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Tyna Moore: Microdosing GLP-1 quietly heals the brain

Moore reframes Ozempic as a regenerative tool at micro doses; she explains how GLP-1 calms brain inflammation, heals the gut, and helped her chronic pain.

Dr. Tyna MooreguestSteven Bartletthost
Jul 4, 20241h 58mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:06

    Intro

    1. TM

      This is not what they're telling us. (dramatic music) We can start to heal some of these chronic lifestyle conditions that are so rampant with tiny doses like this. It's like opening a window of opportunity for somebody to completely change their life.

    2. SB

      Dr. Tyna Moore is a distinguished naturopathic physician... Whose groundbreaking work is leading the way in combating some of the biggest diseases and medical conditions that our modern world currently faces.

    3. TM

      Everyone's saying that Ozempic is evil, this is the worst thing ever, but a lot of people are being overdosed for weight loss, and this leads to a very high risk for side effects. But Ozempic, done correctly, has all these other benefits that have nothing to do with weight loss, and they are just mind-blowing. Healing and reversing Type I diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. We've got studies showing really positive impacts on depression and anxiety, and potentially reducing cancer risk. It shifts your gut microbiome to a more favorable microbiome. And then my daughter's PCOS symptoms reversed, which is probably one of the number-one drivers of infertility in young women. I mean, holy sh- (beep) And I've seen it with my patients, and I've seen it with myself 'cause I lived with chronic pain my whole life. And I remember by the end of 2021 thinking, "If this doesn't get better, I think I'm gonna kill myself." But I started myself at a tiny little dose, and the destruction fell away.

    4. SB

      Dr. Tyna Moore, what would you scream to the world right now?

    5. TM

      We are eating a chemical sh- (beep) storm of a food supply. Young women are bathing in toxic chemicals through their beauty habits. Microbiome disruption from all the antibiotics. I joke that humans are going extinct, but I think it's really happening if we don't right this ship. But there's things we can do that are non-negotiable that have nothing to do with drugs.

    6. SB

      Your six pillars for a pain-free life?

    7. TM

      Yes. First of all, I would...

    8. SB

      Congratulations, Diary of a CEO gang. We've made some progress. 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe, which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%. So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know, and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you, and enjoy this episode. (upbeat music)

  2. 2:06 – 3:33

    What Is Tina's Mission?

    1. SB

      Dr. Tyna Moore, who are you by profession, and what is the mission that you're on?

    2. TM

      So I'm a naturopathic physician and a chiropractor. I don't know if you have naturopathic physicians here in the UK. We are trained formally in a four-year medical program, and we take national board exams, North American, I should say, and we are taught root cause medicine. So the functional medicine community basically appropriated our medicine many years ago. If you've heard of functional, I'm pr- you've had doctors on that are functional medicine practitioners. And it's the idea that the body can heal itself. We are looking to restore homeostasis in the individual. So why are things awry? I'm less interested in someone's diagnosis as much as I am why are they presenting with that symptom picture, what's going on. And I was mentored up by one of the finest naturopathic physicians in our profession over the past many decades, and he died of cancer in 2013, and I took over his practice. He was a force to be reckoned with, so I carry that flag with me. And he was a truth-teller, and he was often ostracized by our profession for being ahead of the game and, you know, being ahead of the story usually. And I learned so much from him about metabolic health and how metabolic health was really the root cause driver of so many diseases, lifestyle-induced diseases that we're seeing in an- on a worldwide level.

  3. 3:33 – 5:13

    What Is a Naturopathic Doctor?

    1. TM

    2. SB

      Can you give me just a bit of a glimpse, and this is for someone that's never heard the term naturopathic physician before-

    3. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    4. SB

      ... which i- which I guess means naturopathic doctor.

    5. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    6. SB

      Right? What is the difference between, like, a normal doctor and a naturopathic doctor?

    7. TM

      So a traditional allopathic physician is what you're gonna be familiar with, with an MD.

    8. SB

      Yeah.

    9. TM

      They're, they're trained in a system where algorithmically, they are taught to find disease processes, and then they have a standard of care that they follow, which is to prescribe X, Y, and Z-

    10. SB

      Yeah.

    11. TM

      ... for the standard of care, and that's not how they always were. Naturopathic medicine was born out of old-timey European MDs. So back in Germany and, you know, long time ago, when we didn't have all the fancy lab tests, and we didn't have all the fancy pharmaceuticals, we were treating people to bolster their health, really. You know, it's taking you as an individual, finding out what makes you tick, and then how can we optimize your health overall? Symptoms and illness falls away when you treat the body, when you treat the individual in front of you. So I don't treat diseases, I treat people. That's the difference. Whereas in allopathic medicine, they are very obsessed with the diagnosis, and then what pills do we apply to that diagnosis? Which is different than, why is this person presenting this way, and what can we do to help them along the journey of optimizing their health so those symptoms fall away?

    12. SB

      And you, you said you took over a clinic there?

    13. TM

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      What kind of patients do you see in that practice, did you see in that practice? And what was the sort of variety

  4. 5:13 – 10:17

    What Is Metabolic Dysfunction?

    1. SB

      of illness or disorder or disease that you came across?

    2. TM

      So his practice was predominantly musculoskeletal medicine, so it was cr- uh, chronic joint dysfunction. And he did a specialized type of medicine called prolotherapy and regenerative injection therapies. The modern version of that is stem cells. You've probably heard of stem cell injections. I'm sure everyone has by this point. Platelet-rich plasma is another one. And that's what he specialized in, but it's not just about shooting fancy substances into people's joints. You have to get the person into a healing state first, so you need them optimized so that they want to heal. So that means hormones. That means nutrition. That means lifestyle. Those things are far more critical to get lined up than it is to start shooting fancy substances into their joints, even if those substances come from their own body. Even if we're sucking out their own stem cells, and we're sucking out their own blood, and we're using those, it's far more important that you get the person in an optimized state so that they...... want to heal. So I would, you know, I'd ask patients, "If you cut your fingertip off or just sliced yourself terribly, do you heal well?" And if they said yes, they were a wonderful candidate for those types of injections. If they did not, then they weren't, because they weren't in a good healing state at that point. So my job was to get them in a healing state, and then to apply the treatments.

    3. SB

      What is a healing state?

    4. TM

      It's when you fall down and you don't fall apart. It's when you get sick with something and you get over it. It's when you cut yourself and you heal readily, and you don't, you know, succumb to terrible infections. And I think we've ended up as a society where the norm has become to be im- somewhat immunocompromised. I think a lot of people are walking around, not, not you younger folks, but at least in the US, a lot of people are walking around in this sort of semi-immunocompromised state. Much of it is due to metabolic dysfunction, which is something he was always drilling into me.

    5. SB

      What is metabolic dysfunction?

    6. TM

      It is when your metabolic health, at its core, is the ability to take in the foods that you eat and assimilate them properly. So if you were to eat proteins and fats and carbohydrates, you would turn them into the fuel that they need to be. You would turn them into the proteins in your body that they need to be. When that goes awry, which is almost 100% of US adults at this point, from what the data's showing, things don't go so well. And so what that leads to, this metabolic dysfunctional pattern leads to insulin resistance, which is essentially prediabetes, which is the long game into dia- type 2 diabetes. And we've completely normalized that process, at least during my lifetime. I've watched that happen. I'm 50 years old, so I've watched this happen, especially since I got into medicine working for my mentor, Dr. Rick, watching folks go down this pathway of normalization into type 2 diabetes, and it's not until they get there that the doctor says, "Ope, you have type 2 diabetes. We gotta do something about it. Here's your pills." And there's 15 to 20 years of legwork that can be done before that happens, and that's where I think naturopathic medicine really shines, and where preventative, functional medicine, all of us are in the same camp. We're all doing the same thing. We're really trying to just help the patient in front of us, not so much the disease process. We're trying to make sure that the person's optimized so that they can become more resilient, so that their immune system works properly, so that the foods that they eat are assimilated properly, and they don't end up in a cellular milieu of disaster.

    7. SB

      Is, is there, like, a fundamental belief that you have about human beings, how we heal, how to be healthy, um, and the body, I guess, that you think is in contrast or conflict to the current system? Like, a set of fundamental underlying beliefs. 'Cause we all have, like, a set of sunglasses on our lens of how we see the world.

    8. TM

      Yes.

    9. SB

      And what I've obviously learned from doing this podcast is everyone seems to be wearing slightly different lenses.

    10. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    11. SB

      You know, as to their view on health, the s- the healthcare system, hu- humans, healing, society. What are the sort of fundamental underlying beliefs that you have?

    12. TM

      That's a great question. I think that in traditional naturopathic medicine, the purists would tell you that there's no room for pharmaceuticals and that you must only go with nature, the healing power of nature, stoke the individual's vitality. That's very important in naturopathic medicine. We're looking at the vitality of an individual. Some would call that an aura. I think that's a little too esoteric. It is when you look at someone, are they... Are they glowing vitality? Do they look healthy? You can see it. I know you can... Everyone can see it when you actually point it out to people. Do they look healthy or are they sort of walking around in grayscale, right? And I think a lot of people these days are unfortunately walking around in grayscale 'cause they've sort of... You know, we've all been listening to the mainstream narrative and, "The food supply's busted." This has been going on for decades. My mentor was talking about this decades ago and nobody was listening, and now people, I think, are starting to get hip to it, because we've got the internet, we've got podcasts like yours and mine where we're trying to get the, you know, the information out. And it's the inherent ability of the body to heal. However, I do think there's a place for pharmaceuticals, and I have a license to prescribe in the state of Oregon,

  5. 10:17 – 12:45

    Tina's Most Surprising Case Studies

    1. TM

      and I'm not afraid to use it, because in my mind, in the way that my mentor taught me, is somebody comes in and they're on this many pharmaceuticals. I mean, I'm 50. The average person my age is on five different pharmaceuticals at this point, which is crazy to me. And I don't know what the stats are in the UK, but I can't imagine they're tremendously better. So they come in on all these drugs and their lifestyle is in somewhat of shambles. And so my job is to optimize lifestyle so that I can get these down to the lowest or to nil. Ideally, we could get them off, but if they need a little something, then great. I was also taught by him to implement longevity medicine, which is hormones and making sure that people are able to maintain physiologic levels of optimal hormone function as we age, which is really important to aging well. And so it's just kind of a mix of using the best of nature and that science has to offer, and treating the person in front of you.

    2. SB

      Of all the case studies that you have in your mind, experience, and in your past, is there one that you are most proud of?

    3. TM

      It was 2019. My career was really taking off and my mom kept telling me that she didn't feel good. And I was like, "My mom is a rock." My mom's, my mom's, like, comes up to here on me. I call her my little mama. And she just chugs along. And I was like, "Oh, she'll be fine." She's like, "No, I really don't feel good." And I kept blowing her off 'cause I was too busy and I was on planes all the time and traveling all the time and I was never home. And my mom came to visit me at my house, and she came out of the bathroom and she said, she's like, "I... Like, I can't hold my bowels. Like, I, I can't. I'm so sick." And so I immediately started testing her, and she had Crohn's disease. And my grandmother had died of Crohn's disease and several people on her side of the family had died of Crohn's disease. And I just hadn't put two and two together that my mom may have had... But she had all the symptoms. Like, growing up, she had all the symptoms, and I just never put it together.And it was hitting her at, it rears its ugly head when folks hit their elder years, like in their 70s. They call it, you know, colitis of the elderly, and people basically get it and die. They just shit themselves to death. And so my mom was in it, and I was like, "Oh, no." And I pulled out everything I had, and I have access to some incredible regenerative substances that, you know, most people don't, and I can use them off-label in ways that, you know, and m- most people don't even think to do. And I threw everything I had at her, because

  6. 12:45 – 15:47

    What Treatment Did You Prescribe Your Mother?

    1. TM

      I knew if I'd sent her into the allopathic system, they were gonna do a colonoscopy on her, and what that does is they flush you out before they do the colonoscopy, and if I, if her flora were to get flushed out of her gut at that point, I don't think she would've come out of the hospital because they end up getting secondary infections. And so, I- I pulled her out of it. I got her out of the really acute phase, and then I immediately referred her to my colleague, who is a brilliant physician, naturopathic physician, and I was like, "Take over. I'm not, I don't want to manage my mom." But I needed to get her ... I- I- I knew that it was the skillset that I had in particular that was gonna pull her out of that, and so we did it. And she came to me one day, after she was better and she was stabilized, and she said, "You saved my life." And at the time, I was really bitching about my half a million dollars of student loan debt that was just compounding and compounding and compounding, and I was really frustrated by the fact that I couldn't get on top of it, and I had, at that point, spent like $100,000 paying off my loans, and they were still at the same level. I mean, it's just criminal, that system. And she said, "You saved my life. It was worth every penny." You know? And then my daughter turned around, who had just gone through a very difficult time herself, and she said, "You saved my life too, Mom, this year." And I was like, "Well, if that was what it cost (laughs) to gain the knowledge that I gained to save my daughter and my mother..." And then my dad was like, "You saved my l- you bailed me out many times," and I was like, "Okay, that's..." So it was kind of, um, it was just kind of ironic that was the end of my big clinical career, you know, when I had my big brick and mortar with the high volume patient base, and all of that. I still see patients but not at that level, and so that was really ... I was like, "Thank God I had the knowledge and the tools and the knowhow to ..."

    2. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    3. TM

      And the fearlessness to apply some of the therapies that I applied the way I did to-

    4. SB

      In terms of before and after, what sort of picture of health would I observe if I'd saw her on that day when she walked out of the toilet versus, you know, after the- the variety of different therapies that you applied?

    5. TM

      Well, this is a good story, 'cause she was super gray and super thin, and my mom has always been kind of, you know, hippy and curvy, and, I mean, she's- we're built different. She's- she's the more, you know, um, she's the curvy one. And she was just rail thin and gray, and all of her hair was falling out. I mean, she just- I can't believe I missed it. I can't believe it went on that long that I didn't see it, and I- I still carry guilt to this day, and I always apologize to her for being too busy to ... I can't believe I let my stress level get so high that I didn't see it, you know? And then she ended up on a slew of pharmaceuticals that were too expensive to get in the United States, so she had to get them from Canada, so her naturopathic physician is managing her, so she's getting medication, very expensive medication, from Canada, and she's doing okay, and then in the last nine months, I put her on the tiniest droplet of semaglutide.

    6. SB

      Which is Ozempic, yeah.

    7. TM

      And she is phenomenal. All of her joint pain's gone. Her gut's completely regulated and normalized. She is down on a minimal dose of this medication

  7. 15:47 – 19:28

    Tina's Health History

    1. TM

      that she's getting from Canada. She's still taking it, but it's a tiny dose. Her cognition has improved significantly, because through this process, she was starting to get low-grade dementia, whether she realizes it or not. My daughter and I were noticing it. We were like, "Is Grandma okay?" And so when people come at me for talking about microdosing Ozempic, I will not back down, because my mom is solid, and it's the tiniest amount, and she even said to me just the other day, before I was coming on the show, I was telling her I was stressed, I was trying to get ready for the trip, you know, overseas, and she said, "You know, I was so stressed out before you put me on semaglutide," because my dad's health is very poor, and she said, "I was so stressed that I really felt like it was gonna do me in, like I was at capacity, and you put me on the semaglutide, and all of the anxiety and stress just dropped away." And I was like, "That's 'cause it's calming to neuroinflammation, which is secondary to chronic gastrointestinal diseases." When the gut is inflamed, the brain's inflamed. So she was dealing with all this chronic brain inflammation, all this gut inflammation, and she's on this tiny little dose of Ozempic, and she's very solid, and she's- her color's back. She's filled in again. She's curvy again. She's eating normally. She does- I mean, she couldn't eat hardly anything ever for years, and so now she's back to eating very normally. Uh, she's still gotta watch what she eats, but, you know, it's not a free for all, but she is, she's back.

    2. SB

      You know, I guess, glaringly obvious case study for your work but also, I think, many of the things we're gonna talk about, like microdosing Ozempic, is you.

    3. TM

      Yeah.

    4. SB

      Because as I read through your story, from your childhood years through your teenage years and even in university, um, and then even later into your career and, I guess, also now, 'cause you mentioned that y- you still deal with chronic pain, you are your own case study.

    5. TM

      I am. (laughs)

    6. SB

      Can you give me a view of- of the struggles you've been through in terms of your health, um, and really where that started? What was the sort of first- first instance where you experienced the pain, the trauma, et cetera, et cetera?

    7. TM

      So I always had stomach aches. Always, since I was a child, always, and was hit with really pretty severe anxiety. I didn't know what it was at the time, but it was anxiety, and I started getting chronic pain in my teenage years, and I- out of nowhere, when I was about 15, the lights went out on me. I just became extremely suicidal and depressed, out of nowhere. I mean, it was like somebody just switched a lever. I had moved to Oregon from Southern California. I do believe that the lack of light...... was massive. I think that people really... I'm really starting to appreciate it's taken me all these decades, but light deficiency is a huge issue that we're not... no one's talking about. A few people are, but-

    8. SB

      You're talking about, like, vitamin D production as well right there? 'Cause there's-

    9. TM

      Oh, that was huge. So that took years. You know, nobody was talking about that. It was not until decades later, I was sitting in naturopathic medicine school. I was in college, and, um, I think I was in year three of that program, and this doctor, Dr. Alex Vasquez, came to lecture at grand rounds, and he started talking about vitamin D and sunlight deficiency. And I had been kind of low grade looking into sunlight deficiency because it turns out the hospitals of yore really would optimize sunlight, and they would have sun porches. I don't know if you've seen the photos. They would roll all the kids out and all of the convalescing ill people out. I mean, that's how people survived the 1918 flu was the- the ones who got sunlight and the ones who were able to go to these hospitals, and they would build the hospitals to optimize light exposure inside the ward 'cause they knew it kept the bacteria counts down and... I mean, even if they didn't what bacteria was or what was happening, they knew that when sunlight penetrated, people were, you know, healthier, and things were cleaner, and infections

  8. 19:28 – 27:57

    Discovering Ozempic

    1. TM

      didn't seem to spread. And so I hit my 20s, and long story short, I was rocking psoriatic arthritis for decades before I ever figured it out, and it really culminated for me. I went through a lot of chronic pain, I went through a lot of misery, I went through a lot of autoimmune issues, and then I got everything dialed in, I thought I had it handled. Interestingly, autoimmune disease will flare and will recede, and flare and recede, and it's kind of on cue. Like, you'll see it around 10 to 11 years old, especially with things like Crohn's disease. You'll see these little glimmers pop up for kids, and then it goes away. And then you'll see them present in their teenage years, and often they'll present with, you know, mental/emotional issues and not so much the gastrointestinal issues, but it's the same process going on in the body. And then it'll go away. And then it might flare again postpartum because of that big hormone surge that happens with childbirth, and then it'll go away, and then it'll come back with a vengeance in menopause as the hormones, again, shift majorly, and that's what was happening for me. And then all of the stress of pushing back against the narrative really caught up with me, and I was... uh, nothing that I knew to do was working. So the whole protocol I put my mother through was not working for me. Nothing was touching it, and that is how I came to start studying GLP-1 agonists. I started... I was researching anything that would calm neural inflammation because, at the end of the day, diseases down here are coming from here, and when the brain's on fire and the brain's inflamed, the immune system gets sent completely sideways, and the downstream processes culminate in autoimmune disease, pain, hormonal disruption, you name it, and so I... that's how I ended up. I literally put into Google GLP-1 and neuroinflammation, and (mimics explosion) all these studies showed up, and that's what got me going.

    2. SB

      Two questions there. So GLP-1 is Ozempic?

    3. TM

      So it's... yeah, it's- it's the peptide that the body makes naturally. We make it in the brain, and we make it in the gut. But if somebody's had a life of chronic gut inflammation, I don't think they're making it so well in the gut. And Ozempic is just a... it's several versions down in the generational line of these peptides called incretins. They're, um... they're a whole family that started way back 20-some years ago, and they've just gotten a little bit nicer with less side effects and longer half-life as we go along the journey. So the last decent one was liraglutide, although compliance was low because it made people feel really terrible, and they had to inject it too frequently. I think it was daily, or I think that's how it is still, and then semaglutide is a newer generation, tirzepatide is a newer generation. And so they're, they're just getting a little more potent, uh, and I don't mean potent in a pharmaceutical way. I mean they're starting to realize how these work, and they're s- they're getting craftier with not only keeping them in the body for the time that they need so the half-life gets longer, but they're finding, in this suite of signaling peptide hormones that are involved with appetite and with metabolic health and insulin secretion and insulin sensitivity, they're finding better and better ways to combine these to get optimal function with the least amount of side effects.

    4. SB

      Okay. And at that moment in your life where you started googling GLP-1 and inflammation, et cetera, if I was a fly on the wall-

    5. TM

      (laughs)

    6. SB

      ... in your life at that moment, what would I have- what would I have seen? What was the sort of picture of desperation or, you know?

    7. TM

      So 2021, I spent most of that year on my back 'cause I was in so much pain. It was crazy. And my husband, when he met me, he met me in 2019, and we got married in 2020, and I told him I had chronic pain, and I told him I had a funny immune system, but he had never seen it. Like, he'd never seen it full force, and he got to see it that year. He was like, "Wow, so this is what chronic pain looks like." I mean, it's ju- it was devastating, and my spine was fusing, and I'm active. Like, I do pilates, and I dance a lot, and I hula hoop, and I roller skate, and I lift weights, and I'm, you know, I'm moving and shaking. I was not moving and shaking in 2020. I was... 2021, I was flat on my back on the couch, and I remember by the end of 2021 thinking, "If this doesn't get better, I think I'm gonna kill myself." Like, I couldn't do it anymore. Like, I just couldn't live with that level of pain, and my spine was fusing, and I could feel it, and I kept trying to tell everyone, "Something is wrong." And my chiropractor friends were great, but they knew musculoskeletal medicine, and my naturopathic friends were great, but they knew systemic medicine, and I, I needed me. I needed my brain on the case, like, someone who had both, right? And I just couldn't get on top of it, and then finally, I, I don't know how or why, I, I went kind of into the story, oh, I know what it was. I broke out with psoriasis. I broke out with psoriasis all over my scalp, and I was like...Oh, this is what this is. This is psoriatic arthritis, which turns out to be one of the most painful musculoskeletal autoimmune conditions you can have. It- it- it's worse than rheumatoid arthritis on the pain scale from what the studies show. So, I was like, "Okay, now that I know what I'm dealing with, what can I do?" So I started pulling out all the stops and all the things I knew to do, low dose naltrexone, exosomes, you name it. I was doing everything. It really wasn't bringing it down or it would work for a minute and it would- it would- it would wear off. And so I was getting desperate and my pod... I have a podcast and my podcast producer said, "You gotta do an episode on Ozempic." And I was like, "I don't... I don't like talking about weight loss." I really don't like talking about weight loss. It... people get so emotionally triggered and it's a big topic and it's nuanced and it's not as simple as people want to make it be. And in my functional medicine world, people want to make it so simplistic, just exercise more and eat less and take these supplements and it'll... go carnivore and it'll all go away. It's not that simple. There's genetic components, there's brain components, there's epigenetic components and it was like the Pandora's box I didn't want to open. And so finally I was like, "Okay, fine. I'm going to start researching these." And I was sitting... I was laying on the couch on my back (laughs) and it's 2023 at this point, but I'm still having to take frequent breaks, right, on my back. So I'd go exercise and I'd have to lay down for three hours. So I'm Googling and I look up GLP-1 and neuroinflammation 'cause I always start there. I always start with pain, neuroinflammation and immune activation. I always want to know what any substance does in those... 'cause that's my world, right? 'Cause that's what I did in clinical practice. And I Googled that and my husband's in the kitchen and I was like, "Holy shit." And I turned the phone around and I was like, "Look at this." And he's like, "I don't know what that means, babe." And I was like, "This is not what they're telling us." Like this is not what... because that was at the height of mainstream media and all the clickbait headlines and, you know, Mom is overdosing on Ozempic and people's stomachs are paralyzed forever. And I was like... So then I started, of course, looking at all that, like, is that for real? Like are they really getting gastroparesis forever? No. So I started going into all the data and I just... that was it. It was like the rabbit hole and it... that was May of 2023. And I've been knee-deep in it ever since, just consumed by any and all informa... and then of course everybody start... I started doing podcasts about it on my show and everyone's sending me all the information and hundreds of people are reaching out to me telling me these really profound stories and changes in their health that have nothing to do with weight loss or diabetes. And so, that was it. I was like... I got- I got bit by some kind of, um... well, you know, I don't like propaganda. I don't like when I hear everybody saying the same thing. It makes me suspicious, you know? When everyone's running in one direction screaming, "This is evil. This is- this is- this is, you know, the worst thing ever." I was like, "I don't know. This has been around for 20 some years." Not semaglutide, but this version of medication, this family of medication. And so, I don't know, I was like, "I'm not buying this. I'm going to find out what the truth is." And so I s- I called every doctor I knew that might use it. I called every pharmacist I knew that might use it. Nobody was seeing any of these horrific side effects. Like th- the stories you were seeing on the media currently... what was that, summer? That was really... it- it came to, like, full height summer of 2023 I think that was when everybody was losing their minds about it. The minute they started talking about weight loss, people started losing their minds about it, which I find

  9. 27:57 – 32:14

    What Is Ozempic?

    1. TM

      very interesting. And what I was finding in the literature was not at all adding up to what I was hearing. And then there were all of these other benefits that were just mind-blowing, you know, benefits on healing and reversing type 1 diabetes, healing and reversing neurocognitive conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, efficacy with alcohol cessation, people who were... you know, alcohol abuse syndrome, using it for that, people who also had the- this type of HLAB27, it's a genetic propensity towards these, um, spondyloarthritises like psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, those kinds of things, having- showing efficacy for that. And as I started speaking out about it, I was getting messages back from people telling me their stories, hundreds and hundreds of people telling me their stories and I... and then seeing what was happening with my patients so I started applying it to everyone I was treating for different reasons at different doses, very tiny doses though, very little bits, and just seeing really profound changes in people and I... it's not what we're hearing and I don't think that the way also that it's being done in the standard model is ideal for everyone. I think a lot of people are being dosed too high too fast and I think a lot of people are being overdosed 'cause at the end of the day, it's a hormone. It's a peptide signaling hormone. And so, people are being cranked up on doses very quickly. There's a 16 week escalation and they go from this amount to this amount very quickly and in the journey many people are reporting horrific gastrointestinal side effects, which are real, but it's not the peptide's fault. It's the- it's a peptide at the end of the day as well, which is... I can explain what that is.

    2. SB

      Yeah. If you had to explain what Ozempic is or Wegovy or... you know, this- this compound is just to a 10-year-old-

    3. TM

      Yeah. Okay.

    4. SB

      ... how would you explain it?

    5. TM

      So, you eat amino acids, you eat protein and it breaks down into amino acids.

    6. SB

      Yeah.

    7. TM

      And amino acids link up with peptide bonds into chains called peptides and then peptides will link-

    8. SB

      What's a peptide bond?

    9. TM

      Uh, it's just a simplistic bond that binds two amino acids together.

    10. SB

      Okay.

    11. TM

      So it can be broken pretty readily with different enzymes.

    12. SB

      And that's in my body? The peptide bond is in my body?

    13. TM

      Yeah. So your body has all these enzymes present and the amino acids link up very simplistically-

    14. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    15. TM

      ... into different chains.

    16. SB

      Yeah.

    17. TM

      And then those chains of amino acids are called peptides. And peptides link up to form proteins, and your body is made of proteins, your whole body. All of your tissue is made out of proteins. And your cellular receptors are made out of proteins, everything's made out of proteins. So if you go backwards, those smaller versions are the amino acids, I'm sorry, or peptides, and the smaller versions of that yet are the amino acids.

    18. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    19. TM

      So we eat protein, we break it down into amino acids, and we reconstruct it into more protein.

    20. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    21. TM

      And so peptides are these chains of amino acids that we've got all different types of therapeutic peptides, and they insert themselves where they need to go to do what they need to do.

    22. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    23. TM

      So that's it, at the end of the day.

    24. SB

      And what's, so what's ozempic in that? Is, is ozempic is a peptide?

    25. TM

      It's a peptide. And it's made in our L cells of our gut, which line from the most proximal to the distal small intestine, and it secr- these cells secrete GLP-1 in the presence of glucose...

    26. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    27. TM

      ... which is sugar. When we eat sugary foods, or f- uh, well, all carbohydrates break down into glucose. So whenever we eat glucose, and they respond actually when a bolus of food, so, uh, the mechanism of a blob of food going through our guts actually s- gets these cells to trigger.

    28. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    29. TM

      However, I have tested thousands of people's guts in my clinical practice, in my clinical lifetime, and people's guts are a mess. Most people have compromised digestion. So I don't think their L cells are working optimally in many cases. And we also have literature, good solid science, to show that those who are suffering with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and fatty liver, and that whole metabolic syndrome, you know, groupage, those folks are GLP-1 deficient.

    30. SB

      So when I take ozempic, it's causing my gut basically, my body to release GLP-1.

  10. 32:14 – 38:17

    Tina's Use of Ozempic

    1. SB

    2. TM

      No, it is the GLP-1.

    3. SB

      Oh, it is the GLP-1.

    4. TM

      Yep. So we're not causing the gut to do anything. We are mimicking the actual peptide.

    5. SB

      Ah, okay, so it's got the same sort of s- a- atomic structure...

    6. TM

      Structure, yes.

    7. SB

      ... as the GLP-1. So my body thinks it's GLP-1, I guess it is GLP-1...

    8. TM

      Yes.

    9. SB

      ... as far as things are concerned. And then the GLP-1 is doing what to me?

    10. TM

      Well, so it's, semaglutide, for instance, is bioidentical to the GLP-1 that our body secretes.

    11. SB

      Okay.

    12. TM

      So it's the same, except it's been tweaked with a little bit, they've added some lipids to it to make the half-life longer.

    13. SB

      So it lasts longer.

    14. TM

      So normally GLP-1 would be secreted from our cells. It's also secreted from our brain, which we gotta get into, 'cause that's where I got really excited. It's secreted from our body, and it's broken down very quickly. And so these newer versions of these incretin hormones, or incretin peptides, are broken down at a slower pace.

    15. SB

      Okay. And then what does GLP-1 do?

    16. TM

      It does all kinds of cool things. (laughs) So it, most notably, and what it's known for, is to decrease appetite.

    17. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    18. TM

      And that happens centrally in the brain.

    19. SB

      Yeah.

    20. TM

      It slows gastric motility, so it slows things down, so you feel fuller for longer. That's at higher doses. That doesn't always need to happen. And that is what it is known for. And it also has induction of, it, it plays with the cells of your pancreas, and it gets them to secrete insulin at the right time. And so most folks are walking around in, in some degree of insulin resistance as, as they age. And that is the beginning glimmers of type 2 diabetes. And so GLP-1s help that process, it helps sensitize the cells to the insulin, and it helps secrete the insulin when needed.

    21. SB

      And when you were struggling, in 2023...

    22. TM

      Yeah.

    23. SB

      ... you started taking ozempic, semaglutide, one of these brands.

    24. TM

      Yeah. (laughs)

    25. SB

      Um, what impact did it have on you?

    26. TM

      So I got a compounded version, because I thought that the starting dose... Let's back up. The brand name, the prescription that most people are familiar with, are these little pre-filled pens.

    27. SB

      Yeah.

    28. TM

      And the pens only come in certain doses. You can't control the dosage. You start at the lowest dose that they offer, and then you have to escalate from there. Or if your doctor's cool, they won't make you escalate too much. But either way, you don't get to go lower than the dose that it starts. And it starts at 0.25 milligrams. I thought that that was way too high, especially for someone like myself. I'm very metabolically optimized. I have good muscle mass, uh, I have very good bone density. I have, my labs look beautiful. I'm hormonally optimized. I'm on bioidentical hormone replacement. I'm very active. I exercise often. My sleep is good. And I thought, my thinking was, "I wonder if some of us are actually a little GLP-1 deficient, from whether a life of, not because we have obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver." There's different reasons why those folks would be deficient. Insulin at high levels itself will actually induce some GLP-1 deficiency. It'll, it'll decrease GLP-1 signaling. My thinking was, "I wonder if folks are just genetically, or maybe we got ourselves there through chronic illness, whatever it may be, I wonder if there's a little bit of a deficiency. What if I supplement this peptide like I would a hormone?" Which the way I do that is I give people the lowest dose necessary to achieve a physiologic impact that's favorable, and then I cap it. So if you need a little bit of thyroid, the standard model would have you take, "Well, you know, the algorithm says you have hypothyroidism, so we're gonna give you this much, and we're gonna give you this exact drug." In my world, we compound what we need. Maybe you need a little more T3 than T4. Maybe you need a tiny dose. Maybe we titrate you up until you start getting a little symptomatic, and we're like, "Ah, let's back it down a little." So my thinking was to use it that way. So I asked everyone I knew, "Are you using this for anything other than appetite suppression, or weight loss, or diabetes?" And they all said no. Nobody really was. None of my colleagues were anyway. And they were all starting at a dose that I still thought was too high. So I started myself at a tiny little dose, and my first impact was brain clarity.... within days, my brain cleared. I can't even explain it. Um, brain fog was definitely starting to happen. I think it was the psoriatic arthritis, and I think it was the, I think it was post-COVID. You know, I think our brains all got hit pretty hard by that. And I think it was chronic stress, and I think it was menopause. And I was sort of in this, I'm a high functioning kind of boss babe, and I couldn't get my work done. And my team was going crazy 'cause I couldn't remember what I told them. And, you know, they're calling me and they're like, "We already did this. We already had this conversation. What is wrong with you?" (laughs) So I was like, "Damn it, this isn't gonna work for me. I can't be rolling the way I'm rolling and trying to run all my businesses and have brain fog like this." So that was the first thing I noticed, was clarity of thought. Brain fog went away. Anxiety immediately dropped, which I didn't even realize I had. It just, a calmness took over me, which was so amazing. And within two weeks, my pain was down significantly. Significantly. And what I noticed was everything was starting to move and pop again. So I was getting mobility back. And by week two, I wanted to move again. So this version of me that just wanted to, like, go do my workout, go to my work, and then lay down on my back, I wasn't that, doing that anymore. And I immediately, like, signed back up for Pilates. And I found myself dancing and hula hooping around the house again. And I found myself just being much more active, and slowly but surely the destruction sort of fell away. 'Cause I had been in a pretty destructive immune process for a couple years there, and it just has, it's taken me, I think it's been almost a year now, and it's just slowly but surely dropped away. I also noticed a little bit of weight loss, which I had gained some weight over the past couple years. I think it was chronic stress was doing a number on my metabolism, and, you know, you hit that 50-year-old mark and things get tough. So I had some weight loss fall away. I got right back down to my fighting weight. I'm, like, literally the size I was in 2019 going into all of this. And

  11. 38:17 – 41:26

    The Untold Story of Ozempic

    1. TM

      so I quickly started putting people on it, and very similar responses. Uh, all of them had a little bit of fluff, but nobody was on it for weight loss. Everyone had a little bit of weight, fell right off, got back down to a good weight. My mom, I was particularly concerned about 'cause I didn't want her to waste away again. I didn't want her vomiting. I didn't want her having any gastrointestinal symptoms. I wanted all of those to resolve. It shifts your gut microbiome to a more favorable microbiome if you do it right, and so... And we have the data on that. So I was very slow and cautious with her. I don't want her losing any muscle mass. And everybody just had these profound impacts. My daughter's skin, cystic acne, I mean, a decade of severe cystic acne to the point where she did not enjoy her teenage years, and she was suicidal from it. I mean, just hiding behind her hair for s- for years. Her skin... I remember seeing her after three weeks on it, and I was like, "Your skin is porcelain. What happened?" All of her PCOS symptoms reversed. Um, my husband didn't want to drink anymore. The guy is a known alcoholic. He was, like, not interested in alcohol. His blood pressure regulated out. I mean, just all of these little things started happening, and I started seeing similar effects in my patients, and then I s- uh, at the same time, I was posting about it and talking about it on my podcast, and people were messaging me, telling me these profound stories. They were like, "I went on it for weight loss," or, "I went on it for metabolic dysfunction or type 2 diabetes, but here's all the other things that started happening." And then people started telling me they were getting pregnant on it, and, you know, when they had been infertile and gone through rounds of IVF that were not working, and, uh, just all of these amazing stories. And so, of course, I keep... I have to research that and do more information on that. And it's just been... I've just been unwinding. I, I feel like I'm unwinding a story that isn't being told.

    2. SB

      So what is that story? To summarize, what is that story that's not being told that you've come to believe?

    3. TM

      These peptides are healing, they are anti-inflammatory, and they are regenerative, and they have a profound impact on our immune system in a positive way. And they don't just cover up and mask the insulin resistance and the metabolic dysfunction that leads to type 2 diabetes, they actually heal it.

    4. SB

      How do you know that?

    5. TM

      Well, interestingly, as this year's gone on, more and more studies have come out, and we're starting to see it. So many of the hypotheses I had about it are starting to show themselves in good clinical data, in good studies. And I've seen it with my patients, and I've seen it with myself. So-

    6. SB

      Yeah.

    7. TM

      ... I am now able to go off of it. At first, I could only go off of it for a short amount of time, and my psoriasis would come back.

    8. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    9. TM

      That was the first symptoms. I would start getting skin issues, and I usually get it around my scalp line, little itchies. That would come back within seven to 10 days. I am now able to go a month without it and absolutely no symptoms. And the second I start to get brain fog or a little bit of pain, I go back on. I cycle it like I would any other hormone. I don't know if you've had any guests on talking about hormones, but they're done best when you cycle them, because receptors get saturated, and when you saturate a receptor with a hormone, u- after a while, the

  12. 41:26 – 50:36

    Other Benefits of Ozempic

    1. TM

      cell will stop listening. And so you don't want to just keep flooding a cell or a body with a hormone. You wanna take it away and let those receptors pop back up. And so I think done correctly and done in an elegant way that's just reasonable, clinically reasonable, I think that we can actually start to heal some of these chronic lifestyle diseases that are so rampant, and it makes me wonder if we would need less and less and less of the common pharmaceuticals that are being handed out like candy, the lifelong pharmaceuticals. People go on statin drugs or they go on blood pressure medications, and no one says boo. They're on it for life. Oh, here's your metformin for your type 2 diabetes. You're on it for life. I think, done correctly, and also the neuroregenerative process that these induce in the brain, they actually regenerate neurons. Neuroplasticity is this concept where, when the brain... When you do something enough, your brain will w- hardwire into that. And so any habit, good or bad, that you consistently do, or any thought process you consistently have, if you're chronically depressed, or you're chronically negative, or you're, you know, I mean, you know this. You're, you've, you're self-optimizing yourself all the time, and growing, and trying to, uh, grow and be better. You're plasticizing your brain and hardwiring that circuitry so it's getting easier for you and you continue to seek knowledge.... these peptides offer people a window of opportunity of not only giving them the onus of control back, 'cause there are some mechanisms in the brain and the dopaminergic pathways that are giving people the... They're back in the driver's seat, they're back in control of what they're doing, but it's also inducing this neuroplasticity. So if they are to implement really positive lifestyle habits during the period of time that they're on it, they will hardwire that into their brain. So it's like opening a window of opportunity for somebody to completely change their life.

    2. SB

      You mentioned some studies there that have really supported your thesis that Ozempic is more than just a weight-loss drug, and that it has these other sort of regenerative properties and these healing properties. What are some of the studies? You've got some- some things in front of you there that you brought with you. What are some of these studies that highlight this in your view?

    3. TM

      Well, so there's one study in particular that, I don't have the title of it written down, where they looked at all of the data on all of the GLP-1 agonists that are out there, the different versions that I mentioned, and they went back through all of the studies, and they looked at it system by system by system, and I gave your team a link to that. And what they found is, I mean, going from tip to toe, neuroregeneration and anti-inflammation in the brain, they showed improvements in cardiovascular tissue. We just had a study come out at the end of 2023 called the SELECT Trial. It was a big one. Yes, it was sponsored by Novo Nordisk, who's the manufacturer of semaglutide, of- of- I should say, of Ozempic. And so people say, "Oh, don't believe those studies." It was a well-done study. It looked at individuals in their 40s who were overweight but did not have type 2 diabetes, and it showed a 20% reduction in severe cardiovascular events, so stroke and heart attack and- and others. And so then, people argued once that came out and said, "Oh, well, that foof... You know, Novo Nordisk did it, and that would happen if people lost weight anyway, right? You'd- you'd have improvements in cardiovascular disease." Well, they just looked at the data again and realized that those benefits were independent of weight loss. Whether people lost weight or not, they still had significant improvement in cardiovascular outcomes, which there's just nothing... We don't have anything out there that does that. I found data showing regeneration of pancreatic tissue, beta cells, in type 1 diabetics if given early enough. So if a person is d- uh, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition where the pancreas becomes destroyed by the immune system. It's different than type 2. We don't have anything to help those people. It used to be called juvenile diabetes, and then type 2 was adult s- onset, but now kids, many, many children are dealing with type 2, so it's a big mishmash, but they're very two different processes. They shouldn't even have the same name. Anyway, done early, uh, reversal of that pancreatic damage to the point where people didn't need to go on insulin and were able to have pancreatic healing. We don't have anything that does that except stem cells. They... At the end of 2023, they had to stop the FLOW trial because this was a ki- chronic kidney disease trial. Um, they had to stop it because the control group, they needed to be able to ethically give the control group the substance because it was so effective. It was so effective at reversing chronic kidney disease and kidney failure that they needed to be able to offer it to the control group ethically and not let them continue on their journey of kidney damage. So we've got this mishmash of studies, and then they've done little studies here and there looking at muscle, for instance. It's regenerative to muscle. It's regenerative to bone. It's regenerative to our joints. Some of this is in mice. Some of it's in humans. It's regenerative to the testes and to sperm production and motility.

    4. SB

      When you say regenerative to, say, muscle, wh- when people talk about Ozempic, one of the big concerns is that you lose a lot of muscle.

    5. TM

      Right. That's not true. I mean, it is true. I should... Let me, let me-

    6. SB

      Okay.

    7. TM

      ... let me rephrase that. Any dietary intervention or bariatric surgery that induces a severe caloric restriction will lead to about 20 to 35% muscle mass, or I should say lean mass loss. So this is a little bit of a nuanced conversation. If you basically s- put somebody into a self-starvation mode, they will lose 20 to 35% of their lean mass. Lean mass is all the soft tissue in your body, so that could be your tendons and your ligaments and your brain, and they, they clump it all into one, and they're looking at that and saying, "It's all muscle." Muscle's a percentage of that. Muscle isn't all of your lean mass, right? And so that kind of makes the thing, the s- the studies look bad there, I think. The other thing that they don't consider in that is pathologic muscle due to metabolic dysfunction will be marbled with fat.

    8. SB

      What does that mean? Sorry.

    9. TM

      Well, it's like, uh, foie gras. When you induce metabolic dysfunction in an animal, which is what they do in feed lots for cows often, and they do it to geese, they get their liver fatty, you will end up with this fatty infiltrate in the muscle. So the muscle goes from being this lovely, striated, linear, beautiful pattern to marbled with mu- with fat.

    10. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    11. TM

      And that fatty infiltrate becomes very pathologic to the muscle, and it puts the muscle itself into an insulin-resistant state. So once the marbling occurs in the muscle, it's sort of a chicken e- and egg downhill situation for the muscle, and I do believe very strongly, and I've been preaching this for decades, that once that process starts, and it most often starts in the thighs... You've probably seen the pictures of the cross-section of, like, this is an 80-year-old triathlete, and his muscle looks really beautiful and linear, and then here's, you know, the average 80-year-old, and it's really marbled, and the bone loss is significant, and the fatty layer on the outside is thicker. But what's most important in that photo is the marbling of the muscle. We don't want marbled muscle. That's the beginning of the end. You also end up with fatty liver, and you end up with fatty pancreas when you're in this metabolic dysfunction state, this downhill journey that culminates in type 2 diabetes. And so...One of the first things that happens when m- metabolic health improves, whether this is through dietary interventions, lifestyle, strength training, you name it, is that fatty infiltrate starts to dissolve. These GLP-1 agonists induce that process of the fat dissolving, and so I think that's part of the lean mass loss that they're measuring. They're just measuring it as lean mass loss. But we're also decreasing muscle size, because we're having the fatty infiltrate start to burn itself up. GLP-1s have also been shown to profuse the muscle w- with angiogenesis, so we get a vascular supply so that more amino acids are available to the muscle. So when they looked at aging muscle in a human and they gave them GLP-1 agonists, their muscle became healthier and less pathologic because it started to actually get better blood supply and be infused with the amino acids they were eating in the form of protein. So it's... And then there's pathways that are impacted as well that are inducing muscle protein synthesis. So GLP-1s actually induce muscle protein synthesis. They don't cause muscle wasting. It's the caloric restriction that's causing the wasting, and they're measuring it somewhat aberrantly. Does that make sense? That's, that's the story I'm trying to weave here.

    12. SB

      Yeah, so but how, how, c- do I... How can I avoid the caloric restriction if I'm taking a GLP-1 agonist like semagli- semaglutide or Ozempic?

    13. TM

      You don't dose it too high, so you don't crush the appetite. So the whole goal is to keep people at a dose where they still have an appetite. You don't have to crush their appetite with it. The way it's being dosed traditionally is they're ramping it up really fast, and they're just devastating people's appetite with it. And so people go from hungry and starving to, "I don't want to eat anything," and so they don't. And then they often will eat less healthy vers- uh, I'm sorry. They'll eat less volume of a poor app- of a poor diet. So they will continue to eat junk food, only less of it.

  13. 50:36 – 54:45

    Ozempic the Cancer Cure?

    1. TM

      They will continue to eat the crappy foods they're used to eating, only less of it. And I've heard Johann Hari on your show talk about this, and he took... A- The beautiful book that he wrote, his Magic Pill book, he talks about that. He found himself about five or six months in, and he was still just eating the same crap. He was just eating less of it. And what needs to happen when anybody's on this at any dose is they need to be protecting their muscle with all their might. They need to be strength training, and they need to be prioritizing their protein macros. Like, those are the two non-negotiables. I don't think doctors are always talking about that, and I don't think patients are compliant with that.

    2. SB

      If I start micro-dosing though, w- you know, won't I see less of the reward? I see less of the cost, but I... Will I, will I not also get less of the reward, the, the positive upsides that you've described?

    3. TM

      Not if you're doing all the other lifestyle things. So like I said, it opens this window of opportunity where people feel much more in control because there's impacts on the brain that allow people to be much more in control of their choices and of their thought processes and of their... even of their obsessions. It's very interesting how it works. And so people are able to make better choices, and I think given that window of opportunity and introducing these lifestyle interventions, they're going to be much more open to it. So we get them exercising. We get them eating better. We get them doing all the things as... You know, we get them optimizing their sleep. We get them going on walks and meditating and mitigating their stress. All of those things are going to improve their metabolic health. So it's a two-pronged approach, and we don't have to crank the dose. We can do this slow and low, and some people may need more, and some people may need less. But the point is, is the way it's being done traditionally where it's like you get your script, and you walk out of your office, and you don't get any counseling, you don't get any support, this is where people are falling into, I believe, the terrible pits of despair. So this is where the- we're seeing the problems, and it can be done differently where we're doing a holistic comprehensive approach with a patient.

    4. SB

      I was reading a 2024 study by Lindsey Wang that found diabetic patients taking Ozempic were 50% less likely to develop bowel cancer compared to those on insulin. What does this say and highlight about Ozempic's role in staving off cancer?

    5. TM

      Well, that's an interesting study because insulin is pro-grow, so insulin is also a signaling peptide hormone, very much like o- GLP-1, and it is pro-grow when you give it to someone. So someone being on insulin, I believe, will inherently potentially make them more vulnerable to cancer. I don't want to say certainly 'cause I don't want to scare everybody 'cause there's a lot of people out there on insulin, but it is a pro-grow hormone. Now, it's pro-grow in that we get surges of it after we work out, which is awesome. We want that, right? We want that anabolic response, but in your average person who's not working out and who's not really using their insulin the way they need to, who... They're already swimming in it due to insulin resistance, and now they're taking insulin 'cause their pancreas is pooped out, that's a mess. That's a soup of, of things we don't necessarily want happening growing in the body. And so that study looked at insulin versus GLP-1s. It's not entirely fair 'cause it's not a contr- it's not a true control group.

    6. SB

      Mm-hmm.

    7. TM

      But they... There are other data sets coming out that haven't been published yet showing really good, really hopeful and positive impacts on potentially reducing cancer risk, and they're correlative, not causative, so we can't put our finger on it and say these, these, these reduce cancer. But they looked at a, you know, over a million people that were type 2 diabetics that were on semaglutide, and they found a significant reduction in different types of cancer that are obesity-related in comparison to the folks who were not taking GLP-1s. And those were the ovar- the, the cancers you don't want, the ovarian, the pancreatic, the colon, the types of cancers that are... You know, you don't come back from readily. And so that's very exciting. It's not getting a lot of play, and it's really, really new information, so I'm excited just to watch it. But it makes sense to me because these sit on your immune cells as well. There's GLP-1 receptors throughout our entire body. That's why we're getting the impacts throughout the entire body, and I think that the impact that it's having on the overall immunologic milieu of an individual is potentially very anti-cancer.

    8. SB

      I mean, that study that you cited there, I know

  14. 54:45 – 57:14

    Mental Health Connections to Ozempic

    1. SB

      nothing about, um, Ozempic and GLP-1s really, but in my... even in my sort of, you know-... chimp brain. I go, yeah, 'cause if they lose weight-

    2. TM

      Right.

    3. SB

      ... they're less likely to get cancer.

    4. TM

      Right. No, that's totally fair, and I think it's both, because the way that these are working mechanistically in the body, and many of the studies that I've looked at are showing results independent of weight loss.

    5. SB

      Even if they don't lose weight, then their cancer risk reduces?

    6. TM

      Well, their, the healing and regenerative and anti-inflammatory impacts are there regardless of weight loss or not, and then you add in weight loss, and you add in insulin sensitivity, you add in this, this healing of the metabolic dysfunction, and you're gonna significantly reduce risk for everything as well.

    7. SB

      I mean, that's a really good point actually, 'cause if... Has there, has anyone done a study where they give someone Ozempic, and even if they don't lose weight, inflammation goes down?

    8. TM

      Well, that's what the SELECT study, this trial showed, that, that cardiovascular trial I just shared with you. They just relooked at that information and realized that even independent of weight, 'cause that was the big argument everyone had is, well, of course the cardiovascular benefits will stay or will improve because they're losing weight, but they found that even in those who didn't lose weight, they still had really good cardiovascular outcomes. So yes, it... That's what, that's what we're starting to see, and so I think they need to start looking at these things more readily, but they weren't, right? They were just looking at like, here's more with the obese people, and here's type 2 diabetics, and we're gonna crank up the doses, and we're gonna see what we see. But we're starting to get longitudinal data now, so that cancer one, for instance, was looking at, uh, patient records going way back, and so they had over a million pa- you know, people in there that they... And again, it's correlative, it's not causative, but it's showing trends. It's starting to show positive trends, and so I think that's what we have to look at, and we have to start to flesh that out.

    9. SB

      What about mental health, things like depression, um, and sort of anxiety and these kinds of things?

    10. TM

      You maybe have heard that these are inducing suicidal ideation, and people are, you know, getting severely depressed on them, and the EU opened a whole research into it, and people are very concerned about this, and yet we've got studies showing really positive impacts on depression and anxiety. And the thing I will say about that is I'm not saying that people on Ozempic are not having suicidal ideation, but that is a little more nuanced of a conversation, because number one, when you lose a significant amount of weight very quickly, all kinds

  15. 57:14 – 1:00:58

    Sexual Health and Fertility Impact

    1. TM

      of things can go wrong. You can end up with pancreatitis. You can end up with gallstones. You can end up with severe depression. Uh, your fat stores your hormones, and so you lose your hormones very quickly. I've had patients who got tummy tucks and came in a few months later and were losing their minds 'cause they literally just had all of their hormonal depots sucked out of their stomach. And so there's concern there that this rapid weight loss, which again, I am not a fan of, I am not a fan of doing it that way, but if you drop somebody's weight significantly, you may end up with a very depressed mood state. We've also got a bit further to go with that in that many people are using food as their dopamine source and as their crutch or as their coping mechanism, and I'm not judging, I just understand that to be true, you know, we all have our vice. And if you take that away from someone because they suddenly don't want to eat 'cause we've crushed their appetite with too high a dose, then I think that we could end up with a very depressed person in front of us. However, done correctly and what I'm seeing clinically is people are having really profound benefits in their anxiety, in their depression, in their moods, in their cognition. Um, I'm seeing neurodivergent folks taking it who are becoming much more functional in the, in their everyday day-to-day. I'm seeing people who are more of a hermit who don't want to go out in the world suddenly venturing out, being more social, so there is an impact on the brain, and I think it's the anti-inflammatory mechanism. I think it's the dopaminergic system, the dopamine pathways being impacted. And again, if we're not cranking the dose up, I think that we can use these effectively to bolster mood, to improve cognition, to improve brain clarity, and all of that leads... You know, a, an inflamed brain is a depressed brain. At the end of the day, we have to get that point really clear. Depression is a brain inflammation issue.

    2. SB

      You've mentioned sort of sexual health a few times and fertility in passing when we're talking about Ozempic. Um, women's sexual health, male fertility. What is the, the impact in your view of an- an Ozempic intervention on these kinds of things?

    3. TM

      Well, the fertility conversation is really daunting, and it's kind of a long one, but we are looking... We are a few generations into a major fertility crisis, and they say, what is it, by 2100, 2100, by 2000, by 2100, 97% of countries in the world will not be reproducing at a rate to repopulate themselves. We are looking at a population crisis. By 20- by the mid-2040s, they say sperm rates are gonna be at zero, and again, that's multifactorial, but my firm belief at the root of this is metabolic dysfunction. I- I- I firmly believe that metabolic dysfunction is probably the biggest driver. If I could press a button and fix it, I would put my finger on the metabolic dysfunction button. And GLP-1s heal metabolic dysfunction, and so we're seeing reversal in PCOS, which is probably one of the number one drivers of infertility in young women, period, which is really, at the end of the day, just metabolic dysfunction. It's just presenting in women with high androgens. The, the clinical picture of PCOS isn't... doesn't always involve, um, cysts on the ovaries. It's just this... Uh, I don't even know why it's called that anymore. It's a clinical picture where they have metabolic dysfunction, they have high testosterone, they have low progesterone, their estrogen gets converted readily into testosterone, they end up with hair growth, they end up infertile. It's a disaster. Many, many young women, many women in your age cohort have this condition. Many women in your... Many couples in your age cohort are not able to get pregnant without IVF at this point. People are not getting pregnant. I don't know. How old are you?

  16. 1:00:58 – 1:05:04

    Where Is Metabolic Dysfunction Coming From?

    1. TM

    2. SB

      31.

    3. TM

      Yes. People in their 30s are not getting pregnant, and when I ask my friends in their 30s all over the world, I say, "What's, like, how's y- how's the pregnancy going with... Like, how, how's it going with your friends?" And they're like, "Everybody's on IVF."... it's- I don't know what you're hearing, but it, like- that's crazy to me that 30-year-olds are having to do IVF. Healthy-looking 30-year-olds are having to do IVF. So we've got sperm issues and we've got egg issues. It's both. It's not just the female's fault, it's not just the male's issue. Um, we've got sperm health, we've got sperm volume, we've got sperm motility issues. We've got metabolic dysfunction in both groups, and what happens when we do have a successful pregnancy is that that offspring is being epigenetically flagged. If the mother is obese and dealing with metabolic dysfunction, and even if the father is, that fetus ends up bathed in insulin in utero, and they come out epi- epigenetically marked for much more severe risk of metabolic dysfunction and obesity in their own lives. And that cycle just goes into perpetuity. That's where we're at. We're several generations into this as a, as a species. And so I'm worried. Like, I'm legitimately... I, I joke that humans are going extinct, but it's not funny, and it- I think it's really happening, and I, I do believe it will happen in the next few generations if we don't right this ship. And at the root of it is this overarching metabolic dysfunction. 2018 data out of the US that was published in 2021 showed that only 6.8% of US adults are metabolically healthy. 6.8. Th- so that's 93, 94% of US adults are cardio-metabolically busted. That's... and th- that was pre-lockdowns.

    4. SB

      Why?

    5. TM

      That's a great question.

    6. SB

      You know, you talked about PCOS and this sort of infertility thi- crisis, and then you talked about it being about metabolic dysfunction.

    7. TM

      Yeah.

    8. SB

      Where is the metabolic dysfunction coming from? What is the thing furthest upstream if we were to attack it at its source?

    9. TM

      Yeah. The food supply was significantly adulterated in the past few generations, so it starting with my parents, the boomers. You know, they got their convenient food, their... E- everything was about convenience. That's when we got, you know, disposable diapers and fancy microwaves and dishwashers and all that jazz. Well, food became very convenient as well. In the '90s... I watched this happen in my lifetime. In the '90s, the food supply was significantly adulterated and terrifyingly so, and they found the bliss point, right? The perfect emulsion of sugar, fat, and salt to hit those neurotransmitters in the brain to make you want to come back for more. Toxicity is a huge issue. I believe toxicity in general, not just environmental toxicity, but it's the chemicals in our food, um, what we're doing to ourselves. So many young women today are bathing themselves in toxic chemicals through their beauty habits. I mean, the nails and the hair and the skincare, and it's, it's really, really severe. So it's this sort of multifactorial thing. Humans are actually eating the same amount or less calories than they were 30 years ago. It's not the caloric intake. It's not that people are sloths and they're lazy and they need to do better. It's that we are swimming in a toxic soup. We are eating a very adulterated, mineral-deficient, protein-deficient chemical shit storm of a food supply, and then you throw in the massive... I mean, to be totally honest with you, the... a massive uptick in vaccines in infants when they come out, I mean, that's a whole different ball game than it was even when my daughter was an infant. It's significantly different than when I was an infant. So we've just... we've got a lot of things coming at these young people, and it culminates, you know, and it adds up, and I think people don't realize we have a toxic bucket. We all have an individual toxic bucket, and that bucket will become full for whatever reason. Maybe we've got mold exposure, maybe we've got too much stress. It's- it's multifactorial, but that bucket will fill up and overflow,

  17. 1:05:04 – 1:10:13

    What Advice You'd Give Someone With PCOS

    1. TM

      and metabolic dysfunction is a result of that and also a driver of that. So it's- it's very hard to put my finger on why or the chicken and egg, what's- what's leading to what. I know that there's things we can do that are non-negotiable to help right the ship as best we can that have nothing to do with drugs and have nothing to do with peptides, and I've been talking about this for decades. We must be strength training and optimizing our muscle. We must be walking every day like human beings do. Humans were made to walk and lift heavy shit, right? We are meant to be in community. We're not meant to be isolated. We're meant to be around others. We are meant to share our microbiomes. We are meant to have healthy microbiomes, not these super sterilized microbiomes. The abundance of microbiome disruption from all the antibiotics, I mean, that alone causes lifelong issues for people. And so, i- you stack all this up, and people are sitting at home, they're alone. Loneliness is an epidemic. They're eating food that comes from Uber Eats, or I don't know what you have here, but they're ordering in. They're eating processed foods for most meals. They're not getting out. Here in London, I'm so happy everybody's walking, but back in the US, everyone just drives everywhere. Maybe in New York they walk, but any- anywhere else you go, you know, it's like get up, go from the bed, to the couch, to the car, to the desk, back to the car, to the couch, to the bed. People are not exercising. People are not paying attention to nutritionally dense food. They're not getting sunlight. They're not in community. I think COVID really squelched community just in so many different ways, you know. A lot of churches are d- sort of disbanding. Communities are disbanding. They shut the gyms down. So there's just all of these factors that culminate into a human being that isn't a healthy human being.

    2. SB

      Just on that point of PCOS, if I was a young woman, I was 31 years old when I came to you with PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome, and it was impacting my fertility. You could see I had the, uh, you know, higher testosterone levels, I had slightly hairier arms, I was maybe putting on some weight, what would you aim at? What would you do?

    3. TM

      I would prioritize protein, first of all.

    4. SB

      Yeah.

    5. TM

      I would go for 30 grams of protein, three meals a day as best that you can. I don't even care if it's grass-fed fancy protein. I just want them eating animal protein if they will do it. I want them immediately cutting out...... is many of the chemicals that are applying to their skin and their bodies. So, they're not getting their hair done, they're not shooting the Botox, they're not putting the nails on, they're not... I mean, it's just a chemical, uh... Uh, what's coming at young women is crazy when it comes to their beauty routines at this point. I would have them walking three times a day for 10 minutes each. So three 10-minute walks outside preferably. Getting up and seeing the sunlight so we set the circadian rhythm. So it's really important that you get up and outside first thing in the morning to get natural sunlight in your eyes, and it's really important that you see it in the afternoon as the sun is waning, that sort of golden hour, you know, as the sun starts to wane in the sky and the sky gets golden. Go outside then, that really helps you with sleep. Sleep is critical. Cut the blue light, put the, you know, amber/blue light blockers on at night, stop staring at the phone and the TV until 10 o'clock at night. Get that shit out of there, because that is jacking up people's rhythm, which is jacking up their fertility and their hormones. Um, strength training is non-negotiable. We have to protect our muscle and we have to build it. I'm a skinny girl, and I lift more than you would believe, and I don't look i-... I can't hold it, (laughs) but I try. So really optimizing muscle, that alone would be a game changer. Like, if they didn't even cut out... I wouldn't even pull foods away from them. I would just say focus on eating... getting the protein in, and the other foods will start to fall away. And when you start to do all the other things that are good for you, you start to make better choices. When you feel better, you do better. I have reversed so much PCOS in women like that. Next, I would add in some progesterone, which is available over the counter, but obviously do that under the care of someone who knows what they're doing so you don't take too much progesterone, but progesterone's a very important player in there. It's actually a neuro hormone, it's, it's very safe and effective, and I would get them eating as much of a whole food diet as I could.

    6. SB

      Could you... can you reverse PCOS?

    7. TM

      Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're... So, you know, (sighs) genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. So they came out with some bad epigenetic flags, but that doesn't mean that that's their fate. N- none of us... It is not my fate to die a miserable death from psoriatic arthritis. I will do everything I can to make sure I keep that at bay, and that's something that medical doctors don't tell you. You go in, they say, "You have this. There's nothing we can do." And I'm like, "Could I take a multivitamin? Could my... is changing my diet gonna do anything?" And back when I was growing up, they were like, "There's nothing you can do. Good luck." At least now doctors are starting to get a little more savvy and realizing it's more nuanced, and I'm, I'm starting to see the professions come together more and realize, like, diet actually matters, (laughs) and I'm starting to see it in the headlines of the medical journals like, "Diet actually matters, lifestyle matters, light matters," you know? But all of these things... What, what I tell patients is, "I'm not gonna cure you. You are genetically and epigenetically

  18. 1:10:13 – 1:15:07

    Microdosing Examples

    1. TM

      primed, but we're gonna try to keep that as quiet as possible. We're gonna try to keep you optimized so that this over here doesn't rear its ugly head." But, you know, throw in a bad viral infection or throw in a big stressor or throw in, you know, something major like a birth, childbirth, and you might get off-kilter again. But that doesn't mean you don't have all the control in the world to help mitigate that.

    2. SB

      I have to say, you know, as someone that comes from... I'm gonna try and pronounce it again-

    3. TM

      (laughs)

    4. SB

      ... naturopathic medicine, it is quite surprising to hear you talk about microdosing on Ozempic.

    5. TM

      I know. (laughs)

    6. SB

      Because, you know, I think naturopathic medicine, you'd imagine they were very much against microdosing or dosing any sort of chemical pharmaceutical.

    7. TM

      Right.

    8. SB

      So how do you square the circle there?

    9. TM

      Because it's a peptide, and it's been appropriated by the pharmaceutical industry because of its delivery system. But there's many other peptides that are available over the counter, for instance, in supplement form like BPC-157, which is a regenerative peptide. It's also anti-inflammatory. All of these peptides generally are regenerative, anti-inflammatory, and healing. They all just kind of have their special skill set. So we've got a variety of different peptides that were pulled by the FDA because they work, is my opinion, but we also have ones that are available over the counter that are in sprays, that are in pills. If you go get hurt, you can order them online. It's legal. I'm not talking any black market. This, these are reputable companies in a supplement form, and you can induce phenomenal healing in your body, and these are available. People just don't know about them and they don't know how to use them, and they are a bit expensive. This is just another peptide. It just happens to be held over here, and it's being used in a way by brand name pharmaceutical big pharma companies in a way that I just don't think is appropriate for peptide use.

    10. SB

      You've used that phrase, "Done correctly," a few times-

    11. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    12. SB

      ... when you were talking about the microdosing of Ozempic, and you've also highlighted there but also previously in this conversation that people are using it wrong so I... or using it in too high of a dose. So I, um... I brought with me today some... a little science lab which I've got over there in the corner 'cause I would like you to show me when we talk about microdosing, A, what microdosing is-

    13. TM

      Yeah.

    14. SB

      ... as a term. What does that mean? But also, could you show me the comparative difference in how you would and you are giving your patients Ozempic, what dose you're giving them at comparatively-

    15. TM

      Yes.

    16. SB

      ... to how it's typically being administered, in what dosage, um, for the sort of weight loss effects that we've talked about and that most people know it for?

    17. TM

      Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

    18. SB

      Okay. So let me bring over the Ozempic.

    19. TM

      Okay, so this is what they start people on, and then every month, every four weeks, in the traditional model, with the brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy and Semaglutide, they double... This is... This would be specifically for semaglutide.

    20. SB

      Okay, so let me back up here just-

    21. TM

      Okay.

    22. SB

      ... so I've got my, um... so I'm with you. So typically, when they administer Ozempic and semagli- semaglutide-

    23. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    24. SB

      ... they do it in a pen-

    25. TM

      Mm-hmm.

    26. SB

      ... which you kind of self-inject-

    27. TM

      Yes.

    28. SB

      ... which is at a controlled dose.

    29. TM

      Yes.

    30. SB

      So you can't give yourself whatever, uh, quantity you like.

  19. 1:15:07 – 1:20:34

    Microdosing Ozempic

    1. TM

      when folks are exercising, just, it doesn't even matter what kind of exercise. When folks are exercising in addition to, they can come off more successfully and maintain the weight loss. So that's promising. However, my argument is, in somebody who's metabolically optimized... Now, this isn't everyone. This isn't your severely obese patient. But in somebody who's metabolically optimized, I give them a fraction of this. And that differs by person, but I actually have to use an insulin syringe so that I can do a fraction of the starting dose. And I may never elevate it. I may never ramp it up.

    2. SB

      So compared to the 2.5 milligrams now, you're giving out how much?

    3. TM

      I'm giving a fraction of 0.25. I'm giving a fraction of this.

    4. SB

      So you might be giving 0.0...

    5. TM

      It depends. It depends on the patient. And without getting into detail, because whenever I do, people start playing with their dosage themselves, and I've heard cr- pff, seen crazy things in the comments section of my posts on Instagram, so I don't want to tell people exactly how to dose. Um, but it depends. It depends on what they're going... And this is a bigger conversation, because I don't ever do semaglutide as a monotherapy. I never do it by itself. I never just crank people on semaglutide and hope for the best. If that is the only g- if the, I'm sorry, if that's the only peptide they're using, they likely will have to keep going up. And so I have one patient who is obese and has some weight to lose, and I have taken nine months to get him to here.

Episode duration: 1:58:03

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