Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

Signs You Might Be Metabolically Unhealthy @DrNashaInc

7 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:00

In this segment, the speakers discuss how metabolic health is commonly defined by a few laboratory parameters that are achieved without medication. Speaker B challenges the conventional clinical cutoff that a fasting glucose under 100 mg/dL is considered healthy, arguing that a truly healthy range is closer to 80–85 mg/dL. He then introduces a stricter framework he calls the “rule of 5,” which sets a target of less than 5 (or the equivalent unit) for five key biomarkers: uric acid, hemoglobin A1C, fasting glucose (≈5 mmol/L or 80–85 mg/dL), the glucose‑ketone index (GKI), and fasting insulin. According to this rule, if all five values are below 5, the individual is unlikely to be metabolically compromised. The dialogue emphasizes a more aggressive, medication‑free approach to metabolic health than standard guidelines provide.

Chapters

When you're talking about metabolically unhealthy, what are the markers that they're gonna wanna look at? And are you comfortable giving ranges like, hey, aim for this range?
I am very comfortable. Standard of care even defines metabolic health as a few parameters that are things that you achieve without medication. So blood sugar is one of them. Now they qualify glucose and they say a glucose under 100 is healthy. I'm gonna tell you right now, that's not healthy. You need it to be much lower than that, under 80, 85. So I like those parameters more like an A1C. So I have kind of a rule of 5. If your uric acid is under 5, if your hemoglobin A1C is under 5, if your glucose from European or Canadian standards is under 5, which is about 80, 85, if your GKI, your glucose ketone index, is under 5, and if your insulin is under 5, it's hard to make you metabolically broken when all of those are under 5.