Reverse Chronic Diseases using Allulose, with Neil Gyte

Foreign.

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. This is my new favorite product.

I have to start by saying why it's such a low level of, like, only 1 billion.

Such an underachiever, man.

Come on. Like, I wish we could. You have to think big here.

Well, you do. You do. Yeah, I think I need to revisit that. And, well, the funny story around this was why it was 1 billion plus is because the 1 billion was kind of a north star. And then as I dug into the research and realized 93% of Americans, probably 80% of the global population are metabolically unhealthy, that it should be more like 5 or 6 billion, but I don't know, 1 billion plus sounds.

Can you repeat that stat? Because that stat just kind of washed over me and then I recognize. One more time, please.

93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.

What does that mean? Let's start there.

How many Americans is that? There's like 400American. 400 million Americans.

So what does that mean, metabolically unhealthy? Let's start there because that's a definition we need.

Yeah. So per that 93%, there's five kind of basic biomarkers of blood sugar level, your waist circumference, triglycerides, HDL and so forth. That kind of encapsulate that. And you need multiple of those. But I think the simplest way is what does metabolically unhealthy means? It means that your mitochondria are not producing energy efficiently and effectively, and they power every single cell, tissue, and organ in your body. And like anything, if you don't have any of our devices, if the battery is not working properly, they malfunction. And that lack of good creation of energy then causes malfunction within organs and tissues and leads to chronic disease. So that for me is the simple way I scrap your body and your mitochondria not creating energy efficiently and properly.

93%.

And. And it's. I think the other important thing is it, you know, it's not a binary thing, as in, you know, yes, if you're metabolic, you know, dysfunctional, but it's, it's, it's the scale. So people can be acutely, metabolically unhealthy, or they can be chronically, metabolically unhealthy. And that is a scale that's kind of accumulated over time. And the main, I think about metabolic health in terms of five pillars. So you have nutrition, you have exercise, you have sleep, you have stress management, and you have environment and toxins. And all of those five can contribute to good metabolic good mitochondrial health as well as bad metabolic mitochondrial health. But they're actually relatively simple lifestyle changes that people make, can make to get back into good metabolic health. So, yeah, 93% of Americans, America is the, I would say that the worst in terms of statistics, most prevalent. I personally believe, based on what I know, that probably 80% of the global population is metabolically unhealthy. So that's five out of the seven billion people in this world. And it is the leading cause of all of the chronic diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. Ultimately, they're all largely preventable and reversible if you optimize for your mitochondria and metabolic health.

Well, 93%.

So how'd you get into this? Because this is, I know, like that's, it's a big goal and you're obviously very passionate. So why did you start?

Yeah, great question. So I'll give you the short version, then we can dig into a little details. So it started off with my own health journey. So 10 years ago, I was 260 pounds and the epitome of unhealthy, definitely metabolically unhealthy. And I was on the fast track to developing one or multiple of those diseases. It was becoming a father and my daughter's christening, where the family were playing outside, kicking a football or a soccer ball around, and I went to join in. I did a huge amount of sport when I was younger. I went to join in after two minutes. I had to sit down because I was out of breath. I was tired, and I had this kind of epitome, epiphany or moment of clarity where I realized I couldn't be the father I wanted to because I couldn't even kick a football around. How could I do any activity my daughter wanted? So that sent me on my own health journey, which just started with simple basic things of nutrition, you know, running, doing a bit more exercise. And that led down the slippery slope to do ultra endurance endeavors, which I never planned to do. It just kind of happens. And through that, I got fascinated by the body's metabolism and the different fuel sources. Because when you're looking at doing an ironman, you have to fuel yourself for 10, 11 hours at a high intensity. And it was amazing to me to realize that the body can mobilize and utilize fat as a fuel source as well as sugar and carbohydrates, because the prevailing paradigm is you need sugar and carbohydrates to fuel athletic endeavors. So I started doing more low carb, more fasted training as part of that. And so I ended up doing ultra endurance events. But the biggest change in the direction and kind of velocity of my life was really the impact of these chronic diseases on family and loved ones. So I had very close family members being diagnosed with cancer, autoimmune diseases, bipolar, neurological diseases. But it was at the start of last year, a very close family member got a stage four cancer diagnosis. And it's that that really got me digging into, okay, how do we stop cancer? How do we reverse cancer? You know, when somebody close gets a terminal, you know, diagnosis, and the prognosis outlook is very poor. I dug into the research. I found the amazing work of Dr. Thomas Seyfried and the fact that kind of cancer is a metabolic disease and, you know, the cells effectively switch to be able to only utilize glucose is a fuel source. And if you restrict carbohydrates and restrict glucose, your healthy cells can run off fat and ketones, which tied into my previous athletic understanding. So as I realized that, and then I started to read broader work about metabolic health and realized it wasn't just cancer. All of these chronic diseases fundamentally are mitochondrial and metabolic in nature. And then I look to the statistics that I just shared. Of 93% of Americans, 70% of all deaths worldwide, 41 million people a year die from these chronic diseases, and they are devastating and debilitating to those who have them, but also the impact on loved ones and family members. So I realized that every single person in the world pretty much is going to be impacted by one of these diseases, either directly or through family and loved ones. And then I had the realization that the vast majority are preventable and even reversible. And at the time, I was working for Google, helping to build Google Maps and Google Earth, which I absolutely loved. But the world of digital mapping is in pretty good hands. I thought I knew about health and nutrition and realized I didn't know about it. And so that's when I decided to totally change and dedicate at least the next vast majority of my years to metabolic health. Because it's just it's so under known, underappreciated, but it impacts people every single day. And the Western world and our modern world is really fighting against our evolutionary biology. And it's just, it's, it's not well known. So I felt I had to raise awareness, which I do, through kind of metabolic challenges. My swim challenge is one example of that. But then really trying to help people with practical products that can help them reset some of the pathways in their body to get back into metabolic health.

There's a lot to unpack here, Neil.

Yes.

Okay.

I mean, before we started, you were talking about that swim challenge, so I just wanted to. Because you're saying you.2 miles in a row.

Yes, 22 miles in a row. So this is also in Scotland. So it was an open water swim. I swam with my brother. So it was his, it was his swim. Initially he was struggling with kind of mental health conditions back about four or five years ago. Found swimming in open water as kind of a love and something that really helped him. And this would always been his dream swim. He asked me to join him. This was at the same time that I was doing this pivot out of Google and tech and into the world of metabolic health. And so I decided to do it with a Twist, which was 22 miles. It took us 12 hours, zero calories. So I only consumed water and electrolyte throughout the swim, actually even from the evening before. So my last caloric meal was dinner the evening before at 5pm we woke up. We started about half past six in the morning, finished half past six at night. And for that whole time, all I consumed was water and electrolytes to demonstrate the amazing ability of the body to utilize and mobilize fat as a fuel source and to try and break the current paradigm where people think you need sugar and carbohydrates to fuel athletic endeavor, and you really don't. And this really boils back to metabolic health because one of the things which is overwhelming and stressing our mitochondria is being overloaded by sugar and carbohydrates. And that forces mitochondrial dysfunction, which leads to a lot of these chronic diseases. And so that was the aim and the purpose behind the swim challenge, which I'm not recommending everyone do. It was purposely extreme by nature, but just to demonstrate. And I burnt 9,632 calories through the swim, 11,000 in total through the 27 hours that I was fasted and did so, you know, perfectly happy to do. So once you train the body to use and Mobilize fat as a fuel source.

Now you've given me more to unpack. Thank you very much, Neil. So I'm thinking about, okay, first of all, 22 miles. Now, I know you have a mission, but all I'm distracted by in my brain is, okay, did you do the crawl or did you do the breaststroke or did you do the backstroke? Like, what stroke did you use for those 12 hours? And did you vary it up? And was someone guarding you to make sure you didn't get eaten by a shark break? These are the important things I need to know about.

These are the important things. Great questions. So it was all done front crawl. Thankfully, I did a lot of swimming when I was younger. So once you have that muscle memory, it was very tiring on the arms and shoulders, of course. But yeah, all front crawl, we stopped about every hour for three to four minutes to take on water and electrolytes. We did have a safety boat with us, of course. Thankfully, there were no sharks in the lochs or the lakes of Scotland. Some of them do have some supposed monsters. We didn't see any monsters lurking beneath us. But yeah, so that was a little bit about the swim.

To answer your specific questions, really deep seated questions here. Okay, I want to go back to something else you said when you were telling us your story. I want to highlight something you said. Because there's the period of time before you get a diagnosis where you're just doing your thing, and then there's the period of time where you have your diagnosis. And if it's what leads to your death, that's what I'll call the period of time where you're suffering. And what you really highlighted was that there's so much time of our lives spent in that phase. Right? So here's the cool part where you're fine and here's the part where you're dead, so you're done. But we spend a lot of time not being optimized, suffering and having our friends and family and ourselves not feeling well. And that's, that's what was so striking. Because not only does it cause us to die, but it causes us to suffer. And that's the part that I think is really important to remember, is that it's, it's not just like you're fine, then you die, you suffer.

I wholeheartedly agree. And I think the suffering is actually more than people realize. So to your point, when you get diagnosed with one of these diseases, then you know you are suffering because usually you have some symptoms that's when you go to the doctor and you realize it. But actually what a lot of people don't realize is you're even suffering even before you have these diagnosis. There are warning signs if you tune in and listen to your body at the same time. What I've come to realize through this is it's often difficult to see those warning signs when you are, I would say, metabolically and healthy, because our bodies are amazing, they adapt to the modern world. And so once you have that kind of baseline of if you're on a standard western diet, drinking five, six, seven coffees a day and kind of using these stimulants to help you through the day, then that becomes your baseline and you don't realize actually how good you could feel if you were to clean up some of those areas and get back into good mitochondrial and metabolic health. Because. And again, all of it's back to producing energy. The standard kind of western diet and the modern world impacts our mitochondria so much, you're not producing constant energy and so you're suboptimized. But it's difficult to see that once you're kind of in that western toxic stew. And so one of the things that I, that I love is how can people, you know, realize relatively quickly simple things that help them see signs of, oh, if I change this, then I could actually feel better today, tomorrow, and switch into much more preventative before you get any of these chronic diseases.

So.

So I know, I'm trying to bridge, because I know you're, you have two kind of big sites to one is the metabolic health and one is annulose. So how do those two things combine?

Yes.

And what is that?

Yes, I guess.

Great, let's start there. Maybe Wait.

You totally jumped the gun. I wasn't done.

You weren't done.

You went way too fast. We got it back up. I know, we'll get there. You're just in patient tonight.

I'm.

I know we'll get there. I promise we'll get there. But I want to talk a little bit more about this because it's interesting. I started working out with a trainer four times a week a year and a half ago. And I've been doing intermittent fasting since before it had a name of intermittent fasting. It's just how I liked to eat. Eat dinner. We have a lot of kids, so we would eat dinner at the crack of dawn at 5 o' clock and then I wouldn't eat until 11 or 12 the next day. That's just kind of how I liked to. To run it, but I noticed when I went to the gym and. And this is all happening simultaneous with menopause, which is the devil's curse on both men and women, by the way, because, you know, you don't get out unscathed. When I go through menopause, you're all getting the impact of it. Ed knows. So. So anyway, I start working out on with the coach one day on the Saturday morning, and I'm like, I feel like I'm gonna puke. And he said, did you eat? I'm like, no, I didn't eat. I. Intermittent fast. I didn't eat. He's like, you need to eat. I was like, what? So he made me start eating breakfast. And he's like, you need carbs. I'm like, no, I'm not eating carbs for breakfast. That's not how I roll. So I would have eggs and cheese. And what's really interesting is I want to dive into how long does it take to go from. Because I said to Ed, do you remember when I said to you, I feel like I have insulin resistance? And it was sort of going through menopause and I was gaining weight, and I was like, I feel insulin resistant, even though nothing is different in how I'm very regimented and patterned. And so I'm just curious when you start to become dysfunctional around how you metabolize or how your metabolism works and start to rely more on glucose, how long does it take to get you back into utilizing fat for fuel, which is more efficient? So something, what, like 50 times more efficient or something ridiculous. Using fat instead of glucose for mitochondrial to make ATP. So, yes, I know I just gave you a lot to unpack, but, yeah, so I think.

I think it's simple is. Is it can be relatively quick. There's different ways that you can do it. Intermittent fasting is, you know, is one way simply by letting that, you know, carbohydrate glucose level drop low, your body naturally then starts to. To, you know, kind of switch across. But it's not a. It's not a binary thing. Other things that obviously are important are diet and nutrition. So for my swim training, I was on a very low carbohydrate diet, but I would periodically cycle in slightly more carbohydrates. I think a really important point that you raise is there is also big difference between men and women hormonally. I think Dr. Mindy Pelt's, you know, amazing books and work around this, around, you know, fasting at specific points in your cycle and other parts of the cycle, you know your best not necessarily to fast. And then what food you introduce is also important. As soon as you put carbohydrates into your body. Because we can only tolerate one teaspoon.

Of.

Sugar within our six liters of blood that we have, your body works incredibly hard to get that out of your bloodstream. And your muscles are the main sink, you know, obviously for, for those glucose. So time.

I don't know this off the top of my head. Do you, do you happen to know how many grams of Sugar is in 1 teaspoon? Because I know that Americans eat like a lot.

So Americans eat, eat, eat a lot. So I want to say 4 grams, but I would say don't quote me on that, but so this is one of the fundamental things back to the current paradigm that we need carbohydrates and sugar to fuel life, which was very much a narrative created by the food industry and you know, the whole history behind the food pyramid, which is totally upside down in my, in my opinion. But when you look at, I always look at it from an evolutionary perspective. So our bodies can only tolerate one teaspoon of sugar in our blood. Any more than that is toxic. And we evolved like that because we did not have. If you wind back 50,000 years, our biology is so amazingly complicated. It hasn't dramatically changed from a Systems level in 50,000 years. So pre agricultural revolution, what were we eating back then? We were hunter gatherers. So we would, you know, run down, you know, animals and get meat and protein. But we would then forage, you know, plants, herbs and overground things to keep us going. And so that's why we have a very. Our bodies regulate our glucose control so tightly. And in current modern environment to the average link American thing has 18 teaspoons of sugar. Today the average kid is even more than that. 74% of the calories that children in America are eating from ultra processed food which are loaded with sugar. And so simply our bodies are flipping into this kind of survival switch to deal with the carbohydrate and glucose. And where do they put that goes into fat storage and it purposefully actually damages the mitochondria. And our bodies are actually trying to save us because back from an evolutionary perspective we used to store energy because of food scarcity, we would have to go two, three, four weeks without eating like bears hibernate for the winter. And obviously in the current modern environment that doesn't happen. But our bodies don't know that. And so it really is, you know, the over consumption of sugar and carbohydrates, in my view, is one of the biggest drivers of mitochondrial dysfunction, metabolic dysfunction, and these chronic diseases.

We need to dive into this for a moment, so think about this. Okay, so if we're right, and 1 teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams of sugar, 1 teaspoon is 4 grams of sugar. So if you're drinking a kombucha, which often has 26 grams of sugar, you're putting almost eight teaspoons into your body. Or if you're eating a candy bar, or if you're drinking a Coke, which is 39 grams of sugar, a can of Coke is 39 grams of sugar. The RDA for sugar is 40 grams, which means one teaspoon every hour, which I would not recommend, but there's so many ways. Or if you're eating your favorite Greek yogurt that is not plain, you're getting like 18 grams to 24 grams of sugar. So I think what's crazy is this is very invisible to people. Okay, so every 4 grams is a teaspoon. If I said to you, oh, have a teaspoon of sugar, you'd be like, you're crazy. I would never do that. But then it's all of these invisible ways we're getting exposed to sugar and it's invisible. So it doesn't make you think like, oh, oh, this is not good.

You know, I wholeheartedly agree. And I think, you know, it. The statistics are mind boggling in that, you know, now the, the average adult or child has more sugar in one day than we used to have in a whole year.

I presented this in 1840 people had 40 grams of sugar in a year.

Yeah.

And now in 20, 20, 24 people have that amount in an hour. Honestly, it's not even a day, it's an hour.

Yeah. And this is, and this ties really into, you know, glucose control. And why I think one of the simplest thing back to how can people, you know, know if they are, you know, kind of mitochondrially, you know, metabolically healthy or not, how can people test. And, you know, continuous glucose monitors now available over the counter, a lot of devices. Because when you look at it through that lens, okay, one teaspoon of sugar and minimizing, you know, blood sugar spikes, when you wear a cgm and you see what happens if you have a Coke or a yogurt or any of these drinks from Starbucks that are just loaded with sugar, your blood sugar spikes up and, and down. And it's the Repeated spiking that causes the body to switch into this kind of survival mode. And all of this metabolic machinery kicks in to actually produce less energy and promote fat storage because it's, our bodies are signaling, oh, there's a, there's a caloric surplus. Let's hang on to a lot of this. And in current modern day, you know, if we were then not to eat for, you know, a few weeks, which, you know, I'm not necessarily remaking recommending, but can be done. I think Angus Barbary, a Scottish guy, set the world record, I think, for, you know, water only fasting. He went something like 374 days. He was £450 before he started. But back to, you know, utilizing.

What was he after? Out of curiosity.

So after he got down to like, yeah, I think like 190, 200 pounds. And he then actually lived pretty, you know, lean for the, for the rest of his, for the rest of his life. But, you know, back, if you look from an evolutionary perspective, we know we were, you know, feast, famine, feast, famine. That's how we used to kind of, that's how we survived. And in current modern day, there's, there's no famine that comes because food is available on the corner and it's loaded with sugar and carbohydrates, which is constantly triggering off this survival switch within our bodies. And it's leading to all of, all of the chronic diseases.

I promise you, we're going to get to allulose in a moment. I know you're, I know you're feeling excluded here. I don't mean to do that. I just, I just have one more question, which is if people are listening and they don't have, you know, it's interesting to me, I figured a CGM should cost 30 bucks, but it could cost 200 bucks. So they're not readily available. Even though they're over the counter, they're not easily financeable for a lot of people. So if you're listening and people are saying, okay, how do I know if I'm metabolically out of balance? What are the things that you would say to people? Because I would say, okay, if you get easily hypoglycemic, that's a warning sign that you're metabolically out of balance. Or if you have a lot of deposition of fat on your body and can't seem to move it, that's an indicator. But are there other indicators that people should be looking for that are signs? Right, because you said the body speaks and gives you the signs so what are those signs that people should be looking for?

Yeah, great question, I think. And obviously there's, you know, there's. There's blood tests that you can do to help and other things. But I think for me, the simple thing is, you know, how do you feel your energy is during the day? Do you have a constant source of energy, or are you constantly going through peaks and troughs and relying on stimulants to help you through that? So when you have lunch, do you feel like you need to sleep afterwards? Do you have a lull in energy afterwards? Are you reaching for, you know, coffee, caffeine, and these other stimulants to help kind of give you that energy? So for me, I think a lot of it is that you doing to try and help give you that energy, because the more you're relying on stimulants to help you through the day, the more you are having these peaks and troughs of energy that you feel, the more metabolically dysfunctional you will be. And to tie this, I would just say, back to my own experience and, you know, intermittent fasting once you get the body utilizing and mobilizing fat as a fuel source. I've never had as much consistent energy, especially when the brain starts to run on ketones instead of glucose, which is actually the preferred fuel source for. For the brain. You just have this constant source of energy throughout the day. The hunger noise, you know, quietens down and you just get into this beautiful kind of homeostasis. And if I look at my life before that, when I was, you know, unhealthy or the rest of it, then I would have all of these energy peaks and crashes. I would rely on coffee five, six times a day to get, you know, to get me through the day. So I think for me, that's the easiest way to relate, is just to take a step back, think about your energy. What are you using to get your energy? What are you using to prop up that energy when it sinks low? And I think that's usually the best indication of. Of whether you're producing energy in a good way or whether you're not.

Ready for allulus.

I don't know. Are you?

Hit it.

All right.

Can you repeat your question, please? I shut you down. Poor Ed. Poor Eddie gets no love. I'm saying it's a star sighting. And then we shut him down.

No.

So much of it actually relates back to the conversation we've just had, actually, in that as. As I was pivoting, I set myself the new North Star to help A billion plus people become metabolically healthy. And as I was looking at the landscape of metabolic health, what causes it and then from a solution perspective, what are the underserved areas and how, you know, with the lens of a billion people as a kind of force function of, you know, making sure that I wanted to work on something important and impactful. And I was initially drawn to tech and looking into the tech side of things, having spent 20 years in the tech world. But as I looked at the tech side of things, there are some amazing companies doing amazing things. There's already a huge amount of progress in that space. But probably over 50% of the 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. In parallel, I then serendipitously kind of learned about allulose and then RX sugar, which is the company that I joined that formulates products with allulose when I was at the Metabolic Health Summit in January. 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. 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 as impact will go to 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 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 sweeteners, $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.

Oh, and glyphosate pesticides. Yep. Crazy.

Exactly.

And 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 dysfunction. 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 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 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. 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 allulose is 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, you know, sniff test versus some of the other, you know, sugar, alcohols or more kind of synthetic sweeteners that our bodies simply just like are not used to, or the intensity profile of those at hundreds of times. You know, the, 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, 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, where is it coming from?

Yeah, great question. So it is because it's 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, it's not like it's something dramatically complex or we're going and changing it. 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, like 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 we made 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 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 is 10 and I've spent the last couple of years really trying to reset her relationship with sugar and carbohydrates on ultra processed foods. Not in that anything is banned and no, 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 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 every 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, 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 draw. 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 other, 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 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 controlled trials. You know, what does the science show? But we've had cl. 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 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 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, 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.

Allulose sugar. So she just doesn't. This gets the quote unquote, dessert sweet. But yes, but the appetite goes down so that she doesn't feel like she needs more.

So, yes, which, which is amazing. And it's such a common 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, quieten 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 we 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.

I didn't know that. That I did not know. I mean, you know, me, the baker, I didn't know that. But Yeah, I know we didn't know about that.

Candy bars, but.

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, the, we also have then flavored syrups as well. So caramel, chocolate, vanilla, which are amazing also for, 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, you know, up to nine hour training sessions in the pool. But I would have, you know, a macadamia, fresh macadamia, milk, flat white with yeah. Some RX sugar, vanilla or caramel in. And that was kind of my delicious, you know, fat bomb, beautiful coffee that had that nice bit of, you know, sweetened flavor to it. So the syrups are really versatile. 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. It sounds like a problem, but I.

Do, I don't mind that I don't like ice cream, but this sounds like a project for your oldest child. Yes, we have an ice cream maker. Okay. There's only one complaint I have about the RX sugar thing. Okay. Yeah, we don't have a microwave, so y' all sent us this brownie mix. But it's a microwave brownie mix. We don't have a microwave. We don't own it. So I can't make the brownie mix.

Well, I would, I would just say I did think about. I haven't. So great. You don't have a microwave. Any heat will do. So you could, you could put them in the, in, in the oven for sure. It's just, it's just about obviously warming it up to have a, to have a warm brownie. So let me, I'll do some testing when I get back home in, in the oven.

I need the, I need the, for the weirdos who don't have a MIC recipe because remember, I don't bake, so I don't understand how to convert.

You don't believe in microwaves, so.

No, I mean, I know, but I mean. Right. What I just mean is a good baker would know how to convert a microwave recipe to a oven recipe. And if y' all are listeners, you can send it in because I don't get it. But yeah, that would be great. To have on the package. That's my only complaint about your product. I don't have a microwave.

Well, amazing that we always love feedback greater. That's the only complaint. So, yeah, we'll fix that. We'll do some testing and we'll figure out how long you need to put it in the oven to. Yeah. To. To bake it as well. So. So yeah, so we have the brownie mix, then we have the. The snacks bars we also have, which I probably didn't send you as well. I can send you some of these. We've got the. They're called Swelly sticks. So these are just pure allulose in a stick pack that are orange sweet tea. And so 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, 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 go. 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.

You know, we're recording this in October even though it's going to be published later. And I'm thinking, okay, now I want to get these for Halloween instead of the stuff I got. I want. Do you guys have Halloween packs? That's another complaint. There's no Halloween pack. I'm not ready for Halloween. For the kids, the trick or treating.

We'Re gonna keep buying.

I'm your idea person. I can just tell you what you need. So Halloween needs Pixie sticks for Halloween would be amazing. We're totally gonna order those.

Yes. So. So Pixie sticks for Halloween. So we absolutely have that now. It's one of the things that I realized a few months back. So, yeah, I'm sincerely hoping for next year we will have kind of miniatures of the chocolate bar. So if you imagine that chocolate bar just chopped into thirds but obviously there's the environmental concerns with that, with the packaging and so forth. But I think back to actually even, you know, if I think about family members that use the product, you sometimes they're like, well, yeah, I actually only want half and half is good, good for me. So I do think a smaller form factor for Halloween, for Christmas. And honestly, we'd love nothing more than to be, you know, we're still an early stage startup, so we're still going through the kind of, you know, the growth phase, but we would love nothing more than for an houric sugar chocolate to be in, in every house's candy along with the other things. Ideally not with the other things because they're driving a lot of the metabolic dysfunction and, and I mean the statistics in children, especially in America are staggering in terms of. I think 30 are either diabetic or pre diabetic and it's just really, really sad. So we would love nothing more than to have allulose there as, as an alternative for, for kids to have to help mitigate some of the impact especially that the holiday, holiday season has.

Cool.

We're totally gonna order that.

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 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, because we don't have a microwave double burner.

It is.

And, and I put them, I put, 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 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 layer the bottom. So you get these chocolates that come out of the mold. You have to keep them in. In the fridge, but you have these, they're 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.

We'll.

We'll send you over some of the. Some of the syrups 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 gotta 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? 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 Gites on. 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-loman.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, you know, through the swim. So I'd say they're. They're the three 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, the swim challenge was a demonstration. 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 troughs? 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.

This is awesome. I'll wrap it up. I mean, this is.

I'm ready to get my ice cream and 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.

Ours too.