Hello, and welcome to the Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast, the show designed to give you science -based solutions to improve your health and life. I'm Dr. David Jockers, doctor of natural medicine and creator of DrJockers .com, and I'm the host of this podcast. I'm here to tell you that your body was created to heal itself, and on this show, we focus on strategies you can apply today to heal and function at your best. Thanks for spending time with me, and let's go into the show. If you're struggling with stiff or aching joints, and you're tired of letting the cis -comfort steal the joy and freedom from your life, then I have a natural solution you're going to love. It's called Joint Support by Pure Health Research, and this stuff is amazing. It contains seven of Mother Nature's best superfoods for supporting comfortable, healthy, and flexible joints. It even promotes healthy cartilage growth, too. All it takes is one small capsule of joint support every day to start feeling the positive effects on your health. As a listener of our show, you can try Joint Support risk -free today and get a free 30 -day supply of Omega -3 when you take advantage of this special offer. It can promote healthy joint lubrication, making it easier to move in comfort. You're also getting two free e -books, so you can learn more about joint health. Just head over to getjointhelp .com forward slash jockers. That's G -E -T -J -O -I -N -T -H -E -L -P dot com forward slash J -O -C -K -E -R -S getjointhelp .com forward slash jockers to order Joint Support and claim your free bottle of Omega -3 while supplies last. Again, that's getjointhelp .com forward slash jockers. Welcome back to the podcast. In this episode, I'm being interviewed by Dr. Beverly Yates for her upcoming Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Summit. We talk all about the best advanced nutrition strategies to reduce inflammation and improve insulin sensitivity. There's a lot of things you can do if you are looking to lose weight, if you're looking to improve your blood sugar sensitivity. We know insulin resistance is at the root of all chronic inflammatory conditions, but there's a lot we can do from a nutrition perspective. We go through that in this interview. I talk a lot about intermittent fasting and how that helps improve mitochondrial function, helps improve blood sugar stability and turn on fat burning. We talk about how to improve your stomach acid, bile flow, pancreatic enzymes, so you can reduce the amount of endotoxins that are released from your gut and into your bloodstream that drive up inflammatory activity in your body. So this is a really powerful presentation showing you exactly what you need to do to stabilize your blood sugar, to burn fat for fuel and reduce inflammation. If you know anybody that's dealing with type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, perhaps they're overweight looking to lose weight or they're obese, please share this episode with them. And you can also check out the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit that Dr. Yates is putting on. Just go to the show notes for this episode on DrJockers .com and there will be a link there where you can register for free for the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit and listen to all the great interviews with top experts when it comes to blood sugar stability and type 2 diabetes. And if you have not left us a five -star review for this podcast, please do that now. When you leave us a review, it helps us reach more people and impact more lives with this message. It's really easy to do. Just go to Apple iTunes or wherever you listen to the podcast, scroll to the bottom, usually the review areas at the bottom and leave us a five -star review, leave a comment in there. That means so much to us and helps us reach more people. So thank you for doing that. Thank you for being a part of our community and let's go into the show. Hey everyone, welcome to the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Beverly Yates, MD. It's my distinct privilege and honor to interview a wonderful colleague of mine, Dr. David Jockers. He's been a leader in many aspects of health and continues to help people have clarity about their health. One of the things that's so interesting as we do all the episodes here for the summit is I'm trying very consciously to give people different points of view and different aspects of what it takes for blood sugar success to be well. So with Dr. David Jockers, we're going to introduce him in just a moment here. He's a doctor of natural medicine and runs one of the most popular natural health websites online in drjockers .com and has gotten over a million views for monthly visitors and his work is really popular. It's been seen on shows like The Dr. Oz Show and Hallmark Home and Family. He's the author of the best -selling book, The Keto -Metabolic Breakthrough and also The Fasting Transformation. He's a world -renowned expert in the area of ketosis, fasting, brain health, inflammation and functional nutrition. He also hosts his popular Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition podcast. Be sure to look up his work, check out what that he's offering. Dr. Jockers, welcome to our summit. Thanks so much, Dr. Beverly. Great to be on with you. Yeah. You know, I've really been excited for our talk because I think that there are so many ways in which people can eat and nourish themselves and some things are certainly more helpful or successful when it comes to blood sugar control and glycemic regulations than others. So with that in mind, let's dig in right away here. So please, if you would share with us your perspective here, what is inflammation and how does it develop? Yeah. Inflammation is just a natural process of healing. In fact, it's actually designed to help protect our body from some sort of chronic systemic infection and so, well, not chronic infection, but some sort of systemic acute infection from killing us quickly. And so I think we look at the history of mankind. More people have died from infections that got into our bloodstreams, bloodstreams spread throughout our body, went into major vital organs and killed us is what used to kill most of our ancestors. And so our body has created this inflammatory process to help protect against that. So the infection that gets in doesn't get into our lungs and cause pneumonia or our nervous system and cause meningitis. And so in order to do that, we created this inflammatory process to keep basically infection under control. And it's also part of the healing process. We break down damaged tissue and we try to remove that in order to build new healthy tissue. So for example, if we sprain our ankle, we're going to break down that tissue and try to rebuild new healthy tissue in that area. So inflammation itself is life saving. The issue is that it should be turned off when the appropriate area is healed. And so in our society, we have certain vectors that are turning up inflammation. For example, one is called leaky gut, right? So when somebody has leaky gut, there's damage, micro damage to the intestinal lining. And every time that person's eating food, particularly food that causes more gut irritation, they are further tearing that gut lining and they're not really allowing their body to heal properly. And therefore, they're spewing out bacteria and endotoxins into their bloodstream through that lining, through that hole. And that's driving up inflammation in the body because the body thinks that it's under attack from some sort of systemic infection or some sort of basically infectious process that could be life threatening. And so we've got to do what we can to get inflammation under control in our society. And so I think about it like a fire in a fireplace. You know, if the fire is on in the fireplace, it's great. It warms the house. You know, it creates a great environment, an ambiance. However, when we dump gasoline on the fire, right now it spreads on the walls and starts to burn our home. And obviously that's when it's a major issue. And so in our society, we have lifestyle habits that are dumping gasoline on the fire and causing us to burn up our home. And we just don't really understand it. We don't realize that's actually what we're doing to our body. And then we later, you know, after doing this for years and years and years, we get diagnosed with the chronic disease. But this is many years of chronic inflammation, damaging cells, tissues and organ systems of our body leading to, you know, that disease diagnosis. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you for laying that out so clearly. You know, it's so interesting in clinical work, sometimes it comes up. People are like, this just happened to me overnight, thinking that their body has attacked them or betrayed them and that their diagnosis has come on all of a sudden when in reality, nope, this was years in the making. So thank you so much for pointing that out for us. So anyone listening to this, if you have an inflammatory problem, please know. It took time for it to develop and it will take some time for it to heal. The good news is, if healing is possible, that it's likely to be a lot faster compared to the silent onset process. It's like too bad. It would be great if our body, as we get more and more inflamed, gave us a sound or a noise or maybe we turned polka dotted or something so we can know that something's going on here, you know? Yeah, for sure. And many times people do have chronic symptoms that are giving them a warning sign. And we just ignore it in our society, right? It's kind of like a check engine light goes on in our car. Typically we know, okay, I need to bring this in and get it looked at. But in our society, if we have headaches, chronic headaches, if we have chronic gut pain, if we have chronic joint pain, if we have skin rashes, acne, eczema, if we are gaining weight and we try some lifestyle strategies and we're just not losing weight, if we're gaining weight and we can go on and on, in our society, oftentimes the first thing we do is we go right to some sort of medication or we try to just ignore it. It's like we just let the check engine light stay on or we take some duct tape and just kind of stick it over it and pretend that everything's okay with the car. And that's really what we're doing. We're not actually getting to the root cause. Exactly. So that brings me to my very next question for you, which is this. What are some of the root causes of inflammation and how can this be measured quantitatively with lab testing? So when we look at root causes of chronic inflammation, one, and this is what you're really addressing in this summit, is a diet and lifestyle that is not right, right? So high blood sugar and insulin resistance, primarily driven by the food that we're consuming and lack of exercise, right? Lack of movement, food that we're consuming, obviously stress plays a role. So high stress, poor sleep hygiene and poor sleep quality. Sleep quality is super important. We've got to make sure we're sleeping really well when we are sleeping, but also proper hygiene when it comes to sleep. That plays a big role with our sleep quality. For example, shift workers, they might sleep eight or nine hours, but because they're sleeping at the wrong hours that are not right with, you know, humans, natural circadian rhythm or we're supposed to be sleeping at night, they tend to have higher levels of blood sugar and insulin resistance compared to people that are sleeping the same amount of hours and working kind of a normal shift and then sleeping overnight. So those are major factors. And then beyond that, we have things like chronic infections. So we know that when we have different infections, whether it's a candida overgrowth in our gut, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, H. pylori infections in our stomach, parasite infections, Lyme disease, things like that, that all drives up inflammatory processes in our body. Chronic overload of toxicity. All of us are exposed to chemicals in our air, water and food. So all of us have levels of toxicity coming into our system. But if our drainage and detoxification pathways are working properly, we should be eliminating a good amount of those and keeping our toxic bucket under control. And so we all have kind of like a toxic threshold. And so if we keep things under that threshold by keeping, you know, by limiting our exposure to toxins and then by allowing our body to detox and drain effectively, then, you know, that doesn't drive inflammation. However, if we're consuming lots of toxins from the food, we eat the air, we breathe the things we're putting on our skin, the water we're drinking, and then we're not doing things to help improve our lymphatic system, our liver, our gut, our kidneys. Right. We're not we're not peeing. You know, we should be urinating. Right. We should be peeing out toxins. We should be breathing them out. So respiration, perspiration, that's sweating, urination and defecation. Right. So we should be peeing, pooping, breathing. And sweating out these toxins. If we're not doing that, then our toxic load goes up, goes over that threshold, drives inflammation in the body. So toxicity is a big factor. You know, I mentioned stress. There can also be things like post -traumatic stress disorders. Right. So where somebody's had major trauma and their body never really recovered from that trauma and they're kind of reliving that trauma. Maybe somebody that was a war veteran or perhaps they were sexually abused or something along those lines. Right. They may relive those traumas on a regular basis, driving up inflammation in the body. So all of these things need to be addressed and and considered. Somebody might be living in a mold toxic house, right, breathing in mold and mycotoxins on a daily basis. They're trying to live a healthy lifestyle, but they're constantly overloading their their system with toxins. And so we've got to be able to look at all of those factors and make sure that we're addressing those to keep inflammation under control. Now, when we're measuring inflammation on labs, there's some easy labs that we can look at. You know, you can get done on blood work. For example, one of the most common is high sensitivity C reactive protein. CRP is a protein that our body, our immune system produces in response to inflammation. And, you know, so long as you don't get a false negative, like if you work out really intensely right before you get your blood test done, your CRP will be through the roof. That's actually a healthy level of inflammation, because after we exercise, we have inflammation to help our body heal and recover. So normally you want to not work out roughly 48 hours before getting the test done, ideally at least 24 hours. So you get the right measurement and your HSCRP should ideally be under one and really as close to zero as possible. And so typically it's not flag tie unless it's up over two or three, somewhere in that range. But anything over one is a sign that there's underlying inflammation there. And that's something that we definitely want to look at and address. So that's a big factor. You know, I know in this in this summit, I'm sure you've got people talking about things like hemoglobin A1C. We know hemoglobin A1C, that's a sign of the glycation process or basically when a sugar molecule binds to a major protein, like in this case, when it binds to hemoglobin, major protein that helps bring oxygen to the cells in the body and denatures the hemoglobin. And so it causes a sticky protein process. So we should have ideally like the optimal range really is is really under under 5 .2 on the hemoglobin, 5 .2 percent under. And so typically in our society, nothing is flagged until it's up over six, up over six percent. I like to keep mine under five, right? Between four point five and five. Some are in that range to make sure that my hemoglobin, my red blood cells have great capacity to bring oxygen to the cells so I can create the cellular energy I need to really thrive. So hemoglobin A1C is a really good marker. There's another one actually that you can test, too. It's it's it's called a novel marker for systemic inflammation. It's called GlycA, right? And so it's also a marker of glycosylation and again, a sugar molecule binding to proteins. In this case, GlycA looks at proteins particularly involved in the immune system. And so when that's elevated, I like to see it between one hundred and three hundred. Some are in that range, more closer to one hundred when it's up over three hundred. We know that's a sign of systemic inflammation. In fact, there are some individuals that will have normal HSCRP, but we'll see the GlycA elevated. And so that's a really good it's a novel marker. They've just been doing a number of studies on that, really starting just in the last five years. Very interesting marker. We know, for example, statin drugs will have a cholesterol lowering medications can have a mild anti -inflammatory effect that may bring CRP down, but they don't bring GlycA down. Whereas a lot of lifestyle strategies that you're talking about on the summit will help bring both of those markers down. And so that's a that's a really important thing to be looking at. Another key marker is LDH, lactate dehydrogenase, which is part of our natural energy, you know, our glycolysis and Krebs cycle. It's kind of a Krebs cycle glycolysis intermediary enzyme. And so when that's elevated, it's a sign that there's inflammation, particularly heart tissue related as well as liver. Right. Could be related to liver. And speaking of liver, liver enzymes are another really good marker. So when we're seeing liver enzymes like ALT, AST, GGT, when these when these are elevated up over roughly up over 25, that's a sign that there's inflammation affecting the liver cells. And then based on the ratios, for example, if ALT is real high, AST is kind of in the normal range, roughly 10 to 25 in that normal range. We know that inflammation is really affecting the liver when AST is high and ALT is more in the normal range or a lot lower than AST. We start thinking about that inflammation affecting muscle tissues or affecting the heart in particular. So that's a key marker for that. When GGT is real high up over 25 again and the AST and ALT are lower than the GGT, then we start thinking about biliary tree, gallbladder, bile ducts, that region. So it kind of helps us understand more of where that inflammation may be located. So these are just some of the markers. You know, if you get a good a good look, you know, you can also look at just a lipid panel, like where you're looking at your LDL, which is considered the bad cholesterol, your triglycerides, your HDL levels. We like to see the triglyceride to HDL ratio. If there was one thing I was going to look at on a lipid panel, I think all the markers can have some importance. We can get some good clinical data from all those markers. But if there was one marker I think is most important to look at, it would be the triglyceride to HDL ratio. So how many triglycerides, which are basically free fatty acids that our body can use as an energy source that are circulating in the bloodstream versus the high density lipoproteins, which are a carrier molecule that helps bring fats, lipids, all different types of molecules back to the liver from the cells. And so when we're looking at that ratio, we ideally should be under two. So under two parts triglyceride to HDL, roughly close to one. And that kind of close, as close to one as possible, one part triglyceride, one part HDL, like to see that triglyceride level certainly under a hundred. OK, and we look at that. That is a key marker for insulin resistance and inflammation. If your triglyceride to HDL ratio is up over two, if your HDL is under 50, you know, triglycerides are up over a hundred. You know, definitely a sign of insulin resistance and inflammation taking place in the body as long as the test is done fasting. Right. We always want to make sure with the lipid panel definitely can be affected if we eat a meal right before we we get that lab done. But that's a really key marker to look at and helps us understand how well our body's responding to getting nutrients into the cells. So when triglycerides are real high, we're not good at burning fat for fuel. We've got all these extra fats out in the cell or outside in the bloodstream. And those fats can become denatured and cause more reactive oxygen species and drive up oxidative stress and inflammation in the system. So all very important markers to be looking at. A lot of these tests are not expensive, but glyca is a little bit more pricey. But most of the other ones you can easily get from your physician. Just go in, ask for the high sensitivity, high sensitivity to your reactive protein, lipid panel, liver enzymes. Right. They'll run all of those. And then one other marker that we should look at as well as vitamin D levels are 25 hydroxy vitamin D. A lot of research out showing that levels on certainly under 30 nanograms per milliliter, where you're you're the lab will actually flag you as deficient, you know, linked with all cause mortality. So if you have levels under 30, you're all cause mortality, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, neurodegenerative condition. We talk about any sort of chronic disease and then dying of anything goes up. Right. So it's really easy actually to bump that up. Ideally, we do it by getting in the sun. However, most of us just not getting enough sunshine. We may not be living in an area where the sun's going to impact us in a significant way to get the vitamin D if we're up. Let's say we live in Canada, we live in Maine, we live in these northern climates. It's going to be harder to get enough vitamin D from the sun. But if we are in a you know, even if we are in that location, like in the summer months, trying to get as much sun on as much of your body as possible. Obviously, you don't want to burn. But outside of that, trying to get the sunshine is key. Sun offers a lot more benefits than just a vitamin D supplement. However, taking a vitamin D supplement as well can be really helpful. I usually recommend about a thousand international units per twenty five pounds of body weight taken with meals you do at one or two doses, depending on how much of that you need. And that will definitely get your vitamin D levels up. You want to test every three to six months or so and kind of look at where you're at. Ideally, I like to see it up over 60 nanograms per milliliter, usually not concerned about overdosing. The research shows that as long as you keep it really under about 150 nanograms per milliliter, you won't deal with any sort of, you know, toxicity, vitamin D toxicity. It's really hard to get it up over 150, although it can be done if you're taking like 50 ,000 units every single day. So if you're taking roughly five, 10, 15 ,000 units every day, you're probably going to optimize your vitamin D and do really well. And so those would be some of the key labs I would definitely recommend. All right, great, thank you for that list of people listening, friends, you know, here in the audience, please do take out your notes, get your paper and pen ready, or if you're keeping a Google doc or however you're keeping track and look at this list because it'll be helpful to you to help guide your own health and be aware. And you may find you're already working with a doctor who's doing these kind of testing. It's not time to time to up level. Hey, I just wanted to interrupt this podcast to tell you about my cell liposomal glutathione. This is an amazing product because our modern world is toxic. No matter how health conscious you try to be. The truth is that every single day you and I are being bombarded by harmful toxins and stressors, things like EMF, 5G, heavy metals, chemicals, processed foods and the like. And when left to roam free, these toxins take on the form of something called free radicals. 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