Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
Defiant Health Radio with Dr. William Davis
The GLP-1 Agonist Weight Loss Disaster
You’ve likely heard the headlines gushing about the weight loss effects of the GLP-1 agonist class of drugs, agents that go by names like Wegovy, Mounjaro, Rebelsus and others. Doctors are declaring these drugs as breakthroughs or even magical, witnessing the rapid and dramatic weight loss they can achieve.
People appear willing to accept the side-effects of nausea, vomiting, even bowel obstruction, a catastrophic complication, or thyroid cancer, or pancreatitis that can irreversibly damage your pancreas and make you a type 1 diabetic. They also accept the costs that vary widely, depending on who dispenses it, but not uncommonly hundreds of dollars, even over a thousand dollars a month. And doctors jump at the chance to prescribe these drugs, as they often have arrangements with the dispensing pharmacy for kickbacks in one form or another. Prescribe the drug, make a lot of money, for many doctors an irresistible temptation.
People lose weight and even can become non-type 2 diabetic and modestly reduce risk for heart disease—so what’s not to like?
Plenty. That is the topic of discussion today on the Defiant Health podcast, a place where you hear ideas you cannot hear anywhere else because we dig deeper, are not swayed by big payoffs, and thumb our nose at conventional wisdom. The GLP-1 agonist drugs are not miraculous, but invite health disaster or hold you hostage for the rest of your life, shelling out money to enrich the pharmaceutical industry and doctors.
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Books:
Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight
You've likely heard the headlines gushing about the weight loss effects of the GLP-1 agonist class of drugs agents that go by names like Wegovi, monjaro, rebelsis and others. Doctors are declaring these drugs as breakthroughs or even magical, witnessing the rapid and dramatic weight loss they can achieve. People appear willing to accept the side effects of nausea, vomiting, even bowel obstruction, a surgical emergency and pancreatitis and thyroid cancer. They also accept the costs. That can vary widely depending on who dispenses it, but not uncommonly hundreds of dollars or even over a thousand dollars every month. And doctors jump at the chance to prescribe these drugs as they often have arrangements with the dispensing pharmacy for kickbacks in one form or another. Prescribe the drug, make a lot of money for many doctors and irresistible temptation. People lose weight and even can become non-type two diabetic and modestly reduce risk for heart disease. So what's not to like? Plenty? That is the topic of discussion today on the Defiant Health podcast, a place where you can hear ideas you cannot hear anywhere else, because we dig deeper, are not swayed by big payoffs and thumb our nose at conventional wisdom. And later in the podcast let's talk about Define Health's sponsors Paleo Valley, our preferred provider for many excellent organic and grass-fed food products and BiotiQuest, my number one choice for probiotics that are scientifically formulated, unlike most of the other commercial probiotic products available today products available today.
Speaker 1:The GLP agonist world now earns the pharmaceutical industry about $10 billion a year, and growing rapidly. Celebrities gush about the effects of these drugs People like Kelly Clarkson, oprah Winfrey, elon Musk, boris Johnson and they've lost weight. Doctors and pharmacies have jumped on board and they seem to not be able to even dispense them fast enough. There's even been shortages for people who need these drugs for reducing their blood sugar and type 2 diabetes. Doctors receive kickbacks in many instances. They have arrangements with pharmacies, often incorporating pharmacies into their practices so that they can get a kickback by prescribing these drugs. So doctors have a hard time resisting this impulse to make a lot of money by dispensing these popular drugs.
Speaker 1:Now, because these drugs are being dispensed so freely, they are increasing overall health insurance costs for people like you and me. In other words, even if you're not taking it, but your neighbor or co-worker or somebody else is taking it, that adds to overall health care costs and that is passed on to you. Now health care costs were increasing to terrible levels already. Now it's even worse because of this class of drugs and people are willing to endure the common side effects like nausea and vomiting and regurgitation that can lead to aspiration, which has happened in a number of people, including pregnant moms, because of the increase in the intra-abdominal pressure that caused them to regurgitate or to vomit. And there have been episodes of aspiration pneumonia where you inhale your stomach contents and, of course, bowel obstruction and other catastrophic side effects. So people are willing to risk these things in order to lose weight, and these drugs do work.
Speaker 1:There's no denying it that people do lose a lot of weight. How do they work? Well, the GLP-1 agonists reduce appetite. They reduce your interest in food. They also slow digestion or the passage of food through the stomach, so much so that anesthesiologists have recognized that you must stop the drug about a week ahead of time before any kind of surgical procedure where you're going to undergo general anesthesia, because if you have food in your stomach from a meal you had, say, three days ago, you can aspirate that when you're under general anesthesia. So anesthesiologists insist that you stop taking these drugs about a week ahead of time.
Speaker 1:Now here's something to ponder. So GLP-Agnus caused weight loss by reducing your interest in food, reducing calorie intake similar to what is achieved with bariatric procedures such as lap band or gastric bypass, situations in which the stomach volume is reduced, or methods of reducing calorie intake. We could call it move more, eat less. We could call it weight watchers we just push the plate away. All the methods that people use, apps that identify stress triggers for eating these are all variations on the same theme reducing calorie intake. Now we know with good science many clinical studies have told us this when you reduce calorie intake, regardless of the method used GLP agonist diet, bariatric procedure doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Regardless of the method used, when you reduce calories, approximately 25% of the weight lost is muscle. In some instances, with GLP-1 agonists, it can be as much as 50 percent of weight loss is muscle. So let's say you paid $12,000 to lose 40 pounds by injecting yourself with Wegovi for a year. Well, most people can't afford to do that forever, so they stop the drug. Of that 40 pounds they lost, 10 pounds was muscle, 30 pounds was fat. They stopped the drug, they regained typically 32 to 34 pounds of almost all fat, and most of that fat is abdominal fat.
Speaker 1:Abdominal fat is the most problematic form of fat as compared to, say, subcutaneous fat, that's fat just beneath the skin that tends to accumulate in places like the neck, chest, buttocks, thighs. So it's the intra-abdominal fat, that is, fat that surrounds the abdominal organs, that's the source of most of the problems associated with obesity and leads to effects like heart disease risk, risk for dementia, breast cancer, other cancers. That risk is increased by abdominal fat, abdominal visceral fat. So when you stop the GLP-1 agonist, you regain fat, and you mostly in the abdomen, and so you are more prone to prediabetes, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, dementia, alzheimer's, breast cancer and other conditions. You're at greater risk now after having regained the fat than you were at the start. So you paid pharma $12,000 to be less healthy, to have more common health conditions.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, the loss of subcutaneous fat in the face, coupled with loss of muscle, is responsible for this phenomenon that some people call ozympic face. It's not unique to ozympic, it's shared by all GLP-1 agonists. But it's the loss of subcutaneous fat and muscle in the face that makes people often look 10 to 20 years older, with sagging jowls, deeper wrinkles, etc. All from losing the fat and muscle in the face. Another thing to know about the GLP-1 agonists is they preferentially cause loss of subcutaneous fat. Now wait a minute. If abdominal visceral fat is the source of most of the problems associated with obesity, why would you take a drug that preferentially targets subcutaneous fat? You do lose some abdominal visceral fat, but GLP-1 agonists favor the loss of subcutaneous fat. When you stop it, the fat comes back, mostly in the abdomen. So the GLP-1 agonist world sets you up for deterioration in health.
Speaker 1:Now that loss of muscle is a critical thing, because muscle is the principal driver of your metabolic rate, of your basal metabolic rate. We say BMR, that is the rate at which your body burns calories for the work of living, the work of breathing, digestion, production of various proteins in the body. That all requires energy and your body's doing this even when you're sleeping, even when you're sitting watching TV, at this rate called basal metabolic rate. Well, when you lose muscle, basal metabolic rate plummets to very low levels. So there's a recent study, for instance, called the biggest loser study.
Speaker 1:You remember that TV show where people are put through an extreme program of cutting calories and extreme exercise, like Danny Cahill, for instance, who won the eighth season by dropping weight. From 430 pounds he lost 200, an incredible 239 pounds, incredible will and effort. So over seven months he lost 239 pounds. He won the show. He looked great. He won the $250,000 prize. Left the show, won the $250,000 prize. Left the show. Continued a very low-calorie lifestyle and two hours a day exercising. I had a conversation with him and he said he kept on a very extreme effort and regained the weight. Now he and the graduates of that eighth season were studied formally studied by a research group at the National Institutes of Health, the NIH, and they measured the basal metabolic rate of these people after they left the show and they saw a dramatic reduction in basal metabolic rate, about 27%. That persisted for as long as the study continued, which was six years. So, for all practical purposes, when you lose weight by cutting calories in this case even incorporating strength training, resistance training to increase muscle despite that, they still lost a lot of muscle and they regained all the weight due to the reduction in basal metabolic rate. So cutting calories is a loser's game. It guarantees that you lose muscle and will thereby regain the weight.
Speaker 1:Now, do these phenomena apply to the GLP-1 agonist world? Yes, they do. There is evidence that people can lose a lot of weight when they stop the drug. They regain the fat due to the precipitous loss of muscle. So people have to make a choice. You can stop the drug and accept that you'll regain a lot of fat and be less healthy than you were at the start, or you can continue the drug forever. That, of course, is what the pharmaceutical industry wants. They have this great flow of revenue from people who are essentially held hostage by the need, the reliance, and, of course, over time you're more and more likely to develop some of those catastrophic side effects. So you're stuck on these drugs. This is what the pharmaceutical industry has created, this way to hold the public hostage to the use of these drugs, and it's aided and abetted by most doctors.
Speaker 1:You may also see headlines announcing that the use of these GLP-1 agonists reduce the likelihood that you have type 2 diabetes or heart disease. By the way, the studies suggest about a 1% reduction not a big one, very small reduction in cardiovascular events Only if you stay on the drug. If you stop the drug, you're more prone to type 2 diabetes, more prone to heart disease, heart attack, sudden cardiac death. So there's only a modest reduction in these things if you stay on the drug and continue that flow of revenue into the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. Now let me pause for a moment to tell you something about Defiant Health's sponsors, and when we come back let's pick up the conversation on how you do have a choice when you don't start the GLP-1 agonist at all and don't get tangled up in that mess.
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Speaker 1:Now let's get back to our discussion. So, to avoid being tangled up in this GLP-1 agonist mess, the key is to never start the drugs in the first place, because there are effective ways to lose weight. But I would say a better way to think about this is don't think about weight loss per se, let's think about improving your shape and body composition. That is, let's find ways to specifically target the most problematic form of fat abdominal visceral fat and also some subcutaneous fat also but also preserve or even increase muscle and thereby maintain or even increase your basal metabolic rate, so that weight doesn't come back and may even accelerate weight loss. Well, how do you do that? How do you achieve all that? Well, you follow what we do in our programs.
Speaker 1:We follow a smarter diet. We don't cut calories. We never cut calories. We don't cut fat or saturated fat or cholesterol. We follow a diet that eliminates wheat, grains and sugars. Recall that wheat has a protein in it called gliadin and related proteins in other grains, like the cecilin and rye, the hortian in barley and the zean in corn. These proteins are not digestible, fully digestible by humans. We lack the enzymes that break them down into single amino acids, so we break these proteins down to four or five amino acid long peptides peptide fragments that are able to cross into the brain and stimulate opioid receptors. They don't make you high, however, they stimulate appetite. So when you eliminate wheat, grains and sugars, you thereby eliminate glide and drive opioid, peptide appetite stimulants and you will find yourself miraculously freed from hunger and you're not tempted anymore. It may take a few days for this to occur, but it happens typically within the first few days after you banish all wheat, grains and sugars and thereby glide and derive opioid, peptide appetite stimulants.
Speaker 1:We never limit fat, we never limit calories. We also restore nutrients that are largely lacking in modern life Magnesium, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Now, when you replace those things, they synergize to minimize insulin resistance. Recall that insulin resistance simply means that your body no longer responds well to insulin, so your pancreas overcompensates by producing huge amounts of insulin, and insulin causes expansion of abdominal fat. So we're going to take those nutrients vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, magnesium that synergize to minimize or reduce insulin resistance, accelerating the loss of the most problematic form of fat abdominal visceral fat. And I say those nutrients are missing because of modern life, not because of the diet, but because of modern life.
Speaker 1:So magnesium, for instance, we're supposed to get from drinking water, from water that runs over rocks and minerals and rivers and streams, and from wild food, wild plants. But we can't drink water freely from rivers and streams. Right, it's tainted, it's contaminated by sewage and other things. So we have to filter the water, and water filtration is very effective, very efficient at removing all magnesium. Likewise, modern produce has about 80, maybe as much as 90% less magnesium than it used to have. So we're getting very little magnesium from our produce. So we supplement magnesium. Vitamin D, of course we are supposed to get from exposure of the skin to sun, but many of us live our lives indoors, we wear clothes in public and we also lose the capacity to activate vitamin D in the skin upon sun exposure as we get older, especially after age 40.
Speaker 1:Iodine we're supposed to get from seafood and seaweed, but most of us don't consume those things very often, so we don't get much iodine. And fish is now contaminated by mercury, shellfish by cadmium, the heavy metals, so we can't get those things, we can't eat those foods as much as we'd like, so we supplement iodine. And then, lastly, omega-3 fatty acids are supposed to come from the consumption of brain, brain as well as seafood and shellfish. But once again we can't eat all this seafood and shellfish we want because of mercury and cadmium contamination. And most modern people have lost interest in consuming organ meats like brain. So we supplement omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil.
Speaker 1:Lastly, we address disrupted bowel flora. So almost everybody has at least dysbiosis, that is, disruption of the microbial composition in the colon, colonic dysbiosis. But approximately half of you also have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or we say SIBO, s-i-b-o. What that means is that our overexposure to antibiotics, to other factors like glyphosate, the herbicide in food, many foods, other herbicides and pesticides, stomach acid blocking drugs, food additives like preservatives that are antimicrobial, emulsifying agents like polysorbate 80 and carboxymethylcellulose, on and on and on we are swimming in a sea of factors that have disrupted the gastrointestinal microbiome.
Speaker 1:One of the consequences of this disruption is that fecal microbes in a class called proteobacteria, fecal microbes, have overproliferated. These are species like E coli, salmonella, campylobacter. They've overpopulated and, remarkably, in about one of every two people, about 150 million Americans, these fecal microbes have been allowed to ascend into the small intestine, the 24 feet of small intestine, and take up residence. Now, these fecal microbes don't live very long. They live for a few hours at most. So there's trillions of microbes turning over rapidly in the 24 feet of small intestine.
Speaker 1:The small intestine is poorly equipped to handle this flood of fecal microbes. It's very penetrable by design, because that's where the small intestine is where you're supposed to absorb amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. But when the small intestine is invaded by fecal microbes that live and die rapidly, they shed some of their byproducts especially something called lipopolysaccharide endotoxin or LPS endotoxin into the intestines that then penetrate across the intestinal wall and get into your bloodstream. And the entry of LPS endotoxin into the bloodstream is called endotoxemia. Has endotoxin into the bloodstream is called endotoxemia. That's a major driver of insulin resistance, inflammation and weight gain, especially in the abdomen.
Speaker 1:So we address SIBO, colonic dysbiosis and endotoxemia. How do we do that? Well, that's our program for rebuilding a healthy gastrointestinal microbiome. If you don't know what I'm talking about, please refer to my Super Gut book, to my other episodes of the Defiant Health podcast where I discuss SIBO and how to manage it. Also my blog. I have several thousand posts on my blog, drdavisinfinitehealthcom blog.
Speaker 1:You'll see that we do things very, very differently. For instance, one of the reasons I believe that so many people now have seabone, besides antibiotics and other factors, is we've lost microbes, healthy microbes, probiotic species that previously colonized the small intestine, especially two in particular Lactobacillus rhoderi and Lactobacillus gasseri. These are two species that are able to colonize the small intestine. Most microbes can't colonize the small intestine, they only colonize the colon. But these two species colonize the 24 feet of small intestine, where they take up residence and produce what are called bacteriocins. These are natural antibiotics effective in killing fecal microbes natural antibiotics effective in killing fecal microbes.
Speaker 1:So what we do is we take those two microbes and we make a yogurt. It looks like yogurt, smells like yogurt, but it's not yogurt. Nothing like the stuff in the store. You cannot buy this in a store. You make it yourself using my method of prolonged fermentation, because what we want is really high numbers of these microbes. When you buy as a probiotic, there might be a billion or two or five something like that per capsule. We're going to proliferate it a hundredfold, maybe even a thousandfold, depending on what product you start with and the eventual product. That smells like yogurt.
Speaker 1:I call it SIBO. Yogurt has 300 billion counts of microbes per half cup serving. That's what we get when we studied these yogurts with flow cytometry a means of counting microbes. So we consume half cup per day. Do that for a minimum of four weeks and so far, of about 50 people who've done this, 90% have gotten rid of their SIBO, as evidenced by measuring hydrogen gas on the breath.
Speaker 1:If you don't know what I'm talking about, please see all those other resources where I talk about the AIR device A-I-R-E. It's a way to measure hydrogen gas on the breath as a mapping device to tell you where microbes are living in the GI tract. You don't have to have the AIR device it is very helpful but you can just do the SIBO yogurt and you can follow whatever's happening to you. For instance, if you have a lot of food intolerances, they should go away, and when they go away, you now know that you've corrected the SIBO. Or if you have fat malabsorption, if you see fat droplets in the toilet or fat standing of the porcelain, that's fat malabsorption from fecal microbes in the duodenum. If you have conditions that are virtually synonymous with SIBO, like fibromyalgia or irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, like ulcerative colitis or Crohn's, restless leg syndrome, or if you're obese or type 2 diabetic, those conditions are so highly associated with SIBO that you can safely assume that you have it, and the solution is so benign that you don't have to be absolutely certain that you have it or not.
Speaker 1:Now also bear in mind you're restoring, for instance, lactobacillus roteri. Besides helping you eradicate SIBO. What else does it do? It has a whole range of other beneficial effects Smoother skin, a restoration of youthful musculature, a 50% rise in testosterone in males, restoration of vaginal moisture in elderly females, preservation of bone density and, because a lot of these effects are exerted via oxytocin, increased release of the hormone oxytocin from the brain. There's an increase in the intensity of love and affection. There's an increase in generosity. There's an increased acceptance of other people's opinions. There's a reduction of social anxiety. In other words, we don't have to worry about side effects. There's a reduction of social anxiety. In other words, we don't have to worry about side effects. We see side benefits when you do this.
Speaker 1:When you replace lactobacillus roteri lactobacillus gastri and now put that all together the change in diet, the loss of glide and drive, opioid peptides, common nutrient deficiency when corrected, that help you get rid of insulin resistance that was causing weight gain in the abdomen and then address a disrupted microbiome, gastrointestinal microbiome you have now a huge advantage you lose abdominal visceral fat preferentially.
Speaker 1:You will lose subcutaneous fat as well over time and you preserve or even increase muscle. And you preserve basal metabolic rate and you don't. When you lose the weight. You don't regain the weight, provided you stay in the program. So I think it's a far more rational, safe and effective way and it's not going to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. It's going to cost you almost nothing a few dollars for some of the supplements, maybe the organic half and a half. You might need to make the SIBO yogurt, but know that you get all kinds of benefits and that's why I say let's forget it, let's stop talking about weight loss. Let's instead talk about making better shape and body composition. Now, if you learned something from this episode of the Defiant Health Podcast, I invite you to subscribe to your favorite podcast directory. Post a review. Post a comment. Thanks for listening.
