Unlock Your Path To Diabetes Remission

Introduction to the Summit and Guest 0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of The Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit 2.0. We're here together and we're so glad that you're exploring your options around this particular topic for yourself and maybe perhaps on behalf of someone that you know. For this episode, I have the distinct honor to interview Dr. Will Hsu. He is a wonderful medical doctor who is a practitioner of the things that work for patient care. Clearly on this mission quite a while in committed, committed, committed to diabetes reversal and diabetes remission.

All right, Dr. Will Hsu, welcome to the Summit. Dr. Yates. Thank you so much for having me on this. The Summit. I love having you here as a co-host. And I think that as we bring this information forward, I'd love for people to have a little overview of your wonderful professional background in this area. Yeah, so I am an endocrinologist, so I've been practicing medicine for more than 20 years. A Prior to my current role, I was a professor at Harvard Med School and working at Joslin Diabetes Center.

I did research looking into why people with diabetes, what cause they So what are the underlying causes of type 2 diabetes? We have a big name called pathophysiology, but what that really means is, is why in the world do we get diabetes and what parts of the body, what's the mechanism behind all that? So it's been fascinating for about 20 years or so. And but about four and a half years ago, I joined a company called L-Nutra and really wanted to give options to our providers and also to our patients.

And that's what I love to talk to you about. All right, great. Well, we're eager to hear about what the options are, because both providers

Dr. Will Hsu's Background in Endocrinology 1:58

and of course, the patients that we providers serve are looking for options, you know, like what's going to be effective and what's actually doable. There's one thing to do it with a test tube and other thing to have it work in a person's life. Yeah, very different things. Yeah. All right. So would you explain to us what it is that you mean by remission? We know. We know we can't use the cure. Word and cure would not be accurate when it comes to type 2 diabetes. So please tell us what is remission about and how would someone know if they've effectively achieved remission?

This is very interesting. You know, this is a term that we borrowed from the ecology society right there from the cancer world, because there is no such thing as a cure for cancer as far as we know, because, you know, if you and the cancer cells can come back again and again. But there's a lot of things you can do and there's a lot of benefits to driving cancer into remission. So the first effort by the scientists around the globe on this definition of remission came around 2009 when there was a paper published by the American Diabetes Association talking about like this concept of remission.

But I think, you know, more than ten years, more than a decade has passed. And now the scientists, not only here in the United States, but also in Europe, got together about two years ago and said, hey, you know, with all the advances, with all the new knowledge we have about diabetes, we ought to set a new angle. That is, the goals for diabetes treatment should not simply be let's control diabetes for the rest of your lives with all the medicine that we have. And as long as you get your glucose in control under a certain level, then you're fine.

That is medicine practice in the past past years. But what are these? These experts are saying is we we ought to be looking for a new angle where there is a potential to stop the use of medication and at the same time driving this glucose control down to a certain level. So the official definition is to get your A1C, that hemoglobin A1C to three months diabetes marker down to less than six and a half for at least three months without the help of a drug. So now now the experts have put it now on the map

Defining Type 2 Diabetes Remission 4:18

that this is a goal that all of us should be driving towards. And that I think we are completely aligned around that goal. You know, because of all the chronic illnesses. Type two diabetes is probably the most sensitive to these lifestyle choices, especially nutrition. You can do something about it. That's the exciting part. You're not stuck, it's not hopeless, it's hopeful. So with that in mind, how is the approach that you and your career change now? Your shift over to L-Nutra? How is that supporting this?

Why is this approach different? What is it? You know, it's very interesting. Organizations such as the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, they put out a position statement about two years ago stating what really inspired this whole discussion around remission. They mentioned the outcomes that came out of bariatric surgery that we know people with cancer, these thoracic surgery, they ended up not having diabetes anymore. They're in remission. People who are on intensive lifestyle medicine with lots of weight loss.

They also experience stopping the medications and and have their glucose be stable without the help of a drug. The third thing that this American College of Lifestyle Medicine position statement talked about was actually the outcomes of the fasting or the fasting mimicking diet. And so that's what I wanted to tell you. It was for that technology that I left where I was practicing medicine to come to. L-Nutra for fasting, mimicking diet. It's a long it sounds really long. And what it means is that since fasting and certain type of fasting, not all fasting, but a certain type of fasting can drive these amazing results, that most healthful way of losing weight and other mechanism so much that it inspires these organization to think about the potential for diabetes remission.

And I'll go into a little bit more. Okay, great. So I think the fact that colleagues from different aspects of medicine are looking at this and are embracing it and understanding that we can't let the current situation with these wild increase, with number of people with type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, type 1.5 that there are, we can't let that go. Human health will not be sustained going forward and we're having younger and younger people affected by these things that frankly shouldn't be happening that way.

Right. So in that process, what role does supposedly what people think of as normal or typical aging have to play with all this? Because I know some people heads, I think you get older how you might have diabetes. It's not a big deal. They don't really appreciate how much things are breaking. Yeah, Dr. Yates I think you appreciate this very much. The that in our conventional medicine we treat diseases as if they are unrelated right and technologies treats diabetes. The cardiologist treats heart disease and neurologists treats Alzheimer's.

But when you think about it, if you have to tie all these conditions, cancers and others, all together, what is the common denominator? And you will say these things don't typically happen when people are younger like you don't you don't see people with heart attack at age 30 on and in general, generally speaking, you see them as they age.

Why Fasting Mimicking Diets Support Remission 7:34

You don't see diabetes happening. Somebody who is 28 years old, right out of college and working, not really right. I'm talking about type 2 diabetes. And so so the one common denominator is actually the process of aging. Right. And I often use this imagery like it's like a river, Right. You should think about how do you include the rivers and all the branches of a river you actually polluted by dumping toxic waste in the upstream, Right. If you dump all these bad stuff in the upstream, what happens?

You don't have to go to every branch to dump that stuff. All you need to do is dump that toxic waste into the upstream. Then and then entire river chain gets polluted. That's what happened. Aging is like that pollutant gets into our body, it leads to our bodies inability to repair. So when when it happens in the metabolic areas, diabetes happens. When it happens in the brain area, Alzheimer's, that happens when you happens in other cells in the body causing mutation, cancer happens. And so aging is really tied to many of these conditions.

And yet we are treating each diseases by each specialist as if they are unrelated. I think that that is a it's a big miss in the way we practice medicine. I agree It's it's an opportunity to do better. I think, for all concerned, especially for the patients and clients that everyone serves because there's so much unnecessary suffering and harm behind all of that. So I love your words of wisdom here. So when we think about aging, we think about type 2 diabetes, we think about remission. What's the role that weight loss plays?

Because sometimes people are so fixated on it number on a scale or weight. But body composition is a factor here too, right? So give us your thoughts, please, if you would. Is weight loss. Really a great insight there? You know, well, one thing, the aging process and then weight gain, they're correlated, right? So we often say that with every passing year are we reduce our basal metabolic rate by probably 1% or so. So that's why by the time you're in your forties, compared to the times when you're in your twenties, you lose about 1 pound.

I mean, you gain about 1 pound per year. So it's easy to see 20 years, 20 pounds, right? So aging is certainly part of that. Right. And in but it's also very interesting that the the opposite is also quite interesting when we lose weight, a lot of times we only care about the absolute body weight that's lost. You know, let's say if you're in a low calorie diet, you want to lose £10. But little do we know that when we lose weight, most of that weight can be fat, but also could be muscle. And now we're seeing very, very often that now with with a lot of the strong drugs that we see, the GLP one, the Ozempic and others, we're seeing up to about a third of all the weight loss is due to muscle loss.

Now let's say if you think about £10 of weight loss

Aging, Muscle Loss, and Blood Sugar Control 10:48

in which you lose £3 of muscle, three and a half pounds of muscle, now you might think of three, three and a half pounds of muscle is not a lot. Go to the supermarket, pick up a steak that's three and a half pounds. To gain all that back is actually really hard. But we lose it just like that without even paying attention to it. Right? This is mostly this is going to be really relevant for two population. One is people who are aging because they lose muscle naturally Now with weight loss, they're going to lose even more muscle.

It's even harder for them to gain muscle back. Number two, women, because women by nature have have, have have less muscle mass. So you want to you want to cherish those muscle mass. You don't want to give them up. Right. And and from a physiology standpoint, what's quite interesting is a lot of people don't realize all the blood sugar flowing in the bloodstream. Where do they go to? Well, they go to the cells, they go to the tissue. But by far, there's one tissue that absorbs most of that glucose.

That is the muscle, Right? 80% of all the glucose flow in the bloodstream eventually go into muscle form so we can move our body. And so 80% think about that. So with with every passing year, we're losing muscle, with every weight loss attempt, we're losing muscle. My goodness. There's less sync for these glucose molecules to go to. What do they do? They stay in the blood causing. Right. Leading to insulin resistance and all the complications of elevated blood glucose. And that is just a terrible idea.

And so aging, the loss of muscle mass, what we do to our body to lose weight, there's a lot of insight I think we we think can be gained from from this discussion here. The ways to lose muscle, sorry, the way to lose weight, the best smart way to lose weight. We have to think about what is that we should not be aiming weight loss at a at every cost that you know there is. I agree with you 100%. The observation that I've seen over the years and most recently is that people's obsession around weight loss is a number on a scale is misguided.

You need to know what your body composition is and understand that. And I think that's where the conversation will shift in people like yourself, you know, others who are like minded. You know, we're going to be the thought leaders around this because people have to be better informed about the beauty of their muscle mass. We have to build it and increase it, preserve it if you already have it. But whatever you do, don't lose it. It's so important there. And and so a lot of people would lose weight by restricting calories.

That's kind of the most common. I mean, there are other ways, but but intuitively, people say, oh, you know, I need to lose weight out of. Right. Which is reduce my calorie intake. That could be true. But remember that a third of that weight loss could be due to muscle loss. There is a yet a very distinct way of weight loss that is really more healthful and that is through fasting. Fasting is actually a different mechanism than just eating low calories for six months. Right. And I often use this analogy, you know, when we are losing weight little bit by little bit, you know, £1 per week, £1 per month, very slow weight loss.

What happened? It doesn't create any reaction in the body other than. Oh, it's a net in a net out. Okay. You know, I'm eating less than what I'm putting out. Okay. I'm going to lose weight that in that that is simple mathematics. So what that does is the body says, okay, you know what I mean? A calorie deficit, okay? Muscle gives some calories away. You know, fat gives some calories away. So I can sustain that in my body. The body doesn't discriminate where that savings all come out. Right. So muscle could be burned.

Fat can be burned. Now, when we fast in the right way. And we're going to what that right away is when we fast for extended period of time. It's a stress to the body. The body says, oh, my goodness, there's no food. Right? And the body said, Well, because there's no food, we're supposed to go hunt, We're supposed to go gather. So there is actually entrenched system in the body that, for example, stimulates the growth hormone secretion and growth hormone. And it's other acts as well. Then come and support the integrity of the muscle.

In other words, when you says to lose weight, you actually protect muscle mass during that process. Now, I'm not saying you've you fast for 30 days and you're not going to lose your muscle right. What I'm saying is that the mechanism of action is very different because now it preferentially goes to the fat, burn the fat while protecting muscle. And this is very logical because you think about how all these species, all of our life forms existing on Earth is when there is no food. The animal's got to go out and gather.

So if during that process your muscle gets weaker and weaker, weaker, that species would have died a long time ago? Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's great to make those two statements about the different mechanism and what's preserving our muscle. Right. So now that you've made such a great case for the importance of muscle and maintaining it and growing it and having a great reservoir, if you will, for blood, you're for glucose to park in. Please tell us what you do with your programs and your offerings at al-Nusrah, because you all have put together a system that absolutely gives people the keys to being able to handle their blood sugar weight if they need to correct that and preserve their muscle mass.

I think some of our listeners, as they listen to us, they say Fantastic, there's no way I'm not going to fast, I don't want to fast, I'm hungry, I like to eat. And this is where I think now we're in the 21st century. You know, we don't have to just like have you go to the mountains

How the Fasting Mimicking Program Works 16:48

and hide for five days and fast and pray, right? That's right. We're in the 21st century by leveraging our understanding of how the molecules inside the cells work, work we can actually now simulate or mimic fasting. That's what fasting mimicking diet means, the FMD and the sugar for fasting, mimicking diet. It's a set of pressure, precision nutrition that gives you the benefits of fasting without actually going hungry or fast. Real fast with water for five days is a five day structured meal kit.

Everything you need comes in that box. But our program, because he works, we also especially for people with diabetes, since this is a diabetes summit here, people with diabetes, we want to make sure that people do this fasting even with nutrition very safely. So that journey is actually over, is overseen by a team of physicians and dietician to hold you through that entire journey to reduce your medications over time so that we can truly reach two goals. One is to reach diabetes, remission. Remember I mentioned earlier it was in us is six and a half with no mass for at least three months.

And number two, and this is something I think will be very interesting to our listener is remember I mentioned aging as a big factor here. When you says it's 70, there's evidence now and we have actually by the time this summit is aired, we will have new published study to show that when you do these prolonged fasting with nutrition, with FMD, you're able to reverse or decrease biologic age. And so think about this. It's all natural. It doesn't involve medications. It's five days a month, repeated, done repeatedly, done repeatedly under the watch of a physician.

So you can reduce your medications, reduce your agency, and also reduce your biologic age. This is why I left where I was to come and help people to have a natural way to drive type two diabetes readmission. Beautiful. So with that, then, you know, one of the thoughts that I have, particularly for those people here are some of the attendees who are here in the U.S. It would be great if they knew how they could actually pay for this program, because I know sometimes people are looking to make sure they're making smart decisions both for their wealth and their health.

Is my understanding correct, that people can use health savings accounts or flexible spending account plans to pay for this pretax dollars, essentially? Yeah, that's exactly right. If your employer has these provision and you can certainly use this health savings account to pay towards that, we we certainly our end goal is to get it reimbursed, you know, soon as medicine is we are part of the drivers of this of this movement. But we also have different tier programs. We would invite you to come to our website to learn they are coaching only by our longevity and diabetes coaches and dietitian coach.

There's the counseling program. There is our metabolic health programs run by our R.D. and with our FMD Solutions. And there is also our flagship program, what we call l need L-Nutra Health for diabetes. So, so I will invite you to come to our website. It's L-nutrahealth.com L-nutrahealth.com to find out more. All right, great. Thank you for telling us where we can find these wonderful resources and people can check it out and make the choice That's right for them. I'm curious, is L-Nutra Health available in other countries outside of the United States?

Access, International Availability, and Closing Thoughts 20:38

We're actively working right now. I have colleagues since we are in over 14 countries right now, our company portfolio, product portfolio Europe will be launching this hopefully by the time this program is air. The model in Italy and likely UK and other places, Asia-Pacific, places like Taiwan and other places as well so far. So we're very excited that to make this available to not only here in the United States but also around the globe. That's so great to know. So our international friends, you know, they are trying their best to expand the span of the goodness and go around the globe.

So keep checking the website If you're not if it doesn't currently show your country, I'd say check back in every month to be sure, because I know that the team behind the scenes at L-Nutra is working really hard to expand the help because this issue with Type 2 diabetes is an international phenomenon. It's really been amazing to watch this. It is incredible. Beverly the burden of this condition exceeds over 500 million people. I mean, the mind boggling number. Wow. Yeah. And it is the most expensive chronic disease paid for by the government through insurance and others.

So we're doing a lot of good by empowering people and a natural means to drive type two diabetes remission. Yep, I've you know that that stands alone right there. All right. Any final thoughts as we come to wrap up this episode? You know, I think, you know, our listeners on this series, I think they are a different kind of people. They are they want to be empowered. They want to learn. They want to stay at the forefront of technology and what's new here. And I think, you know, this is absolutely great news, right?

Because because it's these people who want to take care of themselves. They don't want to just rely on a physician, although they could be great partners in your health care. But but take health in your own hand. Learn as much as you can. Look out for the resources that we have offer on this Summit. There's so many experts that have come by, come on the programs, and then hopefully you also find our program exciting and and relevant for for you as you take control of your own health. Absolutely.

So, friends, please take advantage of this wonderful offer that Dr. Will Hsu has put out here. Because, you know, having put this together, having the science behind it, the research is done. It's already packaged, ready to go. People are waiting and able to help. And so I think if you can find any way to say, yes, please do, it's an opportunity to reclaim your health. This way. Your health span can equal your life span for so many people. One of the things I hear most commonly is if I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself if I was younger.

Dr. Yates Well said, no regrets. I think, you know, today's that the first steps you could take towards your your better health. Absolutely. All right, friends, you know what to do. Go check it out. All right. Thank you so much for being a wonderful co-host and a partner with me here on the Summit. You know, it's really great. The synergy is so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Yates.