What is Metabolism and the Mediterranean Diet with Dr. Doni | How Humans Heal

Hey, it's Dr. Donny, and I'm recording today from Athens, Greece. Actually, I'm on a patio here, so you might hear some background noise. I'm in Greece because I'm also researching and experiencing Mediterranean diet and lifestyle because I'm working on my next book, which has to do with stress recovery. I'm excited to share that with you. I decided this was a perfect time to. To talk about the Mediterranean diet on the podcast, as well as just metabolism in general. What does that mean? And, and in particular, how does a Mediterranean diet come into play as a potential solution for some of the metabolic issues that come up for us in. In our health and in our lives? So isn't this amazing, this garden? I'm just in love with being able to be so close to nature, and I really find that.

In Greece in general, there's a lot of inclusion of nature wherever I've gone. And so I'm looking forward to sharing that with all of you. So let's start with just talking about what is metabolism anyway? So metabolism, I think, gets used a lot in research articles and by practitioners, but it may not really be a word that's used in common language or common communication.

Metabolism, I would say, is really what we study in biochemistry, which is understanding how all the processes inside of our bodies work. So there's all these different biochemical enzyme processes that help our bodies do their thing every day. Everything from making enzymes to digest our food and then turning our food, our protein, fat, and carbohydrates into energy. That's all part of our metabolism. It's also how our body then responds to the food that we eat. We need to have insulin responding to the carbohydrates, for example, we need to have the mitochondria, then using the. This energy from our food to make energy for our body and our cells. And really metabolism ends up determining how well our body uses our food for energy creation and how quickly our body uses those calories as energy to. To kind of fuel our bodies and burn that energy. So one way that sometimes we look at metabolism is based on body weight, because if the metabolism is slower, so if we're using our calories less effic, then our body ends up storing those calories as body weight. So if you have, maybe your weight is more than you would like it to be or think it should be, that could mean that your metabolism is sluggish. It's not your body's not keeping up with the use of calories. Now, that can be because maybe your Intake is higher. I can definitely say my intake has been higher. I'm going to tell you more about the yummy foods I've been eating here. Um, and so if we're. Our intake goes up, that's more work for our body to convert those calories into energy or convert that food into calories, really, and energy that our body can use. But also, a lot of times what happens with metabolism is not even, like some people tell me, they're not even eating very much food. It's just that the body can't effectively use it. And this can happen when we have high stress levels, especially if our cortisol levels are high, Then our insulin goes high and our mitochondrial function decreases. Also stress from toxins. If we have a lot of toxin exposure, it also drops our mitochondrial function. And so then we don't use our food and energy from food efficiently.

It could be that the hormones and toxins related to stress are causing your metabolism to slow down. This can also be related to hormone changes. When we have hormone shifts. For example, for women, when estrogen progesterone levels shift, or with postmenopause, when the estrogen and progesterone drop low, that also affects our metabolism. It affects the ability of our body to use our food.

For energy. That means that when women are postmenopausal, they're more likely to have their blood sugar levels be higher from consuming the same amount of food, because their insulin is not as good at putting that carbohydrate and glucose into the cells where the cells can use it for energy. Instead, that glucose is floating around in the bloodstream. When the glucose is left in the bloodstream and can't get into the cell, then eventually the liver is the one who has to decide what to do about that. And the liver, if it sees extra glucose fl it really has three options. It can turn that extra glucose into cholesterol, which is why some of you may see your cholesterol levels increasing over time. It can also turn that extra glucose into fat that gets stored in the liver, which is known as fatty liver. And you might notice your liver enzymes increase. It can also turn that glucose into fat around your belly. And so if you notice your waist increasing, then you know, okay, my liver is having to deal with an overload of glucose, which really is a sign of metabolic distress. Sluggish metabolism. Now, what we also know is then when that sluggish metabolism happens, when we start to see glucose levels rise, which in blood work, we would see it as a hemoglobin, A1C, that's going up, even getting close to 5.7 and definitely over 5.7. Then we see increased risk of various different health issues, everything from diabetes, heart disease, cancer, including breast cancer and dementia. This metabolism thing is really important to understand because it's associated with these most common causes of chronic disease and death for us humans at this point in time. I'm really hoping this helps you get a grasp of it and start to understand it. Because it's happening inside of our bodies. Well, we can't really see it or feel it unless we understand how it's showing up. The cool thing is that the way to help improve your metabolism comes back to some of the same tools that you hear me talk about all the time. It comes back to balancing your blood sugar levels, which I'm going to talk more about today. So eating in a way to keep your glucose from going up too high to eat in a way that matches your body's ability to handle that glucose. It also has to do with managing your stress levels, managing your cortisol. So making sure that you're doing stress recovery activities on a regular basis and becoming aware of your cortisol, doing just the right amount of stress recovery support and not too much, right? Because if we do, if we go too much of a good thing, it can actually raise our cortisol. Like too much exercise can raise your cortisol and throw off your metabolism. Too extreme unfasting can raise your cortisol and throw off your metabolism. So it's not about doing more, it's about finding the right balance. And I think that really brings me to talking about the Mediterranean diet, because I think one of the reasons that the Mediterranean diet has been shown to be so effective at helping with health is because it's really about balance. Is one of the main concepts about a Mediterranean diet. It's about a balance of carbs, protein and fat. Instead of going to the extreme of one food nutrient over another, it's these macronutrients, right? There's these three macronutrients that our food is made up of and that our body can use is carbs, protein and fat. And a Mediterranean diet has a nice balance of those. And not only that, but in the Mediterranean diet, the sources of carbs, protein and fat are healthy sources. They're whole food sources. So Mediterranean diet doesn't use very much, if any processed foods. It's all going straight to the actual fruit or vegetable. Or for proteins, it would be actual fish or nuts or seeds or poultry and sometimes beef. So it's an actual protein source from nature. And then the fats are very often, especially in the Mediterranean region of the world, which is where the Mediterranean diet gets its name. There's 16 countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea and they all have little bit varying diets, but essentially it comes back to these basics. And for a lot of them, their main source of fat is from olive oil. It's amazing how much more olive oil they consume than we do in America and the difference in their olive oil. When I taste olive oil here, it tastes like olives. It's amazing tasting. You just want to have more of it. And a lot, unfortunately, a lot of the olive oil that makes it to the United States has been diluted with other types of oils. So you really want to be careful to get authentic, clean, pure olive oil and then to use it in your, in your food and you're cooking because that's a, it's an omega 9 fat, which has been associated with helping your metabolism and decreasing inflammation in the body. Let me touch on inflammation a bit because inflammation is one of the things that results from stress and a sluggish metabolism. If we go back to thinking about this metabolism that got bogged down by stress and toxins and high cortisol, then what happens is that bogged down metabolism creates inflammation in the body. Now it's hard to really put your finger on inflammation. It can show up differently for different people. Sometimes you might feel it as achy joints or headache, or feeling puffy in your body, or tenderness in your digestion. In blood work, we don't often measure this, but we could measure something called crp, which is a C reactive protein, which is a general measure for inflammation. And you could order ask for that in your regular blood work called C reactive protein. But the others that they look at in the research are some of these cytokines, or for example, tumor necrosis factor, which is called TNF alpha, the interleukins and some of the other cytokines is what they measure when they measure inflammation associated with stress and metabolic disease. So what happens is when the metabolism is slow and the stress is high, they start to see increased indications of inflammation. Based on these markers, we also know that inflammation is associated with.

Heart disease. So any kind of heart attacks, strokes, what we usually think of as blockages or in the blood vessels is really associated with inflammation, more so than cholesterol, because the cholesterol just shows up to try to protect you from the inflammation. Remember that heart disease, atherosclerosis and heart attacks is really about inflammation. It comes back to wanting to improve your metabolism. And this is why I'm talking about the Mediterranean diet is because I was just reading a study that I'm including in my book about how the Mediterranean diet has been shown to actually decrease these inflammatory markers. So when people adhere, even from teenage years to adults, when they adhere to a Mediterranean diet, their inflammatory markers come down and their cortisol levels come down. That's amazing because that means we can use our diet, our food choices, what we choose to eat, as a way to prevent health issues like heart disease, also metabolic diseases associated with cancer, all different cancers, including breast cancer, also dementia. If you're wanting to prevent these health issues for yourself, whether that's in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now, this is a great place to start. And one of the things I like about the Mediterranean diet is it's not complicated, it's not difficult to follow or comprehend. It really comes back to eating these whole foods.

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure and high blood sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline, which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care, daily tips come to you by email and video, Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdonnie.com so.

What I found is, and I can share with you a couple examples of what I've been eating here.

This, by the way, is a cup of what they call mountain tea. And mountain tea is a plant or an herb that's found in this region. This one's called organic mountain tea from this company called Anasa. I don't know, maybe you can find it somewhere, but it's. Mountain tea is an herb that has been used way back in time, even was written about by Hippocrates as a tea that's antioxidant, anti inflammatory, relaxing. So it helps recover from stress. So it's like the perfect tea to counteract this metabolic issue and inflammation we just been talking about. And so I'm really excited about it. I'm going to try to find some to bring home with me. It's an endangered plant, so you have to be careful about really getting the. The right form and to make sure you're getting it from a company who's honoring and making sure the plant continues to be able to be available to us. So I've been drinking this oh, my goodness mountain tea.

What I've also found, kind of living in the Greek lifestyle is that they usually have essentially like three meals a day. It seems like with breakfast being sometimes a little bit later in the day. So maybe they are having a little bit of a longer fast before they have breakfast. And the breakfast always includes some protein, whether that's egg or sometimes it's ham or turkey. Sometimes it's. Most times it's a Greek yogurt. Now, this Greek yogurt, I don't know, it's way different than Greek yogurt than I've ever seen in stores. Here's an example. It usually comes in a jar or ceramic pot. And what happens is they don't add any sweetener. So there's no sugar in here. There's no fruit added. And it's really thick. Let me see if I can show you.

It's like that. It almost looks like as thick as I could turn it upside down. And it stays on the spoon. It looks like a mountain of whipped cream. But it's. It's really delicious. And what happens is they will put some fruit usually with it, fresh fruit that's kind of cut in big chunks. You know, we're used to, I think, getting our fruit all mushed up tiny. But they have like a big. They would cut a peach, for example, or a kiwi fruit or an apple. And then they might put walnuts with it, which, of course, are another source of protein and healthy fats. And then they would put. Sometimes they would put honey, like a local honey. Now, honey is fructose, which is another. It's a fruit sugar, but at least it's not cane sugar. It's not refined white sugar. So the fruit, the sweetness, if it's added, is with fructose from local honey or fruit, actual fruit. And then this Greek yogurt has twice the amount of protein than the yogurts we're used to eating. So what I found is it's really been great. Now, it's usually made from cow milk or sheep's milk. And so if some of you may need to avoid cow milk, then you could always choose the sheep milk version. I don't know if we can even get access to this in the United States, but I really want you to just see that the breakfast in Greece has protein, whereas breakfast in the United States oftentimes doesn't have much protein in it. It's much more high sugar and carbs. And remember, those high sugars and carbs is what disrupts your blood sugar and put your glucose higher, which disrupts your metabolism. So one of the best ways I find to solve the metabolic issue is to make sure you have protein each time you eat. One of the things that patients ask me most is how am I going to get protein in my breakfast? Because we're so used to a breakfast that doesn't have any protein in it, or barely any. If we're having just plain oatmeal or cereal, or even just bread or a donut or pastry, it's just carbs. And so we need to be thinking about how to get some protein in our breakfast. Now, if you can get access to really pure, clean Greek yogurt that's high in protein, I think that's a good option. Especially if you do okay with the dairy, the cow milk. You could also go for the nut, like walnuts and other kinds of nuts and seeds are going to provide some protein. You could also do egg if you're not reactive to egg. They do eat eggs often here for breakfast. And also you could go to something that we don't usually think of for breakfast, or ham maybe, or turkey bacon, for example, or even chicken or fish for breakfast. Like a smoked salmon can be a source of protein for breakfast. I think that's one of the key things I find makes a huge difference when I'm help to solve their metabolism and get their blood sugar levels down, is get protein into your breakfast. And so then what happens in Greece is they'll have that breakfast and then their lunch is actually usually kind of small, a smaller meal, smaller than we might be used to. And it might be like a Greek salad, for example. Now, a Greek salad is also vegetables. It's usually tomato, cucumber, olives, which have healthy fats in them. Onions, which have a lot of good qualities to them too, and antioxidants, and also usually has. It doesn't usually have any lettuce. Now, a lot of times in the United States, Greek salad, they put lettuce in. But here I've not seen any lettuce in the Greek salad. Sometimes they have A different kind of salad that's usually more made from arugula, like maybe arugula with watermelon, for example. But in a Greek salad, it's more the tomatoes, cucumbers and feta cheese, which. Feta cheese can be made from cow milk or sheep's milk, and it's also a source of protein. Now imagine, by the way, that most all of these foods are sprinkled with oregano. And oregano is an amazing herb as a antimicrobial, anti inflammatory and antioxidant. So I love all the oregano that we've been having sprinkled. How easy is that to just sprinkle some oregano on our food? Right. So a Greek salad might be for lunch or perhaps there might be, you know, you could have your. Also you could serve a larger meal for kind of a late lunch perhaps with a filet of fish. The filet of fish is usually taken straight from a fresh catch and then it's cooked on the bone and then filleted off. Now, this fish is not usually served with rice or potato or grains. It's not. It's usually served with the vegetables. Oftentimes the fish or chicken is served with carrots or beets or both carrots and beets or greens. A lot of times I've had sauteed greens with the filet o fish. You can get one of the other salad options sometimes is a potato salad, but their potato salad is just boiled potatoes with oregano sprinkled on with red onion. Again, back to the onion, maybe some parsley sprinkled onto and a couple olives. So it's a really simple potato salad. And then you could have that and then you could have. And this could be lunch and. Or dinner, by the way. The dinner might have. You might choose a Greek salad or potato salad. And then you could have a fillet of chicken or fish, rarely beef. I hardly ever see red meat. In some restaurants, they don't even have chicken or red meat. The only options are fish and vegetable dishes. So you really get to see. Get a sense of a diet that's very, very much focused on the vegetables and the protein and the healthy fats. There are some people who will do some breads and the bread is usually a very much of a homemade, not a processed bread, a very simply made bread that might be then dipped in olive oil or eaten with the meal. And we see. But otherwise there's really not much bread involved. And so you have this breakfast, then kind of a later lunch and then a little bit of a later dinner. And interestingly, they actually stay up pretty late. I think they have a lot of times a break in the afternoon and do kind of a siesta, kind of like a Spanish siesta in the middle of the day. So they might, the day kind of get started like 9 or 10 o', clock, then they have afternoon break and then they often work into the evening and eat later. And so that's very. I've seen that in the Spanish culture also. And so that's interesting to me. I think it really depends on the person and of course your work schedule and so many of the things going on. But it's really something to observe how different cultures have created different patterns to their day. So when it comes to the blood sugar balancing, which is one of the other things I just wanted to cover on this topic, because that's really what it comes down to. And that's one of the first things I find is important to focus on if it's. Well, if you're. Especially if you're just getting started with improving your health. But really I think it's good for us to check in on ourselves any, all the time. I do this with myself on a regular basis. I just have to notice how am I doing with my blood sugar balance? And at first it can be hard to tell. I mean, you may need to do some blood work to get a sense of where you are. You could even use a continuous glucose monitor, which you can get prescribed from your practitioner to monitor your blood sugar levels for a week, just to start to get a sense of where are you with your glucose levels. I would also want to check your cortisol levels, because if cortisol is too high, you're going to be working really hard to balance your blood sugar and the cortisol is just going to work against you. We need to help work on getting that cortisol back on track and work on balancing your blood sugar at the same time. And then what you want to do is, here's the thing is, I mean, I'm trained as a, as a nutritionist, so I understand you can get into all kinds of details of counting quantities and grams of different carbs and protein and so on. And you can do that if it's helpful to you. But what I would say is instead of causing yourself more stress by getting obsessed about all of these numbers in your food, I would just look at your plate and look for balance. Look for where's some healthy carbs? Like is, are your carbs coming from vegetables or Some fruit. Where's the protein? Is it from.

A minimal amount of a dairy product or is it from another non dairy source? Like I use a pea protein powder when I'm, I even have it with me when I'm traveling. Or is your protein coming from some other source of protein? And then where's the healthy fats? And so if you just look at your meals and you go, okay, is there protein, carbs and fat in a nice balance in my breakfast, in my lunch, in my dinner? And if you go too long between meals, if you're going six hours between meals, maybe you need to have another little small meal in between. And then when you get to the evening, then stop eating and let yourself have a fast between your last meal and overnight while you're asleep, until your next meal the next morning. The other thing to consider would be the quantity of food. If you find your blood sugar levels are a little too high, sometimes I say just eat two bites less, have two swallows less than you usually would have, save it for later. Sometimes just even having a little bit less of what your meal size is, is enough to shift your blood sugar levels down. Because now your insulin can work with that quantity of food. Our insulin works with the amount we swallow at that moment in time. It's not that you can eat and have your body deal with it all day long. It doesn't work that way. When we eat and swallow our food, we digest it in our insulin response then and over the next couple of hours, it doesn't, it, it can't delay, it can't save it up for you for later. Saving it up for later means putting it as fat storage. And you don't want that. That's much harder to manage. Better to just eat it, digest it, metabolize it. Now you guys know what metabolize means? Metabolize it, use it as energy and be ready to eat again in a few hours and do that all over again. Our bodies really work best in cycles like that where we eat, digest, metabolize, and get ready for the next meal, right? And then you're going to be in a nice, even blood sugar. You're going to drop your inflammation and you're going to drop your risk of all these different health issues associated with stress, inflammation and metabolic disease. All right, I think you guys got it now. I hope so. But please let me know if you have any questions. If there's anything else I can do to help you with this, please reach out to me and definitely sign up on my mailing list. If you're not on it already so that you'll know, you'll hear when my new book is out where you'll be able to read about this and learn so much more about how you can implement this in your life. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to talking to you more soon.

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