Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley, Board Certified Non-Forced Doctor of Chiropractic and Practitioner of
Functional Medicine.
Last week we talked a lot about diabetes and I had a couple of questions come in about
that.
One of them was, you know, why does this happen?
Why is it so difficult to deal with this?
Why is it so difficult to get off this massive consumption of grain, starch, and sugar?
Well, sugar is an addiction.
You know, if you consume something that causes you to immediately crave more of it, that
is an addiction.
And the neurochemical pathways in your brain that cause sugar to be such an entrenched
addiction are the same pathways that underlie the addictions to things like heroin and cocaine.
It's a serious thing.
It's very difficult to break that.
There are ways to do it and we're going to talk about that in a little bit.
We're going to talk about another great case, a diabetic case, an unusual diabetic case,
a skinny man.
A lot of times diabetics are overweight.
This guy didn't look diabetic and, you know, he looked actually pretty fit and pretty healthy,
but he had severe diabetes.
He was very concerned about it.
Drove a couple of hours to get to my office because he heard I could help him and we did.
So we'll come back to that a bit later.
So why are starchy foods, grains, starch and sugar?
You notice I, instead of saying carbohydrates, everyone talks about carbs all the time.
You know, we do need carbs in your diet.
I recommend diabetics eat almost no quote unquote carbs, but even that's not true.
I recommend they eat almost no grains, starch and sugar.
What's the difference?
There's carbs.
There are carbohydrates in broccoli and spinach and tomatoes and carrots and mushrooms and
cauliflower and, you know, delicious, healthy vegetables.
Delicious if you know how to prepare them properly.
And so everyone, if they eat almost any food, nuts have carbohydrates in them.
So that's why it's more important to focus on reducing your consumption of grains, starch
and sugar.
Reduce your, you're going to get plenty of carbohydrates from eating vegetables and nuts
and seeds, just don't eat so much bread, rice, starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn.
Potatoes and corn aren't even really vegetables.
They're just starch and rice.
Don't eat things that are, that are grains, starch and sugar.
Like the worst sugars are the liquid sugars in beer, fruit juices, soda, sweet cocktails,
sweet wine, anything that's liquid and sweet spikes your blood sugar the worst.
When someone is passed out on the floor from a hypoglycemic, you know, passed out from
hypoglycemia, what's the first thing you give them?
Orange juice, right?
Because that'll immediately spike their blood sugar and bring it back up into a safe level.
Well, think about that.
Do you think you should be drinking orange juice every morning if it's really that good?
It's spiking your blood sugar?
You don't want to ever spike your blood sugar unless you have hypoglycemia.
So no, orange juice is not good for you.
No fruit juice is good for you.
If you want to get the nutrients, the antioxidants and the wonderful vitamins that are in fruit,
eat the fruit.
If you eat fruit, then the time it takes to chew the food and swallow it and break the
starch down in the, or the fiber down in the fruit slows the absorption of the sugar in
it.
And there are some fruits that are so sweet that I even recommend most people don't eat
those.
You know, the most people's favorite fruits are the sweetest ones.
The worst fruits, especially if you're pre-diabetic, are grapes, oranges, melons, anything that's
super sweet.
You know, those are going to spike your blood sugar.
So the good fruits that are worth the sugar that are in them because they're packed with
antioxidants and other nutrients are berries.
So blueberries, raspberries, boysenberries, blackberries, even strawberries, especially
small wild strawberries instead of the big, huge, juicy ones that everyone likes.
Everyone likes the sweetest possible fruit.
So eat fruit that's less sweet, that's packed with nutrients like blueberries and raspberries
if you're going to have fruit.
I kind of got off on a little tangent there.
Why is it that these things are so addictive?
Well, let's look at the history of our digestive systems.
The primary cause of death for our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago was starvation.
Hunter gatherers had to spend most of their time just finding food and they would have
to survive long periods of famine.
So we evolved the ability to store carbs, store carbohydrates as fat to survive periods
of famine.
And it takes a long time.
Now we live in an environment where we're surrounded by food.
No one's very well.
Most people in the Western world at least are not going to starve for lack of food,
but we haven't had enough time on the time scale that it takes for our genes to change
and our physiology to change to overcome this predisposition to store carbs as fat to survive
famine.
We're still doing that.
Our basic metabolism has been around for about 2 million years.
And for the first 1.9 million years, there were no pancakes, no bagels, no bread, no
pasta, no orange juice, no Cheerios.
Dinner for most of our physiological existence has been mainly meat, fish, veggies, fruit
and dairy.
So about 10,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution created cheap calories on a massive
scale for the first time we could, we could grow wheat and potatoes and corn and rice
and other starches that would store for months or even years.
And that allowed people to not have to spend all their time searching for food and instead
settle down in cities and create musical instruments and write symphonies.
And you know, whole cultures sprung up and a lot of what we credit now with civilization
as a result of that ability to grow starch, store it and have it available for anyone
to eat.
The problem with that is the very first grain based diets also fueled the development of
modern disease.
Thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians ate mostly stone ground whole wheat bread,
fruit and vegetables, occasional meat, olive, safflower, flax seed and sesame oils.
Well, when they did studies on these mummies and compared them, thousands of mummies were
compared to the remains of hunter gatherer societies that preceded them.
The Egyptians had a shorter lifespan, more heart disease and clogged arteries and more
prevalent obesity, particular abdominal obesity, the worst kind.
So insulin is a fat storage hormone.
It's stimulated by consuming excess carbohydrates and aggressively promotes the accumulation
of body fat.
Insulin simultaneously tells your body to not release any stored fat for energy and
it convinces you that you need more starch to store as more fat.
It makes you hungry.
Excess insulin from eating too many grain, starch and sugar causes an insulin hit.
Your insulin use your body over time.
Your body puts out too much insulin, which causes your blood sugar to go too low.
That's when you get the crash in the mid morning and think you need a sugary snack or more
coffee or in the middle of the afternoon.
After eating too much starch and sugar, it depresses your blood sugar, which causes you
to feel ravenous.
It causes you to feel hungry and moody and shaky and ready to crash all the time, which
creates intense cravings for more sugar, more carbs.
So carb addiction tricks us into thinking that we need lots of this stuff.
And I'm going to come back to this.
It also feeds bad bacteria in your gut, which also helps feed that addiction.
We'll come back to that.
So grain, starches and sugar also disrupt the hormonal system your brain uses to manage
your appetite.
Fat cells produce a hormone called leptin that tells your brain to release fat.
Bad carbs make your brain resistant to leptin, just like all your cells become resistant
to insulin over time.
So your brain thinks you're starving.
This also creates and contributes to carb addiction.
So if you're experiencing cravings, cutting back a little bit won't break the addiction.
Eating a little less bad carbs is a lot like doing a little less heroin.
It's not going to change anything.
The only way to restore proper function to your appetite hormones is to temporarily,
not forever, temporarily eliminate grains, starches and sugar from your diet to force
your body to burn fat for energy again.
Most people have heard of keto diets.
This is a big part of that.
Eating lots of vegetables during this process so that you feel full after each meal also
helps reset your hormones.
So don't do this at home.
Don't do this on your own.
Don't just suddenly stop eating grain, starches and sugar altogether unless you get tested
and you know how your kidneys are functioning.
Everyone's situation is different.
So I don't recommend doing this unless you get tested first.
But one of the ways, the main way that I have helped people reverse and eliminate diabetes
completely is by for about three to four months, usually four months, completely eliminating
grains, starch and sugar to break the cravings.
I'm Dr. Todd Benkley discussing with you safe, effective, natural solutions to almost any
health challenge.
We're focusing again a little bit today on diabetes and then we're going to talk about
the microbiome.
But before we finish on diabetes, know your risk factors.
So the greatest risk factors in America and the Western world for diabetes is just being
over age 45.
Almost everybody over age 45, especially over 50 is at high risk that eats the standard
American diet.
Over weight, if you have a family history of diabetes or cardiovascular disease, if
you have high blood pressure, if you've been tested and know that you have high triglycerides,
your body converts all that starch and sugar into triglycerides in your bloodstream, which
wreaks havoc throughout your bloodstream, increasing inflammation and aggravating every
chronic inflammatory disease.
High triglycerides then get stored as adipose tissue.
So that's the process of consuming sugar that you're not going to eat, becomes triglycerides
floating around your bloodstream, wreaking havoc, and then gets turned into fat cells.
So men with a waist size of 40 inches or more are 12 times more likely to develop type 2
diabetes.
So the risk is tripled for 36 to 38 inch wastes and five times greater for 38 to 40 inch wastes
as compared to a waist of 34 inches or smaller.
Well I feel just fine you might say, even if you are over 45 or 50 or have some of the
risk factors I just mentioned.
Well so insulin resistance and pre-diabetes usually have no symptoms.
You can have insulin resistance and pre-diabetes.
Millions of people have pre-diabetes and don't know it.
You can have one or both for several years without noticing anything.
So listen to last week's episode of my show where I talk about the importance of doing
fasting insulin testing.
Most doctors don't do this.
If you test your fasting insulin levels and see if they'll start to go up long before
your blood sugar will go up, long before your A1C will go up.
Get that tested and make sure it is in a healthy range and contact me for more information
about this.
So we're going to talk about the microbiome now and it's a great segue because sugar
wreaks havoc on your microbiome.
The bad bacteria in your gut love sugar.
When you eat grain starch and sugar it feeds the bad bacteria and gives them the upper
hand to overwhelm the good bacteria that make everything work.
You know we have roughly 10 times as many bacteria in our intestines as we have cells
in our body and we depend on them for our survival.
We depend on healthy bacteria to break down and absorb nutrients.
We depend on healthy bacteria to break down and eliminate toxins that we're constantly
exposed to.
We depend on them to combat inflammation.
We depend on healthy bacteria in the gut to regulate our moods.
The gut brain connection has to do with this profound interplay between the benefits of
healthy bacteria in your gut mediated through the hardwired connection between your gut
and the brain as the vagus nerve that goes from the base of your brain all the way down
to your intestines.
This system is profound and there's more research coming out on it all the time disruptions
in your microbiome.
Add too many bad bacteria and not enough good bacteria cause and dramatically increase your
risk of anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's and all forms of dementia, Parkinson's disease,
obsessive compulsive disorder.
If you listen to one of my previous podcasts I talk about where I attended a four day integrative
medicine for mental health conference and it was every single presenter mentioned something
about the damaging effects of sugar on the microbiome and the increased risks of almost
every psychiatric disorder by consuming too much grains, starch and especially sugar.
So how do you know if your microbiome has a problem?
Well if it's bad, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating, these things are not normal.
If they happen once a year because you ate something unusual, okay, but if it's happening
every month, every week, several times a week, there's a classic sign of a disrupted microbiome.
The gas and the bloating and the nausea and pain in your gut are produced by the metabolic
waste of bad bacteria.
Basically their P is toxins that cause, comprised of toxins that cause nausea and they also
produce the gas that give you gas.
Flagellants and belching is gas produced by bad bacteria.
If it's in your lower intestine it's going to come out the lower end.
If it's in the upper intestine or especially in your stomach it's going to cause belching.
So how do you repair this?
Well there's a number of things you could do.
Number one, eat better food.
Don't eat a lot of grains, starch and sugar, obviously.
But also it helps to eat vegetables.
Fiber, and the best place you can get fiber is from vegetables like spinach and broccoli
and cauliflower and carrots and mushrooms and leafy greens.
So Joe, eat a salad.
And what if you're still hungry?
Some people say, oh a salad never fills me up.
Well the best way to fill yourself up with vegetables and the way I do it is think of
it like this.
Make a salad for four people in a big bowl and then eat it.
Eat the whole thing yourself, that will fill you up.
A lot of people hate salads or just don't ever make time, don't eat enough of them
because they don't know how to make a good salad.
The worst way to make a salad is the way most people make salads, by going to a salad bar
or just chopping up a bunch of iceberg lettuce or chop up a bunch of vegetables and throw
them in a bowl and toss them and then pour some goop on top like ranch dressing or Italian
dressing or some other kind of dressing.
No, don't do that.
The best way to make a delicious salad is to first put your greens in your bowl, especially
some good greens like spinach and mixed Asian greens and butter lettuce or kale if you know
how to prepare it properly.
Kale is tail, tastes terrible if you don't know how to make it properly.
I'll come back to that at some point.
But take whatever greens that you're going to use as the base of your salad, put them
in a huge bowl and drizzle some good olive oil, not the cheap stuff from the supermarket
but good olive oil from farmers market or a local supplier that makes fresh olive oil
right here in California.
But drizzle it with good olive oil and either some lemon or balsamic vinegar and then toss
your greens in the oil and vinegar so that they're evenly coated with oil and vinegar
and maybe just a little bit of salt and pepper and then put all the rest of the stuff on
top and don't toss it.
Put all the, you know, some nuts, some tomatoes, some olives, maybe some little chunks of cheese,
some chicken, some turkey, some smoked salmon, some leftover sauteed mushrooms, some leftover
sauteed vegetables, whatever you like, just put that on top and don't toss it because
then it's just going to end up on the bottom.
Put that on top and maybe drizzle a little bit more oil and squeeze a little bit more
lemon or a little bit of balsamic vinegar, a little bit of salt and pepper and then you'll
have a delicious salad.
Or cook your vegetables, get more fiber by cooking vegetables and most people don't know
how to really cook vegetables that much either.
How do you tell?
If you're eating lots of them, then you probably know how to cook them well.
If you're not, then you probably don't.
And my favorite way to find out great new ways for, to make vegetables delicious is
to Google vegetarian recipes.
Vegetarians have come up with amazing ways to make vegetables delicious.
So then do that and then make that vegetarian recipe even more delicious by adding a little
chicken to it or a little fish, a little prosciutto, a little ham, little tiny little bit of bacon.
That's my favorite way to make vegetarian dishes delicious with apologies to the vegetarians.
So we eat a big salad for lunch every day.
That's a great way to prevent inflammation and dysbiosis, bad bacteria in your gut taking
over the good bacteria.
But what if you're already, you know, what if it's already too late?
You've got gas bloating, nausea, cramping, you know, you've got indigestion, something's
going on in your stomach.
It's not good.
You know, you probably need to kill off the bad bacteria.
So number one, stop feeding them with sugar, but you can also kill them directly with natural
things like garlic and onions, rosemary oil, oregano oil, wormwood, berberine, monolaurin.
This is one of my favorite things to give lots of people, almost anybody with even a
slight gut condition.
It's a great monolaurin is in human breast milk and it helps set up your immune system
when you're born and then you basically never get it again.
But monolaurin, this is an essential fatty acid.
It's a very stable nutrient.
Most people have never heard of it.
It's in a product called loracetam.
So loracetam monolaurin is made from coconuts.
Now the first thing people think, oh, I'll drink coconut water.
I'll eat some coconut.
I'll do coconut oil.
There is no consumable coconut food or drink that has any significant amount of monolaurin
in it.
You can't get any significant amount of it from eating or drinking any of those foods
made from coconuts.
You can get it by taking the supplement loracetam, which is an amazing product.
It's not expensive.
I have a jar of it, costs about $37 with tax and lasts for months.
And it's a natural antibacterial, antiviral, antiparasital and antifungal nutrient that
helps your body kill off all of these things.
Without any side effects, you can give it to newborn infants.
And then of course, the best way to kill off bad bacteria is to support the good bacteria.
So you can support good bacteria with prebiotics and a lot of people get confused about prebiotics
and probiotics.
What's the difference?
Well, probiotics are the good bacteria that we've been talking about.
Prebiotics are food for probiotics.
They're food that support good bacteria.
So prebiotics are things like the fiber we already talked about, but also inulin, which
you can supplement or get from foods like garlic, onions, leeks and asparagus.
You can also supplement digestible fibers like oligosaccharides.
And then there's a whole host and some really excellent products to help support the good
bacteria that are all basically based on combinations of antioxidants.
So the master antioxidant is glutathione.
And there are a couple of ways to supplement glutathione.
I don't recommend buying most glutathione supplements because most of them don't work.
You basically need your body to get better at making glutathione on its own.
Glutathione is made from three amino acids.
The first two are abundant in your diet.
The third one, cysteine is not available.
Cysteine is the missing link that your body usually lacks sufficient amounts to make its
own glutathione.
And you can supplement that.
A lot of people supplement with an acetylcysteine.
There's a really excellent product called Immunocal, which is a special processed form
of gently, no heat, no agitation processed form of whey protein that is an excellent
cysteine donor.
And I've actually done blood tests before and after a case study to show how this particular
product dramatically increases glutathione levels.
Other antioxidants, there are combination products that you can get with powdered form,
you know, easy to take to get some antioxidants in blueberries, pomegranate, cranberries,
kursitin, broccoli, red grape, all in one product.
There's another one that I like from a company called Designs.
That is that's a one from a product called Phytobiome from Designs for Health.
I also often use a similar product from orthomolecular products called Phytopre, which is pomegranate
and citrus bioflavonoids.
So you can also always add more good bacteria by eating fermented foods like yogurt, sauerkraut,
kimchi, kefir, kombucha, and then if necessary, supplement with a good probiotic.
So probiotics are good bacteria in a capsule or a powder.
And I always stress a good probiotic.
Don't buy cheap probiotics from Costco or Trader Joe's or your local pharmacy.
They don't work.
The most expensive supplement and biggest waste of money you'll ever waste money on
is buying a supplement that does nothing.
So good probiotics, when you need them, do wonders and cheap probiotics usually do nothing.
Then the last thing you can do is combat the inflammation that occurs when you have too
many bad bacteria and not enough good bacteria.
So you can clear out the inflammatory debris from a chronically inflamed gut and stop the
processes that result in your gut being inflamed with things like zinc carnosine and various
herbs like turmeric, Chinese skull cap, ginger, green tea, and also again, there's so many
benefits from eating garlic and onions.
Just eat, I eat a head or sometimes two heads of garlic every week.
And you know, the best onions, my favorite kinds of onions are green onions, scallions,
chives, or shallots.
My favorite onions are shallots because they're small.
You cut up one shallot, it's about the size of a golf ball.
You know, you buy these huge sweet onions, they have much less of these beneficial properties
in them than shallots.
Shallots are delicious and you know, you don't waste anything.
You cut up one shallot, that's about the amount that you need for one meal.
Looks like we're out of time.
Remember to do something to be healthier this week than you were last week.
Check out past episodes of this show on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
I look forward to speaking with you right here next Friday at 4 p.m.
Have a fantastic weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on
98.3 The Word, KDAR.