The physiology of diabetes and proposes a solution through the keto diet. He explains how diabetes affects energy production, the role of insulin, and the transition to fat metabolism. The importance of understanding the glycemic index and offers practical advice for managing diabetes through dietary changes. Experiences with patients and highlights the potential benefits of adopting a keto or fat-based diet to improve diabetic health.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:39 – ATP is the chemical that runs everything

02:46 – A keto diet

04:08 – A healthy diet for a person

06:11 – The physiology

07:29 – Fix the diabetes

08:18 – The carnivore diet

09:05 – The physiology

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] We’ll talk about diabetes today. This information is just physiology. I’m surprised it’s not all over the place. But the more and more people I meet her diabetic, more I talk about this, the fewer people seem to have heard about it. So I wanted to, kind of run through the physiology real quick. It’ll take maybe a minute or two, to get it through. But it’s kind of important that we understand how it works. So. Everything starts with diabetes and all this with production of energy. Energy we’re talking about is ATP. So ATP is the chemical that runs everything about it. When you talk about energy, your heart, your brain got all that highly dependent upon ATP. So when we’re creating ATP, we have a couple different ways we can make it. When we’re talking about diabetes, we’re using the sugar system. So what ends up happening is you consume a food, that food becomes sugar is in your blood, and then your blood has to push that into the body. So remember ATP is created in the mitochondria.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:09] And there’s the powerhouse of the cells we got here at from high school. The mitochondria live in the muscle tissue. That’s important. Remember that for. So it ends up happening in the sugar system is when we eat the things and it becomes sugar to the system. The body has to push that sugar into the tissues to get it to work. The way it pushes it into the tissues is it uses insulin. Insulin will then allow the sugar to move from the blood into the tissues, those tissues being fat, which is how you gain fat and the musculature, which is how you make energy. Because remember the mitochondria live in the muscles later. That’s why it’s important. No, because we can’t get into the muscle tissue. We can’t get the energy. That issue creates all sorts of other problems that we see later. Heart attack, strokes, all sorts of stuff. So what we want to do is we realize that the sugar system is now broken because we can’t get insulin through it, because what happens is that as you start having more and more and more insulin, what ends up happening is the receptors that listen to insulin and push things through, stop working. And so that’s what we get when we talk about insulin resistance.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:16] So easy way to track reporter insulin levels however. So we can’t get the sugar from the blood into the tissue because the insulin pump doesn’t work. Well, the easiest way to fix this is to recognize we still have to have ATP. And so the way we’re going to do it is instead of using the sugar system, we use the other system which is the Fat system, because we can make ATP in the mitochondria with either sugar and insulin or fat. And so the way that we move from the sugar system to the fat system. That’s a keto diet. That’s all it is. So you’re using fat as your major fuel source. Now, that’s also why people who are on the keto diet lose fat so much because your body’s burning that fat or oxidizing that fat to make ATP. So if you move from the sugar system, the glucose system, to the keto system of the fat system, and you leave yourself there for 3 or 4 months. What is happening is because you’re producing a lot less insulin, because you’re not processing sugar anymore. Your body starts to get reset. And so all those insulin receptors that weren’t working before, now they will work. And so give yourself 3 or 4 months and then you can walk yourself back in to, normal carbohydrate function and you’re fine. So that’s the big key. If you’re diabetic and you don’t wanna be diabetic, you’re on a keto diet for 3 or 4 months. Lock yourself back out. Everything’s fine.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:36] The other good thing about learning about keto diet and diabetes is that even if you’re not going to go keto, the knowledge of glycemic index, glycemic load, that’s what I think will really, really help your diabetic function anyway. So if you start choosing lower glycemic foods in your diabetic, your blood sugars will start to come down. Everything becomes more manageable. So, you know, look at the glycemic index, which is how quickly things turn to sugar. There’s a lot of foods that you guys think are really healthy that aren’t. Here’s the biggest piece of that, though. There isn’t a healthy diet for people. There’s a healthy diet for a person. So for instance, a lot of people shouldn’t be eating rice, white rice, Brown rice, Jasmine rice. Doesn’t matter. The glycemic level of that is higher than Coca-Cola. So if you’re looking at when things turn to sugar and how bad sugar is for you, it can be worse than Coca Cola for a lot of you guys. So keep that in mind. Oatmeal or oats are also just as that glycemic index of those is very, very high. So if you wanna look those up just Google GI of whatever gi of oats, you know, come up gi I have donut come up gi I have broccoli come up. The lower the gi the slower it takes for those things to turn to sugar in your blood. And so this the smaller the in the insulin response you get. So that’s kind of the whole crux of what we’ve been talking about the past couple of days.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:55] Every single time I have taken a diabetic type two diabetic and work them into a keto diet about 3 or 4 days into the diet, they’re no longer diabetic. What I mean by that is that they’re producing energy without the use of insulin. And so all of a sudden their chemistry is fine. So that’s that’s what we talk about. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer to get them in there than the others. You gotta clean some stuff up. But that’s the thrust of it. So if you’re diabetic, if you have a friend who’s diabetic, then look at moving into a chaotic state. Now there’s a lot of misinformation about this, I think, on purpose. The thing is, is that it’s not hard to sustain. The only thing that I can’t have in this diet is French fries. And I eat a lot of cheesecake. I eat a lot of pecan pie, brownies, pizza, all sorts of stuff like my diet. Right now I’m trying to cut and lose fat is two pizzas, blueberry cheesecake and pecan pie. But it’s all keto. We don’t use any sugar, and we don’t use any of the things that turn into sugar. So it’s a lot, a lot easier to do than you think it is. So that’s kind of the crux of the whole thing.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:58] And a lot of stuff is like this. You know, if you look at mass, look at dementia, like ulcerative colitis, there’s a lot of things that if you just go back to the physiology, aren’t that hard to heal. And just like diabetes. If you understand the physiology and you start using the physiology, maybe you don’t need to use the drugs as much. Maybe that’s why you don’t know the physiology. It’s pretty simple. Like a lot of the things we talked about just a second ago, ATP, mitochondria. We learned about those in high school. The thing is, is that you probably didn’t learn about the two different systems, the fat system and the carbohydrate system or the sugar system. If one of the systems is broken, stop using it. Use the other one. It’s really, really not that hard. Now here’s the other issue. We get into this. Just like gasoline engines and diesel engines both make cars move. The problem is, is that they’re totally different operating systems, different chemistry, different everything else. So the thing we got to recognize is that you have to have somebody who understands the blood function and understands when they pull your blood, what they’re supposed to be looking at.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:00] Most doctors don’t because they just understand if this is levels high, I give this meth. So there’s a lot of things created in alt ALC. Things like that. Do you and your, a lot of those things are going to cholesterol, for example, are going to be a little bit different. And if you’re in a catalytic or a fat oxidizing state. So this is a big, big piece for your starting part of health. Lots of times when I work on things like dementia or cancer or anything else, the first thing I have to do is fix the diabetes. Otherwise, we can’t get anything else to heal for a variety of reasons. You know, reactive oxygen stress, low oxygen, the physiology . And that’s a big piece of it. So if you guys will start looking at like smooth function, you can start leaning into a little bit more into ketosis. It’ll start helping a lot of your diabetes. And it’s not going to fix everybody every time. Physiologically it should help the vast majority and if only if it helps 50% of the diabetics. There you go.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:59] But remember, you got to say actually down to that real low point, even if you’re in really low glycemic function, if you’re still in that sugar fat state, the lower the glycemic piece, the better your body’s going to do with it. So try as hard as you can to get down low. Eliminate all your sugars, as many carbs as you can. They’re not fiber, and that’s the easiest way to get into it. If you guys are going to do the carnivore diet, that’s a great way to do it because there’s no carbohydrates in meat. And the carnivore diets, if you’re like, that’s super restrictive. You know, many things are on the diet. It’s a giant amount of fat. So, you know, a lot of times it seems to me that people are just said PETA’s unsustainable because they’re trying to sell you their diet plans or because they just don’t, you know, they don’t know how to make food themselves. I have no idea what it is. It’s a giant, giant plethora of foods you can eat. It’s amazing. It’s delicious. But try it out. If you’re diabetic with a friend who’s diabetic, try to get them into a more fat based diet or keto based diet, and it’ll help them out quite a bit. So it’ll also help reduce the amount of drugs people need. And that’s always a beneficial effect.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:01] So if you guys have any questions so to us check it out. Look at the physiology. I didn’t go too deep into it because I’d always force people when we get into the Krebs cycle. On the TCA cycle, people who’ve been through biochemistry get panic attacks. So, but it’s really, really simple. You guys just walk it through, you know, lipolysis versus glycolysis. You can research that all you want to, and you’ll figure out how the whole thing works. So go through that because the easiest way to knock it out. I’ll see you guys at 230. We’ll do a little bit more, check and stuff. And then next week we’re gonna go through everything. And then on Fridays, we’re gonna start doing Q&A and we’re doing recaps. If you guys have any questions, questions at Chalmers Wellness or to me in the comments, share this with whoever you can. Because it’s probably gonna help somebody, guys we go going. Thanks.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

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