Chiropractor’s Insights on GLP-1 Drugs and Diabetes: Ask the Chiropractor

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus, a chiropractor from Rockford, Illinois, discusses the topic of GLP-1 drugs, commonly used for type 2 diabetes and weight loss. He explains how these drugs work, their effects on the body, potential side effects like nausea, constipation, and IBS, and the importance of maintaining muscle mass while using them. Dr. Hulsebus also provides practical advice for those considering these drugs, including the importance of protein shakes, and suggests lifestyle changes like exercise and diet modifications to manage blood sugar levels naturally. #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractor

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hi there. I recently went to Palmer College Homecoming. And at Palmer College Homecoming, we had some really cool classes. And one of the things we will focus a lot this time on classes was about blood sugar. There's a lot of new drugs that have hit the market. Primarily talking about type 2 diabetes and weight loss. These are the GLPs. You've heard of these GLP1s. These are the GLPs. I don't know if I can say their names because of trademark reasons, but I'm, you know what I'm talking about. These drugs are meant for diabetes type 2. People are taking them and they're losing lots of weights. Glucose like peptides. And I want to tell you a little bit what these drugs do. I'm going to share a little bit of my opinion on them. More as a CCWP than maybe a chiropractor. CCWP is a Certified Chiropractic Wellness Practitioner. It's one of my post graduate diplomas I have where we study wellness and how we're really supposed to eat, move, and think. Now the first thing I'll say about these drugs, If you have someone with a fatty liver, grossly overweight, maybe their knees and hips are shot and they can't exercise, I believe these drugs could possibly save their lives. I'm not going to come out against them. There's definitely a purpose for them. But I want to tell you a little bit what happens when you use them, what to expect when you're on them, maybe some alternatives that you can do, and maybe dive into some more different topics. Let's talk about these rugs. Basically, when you take these rugs, it tells your body that You've already had the glucose. The glucose is the, where our food gets turned into for energy. It turns into sugars so we can digest them, whether it's protein, carbs, big time, and our body breaks those down and they get turned to glucose. Our muscles have glucose receptors on them. They take the glucose out and they put them in your musculature and your muscle uses those for energy. And that's how we do our daily activities, moving our arms and stuff. So we always have to have some glucose in our blood so our bodies can do their things. And you've heard of insulin, it's like the taxi service for those. What happens is the more muscle mass we have, the more glucose we need, or the more muscle mass we have, the more glucose we can process and use. So somebody who's really big, like a professional athlete, is using lots of muscles, they tend to eat a lot, and they tend not to get overweight because they're using it all up. People who aren't full of musculature, they tend to eat a lot and they gain a lot of weight because you're not using the glucose for your muscles anymore, so your body stores it as fat. So these GLPs, WANs, have come out and they trick our body thinking that we've had enough glucose. Therefore, you're not hungry, therefore you eat less, and therefore you have less body mass. One thing that these things do, besides, Acting like that, they also slow digestion. So if I have a normal meal, it might take anywhere between 1 to 3 hours of working its way through my stomach. But when I'm on GLP 1s, it slows the digestion rate down to a crawl. So now it might take anywhere between 4 to 8 hours of working its way through my stomach. You've heard a lot of people, one of the side effects of taking these GLPs is they actually have bowel instruction. Because what happens is that food that you're trying to go through your system is taking so long It actually sticks the part of your digestive system to the wall and they have to go in and surgically remove it because it's actually Creating a blockage because the foods not going through you and what happens is when it sits in your stomach longer Your stomach's not empty, the cravings don't kick on, you don't want to eat, and therefore you lose weight. Okay, the problem is when it sits in that air in your stomach too long, it can cause really bad nausea. So you might be losing weight, but for a lot of the period, you feel like you're gonna have to be nauseous. Once it gets through your stomach, then of course that's followed by constipation, because now it's moving really slow, backing everything up. And then when it does finally get to the end of the story, we deal with IBS, irritable bowel, because now it's coming out. Uncontrollable, let's just say, all right? You might be losing weight, but you're going to be nauseous, you're going to be constipated, you're going to have IBS, probably put you in a bad mood. You'll be losing weight, but you won't be feeling good about it. What we have is that's how these things work. Now I lost my craving because the GLPs have decreased my craving. They've also slowed my nutrition and my digestive speed. The food's staying in me longer, so I crave less. And what happens now is we don't eat. People are literally starving themselves under these drugs. But at night, your body has to heal and repair itself, and it has to have certain building blocks to do that, which we typically get from our food, primarily proteins. And if we're not eating, we're not having any protein, then we're not getting proteins in and we're forced to recycle the proteins we already have. And most of those proteins you're gonna find are in your muscles. So now you're actually going to reabsorb your musculature and use that for your daily. healing daily process that you do every day naturally. So people go on these GLP drugs and they stop eating so much and now they're having to reabsorb their musculature to perform normal bodily functions. So now that I'm on the GLP now I'm starting to lose muscle mass. Now remember how we started, the muscles are where it grabs the whole of the glucose and takes it into your muscles. So if I'm on these GLPs and I stop eating so much and I start reabsorbing my muscles, if I ever get off of these GLPs, now I've got decreased muscle mass. And when I'm on the drug I haven't really learned healthier eating habits, I've just been eating less. So now I get off the drug, I've got decreased muscle mass, and now I've got the calories coming back in, I've got the food coming back in. But now I don't have the muscles to absorb all the food. And now we see that people are worse off than when they started in some cases because of the lack of muscle tone, the lack of muscle development due to the reabsorption rates. If you're going to take these GLPs, I recommend that you, highly recommend that you follow it up with a protein shake every day. That sounds pretty simple, but when everything in your body is telling you don't want to eat, you don't need to eat, and you're already nauseous and constipated, trying to chug a protein shake can be a real struggle. But I feel like you almost have to take a protein shake when you're on these, otherwise you'll start breaking down your own body. And should you ever go off of them, and you weren't taking the protein shake, you're going to have all kinds of flab everywhere from your muscles not doing their job and being gone. And again, the odds of your blood sugar skyrocketing afterwards are pretty high because now your glucose receptors have been decreased. And the decreased number of glucose receptors, the extra glucose gets stored for later in fat adipose tissues. So you really want to increase your glucose receptors. Now let's say you don't want to go on these drugs. What's a good game plan? I talked about you can change your lifestyle. What would be a good lifestyle? A good lifestyle change would simply be getting up every morning and exercising. Now, you have to exercise everywhere. You can't, going for walks is better than not exercising, so don't misinterpret this. I'd rather you go for a walk than not exercise. But, muscles don't share. If you exercise your bicep, and your bicep needs more sugar, the tricep isn't going to share with them. You have to exercise every muscle. Now when you exercise your muscles and you get bigger, more active muscles, you increase the number of glucose receptors. You increase the number of glucose receptors and you don't change your diet, you're already better off. And exercising in the morning is better than at night, but exercising at night is better than not exercising. When you exercise in the morning, all the research shows that your cells continue to divide and make more of these glucose receptors all day long. When I exercise at night, they do the same thing, but now I lost the whole day when I could have been doing that, because at night time it slows down and stops, the building part. You want to try to exercise in the morning. That's why you see me a lot of times post. I'm at the gym, Movement Fitness, at 5 o'clock in the morning, many days of the week, and you can come join me. That's my attitude. I'm there trying to do that, build that up, and get that going. By the way, I follow every exercise up with a whey protein shake for recovery and to build more muscles and more fast twitch stuff. If you look at a previous podcast, you'll see I didn't want to have fast twitch muscle fibers and the benefits of whey protein. So you want to exercise in the morning. And then what I'm going to challenge you to do is pick one meal a day and eliminate all the carbs from that meal. We want to start cutting back on carbs because carbs are sugar overload in our system. Now, you already know when you have to cut out the candy, you have to cut out the junk food, you have to cut down the sugar drinks. And that includes the ones that have coffee in them. I drink coffee every day, but it's black coffee. Nothing in it but black coffee. So you want to cut out all sugar intake through drinking, because that just, when you drink it, it's Twice as bad as when you eat it. So drinking is really bad for you. Eating the sugary food is bad for you. But let's start cutting back on our starches and our carbs. Let's cut back on our corn, our potatoes, our rices, our breads, and all that stuff. Let's just try to have a meal with none of that. For me, it's lunchtime. I have a big salad every day at lunch. I throw some olives in there for some healthy fats. I use oil and vinegar dressing for getting healthy fats, no sugar in those. And I really check your salad dressing though. I was, when I went over to get a salad dressing, I really struggled here locally. They almost all had either canola oil or seed oil versus olive oil or avocado oil or coconut oil. And they all had some form of sugar. There's no good sugar. It's all bad. So I went to oil and vinegar. I said to give up. So I do oil and vinegar, and I throw some protein in there. Whether it's leftover grilled chicken, whether it's leftover maybe some diced up ham, or maybe some horrible eggs, I throw that in there. I do my salad dressing, I lay off the cheese again. Try to do good carbs. So find yourself a good meal, no carbs. And then slowly start working that into all the other meals. We can, a little bit of carbs here and there is okay. Really just try to decrease that serving. And your fruit should be like six ounces of a local berry, a fresh berry that's there for in season. This time of year we have apples, we're in the fall time, so maybe a couple apple slices. But try to really keep it down. Fruit isn't as good as the original food pyramid made it sound. Fruit is a lot of sugar. It's a lot of fructose, which is really aggressive sugar in your system. And if you read the book, if you try to lose weight, you really want to cut down on fruit, too, because if you go back and learn about uric acid and how fruit raises your uric acid count, you raise your uric acid. You put fat on at all costs because the body thinks you're hibernating. Check out the book The Fat Switch. It's a really cool book about this. But you really want to cut down your fruit too. So healthy fats, good vegetables, and protein is the way to go. So there's my two cents. That's the challenge I'm doing to myself and I would challenge the rest of you to join me. I started this process about two weeks ago. There you have it. Chiropractic care, chiropractor's perspective on the GLP peptides. Thanks. If you have any questions about this GLP stuff, if you have more depth come back for a future podcast. I'll tell you more about that. Other than that, if you have any questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, ask your chiropractor. Chiropractor is the only ones qualified to answer questions about chiropractic. Getting a little bit off topic today about chiropractic, a little bit more about this stuff, but I've been asked a lot of questions about it. What's my opinion on it? Bottom line. If it's crisis mode, this drug works pretty good. And you better follow it up with some protein shakes. If you know someone's already on it, you better have them take protein shakes. If you're not on it, and you're thinking about doing it just be prepared to be irritable, nauseous, irritable bowel, and know that you've got to drink a protein shake every day. And more and more insurance companies are cracking down on this drug and not renewing prescriptions. So you got to make sure that you do that. Protein shake, otherwise you're going to have a lot more negative harmful side effects. There you have it, Chiropractor's opinion on GLP 1 drugs. Thank you.