off and you're not exercising every day, I don't even want to hear about it because if you're not exhausting your energy like you would your puppy or your child, of course you're not going to be able to sleep. And number two, if your circadian rhythm is screwed up. If you're not getting out that morning sunlight is so huge. If you're not getting out in the daylight, I know when it's gray in Oregon sometimes. It's gray all day long and I can't even tell what time of day it is. And I will still go out there in a raincoat and make sure I'm out in the daylight even though it's gray as heck. So that is absolutely critical. Both of those things will help improve your sleep. Why did you include mindset as one of your six? Because you have to believe that you're going to accomplish this. That goes into the dopamine pathway. It's a challenge, right? This is my challenge. This is and and I mean challenge in a good way. I think of it as a quest not as a negative challenge, right? I don't want people to ever feel like they're up against an insurmountable wall. I I heard that a lot with COVID when I was talking about weight loss and metabolic optimization. People would say, "I have too much weight to lose. There's no point." There's always a point. We can always start to decrease inflammation and improve metabolic health even if the scale isn't shifting. It doesn't matter. So we really have to go into this with a winner's mindset. We have to be goal-oriented. I'm sure you could actually chime in on that, too. Like what are the things that you do that drive you to get up and go do the things that you do that might be hard or challenging but you know they are what you need to do to move the needle. And that's mindset. It has to start there. If it doesn't start there, if you don't make a decision, a concerted decision to execute, you're never going to get there. That's super difficult, isn't it? It is. Cuz people are so riddled with their own traumas and their own complex psychological state that getting them to shift that perspective on the world is is like trying to convert a religious person to another faith. It is. But I think people are outcome oriented and I I see the potential but that's where I said, remember short-term long-term goals. If I'm only focused on the outcome, I'm never going to get there. And when I do that dopamine's going to drop off and I'm going to be like, "Well, shit." I'm going to fly you know, just fly back to where I was. It's the short-term. It's the I want to win. I want to feel better. I want a better life for myself. I want a better life for my children. I want to be I want to be a better person for the people around me. Maybe people are single and they're looking for someone. I always get asked that. How do you find a great guy? I'm like you have to be a great person. You have to make yourself a great healthy person to attract another great healthy person. So it's the journey. It's not the destination, right? That's just health 101. It's the journey not the destination. Interestingly in your in your book you don't have a chapter about this but you've said in other situations that saunas have been a pretty critical beneficial tool for you and your health over the past couple years. Yeah, sauna. Just getting hot. Like you can get hot in a bathtub. You can get hot through exercise. But just getting your body heat up will induce heat shock proteins which does so many great things for your brain and immediately makes people feel better. People wonder often. They go do some aerobic exercise and they think it might be the endorphins from the run. And I'm like if you turned into a sweaty mess during that, you got a whole bunch of other benefits, too, right? We're moving lymph. We're moving blood. It doesn't sound that sexy. But those heat shock proteins are it. They have a significantly positive impact on our immune system. Somewhere around 40% reduction in pneumonia when induced. So like do all the things, right? Just go get hot. And when I am out of sorts and my immune system's flaring and I'm sort of at the end of my wits and I don't know what to do, I just think I got to go cook the [ __ ] out of myself. I just got to go get hot and get sweaty and then generally the solution comes to me or I have a better path ahead of me, right? The a little bit of light will come out ahead. I'm like, "Okay, that's the direction I have to go." And so sauna is a wonderful way to do but I know that's not available to everyone. So, bathtubs, just getting hot. When you When I look back through your childhood and your teenage years and I see all this pain, you know, um There's a lot of I've had a lot of pain. 5 years old, you're in hospital. Um nurses are forcing you down. As you go through your teenage years, you were in a really dark place mentally. You As you said, you were suicidal and you tried to overdose on medicine. I think I was an early I was talking to my husband about this the other day. I think I was a really early version of what we're seeing with so many young people today. I think I was um you know, I was brought up on a lot of ultra-processed foods as ultra-processed as they would have been in those days. A lot of Wonder Bread and baloney and you know, Velveeta cheese. I don't know what you have here, but you know, like a processed cheese blob. And I think that my falling apart of my health and my mental well-being in my teenage years was a direct result of just severe malnutrition and ultra-processed food addiction. Did you have ADHD as well? Yeah, they called it hyperkinetic. And do you know what the solution was? They said, "Get her a dog and make sure she's always physically active and keep her away from white foods." So, breads, cookies, crackers, processed foods, right? That was as processed as it got. And I I always think of that old doctor and that advice cuz it was perfect. It It's perfect. Whenever I have a patient who's really ailing, I'm like, "Do you have a dog?" It's really important they have a dog. There's so many reasons, but it's it's just simple stuff. And I think what we're seeing now is a very extreme version of that. And so many young people are really really really suffering. And my daughter was one of them and she's 24 and her friends are all so sick and have such health troubles and it's there's no answers. There's only just more drugs. Their moms are sick. Their moms all have autoimmune disease. I mean, it's just devastating to me, you know? So, to me, you say, you know, you mentioned like it's hard when we're in this soup of toxins, but to me, it's I'm put That's my pushback. That is how I pushback against the system. I want to infect as many people as I can with the truth of their responsibility of taking care of themselves the best way that they can. And you don't have to do all of it all at once. Like I said, it's a journey. So, just pick one thing. Like start with the walks. Or start with the milk jugs and the push-ups or the squatting your cat. I don't care. Whatever it is, but start with one thing and then start to build. And just start making these things habits, right? And to me, they're just non-negotiable. It's It's just the way it is and that's the only way I I mean, I'm batshit crazy if I don't lift weights and I don't eat well. And I think a lot of people are. And I think we just medicate them or we dismiss them or we just sort of allow them to sort of descend further into the misery. We can live with neurodivergence. We can live with I mean, I do think I have a bit of neurodivergence as well or whatever they would have called it back then, but I I think that we can live with these things harmoniously and turn them into superpowers so long as we take good care of ourselves. I had a whole career built off of helping people with chronic pain because I understood it cuz I had lived with chronic pain my whole life, right? Like I intimately understood how to help them and I thought outside the box because I knew what it felt like and I just wanted to help them. And I I think that that's what it comes down to. And you're in your early 30s, but when you get to your late 40s and you start waking up and you're like, "Oh, so this is what, you know, what it feels like." Hopefully, you'll become more proactive. That's when you really start getting into it. And then you start seeking out other options. Maybe you Maybe you will need some bioidentical hormone replacement then, you know? Maybe you'll you'll have a different perspective at that point a bit as as you go and experience it because we all do, right? We can be vehemently one way and I'm not saying you are, but a lot of people are really dogmatic. And I'm like, "Okay, well, like the people who really hate on Ozempic, I'm like, "Well, it's showing great promise with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. I hope you never need it if you're so vehemently against it that you won't even consider it, you know? I don't mean you, but just in general. Like be open-minded and seek knowledge." What is the most important thing that you have to share that maybe we haven't talked about? Is there anything that we've missed? I would honestly just say always seek knowledge. Always be learning. Always be seeking knowledge. Always be open-minded to different things. Even if you've taken a hard stance on something, consider alternatives. And when you hear people telling the truth or it sounds like they're telling the truth, double-check them. Look up sources. Don't just follow influencers. Don't just follow what someone says on Instagram or what someone says on a podcast. Go look it up and learn more. I often I'm I'm planting seeds for my audience often. And I will tell them something and they want all the information right then. And I'm like, "No, no, no. I'm trying to get you to actually go look up more information. I want everyone in my audience to be a knowledge seeker because that is how you learn and that is how you grow and that's how you stay on top of it. And that's how you stay one step ahead, right?" I have a closing tradition on this podcast as well, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. And the question left in the diary of a CEO for you is, let's see, when you reach the end of your life, what has brought you the most joy and is that the thing you're most proud of? Yes. I have picked a hard path for myself. I I I always try to be brave and tell the truth as I know it. And it's not always popular. And as my audience grows, it gets harder because I get more and more pushback. But I refuse to step down when I find something that can help people. I have dedicated my life to trying to get that message out to as many people as I can if it would be helpful to them. And so, while it at times I've felt like, "What have I done? Why Why do I keep doing I feel like Joan of Arc at times, you know? I'm I'm the girl over here with the early unpopular opinion. But I feel proud of that. I know my daughter is proud of me and I know that I've helped a lot of people. A lot. I know a lot of people have and they've come back to me and said, "You saved my life." in one way or another. And I'm really proud of that. And that's I just want to be of service as best I can. And my gift, I think, is uh taking complicated information and explaining it simplistically so that people can implement. And while that's been hard and challenging and I've received a ton of pushback that has aged me and made me sick at times, I'm really proud of that. Dr. Tina Moore, I I find it so interesting, you know, cuz um it's an idea This idea of microdosing Ozempic is not one that I've come across before. I discovered your work online and I'm of the contingent where I like to hear new ideas that maybe haven't had all the clinical studies run on them before, but I like to I like to imagine the possibilities. And then obviously, there's scientists that are going to do the research and that that research is going to continue for many decades to come. But I'm I'm intrigued by it. I'm curious by it. It doesn't mean that I'm going to go on Google and start microdosing myself in my bedroom. I'm absolutely not going to do that. But I like I like how it assembles a picture in my mind about this new thing and the potential possibilities of this new thing. So, that's why I wanted to have a conversation today. And I think as you've clearly said, everybody listening should do their own research. They should go out there. They should speak to the doctor. They should look at the studies that we've cited today. They should do their own independent research to form their own view. But I think all progress starts with these sort of initial hypotheses, these sort of anecdotal experiences, and then society eventually catches up. Or society proves that that hypothesis was something else or wrong in some way. And that's why I have these I think handled in the right way and when presented with the nuance of all these subjects, they can be the start of a snowball that can cause society to start asking questions. And through that debate and through that investigation, we can hopefully arrive at a better place. And I especially like these conversations when I believe that someone's intent and their intentions are so pure and so well-intentioned. And that's certainly the case for you. So, thank you so much for the work you're doing and all the wonderful people you've helped. I've seen so many hundreds of comments from people that have um benefited from the work that you do. And I think that's a remarkable thing and uh a force for good in the world. So, it's been a pleasure to speak to you today. And thank you for making the journey despite the herniated disc. Thank you so much for having me. It's a true honor.