Reverse Chronic Diseases using Allulose, with Neil Gyte

Pound's Transformation in Connecticut have been using allulose to lose weight, reverse chronic diseases, including successfully titrating hundreds of people off GLP1 meds, using Allulose as a significant part of that. And they've helped all of these people back into metabolic health.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel Freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo. This is Ed Levitan. Star sighting today and we have Neil Gite with us. He is the chief business officer of RX Sugar, as well as the founder of 1bmh.org. His mission is to help 1 billion or more people become metabolically healthy through education, awareness, metabolic challenges and practical products. Welcome, Neil. We're so excited to have you here.

So I know you have two kind of big sides to One is the metabolic health and one is analo. So how do those two things combine and what is allulose? I guess let's start there maybe.

So probably over 50% of the kind of metabolic dysfunction comes from food and nutrition. And then when you look at food and nutrition, the two biggest drivers of that are sugar and ultra processed food, of which there just aren't that many solutions out there to help people. And I've been reading all of the amazing books by Dr. Richard Johnson, Dr. Ben Bickman, Dr. David Perlmutter around metabolic health and the carbohydrate fructose pathways in the body. And I heard all of them talking about this rare natural sugar called allulose, which is metabolized very differently by the body. And I can share a lot of the paper and the studies and the science behind this, but it's a rare natural sugar that is metabolized differently by the body, so it's not actually absorbed by the body. So it's virtually zero calorie, but it has all of these positive metabolic health benefits. Like it can decrease your blood sugar, it can naturally stimulate GLP1, which is the increasing hormone that is obviously Ozempic will go vi all of the pharma industry has kind of made famous, but it can also increase fat oxidization and lower inflammation. And so I was kind of sat there listening to this in two minds Thinking, wow, this sounds amazing. But also this sounds too good to be true. There has to be a catch with this. And so I really dug into the science of, of allulose. I got the products, I tried the products on myself using cgm, using a ketone meter to really test the products. And I just came to the conclusion that, wow, I think this product, I personally believe it does everything that all of the science and the clinical kind of studies and trials show. Taking a step back, sugar is 100. The sugar and sweetened industries, $120 billion industry globally, 73% of all of the foods in the supermarket have sugar, high fructose corn syrup added. And really is the fructose component of that which drives the mitochondrial damage and.

The metabolic dysfunction along with the side of mercury, because mercury is used to extract and convert corn into high fructose corn syrup. So you get a side of mercury with your, your mess, your metabolic messing fructose, like have at it.

Yes, exactly, yes. And then, and then combine that with all of the other seed oils and other things that gets put into ultra processed food.

You forgot the pesticides.

Oh, and glyphosate pesticides. Yep. Craziness.

Exactly. And so, so I then just looked and thought, well, what would happen to the world if we could just overnight replace that $120 billion industry with what I believe is the metabolically healthier sugar allulose? I think we could make a dramatic dent into the chronic diseases, the death rates and, and dysfunction. And, and I also, before joining Rx sugar and allulose, I was very much a purist. I'd made peace with myself that, you know, it took me many years to reset my relationship with sugar and carbohydrates, but it's really difficult thing to do. And so I was there thinking, well, either everybody needs to do this, but the reality is we're human beings, we've evolved to one want and to have sweet things because it's actually saved us as a species. And so if you're totally happy to reset your relationship with sugar and carbohydrates, go low carb and not touch anything, then great. The vast majority of the population then need practical help and tools. And I think allulose can be a hugely helpful tool because it's metabolized very differently. You can still have, you know, a sweet treat, a chocolate bar, it doesn't impact your blood sugar levels, it can do a lot of metabolic benefit to your body, but you're replacing what you previously used to rely on in terms of you know, sugar or other sweeteners which have other negative impacts. And so that was the thing I had. Hopefully that is a good answer as to, you know, why allulose. And a little bit about what allulose is.

I didn't realize it was naturally occurring. So how it, how is it naturally occurring? Is it a plant or is it like, what is it?

So it's a rare natural sugar. It's a single monosaccharide, which I think is really important. So it's the simplest of molecules and it's found in small amounts in many different foods, actually in raisins and figs, even in corn, in wheat. And so that was one of the other things that kind of interested me about alluloses. It's prevalent in lots of foods in small amount. Therefore, our bodies are used to metabolizing and having it in our system. And so from that perspective, it kind of passed for me the natural, natural sniff tests versus some of the other sugar alcohols or more kind of synthetic sweeteners that our bodies simply just are not used to, or the intensity profile of those at hundreds of times. The sweetness of sugar really triggers off the neural circuitry in the brain, whereas areulose is only 70% as sweet as sugar, which I think is one of its best characteristics. And so it doesn't seem to, and I can share the studies to link into the show notes, it doesn't seem to trigger that same neural circuitry in the brain. So I personally find, and many of our customers do, you know, you can have one of our chocolate bars and have allulose and not feel like you need to eat 2, 3 more as you would a regular chocolate bar. Because we formulate with cocoa butter with dark chocolate. And you get the sweet with allulose, you get the GLP1 bump. Because of that, they make you feel satiated and full and not craving more and more, which is really important when it comes to kind of resetting the metabolism of the body, portion control and so forth.

So what are you deriving it from now that you're mass utilizing it? Where is it coming from?

Yeah, great question. So it is because it occurs in small amounts, it's just financially not possible to extract that directly. So we use organic corn as the base and we effectively use an enzymatic process to extract and convert fructose from the corn actually into allulose. So it is manufactured. But this is where I come back to, for me, because it is a single monosaccharide, it is the kind of simplest of Sugars. So from that perspective, you know, it's not like it's something dramatically complex or, you know, we're going and changing it. It is, it is a single monosaccharide, which I think then makes it more interesting than a lot of the other alternatives out there.

So I didn't realize it was 70% as sweet as sugar. I just knew it didn't quite equal. And for the record, I despise baking. I can't follow recipes because I can't follow instructions. But we have a kid who just started going to a new school that's vegetarian. And this kid's a meathead and would be an absolute raving lunatic by the end of the day because he didn't eat enough. So I was like, let's do protein muffins or protein cookies or something. So we set out and found a high protein recipe, but, you know, it needs to be sweetened otherwise he won't eat it. So I was like, let's substitute allulose. And so I made protein, high protein brown muffins, chocolate muffins that were used with allulose. And I ended up using like one and a half times the amount of sugar it called for as allulose. And because we kept tasting it before we added the eggs, it doesn't taste good. It doesn't. And then it tasted good. And it was about one and a half times. So that makes sense. But we'll, we'll attach it to this podcast because high protein allulose powered muffins that both the kids, the, the two younger ones were like, can I have it too? And I was like, sure. And we'll make more. So we'll make more this weekend too, because it, it gets him through and it doesn't spike his blood sugar, which was the thing that I was like, I'm sure he does. You know, he has a bunch of carbs because he's hungry and then plummets and comes home and is a jerk. And I'm like, this cannot go on. So it really works.

So it really does work. And that is one of the important things, I think back to energy and kids these days because so much of their calories come from carbohydrates. They are constantly on this blood sugar roller coaster. And you get the, you know, the, the peaks and troughs with that. So how can you start to, you know, even that out a little bit? And it was, you know, and I became a customer of the RX sugar products first before joining the company. And then it still insisted for the first, you know, two months of joining to continue to pay for the products that I use because, you know, I my daughter, 10, and I've spent the last couple of years really trying to reset her relationship with sugar and carbohydrates unalter processed foods, not in that anything is banned and know, but to help her understand the impact these different foods have so she can try and make choices when she's outside of the home and at school. School lunches is a great example of that. And so, you know, I went from, you know, her largely being okay without sugar and chocolates most of the time to giving her one of the RX sugar chocolate bars, the swealthy snacks day to go to school for exactly this reason because the school food is outside of my control. And if she has one of the chocolate bars before lunch, it helps mitigate the glycemic excursions from what she eats at lunch. And controlling that blood sugar, reducing the amount of insulin, keeping that steady leads to much more stable blood sugar, leads to less mitochondrial dysfunction. So yeah, it's. For me, it was the best kind of insurance policy that I could do. And you know, literally yesterday before I drove down to Austin, I'm speaking at an event a little bit later, my daughter was going to school. So she, you know, she went to get her Rx sugar bar, but she took five out of the drawer and I was like, okay, hungry today? She's like, no, my friends keep wanting and taking the Rx sugar bars because they love them too. So I'm now just going to take five. So everybody, you know, has, has one of these chocolate bars. And so I think to your point, you know, and I tried to say this as objectively as I can and I did become a customer of the product. And I think you guys, we sent you some samples. You've changed, you've tasted some of the products, but they are great, great natural tasting products that kids actually love and enjoy. And so they can feel like they're not missing out and have, you know, a chocolate bar at 80 calories but zero carb, you know, zero traditional sugar, manage that glycemic control without doing the metabolic damage of all of the added sugar that is added into all of the, the, you know, chocolate bars and sweets and treats that are out there on the market or the vast majority.

Does it feed Candida the way that straight sugar feeds Candida in the, in the gut microbiome? Like, what is it doing in the gut?

Yeah, great question. So a lot of the microbiome studies have been done in rodents. So there haven't been huge numbers of microbiome. They're ongoing in. In humans and largely the kind of. The rodent studies show neutral to positive effects in the microbiome in general. I think for me the best, I would say kind of litmus test of this is kind of yes, do randomized control trials. You know, what does the science show? But we've had, we have clinical partners that have been using allulose for years. So Pounds Transformation in Connecticut have been using allulose over the last five years as the foundation of their natural weight loss program and helped over 3,000 people to lose weight reverse chronic diseases, including successfully titrating hundreds of people off GLP1 meds and using allulose as a significant part of that. And they've helped all of these people back into metabolic health. And they haven't seen any, I would say, significant side effects of this. They have tried with the sugar and this is back five years ago before they found allulose with erythritol, xylitol or other sugar alcohols. And they found that the GI side effects, even just from a symptomatic perspective, a lot of people at moderate doses could not tolerate them. But allulose seems to be very well tolerated by the vast majority of people. So there's still a lot of work that needs to be done here to understand exactly what the impact is. We're doing some of our own studies at the moment as well as, you know, the ongoing research. But a lot of the evidence in rodent models and just anecdotally is that it does seem to have in the majority of people, you know, a neutral to positive impact on the microbiome.

Cool. And. And I just want to make sure people got that, yes, there's candy bars, but you can also cook your favorite recipe which is just the sugar. And we had a. We were at a conference with another provider that actually uses it just takes I think like a quarter teaspoon or half a teaspoon after the meal of just the plain sugar. Just so that the allulose Sugar sugar so that she just doesn't. This gets the quote unquote dessert sweet. But. But the soup, the appetite goes down so that she doesn't feel like she needs more. So it's.

Which. Which is amazing. And it's such a common. Yeah use case as you say. And that's where it still blows my mind a little bit that you have this natural rare sugar that is virtually zero calorie that can Give you that little bit of sweet, you know, quiet in the food noise through the GLP1 bump, give you that satiety signal. But through, you know, through virtually zero calorie. And so, yeah, so in terms of product ranges, so certainly from an RX sugar perspective, so have the regular, you know, crystal allulose as well as the liquid allulose which can, you can use for baking, for adding to things. Super functional.

I did not know, I mean, you know, me, the baker, I didn't know that.

But I didn't know about the liquid we had.

I know we didn't know about that.

Candy bars.

Ah, okay. Well, yes, so yeah, well, we'll, we'll, I'll ship you some of the, some of the liquid as well. So we've got the, we also have then flavored syrups as well. So caramel, chocolate, vanilla, which are amazing also for baking, for ice creams, for coffee. So my, one of my favorite treats, which I had a lot of, whether I was training for the swim because I was doing up to nine hour training sessions in the pool, but I would have a macadamia, fresh macadamia, milk, flat white with some RX sugar, vanilla or caramel in. And that was kind of my delicious fat bomb. Beautiful coffee that had that nice bit of, you know, sweetened flavor to it. So the syrups are really versatile.

I'm psyched.

Yeah. And, and even I, you know, ice cream. So we just, you know, take some, some heavy whipping cream and you know, a couple of eggs, add some RX sugar syrup to it and you've got, you know, a vanilla or a caramel or a hazelnut ice cream.

But I do, I don't mind that I don't like ice cream, but this sounds like a project for your oldest child.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so we have the brownie mix, then we have the bars we also have, which I probably didn't send you as well. I can send you some of these. We've got, they're called swelly sticks. So these are just pure allulose in a stick pack that I think a little bit back to when you were saying, Ed, that you know, just kind of taking the allulose after the meal. This is, you know, I didn't grow up in the US but the way it gets described to me by customers is, oh, it's like a, it's like a Pixie stick, but it's a Pixie stick just with pure flavored allulose. And so you can eat it like candy. Kids absolutely love it. And Back to how do we give them more tools to help them navigate the sugar laden carbohydrate kind of landscape. Ultra processed food which, which, you know, they face. Kids absolutely love the product. I actually, I carry them around with me and just in my pockets. So if you got, if I go out for a meal, you never quite know exactly what's going to be in the meal you eat out. So I have it before just as an insurance policy to help, you know, manage the glycemic response of food when you're eating out.

Cool.

I'm just thinking, personally, I've been thinking about single origin cocoa and chocolate and then adding that, the allulose to it and I know it's a non sequitur, but that's where it was.

No, that's fine. That's how your brain works. It's fine. You're talking about you like unprocessed chocolate which is very not sweetened and bitter and you would add the allulose to it to sweeten it.

That's the, the, that's the learning is the bitter. All the stuff is all the cheap stuff. The actual, the single origin high quality is actually very variable. But adding a little sugar to the allulose.

Hot cocoa. Okay, Neil, hot cocoa, that's the next product, I think.

So hot cocoa we need. Yeah, we've got a whole bunch of products that we're planning to launch. But Ed, you're absolutely right and I think you and I same wavelength on this. So I also love kind of dark chocolate. So what I make at home is I get 100 organic dark chocolate that has, literally that's all it is, is 100 cocoa and I, I melt, I melt it down in the, in the microwave or you can do so in hot water of course. And I put them into molds and I put half into the molds and I then freeze those for just five minutes to make it solid. And then I add some of the, the flavored syrup. So either the vanilla or the caramel in the middle so you get this kind of sweetness in the middle. And then I lay at the bottom. So you get these chocolates that come out of the mold. You have to keep them in the fridge. But you have these nice cold, you know, crunchy dark chocolates but you get a little bit of the sweetness from the allulose syrup. And you know, for me one of those, two of those for a dessert just gives me. And again, cocoa, cocoa, pure cocoa is so good for you in terms of, you know, the flavonoids the antioxidants that it has for you. And. Yeah, so. So there you go. I shared one. One of the recipes that you can. You can go and replicate will send you over some of the. Some of the syrup, so you can. You can play around with those as well.

Thank you. All right, so let's go to. I. Now I'm like, okay, I got to do it. But let's, let's. Let's go to. How can people find out more about you? Because this. You just basically started an avalanche. So where can people find you? We'll put it all in the show notes. Talk to me about that.

Yes. So the main place people, I would say, can find and connect me is LinkedIn. I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. So if you just search Neil Gy on LinkedIn. Outside of that two, two websites really, where kind of most of my content is. The first is one bmh.org which stands for one billion metabolically healthy. And that really is the website, the kind of nonprofit that I started to really simplify metabolic health and just provide people with links to tools and resources because people can also be overwhelmed and want to change too many things at once. And so it really was. These are the things that influence. Here's some great resources. Go figure out what aligns with you, be it food, be it stress, be it exercise, and just start somewhere and start your journey. And then, you know, I'll continue to evolve that over time. I also have the Swim Challenge website, which is called 0-2-lohman.com so there you can read more about the Swim Challenge, obviously, why doing that? We are raising awareness and donations for a number of metabolic therapy charities through the swim. So I'd say they're the main areas. I am trying to be more active on Instagram and some of the other social media platforms, but I've been very off social media for the last 10 years, but now realizing actually how beneficial social media can be when you have, you know, a purpose, a passion and a cause and, and you try to. You want to try to reach people. So, yeah, I'll provide you all the links to add in the show notes. They're the main places to. Yeah. To. To find out more. And hopefully for the listeners, it's sparked some. Some interest of. Yeah, how can I. How can I optimize the fuel sources that my body has? And I think for me, it comes back to metabolic flexibility. How can you make sure that your body can burn both fats and glucose, carbohydrates, and you manage your blood sugar levels throughout that and get to that constant energy throughout the day without the peaks and trust, because if you can do that, you're probably in a pretty good place, pretty good metabolic health and you really dramatically reduce your chances of getting any of the devastating chronic diseases.

This has been amazing. Neil. Neil, thank you. So, did you want to say something? No, just as soon as I'll wrap it up. I mean, this is.

I'm ready to get my ice cream in my chocolate bar.

I know I want to go home and I don't know that I want to bake, but I want to go do something. I don't know. Anyway, Neil, thank you for being here for this episode of the Feel Freaky Amazing Podcast. This has been a great open eye opener for our listeners and for the listeners, we really hope this has been an inspirational podcast that will allow you to take a step right to become more metabolically healthy and prevent all those diseases that metabolic dysfunction leads to. So, Neil, thank you so much for being here and joining us for this episode of the Feel Freakin Amazing podcast.

You're welcome. Thank you very much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

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