For me, allulose got on my radar intellectually when I saw data that suggests, that shows that allulose as a rare sugar increases GLP-1. Now, GLP-1 will sound a little familiar to the audience because that is the drug mechanism of the most famous weight loss drugs on the planet right now in the form of semaglutide and then in the form of, Wigovi is the weight loss version. or Ozempic, which was the earlier lower dose diabetes.
Yeah, the anti-diabetic version. Frankly, when it was at the lower levels, when in my PhD work in bioenergetics, it was actually at a lab that was among the first labs ever funded by Johnson & Johnson to study the effects of the incretins. So I have kept my finger on the pulse of this work for almost 20 years at the very, very beginning.
So that has left me with a pretty... strong appreciation for the drug and increasingly a wariness to be frank where at at its original lower dose um and i will mention some of those effects because i think it becomes a little relevant with aldeolos i i could look at it and give it a passing grade as as much as i am very reluctant to embrace drugs as a therapy for metabolic health indeed i am but even still i could look at it and say all right the the benefits may be worth the negative consequences because Every drug we take is a matter of balancing consequences. Are those the ones we want?
Worth the ones we don't want? So again, to answer the question succinctly, I was interested in allulose when I saw that it had a substantial effect at increasing GLP-1. Now, so what? Well, there are benefits to increasing GLP-1, one of which is to delay gastric emptying. So it helps you feel a little more full.
So if someone were to take allulose... before their biggest meal of the day, for example, it's very, very likely that they will control their appetite a little better during that meal. Or in the evening when they're at their weakest and they typically indulge more, perhaps a little allulose is going to be sufficient to take the edge off those cravings and help them just feel full a little better.
So it delays gastric emptying. It slows the rate at which the food is moving and helps you feel full longer. Another benefit of GLP-1 activation that we can see with allulose...
is that it inhibits the hormone glucagon. And as much as we've been talking about insulin, glucagon is insulin's opposite with a few different metabolic pathways or metabolic processes, most especially being blood glucose levels. Whereas insulin wants to lower blood glucose levels, glucagon wants to increase blood glucose levels.
And so if GLP-1 is increased and it's inhibiting glucagon, we can see that that's another mechanism. whereby allulose may be helping correct blood glucose. And this, I suspect, is one of the main reasons why the evidence that we see, a lot of it's anecdotal at the moment, of people with type 1 diabetes who take an allulose product like RX sugar, they will have a significantly easier time controlling their blood glucose levels even after they eat something that is starchy or sugary. And it's probably due to the inhibition of glucagon. which is chronically elevated in states of diabetes, type 1 or type 2. So these two phenomenon, the delayed gastric emptying and the reduced glucagon, I believe are mechanisms that help control blood sugar because it's controlling the amount of glucose coming into the blood, which is helping insulin be a little lower.
But also there's substantial evidence to suggest that allulose helps on the backside as well. which is the glucose clearance or removing the glucose from the blood. So not only controlling the amount coming in, but also the amount going out, namely increasing it by activating an enzyme called AMPK.
And everyone by now has heard of mTOR, and that's a topic for another time. But mTOR is this now famous protein that wants to build things up. AMPK wants to break things down, including accelerating the rate at which we're burning through glucose.
just to start increasing the catabolic side of the metabolic equation, breaking things down for the production of energy. So collectively, this really does become a pretty metabolically favorable milieu where the GLP-1 increase is delaying gastric emptying, and it is affecting glucagon levels, helping reduce the amount of glucose coming into the blood. And then the allulose is directly increasing AMPK at tissues like the muscle, which is accelerating the way that which...
the rate at which we're pulling the glucose out and burning it for energy.