Dr. Martin answers questions sent in by our listeners 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, and once again, welcome to another live this morning and it's Q and A Friday. So we're always happy that you can join us and okay, Joanne is asking a question about bacon. I love talking about bacon. Okay. And she says, "Dr. Martin, bacon is a processed meat." So what? Okay. "Why do you recommend it?" Well, because it's good for you. That's why I recommend it. Bacon has got a bad rap. I always say this, Joanne, olive oil, good for you, and nine out of 10 people, no. 99% would say, yeah, it's good for you. Olive oil for sure. It's good for you. Yeah. Well, what's the oil in olive oil. Oleic acid. What's the oil in bacon? Oleic acid. Olive oil's good for you. Bacon's better. It's got protein, it's got fat. Bacon's good for you, and bacon's got a bad rap.
And I can tell you in terms of nutritional value. Take up a slice of bacon and put it up against you name me the vegetable. Broccoli. Broccoli's good for you. Bacon's better for you. Oh, Dr. Martin it's processed, meaning they put nitrates on it. What do you think nitrates are? It's celery powder. It's a salt, it's celery salt for preservation. Is that bad for you? I don't think so. So listen, I heard that in the sixties, in the seventies, don't eat bacon and eggs, have cereal. Where did that come from? The cereal companies, Dr. Kellogg's and his associates. Okay, so I don't buy it guys. I look at the nutritional value of bacon and I'd say I'd much rather you have bacon than a granola bar. It's not even close because today especially, we're dealing with metabolic syndrome. 93% of the population have metabolic syndrome. They're on the Titanic, they're on their way to hit an iceberg of cancer, of cardiovascular disease. Bacon don't cause cardiovascular disease, but stinking carbohydrates do.
When you got to pour out a boatload of insulin to break, to take sugar out of the bloodstream while bacon and guys, there's good, better, best. If you see they add some sugar to the bacon, but you can get completely natural bacon. That's the best. But I'd rather you have bacon than have a chocolate bar or a granola bar. And nutritionally it's better than any vegetable you can think of. It's full of protein. And, "Dr. Martin, it's got saturated fat." Well, don't be saturated stupid. I make that term up. Don't be saturated stupid because people vilify saturated fat. When it's a fat that's good for you. When you see saturated fat on bacon, it's good for you. You see saturated fat on steak, it's good for you. Eat the fat. So that's me. Okay, John's saying pork belly at Costco. Yeah, there's always better.
But I'm in generalities. I had a radio show for 20 years. I've written what, 25, 26 books now. I talked to people that in a lot of ways have never even studied nutrition for five seconds and they just buy the lies that are fed to them. That bacon's no good for you. It's full of cholesterol. Well, cholesterol's good for you. And it always, if you looked at the bottom line, it was guys like Dr. Kellogg who influenced and really started the dieticians. They didn't want any meat. They didn't want you eating eggs. They didn't want you eating butter. And even today, I can tell you because I know because I went through, I took a couple of thousand hours of nutrition and you had to undo the propaganda. Fat is bad, bacon is bad. Eggs give you cholesterol. Butter is bad, margarine is better. And I'm sorry, I don't buy it. I didn't buy it then. And when you understand what's going on, then all I can tell you folks is bacon is good for you. Start your day with bacon.
You like bacon? I used to tell my patients this, okay? I diagnosed metabolic syndrome in my office. Either A1C, low HDL, high triglycerides, belly fat, high levels of uric acid. Maybe their blood pressure was up and their blood sugar, their glucose was up. Maybe not to a diabetic level, but elevated. And I used to tell 'em, okay, we're going to change your life here. What do you have for breakfast? Cereal. Okay, we're going to stop that. No more cereal. What? I said, you like bacon? I love bacon, but my doctor, I said, I don't care what your doctor says. Your doctor doesn't know nutrition. They've never studied it, so they're just towing the line. So you like bacon? I love bacon. Well then have it every morning. You like sausages? Yeah, I love sausages. Well have bacon and sausages if you want.
And add in as many eggs as you like. Leave the toast aside. Why? Because toast is going to turn into sugar. "Well, Dr. Martin, it's whole wheat." I don't care. And stop the orange juice. Why? Because you're on the Titanic. No more orange juice. What? Yeah, so I had to undo that with people. You like bacon, enjoy it. It don't clog your arteries. It unclogs your arteries. So it was just propaganda guys. And even today I know it, they still say process meat, don't touch it. So stupid. I'm glad you brought it up, Joanne. Joanne got my heart rate going this morning already. I love it.
Caroline, "I'd like to know what a normal BP is level according to the doctor?" Well, the goalposts have changed over the years. Okay? And look, you can Google this. So like me, what's normal? Okay, look, here's me. The top number. I don't care about as much. I'm not saying I don't look at it. Of course I do. I've told you this before. I had patients that would come into my office and they had a book. You want to read my book Dr. Martin? No. They had their blood pressure three times a day for the last five years in a book. I said, do you want to read my book Dr. Martin? No, I'm not going to read your book. Okay? And by the way, I did your blood pressure when you came into my office, okay? That's the one I'm interested in. And I always take it with a little grain of salt when done in the office because you could have white coat syndrome, right? You're scared to see me. Look at me. Why would you be scared of this face? I'm a teddy bear. No, but sometimes in the office, doctor's office, your blood pressure.
But let me answer the way I want you to understand. Okay, Caroline, look at your bottom number. If it's not over 90, I ain't worried one little iota. Millions and millions and millions of people are put on blood pressure medication when in my opinion, they have no business being on blood pressure medication and testimony. Tens of thousands of patients over the years when we change their diet, their blood pressure. As a matter of fact, I heard it yesterday from a former patient who said, doc, I did the reset. I don't need my BP meds anymore. My blood pressure's come back to normal because it's sugar, it's not salt. Okay? Salt never affects your blood pressure unless you're extremely dehydrated. Salt gets retained by the kidneys when you stress the kidneys with sugar. There's nothing that stresses the kidneys like sugar. I never tell people to come off their medication, but if their blood pressure is normal after changing the diet and getting off the sugars, amazing what can happen.
And I look at that second number in the office, I was not interested almost in anything in blood pressure unless I saw your second number go above 90. If it was there, I was more concerned, okay? Because it's just an average. And like I said, you can Google it, it'll say 120 over 80. I got to tell you a funny story, okay? There was a guy when I was in school, we had to go up in front of the class and take a person's blood pressure. They were showing us how to do. This was in our first year and they were taking blood pressures and in the old days with the stethoscope and listening and, and then we would write down what the blood pressure was. Okay? And then the teacher, would they do the blood pressure and see, we knew what we were talking about. Okay? Anyway, this one guy, he forgot to put the stethoscope in his ears and then he gets up on the board after he takes the blood pressure 120 over 80. He didn't even have the stethoscope in his ears. We were just dying in class, dying. He was trying to fool the teacher. Anyway, that was back in the seventies, so.
Okay, Akea, "my 14-year-old son has what looks like gynecomastia." And that is in men where they have increased breast tissue. It only seems to be on one side. And what do I think? Well look, I mean obviously you've seen it before. What can you do about it? I don't know if there's anything specifically you might want to try and dim it out. It's usually too much estrogen and I don't know if there's any way of fixing it. I know they've done surgery in the past. I'd dim it out. Flax seeds. That's what I would do. Okay?
Iris. Okay, Iris is asking another question. It's very similar to the blood pressure question. "What should glucose readings be prior to breakfast and diabetes during pregnancy?" Well, that depends. Number one, they're a diabetic, right? Are they on meds? Remember this too. I never like taking glucose in the morning, okay? Blood sugar because it's always going to be elevated. Why? Because cortisol, when you're waking up in the morning, cortisol elevates your blood sugar, it elevates your blood pressure to some extent. And blood sugar, it's part of your circadian rhythm, it's waking you up. So I used to tell patients like, don't give me blood sugar readings when you get out of bed in the morning. I don't want to know that. I'd rather you after you eat, what is your blood sugar readings an hour after you eat? Let's see what your insulin is doing. If you're a diabetic, are you on meds? That's important during pregnancy. Are you a type one diabetic? Are you a sugar diabetic? The type one is autoimmune is different. So I don't want to answer Iris only because those numbers really can vary big time.
Okay, Corey, "what is the best way to raise ferritin levels?" Okay, eat steak. That's the best way. You know what we've seen? Okay? You can have high, high ferritin. I see that more often. I saw that more often than I used to. And I always blame that on the liver. And high insulin affects ferritin. Fatty liver affects ferritin. But the vast majority of people, especially women, were very low in ferritin. And the reason is oftentimes they were very low in B12. They didn't eat enough red meat. And that's how you get iron and you need that right iron. The heme iron, heme iron isn't found in the vegetable kingdom. It's just not there. And when you're as pale as Casper the ghost, your ferritin levels and they might be normal, but they're low normal, you want them elevated. Now, not extreme, that's the other side. Hemochromatosis too much iron in the blood.
But I like ferritin because when I look at it, I can tell a lot of things with ferritin. I can usually tell you if there's some anemia involved and even when it's normal because it's in the low normal range, because ferritin ranges are from here to eternity. And you might have to get yourself on a liquid iron. This is why I had so many people on blood boost and our multi nutrient with iron. "Are the risks of iron infusions worth it?" Well, maybe if they're extremely low, you might need an iron infusion. I've seen that. I'm not against that. If it's extremely low and you can't get it up strictly with diet and supplementing, I've seen them get iron infusions. If you need it, you need it. Especially with people with women that have terrible menses. And I saw it, a lot of young kids, too much estrogen and they had all sorts of issues. As the Bible says, issues of blood. Okay? Remember Jesus, the woman went and touched the hem of the garment. She would spend all her life savings on trying to stop the bleeding. Okay, that was Corey. Thanks Corey for the question.
Janice, "I've been on the reset for three weeks, drinking water with pink salt." Good for you. "I developed dry eyes." Well, not from the reset, Janice. Okay, that's a coincidence because I've never heard that before. And dry eyes much more common today dry eyes. Well, look at the devices. Look at me. I'm on my device all the time. I'm more susceptible to dry eyes with that, okay? And the way I fix it and the way I prevent it is with high DHA. But the fact is that you were on the reset. Well, if it did cause dry eyes, there's no reason for it. And you would be the first one out of probably over a hundred thousand that have done the reset now. Yeah, well over a hundred thousand people have done the reset, the 30 day program. So I think it's just coincidence, Janice and I would have you on get on the high DHA with Navitol that'll fix your dry eyes. I've seen it, I mean thousands of times and it really helped. And stay on the reset, Janice. Okay, it's so good for you. You're three weeks. You're almost there.
Sandra, concussions. Well, look, Sandra, like she's seen her daughter and son in car accident 2022, still got trouble with concussions. You see the movie Concussion guys? I always ask people that I've done podcasts on that. The whole movie was made on a friend of mine, okay?Will Smith wasn't a friend of mine, but Mike Webster was the center with four Super Bowl rings and Hall of Fame, first ballot, hall of famer, exactly my age and long story, how I got to know him, had him in my house, and I've been at his place in Pittsburgh, but the whole movie was on him getting concussions. Watch the movie guys, because people, I don't want to watch that. It's all about football. No, it's not. It's all about concussion and how serious they are and how the NFL for years tried to deny concussions and you know who's worse? The NHL. They still don't like the word concussion, although they have to admit it exists. But CTE, which is brain damage, that's what that movie is about.
Listen, here is how I got tremendous results in concussions. High DHA, your brain. And you have to do therapeutic doses. If I had patients that had just been in car accident, I had them on six or eight capsules of high DHA oil. And it made unbelievable difference. I loved it combined with Navitol. Why Navitol crosses the blood-brain barrier. Brain, brain, brain, brain regenerate. And I'm telling you, it's very, very helpful. So I don't know what your protocol is, but that's what I would add. If they're still having trouble, and by the way, like I said, watch the movie Concussion, if you can still get it. Should have won an academy award. Will Smith should have won an Academy Award. He plays the pathologist that discovered this CTE and brain injury in my friend on autopsy. That's the connection I have to concussion the movie. Okay? It was a close friend of mine, okay, anywho, that was Sandra.
And Sandra, I don't know if this is another Sandra or two Sandras or the same Sandra or I don't know, but another Sandra I'm going to say, but I don't know this. "Can you take cortisol and magnesium before bed with sleep?" Well, thousands do. Tens of thousands of people do every night they find they sleep better. They take the cortisol formula with what have we got in there? Eight ingredients. What a combination it is. It's amazing. I just got to tell you a little bit about cortisol formula. If you look at the progression of the books that I wrote, and Tony Jr. and I have written many of them together. We wrote a book in 2011 on the hundredth year anniversary of the Martin Clinic. My grandfather David Martin, started the Martin Clinic in 1911. I never knew him, although I met him, but I was a baby. He died in 1952, the same year I was born, six months after I was born. Little did he know when he probably held me in his arms that someday I was going to be the third generation of Martin Clinic?
Anywho, wrote a book 2011 on two hormones that want you dead. Serial Killers, we called the book. Insulin and cortisol. And the reason I wrote that book is because it was amazing even back in 2011, how much, and I didn't guess, we tested the difference in the amount of cortisol, the stress hormone that we were seeing. Look, stress has been around as long as men has been around. Okay? The Bible even says it be anxious for nothing. Okay? Stress has been around. You got stress glands. You got two organs on top of your kidneys called adrenals. That's what they do. They respond, fight or flight. And what I was seeing in my practice is there was so much fight or flight instead of rest and digest. People were wired, wired like never before. And it was a paradigm shift in my office. It was incredible. Tony Jr. and I were just talking about it all the time, but look at amount of stress, the amount of cortisol that we're seeing.
So, he said, we got to help people lower that. And I knew magnesium is certainly good, but we worked on the formula and we tested it because it had to work. I had someone the other day that's questioning me, for example on vitamin D and Dr. Martin, you're overboard on vitamin D. Well, look, I said it when Linus Pauling one is Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on vitamin C. I said, well, he only missed by one letter in the alphabet. But I found when I got your dihydroxy vitamin D levels to a certain level, they got better. Their immune system got better, their brain got better, their heart got better. Inflammation went down. I wasn't guessing. I tested it. It's like cortisol. I wasn't guessing. I tested it. We live in a different world today. You have environmental stress coming at you 24 hours a day. You can't get away from it. And we have social media and just coming at us 24 hours a day and we have relationships and kids and finances and the body was never meant to be secreting cortisol 24 hours a day.
I noticed that in my practice. Well, even before that, I talked about it when I wrote a book on chronic fatigue syndrome. I said, well, it's adrenal gland exhaustion. And doctors, that Dr. Martin's crazier than two hoot owls because they didn't know anything about chronic fatigue. I said, well, it's new, it's different. It's like an epidemic. And they called it the yuppie flu. And they gave it names like Epstein Barr. And I said, it's not Epstein bar. It's not a virus. It's not. It's what's happening. Why was it women? Well, women got hormones until they become horrormones. Exhaustion, adrenals. I talked about it back in the eighties. Leaky gut. What's that? You're crazy, doc. No, I'm not crazy. Well, maybe I am, but I'm right. And so guys, that's cortisol.
I don't know why I said that because someone's asking, can I take cortisol formula and magnesium together? Yeah, you can for sure. Thousands that do. But I had to get on it because I just got to talk about it. I want to tell you why I'm so fixated on cortisol. Because cortisol pours gasoline on the fire of inflammation. That's why it's so involved in heart disease. Why it's so involved in cancer. Why it's so involved even in the autoimmune disease. Cortisol is an accelerant. Okay? An accelerant. It doesn't necessarily cause all the problems, but it pours gasoline on your problems big time inside your body, because it's not meant to be secreted 24 hours a day. And one of the biggest things we see, and I mentioned this in 2011, is that about 80% of the population wasn't even getting a good night's sleep. Couldn't sleep anymore. Wired. Wired, but tired inside the body.
I used to do this with my patients in my office. I go, do this, okay? I said, that's what's happening inside your body. And it's not calming down. You're tired, but you're wired. You know what I mean by that? And it goes back all the way when I was talking about chronic fatigue syndrome and it got worse and worse. Here we are in 2026 guys, and I'm telling you, cortisol is worse than ever. And you know where we saw cortisol, because not that I was in practice monitoring this anymore, but reading all of the post COVID problems. The research that they did after the lockdowns and the virus and whatever, people's cortisol was into another stratosphere. Uptight. It's not good for you over a long period of time. Cortisol will save your life, but you don't want it to be secreted 24 and seven. It's not good for you. Anyway, thank you for the question. And yes, you can take it before going to sleep. Okay, I can guarantee we're doing two programs.
Okay, let's do this. Want to be the last one today. Let me just see if we can get through the rest on Monday. Yeah, I think we can got some good questions here that I want to talk about too. We'll do that Monday. Okay, so let's do George's. What is he asking to go up there? "What does Dr. Martin recommend to address liver large cysts?" Well, George, if you got cyst on your liver, you don't want any growth of those cysts. So one, block insulin lower your insulin. Insulin makes things grow. It's a growth hormone Block estrogen. Estrogen makes things grow. It makes a woman, a woman and a man, a woman too. I'm always into blocking extra estrogen because we live in a world of estrogen dominance due to xenoestrogens, all of the environmental estrogens that are everywhere, including plastic, microplastics and herbicides and pesticides, and you name the sides, they're all over the place. We live in a different world. They spray the crops, they spray food, they spray, and you can't get away from it. You can run but you can't hide.
And those are xenoestrogens and those mimic estrogen. Your body thinks it's estrogen and it makes things grow. That's why when any cancer, I always tell people, don't feed it sugar. And you shouldn't even with assist, you want to empty that liver, George. Eggs, meat and cheese and lay off the carbs. Do the reset. I would. Okay, the liver. Okay, the liver. Now they can be benign cysts. I understand that. Doesn't matter. Be preventative. That was George. Okay, now I know where to start next time. I got off on the little diatribe this morning, couldn't help myself. And guys remember this because you guys are so faithful. We appreciate that. And people have been on with us for years. Some people on this this morning even have been with me since even my radio days. We appreciate it and the podcasting.
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