Fasting and Chronic Inflammation with Dr. Cheryl Burdette

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Hello and welcome to the Dr. Jockers Functional nutrition Podcast, the show designed to give you science based solutions to improve your health and life. I'm Dr. David Jockers, Dr. Of Natural Medicine, Chiropractor and functional Nutrition practitioner and I'm the host of this podcast. I'm here to tell you that your body was created to heal itself and on this show we focus on strategies you can apply today to heal and function at your best. I'm excited about today's podcast, but before we jump in, I wanted to remind you to download this month's Special gift@drjockersgift.com from Keto Meal Plans, Smoothie Recipes to Fasting Quick Start Guides, we have a new complimentary gift every single month. To get your gift, simply visit drjockersgift.com that'S-R-O c k e r s g I f t.com thanks for spending time with me and let's go into the show. I'm excited to announce that we just launched my new book, the Fasting Transformation, A functional guide to burn fat, heal your body, and transform your life with intermittent and extended fasting. If you've been listening to this podcast for any period of time, you know that I'm a huge advocate of fasting. And in this book I take you on a journey to help you understand how fasting helps balance your blood sugar and improve your insulin sensitivity, how it shuts down inflammation in the body, how it optimizes your hormones, turns on fat burning and activates stem cells for deep cellular healing. Guys, I go through how fasting. I go through all the best science and research on intermittent and extended fasting and how to utilize it to help prevent or even heal from cancer, autoimmune conditions, digestive disorders, and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Guys, the book goes over all the various research and practical applications for daily intermittent fasting, pract partial fasting and extended fasting. This book is designed to help inspire and empower you to embrace a fasting lifestyle while also enjoying tasty and healthy foods at the right time to improve your metabolic flexibility and energy efficiency so you can burn fat for fuel and have all day energy you are going to love this book. So check it out. You can get it on Amazon.com we also have a website, drjockers.net for fastingtransformation. That's drjockers.net fastingtransformation. You can learn more about it and of course you can pick the book up on Amazon. You're gonna love it. Thanks so much, guys. So this interview is a part of a series I did called the Fasting Transformation Summit. And in this summit, I interviewed the top experts in the world when it comes to intermittent and extended fasting and autophagy and self healing. Now, these interviews were originally done 2019, but the information is extremely relevant today. And this expert, as you will see, really has a great knowledge of this topic and will give you guys so much value. Now, if you wouldn't mind just taking a moment and leaving us a five star review. Your reviews help us reach more people and impact more lives with this podcast and take a moment and subscribe to our channel. That way you get instant notification every time we put up a new podcast. Thanks so much for doing that and I'm honored to share this information with you guys.

Welcome everybody, to the Fasting Transformation Summit, where we are uncovering the most ancient, inexpensive and powerful healing strategy known to mankind. Fasting. I'm your host, Dr. David Jockers. And in today's presentation, we're going to be talking about the impact of fasting on chronic inflammation. We know inflammation is a huge buzzword out there. I'm sure you've heard of it. And we know inflammation is the underlying marker that we find with every single degenerative disease. So we're talking about brain degenerative diseases that affect the brain like Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's. We're talking about autoimmune conditions. We're talking about metabolic issues like being overweight or obese, heart disease, diabetes, cancer. And so I brought on one of the leading experts in the area of inflammation, this is Dr. Cheryl Burdett. So she can really uncover what inflammation is, what sort of things impact our levels of inflammation, what causes inflammation, what impacts our levels of inflammation. And we're also going to talk about how fasting can be a great strategy to use to down regulate inflammation. And we're going to talk about some key supplements that you can use to also help modulate and balance out your inflammatory levels. And so Dr. Burdett is a doctor of naturopathy. She got her degree from Bastyr University in 2001, and she's been doing A lot of work in the research field as well as with big organizations that are involved in natural health and natural medicine. She works, she has a private practice and progressive Medical center, one of the largest integrative medical clinics in the Southeast. She's been the director of the only naturopathic residency program in the US that's trained in functional medicine and nutritional biochemistry. And she serves on an IRB board and reviews studies related to complementary and alternative therapies. Dr. Burdette is one of the authors of the book Laboratory Evaluations in Molecular Medicine and is published in many journals including the Alternative Medicine Review and Clinical Chemistry. She is often a sought out speaker and is invited yearly to present at grand rounds at all the naturopathic medical schools in the country. She's been a member of the board of advisors for a company called Zymogen, one of the largest professional supplement companies who's also a sponsor of this summit. And she's been working with them since 2009. She's also a president education director of Dunwoody Labs. Fantastic lab that really specializes in functional medicine labs. So I actually utilize them as well. So they have fantastic labs that really get to the root cause of chronic disease and they measure inflammatory levels. And so her marriage between clinical practice and laboratory oversight really gives her a unique perspective in evidence based natural therapies. And so Dr. Burdette, quite an extensive resume. So welcome to the Fasting Transformation Summit and tell us your story and how you got going, how you got started with all this.

Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me here because I think that one of the most powerful ways we can interact with patients is through diet and is through lifestyle interventions. And the more we can bring an awareness to that, I think the more people will help. So thank you for making this summit available. My path was a bit academic, so rolling through college doing my undergraduate work and double majoring in both pre med as well as psychology. And somewhere along the line I thought surely these disciplines must intersect somewhere. There must be some overlap between the brain and the rest of the body. And so in that didactic coursework also one of my last classes in psychology was called biofeedback, self regulation and meditation. And in this class, Dr. Traub, the professor taught us that there were many interventions out there, there were many treatments out there that were well researched, that were less invasive and that worked on root cause of disease, but yet they were dismissed because they were more about education or they were more about rehabilitation. And a lot of these root cause treatments, our medical system Wasn't set to deal with. You just really can't accomplish that in an average seven minute visit. And so he really opened my mind to the idea that there are less invasive treatments out there, they're just not being utilized. So with him we did some research. And one of my research studies as an undergrad was in this area of biofeedback. And we would take and biofeedback is a procedure that allows you to see what you're doing inside of the body, but reflected on a device outside of you. So we would take college students and attach electrodes to their fingers and then we would tell them to take their body temperature up or down on command. And they would learn how to do this by seeing the feedback on the device and they could take their body temperature up 3 degrees, back down another 3 degrees. They got a dollar for every degree they could move their temperature. What you saw was that when people worked mind body connection, that it was a very powerful tool and they could teach themselves how to do this within a matter of weeks. So while it might not be that clinically meaningful to adjust your body temperature, the idea is if we can engage that mind body connection, we can modulate blood pressure, we can control anxiety, and we can really do these things in much more of a root cause way than merely a symptomatic treatment. So then that just led me on to think, well, what kind of medicine would address both sides of the coin here? I went to paper, college guides, I don't even think online resources exist yet. And went through the Peterson's guide and there was something called naturopathic medicine. I had no idea what that was, but I was also 20 some and a healthy dose of naivete to go with my ambition. But I'm happy for that. And went on to naturopathic medical school and from there I have just enjoyed being an advocate for medicine that gets people well.

That's awesome. Just talking about mind body medicine, really so much of health is that mind body connection. The most proven tool is the placebo effect. It seems to work every single time. It's this belief that whatever we're putting our faith in is going to help us move in the right direction. Biofeedback is such a powerful tool. Let's jump into inflammation. It's such a hot topic. Can define inflammation for us and talk about its impact in our body.

Yeah, so when I think about inflammation, I think about this ongoing process in the body. I think about kind of a low grade fire that's brewing and I think about kind of A stew that your genetics could be cooking in. And when you cook your genetic stew, that causes problems with proteins and mutations and other issues in the system. And so essentially, inflammation, it's not a singular diagnosis. It's not depression, it's not als, it's not ms, it's not fatigue. That's a diagnosis. But inflammation is a process that can drive almost every diagnosis out there. And so whether or not we're talking weight gain or depression or even multiple sclerosis, in a world where there's more inflammation, you will make that process worse. You will make that condition worse. We have an inherent choice over how we're going to hold our genetics, how we're going to bathe our genetics, if you will. And we could either be cooking them in this ongoing stew of inflammation, or we could be bathing them in a wash of nutrients and low stress environment and being mindful of toxins and really keeping our genetics in a healthier place. And to me, this is really the definitive part of integrative or functional medicine is that we recognize that it's not just a diagnosis, but there's a process behind that diagnosis, and that allows us another way to intervene and another way to change. And the good news about that is it turns out one of the strongest ways to create inflammation on planet Earth is our own choice. Now, genetics are not our own choice. And there are many conditions, obviously people do not choose to get, but we have the power to change our diet. And when we do that, that changes the inflammatory load, and that's a powerful tool to reduce that inflammation and help many conditions see improvement from that.

Yeah, for sure. Inflammation. Why does the body even produce inflammation? Because we hear inflammation, this really bad connotation, and of course we're going to address why that is. But why does the body produce inflammation? How does it. Because I look at the body as an intelligent organism. So why would it create something like this? How does it serve us?

Yeah, absolutely. So if we were having this conversation a couple hundred years ago, then I would be much more concerned with you dying from dysentery, an infectious disease, than I would be concerned with your risk of rheumatoid arthritis or your risk of Alzheimer's. Because we didn't live as long, we were much more likely to die from infections. And therefore, because we would die, we were less likely to get chronic conditions. The good news is we live longer now, but that increases our chance for chronic conditions. So the immune system evolved to be able to create this high level of inflammation. So when it became, when it was under attack by a bug or a virus or a parasite, we could hopefully make it through that. However, fast forward the timeline, Plunk us down in about, let's say, 1940, where you begin to see a great escalation in autoimmune conditions. And even though in the 1970s we declare this war on cancer, you don't see a drop off in rates. And so what began to happen is a change in our environment, an environment that's more inflammatory. And when that occurs, it confuses the immune system. Now, the immune system, if you present the immune system with a food and a pesticide, for example, or let's say you live in a moldy house, so you're generally more inflamed from your environment and you get some type of low grade infection, it's harder to fight that. So from a bug to a food, all the toxins and poor nutrition have created a world where our immune system is overburdened, but also easily confused by what it sees and feels. It's under attack. So now, rather than creating inflammation to this bacteria or this virus that might kill us, we're creating inflammation to pesticides. We're creating inflammation, inflammation to lead or exhaust in the air that we breathe. And so we're creating inflammation to all of these things that are a normal part of our environment, meaning that immune system's gone haywire. Much more inflammation. And that inflammation, while it's great at damaging bugs, can also damage us. It damages our tissue, it damages the vessel, it damages the brain. And so it's a way that our organs or our genetics begin to fall under attack.

Yeah, really fascinating. So the same system that the body created to help us survive, because we know really chronic infections have killed more people in the history of mankind than probably anything else. Absolutely. It helped us be here right now, but it's actually now backfiring on us because we're not able to control it and keep it. Basically, it's kind of like a fire. If the fire is controlled in the fireplace, it's great. Everybody enjoys it, warms up. The house, provides a unique element to the home. However, when we start pouring gasoline on that and the fire starts going up the walls now, it becomes a major problem. What are the things people are doing, the major factors that are taking place? Now you talked about pesticides, different things like that that are driving up chronic inflammation. Like gasoline on that fire.

Well, I think diet is right front and center when we talk about gasoline being dumped on the fire creating that inflammatory load. And I recognize when I Say that that also our diet, our foods are also more contaminated with certain toxins, like glyphosate, a major pesticide that gets used, and the data is strong at this point to say that it does a number of things to us. First of all, when my immune system sees food plus pesticide, it that's weird, I should attack that. So it's a major reason for some of this immune confusion. Beyond that, it begins to kill off those pesticides and foods with less nutrients in them as well, foods with less healthy flora surrounded with them, foods that are stripped of a lot of what they used to give us. That combination means less nutrition in our body. That combination means a better potential to damage the gut lining. The gut lining is that area from your mouth all the way down. That includes the stomach and the small intestine and the large intestine. But within that gut is held 85% of our immune system. This is the place where we decide, are we tolerant or are we inflamed? Are we going to gain weight from this food or are we going to drive the metabolism from this food? And so we've really wrecked the interface there. The foods that we eat, the way they're treated with pesticides changes how we interact with our external environment. And so what we see, and I like to keep in mind the gut is the size of a tennis court. So when you think about that size, that's an enormous opportunity. If you're rubbing up against your tennis court in a difficult way, that's an enormous opportunity to create inflammation or either to create immune tolerance. And we really damaged that interface. So now that we're more reactive to many things, not only that damage, but once that damage occurs, that gut lining becomes permeable or leaky. Now bugs, little bits of bacteria or bits of food that shouldn't come in, come into our body, inflame our immune system. And we get back to the idea that diet is front and central in terms of controlling this inflammatory load.

Yeah, for sure. We look at. Basically, we want to protect our bloodstream. And we know that intestinal lining is only one cell, whereas like our skin, I don't know if you know, but our skin's like. I think it's like seven layers, something like that. So we can all see a cut on the outside, and we can see what happens. We clot it. There's a whole inflammatory process that takes place. It aggregates all these white blood cells. We end up creating a scar. It's kind of the same things happening in our gut on a Consistent basis. When we're eating these sorts of irritating foods and we've got a stressful lifestyle, we just don't necessarily feel that. Right. Why is the gut only one cell, whereas our skin is multiple cell layers thick? Why is that?

Well, in theory, we would like to have good transfusion of nutrient eat into the body as quickly as possible. Evolutionary, we're set up to do that, but now we're bombarding our system with not just food and nut, but pesticides and toxins and low nutrition as well. So it's a very vulnerable part of our body. Like you said, those GI cells, those gut cells, have to turn over every three days. So they require a lot of energy to do that. The mitochondria is that powerhouse of the cell that helps us to make energy. And so it's a very energy dependent process. Now, not even allergies, just a high carbohydrate, sugary diet, what we would call glycation. That is enough to make the gut permeable. It damages what are called tight junctions, the Lincoln Logs, the glue between the cells. And when those tight junctions get damaged by sugar, boom, they open up. And now our immune system is exposed to so much it wasn't exposed to previously. So the diet has really tipped us in terms of this inflammatory potential.

Yeah, for sure. And our ancestors really needed that. Food was scarce at times. Right. So it was like whatever you ate couldn't just sit there in your intestine and need to get into the bloodstream, you know, so you had some nutrition. So it's only that one cell. And just like you said, we start consuming foods, you know, and toxins and things like that, that inflame, it breaks those junctions. And now we get these large particles seeping in there, the immune system goes haywire. And so what are some of the foods that we should be eating when we are eating to help basically help our gut, help strengthen our gut, help reduce inflammation? What are the foods that we should be staying away from?

Yeah, so first of all, eat less is probably generally true for the standard American diet. And you make a good point when you mention that previously when we would be hunting, we would go longer periods in between in terms of having those calories. There was no refrigerator to go put the buffalo into, so you ate. And then there was a pause or what we might liken to intermittent fasting. And so those pauses are really critical. So before we even get into the foods that you eat, how you should eat is important as well. In today's world, people eat all the Time. In fact, many times they're instructed every two to three hours you should be putting more calories in and that's good for your metabolism. I think that there are rare cases or some subsets of the population that need that diet short term. I think that's telling them more about how their adrenals are and that they're probably adrenally fatigued. Because adrenals should pull your blood sugar back up into normal range, they should be able to keep us feeling good for a longer period of time. So yes, there are some people that will do well with eating every two to three hours, but it's a sign they're probably more hypoglycemic and that can be caused by adrenal fatigue. So there's something else that needs to be fixed for the rest of us. Eating and not eating all the time is important. Think about if you ran your car all the time, it's going to give up much more quickly. But those breaks where you do tune ups and where you fix things are critical to the longevity. The same is true of our GI tract of the gut. If they have to reproduce those cells every three days, then having breaks in between away from food is really important to be, to have that repair, to be able to allow the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, to make what it needs. So first of all we've got to make sure that we're not feeding the face all the time and that we're giving the GI tract a chance to rest then from there. Yeah, and you're one, you're quite an expert in this area. You're somebody that's really helped us to change how we think about this. Because it is true, if you talk to most docs, maybe even five years ago or certainly a decade ago, they would tell you the best thing for your metabolism is to eat every two to three hours. Well, we're learning that nutritional advice just isn't accurate. The body needs a break and it needs to repair.

Yeah, absolutely. I discovered it just in my own pain to purpose story on my own while I was in graduate school learning how I should be eating six meals a day. I realized I don't feel good when I do that. That's how it started. But now the research has coming out talking about all the benefits of fasting. What have you noticed? We'll come back to the food. Have you seen anything in the literature on fasting and how it impacts like the inflammasome SIRT 3 some of the different kind of genetic Pathways associated with inflammation.

Absolutely. Because so your alternative, basically, the body will prefer a couple types of fuel. And so the fuel that it can use most preferentially is either glucose or sugar or ketone. Bodies which come predominantly from fat tissue. When we've restricted carbohydrates, when we restricted sugar, this is the time that the body will move into alternative fuel to make those ketones. We used to think of ketones as maybe even being secondary to the brain to glucose. But what we're learning now is that couldn't be further from the truth. The brain loves ketones. The brain uses them efficiently. The brain uses ketones efficiently, not only in the brain, but other places in the body as well. I can imagine going through grad school, you're eating every two to three hours, you're spiking a little bit of insulin. With that, even with healthy food choices, it's easy to get there. You think, I'm having some carrots with hummus. And even that could be enough carbohydrate to kick you out of ketosis. And now that preferred brain fuel. Many people will talk about when they are using more ketones as a source of fuel, they can think better. They feel like they think faster, and that's because evolutionarily, we are wired to do that. As you began to need to find the next buffalo, the next berry, the next sustenance, it probably meant that your blood sugar was lowering. And so the body says, I've got to stay alive makes these ketones, and those ketones really click on our brain. So we're able to find the buffalo, we're able to find the bear, we're able to find the berry, stay alive. The more we can utilize these ketones, the more our brain works better. And those ketones, part of why that happens is because they address that process. Not a diagnosis. Again, not per se. Depression, not per se. Weight loss, although they're absolutely helpful. Getting into ketosis is absolutely helpful in both those examples. But because of reducing that process of inflammation, one of the things we know is when you eat sugar, you produce insulin. When you produce insulin, that sends a signal to your liver. Liver. It tells you to make more inflammatory fats, to make more ldl, to make more triglycerides. And things like triglycerides directly increase something called NF kappa B. And that's a big upstream pathway that turns on lots of inflammation throughout the body. We know that's one of the things that happens in terms of ketones. And one of the ways that if we can move Away from insulin and move from away into ketosis will reduce the inflammatory load. Another thing that we know about the contrast between using sugar as fuel and using ketones as fuel is the ketones make much less reactive oxygen species. And that's just a fancy way of saying free radicals. We all know free radicals are bad for us. They damage our skin, they make us age, they damage our DNA. They set us up for cancerous change. Those free radicals are what age us from the inside out, from the outside in our cells. They cause the cell to make less energy. The cell wears down, the organ wears down, we wear down. Ketones have a little special magic to them. They move right into the powerhouse of the cell, that mitochondria, and they help us. They build a little bridge between parts of the pathway, something called succinate and fumarate. But that bridge that they build helps you to make more of something called ubiquinone. And ubiquinone comes from the word U. Ubiquitous. Every cell needs it. Or another way you might be more familiar with, our audience, might be more familiar with ubiquinone is knowing it as CoQ10. Well, that's a nutrient probably you read about that helps with energy and helps prevent Alzheimer's and helps prevent heart disease. Why? Because it helps us to make cellular energy and ketones come in right at that spot and help us to make our own CoQ10, our own Ubiquinone, keeping the cell moving efficiently. And the more eff the cell moves, the longer it lives. The longer the organ lives, the longer we live. There's a number of identified ways by which ketones reduce inflammation in the body, and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Again, it's very mechanistically driven. And the more we understand it, the more hopefully we'll pull it in as a therapeutic tool. Because where other medications have failed in terms of seizure control, something like a ketotic diet has had success. If I go to PubMed, where the peer reviewed medical research is in terms of things like a brain cancer, a glioblastoma, the research says that standard of care is less effective than a ketogenic diet. So again, it's back to what my professor was teaching way back a number of years ago, that there are less invasive, more effective therapies, but they're just not utilized and harnessed because they're more about education, they're more about doctor patient relationship, and the system's not set up to do.

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Yeah, absolutely. That was just powerful, powerful explanation of what ketones are doing in our body and how they're creating cellular energy. Let's talk about some of the best foods for helping heal the gut and also the foods that. Let's definitely go over some of the foods that like insulin, restrict our ability to produce ketones and create more inflammation in the gut. And then also foods that are going to help support us.

Yeah. So when patients, patients or people, when we talk about what we are most afraid of in terms of health conditions, the things that you see, even though heart disease is the most common, that's not what tops the list. You tend to see cancer and Alzheimer's disease and then you see cardiovascular disease. Great news. Ketogenic diet helps us to address all of those. And so foods that we want to utilize, first of all, Less food, less calories. And that's a big stumbling block for people. We're moving into holiday season and it can be natural to want to overindulge. And we have patterns. We come home, maybe stress at work or stress with the family or just relaxing. And so it's a comfortable time to eat and to eat more calories than we should. So one of the nice things about being in ketosis or ketone bodies themselves is that they make us less hungry. It makes this achievable. Every single one of us has thought, I should reduce my calories, I should be better about this, and had a failure along the way. And that's because, simply put, you get hungry. And we were driven to go look for calories. So when we have ketones in our system, we are less hungry. Some foods that help us with that, first of all, you could take exogenous ketones, but we'll talk more about that. But some foods that help us with that. Coconut oil is a great go to those medium chain triglycerides are fundamental in our ability to make more ketones. And so we get those from coconut oil oil. It's a great thing to start utilizing more of in the diet. Whether we're talking your protein shake, a tablespoon in there in the morning, or we're talking about sauteing some vegetables, giving it more substance, giving it more fat, can really be useful in terms of helping the gut. One of the things that we're learning, of course it goes without saying, we need to get out sugary foods. We need to get rid of the sugar, we need to get rid of the white flour. If it's white, it probably needs to go. Those are going to be things that spike insulin. Those are going to be things that keep you from getting in ketone ketosis. While we know that it's a high fat diet, I never like to see the vegetables go. So still a nice strong focus on green leafings, having spinach around to throw in some stews or throw in a shake. You got to keep the phytonutrients dense. Then from there, what we're learning is that when you do that, moving into ketosis, having a ketotic diet is one of the best ways to restore a healthy gut lining. In fact, they're even saying that some of the data around seizures is not just because of the intake of fats. When I think of seizures, I think of where is this happening? It's happening in the brain. And the brain is 80% fat. Change the diet to better Fats put better fats in the brain. This must be how seizures work or seizure control works from the diet. It does in part. But what we're also learning is that diet changes flora in the gut. It produces something called Akkermansia. That Akkermansia is being found to be part of the anti seizure potential. But that same Akkermansia creates a thicker lining on your gut, creates this mucus lining that helps to protect the gut and buffer the gut. Making sure that proteins don't come into the body that shouldn't, making sure that the gut lining is soothed and working well. So nutrition moves into our system. A lot of the benefits of those ketogenic foods like coconut oil, like good healthy nuts in the diet that are going to provide healthy fats to us, like avocado, a wonderful source of healthy fats. They're not only changing our fat biochemistry, but changing our microbiome. And that does a couple things for us. Changing that microbiome is one more way we reduce inflammation in the system. And changing those fats also changes the inflammatory load because it works on this little part of the cell. And we know the peroxisome is an anti inflammatory pathway. This is why you've been taught about fish oils as being anti inflammatory. This is why we've been taught about something like CLA helping metabol because it's a fat that works on those peroxisomes. Ketogenic diet, healthy fats also work on those peroxisomes to create anti inflammatory fats in our body. Anti inflammatory prostaglandins, which helps our brain, helps our weight, helps our energy. And so when we can incorporate these foods into our diet, a very powerful tool to help us with most pathologies out there.

Yeah, so good. So you're saying let's get these healthy fats in there. Lots of veggies, vegetables, let's keep the carbohydrates, so the grains, the sugars, things like that, let's keep those out, they spike insulin. We obviously want to keep our insulin down and low and let's eat less often. Right. And so there's a big, a big thing like if you eat once or twice a day as opposed to three to five times a day using the same amount of calories, you actually have 25 to 50% less insulin that's released when you do that.

There was a big study that just came out that really confirmed the low carbohydrate hypothesis. Sometimes we're taught that the data is back and forth. I think it's A little less back and forth than sometimes the media would like us to believe. Really? Every time they set up a study to try to prove that high fat diets cause you to gain more fat. That's the bias. They're trying to show that it does that. And when you have bias in a study, you influence it. Even with that influence, it's failed to show that high fat diets are the diets that keep us from releasing insulin. Guess what else keeps us from releasing insulin? Not a surprise to you, but ketones. I used to think, well, the only good ketone is the one we make because it must come from fat cells. If you are making your own ketones, then you're breaking down your own fat. That's the benefit that I was wrong. Yes, there's benefit to that. Of course, that's how we lose weight. But exogenous ketones help us mimic what our own ketone bodies do. When I take some ketones, I'm going to be less hungry first of all because my body says, ah, food is scarce right now. Ah, we're hunting, we're gathering. Don't disrupt the hunt. And the gather with feeling more hungry. So those ketones send a signal to my brain to eat, eat less. Then in addition to that, they send a signal to my pancreas to make less insulin. Well, remember, insulin is the thing that's causing that inflammation. Insulin is causing us to make more triglycerides, to pack in more fat. That's the signal. When that signal gets shut off, my pancreas doesn't make insulin. My brain says, I'm not hungry. This now becomes achievable. That's the big thing. We all realize the benefit, but many times doctors, clinicians will say, what patient is going to do that? Well then let's give them the tools to help them do that.

Yeah, absolutely. Exogenous ketones can be really, really helpful tool. I talk about that and kind of in a sense how to create a fasting lifestyle can really help you get more adapted. So it's a tool you can use, especially in the beginning and then also for performance, a lot of different factors. So that is great. Let's talk about some other supplements. What other supplements can people use to help reduce inflammation and in their body? And we'll talk about different brands as well that you really like and that you recommend.

Yeah, so yeah, I think again, this is so important. You can't just treat the diagnosis, you've got to treat the process. And when we treat the process that allows the diagnosis to move into remission. So a huge part of that process is lowering the inflammatory load. And a big way we do that is through diet. So in many ways, I've begun to. To think we should step back a bit from being so focused on the pathology and really think more about how we optimize healthy pathways in the body. If sleep is a healthy pathway, if diet is a healthy pathway, if exercise is a healthy pathway, what things can we do that amplify the effect of those? Diet's probably our most important therapy. So how can we amplify what we do with diet? And so I used to kind of maybe have a little of this bias too. Well, you can just control everything, all dietarily. Why should you need a crutch? Well, it's not per se, a crutch, but making a system more efficient. If I can take some, for example, ketonics is an exogenous ketone body that I like. It's got a good flavor to it. It's very easy to take. Let's work by taking a scoop of that once or twice a day. When we do that, that will help help to get the appetite down. So the dietary goals are achievable. The next thing is that there are so in some ways, some of our foods out there that have higher phytonutrients, maybe like a sweet potato or a carrot, are still a bit higher in carbohydrates. So how can we have our keto cake and eat it too, so to speak? And so I like to also combine something called optifibrilene. It's a konjac root. Konjac root is a food. In fact, there's a Japanese noodle that's made completely from konjac root. And they've known this for years. They know that we can make this noodle from this konjac root. It doesn't spike blood sugar, it has no glycemic index, and it blocks some absorption of carbohydrates. When we're looking at longevity in Asian cultures, certainly we wouldn't point to one thing. There's many factors. Green tea, and you may potentially being different in terms of sedentary lifestyle. But it's interesting that this konjac fiber is something that's been utilized as a food, literally for hundreds of years in Asian culture. Well, we can utilize it as a powder, as a capsule, and one of those before you eat. So carb cycling, too, is another thing that we might consider doing. There might be times where you want to Pull in more sweet potatoes or carrots or things that have, again, nutrition to them. But you want to balance that carbohydrate load. Well, the optifibrilline blocks the absorption of the carbohydrates without blocking absorption of the nutrients. So again, it's a way to have our cake and eat it too.

Yeah, absolutely. You're talking basically these products, they can get through Zymogen, which is one of the sponsors here. Zymogen sells to professionals, right? Yeah. Let's go into a little bit more supplement. But first, can you differentiate? Because I know there's lots of different supplements out there on the market that people can go on Amazon, things like that. Why is it important to get professional grade supplements? And then we'll go back into some of the other supplements because I just want people to understand why you're recommending these certain products.

Well, I know I'm preaching to the choir here because I know you reach for a similar thing in terms of making sure what you are bringing to a patient is a physician in line and that the quality control is there. Because unfortunately, right now in the supplement market, it's a bit of a buyer beware market. Meaning that we don't have the quality measures in place that you might with maybe the regulation around vehicles or the regulation around building codes so that the roofs don't fall in on our head. We just aren't scrutinizing as much on the supplement front. So it is up to really the consumer and the physician with the patient or consumer to help make an educated choice. Zymogen is a physician line nutraceutical company. And what that means is that every batch of every ingredient is assayed or measured for what should be there and what shouldn't be there. Meaning if you've read stories about people getting contaminated supplements that had lead in them them or that had pesticides in them, there's a reality to that. If you have read articles about people buying supplements that are actually just sawdust, okay, well, maybe that doesn't hurt you, but it's certainly not why you bought it in the first place. So when you work with a physician line, you know that every batch is tested to make sure that it meets quality control standards. And this testing is not done by Zymogen. It is, but it's also done by independent third party labs. And these third party assays are made available to the public at large. So you can always check their work for you and I, when we're working with patients, the worst thing, the last thing we want to do would be to give them something that would set them back. A key tenet of our medicine is first, do no harm. If we're working with supplements that might not meet their label claims, we can't feel true in our steps in terms of offering that first do no harm. The second thing is probably like you as well. When we're working with a patient, what we want to see is we want to see them recover quickly and to feel better as fast as they can. We know that many times that it's a process and it takes time to do this, but that's what we're hoping for. If we're using something that doesn't meet label claim, if we're using something that's contaminated so it increases inflammation rather than decreasing inflammation, we slow that patient down. And so the more we can see a faster, better result, the more people feel well, the more they feel well, the more they're even able to minimize what they need to do through supplementation. Because the more they're able to shop for that ketogenic diet, the more they're able to go on that 30 minute walk every day that we're recommending that they do, the more they're able to partake in diet and lifestyle changes that really augment their wellness and augment their care. So quality supplementation is, it is really critical in terms of patient wellness on so many levels.

Yeah, I think it's so important as you know as a clinician, you've got this intimate relationship with that patient, they're putting their trust in you Absolutely. Gotta make sure that you're giving them the best quality stuff. You need to make sure you're getting results. And that's really what it's all about. And so you need a company that's gonna come through and really be able to test their products. And that way when you get that product, you know what's in there is in there, it's been clinically tested and that it's going to get results for you. I think that's so important. Practitioners out there can check out Zymogen, we've got their logo and landing page and all this stuff.

You've done a lot in terms of formulation yourself, you've done a lot in terms of working in this industry. I bet you can attest to, even if you meet all of the quality, what if you're working with a ketone, but that doesn't taste that great, how long does the patient actually utilize it? So even things that in some ways are more minimal, like that it's a big difference.

Yeah, I mean, big thing too with exogenous ketones is you got to make sure that they're actually raising up your ketones, effectively tested that you're not getting. They shouldn't impact your blood sugar. If anything, they're going to lower it slightly. These things all need to be tested. I think it's just so important because so many people out there that are listening just go to Amazon and try to find something, but you just don't know the guarantee. So it's a really good idea to find a trusted practitioner that you can be working with that typically has vetted out good products that will really help you because so many people have a supplement graveyard. All these weren't supplements they've tried, just aren't getting results. They're all sitting there and it's just very expensive. Expensive. And like you were saying, it can be harmful in some cases. I've heard stories of people using traditional Chinese medicine, using different Chinese herbs and things like that, only to find out that these things were contaminated with lead or whatever it was. It was never tested. It is very, very important in our society today to find the right manufacturers and find a clinician or a practitioner of some type that you can, can be working with. With that said, you can continue on that. But let's also talk about some other supplements that you like for reducing inflammation in the body.

So I think many of us are familiar with the idea of a functional food. And what that means is something that looks like a protein shake but often has much more therapy included in it. One that I like is something called Opti Ghi that's also from Zymogen. And the reason for that is that it's a nice high quality protein. It also has some medium chain triglycerides in there, but a gram of natural anti inflammatories. So our botanicals, our phytonutrients are some of our best ways to reduce inflammation. Many people are familiar with things like turmeric, the yellow spice that's in curries. And it's interesting because in India, where more curry is consumed on autopsy, there's even a slight yellow tint to the brain tissue. So we know turmeric or the active compound in turmeric. Curcuminoids go straight to the brain and reduce brain inflammation, but body inflammation as well. That's one of the ingredients that's in there. Another thing that I like about Opti GHI is that the carbohydrates are low, particularly the stevia and the sugar free one is that you're getting seven net grams of carbs in a serving of a shake. So you can get full with that. But in addition to that, there's a very healthy dose of a mineral called vanadium. Vanadium is important to think about in our ketogenic strategies because the diet works extremely well. The diet works most of the time, but as you know, we can always have an outlier in medicine. We can have somebody who doesn't seem to respond as well or they're not quite dialed in in the same way. So one issue that can happen for people is when they're first adjusting to moving ketogenic diet. This is another reason exogenous ketones help, because it smooths this transition and it helps erase part of this problem. But part of that transition, the body feels it as stressful. I'm changing fuel sources. There's a short term stress associated with that. Some people will call it a keto flu. And again, this is a great place. Our exogenous ketones build a bridge there. But the way the liver interprets stress is to say, oh, I'm under stress, I better make sure sugar. And the liver will go into something called gluconeogenesis, the production of making sugar. There you are. As you're working on your diet, you're trying to make this transition, but your body is saying, ah, I feel a stress. And so you're getting a bit of a pushback in terms of some of the sugar being made. And your weight loss has slowed down the vanadium and the opti GHI decreases gluconeogenesis. So it's a great way to help say, okay, we know ketogenic works most of the time, works very well. But when there are exceptions, what are those exceptions? And let's just make sure that we have a comprehensive strategy to deal with roadblocks too.

Yeah, I always tell people, hey, chromium and vanadium, I see a lot of people deficient in both of those and they both really work to help improve insulin sensitivity. This is what we've been talking about is, hey, if the less insulin we need in order to get the sugar into the cells, the sugar in our bloodstream, the better off we're going to be. The less activated activation of these inflammatory gene pathways, we're going to have really, really key nutrients. You also talked about the fiber and how that can impact it, the exogenous ketones. Anything else that you want to talk about as far as supplements?

Yeah, I think that one More that I like to augment. These pathways that ketogenic diet turns on is some alpha lipoic acid. And the one from Zymogen is unique in that it is controlled release. You can get a much better dose because of that formulation than you can standardly. Most the time in supplementation, we see 50 milligrams or 100 milligrams of alpha lipoic acid. Ezymogens is 600 milligrams, but also controlled release. So it washes through the body over a longer period of time. Alpha lipoic acid is like turning down the faucet on insulin. Again, causes the pancreas to make less of it and then makes the insulin receptors more sensitive. When that occurs, the body says, I don't need more insulin. And so that's one more way we can decrease it. One of the things that we know about a ketogenic diet is those ketones are excellent at turning on pathways in the cell that create energy. They have fancy names like AMP kinase, and that will help the muscle to utilize more glycogen, to utilize more fuel, to create more energy. But what's interesting about that path that exercise turns on, ketones help there as well, and it inhibits a major pathway that gets turned on in cancer cell development. So long and short, I'm saying this is one more way that exercise is good for us. Our exogenous ketones help us to mimic what that exercise does, and that alpha lipoic acid helps to amplify that as well. When we start to put these things together, we start to chip away at the roadblocks that I'm hungry or I crack or I have cravings, and if we get a 10%, 15% additive, another 20%, 25% improvement by putting these things in our arsenal, then it really makes the key therapy, the ketogenic diet, much more achievable. Again, we're not really treating a pathology. We're treating that process, that inflammatory process. A great way to be inflamed, besides a leaky gut, is to be overweight. Fat cells make inflammation. Until we've achieved our normal bm, we haven't fully optimized our ability to lower that inflammatory load. That makes us hurt, that makes our brain less clear, that makes us gain more weight. And so working with those interventions, the Konjac fiber and the Opti GHI and the ALA and the exogenous ketones are a really nice grouping to help us move along the metabolic continuum in a way that shuts down those inflammatory pathways.

Yeah, powerful information, really really good stuff, Dr. Burdett. And so any final words of inspiration? There's a lot of people out there that are checking this out. They're not sure about fasting, not sure about getting into ketosis. What sort of inspiration can you provide for them here at the end?

That your most powerful health tool is you. It's not a doc, it's not a prescription pad. It's not someplace you have to go. It's not something that your policy has to. It's the choices that we're making every day about diet. We eat probably at least two times a day. Many people more every time you eat. It's the opportunity to either increase inflammation or reduce inflammation. But ultimately, we are empowered to change our health much more than any prescription pad ever could. And that means that we can take control over these things, and everybody has the potential to reduce their inflammation, inflammatory load.

Well, that was wonderful. That was absolutely fantastic interview. Thank you so much for joining us here. And you know, it's just like Dr. Burdette said, the power to heal is within you. For many people, it just lies dormant because they haven't activated the right pathways. And she talked about that. Activating these pathways, enhancing these pathways with nutrition supplementation, different lifestyle strategies. And so fasting has the ability to really activate the dormant healing potential within you. It's safe, it's powerful, and it just might transform your life. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this interview and if you have consider owning the entire Fasting Transformation Summit for yourself, that way you get lifetime access to all these interviews, all the transcripts, MP3s, everything that you need, plus all the fantastic bonuses. If you haven't checked those out, definitely do. And I find most people tell me this, that especially when they first get started with fasting, fasting is so much easier when they're starting able to listen to transformative and empowering information about fasting. Like this interview here, it can really just to help empower you and give you the momentum to carry through with a healing fast and really apply this into maybe an intermittent fasting lifestyle and all different strategies that we talk about. So if you consider owning this, we would really be honored and we'll see you on a future interview. Be blessed.

Well, that's all for this show and I want to thank you again for spending your valuable time with me today. And if there was something you heard in this interview that you have questions on or you want to dive into deeper, then drjockers.com is the best place to go. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider taking distance quick moment and giving us a great review. Your reviews help us influence more people and transform more lives. And if you took something valuable away from this episode, then please share it with someone in your life. You know it can help. We'll see you soon on a future podcast. Be blessed everybody.

Sam.