Dr Gurpreet Padda – Discover The Secret to ‘Becoming’ a Type 2 Diabetic

Content by: Gurpreet Padda

Watch the full interview below or listen to the full episode on your iPhone HERE.

Stu: This week I’m excited to welcome Dr. Gurpreet Padda. Dr. Padda is a board-certified MD and the Medical Director of Reversing Diabetes MD. This online space features protocols designed to reverse disease in patients who are overweight or already have established pre-diabetes or diabetes. In this episode we talk about the secret to becoming a type 2 diabetic. We discuss common industry myths and how the Reverse Diabetes MD protocol can help address this global epidemic.

Jump to 05:05 to hear Dr Padda explain about ‘The Secret to Becoming a Diabetic’.

Audio Version

downloaditunesListen to Stitcher Questions we ask in this episode:

  • What do you mean with the term ‘The Secret to Becoming a Diabetic?’ (05:05)
  • We’re told it’s incurable, what are your thoughts on this? (18:11)
  • Where should we start if wanting to explore the possibility of reversal? (26:23)

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Full Transcript

Stu

00:22 Hey, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions. It’s here that we connect with the world’s best experts in health, wellness, and human performance in an attempt to cut through the confusion around what it actually takes to achieve a long- lasting health. Now I’m sure that’s something that we all strive to have. I certainly do.

Before we get into the show today, you might not know that we make products, too. That’s right. We’re into whole food nutrition and have a range of superfoods and natural supplements to help support your day. If you are curious, want to find out more, just jump over to our website. That is 180nutrition.com.au and take a look. Okay. Back to the show.

This week I’m excited to welcome Dr. Gurpreet Padda. Dr. Padda is a board-certified MD and the Medical Director of Reversing Diabetes MD. This online space features protocols designed to reverse disease in patients who are overweight or already have established prediabetes or diabetes. In this episode we talk about the secret to becoming a type 2 diabetic. We discuss common industry myths and how the Reverse Diabetes MD protocol can help address this global epidemic. Over to Dr. Padda.

Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Dr. Gurpreet Padda to the podcast. Dr Padda, how are you?

Dr Gurpreet

01:50 Excellent.

Stu

01:51 Good stuff. Well, look-

Dr Gurpreet

01:52 I appreciate being here.

Stu

01:52 Oh well look, we appreciate you sharing some of your time, especially on a late Sunday afternoon as well, so thank you for that. But first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I would just love it if you could tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into the questions.

Dr Gurpreet

02:10 Yeah, so I’m a clinician. I actually practice medicine every single day. I see patients every single day. I started off as a physician, treating patients with extremely complex medical problems. I do interventional pain, so I see patients that have just horrendous symptoms and in my career, as I started to treat them, I realised that they had a commonality. You know, everybody talks about patients having fibromyalgia, people talk about patients having all of these symptoms, and I kept coming back to, well, what’s the common root cause for all of this? Is there something that I can treat? And it seemed to be progressing. It seemed to be getting worse. I’m 55 years, I started my career 30 plus years ago, and I’ve seen a dramatic shift in the patient population. This is not the same population that I started with when I first started. Patients were never this heavy, patients weren’t this diabetic. And now, three quarters, more than three quarters of my patients, are diabetic.

And so I’m trying to figure out, why is it that we’ve had this epidemic of diabetes? And what is it that we can do about it? And it brought me through a whole bunch of rabbit holes. I dug deep to figure this out. And it turns out it’s been in front of us the whole time. It’s the food that we’re eating. We don’t have an epidemic of diabetes. We have a pandemic of diabetes. If animals eat the same food that we eat, which is the standard American diet, they get the same disease. And at this point, we have rats in New York that are gigantic, that are diabetic, and they’re cognitively impaired, like Alzheimer’s, and they’re venturing out in the daytime because they have all this growth hormone, which is hormone pumping through their bodies, they’re gigantic, and their brains are defective and they’re out in the daytime and they’re dying. And so if you look at tourist places where you used to have thin dogs, and now thee tourist places have extremely fat dogs. You look at the monkeys at locations, the monkeys are getting huge.

And it’s not that we didn’t feed them before, we’re feeding them something different now. And those are the kinds of the conclusions that have come about. So we know how to make somebody diabetic now, I can guarantee I can make somebody diabetic in about two weeks.

Stu

04:49 So that then leads me to my first question because I read while researching that you use the phrase the secret to becoming a type 2 diabetic. So tell me what the secret is. Tell me how you would make somebody, quite efficiently, diabetic, very quickly.

Dr Gurpreet

05:05 Yeah, it’s real easy. You give them vegetable oil, you prime their livers with vegetable oil, and you feed them sugar, and I can take anybody and make them diabetic. You know, it’s interesting, you can’t give a rat cancer unless you prime the rat with vegetable oil. You can’t give human beings cancers and diabetes unless you prime it with something. It’s really hard. I mean, yes there are cancers, but if you look back at it, this really started around the time of the Industrial Revolution when we started to process vegetable oils. We didn’t know what to do with them because they were hazardous waste product. And so we started off with Crisco becoming integrated into basically our food supply. And if you look back at it, you look back at what happened right during World War II, Hitler was terrified of cancer. It was the emerging threat. He actually kept a Jewish doctor alive. His name was Dr. Warburg, he kept him alive because he thought this guy might have figured out the answer for cancer, because he was researching cancer and diabetes.

It turns out that Warburg, essentially, the Warburg effect is that you have to have certain nutrients to grow cancer. He didn’t get as far as he would have wanted, but he suspected, at that point, that there may have something to do with the vegetable oils. Now the vegetable oils really cranked up. They started in 1800s, but they really cranked up in the 1970s and 80s, just about the same time as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working through the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. started to push away saturated fats, regular, natural saturated fats and started to encourage the use of vegetable oil.

In fact, so much so, that they said that vegetable oil, reduced cholesterol, and we should substitute saturated healthy fat for vegetable oil because it was healthier and that’s when we started this dramatic uptick in cancer rates, in diabetes rates, we saw a dramatic uptick in fibromyalgia. We saw a dramatic uptick in Alzheimer’s. Anything that you can imagine that is related to the surface cell membrane and metabolic inflammation, you can trigger. Even if you look at populations that aren’t super obese like, look at Asian populations. Asian populations are not super obese, but they eat a lot of vegetable oil. They’re the thin people that become diabetic because they’re consuming vegetable oils and they certainly eat a lot of carbohydrate, but they’re naturally not as obese.

So those are the triggers. So I can take anybody and I can make them diabetic if I can prime them with vegetable oil first, give them high glycemic index, if I really want to throw an extra on it, I would give them grain or gluten, because as soon as I’ve done the first two and they have a leaky gut, I can give them grain or gluten, and that’s going to make them have a fuzzy brain, and it’s going to make them have pain all over their whole body. And I can reverse it. I can take these patients and I can reverse it in a matter of about three months. It takes longer to reverse than it does to start.

Stu

08:26 That’s interesting. And it’s interesting because you have described the standard American diet, standard Australian diet, 85 to 90% of the foods that you see in the supermarkets today are a fantastic combination of grains, seed oils, hidden sugars, and all manner of fillers, thickeners, and chemicals as well. And it’s kind of hard to find a convenience food that doesn’t have a vegetable oil in one way, shape, or form, as well. So with vegetable oils in mind, are they all as damaging as I’m reading that they are, in terms of canola, sunflower, safflower, rapeseed, you know, all the way across? Because we used to hear the term hydrogenated and that’s kind of slipped away and trans fat, that those terms are kind of slipping away now and there’s still confusion in there. So is vegetable oil 101 like, just forget it? Or are the healthier versions?

Dr Gurpreet

09:35 I don’t believe that there’s any version of vegetable oil that’s healthy. Now we have to discern the difference between a polyunsaturated fatty acid such as a vegetable oil, a polyunsaturated fatty acid such as shrimp or krill or fish. Vegetable oil is an Omega-6. Shrimp, krill, fish is an Omega-3. Now that’s not the same thing as a monounsaturated fatty acid, like oleic, which is olive oil. And actually, just as an incident, bacon has more oleic oil than does olive oil. And so it’s interesting, bacon’s actually relatively healthy, if you look at monounsaturated fatty acids. It’s really the preparation that can be the problem. But in general, the issue is that these polyunsaturated fatty acids that have a bend at the sixth Omega position, at the sixth carbon position, they tend to get into the cell and they tend to make the cell membrane less flexible. And the way that the body metabolizes these, it has to break them down in segments of two. It just turns out that the body naturally metabolizes them and gets stuck at that six carbon, and it turns into arachidonic acid, which is the precursor for severe inflammation. And so it creates a cascade of effect of inflammation, as opposed to the Omega-3, which doesn’t get stuck there.

And so it allows that to be processed and so the pro-inflammatory effect of Omega-6s is what’s getting us in trouble. And that’s what creates [inaudible 00:11:18], it creates the center concept of the liver toxicity because all of this stuff gets absorbed in your gut and it goes, first pass, through the liver and it gets stuck in the liver and causes hormone resistance there. And that’s the beginning. And that’s why this is so rapid of an effect. And once it’s there and it intercalates into all your fat and it leaches back out again later, it might take three to six months to replace that fat. And so that’s why it’s easier to get the disease than to get rid of the disease.

Stu

11:49 So in terms of early warning signs, what might we experience if we’re in those very early prediabetic stages? And also, to throw into the mix, it’s quite common for lean people to become prediabetic as well, and I throw myself into that category as well. I might think, “Well hey, look at me, I look healthy,” but who knows what’s happening inside. What might I experience?

Dr Gurpreet

12:19 I would tell you that over 75% of prediabetic patients don’t know they’re diabetic. You have no idea until you actually do the test. And testing your morning sugar is an invalid test. What you really need to do, is you need to have a combination of tests done to determine if you’re truly prediabetic or not. And that necessitates that somebody runs an hormone level on you. You want to see something called an LPIR score, which is lipoprotein IR, it’s an hormone resistance score. You want to see something called fructosamine, which is a measure of blood sugar over the last 30 days. You want to see hemoglobin A1C, which is a measure of blood sugar over the last 90 days.

And so it’s more than one thing. It’s not just, you have a blood sugar of less than 100, and so you’re probably okay. No, it’s a bunch of stuff, because when you’re prediabetic, and you’re releasing hormone, your blood sugar by definition is going to be normal. In fact, I would be surprised if your blood sugar was high. And so most people get tested and they don’t do the right test. And the average GP doesn’t know that they’re supposed to order an hormone test. Most of them don’t. And so you really have to get that hormone level. You want to see what it is in comparison to your glucose. Because if you’re hormone level is three, if it’s very, very low, you’re okay. But if you’re hormone level is 25, and your blood sugar is 90, you’re prediabetic. And then you really need to look at your hemoglobin A1C and the hormoneresistance factors. So there’s a combination of factors.

Stu

14:05 And what might I be feeling? So what are the telltale signs? Might I be carbohydrate cravings, erratic energy levels, things like that?

Dr Gurpreet

14:16 Yeah, you might just feel tired, you might feel fatigued. These are such general symptoms that they may not mean anything. You just may not feel great. Most of my diabetic patients, or my prediabetic patients, just don’t feel right. But the thing is that carbohydrates become an addiction and you don’t know that you’re addicted. It’s so subtle, and food itself is an addiction. It creates a lot of dopamine release, especially fructose, which is what’s in most of the sugar-sweetened beverages. And they’ve specifically engineered these sugar-sweetened beverages to disproportionately have higher levels of fructose than what should normally be in there. It’s much higher than high fructose corn syrup. They’ve actually engineered it to be super high fructose corn syrup and that’s the addictive component. And, of course, why would they do it? Why would they spend the extra money? Because it makes it more addictive. And so you might not even know that you’re prediabetic because you’re just hooked to the stuff.

Stu

15:28 Interesting.

Dr Gurpreet

15:29 You’re in denial.

Stu

15:31 In terms of carbohydrates, as well, so at the moment, this culture is shifting towards carbohydrate bashing, and we’re looking at things like low carbohydrate, time-restricted eating, ketosis as being the better way to start thinking about how we eat. But are all carbohydrates, could we put them all in the same camp, in terms of, well, if I’m really mindful about reducing carbohydrates, then I’m going to start eliminating vegetables and fruits, things like that.

Dr Gurpreet

16:08 Yeah. And honestly, I look at fruits as dessert. The fruits that we have today have no bearing on the fruits that we had in the 1950s, the 1930s, or the 1910s. If you take grapes and you put it in a glass and you smash them down, there’s more sugar in that grape juice than there is in soda, for the same volume. So the stuff that has been so engineered to be hyperglycemic, so much sugar in it, that it really is not relevant. As in terms of, people talk about the health of fruit. And so I make my patients separate the concept of fruit and vegetables, or vegetables and fruits, because people talk about it like it’s one thing, “Oh, I eat my fruit and vegetables.” No, you eat your fruits, which is dessert,

17:00 And that’s a special treat. And your vegetables are next to you, and those may be healthy for you, or they may not be. It really depends on your personal gut health. There’s a lot of people that have leaky gut, and for them, phytates and oxalates and some of the things, some of the chemical defenses in vegetables can cause the problem. But the intrinsic nature of it as in terms of the fiber that you’re going to get, which is going to buffer the glucose rise, it’s not going to be a big deal. I wouldn’t eliminate vegetables.

Now, I’ll be very honest with you. I’m pretty much carnivorous. I eat mostly meat, but I love vegetables. I grew up as a vegetarian, but I’ve converted over time to be more and more carnivorous because it fits my schedule, and it’s very nutrient dense, and I can eat one meal a day and get away with it. I can’t do that with vegetables. It’s not as nutrient dense. I have to eat a lot of them. And I’m running around 16, 17 hours of the day. So for me, this is convenient.

Stu

18:07 That’s fa-

Dr Gurpreet

18:08 On the weekend I’ll eat vegetables and stuff. But on the weekdays I’m too busy.

Stu

18:11 Yeah. Well look, that is fascinating because you are not the first MD to come on and talk about a largely meat-based diet, which is really interesting and certainly seems to be gaining more press these days as well. So I’m intrigued about the supposedly incurable nature of diabetes. And you mentioned the reversal of that as well. So is it incurable? Clearly not from what you’ve told me. So where would we start on that route?

Dr Gurpreet

18:43 So what I do is, again, I go back to my hormone level. If the patient is producing hormone, I have a chance of reversing them. If they’ve gotten to the point where they no longer produce hormone, they have no intrinsic hormone, and there’s two things you want to look at. You want to look at their hormone level, and if you’re giving them hormone from the outside, then you want to look at their C-peptide because you don’t give them C-peptide when you inject. C-peptide is only manufactured from the patient’s own hormone, so if you’re giving somebody hormone, you want to check their C-peptide. You want to see what that ratio is, and C-peptide is just a marker for the body’s production of hormone. It’s a little bit more sensitive test.

If they’re producing hormone, I can reverse them, but then it’s a matter of going through the machinations of getting them detoxed off of their sugars and getting them to the point where they’re sensitive to glucagon again and getting their weight down just a little bit to increase the blood flow to the pancreas because what happens is it only takes about eight grams. That’s like less than a half a tablespoon of fat to be thrown into your pancreas to change the blood flow to the beta cells. And if you just put a very tiny amount of fat, just a little bit of expansion, it reduces the blood flow to those beta cells. And the beta cells don’t see the sugar in the bloodstream and they stop producing hormone.

In fact people have done this. They’ve actually gone through with catheters and dilated the pancreatic arteries, and temporarily there’s a surge of hormone because the body sees that. The vast majority of patients can be reversed because they were still producing hormone. There’s a few patients that can’t, and those are usually autoimmune patients. They’ve had antibodies to their beta cells and you can’t because they’re really type one diabetics now.

Stu

20:43 Okay, interesting. And in terms of medication, things like Metformin, what are your thoughts on that as a tool?

Dr Gurpreet

20:55 So I love Metformin and not everybody agrees with me. It’s super cheap. It’s very effective and it doesn’t work anything like we think it works. So everybody assumes that Metformin does something to the hormone receptor, and that’s not my opinion. I think Metformin certainly works on the mTOR pathway, which is the the rapamycin pathway. But I think mTOR has a another significant effect. It changes your gut microbiome and it shifts the bacteria in your intestines so that you have less absorption of glucose into your system. And the bacteria take the brunt of it and they consume it. And that’s why people get diarrhea when they first start Metformin because you’ve given them a weak antibiotic, and those bacteria are, are shifting bacterial populations. And initially most patients will get abdominal pain because you’re causing a die-off of bacteria. So I think Metformin has a solid place to play, and I think you’re seeing the mTOR component of it for people using it for longevity.

The people on the West coast, in the US, in Silicon Valley are using it to affect and try to affect longevity. The key element for me in reversal is do everything you can to take their hormone down. Because hormone is a growth hormone. It’s a fat storage hormone. Anytime I give somebody hormone, I can make you fat. The higher your hormone is, the more fat you get. You don’t get a type one diabetic getting fat until you increase their hormone too high. And as you increase their hormone, their liver stores fat, and that’s the vicious cycle that occurs. Because the more fat they have, the more hormone they need. And so you have to break that cycle.

Stu

22:55 What about the other areas of a person’s life, and I’m thinking about sleep movement mindset, all of the above? How does that feed into the problem or even the cure as well? Because I’m mindful that if your blood sugars are all over the place, it’s likely that you’re not going to be sleeping well. And if you don’t sleep well, then you wake up and you’ll make poor food choices because you’re hungry. What are your thoughts on those other areas?

Dr Gurpreet

23:28 Yeah, so my opinion is is that if you don’t sleep well, you don’t produce hormones. If you don’t produce hormones, your metabolism is defective. And as your metabolism becomes more defective, your thyroid hormone drops, your testosterone drops, your muscle mass drops. It’s a feedback loop. These are complex adaptive systems that have thousands of different inputs and that’s why to pick out the few that we have, we know that causes a defect in this complex adaptive system. We know just where to hit this, and fortuitously, we figured it out as a human race that we figured out just how to poison ourselves perfectly.

And so once you just throw the sleep, you destroy your hormone production. Most of your male hormones are produced early in the morning around between 4:00 and 6:00 AM. One of the earliest things that people talk about that are prediabetic is they start to lose their erections. Now that’s from two reasons. That’s from the low testosterone and it’s also from the vegetable oil. Vegetable oil itself changes the vascular elasticity, and in fact it’s more damaging than even cigarette smoking. So there’s a couple things that happen at the same time.

Stu

24:54 How long would it take for us to eradicate vegetable oil from our system given the fact that it would get into our fat cells, and all of us are in very different states of health? Can we do this within a few weeks or does it take years?

Dr Gurpreet

25:13 It’s going to take awhile. They’ve done biopsy studies when they did liposuction on patients to see what the percentage of vegetable oils that we have in our fats, and they compared it to studies that were done 20, 30 years ago. And we’ve had about a 7x increase in vegetable concentration in our fat cells over the last 20 years when they compared the same type of surgery and they looked at the same kind of fat biopsy. And it’s very easy to tell. You can measure your ratio. It’s called an Omega 6 to 3 ratio. It’s called an Omega check.

You can tell what your serum level is, but as you lose weight, it’s going to peel out of your fat. So it’s going to take it six months just to become normalized. You can really combat it more quickly if you supplement with Omega 3. It’ll at least clear your bloodstream and get the ratio a little bit better in your bloodstream. And so I usually use four to six grams a day of either krill or fish oil for my patients as a supplement to try to more quickly reverse it while they intermittently fast and while they’re doing the other things that they need to do to shift their diet.

Stu

26:23 Yeah, it’s fascinating. Well, you’re using lots of terms that aren’t common in a lot of medical doctors phrase books, I guess. Hearing things like mTOR and intermittent fasting and mitochondria. Yeah, it’s very, very interesting. And so I’m keen to understand that if somebody is listening to this and they know that something isn’t right and they do eat the standard Australian American diet and they want to start somewhere, where could we go? Obviously they might be on the other side of the world. They might not be able to have direct contact with you and their medical doctor perhaps a doesn’t even consider any of these things. What should they do?

Dr Gurpreet

27:12 So all of our information is available freely on the web. We have our entire protocol for our patients. It’s www.reversediabetes.md. If you go there, there’s downloadable protocol and it’s all there, all the videos, all the information, every single word that I use. Because sometimes I get too fast in my verbiage, I went ahead and recorded information for people so that they can go back and say, “Okay, well what does this guy mean by this?” So all of this is there, including descriptions on Metformin and how and why and what we do.

Stu

27:47 Okay.

Dr Gurpreet

27:48 So it’s all free. It’s all fully available. I recommend that people start with the very simplest thing, and that is they should have more time that they’re not eating than they are eating. That’s the first step. So at least change and time restrict your feeding. That’s going to be a massive impact for you. So that’s the first step.

And then as you time restrict your feeding, start reducing the things that are sweet and get anything that’s sweet out of your repertoire of food. My feeling is you can’t change the patient by themselves. You have to change the patient and the people around them. I run indigent care clinics in an urban setting in St. Louis, Missouri. We’ve got 11 clinics. We target the church groups around a patient, and we target the patient, we target the family, we target their immediate people around it. And because we have 65,000 active patients in our clinics, so we eventually target two or three people in the same community, and it’s like throwing a pebble into a Lake. Those ripple effects aggregate, and so eventually it’s a self-feeding loop because there might be three or four people in the same church that might be my patient or might know somebody that I know that’s my patient, and they all start to change. And so my goal is to change the health of the community.

I want to change it in a bigger way because my feeling is that we’re facing a disaster. We’re facing the biggest single disaster that we’ve ever faced in our entire existence as a human race, and we’ve created it in 20 years. This is going to be the biggest thing that’s going to destroy the healthcare system. In fact, it’s probably going to consume two thirds of all of the healthcare dollars in the US. I did a epidemiologic study in St. Louis, and this is why I got passionate about this. I realized that by 2025, 99% plus of my African American female patients would be either overweight or obese, 99% plus. And two-thirds of them, the three quarters of them would be pre-diabetic, and one-third of them would go on to becoming so badly diabetic. They would end up with end stage renal disease. And the cost of care of end stage renal disease in the US is $60,000 to $100,000 a year. So once I started running my numbers and I started extrapolating populations, because I have an MBA in finance as well as an MD, and I did populate nation health, I realized that the entire state budget for the state of Missouri was going to be consumed in just about 12 square blocks starting in 2025 to 2030 because the rate of end stage renal disease was so high. That becomes just profound when you realize how expensive this is going to be for us.

Stu

31:02 How do you think people might adopt this change or need to change given the fact that they may not have access to the best foods? Whole foods are typically way more expensive than processed foods. They’ve got them a McDonald’s or a Burger King or a Taco Bell on every street corner that are offering $5 meal deals, and they’re hooked on sugar. So they taste fantastic and their brain is telling them that this reward is going to be the best thing they’ve ever had again and again. How do we start this?

Dr Gurpreet

31:35 So my patients have no household income practically speaking, and I start them on eggs because you can get a boiled egg in the US for about 15 cents. If you’re desperate for money, that’s an awesome way to do it, and they store well. You can eat four or five boiled eggs. There’s nothing wrong with the cholesterol in eggs. It’s actually healthy for you. It helps build your hormones that you need. I have patients that travel all the time and what they do is they go to a hamburger joint and they get four patties of beef and that’s okay. That’s what they’re getting. It gives them satiety. It gives them the signal of fullness. What you don’t want to do is eat sugar plus protein plus fat and overwhelm yourself because that’s going to make you hungry again in two hours.

So what I tried to do is get them to get away from the sugar so they have satiety and then they’re not grousing for food later. I recommend that people preplan where they’re going to be, preplan their meals. And it’s not as expensive as people think it is, especially if you plan what you’re going to buy. I have patients that take up hunting so they can get venison, and I’m sure that there’s other things that people can eat. People start raising their own chickens. It reconnects them. They go to farmer’s markets. There’s a whole host of tools. We actually have worked with some of our local grocery stores, and we recommend that our patients go to the grocery store on the day like Monday because after Sunday they get all their deliveries on Monday for the rest of the week and everything is marked down by 50%. They can buy large amounts of food. Or precook food and pre freeze it. It’s not as complicated as people think it should be.

The other thing is, remember, the more flavorful food is, the more you’re going to eat. So if you eat three different kinds of food, you’re going to eat all three kinds of food because it’s specific satiety for that flavor. And so what I usually actually recommend is, look, if you’re going to eat a meal, stick to one item for that meal, and eat until you’re full. Then don’t eat any other item. Don’t mix it up and add sour cream plus this,

34:00 … plus this and then add these other flavors because you end up overeating.

Stu

34:04 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

34:05 It’s like having a dessert stomach. You’ll always have room for dessert.

Stu

34:08 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

34:09 It’s a tidy civic.

Stu

34:12 You’ve wrote some great strategies and your thoughts on sodas. Obviously, we know tap water’s free and it does radically different things for the body than Coca-Cola perhaps. What are [crosstalk 00:34:27] your thoughts on diet soda? So does [crosstalk 00:34:29] diet soda-

Dr Gurpreet

34:28 I think diet is worse than soda because it’s more problematic and it really jacks the hormone almost immediately, and what’s happening with diet soda is you drink the diet soda, it feels good on your tongue, so you’re hitting some of your dopaminergic addiction receptors in your brain because you think you’re going to get sugar, and you have that happiness.

Your pancreas dumps a bunch of hormone, it gets into your bloodstream and there’s hormone with an absence of sugar and you become hypoglycemic and an hour later you’re hungry because you became hypoglycemic. And so it creates… it actually is more diabetes inducing than sugar is. It’s actually a lot worse, and there’s actually good study and data on this that patients who drink diet soda are more likely to become diabetic.

Stu

35:23 Fascinating. And then there’s the conversation on artificial sweeteners and gut health as well, which is-

Dr Gurpreet

35:31 Yeah. I don’t think that any artificial sweeteners are appropriate. There might be some… We don’t have enough information. There might be some that are quasi-artificial-

Stu

35:43 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Gurpreet

35:44 Or they’re natural sweeteners that have a sweetness to them-

Stu

35:47 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

35:47 And there are appropriately degradable, maybe allulose might be reasonable, but we don’t have enough data, so I tell my patients to completely stay away from them.

Stu

35:57 Okay, fascinating. Such great advice. What I’m keen to do, I realize we’re kind of coming up on time, but I’d like to dig into your personal day and just get an understanding of the types of tools and tips and strategies that you use for yourself given the fact that you’re clearly very busy, you’re doing a whole heap of things, your days are… sounds like you’re full board doing what you’re doing. What do you do in terms of the way that you eat? Perhaps supplements that you may take and even movement and exercise routines and maybe sleep routines as well. What does it look like for you in a day?

Dr Gurpreet

36:48 So, let me start with the caveat. This is not normal. My day starts around 3:30 in the morning.

Stu

36:58 Oh, boy.

Dr Gurpreet

36:59 And I spend my morning working on projects, specific projects because I work in the tech field as well. I have some technology that I’ve been working on and I have some patents that I’ve got and I also work in the financial world. And so I spend from about 3:30 in the morning to about 6:30 in the morning working on that. Then around 6:30 in the morning, I work out.

And effectively I’m only doing 15 minutes of workout.

Stu

37:27 Okay.

Dr Gurpreet

37:28 And what I’m doing is very significant weight, very, very slow and more eccentric than concentric.

Stu

37:37 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

37:37 So, what I’m trying to do is trash my muscles and do very, very slow. And what I’m trying to do is maintain muscle mass because I’m real lazy, and I don’t like to spend an hour on things that I don’t have to do, so I’m biohacking myself.

Stu

37:53 Yeah. Brilliant.

Dr Gurpreet

37:55 And so then I get to the clinic and I start my day. I do drink coffee. Some people would say, well, you probably don’t need the caffeine, but that’s what I do. The only supplements that I take routinely is I take Krill oil and I take four to six grams a day of Krill oil and I take vitamin K1. Vitamin K1 is a critical… it’s basically derived from butter. It’s Beta-hydroxybutyrate and it clears the bloodstream of calcium. It clears the blood vessels of calcium, and I can tell you that it works based on my personal experience, but not from a medical statistical standpoint.

The reason why I know it works is because I’ve done calcium scores and I know that my calcium score dropped almost immediately. I’ve also played with it and looking at coronary artery intimal thickness. I’ve checked my own, sorry, my carotid arteries.

I’ve checked my own carotid arteries and been able to discern the thickness change by about 30% when I eat [inaudible 00:39:08] versus not eat crap. So it’s beneficial. I usually eat a meal around 11 or noon, which is typically hamburger meat and that’s it. And then I’ll eat dinner around six 30 or seven and I’m done. And then I don’t eat any other snacks.

Stu

39:26 What might dinner be for you?

Dr Gurpreet

39:33 It’s typically some sort of meat. For me, it might be a steak, it might be a salmon, it’s just some sort of meat and that’s my usual six days a week and then on one day a week I might have a Pizza Pizza or I might do something that… But, I don’t do more than one meal a day, one day a week that’s of any significance. And frequently I find that I miss my lunch completely and I forget that I didn’t eat just because I’m running constantly.

Stu

40:07 When you mentioned you might eat a piece of pizza, I mean it sounds like it’s almost like a semi cheat day. Is there a strategy around that biologically for that decision?

Dr Gurpreet

40:17 Yeah, there is. I believe that if you remain in constant ketosis and you are not getting an hormone excursion, you are actually getting a different form of hormone resistance.

Stu

40:29 Right.

Dr Gurpreet

40:29 And what’s happening there is you’re down-regulating the number of hormone receptors that are on the cell surface. And so I want to maintain some degree of excursion of hormone. I want to make sure that my levels go up and down appropriately.

Stu

40:43 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

40:43 Just not high and sustained.

Stu

40:45 Yeah. Okay. Fascinating. Yeah, I’m laughing because I’m reading about so much of what you’re doing and I know that there is, there’s a finite reason why you’re doing it and it’s clearly working. It’s based upon your biology or your genetics and hard and fast science as well. So its, yeah, absolutely fascinating. So you trained in a fasted state? Always?

Dr Gurpreet

41:12 Yeah. That’s the only way to train always. I’ve never been able to train with food.

Stu

41:17 Right. Interesting. So, and what would you say to those people out there that are bought into the dogma that you have to get as much protein as possible within that 30 minute window post-training?

Dr Gurpreet

41:31 I can see a reason for that.

Stu

41:31 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Gurpreet

41:35 If you’re a Olympic lifter-

Stu

41:37 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Gurpreet

41:37 And certainly that’s the window that you should use, you should use that biohacking technique to get extra protein into your muscle. But that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m not going to be an Olympian and I’m not going to be a power lifter lifting ridiculous weight. I do the weight lifting because I want to avoid sarcopenia.

Stu

42:02 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

42:02 The one significant factor that this thing wishes frailty and early death from anything else is, is muscle mass. If you hold muscle mass and are non-sarcopenic, you’re going to live a lot longer. It’s a critical element and so that’s what determines your success as a biological creature. How much muscle mass do you have?

Stu

42:25 Interesting.

Dr Gurpreet

42:26 As soon as you lose your muscle mass, you’re going to become senescent. You’re tapering off [crosstalk 00:42:31] at that point.

Stu

42:32 I spoke to a longevity specialist about six months ago, and at the end of the conversation I said to him, well look, if you can give me one tip, which is one tip that you think would help me and everyone that’s listening to this live their best life, live as long as they can, what might that tip be?

And he thought about it for a while and he said two words. He just said lift weights.

Dr Gurpreet

42:57 Yes. Absolutely.

Stu

42:57 That was it. Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

42:57 Yeah.

Stu

42:58 Fascinating. Brilliant. Well, I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. So just to wrap up, I’m very intrigued about what’s next for you. I mean, it sounds like you’re doing lots of stuff. You’re into mini projects and you wear different hats. What have you got coming up in the future?

Dr Gurpreet

43:24 So, what we’re working on right now is a larger project for reversing diabetes. I want to extrapolate this out to larger populations rather than my patients. I want to coach other physicians to do this. And so we’re simplifying our protocols continuously. We’re trying to figure out what’s, how simple can we get this? And so my hope is that over time we’ll have simplified it and incentivized it for people to participate in it because people will only participate if they’re incentivized.

Stu

43:57 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

43:57 And unfortunately, incentives drive everything.

Stu

44:01 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

44:01 And that’s why we sell hormone. And that’s why we sell processed food; incentives drive that.

Stu

44:01 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr Gurpreet

44:08 And that’s why the physicians are not chasing after lifestyle changes because they don’t get paid for that. And so what we’re trying to figure out is how can we drive the incentives to make people pay attention? So, change is the population.

And I think that’s coming pretty quickly because we know what the alternative is and it’s abysmal. So in the U.S., there’s going to be significant commercial incentives from the federal government to drive this behavior. And what I’m trying to do is simplify our approach so that anybody could do it. And I’m also working with prison populations right now, changing the criminality inside the prison population by changing their diet. And so what we found is that you get about a 30% reduction in in prison violence and less psychotic breaks if you change their diet.

And basically you get away from the sugars and you get away from the vegetable oil and over the next period of 30 to 60 days, people are able to concentrate better and they’re less likely to have violent outbursts. So, I’m working with prison populations.

Stu

45:21 Fantastic.

Dr Gurpreet

45:21 On that as well.

Stu

45:22 Fantastic. And just thinking about from the other end of the coin, what about kindergarten, high school students sending them loaded, wired, tired-

Dr Gurpreet

45:33 Same thing.

Stu

45:33 And expecting them to learn?

Dr Gurpreet

45:33 Yeah.

Stu

45:34 Impossible.

Dr Gurpreet

45:35 Yeah, exactly. I can’t imagine the kind of crap that we feed these poor kids and give them cereal and then we use candy as treats-

Stu

45:46 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

45:46 Every two hours.

Stu

45:47 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

45:47 And we’re creating a constant high hormone load and we’re making them hormone resistant. I mean, I see this and I see that 70 to 80% of these kids are prediabetic when they’re coming into me. And that was unheard of.

Stu

46:02 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

46:02 If you look at the Joslin Institute, the Joslin Institute kept records in the U.S. on type two diabetes and they only had 20 reported cases of type two diabetes in the 1900s in the entire New York area. And that was it.

Stu

46:02 Right.

Dr Gurpreet

46:19 You couldn’t find it. It was unheard of.

Stu

46:20 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

46:20 And now it’s 2/3, two out of every three people.

Stu

46:24 Something’s changed radically. Boy, oh boy. Unbelievable. Well look, thank you for everything that you have spoken about today. There is so much information and the one thing that I like to be able to prompt, I think in any of our listeners is curiosity. So I want them to find out more, just question things. So for all of those that want to find out more about you, dig deeper into any of the topics that we’ve spoken about, where can I send them? What’s the best address?

Dr Gurpreet

47:00 Just use my website or even Instagram, reverse diabetes MD.

Stu

47:05 Okay.

Dr Gurpreet

47:06 Www.reversediabetes.md or my Instagram reversediabetesmd. And just shoot me a question from there. I don’t mind helping. I love helping. I love people when they ask questions because maybe we can help them navigate.

Stu

47:20 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

47:20 My real hope is that other people listen to it and then they affect their family-

Stu

47:24 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

47:25 Because it’s not… If you’re in a silo and you’re doing this by yourself, you’re not going to succeed as well.

Stu

47:31 Yeah.

Dr Gurpreet

47:31 If the people around you are doing the same thing, you have a much better chance.

Stu

47:36 Yeah. Absolutely right. Fantastic. Well, look, I’ll put everything that we’ve spoken about in the show notes today with all the links so everybody can can find you and your work and dig a little bit deeper, but so thank you so much Dr. Padda for your time today. Really appreciate it and look forward to following what you’re doing in the future as well. Thanks again.

Dr Gurpreet

47:56 All right. Thank you.

Stu

47:56 Okay.

Dr Gurpreet

47:57 Thank you. I appreciate it. Take care.

 

Gurpreet Padda

This podcast features Dr. Gurpreet Padda. A graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Medical School, Dr. Padda served residencies in surgery and anesthesia. He is board certified in pain medicine, anesthesiology and age management. He also holds an MBA from St. Louis University. He is a member the American Academy... Read More
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