Improving Metabolic Health and Potential Indicators That Your Blood Sugar Levels Are a Problem with Dr. Casey Means
Episode introduction
Glucose is unique in that when tracked, it provides a valuable closed feedback loop. Users of a technology like Levels can see in real-time the impacts of their diet decisions. Want to know how that personal pizza you ate five minutes ago is affecting you? A biowearable can show you how. In this episode of Ever Forward Radio, Levels co-founder Dr. Casey Means share why real-time insights are such a game changer, and the steps that you can take now to take your metabolic health to the next level.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
09:14 – The beauty of glucose
There are tools right now that can measure glucose levels in real-time at home with a wearable sensor. Unlike other biomarkers, glucose changes based on choices made in real time.
“With all the other things you mentioned like genetics or even cholesterol, these are things that we cannot get information about in real-time. We can’t see a change in that variable with our behavior on a day-to-day basis. It’s more of either a lagging indicator for the case of cholesterol or for genetics, it’s something that we’re not going to see necessarily change over time. The genetic polymorphisms that show up on our 23andme tests are not changing. Now genetics can change in the sense that we can change gene expression over time with our choices, but that’s not a readout that we really have a lot of availability. There’s no consumer product that really does that right now. The beauty of glucose is that there are tools right now that can measure our glucose levels in real-time at home with a wearable sensor. This is what a continuous glucose monitor can do. Unlike these other variables, we can actually see how this biomarker is changing based on choices that we made five minutes ago, whether it’s what we chose to have for breakfast or whether we allowed ourselves to get stressed in response to an email we read or whether we got a poor night’s sleep.”
13:49 – How disorders of glucose develop
Increase in blood sugar leads to a decrease in insulin sensitivity, which leads to a vicious cycle where the body produces more and more insulin until it becomes insulin resistant.
“We have to get into a little bit of the physiology to understand this, but one of the ways the disorders of glucose, like diabetes or pre-diabetes develop is that over time as we eat diets that are predominantly composed of refined carbohydrates, western American diets are predominantly composed of refined carbohydrates, these are digested. They turn to glucose in the bloodstream. So does refined sugar, of course. And when that sugar elevates in the bloodstream, our body has a hormonal response. It releases insulin from the pancreas and that insulin helps you take that sugar out of the bloodstream into the cells so that glucose can be converted into energy. When there’s excess, it’s either stored as chains of glucose called glycogen or it’s turned into fat. When this happens too much, when we are getting really high glucose elevations in the blood, or we’re just doing it many many times per day, like let’s say we eat three high carb meals, plus three snacks, that’s six spikes of glucose in our bloodstream. That’s a lot of insulin the body has to produce to manage that insulin in the bloodstream. And over time the body gets tired and the cells actually become numb.”
16:35 – What causes a food coma
Carbs create a spike in blood sugar when not paired with protein, fat, or fiber. These peaks lead to a sugar crash and cause food coma. The way to reduce this is food pairing, walking after eating, and other strategies to avoid the crash.
“We can use tools like continuous glucose monitors to actually see how different foods are affecting our glucose and make smarter choices about what foods we’re choosing or how we’re even pairing foods. When you add protein, fat, or fiber to carbohydrates, it tends to blunt the glucose response. When you walk after a meal, it tends to blunt the glucose response. If you add vinegar cinnamon to a meal, it tends to bump the glucose response. There are innumerable strategies for minimizing the glycemic impact on our bodies. And over time that can keep our bodies sharp to that signal of insulin. So that’s like the long-term chronic disease part of things, but then there’s also just like the current performance side of things. When our glucose, even if we’re young and healthy and our pancreas is working well, is going up, down, up, down, up, down like peaks and valleys, that’s going to have an impact on our subjective experience of the day.”
24:08 – How to tap into fat burning
Insulin stops the body from burning fat. When the blood sugar level stays low, the body stops producing insulin and switches to burning fat. The key is to restrict the duration of high blood sugar in the body.
“The interesting thing about insulin as a hormone is that not only does it help to shuttle the glucose out of the bloodstream into our cells, that’s the purpose of insulin, it binds to insulin receptors, helps you move that glucose into the cells, but one of its other roles is that it’s a blocker on fat oxidation. So it stops you from being able to burn fat for fuel and glucose and fat are two main sources of energy in the body. We only have about two to three hours’ worth of stored glucose in the body. If we’re working out more or if we’re just at rest, the body’s going to use that first, and only when you run out of that and insulin is in a low state, do you start flipping the switch to burning fat. And that’s obviously going to be important for weight loss to be able to actually tap into fat-burning. But for the average American who’s eating multiple meals a day, lots of snacks, a high-refined carbon sugar diet, it’s very possible that we’re never getting to a state during the day where our insulin really comes down to baseline, really low, and allows us to take that break off of fat burning.”
27:08 – Health is not a one-way street
Health moves both ways. Metabolic dysfunctions are often reversible, and can be done so by improving insulin sensitivity and training the body.
“The beautiful thing about metabolic health and really the body, in general, is that so often things are reversible and we can move in the right direction. It’s not a one-way street with health in so many ways. There are certainly exceptions to that rule, but with blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, it’s very much a two-way street. I like to use the term metabolic fitness because we really need to orient around this idea of fitness as if we were going to go lift weights. It’s like the first time we lift weights, we’re not expecting to be jacked. We need to do it day in and day out in order to build the cellular adaptations that lead to muscle growth. And the same is true of how we should think about improving our insulin sensitivity, improving our glucose. You have to put in the reps in order to achieve metabolic flexibility and metabolic health and metabolic fitness. The reps in this case are days of not psyching your glucose too high, of keeping glucose lower and more stable. Those are the reps, keeping your insulin down is a rep that allows you to perk up and say, Oh, I need to be more insulin sensitive because I’m not seeing a lot of it around. I need to perk up a little bit and these are adaptations we can make.”
34:27 – Going beyond the standard care
Diagnostic tests based on single-time point measurements are not a good system of measuring metabolic health. A lot of doctors are now ordering fasted insulin tests and other non standard tests to get a better understanding of their patient’s health.
“I think a lot of doctors are starting to realize that we actually have to think deeper than that for a couple of reasons. One, because these diagnostic tests are just single-time point measurements that don’t tell us about what’s happening actually with the insulin. What if that person with this high, normal fasting glucose, like 95, maybe there’s a person out there who’s keeping that glucose at that level with very low insulin. They’re very insulin sensitive and they’re just putting out a little bit of insulin to keep the blood levels that way. Then there’s another person out there whose insulin levels are 10 times higher to keep the blood sugar at that same range, they are going to be much farther on that spectrum than the person with low insulin levels. So a lot of doctors are starting to order fasting insulin tests now, which is not standard of care, but there are many doctors who are starting to incorporate that into their practice.”
39:13 – How to perk up insulin sensitivity
The key is not about trying to find global solutions, but about enabling individuals to test and see what works best for them by testing and getting real time feedback.
“What we’ve seen now in the research is that people respond very differently to the same carbohydrate source. And there is this amazing paper out of Israel five years ago, it was published in the journal Cell that was called Personalized nutrition by prediction of glycaemic responses. They gave 800 healthy people, standardized meals, things like bananas or full meals or cookies, and saw this vast array of responses to those identical foods. They looked at what the predictive factors of that were. One of the big predictive factors was actually microbiome composition. So what’s in our gut actually changes the way we respond to a carbohydrate, which is fascinating. So the idea of just following a very restrictive blanket, low carb diet to me seems less favorable than actually testing, like what works for your body and choosing the things that have less impact.”
41:49 – What stress hormones do to our body
Stress hormones tell the liver to dump stored glucose into the bloodstream to prepare the body to fight off a threat. Since there is no active physical threat, the glucose stays in the blood sugar and contributes to metabolic dysfunction.
“When we stress, we release stress hormones like catecholamines and cortisol, and these have a really big impact on our ability to metabolize things appropriately, a time of threat that has to put our body on a different pathway. It’s not focused on optimal nuanced pathways where it’s survival mode. What stress hormones do to our body is they actually go to our liver and they tell the liver to dump out our stored glucose into the bloodstream because traditionally our threats were going to be physical in nature. We were going to have to run from a lion or something like that. We needed easily accessible energy to run. Now, most of our stressors in our modern world are very physically safe, but they’re psychological in nature. It’s the text message, it’s the email, it’s the conversation with a coworker, it’s the honking. It’s these chronic all-day low-grade stressors and our body is still dumping sugar into the bloodstream, and yet we don’t need it. So it’s sitting there causing problems.”
46:07 – The difference of an extra hour of sleep
A study revealed that the people who got 6.5 hours of sleep had to produce 50% more insulin to process the same amount of glucose as compared to those who got 7.5 hours of sleep.
“It’s this simple, it’s like if you don’t sleep enough, you are at significantly higher risk for developing metabolic conditions, ranging from being overweight to having diabetes, to having heart disease, to the extent that these are now becoming like sleep is being asked as like standard questions when we’re thinking about heart disease risk for people because it’s so strongly linked. One really interesting experiment that was done was they looked at a large group of people and they categorized them by people who are short sleepers or long sleepers. Short sleepers where people who are getting 6.5 hours of sleep per night, which for us, doesn’t seem that crazy. And the long sleepers were 7.5 to 8.5 hours. They gave each of these different groups an oral glucose tolerance test, which is where you take a bunch of liquid glucose in, and then we track your blood sugar for two to three hours after the test and see what happens. And, each group had similar glucose responses. So it’s like, Oh, so they’re the same. It doesn’t actually matter. But when you looked at insulin, the short sleepers had to produce 50% more insulin to have the same glucose levels as the people who are long sleepers. So we know that even one night of sleep can make us acutely insulin resistant.”
54:03 – Moving forward
Focusing on a positive, gratitude-based mindset, eating healthy, moving the body, are simple ways to move forward towards a healthy lifestyle.
“To me, part of moving ever forward just has a lot to do with mindset. It means waking up every morning with a growth mindset and with optimism and really knowing that the brain and the body are something that are modifiable and modulatable based on habit. When we put in the consistent effort each day, whether it means focusing on a positive, gratitude-based mindset, or putting beautiful food into our body or moving our bodies, there is an amazing payoff, there is plasticity in the body and we will move in the right direction. So it’s just really about keeping that growth mindset and keeping an optimistic outlook on the mind and body because life comes in waves and there’s generally a brighter side down the road, but we can help make things brighter by the way we approach each day with our habits.”
Episode Transcript
Dr. Casey Means:
Hi. My name is Dr. Casey Means, and I am the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Metabolic Health Company at Levels, and I’m thrilled to be on Ever Forward Radio. Today, we talked about why glucose management is our superpower, what metabolic health is, why personalizing our diet and lifestyle around glucose can help us live our best lives now and in the future, and some great strategies to keep our glucose on point.
Chase Chewning:
All right. Here’s the deal. You’re training hard, you’re working hard, you’re living your best life, and in doing so, you’re letting go of a lot. You’re sweating it out. You’re losing water, vitamins, nutrients, minerals, electrolytes, and many of you may just be reaching for let’s just go with insert popular electrolyte drink name here.
Chase Chewning:
Well, in most of those, you’re getting about 200-230 mg of sodium, 65 mg of potassium, zero magnesium, and then about almost 30,000 mg of sugar. You heard me right. You reach for a generic electrolyte drink mix or a bottled electrolyte drink, that’s what you’re getting, but today’s sponsor, LMNT Recharge, well, they make convenient grab-and-go packages that you can add into your favorite drink or your trusted water resource, and you’re going to be getting tried and true ingredients such as 1,000 mg of sodium, 200 mg of potassium, 60 mg of magnesium, and zero, zero added sugar.
Chase Chewning:
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Chase Chewning:
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Chase Chewning:
Welcome back, everyone. This is your number one source for inspiring content for people who are putting a purpose to their passion and truly living a life ever forward, conversations and messages that will take your fitness, nutrition, and mindset to the next level. I’m your host Chase Chewning. This is Ever Forward Radio.
Chase Chewning:
We’re on a new level, my friends. This episode is going to take your knowledge, your education, your empowerment to an entirely new level when it comes to understanding the sneaky little thing called glucose, understanding blood sugar, understanding insulin response, understanding insulin resistance, all things metabolism.
Chase Chewning:
Look, we know, we now know after going through this pandemic, this global pandemic, we’re still enduring this as of 2021, when we look at the unfortunate deaths or the unfortunate comorbidities around those deaths, so, so many, the overwhelming majority of them are chronic diseases and illnesses centered around things that we can prevent, things that we can even reverse if we have the knowledge, if we take dominion over our health and our wellness.
Chase Chewning:
One of those key markers that we can definitely understand more of and get in front of is blood sugar. Today’s guest, Dr. Casey Means, the co-founder over at Levels Health is helping us do just that. Levels is an incredible group of people, of doctors, of experts, of wellness authorities, entrepreneurs, just people whose mission now is to bring both hardware and software, technology and information to the forefront for everybody to understand what is going on internally when it comes to their blood sugar metabolism, their insulin response, family history, genetic predisposition, and just putting the power literally in the palm of your hand.
Chase Chewning:
Look, I personally have been using Levels for a while now. I’ve done a hard just one month analysis of wearing their continuous glucose monitor. I didn’t change a single thing in my routine, which I would personally recommend anyone to do when you’re looking at just understanding more about your physiology, your biochemistry, what makes you tick. Before you go changing any variable, you got to get that baseline, right?
Chase Chewning:
I did it for a couple of different reasons. I’m very curious about new technologies. I love the whole human performance, human optimization, biohacking kind of stuff, but, also, I have immediate family members that are diabetic and staying on top of my blood sugar is something that I just have to do. I refuse to just be that statistic to where one year I show up for my physical and my doctor tells me, “Hey, you’re pre-diabetic. Hey, you’re A1C is through the roof. Hey, we need to radically change your diet or else.” Levels has helped me do just that.
Chase Chewning:
I’m very excited to be back on my second round, my second month of Levels on their continuous blood glucose monitor. It just is so helpful, a very easy tool to just track and to see what’s going on internally because there are a lot of things we can do, right? We can look at our nutrition. We can look at our training. We can do all these things externally to live a life ever forward, to fine things, to fine tune ourselves, but we don’t often always get this lab, this lab, thing on our arm, this ability, this insight to see what’s going on inside of us so that we can make even more informed decisions when it comes to our fitness and nutrition and our mindset.
Chase Chewning:
So Dr. Casey is going to be breaking it down for us in ways that are so easy to understand of what is glucose, what is insulin, how does it get triggered, how does it enter our bloodstream, how does it stay there, what are things we can be doing to pay attention in terms of biofeedback to get ahead of it, what are some things we can be looking at in our sleep, our fitness, our nutrition, all these things.
Chase Chewning:
So whether you have a concern, an immediate concern or not, whether you’re diabetic, pre-diabetic or no one in your family is, it’s just good information to know. Another great area, another little sliver on the pie called total wellness here, I think. So I’m so glad you’re here with us on the show. If this brings value to you, if you think there’s one person in your life that could benefit from learning more about insulin response, blood glucose, and everything that Levels is doing over there, then I would really appreciate, great appreciate if you would just share this out with one person. Send it to that one person. Post it up on your Instagram story or text it to a friend. Just the more information we know about our own cells is great, but when we can share that and really have a positive ripple effect in our homes, our communities, our neighborhoods, then that’s the change that I’m after, and I need your help to do that.
Chase Chewning:
So with that in mind, thank you again so much for tuning in today. Here is Dr. Casey Means.
Chase Chewning:
… which I think is a great segue into what we’re going to be talking about today. We have so many great tools for our health and our wellness nowadays, hardware, software to help us become more empowered about what’s going on in our bodies, in our minds, and to really take charge. That’s really what you and everybody at Levels is all about, huh?
Dr. Casey Means:
That’s exactly what we’re doing. Our mission is to empower people with their personal health information so they can make better daily choices around diet and lifestyle, so that they can live their best life right now and really enhance performance every day currently, but then also ideally ward off chronic problems down the road related to diet and lifestyle, which the majority of our chronic illnesses these days are related to that. So we’re all about empowering people with the information to make those choices.
Chase Chewning:
So when it comes to curating information or putting together a team to go find the information, there are a lot of different avenues I’m sure you all could have done or gone down when it comes to genetics, when it comes to cholesterol, blood sugar, when it comes to cholesterol, sodium, all these things. Why was the focus on blood sugar and glucose and what it can do for or against us?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. That’s a great question. The key answer to this is that glucose provides us a closed loop biofeedback circle. So with all the other things you mentioned like genetics or even cholesterol, these are things that we cannot get information about in realtime and we can’t see a change in that variable with our behavior on a day-to-day basis. It’s more of either a lagging indicator for the case of cholesterol or for genetics, it’s something that we’re not going to see necessarily change over time.
Dr. Casey Means:
The genetic polymorphisms that show up on our 23andMe test are not changing. Now, genetics can change in the sense that we can change gene expression over time with our choices, but that’s not a readout that we really have a lot of availability. There are no consumer product that really does that right now.
Dr. Casey Means:
The beauty of glucose is that there are tools right now that can measure our glucose levels in realtime at home with a wearable sensor. This is what a continuous glucose monitor can do. So unlike these other variables, we can actually see how this biomarker is changing based on choices that we made five minutes ago, whether it’s what we chose to have for breakfast or whether we allowed ourself to get stressed in response to an email we read or whether we got a poor night sleep or if we did a high-intensity workout versus a walk. All of these things are actually going to have an immediate impact on our glucose levels, and there’s a technology now that picks that up, that creates closed loop with nutrition and lifestyle choices.
Dr. Casey Means:
The crazy thing about nutrition is we have never had a closed loop system on nutrition. We have had closed loop for fitness with fitness trackers and heart rate trackers. We’ve had closed loop for sleep with sleep trackers.
Chase Chewning:
I’m double dipping on mine. I’ve got my WHOOP, my Apple watch, all that. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
I love it. So you can wake up and see exactly what happened with your sleep. We even have close loop for stress now with HRV trackers and heart rate variability, but we’ve never known, there’s never been a tool where you put something in your mouth and you know exactly what’s happening in your body. That’s what glucose can do for us. It’s right now the only biomarker that can do that for us.
Dr. Casey Means:
So this technology continuous glucose monitor has been available as treatment tool for diabetes for several years, but what Levels does is bring this to a more mass consumer market to be used as a precision nutrition tool so that we have a sense of what’s going on with this key fundamental metabolic biomarker in our body.
Chase Chewning:
Now, you mentioned there predominantly this type of hardware, this type of information was for people who already had a concern or had an issue, the diabetics, the pre-diabetics. Why should someone who is not diabetic, why should someone who’s not pre-diabetic be concerned about monitoring their glucose?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about pre-diabetes and diabetes is that the vast majority of those conditions is preventable. So right now, we have 128 million Americans in the United States with pre-diabetes or diabetes. That’s a huge chunk of our population.
Chase Chewning:
That’s a lot of people.
Dr. Casey Means:
It’s a lot of people. It’s epidemic.
Chase Chewning:
Look around where you are. It’s probably one or two of the people you’re probably staring at right now.
Dr. Casey Means:
Absolutely. If you walk down the street, it’s close to 40% of people have either pre-diabetes or diabetes. With pre-diabetes, which is 84 million people in the United States, 90% of those people do not know that they have a blood sugar problem.
Chase Chewning:
90% don’t know.
Dr. Casey Means:
They don’t know. Yeah.
Chase Chewning:
That is a scary statistic. Wow!
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah, CDC data, 90% don’t know. Yeah. What’s so interesting about it is even if you’ve reached that pre-diabetic threshold by diagnostic criteria or the diabetic threshold by diagnostic criteria, that doesn’t mean that if you’re not in the pre-diabetic threshold that everything’s perfect because this is a spectrum. This is a spectrum illness where over time we move towards these conditions and metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance over time until one day we go into the doctor’s office and we finally met that criteria for diagnostic threshold, but that we’re marching along the spectrum throughout our lives. There’s good evidence to support that 13 to 17 years before we actually reach those diagnostic threshold we’re showing signs of early problems with our metabolism.
Chase Chewning:
So over a decade before we possibly get a diagnosis. We are exhibiting signs of something that we can get ahead of.
Dr. Casey Means:
That’s right. Yeah.
Chase Chewning:
Wow.
Dr. Casey Means:
Specifically, and we have to get into a little bit of the physiology to understand this, but disorders of glucose like diabetes or pre-diabetes, one of the ways that these develop is that over time as we eat diets that are predominantly composed of refined carbohydrates, which our Western American diets are predominantly composed of refined carbohydrates, these are digested. They turn to glucose in the bloodstream, so does refined sugar, of course.
Dr. Casey Means:
When that sugar elevates in the bloodstream, our body has a hormonal response. It releases insulin from the pancreas, and that insulin helps you take that sugar out of the bloodstream into the cells so that glucose can be converted into energy. When there’s excess, it’s either stored as stored chains of glucose called glycogen or it’s turned into fat.
Dr. Casey Means:
When this happens too much, when we are getting really high glucose elevations in the blood or we’re just doing it many, many times per day like let’s say we eat three high carb meals plus three snacks. That’s six spikes of glucose in our bloodstream. That’s a lot of insulin the body has to produce to manage that insulin in the bloodstream.
Dr. Casey Means:
Over time, the body gets tired and the cells actually become numb to that signal of insulin and we develop what’s called insulin resistance. What the body does to respond insulin resistance, it still has to get that glucose out of the bloodstream, and so the body produces more insulin, and it overcompensates. A young healthy body can do that. You just push out more insulin and force that glucose to the cells.
Dr. Casey Means:
So what we can actually pick on lab tests a lot earlier is that elevated insulin and that insulin resistance, that hyperinsulinemia, which is in this compensatory period where your glucose levels may not actually look problematic because your body is working hard on the insulin side to compensate for it.
Dr. Casey Means:
So there are studies that suggest that, yeah, 13 years in one study we’re seeing signs of insulin resistance and elevated insulin before the actual diagnostic test shows that there’s a glucose problem and you can imagine over time the body just gets more and more tired. The insulin resistance gets worse and worse, and then you start to see that glucose variability show up quite a bit more.
Dr. Casey Means:
So long-winded way of saying that part of the reason the average person on the street should care about their glucose is because we’re all on the metabolic spectrum and we want to stay in that healthy insulin-sensitive part of the spectrum for as long as we possibly can. Part of doing that is making sure that we’re keeping our glucose levels stable throughout our lifetime. We’re not getting exposure to these really high peaks or really frequent peaks and creating more rolling hills in our glucose levels in our blood with our diet, and we can use tools like continuous glucose monitors to actually see how different foods are affecting our glucose and make smarter choices about what foods we’re choosing or how we’re even pairing foods.
Dr. Casey Means:
When you add protein, fat or fiber to a carbohydrate, it tends to blunt the glucose response. When you walk after a meal, it tends to blunt the glucose response. If you add vinegar or cinnamon to a meal, it tends to blunt the glucose response. There’s innumerable strategies for minimizing the glycemic impact on our body. Over time, that can keep our body sharp to that signal insulin.
Dr. Casey Means:
So that’s like the long-term chronic disease part of things, but then there’s also just the current performance side of things. When our glucose, even if we’re young and healthy, and our pancreas is working well, if it’s going up, down, up, down, up, down like peaks and valleys, that’s going to have an impact on our subjective experience of the day.
Dr. Casey Means:
When we go way up like let’s say we have five cookies and our glucose shoots up through the roof, the body is going to soak up, it’s going to produce all this insulin and soak up all that glucose and we may actually have a crash, a glucose crash. That’s like that post-meal slump that many of us have had before.
Chase Chewning:
The itis, the food coma. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
The food coma, and that can be associated with a little bit of jitters, anxiety, some mood instability, maybe a little brain fog. So I like to say that a lot of variability in our glucose even when we’re otherwise healthy leads to variability in our day, whether it’s mental sharpness, athletic performance, fatigue or mood. So it’s really at the nexus of our current reality and our current performance and then, of course, our long-term disease risk.
Chase Chewning:
All right. We’re going to shift gears here real quick. We’re going to go from talking about blood sugar and insulin and these ingredients in a lot of the food stuffs we consume and even additives such as added sugars and what it does to our body. We’re going to go from sugars. We’re going to get a little bit salty here today. I want to bring your attention to my friends and partners over at Elemental Labs and their Recharge electrolyte drink mix.
Chase Chewning:
I want to share with you a really interesting study. Well, a couple of pieces here that they have found to be not only scientifically true, but when you think about it, think anecdotally, think about how we train, how we perform, how we live. Just think about how real the science is and the sense that it makes to our recovery, to our hydration, and just overall energy and mood.
Chase Chewning:
I’m going to link this down on the show notes for you guys as well. You can check it under episode resources, but a 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looking at sodium intake in cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attacks paints an interesting and different picture. Of course, they’re talking about here the comparison to old school thought that if we have hypertension, if we have high blood sugar or we have any kind of cardiovascular disease or disorder we need to be drastically decreasing sodium. Well, here is a study that paints the other side of that coin.
Chase Chewning:
The likelihood of health problems was quite high in individuals consuming less than two grams of sodium per day. The lowest rate of events was at about five grams per day of sodium intake. This is more than double what is recommended by the AHA, FDA, and CDC. What is particularly interesting is that the studies’ authors noted that one must get as high as eight grams of sodium per day to see the same degree of problems as below two. Think about that.
Chase Chewning:
So under two grams of sodium per day you’re seeing the same cardiovascular havoc as then again up at eight and above. So what’s going on? What’s going on between that two and eight grams? Well, let me tell you.
Chase Chewning:
In another study published in Preventative Medicine found that not only was sodium restriction ineffective in hypertensive patients. Those who consumed lower than 2.5 grams per day of sodium had consistently higher blood pressure than those who consumed larger amounts. It’s important to note that this study was done in a population that one could reasonably assume a reduction in sodium intake might actually be helpful, but, in fact, it was not. These studies involved a population of folks with known cardiovascular disease.
Chase Chewning:
So what if we are thinking about healthy or physically active populations? Were the electrolyte requirements even higher? Well, I’m here to tell you that many of us, many of us, a drastically high percentage of humans are deficient in most electrolytes particularly magnesium, and you would be surprised the amount of sodium that we lose through breathing, through sweat, and just a lot of daily living. This is why I trust the science and I trust the whole team behind LMNT and what they have created with Recharge electrolyte drink mix.
Chase Chewning:
So if you would like to strive for that happy medium, that ideal range of adequate electrolytes particularly sodium for your daily energy, for recovery, for improving the neural connections in your brain, electrolytes, they’re really one of the main fuel sources that our brain requires to charge and to fire and to just think more clearly and to honestly grow new neural connections. They’re called electrolytes for a reason.
Chase Chewning:
So if you want to try LMNT and if you want to see the same profound value that I have found in it, and you want to get it for free, you want to get a free variety sample pack for simply just a couple of dollars to cover shipping, well, you can. As a valued listener here on Ever Forward Radio, you’re going to get their free variety sample pack. All you need to do is cover for just $5 for shipping and you’re going to get it sent straight to your door.
Chase Chewning:
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Chase Chewning:
All right. Let’s switch this conversation from salty to sweet and continue learning about Levels, blood sugar, and the incredible things that Dr. Casey Means and her team at Levels are doing. Let’s jump back in to the conversation.
Chase Chewning:
Insulin resistance, those are two words that I used to hear a lot. When I was working in clinic, the doctor would come in, the patient would be ready to come see the health coach after they just had their physical labs, and the doctor would always say, “Oh, you’re exhibiting signs of insulin resistance.” It was always my interpretation was the patient seems, the person seems to be doing everything “right”, but they’re having just that little bit of that tummy.
Chase Chewning:
It’s like that abdominal fat that they just can’t seem to get going away. Maybe the doctor would see some numbers that look questionable over the months or years in terms of blood sugar. Is insulin resistance, is that the telltale sign that maybe we have that? Is that what’s going on? Is that that last few pounds that we just can’t seem to get rid of? Is that where it just likes to live and could that be an initial sign?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah, it definitely can be associated with that. So the interesting thing about insulin as a hormone is that not only does it help us shut all the glucose out of the bloodstream into our cells. So that’s the purpose of insulin. It binds insulin receptors, helps you move that glucose into the cells, but one of its other roles is it’s a blocker on fat oxidation. So it stops you from being able to burn fat for fuel.
Dr. Casey Means:
Glucose and fat are our two main sources of energy in the body. We only have about two to three hours’ worth of stored glucose in the body if we’re working out, more if we’re just at rest. So the body is going to use that first. Only when you’ve run out of that and insulin is in a low state. You start flipping the switch to burn fat. That’s, obviously, going to be important for weight loss to be able to actually tap in to fat burning.
Dr. Casey Means:
For the average American who’s eating multiple meals a day, lots of snacks, a higher refined carbon sugar diet, it’s very possible that we’re never getting to a state during the day where our insulin really comes down to baseline, really is low and allows us to take that break off of fat burning.
Dr. Casey Means:
This is why I think so many people are interested in ketogenic diets for weight loss, but also fasting for weight loss because both of those strategies keep the glucose, exogenous glucose from the diet lower. The keto diet through a low-carb diet, fasting through just not eating at all, those are times essentially where your insulin is low and you’re taking that break off fat burning. You can actually flip that metabolic switch from glucose burning to fat burning.
Dr. Casey Means:
So yes, people who are dealing with that abdominal fat, what’s interesting in that insulin is it preferentially stores your fat around your middle. It preferentially stores what we call visceral adiposity, which is the fat-
Chase Chewning:
Lucky for us, right?
Dr. Casey Means:
What’s that?
Chase Chewning:
Lucky for us, right?
Dr. Casey Means:
Lucky for us, yeah. You see a lot of people walking around with maybe relatively lean appendages but really a huge belly. That’s a telltale sign of insulin resistance where that insulin is elevated, we’re on that spectrum moving towards a problem, and that insulin is basically stopping us from being able to burn through that fat, but also telling the body to store any excess glucose as visceral fat around our organs and in our belly.
Chase Chewning:
When is the best time, the best place in that spectrum to actually take action because I can imagine someone who is maybe going to the doctor in the last two years or last five years the doctor goes, “Your sugars look a little high, but don’t worry about it. You’re not pre-diabetic. You’re not diabetic.” When should we actually step in and take note of, “Hey, there’s something going on internally that I need to get ahead of”? How much time really do we have to get to it later so to speak?
Dr. Casey Means:
Well, the beautiful thing about metabolic health and really the body in general is that so often things are reversible and we can move in the right direction. It’s not a one-way street with health. So in so many ways, there are certainly exceptions to that rule, but with blood sugar and insulin sensitivity, it’s very much a two-way street.
Dr. Casey Means:
I like to use the term metabolic fitness because we really need to orient it around this idea of fitness as if we were going to go lift weights. The first time we lift weights we’re not expecting to be jacked. We need to do it day in and day out in order to build the cellular adaptations that lead to muscle growth. The same is true of how we should think about improving our insulin sensitivity, improving our glucose. You have to put in the reps in order to achieve metabolic flexibility and metabolic health and metabolic fitness.
Dr. Casey Means:
The reps in this case are days of not spiking your glucose too high, of keeping glucose lower and more stable. Those are the reps. Keeping your insulin down is a rep, which allows yourselves to perk up and say, “Ooh, I need to be more insulin sensitive because I’m not seeing a lot of it around. I need to perk up a little bit.” These are adaptations we can make.
Dr. Casey Means:
So I think going back to I did a lot of wilderness leadership in my early 20s and one of my favorite lines is the best way to not get lost is to stay found. So you always want to know where you are in the middle of the wilderness. That’s how I feel about glucose monitoring and knowing about it, orienting our diet and lifestyles through glucose.
Dr. Casey Means:
The best time to do it is when we’re very, very young. We want to look through that lens as we approach our diet and our lifestyle so that we can stay found, so to speak, but the hopeful thing is that even if you’re well down the road, even in full-blown, fulminant type two diabetes, there is evidence that it is reversible.
Dr. Casey Means:
A wonderful company is doing great research in this, Virta Health, which is a diabetes reversal program that’s done through a coaching and low-carb diet, and they’ve put out a research showing that in 10 weeks with a dietary intervention their participants can go from diabetes to a non-diabetic glucose level.
Dr. Casey Means:
So not to say that this is the only program or a program that is the end all be all. I actually think there’s other strategies other than just super, super low-carb to improve insulin sensitivity, but what it shows us is there is a door towards reversing these even when you’re on a late stage, but with that said, starting early, I mean, and just crafting a diet that works for you to keep glucose fairly low and stable that you still love and learning those tips and tricks to modulate diets that doesn’t have so much of a glycemic impact for your personal body, I think that’s the time to do it.
Chase Chewning:
I agree. Absolutely. I would love to get there, but before we do, before we get into what do we need to do to regulate or even reverse high blood sugar concerns, can you walk us through, and we touched a little bit on it already of the food coma, the itis, can you walk us through from just initial body scans, biofeedback to harder telltale signs, how do we know when we have blood sugar concerns? What can we be looking for to feel, to note, brain fog, physically, and then even other bigger manifestations?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. So one thing that’s really interesting about blood sugar problems is that it can masquerade as almost any symptom. The reason for that comes down to fundamentally what is metabolism. So metabolism is a core pathway that takes place in every single cell in our body to generate energy for our cells. It’s basically the process, the set of chemical reactions in the body through which we convert food substrates to a currency of energy our body can use.
Dr. Casey Means:
We have over 30 trillion cells in our body. Every single one needs a well-functioning metabolism for our cells to work. When cells start not functioning properly, when they don’t get the energy they need, then we start getting tissue dysfunction, then we start getting symptoms, and then we start getting disease. So it all comes down to the cellular level of what’s going on in the cells, and one of those core pathways is metabolism. So it can look like anything.
Dr. Casey Means:
For instance, if your metabolism is off-kilter in your ovaries, it could look like polycystic ovarian syndrome, the leading cause of infertility in America, which is a metabolic condition. If it’s happening in brain cells, it could look like Alzheimer’s, dementia, which is being called type three diabetes now because it’s so linked to insulin resistance, but it could also look like depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or chronic pain. All of those conditions are associated with blood sugar.
Dr. Casey Means:
If it’s happening in the liver, it could look like chronic liver disease. If it’s happening in the blood vessels, it could look like any host of blood vessel endothelial problems, and we know that retinopathy, which is an issue with the blood vessels of the eyes is related to diabetes. We know that big vessel disease like heart disease is directly related to blood sugar problems.
Dr. Casey Means:
We also know that erectile dysfunction, which is a problem with blood getting to the penis, is very much even considered a warning sign for having blood sugar problems. Men in their 40s with erectile dysfunction, if that’s a symptom that comes up, at this point, you must get checked out for blood sugar problems. It’s a very-
Chase Chewning:
Yeah, seriously.
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. So it’s really this great masquerader based on where this core pathway is showing its signs. In the skin, it can be acne. We know that blood sugar is related to too much oil production in the skin. So I could just go on and on, but it’s amazing because it could look like anything. It could also just look like feeling crappy, like you’re in your 30s and you have some brain fog, you’re often tired after meals.
Chase Chewning:
You just can’t hardly put your finger on it and you’re just like, “Something’s off.” Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. I mean, I skipped over the biggest one, which is issues with losing weight. 72% of our country right now is overweight or obese. What is being overweight or obese? It’s excess fat storage. How does fat get stored? Through elevated insulin and by not ever having that break of insulin off so that you can actually burn through those energy stores. Being overweight is really just having too much energy stored as fat that we’re not using.
Dr. Casey Means:
So there’s not a specific symptom that I would say is directly related, a one-to-one relationship, but any of these things that I just mentioned should be red flags to dig in to this deeper.
Dr. Casey Means:
What often will happen is that you go to the doctor’s office and they’ll check your fingerstick glucose first thing in the morning and they’ll say, “Oh, it’s less than 100 mg/dl so you’re totally fine.” I’m sure a lot of people would have that experience. Someone out there might say, “Oh, my gosh! I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I’m going to go to the doctor and ask for a fingerstick glucose,” and they’re going to go in and it’s going to be 95, and the doctor is going to say, “You have no problem. There’s no issue here.”
Dr. Casey Means:
I think a lot of doctors are starting to realize that we actually have to think deeper than that for a couple of reasons. One because these diagnostic tests are just single-time point measurements that don’t tell us about what’s happening actually with the insulin. What if that person with this high normal fasting glucose like 95, maybe there’s a person out there who’s keeping that glucose at that level with a very low insulin. They’re very insulin sensitive and they’re just putting out a little bit of insulin to keep the blood levels that way.
Dr. Casey Means:
Then there’s another person out there who’s insulin levels are 10 times higher to keep the blood sugar at that same range. They’re going to be much farther on that spectrum than the person with the low insulin level. So a lot of doctors are starting to order fasting insulin test now, which is not standard of care, but there’s many doctors who are starting to incorporate that into their practice.
Dr. Casey Means:
There’s other ratios that we can actually tell from our cholesterol test like our triglyceride to HDL ratio, total cholesterol to HDL ratio. So these are just from your standard cholesterol level tests, and based on what those ratios look like can actually be predictive of whether you are insulin resistant.
Dr. Casey Means:
Then there’s another test you can do with the fasting glucose and a fasting insulin test that gives you, it’s called the HOMA-IR score, which is a score of insulin resistance. So these are things that you can ask your doctor for potentially to get a sense of where you are in terms of insulin resistance, and then continuous glucose monitoring gives you, while a fasting glucose test is the standard of the care, tells you just a snapshot of what’s happening with your glucose but nothing about the context, the insulin, et cetera, continuous glucose monitoring can give you more of like a movie of what’s going on with your glucose levels and-
Chase Chewning:
Yeah, leading up to, during the event, after the event. It paints a fuller picture, a much needed fuller picture.
Dr. Casey Means:
Precisely. So an example of this, let’s say you have a glucose monitor on and you’ve eaten a full breakfast, and your glucose, you’re going to break down those carbohydrates that you ate. The glucose is going to go up in the bloodstream and it’s going to come down. That should typically happen for a healthy person in about two hours. Ideally, we don’t go above about 140 when we eat that meal, but I would argue we want to not go that high ever, but just in terms of standard guidelines. You don’t really want to go above 140 after a meal. You want to come back down within about two hours.
Dr. Casey Means:
Well, let’s say you put it on. You’re sitting there next to your friend. You both eat the same breakfast and one person goes up and comes down in two hours. The other person goes up and stays elevated for three and a half hours and then comes down. Well, that’s a lot of information. That might be a sign that that person is actually more insulin resistant. Their body is not responding to that insulin well enough to get the glucose in. It takes longer for them to clear it from their bloodstream. You’re never going to pick that up from a standard single-time point measurement, but on a continuous glucose monitoring you can. So that’s the lay of the land of some of the objective things you could potentially look at and also some of the more subjective, symptomatic things you might see.
Chase Chewning:
So then what can someone do with that information? What can someone do with seeing, “Oh, wow! This meal that my whole family is eating or I’ve been used to eating my whole life I’m actually learning it causes a longer insulin response, a longer blood sugar spike. Maybe I don’t have any other signs or symptoms or concerns yet, but this is something that I’m aware of and I want to get ahead of. What can I actually do about it?”
Dr. Casey Means:
So there are a couple of lenses we can look through. One is food, which we should dive in to, but then there’s a number of other factors that we know can improve our insulin sensitivity that I’ll just touch on briefly. So with food, the key point is to regain our insulin sensitivity. We can do that by stopping the constant stimulation of insulin in the body. We do that by keeping our glucose more stable essentially. We can learn how to do that by there’s lots of books out there about low-carb, low-glycemic keto type diets. You can read about what foods are the major offenders and what aren’t, but you can also use biofeedback like a continuous glucose monitor and actually test for yourself. That’s what I personally recommend. Obviously, I’m biased. I started a company about this because I’m so passionate about it.
Chase Chewning:
Shout out Levels. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
The interesting thing is that you and I could both eat a banana and we might have totally different glucose responses to that banana. I might go up from baseline of 70 mg/dl to 170 and go up 100 points and you might go up 10 points. That’s what we’ve seen now in the research is that people respond very differently to the same carbohydrate source.
Dr. Casey Means:
There was this amazing paper out of Israel five years ago. It was published in the Journal of Cell that was called Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses. They gave 800 healthy people standardized meals, things like bananas or full meals or cookies and saw this vast array of responses to those identical foods. Then they looked at what were the predictive factors of that.
Dr. Casey Means:
One of the big predictive factors was actually microbiome composition. So that’s in our gut actually changes the way we respond to a carbohydrate, which is fascinating. So the idea of just following a very restrictive blanket low-carb diet to me seems less favorable than actually testing what works for your body and choosing the things that have less impact, and then also using that tool to modulate foods to have least glycemic impact.
Dr. Casey Means:
So doing things like I talked about earlier like food pairing, making sure that we’re not eating carbohydrates alone and pairing them appropriately with fat, protein, fiber to minimize their impact, to sequence meals appropriately. If we eat protein and fat and roughage before we eat our carbohydrates in a meal, we tend to have less of a glycemic response. If we eat earlier in the day, we tend to have a better response. So just learning this metabolic toolbox of how to eat to minimize that glycemic impact therefore minimize that insulin impact and over time perk up our insulin sensitivity.
Dr. Casey Means:
So that’s big picture for food. It’s really just keeping it more stable, but just to quickly touch on, there’s many other aspects. I mean, cell biology is complex and it’s more than just food and there’s no one like we already talked about, there no one food plan for everyone. It’s your personal low-glycemic food plan.
Dr. Casey Means:
We also need to think about the other pillars, which are sleep, how we’re sleeping, how we’re stressing, how we’re moving, the micronutrient composition of our food in our bodies, our microbiome health, and then exposure to pollutants. So these are really the big factors with-
Chase Chewning:
I’m so glad you bring this up. That was going to be actually my next question was, okay, besides taking care of our blood sugar if we have a concern around that, why else should we care about monitoring our blood sugar? What are the other spillover effects, basically?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. So I mentioned those things because all of those things fit in to how our metabolic processes work. So stress is a really interesting one. When we stress, we release stress hormones like catecholamines and cortisol, and these have a really big impact on our ability to metabolize things appropriately. Makes sense. A time of threat, that has to put our body on a different pathway. It’s not focused on optimal nuanced pathways, where it’s survival mode and so what stress hormones-
Chase Chewning:
It’s slowing down metabolism. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. What stress hormones do to our body is they actually go to our liver and they tell the liver to dump out our stored glucose into the bloodstream because, traditionally, our threats were going to be physical in nature. We were going to have to run from a lion or something like that. We needed easily accessible energy to run.
Dr. Casey Means:
Now, most of our stressors in our modern world, which is very physically safe are they’re psychological in nature. It’s the text message. It’s the email. It’s the conversation with a coworker. It’s the honking. It’s these chronic all-day low-grade stressors, and our body is still dumping sugar into the bloodstream and yet we don’t need it. So it’s sitting there causing problems.
Dr. Casey Means:
So there’s been research to show that if you can manage your stress response and using diaphragmatic breathing and parasympathetic nervous system activation to douche-
Chase Chewning:
That’s something I’m learning about actually in a James Nestor’s book I’m wrapping up now, Breath.
Dr. Casey Means:
Best book ever.
Chase Chewning:
Mind-blowing. I’m in the section where he’s talking about the metabolic spillover effect that getting better at breathing can have, and talking about blood sugar management and disease management. It’s unreal.
Dr. Casey Means:
It’s incredible. When he was forced to do mouth breathing by plugging his nose in the Stanford experiment, his blood biomarkers just went totally out of whack. It’s incredible. Our bodies are so finally tuned to help us self-manage our stress, but we’ve lost a lot of that traditional wisdom, which is so prevalent in so many other cultures, but we don’t think about it. I don’t think vagal nerve stimulation is something that children are taught in the US. Yet, it is our keys.
Chase Chewning:
I’m going to teach my kids. Damn it. I’m going to teach my kids about vagal nerve stimulation.
Dr. Casey Means:
I’m with you. I mean, this is about coping. This is about self-soothing. That makes your own life better, but also makes everyone around you their life better when you know how to manage your emotions. We literally have builtin hacks. There’s places we can touch on our body to actually activate some of those stuff that changes our stress hormones and it’s amazing.
Chase Chewning:
I’ll share another one with the listeners right now speaking of breath to couple what you’re talking about here. The cycles that he talks about are nostrils going in in terms of left or right breathing. The left side is more directly tied to your sympathetic and right tied to your parasympathetic. I’m pretty sure I got that right. I’ll have to double check and put that down, but just paying attention.
Chase Chewning:
This is a great biofeedback hack for someone right now is pay attention. Biofeedback. Which nostril side are you predominantly breathing through? That can be an indicator of, “Wow! I’m actually stressed out. What am I on edge about? What am I nervous about? What am I worried about? What am I thinking? What am I doing? Who are the people I’m with?”
Chase Chewning:
Just a small little thing of paying attention to which nostril you are breathing through can be the precursor to managing your blood sugar.
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. Totally.
Chase Chewning:
Wow.
Dr. Casey Means:
Totally. Yeah. A major shout out for that book. It’s amazing. I originally trained as a ear, nose, and throat surgeon and I was-
Chase Chewning:
That’s right. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
I was so blown away by how much I did not know about the nose. I’m like, “Here I spent nine years between medical school and residency obsessed with the nose, operating on the nose, and in that book I learned so much about just-”
Chase Chewning:
You’re like, “I know nothing.”
Dr. Casey Means:
Right. I’m like, “I’m sending this to every one of my colleagues.”
Chase Chewning:
“I’ve been living a lie.”
Dr. Casey Means:
Agreed. It’s a great just broad brushstrokes about some other ways we can be thinking about our life, but stress, it’s huge for metabolic health, and it makes sense from that evolutionary protective mechanism that gone awry. Sleep really fits hand-in-hand with that. We basically know, I mean, it’s this simple. It’s like if you sleep not enough, you are at significantly higher risk for developing metabolic conditions ranging from being overweight to having diabetes, to having heart disease, to the extent that these are now becoming … Sleep is being asked as standard questions when we’re talking about heart disease risk for people because it’s so strongly linked.
Dr. Casey Means:
So one really interesting experiment that was done was they looked at a large group of people and they categorized them by people who are short sleepers or long sleepers. Short sleepers were people who are getting 6.5 hours of sleep per night, which is not even that. For us, it doesn’t seem that crazy. The long sleepers were 7.5 to 8.5.
Dr. Casey Means:
They gave each of these different groups oral glucose tolerance test, which is where you take a bunch of liquid glucose in and then we track your blood sugar for two to three hours after the test and see what happens. Each group had similar glucose responses. So it’s like, “Oh, so they’re the same. It doesn’t actually matter,” but when you looked at insulin, the short sleepers had to produce 50% more insulin to have the same glucose levels than the people who were long sleepers. So we know that even one night of sleep can make us insulin resistant.
Dr. Casey Means:
There’s another crazy study. This one’s impacted me a lot, where they had a group of very healthy, young men and they subjected them to five nights of four hours of sleep per night, which is extreme, obviously. That would grow us-
Chase Chewning:
Sounds like a lot of my time in the military to be honest, especially in bootcamp.
Dr. Casey Means:
Totally. It sounds pretty crazy for day-to-day, but I think back to my surgical residency when I was on call two to three nights a week-
Chase Chewning:
Oh, yeah, those all-nighters, yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
All-nighters, and so it’s not four hours of sleep at night but on average some weeks it was four hours a night of sleep. They basically took these healthy young men, and in that intervention converted them from normal to pre-diabetic based on their lab studies. Then they gave them basically unlimited 12-hour sleep at night for the next five nights and people, it was reversible, but if you think about college kids during finals weeks, how many of those kids are, and I say kids like it’s so long ago, but I mean it’s only 15 years ago, but they’re probably flipping in and out of pre-diabetes in college not infrequently.
Dr. Casey Means:
So best thing we can do I think for our mental health is just get a quality sleep and also for our metabolic health. Exercise, just I’ll keep it short. Anytime we’re moving our body, we’re improving our metabolic health, and the reason for this is twofold. One is that muscles are one of our biggest glucose syncs in the body. They are this gigantic full body place that’s using glucose. So if you’re moving a muscle even it means walking across your room, that’s just every single one of those muscle fiber is having to take up glucose out of the bloodstream and keep it in a more stable range.
Dr. Casey Means:
The cool thing about muscle is that it’s actually able to function in an insulin-independent way. Muscle contraction in its own right allows glucose to be taken up. You don’t need the insulin as a lock and key.
Chase Chewning:
Oh, nice.
Dr. Casey Means:
So it’s like a way to dispose of glucose without trigger the whole insulin physiology.
Chase Chewning:
It’s that dark knight working in the background for us. Amazing.
Dr. Casey Means:
It is. It is. There’s been some really interesting studies where basically you take people, put them in different groups, one that walks for 20 minutes three times a day before meals, one that walks for 20 minutes a day after each of the three meals, and so that’s 60 minutes total for each group or a group that walks two minutes every 30 minutes throughout the day. So each group totals 60 minutes of movement but at different times.
Dr. Casey Means:
The people who walk every 30 minutes actually have the best glucose control more than eating before or after meals or in chunks. I think the reason for that is because by moving every 30 minutes, even for just a couple of minutes, you’re activating the whole body of muscles-
Chase Chewning:
Nothing gets stagnant.
Dr. Casey Means:
… and you’re keeping those pathways constitutively activated. You’re becoming a body that moves as opposed to a sedentary body that has little chunks of movement.
Chase Chewning:
Body in motion stay in motion. That’s what they say, right?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yes. Yeah. I love that.
Chase Chewning:
Body at rest stays at rest. Yeah. Your expertise is very apparent. It’s been so great hearing. Some of these things are a reminder for me personally, but so many other nuances and new studies and new technologies that are coming out of the work that you’re doing and the whole team at Levels is, well, first of all, I’m thankful. Thank you so much for what you’re all doing and for the education and empowerment you’re passing on to the world and through the audience here on the podcast.
Chase Chewning:
Getting towards the end, I know that you all have now been able to not only educate, empower, but now pass off a tool to help somebody track it, become more in tuned with their body, learn biofeedback, and just make a decision or make better decisions for their general wellness to ahead of diabetes like myself who has it directly in his family. I’m very mindful of carbohydrates and sugar and getting my A1C every year, but with Levels, it is giving me daily immediate continuous access to what is going on to some of my food choices, to my physical activity choices, and in a lot of ways it’s been a great little just nudge of, “Hey, Chase. You think you’re doing the right thing? Well, maybe for you due to your bio-individuality, you need to be doing something a little bit differently.” It’s just been that great little nudge for me in maintenance, in my wellness. So for that I say thank you, but can you please give us the high level view of what is Levels and what is it doing for the person?
Dr. Casey Means:
Yeah. Well, thank you for those kind words, and I’m glad it was a positive experience. So Levels is doing exactly what we’ve been talking about. It’s giving people this window into their metabolic health through providing access to continuous glucose monitoring technology and then pairing that with software that helps you understand what that data stream means and how to optimize and improve your diet and lifestyle to keep glucose levels in ideally a stable and healthy range.
Dr. Casey Means:
Because it is so personalized, each person is going to respond differently to carbohydrates. It allows people to really have that personalized closed loop lens on how these choices are actually specifically affecting your own body and to move towards more of an optimal state.
Dr. Casey Means:
So our program is a one month program. We call it a one month metabolic awareness journey. During that one month, people get these wearable sensors, the continuous glucose monitors, which you just stick on the back of your arm.
Chase Chewning:
Very easily. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
Super easy, super painless. They last on there for two weeks. So during the month, which is 28 days, you get two of these two-week sensors. It’s like a little lab on your arm. It’s like doing a little lab test on your arm 24 hours a day.
Chase Chewning:
It is. Yeah.
Dr. Casey Means:
It’s crazy. It’s like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, but it’s actually testing something inside your body through this tiny little painless filament that goes under the skin, and then it’s transmitting that data to your smartphone or a software interprets that data for you. So that’s what Levels does. Ultimately, it’s all about empowerment, help people understand their bodies better, and helping us make the consistent dietary and lifestyle choices that keep us healthy both now and in the future.
Chase Chewning:
That’s what Ever Forward Radio is all about. That’s the meaning behind the message is what are these things that we can continue to do, what can we learn more about, too, to keep us moving forward. So the last question I’ll ask you, Casey, the question I ask everybody is, what does that mean to you? How does your work, how does your mission, how can Levels and what you’re doing in the world, what does that mean to you to live a life ever forward? How can this help us at the same time?
Dr. Casey Means:
To me, part of moving ever forward just has a lot to do with mindset. It means waking up every morning with a growth mindset and with optimism and really knowing that the brain and the body are something that are modifiable and modulatable based on habit. When we put in the consistent effort each day, whether it means focusing on a positive gratitude-based mindset or putting beautiful food into our body or moving our bodies that there is an amazing payoff. There is process in the body and we will move in the right direction.
Dr. Casey Means:
So it’s just really about keeping that growth mindset and keeping an optimistic outlook on the mind and body because life comes I think in waves and there’s generally a brighter side down the road, but we can help make things brighter by the way we approach each day with our habits.
Chase Chewning:
I agree. Well, Dr. Casey Means, thank you so much. I don’t think we’ve formally said that. So anybody curious as to, “What is this lady? What is she talking about? Who is she?” She’s got the background, for sure. I mean, again, your work at Levels is incredible. I’ve had a great experience so far. It’s great for my continued daily wellness, but also someone like myself who just I’m unique like you’re unique. We’re all unique. We all have things that we want to achieve in life, in our body composition, in our wellness, but also things that we should I think be mindful of because we didn’t just pop out of nowhere, right? We’ve got parents, we’ve got uncles, we’ve got family history. So do your due diligence, for sure.
Chase Chewning:
Casey, thank you so much. I’ll have all of your information down on the show notes for everybody. We’ll wrap it there.
Dr. Casey Means:
Thanks so much, Chase.
Chase Chewning:
For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode’s show notes or head to everforwardradio.com.