Dr. Martin looks at a case study where a physician seeks treatment for gout and leaves his doctor’s office with prescriptions for 4 different ailments.
Join Dr. Martin as he shares this comical yet sad story of our dependence on prescription drugs. There’s a drug for everything but it seems as though doctors have forgotten that food is also medicine.
TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
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Dr. Martin: Well, good morning everyone. How are you? Once again, welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great start to your day. We certainly are. Okay. Thank you guys. Thank you. Now listen, this is a true story, okay? And I'm not going to tell you names, but I want to tell you something that happens almost on a daily basis, but I heard it from, this is a physician who teaches at medical school. This was his experience that I listened to yesterday and it was a little bit comical if it wasn't so sad. Okay? So true story. Are you listening?
Okay, I just got to repeat it because I've heard this a thousand times. But this guy's a doctor. He's a medical doctor, but he teaches, he's a professor. And he starts out, he gets a gout attack, okay? Gets gout attack, high uric acid. When he goes to his doctor, okay? So he's a doctor, but he's got a private physician who looks after him as most people in North America have, right? You have a family doctor or whatever, and he goes and yeah, he's got uric acid. So they give him allopurinol, which is a medication to lower uric acid, and he discovers while he's in the doctor's office that he has high blood pressure. So he's given a medication for that and he gets blood work done and within a week he goes back in and he also finds out that he's got high cholesterol and he also has high A1C.
Now if you want to know if you have insulin resistance, there's no better test than A1C. You can get your insulin done. Fasting insulin is good too, but I like the A1C because A1C, just understand what it is, it's sugar, okay, attaching itself and damaging a red blood cell and you can actually measure it. So if you have elevated A1C, anything over 5.4 and actually should be lower than that, but let's just give it 5.4. If it's anything over 5.4, you have insulin resistance, you're in trouble. You have metabolic syndrome with high A1C. But the funny thing is, when I listened to him yesterday, he's telling the story. So on his second visit after he gets his blood work done, his doctor says this to him, okay? First of all, he gives him four medications, okay? Two at the first visit and two more after his blood work.
So listen to this. He's given allopurinol for gout, high uric acid, okay? He's given a high blood pressure medication and he's given a statin drug. He's given Lipitor, okay? And then he's given a fourth drug because his A1C was high. He's given metformin, okay? That's given out that diabetics or pre, okay? And this is where I almost fell on the ground laughing. Okay? So he is given four medications, walks out the door with four meds, but before he leaves, the doctor says, "oh, by the way, you know gout? Cut out your red meat." That's all he said, for gout, you cut out your red meat. High blood pressure. You know what he said? You guys guess, what did he tell him to do? You know it. Cut out salt. So he says, cut out red meat. Okay, cut out salt because you've got high blood pressure and for your cholesterol, well, if you stop eating meat and no eggs, no eggs and no butter, and cut your cheese down, okay?
And this physician is kind of funny, okay? The guy that's telling the story, he's a little bit of a comedian and he said, this guy rhymed this off so fast, he must be doing this all day long. So he said for your fourth thing, okay, your high A1C, you're on your way to diabetes, which is true, but he says eat frequently and have small snacks. Okay? Didn't even tell him to cut out the sugar, just eat frequently and small snacks so that you regulate your blood sugar. Okay? So the physician went home and here he was, he wasn't taking, I mean the week before, whatever, he wasn't taking any meds. Now he's taking four and he's been given advice about food. He didn't disagree with it, he just didn't know like, okay. And he starts looking into it and he starts reading about a guru like me who says the opposite of what he heard.
Guys, if it wasn't so sad, it would be hilarious, but it's sad. This goes on. Can you imagine how many thousands of times a day, they don't even look at what's causing all of those four things that he had. Okay? I shake my head, I shake my head. Here we are in 2023 and we're still getting this nonsense. And look guys, when I'm on my podcast here, I'm not going to tell people not to take their medications. I won't do them, okay? So don't say Dr. Martin's against medications. I'll deny I ever met you in a court of law. I just won't. I don't do it. I'm not your physician, but I'm giving advice. I'm giving an opinion and this physician gave an opinion. I wouldn't do it that way. Look at the underlying cause. Okay guys, let's break this down for a minute, okay? When they give you allopurinol, okay? When a person has gout, is gout any fun? It's no fun at all. Terrible pain, okay? And you got pain. Doctor says you got high uric acid, you have gout, but here's a drug and then they give you the wrong advice as far as diet, okay?
The biggest thing that drives uric acid is fructose. Okay? It's not red meat. I know they like to say purines, but it's fructose and it's the reason. Look, gout has been around for a long time, okay? Gout has been around for a long time. Alexander the Great had gout. Henry VIII had gout. It used to be called the king's disease, but it wasn't because the king was eating too much meat. The peasants were eating meat. It wasn't that it, he was drinking too much wine and beer. Alcohol and fructose. Alcohol and fructose. You know what alcohol, guess where alcohol is processed? It's not processed in your gut or anything like that. You drink it. It's not processed there. It's processed in your liver and one of the byproducts of that is uric acid. Now we all make uric acid, all of us. It's a byproduct. It's part of your metabolism. You make uric acid, but when you can't filter it out from your kidneys as urate, you can get gout. A lot of people have high levels of uric acid, but they don't have any gout.
But the problem is what causes it? Way too much alcohol or fructose because fructose gets metabolized. Fructose is a very sweet different sugar. People think fructose is the best thing since sliced bread because fruit, it comes from fruit, Dr. Martin. I know, but it's processed much differently. It doesn't get processed in your gut per se. It gets processed in your liver, just like alcohol and fructose. The problem with the liver, when it gets fructose, it makes uric acid, okay? It makes uric acid and gout. Allopurinol, it doesn't stop that at all. It stops maybe gout attacks from coming, but it doesn't fix the issue. It doesn't get to the problem. And of course it has a boatload of side effects on the kidneys, okay? A boat load. So one, they got gout. Two high blood pressure, given a med. And look, I don't want anybody to have high blood pressure, okay?
The physician said for gout, by the way, cut out red meat. That'll do nothing if you cut out red meat for gout, you better cut out your sugars, you better cut out your fructose and you better cut out all those carbs and I'll come to that in a minute. Okay? High blood pressure and even its connection to uric acid. Okay? I'll just give you the connection with the uric acid part. Uric acid, you know what it does? It lowers your nitric oxide. You know what nitric oxide is? Opens up your blood vessels, it relaxes your blood vessels. It's not salt and blood pressure. Okay? Now there's other factors in blood pressure, but one of the biggest factors is nitric oxide and nitric oxide. When you have sugar, it lowers nitric oxide that affects your kidneys and you hold on to salt, but it's not salt and it dehydrates the life out of you.
So it's given two medications and then a third because his cholesterol was high, okay? And I said, what's your triglycerides? What's your H D L? You've been given a statin drug, okay? Lipitor, the number one selling drug of all time in terms of revenue, looking for love in all the wrong places. What's your triglycerides? His triglycerides were high. I said we can fix that. We can fix that. And fourthly, high A1C. Okay, glycated hemoglobin, what's that mean? Big word. It just means sugar in the blood destroys, attaches to red blood cells. You can measure it. It's a three month measurement. It is so unbelievable how important that is. Not for diabetes, yes, but even more so for insulin resistance, which comes way ahead of time and then undoing all the bad nutrition advice he was given.
I know it's still out there guys. I know what they say, but I just sometimes I find it comical that I have to go back to nutrition 1 0 1 and teach nutrition 1 0 1, okay? Red meat ain't bad for you. Red meat does not cause gout. I know that's controversial, but it doesn't. Red meat doesn't cause gout and salt, I'm sorry, does not cause high blood pressure. I'm sorry, it doesn't. It's been a colossal failure. Eliminating salt is a colossal failure. Now, I don't like table salt. You guys know that. I like a real salt. A real salt, okay? You eliminate salt and don't fix your high blood pressure. I'm sorry. And you know what? My generation, okay, people that are my age and my parents' age, my word that they ever go for that eliminate the salt. You see people on salt and they're putting salt on their food and they go, that's going to give you high blood pressure. Nah. And red meat's going to give you gout. Nah. And then you better cut out the butter. You better cut out the eggs because you got high cholesterol. You want high cholesterol.
Now you don't want high triglycerides, fat balls. And when we talk about fat balls, we go back to that liver. What happens in the liver is not Las Vegas, it doesn't stay in the liver. What happens in the liver does not stay in the liver. What happens in the liver when you eat carbohydrates, especially crappy carbs with sugar? What happens when you consume high fructose corn syrup, which is in everything? New study just came out. I will talk about it. Hold on, let me just see where I'm going to get to it. New study, Journal of Clinical Nutrition, obesity, an unexplained epidemic. Oh, I can't wait to get at that study because they call it unexplained. They can't figure it out. I got it figured out. I'm going to talk to you about it maybe tomorrow. It's so interesting. I got other ones too. I got a new study on coffee. Wait till you hear this. Wait till you hear this. You won't believe it. What did I tell you about the real vitamin C and I mean it.
Okay, now back to this case history. That's what it is, it's a case history. Okay, so his doctor not only gave him a statin drug but also gave him bad advice. You know what you got to do? You got to cut back on butter. You got to cut back on eggs. You already told 'em to cut back on the red meat. You can eat chicken. The doctor said, okay, no fatty meats. That's bad advice. They mean, well guys, you think doctors don't mean well or they mean well, that's their training. They take about a half an hour in nutrition in medical school and even if they took 2000 hours, most nutritionists, most dieticians, most not all, most haven't got a clue. I got trained like that. I took 2000 hours of undergraduate and postgraduate nutrition. I was taught by the same gurus, but it wasn't true then and it's not true today. You can lower your triglycerides, okay? Your bad fat balls that come out of your liver when your liver is all gummed up with fat and fat in the liver doesn't come from fat and food, it comes from sugar, it comes from fructose, it comes from bad crappy carbohydrates. That's how you get a bad liver. And the body's smart. It says, well, you insist on eating that crap. I've got to make triglycerides, fat balls. I'm going to make fat balls, not chicken balls. I'm making, your liver says, I'm going to make some fat balls. Tri. Glycerides. Comes from food, bad and nutrition got it upside down. Okay?
And then fourthly for the A1C, okay, glycated hemoglobin, okay, damaged red blood cells. What an indicator. If your A1C is high because you're eating too much sugar, you're eating too many carbs. Not red meat, not eggs, not cheese, not butter, not cream didn't come from any of that. A1C comes from sugar and things that turn into sugar rapidly and they were given metformin, physician given metformin, okay? I get a headache, I get a migraine. But the good news is you get people that listen, Linda. Kevin sent me that this morning too. I love watching that. You see that little guy talking to his mother and calling her Linda? Listen Linda, listen. I love that I could watch it a hundred times. I think I have over the years. Listen, Linda, listen, okay, because he's saying true too. I don't have any of these rules at grandma's house. It's so cute. It's unreal. You can win an Oscar.
Okay, but listen, Linda, listen. The four things that this physician had, the four things, gout, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, which is what you want by the way, and high A1C. He was told he was a diabetic or a pre and given the worst opposite food advice. Why do you think I developed a reset? How did it start? High A1C. I had people, diabetics, or pre, but mostly diabetic, and you guys know this. Here's my story to them, it's always the same. You, okay? They'd come in, I'd see sugar in their urine or they had high A1C or whatever, and I go, you they'd look around. No, no, I'm talking to you. Okay? Listen, Larry, if it wasn't a Linda, it was Larry. Listen, Larry, listen. You got a problem. Houston, you got a problem? We're going to fix it if you listen, Larry or Linda, okay? I'm going to go against everything that you might know, okay? But I'm going to supervise it. I'm going to show you what to do and I am going to make you a promise. If you listen, all four of those things have an underlying condition. It's called insulin resistance. You know what that means? It means you, Larry or Linda, have a trouble with carbs. You and carbs don't get along anymore. You've got a bad relationship. You like them, but they don't like you.
Listen, you have an allergy. What? You have an allergy. "Doc, I never used to be allergic." Even allergies, right? One day you have it, one day you haven't, don't have it. And then one day you wake up, you got an allergy to something. Okay? Well, carbs, I used to tell 'em, you have an allergy. You don't take the very thing that you're allergic to, you got to cut out the carbs. And the reason I'm doing that, I'm going to cut your insulin down and I am going to fix insulin resistance because at the end of the day, that's what's causing gout. That's what's causing high blood pressure. That's what's causing high triglycerides, which are dangerous and low cholesterol. And fourthly, that's what's causing high A1C. Okay?
It's not your genetics. Look, genetics is a factor, okay? Everybody in the universe that lives on this planet, we're up to 8 billion. Everyone has a weakness, okay? Some, "oh, my uncle, he lived till 110. He smoked, he drank, he ate whatever he felt like. How come? I got his genetics" Ahhh be careful, your uncle got to 110 because of the grace of God, not because of his lifestyle. Because the vast majority of people, 99.9% of people when they eat wrong, they're going to become diabetics. When they eat wrong, they're going to get high blood pressure. When they eat wrong, they're going to get a lot of them gout. When they eat wrong, they're going to get bad triglycerides. It's as simple as that. 99.9% of the population, they don't get away with stuff they do for a while. They do for a while. Some don't. But you don't drop dead immediately.
Like I said, I was a very practical, let's win. Let's be winners, not losers, and I'm going to show you how to win. You got to trust me. And I used to tell my patients this. Hey, you came to see me, didn't you? Yep. Okay. Yep. Well, I'm going to tell you something and now you got to trust me. And I said, you only have to trust me for 30 days. After that, If I don't make inroads into your health, then don't trust me anymore. You don't have to trust me after that, but trust me that I'm right. And I was very vocal about it, very vocal in your face about it. I said, you have an allergy to carbs. Stop eating them. They're going to kill you. Hello?
Well, I didn't have to do this. I got a loud voice to start off with. I remember a patient going to me. I started laughing. She was serious. She goes, bring your volume down. I said, I can't. I said, you're in my office and this is the way I talk and doesn't mean I don't love you. It means that. If my grandchildren, if I had known grandchildren that much fun, we'd have had 'em first. If my grandchildren are crossing the street and the car is coming, I don't whisper. There's a car coming, get off the road. I don't do that. I yell, is that because I don't love them? That's what I told the lady who said, to bring your volume down. I said, you're in trouble and I'm trying to get your attention. I said, you need to change your lifestyle. Get the memo. You got it?
Nah, like you know sometimes I remember this one guy came in and I told him it was a diabetic. It's like I slapped him in the face like, no, I'm not. I'm not a diabetic. I don't believe you. I said, well, whether you believe me or not, unless you change your lifestyle. I said to this guy, I said, it's not going to finish well for you. So he said, you can bury your head in the sand or you can listen. He didn't believe me. He left the office. I don't know what happened to him. Yeah, he was mad at me. Hey, I'm just a messenger. I'm just giving you information. We talked about that yesterday. Isn't information powerful? 99% of my patients that when I told them that they were in trouble, they were on the Titanic and they were part of the 93% of the population with metabolic syndrome. I said, this isn't going to end well. You need to do something about it. And most people, "okay, doc, what do I do?" Change. Change course. Turn the ship around.
Anywho, guys, okay, I got excited today. I didn't mean to, honest. Okay, have I told you lately that I love you? Okay, put up with these shenanigans every day. You guys are unreal. We appreciate you so much. You know what? Tell your friends. Tell your friends. And one way you can tell your friends, Sun, Steak and Steel. Let 'em read it, and sleep. Let 'em read it on their own. How many people have read this book on their own and it woke 'em up? They didn't know. They had no idea, when I teach them nutrition 1 0 1. Give it to your doctor, buy a copy for your doctor, okay? Okay, guys, love you, talk to you soon.
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!