What do I mean by "Super Body"?

It's not about having the build of a bodybuilder, nor 6-pack abs, or bulging biceps. It's about having optimal metabolic health that stacks the odds in favor of being free of heart disease, risk for cognitive impairment, cancer, loss of independence and other health conditions. We therefore work to reduce or minimize abdominal visceral fat while restoring youthful musculature. 

We do so starting with unique methods to restore a healthy gastrointestinal microbiome, then restore other factors largely absent from the modern health experience, effects you can track using a variety of methods: biomarkers, grip strength, visceral fat measurement, for example. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Redefining A “Super Body”
• 0:26 Metabolic Markers That Matter
• 1:07 Protecting Muscle As You Age
• 2:37 Visceral Fat Versus Subcutaneous Fat
• 4:21 Why Conventional Weight Loss Falls Short
• 5:13 Microbiome Strategy And SIBO Yogurt
• 6:13 Bacteriocins And Targeted Microbes
• 7:14 SIBO’s Role In Fat Gain And Muscle Loss
• 8:23 Hormones, Control, And Next Steps
• 8:54 Where To Learn More

Transcript

William Davis, MD: 0:00

What exactly do I mean by super body? Well, let me tell you what I don't mean. I don't mean having the body of a bodybuilder, or having six-pack abs, or having bulging pectoralis muscles or biceps. I'm talking about achieving shape and body composition that allows you to achieve optimal metabolic health. That is normalization of blood glucose, of inflammatory measures, of hemoglobin A1C, of your lipoprotein abomales, like small LDL particles, like triglycerides, like fatty liver. In other words, we've come at these conversations in past, but typically at the starting point of, say, a high hemoglobin A1C or high triglycerides. Let's now start the conversation, beginning with the con in the context of what I call shape and body composition. And there are two very important aspects of that. We're going to work to minimize abdominal visceral fat and to preserve or even increase muscle. So recall that as you age, you lose a lot of muscle. It's part of the aging process. Most people typically lose around 30% of the muscle they enjoyed at age 25 or 30 as they age, lose about 30% of your muscle. Now, if you had anything happen like you took a GLP1 agonist, or had a bariatric procedure, or lost weight by some program to reduce calories, or you had an extended illness that involves, say, bed rest for a prolonged, like you broke your ankle or something like that, or if you've had struggles with cortisol and some other factors, you've lost more than 30% of your muscle. And that's gonna program you for a future of frailty, faults, fractures, loss of independence, increased potential for cognitive impairment and dementia, increased risk for other health conditions, and believe it or not, earlier death. So we don't want this to happen. So we're gonna manage in my super body approach, we're gonna manage muscle. And we're gonna try to maintain or even increase or restore that youthful muscle. And please don't hear this involves going to the gym for extended periods. It does not. Yeah, resistance exercise can help somewhat, but I'm talking about addressing factors that cause you to accelerate the loss of muscle. We're gonna reverse them. And we're gonna try to reverse that process to increase or restore lean muscle mass. We're also going to specifically target abdominal visceral fat. Recall that there's two general depots of fat in the body. There's subcutaneous fat, that's the fat just below the skin. It could be around your buttocks or thighs or neck or chest, wherever, but it's below the skin, subcutaneous fat. But there's another sort of fat called abdominal visceral fat, and that's the fat that encircles abdominal organs like your liver or your intestines or your pancreas. Now, sometimes you can pretty much guess if somebody has a lot of abdominal visceral fat because they have a protuberant belly. But what's surprising is you can actually be slender, maybe even have a BMI body mass index in the ideal range, maybe 24, 23, and still have a significant quantity of abdominal visceral fat. And abdominal visceral fat is often accompanied, it causes accumulation of something called ectopic fat. And all that means is while you have abdominal visceral fat, it somehow triggers the accumulation of fat in other parts of the body. It could be fatty liver, it could be fat globules in your knees and hips. And you can see this, by the way, on joint MRIs. When that happens, it's very inflammatory, it accelerates the erosion of your cartilage and accelerates your path to bone-on-bone arthritis. You could have ectopic fat around the heart, epicardial fat, and that inflames the coronary arteries and causes your coronary disease to march forward much more rapidly. Now, there are other parts of the body where you can accumulate these so-called forms of ectopic fat. But the marker for this is abdominal visceral fat. Now, here's the thing: virtually all conventional methods of losing weight, cutting calories, move more, eat less, right? Push the plate away, GLP1 agonists, bariatric procedures. These are all preferential ways to lose subcutaneous fat, not abdominal visceral fat. So it targets the least problematic form of fat. You do lose some abdominal visceral fat. Wouldn't it be smarter to engage in strategies that specifically preferentially target abdominal visceral fat? And you know what happens? Metabolic improvements go faster. You achieve endpoints like a reduction in hemoglobin A1C, reduction in blood sugar, blood pressure, faster because you're getting rid of, you're targeting the source of those problems, not the more benign subcutaneous fats. So these are the topics I tackle in my new superbody book. These are mostly microbiome strategies. There are some non-microbiome strategies, but the cornerstone for a lot of this effort is my recipe for what I call SIBO yogurt. So those of you who've been following my conversations know all SIBO yogurt is it's a consortium, a group of three microbes, chosen specifically because they colonize the small intestine as well as the colon. This is very unusual. Most gastrointestinal microbes do not colonize the small intestine, but small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, S-I-B-O, is unique to the small intestine. That's where the battle occurs. That's the source of microbes that cause you to gain weight, send your blood sugar higher, increase risk for dementia and diabetes and heart disease and atrial fibrillation and psoriasis and fibromyalgia, etc. So we're going to target the microbes in the small intestine specifically, as well as the colon. So we're going to choose microbes that have the capacity, the unique capacity to colonize the small intestine, and produce something called bacteriocins. Bacteriocins are natural antibiotics. These natural antibiotics, bacterioins, are smarter than prescription antibiotics. So bactericins target undesirable microbes, like fecal microbes, such as E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, pseudomonas, proteus. The microbes you don't want. You want to minimize. Unlike a prescription antibiotic, which kills almost everything. It kills bad microbes, it kills good microbes. That's why you lose hundreds of species, beneficial species. When you take, say, a zithromycin or clarithromycin or doxycycline, it wipes out many, many of the beneficial microbes, which then allows unhealthy microbes to proliferate and then remarkably ascend into the small intestine. That's the origin of this process called SIBO. And that's a big driver of expansion of abdominal visceral fat and loss of muscle. It erodes muscle. The inflammation and insulin resistance of this process erodes muscle and accelerates aging, by the way. Now there's many other strategies, but we start with this idea of SIBO yogurt, microbes that colonize the small intestine, produce bactericins, and have other effects, beneficial effects, on the hormones that influence where fat is deposited and how much muscle you have. Hormones like cortisol. So this formulation addresses cortisol. This formulation also addresses oxytocin, the hormone I call the hormone of body composition, of shape and body composition. And there are other strategies. But this does not involve hours and hours at the gym. It's a way to restore your control, your metabolic control over all these factors that determine where fat is deposited, how much you have, and whether you enjoy youthful muscle or not. So if this interests you, I invite you to join the conversations that I bring in my super body book. If you want to talk uh two-way via Zoom, I do that in my inner circle.dr Davis Infinite Health.com. And of course, follow my conversations here on my YouTube channel, my Defiant Health podcast, and the thousands of blog posts I have in my William DavisMD.com blog, where you'll find a post, by the way, uh that addresses some of these issues in a little further detail.