The Shocking Truth About Carbs & Diabetes | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] great to see you guys thank you for doing this it's good to be here we should take some of you and the work that you're doing I'm very exciting you're at the book coming out soon so you're making rounds yes sir I appreciate you taking time out to talk to me about all the stuff that you guys are up to it's cool and Cyrus you you live in Costa Rica that's right yeah I've been in Costa Rica two years what is the deal with that so my wife and I went to Costa Rica for our honeymoon and while we were there we had just sounded like this idea that like maybe it would be fun to live outside the United States one day uh-huh and then when we started talking with people we got introduced this whole network of expats that live there and the overwhelming feeling from the expats that we had talked to were like if you don't move here you're making a big mistake and we were like wow people so holy that's such strong conviction about this right and we made a real estate agent and he said oh you could live over here on the beach and here's a condo here's the house here's up on the hill you name it and it was very affordable so we can't meet each other we were like should we do this well back to San Francisco where we were living at the time about a month set-in or so and we had like you know the desire to move there was like very strong and then it kind of started waning over time of course so you know it's June we wake up one morning and it's cold it's windy it's foggy and I think it's raining and everywhere else on the planet is warm right except the little like 7 by 7 city of San Francisco there's great summers and San Francisco so my wife wakes up and she looks at me she's like can I ask you a question I was like why she goes what are we doing here and I was like I don't know let's go so within a couple of weeks we had bought two one-way plane tickets she'd resigned from her job working as a nurse manager at Kaiser and then we basically just like packed up our bags sold all our stuff and moved on Costa Rica that's a bold move very bold move yeah and after two years I mean do you feel do you I mean do you come back here frequently or do you feel like I would my sense is that I would start to feel kind of detached like you know a little bit isolated but maybe that's not I mean if you're surrounded by an amazing community I mean living and doing what you do kind of online and all that kind of stuff you can do what you do anywhere I suppose right yeah for sure yeah so because we can do video conferencing and we can do podcast and you name it and I can interact with Robbie and the team every single day all day long uh-huh it's great you know the Internet is like more powerful today than it's ever been and so as a result of that you don't really feel isolated but then you know aside from being on the computer all day long there's a whole collection of people that are from the United States that move down there plus there's a whole bunch of Tico's that I become friends with I'm on a soccer team there I got a CrossFit gym you name it so right we're like integrated into this into the community which is great what part of Costa Rica we're in you know what Tamarindo is money chance yeah that's like the big surf beach yeah I've been there so it's like west coast on the north yeah and then we're like another 20 minutes north of there oh cool yeah so I know that area yeah you have to been there I've been there yeah one time one time yeah do you like it I did yeah I wasn't there as long as I would have liked to have like sort of explore the area but I did go to that one beach mm-hmm yeah yeah the whole area is really nice and you know the town that we live in has on a good day a thousand people you know and it's there's there something that's actually what we like about it so much is that it's real simple and that's the main reason why we moved out there we were just looking for simplicity yeah you know and like I think there's sort of there's many people you probably yourself included where you're sort of like a certain point you're just sort of like I don't I don't really want things and I don't want all this sex stuff around me I just want to like live in a nice place that's just like close to the beach I want to hear the monkeys in the morning and I want to hang out with my cats like is that okay yes you know to me you're like a 65 year old man it's beautiful I can confirm is retreats yeah that's great do you go down there yeah for the rhone retreats and visit and I told them like the Internet connections got to be good if internet connection is good that was the condition and Robbie I was trying to remember when we first met I mean I think it was almost 10 years ago going over to Brian windows for lunch yeah lunch with you he's really like 2009 or something like yeah and we even met I believe was before that of one of the veg fests before you even launched the podcast and everything yeah yeah yeah I remember people say hey that guy he's an incredible athlete I check him out yeah you you I mean you cut your teeth at forks over knives or going out on your own so it's cool man and it's this is a this is a holy alliance between the two of you guys you guys are doing powerful stuff so let's get into it I mean I think that the the best place to kind of launch into this is is for both of you guys to share your own personal story with diabetes type 1 diabetes if you're both you're both T 1 and you both have pretty fascinating kind of histories around that that's right I don't know who wants to start who wants to start with roshambo ok so I grew up in Palo Alto California two parallel to high right I went to Palo too high and then went to Stanford as well just like you and my age what year did you graduate 89 you're not even in high school yet I was you're right I was I was in fifth grade right yeah all right so I'm just a few years younger so I went to palliative high and then you know when I was at Stanford senior year in college trying to graduate move on with my life and all of a sudden I get diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and I didn't know anything about diabetes at that time so all I remember feeling before I even knew what diabetes was was I was trying to study for finals and I was extremely low energy my thirst was unbelievable and I just couldn't concentrate very well and as a result of drinking you know one gallon one and a half two gallons of water a day just kind of out of the blue I was urinating all the time so I would go to the bathroom like clockwork every 30 minutes so I picked up the phone and called my sister after like 48 hours of going through this and she's a Doctor of Osteopathy and I said hey Shahnaz here's my symptoms what is happening to me and she's normally pretty calm under pressure and she just she just lost it she just started crying right away she was like please just drop everything you're doing go to the hospital right now or go to the health center and I was like why what's happening and she's like you you have type 1 diabetes and that's what you're explaining to me and I was like Shahnaz come on I don't have diabetes don't be silly don't be you know how can that be possible I'm like I'm normal weight I exercise I think I eat well and she's like you don't understand at that time I literally thought that diabetes has something to do with old people and cake that's literally all I thought about right and so I was like alright let me go to the health center show up at the health center half an hour later test my blood glucose and it's 600 a little higher than 600 so for a normal range we were just talking about this because you just tested in you were at 77 normal matches between 70 and 130 70 130 exactly that's what's considered so sort of like you know normal range so if we tested your blood glucose at any moment in time either before a meal or after a meal you would likely be within that 70 to 130 range and that's good because you're sort of your pancreas and liver or making sure that you stay in that physiologically normal range I was six times higher than that and so at that point I was like wow I don't really understand what's happening they took me the hospital they started giving me an IV of saline in one arm IV of insulin in the other arm and over a 24-hour period they monitored my blood glucose by giving me insulin and they dropped my blood glucose to a safe level and then they discharged me so while I was in the hospital they pieced together my health history that I wasn't able to do before that and they said hey by the way you don't have you have not one not two but three autoimmune conditions and I was like wait well huh and they said yeah you have Hashimoto's hypothyroidism which had set in six months prior you also have alopecia universalis which is why I have no hair no eyebrows did you have no hair at that time I was losing my hair at that time to be confusing extremely confusing I mean I remember I was seeing pictures it was up for sure when she hauled your sister like something's not right my hair's falling out exactly right but eyebrows are yeah bald patches in the back of my head and then it kind of like spread to the front of my head and a little bit on my like chest hair as well but the doctors at that time before they can't arrive at the conclusion that it was alopecia were treating me for ringworm and so they were giving me steroid injections directly into my head thinking that if they if they did that it would stimulate hair growth and I went for some of those injections and my god was it painful so they said okay you have Hashimoto's hypothyroidism alopecia universalis and then number three type one diabetes by the way we've never seen anybody with this combination of autoimmune conditions ever before you have what's called a poly glandular Ottowa syndrome can we talk about you at our next huddle and I was like the okay so they didn't really instill me with much confidence mm-hmm and they were being honest with me and that's all I could ask right so what have you learned sorry to interject like what have you learned in the years since about the relationship between those three things like what what kind of confluence of events or what was happening biomechanically inside of you that led to all three of those manifesting at the same time yeah it's a great question actually so as far as alopecia universalis is concerned I haven't I haven't found too strong of a sort of like dietary connection or like what could actually trigger that but there is a strong axis between Hashimoto's hypothyroidism type 1 diabetes and celiacs disease so patients that present with one often can present with another but in that group and so there's a lot of people that we know who are living with type 1 diabetes as well as Hashimoto's hypothyroidism and that seems to be a really common occurrence some of it could be died induced some of it can be induced by a virus some of it can be induced by potential pathogens inside of food and so there's there's a whole collection like the the the type 1 diabetes research base is constantly searching for us an answer it's like what causes type 1 diabetes what and and there's there's some strong evidence that there's multiple environmental triggers but there's really no smoking gun at this point and I don't I don't necessarily know there ever will be right point being they give me this diagnosis of 3 they discharge me from the hospital blood glucose meter two types of insulin test strips carbohydrate counting guide a life alert bracelet and about a box of syringes and they're like see you later and as far as the hair is concerned just forget about it yeah I did have a friend who I was eating dinner with him at some point around that time and he was like hey Cyrus no offense but your hair looks weird I got you I got you and he's like here's what we gonna do we're gonna finish dinner we're gonna drive to the store I'm gonna get a big razor that's what I was gonna ask you guys decide to shave it yeah and he was like I'm just gonna get rid of your hair tonight and I was like game so there's a few people that can wear it as well as rocket well I appreciate it but see at the time I didn't know right because I had hair and I was like get rid of this is a gamble right so get discharged and you know like I had all those physical you know medical electronic devices plus insulin syringes test trips you name it and then what I didn't expect was that I was going to also be discharged with a bunch of fear so I go return to my normal life you know I have like six months left to school and I'm like I don't know what to do I literally don't know what to do I don't know what to eat I don't know what to exercise I don't know how much insulin to give myself this is literally just like a guess and check game I guess they didn't give you any sort of counseling or somebody who could help kind of you know mentor you through that aspect of it they gave me some light recommendations and they they have this sort of you know inject this much insulin if your blood glucose was doing this it's called a sliding scale you know and it's like it's like a generalized set of recommendations that are all based off of you know what use your glucose right now and it's just like it's just it's just not that helpful let's put it that way right and so I got that plus I also got this idea of like you should eat a low carbohydrate diet and I was like why would I do that they said well when you eat more carbohydrates your blood glucose will go up and your insulin use will go up so a simple way to not have that happen is to reduce your carbohydrate intake and then you can keep your glucose controlled and you can keep your insulin controlled and I said cool sounds good so I started eating a lower carbohydrate diet more turkey burgers for breakfast eggs black forest ham sandwiches for lunch with you know small amount of bread I'd have some fish for dinner small amounts of rice and I was just really trying to focus on like eating more fat and protein rich foods and eating less carbohydrates what my doctor told me so for the first year of my life with diabetes supposed to make my glucose more controllable it didn't not at all my blood glucose meter which you would saw me using just before this right what it does is you to use it every day multiple times a day and it's it's an indicator of whether where your glucose is so you can use that to make decisions and so what was supposed to happen is my glucose was supposed to stay within that 80 to 130 range for majority of the day and if it goes higher comes low I can do something about it but on a given day Michael cosas was 40 210 120 280 64 just bouncing up down up down up down random number generator literally a random number generator and when you're dealing with if you I don't know if you've ever you've probably never experienced a glucose higher than like 140 or 160 as my guess because your non diabetic and that's a good thing but when your blood glucose goes high it feels terrible it feels really terrible what it what is that experience so for me I feels like it feels like my head is a balloon like it's kind of expanded and it's very large I get a taste of metal inside my mouth and my nose starts to feel like it's it's larger than it really is and it just kind of feels like my head is swelling it's got a lot of pressure inside of it and I get really thirsty when your glucose is low or when my glucose is low you get the opposite which is it is sort of that you basically your brain is sort of being starved for glucose temporarily and so it leads to shaky hands some slurred speech sometimes you see little like black spots in your vision you can get this diaphoretic sweating and it's just kind of this like panic mode and also in your appetite increases and you want to eat everything that you can see so you know bouncing between hypo hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia on a daily basis just like it sucks all the mental energy out of right it just takes away and you must been thinking that well I just need to perfect how I'm doing this right like clearly like I'm just I'm an amateur and if I can just figure out you know if I can read the signals of my body right and regulate my insulin intake and pay more attention to when I'm eating and what I'm eating that I can get this like dialed in exactly right and like I I was trained as an engineer as a mechanical engineer in college and you know that training basically teaches you how to control very complex systems that have multiple moving parts right you know into something that's very controlled you got spreadsheets out I've gotta figure this out like come on this is not there's not that many variables let's control this and this is literally the one system I could not control again I didn't have a degree in biology I didn't really know that much but I figured I could try and control the system and why was I wrong so it all kind of came to a tipping point one day I had gone to work in the morning I had played a game of soccer at lunch for an hour I had worked out in the morning before work I had eaten a low carbohydrate diet and then I got home at like 5 o'clock p.m. to go to to eat dinner so I checked my blood glucose in preparation for eating dinner and I was hoping that it would be in range give me a 120 I 130 than that I can inject a normal amount of insulin go eat my dinner and go to sleep I checked my glucose and it was like 288 and I got so frustrated because again I was doing everything that I was supposed to do and so I just got I just got filled with this just anxious rage and I just picked up my glucose meter and I just threw it across the room and it just hit the wall and shattered and then I just sunk into the couch and I just started crying and I was just like I was so frustrated that I couldn't figure this out and it was in that moment where I literally heard a voice inside of my head and the voice said Cyrus just learned how to eat you don't know anything about nutrition learn how to eat and your life will fundamentally change for the better and I was like ok this is this is my calling this is me message from God literally yeah and you're like and I probably should get a new glucose meter exactly so the next day I basically started looking for more information I started getting recipe books I started you know viewing videos online and talking to people one thing led to another and I got introduced to this guy named Doug Graham so Doug Graham when I met him he basically was the only person I knew that was confident and talking to a person with type 1 diabetes because type 1 diabetes is considered like a like dangerous enough condition or like a nuanced enough condition that most health practitioners you know sort of like like I I don't really know how to handle insulin it's kind of dangerous but Doug was like listen come under my wing I'll show you exactly what to do so I go to a retreat that he's hosting and under his guidance he basically says listen I'm gonna transition you to a diet that's basically lots of fruit lots of vegetables and we're gonna temporarily while you're here we're gonna give up meat cheese chicken fish and high-fat foods in general I said okay great let's do this and he said your glucose is gonna become a lot more controllable but I want you to feel it so over the course of that seven days what happened to my blood glucose was mind-blowing absolutely mind-blowing I went into it with again really highly variable blood glucose a lot of insulin use in the first 24 hours of being there my blood glucose fell so dramatically that I hit six hypoglycemia is five to six hypoglycemia back to back to back to back and I was like I hadn't felt that in a long time as a result of that I had to start backing off on the amount of insulin I was dosing myself and then that got better by day two by day three by day four by the time day seven had rolled around I had cut my insulin use by thirty five to forty percent and the kicker and this whole thing was that it wasn't I wasn't calorie restricting I wasn't I wasn't not eating food in order to reduce my insulin use on the contrary I was eating more food than I'd ever eaten before and I was eating more carbohydrates food than I'd ever eat before more fruits more vegetables I mean I kid you not I was eating plates with like six to eight bananas on them with persimmons and grapes and papayas and mangoes and I was like how is it that I'm eating all this food but I'm using less insulin that doesn't make sense and it kind of put this in context first of all you know Doug Graham widely known for for being a proponent of what he calls the 80/10/10 diet what ratio of macros 80% carbohydrates 10% fat 10% protein and this you know in in terms of type 1 diabetes this is anathema like you this contravenes the medical establishment or the point of view that somebody with your condition should be eating a carbohydrate diet instead he's putting you on this very high carbohydrate regimen which basically flies in the face of everything that you've been told exactly right so the conventional wisdom would be that if you're eating this much fruit that this is gonna make your your blood glucose skyrocket and make this more difficult to control and acquire more insulin yes yeah so my insulin have been creeping and and so it you know just to put a pin in it that the the experience that you had was was diametrically opposed to that was the opposite exactly right so yeah my insulin use had been increasing over the course of time from the time I was first diagnosed I was using like mid 20s and then it became 32 36 37 41 43 there were times where I was injecting 45 to 50 units of insulin per day on this low carbohydrate diet and now I'm faced with the prospect of eating up boatloads of fruit and I'm doing some mental math on my own 50 is gonna turn into seven he's gonna turn into 120 that seems like a lot of insulin but instead 50 turned into 26 27 32 units are in sanh per day yeah and we're gonna talk about why that is we're gonna get into the weeds on that geeked-out and I but I also think it's worth mentioning like Doug Graham you know he's not without controversy himself versus guys like you know he's gotten into trouble with these fasting retreats and you know people going a little bit too far with this stuff right yeah to be clear you know we're not advocating that exact approach in what we've written in the book and the science we're citing it's it's different he's kind of like sparked our journey right yeah I got it I got it yeah to give Doug the credit that he's do Doug fundamentally changed my life no questions asked and like you know if it wasn't for Doug I wouldn't have been introduced to this at that point in my life and it wouldn't have like allowed me to start changing my life for the better and then going on to learn more about it so I gotta give him the credit writings do and as an engineer this must have blown your mind a little bit a hundred percent it was fascinating to me so I leave this retreat I was so fascinated by what I learned that I just went straight to the books and I just started reading everything I possibly could started accessing the literature reading text books you name it then I enrolled in school to go learn organic chemistry biochemistry nutritional biochemistry and then at a certain point I said you know what I think I want to actually get a PhD degree in this so I applied to schools I got into UC Berkeley and then I was there for five years to learn nutritional biochemistry so that I could I could talk science about my own personal experience but the motivation to get your PhD was was fueled entirely by your own experience fueled entirely about my own experience but but it was to ask a bigger question and the question was am i a freak of nature that's literally what I wanted to learn because if this was something that only applied to me and I was just some really interesting and of one experiment okay fine I get it but if if what I was experiencing could also be applied to other people living with type 1 or pre-diabetes or type 2 now you have a much bigger story right and so while I was at school I started to understand the science of blood glucose control and diabetes and insulin resistance and while I was there I started to realize that that there is almost a hundred years of science that clearly describes the phenomenon that I was experiencing and that hundred years of science is actually one of the most powerful solutions that that we've ever found for treating this thing called diabetes in all forms and you know can really be applied to large numbers of people with phenomenal results that being the case then why is this not the conventional dogma today in terms of treating diabetes I mean this is a big question right this is why you do what you do and why you write your book absolutely yeah I mean I think I wish we had the the exactly Yuval guesses I think part of the problem here is that doctors are not trained to they're not trained in nutrition first of all so they go through medical school you know they go through four years of medical school plus a residency plus a fellowship sometimes I can be almost a decade worth of schooling and you ask your average doctor hey how much nutrition do you learn and they're like I don't know I learned one class one day maybe six hours right and their studies that actually show that your average doctor learns nutrition for a maximum of twenty to twenty-five hours while they're in med school so they're just not given the training to talk about food and it's not their fault because doctors are phenomenal human beings and they go into it with altruistic tendencies but they're just not given the right tool set so they leave Medical School they go into their practice and then when they when somebody with diabetes or high cholesterol or hypertension presents to them their solution is like well I have this pill that I you know can prescribe for you because that's the system that I know how to do right and so that's that's a huge problem and then it sort of makes it so that people living with diabetes don't really have dietary options when they go talk to a dietician who's been trained in a much more traditional setting their answer is low carbohydrate so you're getting sorry go ahead yeah that's part of the confusion around diabetes it's one of the few chronic conditions you can monitor on a meal by meal basis you can look at your your own cousin Peter back all day long writing data and and like you said we're gonna get into the weeds you know the cause and what's going on here but yes it's true if you do a low carbohydrate diet you will see better numbers you'll see flatlined blood glucose blood glucose on your CGM so there is particular confusion in diabetes that is very nuanced and that is part of the reason I think this approach has not caught on yet because people don't understand the confusion of the headlines and the studies that are being cited just a lot of misinformation so Cyrus when you're getting your PhD and you're you're digging deep into this stuff and you're uncovering these studies that date back decades and decades was this and and when you would kind of present this to your colleagues or you know whoever you were working with at the time were they on board with what you were finding and kind of the path that you were blazing or are they were they more on the conventional path of like hey this isn't really the way we do this no no they they were very supportive actually because you know whether it was talking to other graduate students or whether it was talking to my advisor or even some of the other professors you know I would be explaining the results of the research so I was like you know my story was one thing okay fine it's an anecdotal experience it makes sense but then when you translate that and you start to get the same results in laboratory animals because that's the what you're supposed to be doing in graduate school you know we are running a whole collection of experiments to induce insulin resistance in mice using dietary methods and then reverse that using either intermittent fasting or diet or exercise so we were and the way that you induce a diabetic response in an animal is to is to put them on a pretty high fat diet so that was another epiphany for me right I'm sitting here with you know tasked with the with the objective of trying to make animals insulin resistance so that we can use them as a testing ground and when I started looking in the literature I was like how do I make an animal insulin resistant okay I probably got to give him a high fructose diet or high sucrose diet and so I was looking in the literature with that preconceived notion and then it would I would read you know we induced insulin resistance in laboratory animals by feeding them a diet containing 70% saturated fat for eight weeks we induced insulin resistance we induced type 2 diabetes in laboratory animals you know by feeding him a high-fat diet high fat diet high-fat diet and I was like this is unreal you feed animals a high-fat diet and they develop diabetes why is it that when when in the in the public when you say the word diabetes the first Association for the people makers is sugar right yeah I had Neal Barnard on the podcast I just put an episode up with him last night but I had did a previous episode with him where we talked a lot about this and people went crazy they're like that can't be true because he was talking about the real cause of this condition is people eat too much fat 100% and that it's just yeah that flies in the face of everything that you thought that you knew the disconnect between the research and what the public believes and understands is mind body its massive hmm absolutely mind-boggling all right so you have this epiphany so had this Epiphany and then you know I start to realize okay wait a minute the high-fat diet that leads to insulin resistance insulin resistance being the underlying cause of pre diabetes pre-diabetes being the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes right the the stepwise progression is person develops insulin resistance they then progress to pre-diabetes and then progress to type 2 diabetes that affects 90% of the diabetes population right type ones like Robbie and I are like eight to ten percent of the population so that story I was like wait a minute okay so so does this mean that it could be that people who are eating high fat diets in the real world are actually developing a state of insulin resistance that can then progress the type 2 diabetes themselves and the answer is absolutely because these studies have also been done in humans and the way to induced insulin resistance in a human being which we'll get into a thousand times more detail is by feeding them a high-fat diet right in terms of the statistics obviously there's been an explosion in the incidence of type 2 is it similar with type 1 or is that remained kind of a stable data point that's it that's a phenomenal question actually it's growing it's growing yeah over the past 10 years there's been a 23 percent increase in type 1 diabetes and it's the first time in human history that we've ever seen that and so scientists are really struggling their shoulders and throwing up their hands and they're saying we don't know why because type 1 diabetes has historically only affected the same proportion of the population so as the population grows the proportion of the population stays flat but now we're actually seeing an increase in the in the proportion of the population that's diagnosed with autoimmune conditions in general type 1 diabetes for sure and you know who knows why that's happening so type 1 is essentially they're still trying to figure out what what the kind of initial cause of this is but essentially your pancreas just stops functioning properly and it's not secreting insulin yeah so so for clarity your pancreas basically has many many many functions so there's what's called an exocrine function and an endocrine function so the exocrine function is is what 99% plus of your pancreas is requires is occupied doing and that exocrine function is to make digestive hormones and so our digestive enzymes such that when you eat food you can digest that food these are like amylases these are these are hide races these are proteases these are lipases right the other 1% of your of your pancreas as is endocrine endocrine meaning it's these cells secrete hormones into your blood and then those travel to various tissues to elicit their biological effect so the beta cells are part of these things called islets clusters and the beta cells are responsible for making insulin and so those guys secrete insulin into your blood and when you develop type 1 diabetes the autoimmune reaction is effectively your own immune system that has been sort of tricked or hijacked into believing and and and targeting beta cells for destruction so your own immune system is manufacturing antibodies that basically go and they they target proteins on the cell surface of beta cells and they end up disabling those beta cells so you end up losing insulin production and as a result of that 99 plus percent of your pancreas is functioning just fine it's that 1% that's not functioning and all of a sudden that's non-recoverable right got it okay before we get too far into this body here your your version of this so when I was 12 years old I had the same symptoms cyrus head i was thirsty all the time going to the bathroom all the time what's with the thirst thing is that bad yeah so when your glucose level goes really high then the concentration of glucose inside here inside of your blood increases your brain basically says oh wait a minute let's drink more water so that we can flush that glucose out so it's a it's a way that you will take on more fluid to decrease the concentrations of glucose and then eventually pee it out so it's a way of just basically getting rid of the house all right so I was quite familiar with these symptoms because my older brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes nine years prior so I said to my mom I think I have type 1 diabetes she said no no don't be silly you don't have type 1 diabetes so she leaves town for a weekend to go check out some places with my dad in Florida because we were gonna move to Florida we're living in st. Cloud Minnesota mm-hmm so my mom calls a check in and she says how are things going I said mom I couldn't sleep last night I was cramping she said okay go upstairs test your blood glucose and let's see what's going on so I test myself on my brother's meter I'm over 400 so four times higher than I'm supposed to be and my brother says write that in there yep you have type 1 diabetes pack your bag you're gonna be in the hospital for a few nights so we go to the regular doctor they make the diagnosis I see my brother cry for the first time he's like I'm just so sorry you have to deal with this and my parents fly back the next night and my dad just said in the hospital it's an inconvenience don't worry about it you're still going to get to do whenever you want in life and that was sort of the way I was brought up I had standard medical care I went to the Mayo Clinic had an endocrinologist a psychologist a dietician and looking back it's really a missed opportunity I think to really turn somebody on to a better state of health whereas at that point all they were saying is just eat normal follow the standard American diet just make sure you get every single food group we want you to feel normal you're a teenager don't let this you know make you feel weird that was the focus and you're at the Mayo Clinic yeah exactly we think you know the best care they could do a little better but that's what happened so life a type one begins I was a competitive tennis player I have type A personality I took pretty good care of it you know I was on top of it I'd count my carbohydrates i dosed my insulin properly I'd fill out the logbook very diligently to figure out what to do sort of that guidance that you had suggested that hey that probably would give right so the Mayo Clinic did give that guidance and I had you know pretty good control but I had lots of other just unfortunate symptoms like chronic allergies of take a xanax and claritin-d and still get sick all the time I had plantar fasciitis which was very frustrating as a tennis player I wore these big blue boots at night to try and do passive stretching I had warts on my feet and in high school I developed cystic acne it's really frustrating I did all the treatments the creams the pills the laser treatments microdermabrasion eventually they put me on accutane it's like the most serious drug you can possibly take when you have acne so your parents have to sign a waiver because some people committed suicide on that drug so I had these frustrating symptoms but I was starting to get into learning about how can I take better care of myself just through some of my dad selling supplements and just it kind of resonated with me I just kept on learning a little more a little more hey trying to avoid the msg trying to avoid the additives it just it kind of made sense what was your dad slinging he was his herb or the life any different ones USANA eventually a lot of different network marketing okay so in high school I'm living in Florida at this point and I stumbled across a book called natural cures they don't want you to know about okay this is by Kevin Trudeau we are not recommending this book this guy got put in jail for fraud do you remember seeing those commercials I don't know it's like a purple board you guys drink smiling face on the front it was crazy was it what was his pitch so this book planted a seed in my mind that would be possible to reverse type one diabetes and that changed the course of my life and I said okay I'm gonna do anything and everything to get my beta cells to work again that was the - which is protocol to do that yeah see it was just what it was like one sentence was one sentence in the book that planted the seed okay wait it wasn't a particular protocol right tell you how there was there was all kinds of crazy things like colonics and supplements the idea that that could be possible yes that's exactly open the door yes absolutely and my mindset was hey people told Roger Bannister you can't run a four-minute mile the smartest people in the world said that's not possible and then he did it and now other people can run four-minute miles so somebody's got to do it first so like I will do anything and everything so this leads me to try the Western a price foundation which is a diet where you're eating lots of grass-fed beef you're having raw milk I would go to the local farmers market and buy milk for a cat because you couldn't sell raw milk to a human so I was willing to do anything it was crazy stuff and learning the information like each step along the path like it made sense okay that's interesting that's interesting I'll try this I'll try that grass-fed beef yeah probably better than the beef from the factory farms and stuff like that so I did the Weston a price foundation diet I didn't see any big difference in my diabetes health so I continue to learn eventually I come across a plant-based ketogenic diet so this guy Gabriel Cousins had a movie called raw for 30 days mhm and this is a diet where you eat lots of greens lots of vegetables but you're getting your calories from nuts and seeds and oil so I started trying that and of course now I'm removing carbohydrates from my diet my total insulin use is coming down now I'm saying wow this is working that's my goal I want to take less and less insulin but in hindsight that only makes sense if you know the beta cells in your pancreas are simultaneously starting to make their own insulin but that clearly wasn't the case in hindsight so I'm following that diet and I'm at the University of Florida this time I'm a freshman and I'm on campus and i black out several times it's just really scary that moment like you just kind of need to pause and like wait a minute what's going on he'd like regroup get home rest hypoglycemic I mean I don't know exactly I mean yeah I probably was a little bit but I think I was just low-energy uh-huh so I go back to my naturopath I'm like what's going on here like what can we do and she's like ok you know what maybe you should do some chelation therapy maybe that'll help you get rid of some heavy metals and stuff like that I'm like ok you know what I'll Drive from Gainesville I'll go all the way to Tampa and I'll try this therapy I'll do any well daddy I'll do anything I mean I also I flew to San Jose California met with a Chinese medicine man he may be this herbal tea I have drinking that and call it smelled so bad that I would brew it outside on the sidewalk it was like a portable I'm not a stranger to that good yeah I mean they're done the guy had worked magic for my father and some injuries he had like put some like peanut butter stuff on his arm and like it's crazy but I didn't really see again any specific results with my diabetes health so I'm considering all my options trying all this stuff but before I commit to the chelation therapy I here Doug Graham on a podcast and this is in September of 2006 and he's talking about you know this fruit based diet also being able to help you get rid of heavy metals and cleanse your body like this is a healthy thing to do like you know what I'm missing fruit I would love beets and fruit again I don't want to do this expensive chelation therapy let me try this so I start dabbling a little bit the book finally comes out in December of 2006 I read it straight through and Cyrus is one of the testimonials in the back I'm like wow this is interesting the 80/10/10 yes he's all the testimonials in there so I start googling a little more about Cyrus I find some pictures of him online Latanya me all right this is like looking Fanta my god this is cool this is encouraging I'm gonna try this so I started working with Doug Graham ie every single day for 90 days straight he emails me back every day for 90 days straight and I learn how to do this fruit based living and this is again around Christmas time I remember going down to eat Christmas dinner I have a pyramid of bananas they don't like five on the bottom and for them three my family just looking and laughing like this is gonna be another face it seen me go through so many things and now we're 13 years later yes not a phase I mean if you if you follow Robbie on Instagram I'm like wow like that is so like this this is like first of all like the the amount of attention and like diligence that you put into like preparing all of this you create like these sort of performance art like it's just it's like all raw for it it's fun yeah and it looks like a lot of food but I always tell people it's a lot of water it's a lot of fiber it's a little deceptive yeah yeah yeah yeah so I start doing this diet and just like sighs you would expect you need to use way more insulin your blog because should be way more difficult to control and that's not what happened my insulin sensitivity improved by over 600% so you can calculate that by taking a 24 hour insulin sensitivity ratio you take your total carbohydrate consumption divide that by your total insulin use and you get a ratio there so when I was doing the plant-based ketogenic diet it was 3 to 130 grams of carbohydrate per day one unit of insulin now it's well over 30 grams of carbohydrate per day one unit of insulin no no sorry ten units of any one sorry I tell you some insulin let's get you to a 3:1 ratio that's what I was using 10 years of insulin sorry yeah so then now I'm it's the ratio is 22 to 1 I'm eating over 750 grams of carbohydrate per day and injecting roughly 27 units so it's over 22 to 1 that's over 600 percent improvement in insulin sensitivity and this just gets me really excited so I'm in college I decided to start looking up some research looking into this Niel Barnard's informations out there dr. MacDougall's information that leads me to the original studies and just like cyrus i find this information has been out there for almost a hundred years that if you eat more car hydrat rich food and limit the fat consumption you improve the function of insulin insulin resistance is caused by a high-fat diet so it was really transformative all my symptoms went away plantar fasciitis gone my skin starts to clear up I'm not using any more medications no more creams I don't take any allergy medications I don't get sick no more warts on my feet and I'm feeling energetic again really excited about life at this point and I'm like you know I'm gonna the Y was really strong again I'm doing all this stuff because I'm trying to get my beta cells to work again so like okay this is gonna help my body rest and rejuvenate and heal the cells maybe my stem cells can make some new beta cells I wish it was that simple it's a little more complicated but that was the mindset so I was just really stoked about life okay let's just keep doing this let's keep doing this it's keep optimizing the insulin sensitivity eating really well giving you a nutrient-dense diet and let's see if we get the beta cells working again so that was the mindset and you've essentially just built on that ever since right I mean are you eating any vegetables at all at this point I eat lots of non starchy vegetables and lots of greens yeah true right big-time so it's not entirely a fruitarian doctor it's not it's not a Michael Arnstein yeah we're not advocating a fraternity Arian no pure diet and and have you felt like do you do we're kind of skipping ahead here a little bit but like are you supplementing at all like are you worried about your omega threes and your DHA and d it and like all that other kind of stuff so like how does that all work as far as Omega 3s essential fatty acids I do not supplement and we actually covered this thoroughly in the book there's a lot of confusion when it comes to essential fatty acids so the two essential fatty acids are LA on the omega-6 side and ala on the omega-3 side and getting enough ala is not that difficult I mean you can get it just by eating enough calories but if you want an insurance policy some nuts and seeds well if you have one tablespoon of you know flaxseed or one tablespoon of chia seeds ideally ground up you already meet your requirements for oh I and yet in that to your point if you have some nuts and seeds that's gonna increase your and I can take no question yeah but the issue is the conversion process so people are consuming too many omega-6 fats which is inhibiting the conversion the same enzyme Delta 60 saturates starts the conversion process on both sides so if you're eating too much omega-6 fats it's gonna prefer that pathway and it's gonna focus on doing the conversion on that side and it's not enough enzymes left over to do the conversion on the ala set to can take the omega-3s and make epa and DHA right so in the book we talk about an end of to study which is our own personal results and you can get this quantified through an Omega quant test and you can see what is your essential fatty acid status inside the membranes of your cells and our numbers are extraordinary I mean mine was over 8% Cyrus's over 7% and people who are supplementing people who are eating excess nuts and seeds they're roughly around 4% and they're happy with that mmm interesting all right so both you guys have this epiphany and it flies in face in the face of all this conventional wisdom that you got to go low-carb you're eating this unbelievably high carbohydrate diet how are you like when you go to the doctor like what is it what are they what are your doctor saying if this at this point early on my under chronologist have never even asked they don't look in the details they say you know why your a1c is great your insulin use is fine you don't have any complications just 10 minutes let me in and out write my prescriptions and that's it so they're not even really diving into three different endocrinologist over the past 13 years of following a low-fat plant-based whole food diet not a single one of them knows exactly what I eat they've never know they don't ask so I don't need to tell him right what about you Cyrus yeah the when you go to an endocrinologist office the like currency that they ask you for is your blood glucose meter or your CGM so they take a device from you they then download the information from that device and they look at numbers and they say okay your timing range was this highs lows okay your a1c is doing this okay great here's my prescription for you change your insulin dosing strategy don't change something like that nowhere in that conversation does food enter into the picture I had the opportunity to bring it up once with one of my endocrinologist and the response that I got was like oh that's really interesting yeah I guess a plant-based diet works for some people and I was like okay fair enough you know like I didn't want to get into it but I was like all right I understand you know but for the most part just like Robbie's saying 90 plus percent of all people's you know doctors again they're not trained and diet that's just not part of their tool set and therefore it doesn't even come up right but again I think if there was a problem they would take the time to look into it there just hasn't been a problem gotcha all right so we talked about what type one is maybe we can talk a little bit more about what type two is let's let's kind of define our terms distinguishing type two from pre-diabetic from insulin resistant and also type one point five which I'd never heard about until I was listening to you guys talk about it mm-hmm researchers believe there's more people living with type 1.5 diabetes than type one what is that it's a slow onset version of type one okay so so let's start it let's it's kids can be very confusing so let's just think of like diabetes as being like a general umbrella term for like what could happen the thing that you get when your blood glucose becomes variable right within that umbrella you have many different things many different flavors we'll call them right so you have the type one which is Robbie and me so it's an autoimmune condition like we described earlier and generally it's considered a strong autoimmune condition which means that you express at least one sometimes multi of the time multiple antibodies to the beta cells and as a result of that it's a rapid destruction happens within 12 to 18 months and then you go to full insulin dependence and that can affect kids as low and you know it from the age of from birth all the way up to the age of about 30 there's another type of autoimmune diabetes which affects adults greater than the age of 30 who also get an autoimmune reaction but it's a weaker autoimmune reaction so rather than having multiple antibodies to the beta cells or to insulin they usually only express one it's not a hard and fast rule but generally only one so as a result of that type 1.5 diabetes is considered adult onset adult onset slow progressing type 1 diabetes mmm yep and again over the age of 30 there's people who are now in their 60s that are getting the that are diagnosed with autoimmune diabetes its type 1.5 mm okay the third type of diabetes is called pre-diabetes think of pre-diabetes is like baby type-2 diabetes so it's the thing that you get on the way to type 2 and like we were talking about earlier insulin resistance is the underlying condition that first sets in and then insulin resistance progresses to pre-diabetes you know that you have pre-diabetes because you go to the doctor you get your a1c value measured and or your fasting glucose and or your fasting insulin and those numbers usually are showing a slight elevation so as a result of that you get this diagnosis of pre-diabetes but usually people are given the warning like hey if you make some lifestyle changes right now you can go back to being non diabetic right it's your choice if pre-diabetes progresses and continues to get worse and the amount of insulin resistance that you're experiencing grows then it turns into type 2 diabetes type 2 diabetes occurs when again you are you are quite insulin resistant glucose levels are quite high you know fasting glucose postprandial or post meal blood glucose is high and the amount of insulin that your pancreas is secreting okay in this progression goes from being normal to high in the pre-diabetic State so your pancreas is like trying to to control your bug because like hang on I can secrete more I can secrete more so pre-diabetics usually have a high insulin level and then by the time you get to type 2 diabetes the ability of those beta cells to continue to manufacture insulin has been compromised so now instead of having a high in some production you go back to having a compromised insulin production okay so it's like you started out at normal you went into overdrive and then boom now you fell you didn't fall to zero right usually but you felt like you know suboptimal 50% 60% normal insulin production that's one type two sets in and at that point the question really becomes is it possible to go from type 2 back to pre-diabetes back to non-diabetic and if so how would you do it and the answer is absolutely it can happen in more than 80 percent sometimes even 90% of all cases the question is what are the lifestyle choices that you put into play to make that happen right and that's a complex question right because you know there's so many different types of there's so many different worlds saying I know the answer I know the answer I know the answer but the idea is and General Allen generality speaking yes you can move from type 2 back to non-diabetic and it happens for the majority of people and I want to get into that solution but before we do that maybe we should talk a little bit about cause I mean when I was a kid it wasn't even type 1 and type 2 it was like adult onset diabetes and juvenile that's right right right and I didn't know anybody that had what we now commonly refer to as type 2 but we're in a situation at the moment where I think the statistics are something I mean you would know much better than me but we're verging on like 30% of Americans being of adult Americans being diabetic or pre-diabetic right and the childhood rates are insane as well I mean where are we at the moment yeah okay so the statistics say by 2030 that 1 in 3 people in the United States will be living with some form of diabetes it's insane ok let's do the math on that how many people we already have one-third with the Prieta B's it's 85 million people just don't know it correct correct so so what the statistics are saying is that by 2030 so it's a fast forward ten years from now there's gonna be a massive diabetes problem with one out of every three people walking around saying I have diabetes I have type 2 diabetes mainly right but what Robbie is saying which is absolutely right which is at today in 2020 there are 30 million people approximately in the United States that have been diagnosed with some form of diabetes so about 1 to 3 million of those have type 1 and then the other 27 to 33 million have type 2 in addition to those people there are now 85 million other people who are living with pre-diabetes but don't even know it mm-hmm right so the total number is somewhere about a hundred ten million people who are living with some form of blood glucose instability blood glucose variation problem and majority of them don't even know it and those are the people that over the course of the next ten years are gonna likely progress the type 2 diabetes causing a huge you know and even larger epidemic than we're facing now and the cause is standard American diet and not enough exercise and living stressful lives essentially excess calories excess saturated fat in the diet not enough exercise high stress no questions mm-hmm and the solution with the diet being the biggest problem of all yeah yes exactly right yeah all right well let's talk about the solution so we already kind of we already kind of you know waded into it a little bit here but you guys are coaching people you've got this book mastering diabetes and it's essentially you've created this protocol to say look we're n of two but here's what the research says here's what the science says mhm here's how we can hold your hand and walk you through this process and get you from your type 2 diabetic state or you're pre-diabetic state and walk it back yeah at the end of two and also three thousand-plus people who've been through our coaching program and like you said a lot of research there's over 800 plus citations in that book and the research goes back it goes back all the way to the 1920s showcasing that the more carbohydrate food you eat the lower your insulin resistance that goes so I mean insulin was first discovered in 1921 and it was first used in humans in 1922 so the around the Sun that's when the whole conversation starts to emerge about okay insulin sensitivity so 1926 dr. Sansom publishes the paper in the journal of the American Medical Association called the use of high carbohydrate diets in treating diabetes and this is the first time he said I used a radical experiment in 150 patients adding bread potatoes fruit and low-fat milk all right that's what he adds and he finds that his patients don't need to use more insulin so prior to the discovery of insulin they were fed a very very low carbohydrate diet very high in fat very high in protein just to keep people alive so that's what was going on they were having like 400 calories a day it was miserable nobody liked the food they couldn't think clearly they had no energy so doctor Sansom feeds them this higher carbohydrate diet and all of a sudden they return to physical activity they returned to their normal mental capacity the diet actually tastes good this is just the beginning then in the 1930s dr. Rabinowitz in Canada starts practicing a higher carbohydrate diet with his patients publishes several papers in 1935 he publishes a paper which is a five-year randomized controlled trial in a hundred people 50 people try the old low carbohydrate diet 50 people try the new higher carbohydrate diet okay he sees a 1% reduction in insulin use on the old diet and a 57 percent reduction in insulin use on the higher carbohydrate demo okay I mean he actually actually brought a few statements here to read he concludes carbohydrates increase whereas fats decrease the sensitivity of the individual animal and man to insulin this is 1935 just researchers clearly stating fat consumption impairs insulin sensitivity then at the same time you have dr. Hemsworth in the United Kingdom he's publishing very fancy studies in people who do not have diabetes so he wants to test in normal human subjects what's going on with insulin use depending on what type of diet I feed them so he gets a bunch of healthy young male medical students he feeds them seven different diets for the minimum of seven days all right the high fat diets 80% of calories come from fat low fat diet is 16 percent of calories coming from fat ok and he sees there's a stepwise improvement in insulin sensitivity as he decreases the fat in the diet get seven different diets over seventy for this very very thorough experiment he concludes that study saying the greater the amount of carbohydrate in the diet the greater the sensitivity of the organism to insulin again this is 1935 people are saying this and then you skip to like the work of Walter Kempner 1958 remember his work I mean referring to speeding people white rice uh-huh fruit juice fruit and white sugar this is a diet of less than 5% of calories come from fat a very highly processed it was originally designed to treat hypertension okay so he publishes a paper he's like he got great results he was reversing heart disease kidney disease all kinds of stuff he was even skeptical what's gonna happen if I feed this diet to people living with diabetes so he publishes a paper on 100 consecutive patients no cherry-picking and they're eating all these processed foods their fasting blood glucose drops their insulin levels drop their cholesterol drops and their weight drops eating processed high carbohydrate rich foods and what's amazing is that the foreheads that heat with fed people mm-hmm fruit fruit juice white rice white table sugar these are literally four of the foods or food groups I would say that modern diet is tell you to avoid all of those I mean we vilified fruit but you know the other ones seem Allah even more like of course you're not supposed to do that yeah does anybody ever studied what would happen if you put a diabetic on like just they just drink coca-cola neat candy like just like pure table sugar okay that question like no fruit no fiber for him 1971 doctor Bruns L publishes a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine he feeds people a sugar water diet literally dextrose and a little bit of protein powder 85% of calories coming from carbohydrate 15% from protein 0% from fat because it's a processed diet when you eat a whole food diet you can eat 0% fat there's fat and lettuce there's fat and bananas there's fat and apples there's fat and everything you eat you just need enough whole food you're gonna get like six seventy percent of calories come from fat so he feeds people this highly processed diet so he had him on a controlled diet there were 22 subjects 13 of them had pre-diabetes the rest did not have diabetes okay puts him on a controlled diet for seven to ten days and then he feeds in the sugar water diet there fasting blood glucose levels drop eight percent in the non diabetics nine point six percent and the people having the pre-diabetes but more importantly he does a paired or glucose tolerance test so this is where subjects are given a glucose challenge like 75 grams of carbohydrate and like a liquid solution and they going to measure the blood glucose levels at every 30 minutes and insulin levels every 30 minutes for the next two to three hours and he finds that on this sugar water diet the blood glucose values went down and their insulin levels went down so they're eating liquid sugar water requiring less insulin with low so New England has everyone so how come you're not just like eating candies all the time well I mean but what the point is is because it's this is just the biology of what's happening but as far as long-term health overall health you've got microbe of course you want to have nutrient-dense foods that also happen to be low in fat right okay but there's still one there's a couple more studies that I think are worth noting but the 1979 yeah tell them uh that's 1979 my boy James W Anderson he conducts a study at the University of Kentucky with Kylene ward they take 20 subjects who are all living with type 2 diabetes for a minimum of two years he puts him on a controlled diet you know the standard I I think was like 40% of counters from fat or so and then they put him on a weight maintaining high carbohydrate diet so this is not weight loss can be attributed to any success here and in 16 days 50 percent of the subjects require zero insulin so these are individuals that have been using insulin for two years high fasting blood glucose levels they were straight-up type 2 diabetics and then he just switches him to a diet they had and he forces them to eat enough food so they don't lose a single pound and within 16 days call it two weeks they're off insulin altogether and what were they eating specifically it was a lot of starch high carbohydrate start a doze rice things like thread mmm stuff like that Wow percent of calories was nine percent of calories come from fat on that diet as we go into the biochemistry which I know we're gonna have Cyrus talked about you understand why the low fat component is so important so let's talk about what happens conversely on a low carb fad diet which is kind of the reigning protocol for people that have this condition it is either ketogenic or very low carbohydrate you can't talk about diabetes not talking about the ketogenic diet 100% no question about it okay so let's suppose that you're eating a low carbohydrate diet eat so what that means is that you're gonna be eating a diet that contains somewhere between call it 70 to 85 percent fat in your diet and then the remainder is going to be fat protein and carbohydrate so a low carbohydrate diet has been sort of talked about you know for 30 40 50 years at this point at this point we are now in the ketogenic diet and the ketogenic diet is basically considered a very low carbohydrate diet so that means is that the total number of carbohydrates they were at the suggests per day is 30 grams per day maximum divided between breakfast and lunch and dinner so you're eating 30 grams of carbohydrate plus more than 150 to 170 grams of fat per day so again we're looking at like an 80% fat intake you know then the room ate a small amount of carbohydrate and the remainder in protein okay so in that situation when you eat a low carbohydrate diet you're effectively eating foods that are high in fat medium and protein and the fat molecules that are that are coming inside of your mouth are actually locked up as triglyceride in the food that you're eating so triglyceride literally means glycerol backbone with three fatty acids attached to it so you're eating you know a lot of that triglyceride it comes down your esophagus it gets into your small intestine in your small intestine the the glycerol backbone is removed from those fatty acids those fatty acids then go through the wall of your small intestine they get into your lymph system your lymph circulates it into your blood and then from your blood they circulate in these particles called chylomicrons chylomicrons are are particles that can basically deliver these fatty acids to tissues so you eat it they get inside of your blood now these column microns are basically trying to give fatty acids to tissues so if 100% of those fatty acid molecules ended up inside of your fat tissue or your adipose tissue then diabetes probably wouldn't exist today the problem is that those fatty acid molecules a lot of them do get into your adipose tissue which is where they belong it's a perfectly designed storage warehouse to absorb fatty acids from the blood when they're available but in addition to getting inside of the fat tissue they also get inside of your muscle they also get inside of your liver and that's okay if the total quantity of fat in your diet is maintained at a low level like Robbie was saying 10% 15% maybe as high as 20% okay but when you're eating a ketogenic diet again you're eating 7080 percent fat in your diet and as a result of that the amount of fat that gets partitioned inside of your muscle and inside of your liver starts to grow over the course of time so today you start a little bit tomorrow you store a little bit more the next day you store a little bit more and over the course of time now your muscle and liver have become effectively fatty acid storage depots in addition to your adipose tissue so your muscle and liver are designed to store small amounts of fatty acids and inside of each cell they have this thing called a lipid droplet the lipid droplet is effectively where the the fatty acids are lipid soluble comp compounds congregate together so this lipid droplet starts to grow over the course of time within each liver cell within each muscle cell and effectively that cell gets into a high energy state where what it's trying to communicate is like wow I have too much stuff inside of me this lipid droplet has grown each one of these fatty acid molecules is worth is nine calories per gram and it's it's a very energy dense molecule and so the cell effectively says okay wait a minute we need to go into self defense mode here and we need to prevent more stuff from coming inside so if it were able to block more fatty acids from coming inside it would do so the problem is that fatty acids can easily get inside of tissues they can easily get inside of your fat I'm sorry your your liver and your muscle because them the mechanisms to get fat inside of there are not very highly regulated so because these tissues can't really block too much more fat from coming inside what they can do is they can they can block the ability to communicate with insulin because the insulin is a molecule that's mainly designed to allow glucose to enter tissues in addition to that glucose can also signal fatty acids and amino acids to come into tissues albeit just a little bit less powerfully an insulin glucose yes sorry so the cells do is they basically say all right listen what if we were to just shut down this insulin signaling pathway because if we did that then when insulin comes knocking at the door we can basically block pretty much all of glucose from coming in and we can also block a small amount of fatty acids and a small amount of amino acids from coming inside so intracellularly this lipid droplet starts to create a traffic jam and this traffic jam you know basically goes into the the inside surface of these insulin receptor and starts to alter some of the proteins that start the insulin signaling cascade on the surface of that cell on the inside of that okay yeah so the insulin receptor is kind of like out into the surfer and you know in the extracellular environment interacting with insulin but then as when you cross the cellular membrane on the inside there's a whole bunch of there's that there's another motif in that protein and if you alter the way that that protein functions or alter any of its downstream signaling molecules then you can basically shut down or strongly inhibit the action of everything underneath it so it's basel ii just a game of dominoes let's just like alter the first couple so that nothing else but beneath it functions properly so this lipid droplet ends up causing a problem and impairing insulin signaling so as a result of that the next time that you go and eat a banana or you have a bowl of quinoa or some wild rice as an example that's carbohydrate rich food those carbohydrates enter your digestive system those carbohydrate chains get broken down into glucose glucose is now in circulation inside of your blood glucose has to be accompanied by insulin in order to get inside of tissues so insulin comes knocking at the door says hey knock knock I got this glucose do you want to take it up and the cells respond by saying we can't take it up right now sorry we got all this lipid that we got to take care of first or some of the cells can't even hear insulin because they've shut down the entire signaling pathway so as a result of that insulin is knocking it's knocking it's knocking it's knocking saying there's no response knocking no response so as a result of that the glucose gets trapped inside of your blood right so you have literally one banana and then you go check your blood glucose two hours later and you look at the number and you're like huh 245 I only had one banana I guess bananas are bad for me see every time I try and eat fruit my blood goes goes high every time I eat potatoes my blood glucose goes high I guess those foods are bad for me I should eat less carbohydrate rich food so when that glucose is trapped in your bloodstream with the insulin and the cells are sort of refusing to uptake it does that then prompt additional insulin secretion so the insulin then continues to build in the bloodstream like what is the downstream impact of that and how does that relate to insulin resistance yeah someone knows his biochemistry great so yes in that situation what we just described that is classic insulin resistance right so like we talked about earlier insulin resistance can progress into pre-diabetes and then eventually to type 2 so in that state if you've developed this this level of insulin resistance a small amount of insulin resistance then the beta cells inside of your pancreas are saying you know what the insulin that we just manufactured and secreted into the blood it didn't really do much let's make more mm-hmm so then they go into sort of overproduction mode and instead of making call it five units for a given meal they're gonna make seven units and that happens today maybe those extra two units they go and they get the job done and it brings your blood glucose down mm-hmm then tomorrow the same thing happens and then the next day same thing happens and then months and years down the road before you know it normally your pancreas was secreting call it 25 to 30 units of insulin per day and now that 25 to 30 has grown to 40 50 60 sometimes it can be four to five times as much as you were secreting in the non-diabetic state so this domino effect this cascading series of events can all be tracked back to excess lipid intake which which and you know causes your your liver and muscle cells to over accumulate these lipids shut this whole thing down exactly right Wow yeah so what you can think of it as like excess accumulation of liver I'm sorry excess accumulation of saturated fatty acids in tissues that are not designed to store large amounts of fatty acids that then causes a traffic jam of glucose inside of your blood right and in turn eating a low-carb or a ketogenic diet that's high in fat is basically a masking technique because you're not taking in any carbohydrates you're not you're not prompting your your pancreas to secrete any insulin so you're under the illusion that you're dealing in this solution but actually you're you're just basically exacerbating a situation that will manifest the minute you put any carbohydrates into your body whatsoever so you're actually exacerbating insulin resistance by doing that you're just not seeing the impact of that until or unless you eat some carbohydrates that's accurate so you you you live in an insulin resistance state by eating a ketogenic diet and you're making it worse and you're making it worse over the over the course of time and you're playing the carbohydrate avoidance game which allows you to never challenge your liver or muscle with the you know to uptake glucose large amounts of it and as a result of that you literally cannot see that you are living with insulin resistance and to be fair I don't want us to get ridiculed on Twitter okay so if you do a low carbohydrate diet and you lose you get results you you get results but you also can see some studies showing improvements and instant sensitivity if they lose weight so there is a small improvement but it's not the same magnitude of improvement that we're talking about here but once you lose the weight and your weight stabilizes and you perpetuate like a low carb diet you'll be able to kind of maintain that state right and your blood work will will be stable you're gonna hit a plateau yes and no yeah so I mean it is possible sure let's say you lost 40 pounds on a ketogenic diet because weight loss is an inevitable consequence and it's one of the main things that happens and it's one of the main reasons why people adopt a ketogenic diet so they lose weight and as a result of losing weight total cholesterol drops HDL cholesterol sometimes goes up triglycerides drop a1c goes down fasting insulin goes down fasting glucose goes down blood pressure goes down so all these markers these biomarkers start to move in the right direction and you're like huh I've done this only for a year this is fantastic now I'm at my normal weight that's great those are short-term results and those are phenomenal and I'm not gonna take that away from anybody who's experienced that that's that's great but what a lot of people who come to us relate to us is that they say hey look I've been doing this ketogenic thing I've been doing this low carbohydrate thing for a while but I can tell that I'm just not functioning I'm not firing on all cylinders right and what that means is that they've either developed or are in the process of developing other chronic conditions like hypertension okay once they've plateaued now things can move in the wrong direction sometimes they get high LDL cholesterol mm-hmm okay sometimes they become hypertensive sometimes they end up developing really complex digestive problems they get gas bloating constipation and that's frequent and it prevents them from being able to eat frequently a lot of people say oh you know I just I have this brain fog like I just cannot think clearly and I don't know what's happening a lot of people can't exercise frequently and so there's all these sort of like ancillary conditions that begin to accumulate over the course of time some of them are diagnoseable conditions some of them are non diagnoseable conditions and it generally makes people over the course of a year to two years to three years depending on the individual a lot of them are like hah I don't know if I can continue or want to continue to do this anymore it's very difficult to maintain and the one thing that's happening that you cannot argue or disagree on is that they have eaten themselves into a state of glucose intolerance they'll say oh oh I don't care like I'm not gonna eat a banana anyway just never gonna eat a Cobra so what they can say if they want to that's fine but the fact is they've eaten themselves into a state of glucose intolerance and the only way to get out of it is to lower their fat intake and eat more carbohydrate rich food which they will do when they say oh yeah if I want to become more insulin sensitive in a perform well on oral glucose-tolerance test I just have to carbon apt okay yes you have to start adopting features of the master diabetes method to become more insulin sensitive in fairness to that that that individual that's that's got to be a scary prospect like if they've been told their whole life or ever since they've been diagnosed that they got to eat low carb and they've been doing it and they've been they've gotten to a place of stability with that for you to then say actually you got to switch gears and do the exact opposite I would imagine that that provokes a little bit of fear and most people for sure there's no question yeah no doubt yeah I mean I think you're bringing up a really important topic here which is the psychology of this is just as important as the the you know biochemistry yes I would say this the psychology is even more important right about chemistry like we can nerd out on biochemistry all day long but at the end of the day you know it there's a certain amount of like emotional anxiety that creates in people when all of a sudden used you say to them you know a couple of things like number one you can't eat potatoes as an example you can't eat fruits and I think what people do is they translate that message into oh so you're saying what I've been doing is wrong right and and then it can create a sort of like negative mindset right right and sadness exactly and in reality we never want to point a finger at someone to be like yo you're doing something wrong you know again even in this conversation of low carbohydrate diets we're gonna be very clear we're not pointing a finger at any individual we're just sort of saying the science could require could use some refinement mm-hmm think the conversation about the science could use some refinement and to be clear we also have a lot of respect for people who choose to adopt a look however I doubt that all the experts people who choose like say you know what I'm gonna do something different I'm not just gonna go to McDonald's eat standard American diet we have a lot more in common than we don't have in common you know as far as lifestyle change there's a lot to celebrate yeah everyone's they're all trying to do the right thing a great buddy is putting a lot of effort towards it right so all right you've and you guys have gotten together and you've taken 3,000 people like forward 3,000 all so walk me through like how you know the experience of onboarding somebody into this and like how long it takes before you start to see results and what that looks like specifically okay so Cyrus and I initially you know you were working in like a biochemistry lab to working to really enjoy I was loving life at Forks Over knives having a lot of fun we're changing a lot of lives but the one thing that I realized is that if you were a person living with diabetes and you wanted some guidance some coaching some support a go-to place to adopt a plant-based diet and you know manage your diabetes or reverse type 2 diabetes and pre-diabetes there wasn't one place to go do you know neal barnard he wrote the foreword of this book with good friends with him he had a great book he didn't have like a website a destination you know joel firm has written some good books and some good information out there but there wasn't one place actually get coaching and support and the nuanced details of diabetes in general and especially type 1 type 1.5 insulin dependent type 2 how to manage all that so so we joined forces 2017 we create an online group coaching program that but that's our passion is really working directly with people uh-huh and so you joined the coaching program there's three different tools that we have to help people really transition understand what to do we have an online course which teaches people step-by-step what to do and we help people transition slowly okay a lot of people they if you jump in make too many changes you bite off more than you can chew it can become challenging so we're teaching people just change breakfast just start there one step at a time and then people start doing that and they work through the program all the way down to lunch to dinner to cleaning out your pantry to go into restaurants all the details okay so that's really step one of onboarding with the master and diabetes coaching program then you have an online community and this is where we have coaches who have a lot of experience with diabetes several of them have reversed type 2 diabetes themselves at Sud was on your show in the past these people are gonna help you answer questions every step of the way we literally promise you post a question we're gonna have a team member answer it within 24 hours in addition to a coach helping you out you are also gonna get support from the community from a bunch of other people living with diabetes going through the same thing you're going through and that is priceless especially when somebody's struggling and those are actually the posts that get the most interaction so I'm gonna said hey man I fought the wagon I feel really bad you have all these people hey it's okay I've been there I've dealt with that I had this challenging family interaction I have a challenging situation with my doctor they're telling me I shouldn't do this I'm gonna get my health worse they've all these really scary moments to have a place to go to and get that support from other people has been really valuable so that's another part of our program but we also do live coaching calls so the every the first and third Sunday of every month we do a zoom call so you can actually interact with the coach interact with the community but it's this really supportive comprehensive program that has helped us get amazing results in a lot of people and we are publishing testimonials all the time getting a new story almost every day on our slack thread and just hearing it through Instagram and Facebook and are you able to scale this or are you maxed out on the number of people that you can deal with I mean when people listening you know there's gonna be people listening to this yeah or dealing with these very conditions so so we we do actually have a waitlist so that is true but the goal of we initially did coaching was just iris nine okay we're just helping people that's it and we realized that we can't clone ourselves so we have to get other coaches involved and that has definitely helped us to scale this and that is our plan we can help a lot of people for sure yeah that's cool and once somebody begins this process I'm sure it varies depending upon the extent of their condition but how quickly do people start to see results days yeah absolutely days especially if you're living with insulin dependent diabetes type 1 type 1.5 and some dependent type 2 you're injecting insulin and you start eating more carbohydrates food it is not expected to see your insulin use change within 24-48 hours that's literally how quickly it can wear off depending on how much of a change you make so we have four-day retreats people come down we ran some in LA we've done something Costa Rica now in four days people are adjusting their insulin use dramatically and they're literally eating unlimited amounts of carbohydrate rich foods you come there there's there's butternut squash there's mangos there's papaya there's beans just in individual bowls a buffet go and take what you want we have lots of vegetables lots of greens and there's no calorie restriction at all we're actually encouraging them to eat more because that's one of the biggest mistakes when people adopt this dye is they don't eat enough yeah I know one of the things that you that you do and you lay this out in the book is you divide these foods into kind of three buckets like the green light the yellow light and the red light and for foods that are in this green light category it's like easy you want there's really just just eat until you you literally can't eat anymore absolutely and because they're so full of water and fiber it's difficult to eat too much of them and in the green light category we have specifically listed the carbohydrate-rich foods first fruits starchy vegetables intact whole grains legumes and then intact whole grains so have those four categories listed first because we want you to emphasize them and I know people they're scared they're absolutely scared in the beginning and part of the book I think is understanding the science and what's actually happening in that for people living with pre-diabetes type 2 diabetes the high blood glucose reading is a symptom of insulin resistance don't get too lost in worrying about higher readings in the beginning and we go through a lot of tips and nuances that you can apply to really handle that depending on how insulin resistant you are so there are certain foods you can add lots more starch non starchy vegetables lots more greens you add foods like that to any given meal you're going to slow down the rate of glucose absorption and that's gonna help you avoid spikes so there's lots of tweaks we can make small amount even walking after a meal can make a big difference just walking in general anytime a day is a huge huge difference for people living with all forms of diabetes so the foods that find themselves in the greenlight category are fruits starchy vegetables gums legumes intact whole grains and then non starchy vegetables leafy greens herbs and spices and mushrooms uh-huh yellow light are things like nuts and seeds avocados things that are higher and yes so these are healthy plant foods they're whole plant foods they're nutrient-dense but you're exactly right they're a little bit higher in fat actually a lot higher in fat and you can easily eat way too much of them which is not gonna help your insulin sensitivity and definitely not gonna have weight loss as well which a lot of people are looking for who are living with insulin resistance now we also have highly high processed foods in that category so brown rice pasta Ezekiel bread foods like that it's a little bit more processed the original intact food it was made from so rather have you have brown rice than brown rice pasta but still it's in the yellow light category and can be part of your diet right and red light the red light is basically everything else basically everything else you know you have animal products in there in oils in there because it's a highly processed food you've taken virtually all the vitamins all the minerals all the antioxidants all the carbohydrate all the protein you've stripped it out you have basically nothing but fat left very very calorie dense it's easy to eat too much also a lot of oils are gonna mess up your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio so it's best to just limit or avoid them to the best of your ability and then we also have processed foods I mean the basics but I think it's worth pointing out there's a lot of vegan processed foods coming out now now more than ever they're not health foods yeah so if you want to enjoy them for other reasons go ahead but if you're trying to reverse insulin resistance it's not gonna help you right what about beans beans double green light green light yeah I think yeah do you ask a question because you enjoy eating beans yourself I ridiculous amount of beans yeah yeah and I was about the second meal effect oh yeah okay one second here in in-fighting ultra you talked about the fact that when you finally transition to a plant-based diet and you actually gave it a good shot that you had to go through some personalization as well Yeah right you were sort of manipulating your diet to determine what's gonna give you the best performance the best recovery and what's gonna make you feel best were you also at that time did you also get excited about the the prospect of eating lots of carbohydrate rich food like what was the emotional under London feeling I mean yeah I would say yes I wasn't I mean I don't I didn't approach it with an engineer's mindset in the way that you might and I wasn't avoiding carbohydrates prior to that I was just trying to find a way to eat that would keep my energy levels super high like all the time and then as as the training began to ramp up I mean my my diet is much higher in fat than what you guys are recommending and and and even this conversation having it with you guys right now is and and other conversations that I've had with lots of other people interesting people in this podcast that do things similar to you as me rethinking that and reducing my fat intake considerably based at you know in in comparison to what I have been doing but when I was training 25 30 hours a week yeah like lots of akkad OHS and some higher fat stuff that you know I probably wouldn't do now fair enough was that there's this thing called the athletes paradox which i think is actually phenomenal it's very interesting which is that some research actually shows that the lipid droplet also grows inside of inside of muscle tissue of athletes who are eating a slightly higher fat intake but it's not problematic because that lipid Depot is basically it grows and shrinks and grows and shrinks rapidly hmm so as a result of doing endurance sports a result of being a frequent athlete that becomes a fuel depot rather than a pathological you know it's so urgent about training well let's talk about what what you mean when you say reversal like reversal remission like are you is it possible to cure type-2 diabetes like what do you actually mean okay great question I think this is actually it can be kind of controversial to even talk about this because it means different things to different people so when we refer to reversing we we talk about reversing insulin resistance because that's the underlying cause of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes and it's the thing that makes your blood glucose wonky and when it comes to reversing type 2 diabetes as an example what you want to do is drop your a1c value or anyone sees basically like I said 3-month an indicator that tells you what your blood glucose stability has been over the course of three months and so the the standard is to get your blood your a1c to less than a five point seven percent okay so between five point seven and six point four is considered pre-diabetes and then six point five and Beyond is considered type two so let's say start out at a seven point O and then you drop that from a seven to a six from a six to a five point five boom you're at a five point five technically you're in the Green Zone you're in the non-diabetic range cool let's stay there in addition to that we also want to see a low fasting blood glucose and a low fasting insulin so a low fasting blood glucose means less than a hundred milligrams per deciliter and low fasting insulin means less than five okay so if you can achieve all three of those then technically speaking you're in the safe zone but what we want to see is that you maintain that not only do just get it today I want you to maintain that for a year all right I want you to prove to me that your lifestyle is dialed in enough that you can maintain all of those biomarkers for a year now those are those two markers the fasting insulin and fasting glucose are indicators of what your fasting metabolism is doing and that's important no question but it's also important to make sure that your glucose challenged metabolism is also functioning well and the glucose challenged metabolism effectively refers to what happens after you eat a carbohydrate rich meal right so if you were to go eat a carbohydrate rich meal I also want to make make sure that your fat your post meal insulin is not high and that your post meal blood glucose is also not high right now in the world of ketogenic diets what we're talking about earlier a lot of the research focuses on what's happening in the fasting state because again you lose weight you drop your fasting glucose you drop your fasting insulin drop her a1c everything looks good but they're using that as a collection of information to say good job you've reversed type-2 diabetes but they're not testing the glucose challenge State mm-hmm and if you're not testing the glucose challenge state then you're bit missing an entire that's the real marker of just how insulin resistant you are or not exactly so that's why what we like to say is let's get the biomarkers set in the in the fasting state and let's get them set in the in the glucose challenge state mm-hm and if you can do both of those and you can maintain that over the course of time give me a full year then we can say that you've reversed type 2 diabetes altogether so I mean I don't think the exact words matters it reversal is a cure is it remission it's what's happening in real people's lives people who come to us with a high a1c they're taking diabetes medications they have fatty liver disease they have no energy okay so we get them they don't need medication anymore I mean I just pulled up the story Tammy because she's one of my favorite testimonials she actually lives here in Los Angeles I got to meet her at the farmers market when she joined our program her a1c was seven point two percent and she was using metformin so that's a common diabetes medications that's a high a one C medicated now she follows our program she gets eat all the carbohydrate rich food she wants unlimited amounts she reduces their a1c 25.3% unmedicated so totally off the metaphor yeah so at that point what I don't care what you want to call that right averse it doesn't matter she's she's non-diabetic she's removed the cause of the problem and now she's able to metabolize glucose but most importantly she also had insulin data so when she was living with type 2 diabetes had the elevated a1c still using metformin for fasting insulin was 17.4 this is very high now she starts eating our diet doesn't need the medication anymore as lost weight her fasting insulin is 5.2 that's healthy that's where it's supposed to dance crazy is there ever a situation where somebody's type 2 diabetes is sope regret like the extreme examples of this being unchecked for a very long time somebody's very overweight like that person who's going to get you know their foot amputated or whatever where it's just even even to like put them on this program like it's too late or or do you always see improvement it's never too late so but this is a really important topic we're actually quite passionate about it and we wrote about this in the book there is a situation where you can become an insulin dependent type 2 that's actually real so if you have gone through that situation where Cyrus was talking about all the insulin being produced and knocking on the door it's possible that your beta cells have become exhausted and you literally aren't able to produce enough insulin to manage your blood glucose level without exhaustion as insulin so you're more like a type one without the autoimmunity right without the antibodies and that's okay so we talked about c-peptide testing you can go and get a test done you can figure out and establish how well are your beta cells working how much insulin are you producing and then we can gauge your goals yeah it's cool and so yeah you you at that point okay for of course they're more like Cyrus and I they're more like a type one there's still no reason not to gain some more energy to reduce your risk of heart disease which is the number one killer of people living with all forms of diabetes introduce your risk of fatty liver disease chronic kidney disease high cholesterol high blood pressure erectile dysfunction depression you name it you want to maximize your insulin sensitivity where do you guys come down on intermittent fasting oh ho huge fans huge fans um I when I was in graduate school I got to study intermittent fasting and and many different permutations of it and how it affected you know animals in the insulin resistance state and the results that we were getting were just phenomenal so we were learning about different techniques that other research labs had used to to improve the health of you know either animals or humans and there's there's a whole laundry list of different intermittent fasting strategies and permutations so we were testing out what happens in at 25% calorie restricted state which basically means you eat 25% less food than you normally would and you hold that constant every single day then there's what's called an alternate day fasting strategy where you eat today that nothing the need today than nothing tomorrow then there's 25% alternate day fasting eat today and then you only have 25% of your normal food and on and off on and off so in the bassinet abuse program we we implement we basically teach people how to implement one of two different strategies the sort of beginner strategy and where we recommend starting would be a once per week 24-hour intermittent fast mm-hmm and when you do a once per week 24-hour in a min fast I think it solves many problems number one is it's an opportunity to recognize the difference between true physiological hunger and mental hunger or emotional hunger all right I'm sure you've probably felt that before you know most people think that they're truly hungry but in reality they're not necessarily it's just you know it's time it's programmed oh it's six o'clock p.m. it's dinnertime all right I smell that pizza so therefore I want food so this is an opportunity to sort of really recognize what is true physiological hunger and what is now that's a psychological experiment that is an absolute psychological experiment no question and then in addition to that people who are living with insulin dependent type I you know you type one diabetes or insulin dependent type 2 diabetes are able to use it as an opportunity to check whether their basal or their background insulin is set properly are they injecting the right amount and if so then their blood glucose is stable if they're injecting either too much or too little their blood glucose will do some funny thing because in in that period without food you get some kind of baseline reading that you can set your parameters on exactly so if you're using an insulin pump as an example the insulin pump is literally just drip irrigating insulin into your bloodstream or into the subcutaneous tissue that gets into your blood Rich's healthy pancreas he's doing that right now this is a key right yeah so that's the thing like my friend Robin our jean has a thing on her tricep you know like a little box thing there yeah that's what that's doing yes she has an omni pod right and she also you guys don't have that so we do not personally use pumps but she also has a continuous glucose monitor a CGM she wears a Dexcom but yeah don't blank stare the glucose monitor it's new technology uh-huh and what it's doing is it is actually measuring subcutaneous fluid right they have a she's got like a little doodad like that's not her phone that she's like looking at all the time looks like a pager yeah yeah now she's probably doing it on her phone because they didn't hear with you know but yeah so anyways it's giving you 24/7 data on your blood glucose values every five minutes you get a new number from these continuous glucose monitors and it's fascinating data and now for people living with type 1 and type 1.5 this concept of time in range has become a very big deal so we can now see what percent of any given period of time are you spending and in any range so the type one community has established between 70 and 180 milligrams per deciliter that is in range you want to try and be there as much as possible a minimum of 70% that's the goal and then to be low that would be 69 or lower you want to be there four percent okay no more than four percent max and then less than 55 no more than one percent so below one percent in a very urgent low and then you want to minimize the high so above 180 you want to try and be there as little as possible so they have done some studies and New England Journal of Medicine some high quality journals have look into this what's actually happening with people with type 1 diabetes right now how good is their time in range and people who are using a pump they see a little bit of an improvement they're getting you know maybe somewhere around like 65 percent of their time spent in range but then this new technology called a closed-loop system also known as an artificial pancreas is getting people on average closer to the 70 percent threshold that we're looking for here seventy-five percent okay now this is where the pump and the CGM are talking to each other so the CGM says oh hey you're going up you're 115 going up so that talks for the pump of the pump says okay you know what you need one unit of insulin let's bring you back down and where it's really helpful is when people are sleeping so it makes these small micro adjustments overnight helps them keep a steady blood glucose profile but even then I want to make a point here they're still getting somewhere around my seventy seventy five percent on average I have become personally very passionate about this topic I'm like hey if I'm gonna be an educator in this field like I should have some good numbers here so here look into this let me start looking at this data and I've started to pay close attention to it and over the past 90 days my time and range is 91% Wow which is again people with the closed loop system are they're getting the some people are getting close to that I mean it's not that often so without a system without antiquated technology I'm at 91% my low is 3% less than well less than 55 is less than 1% and then the high is 6% so in addition to the time and range data we now also can have an average blood glucose value throughout the entire day and it's not based on just finger pricks it's 20 you can't hide from this data and so we can see okay what's your average over 24-hour period and that number you can also figure out okay what's the standard deviation what's the fluctuation from your average and you want that to be you want your standard deviation to be less than one-third less than one-third okay of the value yeah and mine is about 1/4 so you're basically flattening that sine curve exactly and so what I'm trying to demonstrate here and what we're doing here with the master babies method it's like I'm not special I'm just telling I promise you if you apply these principles it's just matter what form of diabetes you're living with you can get your blood glucose under excellent control you are not gonna see these peaks and valleys but you would expect with carbohydrate rich food and so I have the data to show that hey I'm doing that myself and I'm not even having the best technology doing it yeah but Robbie bacon today you know people like their high fatty foods man yeah you know and you know we teach that in our program in the book we say we're not the food police it's your choice we're just here to teach you the consequences and you can get whatever result you want we're just giving you the information and the support if you want it Robin is one of the most active energetic people I've ever met and you guys seem like you have a lot of energy like are there things that you can't do it like as as people who are athletic like you find that you can go out there and be all you can be and do all the stuff that you want to do without running into problems okay so how does that work with someone who has a progressed state of type - all right so the number of stories that are popping into my head right now is just like Dean Dean Dean Dean Dean okay when I first transitioned to a low-fat plant-based whole food diet one of the first things I felt not only was my glucose more controllable my insulin use is down but I literally felt like I took a like a wall charger and stuck it in a wall and I just got like electrified so I felt the energy boost immediately and as a result of that I went out and bought a bike and I started cycling all over the place and a new guy wrote brother yeah you know it is I think I wrote something like 6,000 miles in the first year because I was literally just excited and I told people at that time I was they would see though why are you up at six o'clock in the morning and I'm like I feel like a puppy I like I wake up and I just have all this energy and I don't know what to do with it right so I've experienced that Robyn is a perfect example we taught her this method right and we sort of were like hey you know how do you feel about this and so she's like great let's do it when I was talking with her not too long ago she said hey one of the things that uh one of the best benefits of this is I thought I had a lot of energy beforehand but now my boyfriend makes fun of me all the time because he says that I don't stop yeah right and I was doesn't she literally does not yeah and her her her now-husband i mean he's you know he's one of the most fit dudes ever now yeah so take the Robin that you know and then add another 20 30 40 okay then in addition to that one of the one of the best stories that we've you know been able to influence is there as a woman named Marilyn who came into our program and she was literally house ridden couch ridden she'd been living with type 1 diabetes for I want to say 60 plus years and she had so little energy that on a given daily basis she could not even leave her house she was hardcore ketogenic hardcore so she was very ketogenic leading up to that she her glucose was under exceptional control yeah while eating a ketogenic diet but she was like I think so I'm missing something so she comes over to starts learning from us her glucose is under great control following this approach as well and over the course of I want to say it took her in her particular situation about one and a half to two years to get to a point where she started to really feel it right so there was there was a lot of work that had to be done underneath but she eventually became a little bit more active inside of her house and then she eventually started going outside of her house to go get things and then she now gets on a bicycle and goes and rides her bike for ten ten miles a day yeah and then she's like you have fundamentally changed my body and my life and I'm like I didn't do anything Marilyn you did all the work here it's the classic example she had a once he's in the force consistently and you think oh this is great what was the long-term consequence she became house ridden so yeah exactly is there what's the deal I mean basically you guys are eating a raw diet right it's it's it's predominantly raw like where where do you come down on like cooked foods and I mean you like beans so you got a Coco's right so we're definitely we're not teaching a raw food diet that's not definitely not like I focus it on you stayed clear like you're not labeling this you know you you guys avoid words like vegan and raw and all that kind of stuff I get that you know but I just want to kind of drill down for sure so we get the nuances of both of our personal stories yes it is true I still still do follow a raw food diet I eat lots of non starchy vegetables lots of greens I could do this for a long time it's open over 13 years now and I eat prime my calories comfy tough fallen out see they're still working just fine [Laughter] and Cyrus and he's added some foods yeah so I I was raw for I don't know 14 years or so and I just decided that I wanted to start eating potatoes so I started eating potatoes quinoa garbanzo beans black beans steamed vegetables and those are all in my diet right now and how did that doesn't impact your blood work like what was that any changes that you saw when you did that or why did you decide to start doing that yeah I decide to start doing that because when I would go to like you know go to rest and go out to dinner with people I would always kind of like be eyeing the food and I was sort of like oh I don't want to eat some of that right and then I said you know what what if I were to just try incorporating it so the first time I tried incorporating cooked foods it it did not do good things to my blood glucose my blood glucose went high and as a result of that I had to use more insulin and I was like man this is frustrating but what I've learned in this process is that there are certain cooked foods which are very non problematic you know I can eat quinoa as much as I want I can eat garbanzo beans as much as I want steamed vegetable as much as I want and it's not gonna budge my blood glucose but there are certain types of beans for some reason that I cannot explain that make my look like let's go crazy and just to be clear this is these are nuances of living with insulin dependent diabetes type 2 there is no restriction on any of these healthy cooked foods that we're talking about in the book now I'm probably have like 30 recipes in here I'm pretty sure like 26 of them that I cooked couple raw food ones in there so let's let's blow a few minds and you guys can walk me through what you eat let's like get down to brass tacks yeah on what this actually is so I mean we're just go to either of your Instagram for sure your Instagram has the word mango in the in it people call me the mango man yeah I mean personally I will eat for breakfast I mean right now persimmons are in season I go but I should say you you gifted me with this beautiful fruit bag that's some high-quality fruit there thank you local grown Valencia pride mangoes very special Hachiya persimmons which are there like up you gotta eat them when they're like a balloon he won't even give me some of those foods yeah that's a great fruit so anyways you know every meal is essentially fruits and greens like pretty and I eat four times a day I have breakfast I have launch I have a pre dinner and I have dinner so breakfast it's gonna be whatever see whatever fruits are in season but a particularly calorie dense fruit so persimmons are much more calorie dense than something like melons so you know we and we list all the foods in the book in order of calorie density so people can use that as a tool to make sure they're staying satisfied sticking to the program long term and then lunches again gonna be another fruit based meal again final blow some people's minds i will commonly eat well over 210 grams a total carbohydrate at a lunch meal that's my biggest meal of the day and if you're following a ketogenic diet and you're staying 230 grams of carbohydrate or less per day you're eating 210 per week so I'm eating more carbohydrate than a low cut person is eating in one week but here's most use the kicker rich there's published research people with living with type 1 diabetes following a ketogenic diet will use on average 30 units of insulin per day 30 grams of carbohydrate 30 units of total insolence a one to one ratio I am eating over 700 grams of carbohydrate per day and using 27 total units Wow that's mind-blowing if people really let that sink in and that's the conversation of this whole book about maximizing insulin sensitivity or reverse sizes in the size of your your lunch meal is like the size of your physical body I used to think that I could eat in the night Robin I was like wow no question about it my preview is gonna have like some blueberries some bell peppers some mango some greens I love arugula I love spinach I like specific varieties that gift you some Bloomsdale spinach yeah special stuff and then dinner is a very high you know vegetable based meal you know lots of greens again I'm lucky I live in LA I get to have different varieties of lettuce like I'm sort lettuce you know green Oh blah yeah it's fun green peas sugar snap peas stuff like that and then of course there's some fruit in my dinner so I have some mangoes there some berries stuff like that Cyrus okay so because I live in Costa Rica I get to eat lots of plantains lots of papaya lots of mangos I just have this vision of you sitting on the beach just eating fruit wearing board shorts just stuff for hours and ties to go do it do a webinar okay so for breakfast I will wake up and I will eat maybe one plantain raw plantain which people find weird but it's very tasty so eat like one giant raw plantain and then maybe like half of a Mara doll papaya you know those like big Mexican papaya okay then I'll go and I'll do a workout I'll go to CrossFit for an hour and then I'll come back and my wife Kylie will put together some type of like giant fruit bowl slash smoothie Bowl for me so I'll eat that and that usually contains maybe another three plantains plus two mangos and some berries and maybe you know another half of a papaya okay so fruit heavy breakfast fruit every second breakfast lunch rolls around I still eat some more fruit why cuz I really like it just like Robbie okay this whole free thing just like say this the people that I know I know you don't characterize what you do is a fruitarian diet but the people that I know that that like are like fruitarians quote unquote okay I've never seen people more in love with what they eat like they just want to talk about it like yeah like romanticize it I'm like what is what is that about there's like I'm not gonna like write poetry about it I wish I explained cuz I seriously I have the same issue and Cyrus actually makes fun of me he cares away less about like this particular variety yeah like the rightness and I got all these farmers markets I don't know what to say rich I just love it it's like a Saturday Night Live skit okay no but when it comes to mangoes I am mildly obsessed with them and so like this fascination with like different types and different shapes and different colors and whatnot I'm wailing well into that when I was living in Hawaii back in 2005 and 2006 I wanted to set the world record for eating mangoes so I mapped out all of the mango trees on the south a part of Oahu and I would drive by them every single day and I would go mango hunting uh-huh and then I would had a bucket in the back of my truck and I would just go to people's houses and then I would pick up the Fallen mangoes and I would just eat those is this like a series on YouTube right so during that time I was eating 23 mangoes a day on average over a three and a half month period and I was eating a 17 1703 mango all right and again I was trying to set the world record applied to the guinness book isn't world record did somebody hold this sword well I tried to set the world sorry I applied for the Guinness Book and they basically said we don't do food eating records it promotes too much competitive ism you're gonna have to go to this other organization to do it so I said fine I hold the unofficial world record or money again so 1750 mangoes and three half months but really what I wanted to do was set the world record for a 24-hour period alright and eat something like fifty mangoes on 24-hour period or more point you could still do that I could point being so you know it's like fruit heavy up until lunch and then when you know middle of the afternoon and dinner rolls around that's when I go into more on vegetables so that's when I eat things like chickpeas I'll have some steamed vegetables I might have a giant salad I might have some red beans I might add a little bit of rice in as well so you know I used to be 100% raw but now I'm you know whatever 70 percent raw and your wife she eats the same way she does she's a little bit less fruit obsessed than than we are she tends to eat a little bit more cooked food but she's you know whole food plant-based low-fat loving it one of the things that I can imagine you know somebody listening to this right now might be thinking is like wow maybe I need to take a look at this but it's intimidating like because I think for the social aspect of it like oh I guess I can just never go to a friend's house again or I can never go to a restaurant like I I could see people panicking over how how they could actually make this function yeah well again when you look at the list of foods that can be eaten you actually can eat this way very well and enjoy it at just about any restaurant you really can I mean I've been 13 years now a lot of business meetings a lot of restaurants a lot of traveling you can make it work and I I also want to remind people it's not about being perfect you know you may be a little intimidated maybe so I don't want to give this up like small changes make a big difference and I can tell you like almost every success story we publish like they'll say I'm not perfect well get consistently regular posts in our Facebook group of like I have been like kind of struggling I haven't really been doing it I just got back to my doctor I couldn't believe how good my a1c was I couldn't believe how much weight I'm still losing my my blood pressure went down like all these amazing things are happening even if you don't go all the way so I want people to think like oh you have to be you know perfect and eat this amazing clean diet that we just described you don't have to do that in general but even when it comes to social situations like there there's a lot of nuanced things you can do either you can prepare a dish before you go you can learn how to communicate with them and if you're living with diabetes and your use that as sort of like a clear communication of why you're doing this a lot of people will get behind you same thing with using you know communicating with a waiter you know we have strategies for that you can sort of pull them aside and let them know hey I have these specific goals and you can add some humor in there make sort of funny like Cyrus will tell the waiter I'm trying to set the world record for insulin sensitivity can you help me out if you put a little oil in there you're gonna crush my hopes and dreams so let you know there's ways to make it fun and I really think it comes down to your desire your goals figuring out what your Y is figure out what's important and if you can communicate that to the people you love they're gonna support you and you can get through any situation mm-hmm yeah I think that's good advice and I think if you are dealing with diabetes you have a perfect thing to hang your hat on and say this is why I'm doing it as opposed to like oh this is just the freaky new thing that I stumbled across exactly the new year and making sure that you're focusing on hey this is me this is what I'm doing for my health you're not saying what you're doing is wrong or the way you eat is bad if you can really establish that level of comfort and support hey I'm just I'm just doing this for me like I'm just trying I'm just testing it out are you supposed to avoid those things that's the conversation that well I would sooo all right I got a land this plane in a few minutes but the last thing I want to talk to you about really out of just my own personal curiosity is about YouTube culture like you're you know you're not like a vlogger but like I can sit or you as as somebody who's kind of part of that ecosystem sure have like the vegan YouTube community at large and it's been fascinating to me to kind of observe at arm's length the evolution of that whole dynamic your over the last several years and for the most part I think it's been an absolute show and I'm just I'm interested in kind of your relationship to that world and your perspective on it I think it's involved like it there's a lot of really cool stuff that's happening there now exactly and I think the content that you guys are putting out like super high quality but yeah I've sort of watched you know it start out as this kind of cultish thing and then became kind of a vlogger thing and then it kind of devolved into a lot of mudslinging gossip and very unproductive yeah you know dysfunctional behavior exactly we do not participate in that and I think that everybody should know the evolution of YouTube and I think in general think this movement on a lot of levels is the focus on evidence-based information and there are channels popping up that are putting that at the center of what they're communicating versus Lykes a vegan I think is yes amazing absolutely yeah I love that base news like there's some really great channels that they're doing really solid work exactly and so I think we've graduated from that contest gestation phase taking away the emphasis on n of one examples and being oh I'm gonna listen to this blogger because that's what they said oh and then when they said it didn't work for them then I'll just listen to why they why didn't work for them it's it's it's too small of a sample size you can't make decisions based on bloggers yeah you really got to look at the evidence it could be inspiring it could be interesting but go and look at the research what about all these people making I mean we're kind of past this now but there was that whole sort of season of like why I'm no longer vegan it was very unfortunate I mean it's probably not gonna disappear unfortunately but but again it's just you got to remember to look at the research and not get lost in the details of individual stories and I think if you look at some of the nuances of a lot of those stories you realize that we don't we don't know a fraction of what's really going on in people's lives for how long are people showing they're looking amazing they're feeling amazing they're doing this they're selling programs or whatever and then behind the scenes you know we find out no that's not what was going on yeah so you just have to take it all with a grain of salt and I think there's also a huge growth in evidence-based doctors and being able to access that I think that the Instagram culture sort of like taking over you know and now instead of vlogging its Instagram story yeah and the amount of doctors who are participating in that game and giving really solid information is very encouraging for the so who-who are the go-to people in your guys's estimation Danielle doctor will be dr. B will busca wits gastroenterologist unbelievably smart yeah dr. Danielle Bilardo dr. Michele McMackin dr. Rob Oz felt Who am I missing dr. Joel kaan yeah there's dr. Michael Greger all participating in the Instagram cause it really has shifted to see doctors you know these really well-respected people making instagram stories it's kind of funny like when I saw this happen you know you're not we've been around a long a long time this Instagram thing when I was just you know the homepage was one homepage for everybody okay everybody saw the one high note remember it like if you got your picture on that homepage that was like that was the page at everybody all over the world saw the same thing absolutely and all it was was pretty food photos yeah that was it and now Instagram posts they're kind of like replacing blog posts people are posting really yeah solid educational content in an Instagram post and also illustrating it with great pictures you're sliding through you're seeing the pictures you're seeing the videos we're doing a lot of that on our Instagram account so it's been fun to see the evolution cool all right you guys thank you so much I really appreciate everything that you guys are doing your your your truly changing lives and your to be applauded for that appreciate it so thank you thank you my man I'm super excited for the book to come out it comes out on February 18th right favorite mastering diabetes here it is what it looks like Bowen camera don't pick it up wherever you purchase books and I would assume that you guys are gonna be out and about talking about this quite a bit we are you're gonna be doing our best yeah cool we'll stay in touching and come back talk to me again sometime thank you really thank you so much for everything I mean you are one of the most inspirational human beings literally on the planet thank you and I hope you know that at this point that's a very difficult thing I mean the number of people that that I love the affirmation and validation and I live for that so I will feed out on that for a while reserve the number of people I know that have told me that that your podcast has truly fundamentally changed our life is gets countless at this point so I mean for us to say we appreciate what you do would be an understatement you're a force for good and we totally appreciate it thanks you guys all right so beyond the book the best place to get in touch with you guys mastering diabetes.org it's and your Instagram accounts mastering diabetes and then- at mindful diabetic Ravi right and you yours is a mango oriented one at mango man nutrition tango malnutrition sorry you guys peace out these plants [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 218,941

Rating: 4.7735252 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, vegan podcasts, mastering diabetes, whole food plant-based diet, mastering diabetes book, cyris khambatta diabetes, robby barbaro diabetes, lchf diet for diabetes type 2, plant based diet for diabetes, carbs and diabetes, best diet for diabetes, best diet for diabetes type 2, type 2 diabetes diet, low carb high fat diet for diabetics, high carb diet for diabetes, diabetes podcast

Id: enIvfC985U8

Length: 123min 56sec (7436 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/larkasaur]

The people in this video keep saying that a low-carb diet is the standard recommendation for diabetes.

But it isn't. The standard dietary advice for people with diabetes is a lowfat omnivore diet. Look at their plate in that link - the foods on it are all low in fat.

Reasons for this:

• a lowfat diet is also low in saturated fat, and they especially recommend restricting saturated fat. They're aware that saturated fat causes insulin resistance.
• A lowfat diet tends to cause weight loss, and most diabetics need to lose weight.
• Their lowfat diet is a lot more likely to be heart-healthy than a low-carb diet, and diabetics are at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease anyway.
• Their lowfat diet has lots of fiber, which helps with glucose control.

It's not as lowfat as the Mastering Diabetes plan, but they don't recommend against a very lowfat vegan diet so far as I know. That would be hard to justify, given the research supporting a 10% fat vegan diet for diabetes.

[u/Josh_Ketzen]

Perfect video, they're curing type 2 diabetes left and right .

The standard recommendations has a snippet on <lowering> fat , but if you keep meat in the mix , you'll never get down to the natural human macro , approximately 80-10-10. carb, fats, protein distribution.

80-10-10 is so radically different from anything a person in their standard western diet framework would eat.

NO omni-PERSON simply told to eat less fat, would get anywhere near to 80-10-10. AND YET, a person with type 2, that's exactly the macro they need to go to to reverse their disease.

[u/WOULD_QUESTION_MARK]

i think i’m gonna but this book for my parents and see if they’ll try eating something like this. they’ve both been hypertensive and prediabetic for a long time :(