Welcome And Show Purpose

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Hormone Heroes, where I share testimonials from real people who have experienced bioidentical hormone therapy. Men and women share the symptoms they have experienced and the difference proper hormone replacement has made. I'm your host, Dr. Kelly Hopkins, and I have been in the functional medicine space for over 30 years, with a focus on hormones for 20 years. Please keep in mind this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult with your physician or practitioner for medical advice. Let's get started with today's guest.

Meet Dr. Kevin Smith

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Hello and welcome to the podcast. Today I'm very excited. We have Dr. Kevin Smith. He is a chiropractor and a functional medicine practitioner. His office is in Bethel, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb of Pittsburgh. And he also offers virtual consultations as well. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Smith.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

So just give us a little bit of background for where you grew up and brothers and sisters, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Okay. I grew up in Pittsburgh and I'm the youngest of four siblings. My oldest sibling and my brother are about 15 and 11 years older than me, and then my sister is four years older than me. And then they had me, and then I broke the mold. So no more after me.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

That's what they usually say about the youngest kid.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

And have you always grown up in or around Pennsylvania?

SPEAKER_00 1:45

So I was born and raised here. I lived here my whole life until I went to chiropractic school. I went in Palmer, Davenport in Iowa. And I left for there in 1997. And I graduated in 2001. And then I moved my family back to Pittsburgh. We had a daughter while we were in Iowa. It was a smart move to have her near her grandparents, her cousins, and her aunts and uncles and stuff like that. We're out of family. So back here. But after the winter we just had, I think that I would have been better off in Florida or Texas.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Oh my goodness. You said that all the snow is just beginning to melt.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Oh, it's wonderful. We can actually see our lawn again.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Wow. Yeah. So after chiropractic school, did you do further study in the functional medicine realm?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Yeah.

From Chiropractic To Functional Medicine

SPEAKER_00 2:41

So I opened up a practice shortly after I moved back, and I was working on things that you'd typically see a chiropractor working on, like back pain, neck pain, automobile accidents, sports injuries, headaches and migraines, you know, musculoskeletal stuff. And, you know, the thing is, people would come in the office from time to time with some weird, mysterious medical problem that I could not figure out what was going on, and I couldn't fix it using the tools that I was given in chiropractic school. And people would come in with like thyroid disease or diabetes, or they would come in with brain problems or gut problems. And I could not help them using the plain old tools that I was given. So that led me to want to learn more about this and read books, attend seminars, do all kinds of functions out of state. And that's what I did. And that led me to the world of clinical nutrition. And from there, then I learned more about functional blood chemistry analysis and laboratory testing. And that led me into functional medicine, which is a patient-centered, personalized approach to healthcare. So, as I explained it to people, there's two broad classifications of healthcare in the country. There's allopathic health care, which is what medical doctors do. And what they want to do with that is they want to help people overcome symptoms. And they usually use a drug to counteraffect the symptoms. So if you have high, say high blood pressure or low thyroid, they're going to give you a drug specifically tailored to that approach. I'm not anti-drug, I'm not anti-physician. I believe there's a time and a place for all healing at some point. There's a time and a place for drugs, surgery, chiropractic care, physical therapy. It's whatever the person needs at that time. So the second part of healthcare

Functional Vs Allopathic Care

SPEAKER_00 4:44

is called functional medicine. That's what I practice, and that's a very personalized, patient-centered approach. And functional medicine doctors ask the question why? Why do you have high blood pressure? Why do you have low thyroid issues? Why do you have autoimmune problems? My experience has taught me that nobody has a problem just because. There's always a hidden root cause of what's driving the problem in the first place. And medical doctors don't really ask that question. They don't really care. They want to find out like, what can I do to get this lab value back to normal and alleviate the symptoms, and that's it. And so it ends up being a very superficial, glossy overview, like a veneer of the actual problem. And whereas functional medicine, you have to dig, you have to figure out what's the root cause of what's actually driving the problem. So it requires me to put on my detective hat and to figure out what is going on. Is it lifestyle-based? Is it dietary based? Is it due to the toxic load? Is it due to a food allergy or a chemical sensitivity that's causing the problem? And really figure out what is driving it so we could put an end to it. And that is you spend a lot more time with a person and a lot more time digging to figure out what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 6:17

That is so true. And I think chiropractors in general come out of school thinking about the body having this innate ability to heal itself given the proper conditions. And so it's just natural that someone that went to chiropractic school would want to study further about metabolic issues and things like that. So you're able to recognize through an intake form or a history form which diagnostic tools to use, correct?

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, I start off the process by gathering their general medical information, doing an intake form, doing some questionnaires like you mentioned before. And that's not a diagnostic, it's just a place to start looking what's going on. It helps me to figure out which labs that they need. I found that there's no one size fits all approach to this. There's no such thing as that. Everybody has to be treated as an individual, and they have to be given labs that are specific to their particular issue, whatever that may be. And so I start off by gathering some foundational lab tests. The foundational lab tests are things like blood and urine and stuff

Personalized Labs Over Insurance Limits

SPEAKER_00 7:34

like that. And then we take some measurements and find out what's going on and what do we need to do to correct these problems. It's different than medical doctors, and that we order a lot more tests. The thing that your audience needs to understand is that when medical doctors order tests, they're going to order exactly whatever the insurance company dictates that they will pay for. Usually by an actuary that works for the insurance company that works in a cubicle in another city. He's never met you, he's never read your chart, he's never looked at your labs, he's never looked at your x-rays, but he's making clinical decisions for you. That is very frustrating for a lot of medical doctors, knowing that they are not in the driver's seat, the insurance company is.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

It is a shame. And then it's based off of you know a series of information being gathered about typical symptoms, then this typically means this, this, and this. And so the standard of care is based off of that as well. So you mentioned you do sort of a baseline lab work, and that's do you do blood first or do you go straight to urine? How do you decide which pathway to go, testing-wise?

SPEAKER_00 9:05

It's a

Comprehensive Bioscreen Explained

SPEAKER_00 9:06

great question. So, what I do, what I start off with is called a comprehensive bioscreen, and that is 63 different lab markers. And so it's a combination of blood and urine. Okay. So we're able to see the function of the kidneys, the function of the liver, the blood lipids, like triglycerides, cholesterols, all the little fractional components of that, uh, cute phase reactants to look for inflammatory markers. We ordered 10 different thyroid tests of vitamin.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Wow. Now that's saying something.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Yeah. So, like when you go to see a medical doctor, they're going to order a TSH and that's about it. And they're going to extrapolate all the information from there. That's one of the reasons why only 17% of people that are taking synthroid or levathyroxin, some kind of a thyroid replacement hormone, it does not work. It only works about 17% of the time, does not work 83% of the time. Right. So they don't get enough information. They order very, very, very small amounts of lab tests. And again, those lab tests are determined by the insurance company, not by your medical doctor. Your medical doctor wants to order more tests, but they can't because their hands are tied behind their backs. Whereas if you work outside of the insurance realm, you could do whatever you want.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

So your testing is the cash-based test. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

We have ways of making it very, very affordable. So, for example, with the comprehensive bioscreen, if we ran it through insurance, it's about $2,500 worth of tests. We could do it for $400. And that is the full bottomy fee. It includes two different consultations with me and my team and an analysis of all of your lab markers. It's a hell of a deal. If you take the middleman out, you eliminate the insurance company and remove them from the equation. It's actually very, very affordable.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

So we mentioned that you have a brick and mortar office in Bethel, but you also are able to do all this blood and urine testing virtually, correct?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

That's correct. So we work with what's called a professional co-op. And a professional co-op, as you know, is a company that negotiates a cheaper cash discounted price for folks, no matter where they live. I think the company that I work with works with Lab Core, but there are certain professional co-ops that also work with Quest Diagnostics. And so wherever that there's a major lab like that in your town, all you have to do is uh email the requisition form to a person, then they take that to the lab core, they give it to the person that checks them in,

Virtual Testing And Access

SPEAKER_00 12:04

they see a code at the top of the page, and that shows all the lab tests that I want done. Wonderful no matter where that you live, you can get access to this stuff. It's really, really cool.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

So someone that lives out in the country somewhere in the middle of Ohio, let's say, if they can get to a decent sized city, they can have these labs drawn, correct?

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Yeah, like most towns have labs. Most have a lab core or a quest or someplace like that. Uh-huh. As long as they have a place they can do, they could draw blood and collect urine, you're in business. Unless you're like in the Arctic Circle, you're pretty good to go.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Are you limited to the United States? Because we do have listeners all over the world.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

I would say yes, just because other countries have different ways that they have labs. And I don't want to get in the middle of like customs and all that kind of business.

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Sure. But you would be available for a consultation to someone anywhere in the world because you could advise them on what they would need to ask their doctor.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, absolutely. But people in the lower 48 states, they can speak to me via phone or internet or whatever, whatever's the most comfortable.

SPEAKER_01 13:28

Okay, wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

You don't have to be physically present. Like if you went to a chiropractor or you went to a physical therapist, you would actually have to be physically present to get the therapies. It's a physical modality. Right. Functional medicine can be done through the internet or through the phone.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

Yes, that's the great thing about the internet. And I do want to mention his website for functional medicine is metabolicsolutions.net. And on that, he offers a free online quiz and a free 15-minute consultation with Dr. Smith. So you could see if what he had to offer would be worthwhile to you, and I'm certain it would be. So back to the biomarker tests, you mentioned 10 different thyroid tests.

Thyroid Triggers And Hashimoto’s

SPEAKER_01 14:22

I know you're probably looking at all the comprehensive stuff: kidney function, liver function, CBC, and then you mentioned inflammatory markers. It was there anything else we needed to highlight there before we moved on?

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Well, I would just say that like looking at the totality of a person's physiology, you want to look at the entire metabolic landscape. You want to see how the liver is functioning, how the kidneys are functioning, how their iron cycle is functioning, if they have any kind of anemia problems that could lead to decreased energy. A lot of women, childbearing age women, that are going through menses once a month, they lose some blood, and that leads to an energy drain because you can't get energy throughout your body without oxygen. That's what anemia is. So let me take a step back. When I'm looking at thyroid issues, there are problems that are related to your thyroid that medical doctors rarely, rarely check. What I call triggers are things that are related to thyroid physiology but aren't in the thyroid itself. Things like anemia, blood sugar problems, cortisol issues that regulate your fight or flight response, sex hormones, meaning estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. Remember, boys and girls make both. And they have to be in the right amount for your gender and for your age. Chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, GI problems, food allergies, chemical sensitivities, and unresolved viral loads like Epstein-bar virus, cytomegalovirus, and even herpes. All of that stuff could throw off your thyroid function, which is a problem. And medical doctors simply don't look at all that stuff. Additionally, in the United States, the number one cause of low thyroid problems is Hashimoto's disease. Hashimoto's is an immune system issue where the immune system or your body's defense system is actually attacking and destroying your thyroid gland. 90% of everybody that has thyroid issues in the United States, it's due to Hashimoto's disease. That's nine out of every 10 people. That's a lot. Outside of the United States, it's due to low iodine, our iodine deficiency. We don't have that problem as Americans because we put salt on everything.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

Right. And our salt is iodized most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

So it's due to an immune system issue. So realistically, if your thyroid is messed up, you need to find out if you have an immune system issue that's beating up your thyroid gland. It's an immune system issue, not an endocrine issue.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

So do you do a lot of food sensitivity testing once you find out Hashimoto's is a problem?

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yes, I do. I use a lab called Meridian Valley Food Safe 95, and they give me a full color report, and it shows me how reactive that the body is to certain foods. So the more reactive that your body would be, the more sick that you'll get if you're exposed to that food. I did this test on myself, and I have a problem with dairy. I have a problem with some grains, with crab meat, and with almonds. And that made me feel very sad because I love to eat crab.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

A lot of times, do you find food sensitivities can

Food Sensitivities And Real Cases

SPEAKER_01 18:14

come about if we are ingesting them over and over and over? Because I've seen food sensitivities change.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

I found that that people could unwittingly eat something they think is perfectly fine, no problem at all, and they have a severe reaction to it. So, for example, I had a gal, she was 20 years old, her mom brought her to me because she had fibromyalgia, she had chronic pain, she couldn't sleep, she was just in misery. And like a typical 20-year-old, she eats a lot of junk food, a lot of bad stuff. And her mother was trying to clean up her diet in the best way that she knew how. So she was feeding her chicken breast filets and green beans and garlic. And I ran the test, and she had a severe reaction to chicken and green beans and garlic. So I said, you need to stop feeding her that right away, make your diet up, and then she came back in two weeks. She was like a whole different person. She said, She's sleeping like a baby now, she has no more pain. And her mom took her to all these different medical specialists at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, gastroenterologists, podiatrist. She took her to pediatricians, she took her to rheumatology, all these different people that just wanted to put her on drugs, more and more and more drugs. And she did this test, and but lo and behold, I solved the puzzle really quick. She has some food sensitivities. It's very, very common for people to have dairy. And why is that occurring? I can speculate. I think it's because the food industry has been meddling with the foods that we eat. Like when I grew up as a kid back in the 70s, they didn't have the food industry playing around with basic wheat and make when they're making bread, but they use GMOs and they use genetically modified this and that and the other to make breads softer and cupcakes lighter and fluffier and make things more appealing for people. Again, this is based on economics. It has nothing to do with what's best for you as a person.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

Very true. And I grew up with the understanding that cow's milk was meant for baby cows, and it's no wonder that a lot of humans have issues with dairy and things like that. So is the Meridian Valley, is that a serum test or a blood spot test?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Or it's a blood spot test. So what you do is I give you a lab kit, or we drop ship a lab kit to your home, and you prick your finger and you express some blood drops onto a test card, and then you mail it into the lab. And what they do is they they measure how reactive that your blood would be to 95 different food antigens. And the more reactive you are, the more you need to stay away from that particular food, whatever it may be. I've had people that have reactivity to pineapple, green beans, or you reserve the right to have more than one problem. So whatever it may be, you can you stay away

Gut Testing And The Microbiome

SPEAKER_00 21:33

from that.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

So talking about foods, do you you dive into gut issues pretty deep with stool testing, or how do you look at that?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yeah, so for stool testing, I've experimented with a lot of different types of tests, and I've kind of settled on the GI Map test. The GI MAP test takes a small sample, about the size of a Hershey's Kiss, and they measure the ecology. Of what's called the microbiome in your gut. That's the bacteria that lives in your gut. This is super important. You have friendly bacteria and you have unfriendly bacteria. And the analogy that I can use for this is kind of like a flower garden. So if you plant flowers in your garden, and if you ignore the garden for a few months, what is going to grow in the garden? Weeds. Weeds, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

The weeds are going to compete with your flowers for a finite supply of natural resources, food or moisture or sunlight or whatever. And eventually, if you continue to ignore it, the weeds are going to overtake the flower garden and start to grow out of control. But if you pull the weeds out by the root periodically and you plant more flowers to choke out the weeds, you're going to have a nice, beautiful flower garden. It's the same thing with bacteria in your gut. That's why people take probiotics. They want to reinoculate your gut with friendly bacteria and choke out the bad bacteria. But the GI map will quantify that and they'll show you exactly how many good species of good quality bacteria you have versus bad. If you are prone to a yeast infection, if you have a parasite, how's the absorption of your nutrients doing? What kind of uh antibiotic resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria are growing in your gut? So it gives you a ton of really good information. So you can make some really wise decisions about that.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Yeah, and I don't think people realize that after you take one round of antibiotics, it takes your microbiome five or six months to recover on its own. So it's always good to follow up an antibiotic use with a good probiotic, just a little clinical pearl there. Let's talk about adrenal fatigue. How do you address

Adrenals, Cortisol, And The DUTCH Test

SPEAKER_01 24:03

that?

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Well, the first thing I would do with that is I would want to take a measurement to see exactly how bad it is. And so for adrenal function, and specifically for cortisol function, I do what's called a Dutch test. Dutch is an acronym that stands for dry urine testing for comprehensive hormones. There are other companies that will do it via saliva, but I use a urine test. And so what it does is it shows me the rhythmicity of cortisol secretions out of the adrenal gland and the brain and as it hits the pituitary gland. So the amount of cortisol that your body naturally produces kind of resembles a sliding board. It's the highest in the morning when you first wake up and then it eventually continues to drop. Cortisol has an inverse relationship with insulin. So when insulin goes up, cortisol goes down. When cortisol goes up, insulin goes down. Go back and forth with each other. So when you are sleeping, right before you wake up in the morning, your insulin level is the lowest level throughout the 24-hour cycle. So when you eat, you're breaking your fast. That's what breakfast is. And so when you eat, your insulin goes up and your cortisol continues to go down throughout the day. But for people that have abnormal cortisol patterns, the Dutch test will pick up on that and it'll show that at certain times of the day, your cortisol secretions are too high or they're too low. And there are certain supplements that I can prescribe depending upon how you show up on that test.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

So, and just for the listeners that might not know you even had adrenals, they're little glands that sit on top of the kidneys and they produce our stress hormones, cortisol, but they also produce our adrenaline for that fight or flight response we feel. And they can get tired. And the reason we like to test the adrenals is because, especially someone that has dealt with chronic stress or long-term stress or even inflammation, things like that we've been discussing, it kind of helps bring a full picture into what else might need. The adrenals get tired and they need a little support. And you probably have a wonderful adrenal protocol that you use when you see that.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Yeah, I mean, so let me let me elaborate on what you just said. So when the tiger is chasing you through the jungle, in order to survive, you have to run away from a threat or you have to face and fight it. So your fight or flight response of your autonomic nervous system is there to protect you and save a life. So when the tiger is chasing you, it causes your pupils to widen, it causes blood to pump to your extremities, it causes digestion of your foods to stop entirely. But when the danger is over, the fight or flight mechanism should come back to normal. But for some people, it can no longer go back to normal. They're just always trapped in that fight or flight mode. And that is bad on the adrenals, it's bad on the brain, it's bad on the thyroid gland, it's bad on the sex hormones. It can cause a lot of problems if you can't shut that down. It's kind of like if you can't shut down inflammation and it becomes chronic, that leads to cellular decay and dysfunction. And so with the adrenals, we have to make sure that they're you're producing the right amounts for your body and your age, and it's it's working for you, not against you.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

So true. And it's interesting because the adrenals back up so many of our other systems, our sex hormones, our inflammatory system, blood sugar regulation, you know, all these different things. But a lot of people can make it through menopause and andropause if their adrenals are healthy. It's a double whammy if you're going through menopause or andropause and your adrenals are fatigued as

Insulin Resistance And Cell Health

SPEAKER_01 28:21

well, you really have a completely empty gas tank. So I'm sure that's something you see quite a bit too.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah. One of the things that's really important to mention is that there's no one test that's going to give a clinician 100% of all the information out there. So it's sometimes required to do multiple tests, and they can be broken up and done over time. They don't have to be done all at once. It is smart to do them all your testing within a certain amount of time so that the doctors can make some clinical decisions regarding your health. But you don't have to do everything at the exact same day. You can break it up into little chunks and come away with information that would work for you, but not doing it at all, which is what most people do, is even worse.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Right. Let's talk for a second about insulin resistance. Yeah. Because especially with all the new GLP1 medications, semaglutide, trzeptide, all the all the different GLP1s. Tell me a little bit about how you like to look for insulin resistance and in treatment.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

So at the smallest level, we are composed of cells. Cells get together to form tissues, tissues get together to form organs, organs get together to form systems, and systems form a human being. But at the smallest level, we're composed of cells. The cell has a cell membrane, and the cell membrane's job is to for gases to escape the cell and to go into the cell, like oxygen versus carbon dioxide. They can metabolize those gases. They also have to cause waste products to leave the cell and get expelled from the body. They can also have to have nutrients leave the cell. And all of that takes place through the cell membrane. So the cell membrane controls a ton of stuff about what goes in and what leaves the cell. Under chronic stress or chronic inflammation, you degrade the cell membrane a lot. And so you can't get bad stuff out of your cells. You can't get good stuff into your cells. And as a result of that, you have a problem making energy in your body. It used to be thought that insulin resistance was due to eating too many sugars. But now, upon a deeper dive, it's it's confirmed that it's due to other stuff like chronic inflammation and oxidative stress. And so it's very, very important that you are paying attention to how much inflammation your body is producing and take steps to reduce that all the time. Otherwise, you're going to end up in a bad way. Now, insulin resistance is the precursor to type 2 diabetes. So as sugar molecules stay in your bloodstream and can't get into your cells, it keeps rising and rising and rising until you reach a certain threshold. And that is what causes type 2 diabetes. And that sets the stage for things like heart attacks and strokes, blindness, kidney disease, peripheral neuropathy, early onset dementia. It's just really, really bad news. And in my opinion, that's the number one health threat in the United States today insulin resistance leading to type 2 diabetes. And for your listeners, I would just say if you want to find out just how big of a problem

Diet, Fasting, And Re-Sensitizing Insulin

SPEAKER_00 32:18

that this has grown to be, look at all the dialysis centers that have popped up all over the place in every single city. It is enormous. And people are spending so much time, money, and energy on chronic kidney disease as a result of type 2 diabetes as a result of insulin resistance.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

So something someone could do for insulin resistance if you find you have a high A1C number or a high fasting insulin number is of course change your diet.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 32:56

And then medications like metformin, a supplement called berberine is good. But also, what give me your thoughts, Dr. Smith, on intermittent fasting?

SPEAKER_00 33:06

So that's what I was just about to say is uh if you are having insulin resistance issues or you have full-blown type 2 diabetes, first of all, that's a completely reversible problem. It's a self-inflicted wound, is really what it is. Now, let me back up a second. When it comes to diabetes, there's four types of diabetes out there that we've recognized in the medical literature. There's type one, which is juvenile onset diabetes. That's an autoimmune disease, where your body's white blood cells are attacking and destroying the beta cells of the pancreas, and you can no longer make your own insulin. You are going to be needing insulin for the rest of your life. There's type 2 diabetes, which is mostly because of diet and exercise. There's type 1.5. That's a lot of people haven't heard of that. Type 1.5 happens in adulthood, but it's the same exact mechanism as what happens in type 1, except it doesn't happen when you're a child, it happens when you're you're an adult. It's an autoimmune problem.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

An autoimmune problem. Your own immune system attacks your pancreas as an adult. That's 1.5.

SPEAKER_00 34:29

That's type 1.5. There's type 3, type 3 diabetes, which has been commonly called Alzheimer's disease. So there's a direct correlation between out-of-control blood sugar and early onset dementia and uh loss of brain function. So, what do you do about this? The first thing is you have to change the way that you eat, you have to change your relationship with food. You cannot consume uh ultra-refined food as much as you used to. You have to rely on real food, real whole food. I would say that the best possible diets for diabetics would be either a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet, where you are consuming animal proteins and animal fats, and you're going to complement that with intermittent fasting. So you asked about intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting is when you are controlling when you are eating. So during a 24-hour cycle, if you eat during an eight-hour window, and you don't eat during a 16-hour window, that's called a 16-8 intermittent fast. 16 hours of not eating followed by eight hours of eating. It could be an 18-6 fast, it could be a 12-12 fast, it could be whatever. So if you limit the amount of times that your body is producing food or consuming food, you are controlling how much insulin that your body is needing

Detox, Liver Support, And Leaky Gut

SPEAKER_00 36:10

to secrete. So whenever you eat, doesn't matter what it is proteins, carbohydrates, or fats, your body is going to start to secrete insulin as a result of the increased load. And it's going to take that food and put it into your cells where it can be burned as energy to make ATP, adenosine triphosphate. If you limit the amount of food that your body consumes, you're limiting the amount of secretion of insulin that your body is going to produce. About 25 or 30 years ago, the experts that knew everything told us to eat all the time, all the time. You want to constantly snack and graze on food throughout the day, and that was the best thing for you.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

Well, it's well, yeah, they told us that kept our metabolism higher.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Remember? Kept your metabolism higher. What it also did is it caused a ton of insulin resistance.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

And so what you want to do now is you want to actually limit the amount of times that you're eating. So a great way of thinking about this is you eat a healthy lunch, you eat a healthy dinner, and then you don't eat again until the next lunch. Yes, that's pretty easy, really. You skip breakfast. That is very, very easy because the hormones that control your body's metabolism is called insulin, cortisol, ghrelin, and leptin. And ghrelin is the hunger hormone. Leptin is the I'm full hormone. So when you're hungry all the time, your body is secreting a lot of ghrelin. And when you're full all the time, your body is secreting more leptin. Now, ghrelin is at the lowest level of the 24-hour cycle at eight o'clock in the morning. So at eight o'clock in the morning, your body doesn't produce much ghrelin, and you're okay to skip breakfast. Ghrelin is the highest level of the 24-hour cycle at 8 o'clock at night. That's why you turn into a tyrannosaur in the evening.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

It's biology. It's not because of a lack of willpower, it's uh because that's what your body is producing, and that's what's going on. So you want to you want to find an intermittent fasting program in addition to eating the types of foods that are going to work to decrease insulin sensitivity. And then you set uh a couple of different supplements, barberine. You want to work on the cell wall. So you definitely want to work on consuming fish oils and things like that. I would say cinnamon bark is a very, very good supplement that re-sensitizes insulin in your body. So anything that you do, I'm a bigger fan of just working on your food and your diet than I am about just selling you a lifetime supply of supplements.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

I think that we would we should arrive most of our benefits via the diet and via the behavior.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Is there anything else you'd like to touch on? Any other symptoms or health issues that we haven't touched on so far?

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Well, there's a lot. I say that when a person is exhibiting signs of toxicity, liver toxicity, there's two different types of toxicity that your body produces. There's water-soluble and there's fat-soluble. Water-soluble toxins are very easily excreted by your body. Every time you go to the bathroom, number one or number two, by the lungs or by the skin, you're you every time you sweat, every time you breathe out carbon dioxide, you are detoxifying your body. Fat-soluble toxins are stubborn. They like to linger in the fat cells of your body, and they're very tough to get rid of. And how do you know if you're toxic? Well, there's telltale signs of this. People that have chronic joint pain, people who have chronic muscle problems like fibromyalgia, people that have brain fog or problems sleeping,

How To Work With Dr. Smith

SPEAKER_00 40:20

falling asleep or staying asleep, they are exhibiting signs of toxicity. And I like to do a detox, a liver detox, about four times a year at the minimum to clean house and keep things moving. So what liver detox does is it turns fat-soluble toxins into water soluble, and then you have no problem kicking them out of the body. That'll keep you going and it'll keep you healthy.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

That's a great idea.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Yeah. So I would say there's gut liver detox. There's also a thing about gut detox, working on your gut and working on uh your body's ability to regulate your bowel transit times so you don't have constipation or diarrhea. You have normal absorption. There's a problem called leaky gut syndrome that affects a lot of people, and that is the precursor for a lot of types of autoimmune disease. So, but that can be relatively easily corrected with a lot of people.

SPEAKER_01 41:23

Well, that's where your expertise comes in, Dr. Smith. I just want to reiterate where you can find Dr. Smith. He is at metabolicsolutions.net. And his brick and mortar office is called Chronic Conditions Center, and it's in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. I think I was just saying Bethel earlier, but it's Bethel Park. Would you like to share phone numbers?

SPEAKER_00 41:52

As far as getting a hold of me, really the best thing to do would be to go to my website, read about what I have. There's a free health quiz available through metabolicsolutions.net where you can learn about what is bothering you and what do you want to do about it. So if you have a very, very high score and you need some help, the next thing to do would be to reach out to me via the contact page and I'll set up a time where we can discuss your issues and what I feel would be the next best steps for you. If you score very me, like a moderate score, I would say that I'll put you on my nurture file and I'll send you little pieces of information via my via email. And if you have a very minor issue, I would just say check me out online and check out my social media presence. That would be the best thing to do. I don't think that every single person needs to see me, but if you do, there's a mechanism for that as well.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

How do we find you on social media?

SPEAKER_00 42:54

I would say I have a presence on Instagram, on Facebook, X, uh, LinkedIn, Pinterest, things like that. So you can definitely put the links on your on your page as well. And yeah. But you know what? I if you do the test, I'll send you a link from there too.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

Okay, wonderful. In the show notes, we'll have all your social media links and websites and things like that as well.

Simple Habits For Lifelong Health

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Well, Dr. Smith, this has been a one of the most comprehensive podcasts I've ever done. So I appreciate that. I think it's been eye-opening to people to realize that with the proper testing and the proper guidance that a lot of things can be remedied without pharmaceuticals and those types of medications. So, is there any last thoughts you'd like to leave with us?

SPEAKER_00 43:47

You know, when we go to school to study the body, it's very, very complicated. And there's a lot of pieces and parts. But as far as the general maintenance is concerned, it's relatively simple. If you want to make Sure, that you're paying attention to your diet first and foremost. You want to make sure that you're paying attention to your levels of hydration and you're staying amply hydrated all the time. You want to make sure that you're getting plenty of sleep so that you're resting and replenishing your brain for working for play the next day. You want to make sure that you're paying attention to your body, so your joints and your posture through chiropractic care and make sure that that's well taken care of. You want to make sure that you're managing your stress correctly, whether if you have a meditation routine or some other way of just expressing what's going on, so you're not it's not consuming your body. If you pay attention to those things, your body will reward you later.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

100%, I agree. Thank you so much for your time today.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Thank you. We've been a while since it felt like dip.

Closing And Listener Actions

SPEAKER_01 45:00

Thanks for listening to Hormone Heroes. Take a moment to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. While you are there, help us spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. If you would like to share your bioidentical hormone story or need help finding a physician in your area, please email us at drkelly at hormoneheroes.org. That's D R K E L L Y at H O R M O N E H E R O E S dot org. We want you to be a hormone hero.