on this episode of the Dr Tina show I'm going to be talking about a very controversial topic as of late all over social media all over mainstream media and that is all about wovi OIC majoro also known as tamac glutide or tepati these are all glp1 agonists and they are being used for type two diabetes and weight loss and we are going to dig into it because I have been knee in the research and I honestly think these drugs are absolute Miracle drugs so let's jump in first of all these drugs are getting a really bad rap you guys I don't know why I don't know what's going on I have my theories I'll tell them to you later but here's the deal I recently pulled my audience and asked them hey what questions do you have about these drugs and the results were astounding there were a lot of great smart comments and questions but oh my God the ignorance around these drugs and the assumptions and the propagandized rhetoric that I was hearing over and over again was shocking to me and I thought oh my goodness people have no idea how these drugs work they have no idea how great they could be for the right person I think they're life-saving drugs I think they're amazing when done appropriately and yet they're being so vill ified and what's even more shocking is that the functional medicine Community is [ __ ] all over them as well which I thought of of all people that group would get behind this because they're not drugs they're peptides they're just strings of amino acids put together and they are peptides peptides are kind of hormonal like substances and they're big in the bodybuilding community and the biohacking community peptides have been around for a long time time peptides were getting really big in the regenerative medicine space when I left practice so I didn't pay as much attention to them as I should have because I was on my way out but I have been kneee in the research you guys I have literally bought every continuing education course I could get my hands on every certificate course every book I have been digging into all the peptides and we're not going to talk about all of them today but we are going to talk about stide and tepati so wovi and OIC are seac tide and murro is eptide tepati is sort of like the second generation of the seacu tide there has been such a propagandized push to vilify these peptides and scare people away from them and I truly do not understand it I will explain to you why I think it's being done completely wrong in the alpath community because the way they're prescribing it is not ideal and it's not conducive to longevity but used correctly I do think these drugs are Miracle drugs and here's why I say this there is long-term data and there have been studies going on for years plus like I said in the biohacking and bodybuilding Community they've been using them for a long time with great safety ratings in all of these studies that have been done most recently in the past few years what they keep seeing is shocking these folks are losing not only losing tremendous amounts of weight which is what is reversing their diabetes that's the thing you guys these are not like insulin dependent diabetics who need insulin and will die without their semaglutide that's not how this works these are simply weight reduction drugs and the actual side effect of the weight reduction is a reversal of the diabetes we'll get into more of that in a moment because fat cells in of of themselves are driving the whole process in my opinion but these folks are also having tremendous impact in a positive way on their cardiovascular health on their Kidney Health on their Liver Health on their pancreatic Health um brain health depression reversed anti-inflammatory impacts impacts on rheumatoid arthritis positive like really effective impacts on some of these debilitating horrific Downstream effects that come when your metabolism is all screwed up you guys know I beat the drum on getting your metabolic Health in order but some folks are so far gone that no matter if they do every single thing right that I preach they still are going to have a really difficult time time getting it all tied together my question is this why are we using these very safe drugs and yes there are some side effects we'll cover but why are we using these otherwise very safe drugs as a last ditch effort to bring back the type two diabetic from the brink to bring back the morbidly obese person from the brink why are we waiting until people are so far gone and you know I've said this before if you get diagnosed with type two diabetes the chances are better than not that you have been rocking a busted metabolism for 10 to 15 maybe 20 years so all the damage that that causes has been going on in a low-grade fashion as you slowly acquired more weight around your midsection as you slowly acquired high blood pressure as you slowly acquired cardiovascular disease and they have drugs for all of these right I've said it before type two diabetes is incredibly profitable it's an incredibly profitable process for big Pharma because there's all these drugs to treat the side effects of a busted metabolic process and so by the time someone gets diagnosed with type two diabetes they have been so metabolically deranged that so much damage has been done already and they didn't even know it it was silently creeping up it was first it was the maybe the high blood pressure and then it was the Statin and then it was the metformin and then it was you know drug upon drug upon drug to try to lower the blood sugars that's really the going strategy has been let's lower the blood sugars with metformin and will reverse the diabetes but that doesn't work so well now I have a whole other theory about metformin I am not against metformin I think metformin's awesome for a variety of reasons but that's something we're going to talk about today the bottom line is when these folks obesity is reversed when their fat cells are shrunk down and they lose the weight all of these other comorbidities are going away so that tells me what I've been preaching all along is right the root cause the true root cause of so many of these disease processes these lifestyle induced chronic disease processes the insulin resistance that comes with it heart disease that comes with it the diabetes that it eventually comes down to is being driven by at the root cause level by the fat cell the filling up of the adipocytes is driving these processes that's not to say say that thin people don't get metabolically busted because they do but the problem in that group and we call them the skinny fat or the tofi a thin on the outside fat on the inside that group is actually just bone and fat there's no muscle right I've talked at length about the importance of muscle in the obese group we've got the fat cells are full and when fat cells fill up they become pro-inflammatory they your immune system rushes in the immune system inside the fat cell becomes deranged it's a whole process we won't get into right now but when you reverse that process all the other comorbidities improve so that really kind of blows the health at every size hypothesis out of the water and I mean no disrespect by any of this it's just at the end of the day we've got these chronic degenerative illnesses that are being driven by busted metabolic Health insulin resistance you know metabolic syndrome pre-diabetes into diabetes Frank diabetes I'm talking type two here for the sake of this entire podcast I'm talking about type two here unless I specifically say otherwise uh it's the fat cell and the fat cell drives the process so in a nutshell in your brain when you are dealing and struggling with obesity there's sort of a feed forward mechanism and the fat cells themselves be they become deranged they start signaling improperly the brain itself stops hearing the signal correctly the letin and gin the adipokines that are being secreted all of that messes up things very badly with your metabolism it it further deranges your metabolism so it's harder to get back and come back from and it has a feed forward mechanism in the brain which induces Downstream inflammation as well so you've got local inflammation in the flat fat cell you've got uh Downstream inflammation coming from the brain itself and the whole thing turns into a hot mess so if we have a drug that has pretty minor side effects it's a peptide again it's a peptide you guys if we have a peptide that has pretty minor side effects why aren't we giving it to everybody who's struggling with even the lowest amount of metabolic derangement like why isn't this first line because I have found paper after paper after paper showing glp1 Agonist significantly reducing visceral fat gp1 Agonist significantly improving cardiovascular health literally regrowing heart tissue growing neurons in the brain I don't know of anything else that does that there's very few drugs that we have or Therapeutics that we have that regenerates neurons in the brain it reduces inflammation in the brain that's a huge huge piece of this whole puzzle is neuroinflammation I did a podcast some time back uh with a dietitian and we talked about Central sensitization as a pain you know it's a pain process and neuroinflammation and the downstream effects of that so you can go back and listen to that we'll link it up in the show notes it's just wild to me and the list goes on I mean I've got a whole list sitting in front of me that Improvement after Improvement after Improvement after Improvement and my theory is this these things are I know you've heard some terrible horror stories we'll talk about that but these peptides are so darn safe and well tolerated for the most part and they would literally eradicate the need for all of these other medications that big Pharma depends on so that's my theory my conspiracy theory here is that these there is like an inside propaganda machine coming from other pharmaceutical companies against the manufacturer because all of these drugs are owned by the same company and so for the most part and so the companies that own lipor the number one selling drug in America the companies that own the high blood pressure medications the companies that own all of these other fancy expensive complicated blood pressure medications cardiovascular medications all of the things that busted metabolic Health causes Downstream these pharmaceutical manufacturers probably don't want everybody on a glp1 Agonist because if 96% well I'm sorry 94% as of 2018 94% of us adults were metabolically busted I would say it's more like 96 to 98 now because that was old data if that many folks are headed down the pathway we've big Pharma who man ufacturers these other drugs are sitting on a gold mine right diabetes is very profitable for them we know when folks get an elevated waist circumference for women it's 35 inches for men it's 40 inches we know those are the red flag zones those are not just the oh I'm up to there it's okay like that's when you should be like sounding the siren we know when those that waist circumference gets hit another way to look at this is the waist to height ratio so your waist should be half of your height I don't care how you measure your height centimeters meters inches doesn't matter your Weist should be less than half of that so whichever one you want to go on that's the red flag for significant increased risk for type two diabetes down the line we have the data on this if that's the case and most Americans are sitting in that boat including children the rates of diabetes doubled in 2020 type two diabetes doubled in 2020 due due to lockdown so if we've got this huge group of people sitting in this massive risk factor Zone and they're all headed down the same path which is diabetes type two diabetes why would we hold out on something that could reverse the process for them do we wait until somebody has a heart attack before we give them high blood pressure medications do we wait until somebody has a stroke or a heart attack before we offer them statin drugs no those are pushed early they're pushed prematurely in many cases do we wait until somebody goes into full liver ceros from fatty liver before we offer them you know a drug we don't have any drugs for that really but you get my drift why are we then therefore vilifying folks who want to take this for weight loss when they are clearly headed down that path that's what gets me that's why I'm so confused that the entire functional medicine Community is against this and the entire mainstream media seems to be against these peptides being used now the shortages you're hearing about everybody's freaking out about the shortages I've done some research the only shortages I can find are not on the actual substrate they're not on the pep side it's on the pen the injector pens there's these little injector pens that are preset at different dosages and it's the initial dosage pens that they're running short on stock of so it's not the seacu tide that is we're having a shortage of and the other interesting point is that you can have these compounded because the other argument I hear is oh they're so expensive yes trapti compounded is a bit cost prohibitive cacti is pretty darn cheap like really cheap in my opinion for what you're getting and what it's replacing because I have folks that I know that are on it who have completely reversed their depression yes it works as an effective anti-depressant in the data we have the data on it I know folks who've reversed their IBS uh I know folks who are having significant improvements in their PCOS I know folks who have seen drastic improvements in their cognition and in their cardiovascular health so what I'm saying to you is I think we have a peptide on our hands that's actually readily available by compounding pharmacies at a re relatively affordable price that could change the face of medicine and yet were vilifying it so what are some of the reasons people are vilifying it well there's this whole thing that came out with gastroparesis which is paralyzation of the stomach I do know somebody who started on a very low dose of it and experienced that so that is real that risk is real some of these other stories I've talked to different doctors who've been prescribing this for a long long time they all think that the fear around it is ridiculous as well because they've got lots of patients on it doing very very well reversing all kinds of chronic degenerative disease processes and I mean the numbers of people they've seen with gastro pris are low to none so I don't think it's that common we don't have good data to look at on how common it is yet but it's not that common the fact that it's bringing up pretty much a blackbox warning for people and people are freaking out about it is surprising to me because it's really not the hugest thing now the folks that we're hearing about in the media those folks had been on high doses for a long long time and I'm going to talk to you a minute about dosing it I don't think it's being done right I think the alpath community has this wrong but at least they're trying right so I'm not sure the gastro prus is the biggest thing to be concerned about with somac glutide the side effects of nausea vomiting and diarrhea tend to be much more significant than with tepati tep ties like second generation it is the more expensive one you can have it compounded too it is a little bit price prohibitive for folks but it's available and it seems as if for most folks those side effects go away as they move along their experience as they increase their dose now some of them just can't tolerate the semac tide they'll get to a certain dose they really start to see Improvement in their weight loss journey and in their diabetes markers and just can't tolerate the side effects of the nausea vomiting and diarrhea so that's it's a thing it is real right it's something to be concerned about but I'm not hearing about that nearly as much with tepati I tried to prescribe tepati to a few folks and it has been like pulling teeth getting the insurance companies to pay for it it's crazy I'll talk about that later more in depth but I'm shocked at how hard it is for folks to get their hands on this stuff when they're trying to go through their insurance because the brand version that you get from the regular pharmacy is really expensive and so that is very cost prohibitive but the compounded versions are not so much so the other side effects that we're hearing about are uh rebound weight right people go off of it and then they gain all the weight back well here's the thing let's just put this in perspective these drugs I'll tell you the mechanism of action these drugs do a couple things one they work centrally in the brain to decrease appetite so they work on your gin and your leptin and they decrease appetite so you're less hungry in the biohacking community they're using that for intermittent fasting and for body composition so there's that there is some insulin secretion you would think oh my gosh if insulin resistance is the problem then having more insulin on the scene is a bigger problem but especially when it comes to tepati there is an insulin Sensi sensitization that happens so the body and the cells become resensitized to insulin which is freaking phenomenal if you ask me like that's the miracle drug part so we've got this insulin secretion thing happening but even with the stide groups they're still showing marked improvement in their diabetes so it's we don't have it all figured out with if it's elevating insulin just a bit why therefore would we have Improvement in insulin resistance but we are seeing that it it does all kinds of great things when it comes to your overall metabolism and the way glucose is handled in your body body again it decreases appetite it decreases inflammation in the brain I think a lot of what's driving a lot of this the busted metabolic health and the comorbidity of obesity it's like chicken and egg which comes first right but I think a lot of that's coming from a central situation from a brain so if we can decrease inflammation in the brain we can do a lot of good for people I also think that would significantly decrease people's pain I do believe that some folks hurt more the heavier they get and it's not just a weight on the joints issue it's not just an actual mechanical issue on the joints there's something about fat cells secreting their Cy they secrete cyto kindes when we add when we fill up our fat cells our deposites we are creating a more cyto prone environment for sure and so I think that that can be a feed forward mechanism that's driving a lot of people's joint pain muscular skeletal pain depression of course there's a lot to talk about and unpack when it comes to neuroinflammation but trust me on this one I understand that field very well and if we can decrease neuroinflammation we're talking Holy Grail type of treatment here there's very few things that do that so we've got all these different mechanisms of action and the side effects themselves are not as significant and as horrific as we're being led to believe there's also a don't mind my lighting my peppy is playing with the curtains and he's but he's being quiet at least so there's also the concern of course about cancer you're hearing concerns about cancer well if you go to the W GOI website it actually gives you the popup and it tells you about the cancer this was a specific type of thyroid cancer found in rats not found in humans found in rats so that's as far as they got with proving that one not to say it's not a real risk if you've had thyroid cancer you should of course in in every case I'm not your doctor the full disclaimer I am simply providing all this information for education purposes and so I'm not going to talk specifics of dosing I'm not going to talk specifics of how to use it but I am just trying to educate you on how it works and some of the data that I found so with the cancer if of course if somebody has had thyroid cancer be concerned and talk to your doctor but what I'm finding is a lot of doctors don't understand these drugs again because I don't think this is being done right and I'll talk about that in a moment the other big concern is pancreatic issues so let's talk about that a minute when you lose a significant amount of weight really fast you definitely can put a load on your pancreas and confuse things you can put a huge load on your gallbladder you can put a huge load on your pancreas your gallbladder your pancreas your intestines your stomach they're all kind of like BFFs liver is in there so when something goes wrong with especially gallbladder pancreas liver when something goes wrong with one something usually goes wrong with all of them to some degree and so I've had patients with gallbladder stones who started having you know mild acute pancreatitis I've seen liver enzymes Elevate along with the gallbladder issues you know and so forth so I think of that as a Triad when we start having excessively fast weight loss especially when somebody is just a complete hot mess of Health they've never exercised they are completely metabolically devastated they're extremely overweight and they're losing excessive amounts of weight on a very high dose of one of these peptides I could see how the pancreas could become a problem so that to me made perfect sense I'm like well that just that patient wasn't managed right the other thing to consider is diabetics when you get into severe type 2 diabetes you are looking at potential risk for gastroparesis and some of these other issues like these are not uncommon side effects of severe diabetes and so we're talking apples to oranges here there's two different groups of people that could really benefit from these drugs and I'll talk about both of them uh here in a few so those are the big concerns there were some kidney issues I think those people had had induced severe nausea and vomiting and so there was some damage to the kidneys but it's crazy how these very few and far between cases are being blown way out of proportion that's the part that's got me completely baffled I'm like wait a minute why are we blowing these completely out of proportion when we've got another therapeutic intervention going around in the world with really strong data and study after study showing some severe complications but can't talk about that right so but we can you you know poo poo all over this one because some rats got thyroid cancer and a few people got gastroparesis like do you see what I'm getting at here I'm really confused why all the hate on this and I again I do think it's coming potentially from other pharmaceutical companies that's again totally my guess I'm just pulling that out of my head but I I just can't figure out after reading about these drugs I mean I have literally sat down every single day for the past few months and when I think of a condition I put in gp1 Agonist and that condition plus the word scholar because that'll pull up the scholarly articles the scientific data and boom there's a study on it almost 100% they have tested glp1 agonists against all of these different conditions and in every single case there was Improvement so I'm not saying it's the Panacea for all conditions of course but I'm really interested in it for neuroinflammation and pain and depression and cognition improvements in cognition right so I think that there's something that happens in the menopausal state with the shift in hor it's not just the shift in hormones because yes that's very acute and it's significant when we start to lose our estrogen and we start to have our testosterone dip and of course usually there's been some low progesterone going on for some time but uh oh he got a squeaky toy if you hear squeaking it's puppy but he's being a good boy so I'm really interested in its impact on neuroinflammation cognition and downstream pain like that's really where my interest queued when I put that into the Google and I saw the studies that came up I was like wait wait what why is nobody talking about this so yes we've got these secondary improvements in cardiovascular disease Etc but that are happening in the studies of the diabetics the these are the step trials they're called there there's a series of studies called the step studies the step trials and they just completed one on heart failure get this you guys heart failure they looked at non-diabetics they put them on glp1 agonists that had heart failure and there was Improvement there was Improvement in the diabetics there was Improvement in the non-diabetics I mean name me a drug that can do that it's reversing heart failure this is phenomenal to me this is just absolutely phenomenal to me and the fact that it's being so so vilified that anytime I see a large group of people go against something I'm like what is up like who is feeding them this and so that's why I've been really confused at the functional medicine Community but to their defense let's get into that these folks are being generally put on high doses or low doses titrated up to high doses not every doctor is doing this there's a lot of astute doctors out there doing this right there's a lot of weight loss doctors who've been using this for a long time on a lot of patients very safely and they never get into these higher doses but the standard if you look these up and you look up dosing is to get up to with Som acuti it to go from 0.25 milligrams up to 2.5 milligrams so we've got people way up there in the 2.5 milligrams they're left on it forever they're not told to strength train they're not told to change their diet they're not told they're not taught how to eat they're not taught anything they just experience significant weight loss with Fast and Furious weight loss causes comes a lot of problems uh one of them being muscle loss so you guys have all heard about the muscle loss concern right and I know Dr petera was all over it and after he put out whatever he put out everybody was like well Dr AA said you guys anybody who knows any I've helped a lot of patients lose weight a lot of patients lose weight and we've used HCG we've used all kinds of different things we've used a lot of mostly natural but when somebody loses weight aggressively and quickly they tend to lose about 25 to 30% of their lean muscle mass guess what the percentage is on somac 25 to 30% so it's the same it is the side effect of a severely calorically reduced diet that's it it's not the semac glutide it's not driving muscle loss actually there are mechanisms in these glp1 Agonist that drive muscle protein synthesis so you're being lied to about that and everybody's jumping all over it and it's cracking me up because I'm like do any of you know anything about weight loss because if you look at any weight loss studies it the standard is to lose 25 to 30 % of your muscle mass if you're not actively pursuing strength training so these folks should all be on a strength training regimen they should all be on a high protein diet right macros on protein should be hit every day strength training three times a week at least the the bare minimum that's how these patients should be being managed but we of course know that's not how they're being managed they're just being given the drug they're losing the weight they're like look how skinny I am well what happens with that is they lose sometimes more muscle mass than they do to Fat so their body weight goes down significantly but you know it's about 5050 at that point for several of them and now when they regain the fat back because they went off the peptide and they don't have any lifestyle improvements in place they don't have any lifestyle you know strategies they don't have any insulin resistant you know none of it's been talked about none of it's understood they're not living a metabolically sound life not living a life conducive to good metabolic health and then they go off the peptide and they gain the weight back well now they're under muscled they've lost a ton of muscle and they gain back all this weight and most of it's fat so now they're fatter than they started when it comes to body composition percentages right their percentage if they started as 50% fat and 50% muscle and then you know bones soft tissue and then they took the peptide and they whittel away and they did nothing this is the same with any caloric restriction diet I've seen this with keto I've seen this so many times with keto actually you guys I've seen people go on Extreme keto diets and come into my office and they just look like a bag of bones they just look like a saggy sad skinny person and they're frail and they never strength train during the whole keto process right they just had Extreme Weight Loss with keto so this goes for any Extreme Weight Loss where strength training is not emphasized and muscle synthesis is not being emphasized so at least the keto folks were eating a high protein diet so they had something going for them but you get my drift all this hype all this vilification is just because it's not being done right it's not the glp1 agonis so we got to get that out of our heads the mechanisms with how it induces muscle protein synthesis is not entirely understood or at least I didn't understand it entirely and I'm still looking into that but it's there I've read it I've seen it we are being misled on that one so let that go if you're not strength training and you're losing weight you're doing it wrong that's that's why I tell you guys strength training is non-negotiable absolutely non-negotiable right 100% non-negotiable if you're not lifting weights three times a week you're not doing it right that's just for maintenance that's just for longevity that's just for aging well that's just for having a good metabolic Health right we have to be strength training regularly we have to be building muscle I've told you again and again my stance on protein I prefer animal protein I actually prefer red meat I think it's very nutritiously dense it's very easy to hit your Macros with red meat so I'm a big fan you'll get a very comprehensive profile of nutrients and minerals when you eat red meat so hitting your Macros is key you can add in eggs you can add in Greek yogurt you can add in what I don't care I don't care what people want to eat that's fine whatever protein they choose whether it's chicken or turkey if you want to try to do it from a vegetarian or vegan standpoint have at it good luck that's going to be harder but hey if you can induce muscle protein synthesis with a protein heavy diet and or protein forward diet right at least 30 milligrams a meal is the minimum in my opinion more for men more if you're strength training a lot right and then making sure that you are strength training I don't see why anybody would be losing significant muscle mass and in fact I talked to my strength and conditioning coach who I've worked with for years and he has three clients who are on it all three very different so one is a woman in her 70s and she was significantly overweight one is a woman in her I think also 60s or 70s who was moderately overweight so maybe I think the first one was more like 80 90 pounds overweight the second gal was like 4050 pounds overweight and then he's got a g a little bit younger than me kind of same body composition she's got a little bit in her midsection like I do and she's not quite thrilled about it so she was using it predominantly for just to lose a few pounds and I'll say to that before I tell you the results I'll say to that there's nothing wrong with that I have no problem with that that's not a vanity issue that's an early sign of insulin resistance this gut that I have that I can't seem to get off is an early sign of insulin resistance now the insulin resistance isn't showing up on labs yet it's not showing up on my continuous glucose monitor but it's there it's telling that there is adapost depositing itself in my midsection that is telling me that I am headed down a insulin resistant pathway right so that belly fat is so clearly indicative of insulin resistance you guys and this is why I always say if you can lose your gut it's not a judgment call on people I'm not make trying to shame anybody or make anyone feel bad when you have a gut especially if it's visceral fat you are looking at trouble and that is a very clear indicator an early sign of a of what's to come which is insulin resistance so I'm built this way and this is how my family is and everybody turns into a round little apple as they age in my family and I'm fighting tooth and nail but lo and behold it's still you know doing a little job on me so I see no reason why somebody even in that scenario shouldn't be using these I think they could use a very low dose and have incredible success and I've talked to several doctors who are practicing this way where they're using it it folks think it's vanity prescribing but it's not we're optimizing optimal Human Performance we're getting people in a really awesome metabolic state so that they can age well and they don't have degenerative joint disease and they don't have all these other things that come along with it all right so hopefully that explains the bulk of it and so I want to get to some of your questions here because a lot of you guys have been asking me and I think I've answered a lot of them but I want to just be clear and I am probably going to do a part two because there's a lot to unpack here I want to get into some of the deeper science with it so that I this is just a quick overview right somebody said is it just a crutch absolutely not hopefully I've clarified that we are trying to improve metabolic health and we have got in my opinion we've got to get the fat off we have multiple studies showing that the leaner you are the longer you live we have multiple studies showing that the more at deposity you have the more inflamed you are period so it is my Firm Stance I'm with the former the leaner someone is the better their overall health the longer they're probably going to live according to the data so if insulin resistance is the number one cause of age related illness in this country and obesity is the biggest driving force of insulin resistance then why are we not giving folks these peptides early and why are we not doing it with a comprehensive lifestyle treatment plan that's what I'm getting that it's being done wrong in the alpath community I totally understand why people think it's a crutch I totally understand why it's being vilified in that capacity but the folks taking it don't think it's a horrible thing the folks taking it I've talked to multiple people people who were severely overweight who have lost it with glp1 Agonist and all of them said the same thing this is a miracle drug one of the things that it does is it it removes the hedonic urge to eat that compulsive urge you get to eat you know it creeps up on me too I'm usually really good with controlling my appetite but there's times when you know you're sitting there it's 9 o'clock at night you start thinking about something you want to eat and then you start to ruminate on it right and so that goes away it completely goes away with these peptides which I think is just miraculous because that's what's driving people to eat the wrong things right so if we can give them control back of their appetite I believe if they're educated I believe in human beings and I believe they're intelligent and if we give them the right education and access to the right foods which I know is easier said than done they'll make the right choices but getting adapost cells to shrink on a human being is probably one of the best gifts you can give them when it comes to their overall Health and Longevity of all their other organ systems their brain I mean the larger your waist the smaller the gray matter in your brain for every inch on your waist that you accumulate your brain shrinks so we're dealing with this lowgrade apathy this lowgrade dementia that's not even being acknowledged because folks are walking around as they are right in America I mean just go out just go to the mall I guess it depends on where you live but where I live in Oregon pretty much all over Oregon it doesn't matter where you go people are really struggling with their weight and it's causing all kinds of problems for them Downstream especially the Young Folks I feel horrific for young children and I'm not saying put kids on this and leave them on it and put them on it for the rest of their life let's teach them how to eat well let's teach them how to hit their protein macros let's teach them how to move let's teach them how to lift weights right I know this is a big Hype Dream but I'm just saying that's why people are are calling it a crutch is because doctors are putting folks on it and sort of leaving them to do to their own devices and they are uh ending up just skinnier versions of a hot mess of Health that's not the answer right so in that case yes it's a crutch but shoot let's give people a leg up where we can right okay so let's get to some of the questions besides is it a crutch is it a Magic Bullet no I hopefully have just explained that I don't think this will work well without being fully optimized and so that's the other group of people I said earlier it's two groups of people here so we've got the folks like my dad my dad could really use this drug my dad is morbidly obese he's diabetic I mean shoot he's in bad shape right and he's in so much pain and he's so heavy he can't even walk down the street he he can't even get down the driveway so we can't get him exercising it's just we can't get him exercising if he could drop 30 or 40 pounds I don't even care if he does it without lifting weights I just want it off of him so he can get moving and we can give him a leg up so he can get moving again because I know once the pain is recited or it's less and I know that once he's not it's not literally carrying the weight of the world around on your body he can start moving again and this is one of the things I've done with many patients I've had I've helped patients that were 400 pounds and we had to get the first hundred off before we could ever get them moving because you just can't put that kind of load on those joints these are joints that are not well trained these are joints that are not well conditioned and then we end up you know people go out and pound on them it's not great so yeah mild walking getting in a pool if that's available but a lot of people don't want to get in a pool when they weigh two three 400 pounds right so if we can give them a leg up and get some of the poundage off literally and then we can get them moving right and then we can start implementing some of these lifestyle strategies so that's the one one group the second group would be somebody like myself or many of you I get messages from many of you every single day Dr Tina I'm doing every single thing you say and it's just not working I just can't get the weight off I just can't get the belly off my blood sugars are creeping up my insulin's creeping up I I can't get a hold of it I'm doing the hormones I'm doing everything and let's admit it functional medicine is expensive for a lot of people and it's cost prohibitive finding somebody to do bioidentical hormone replacement well is a challenge often you have to travel to do it so that's tough and that's expensive I know these hormones are expensive it's it can all be quite expensive in some cases it's quite reasonable but when you start adding it all up it can get out of hand pretty quick and so shoot a bottle of seacu Tides anywhere starting you know it's about 100 to 150 bucks a month that's something a lot of people can't afford and maybe they don't need all the other stuff right I do believe you need to be hormonally optimized I do believe you need to be lifting weights I do believe you need to be getting Sun I do believe you need to be grounding and meditating and managing your stress and doing all the things I talk about but that said what do you want to do first right A lot of people don't want to go to the gym because they're so heavy set and they're scared and they're intimidated I understand this so maybe if we get some weight off of them regardless of their age we could get them to start moving but in somebody like that who is doing all the things right I think lowd dose can be really life-changing for people so I think there's application in a variety of different types of folks and we shouldn't be P poo pooing it if somebody chooses that route we don't poooo them or shame them if they take met Borman we don't pooo them or shame them if they take blood pressure medication we don't pooo or shame somebody if they take antibiotics for pneumonia but we shame them for wanting to get you know 30 40 pounds off that's causing them cardiovascular disease I just I don't understand it but if your health is a complete disaster and you're not willing to put in any of that leg work then this is not a Magic Bullet by any means sure you might lose the weight but you're going to gain it back so you have to implement the lifestyle strategies all right so let's see I've got a lot of notes here and I didn't even cover half of them but shoot I mean this drug decreases fasting serum insulin you guys this is it decreases triglycerides it improves systolic blood pressure it improves diastolic blood pressure it improves C reactive protein levels it decreases hemoglobin A1c levels if you guys know your lab work the this is profound it improves neurodegenerative diseases it has been shown to improve and assist with longevity and anti-aging it's helps gut dysbiosis I mean the list just the list goes on and on and on some of your questions that I have gotten here so what about giving it to kids I think I've addressed that only as part of a comprehensive lifestyle modification treatment plan lifetime use I think I address that as well paired with a high protein diet would this minimize loss of lean body mass Bingo that's what I said earlier yes of course is it a good tool if monitored I absolutely think so if it I think it's a remarkable tool if monitored what are the side effects I think I've covered those I'm not too concerned with muscle loss if people are strength training hair loss let's talk about this most of you dealing with severe hair loss are probably sitting with excess weight on you and in a PCOS type State I I think most people could agree with that I know that there's been some hair loss postco with people but generally speaking when we see hair loss in someone there's a hormonal derangement it's usually being driven by a PCOS polycystic ovarian syndrome type scenario which at its root I'll do another podcast on this another day PCOS is just metabolic dysfunction I don't know why they call it that because really it's just metabolic derangement and you treat the metabolic derangement the same way everything else every time I mention I do like an ask me anything on my Instagram people say what about PCOS I'm like it's literally exactly the same strategy as everything else I talk about lift weights get sun eat protein sleep meditate all those things right so I think that's where a lot of the hair loss is coming from I think if you lose weight drastically fast you're going to have hair loss because you're these folks are malnourished right I I didn't use that word earlier but you take somebody and put them into a severe you know they completely wipe out their appetite they go into a severe caloric restriction they're going to be malnourished they're not going to be eating at all and when they do eat they're going to choose garbage right if they're prone to eat garbage and they stay on garbage and nobody tells them otherwise or encourages them otherwise and we can't control people in what they do but you know they're just going to eat less L of the garbage food they're eating of course they're going to have hair loss that's a side effect of malnourishment and mineral and vitamin deficiencies right so we talked about the gastroparesis and the delayed gastric emptying cycling to reduce leptin well we want leptin we just want to hear it we want leptin resistance to be over you know overcome if you will so leptin resistance is a condition that happens in the brain where the body is secreting leptin the fat cells are secreting leptin and the brain's not hearing it and so you end up with a appetite problem and so we want leptin resistance to be overcome is it more good than bad I absolutely think so what about berberine berberine you guys weak go1 Agonist not nature OIC I'm sorry yes it has profound impacts on blood sugar handling but I believe the magic of these gp1 agonists is in the weight loss and in the fat shrinkage of the cells right we your adipocytes grow and Shrink you accumulate them as a young person and then as an adult you generally are kind of set with the amount of cells you have you don't get more cells and so you fill them up and as they fill they get more inflamed and more inflammatory and more cyto producing this is why it's so devastating when young children are obese because they're developing fat cells they are now going to have more fat cells for the rest of their life than if they had stayed lean and that means they're always going to be struggling with their weight because they have way more fat cells to fill up and it's really challenging so let's see is it dangerous is it dangerous everybody kept saying is it dangerous this is why I think it's been so propagandise does digestion stay messed up no that's that reverses itself so I don't know about some of these cases where folks were severely overweight severely diabetic and on very high doses for a long time I'm sure they've going to have some digestive issues but who's to say that's from the OIC and not just severe disposes right um I think we're blaming one thing for a disease process that's been going on for a long time and I'm not discounting what's going on with them but yeah gastroparesis generally reverses itself of course it's just a temporary process while the peptide is interacting with those tissues and impacting them and then once that's removed or out of the system digestion returns to normal long-term data a lot of people ask about long-term data I just shared that with you yes there is long-term data and somebody asked about will long-term use lead me to become skinny fat only if you don't build your muscle and prioritize your protein right this is think of it as a tool in addition to all the things if we add in the tool to all the things we're doing all the things for optimized metabolic health and insulin sensitivity and Longevity lifestyle and then we add in a tool that can help with that that's the perfect scenario but I also think it would be effective in helping somebody like my dad who is just a complete I love him but he's a dumpster fire of health and he needs some help to get started to get back on track how to track skeletal muscle mass I like dexus scans those might be harder to come by there's different ways that you can there's inbody machines there's calipers where you can do pinch tests but oh I was telling you about my coach I didn't mean to go off topic there puppy distracted me so my coach had these three women and he said in all three cases they I think they were managing and monitoring their muscle mass and the only reason they were losing muscle mass was because they weren't prioritizing their protein because as you can imagine if your appetite significantly reduces there's kind of a I don't know about you I've had this happen to me naturally where my appetite just goes away and I've lost a lot of weight and it had nothing to do with anything but stress and you you get confused for a minute you're like I'm not hungry what should I eat right and that can be hard to prioritize protein when you don't have any appetite because it sometimes doesn't sound appealing but as soon as they got back on track and really started emphasizing their protein intake and making sure that they hit their macro goals they were fine and their muscle mask came back up per dexa scans so that's there you go I thought that was really compelling information probably the best information I've gotten from anyone I've talked to lots of doctors and lots of patients but I hadn't talked to a strength and conditioning coach who actually had clients on it and was kind of tracking how that was going for them so is it really safe if you aren't diabetic I really hope that the last hour I have convinced you yes I believe so this is not about diabetes or not diabetes this is about fat cells and how many of them do you have so how do you wean off great question I don't want to get into dosages but I will tell you with peptides they cycle them and so generally speaking even with hormones when I do bioidentical hormone replacement with patients we cycle them so we do a cycle of them we do several months on usually 90 days and then we'll take a month off or two I Cycle lotos nrex Zone I cycle everything because I don't want those receptors to get too overly desensitized and I want those cells to be sensitive to whatever it is I'm giving the body and so I highly encourage everybody to I I cycle anti-depressants in patients I cycle them and we work very closely with them to make sure when they're off the cycle that they're feeling okay right so it does help to work with someone who knows what they're doing but this like any other peptide I believe and when I talk to folks in the biohacking community who've been using it for a long time or when I read their work that's the consens sensus is you cycle these things you use them as a tool all right and then a lot of people asked about what about OIC with hypothyroidism what about OIC with this what about OIC with that I think that anytime we can improve metabolic Health we're probably gonna more likely than not improve those conditions so autoimmune disease inflammation driven diseases you know any of those processes are going to improve when you improve metabolic health and we will improve metabolic Health by shrinking the fat cells even if those people are eating like garbage they're still going to improve their metabolic Health while they're on it so I'm betting money I don't have any doubt on this but I'm betting money just from what I've heard on the street talking to people who've been on it that everything gets better their skin gets better their acne clears there oh the other part I didn't mention is there's data around Cravings not just for food but for other things more of that addictive qualities are being ameliorated ated people just don't want their alcohol they don't want to take some of the drugs they were taking like people just don't want the stuff when their brain I don't know if their brain is calming down the neuroinflammation is being addressed I'm not really sure but there is this that that hedonic urge to consume the things all the things that are not good for us uh seems to be somewhat ameliorated and I think that's really promising that's probably why big Pharma doesn't want everybody on it uh a lot of people said there just can't be a magic pill maybe but again only if done in context let's see oh here's a good one what about people who use it to look heroin Chic what are the long-term risks I think I addressed that if you want to waste away down to absolutely nothing but Skin and Bones you will end up skinny fat and you will end up in a metabolic mess I've done that to myself it's not a good plan I did that when I didn't know better when I was younger it was all the rage to be heroin Chic around here back in the 90s and you will end up in a complete disaster of metabolic health so of course there is it's not a good plan you we're not using it to become heroin Chic we're using it to get inflammatory fat off of our body as needed while we're lifting weights and leading a metabolically optimized lifestyle are people having bad side effects if they're on it for diabetes not weight loss let's address this this is where I was like God people really don't understand how this works everybody's going to have the same side effects because it works the same in the body I explained the mechanism of action to you it is working by doing all of the different processes I mentioned but most notably decreasing appetite and so the seacu tide has the more common side effects of nausea diarrhea vomiting usually most people just report nausea though to be totally truthful with you I've asked a lot of people who've taken it it's just some nausea tends to go away tepati seems to have way less way way less side effects and that's going to be the same for whatever condition you walk into it on whatever you come to it with you're a human being it's going to impact you the same way has nothing to do whether you have diabetes or not that's why I think it's so funny that they release this drug as a diabetes drug like why didn't they just release it as a weight loss drug because that would take care of the diabetes do you get what I'm saying if we just get the weight off the diabetes resolves because the diabetes is being driven by these adipocytes being full and being inflamed why do people get OIC Pace because you have fat pads in your face and if you lose fat too quickly too aggressively your fat pads will shrink so I've had this happen to me when I went through a divorce and I was severely stressed out I was a single mom I was trying to finish two medical programs I lost a ton of weight really fast I mean it was so severe that people were like do you have cancer and I did not but I did get OIC face even though I wasn't on OIC it was because I just completely depleted myself you can also Imagine like I said a lot of these folks are malnourished so they're malnourished they're losing weight too fast they're losing their fat pads so as long as you're eating a protein forward and focused diet and you are strength training you should not be withering away and having your face wither away with you and I think a lot of the skin you're seeing like this the skin itself starts to look salow it starts to look pale I think that's malnourishment at the end of the day it's not the OIC doing damage to your skin there might be some impact on collagen I don't know yet I haven't looked into actually how it impacts collagen specifically but I will that's on my list of things to look at but I more often than not would say that's the same way people look when they become anorexic or when they lose weight too fast I've seen the same face right the skin gets kind of gray and thin and their color is not good and they lose their fat pads and they look gaunt right we've probably all seen that potential benefits for severely obese yes yes I think this is truly a miracle drug for people out there especially if they're dealing with severe obesity as long as they're willing to put in the work to live a lifestyle that is conducive to longevity are there better Alternatives no this is it it's a class of drugs and there is a new so second generation is tepati there's a third generation being developed and studied right now and it seems to be phenomenal so that would be the better alternative but I don't think that's available yet why would you take this given the side effects why not save it for a type one who actually needs it see that's where the misinformation is you see that type ones don't need this to survive this isn't an insulin dependent diabetic situation this is a drug to help you lose weight now type ones when they're on insulin they do tend to gain fat that's one of the side effects and so when I talk about a lifestyle of metabolic Health the same rules apply for a type one as they do a type two and when I talk about this online I always get the type one mamas come in and start yelling at me over God knows what and I get it they're defending their children but type ones I have a good friend who is a naturopathic physician who is a type 1 diabetic since she was age nine and she specializes in this and Dr Laura Neville and she preaches the same thing I preach from the stage lift weights get sun eat plenty of protein meditate keep your stress modulated it's the same treatment you guys it doesn't matter if you're type one or type two I'm so tired of people trying to argue with me about that there is no difference when I'm talking about metabolic Health it doesn't matter if you're insulin dependent or not if your blood sugars are whacked out we have a problem right so it's all about blood sugar regulation and someone said crazy how someone so smart as you will pump anything in them to get skinny fast who's to say I even am trying it if I do I'll let you guys know but who's that like what a i some of the comments just cracked me up somebody said a good asked a good question I didn't lose any weight after a month I ate less walked more is it too small of a dose yes probably just didn't give it enough time I would from what I've heard it can take every here's the thing everybody needs a different dose from what I'm hearing some people can micro dose it others really need to go up to a higher dose before they start to notice and impact I have one friend who was on it for four months she said before she even lost a pound so it really depends on the person I think it depends on how busted someone's metabolism is probably how much weight they have to lose so I don't think throwing the baby out with the bath water after a month eating less and walking more I mean that's cool but are you lifting weights are you living a metabolically optimized lifestyle I don't know right so lots of variables there to consider what foods is it in to find a natural source it's not there is not a natural source this is a synthetically derived peptide and it is what it is let's see oh does do you lose weight from your connective tissues again that goes back to me looking into collagen which I promise to do and I will address on an updated second part to this is it worth it for someone who is overweight and diabetic yes absolutely that is specifically the best candidate does resistance training mitigate muscle loss 100% yes a lot of people ask me how do I convince my friends it's not worth it the effects it's so dangerous that tells me that that person is really prone to propaganda and isn't willing to look into the data it takes all it took me all of 10 minutes and granted I'm skilled at this but it took me all of 10 minutes to go from oh my gosh is this really as horrible as they say it is to oh my God this is a miracle drug I'm not kidding within 10 minutes I was like texting every single person I know who knew anything about it who was prescribing it who was using it who was you name it I was like tell me everything so I think that anybody who's super concerned about their friends being on it might just be a little jealous that their friends are losing weight does this help someone with reverse metabolic dysfunction longterm with diet and exercise Bingo yes I do believe and I don't have the data to support this but this goes back to that I think there is a switch in the brain you guys I think there is a switch that gets flipped and I think it's happened to me that's why I think there's a switch I watched it happen to my mother a lot sooner in her life I watched it happen to my father I watched it to happen to a lot of people in my life there's this metabolic switch that happens and people go from Gaining a tiny bit of weight to a lot of weight now I did not gain a lot of weight but something is off and it's not just menopause and I'm so tired of everybody saying oh it's just menopause something is off and I know it's at the brain level because my pain skyrocketed and I had a myriad of other symptoms but there's something there and I know that it is intimately tied to the metabolic process and I am I could give you a more comprehensive scientific explanation of it but for the sake of Simplicity let's just call it a switch I think a fuse blows if you will and we need to reset the breaker I think this drug might do that I'm very interested to see how some of the folks I know who have been on it for a little while or who are just starting it long-term they all are metabolically optimized for the most part all of them are lifting weights all of them are eating plenty of protein all of them live a really insulin resistant life or insulin sensitive lifestyle but I'm interested to see how going off of it how do they respond and did they do enough or long enough to reset that breaker that's just my hypothesis again something I've been thinking about and I've got to look a little bit more and see if I can find more data around it with the neurophysiology does it make you lose muscle instead of fat I don't think so I think it just makes you lose weight because you are calorically restricting so you choose how that goes by how you live your life right and then make the appropriate choices will it make you skinny fat if you do all the things because I always say all the things no it won't I know plenty of people who are on it who are very well muscled who have incredible physiques who have incredible metabolic Health incredible labs and they use it they cycle it they use it when they need to get themselves back in they start to get a little fluffy and they use it to get back into check because I'm telling you my mentor taught me this 20 plus years ago always keep a sharp eye on your waist circumference if you start to get a little fluffy in the midsection it is a clear indication that you are starting to lose some of your insulin sensitivity and that is facts that's straight up facts he told me that decades ago we have the data to support that that is facts so I actually don't think it is a terrible drug for people or peptide for people to try when they are getting a little fluffy when they want to keep their metabolic Health intact for longevity so with that I will close I know there's a lot here to unpack I've got a lot more on this eight pages 10 pages of notes that I want to share with you but I wanted to dispel some of these myths and get you guys thinking how can you get it where can you get it I'm not sharing that I don't know but I want you to understand it so we can quit vilifying it and we can quit really giving people a hard time that are on it because they're trying to improve their health and if they're using it as a crutch heck how many people do you know that live off of five different Pharmaceuticals and they don't do a damn thing for their health right we've all got them in our lives we love them they take their blood pressure meds their statins their anti-depressants their Calis all the things right they're on all the medications because their metabolic health is a disaster we don't give them any grief why are we vilifying people who are trying to lose weight so that they can improve their health right so with that I'll close if you guys like this episode I'd love to hear from you if you have more questions anything I didn't cover here hit me up you can email us at podcast at Dr tina.com and that's drty y Na and if you like this episode please follow me on YouTube I'd love to have you guys come over there we're building a small tribe it's great we're getting episodes up and trying to make that happen and you can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player we really appreciate it when you rate review And subscribe it helps get it helps the algorithm get the message out to more so with that I will close thank you so much