Blood Sugar, Thyroid & Gut Health: The Nutrition Advice Your Doctor Should Be Giving You
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Jon Skelton, MD: All right. Welcome back to The Living Life Well show. Today, I'm excited to bring you some new information, new in the form that, you know when you've known something for a long time, but finally, it's actually out there in the media, and the mainstream is really going about it? Well, that is what I'm excited to bring you today.
So recently, back in twenty twenty-five the state of Texas recognized, hey, our people are unhealthy. We have some of the highest insulin resistance in the country. We have some of the highest rates of diabetes within the country. We need to actually do something about this. So where do we start? Well, they started with a great place.
They- they've decided to really [00:01:00] start with medical education. So for nurses, for physicians, for nurse practitioners, for physician assistants, this information is gonna be new. So let me back up about, oh, let's say about thirty years into when I was in medical school and tell you about the nutrition education we got.
Virtually zero. , A twenty twenty-two survey was done that really looked at how much nutrition education do prospective physicians actually get during the course of their four years of medical school. It found that on average One. 1.2 hours to be exact was all the nutrition education that physicians received during medical school.
So as you can see, [00:02:00] this is quite asinine, quite honestly. How can you expect your patients to eat healthy when this is what you tell them, and you don't even really know what eating healthy is? And so now, what is going on is there is a revolution going on, and I'm proud to say the state of Texas was actually even before Secretary Kennedy.
Secretary Kennedy, in March, announced a pledge for all medical schools that wanted to, to sign up to agree to forty hours of nutritional education over the course of the four-year medical school program. And so today well, a- as of the writing of the article in late June about seventy-three schools had signed up.
I'm proud to say Texas Tech, my medical school, RECM is one of those [00:03:00] schools. And there are several schools throughout the, the state of Texas. But- Now we really need to focus on what is this education that these students are receiving? Who is really in charge of doing this? So really for Texas, this started out in twenty-twenty five in the legislative session with Senate Bill 25, and it really started outlining different CME requirements related to nutrition and metabolic health.
Now, for your current physicians, this is great news as well because this will start showing up in their CME requirements on a year-by-year basis, but not till next year. The pledge for the medical schools could start for some as early as this fall, if not, definitely next fall. All of this kinda came out of [00:04:00] this committee looking at Texans' eating habits and a desire to establish some guidelines to, to really improve them.
So they, they devise a nutrition advisory committee, um, and it looks at four different areas: examining the impact of nutrition on human health reviewing the scientific studies on the effects of ultra-processed fu- foods on human health, and developing education on these effects, and then establishing dietary nutritional guidelines from scientific studies and information on diet and nutrition.
So the, the Texas Medical Board, You really had to adopt these rules by the end of this year to define the CME content and the dietary and nutritional guidelines that will be in place for your physicians to learn this information. So why this is such great news [00:05:00] is because now you are actually going to get a physician who's informed, a physician who is now going to understand what eating healthy really means.
One of the interesting physicians as quoted in this article is Dr. Brandon, Al- Altillo. And, you know, he indicates that, yeah, we really don't talk about nutrition enough and, and that, that really is true. Nutrition is so intricate and so de- detailed, and it is personalized. And he says, quote, "The fact that more attention is being paid to it, just to mention it at all, is really important."
And that's a sad but true fact that Dr. Altillo is referencing because when we go to our primary care physicians or really any physician, any physician that maybe tells you, "Lose weight," really they don't have much of a plan for you. They just [00:06:00] say, "Eat healthy and exercise." Okay, what exercise should I do?
What should I eat? What should I avoid? Do I need to do low fat, low carb? Do I need to do keto? What do I need to do? And effectively, for the last few years, our nutrition education has been reliant on GLP-1s for weight loss and for healthy eating. Well, we know that over time, that's just not going to be beneficial because over time, we can't stay in that fasted state forever.
In addition, the other great thing about this education is now for patients that are on GLP-1s, they should get some actionable advice as to what really specifically to eat while they are on these GLP-1s. And so hopefully, they will get the double benefit of not only the weight loss, but also developing a lifestyle that will be [00:07:00] created and specified to them to the nutritional requirements that they need while they are on the GLP-1s and once they get off.
And Dr. Altillo along with a Marissa Burgermeister, also created a great course. I love the name of this course, Nutrition Communication for Diabetes Prevention. And this came out of UT Austin the Center for Health Communication. This is really, really important. This is a great CME that could go to any healthcare practitioners to really help to inform their patients about how to prevent diabetes.
Maybe that A1C is creeping up a little bit. Maybe that fasting blood sugar is a little bit higher. Maybe it will even spur your primary care physicians to check things like a [00:08:00] fasting insulin so that we can see where you are before you get that diagnosis of diabetes or metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes, if you will.
So the fact that Texas is really-- I, I, I'm proud of the fact that they're really taking the lead on this and really trying to put this in place because this is going to play such a huge role in every single part of our state because we will help to bring down healthcare costs. We will help to bring down unnecessary suffering .
Finally, mainstream education, medical education is understanding nutrition actually is really important, and wow, we don't pay nearly the amount atten-attention that we need to. So let's talk about just in general- What we need [00:09:00] to take a look at when we are talking about healthy nutrition.
Well, this applies whether you're talking about diabetes whether you're talking about thyroid, whether you're talking about gut health. Simply saying, "Eat better," is just so vague. You, you, you maybe have an idea of what that means, a- and Dr. Altillo really kinda, kinda commented on this in the article, but really what you need is specifics.
So what does that really mean? So let's redefine that for you with some generalizations that hopefully you can then implement for yourself as specifics. So number one, if you are someone that has or has been diagnosed with diabetes, metabolic syndrome, has been told that your hemoglobin A1C [00:10:00] is 5.6 or higher, you need to take control of your sugar intake.
You need to take control of your fiber intake. You need to reduce sugar, increase fiber. So how do we do that? Number one, you have to stay out of the center of the store. Only shop the perimeters. Shop the fruits and vegetables aisle, produce section, and then go into the butcher section. Stay out of the bread aisle.
Stay out of the canned food aisle. Stay out of the bakery. Even watch very closely the, the milk or dairy aisle as most things have added sugar. Educate yourself to read labels. Determine what the 30 different names for sugar are. [00:11:00] The same thing applies to gut health. So gut health is also gonna be very tied to your sugar and/or carb intake.
Let's face it, we like sugar. We like carbs as a society. Not only do we like it, but also those bacteria that tend to crowd out the good bacteria in our gut like it. Whether you're talking about H. pylori, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, Staph, Strep just to name a few those are going to be bacteria that love sugar, love carbs, and really thrive on them.
So the more that you can do to help eliminate that is gonna be beneficial. In addition, one of the big things that applies across all three, whether you're talking about diabetes, whether you're talking about gut health, and definitely whether you're talking about thyroid health, is start to use good cooking oils.
Do not use [00:12:00] seed oils. Make sure you understand the difference between a seed oil and a non-seed oil. Make sure you understand what means high quality And then, and this is most importantly, regardless of whether you're using seed oils or whether you're using really good oils like avocado oil you know, olive oil, ghee, tallow, whatever the case may be that you're using to cook with, make sure you understand the smoke point.
Don't exceed it. So the first time you're cooking with one of these oils just turn that dial up slightly until you get to where you see that it's smoking. Don't cook anything at this point. Then turn it down, back down about 10 to 15%, and then that's gonna be the highest level that you can cook with with that particular oil.
This will help ensure that you aren't creating a [00:13:00] state for inflammation within your gut. It's going to increase inflammation. Inflammation is going to trigger higher blood sugars. For those of you that have issues with autoimmune thyroid disease, it is also going to potentially increase that risk for more antibody formation and/or less absorption of whether you're taking thyroid hormone or whether you're taking supplements to help increase your thyroid's natural production.
Whatever the case may be, when you are using seed oils, you are creating an environment that is disruptive to all three of these areas. So, and then finally, for the thyroid, really we need to make sure that we are getting quality nutrients that are specific for the thyroid. So things like iodine and [00:14:00] selenium.
I've talked about these in the past. These are gonna be very important. And so for anybody that has thyroid dysfunction, you need to understand where your iodine is and understand for you where that individual range needs to be. There's a wide continuum of iodine, and historically, throughout history, the vast majority of hypothyroidism has been due to iodine deficiency.
We primarily get iodine from the sea. Think seaweed, kelp fish. That's where we see a lot of iodine. There's also been a lot of use of sea salt now Interestingly enough, sea salt does not contain iodine. You think, "Well, whoa if you're telling me all the iodine comes from the sea," and it does for the most part, but we are [00:15:00] needing it through fish is how we get it, and that's seaweed.
So most of us don't consume the type of fish or enough fish that are from the sea to be able to get iodine. This is why again, this is controversial here a bit, I recommend for a lot of people, if you can't find a good iodized sea salt or it's too expensive Use iodized table salt. You will get iodine that way.
So just using sea salt in and of itself, while sea salt is great for so many things, it has such a wide variety of nutrients that traditional table salt doesn't with just its sodium and chloride content, but it does have the iodine. And so that is the one thing that I really want you to take a look at.
Make sure that you know if you're on thyroid hormone, what your iodine's doing, where is it? [00:16:00] Do I need to supplement to it? Do I have too much iodine? Do I have too little? Because really, you want that iodine in that sweet spot for you that is giving enough substrate to create the amount of thyroid hormone that we need, but is also not contributing to depressing thyroid production and/or causing it to go too high as well.
So with that being said, those are a couple of actionable items for you in each one of the areas of health that I really look at, whether it's diabetes whether it's gut health or whether it's thyroid. This is great news that the state of Texas and U-Under Secretary Kennedy and with, with Trump's signing of this, that we are really getting soon to a state to where true helpful nutritional education can actually come when you go to your primary care physician.
[00:17:00] Now, for those of you who don't wanna wait for those of you who really wanna get started, that's what we're here for at Live Life Well Clinic. We have the Metabolic Reset course. We have the Forty Days course. And so if any of this is of interest to you and you wanna get started now, you don't wanna wait for your physician to be educated, I invite you to, to jump on with us on a discovery call.
Or if you wanna jump in a-and start the course, the Metabolic Reset is available there as well as the Forty Days to Living Life Well is available there on our website. So, I hope this has been beneficial. I hope this has been informative. Thanks, and God bless.
That's it for this episode of the Living Life Well show. If you like what you've heard and want to learn more or want to know how to put this into practice for yourself, go to livelifewellclinic.com. Until next time, this is Dr. Jon Skelton saying go out and live the truth [00:18:00] so you can live life well.
