Episode 85
This episode covers the following topics:
➡️ Wellness Journey: Praise, Criticism, & Critiques
➡️ Article 1: Obesity Decreases COVID Vaccine Response
➡️ Article 2: Small Increases In Movement Improve Metabolism
➡️ Supplement Discussion: Alpha Male X – Longjack
Lifestyle Medicine with Dr. Harris:
Episode Transcript
Dr. Richard Harris: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Strive for Great Health Podcast with your host, Dr. Richard Harris. And this is our wellness review. For those of you who are new to the podcast, this is a different segment where we actually have four different parts to each episode. The first part is a wellness journey. It is something related to the health mindset, how we think about health and what we’re going to be talking about today is praise, critique, and criticism.
Next, we’re going to be diving into a study, looking at vaccine efficacy and obesity, and some surprising results for most of you, not surprising to us who actually know the literature. And then the second article we’re going to be talking about movement and how getting more movement actually is shown to reverse some of the chronic causes of disease.
And then last we are in a supplement discussion. We’re talking about our supplement, Alpha Therapeutics, Alpha Male X, and we’re going to be talking about Longjack and what that does and its benefits. So, are you ready to boost your health EQ & IQ? Cue the music!
Join me, Dr. Richard Harris, as we strive to unlock the secrets of the human body. Strive for wellness, strive for great health. Follow the show on iTunes, Spotify, Google, and Android.
Real quick before we get started. The Strive for Great Health Podcast is a lifestyle wellness and mindset podcast, but we can’t put everything about health, wellness, and mindset into the podcast. There’s just not enough time. It’s such a complex subject. That’s why we created our lifestyle medicine and health mindset wellness courses.
Now you may be asking, are these courses right for me? If you’re someone who wants to increase their health span, longevity, how long we live without chronic disease. If you’re someone who’s been told you have risk factors. If you’re someone that’s been told, there are some things that you need to watch out for some things you need to change, otherwise you’re heading down a road that leads to disease. Or if you’re someone who has a chronic ailment and you’re wanting a more holistic approach to fix your self, to heal yourself. Then the wellness courses are for you. If you’re not willing to invest in your health. If you’re not someone who is willing to do things in a sustainable manner, if you’re someone who’s looking for a quick fix, then the courses are not for you.
The courses are designed to teach you everything that I have learned through reading hundreds of studies, hours of clinical practice, years of devotion to this lifestyle medicine and the health mindset so you can live a life full of joy and purpose. If that sounds good to you, head to theghwellness.com and click courses at the top. Now to this week’s episode. Welcome to the Strive for Great Health Podcast, I’m your host, Dr. Richard Harris. And this is our monthly review. I know it’s been awhile. We just moved and all kinds of craziness with business and me switching the podcast over to every other week, but we’re still going to be doing the wellness reviews. As far as some additional housekeeping stuff, we’re probably going to have less guests on the episodes going forward.
Unless the guest has a completely different way of viewing things or subject matter expertise [00:04:00] than myself, but we’ve lined up some pretty cool guests coming up. I won’t give you any spoilers just yet. Let’s dive into this month’s wellness review.
It’s September, let’s start with our wellness journey and we’re talking about praise, critique, and criticism. And this is something that I find that I’m unique among a lot of my friends, but a lot of my entrepreneurial friends are like this as well. Wherein, I don’t want praise, of course, I don’t want criticism.
I want critiques. I don’t care about praise. I don’t need praise. I have my own internal joy. I have my own internal metrics. I have my own internal standards and I hold myself to a very high standard and I work very hard to achieve that standard. And when I am able to, I am very self satisfied with that. Like the podcast, like my businesses, helping people that brings me a great deal of internal joy and happiness.
And we’ve talked about on the podcast before, how joy is a choice, happiness is an emotion and the difference between the two. But why don’t I like praise and why is it that I seek critiques? Well, let’s dive into the definition of these words. Criticiscm, the expression of disapproval of someone or something based on perceived faults or mistakes. Praise, the expression of approval or admiration for someone or something. Critique a detailed analysis and assessment of something, whether that be a work of literature or a speech or anything like a business, whatever you’re working on.
Why do I go for critiques? Why don’t I go for praise? Why don’t I go for criticism? Here’s why I don’t like praise because you never know if the praise is genuine or not. People can say nice things about you until they’re blue in the face and then turn around right after that and talk bad about you.
What’s the expression. I’d rather have people who talk dirty about me to my face and good about me behind my back. And that’s what critique is all about. But we’ll get into that in a minute. You never know if someone is being genuine with their praise or just telling you what you want to hear. Maybe they’re a yes man.
Maybe they think the idea is terrible. Maybe they think that dress is terrible. Maybe they think your idea isn’t going to work, but they do tell you, oh yeah, do that wear that everything’s going to be fine. And then it blows up and then you look back at it and say, whoa, how could they not have told me?
How could they not have seen, it maybe they did. Praise can be false. Praise can be true. Sometimes praise can be true, but it can be false. And you really need to know who’s sending you that praise to be able to discern is this truth. Is this falsity? Is this someone trying to placate me just saying things that I want to hear?
The other problem with praise is there’s no growth associated with it. If someone tells you you’re the best, you’re the best, you’re the best, you’re the best all the time. Where’s your motivation to grow and get better. And then what can happen is you can literally run into a buzzsaw where something rattles that praise you got before shakes you to your core.
And then you may quit. You may give up. We see this all the time on people’s fat loss journeys, they get praise, praise, praise, praise, and then all of a sudden something happens. Maybe they start gaining some weight and like any journey journeys are going to be up and down. But then all of a sudden you go in reverse and you don’t know how to handle it because all you’ve gotten is praise and it deflates your ego when something bad happens.
Praise does not prepare you for life because life is up and down. And if all you get is praise, it is not preparing you for the downs. It’s not growing you to deal with the downs. Does not grow you to prevent, or if a buzzsaw happens to mitigate or [00:08:00] deal with it. Praise can foster dependency.
How many times do we see people who are dependent emotionally or physically on someone else? And we’re like, why are they with them? Why are they in a relationship? Or why are they friends with that person? That person clearly doesn’t have that person’s best interest at heart. At my church, we talk about trauma bonds and how, when you’re in a trauma bond, one of the things they’ll do is they’ll love bomb you every now and then.
They’ll just say, oh, I love you. You’re the best. They’ll heap, all this praise upon you. You’re hooked. And then they go and do all the horrible stuff, but then every now and then they love bomb you. And then you say, you know, you don’t really know what this person is like. You don’t know them like I know them. No, your friends know them better because they’re looking at it objectively. Feelings and emotions can lie to you.
And then when you go through p raise and then something happens contradictory to that praise. It can stoke self-criticism and feelings of doubt. And why is self criticism so bad? Because now you’re feeling failure. Now you’re feeling guilt. You’re feeling all of these negative emotions. And when you are getting criticism, criticism can be false.
It can be true, but it can be false. Typically when people are criticizing someone they’re trying to hurt that person, they’re trying to hurt you. They’re trying to belittle you. They’re trying to demean you and they’re trying to bring you down. They’re trying to make it like it’s a character fault that you’re not smart enough.
You’re not good enough. You’re not fast enough. Instead of looking at the action. Because as humans we tend to think people’s actions are their character, the fundamental attribution error. This is a cognitive bias where we think people’s morality are their actions. And that’s not the case. The data shows our actions are very context dependent.
And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. Criticism can be false, absolutely can be false. And it can be just specifically designed to tear you down and it doesn’t help you with what you did, right? Because there’s no situation or environment or whatever, where you are, right a hundred percent of the time, it just doesn’t happen.
And I see this in politics now all the time we have our pro-Trump people who was like, Trump is the greatest, trump did nothing wrong. That’s impossible, there’s no person alive, the only person who ever did this was Jesus Christ who did everything right. And I’m not anti-Trump if you looked at my political beliefs, I’m libertarian by belief.
I’m not anti-Trump. I think he did some good things. I think he did some bad things. Obama, I think he did some good things and then he did some bad things, but I’m not attached to the person I’m attached to what did they do? And this all or none behavior, you see this with criticism. That it’s all bad. Well, not everything that you did in that situation was bad.
And if you’re criticized, you’re going to think everything you did was bad. You’re not going to figure out, oh, this actually worked, but maybe if I tweak this a little bit. We talked about how praise and running into a buzzsaw can hurt your ego, well criticism hurts your ego. It puts people on the defensive. When you’re on the defensive, you are not in a position to receive correction, not in a position to listen to the other party, not in a position to be open to new ideas or new ways of doing stuff.
You’re going to get cortisol spikes, and that’s going to put you in fight or flight mode, and that’s going to put you in your reptile brain. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a reptile be able to receive criticism and be like, you know what? You didn’t eat that fly correctly. Maybe if you moved your tongue a little bit, this way, you’ll be able to catch more flies, right.
That doesn’t happen. And when you’re on the defensive, you are not receptive. And the other thing it does is it causes resentment. You [00:12:00] may resent that other person. Maybe that other person even was trying to actually help you, but they did it in a way where they only criticized you and you’ll resent that person. You’ll have feelings of anger towards them.
And again, that’s not a place where we can improve, if we’re stuck in feelings of anger. Now, why do I search out critiques? I search out critiques because people who critique you always have your best interests at heart. They always want to see you grow because a critique is a detailed analysis and assessment. That means they are putting their own time into it.
They are investing themselves into helping you, someone who critiques. You always has your best interest at heart. And it fosters trust because they’re giving you what the kids call the real real, the good and the bad. Hey, you did this part great. You really nailed this message, but this part over here, I wasn’t really feeling it.
I was a little confused, maybe you can do something to clear it up. You’re hit with the good, the things, you know you did well. And now you’re hit with some things that you may not have done so well and areas for improvement. That’s going to make whatever you’re doing stronger. It includes strategies for growth or improvement.
It’s not just tearing you down and then saying you suck and then walking off. It’s saying, Hey, this area wasn’t so hot. I didn’t really get it, but maybe if you said it this way or presented the information this way or something like that, I think it would be more clear.
In critiquing, you are seeing the problem and assessing it, and then coming up with a solution to help that person. Critiques make you uncomfortable but in a good way, we always say growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone. It really doesn’t. You have to get uncomfortable to grow. A good critique should be uncomfortable.
And not wriggling in your chair or super nervous, uncomfortable, but makes you question your assumptions and your beliefs and get you to implement a plan to strengthen them. And then it increases insight because I may think I have the best presentation in the world and then I do it and my target audience, it’s crickets. They’re looking at me, they’re blinking and oh man, I really bombed this. But if I do it with someone, who’s my cheddar and I got this from the book Backable really great book on pitches. And it’s from the movie Eight Mile, how cheddar would always try to literally punch holes in what Eminem was rhyming to try and help him.
It’s that person who says, okay, well, what if this, well, what if that. They’re really just trying to get you to think outside the box and improve what you’re doing. And this is a really big benefit of critiques is that it increases your insight into what you’re doing into the problem, into what you’re trying to solve and how you can better get there.
That is why me personally, I don’t care about praise, don’t criticize me you’re just being a jerk, you’re not helping me, but give me that critique. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? And let’s figure out how I can do the wrong stuff better and the right stuff better too.
Article number one, and for all of those who are new to the podcast, all the articles you can see for yourself, if you join our Strive for Great Health Podcast Facebook group, there is a post that’s pinned that gives you a link to the Google drive so you can read these articles and make your own interpretations. Now the article is titled central obesity, smoking habit and hypertension are associated with lower antibody titers in response to COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
This is really important because antibody titers titers just means how much of the antibody there is in a particular [00:16:00] person’s blood. Now what this study was looking at is are these factors here associated with lower antibody levels And why is that important? Because antibody levels can correlate with disease response, or prevention, meaning how well you can prevent getting a virus that you’ve been vaccinated for and then if you do get it, the severity of it. Well, let’s dive in. In the introduction, obesity and excess visceral fat are major factors for the development of COVID-19 complications. This has been everywhere since the pandemic started the comorbidities, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and then excess visceral fat is fat around the organs.
It’s not fat underneath your skin. Fat around the organs is a major killer that’s linked to diabetes and high blood pressure, stress, it’s been linked to Alzheimer’s and dementia, cancer. Pretty much all the major stuff that’s killing Americans, it’s been linked to. Obesity is typically defined by BMI, but we know that BMI can miss some things.
Number one, if you have high muscle mass, your BMI is going to say you’re overweight or obese, but you have high muscle mass. Like mine is 28, but my body fat percentage is like 11 percent by DEXA. So I’m at a very healthy body, fat percentage. My BMI says I’m over weight. The other problem is you can have a normal BMI, but you can still have excess body fat.
In the mainstream this is called being skinny fat and we see this all the time. So BMI does not account for people in normal weight with excess body fat. DEXA is an alternative and it’s something that we recommend to people because you can get measurements for different areas of the body. Another way that you can do this, that’s simple and everyone can do this is waist circumference, and waist circumference is a very well validated measure of central body fat.
And in the studies, this is a study that was done in Europe. There’s different markers that are used in Europe versus America, but in Europe they use a waist circumference of greater than 80 centimeters in women and 94 centimeters in men to indicate increased central body fat. That’s 31.5 inches for women, 37 inches for men.
This study was to explore the association between COVID-19 vaccination and adipose measures such as central obesity and then the secondary aim was to explore association with other cardio-metabolic conditions and risk factors. We’ve been talking about this all pandemic about how this was a cardio-metabolic phenomena and it’s increasing and things are only getting worse.
But let’s go back to this study. This study was done in Italy. They used a group of healthcare workers because everyone is tested regularly per hospital policy. And no previous infections have been documented in this group. So you’re removing that confounding factor of people who have been vaccinated and had COVID. Before the study, they did blood tests to look for antibodies and anybody who had antibodies was excluded.
They included people 18 years or older, they had to have a stable body weight, which means less than five kilograms change and proceeding three months, that’s about 10 pounds. Absence of previous SARS COV-2 infection. No contra-indications to the vaccine. They didn’t want to look at immuno suppressed people because they’re measuring antibody titers.
No medications that suppress the immune system and they didn’t want to look at pregnant patients. So what happened is the participants got two of the Comirnaty vaccines 21 days apart, they did blood draws before the first vaccine and then one to four weeks after the second dose. And they got measurements at that [00:20:00] time where they’re measuring waist circumference and height and calculating the BMI. They also use waist and hip or conference as well because the waist to hip ratio is another well validated marker of central body fat and they also looked at DEXA results. If those were available. The study enrolled 86 participants, the average age was 29. 40% about where male, the BMI was 22.4, which is way lower than what you’d see here in America.
But this is what we’d expect. In general, countries outside of the US have a lot less obesity than we do. 31.7% were smokers, 15.3% hypertensive, only 2.4% were diabetic. Again, these numbers are much lower than what you see in America. It’s estimated that 50% of American adults are hypertensive, 15% of people in this country are diabetic.
In the study 7.1% had dyslipidemia or abnormal blood lipids. We talked about that in the truth about cholesterol podcast. Now, if you looked at the proportion of people in the study by weight 63.1% had normal weight, 27.4 overweight and 9.5% obese by BMI. Again, these numbers are much lower than what you’d see here in the us.
We have much more, obesity much more than population is overweight. About 70% of the US population is overweight and obese together, that number is increasing. Now, when they use waist circumference as a marker of central obesity, the numbers actually increased. It was 61% had central obesity. And this is why it’s so important to use waist circumference or waist to hip ratio as a marker because BMI misses so many people. And that’s why when I do physicals in my part-time conventional job, I always ask for that waist circumference. They did look at safety in this study on the first dose, 69.5%, about 56 people complained of an adverse event and this is something that we’re seeing where a lot of people were saying, oh, you know, a hundred thousand something people have had adverse events reported to VAERS, which is true, but most of them are pain at the injection site, itching, low grade temperature, those type of vaccine responses. Severe responses are very rare.
There’s been at the time of this recording, 360, almost 370 million doses of the vaccine given in the US severe complications are very rare. The second inoculation, 78.2% reported adverse events. Again, very minor 44 were pain and itching. 28 headache fatigue, malaise. 21 low grade fever, eight other minor adverse events.
There was no major adverse events during the duration of this study. All right, let’s dive into really why you’re here. What did they find? Higher adipose tissue was not associated with more adverse events, but patients with higher waist circumference had significantly lower antibody titers. Interesting, this study didn’t find that BMI was associated with lower antibody titers, a previous study did.
Smoking, hypertension, and dyslipidemia all had lower antibody titers when looked at in isolation. Central obesity as defined by waist circumference or waist to hip ratio was associated with lower antibody titers in a secondary analysis. This was called a regression analysis, and this was also seen with hypertension, dyslipidemia and smoking. A regression analysis as a way of seeing a relationship between one and one or more variables. In this case, it was looking at the antibody, titers and obesity, the hypertension, dyslipidemia. The presence of side effects was not associated with antibody titers or previous flu vaccination. That’s something they threw [00:24:00] in because a lot of people are concerned with it being flu season, that things are going to get worse or they can have adverse effects by getting both vaccines.
So that’s something that a lot of people are going to be looking at, right now. In a multivariate analysis where you’re looking at all the variables at once, waist circumference times since vaccination, hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemia, all remained significant meaning in this analysis that there was a association with decreased antibody titers, and time was very strongly correlated.
And we’ve seen this in the literature. This is why they’re recommending boosters. We’re not going to go into that conversation today. We may at another time. They want to do another analysis, looking at controlling for time, because that was a strong factor and the association still remained when they controlled for time.
They did another analysis when they controlled for gender, age, BMI and it still showed the same thing that waist circumference, time, since vaccination, hypertension, and smoking still had significantly lower antibody titers. And then they did a final analysis where they looked at people who had DEXA scans and the association of waist circumference was lost, but the others remained. And this is showing that waist circumference is a good proxy for actual body fat.
Discussion, central obesity, independent of BMI is associated with lower antibody titers, following vaccination. This is likely due to metabolic derangements that come with visceral body fat, immune dysfunction, insulin resistance, changes in hormones, changes in stress response.
There’s a lot of really bad metabolic things that happen when you have excess body fat. Obesity previously in other vaccines, flu and Hep B are associated with poor seroconversion. This means if you get vaccinated, do you actually make antibodies? It’s not a hundred percent. It’s not, you have to seroconvert, meaning your immune system has to be functioning well enough to see it and actually start making antibodies.
Now we go into the immune system in depth, in our immune balance episode. Highly suggest you check that out, if you haven’t checked that out. But obesity is associated with poor seroconversion, so lower rate of actually making antibodies after vaccination and flu and Hep B and an increased risk of infection even if the seroconversion seems robust. Now, what this means is antibody levels don’t always correlate what the antibodies ability to neutralize that infection. And so if you’re having a robust seroconversion, that means that you’re making a lot of antibodies, but it means that these antibodies aren’t functioning well.
And that is due in those other studies to obesity. What we’ve seen is the mRNA, vaccine titers fall off quickly, and it’s still being studied to determine the kinetics, why this is happening, how fast it’s happening in the different populations. We know that BMI poorly describes body fat. And we’ve talked about this before, how we recommend, DEXA, waist circumference, or waist to hip ratios. Elevated waist circumference is associated with chronic inflammation.
If you want to know why that’s bad, check out the inflammation podcast. Inflammation is a root cause of all root causes of disease it’s associated with cardiovascular disease, increased disease risk and early death. In fact, these authors did a previous study where they showed that obesity was a strongest risk factor for ending up with a breathing tube, getting intubated in COVID. Previous studies have also shown that vaccine titers fall faster in smokers. And this is probably due to the immune dysfunction effect of smoking. Smoking can be profoundly auto immunogenic meaning it can make the immune system attack itself.
And then it can have [00:28:00] reduced immune response when it sees pathogens as well, so it’s completely disregulating the immune system. High blood pressure, we need to think of high blood pressure as a metabolic disease, just like diabetes, just like obesity. High blood pressure is a metabolic condition. It’s associated with abnormal metabolic responses, inflammation and insulin resistance.
So all of these things are things that can profoundly dysregulate our immune system and what this study is showing and some other studies are starting to show that Hey, if the host is not in a good condition, it hosts does not have good cardio-metabolic health then the vaccine is probably not as effective.
And we know this from previous vaccines yet all of our leaders, all of the health gurus are talking about only vaccine, this social distance that mask this, they have not done anything to address the root problem. Now the limitations of this study, the evaluations were one to four weeks after the vaccine.
So there could be a time bias. They did control for this in one of the analysis and everything remained significant. This is a small sample size, so that means that there could be a higher risk of error. And then there’s an under-representation of people with multiple co-morbidities. Now they use a sample in the US I think the effect might have been more powerful because of the rate that we have of chronic disease in this country, 60% of adults have one 40% have two. The default in America’s disease.
This was a much healthier population than the US population and this could underestimate the true effects. One of the things to take into and we alluded to this earlier is that antibody titers right now can not predict the likelihood of developing COVID-19. We don’t have enough research on this and we need research to show the neutralizing effect of these antibody titers and that’s being done.
But previous studies with other viruses and other vaccines show that neutralizing antibody titers correlate with disease protection. I’m imagining we’re going to see the same thing here with COVID because we’ve seen it parallel with what we know about other viruses.
Let’s go into study number two. Study number two is three weeks of interrupting, sitting, lowers, fasting glucose, and glycemic variability, but not glucose tolerance in free living women and men with obesity. Okay, 30,000 view, this study was looking at hey, we’ve got a population of people who are obese and sedentary. Can we get them to improve cardio-metabolic markers with a simple intervention of getting them to sit less?
Basically all looked at. In the introduction more than one third of Europeans are physically inactive. Studies here show that about 35 to 47% of people here are completely physically inactive, which just blows my mind. In Europe people spend more than 40% of their leisure time watching TV. That’s crazy. Accumulation of secondary behaviors associated with insulin resistance and poor metabolic health. Sedentary time increases the risk of the metabolic syndrome, which is insulin resistance, central body fat, abnormal blood pressure, abnormal blood lipids.
When you see all of these things together, that is a death sentence. I don’t know when, but you are a ticking time bomb and you will explode one day. And this is something that I tell people all the time you can do very simple tests, very simple blood work, very simple measurements to see if you are metabolically healthy, check your blood sugars, do your waist circumference, measure your blood pressure, get your cholesterol checked.
And if these things are off, then you have a metabolic problem and you need to solve that metabolic problem. And we outlined metabolism in our metabolism podcast, and things you can do to help with your metabolism. But [00:32:00] in general, everything that we preach in lifestyle medicine and putting our wellness courses is designed to optimize your metabolic health.
I am a huge, huge, huge, huge fan of metabolic health and optimizing metabolic health. Let’s get back to this study, reducing steps to less than 4,300 per day for more than three days creates insulin resistance. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. If you get less than 4,000 steps per day, that is increasing your risk of death from all medical causes.
Why? Because it is literally horrible for your metabolic health. And it doesn’t take that much time. Three days of less than 4,300 steps per day can create insulin resistance. Two weeks of less than 1,300 steps per day lowers lean body mass. Now you’re losing lean body mass. Sarcopenia is a wonderful way to make yourself sick.
Sarcopenia is a loss of lean body mass, wonderful way to make yourself sick. And this correlates with just about every single disease you can think of. But two weeks of less than 1300 steps per day, lowers lean body mass, lowers aerobic fitness, what we call VO2 max, and it actually increases insulin resistance.
Being sedentary is associated with obesity, with decreased ability of the muscle to utilize fats. It raises our lipids, our cholesterol are LDL and leads to insulin resistance. A single bout of resistance training can increase insulin sensitivity for 48 hours. We’ve talked about this before on the two episodes that we did on insulin resistance, regular exercise improves insulin sensitivity, and it improves the lipid, the cholesterol, the LDL, the HDL homeostasis so that system is in balance. We talk about that in the truth about cholesterol habits. Data also suggests that those in the highest 25% of breaks, meaning those who take the most breaks and sedentary time have less central adipose tissue, less central body fat and better insulin sensitivity. We’ve talked about this so many times on the podcast, your body is designed for movement.
And you cannot be healthy if you’re not moving. And this is what really grinds my gears about when people talk about, oh, this healthy person I’ve seen people say, obese, people are healthy. You’re not healthy if you’re obese. Can you be beautiful and obese? Yes. Can you be healthy and obese? No, we have to separate the cosmetic from the health.
And that is a major issue, is that we’ve made it a cosmetic issue. So if you speak up, you’re attacking the way someone looks and it’s not about that for me, it’s about you have a ticking time bomb that is horrible for your health, and it is my job to help you get healthy. Interrupting, sitting with multiple breaks of light to moderate intensity activity lowers glucose, sugar levels after we eat, lowers triglycerides after we eat, and improves whole body fat oxidation. Fat oxidation is fat metabolism. It is turning stored fat, the fat in our bodies into energy. That’s what you want. And this is one of the things that we recommend all the time. And we’ve talked about this and the insulin resistance episodes.
If you’re insulin resistant, take a walk after you eat, it creates demand for that food and lowers the blood sugar spikes, lowers blood triglycerides, which will get stored in adipose tissue as fat and improves fat burning probably through activation of hormone sensitive lipase. And that actually causes fat to come out of the fat cells.
But that’s a talk for another day. Now what the study investigated was three weeks of frequent breaks from sitting on blood chemistry, blood sugars, and skeletal muscle, muscle lipids, and men and women with obesity. And the [00:36:00] hypothesis was that breaking sitting would improve glucose control, insulin sensitivity, and markers of metabolic health.
So what did they say? Well, they had 20 adults with obesity who were sedentary and had a BMI of at least 30. They excluded people who regularly exercise, who regularly did physical activity, who had diabetes or severe cardiovascular disease and people who were on blood thinners. 16 completed the trial.
At visit one, the participants went to blood draw after an overnight fast. And no physical activity for 48 hours. And they also got muscle biopsies from their leg to measure the skeletal muscle lipid concentration. They’re also given a two hour oral glucose tolerance test where we basically give you a set amount of glucose and then measure your blood sugars after that.
They did it every 30 minutes for two hours, participants were also given a continuous glucose monitor from freestyle, and that’s a popular monitor these days. These CGMs just continuously measure your blood sugars and link to an app. Week one was kind of the baseline. There was no intervention done in the first week.
They just wanted to see people’s habitual patterns and establish baseline glucose and activity levels. And they were instructed to maintain their baseline nutrition throughout the study. And weeks two to four, the testing group received a notification every 30 minutes, between eight and six, reminding them to break sitting.
They were then supposed to perform three minutes of low to moderate intensity physical activity, walking, stair, climbing, body, weight, squats, something like that. And it registered if they did a minimum of 15 steps for it to be successful. And at the end of week four, they repeated the blood work and the biopsies and they measured HOMA-IR. HOMA-IR is looking at your glucose and your insulin levels. And it’s a measure for insulin resistance. They used an app called Activepal and they considered a day to be a full day if they had greater than 10 hours of wear time of the device. And that was registered during waking hours and less than 95% of that time was spent in one behavior.
IE sedentary standing or walking, and they had to have greater than 500 steps recorded. The data was collected hourly, and then they added it up to 24 hours. And given the low threshold of 15 steps, every 30 minutes, they considered successful adherence to be an increase in hourly steps or transitions from seated, standing, walking that type of thing above each participant’s own median baseline levels.
And they stratified the activity into high versus lower active, but he groups. What’d, they find activity was monitored for seven baseline days and then 20.5 intervention days. These are on the median. Participation was high during the first week and then slowed down to baseline for six out of the eight participants through weeks three through four. The activity increase was very modest only by a median of 744 steps a day from 3,285 steps to 3,926 steps.
And only about 10.4 minutes more walking per day from 80.8 minutes to 96.8. If you do the math that doesn’t add up because we’re dealing with median times here, not average times. No change was seen in the control group. The control group got more steps on average, 4,255, and they walked about 105 minutes.
Changes in posture during the study, the control group went from 51 changes to 55 changes per day. The activity group from 52 to 56. Total time seated 491.6 minutes at baseline for the control group vs 487 minutes. So not much change [00:40:00] there. And the intervention group was 598 baseline to 5 99. So both groups and these two measures were unchanged from baseline.
Both groups at baseline were insulin resistant. That’s not surprising. The HOMA-IR was 1.21. It’s not surprising because these groups were both obese there. No improvement in insulin resistance, which was interesting. And that’s probably because the. amount of steps that was increased was very small, but there was a reduction in the fasting glucose by about 0.34, also reduction in fasting LDL. It was small is about 0.3. No change was seen in the control group and weight remained stable in both groups. In the intervention group, glucose variability was reduced. And that’s really interesting because glucose variability is just that. Are you seeing large spikes? Are you seeing large peaks and large valleys?
And we know that variability in your blood sugars is a wonderful way to make yourself insulin resistant and sick. You want to not have peaks and valleys. You want things to just be level and the more level, the more regulated your blood sugar is the healthier your metabolic health is. In subgroup analysis those with higher activity levels had more consistent and lower glucose variability, which is. In muscle biopsies, triglycerides were the most abundant lipid class and that’s not surprising considering these were sedentary, overweight participants. There was no difference overall at baseline, but long-chain saturated, triglycerides increased in the activity group.
And that’s interesting because increased levels of long-chain saturated fats in the blood are associated with healthier outcomes. And we’re going to do a study talking about that later. The activity group also had intra muscular triglycerides decrease, which is something that is beneficial. You don’t want large amounts of triglycerides in your muscles.
That means that fat is being deposited in your muscles. That’s a wonderful sign of insulin resistance. In the discussion the effect size was small, but the intervention did lower fasting, glucose, glucose variability, and LDL levels. There’s no effect on glucose tolerance and this is probably because of the small increase in steps. The intervention, it was very small and they didn’t have any behavioral aspects, so most people went back to baseline. And that’s why you’re seeing this study have a very small effect. You also need to focus on education and the why behind things. And that’s why our wellness courses, the first week is all about the health mindset and the why. And developing the right tools in your brain to have success in your body.
Now, overall inactivity promotes blood vessel dysfunction and even light intensity movement increases blood flow and increases skeletal mass carbohydrate metabolism. It’s also known that movement after you eat helps regulate inflammation in fat cells, which is great. Other studies show that frequent activity breaks helps lower CRP, which is a known marker of inflammation.
Other studies have shown significant reductions in developing cardiovascular disease with even small changes in blood glucose lowering. So a glucose between 70 to a hundred versus a hundred to 126, which is insulin resistant, a 12% reduction in cardiovascular disease. Exercise and movement it’s also known to help clear LDL from the blood by increasing the amount of LDL receptors in the liver.
We talk about this in the cholesterol podcast and previous studies also show two minutes of light intensity walking every 30 minutes for eight hours increases whole body fat oxidation versus sitting. So you burn more calories, you burn more stored fat.
Well, let’s wrap up with a quick [00:44:00] discussion of Longjack. Longjack is in our Alpha Male X to me, the best hormone regulating supplement for men. Does a wonderful job with testosterone, with cortisol. I take it, it does amazing things for me. I really feel it when I don’t take it. And I actually started taking it when I was having low testosterone issues and adrenal fatigue when I was working nights and it helped me bounce back to myself very quickly after I started taking it.
But let’s dive into Longjack . Longjack is from a shrubby tree that grows in Southeast Asia. What it does, studies show that it has anti-neoplastic anti-cancer effects. Rat studies show it helps lower blood glucose levels, other animal models show it helps with stomach ulcers. It reduces cortisol and improves stress in human studies.
Cortisol, we’ve talked about that so many times on the podcast, you can go listen to one of, I don’t even know how many episodes we have on stress at this point in time, we’ve have so many. But Longjack reduces cortisol, improves stress in human studies. In animal studies. It increases bone proliferation and calcium deposition.
We’re going to talk about this. We’re going to talk about a bone health podcast where I go into bone health and how we optimize our bone health. Osteoporosis is a huge problem in this country, but we’re going to talk about how we address that from a holistic perspective. Now there’s also some evidence it promotes nitric oxide. We talked about nitric oxide with Dr. Nathan Bryan, one of the world’s best researchers in nitric oxide, and then also increases testosterone. So human studies showed increases synthesis of androgens like testosterone and DHEA by activating the enzymes, the little cellular machinery that makes these things.
There’s also evidence. It modulates the immune system with some beneficial effects on circulating CD4 cells. We talked about the CD4 and the CD8 and all the different immune cells in our balanced immune podcasts. But overall, this is a beneficial modulation of our immune system to help us not get sick.
It’s also been shown to increase muscular strength, muscle size, reduce fatigue, and improve exercise recovery. If you’re a lifter, those are all things you definitely want. It can prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. One of the main problems with all these little low T centers, they just jack you up with a large dose of testosterone every two weeks.
That’s not how we physiologically release testosterone. We release testosterone nightly. And if you do that, that’s a wonderful way to make you convert a lot of your testosterone over to estrogen. But one of the things longevity does is it can prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. So more of that testosterone hangs around and does what it’s supposed to do.
It also has been shown to lower SHBG. This is sex hormone, binding glide. Which increases free testosterone, testosterone needs to be free in the blood stream, not bound to do it’s action. Safety, the devil’s in the details when it comes to all supplements. And if the supplement, this Longjack comes from certain areas like Malaysia, it can contain high levels of mercury and lead.
That’s why you always want to buy supplements from people who do third-party testing and our products are third-party tested to make sure they’re not contaminated with heavy meals. And then we make sure that our products are sourced from areas that don’t have high levels of soil contamination. Also a lot of the over-the-counter products that contain long Jack or a lot of these over-the-counter testosterone products contain pharmaceuticals.
They’re contaminated with sildenafil, Viagra and other pharmaceuticals. Dosing in deficient males, 300 milligrams once daily has been shown to boost testosterone levels. If you have normal levels and you want to [00:48:00] boost it 600 milligrams, our product comes with a 300 milligram per two capsules. In studies of safety, it’s well tolerated in doses of a hundred to 200 milligrams daily for nine months. And then studies of 400 milligrams daily for three months showed no adverse effects. In fact, when you look for adverse effects, there really aren’t any reports. So something that is safe and efficacious, that’s our gold standard when it comes to supplements.
All right, guys. Well, thanks for listening to me ramble here for 50 minutes, man. This was a really long podcast. Well, I hope you found it informative and enjoyable. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode about the hidden benefits of exercise. You definitely want to check that out.
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