1141. Weighing Risks: Unseen Dangers of Weight Loss Medications

THE DOCTOR IS IN Podcast


You may have heard about the latest craze in weight loss. Drugs intended for diabetes such as Ozempic and Wegovy are being used off-label for weight loss.

The drugs definitely help you shed the weight, but it turns out they have significant side effects such as stomach paralysis that can persist even after stopping the medication. Dr. Martin says the pharmaceutical industry is prioritizing profits over people's health by encouraging off-label use of their drugs.

Join Dr. Martin as he discusses proper nutrition and fueling the body with nutrient-dense foods for long-term weight loss and overall health in today’s episode.

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well, good morning everyone. Welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great start to your day. We sure appreciate all our friends and folks that come on and watch us live. And then of course, we sure appreciate all the downloads of the podcast, The Doctor Is In. Now, I was asked a question years ago, okay? I was asked a question years ago by a Doctor Fishman, who was teaching a course on hormones, horror-mones, and I was taking a course down in Florida. This is years ago, guys on hormones, always learning, always studying. Better never stop that because you learn something new every day. Okay?

Now, he asked a question when he first started the course. I guess it was maybe a hundred of us or more doctors of all kinds. And he asked the question, he said, who won World War II? And somebody put their hand up pretty quickly, as you can imagine, and said, well, we did the Americans, Canadians, the Allies, we won. He said, nah, you didn't win. He said, the Nazis won. And I never forgot what he said there, okay? He said, okay, and I'm quoting him, okay? So don't come after me. I'm quoting Dr. Fishman, who is a PhD in pharmacology and really one of the fathers of bioidentical hormones therapy. And he said, no, the Nazis won and I, what are you talking about? Well, what he meant and what he did tell us is that the Nazis started all the pharmaceutical companies and they came over. And even though he was a PhD in pharmacology, he said, we're killing people left and right and we're still killing people with our drugs.

Now, that was his statement. And the reason I bring it up, okay, the reason I bring it up, because I was reading again yesterday, a new study. Here it is, okay, on Ozempic, okay? Ozempic and Wegovy, I think I pronounced them right. They are two weight loss. They're not weight loss medications. They're using them for weight loss. They were actually diabetic medications that are used off label now as sort of, how can I describe them? Medications that have become famous for weight loss. Okay? Wegovy or Ozempic and a new study out that I read yesterday on them. Now we're starting to get, because they're sort of Hollywood started in Hollywood, how can we lose weight and let's do it on a crash course type of thing. And they became like off-label giants for losing weight. And now we're starting to find out maybe that wasn't such a good idea.

Did they work? Yep, they worked. So you can imagine tugging at the heartstrings of people who have struggled losing weight, you tug at their heartstrings. The problem is they've never been studied. They've been studied for diabetes, but they were never studied for people taking them for weight loss. And now you know what they're finding? Major side effects that don't go away. And this one is Ozempic and Wegovy. Here's the article in, I saw it in CNN News, CNN news.com, and it said they can have significant downsizes like stomach paralysis. What? Stomach paralysis, even after you stop taking the meds, okay? You can have side effects down the road like stomach paralysis. That never goes away according to the article.

And that brought me back to Dr. Fishman who shocked us on day one of the course with that statement. And he's a pharmacist, he, he taught pharmacology and he said, look, drugs can save your life, but they can kill you too. And the side effects. And what he went on to say in that course, and that was like I said, got to be 10 years ago, more than that, that I took that course from him. But he said, the iatrogenic, you know what that means? That means the self or medical induced sickness or injury is iatrogenic. He said it's killing hundreds of thousands and maneing hundreds of thousands of people every year. I'm just quoting him. And he said, people don't realize the side effects of these things and we're not teaching them.

For example, on these two weight loss products. I've been talking to you about why I don't like them. They're not getting at the root problem at all. And here's a fact, the second you stop those drugs, generally you gain all that weight back. It's just like you remember I did. Well, for some of you, you remember, I actually talk about this in my new book, Sun, Steak and Steel, that in 2016 they stopped that program. It was a very successful one called The Biggest Loser. You remember that? And for months, they would have these people who were morbidly obese and they would work them out and starve them just about literally to death. It works. It works. If you don't eat and you move, it works almost invariably going to lose weight. However, It's looking for love in all the wrong places like these medications, they do something to your appetite. You're not hungry, therefore you cut back on eating. It's temporary at best.

And of course, they didn't tell you and they might not have known, I don't know, the boatload of problems when you get a medication that you don't feel like eating. Well, yeah, okay. I used to say this about gastric bypass too. It sort of became a Hollywood thing. Gastric bypass surgery. There was clinics all over the place and isn't it something we're just going to staple the stomach or reverse it? I was screaming blue murder about that. I was, because I've always, and I think you guys would agree with me, I've been pretty consistent over the years talking about it's not eat less and move more. If that was successful, we would've tackled weight loss a long time ago. I've always talked about the importance of fuel. It's what you eat. It's not how much you eat. It's not. Short term, yeah, you don't eat. People like the idea of fasting. I'm not against it. You know that. But what do you, you're not going to fast and never eat.

So somebody says, "well doc, I only eat once a day." Well, good for you. I like that, that that's fine if you can do it. Okay, but that's not the key. It's not the key. It's not the key. See, I don't like putting the cart before the horse. The key is eating the right food, the food that your body was meant to eat. When you do that, you are going to get healthy. And if you get healthy, your body will lose the weight. But don't put the weight loss first and your health second, because that's what these medications do. Medications, it's a shortcut, but it's short term success and long term disaster. And I said it with even surgery, stomach surgery, it's short term. But what about long-term? What happens to these people? You play around with your anatomy and you're not absorbing anymore. You're not absorbing your vitamins properly. You play around with your stomach.

I talked to you yesterday about the importance of your stomach acidity. You play around with that stomach and then you know are not a chance that you are going to be absorbing B12, not a chance. And your fat soluble vitamins that are absolutely essential for your wellbeing, I don't care. You're not absorbing them properly and you don't even on these medications, and guys, I've been consistent about that. So am I compassionate? You better believe it. You bet your boots. You can't be in practice as long as I was in practice, I had a weight loss clinic, guys, but it was based on nutrients. People are surrounded by food. We've never had a world like it is now, especially in North America. We're surrounded, go in almost any downtown in North America. Everybody's screaming about this.

For example, in my hometown, now I live in Sudbury, but I used to live in Timmins. You know where Timmins is? There's Santa Claus and then there's Timmins. Okay? We're just a little bit south of the North Pole, but there they were screaming to city council about the downtown, what's happening? All just about guys. And look, I am very, very, very sympathetic, okay? So don't come after me about this. What's happening? The homeless, why are they homeless? 99.9%. They're drug addicts. They're everywhere now in North America, and they seem to congregate true or false in the downtowns? And the problem is, okay, the problem is it's there. We live in a world where we have very little solutions, okay? Very little solutions because we look at the problem the wrong way and we give them safe sites to inject even more drugs. And it's safe. Well, who is it safe for?

And guys, this is like these meds. Like you are giving to an addict. My name is Tony and I'm a carboholic. When you see someone that struggles with weight, they're carboholics. Now what do we do? We surround them. We lie to them. We tell them that you can't live without carbs. And the grocery stores are 90% carbs. And we've made it almost where you can't even afford. Carbs are cheap, crappy carbs are cheap compared to produce, eggs, meat, and cheese. Is that true or is it false? That's true.

You don't surround an addict, like a drug addict with drugs, in my opinion. But with food, I mean almost everything is a fast food. Breaks down so quickly, turns to sugar in nanoseconds. Cereal, muffins and bagels and pastries and sweets and milk and juices. And we surround people with that and we wonder why we got a big problem. So what do we do with a big problem? The pharmaceutical industry, coming back to my first point, they want to be involved. There's money to be had and they, hey, we found something like a weight loss drug. Hey, we were using it for diabetes. And guys, you know what I think about diabetic drugs? You don't get type two adult onset sugar, that's what it used to be called, sugar diabetes. You don't get sugar diabetes because you don't have medication. You get sugar, diabetes because you live on sugar. That's how you get diabetes. True or false? That's true.

And you know how many people used to come my office and say, doctor, I say, Hey, hey, I don't eat a lot of sugar. I said, do you eat bread? Oh yeah, I like bread. I said, well, that's sugar. Do you eat cereal? Yeah, of course I got to have my fiber in the morning. Yeah, well that's sugar honey. How come nobody ever told me that? Well, I said, it turns to sugar in five seconds. And I said, you have an allergy to the food you're eating. That's what causes sugar diabetes. What? Yeah, how come nobody ever told me that because the Nazis won the war like they did. So the pharmaceutical companies, and they do some good things, but they come out with, and the thing is, it becomes the narrative. Okay? So listen to what I'm saying. It becomes the narrative.

Knock on doors, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, go right throughout your hometown. Do a survey if you want, okay? And you'll find out that people don't know anything about food. Not really. They don't. They know about calories. Somebody came on our private Facebook group yesterday that were new to us, and they said, well, when Dr. Martin talks about eggs, meat, and cheese, how many calories is that? I don't care. It doesn't matter. Calories came from the food industry. Calories came from eat less, but eat in moderation. From the dieticians, eat less, fatso. That's what they were saying, eat less fatso and move more. And we had a whole generation of physicians looking at people that were gaining weight and they go, well, hey, fatso, eat less and move more.

That's what they did with The Biggest Loser. And by the way, you can actually look this up on one of our podcasts I brought up what happened to the biggest losers, those stars of live tv. Remember that? What happened to those people? Well, they all gained their weight back, every one of them. And to me, I was saying, hello, what did you expect? You didn't teach them. You taught them that it was calories in and calories out. I mean, there was weight loss clinics like Dr. Bernstein, okay? I don't think it's as popular as it used to be, but it was very popular. I had hundreds of people come to see me and they had gone to Dr. Bernstein's weight loss clinics and I knew what there success rate was temporarily. Man, you couldn't beat it. 600 calories. That's starvation. And one thing he did right is he gave you B12 shots, right? B12's important and Dr. Bernstein understood that and he gave you B 12 shots for your metabolism.

And I love B 12. You guys know that. It's one of my superstar vitamins that most people are very low in because they don't eat steak. When you eat the right foods and you change fuels, I go right back to your battery packs in your body. I go to the battery packs. What are your batteries? What's going to charge them? Carbs, bread, pasta, rice, cereals, sugar, sweets, pastries, juice, milk, nah, Uhuh. No. It's going to give your battery a charge for about five seconds and then you're going to need to recharge it again because those fuels burn like that in, out, in, out. And your battery packs from your brain to your toes, your mitochondria. They're getting the wrong fuel and you are starving. Like I said, you are surrounded by food. You are surrounded. You go to the grocery store, there's 30 over 30,000 items in there, and 90 something percent of them are fast foods, devoid of nutrients. Your mitochondria, they burn it too quickly.

So my idea was getting you on the right fuel first, getting your body the nutrients it needed first. Guys, I know you look at me and you go, that guy's crazy. I know I look crazy, but I had a method to my madness. I was trying to change the fuel. I was bound and determined in my practice to get people to understand that their body needed nutrients, nutrient-dense food to satisfy, to satisfy the battery packs. And I use these illustrations in my office all the time. I said, okay, you're a log cabin. What? Yeah, pretend you're a log cabin, okay? When you heat a log cabin, yeah, yeah, you got a wood stove, true? Yes. Okay, what do you put in it? You want it to last. Do you put paper and twigs or logs? Oh, you just use paper and twigs a little wee bit to get the fire started, but you use the log. I said, yeah, that's your body. Your body is striving for logs. It wants logs on the fire. I said, I'm going to give you another illustration. I'm a simple man.

Okay, go to your airport. Go. I like watching planes land and take off, don't you? I never get tired of that. It's always amazing to me. I remember as a kid, my dad used to drive us out to the airport and we'd watch a plane come in, okay? I lived in the days of Noah, okay? But go to the airport and watch them fuel up an airplane. The jets, okay? Do they use 87 octane that you put in your car? What do you do when you go to your car and you fill up your car? Okay, today you got to fill it up yourself, right? Again, I tell my grandchildren, you know what? You used to go to the gas station when I was a kid. You always had a gas attendant, but not anymore. You do it yourself. You see women out there never saw that when I was a kid. A woman filling up her car, never saw that. But today everybody fills up their own car, right? And you can't talk to anyone. You got to put your card in and you can hardly... Look it doesn't matter.

What kind of fuel do you put in a jet? The same fuel you put in your car? 87 octane? No, you put jet fuel, it's 99% octane. That's eggs, meat and cheese. If you want your body to run on turbo, there's no magic, guys. It's not magic. Turbo is eggs. "Dr. Martin, what about cholesterol?" Yeah, you need it. The best fuel is eggs, meat and cheese. Dairy. Dairy minus the cow's milk that's in the grocery store. You got a cow in the backyard, you can drink milk too. I'm telling you guys. So when I read Ozempic and Wegovy can have significant downsides. Significant downsides like stomach paralysis. Who knew? "Doc, I lost weight, but now my stomach don't work anymore." Oh yeah, that, that's, hey, wasn't it worth it? But that's my friend. You want to know when I get excited is when I see nonsense like that, I get excited in the wrong way. I actually get angry because people get duped and they think there's shortcuts to weight loss. I'm going to take a shortcut. There, there's magic in those pills. Not really. It's magic. All right? But you are going to pay a huge price.

There's no magic guys every day you got to make choices every day. One of the worst addictions that I can think of, I feel sorry for addicts. I really do. Okay? I really do. I was in as a volunteer, a prison ministry for years and nineties. It changed around the eighties. And in that almost everybody incarcerated, almost, not all, but almost were all drug addicts. They'd steal from their grandmother, they'd steal from their grandmother. They didn't care. They needed to get their fix, man. They needed money for their drugs. And all they could think of was their next fix. And it ended up in, they ended up in jail for it. I'm not kidding you. And then today we got food and a food industry that doesn't care about your health. If you can get that, that is a huge point. They don't care about your health.

And then you have a pharmaceutical industry that knows nothing about food. And you put those two babies together and you have disaster. And that's what I teach. And I would teach my patients to understand nutrients to understand as much as they could, food what goes in and understand, okay, understand the wood stove theory and the jet theory of fuel. You better start there for health and then weight loss. So people have asked me a thousand times, "Doc, I want to do the Reset because I want to lose weight." I said, well, okay. It was never meant for that primarily because the weight loss program is secondary because what I am trying to do is lower your insulin response. That's the key to the Reset. It's lowering insulin. And the beneficiary of that will be weight loss because your body will be burning the right fuel and you won't be hungry. And it will do a lot of good things.

And I'm telling you guys, the more and more and more and more we go along and tens of thousands of you have done the Reset, tens of thousands. It's true. And the truth shall set you free. Ooh, I get so uptight. Okay guys. Okay, now you got your questions ready for Friday? Okay, that's question number one. You have your questions ready for Friday? Two, are you part of our private Facebook group asking the question. Three, have you got our new book, Sun, Steak & Steel (and Sleep)? Got that yet? Okay. Questions? Do you get our newsletters via email? Okay. Do I love you guys? Question. You know the answer to that. Talk to you so.

Announcer:  You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!

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