Debunk Top 5 Myths Impacting Your Gut Health

Beverly Yates, ND

Hi, Sinclair. It’s great that you’re doing the summit. Thank you for taking your leadership role here, helping people with better gut health. I’m looking forward to our interview to bring some clarity and hopefully inspiration, some hope to people who are struggling with these things because it’s such a central problem in people’s health and in their lives.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. Love this. So we’re going to start by myth busting today. This is one of my favorite things to do. I really want to give you a chance to unpack for people. What are these persistent blood sugar myths? Because when we think about diabetes or pre-diabetes there’s this subtext in between the lines of like, well, you’re lazy, you have made bad choices lifestyle wise. Therefore just deal with it and it’s your fault. I know that you are really passionate about dispelling these persistent myths. So what do you think are the biggest blood sugar myths that are holding us back right now as a culture?

Beverly Yates, ND

What are great rich questions? All right. Let’s peel back the layers of this onion. So you’re right, people do get a lot of shame and blame and disparagement when it comes to a diagnosis of type two diabetes or pre-diabetes. People often jump to a very judgmental, assumptive place that someone has earned. They deserve this particular chronic illness, which is just bizarre because often and certainly in my clinical work 30 plus years now helping people. A lot of times people don’t necessarily have a crazy lifestyle. They aren’t necessarily eating too much of the wrong things or deliberately abusing themselves. Tell me, Sinclair, if you agree with this statement, I think it’s true that none of us wake up in the morning saying, how can I screw up my health today? Like, no one does that. But there’s this implicit bias behind the whole thing that if someone has that diagnosis, they must have done something actively and consciously to destroy their health. The onset of diabetes can be caused by lots of things. Could be a really bad reaction to a viral respiratory infection. It could be from way too much stress, not enough sleep or none of quality sleep. It could be due to a variety of things. Yes, of course it could be due to eating all the wrong foods and knowingly and not exercising. But usually what precedes that are some things that are really difficult and people’s lives we don’t choose to be ill. We don’t.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s beautifully said. I really agree with you. I can’t think of a single person in our practice or our group courses that would ever knowingly say that they chose to get sick. Here we are with this epidemic of gut health issues and diabetes. Of course, those are so intricately over well interwoven. So I really want to dig into the different aspects of this with you today. Why don’t we start by actually talking about the impact of nutrition, on delaying gastric emptying and slowing the release of food from the stomach. I also want to give you a chance to explain to the audience why we chose to start here.

Beverly Yates, ND

All right. Absolutely. So I think we can all agree that your food is your medicine and your medicine is your food. Nutrition would be the bull’s eye of the target if you’re working on blood sugar issues. You can’t just like you cannot exercise a bad diet. You’re not going to have good health if you haven’t figured out nutrition that is healthy for you. I tell people, eat the foods you love as long as they love you back. Part of that is how your blood sugar is responding. Part of that is whether or not your gut is bloated. You experience a lot of gas and belching and burping and farting, etc. Because those are all symptoms. Those are clues that something’s not right. So I have found that the order in which people eat their food matters and it does vary by individual. Most people will benefit from one of a few following really simple strategies that they involve noticing. If you wear a CGM, like I’m wearing now, Continuous Glucose Monitor or you don’t. There’s different ways to assess. Your biggest clues will be after you eat. Is your mind clear? Are your moods in a good place or in a bad place? Are you irritable and difficult to be around? Everyone flees until you’ve eaten or after you eat. Are you so exhausted that you just act like a face plant on your desk? You have them pull your head up your back because you’re so exhausted. 

You go into a food coma. We get a lot of clues. So for most people, if they start their meal with either a dense protein or with leafy greens, that’s usually going to be the first food in, followed by a healthy fat. Then the last thing they should probably eat would be their complex, slow burning, resistant starch carbs. This will then lead to usually a gentle, healthy blood sugar. So their blood sugar will move a little, maybe 20, 30 points from where it started right before they eat, which is okay if you start out with, God forbid, simple carbs. Highly refined, ultra processed foods, particularly rich in carbohydrates, butter is likely to spike up like a rocket, come crashing back down and you’ll be like this. Your moods, your attention, your ability to focus and function, your desire to exercise will probably be gone. You won’t be supporting your health. So if you eat the wrong thing first or at all, this is the problem. So that also leads to knowing when it’s time to stop eating, feeling satiated and satisfied, and being able to know that your hunger has been met. All of these things are related and give people a reasonable chance of having a healthy weight and metabolism. It still works and does not overwhelm your digestive system because your gut is asking you all the time to treat it with love and with care.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s so beautiful. Thank you. So let’s talk about the other aspects of lifestyle that often get overlooked when it comes to diabetes and persistent kinds of health issues. So I know that you’re really passionate about sleep quality and want to give you a chance to unpack some of those important factors for sleep appetite, satiety. How do all these things relate together?

Beverly Yates, ND

All right. So let’s share with the audience the story of the twin ghrelins. These are two hormones you don’t hear a lot about, and I’ve nicknamed them just for fun. It makes it easier to remember the twin gremlins. One is ghrelin spelled g h r e l i n. The other one is leptin l e p t i n. So those two, I call them the gremlins because they can kind of sometimes run around in the background rather a lot of havoc, a lot of chaos. If people don’t understand that these two groans, when they’re out of balance, cause a lot of problems. So for those who struggle with overeating, those who struggle with insatiable hunger, they just cannot tell when they’re full. For anybody who finds that their appetite just doesn’t make sense relative to their activity level, I invite you to look at leptin and ghrelin, because those two hormones might be out of balance. Ghrelin is the one that is related to you feeling hungry. Ghrelin, your stomach, your tummy goes grr. That helps you remember. That’s ghrelin. That’s the explanation. Yeah. Get that one to your girls. Ghrelin. Then leptin is the one that lets you when you are satisfied. You’re satiated, you are full. You’ve had enough. For some people, they’re broken. That’s one of the reasons why some of the peptide therapies, whether it is something like Ozempic or something like Mounjaro, Semaglutide, other names they go by. This is why they’re so popular, because for a lot of people, leptin and ghrelin are broken and they need very real support telling people they can muscle through and ignore that they are hungry or ignore that they can’t tell when they stop eating is cruel. It doesn’t work like that, and it often is rooted in issues with chronic stress or poor inadequate sleep that those two the stress of sleep will completely disrupt leptin and growling.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

So if somebody knows that they have absolutely had now they’re listening to you about the twin groans of the going, Yep, I feel broken. I think that’s exactly what intuitively is going on with me. They would agree. Yes. Stress and sleep have been major issues for me. What do they have control over in regards to that? What are some steps that they could take to support that without getting into costly drugs?

Beverly Yates, ND

That’s a great question. So let’s dig in on this one. The things that they could do to take control and do something simple like personal, do I feel better or worse after this would be this one would be to be sure that they have leafy greens with all their meals and yes, friends. That includes breakfast. I know that’s controversial. Some people have told me that they think that’s weird. Some of my longest term patients, that’s where we started. They now do it. They’re now so much better. The reason you want to have those leafy greens with all of your meals and ideally at the front end of your meal is because they help you in a primary way with that feeling of fullness of satiety, of being able to have control and not constantly overeating, giving yourself that feedback. The fiber that’s in the leafy greens is a blood sugar sponge. The fiber leafy greens also help with cholesterol. The fiber in leafy greens helps your gut literally to expand in a good way, not a bloated way. But that expansion in that small intestine lets the brain know it gets a signal, saying, “Oh, we have food coming through.” And it makes all the rest of it work, including if you’re struggling with bowel movements and things like that. So you get more intestinal motility where the intestine squeezes so that all of the product goes through its large intestine becomes fecal material. If you aren’t eating leafy green vegetables, friends, you are missing out on a great, helpful thing that’s doing like eight things for you at a minimum.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s what a great point and it’s super accessible to do. So you bring it up with them and I really want to give you a chance to comment on this. This is so topical right now, and I promise we’re going to keep talking about the twin gremlins, guys. But since Dr. Beverley’s area of expertise is diabetes and we’re watching this huge ozempic craze right now, I really want to get your thoughts on it.

Beverly Yates, ND

So if there’s anything with any of the peptide therapies that are addressing what I feel are for some people the missing pieces, I think that they are a helpful therapy and they buy people time. You still need to make the life felt changes. What I’ve seen is often when people have diabetes and if that’s why they’re put on a drug like Ozempic, or if someone is obese and that’s why they’re put on a drug like Ozempic, or for that matter. Mounjaro. Often, in fact, I could safely say honestly, Sinclair, most of the time they have not been supported in the rest of the lifestyle things right there are five factors that matter. Five pillars that make the difference. Or steps in your lifestyle that you could take. I bundled them up in the Yates protocol. Nutrition is the bullseye, the target, I think we can all agree on that. The next one would be paying attention to sleep. It is restorative and foundational. You cannot be well or it’s much harder to be well if you weren’t sleeping well, next would be stress. Stress is the bully that grabs people by their genetic color and slams them up against the wall of epigenetic expression. Whatever is lurking, you have to live it. It’s a vivid image. 

But I think we’ve all, many of us have lived it. If we’ve gotten stressed for long enough and hard enough, the stuff that’s lurking in our gene pool is what has shown up as an expressed chronic condition. Because the stress bully ran amok with our genetic potential, our genetic vulnerabilities. This is where lifestyles make the difference, because we can also turn it off and influence it to get back to health. The fourth piece is going to be exercise in particular, strength training along with consistent exercise. Some of us are working way too hard for exercise. We’re beaten ourselves into a pulp. Therefore our stress response has been hijacked. Because we’re doing too much exercise. Some people aren’t doing enough. Some people are different. Some of us need gentle, consistent exercise. Some of us need more vigorous, less frequent exercise. You have to figure out what’s going to work for you. In fact, with meal timing, some people, particularly if they have diabetes and blood sugar issues, are so fascinating in terms of human behavior. They’ll eat breakfast, forget to eat lunch. They get so busy they’re doing everything for everybody but themselves, their own self care. Is it number one on their list? These are sometimes the most amazing people in the community. They give a lot. They say, are people coming back to say, “Hey, have you had lunch today?” Or basic things like that, by the time they get to dinner, Sinclair, they are ravenous. They could eat a bear and they’re going to make that they’re much more at risk than they eat for choices. This is where the cycle can come in a real damage around nutrition. So when you’re looking at the drugs like Ozempic, etc., because it is conversing directly with the brain, it’s getting that support, it’s getting the feedback to say, “Hey, we’ve had enough. We were satisfied at a much lower level than the person without that medication.” I think the potent thing to do is get that lifestyle support. So if you are on Ozempic and it has been life changing, great. If you’re not having nasty side effects because it can have some nasty side effects and it’s working for you. Cool. But if you’re finding you can’t tolerate those side effects or you’re looking at a way maybe to get off and not have to do this for the rest of your life or it’s gotten too expensive. I really would invite you to explore all five of those lifestyle factors the nutrition, the sleep, the stress, the specific kinds of exercise and mealtime to make sure that you are robustly supported. Because for most people, it’s one or two of these that really matter for their blood sugar health. That, combined with your gut health, makes for a really rewarding, sustainable lifestyle that will support your gut.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Thanks for helping me go down that rabbit hole because I just could not resist now. But I know we need to get back to the twin gremlins, here, leptin and ghrelin. I want to give you a chance to talk about this from a different angle. So when we talk about the impact of stress, like if we brought this up a couple of times and how this can actually drive cravings and then food choices. How does that relate to the twin ghrelins?

Beverly Yates, ND

It sounds easy to say that we’re right. gremlin and ghrelin. Yeah. So here’s how it relates. This is rooted in human survival rates. Back in the day, if we needed to respond to an emergency like, say, there was a predator or something threatening our survival, we had to be able to get up and go and we needed to have the energy to do that. That meant we could be amazing. We could be superheroes in that moment for probably about 10 minutes, there’d be enough adrenaline from our fear, from our cortisol being released to save us or to save a loved one. It’s how you hear about tiny people lifting cars off of loved ones. You people set Olympic records and don’t even know it, trying to get away from something or to be really strong and fight off. I have a friend who recently fended off some people who had ill intent, and I’m sure her cortisol was intense, but she did it. She’s maybe about five feet, five foot one tall, and she kicked their asses. So that was cool. I’m sorry that it happened, but I’m so glad she was able to avoid further harm. 

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Small but mighty. I love that.

Beverly Yates, ND

Small but mighty. So in that moment then you’re able to do what you need to do. That is supposed to be a temporary stress. For many of us, the way life works, it’s that we’re kind of always in that mode. We don’t really get to calm down and reset. So here’s the deal. When your body has released that much energy, it needs to be fueled. You’re going to preferentially go to look for blood sugar, for glucose. Your muscles are ready. They’re primed to absorb it. That all works for 10 minutes. Nothing’s going to break like that. But if you’re like this 24 seven, this is a problem. So as a result, then if you’re chronically stressed or you aren’t sleeping well, either one, heaven forbid, both are happening the next morning when you wake up leptin and ghrelin are now out of balance, you will feel overly hungry. You’re going to want preferentially simple carbs, not complex carbs. So, things like lentils and chickpeas will not seem sexy, but donuts and croissants will seem amazing. Any of the simple, highly processed flours, things like that. You may also want things that are savory, really umami, really highly comfort level foods. They’re going to be high in calories. Maybe high comfort, but low nutrient density. It’s a real set up. So if you get stuck in this cycle, this is day after day, week after week, month after month, God forbid, year after year. You got some trouble here. This is how leptin and ghrelin can get out of balance, stay out of balance and take you with it.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

It’s really well said. So it’s basically describing the modern lifestyle. 

Beverly Yates, ND

Yeah, I kind of am. Then we wonder why it all ran amok.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Exactly. We wonder why we’re not getting better. So let’s unpack this intertwining of chronic gut conditions and diabetes. What overlap do you see there between the biggest chronic gut conditions of our time? Of course, there’s leaky gut, but we also see, like this could be we could talk about this from the perspective of symptoms as well, not just diagnostic labels, but what do you see in terms of the overlap of this basket of chronic conditions and diabetes?

Beverly Yates, ND

I think that there’s two layers of it. One is when the digestive capacity of the gut and its ability to assimilate well, to digest, absorb and assimilate. So break stuff down and then make it useful to the rest of the body. When that’s compromised, chances are really good that other things are broken with it and in the case of chronically high blood sugar or people who get on the blood sugar rollercoaster spiking up and that may have high blood sugar, low blood sugar, and they rarely spend time in the middle. This means, then, that their gut microbiome is most likely compromised. The signaling that comes from those good, healthy gut bacteria is probably being overwhelmed by unhelpful inhabitants in the gut, and as such, their blood sugar is not stable. It also means they’re not absorbing their nutrients correctly because they weren’t digested correctly, were broken down into their smallest bits, they weren’t digested properly, and therefore they’re not assimilated, put into the cell, into the tissues for repair, which means an elimination now is being usually overwhelmed, overburdened. The poor liver is trying to bag and tag and detoxify things. The gallbladder is trying to help you with your fats. Your pancreas is trying to help you with all those beautiful enzymes that it makes along with the hormone insulin, other the good things that it has to offer and everything is just on overdrive and it’s like over stimulation but under-effective.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

It’s a really important distinction. Overstimulation but under-effective.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yeah, it’s trying real hard. Real hard. But the sensitivity isn’t there. So when you think about how I talk about things like insulin resistance, we don’t necessarily talk about assimilation. Resistance, maybe we should.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Mm yeah. I agree. So what are some signs and symptoms that people might have pre diagnostic labels that would actually be an issue for them where they’re overstimulated but under-effective aside from those blood sugar swings what else might they be noticing when they’re in the stage?

Beverly Yates, ND

Sure. Great question. So I always ask people, what’s your energy like and what’s it like throughout the day? Because I find that clinically it should match things that we can observe when we do laboratory testing, like if we do a diurnal cortisol test. In other words, four points throughout the day, we want to know what your awakening cortisol is like, what it is like at around midday or lunchtime, what it is in the late afternoon, and then what it is at bedtime. We are really clear about what cortisol should be doing at different points in the day. If your curve doesn’t match that, then we’ve got some work to do. What you might feel is you wake up and you feel like you didn’t go to sleep. You feel like a truck ran over you while you’re in bed. You’re like, Did I go to sleep? You look at your watch, your clock you’re like, Well, time went by, but what the hell? I don’t feel good. That’s one.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I remember the stage of my life well.

Beverly Yates, ND

I think we have all been there. My entire mind. It was caused by another error of your expertise because. “Oh God, that just blew me up. It was terrible.” Now I know Ben at that time was an engineer, so I just didn’t know how damaging mold is for human health. Midday, you should still be feeling good, even brain clear, able to get stuff done. If you find that your energy is just in the tank midday, something’s not right there. You might find that your stomach is kind of rumbling, but not like it’s hungry. It’s upset, it doesn’t feel well. Maybe you’re eating them because you feel like that’s the only time you have to eat or not. Or you’re just eating something for comfort because, hey, look, let’s be real. We’re all human. We don’t want to struggle and suffer. We want to feel good. So you’re going to go for that 15 minutes of feeling good, even though you’ve got 3 to 4 hours of hell to pay for the 15 minutes. It’s a tradeoff. Yeah. Late afternoon energy should still be there. If it’s completely crashed and you’re in line at the cafe to get a hit of caffeine, I’m looking at you right now. You need some other support. Then in the evening, if you perk up, you’re ready for the day. It’s like, carpe diem, seize the day, but now it’s night. Notice that the saying is Carpe diem, seize the day. It’s not carpe at night, seize the night. You are just saying your energies upside down.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yes, that’s a really good point. I mean, that and you’re also really highlighting something that I think so many of us have normalized in this culture. It comes as we pay such a high price for it that we’re looking for that short term fix to reset the nervous system, to boost the oncoming crash, award it off to try to self-regulate and get some short term relief because we’re just so depleted. Are there any specific gut symptoms that you think that you see as early warning signs for pre-diabetes and like, Oh, you are headed nowhere good.

Beverly Yates, ND

One of them can be if you notice that your accumulation of body fat starts to really show up so much more so in your belly and not necessarily just under the skin, but at a deeper level. You can be thin, otherwise thin on the outside, but then you can have the accumulation of that abdominal fat inside your organs. It’s called Tofi. Tofi is thin on the outside, fat on the inside. People make lots of judgments, make assumptions and judgments like, for instance, with sumo wrestlers, much of their body fat is right below the skin. It’s actually not in the organs. It’s not in visceral deposition despite their appearance. It’s so interesting where that fat is in your body matters. So if you start to notice that your midsection starts to feel thick, that’s one another could be if you are visibly overweight or obese and you can see you have that apple distribution where your body looks more like an apple with a lot more weight around your midsection than anywhere else. That’s another thing to think about. If you start to find that your stomach or your belly area just feels really uncomfortable no matter what you eat. 

If you find that you are hungry, hungry, hungry, like all the time, as if you were still a teenager who was like a varsity athlete, kind of hungry. You don’t have that age and that really busy, active lifestyle anymore. That’s another thing you might notice. Also, if your bowel movement pattern just doesn’t make sense, where if it’s just sluggish, even though let’s say you are eating a high fiber with plenty of hydration diet because with plenty of hydration and fiber, it should be easy to move the bowels. If you’re struggling with that, that’s a clue on the other side, if you have too much motility, it could be your body’s just dumping things. If you have bowel movements that are really frequent because you haven’t figured out how to really hang on anything long enough for you to benefit from it. There is such a thing as too quick of a transit time from when you eat all the way for it to be excreted down the other end.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Can you explain that a little further? What is the relationship the audience needs to know between intestinal motility and blood sugar balance?

Beverly Yates, ND

Yeah. So there’s this thing in particular with type two diabetes where people get into gastric emptying syndromes. It goes by all kinds of names. But for some people, when they eat, particularly if they eat the really high sugar content foods with no fiber, minimal protein, minimal fast, their body just dumps. So the second it hits the stomach is just on an express train right out of there. They’ll get into all kinds of problems. Because type two diabetes, when it goes to the more serious consequences, compromises everything, including your nervous system. One of the things that happens is the signaling that should happen in the stomach via the nervous system that beautiful feedback gets broken because as blood sugar in excess starts to glom onto naturally found proteins in your blood circulation. One of the things that happens is the proteins that help compromise your or comprise rather your nervous system. Also get glycated. They get sticky with that excess blood sugar and they become less able to function normally. Your body’s signaling gets literally gummed up. That’s one way you get these gastric emptying syndromes where people’s food just dumps through. So they never got a chance to really digest their primary stage in the gut. In the stomach specifically.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. Wow, what a great point. I think this is so important because I even meet practitioners all the time that have not made that connection and they’re not looking out for that in the same way they’re like really quick to jump to like a microbial emphasis, which is fine. That’s an important layer to discover and assess. But there are larger implications here that we need to get better at assessing.

Beverly Yates, ND

Yeah, yeah. There’s a reason why your body has decided to dump it. You need to determine if it is microbes, is it neurologic feedback or the lack of it, etc., which was compromised because once you know what that root cause issue is, then you can address it. I would say always keep an eye, clinicians. For those of you watching who are clinical in your work around what people are telling you with their lived experience, their symptoms, and then you look at the signs and assess what’s the appropriate way to determine where the struggle is, because that’s really going to make the difference for that person’s health.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Okay. So I really want to give you a chance to talk about meal timing and gut health, since we just kind of brought this up several times. Let’s get granular about this piece right now.

Beverly Yates, ND

Okay. So meal timing is one of the most fun things. For most people, it’s probably one of the things you definitely have control over throughout your day. Ideally, particularly for those of us who are an adult, we really have to pay attention to a few key things. So number one, if you have a typical meal eating pattern of having breakfast, I highly encourage you to have lunch and dinner. Going from breakfast to dinner with no lunch and no plan is a mistake. I’ve seen more wreckage from that than anything else. So if your life is stressful or if it’s unpredictable, if you have others that you care for who count on you, if you have a crazy boss, whatever it might be people in your lifestyle circumstances. Make sure you have a plan for lunch. That is the meal that can cause the most havoc for blood sugar and gut health. I feel if you typically eat three meals now, if you’re doing some sort of intermittent fasting or you just don’t typically eat breakfast, that’s okay. Different people’s metabolisms can respond beautifully to that eating pattern. I’m agnostic in terms of thou shalt always eat right now we have so many ways in which we can be healthy as long as you find what works for you. So if you’re going to eat your two meals, then you want to be relatively consistent across days. At what times those meals are. 

If you can remember your childhood as a little kid and if you particularly had a good childhood, you probably had regular meals if you didn’t have that experience as a child. I’m sorry. I’d say now as an adult, you get to give yourself that gift of consistency because your other hormones and circadian rhythm depend on these things. But similarly, if we go to bed at really different times, it’s hard to be, well, your hormonal system, your endocrine system, all of the magic. It really likes predictability. That doesn’t mean you have to be rigid to the minute, but certainly within a half hour or so you just give yourself that gift of easier health. Your body knows when to expect new inputs. Therefore, I can give you the outputs called bowel movements or urination or whatever it might be. The biggest, most important thing about meal timing that I see a mistake with Sinclair is when they eat their final meal of the day relative to that time. My professional advice, lived experience. What I’ve seen with all of the people I’ve helped is that it is critical to allow at least 3 hours before bedtime and up to 5 hours before bedtime between dinner, your final meal in going to sleep because you give your gut time to do that work while you’re still upright, while gravity is working for you before you go horizontal. 

Now, I want to make this visually clear. When you’re like this gravity is working for you, it’s going to help pull that food down. Once you go horizontal to sleep. I’m assuming most of us aren’t bats. We’re not upside down trying to sleep. We’re sideways right around a bed before a futon, whatever it might be. Your body no longer benefits from gravity to drive that food down. So the intestinal motility, the guts, ability to squeeze the small intestine in particular is critical to keep that food moving. If you eat a heavy meal and go to bed like this, it’s sitting there between your esophagus and your stomach. It has even gotten to your small intestine. Yet there are sphincters along the way, some of which are mechanical, some of which are more dependent on gravity. If you don’t have gravity to assist you, the likelihood that that food now will travel back up, come up the esophagus through the throat with the stomach acid causing you to have heartburn and or gastro esophageal reflux disease is much higher. I’ve seen some people’s cases of heartburn and gastro esophageal reflux disease. Gerd, go away simply by having that time 3 to 5 hours between dinner and sleep.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Wow. That’s amazing and not uncommon. If you think about it, you would need to work with the body here. So one of the things that I’m really tempted to talk about with you before we go, I’m actually going to resist because you and I did a really good job of this. When I interviewed you for my podcast on your Health Reset, there’s an amazing episode with Dr. Beverly that we did together called Why Haven’t We Fixed Diabetes Yet? She’s given you so many pearls today about these overlooked pieces, really, like layering the basics here and understanding the underlying scientific factors like what has gone awry, not just in our modern lifestyle, but in our diets specifically, and how you’re treating food. But we’re talking about the systemic piece of why haven’t hasn’t diabetes been fixed yet in that interview? So I’m going to resist the temptation to do it because I know you guys can all find that. I really want to give you a chance to zoom in on our remaining time on a couple of stories that can help give people hope. I’m thinking about how often diabetes and chronic conditions are characterized by this emotional roller coaster of long term suffering. I would love it if you would end. Take us home today. I can barely hear stories of hope. People that started out really sick and had advanced chronic gut issues and also diabetes was complicating that. Then you saw them get well and walk us through the path they took to get there.

Beverly Yates, ND

I’m happy to do that. So one story that comes to mind is of a woman who has a family history of diabetes, along with gut health problems. Within the family, there was this belief that this was just then this was part of being in the family to accept it. It’s going to happen to you, too. It was kind of like being in the air. That was the expectation. This one particular person was like, “No, I refuse to accept that. I want to be well, but I need to figure out how.” So for her, she had started out with pre-diabetes. I was going along with her life and then her usual du pot of stress and all the other things that go with it. Not eating well. Having poor gut health. Then one day she was diagnosed by her doctor with having type two diabetes. When it flipped, a switch flipped in her head because now she felt a sense of mortal threat. It felt so much more real for her now that it was type two diabetes. She’s like, there’s no pre I’m in it. Her gut health was getting worse. She was getting more and more uncomfortable in her own skin. When you have something wrong, when you can feel it, it’s not some sort of an unknown or existential threat or it doesn’t seem real when it’s quantifiable. It can be diagnosed and you feel crappy when those things all come together. For her, it was compelling.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Interesting. Okay, so it was no longer abstract. She made it into type two diabetes surgery. How did she get out of it?

Beverly Yates, ND

She got out of it by taking it seriously. She went and looked at all five of those factors that we talked about nutrition, stress, sleep, exercise, meal timing, realized her biggest pieces, reworking what her nutrition was, and having a plan that was part of meal timing really for her. But it really is nutrition and planning her meals. That was huge. The other piece for her actually was sleep. She realized she didn’t sleep well. She hadn’t been prioritizing it, so she became fastidious about sleeping in a regular time allowance. So eight hours sleep, so going to bed with enough time so she could get 8 hours of sleep, so she’d plan for nine and hope for eight. That worked out great for her. Meal planning made a huge difference. This meant then when it was time to be social and go out here, she already knew what she was going to eat.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Nice.

Beverly Yates, ND

Big difference. So in the course of three months she got back completely out of all of it. The last time I heard from her, she has an A1C of 5.5, so she took that seriously.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Oh, and that was just three to four months you said?

Beverly Yates, ND

She got after it. She really did.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s amazing.

Beverly Yates, ND

She still had real life going on in some stress. So I’m not saying this person lives in a bubble and has 30,000 people to weigh on them. No, no. This is a regular person.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, right. That’s really important for us. I think we assign way too much power to our genetics instead of considering what our what our family habits, our family co exposures and other factors of our family history, aside from genes, actually are teaching us what are the lifestyle pieces that we picked up from family instead?

Beverly Yates, ND

Yeah, exactly. That’s a great way to say it. Thank you for putting it that way. So now she’s the one who’s lighting the beacon for everyone else in the family to follow because they’re shocked. They didn’t know that this was possible.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. Yeah. So cool. Yeah. I remember vividly when I became the sickest in the family and like the one nobody wanted to have around, because I just felt so terrible being the coffee enema enthusiast, like, you got to try this. It is getting to be amazing. They call it that coffee enema speech, my TEDx Talk. You can literally change the whole world. One family at a time.

Beverly Yates, ND

One family at a time. Another story. Quick one to share with you is with someone who started out with an A1C of ten. So they knew they had type two diabetes. They had kind of been hiding ducking and covering and what got their attention was when their doctor said, That’s it, we’re putting you on prescription insulin. You’re going to need to inject this. And for a lot of type two diabetics, that’s a wakeup call. Now, they’ve progressed, gone through all the meds. They’ve done all the things in that conventional Western medicine allopathic world, and now they’re finally there. For people who’ve watched others than if they’ve seen their health just get so much worse when that happens, because it’s like hammering his ortho. Like, if you want this ortho to  heal, you have to stop hammering it. So the issue is insulin resistance and you keep feeding the body more insulin. You’re not solving anything, you’re just stuffing them. They become supercharged. They usually put on a bunch of weight and they feel miserable. It’s not the right approach. So long story short for her in this case, that got her attention and she again, we looked at five factors. 

Her deal was stress. The exercise that she was doing in her case wasn’t vigorous enough for her, but she was so miserable, uncomfortable and fatigued. I forgot to say that earlier in our talk, Fatigue is an overwhelming element here because of the issues with blood sugar. It’s so ironic, people have so much extra blood sugar available. They ought to be the peppiest people on the planet. But the energy represented by the extra glucose is not available because of the resistance of insulin to be able to use the energy and instead it’s in storage form, in active form. So in her case we changed up her exercise, so we had her focus on resistance training. So she had focused, focused use, focused demand for that blood sugar. We focused on stress to bring down the overall demand for blood sugar. So cortisol could start running off of things. So we fired-stressed the bully, put that back in the corner, and got out of the way. Those two things for her of the five really made that difference. Over the course of the year, A1C came down to 6.8. Right now it is at eight because I get these messages for people. It’s pretty fun. It is at a 5.9. So she’s almost out of the pre-diabetes range. But again, they did the work. They did the work. I love it.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

So. Okay, then I have to ask and this’ll be our last question. We want to end on this note. I so appreciate you sharing the case studies because I think it makes it accessible for people and we need to see and hear stories of people who have gone before us and how what worked and how they do it. So for those people who are in the audience, whether they’re just getting started taking control over their health or they’ve been struggling for a long time and they’re quite advanced in their research, they’re still not making the progress they want to. What would you say to them about if they’re in a state of overwhelm right now? Like, okay, those people did it, but I don’t know where to start. I feel like I’ve tried a lot of things. How can we get them out of a state of overwhelmedness with some pearls from Beverly today?

Beverly Yates, ND

Sure. I’m thinking of a very specific patient I’m working with right now. She’s been a type two diabetic for over 25 years in the journey, has a strong family history and has not seen others around her succeed. Right now, she’s enjoying success because we focused on two simple things. One was to get her back some native energy. So we started working on her mitochondrial health, some other things that just pop up those cells at the core level. Get the mitochondrial energy factories producing energy. It has literally gotten this woman up off the couch. Now she realizes, “Oh, with nutrition. Oh, wait a minute. So you were saying I could, like, get I could even just buy bone broth if I don’t feel like making it.” So now this is a person who was on her own, doesn’t want to cook for herself. The usual things that go on. We’re all human. I get it. Yeah. All the stuff I said to her in that first visit. Now we had our fifth consultation of the day. She has transformed how she’s doing it. She’s enjoying it. 

She told me, and this is always music to my ears. When this happens, I feel like myself again. She’s thrilled. We are doing lifestyle stuff. There’s no prescription meds required on this stuff, but you got to be willing to do the work. The thing is, I’m not asking people to do anything crazy. I’m not saying go run a marathon in a month like nothing of that kind. We’re identifying one or two usually key things that need to shift. In her case, it was her energy. She had none. The other was the self-care focused on her nutrition because it looked to me like if she could do that, the rest would come along. That’s the case. It starts, the support person goes, Oh, well, I can do this one other thing. It becomes really simple, really straightforward as they get reconnected to themselves.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Love that, honey. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today and for being such an advocate for people because I feel like every time I hear you talk about diabetes it feels so persistent, such a big problem becomes very practical, very solvable as long as they just follow your system. So thank you so much today.