Ep 266 – The Biggest Myth About Diabetes with Cyrus Khambatta, PhD

In this episode of Muscles by Brussels Radio, Ben and Giacomo sit down with Cyrus Khambatta, PhD, co-founder of Mastering Diabetes, to unpack the science behind insulin resistance, diabetes, and long-term metabolic health. Cyrus shares his own journey living with type 1 diabetes and explains why his diagnosis ultimately led him to dedicate his career to researching nutrition and helping others improve their health through a whole food plant-based diet.

The conversation explores the differences between type 1, type 2, prediabetes, and insulin resistance, while breaking down why skeletal muscle plays such a powerful role in blood sugar regulation. Cyrus discusses the relationship between saturated fat, carbohydrate metabolism, and insulin sensitivity, addresses common misconceptions surrounding keto and carnivore diets, and explains why exercise and nutrition work together to improve metabolic health. The episode also covers GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, discussing where these drugs may be appropriate, where they may fall short, and why lasting lifestyle change remains essential for long-term success.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ben (00:00)
Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Vegan Proteins Muscles by Brussels Radio. My name is Ben, and today I’m joined by Giacomo and our guest, who is Cyrus Khambata, co-founder of Evolution Health and co-author of the best-selling book, Mastering Diabetes. He’s a type one diabetic himself with a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, and he’s helped thousands of people improve insulin sensitivity and blood sugar management using a whole food plant-based diet.

many of you may recognize him on appearances on plant based platforms such as Ritual, The Proof, Forks Over Knives, and The Exam Room. so Cyrus, thank you for giving your time and being here today.

Cyrus Khambatta (00:34)
Absolutely. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Jack Mo. I can’t wait. Let’s have some fun.

Giacomo (00:37)
This is cool.

Ben (00:37)
Awesome.

So I think usually before we get into the nitty gritty and as Giacomo loves to do, we need to have a little bit of casual chat at the beginning because you know, Giacomo’s worst nightmare is when we jump right into the topic. So Cyrus, what’s what’s going on with you? What are you up to today? How’s your day going? How’s your week going? And we’ll start there before we get into anything more.

Cyrus Khambatta (01:00)
Yeah,

for sure. No, I appreciate you asking that. So, truth be told, as you can see, I’m in a hotel room right now and I’ve been traveling for the better part of the last month. I went to my family is originally from California. So my wife and I and our daughter live in Florida. So we went to California, not just for like a week. We were there for the entire month, going from place to place to place, which is awesome. the main purpose of our journey actually was to go to a graduation party for my youngest niece.

Who is youngest niece in California, who’s 18 years old. She just graduated from high school. She’s a phenom soccer player. She got recruited to go play D1 soccer at the Air Force Academy. And she literally starting today is her first day of basic training. So she’s about to get her, excuse my language, her ass kicked for the next six weeks. but she’s also like real fierce and she’s rugged. So I’m pretty sure that this girl’s gonna just like cruise through the whole thing. But it’s really fun to be able to like go and have like a send-off party for her.

You know, and then finally like we’re I’m in a hotel room because we’re at a a scientific conference and I go to a couple of these every year so that, you know, Giacomo joins me on, you know, the the holistic holiday at sea cruise. That’s where I got to meet him in the first place. But, you know, it’s a bunch of super nerds, you know, convening to talk about everything related to plant based nutrition and you know, hopefully learn something in the process.

Giacomo (02:12)
Okay. I I wanna be part I wanna be part of this like super nerd conversation. What do you even tell what do you do? How does that what does that look like?

Ben (02:12)
Jacoma, jump in here.

Cyrus Khambatta (02:20)
Okay. So the way that these things are structured is that it’s kind of similar to the cruise where it’s like every hour of every day there’s, you know, a presentation and it could be given by a cardiologist on one hour, and then it’s a a breast health specialist the next hour, and then it’s a prostate specialist the next hour, and then it’s a yoga instructor the next hour, you name it, right? So for like four days, it’s literally just like presenter after presenter after presenter. And, you know, I’ve been in this world of

You know, I’ll call it like metabolic health or like reversing chronic disease using food as medicine for the last nine years. And I feel like I’ve done a good amount of reading, but what I come to learn at these conferences is that it is literally an endless world. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend reading, whether they’re books or primary scientific literature, it doesn’t matter. Like there’s always something to be learned from either research that you haven’t read.

Or, you know, results that come from a particular doctor who’s been investigating, you know, cancer development for the last 30 years and has come to a realization based off of their own client work. So long story short, I come to these things to be able to like network with other scientific specialists and to like open my mind to the fact that like plant-based nutrition, honestly, is like the gift that keeps on giving. That’s the way I look at it.

Right. No matter what lens you look at it through, whether you come at it from the a you know lens of like, I’m trying to keep my blood glucose under control, it’s a win. Then you talk to people who have lost weight and you know they’ve lost sixty pounds and kept it off for like two decades. That’s a win. Right? Then you’ve talked to people who have recovered from a coronary artery, bypass surgery very effectively, and now they’re climbing Kiliman Mount Kilimanjaro. That’s a win, you know? So it’s like thing after thing after thing, no matter how you slice it, I feel like

Plant-based nutrition from a cancer prevention strategy, cancer recovery strategy, it’s awesome. Cardiovascular health improvements, it’s a win. Diabetes, it’s a win. improving muscular strength, it’s a win. Endurance, it’s a win. Adding 10 years to your life, it’s a win. And being able at these conferences just a lot shows me just how powerful this like one specific tool is for so many different aspects of life.

Ben (04:24)
So I have a question for you. You mentioned there it’s like the more you get into it, the more you realize that what what you don’t know. and I think that there’s there’s sort of people might be familiar with like the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s like when you start learning about something, you don’t really know that much, then you learn a little bit and you feel like you know a lot, and then the more that you learn, the less do you feel like you really know. how do you look at that from a lens of that being like a positive, encouraging thing? Because I think a lot of people would be like, wow, like there’s so much that I don’t know. maybe then they start to feel

some sort of way about themselves or, you know, the fact that, you know, I I still have so far to go. How do you look at that as like a you know, more from the lens of wow, like there’s so much out there for me to learn and get better as like a a practitioner? how do you kind of view that and and what’s your mindset with that?

Cyrus Khambatta (05:07)
Yeah, great question. So in order to answer that question, I’m gonna go backwards in time to the year two thousand and seven when I first started doing I studied a PhD program in nutritional biochemistry. The reason I wanted to start that program in the first place was because I had felt such a rapid transformation in my own personal health, having adopted a plant based diet four years prior in the year two thousand and three. So quick backstory, living with type one diabetes in two thousand and two is when I was diagnosed.

switched over to eating a plant-based diet in 2003 after one year of feeling terrible. Blood glucose all over the place, insulin use high, energy levels low, anxiety, depression, joint pain, you name it, the whole thing. And then when I switched over to eating a plant-based diet, it literally felt like I was a an iPhone on 6% battery, stuck it into a wall charger. And within like, I kid you not, 48 hours, I was like, dang, I’m back. Like this is real. Let’s go. And then from that moment onwards, it was like I could exercise as l I kid you not, as much as I wanted to.

I could exercise for like six hours a day. And the only thing that was stopping me was that I didn’t have six hours for of free time. Right. You know, I was recovering from exercise very well. My blood glucose was under control. My insulin use had come down. My and my general energy levels were higher than ever before. I was sleeping like a champ. I was pooping three times a day. I was like, this is fucking awesome. Right. So having felt that in the year 2003, and then continued onwards, finally 2007, I was like, all right, let’s put some science behind this thing.

Then when I started the PhD program, it was like the image that I have is like, imagine walking into an office and you don’t know what to expect. And then as soon as you get in this office, you realize that there’s like one room that has like piles and piles and piles of papers and books. And you’re like, crap, I gotta learn all that information. And then you walk into the next room and there’s bigger piles of papers and books. Then you walk into the next laboratory and there’s more piles and more papers and more books. You get to a point where you’re just like,

God, like I can’t read all this stuff. I can’t learn this stuff. And even if I did, I wouldn’t remember 90% of it. Right. So I learned way back in the day that like when presented with like universes of information, don’t get overwhelmed. Find the little tiny microscopic niche that interests you. Start there and then just kind of like broaden it a little bit. Right. And then over the course of time, you can eventually learn more and more and more information. But don’t get overwhelmed because truth be told,

There’s too much information in this world and my brain’s not big enough to be able to hold it all. Right? So you’re right. When I first started learning plant-based nutrition, I was like, I’m a god. I know everything there is to know. And then all of a sudden I was like, wait a minute, I’m not a god. Like, you know, I know one of the things they kind of joke about in the PhD is that when you graduate with a PhD, you rem you learn that you don’t know anything.

Right. That’s one of the things that a lot of PhD people will tell you is that they’re just like, yep, there’s a lot that I don’t know and I will never know, but I’m totally cool with it. Right. And so I actually get motivated when I walk into new universes because it gives me endless questions to ask and endless information to learn. And I get to pick and choose which questions I ask at what moment in time because they interest me and because it has the opportunity to help myself and other people.

Ben (07:58)
I feel like when you become, I guess you could say, an expert or or at least you know enough in a certain domain, then your kind of curiosity and when you discover a new topic or a a new idea, becoming a beginner again, it’s like this really rewarding experience because you’ve been through that before and you’ve, you know, gained excellence and mastery in a certain domain. And then when you become that beginner again, there’s that that feeling of, wow, like there’s all these things for me to discover. And like you were talking about, you can view it

in a negative light, but you can also look at it from a like what is there to gain here? Let me just start small and let and let me see how that goes. I think there’s a lot of parallels to to fitness as well. But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about you mentioned getting you know having your your diagnosis in 2002 and having a lot of symptoms kind of you know a after that diagnosis or I’m curious are are the were those symptoms something that you struggled with throughout like childhood and your life and you just never really had like an answer for it or was that something that kind of started to manifest

Later down the line, what was that process like?

Giacomo (08:52)
Yeah.

Cyrus Khambatta (08:52)
Yeah, that’s good question. so truth be told, I never, to the best of my knowledge, I don’t know if I had any overt symptoms of like type one diabetes when I was a kid. Right? Type one diabetes is one of those things that like just kind of happens. You know, you wake up one day and all of a sudden you’re like, hmm, I feel like shit. What’s going on? And then you do a little bit of investigation, you show up at the ER and they’re like, huh, your blood glucose is six times higher than it’s supposed to be.

We should probably put you on insulin in order to bring your blood glucose down. And then 24 hours later, they’re like, hey, hate to break it to you, but you have type 1 diabetes. And you’re like, cool, good talk. Thank you very much. Right. And it’s like it’s a very sudden onset. but the funny thing is that I was I have three autoimmune conditions, right? So the first one that I that I actually started to experience was hypothyroidism, which is Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, autoimmune. Very common in today’s world, but back in 2003, it wasn’t as loud.

Number two, I used to have hair. I used to have like eyebrows and eyelashes, and I used to have some, you know, facial hair. But then in at about that time, I started to lose my hair in like very awkward patches. And it would like I I had like a patch over here and then a patch like right here on my hairline, and then another one in the back of my head. And another buddy of mine looked at me after, you know, six months of this, and he’s like, Hey, I hate to break it to you, but like don’t take this the wrong way, but like

You look weird. We’re shaving your head tonight, and you can kiss your hair goodbye. And I was like, cool. Let me sound like a plan. So we go to the store, we get a bic razor, we then shave off all my head, or my you know, all the hair on my head, and I go down to like basically skin. And then from that moment onwards, I kid you not, the the remaining hair that was on my body, like a little bit of chest hair, a little bit of pubic hair, a little bit of armpit hair, gone within 24 hours. It all just fell right off. So somehow my head, having gotten rid of that hair, was a signal to the rest of the follicles on my head.

Body to ditch their hair. I still can’t explain it. That was number two. And then number three was type 1 diabetes. And all three of those set in within like, I don’t know, six to nine months or so. So it was kind of like a rapid progression of like one and then two and then triple whammy. And I was like, ugh. All right. These are probably connected. What did I do? Did I smoke too much weed? Did I drink too much alcohol? Did I not eat enough protein? Am I eating too much inflammatory foods? Like I didn’t even know what questions to ask at that time.

Giacomo (10:33)
Weird.

Cyrus Khambatta (10:54)
Because I’m like a 22-year-old kid trying graduate college. Right. But to answer your question, if we go backwards in time from like 2002 was when I got diagnosed, if we go backwards to the year like 1980, I don’t know, six, nineteen eighty-eight, when I was growing up in Palo Alto, I do remember there were times where I would look down at my legs and I was like, huh, it’s a big old bald patch on my right tibia. What’s up with that?

Right. And I always reasoned that it was because I played soccer and I would wear shin guards and I had socks on and I would get kicked and I would get bruised. And I was like, that’s probably the reason why that hair’s not growing. But if you kind of go backwards in time, I I I think that I actually had alopecia for a very long time. And it just kind of started on my lower body very, very, very slowly, and then eventually made its way all the way up to my birth my head, and then basically took over my entire body. Right. So

Here we are today. I don’t, truth be told, I don’t have many answers for like the the main question that I think a lot of people who are living with some form of autoimmune diagnosis have are what did I do? Was this me? Did I was this my fault? Right? Cause if I could go backwards in time and maybe like rewrite some of the stuff that I used to do, knowing what I know now, I might make different decisions. Right. But no doctor has ever been able to

link together those three autoimmune conditions. Even within this plant-based world, you know, I know some of this I I’m privileged to be in the presence of some of the smartest human beings I’ve ever met before. And even they, they throw their hands up in the air, they’re like, I can’t answer that question for you, dude. I don’t know what is happening inside of your immune system that basically has set into motion three different three different conditions. So after having lived with these three different conditions for

probably the better part of like three to four years, I got to a point where I was like, you know what? I’m gonna stop asking that question. I think it’s the wrong question. Because I don’t think I’ll ever have an answer to that question. And even if I did have an answer to that question and I was like, it’s because, you know, I drank too much beer when I was in high school. Let’s just pretend like it was that. Right. I’m like, okay, cool, sweet. That’s intellectually, you know, stimulating. What am I gonna do about it now? Right.

I’d much rather care about like what can I do right here, right now, to set myself up for success so that I can live on this planet as healthy as possible for the longest period of time possible. Right? Yeah, go for it.

Giacomo (13:01)
I have an interesting question for you. So obviously

you work with people and you help them master diabetes. So when people come to you for coaching and they’re looking for the program with the formula the whatever, like, how long do you think it’s how long does it typically take someone to cut through all of that blame where they put it on themselves and they’re like worried about how it happened and they don’t know how to fight the past and and get to the where you have logically been able to get to on your own for yourself? I’m I’m ready. It’s time to do this. Like, what does that process look like with the people that you work with?

Cyrus Khambatta (13:29)
Great question. I would say it differs from person to person because if you’re dealing with somebody who has an autoimmune version of diabetes, which is either type one, which is what I have, or type one point five, which is adult onset autoimmune diabetes, which usually happens after the age of thirty, all right. Oftentimes those are the patients that ask themselves or those are those are the people who ask themselves, What did I do? Is this my fault? You know, like did I eat something incorrectly, or was there was I

you know, using too much, was there too much electromagnetic radiation in front of me from the job that I used to have at the telephone company, who know who you know. But when you’re dealing with somebody who is living with pre-diabetes or type two diabetes, it’s usually a different mindset because what the research demonstrates is that pre-diabetes and type two diabetes are a result of your lifestyle. It’s a result of all of the 700 million decisions that you’ve made up until that moment in time.

And pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes don’t just show up on your doorstep one day, like type 1. They progress and they develop over the course of a decade or more. And most of the people who get a diagnosis, like let’s say they go to a doctor and the doctor says, Hey, by the way, Mrs. Johnson, your A1C is now 6.2%. You officially have pre-diabetes. That can be a shocker to a lot of people where they’re like, Whoa, hold on a second. What? Pre-diabetes? I heard about that on commercials.

You know, I watched that, you know, I watched that pharmaceutical commercial of that couple playing tennis and now I have that. Does that mean I have to take that medication? Right. So it can be a little bit of like a a rude awakening. But those people usually can go back and they’re like, you know what? I did it to myself. I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I’m 35 pounds overweight. I haven’t exercised in two decades. I drink a decent amount of alcohol, and I love to eat a lot of meat. And you’re like, Cool, sweet.

Sounds like a plan.

We got a lot of work to do. Let’s move, let’s move forward, right? so I think it’s a just a what what I’m trying to get at is that it’s a little bit more obvious for people who are diagnosed with pre-diabetes and type two as a generality. And oftentimes what I find and what the research also supports is that being overweight is the thing. Being overweight is the number one most powerful domino.

That sets into motion all the other downstream dominoes. So whether you’re 15 pounds overweight or 40 pounds overweight or 65 pounds overweight or 120 pounds overweight, that excess adipose mass, especially if it’s concentrated around your abdomen, which is your visceral adipose depot, as you guys both know, that stuff is extremely inflammatory. And so

The inflammatory burden that is created by having all this excess mass is so significant that tissues go into the self-defense mode where they’re like, please, please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me. But the inflammatory processes that are originating inside of the adipose tissue then make their way inside of the liver, inside of the kidney, inside of the muscle tissues, inside of your brain, inside of your thyroid gland, inside of your vasculature, and they start to permeate those tissues.

And then start to cause tissue dysfunction, which then leads to a whole collection of problems known as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-diabetes, type two diabetes, chronic kidney disease, fatty liver disease, pre dementia, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and the list goes on. Right? So does that answer your question?

Giacomo (16:35)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ben (16:36)
I have a kind of follow-up question while we’re on the topic of type one versus like pre diabetes, type two diabetes. Could you just for our listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar with the differences between those two, just give like a really basic rundown of what that is and then also if your coaching or recommendations then change based on that or if it li ends up being largely similar?

Cyrus Khambatta (16:56)
Good question. Okay. So let’s kind of give a rundown. There’s one, two, three, four, I’ll call it five different flavors of diabetes. Okay. Flavor number one is called type one diabetes. That’s an autoimmune version of diabetes that usually sets in before the age of thirty. All right. And it’s a rapid progression from the time that you are diagnosed to full insulin dependence. What does that mean? That means that autoimmune type one diabetes is basically when your immune system

Targets the insulin secreting beta cells in your pancreas for destruction. Okay. Again, the we don’t fully know as a scientific community what are the reasons. If you did presented with type 1 diabetes today, nobody, I don’t think, can come up to you and be like, Ben, the reason why you have type 1 diabetes is because you had too much milk when you were a kid, right? It’s usually a constellation of problems, right? But there are definitely things you can do from a young age that can predispose you towards.

Autoimmune development and type one diabetes. Period of story. So long story short, type one is autoimmune quick onset, like we talked about earlier, but also rapid progression to full insulin dependence, meaning within usually about 12 months, maybe 18 months at the most, you go from you know needing a couple of units of insulin, six units, ten units, fifteen units a day, to 30 units a day. And that means that you no longer synthesize endogenous insulin from your own pancreas. All right.

So beta cells kind like die quickly and then they die a slow death over the course of the next 12 to 18 months. All right. That’s number one. Number two, type 1.5 diabetes, which is the exact same thing as type 1 diabetes, with two caveats. Number one, it happens after the age of 30, and it’s a slow progression towards full insulin dependence. Okay, so it’s it’s a relatively rapid onset, but it’s a really slow condition.

That inches its way towards needing more insulin over the course of time. And some people, you know, have been living with pre-uh with type 1.5 diabetes for like a decade, and they still don’t need that much insulin because they’re still synthesizing endogenous insulin as well, right? So it’s very individual from person to person. So that’s flavor number one, flavor number two. Flavor number three is pre-diabetes. Prediabetes is the warning sign when.

You have developed a separate condition known as insulin resistance. So, insulin resistance is the underlying condition that is concentrated mainly in your liver and mainly in your muscle tissue. So let’s talk about muscle after this, because obviously that’s a huge focus of what you guys do. Long story short, insulin resistance is a condition that takes residence inside of your liver and takes residence inside of your muscle tissue.

And over the course of time makes both of those tissues resistant to absorbing glucose from your blood. So as a result of that, as those tissues become more and more resistant to absorbing glucose from your blood, well, guess what? The glucose gets trapped in your blood. And as a result of that, your blood glucose starts to climb a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, a little bit the next day, and so on and so forth. And as you you know, over the course of many years, you end up.

With an e an A1C value, which is a sort of like three-month average blood glucose value that begins to climb and then eventually gets into an elevated state. If you can catch it at that moment, then you’re like, okay, hold on a second, I’m on my way to developing the next flavor, which is type two diabetes, and you can change course and you can go backwards down into the non-diabetic territory. But you gotta know what to do, right? But if you don’t catch it, or you don’t care, or you

are trying and you’re you acting on a lot of information that comes from TikTok from influencers that act like they know what they’re talking about, or you’re following a ketogenic diet, or you’re following a carnivorous diet because it sounds sexy and it’s something that enables you to eat more meat. Well guess what? Type two diabetes is likely to happen to you. So then you progress to stage four or flavor number four, which is type two diabetes. That’s when your A1C is now elevated six point five percent or beyond. And that’s basically saying, all right,

There’s a sufficient amount of insulin resistance inside of your liver and muscle tissue, so much so that your blood glucose is not just minorly elevated, but a lot elevated, right? It’s still reversible. You can still go from type two down to prediabetes and then down to non-diabetes or non-diabetic, but it’s going to take a little bit more effort and a little bit more time. Okay. But it’s like the full-blown version of insulin resistance inside of your liver and muscle tissue. All right. The fifth

Flavor is called type three diabetes, which has kind of gained a little bit of popularity over the course of the last decade. Type three diabetes is dementia, aka Alzheimer’s disease. Okay. When I say aka, I mean cognitive decline that affects your brain that can promote vascular dementia that can then become Alzheimer’s disease, but does not necessarily have to be. Okay. So you can think of it as a a simple way to think about it is it’s either diabetes of your brain or it’s

Insulin resistance of your brain. Similar mechanisms that happen inside of your liver and muscle tissue, which make them resistant to absorbing glucose, happen inside of your brain. And before you know it, your brain is now in an impaired cognitive state because its primary fuel, the fuel that it is designed to oxidize for literally 99.9999% of your entire waking life, which is glucose, has now been compromised. And as a result of that, your brain.

Glucose concentration increases in your blood. Now your brain is taking a hit. Your brain is saying, hold on a second, my fuel, where is my fuel? I don’t have enough fuel. I’m resistant to that fuel. I need help. And then that can set into motion, you know, some significant cognitive impairment over the course of time.

Giacomo (22:05)
Is there any coming back from that?

Cyrus Khambatta (22:06)
That’s a great question. That is an open area of research. And the answer is from what I’ve seen, that the the Sherzai’s, Dean and Aisha Sherzai, who are two leaders in the world of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, what they’ve demonstrated is that by the time you get to dementia and/or Alzheimer’s disease, I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but it is extremely difficult to go the opposite direction. Okay? I do believe that there may be some

I don’t know, interventions over the course of the next decade or so that we’re gonna, you know, that that will help this process. But as of today, right here and right now, no matter how clean your diet is, no matter how much you start to move your body, no matter how optimistic you become, you can probably slow the progression from vascular dementia to Alzheimer’s disease. And you can maybe even arrest the process. But to go backwards to non-dementia or like optimal brain status is probably not is not ha not a

Is not realistic. However, there’s a state before that called MCI, which is mild cognitive impairment. And mild cognitive impairment is basically, you can think of it as like pre-diabetes, to you know, it’s the warning sign, the warning state before dementia sets in. And when you’re in MCI and you start to recognize, you’re like, hold on a second, my memory’s not working like it used to. Hold on a second, I can’t find my words like I used to. Hold on a second. I can’t remember things.

I’m I’m having a difficult time with places and names, my spatial unawareness is is it’s weird. At that moment in time, there’s lots of things that you can do to go in the opposite direction. So if you catch it early, now you have a chance to chance to change course and start to go back into the, you know, non, I’ll refer to it as non-diabetic or non-insulin resistant state, which can make a significant impact.

Ben (23:34)
Thanks for breaking down the different kinds. I didn’t even know that there were there were five di different kinds that you could kind of think about. So I’m I’m learning things. so you had mentioned muscle, and that was something that you wanted to come back to and touch on. And I think for a lot of folks, when they think of muscle, they think of just the aesthetics of it or maybe, you know, they might think about some of the strength components you know, as you age and maintaining independence and being able to do those.

Cyrus Khambatta (23:39)
Yeah, it’s crazy.

Ben (23:55)
activities of daily living, but I don’t think there’s often as much awareness around some of the metabolic impacts that I think you are kind of getting to in that discussion. So I’d love for you to just talk a little bit about why you know, having muscle mass, skeletal muscle tissue is so helpful for managing, you know, some of these conditions.

Cyrus Khambatta (24:13)
Yeah. It’s it’s it’s like I mean, how much time you got. We could talk about this for the next six hours. Okay. Here’s the way that I like think about it. Okay, we said earlier insulin resistance is a condition that affects your liver and your muscle. All right. If you take a look at your liver by weight, your liver you weighs approximately, I think it’s seven percent of total body mass. Okay. So let’s say, Ben, give me an idea how much you weigh.

Giacomo (24:16)
Hmm.

Ben (24:33)
like one hundred seventy five.

Cyrus Khambatta (24:34)
Okay, so 175 times 0.07. So you your liver weighs approximately twelve pounds. We’ll call it twelve to thirteen pounds. All right. your liver weighs thirteen pounds, but

Your muscle tissue can weigh anywhere from 78 pounds to 88 pounds, somewhere in that ballpark, depending on how active you are and how much strength training you perform. All right. So think about the the difference in weight, right? We’re looking at 12 pounds versus call it 80 pounds, right? It’s massive. Your muscle tissue is freaking massive, okay?

But the best part about your muscle tissue, there’s so many, there’s so many positive advantages to like building strong muscle tissue. But to start, we’ll say your muscle tissue, the quality of your muscle tissue is 100% underneath under your control. You are the one that gets to shape it, you’re the one that gets to design it, you’re the one that gets to mold it, you’re the one that gets to decide how much stress you’re gonna impart onto it, you’re the one that gets to decide how big you want it to be, right? And as a result of that.

You have an opportunity to not only change the shape and the look and the size and the feel of it, but behind the scenes, what you’re actually doing is you’re creating an engine, which is so unbelievably powerful, and you are building a very powerful blood glucose sucking machine. And truth be told, you are also building a blood pressure reducing machine. You are also building a

Cholesterol-reducing machine without even knowing it. All right. So I like to think of muscle tissue as being the hungriest tissue in your body. And when you use your muscle tissue on a regular basis through a combination of both resistance exercise as well as cardiovascular exercise, you create a machine that is so powerful that while you’re sleeping, while you’re sitting at a desk,

While you’re chit chatting with friends, the machine is saying, feed me, feed me, feed me, feed me, feed me, give me fuel, give me fuel, give me fuel, give me fuel, give me fuel. And so what that machine has to do is look into your blood in order to find appropriate fuels. Okay. So if you’re let’s pretend like you are a quadricep muscle, you’re the, you know, you’re the vastus lateralis and you’re you’re big and you’ve been like exercised a lot pretty heavily.

Right. And you’re sitting there and you’re like, all right, I’m pretty hungry right now. I need some fuel for a couple of reasons. Number one, I gotta go do a bunch of repair to all those micro tears that have happened over the course of the last, you know, 24 hours, 48 hours, two months, six months. So give me some amino acids so I can go and rebuild this muscle tissue and get the architecture stronger so that I’m more resistant to exercise the next time it happens. Right. So you need amino acids. Number two, you also need glucose.

When you get that glucose, you’re gonna take that glucose in, you’re gonna oxidize that glucose on demand and use that as a fuel to generate ATP. But in addition to that, you’re also gonna take some of that glucose and you’re gonna put it into that glycogen granule and you’re gonna store it for the next time it’s needed during exercise. And then in addition to that, you’re also gonna look for some fatty acids because fatty acids are a fuel, and fatty acids, you have a temporary fatty acid reservoir, and it’s a triglyceride pool. You’re basically gonna say, I need some fatty acids, I’m gonna stick it in a triglyceride pool, and I’m gonna use that for fat oxidation.

right here and right now, and I’m also going to store it for the next time exercise happens. Okay. So you’re sitting there and you’re constantly asking for those three fuels: glucose, amino acids, and fatty acids. And because of that, if the glucose and amino acids and fatty acids are not present in sufficient amounts inside of the blood, then you, as the muscle tissue, are going to be relatively starved and you’re not going recover as well and you’re not going to be able to perform as well for the next bound of exercise, right? So if that’s happening not only in your vastus lateralis, but it’s happening in multiple different

muscle tissues all throughout your body because you’re constantly moving your body and you’re able to you perform exercise frequently. Well then guess what? Your entire machine is hungry, which gives you the opportunity as the user to say, all right, cool. I’m gonna go eat the, I’m gonna first of all, I need to get a sufficient amount of fuel. I need to get an appropriate number of calories. I need to get an appropriate number of carbohydrate an appropriate mass of carbohydrate and fat and protein every single day. And then I’m gonna need a whole bunch of micronutrients also to stimulate the, you know,

The oxidation and use usage of these fuels. But my point here is that you, as the user, have an opportunity to increase your calorie intake. Because the more active you become, the higher your basal metabolic rate will go, the higher your total energy expenditure will go. And as a result of that, you’re like, cool, sweet. Now I get to I I earn the ability to eat more food, to eat more calories. Okay. So if you’re active on a regular basis, your muscle tissue has

Becomes, number one, extremely insulin sensitive. What that means is that the insulin resistance, which has accumulated over the course of time, mainly through excess fatty acids that you’ve been consuming over the course of many months to weeks to years, right? Those fatty acids end up getting oxidized. They end up getting burned, they end up getting set to the mitochondria, converted in ATP. And as a result of that, the fatty acid pool gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Now, here’s a thing that most people are unaware of.

Insulin resistance is caused by, not just associated with, but is caused by excess accumulation of saturated fat inside of your muscle and inside of your liver. When I first learned that in the year 2003, I was like mind blown, right? I had no idea that diabetes and insulin resistance was a problem, not of glucose, not of sugar, but of saturated fat. Once I learned that, it changed my entire perspective on the world. So in this particular situation, if you’ve been accumulating saturated fat from eating a

High fat diet, meat, cheese, fish, coconut products, oil, you name it, the standard American diet will say. And there’s a sufficient amount of saturated fat that has been stored literally inside of your musculature and inside of your liver. Well, now when you start to use those muscles on a regular basis, those muscles have to dip in to that fuel source in order to start oxidizing and get it getting it away. So number one, use your muscle to get rid of that stored saturated fat. Number two,

Rather than eating more saturated fat-rich foods, replace the saturated fat-rich foods with plant-based low-saturated fat foods or no saturated fat foods with lots of fiber, lots of antioxidants, lots of vitamins, lots of minerals, predominantly carbohydrate energy with small with sufficient amount of protein and small amounts of fatty acids. So when you change your overall fuel supply, then now you’re not replacing the fatty acids that have been burned with more saturated fat. What you’re doing is you’re replacing the saturated fatty acids.

With glucose from the carbohydrates. When you do it that way, you end up decreasing the inflammatory insulin resistance trigger inside of the liver and muscle tissue, which then makes them more responsive to insulin the next time insulin comes around. Insulin knocks on the door, hey, knock, knock, there’s some stuff in the blood, you want to take it up. And it’s and the liver and muscle tissue are like, heck yeah, I’m hungry. Give this stuff to me. Right? And so when there’s less saturated fat inside of your liver and muscle, then it opens their ability.

ability to start to pull fuel into the tissue, primarily glucose, which is what they need and what they want. And so they start to suck in a bunch of glucose. So people who are active on a regular basis often find that their blood glucose goes, that’s like the first thing that happens. Their fasting blood glucose goes down, their postmeal blood glucose goes down, their A1C, which is an average blood glucose over three to four months, that also comes down. And then they’re like, wow, this exercise is having an impact. But again, we can’t just do exercise in isolation. It’s exercise plus

A diet that is low in saturated fat. And if you can combine the two of those together, then boom, you can gain insulin sensitivity very quickly. And as a result of that, you can significantly reduce your risk for development of prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. And if they’re present, you can guess what? You can reverse it and get back to the non diabetic state. The same process also happens for people living with type 1 and 1.5, where instead of using 35 units of insulin per day,

Now all of a sudden they’re using 32 and then 27 and then 24 and then 21. Before you know it, they’re like, holy crap. I just cut my insulin use by 15 units a day. And all I’ve been doing is exercising more frequently and then also eating as a low saturated fat plant-based diet. Okay. That’s just what happens on the glucose world. As far as blood pressure is concerned, blood pressure comes down significantly for a thousand different reasons. LDL cholesterol also can come down significantly as you shape and mold and use your muscle tissue on a regular basis. So my point here is that.

Muscle is under your control. You get to decide how much exercise you want to do, what types, how often. And if you work hard and work with a professional like you guys, who can train people to be like, all right, this is how much cardiovascular exercise, and this is how much resistance exercise, this is how you prevent yourself from getting injured, this is how you do progressive overload over the course of four months, six months, twelve months, and get you to a point where you really build this machine and you build it slowly.

But methodically, you can get to a point where your muscle tissue is such a powerful machine that it can not only help you reverse many of these chronic conditions, but it can actually add, in my opinion, add years to your life and keep you on this planet for a longer period time. End rant.

Giacomo (32:52)
How quickly are we talking here? How quickly is the process when you become extremely insane sensitive when you start making these changes? How much of a fight is it for your body? And I guess like it does depend on the type of person. Like let’s say you’re coming from a place where you’re very overweight or your diabetes, you’ve been living with for it for a while, as opposed to someone who is newer to it and saying, I’m ready to make a change, like

Cyrus Khambatta (32:55)
Say it again.

yeah, okay. So it

Giacomo (33:14)
Give me like a couple different scenarios here as far as like how you can get there just by turning on the switch and and becoming very insulin sensitive and creating your machines.

Cyrus Khambatta (33:22)
Okay,

beautiful, beautiful question. All right. So I’ll take, I’ll say that there’s three different scenarios. You have like the normal weight, active individual, that’s person number one. Then you have the slightly overweight, maybe slightly less active individual. Okay, maybe you call it 20 pounds overweight, not as active. And then you have the third person who’s 50 pounds overweight and generally inactive. All right.

Person number one, normal weight, relatively active. That’s me. When I was diagnosed with type one diabetes in the year 2002, I was 100% normal weight, 163 pounds on my ideal body weight, active my entire life leading up to it. And I was like, huh, this is a little weird. What do I got to do about this? Right. So in someone like me, when you switch over to eating, let’s just pretend like I made the transition to eating a plant-based diet that’s low in saturated fat overnight, which is exactly what I did. Okay.

From that moment onwards, I saw the changes in my blood glucose. I kid you not, within 24 hours. It was that fast. But I didn’t just see small changes, I saw rapid reductions in my overall blood glucose and rapid reductions in my need for insulin. Okay. Over the course of the first seven days, because I was under supervision at a sports camp with with a with a a physician who really knows this game inside and out. He basically showed me how to go from using forty-two units of insulin per day.

To 24 units of insulin per day. Okay. That’s a what is that? An 18.18 unit reduction, a 40% reduction within seven days. I mean, that’s like mind-blowing stuff. Right. But the reason why I was able to make such a rapid reduction is because number one, I was already pretty active. And number two, I already normal weight. And the two of those were working to my advantage. Okay. Now, if you take person number two, who’s let’s say 20 pounds overweight.

Maybe not that active. Maybe works out twice a week, three times a week, you know, kind of does some walking here and there, maybe gets on a treadmill every so often, does a small amount of train strength training, but nothing significant. Okay. That person is going to likely see if they were to flip over to eating a whole food plant-based diet, low in saturated fat, overnight. That person is likely to see some changes in their blood glucose maybe within three to five days. Okay, so they’ll see the initial improvements in blood glucose within three to five days.

And then they’re gonna see a call it like a significant reduction over the course of probably three weeks, two to three weeks. Okay? Which is still pretty quick if you think about it. Right? We’re talking about years and years and years of metabolic dysfunction that can be that you can start to see reversing within a couple of weeks. That’s pretty motivating. Right. And then if we follow that out over the course of time, we would say, okay, great. If that person comes in and they have like a, you their pre-diabetes, they can probably normalize their A1C within three months. Okay. Three months and but they can go from an A1C of six point two percent.

All the way down to 5.5%, which goes from pre-diabetes down to non-diabetic. And then from that moment onwards, they can keep that going for an extended period of time for as long as they’re on this planet if they continue to adopt those same practices. Okay. Person number three, 50 pounds overweight, A1C of 7.5. So well into the type 2 diabetes world. Okay. Not very active. Maybe has exercised, you know, light walking once a week.

Goes to walk their dog every so often, zero strength training, zero cardiovascular exercise. that person is gonna probably see a change in their blood glucose within, again, probably two to three days to begin with. But then by the time they see some significant improvements in their blood glucose, it might take about a month. Again, it’s not, it’s still a pretty short period of time, if you really think about it, right? For them to be able to fully reverse.

Type 2 diabetes and get to a non-diabetic A1C, that could take six months of consistent behavioral change. And then from that point onwards, they can then get to a non-diabetic A1C and stay there over the long run. The last thing I’ll say here is that in person number two and person number three, who are both overweight, okay, person number two is 20 pounds overweight, person number three is 50 pounds overweight, the kicker here is that they don’t have to become normal weight in order to become non-diabetic. That’s what’s so beautiful about this game.

Right, you you can certainly start to lose weight. Okay. But oftentimes the glucose changes precede weight loss. So you can see rapid improvements in blood glucose concentrations with minimal weight loss, one pound loss, two pounds loss, three pounds loss, five pounds loss. Awesome. So you’ll see a large change in blood glucose, even though there’s a small amount of weight loss. And in the individual who’s 20 pounds overweight, they can literally reverse.

Their A1, they can get their A1C from 6.1, 6.2 down to 5.5 into the non-bodiabetic range with maybe 10 pounds of weight loss. That’s it. It doesn’t even have be that big. It’ll get better as they lose more weight and get to their ideal body weight, no question. And then the person who’s, you know, 50 pounds overweight, maybe they lose 10 to 15 pounds of weight and all of a sudden they can get to a point where they’re not their it A1C is non-diabetic. And of course, it will get better over the course of time as they continue to lose weight and get to their ideal body weight. But my point is that it’s not necessary, it’s helpful.

But it is not one hundred percent necessary in order to start to see these dramatic improvements in blood glucose concentration.

Ben (37:53)
Well, I think that’s really empowering for people to know that, you know, one, just making these changes regardless of of any weight loss and, you know, if they start resistance training alongside of that and building muscle, like all of these things are things that are under their control and things that can make a massive difference. that I think is is just very encouraging. and something that I want to kind of circle back to, I was thinking about this. You were talking about

building muscle and how important it is and protective it is. And I’m thinking about, you know, in the world that we operate in, all these bodybuilders who have tons of muscle. Let’s take, you know, performance enhancing drugs out of the equation for a second. Let’s just say, you know, still they’re they’re naturally they built all this muscle. But I’ve seen it so many times where their blood work is still all over the place and not so great. And I’m thinking about, you know, you mentioned and I think it was probably it would probably be surprising to a lot of people that it’s, you know, this this excess intake of saturated fat versus it being

I think oftentimes carbohydrate is what gets you know villainized or demonized. And you know, I think about these bodybuilders who eat, you know, tons of meat every single day, all day, probably you know, not lean cuts all the time. Even if it is, you’re still getting saturated fat with the leanest cuts of meats and you know, that over the accumulation of years, it almost kind of offsets all the muscle that they’ve built in a certain way, and they still end up with all these chronic health conditions. and

Cyrus Khambatta (39:07)
Correct.

Ben (39:09)
you know, we were talking a little bit about you know, people adopt like a keto ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet, thinking that this is gonna be something that helps them in managing you know, let’s say that they get you know, a diagnosis of you know, of type two diabetes or pre diabetes. And so they might think that this is a a route to go. Can you maybe talk about why that’s not necessarily the case? Why adopting, you know, a I I mean, we’ve kind of already hit on it with with the saturated fat intake, but

I guess specifically, you know, why do people fear the carbohydrates so much? Is that something relating to okay, it’s gonna, you know, spike my insulin, that that sort of thing? I that’s something that I’ve heard kind of people talk about and worrying about like, you know, the glycemic index or the glycemic load of certain foods. Could you maybe speak on th touch on that subject a bit?

Cyrus Khambatta (39:52)
Yeah, it’s a it’s a it’s a really good it’s like a universe that you’re just like touching on right now. So let’s let’s suffice it to think about it this way. there’s like two views on what insulin resistance is and what you can do to reverse it. And the two views, unfortunately, are the exact polar opposites of one another that have that literally point fingers at the other one saying, You have no idea what you’re talking about.

You have no idea what you’re talking about. And it is it is shocking to me. Like I don’t know of any other condition that has such dramatically opposing views on one particular condition, right? So if you go into the world of plant-based nutrition, what the plant-based world has identified through, truth be told, a hundred years of research dating back to the 1930s. I kid you not. There’s there’s research that goes from the 1930s to 1935 to 1950 to 1970 to 1979.

All the way to the you know early 1990s and then repeated over and over and over and over and over again with more sophisticated methodology, has clearly demonstrated that carbohydrate is not to blame for insulin resistance. Okay, this has been proven period end of story. And what this line of reasoning says is that carbohydrates metabolized to glucose and fructose. Those are the two main monosaccharides that are then absorbed.

Into your blood and then are used as energy sources for muscle tissue, liver tissue, kidney tissue, and beyond for and you as well as your brain. All right. Okay. Now, the carbohydrate itself is not problematic. The carbohydrate itself is actually a fuel, and in order to use that fuel properly, it it is important to keep the this total fat content of your diet.

Relatively low because when the fat content of the diet increases, it then impairs the action of insulin receptors on the surface of liver and muscle tissue. And when the insulin receptors are not functional, not as functional as they should be, the insulin receptors can’t recognize insulin.

And when they can’t recognize insulin, they cannot initiate glucose disposal or increase they cannot clear glucose from the blood. So it’s a multi-step process that goes from again excess total fat, primarily saturated fat, that then causes insulin receptor inhibition, which then leads to inability to clear glucose from blood, which then leads to high blood glucose.

Okay, so you’ve you’re working with me on this chain, all right? Now that’s what the plant-based world has identified, but truth be told, that’s not even what the plant-based world has identified. That’s what basic physiology has identified. And the plant-based world has basically said, yes, that is correct science. We subscribe to that model. Okay. What the ketogenic world and the carnivorous world has created is a completely separate picture of insulin resistance. And what they say.

Is that carbohydrate is bad for you? Carbohydrate is toxic because carbohydrate metabolizes to glucose. And glucose should not be in circulation in your blood in any sufficient quantity. Because when glucose is present in your blood, it causes a whole bunch of problems. Namely, number one, it tells your pancreas to secrete.

Very large amounts of insulin. And then as a result of that, the hyperinsulinemic state, meaning excess insulin secretion, then goes to your liver that then tells your liver to convert glucose into fatty acids. And then the conversion of glucose in the fatty acids impairs your liver. And then those fatty acids are also sent to other tissues, namely your adipose tissue, to make you fatter.

Okay, so they’ve created a separate line of reasoning that says glucose is to blame because glucose makes you fat. Glucose causes insulin rapid insulin secretion, which then creates the con the need to convert glucose into fat, which then causes fat deposition. All right. Now the the truth is that both worlds are right. Both worlds are right, and the

The carnivorous world and the liquidogenic world is right but wrong. And what I will say is that they have some of the physiology correct, but some of the physiology is incorrect. The part of the physiology that is correct is that hyper secretion of insulin can lead to a necessity to convert glucose into fatty acids and store fatty acids as energy. No question. That has been proven in the scientific literature. There’s no debating that.

We know that that is a true statement. But the previous thought process that glucose leads to hyperinsulin secretion is a factually incorrect statement. Okay. So what you’ll see if you look carefully at a lot of posts from Instagram and from you know TikTok and beyond is what so many of these people say is that anytime you eat carbohydrate, anything, cookies, crackers, chips, pastas, sodas, anything refined, or bananas. Or

dates and mangoes and papayas and by all means potatoes and bread and and cereals and rice. The the sort of we’ll refer to them as whole carbohydrates, regardless of whether you’re going to refine it whole carbohydrates. Any version of carbohydrate is gonna get inside of your blood as glucose and then it’s gonna cause a rapid hyper secretion. Okay? That is an incorrect statement, because what they are missing is one piece of the puzzle, which is that carbohydrates don’t

Always lead to a hyper secretion of insulin. They can. And they can. And the reason that they would do that is because you’re already living in an insulin resistant state. Okay? So when insulin resistance is already present inside of your muscle and inside of your liver, then carbohydrate, again, we’ve talked about this. Carbohydrate metabolizes to glucose. Glucose is in your blood. Glucose gets trapped, it has nowhere to go.

Because the insulin that has been secreted goes knock knock, there’s glucose in the blood. Do you want to take it up? And the liver and muscles say, Sorry, I can’t do it right now. I don’t have any space. There’s too much saturated fat in here. I can’t help you out. So then it goes back to the pancreas, and the pancreas goes, hey, I need to make some more insulin because a small amount of insulin didn’t work. Let me make some more insulin. So then it creates this hyper-secretion sort of cascade that leads to more and more and more and more and more insulin over the course of time. But what they don’t realize is that if you basically

Are insulin sensitive because you are exercising frequently, you’re eating a low saturated fat diet. Well, then guess what? When you eat carbohydrate energy, everything’s fine. There is no problem. You’re not going to hypersecrete insulin, you’re not going to store a bunch of fatty acids, you’re not going to get fat. Everybody’s happy. Okay? So my point here is that there’s two completely different stories. And

We have to get so unbelievably detailed in the biochemistry in order to understand the nuances of what’s actually happening under the surface in order to eventually arrive at the idea of like, wait a minute, hold on a second. It’s actually saturated fat that’s causing the problem. Cause if you go down reasoning number one, you get to saturated fat. If you go down reasoning number two, you say, No, no, no, no, no. It’s carbohydrate. Carbohydrate’s the problem. You should be eating more saturated fat and you should be eating more meat and more protein and more cheese and more chicken. That’s their solution.

But what they don’t realize is that they’re actually fueling the fire which they forgot to identify in the first place.

Ben (46:50)
kind of briefly, Cyrus, over the past couple of years, these have become a lot more common. we’ve had some people on the podcast talk about them and give their opinion.

I think maybe some people would or wouldn’t know that a lot of these GLP1 medications, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, were developed as diabetes medications before they then became weight loss medications. so yeah, I guess you could just talk about maybe briefly like some of the, you know, what you’ve seen you know, over the past couple years as these become more po popular. and maybe your, you know, in your view, pot net net negative or net positive. Because I think some people

I we we’ve kind of discussed our our stance on this in the past. And I think some fitness influencers, I guess you could say, I think are just unnecessarily negative on them for for pretty much no reason other than this like you know, like mental mental barrier that they have where it’s like people should be working harder and shouldn’t need medication, which again, this is this is a whole other topic in and of itself.

and I think there’s a ton of flaws in that. But what have what have you observed with these medications that they’ve become more popular over the last couple of years, real real quick?

Cyrus Khambatta (47:49)
Yeah. It’s a great question.

It’s a whole universe. Okay. Let’s do it quickly. you’re right. GLP one medications were first designed and developed as type two diabetes medications to lower blood glucose values. It just so turns out that when they were investigating them in the pharmaceutical world as they were going through the randomized control trials, they recognized they were like, wait a minute, hold on a second. These things actually are very powerful at stimulating weight loss. And then they when I want to say maybe like four years ago, five years ago when Ozempic first became kinda a big deal.

Okay, there was a whole collection of trials. They’re called the step trials, step one, two, three, four, five trials, that then first investigated the effects of Ozempic and then basically like put it out into the into the world. Okay. So the active ingredient is called semaglatide. And semaglatide is a is literally the the origin of a collection of different compounds that have collectively become known as the most powerful appetite suppressing compounds that the world has ever seen before. Okay.

So the reason why GLP ones have become so popular is because they can literally kill your appetite. They can kill your appetite. And I use the word kill very specifically because they’re not just like kind of reducing your appetite a little bit, a teeny tiny bit, and reducing 500 calories a day. No, no, no, no, no. They are destroying your appetite to the point where you’re like, great, sweet. I don’t need to eat any food. I haven’t eaten any food for like three days, four days, five days, and I’m not hungry and I don’t want any food. Okay. So as a result of that, depending on

Which medication you’re using and what strength you’re using, okay? Which again should be always dosed under medical supervision. You can go from losing five pounds of weight all the way upwards of a hundred pounds of weight over the course of time. All right. So GLP ones have a place and a time. Okay. I’m not, I’m not one of those people that basically says all GLP ones are bad. Everybody should be off of them. You should just work harder, right? That’s fine. If you want to adopt that that mindset, that’s totally cool. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna say you’re a bad person, but I think that there’s

There are specific use cases for where GLP1 medications are are necessary and and useful. And then there’s specific situations for which they’re not. Okay. What I would say is a generality here, without going into like too too much detail, is that again, they were first developed and they’re called GLP1 receptor agonists. Cause what they do is they basically mimic the action of endogenous GLP1 inside of your body. And what GLP1 really does is it has a couple of effects. Number one, it stimulates your small intestine to think that it has food inside of it. So it literally

Activates stretch receptors inside of your small intestine that happens when you normally eat food. And when those stretch receptors get activated, it’s picks up the phone and it calls your brain on a neurological impulse that says, Hey, hey, hypothalamus hey, pituitary gland, could you please turn down the volume? There’s already stuff inside of me. I don’t need you to be as hungry anymore. And as a result of that, you’re like, okay, sweet. Sounds like a plan. Your brain says, Don’t need food, please reduce volume. And as a result of that, you, as a user, was like, okay, I’m already full. I don’t need to eat any food. Okay. So it’s got both a

digestive component as well as a central nervous system component. And because there’s like two different ways that they can interact with one another, those are just two of the, you know, two mechanisms that then have spawned many other mechanisms. But point is is that because it’s a two-way mechanism, it’s very powerful at suppressing your appetite. Okay. So

The people who, in my opinion, should be using GLP ones or are going to benefit from using GLP ones are people that have that are significantly overweight, 50 pounds, 70 pounds, 100 pounds, you name it, okay, and have a very, very, very difficult time losing weight for any number of reasons. It could be emotional reasons, it could be physical reasons, it could be that they are, you know,

They’re living in an environment where it’s extremely hard for them to exercise and eat healthy. Okay. Any number of those reasons, getting on a GLP one to lose weight as a really powerful band-aid is gonna create more benefit for them and reduce their chronic disease risk so significantly that it’s okay for them to use it. And in fact, I want them to be using it because it allows them to lose weight without having to work so hard. That’s huge. Okay, that’s a good that’s a good thing.

number two, the person who’s who has food noise all day long every day, the voices inside of their head that are saying, Eat, it’s time to eat. Where am I gonna get my next meal? I want some chocolate, I want some cake, I want some cookies. Okay, that’s a real thing that I’ve come to learn over the course of time that can literally sabotage somebody’s existence on this planet. And when food noise is at a very high volume, you take a GLP one receptor agonist, all of sudden, boop, food noise disappears or gets way silenced. And as a result of that, they’re like, my god, I can actually live like a normal human being. Then they’re not constantly on a hunt.

For their next meal, and then they end up losing a significant amount of weight, they become healthier, good, problem solved. Okay. The people that I number three, people who have significantly elevated blood glucose, okay, A1Cs 7.5, 8%, 8.5, and beyond, who are also overweight because they have a dual action. They can number one reduce blood glucose and help stimulate weight loss, those people would also benefit from being on a GLP one, no question. All right. The people who I don’t believe should be on a GLP one.

The people who need to quote unquote work harder are the people who are 10 pounds overweight and doing it for aesthetic purposes. And they’re like, I really need to lose a little bit of weight so that I can fit into this wedding dress or so I can fit into this tuxedo because I gotta go to a ball. Give me some Ozephic. I don’t think that that’s necessarily the right use case. Okay. or the person who is, you know, has no glucose abnormalities.

Don’t want to exercise, doesn’t want to eat healthier, and is trying to lose 20 to 30 pounds. Okay. That’s an emotional desire. They’ve made decisions in their lifestyle that say, I don’t really want to try that hard. I don’t want to eat healthier. I don’t want to move my body. I’m kind of resistant to doing all those things that I intellectually know are good for me. Can I have the pill, please? That’s gonna help me lose the weight. Okay.

That type of person, I could argue both ways. Generally speaking, I would argue you probably don’t need a GLP one. You would just benefit from adopting healthier lifestyle habits. And as a result of that, you can lose that weight. It’ll take longer, but you can lose that weight and keep it off over the long term or long term, right?

Giacomo (53:24)
My

fear is the end game. Once you get what you want, if your choice is to not stay on some dose of GLP ones when the noise comes back, even though you’ve put some behaviors in place, there’s hope. But like what’s your end game after the fact? That’s the part that I continue to recognize and I’m not sure how it works for Ben and Sawyer and Alice and Danny, but when we’ve been looking at it, we’ve found people take GLP ones, they work until they don’t, or they continue to work and then all put it but it’s like

that hypothesis of like after the fact, when you have this supplement, if you will, right? Where where do you land? And like you hope as many of these behaviors stay in place as is possible. But what’s gonna happen when the food noise returns and how do you and to I don’t know, like I I per I if I’m giving my opinion, if my bias it’s like, well, if if it’s reducing the food noise and there’s there’s not a part of you that’s adapting to what food noise feels like, like how do how do you land after the fact when you’re

i should you choose to stop taking GLP. I don’t know, that’s the stuff that I think about in my mind ’cause I ’cause we haven’t seen too many success cases like long term and lasting here yet. But of course this is brand new in terms of how GLP one’s being applied towards people who aren’t diabetic.

Cyrus Khambatta (54:27)
Correct. Yeah, well said. Go ahead.

Ben (54:31)
Yeah, I just gonna say, I think like the the the takeaway and what I was getting from you, Cyrus, is like it’s it it’s an adjunct, like it can’t be the only change that you’re making. It has to like be the thing that allows you to make the change because I think where people get it wrong is they take the person who is very overweight, obese, who has been trying really hard, you know, for for five, ten years, however long, and they tell that person that they need to be working harder, they’re already working hard. they just have all these factors working against them.

it’s not the person who, like you said, you know, maybe it’s more of a cosmetic thing. They’re ten, fifteen pounds overweight. they’re really not, you know, haven’t made many attempts for lifestyle change. so it’s more of something that is kind of that bridge to the lifestyle habits as opposed to like the thing itself. Is that did I get that right?

Cyrus Khambatta (55:15)
You got it right. You absolutely got it right. So I think another way of saying it is it’s a pressure release valve. Right? It’s a thing that enables you to start to to to reduce the pressure of everything in life to say, all right, I can do this. I’m gonna start moving in the right direction. They start losing a little bit of weight, it becomes motivating, then they get to the gym, then they start moving, and then they start eating healthier, and then sets into motion a whole collection of lifestyle habits. Now, at the same time, Giacomo, what I would say is that I agree with you in the sense that

Giacomo (55:20)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Cyrus Khambatta (55:43)
In in theory, people would use it as a pressure release valve to begin with, and then they would go and they would create a bunch of new habits and then stick with those habits over the course of the next two to five to ten to fifty years. But I think in reality, what ends up happening is that it may start as a pressure release valve and then it becomes a crutch. And it gets to a point where you’re like, all right, I don’t need to go to the gym because I’m already losing weight. Fuck it. I’m not gonna go to the gym. I don’t really need to eat any healthier because I just lost 15 pounds.

Why would I do that? It’s like it kind of takes away some of the desire to have to go develop all these new habits because developing new habits is hard. And if you don’t need to develop the new habits, then human nature is going to set it in and be like, you know what? Maybe maybe you don’t need to do it. You should just sit down and watch that next deck. Not Netflix documentary. That’s a better use of your time. Right. So I think that there’s there’s always a a pros and cons. There’s always a balance to be struck here. But

Giacomo (56:10)
Yeah.

Hmm. Yeah.

Cyrus Khambatta (56:32)
In an ideal world, if we’re talking about like who would benefit from using the GLP1 receptor agonist, it’s the person that either has blood glucose instability, high A1C, is significantly overweight, and has multiple things working against them. They’ve tried a lot, they’ve tried, failed, tried, failed, tried, failed, start, stop, start, stop, yo-yo died for some period of time, and they’re like, listen, I got I need some help. They get the GLP one, they start moving in the right direction. And then from that point onwards, I think what you have to do, truth be told, is undergo a significant, not only lifestyle change in changing the food.

Changing the food that’s going in your mouth, changing your exercise habits. But I honestly believe that you gotta do a lot of deep, deep, deep, deep, deep emotional and psychological restructuring. I think ultimately that’s what ends up leading to a point where you feel very capable of getting off of them and being able to counteract the voices that may become louder over the course of time because you’ve changed internally as a human being. And don’t get me wrong, that’s the hardest part.

Giacomo (57:10)
Mm-hmm.

Cyrus Khambatta (57:26)
Right, you can change your diet easier than you can go to therapy. You can change your diet easier than you know, like really changing the way that you think about the world. And so because it’s such a heavy lift, I think what ends up happening is that people just use it and they’re like, cool, sweet, it’s working. I’m good to go. But they don’t really think about what’s gonna happen a year down the road.

Ben (57:42)
And I’m sure you do a lot of that that work you know, on on a daily basis, just working with people and talking through a lot of these topics because it goes beyond like the actual practical recommendations. It’s the the psychology behind the decision making, the things that have led up to that point. I mean, we we do you know, that’s how we spend a majority of our time. It’s not just the protocols, it’s then like the things that have led to the protocols and you know, how they can, like you said, almost create a new identity for themselves. I think there’s a lot of like identity and and

that change in identity is then what helps to change the behaviors and they kind of go hand in hand. you know, I just want to say thank you so much for for giving us your time today to talk through not just you know the physiology, but also just hit on some of these big topics. And you know, I I definitely feel like I could pick your brain for, you know, hours and hours more. so I again just want to say thank you and we’ll have all of your information linked in the description to the podcast and where people can find you.

anything else that you want to leave the the listeners with?

Cyrus Khambatta (58:40)
Yeah, I what I want to say is Giacomo, first of all, Ben, thanks for the thank you for saying that. Thanks for the podcast. This is awesome. Giacomo, over the last two years or so, we’ve been working together now, you as my personal coach, you have fundamentally changed my view on life. And I and I mean that one hundred percent. Right? You being there telling me what to do, telling me what not to do, telling me what small microscopic tweaks to make to my diet.

And to my mindset in order to become a little bit bigger, better, stronger, faster, you name it, has literally changed my life. So I got nothing but love for you. And I I wish everybody could experience what I am currently going through and what I’ve already gone through because the stuff that you do removes mountains. And I love you so much for doing that. So thank you.

Giacomo (59:21)
Yeah, we love you too, buddy. And it’s the stuff that you’re doing with people is really, really important too. So I hope that the listeners find some value, not just some value, but they find an opportunity to find you and your work too with Master and Diabetes. It’s been n nothing but a pleasure. Although I will I will say that we had we were gonna meet today to talk about you. And you said no, but the second you got a chance to give and you’re like and give you the opportunity like, hey Cyrus, you want to meet later today to talk? Sure. So but I mean obviously you were just busy, but it was just kind of funny. I was like

Where is he? But then but that yeah yeah, it’s all good.

Cyrus Khambatta (59:50)
Yeah, don’t worry, don’t worry.

I’ll bore you with all my personal details, no problem. You yeah, I can do that. If you want it, I’ll give it to you. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks guys.

Giacomo (59:55)
Done. I’m I’m I’m in. I’m ready for it. Let’s talk tomorrow. Love you, dude.

Yeah.

Ben (1:00:03)
Well thanks and everyone, thank you for listening to another episode and we’ll catch you in the next one. Bye bye.

Giacomo (1:00:08)
Yeah.