I’m JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. Yes, I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can.

And that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast. To synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out.

Imagine if you could see, in real time, how every bite of food and every choice you make impacts your body’s energy systems. Well, today we’re diving into the cutting edge world of metabolic health. And we’re not just talking about counting calories or steps here. We’re talking about understanding how hormones, blood sugar, and cellular energy work.

Power every aspect of your life. And who better to guide us through this fascinating landscape than Dr. Casey Means. Dr. Means isn’t your average physician, she’s a Stanford trained innovator who’s on a mission to reverse the world’s metabolic health crisis. She’s the number one New York Times best selling author of Good Energy, the groundbreaking connection between glucose levels, metabolism, limitless health, and longevity.

And, as the co founder of Levels, she’s putting the power of continuous glucose monitoring into the hands of everyday people, giving us unprecedented insights into our own bodies. In this episode, we’re going to explore how you can boost energy, sharpen mental clarity, and even optimize your body composition.

Dr. Means will also share groundbreaking strategies for naturally increasing your body’s production of key hormones, like GLP 1, without resorting to expensive medications. Whether you’re a biohacking enthusiast, struggling with energy or weight issues, or just curious about optimizing your health, Dr.

This conversation is full of actionable strategies, so buckle up and get ready to see your body in a whole new light. Let’s jump into this eye opening conversation with the brilliant Dr. KC Means.

Dr. KC Means, I have been waiting literally months and months. For this interview, I’m so excited to have you here.

I’m so excited to finally meet you in person, virtually. This is so exciting. I’ve, I’ve loved your work for so long. Thank you for

having me. Oh, thank you. Well, this book, Good Energy is fabulous.

I love that it is getting out everywhere. I think as we’re recording right now, it’s back up number one on Amazon, which, you know, people talk about the New York Times and I know it’s been on the New York Times, but, Getting on Amazon in the top 10 of all books and getting to number, I mean, that is a huge feat.

I don’t think people realize because it is based on actual book sales.

Yeah. Thank you. And to me, it honestly just gives me so much hope that this

It’s, it’s, it’s a sign I think that metabolic health is top of mind for many Americans, which it needs to be. So

I know I was like, boy, I hope so considering where things are, why don’t we kind of, uh, you know, unpack metabolic health and, and kind of the state of the union of it right now. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great place to start because I don’t know if people realize truly how bad it is in our country right now.

There’s different stats you can look at, but they’re all bad and getting worse. And we need to be aware of that because metabolic health underpins all health. So broadly speaking, if we look at overt metabolic diagnoses, that would be type two diabetes. And when we take all American adults with type two diabetes, Type 2 diabetes or prediabetes.

That’s 50 percent of American adults. So a full half of the country, about 140 million Americans, have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, which is clinical metabolic dysfunction. And, you know, we don’t want to get confused about the word prediabetes. Prediabetes is still fulminant, metabolic dysfunction that’s likely been going on for years, if not decades.

Then you look at metabolic adjacent conditions like obesity and we’re nearing 50 percent of American adults with obesity and when you take overweight and obesity together, and I will say that not all overweight or even obese people have metabolic dysfunction, but it trends towards that, we have 74 percent of American adults with metabolic, with uh, 74, 74 percent of American adults with overweight or obesity.

Then when we look at different research, like from a recent paper in the 2022 American College of Cardiology, this group published a paper showing that 93. 2 percent of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. If we define that as having at least one heart attack, key biomarker that is not in the normal or optimal range for metabolic dysfunction.

So these are things like fasting glucose and triglycerides of weight circumference and other biomarkers like that. So this is totally widespread based on whatever criteria you look at. We’re talking about more than half the country and this is almost entirely preventable and is due to our Ultra processed toxic food system and several environmental factors that have rapidly changed over the past 50 to 100 years.

It’s also reversible. And when we look at the chronic diseases affecting Americans the most and the leading causes of death of Americans, they are almost all related to metabolic dysfunction, either totally rooted in or worsened by. So we’re talking about things like heart disease, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia, chronic liver disease.

Um, the top killers are intimately interrelated with the physiology of metabolic dysfunction. So this is a epidemic in our country. Um, it’s not being talked about widely enough by healthcare practitioners, because unfortunately, We’re not trained to see root cause connections between diseases. And it is really a national emergency that we focus on it individually, collectively, and at the policy level.

So that’s really what the book is focused on and what, what my work is all about sharing.

And, you know, you, you said that was a great synopsis of the current situation. And when you talk about these, Health markers that determine metabolic dysfunction. And the big challenge I see, like when we look at it and go, okay, it’s 93 percent of Americans are not metabolically healthy.

The markers that they say, I’m like, but the markers they’re saying are not optimal. They’re like, you know, I’m sorry, triglycerides of, you know, 150. I don’t want to see someone with triglycerides of 150 or a waist circumference of 34, you know, so, you know, I think it’s even if we start to really look at optimal versus Normal.

I mean, what’s normal nowadays, right? That it would look even worse. And you did say something, and this is what we’re going to get into, because that was like a gloomy picture. However, you said it was, you know, we could turn it around. It’s preventable. And the important thing here is someone does not wake up one morning and they’re diabetic.

They might, the doctor might finally say, Oh, now you’re at a point where we can give you medications. But this was a process that happened and left a lot of clues for a long period of time. So all along the way, we can turn things around, which I think is the key thing here. So the book is titled Good Energy.

What do you mean by good energy? And then of course, if there’s good energy, I’m sure there must be bad energy.

Yeah, when we’re talking about good energy, we’re really talking about good metabolic function and the reason. I entitled the book Good Energy and tried to make this term more accessible for people is because fundamentally metabolism is how we make energy in the body.

I think we all come to the word metabolism with different connotations. One of which that’s very common is like this has to do simply with my weight. I have a fast metabolism or a slow metabolism and that determines how lean or heavy I am. That’s, that’s very common. The other, Perception would be from high school biology, which is more like, Oh God, the Krebs cycle, the citric acid cycle.

I never want to think about this again. But really the key thing that is so important to understand is that it’s, it’s not only simpler than that. It’s much more far reaching than that. It is the foundation of all health because it’s the way we get gas to the machine of our body. And underneath that, All the other parts of wellness and health, we talk about like hormone health and brain health and muscle health underneath all of that is still metabolic health because every single cell in the body requires energy constantly being produced by metabolic processes for the cells to work properly.

So metabolism is just simply put required for optimal health. And so it’s, it’s such a wonderful area to focus because it’s. Being destroyed in the vast majority of American bodies, but that’s the bad news. The great news is that it’s very simple to understand in our own bodies, and it’s very Simple, not easy necessarily, but it’s simple to improve and to track over time.

So it’s this area that if you get it cleaned up and if you start better powering your body and your cells, a lot of the things that are bothering us various symptoms we have, or I’ve had throughout our lifetime, or even diagnoses that we have can often get better because we just fundamentally have a better functioning body.

And that better function, better power shows up often as the amelioration of different symptoms all throughout the body. So if metabolic functioning isn’t working properly in our bodies, it can show up as almost anything because we have all these different cell types in the body. We have over 200 cell types and, you know, some of them would be easy to sort of think about.

Okay, we’ve got neurons, we’ve got ovarian cells, we’ve got, blood vessel lining cells, we’ve got liver cells, we’ve got kidney cells, we’ve got retinal cells, and within of course all these Things I’m talking about, there’s actually even more subdivision of cell types, but we all know there’s these different types of cells that have different function in the body.

And if you have underpowering, this core foundational dysfunction in the body, which is what I call bad energy, bad metabolic function, then in the retinal cell, it can look very different than neuron or an ovarian cell or a liver cell. So. So metabolic dysfunction is really like a great masquerader because where it’s showing up most prominently in the body can look like a different disease from if it’s showing up in a different part of the body.

In the ovary, metabolic dysfunction can look like infertility and polycystic ovarian syndrome. And in the brain, it can look like depression or Alzheimer’s dementia. So, so that’s why it’s so interesting and so high yield to understand. And when I talk about bad energy, which is fundamentally metabolic dysfunction, we’re really zeroing in on thinking about the mitochondria, which if we remember from high school biology, it’s the powerhouse of the cell.

And it’s the part of the cell that actually does the conversion process of food energy to cellular energy that we can actually use. And in the book, and this is sort of a little bit more technical, when we think about bad energy, we’re really talking about three core. biochemical processes happening in the cell that are maladaptive, that are not, that are not good.

And I call that the trifecta of bad energy, which all boils up into metabolic dysfunction. And that’s mitochondrial dysfunction, a process called oxidative stress, excess free radicals, and basically damaging molecules in the body, and then resulting chronic inflammation. And those three things together, when you really actually Look at the scientific literature through this, a more root cause lens.

And you look at all these different conditions that are all going up in America all at once. And you actually look at the diseases, not this based on the symptoms, but based on the physiology inside the cells of what’s happening. And actually the pathophysiology, so the problematic physiology, that’s what What you’ll find is that many of these different diseases that are all skyrocketing in America, when you look inside the cell, it’s the same stuff happening.

It’s this mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, um, and that’s just showing up as all these different diseases. And unfortunately, those three things are by and large caused by our modern toxic diet and lifestyle. But the good news with that is that we can fix it. Um, and we, and we must.

So that’s good energy, bad energy, um, and how it relates to our, our symptoms and our chronic disease epidemic.

And I’d love to bring up, because I think it’s so fascinating how you came to this, where you are working as a, in, Ear, nose and throat surgeon in a very subtle, if I read the story correctly, like you’re working like three inches on the face, you know, seeing this, these chronic conditions and then kind of going, well, I’m seeing the same thing and I’m just drilling through, like did you kind of drilling through someone’s, Like nose area to pull out pus.

I’m like, listen to this going, ew, but kind of going, why is this continuing to happen? What’s going on? And you hear this and go, wow. Well, whether it’s this chronic sinusitis or it’s endometriosis, or it’s like, you know, that there could be an underlying cause. And yet the way that we treat all of these different things is to have all of these different specialists.

And it’s, it’s kind of crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that really was my awakening. I had done what was so encouraged of me in the healthcare system, which was to hyper subspecialize. We are really obsessed with specialization in our Western medical culture. And if you think about like What makes for a prestigious doctor?

It’s usually an intense subspecialist, like a neurosurgeon, you know, or a plastic surgeon who’s done like regular residency, then specialist training, then more. That’s what we celebrate. And In the culture of really prioritizing and celebrating specialization, unfortunately, what it does is it systemically creates a lot of doctors who are focused on very narrow parts of the body.

And I think what it can do is distract us to seeing how Conditions all over the body are actually connected because that’s not really what we’re paid to do, right? We’re paid to wait until someone gets sick in the area of the body that we focus on and then help them with that. But what we miss in that paradigm is seeing the big picture of how actually maybe the eight symptoms of this patient’s has are actually connected.

That’s not really our job anymore. Once we’re in ear, nose and throat surgeon. So that’s something that I started, Sensing and then diving into and then unraveling and realizing that there’s actually a lot of Unfortunate incentives in our healthcare system to keep us heads down in our specialty lanes and not thinking about root causes, but rather waiting for a sickness to emerge and then treat it.

Of course, there’s a role for that. You know, people, there’s always going to be people who are going to get sick and need help. But we need to focus a lot of our collective energy on the time before patients get sick, before they get sick with these often connected and preventable issues. So that’s really the wake up call that I’m hoping to inspire in the healthcare system is, is that the specialization has a place, but it’s, it’s, we, we’ve overdone it.

Um, and so that was my experience training as a head and neck surgeon and just seeing that. You know, while I could drill into sinuses and stab little holes in eardrums, let the pus come out and dilate tracheas and all these things that we were doing.

Interesting thing to choose to want to do. Yeah, it’s

exciting, you know, it’s, it’s, it feels thrilling and it’s, and there’s so much need.

There are so many people with, um, these very, these, these, these issues in the head and neck can cause such a quality of life issue. Cause you know, if you’ve known someone with like, you know, a recurrent sinusitis, or their ear is always clogged, or they’re losing their hearing, or they can’t breathe well, or they have a chronic cough, like It’s, it’s very, very troubling for the patient and that really inspired and compelled me.

And so I found a lot of meaning in my work for the first few years until I started thinking more deeply about how many patients might have never ended up with those conditions if we had approached the modifiable factors of their environment that might be leading to diseases. And once that kind of it started happening, I was like, Oh geez, I don’t know if I can keep doing what I’m doing.

Because what if we could keep patients out of the clinic, and out of the hospital, and out of the operating room? Unfortunately, that’s not what gets paid for. So if you start thinking that way, all of a sudden you become a little bit of an enemy to the system. And so I had to leave the system, and, and focus on I’m pursuing this path outside of the conventional healthcare system.

You’ll love this in our, in my other company, Mindshare, where we support all of these health practitioners in really getting their message out to the world. We call everyone rebels with a root cause.

Yes, rebels with a root cause. I love that. My

husband came up with that, but it really is. All of a sudden you see You see a different way.

Yeah.

And then you, and, and quite often it happens because it’s either you or a family member or close friends not getting better and you start kind of sniffing around looking at what else there is out there and then you see this whole other thing and you’re like, Oh, and you can’t unsee it. And you know, I’m, I started out as an exercise physiologist and then realized I needed To know the nutrition side too, because I kept getting asked about it.

And, and, and I thought, well, you know, can’t out exercise a poor diet. Although it turns out you can do a lot with exercise and a poor diet, but you know, why would you, um, but I never had those tools. I always said the tools of diet. Exercise and lifestyle, which is actually really pretty great. Cause you can get people very far with that.

Right. So, so I, you know, I’m loving now that these are becoming mainstream tools. And so you dug in, you started to look at this and uncovered this trifecta of doom of having, um, you know, mitochondrial dysfunction, which we’ve talked a lot about on this show, because I’m a big fan of urolithin A and what do we need to do with that?

You know, mitophagy and cleaning out our mitochondria as we age. And we, and then you have inflammation, which of course is a major, major problem. And then you had oxidative stress. So you discovered those things. And then how did you start to put together how to turn this around and what were the culprits and all of that?

Yeah. You know, I think that it really comes back to I think just diving deep into the science of what impacts each of these different factors. And so, you know, take the mitochondria for instance. It’s, it’s, it’s so wild because if you go to PubMed, which of course, as you know, where all the papers are, all the scientific papers are in PubMed, but for people who don’t know, it’s a, it’s a government website where all peer reviewed research goes.

And. If you start to go there and search things like mitochondria and like ultra processed food, or mitochondria and artificial fragrances, or mitochondria and circadian biology, or mitochondria and sleep, or mitochondria and psychological stress or trauma, and just start looking at, I mean there’s, Millions and millions of scientific papers.

And we just as physicians see the smallest little fragment of it related to mostly diagnosis of diseases, intervention, whether that’s pharmacologic or surgical. And workup. So how do you actually like order the right tests to basically diagnose a patient? That’s just a small fraction of the research.

There’s all this other basic science research and molecular biology research that is looking at the cellular biology of what’s happening. So it really was like going back to the science and uncovering a whole world of physiology that I just had not been made aware of. And, and, and, and reflecting on what has changed so much in our environment over the past, why have all, why are all these diseases going up since like the 1950s, 1970s, and then really just reflecting on like what has changed and then going back to the science.

And the case was it took years to do and to put together, but You know, and ultimately that’s why I felt so compelled to write a book. You know, I’m not the first person to make these conclusions, but my journey from my specialty to metabolic health, like, you know, this was the journey that I had to go on for myself and really learn it from the primary literature myself.

And, you know, when you do that, you just start to see these patterns and there is An amazing world and field called network and systems biology, which is kind of like the academically accepted phrase for root cause medicine. But the idea is that you’re looking at the networks of diseases rather than silos of diseases.

So what are the connecting points between all the diseases rather than just seeing them each as totally separate silos? Um, but even though network biology is something that there are researchers thinking about, um, it hasn’t made it into clinical practice at all. So that’s where we have to take it upon ourselves.

Like there’s, there’s some actual research that shows it takes 17 years for research findings to make it into clinical practice. First of all, 17 years is too long. We’re in the middle of that right now, where There, we know there’s a connection between all the chronic diseases and yet our doctors aren’t really talking about it yet.

So that’s where it becomes something that we as like a more grassroots movement have to spread this awareness so people can take their health into their own hands. But I actually fear that it’s going to be much longer than 17 years. If people don’t get active about this, because there’s actually huge financial incentives in the healthcare system to not adopt a network biology type of perspective where we are focusing on the links like oxidative stress and chronic inflammation.

Because if we do that, what happens is if you really, if we really like pull the weeds of disease out from the roots rather than just trimming, Patients will get better and that will reduce a lot of customers of the healthcare system. And so that’s not to say there’s nefarious forces, but it is in conflict with the current financial model of healthcare to focus on root causes because sequestering people into 10 different specialist office year after year is very, very profitable.

So, so that’s kind of what my journey was with it and to kind of back up a little bit with one of the three aspects of. of bad energy, which is chronic inflammation. That one, I think, that one I think makes it actually easy to think about, sort of, The logic flow of how this came to be. So I was an ENT and almost every condition we treat is a condition of chronic inflammation.

That I knew. I didn’t make the connection between mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress and chronic inflammation, but I knew that we were prescribing steroids, which reduce inflammation and everyone coming in had these red swollen tissues, whether it was in their ear, nose or their throat or their skin of their head and neck.

So that was obvious. But what I didn’t think about ever in my training was what causes inflammation. We knew how to treat it and diagnose it, but not what caused it. And when you step back and think about what inflammation is, our immune system, which is what generates inflammation, they’re like the warriors in our body.

They’re the army. So they are there to address the problem. Threats and to fight. And that’s amazing if you have an infection or a cut or a wound that needs to be healed. But unfortunately, in most American bodies, the army is always on. It’s always activated. So it’s not like we’re always infected with a bacteria.

So what’s going on? So that actually was a reflection for me of like, what is happening, maybe invisibly. In our world right now that is causing our body to think that there is always a war because that is what’s going on. What is there happening in our environment that’s making our cells Always be in fear.

Like that’s pretty scary. And from that place of kind of just compassion for the body, a body that has chronic inflammation, you start looking around the world and thinking like, what are the threats? And you know, you pick up your phone and it’s like, well, that’s a threat, right? You’ve got social media 24 hours a day telling you about about war happening all over the world and about the violence in your city.

You’ve got, you know, eating ultra processed food. Well, that’s not really real food. It’s, it’s, it’s industrially manufactured frankenfood. So that could be a threat to the body. So, you know, the pesticides covering our food that our body was never meant to handle, that’s a threat. So just really thinking like, what’s the body up against?

And it, what, what comes from that is just this like logical, it’s so logical. The body would be. revving up a fighting response. So what we need to do is think about the body. Like what, what is our individual body being threatened by in our environment? How do we remove that threat and let the body have a break?

And in that break, It can pursue its normal healthy physiologic processes like metabolic health.

And there’s so many threats. You look at it like, you know, you look at the ultra processed food research and just the crazy thing it does. Just that. Right. Um, which I find so, that one thing.

That’s seventy percent of our calories now.

Right? Oh my gosh. So I was just in Spain this summer and kind of looking around going wow, there’s really no people here who are overweight or obese. First of all, they’re walking everywhere and no one’s walking frappuccino. Or a jumbo, jumbo juice or anything like that, or a candy bar. And they said, yeah, we maybe 20, 25%, um, processed food, but literally go to the grocery store and you don’t see it.

It’s kind of in the back, you know, everything’s fresh. I was like, wow, this is, this is interesting. And then you look at the research. Cause you know, I get so much, uh, on my DMs and Instagram about how to boost metabolism. I’m like, well, If you eat processed food, have you seen what it does to your I think, I think I heard you talking about that one.

I don’t know if you’re, were you the one talking about the research study where they put them or was it, uh, where they put them in a lab? Cause I know that eating processed food can drop your, can make you overeat and drop your metabolic rate alongside it.

Yeah. I mean, there, I had mentioned on, on a podcast about this study at the NIH with, with Dr.

Kevin Hall, where they were really looking at like, what is the impact of, of ultra processed food? And it was fascinating. This was back in 2021. And they took Like 20 participants that had like stable weight and they basically checked them into the NIH for a month and didn’t let them leave.

I can’t believe anyone would agree to do this.

I

know, it’s fascinating. And so for the first two weeks, they were able to eat unlimited quantities of unprocessed food. And so they’d bring them all these unprocessed food meals and weren’t restricting any calories. They just could eat whatever they wanted. And in the second half of the experience, they were eating almost all ultra processed food.

And what’s so interesting is that they, the paper actually shows images of what the meals were. And you’d be surprised the own, the unprocessed or minimally processed and ultra processed trays looked very similar. Cause you can fake what looks like real food with ultra processed food. So for instance, like if it was a.

Whole wheat bread, turkey sandwich with freshly carved roasted turkey with maybe some like homemade aioli on one side and some freshly cut fruit on the other side. It would be also a turkey sandwich and fruit, but it would be white bread, deli meat. Hellman’s mayo, and then maybe some fruit that came in a cup.

So it’s not like it was like, you know, the most beautiful organic, you know, specialty food on one side and just chips on the other. It was actually, it shows you how much we could be fooled. So the results were that when the people were in the unprocessed food two weeks, they ate 3, 500 fewer calories per week, which added up to 7, 000 calories over two weeks.

then in the two weeks where they were on the ultra processed food diet where they ate 7, 000 more calories and the in the unprocessed food Two weeks they lost two pounds and in the processed food two weeks they gained two pounds. So this was just showing that like if you just leave people up to their own devices and give them food they are going to eat far more calories if it’s ultra processed and we understand the reasons for this.

Ultra processed food is designed to subvert our satiety mechanisms. It’s designed by food scientists to take us to our bliss point to make us insatiable to do things like they’ll add ingredients like fructose, liquid fructose, which actually drives hunger and doesn’t make us full. Um, and so, and then the, the actual pleasure and, and the, the way that it’s triggering our reward search in our brain just makes us essentially ravenous.

So it’s empty calories that drives, that inhibits our normal release of satiety hormones that effortlessly make us know when to stop eating. And actually uses scientific strategies to get us to eat more. Um, so we kind of all know that, but it actually took locking 20 people up at the NIH for four weeks to really show it.

So the simplest way, you know, again, simple, but not easy, but the simplest way to transform your health is to just eliminate ultra processed foods for some period of time. And I think that is one of the most transformational things you can possibly do. In four, eight weeks of eating unprocessed, ideally organic food.

You’re going to change your taste preferences. You’re going to give your body just innumerable, you know, amounts of nutrients and, and just helpful, uh, food, food compounds to support our cell biology. We’re going to improve our metabolic health and we’re going to change our microbiome composition and everything’s just going to be easier after that.

So I think it’s. It’s just such an unlock when we can make that commitment to reduce or eliminate ultra process foods.

It’s, it’s, when I look at, you know, the virgin diet, which was based on food intolerance, but here’s the reality when you, and it was, you know, pulling out these seven foods for three weeks.

And, but literally when you look at the foods, gluten, dairy, corn, egg, soy, peanut sugar, and artificial sweeteners, you just, you can’t, you pull out all the Ultra processed foods, right? And so the reality is, you know, people are like, Oh my gosh, I cannot believe how much weight I dropped. I’m like, well, you really just pulled out ultra processed foods.

Same with sugar impact diet. When I did that one, it was to show people I could retrain their taste buds literally in weeks and that they wouldn’t like these things anymore. And that was the reality. It was. You’re pulling out all the processed foods. And we don’t realize how addictive they are until we get rid of them.

I remember looking at a study, Sean Stevenson turned me onto it. It was the, you know, they did one American cheese, uh, and white bread sandwich compared to the whole grain and cheese sandwich. And it was the same thing. 500 calorie difference, just the cheese sandwich. I’m like a cheese sandwich, you know, it’s crazy stuff.

So, and I really love this concept in food that a mentor taught me early on of adding before you take away. And I think that we can crowd out a lot of that bad stuff if we just went, you know what? I’m going to sit down and I’m going to have my clean protein. I’m going to have non starchy vegetables.

I’ll get some healthy fats in. I’ll make sure I’m getting the fiber trifecta, some fermented foods. I’d love you to talk through. I like your presentation. Kind of like a plan that you have for food. But when you put those things in, You’ll actually be full

and

you’ll crowd out. And I heard you on another podcast.

I don’t remember which one that was either, but I think maybe it was the Huberman lab, but talking about some of the different foods you want to make sure that you get into your diet. I thought it was, it was fantastic.

Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s so many ways to think about how to structure a diet, but the perspective that I wanted to bring to the conversation was that Very, very first principles.

We have these cells in our body and we know a lot about them thanks to scientific research. And if we give the body what it needs and expects to function properly, we will much more effortlessly just be healthy. Because we are. Most of what our body is actually comprised of is food. So if we give it the right building blocks consistently, and consistency is key because our bodies are constantly turning over.

We shed billions. We literally die, have billions, hundreds of billions of cells die every single day and get reborn. And that all requires food to be the building blocks. And so we want to just give the best possible materials that we know are required for functioning. So to just break it down simply, I mean, there’s tens of thousands of different types of nutrients we can get from food, but I believe that if you focus on these five things, it can get you a long way there to meeting your body’s needs.

So I focus on a fiber source in every meal, a probiotic source in every meal, omega 3s, a healthy protein source, and then micronutrients and antioxidants. And so some people might be thinking, well, I don’t know what. Micronutrient antioxidant rich foods are, but really in the book, of course, and on my website and everywhere for free, I share lists of what are the top sources of each of these things.

I think

you’re giving a food list too. You’re giving an ultimate foods list. So we’ll have that for everybody at jjvirgin. com forward slash good energy. So you’re getting the list.

Perfect. Okay. So yeah,

let’s. That list is

a great place to start. And yeah, so.

Walk us through then with. Those recommendations.

’cause when I heard I go, oh that’s really good. Um, I think I might’ve emailed myself it ’cause I was listening to a podcast at a gym, walk through what that would look like in a meal.

Absolutely. So I like to start with just a few of my favorites from each of those categories. So when I think about fiber.

So my favorite sources for me personally are beans and legumes, uh, seeds, especially chia seeds, basil seeds, flax seeds. Basil

seeds. Where do you get basil seeds? I’ve heard you talk about these. I’m like, what are those? Basil seeds are amazing.

You can use them completely interchangeably with chia seeds.

But they have twice the omega 3s, more fiber, and far more of several other, um, vitamins and minerals. So they’re like a, they’re like a souped up chia seed.

Wow. And

the brand that I use is called Zen Basil. It’s an org, fully organic, women owned company. And they’re a little bit pricier than chia seeds. But if you think about Nutrient per dollar over just calories per dollar.

They are, they are filled with it. So we in just two tablespoons of basil seeds, I believe that that has nine grams of fiber. And so my partner and I eat chia based basil seed pudding. For breakfast most mornings with some homemade, um, like nut milk and easily we can get 20 grams of fiber just from having a small, very small portion of basil seed pudding.

So that gets me. Two fifths of the way to my 50 grams of fiber per day goal, just by having that. Does that basil

seed, is it basil tasting? No, not at all. Okay, good. Cause I was like, I don’t know if I’d want basil pudding in the morning. It’s so

amazing. It, it, it’s, I, it really tastes pretty identical to a chia seed, maybe a tiny bit difference in flavor, but, but you negligible, like you could definitely fool someone and say that this is a chia seed pudding.

So you just use them the exact same way. And, um, and sometimes I’ll even grind in some flax seeds into that, which means extra fiber. So, so that’s like my favorite of the fiber. And then when I think of Omega threes, like I love wild caught salmon, I do like sardines, I love hemp seeds. So I’ve always got those in my pantry.

And then I think about my probiotic sources. I love sauerkraut. I love kimchi. I love Greek yogurt. I really like kvass, which is a low sugar kombucha. Basically it’s like fermented beets and it makes a drink. Um, and so it’s a nice alternative to kombucha, which has basically just become soda in most of the brands at the grocery store.

It’s filled with sugar. So have a few, I always have those in my, in my fridge and then healthy protein for me. It’s like. A freezer full of force of nature game meats, not affiliated with them in any way, but I just, I love my elk and venison and bison. I’ve got that in the freezer and I’ll usually defrost one every couple of days and cook it up.

Um, so that, and I do, I love tempeh. And then micronutrients and antioxidants. This is going to be like the colorful fruits and vegetables, the color, more colorful, the better. Um, and variety of colors, all those colors represent anti different types of antioxidants. And then the highest antioxidant foods of all foods are herbs and spices.

And actually Dried herbs and spices. Cause you kind of get rid of all the water content and then you’re using it more volume essentially. So fresh or dried herbs and spices of any kind are just packed with antioxidants. So all that has to say, those are, I always have my kitchen at the ready, you know, just able to grab something from each of those categories.

And then putting together a meal becomes like totally mix and match. So for breakfast, if I’m like, Instead of just having scrambled eggs, which would give us protein and maybe a little bit of omega three fats, if we’re getting pasture raised, um, organic eggs, but, but scrambled eggs, that’s great. It’s a great start, but how about we add a little bit of sauerkraut on top?

How about we add, Freshly, uh, chopped basil and dill on top. How about we add a little side of basil seed or chia seed pudding, or maybe like a little bean salad from the night before with some chopped onions and parsley for some fiber. And so it’s all about just building a meal with these five things in mind.

And. And then, you know, for Omega to add more Omega 3s to that, you know, you, you could put some hemp, some hemp seeds or flax seeds on your basil seed pudding. So it’s like, it’s just constantly having that list in your mind. And again, like you said, adding to the meal. And I just genuinely believe that if we’ve got a framework like that for every meal, and there are other frameworks that might work really well for people, we will Get to a healthy diet so much faster and the beauty, it works for anyone.

If you’re vegan, if you’re keto, it’s like you can, you can get those things on any diet, but we got to give the body the building blocks that it needs. And looking into the research, those are five that all support specifically Metabolic health.

Well, and good blood sugar balance too, which of course is a big part of metabolic health.

And I would love to dig in since now, are you co founder of Levels? What’s your Yeah. Um, so I’d love to dig into the use of a CGM. Yes. And because all of that, when I think of good blood sugar balance, I’m always thinking protein. fiber bat is this beautiful little trifecta, but tell everyone about levels.

And then I’d love to just walk through, cause I get asked all the time, like if I’m going to use a CGM, how, you know, what am I looking for?

Yes. So I was just, I was checking my blood sugar while you were just asking. I’m like, I’m at 78 right now. I’m very happy with that. Um, just after lunch, which is good, which we’ll get to speak to, uh, How we balance our meals, which I fully agree with what you just said about protein and fat and fiber.

Um, so levels. Is a company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic disease epidemic. So we have lofty, lofty mission, but I think together with the amazing community around us, like yourself, like we, we can all do this together. We can work towards a metabolically healthy country. The way we’re doing this is by helping just radically spread metabolic awareness for each individual so they can understand their own bodies better and make better choices.

Cause we’re up against so much. So many cards are stacked against us right now in our culture for health. And if we can understand more about our own metabolic health, we become so much more powerful and clear in our health journey. We can cut through a lot of the noise and confusion. So the way that we facilitate metabolic awareness is through Democratizing access to this device called a continuous glucose monitor, which is a wearable similar to an Apple watch or an aura ring, but it’s a wearable that you put on the back of your arm that actually does have a little internal probe that’s painless, but it is actually doing a lab test every five to 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, and send that information to your smartphone.

So you get a movie of your blood sugar 24 hours a day for the length of time you’re wearing the sensor, which varies between 10 and 14 days, depending on which brand you’re using of sensor. And What’s so exciting about having that data stream is that you can see how every bite of food you’re taking, every meal, every workout, the sleep you got the night before, how it’s all working together to either keep your blood sugar in a healthy and more stable range, which is Critical over the long term for health, or if it’s causing you to go on a glucose roller coaster, up, down, up, down, up, down.

And then you can make real time choices to, uh, improve your blood sugar. And over time, those day to day choices and insights build ultimately a more, a more healthy lifestyle. And we couple that main offering, which is access to continuous glucose monitors, which are still prescription only devices in the U S they’re pretty much over the counter everywhere else in the world.

But for some reason, we, we gatekeep them in the U S unfortunately. So we help people get access to those. And we also, um, offer blood work, which can help you see more of these like lab work based markers of, of, of metabolic health, like fasting insulin. Um, ApoB and things like that. And then we just have a huge education platform with just putting together metabolic health thought leaders, podcasts, a newsletter, deep articles, research based.

And then of course our app, which is the software tool that overlays everything and helps people create these insights on how to. How to work towards more stable blood sugar, like helping you understand how your sleep is impacting your blood sugar and that you should probably take a walk if your blood sugar is starting to go up and things like that.

So I trying to think of when this was, it was about two years ago. I, I played around with my first CGM and I’ve been playing back and forth with CGM. So I remember when I first put it on and of course I shared on social media and I got attacked. Whoa. By, um, type 1 diabetics saying I was taking their machines away.

And I’m like, there’s not a shortage of CGMs. Like there’s no shortage. So, and. My comment to all of this is we have this metabolic health crisis that didn’t happen overnight, happens over time, and if we could give people CGM so they can connect the dots, and I’m glad you said it, it’s not just what you eat, it’s how you sleep, it’s your exercise, so that you can see, oh, if I did some air squats after I ate, or if I went out for a walk, and then I did that from my brain, you know?

Bye. This is going to have a dramatic impact in my blood sugar regulation. If I get crappy sleep, uh oh, my blood sugar is a rollercoaster the next day. I discovered, um, that kiwi fruit’s a really bad thing for JJ. Like, just, nope, kiwi fruit. I, I wore it, I was in the Maldives and, you know, I, they had Kiwifruit, I’m like, cool.

I got, now granted I got a bowl of Kiwifruit, not bad on me, but boy, it just boom jacked me straight up to 180. Wow. So I was like, wow, I would love you to share. When someone’s looking at using a CGM, and again, I think this is a great way for you to connect those dots and really understand how, you know, what’s impacting your blood sugar, but I’d love them to understand what, what does, what should they be shooting for?

What does it look like for, for you to have good blood sugar control?

Yeah. Yeah. So the interesting thing about the Kiwifruit example is that it really gets to a key point about blood sugar, which is that Everyone is different in terms of what they will really spike to. And so for me, like Kiwis actually aren’t so bad for me in terms of spike, but grapes are, will put me through the roof and those might be fine for you.

And so that’s what the data actually shows us is that there’s biochemical individuality in terms of how we each respond to different carbohydrate loads and different pairings of food. So that’s why it’s so interesting. And of course there’s. General statements we can make about how to keep blood sugar more stable, which are very important.

Like If we eat refined added sugars or refined carbohydrates like white flour, that is going to turn into sugar in the bloodstream and, and, and spoke spike. Most people, if we add protein to meals, that’s often going to curb a spike. If we walk after meals, that’s often going to curb a spike. So there’s, there’s generalizations, but, uh, that we can make, but ultimately it’s, it is very individual.

So in terms of what we’re shooting for, what we know is that if we are going up and down big, Big spikes, big crashes all throughout the day. That’s not only good. That’s not only not good for our long term health. That’s called glycemic variability. And the more glycemic variability, the more you’re associating with things like future risk of type two diabetes and other metabolic issues.

So we want to get off the glucose rollercoaster, which is

So, I think we’ve all had the experience where we have like a post meal crash, we eat something and then we feel lethargic or tired afterwards. Often when we see what’s happening with our blood sugar during something like a crash, We may have had a blood sugar spike and then the body overcompensates to bring it down and we actually crash below our baseline.

And it’s often in that dip that we don’t feel good and we actually feel hungry and want sugar because our body is asking us to get the blood sugar back up to baseline. So we get on this weird, vicious cycle where we Spike, we crash, then we want sugar. We spike, we crash, then we want sugar. And I would venture to guess that there are millions of people on that rollercoaster every single day since Close to 70 percent of our foods are ultra processed foods and a backbone of ultra processed foods is added sugars and refined grains, which put us on that roller coaster.

What we want more is gentle rolling hills with the occasional spike, which is fine. Our body knows how to handle an occasional spike. It doesn’t know how to handle being bombarded Five times a day, every day with that glucose load. So gentle rolling hills. And it’s hard to give an exact range of what we’re shooting for, because frankly, there’s not good data to suggest what the optimal window to be in, but based on our review of a lot of different data sources, it looks like healthy people without metabolic dysfunction, wearing continuous glucose monitors tend to stay between about 70.

And 120 almost all the time, like, like 95 plus percent of the time. So in that range of about 70 to 120, I try and stay about 70 to 110, meaning that after my meals, I’m not really going above 110, occasionally 120. And then if I go out to a restaurant, And I get bamboozled by like sugar and a salad dressing.

I might go up to one 70 or one 80. And that’s obviously something I like to avoid with my, with various strategies. Like you talked about pairing protein, taking a walk. So I would say 70 to one 20 with the rare big spike. Um, and. Most people would likely want to be in about the 70 to 85 milligrams rest leader range when they wake up.

So like they’re fasting glucose and I will say these sensors, they’re not meant to be diagnostic tools. And sometimes they can be a little bit inaccurate compared to like a finger stick, but typically if you’re, if you’re waking and your blood sugar is between 70 and 85, that’s a good sign that. Your insulin sensitivity is quite good.

So those are some of the ranges I, I, I think are, are fairly well supported, um, with research in healthy populations.

And I’m, I’m sure part of your plan includes exercise. So, and since you work with a CGM, what are you seeing with, um, exercise, especially using things like air squats and walking after a meal and then resistance training in general?

Yeah. So I would say the most overwhelming. Magical thing that people learn from CGM is the power of moving after a meal. And people often find that simply 10 to 20 minutes of a walk or being active in any way soon after eating can Greatly diminish their propensity to have a big blood sugar spike. And there’s tons of research to support this, but even in our anecdotal customer experience, uh, data, this is.

Probably the most widely reported phenomenon. And so that’s very exciting because it’s a simple, not high exertion tool that we can use to more stabilize our blood sugar and actually get that post meal load out of the bloodstream and put it to work as opposed to requiring the body to secrete more insulin to take it out of the bloodstream and then essentially have the cells having to figure out what to do with it, which either Process it for energy or store it as fat.

And so we want to get that blood sugar into the muscles being used because there’s a need you’re moving your muscles. And that’s, that’s wonderful. So that’s kind of as much as a silver bullet, as I think there is, is a, is a post meal movement. Um, and what that can look like is just like, Like right after clearing the dishes and before kind of digging into cleaning the kitchen, just like go for a walk around the block.

Um, if you can’t get outside, do 20, 30, 40, 50 air squats and some jumping jacks, or have a little dance party in the kitchen, but just making sure you’re staying active and using those big muscle groups. So that that’s an awesome one. And then. I think more broadly, if I had to speak to some trends around just exercise and glucose, we do find that people who do high intensity workouts, like a HIIT training or, you know, really getting up into the top, like 80 to 195 percent of their max heart rate, that and intense weightlifting can sometimes actually cause people to have their blood sugar spike during a workout, which.

is not necessarily a problem. It’s very different physiology than a food spike. And what that tends to be about is that the body is doing stressful, intense physical activity. And the body is trying to mobilize stored energy in the body. And usually that’s coming from liver glycogen, essentially stored chains of glucose in the liver and mobilizing that to fuel the muscles.

So that’s actually, that’s, that can actually be a sign essentially that you’re working really hard and can be kind of a nice.

When I was wearing the CGM, I was like, how high can I get my blood sugar at the gym? I thought they’re going to call me going, what is wrong with you? Right. Cause it’s like, I got it up to 200.

Wow. Yes. Cause

it’s so fascinating cause you’ll find these different thresholds. Um, which, you know, and I, I would say I can sort of tell the difference now between, What’s really pushing it. And what’s more of like an endurance training workout by seeing what’s happening with my blood sugar. The caveat being that this is, if you haven’t had a carb load right before the workout, this is sort of more in like a balanced blood sugar state.

That’s when you can, but for more of like a hike or a slow jog, or maybe a yoga class, that’s when I’ll find glucose to either be stable or dip a little bit because there I’m not stressing my body to activate. These, this, this glycogenolysis process through catecholamine hormones. Like we’re not activating that, but we’re actually just doing is activating muscles to be a sink for glucose.

Right. We’re just sucking sugar

into the muscles, which is magic.

Yeah. So either way, the glucose can tell you quite a bit about. what your workout is doing to your physiology, um, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. And both those things are important.

Yeah.

So it’s fantastic. I mean, the fact you can see a little blood sugar lowering when you’re doing more of this lower intensity exercise, sucking the sugar into your muscles.

I call it the sponge, you know, and then you can kick it up, which is now using some of that sugar. So now it has a place to go when you’re, Done exercising is fantastic too. And I mean, that’s part of my, when I’m doing high intensity or resistance training, I would tell people that’s not when you want to be in fat burning mode.

Right. It’s not the point of that high intensity exercise. So that’s, so now you’ll be burning fat all day long, not during that high intensity.

Yeah.

So I, I love using a blood sugar, like a CGM to be able to look at these things and understand that. Yes. The, uh, the other thing I heard you talking about, and I never heard someone say it this way, and I thought it was just fantastic.

Um, it’s, it’s kind of like creating your own. bodies pharmacy. So there’s so much discussion around weight loss drugs and when I started to look at them, I go, well, wouldn’t the real question be, why aren’t we making what we need? What has happened? Where have we become, you know, and as I started to unpack, um, GLP ones and, and what we need, if you’re metabolically dysfunctional, if you’ve got insulin resistance, you’re going to have struggle with making GLP one.

So you talked about how, how to help your body make GLP one. And I thought it was just a fantastic description of it. It was three things. Yes.

Yes. So, You know, I just think it’s a, it’s such a great point of like, okay, if we’re giving the body a shot of something that it theoretically already makes, what if we could just get back to making enough of what we need?

And, and theoretically, We should be equipped to make enough of this satiety hormone because if you think about two things, one, the entire rest of the animal world, which has very similar physiology to us, you know, or at least the mammalian world, there are not, there are not chronically ill or obese Uh, they’re, they’re not chronic illness or obesity epidemics in any other animal species.

So they’re, they’re GLP1, their satiety hormones are working okay. So why aren’t ours? And then you look at the human species and just a hundred, 200 years ago, obesity was almost non existent. It was so rare that case reports are written about it. So something was working and is working in other animals that is broken in us.

So instead of going towards a mass injection campaign, Why don’t we think about what has changed? And fundamentally, it’s our diet. It’s the composition of our diet, which no longer is appropriately stimulating satiety as it is in other animals. And we’re not working,

we’re not working for that diet either.

That’s, that. Doesn’t help us either. At least those animals in the wild have to actually work for it. They have

to work for it. Yeah. We did have, we also had to work harder for it in the past, right? We were, we had to, we didn’t have cars. We had to walk, we had to farm. And it’s such a good point as well. So going down that road made me think about, okay, at what levels could we intervene naturally?

And there’s three main ways that we could. So just thinking about GLP 1, cause these medications that we’re talking about are GLP 1 agonist medications. We could increase GLP 1 in the body theoretically through three ways. One, make more of the cells in the body that make GLP 1. So those are L cells of the gut that make this hormone.

Then, we could get each L cell that we have to make more of the GLP 1 hormone. Maybe there’s ways to stimulate the L cells to secrete more. And the last one is Whatever GLP 1 we do secrete in the body naturally, how do we keep it around for longer instead of degrading it so it can do more work? And there’s an enzyme in the body, a protein that degrades GLP 1 called DPP 4.

And when you start thinking that way and go to the literature with those questions, you find that there are dozens of strategies to do each of those things. Make more L cells. Get L cells to make more GLP 1. And activate DPP4, or I’m sorry, inhibit DPP4 so that it does not break down so much GLP 1. And simply put, it’s things you would expect.

It’s eating a broad range of nutrient rich, unprocessed foods. But specifically, it’s, if you look at, let’s say for the first one, increasing L cell differentiated in the gut, it’s been shown that short chain fatty acids can promote differentiation of L cells in the gut. How do we make short chain fatty acids?

We eat fiber, our microbiome ferments the fiber, they make short chain fatty acids. So, We need to eat more fiber. We know that fiber is associated with satiety. This is one of the biochemical reasons why, uh, we know that people who have blood sugar problems like diabetes have fewer L cells. So this is more correlation, but we would assume that if we can, and you know, it’s, it’s hard to know the chicken and the egg here, but if we can keep our blood sugar levels healthy and not move down the road of type 2 diabetes.

Ideally, we can maintain our L cell population, certain phytochemicals and molecules in plants like ginseng has been shown to increase L cell proliferation in animal models. And then antioxidant rich foods have been shown to increase L cell proliferation. So all of this goes back to, wow, the same things like fiber and antioxidants that we talked about as important components for metabolically healthy meals and mitochondrial support are also are the things that stimulate this population.

And just how long would it take, do you think, for, you know, to, for this, the fiber, I’m assuming resistant starch would be a great one here. Uh, ginseng, like how quickly could you start to notice a difference in your L cells?

I don’t, I don’t think we know the answer to that question. I will say, um, The research I’m citing about short chain fatty acid, it’s done in cell cultures.

The research on, um, fiber rich diets in L cells, a lot of rat studies, mice studies, one human study. So, This is, and I, the, the ginseng was also in a rat study. So this is all theoretical, this is all molecular biology, but this has not been, it would be very difficult to study in humans because you’d have to biopsy the intestine to understand how many more L cells.

So the purpose of sharing And find someone to

pay for it.

Right. Yeah. The idea is like, let’s take, mechanistic research, which are harm free interventions. In fact, any of these interventions, fiber, short chain fatty acids, antioxidant rich foods are going to help us and see if we can find a subjective improvement.

So I think the answer, JJ, is that we don’t, we do not know. Um, and this is all about putting together pieces that are really not being put together for us, um, in our, in the ecosystem, um, of the health conversation right now. The same goes for. How to actually stimulate the L cells to make more GLP 1, which is of course of intense interest because we want to make more of the hormone.

Similar characters here. We want to eat more fiber. That’s been shown to increase GLP 1. A really interesting one is this concept of thylakoids, which are plant compounds that exist in chloroplasts of plants. So they actually make plants green or part of the pigment that makes plants green. And they, there’s been research that has shown that, um, simply having five grams of thylakoid, in this case it was purified, um, in humans for 12 weeks led to significantly more GLP 1 secretion.

So if you want to get five grams of thylakoids, that’s eating simply about 3. 5 ounces of spinach. This is so such a small amount. Um, so that’s about a hundred grams of spinach. Cause the thylakoids about.

So would this be like any kind of deep green leafy would be?

My understanding is that pretty much Green plants are going to have thylakoids because it has to do with the photosynthetic machinery.

Um, this is huge.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s so funny. You, you look at this and go, okay, so we’re talking about fiber, deep green leafies. Right. And it’s not, these are, these are not in protein. I mean, obviously like protein is going to be an easy, huge one along with fiber. You already knew those help with satiety, but then you look at it.

This is what I love about, about food, about nutrients versus drugs is There’s so many side benefits. So you might be eating fiber cause you go, Oh, you want a better blood sugar control. Oh, by the way, it’s also doing these other things, you know, it’s exactly. And it’s just, it’s just

like science showing us what we kind of already know, but you know what, that’s great.

It’s good to know that there’s papers to back it up, but you know, we, we know that. Eating a diverse, nutrient rich diet that includes good quantity of different key macronutrients like protein, um, is gonna be valuable for our health. We know that, we can feel it. The molecular biology just brings it more alive.

And I think helps us feel maybe more committed to like doubling down. Like if we know that valine containing protein, uh, have a really stimulatory effect on GLP one, maybe that encourage us to eat, to eat more valine rich foods that we know are, can be very part of a healthy diet. Like. You know, grass fed cottage cheese and, uh, game meats and turkey and eggs and things like that.

So, um, yeah, there’s a, there’s a long, uh, blog post on my website from my newsletter that goes through all of the research I found. We just touched on some of it, which I think is, you know, helpful to get a few of the examples, but, um, there’s more in there. And, um, I think the article’s called BYO. B Y O zempic.

Bring your own ozempic. We’ll find it. Yeah. We will

find it and link to it because this is super important.

Simply it’s, it’s a well balanced, colorful, protein rich diet.

I just have to throw this one out there because everyone got like spinach phobic because there was a book written that made oxalate the word.

You know how, you know how something’s pulled out and it is now the devil and this is the thing taking everybody out. And so it was oxalates and this has come up all the time. And I’m like, you know, there’s this. Small percentage of people that have issues with oxalates. It’s not, this is not a global health problem.

Um, so I’m glad you brought up spinach and deep green leafy because I thought, oh gosh, now people are going to be afraid of this. I know.

I hear it every day on social media because I love greens. And to be totally oxalate rabbit hole. Um, But, you know, it, I do see it on every post about greens, that people are concerned about this.

And I don’t quite know how to reconcile it because there’s overwhelming data that green leafy vegetables are very healthy for the human body. And so, you know, it’s either oxalates or it’s, it’s carnivores saying that spinach is poison. So, uh, you know, this is, this lectins, right? But this is where, this is where I think.

You know, you preach this, I preach this. It’s like, there is enough tools and technology today, like biomarker testing, to deeply understand whether your diet is working for you. And you don’t have to fall prey to different marketing food philosophies, like oxalates are a problem, lectins are a problem.

Carnivore is the only way to be healthy. So what I mean by that is, if you’re on a diet that on A deep intuitive level you feel is right for your body and you are moving towards subjective health. You’re getting stronger. You feel better. Your symptoms are going away and you get your key biomarkers checked things like inflammation and autoimmune markers.

If you’re concerned about inflammation or things like that and your metabolic biomarkers, and they are all moving in the right direction towards optimal range or are in optimal range, then You can ignore the noise about this. So people say to me, how could you possibly eat oxalates? How could you possibly eat spinach or whatever?

And I can just say, if you want to see it, here’s my, here’s my lab work. I have virtually no inflammation. All my autoimmune, you know, markers are negative. My gut function is great. My mitochondrial function is good. And. I feel amazing. So for me, it’s not a problem. And my wish for everyone is that they can understand enough about tuning into their own symptoms of body and understanding enough about their biomarkers to be able to transcend the insanity of the nutrition conversation right now.

This is so important. It’s funny, when I wrote The Virgin Diet, it wasn’t take these seven foods out forever. It was, take these seven foods out for three weeks, then re challenge to see how they work for you. And I was like, people go, I’ve been on this for years. I go, it’s, it was, it’s a, it’s a three week plan.

Same with the sugar impact diet. It was really to help people become a food detective. And there are times, like I have one person I’m working on right now, with right now, and I put him on the carnivore diet. Not forever, but because it’s work, it like, this is someone who has 200 pounds to lose and I had to get the food noise out.

Yes. And help him get through this. Now, I think there’s, that you use diets therapeutically. Some, some are meant for a short period of time, some are meant for a longer period of time, and things may change based on what’s going on with you. So, but you know. And that’s why testing

regularly is so helpful because maybe Vegan or carnivore is great for you to get off the processed food and like you said, cut out the food noise.

But there may come a time when a deficiency arises or when it’s not quite working for whatever phase of life you’re in. And that’s where testing, which I like to do it about every four months, three to four a month seasonally, but usually I slip. So it’s like three times a year. And I can, I can say, okay, this is still working for me or it’s not.

But I will tell you, even though after writing a book about nutrition, I still make dietary tweaks after every single time I get labs generally, because something may have happened. Maybe I’m more stressed. And so my hormones are a little off and, you know, or my progesterone is a little lower. Maybe I, you know, I got my, Fiancee and ice cream maker for, we were going to make healthy ice cream and we started making grass fed, raw, beautiful, you know, naturally sweetened ice cream, but we ate it every night and our ApoB both Skyrocketed, you know, and it’s like, you’re like, Oh, this is a health.

I mean, I think that raw grass fed dairy is a healthy food, but not in that quantity. And so we totally peeled back. So it’s dynamic. And I just, I agree with you totally about the therapeutic diet use. And then. I just want people to be empowered enough with their lab results to be able to be an active participant in the decision of the direction of their diet, rather than feeling afflicted by all the noise and then, and then having to basically just be faithful to something and maybe not getting the outcomes they want, which the beauty is it’s possible now with the You know, all the tools at our disposal, and even if you don’t have access to A-C-G-M-A glucose monitor or extensive biomarker testing, I think there’s 10 tests.

You can ask your standard primary care doctor for that. They’ll probably order that can tell you a good amount. Okay. We

have to go through the 10 tests, but we have to talk DPT four, so we got both those. Oh, yeah. Leaves open, so, oh, sure. Let’s go to DPT four and then we’re gonna go to those 10 tests. Sure.

I’d love to just get those. Okay.

Yeah, so for. Increasing GLP 1, other things, it’s like valine rich foods, like I mentioned, L glutamine rich, uh, proteins, um, pistachios seem to have a unique stimulatory effect on GLP 1, um, curcumin, which is in turmeric, a magical supplement, and also found in just raw turmeric root.

Green tea, so ECGC, an elagitannin compound that is found in green tea, seems to stimulate GLP 1. And then the whole class of compound called flavonoids, which are basically plant compounds that are usually found in very colorful fruits. So that’s the GLP, that’s the part two. Part three is the inhibiting, inhibitor.

DPP4. And this one, there’s not a lot of papers on it, but one of them was super interesting. Um, the paper is called, I actually, it’s called functional foods with dipeptidylpeptidase 4 inhibitory potential and management of type 2 diabetes, a review. So they just, they were screening all these different molecular compounds that could inhibit this molecule.

And they found them in things like oregano and marjoram and rosemary. So a lot of herbs also in Black beans. They mentioned guava. So it’s kind of a diverse body of foods, but the paper is really interesting if people want to look that up. And there’s actually a chart of like all the different foods, but that’s some of them.

Um, and then. Myricitin, which is a molecule found in berries, especially cranberries, um, dark leafy greens like swiss chard, certain peppers, that’s a molecule that seems to inhibit DPP4. So myricitin. There are a wide variety of foods that seem to have molecules that can bind with this enzyme and inhibit it.

Um, and like we said earlier, all of these are healthful foods. So even if, you know, there’s a mild effect, you know, or even no effect on DPP4 in the human, in your human system, these foods are not going to, you know, There’s some

other side benefits that are going to happen because of them. Yes. That’s super cool.

The, um, 10 tests that would be helpful.

Yeah. So, I mean, they’re, the sky’s the limit with the testing for how to know how your metabolic health is going. Um, so. And frankly, I like to kind of go with the more the merrier, but if you’re just getting started and you’re trying to understand the question, like, am I in that 93.

2 percent of Americans who are metabolically not optimized or not, the tests that you want to be looking at are a fasting glucose, A triglyceride level, an HDL cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c. You want to get a blood pressure checked. You want to get a waist circumference checked. And the reason these are sort of like the basics, um, I would also throw in for sure, like an LDL or an APOB.

One of those two tests, although that’s actually not part of the metabolic syndrome criteria, but all the other ones I mentioned are part of this metabolic syndrome criteria and no doctor will balk at you about ordering these. So. To be considered optimal by that criteria, which they would suggest that we want a triglyceride under 150, a fasting glucose under 100 milligrams stress leader, an HDL above 40 for men or 50 for women, a hemoglobin A1c less than 5.

7 percent. a systolic blood pressure less than 120 and diastolic blood pressure less than 80 and a waist circumference less than 35 inches in women and 40 inches in men. And so it depends on exactly what paper you’re looking at, but if all of those, um, are in that range and you’re not on medication for any of those, you would be part of around this like 7 percent of Americans who are quote optimally metabolically healthy.

So At a very, at a, at a minimum, ask your doctor for those in the next few days and go into the lab and get them done. It should be covered by insurance, um, and try and get them done every few months. Now, sort of the next level, like the next few tests I would recommend, um, certainly like I mentioned ApoB, which is essentially like, we know LDL, people call it the bad cholesterol, but ApoB is a marker of Not just LDL, but all of the particles in the bloodstream that can cause heart disease that are atherogenic.

Um, so ApoB is a really great test to understand this atherogenic particle risk. I love fasting insulin because it’s the hormone that helps us get sugar out of the bloodstream into the cells. And if we are brewing the bad energy trifecta and mitochondrial dysfunction is poor, then It’s going to cause the cell to reject glucose by becoming insulin resistant and insulin levels will rise.

So that’s a really good early marker of metabolic dysfunction. Fasting insulin will usually go up before even fasting glucose goes up. Um, so that’s a very helpful one. I often like to see that between, like, 1 and 6. Um, even though the lab slip will often say that less than 25 is normal, that’s far too many.

That’s, that’s what the labs will say. I know. Above 10. And we’re definitely talking about some baseline insulin resistance. Um,

isn’t it amazing that this is not, and it’s an inexpensive test that we don’t do this. Like, like I look at it and go, why aren’t we doing fasting insulin and vitamin D for standards?

For everyone. For everyone.

For children, for everyone. I mean, when you’ve got half the country with prediabetes or type two diabetes, 74 percent of the country with overweight or obese and 30 percent of teens with prediabetes, why in God’s name are we not looking at the earliest markers of metabolic dysfunction, which are things like fasting insulin?

It’s, it’s, it’s astonishing. Um, you mentioned another one that I love, which is vitamin D. And then I also really like liver function tests, which are things like AST and ALT. The reason being is that The liver is such a key coordinator of our metabolism, and we want our liver to be pristine and so healthy.

And when liver cells are damaged, they leak out AST and ALT, these, what are supposed to be intracellular liver enzymes. So if those are starting to rise and one, one threshold we can think about is 17 as a level that we want to stay below, um, that can be a sign that the liver has got a little more strain on it.

So those are some of the tests that. You know, what is that? 10 to 15 tests that can just give us such a good snapshot of, of where we’re at on the metabolic spectrum. And if we need to keep iterating on our diet, what, oh, sorry. One other I would add for sure is HSCRP, which is I was just going to ask you, like, how are you

looking at overall inflammation?

So that’s the HSCRP. And I’m glad you mentioned the liver. Tests because, um, I had a liver expert on the show talking about how we have like 30% of the population now with fatty liver. Yeah. And which is just. Absolutely incredible. How would someone know if they had mitochondrial dysfunction?

Yeah. So there’s not a single test that can tell us really about mitochondrial dysfunction that’s accessible.

So it’s actually about just like looking at a lot of these tests and kind of reading the tea leaves of what it’s saying about our intracellular physiology. So for instance, if, if we have mitochondrial dysfunction, that is typically because of a root cause of why we’d have high blood sugar. Because if the mitochondria were working perfectly, it would be processing food substrates to energy.

And so we’d be taking in food like glucose, fatty acids, converting it to ATP, and all would be humming along. But when there’s a backup in that system, because the mitochondria are being damaged by all sorts of elements of our environment. The cell will not be able to process all that energetic substrate and will generate insulin resistance in order to protect the cell from work it can’t do.

And so insulin will rise and glucose will rise. And usually in concordance with that, we’ll see triglycerides rise because the glucose needs to go somewhere and it will be converted to fat in the form of triglycerides. So a pattern that to me would suggest Some level of problem inside the cell with processing glucose to energy would be high triglycerides, high fasting glucose, high hemoglobin A1c, and rising fasting insulin, or maybe even high triglycerides, high fasting insulin, and like still normal glucose and slightly creeping up glucose and hemoglobin A1c.

So that would be a signal to me. So it’s kind of like thinking really about what’s going on inside the cell and then what would What would start creeping up if there was an issue converting food to energy? And then since we know that mitochondrial dysfunction can create a cell that’s in distress, that can send out essentially alarm signals about it not being able to produce energy properly, we would often see that go hand in hand with HSCRP.

But of course, CRP, which is an inflammatory marker, isn’t just going to go up in the face of mitochondrial dysfunction. But if I saw that as well, along with the glucose and triglycerides and insulin markers, I’d be concerned. And then there’s another marker, um, called GGT, which is another protein made in the liver that is involved in recycling antioxidants in our body.

So if that’s going up, I’d also be thinking, huh, maybe we’ve got too much oxidative stress inside the cell because of the mitochondrial dysfunction. So now the body’s needing to upregulate GGT. And oh, the, the liver function’s starting to creep up. So that’s telling me that maybe there’s overwhelm metabolically in the liver.

So it’s really just like, like reading the tea leaves, but there’s not, there’s not one test, unfortunately, that is easily accessible to understand it.

But these are all good. tests that are normal tests to get at the doc that you could, you know, you can see

easy. And I think the thing

is they can be just all a little, first of all, what the normal range is not the optimal range.

And so when you start to see them even a little out of normal, this is not good, especially when you start to see the trends. So this is a super important one and you can turn this all the things you talked about and everything that’s in the book, the good energy book here. Um, Everything in here can start to turn things around so quickly.

Yes. So quickly. I’ve seen people drop their triglycerides from 350 to 70 in three months, just by cutting added sugar and processed foods. Because once you stop taking Putting the body under so much strain to process so much of this overnutrition, all this substrate, all this work for the body, it starts humming along and processing those triglycerides.

And so it just drops like a rock. Um, fasting glucose can change. In days, I would say with simple changes, um, just

the walk after your meal or doing the air squats can make a huge difference.

And getting good sleep and managing your stress. I can, I can certainly shoot my fasting glucose up just by pulling a couple of late nights on work, you know?

And so. They’re all rapidly changeable. They’re all improvable. There’s not a single biomarker I’ve mentioned that’s not modifiable with diet and lifestyle. That’s like fixed because of our genetics. There’s, that’s just none of them. So it’s a really hopeful message. And the part that’s the, the hurdle we have to get over is the fact that.

The healthcare system’s not orienting to metabolic health. So we have to be so educated ourselves as individuals to be able to basically stand up to the system that’s saying like, you’re 35, you don’t need a fasting insulin. That’s crazy. You know? And you actually saying, no, I do want a fasting insulin. I want to understand my metabolic health and really just finding a way to, to get the information you need.

to put yourself on a much better trajectory than the average person living in America today. So it’s hopeful, but takes a little bit of self self starting. And of course, if you’re listening to your podcast, you’re listening to yourself. Everyone’s already there.

They are. It’s a mindset shift. Yeah. Uh, where we, where it’s like, this is no longer you go to the doctor and have that.

You now, you now do your own research. We’re probably doing direct to consumer labs. You’re using CGM. So we’ll put all of this in the show notes along with your food lists. Information on levels, information on the, some of the articles you cited in your blogs, because really all the information is there.

And if you’re going to the doctor expecting to get it there, what you’re going to get is managing disease. And that’s not what we’re, that’s not the point of this. No. So this, the book is a great place to start. Um, I was going, yes, we are on the same page. All this. And I, I love seeing it. I love seeing the fact that now the big hammers are diet and lifestyle.

It makes my heart sing. So thank you for all of your great work. And we’re going to put everything at jjvirgin. com forward slash. Good energy. And you just keep, keep spreading this information out there because it is, what I love is you have taken complicated things and made it very simple for people to understand.

Because mitochondria even though we like learned about it in sixth grade is, is it’s, It’s complicated for people to understand. Yeah. And so I love the fact that you just framed it in terms of energy. It makes it easier for people to grasp.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for, for having me on and for all your amazing work.

That has been an inspiration to me. For sure. Thank

you.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jjvirgin. com, and make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj. com so you don’t miss a single episode.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in. Take care. And I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

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