The Effect of Sugar On Our Hormones

In this episode, Katie Jo and Dr. Nayan Patel explore the intricate relationship between sugar, hormones, and overall health. They share practical tips to manage sugar consumption, discussing its adverse effects on hormones like insulin and stress hormones.

The duo emphasizes the importance of breaking the cycle of sugar cravings to maintain hormonal balance. Katie Jo provides relatable insights into overcoming sugar addiction, while Dr. Patel adds historical context, illustrating the long-standing challenges of sugar overconsumption.

The podcast concludes with a commitment to supporting individuals on their journey to better health, addressing sugar cravings, weight loss, and hormone balance. This engaging discussion is a valuable resource for those seeking to enhance their well-being by understanding the complex dynamics of sugar, hormones, and stress.

Head to www.thrivelab.com or find us on Instagram @thrivelab_women to learn more about the benefits of BHRT and women's hormone health.

Transcript

Dr. Nayan Patel (00:02.102):

Hello, welcome to Thrivelab. Today we have a famous Katie Jo Dixon, our nurse practitioner at Thrivelab, and she'll be discussing a major issues that we are dealing with is sugar addiction. And I'm not sure if it's just a sugar addiction or just food addiction, but the concerns that we have is we have a numerous amount of patients coming to us, need the help with the hormonal health. And what we are dealing with today is more than hormones is, can we first fix the eating disorders or the eating habits or sugar addictions or whatever we call it today? So the first question I want to ask is can sugar be detected on a lab panel?

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Katie Jo (00:44.841):

The answer is Dr. Patel, in short, is it depends. So our basic labs, we use what's called a comprehensive metabolic panel, and that looks at your blood sugar level. And so the next question I asked my patient is, were you fasting when you had this? Many times my patients will say, yes, I was fasting. I said, okay, well, this might be elevated if you're fasting. If you weren't fasting, this might be normal. But the blood only tells us so much. What really tells us it's happening inside the cell is how the patient's feeling. So asking more of those detective questions as a healthcare provider, you get to be a sacred detective and you get to ask those probing questions. The caveat is if you're a new patient, there is so much shame around food. There's this beautiful quote, and this is in the book called In the Flow by Alyssa Vitti. Some of our patients may be familiar with her. She's a female biohacker. So this conversation today is gonna circle around females. However, if you're a potential male, know that this information is valuable to you. I've had an appointment recently with a female client and her husband, and her husband said her mood swings are so severe when she doesn't take her bioidentical hormones consistently. I'm here to help her be consistent. So it affects our male counterparts, and for our other males, some of these will apply to you as well. So Alyssa Vitti in her book, speaking about sugars and how it affects women, and also tying into disordered eating, there's a small quote, it's by Janine Roth. It says, “When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away, our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when, our belief in ourselves, our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Your body is reliable. If you listen, it will speak.” Again, that's by Janine Roth. And this was huge for me, Dr. Patel, because I'm of the generation, I had disordered eating my entire life. My mother had a eating disorder, my grandmother had a eating disorder. By the time I was 16, I was vegan, I was cutting out whole food groups from my diet. And so I didn't know what it meant to cycle my diet. I didn't know what sugar addiction was. I knew that I had mood swings. I knew that if I limited food, I felt like I was in control, and I knew if I ate food, I felt like I was out of control. So many of our female clients can identify with that. And that's often, those feelings are often due to severe sugar swings. So even if your lab results say that your blood sugar is normal, are you having signs of sugar instability? Do you have spikes in your blood sugar? Is your blood sugar dropping and then you start to have sugar cravings? So I often see with my clients, males and females, that afternoon crash. So is it post lunch you start to feel low energy? Is it around two to three? What do you reach for? Are you reaching for a coffee? Does it have sugar added into it? Are you going for a tiny Snickers? One of my clients said I just need the small Snickers. I said okay that's better than big Snickers but we need to talk about it. Or are you needing to take a nap? I am a fan of siesta culture but if you're post meal, you feel like your energy's depleted, you feel tired. That's a clear sign of blood sugar. More severe signs would be things like dizziness, lightheadedness, signs of severe hypoglycemia. What some of my patients will evaluate with a nutritionist evaluation, or we may even dig deeper with what's called a continuous glucose monitor, CGM. So we can see specifically what's causing your blood sugar to drop. And then also I think Dr. Patel, you've had some conversations around some of the DNA genetics that we can look at the specifics for you. So years ago I mentioned my disordered eating which has been a lifetime of healing and journeying. At one time I was using the keto diet which I use only specifically for specific patients. I don't think it's good for everyone and I don't think it's good all the time. But at that time I didn't know better. I say with most providers we do the best we can with what we know and when we know more then we do better. So at that time I would tell my clients, and I have some special guests to bring, I would tell my clients that a banana, this is my first special guest, a banana has the same amount of sugar as a Snickers bar, which you hear that and you think, I can't eat a Snickers bar because I know that's going to give me love handles, so I can't eat a banana anymore. Well that's false. We know that a banana and a Snickers bar are not the same. Changing the conversation about calorie per calorie. And I've quoted Dr. Robert Lustig on my previous webinars. That's how impactful his book is. Metabolical, I recommend it. And so we let bananas, they have things like potassium, which are essential minerals that you need. It has a slow release sugar. So it has a different effect than a Snickers bar because it's not a huge blast to your bloodstream. It's slowly over time.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (05:46.818):

Plus fructose.

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Katie Jo (05:54.001):

And for female clients, during the second half of your menstrual cycle, from when you ovulate to when you menstruate, we call that the luteal phase that's when the female clients tell me Katie Jo. I'm so angry. I want to bite my husband's head off. Katie Jo I feel so bad. I don't want to go to work during that time because I'm so moody I'm gonna yell at my co-workers. Katie Jo, I don't want to be around my kids. And so they're in that time that's often when your body needs complex carbohydrates and possibly bioidentical hormones specifically progesterone to help balance those blood sugar issues and help to balance your hormones so the answer is, it depends.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (06:25.87):

True, true. And the thing is, yeah, when you compare the Snickers to a banana, banana has a fructose, which is a fruit sugar, whereas the Snickers is a sucrose, which is a way different types of sugar. So yeah, even though for calories, calories are the same, it's probably not the same thing because the body processes it differently. So yeah, thank you for breaking it down so efficiently. So this is a funny question. So do you think that Americans have problems with sugar or if it does do they even know the hidden sugar ingredients in the daily intake?

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Katie Jo (07:04.809):

So obviously America knows they have issues with sugar. If they didn't know that, you couldn't go buy keto bread at the grocery store, which don't eat keto bread. It's false. It's- look at the carbohydrates. So I asked a client today, they told me, Katie Jo, I am eating a protein shake in the morning. It has caffeine in it. And I said, is it sweet? And she said, oh yeah, it tastes sweet. I said, okay, well, you know, how much caffeine does it have in it? I don't know. Okay, all right. Does it have one cup of coffee, two cups of coffee, three cups of coffee in it? What's the equivalent? No information there, which is okay, because I've been a label reader since I was little. Not everyone is. I talked about the history of disordered eating, so I was taught to read labels from a very young age because of that history. The next question I asked is, well, what kind of sweetener does it have? Like you mentioned, there's fructose, there's sucrose, there's high fructose corn syrup, there's monk fruit, there's stevia, there's aspartame. All these types of sugars and this patient also said, I don't know and I said, well, let's read the label and figure out what it is. If it has an artificial sweetener, pull it out. And so we have to be self-educated. One of my clients today said, my doctor never told me this. I said, you're right, because it's not your doctor's responsibility to educate you. You want informed consent, but if you're relying on someone else outside yourself, you might not learn as well. I know I learned the best when I'm self-motivated to learn. So I want people to look up those alternative names for sugar. Even if that's too much, because many of those names have long titles like malodextrin, which is one of the sugar, if you look in the ingredient label and you see added sugars, so if it's inherent sugar, which I have another special guest I'm going to bring, which is one of my favorite sugars right now, is a plum. I love red colored fruits, we'll talk more about that and vegetables, but a plum doesn't have a label on it. It's gonna have sugar in it, and it's gonna be healthy sugars for you with that delayed release. But if something has added sugars on that ingredient label, then I would say eat it as a sweet treat, maybe once a month, or a birthday party, or Christmas, or have it eliminated from your diet. Because if it has added sugars, your body's gonna process that. One of my clients and I shared this in a recent one, she said, well, Katie Jo, why do I have to give up alcohol and beer, I used to be able to drink those when I was young and I had no issues. I said, well, it has a lot of sugar. It's sugar that your liver is processing. And if you told me, Katie Jo, I used to eat a bag of M&Ms, we're quoting a lot of major food candy manufacturers today. When I was younger, I would say that's great, but we don't need to do that now. We know as you age, your body becomes what's called more sentient. Those organs before that were full of minerals that could process that sugar. It takes two magnesium molecules to process one glucose molecule. Well, do the math. You talked about the American diet. You're going to become magnesium deficient very soon if you keep eating that way. 

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Dr. Nayan Patel (10:00.11):

True. So when you're talking about the rainbow diet, it's not the M&M rainbow diet or the Skittles, right? Talking about the fruits and vegetables and all the colors of the fruits and vegetables and not the M&M rainbow diet. So thank you for sharing that with us. So, do you, so at Thrivelab, you know, what do we offer? Can you tell us what do we offer? How does nutrition affect your hormone health and so and so forth?

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Katie Jo (10:32.905):

Well, referencing back to that initial book by Alyssa Viti, she mentions in the book that if you don't have your blood sugar corrected, it's gonna be very difficult for your hormones to be optimized. So clients, in the beginning, what we offer is that first three months, we are starting to, we address hormones first. That's the first conversation. I mentioned earlier for people like myself that had disordered eating for a lifetime, if I come in talking about nutrition, sometimes there's a block there. You've been dealing with weight loss issues your entire life. You've been dieting, you did keto, you did macrobiotic, you did vegan, you did calorie restriction, now you're fasting and you're still not losing weight. And I say, let's talk about your diet. Red flags are gonna go up, you're gonna become defensive right away. And I see that over and over again. I told a client today, he was a male client and he told me what he ate. I always do a 24 hour dietary recall, which many people say, well, yesterday wasn't a good day to reflect what I'd normally eat, but this is what I ate yesterday. And I thought okay, I'll take that as your, I'll take you at the benefit of what you're saying. I trust what you're saying. With that said, I don't wanna talk about diet until we know each other better. I wanna build your trust. I wanna use bioidentical hormones first to start improving the way you feel from the inside to the outside. So for example, I mentioned progesterone earlier. It can help with mood, it can help with sleep, it can help with your PMS symptoms. This is for our female clients. Most men don't need progesterone replacement. I had one or two clients that do. So we can start to improve the way you feel. And you say, oh, Katie Jo, I had a client today, came in and she said, my mood is improved. She says, I've had major depression for over a decade. She's on two prescriptive medications. She sees a psychiatrist and she said, this is the best I've felt in years. And all we did was add in progesterone. And one thing I did ask her to do, which bless her heart, she said, not yet. I said, let's cut out dairy. Let's try cutting out dairy. I said we know dairy for many people is inflammatory. It's also what's called insulinogenic, which means it increases your insulin levels. I mentioned the pancreas earlier. Your pancreas produces insulin in response specifically to milk products, because if you think of cow's milk, it goes from growing this little tiny baby calf to a two ton animal. What's because of insulin being produced when they drink the milk, which causes your body to put on fat stores? So if you're having issues with weight loss, I think of one area that's easy for many people to stop is cut down on your dairy, not forever, just temporarily. And let's see if we can make a small tweak to your diet. You mentioned eating the rainbow of colors. Many of my clients come in, they're not eating a rainbow, they're eating one color vegetable, it's called green, which I normally like, except if you've been eating that way for decades, you're probably deficient in some of the minerals that you may be able to get from one of my other special guests here, which would be beets, that purple color. So if you're not eating rainbow colored, you're gonna be nutrient deficient, which is gonna impact your hormones. So we start replacing hormones first, they have that trust, they have that step in the right direction, and then later on down the road, we can start addressing things like nutrition. We can ask you, let's try to eliminate dairy for a few months, let's see if we can decrease your inflammation and have some of that midlife middle, which is probably why you came to me in the first place, you want to think that's starting to shed off. Hormones can help it shed off, but so can some of these dietary changes.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (13:56.334):

True. I gave up milk when I was seven years old and that was something that was the doctor told my parents to say I can't drink milk and so I give up milk when I was seven years old and I'm 50 plus today and I do drink I don't drink milk anymore I do eat cheese once in a while but again my dairy is completely reduced out completely and it really is really healthy and I feel a lot more energy. When I eat cheese and I can feel the pain that okay, that's what's affecting my just my thought process and my general well-being. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And of course with the hormones, the biggest craze right now is this GLP-1 inhibitors, the semaglutide. How does it affect having semaglutide and having a full of sugar diet? Does it go together? Do they have to stop the sugars completely to do semaglutide or can they still have the old behavior and now shed the weight off by injecting some molecule of peptide in your body.

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Katie Jo (15:04.281):

It depends. So GLP-1 inhibitors are amazing medicine. It's really changing the face of medicine. There's semaglutide, there's also Mounjaro, which is another one. And it's taking people that are going down the road of diabetes where they're gonna have issues with neuropathy, with their numbness and nerve damage to their feet, to their hands, vision loss with diabetes. It can lead to heart attacks. It can lead to kidney failure. So it's breaking this chain of the progression of diabetes. For that, I think it's a wonderful medication. And so if you're suffering from the inability to lose weight, it can be so beneficial for you. I've heard stories over and over again where you've gotten on semaglutide, your triglycerides came down, you feel more stable, you feel like yourself in your skin, you feel like going out again, you're not closing yourself in your house because you don't like how you present to the world around you. So those are huge benefits of it. Now, if a client comes to me and they're already calorie restricted, so intermittent fasting is huge. I just had a male client today and I've had several. They say, Katie Jo, I intermittent fast. I stopped eating at six. I don't eat again until 1 p.m. I said, okay. I said, well, do you have a belly fat? Yeah. I was like, are you losing any belly fat with your intermittent fasting? No. Okay. So then we need to address your cortisol because we know if you intermittent fast for long periods of time you put your body in a state of fight or flight, your body thinks, I'm back to stone age, and I don't know when my next meal is gonna happen, so I need to be in calorie restriction mode. If we were checking your labs, we would see an elevated reverse T3. That is a type of hormone in your thyroid hormones that the gas pedal is not pushed anymore, the brakes are being pushed, so you go into this hibernation mode where your body doesn't wanna burn fat, cortisol is high, high cortisol. High insulin, I mentioned earlier with the baby cows, if you have high insulin, it makes your body put on fat. So if you're using a GLP-1 and you're already calorie restricted, we have to change your diet. One of the essential things for GLP-1 to be most effective, although I've seen some studies say you can do mild fast, maybe 12 to 14 hour daily fast, is that you need to eat small frequent meals. And going back to the pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Robert Lustig, I didn't say that's what his specialty is, but he specializes in kids that have endocrine disorders, specifically diabetes, he says that with the introduction of things such as more processed foods that he noticed his clients, instead of growing tall as a child, they were growing wider. So if you're fasting and you're not addressing the quality of your food, you're not going

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and you start a GLP-1, you may not lose weight as efficiently. You're most likely gonna lose weight because one of the mechanisms that's so beautiful about the GLP-1s is that it helps to move the sugar out of your bloodstream and into your cells. So I explained it to this to my clients. I said, if you have high insulin for a long period of time, insulin is like the friend who comes to the party that you invited them, but you kind of don't want them to show up because you know if they do, they're gonna stay there all night long and they're gonna talk a little too loud. They may drink a little too much alcohol and you kind of wish they didn't show up. That's what insulin ends up being to your cells. It's hanging out and then like your cells are like, why don't you go home insulin? You could go to bed, but go watch a movie. And insulin is like, no, I'm gonna stay here. Well, when that happens, when the cells don't invite insulin in, you have that high insulin, you have inflammation. So GLP-1s help the cells to say, okay, I'm gonna have some more compassion on insulin. I know they're a little lonely at home right now. So I'm gonna go ahead and open the door and let insulin in my cell and let it bring the blood sugar in. That's where it needs to go. It needs to go to your brain for your blood sugar. It needs to go to your heart. It needs to go to your muscle cells, and it needs to go to those organs too, which we use for bioidentical hormone replacement. So GLP-1s help to introduce that into your bloodstream. So the quality of what you eat is important because what you eat grows your eyelashes. So if you're eating poor food, your eyelashes are not gonna grow very well. Typically, people aren't telling me, Katie Jo, my eyelashes are falling out. They say, Katie Jo, my hair's thin. Katie Jo, I noticed that I am having dry, brittle nails, I'm noticing that my skin's dry. So if you notice these secondary characteristics, joint pain is a huge flag for me. And I shared on the previous podcast that I had severe joint pain that was linked to artificial sweeteners. So diet's important, but GLP-1, I think a stair-step approach. So you start experiencing that weight loss. You have that increased trust in yourself. I mentioned the quote in the beginning about finding your voice again around food. And so once you have that voice again, you say, okay, I can be successful in weight loss. It wasn't that I didn't have enough willpower. It wasn't that I wasn't exercising enough. It wasn't that because I wasn't fasting good enough. It's actually something on a cellular level that creates this foundation of regaining trust in yourself. And that impacts how your cells function as well. We know stress is one of the biggest drivers of inflammation. And if you're stressed out every time you're eating, if you take a bite and you think bad thoughts about yourself, it's gonna be very hard for you to lose weight. So if we can switch that paradigm with a GLP-1, let's do it, and then once that's switched and your body's welcoming insulin into your cells, then we can start making some of these small changes to your diet. I remember years ago, Dr. Patel, I was in the gym, and back then I was a gym rat. I loved exercise, and one of the people I would see every day in the gym, like, yeah, we're friends, but we just put our headphones in, and he said, what are you training for? I was doing a HIIT workout. I said, I'm training for life. I'm trained to be 85 and I fall down, I don't break a hip. I'm training to be 70 and my brain to be sharp as it is today or even better. I'm training to be 65 and be able to hike up a mountain. So this is what we're doing with our diet by introducing these tools to help you have longevity and to thrive as you grow old.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (20:58.87):

Absolutely. What you just mentioned was right on the money when it comes to why the thyroid is not reversing, not getting the active thyroid, reversing the thyroid because that's a classic sign of high stress. And when you eat sugar, it is actually increasing stress on your body. So having a diet that is, that is low glycemic diet is actually helping reduce your stress levels. And instead of T4 coming to T3, which is the active form, it's going to reverse T3 and putting the brakes on the whole system. So it is actually modulating your stress hormone more than anything else. So brings to a very exciting point for me is that all these hormones are interrelated. Stress hormones, your insulin, your hormones, like the estrone, progesterone, testosterone, all those things are all interconnected. So, besides the hormones, is there anything else we measure in our blood test for our patients, or this is all we do?

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Katie Jo (22:07.849):

Well, there is something else that we measure and I'm gonna spotlight you, Dr. Patel. So I have my signed copy of The Glutathione Revolution. You can get your own signed copy as well. There it is, Dr. Patel's John Hancock right in there. And so some of the other hormones that I like to assess on our comprehensive metabolic panel is your liver enzymes. So most people think if my liver enzymes are elevated, then I'm sick, I'm having an issue. I had a client who had her liver enzymes in the 30s, and she said, Katie Jo, I need to meet with you right now. I've got my labs back, my liver enzymes are in the 30s. And then we had a beautiful conversation. We talked about how to help her liver enzymes with the use of things such as glutathione. You talk and hear about ways to increase dietary glutathione. And one of the things that stood out to me, Dr. Patel, was the use of legumes and beans, because those are one of the food groups that right now, along with bananas, are often restricted from people's diets. And so there's ways to increase your dietary glutathione. And for those who don't know what glutathione is, although it's very popular in the realm of functional medicine, it is what's called an intracellular antioxidant. So many of us are familiar with vitamin C. Vitamin C works primarily outside the cell, and then glutathione works inside the cell. Antioxidant, we know that oxidative stress is what causes aging for many of us. So if you think about, you slice that apple open, and you set it on the counter, the flesh initially on the apple is white. And then if you leave it there, it starts to turn brown. Well, that browning process is oxidation. That's oxygen starting to break it down. It starts to work through the microbes that are naturally occurring. And so that's happening inside our cells every single day. I describe it actually hundreds of millions of times in every single cell in our body, every moment that we're alive. And it's these little grenades going off. Well, what happens when a grenade goes off, Dr. Patel?

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Dr. Nayan Patel (24:04.17):

Yep, you have to neutralize it, right? It kills a bit.

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Katie Jo (24:07.138):

What happens? Well, exactly. It has shrapnel. It has shrapnel, and that shrapnel needs to be taken out of your cells. It's a natural process. The shrapnel's not bad. What happens is when those little grenades of oxygen reactive species are going off, when they start to become higher than your body's ability to remove the shrapnel, which I call taking out the trash, then you have the inflammation. And it's primarily supported through our liver. Now you mentioned earlier, it's all interconnected. I'm focusing on the liver labs right now, because often what I see is actually not elevated liver labs, it's very low. So if you're liver labs, we check what's called AST, ALT, alkaline phosphatase, and then T-billy. Those are very, there's something in our 14 panel for our comprehensive metabolic panel. If your ALT and AST are low, 90% of the time, I'll ask my clients, are you having any digestive issues? Oh yeah, Katie Jo, when I wake in the morning, my belly's flat, by the end of the day, I feel pregnant. I said, I know exactly what you're talking about because I had it too. This is gonna be borderline inappropriate, but I would tell my husband, I said, I'm gonna go to bed and I'm gonna create a Dutch oven in the bedroom because I'm so bloated and gassy, I'm just gonna release my gas underneath the covers and you probably should sleep on the couch tonight. And he would say, okay, Katie Jo, I believe you, but I was so bloated and so inflamed. And I didn't know it was abnormal because it's also in my family history. A lot of my parents, my siblings had also GI issues. So for yours, it might not be excessive gas. It might not be bloating. It might show up as constipation. It might show up as IBS. So maybe you have diarrhea and constipation, or maybe you say, well, I used to, but now I take a laxative every single day so I don't have issues anymore. Well, that's not typical either. So we can see that in your lab work. And if we see that, often what we need to address is your liver and your gallbladder. And those two, I mentioned earlier, thyroid. So thyroid, adrenal glands, and also your reproductive glands are this, they almost make a triangle in your body. You have your thyroid here, you have your ovaries, your testicles down here, and then you have your adrenal glands resting on top of your kidneys. So it makes this, I think, but it's a triangle shape because there's three and they all work together. Well, the liver and gallbladder, they kind of sit parallel in your digestive system. So when you eat, you start to chew, we call that mastication. You start to break the food into small pieces, which going back to cortisol, sit down when you eat, chew your food thoroughly. Don't drive and eat at the same time. Don't stand up and eat. We need to have those digestive juices start to flow, which tells your cortisol, I'm safe. I think of the adrenal glands as being like grandparents. I mentioned this in a previous webinar. They're like our grandparents. Remember how your grandparents were? Tell me a little bit about your grandparents. What's one thing that stands out to you about your grandparents?

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Dr. Nayan Patel (26:56.55):

Uh for my grandparents were farmers so they worked until they were in the late 80s.

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Katie Jo (27:04.266):

They had longevity, but I bet they probably got up the same time every morning, right?

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Dr. Nayan Patel (27:09.166):

There was alarm clocks, but guess what? In the villages, you get up because you start working before the sun comes out, otherwise it gets too hot, right? So they had to wake up every day at five o'clock in the morning, or even earlier sometimes. And by 11 o'clock or noon time, they're done. And then there's the, in the fields, they'll put the cot over there, and the tree shade, they'll take a nap for two, three hours and then get back to it and just try to come back home after getting all the stuff. So there was a routine out there. And in this routine, there was no binge eating, there was no technology, there was no extra food than what you pack in the morning, right? And it's all fresh fruits and vegetables. There was nothing. There was no packaged goods, so to speak, available in the farms.

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And so life was much simpler. And I can see all my grandpa's pictures. He was a skinny guy his whole life, right? And he was healthy but just skinny the whole life. And so was my grandma. My grandma stayed home of course, but she had the choice to eating whatever she wanted to eat all the time. But even then it was limited choices. So you're absolutely right. So your hormones are affecting your… your insulin is actually affecting your stress. Insulin is also affecting your hormones. And all these things play a big role in how we balance each other out. And so that's a big thing that we do at Thrivelab and I'm so happy to be working with you on this because it really brings people together to see a comprehensive approach to not just your diet and hormones but how to manage stress, how is everything connected to each other to make sure that we can feel better. I'm gonna ask you one more question, really short. What are the different types of sugars? I know you mentioned a high-fructose corn syrup, right? Then there's agave. It's supposed to be healthy, but it's a lot of sugar in there, right? What else? What else is out there?

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Katie Jo (29:31.441):

Well, again, it depends. So for example, for myself, when I'm in that, I mentioned the luteal phase, so from when I ovulate to menstruate, and I can feel it, my body wants more carbohydrates. And if I don't eat more complex carbohydrates, I will start craving things. So for example, during this time, I eat such as, you know, the beets. Beets are such an incredible good source of sugar. They also have what's called blood builders. And this is called the doctrine of signature. This is an idea in nutrition, some people will debunk it, but that the food can tell you what it's good for. So something that dark purple color, it can help build your blood. So that would be beets. I'm also eating sweet purple potatoes. I eat stokes, also Japanese purple potatoes, plums, which I mentioned, hibiscus, non plant-based sources, red meat. I would say maybe, you know, maybe once a week, just be careful about your red meat because too much red meat, you're gonna get the stress hormones from the animals. Also, organ meat can be very beneficial. Our ancestors ate organ meat. They didn't eat just muscle meat. If you see a wild cat on the Safari Channel, it kills something. This cheetah, it eats the organ meat first. And cheetahs don't have diabetes. And they also have better blood sugar control, I imagine. I'm not a veterinarian, so I don't wanna say that. So the other types of sugars, and I brought another special guest with me, and I don't want to show the label, but if you go to the health food store, I'm gonna cover this, and I got this. I got some chia and flax seed and it has cacao and coconut in it. It sounds really great. It says here it's got omega-3 fatty acids and I love flaxseed. Flaxseed can be great for women's nutrition, specifically because it helps to modulate what's called phytoestrogens, plant-based estrogen. So if you're a woman and you're having estrogen deficiency or issues with estrogen modulation, I mean hot flashes or night sweats, cycling flax can be very helpful. However, I do like fresh ground flax because we mentioned oxidization. So that apple that's cut and it starts to oxidize, that can happen very easily with flax. So I got this from the health food store, very excited. I love cacao, I love coconut, all together. And I get it home and Dr. Patel, I didn't read the label at the store. So I get home and last ingredient, organic evaporated cane sugar. I was like, oh! They got me and then under the nutrition label. So even if they had added sugar and it was a name I didn't recognize, maybe it was the maltodextrin that I mentioned. And so I thought glucose or sorbitol, those are other names, but underneath added sugar, it has one gram added sugar, which is 3% of my daily value according to their recommended daily value. It's called the RDA. And so my brain wants to rationalize it. It said, Katie Jo, you can eat one gram of sugar. You don't need any sugar. It's okay. But what I did do at the health food store is I bought myself a treat. It's a little energy nugget. It has sunflower seeds and cacao. I didn't read the label and I ate it yesterday and I ate it the day before and I told myself, it's okay to have a little, you're in the luteal phase. Right away, started to have joint pain in my low back. And I said, it's cause of that food. I know it is. Cause when you're that clean by divine providence and you eat something, you're gonna start to notice the differences. If you don't notice yet, that's okay. Start to journal. Take a notepad and just talk about what you feel at the end of the day. Oh, actually, I notice after I drink that full cup of milk, that I actually felt kind of gassy and bloated and I had two bowel movements afterwards. That could be a clear sign of lactose intolerance. But unless you're mindful of it, you might not notice. And Dr. Patel, you've said in the past, if you track it, you're going to make a difference. You're going to start notice a difference. Dr. Patel is a chief scientist. He has tracked science studies. He knows about tracking and he knows if you track it you're gonna make a change and you're gonna be able to know what that change is. So that's a long way around about sugar. So lactose, that's also a sugar. So lactose for some people can be beneficial, but we spoke about the issues with milk in general in our country, the way it's overproduced. And animals, traditionally you'd have a milking season. Some of my studies have said the best time to drink cow's milk is in the springtime after they had a baby calf when they've eaten the green grass. So that green grass is essential because that green grass has gotten all the winter foliage from the trees, from the old grass, broken down into the soil. So that green, fresh grass in the spring, the cows eat that, they have the most phenomenal nutritious milk. And that's where cows milk gets their nutrients such as not fortified with vitamin D, but getting it through the soil what they eat. And so again, what we eat makes a huge difference. If cows are able to be vegetarians and vegan and just eat grass and grow into two ton animal, imagine how much more for us to have these faster metabolisms than a cow does.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (34:29.782):

True. Thank you for sharing that. And what you just said, it's, sugars are addictive in behavior. And even if you eat one sugar, if you try to crave one sugar one time, it's going to increase your sugar intake. And if you don't watch it, all of a sudden you have sugar addictions, you have cravings all the time. High-fructose corn syrup is probably the biggest culprit. They changed the name to corn syrup now, but they're both the same thing. There's the sugar alcohols. There are a lot of hidden ingredients inside the food. And so if a certain food is too sweet for you, your body will start craving them. And especially if you have a sedentary lifestyle, if your stress is low. If your stress is high, you don't exercise. You're going to start craving those foods all the time just because your body needs it at that point just to just to feel okay. And so it's a vicious cycle. So I know you said that hey, I indulge myself once in a while. But I will challenge every listener that's out there that stop it if you could, Tell everybody that you that you know that hey, I don't need sugars anymore. I don't need desserts anymore. I don't eat simple carbs anymore. And challenge yourself to do that, not just for a week or a month, but a lifelong goal. Because if you do that part, you're gonna thank one person the most, which is yourself. Because you're gonna feel good at who you are and what you have become because of accomplishing something that is, 80% of Americans are not able to do that themselves. So I challenge everybody to do that part. So, what can one experience during a sugar detox? Right, if somebody's into a detox, what are they gonna experience? That's a big thing because if they know what to expect, then they can plan for it.

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Katie Jo (36:36.101):

That is huge. So right now with the shifting of the seasons is changing from summer to fall right now where I'm at in North America. And so seasonal changes are a great time to detox. So I have recommended 21 day purification detox to multiple clients these last few weeks. I've said it's fall now, you're done with your 4th of July, Labor Day I think just happened. The next holiday is gonna be Halloween. Let's get you detox in between now and then, then maybe holidays in between then. But let's go ahead and do a 21 day detox. Now with that said, you send this call out, this call of action to our patients. Tell your family members I'm not eating that anymore. I used to have to mentally trick myself when I was a bedside nurse in the hospital because going to the break room, there's donuts, there's popcorn, patient in room 321 had a birthday cake. You're like, oh, oh. So I tell myself, I'm allergic to that, I can't eat that. And I had to mentally tell myself, and actually I am, if I eat it, I will be inflamed. I'll wake up the next morning, I'll have huge puffiness under my face. I'll feel good for a day. The next day, I'll put in the five pounds of water weight. There's a delayed response. That delayed response tricks my brain to think, oh, you did fine with birthday cake. Remember the day after you were fine? Well, it's a delayed response. And so the cleanse of sugar is not only willpower. Going back to the GLP-1 antagonist, many of my patients say, Katie Jo, the best thing about this is I don't crave it anymore. The mass food manufacturers have mass functional MRIs, which means they take pictures of your brain while you're eating that Snickers bar, and they see, oh, it lights up the same part of your brain that heroin lights up, it lights up the same part of your brain that when you check Facebook lights up, it lights up the same part of your brain. It's your reward center, and it's a very powerful driver. This is not the base of our brain that is our breathing, respiration, this is higher level brain thinking, but it also starts to rewire our brains and that rewiring can take time to get undone. So willpower not by itself is always the best. Sometimes you need a GLP-1. Also, I have a story. I had a patient, Dr. Patel, I think you'll appreciate this, very rare case. She's a private practice and she told me, she said, Katie Jo, five years ago I was in Indonesia in the Peace Corps and she said I had a beautiful time. She said I came back and I started to get sick. And when I would hang out with this person, she would eat sugar the whole time. She would be eating crackers with peanut butter. She would be eating… Sorry about that. My phones going off. I thought I had turned off. She would be eating crackers with peanut butter. She would be eating candy. She would be eating prepackaged energy bars, but just all carbohydrates. And so she was initially diagnosed. Years later when she went to Indonesia, she acquired a very rare type of soil-based bacterial infection called narcoidoises. And it takes years to show up. And she knew she had it because she had a cutaneous version, which means a skin version, and she was having scarring and pustules all over her skin. And I said, we have to get you off of sugar. It's gonna be very hard for your body to heal from this without sugar. And she said, Katie Jo, I can't do it myself. And I said, you're right, because when you start to disrupt your microbiome in your digestive system, because you've been fed sugar for so long, when you stop it, you have, some people call this a Herx response, which is not typically Herx. Herx is just antibiotics. But you have an outcry from that bacteria, they say, no way, you just stopped my food source and you want me to stop living? And they have an antagonistic response which tells you to eat more sugar. And if you don't, you feel horrible. And so during that time, you may need support with some herbs or some supplements using a GLP-1 to help retrain your digestive system, say, actually, I can function without sugar, but those bacterial in your digestive system that are having a revolt when you stop eating sugar also give messages to your brain. There's a vagal nerve from your brain stem down into your digestive system that they communicate with each other that you produce your hormones in your gut travels up to the game brain goes out to the rest of your body, So when you if you stop sugar abruptly you can have those issues, So I often tell clients when they're stopping sugar. We need to add in those complex, low glycemic sugars, which include fruit, because that fruit has fiber, which slows down the release of it. And then you're less likely to have these reactions. With that said, many people, you still might have a mild reaction. We call it the dog sled. During the first few days of a cleanse, the first three to five days, you may feel like you have a flu. You may feel low energy. Therefore, start a cleanse on a weekend, so you can be a little bit more calm. Go ahead and do your coffee detox one to two weeks before you start to cleanse, you're off of caffeine. No alcohol should be obvious because you wanna support the liver. And then if you have a part of your body that you know historically has bothered you, so for example, maybe you fell years ago and you broke your wrist. Well, if we know that that's an area of your body that may be weak, or maybe you have a history of acne in your skin, we need to support those areas by giving key nutrients that feed those. So when you go through the cleanse and you're having this detox process, that areas that are vulnerable for you are already well nourished. And so when you detoxify, you're not gonna have a severe reaction. So there may be a slight reaction that is typical, it's normal, it's expected. That's actually a really great sign that you're doing the right thing. In our culture though, we're taught that any pain is bad. I mentioned working in the hospitals in the past, years ago, I got to be a labor and delivery nurse. I got to be present with so many beautiful little souls were born, and it taught me that pain can be good. All our pain receptors in our body, if you hit your thumb with a hammer, like ouch, it hurts, you draw back. If you put your hand on a flame in the kitchen, ouch, you draw back. Well, pregnancy and birth is the one pain that produces a positive outcome. So we're taught on a biological level that when we have pain, we're supposed to draw back. But sometimes you need to stay present with that pain. And gently with the help of a guided practitioner, like someone from Thrivelab, and go through that so you can get to the other side to see the good outcome. One of my favorite guides told me once, they said, look at the way a seed grows. When it grows and it's coming out of that seed pot, it's pushing through. Imagine that being a painful process, but once you're able to push through and open up that shell, then you can have the small sprout come up and grow into a beautiful, fruitful plant. And that's what we want for you and for all our clients here at Thrivelab.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (43:17.07):

So, okay, let me just go back and just reconfirm that our listeners got that part is that when you eat sugars, it's not just your body's craving but the bugs inside your body is also craving that sugar and so making sure to break the cycle is important. And more than the bacteria, we also have fungus to deal with it as well because the sugars are actually feeding the fungus and that's one of the reasons why if you eat a lot of sugar and if you feel drowsy. Because the fungus will release alcohol from your body and that makes you drowsy. And so, and if you break, try to break that cycle, it's not healthy, it's not fun for you initially because your body's craving that sugars all the time. And it's very important to break those cycles. And we can help do that part because we have some antifungals, nutraceutical products like Saccharomyces boulardii that can actually help with that one. Or you can simply go buy some apple cider vinegar and just drink an ounce twice a day with a full glass of water and that will get the fungus level low enough so that you buy it. So you're not craving that sugars. It's a vicious cycle because when you feed sugar, it grows the fungus. The more fungus, you need more sugar and it just keeps on going on and on and on until one day you're unable to maintain that part. So overall, what we are saying is having a balanced approach of sugars and your hormones and your thyroid and your stress is what we are all about. And we want to make sure that everybody gets a proper care because when people come to us, they're actually coming in for the last thing because they started having hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, anxiety, low libido all the symptoms that are associated with either menopause or andropause for males. But they started on way early on because the initial, the first thing that really affects everybody is your stress. When the stress starts increasing, right after you graduate from college, you get a first job and all of a sudden now, the stress starts building up because now you're gonna build a family and you buy a house and you have mortgage to pay and the student loans to pay and all those things catches on to you. And at the very same time, your eating habits doesn't support you because now all of a sudden, you're trying to survive and you eat whatever you can because you're working so many hours. And so that will eventually lead to thyroid disorders and hormone disorders which will come to us first at the end. So having a comprehensive approach is what we do and what we want to make sure that everybody is taking care of it because it's not just why you're here but what got you here? And so sugar is a big component because it really affects your insulin load and insulin being the most toxic chemical that our body produces. Proper balancing of insulin is utmost critical for us to deal with it. So I wanna thank you for giving us all the stories and all those anecdotes because it's so, so critical. So one last tip, one last tip.

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Katie Jo (46:32.229):

So this is not a tip, but you can give a tip. I do want to give one story, a closing story. So this war with sugar is not new. During 1806, during the Napoleonic Wars, the British prevented sugar from going to France. So Napoleon, he decided that he was gonna plant beets and grow his own sugar from beets, and he was successful. We know that we can extract sugar from beets. They're sweet enough, although I do encourage beets. I think they're a great food source, even though they're sweet. But this whole moral is, is because Napoleon planted beets, grew beets, had beet sugar, so they were able to add sugar, the processing of beets, to their tea, they ultimately lost the war. And the story is, is because they ate too much sugar, which made them weak in the military forces, and they weren't able to win the war. So the war with sugar is not new. We've been experiencing it for a long time, since sugar became more processed and accessible. So if you need support with your sugar cravings, if you need support with weight loss, if you need support with hormone balancing, we are here to support you and we will be with you every step of the way. Thank you so much, Dr. Patel. Any closing remarks from you?

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Dr. Nayan Patel (47:43.01):

No, this is absolutely amazing. I learned so much about you today. It feels like I'm closer to you now than before because now I learned something else that I did not know about you. So thank you for sharing your personal experiences and your stories. They're very impactful and I hope everybody gets to listen to you and your stories so that way they can make changes in their own personal lives. So thank you for sharing.

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Katie Jo (48:09.137):

Until next time, Dr. Patel.

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Dr. Nayan Patel (48:10.766):

Thank you. Bye bye.