Beat Type 2 Diabetes Without Drugs or Extreme Dieting

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. In 2017, a software CEO in New Orleans went in for life insurance blood test that he never meant to take. His agent had switched companies and the renewal got botched. That accident caught a blood sugar number so high, his doctor handed him a prescription on the spot. He never went back for the second test to confirm it.

Nick Urban [00:01:18]:
9 years later, his numbers are better than they were in his 30s. He takes nothing for it. And he says the whole answer Fits in one sentence about one nutrient. His name is Chris Reed. He wrote the book. Welcome to the show.

Chris Reade [00:01:39]:
Thanks for having me, Nick. Excited to be on.

Nick Urban [00:01:42]:
Yeah, me too. Pretend I know nothing about blood sugar.

Chris Reade [00:01:47]:
Sure.

Nick Urban [00:01:48]:
Tell me about, before you even name what it is, perhaps the title of this episode will give it away. If we, if we talk about blood sugar, your focus, one of the main focuses of yours is a particular nutrient that most people don’t get enough of. What happens to the body, to human health when we get this nutrient? And then we’ll reveal afterward what it is.

Chris Reade [00:02:11]:
Sure. So the stuff we’re talking about slows down your digestion and because it slows down your digestion, you are able to handle sugar in a much, that comes in your diet. In a much more safe manner and keeps you from spiking your glucose levels. So if sugar gets too high in your blood, that over time, and this is what makes type 2 diabetes so insidious, is it damages your organs in a very, very, very, very slow manner. And so it takes years and years and years for that damage to show itself. That’s why it’s such an insidious thing. And this nutrient helps you slow those spikes down, keeps your sugar in control better, and can help you, help me, and has helped many other people completely get off of drugs to control that stuff.

Nick Urban [00:03:06]:
I love it. And it also can help the body produce more postbiotics, like the short-chain fatty acid butyrate, which helps with gut health and is also like a highly protective nutrient in the body for all kinds of things, really good for immunity, good for all kinds of conditions. There’s so many other things that it does. And it’s also very strongly correlated with a higher intake and longer longevity, at least in the blue zones.

Chris Reade [00:03:31]:
And it also, you know, this whole thing helps you lose weight too. It’s, it’s kind of a magical trifecta of positive outcomes. Yeah, no, there’s all good. All to the good, none to the bad.

Nick Urban [00:03:45]:
One of the mechanisms behind the very popular GLP-1 drugs is that they slow down motility. They slow down digestion. And this, of course, it’s not the same thing, but at the same time, it also slows down digestion, helping you stay fuller for longer as well.

Chris Reade [00:04:01]:
Yeah. Yep, absolutely.

Nick Urban [00:04:03]:
All right. Well, what is this nutrient, Chris?

Chris Reade [00:04:06]:
So we’re talking about soluble fiber. And soluble fiber is the type of fiber that is found in a whole lot of foods. And there’s, I think there’s a very important differentiation that is made because everybody hears fiber and they think whole wheat. They think stuff like that, right? They think corn, you know, anything that’s high fiber and it, look, fiber’s great for you, but only a particular subset of fiber is going to slow your digestion down and slow down your insulin response in your body and allow you to kind of kill off some of the spikiness and that soluble fiber. And you find that in broccoli, Brussels sprouts, chickpeas, beans of all descriptions, you know, oatmeal, you know, it’s all over the place once you start looking for it, carrots, the whole thing. And a lot of the things that you said in the Blue Zone diet, you’ll see are high soluble fiber items. And what they do is, as I was saying, they slow down your digestion, they make you feel full. And, and, and so a lot of good things happen from that.

Chris Reade [00:05:11]:
One, your sugar uptake slows, and because it slows, your internal organs aren’t taking the damage from any sugar hits that you’re getting. They give your pancreas a break as a result. So that gives you the opportunity to get less insulin resistant, which is what’s kind of the mechanism going on in type 2 diabetes. And then lastly, because it makes you feel full, you tend to eat less overall. You know, so a good example, I use this one a lot and it’s true, which literally last night we got back from a trip and we were all craving some sushi. And everybody who’s ever been to a sushi place knows that white rice is a big part of sushi. White rice is basically mainlining sugar. You know, it’s like White rice just turns into sugar, which is why, of course, it’s the main staple for like 4 billion people, is because it’s a very fast way to get glucose at a very low cost, which is why it’s so popular.

Chris Reade [00:06:09]:
But if you’re trying to control your sugar, it’s terrible for you. So the way I went last night, as an example, I walk into a sushi place. The first thing I do is order an entire thing of edamame for myself. And I put down that entire bowl of edamame and And edamame is soybeans, and soybeans are chock-full of soluble fiber, which then slowed down the rate of absorption of, of sugar in my bloodstream. So when I did have the dynamite roll that I wanted when I got there, uh, and a little bit of sashimi, my blood sugar never spiked. And so I never had the damage that would’ve happened if I just sat down and was like, all right, let’s go to town and have a couple of rolls. So those are the good things. And then the last good thing is.

Chris Reade [00:06:52]:
Well, if you start a meal with an entire bowl of edamame, what you are not doing is ordering an extra roll because you are full. Right. And so it has the additional effect of kind of slowing your roll, uh, not to use a double entendre in this case, since we’re talking about sushi, but slows your roll on, uh, on what you’re eating without trying. Like I dropped almost 25 pounds the first 6 months I was eating and living this way. And I didn’t try, I didn’t do any portion control. I wasn’t thinking about anything except sugar and trying to control it. And I dropped a bunch of weight and I didn’t, never felt like, oh golly, I’m starving myself or anything. If anything, I felt the opposite.

Nick Urban [00:07:35]:
Hmm. Yeah. Fiber is an interesting one because it’s the world of nutrition is so divided. Some people say that, oh, this is an anti-nutrient. It is bad for you. And therefore I’m going to completely cut it out. I’m gonna follow the carnivore diet and I’ll, a lot of people around the world experience dramatic relief once they cut it out.

Chris Reade [00:07:56]:
Sure.

Nick Urban [00:07:56]:
And then other, like a lot of the nutritionists look at it and like, okay, yeah, it’s not technically an essential nutrient. You won’t die if you don’t consume it. But at the same time, it has all kinds of beneficial roles in the body. How do you reconcile that like disparity between the two camps?

Chris Reade [00:08:14]:
Well, I would say, so for me, I’m not a, I’m a technologist and computer programmer by training, right? So I don’t have any background in medicine at all. So I won’t even attempt to have that discussion because I’m not qualified. But what I will say is I’m a pretty science-based person. And in my book, I’ve got an entire chapter on studies because I don’t believe anybody should take a thing I say as gospel. I want them to read it themselves. If they read it themselves, they’re going to see the same conclusions that people have been drawing since the early 1970s, like 1971, 1972 is the first real big studies on soluble fiber. And what all of those studies for 50 years plus have said is that soluble fiber slows down digestion. Soluble fiber is good for your gut health and it helps you control sugar.

Chris Reade [00:09:07]:
Now there’s a lot of ways you could skin that cat. You could, and I have good friends of mine who do this, who are full-on carnivore, paleo, do nothing but proteins. You can also skin that cat that way. But for me, not being a medical person, being a relatively lazy and not particularly self-disciplined human being, I go for the thing that I can actually do. And this way of approaching food works really, really well. It’s got a lot of documentation about why it works. And it doesn’t require me to be the guy who goes to the place and has to order something special.

Nick Urban [00:09:44]:
Right.

Chris Reade [00:09:44]:
Because A, I’m too lazy. And, and I don’t, like I said, I don’t have the discipline to, I tried the Atkins diets in the ’90s and I just could never stick. I was just not, I just didn’t have it in me to do that stuff and not being a person with the kind of willpower required to do that for, I mean, if you think about it, so I was, I was 45 years old when I had this little incident that changed my life. It’s almost 10 years later and I’m got another, probably based on reasonable life expectancy, another 30 years. I can eat broccoli and Brussels sprouts and stuff for another 30 years. I don’t know if I could eat all steak and fish for the next 30 years. I just don’t know if I could do that. I know I can eat the soluble fiber version of it for 30 years, because it’s already been almost 10 and I don’t even notice it anymore.

Chris Reade [00:10:38]:
So I guess for me, less from a medical perspective than a, what can I actually do? And in my book, I talk about this a fair bit. Meditation’s part of my routine, right? Because And it’s all back to the science. The science says any form of meditation and people I like, I happen to like transcendental meditation. I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter. Mindfulness meditation, take nice quiet space in the park, whatever gets your hype in your brain down and gets your heart a little chill from not being quite so stressed out. Meditation happens to be really good at that, but all of those things are going to do a good thing for your blood sugar. And that’s the thing I was going after was controlling my blood sugar without mainlining insulin or popping a bunch of pills.

Chris Reade [00:11:27]:
And that’s what I was trying to get to was freedom, really. I mean, I hate to be blunt about it, but it really represented to me freedom because I wanted, so I was just in, I was just at this wedding last week in Mexico. And if I, my bag got lost. It doesn’t matter. There’s no meds in my bag that I care about. I might be a little pissed off that my clothes didn’t make it. I’m going to have to go buy some clothes and, you know, have to go to the CVS or the functional equivalent of Mexico to go buy, you know, toothpaste and so forth. But if I had not made this left turn in my life, I would be sitting there going, oh crap, how am I going to get more insulin? How am I going to, you know, like, how am I going to be able to? So that’s, to me, that’s the kind of freedom that I’m talking about.

Chris Reade [00:12:12]:
And it’s, It’s for me, it was just, what can I do that will get me that kind of freedom to just walk out my door or have my luggage get misplaced at the airport and not have it be a catastrophic problem?

Nick Urban [00:12:24]:
Yeah, that’s huge. And I think the way I reconcile it too is like, okay, if you’re following a low, ultra low carb, zero carb, or carnivore diet, I tried it in 2020 and I did it for a couple months. Too hard, not sustainable for me, but like, yeah, that can be a great elimination diet that you remove everything. You reintroduce one or a couple things, you see how your body fares, and then you gradually introduce more things and you figure out what’s the problem food or food group. And then you address, you work on the gut, whatever you need to. So you actually fix the underlying dysfunction. Ultimately, you shouldn’t be feeling a lot better on a carnivore diet versus a balanced whole food diet over the long term if everything is healthy. And so you can use that as an elimination diet.

Nick Urban [00:13:08]:
And oftentimes people conflate, okay, I wrote, I, it’s, The meat when it’s actually the fact that you eliminate a bunch of ultra-processed foods and other stuff. And so yes, perhaps in the short term, adding a bunch of fiber and soluble fiber isn’t gonna help your gut if you have major gut issues, because you can cause the certain gut bacteria to flourish that you don’t want to, the pathogenic gut bacteria. But ultimately you want to get to a point where you can incorporate it because it’s a super fuel for your gut and your gut requires that. So you can go a long way without it, but you can go much farther with it. So I’m with you on the,

Chris Reade [00:13:46]:
And you know, it’s funny that you mentioned that gut flora and fauna and all that stuff. I, somebody recently asked me in an interview, they said, so did you, what do you think caused you to have such a tremendous, ’cause I went from a, you know, a 5.0 A1C. So for the listeners who don’t know what that means, so anything less than 5.7 A1C, which is the percentage of glucose floating around your blood for about a 30-day average, anything less than 5.7 is considered normal. 5.7 to about 6.5, 6.7, 6.8, some depends on who you are and which chart you look at, is kind of borderline. That’s when the doctor’s saying, hey Chris, maybe you should take it, chill out on this stuff. Um, everything above 7 is diabetic or 6.8 is diabetic, right? And so I went from 5, you know, the lower end of normal or the medium end of normal to 9.3 in under 10 months. So I had a very unusual circumstance.

Nick Urban [00:14:48]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:14:49]:
Uh, which is undoubtedly what caused me to have such a, a tremendous like drive to find a different solution. But they said, all right, what do you think the, what was the clinical ideation of that? What actually happened? Why did that happen to you? And I said, you know, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I realized I had the weirdest thing happen to me earlier that year. I had Giardia, which is an intestinal parasite that you get in foreign countries a bit. And I got it at an experimental food thing that I went to. And That’s the only weird food I ate. And I just, right afterwards, I was sick as a dog. And the first doc I went to prescribed for me one of those antibiotics that basically kills your entire gut flora. And it’s like a napalm carpeting nuclear bomb for, for like your guts.

Chris Reade [00:15:42]:
And which I would like to go find that particular doctor and smack ’em. But anyway, they said, oh yeah, you’ve got food poisoning or whatever. We’re going to get, you know, real intense food poisoning. We’re going to give you this stuff. So, you know, that’s not what I had. What I had was an, you know, was amoebic dysentery basically. And which is super easy to cure in the Western world, right? You take like 3 or 4 days worth of pills and it’s done, right? That’s it. So anyway, but that happened about 5 months before my A1C went bananas.

Chris Reade [00:16:12]:
So I do think in the end, You know, the only thing weird that happened in that 10 months between when I took one blood test and I was totally normal and took the next blood test and I was totally not normal on A1C is that incidence of Giardia. And I, when I tracked that down, I was like, man, there really is something to this whole, your gut is your health, you know, sort of thing. Because I never had a sugar problem before that. You know, obviously I could lose a couple of pounds. I was a middle-aged guy, you know, I was pretty normal dude. Like I said, Not particularly self-disciplined, not particularly, you know, I was, I play sports, you know, I’m pretty, pretty healthy person. I play sports 3, 4 days a week. So that’s a little unusual.

Chris Reade [00:16:56]:
But other than that, I hadn’t changed anything. I’m doing the same stuff I was 9 and a half years ago. But the one thing that did happen was I did have Giardia and, and then I had this response to it from this doctor that really kind of knocked my gut bacteria to a reset. And I think maybe that the first, the first enemies in were bad ones. And that’s why I don’t process sugar the way I used to process sugar. I think, I think that’s what happened. Honestly.

Nick Urban [00:17:24]:
It’d be really interesting to see a baseline taken of your A1C. I love bleach. And then you introduce 90 days later after all your red blood cells have turned over the antibiotic. Hopefully, I mean, it’s kind of unethical to do this on someone if you expect the outcome to be negative. Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:17:39]:
I wouldn’t wanna do it to myself again. It, it sucked. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:17:42]:
And then afterward, after that 90 days, see what happens to your A1C again. Yeah. And figure out how much has it changed, because obviously you have to keep diet and lifestyle as like similar as possible.

Chris Reade [00:17:54]:
Although to be fair, mine actually did stay almost identical. I’m a pretty serious creature of habit and I don’t think I changed anything in that 10-month period. The only thing, like you said, I did Giardia or intestinal dysentery, amoebic dysentery, whatever you wanna call it. It’s awful. It’s like the worst thing ever. And it kills lots and lots and lots and lots, mostly children in the developing world.

Nick Urban [00:18:17]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:18:18]:
Because you basically can’t keep any food in you. Like it just, it just goes right through you. So it, it kills you. It will, it lowers your, your, your hydration levels so low That it will cause all sorts of really horrible outcomes for you in the Western world. Like I said, I was able, like, like any of us probably listening to this podcast, I just, you know, I’m like, oh my God, I can’t get enough water down. You know, it’s like all of this, can’t eat enough food and it’s still just making me horribly, you know, I went to a doctor too, and a doctor who had the whole pharmacopeia of the West at his, at his disposal. And, you know, as soon as he realized what I had, it was like, oh yeah, man, here’s, here’s 3 days worth of pills. You’re fine.

Chris Reade [00:18:57]:
And I was right. And, uh, never had a recurrence, never had an issue again. Um, but what I think it did do is it left my gut flora in a position where it was having to be restarted.

Nick Urban [00:19:10]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:19:10]:
And the foods that I was eating, I wasn’t eating incredibly unhealthy, but you know, I was having, I was having, you know, the Oreos at night and, you know, and I was having some ice cream here and there and I wasn’t eating the way I eat right now. That’s for sure. And I think that that colonized my gut bacteria when it was reset to something that couldn’t handle sugar or craved sugar in a way that I hadn’t previously. And I think that’s what really did me in. But at the end, you know, and the same person who was interviewing me asked me this question, like, would you change that? Would you change that outcome? I was like, no, I actually would not change that outcome. Not for anything.

Nick Urban [00:19:54]:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Reade [00:19:54]:
Because that changed the whole trajectory of my healthspan in my life.

Nick Urban [00:19:59]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:20:00]:
That, you know, having this horrible thing happen to me that put me through a lot of stress and distress at the time, um, and ultimately caused me to write a book about it was something that will keep me, if I’m wandering around and actually a healthy, reasonably healthy human being at 85, it will be because I made this big change in my life. Which there’s no way I would’ve done absent my A1C going so bananas so fast. So, I mean, just being real about who I am as a person, if I didn’t get the right smack upside the head, I don’t think I was doing anything. I was gonna follow everybody else’s pattern. And right about this time of my life, I’d be having a discussion with the doctor. They’d be saying, hey Chris, you really should cut down on sugar a little bit. You know, instead, you know, I was 10, almost 10 years younger and they were going, Dude, we gotta hook you up some insulin like now, you know? So, yeah. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:20:54]:
It’s interesting cuz I intuitively logically know that there’s a pretty strong connection between the gut and the microbiome and blood sugar. There’s literally even like probiotic strains that people use as blood sugar control strains, like as a support, but I never realized that magnitude of effect. It’s one thing to say, oh yeah, this has a statistically significant effect. It’ll drop your blood sugar by 0.1%. Okay. I mean, who, what’s the functional difference there?

Chris Reade [00:21:24]:
Who cares? Nothing.

Nick Urban [00:21:25]:
No, no one really cares. Cool on paper. But this, I mean, from your experience, it sounds like it’s actually meaningful.

Chris Reade [00:21:32]:
I think it really is meaningful. And I also, I’ve tried those, those two, you know, I, I’m, I’m a big, like I said, I’m a science person. Right. And so being a science person, you have to believe in the evidence that you follow and you just kind of got to leave it where it goes. Right. And so that’s how I came up with the way that I’m living my life and that I wrote about. Part of that is I’ve tried a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t do anything for me. And my personal favorite of those is cinnamon.

Nick Urban [00:22:04]:
Oh yes, it is.

Chris Reade [00:22:05]:
Uh, you know, that was all the craze about 4 or 5 years ago and people were like, oh, cinnamon’s like the best thing, you know? And I did in fact for 30 days straight choke down, and I mean choked down, uh, a teaspoon of sugar. I mean, uh, cinnamon every morning. And it’s a lot. It didn’t do squat. And I could tell you that is not a thing you can do for the rest of your life because that, just try it sometime.

Nick Urban [00:22:29]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:22:29]:
Oh, I just, I tried it once.

Nick Urban [00:22:31]:
It’s miserable. It’s awful.

Chris Reade [00:22:33]:
It’s like the worst. It’s funny too, cuz I like cinnamon.

Nick Urban [00:22:35]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:22:36]:
But a teaspoon of it, it doesn’t seem like it’ll be that much. Ah, it’s a teaspoon. No big deal. It’s almost, it’s, uh, it was one of those things where like, I was like, I said I would do this for 30 days. I’ll try it. And then like day 30, I was like, done. That’s it. Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:22:49]:
This experiment is over. Um, but there’s other ones that I’ve tried that didn’t, didn’t work. And as you said, every person, we are all 99.999% the same. We are also somewhat different. And especially in the food department, some people have better tolerances for certain foods than others. And so, we do have to take that into account.

Nick Urban [00:23:10]:
Yeah. What are some of the things that you tried? Because I also had my own experience with the cinnamon in the morning or around like high glycemic meals. I’ve used apple cider vinegar. I’ve used rock lotus. I’ve used berberine, dihydroberberine. I mean, this is a list of my own.

Chris Reade [00:23:24]:
So, berberine I found to be magic. I loved berberine. Berberine is also the other good thing about berberine is it’s also what’s great about metformin, even as a non, forget the prescription blood sugar control part of it. It’s a great anti-aging thing. And in fact, in the Europeans, they don’t even consider it a drug. But berberine I found to be basically the same thing. For me, the other thing is a question, and this is a big important part of this. what can you tolerate, right?

Nick Urban [00:23:55]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:23:55]:
For me, a lot of people, berberine gives ’em intestinal distress, like makes ’em bloated and feel kind of gassy. I never had that. So for me it was a great, great supplement. I actually really, that, that one I, I’ve stuck with at various times. I’ll, I’ll go through a little berberine phase where I’ll get back and be like, ah, let’s try it again. You know? But, but mostly the ones you just mentioned worked, worked on or off. Cinnamon was a, a bust. Apple cider vinegar was kind of a bust too.

Chris Reade [00:24:24]:
I would say the other thing, and I, I think this is, this is what my doc told me, she and I were discussing this a few months ago, is once you get your A1C down below like 5, 5.1, it’s just really hard to push it further.

Nick Urban [00:24:43]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:24:43]:
You know, and you don’t necessarily even need to, like there’s no necessary Yeah. Requirement for that. And she’s like, you’re already in the lower end of normal. So it doesn’t really, you’re going to have to get really extreme if you want to see that drop even further. And why, why torture yourself? And I was like, you know, that’s a really good point. So now I largely stick with the soluble fiber thing. And then, you know, I don’t, and I’m sure you’ve, you’ve got folks and you may have tried it yourself. Um, I don’t use a continuous glucose monitor.

Chris Reade [00:25:16]:
Uh, that wasn’t in existence when I started this solo journey. Um, or they were very, very expensive and rare at the time.

Nick Urban [00:25:22]:
Yes. Yes.

Chris Reade [00:25:23]:
Um, now it’s kind of on every shelf, but the issue I have with that is, um, again, freedom. It’s a great device for figuring out what you were just talking about. Hey, which one works for me? You know, like some people, like I would love, I would actually try a, a CGM just to figure this one out. The overnight pasta question, which is a study from the last 12 months, which is if you have your rice or your pasta sitting in the fridge overnight, oh, it causes longer starch chains.

Nick Urban [00:25:54]:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Reade [00:25:54]:
And as a result, lowers the glycemic index to where it’s below 50, which means it’s a, a low GI food, which means it’s one you should be able to consume and not have your blood sugar spike. Well, I would love to try that. Well, the only way to try that would either be to stick my finger a whole bunch of times, which I’ve done, but I really don’t want to do, or to get a CGM and like for 30 days, like be like, all right, let’s see what happens. Let’s do it. Pasta immediately eaten, pasta tomorrow morning. Right. You know, and, and do some control experiments to see that on my own body, to see how I’d react. That I would definitely do.

Chris Reade [00:26:33]:
I did that with my Oura Ring. So my Oura Ring was real useful. I stopped wearing it a lot of the time because once I figured out what it was that was making me sleep poorly and how poorly or not poorly I was sleeping, I was like, okay, well now I know. And I’ll go, it sits on my bedside table and, you know, every once in a while I’ll go through a little spike where I’ll be like, all right, let’s try this thing again for 30 days. I feel kind of tired. Let’s see how How it’s working. Um, that for me is, is the utility of those things. I worry for a lot of people who get continuous glucose monitors for like 6 months, 8 months, a year, whether or not you can start chasing the data.

Nick Urban [00:27:15]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:27:16]:
It can be so much information and a normal human like me at 18, healthy, totally 100% normal, everything you could want. A normal 18-year-old dude still going to have fluctuations, blood sugar, and most of it doesn’t mean anything. And so that’s where I feel like I, they’re, they’re great. They’re awesome. But I worry that long-term use maybe puts you in analysis paralysis.

Nick Urban [00:27:44]:
Yeah. I’m with you on that 100%. In fact, I was, I just did a dry fast, a 5-day dry fast earlier this month. And I wore a continuous glucose monitor during it to see what affected me and what doesn’t. And I’ve also worn it previously. I think it’s best used in the one sensor duration because then you get an idea and you’re not tethered to it. What I found interesting during my first experiment was that when I was stressed, that would keep my blood sugar elevated more than eating something that was fairly healthy. And if I did eat something, even though it was very healthy normally, my blood sugar would skyrocket.

Nick Urban [00:28:18]:
So it’s like, okay, stress actually is affecting me.

Chris Reade [00:28:21]:
Huge issue.

Nick Urban [00:28:21]:
Another thing that I noticed was that, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this in a little while, but a walk, a postprandial walk, a walk after I ate was just as effective as my dose of berberine that I would take. I was blown away that it was as effective as anything else, if not more effective.

Chris Reade [00:28:40]:
That was another, that was one from last year, a study that blew me away. And I took it the way I did it because like I said, I, I try to systematize things. I’m a systems, I’m a techie, so I’m a systems person, right? And what I did was I said, well, okay, this, I tested it just like you did. And I was like, man, this actually seems to work. Not only is it tested by science, it actually worked for me. Yay. Um, but I just said, hey, I gotta walk the dog anyway. I have 2 dogs.

Chris Reade [00:29:09]:
I have to walk them. Let’s just move walk time from going to bedtime back a couple hours to right after dinner time. So now we finished dinner and we just go for a little wait. And honestly, you mentioned this earlier. This is one of those things that when you look at your blue zone cultures, yes, this is almost always part of them. Almost always. I can’t think of a single one. Like I’ve been to Italy, I’ve been to Greece and Japan.

Chris Reade [00:29:36]:
What do these people all seem to do? They do a lot of walking, especially after meals. And the Italians are big into digestion. Everything must help your digestion. But the truth is it’s helping your blood sugar. And that is an amazing, like, forget like going running for 5 miles. That’s literally walking the dog a couple blocks down the street, turn around and come back.

Nick Urban [00:29:58]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:29:58]:
And it knocks your blood sugar down dramatically. It’s, it’s really the Those are one of those things where you’re like, man, it doesn’t have to be this hard. It can be easy.

Nick Urban [00:30:06]:
We’re not talking a half an hour or a 2-hour walk or something. Even just a short walk makes a huge difference.

Chris Reade [00:30:11]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it’s, if you think about it, what it’s really doing, and this is what the studies seem to indicate, is it’s your gut is telling your brain, hey, I’ve got a big old sugar load here because I just ate a meal. And your brain is going, if you start walking, your brain goes, oh, well, I’m going to use that now.

Nick Urban [00:30:28]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:30:29]:
Which if you don’t, if you’re sitting, your brain’s like, ah, store that stuff away. Right. But if you go walking, your brain’s like, oh, we should probably use that now. And it’s just a little trick in your brain cuz you’re, you’re like, oh, well I now have this surplus of, of, uh, glucose floating around. What are we gonna do with it? Well, I don’t know. And if you give the signal that says we’re gonna use it now, then your sys, your, your, your endocrine system goes, oh, okay, well then let’s not try and lock that stuff away. Let’s, let’s process it. And that’s an amazing thing to realize.

Chris Reade [00:31:00]:
Like that study blew me away. That was one that, that I was floored by. I was also floored by, speaking of sleep, the, the one last year where they were talking about keeping your feet warm is a key metric in whether or not you are able to sleep through the night.

Nick Urban [00:31:18]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:31:19]:
And I thought this was 100% BS. I was like, No freaking way. That has nothing to do with anything. And I was a person, I, I run kind of hot, so I always had my feet outside the blanket, right? And my sleep sucked. And I actually tried it. I was like, all right, let’s try it. So I started keeping, I put my Oura Ring back on. I was like, all right, let’s find out, does this work? And sure enough, it works like a charm.

Nick Urban [00:31:43]:
Huh.

Chris Reade [00:31:45]:
I, I was like, there’s no way this is gonna work. And I tested it and it worked great. And what a blood sugar change too, because if you sleep through the night and you are fully well rested, just like you were talking about when you’re not hyped up, if you’re hyped up and stressed out, your blood sugar is staying high. It’s just one of those things that’s going to happen. And so that’s why meditation is so useful is because anything that’ll get your hype cycle to chill out is going to get your blood sugar to chill out. And the same with a good night’s sleep, good night’s sleep. Is amazing. You know, and I remember, you know, I’m sure you’ve said, read these studies too on executive and knowledge worker performance.

Chris Reade [00:32:25]:
If you stay up till 3 in the morning working, you think because you’re sleep deprived, you think that you’re crushing it. You’re not. Your actual work product sucks. It’s terrible. But because you are self-deluded, You are, will literally study after study has shown people will answer these questions. How do you think you’re doing on this, on this stuff? When you keep them up for long periods of time, they’re like, I’m doing great. In fact, I’m crushing it even better than it was at 8:00 AM. And it’s like, actually your performance is terrible, but you are so bought into it that you can’t even tell that you’re doing badly.

Chris Reade [00:33:03]:
And that’s why, like, as much as I, I was always a, you know, I’d put my wife to She would go to bed at 10 and then I would start work. Right. And that was a way, ’cause I had a lot of work to do that I could get that work slammed in and not like cut into family time. What I discovered was over time that actually that’s a terrible way to go about it, that I’m really not so hot at 3 in the morning, even though I think I am, that it’s better to go to bed with my wife at 10 and just wake up at 6 and just do my work then.

Nick Urban [00:33:35]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:33:35]:
And I will do a lot better, but it’s, those are the sorts of things where science is so critical because we are incredibly self-deluded creatures. And there’s nothing, I mean, it’s why, like, I signed up. We’ve recently signed up to go to the gym. I signed up for a personal trainer. Why is a personal trainer worth spending money on? Because I will let me down all day long, happy to let me down. But if I’m screwing somebody, some other person’s schedule, if I’m like, oh, the trainer right now just blew their day up. I’m not gonna do that. But let Chris down, I’ll let Chris down all day.

Chris Reade [00:34:11]:
I’m happy to let Chris down. He’s, you know, whatever, that guy will get over it. Right. But the trainer who’s just some guy at the gym, right. I’m like, oh, but I can’t let him down. Can’t not show up for his thing, you know? And it’s just, it’s a hack, you know, it’s a, it’s a way to get me to actually go to the damn gym and do the stuff. But yeah, I just find, I don’t know about you, but I find that if I don’t, set myself up that way. I just don’t do things.

Chris Reade [00:34:38]:
Like I said, I don’t have a lot of self-control.

Nick Urban [00:34:40]:
I like what you’re saying too. It seems sometimes that like, okay, what difference does this meal have if I have it now at 6:00 PM? Or if I have it after I put people to sleep, like I’m busy, I didn’t have time to have dinner, but I’ve seen research that the same exact meal eaten before sundown and late at night can have as much as like a 30% difference in the blood sugar response.

Chris Reade [00:35:01]:
Oh, I believe it. Yeah, I believe that for sure. And, and also, you know, there’s a steadiness in, in my industry, you know, we say ease of use equals use.

Nick Urban [00:35:10]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:35:11]:
If it’s easy, you’ll do it. If it’s hard, you won’t. And, and we use that phrase to determine when we’re talking about user interface design and system design, we’re like, all right, how am I gonna get somebody to change their behavior to use this new system? Right. But it works really well in terms of controlling your health. If it’s simple and it’s easy. So like in my house right now, that’s why I’ve got a whole chapter with recipes in it. There’s a bunch of different foods that are in there that are really great for you. They’re full of soluble fiber and they are the simplest, fastest thing you could possibly make in my house.

Chris Reade [00:35:45]:
Like there’s no way you could make any junk food faster than throwing this stuff in the microwave for 45 seconds and eating it. So as a result, even with, even if I did want to be like, oh, well, get off menu. It’s like, it’s just the simplest thing. And if it’s the simplest thing, I’ll actually do it. It’s kind of like the meditation thing. Like people want to do mindfulness instead of transcendental meditation, whatever, man. If you’ll do it, same with exercise. What’s best exercise? One you’ll actually do.

Nick Urban [00:36:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. Hard to argue with that. And to close the, put a ribbon on the concept of the CGMs, that conversation thread.

Chris Reade [00:36:27]:
Yep.

Nick Urban [00:36:27]:
One thing I also noticed is like my body responds very differently to some, to the same foods as someone else. And so, one thing I noticed is that like if I got a high-quality clean ice cream and I ate it at a reasonable hour, I did not have a massive blood sugar response to that. versus if I eat certain other sweets, I did. And so, certain things feel more restorative to me and my active lifestyle and everything. And, it was interesting to see that actually that was reflected on the data and not just from a CGM but also from the blood sticks. When I was doing my dry fast, I had both and I was testing both at the same time. And initially, I’d see as much as a 30-point difference between the finger stick, which would say my blood sugar was in the 80s, And the CGM, which is actually measuring interstitial glucose, it would say that I’m like around 110 or something. And I just knew that I don’t hover at 110 and I never,

Chris Reade [00:37:21]:
No, that’d be, yeah. If you’re a healthy person, that would be high, a little high, not hugely high, but high.

Nick Urban [00:37:26]:
Yeah. And also, it’s like, I agree with what you were saying earlier too, that glucose is one metric. At the same time, we’re not testing, a CGM doesn’t test fasting insulin, ketones, and the other myriad biomarkers the body has. There’s even other blood markers to figure out how your average blood sugar has been over time outside of hemoglobin A1c. That’s the most common one. I think there’s glycosylated albumin or something like that and other things you can see.

Chris Reade [00:37:56]:
Okay.

Nick Urban [00:37:56]:
Because if you just look at something that’s giving you a score based on one biomarker, all of a sudden, if you take it to the extreme, it’s going to seriously punish you in terms of score. if you ever spike your blood sugar, and if you imagined our ancestors out foraging, they would spike their blood sugar if they came across something on occasion.

Chris Reade [00:38:15]:
Oh, yeah.

Nick Urban [00:38:15]:
They’d have the berries, they wouldn’t have like 3 berries and be like, you know what? Like, my blood sugar might spike a little, so I’m just going to leave these here. And, if I starve, I starve, but at least my blood sugar score didn’t get elevated. It’s like, no, okay. It’s good to be aware of it, but it shouldn’t become the sole determining factor unless you’re perhaps diabetic, then maybe it makes more sense to pay attention to that. But, if you’re otherwise healthy, It’s just one marker and we don’t want to over-index on any one particular biomarker.

Chris Reade [00:38:41]:
Yeah. And I think it’s important to mention, like you were just saying, if you, there’s a world of difference between type 1 diabetics and type 2 diabetics. Type 1 diabetic is an autoimmune disease and that has a whole different deal. In that circumstance, your pancreas is, all the islet cells are killed by your immune system. And every time we’ve tried to transplant people new islet cells, the Your immune system goes around and kills ’em again. And so that’s an autoimmune disease that this stuff can help, but at the end of the day, nothing is going to change the outcome for you the way insulin will, because your body can’t do any of it. So you can help yourself by eating this way, but it won’t really change it. For type 2 diabetics, you can literally, and that’s what I wrote about in my book, Beating Diabetes, you can beat it.

Chris Reade [00:39:27]:
You can beat diabetes back. Type 2, type 1. Until we figure out how to get your, and it’s not just that disease, there’s so many others that are autoimmunes that are real killers, literally and figuratively. Those are, are, are ones that are, are much different deal. But I mean, we don’t have an epidemic of type 1 diabetics in the world. We have an epidemic of type 2 diabetics in the world. And that’s, you know, and, and people have asked like, well, if it’s so simple, why doesn’t everybody do it? I’m like, well, you know, there’s not a lot of money made in selling broccoli and chickpeas, right? There’s a hell of a lot of money being made in CGMs and God help you on all of the, you know, your GOP drugs and stuff like that. There’s hundreds of billions being made doing that.

Chris Reade [00:40:18]:
Chickpeas don’t sell so hot, you know, not the same way that that does. And Americans, you know, and that’s part of our culture, We don’t, we don’t want the hard answer. We want the easy answer. But the, the truth is that if you want to live a healthy life, you’re going to have to treat your body well. I’m the guy who wrote the foreword to my book. Eric is a good friend of mine and had a fitness company and a health company. And he said, one of his best lines, I actually highlighted in the book, everybody is going to get obsessed with their health. Sooner or later.

Chris Reade [00:40:53]:
Mm-hmm. The question is, is it going to be before your diagnosis or after? And that’s a very powerful statement. And Eric’s spot on with that. Um, you know, he also was the one who, who beat it into my head that food is medicine. Um, and it really is true. You know, food really is medicine and it makes all the difference in the world what you are eating. And as you said, this is where, if I, if it were me and somebody I like had the same experience and somebody handed a copy of my book to me. and said, hey kid, read this.

Chris Reade [00:41:24]:
Right. I’d read the book and then I would do exactly what you just said. I would go get a CGM and then I would figure out whether or not this BS in this book is true by trusting it myself. Right. And going through and being like, all right, let me read the studies and let me try this crap that this guy says works. And then I would figure out, oh yeah, 90% of this is exactly spot on for me. But as you said, a small percentage of it is going to be a little different.

Nick Urban [00:41:46]:
Yeah. And I think even if someone is type 1 diabetic, it, the less insulin their body requires. Not to say that insulin’s bad. I don’t think insulin is an evil hormone. I don’t think it, the insulin theory of disease is spot on. I think there’s a lot more going on than just insulin. And I think having insulin is necessary for all kinds of things as well. But like if you’re type 1 diabetic and you’re still, it still seems to make sense to me to avoid the ultra processed food.

Chris Reade [00:42:15]:
Oh yeah.

Nick Urban [00:42:15]:
To do all these things that we’re discussing anyway.

Chris Reade [00:42:17]:
Totally, totally. And I get it. Like, I have a good friend of mine, uh, my old business partner Charles. His son, uh, came down with type 1 diabetes when he was little, like 8, 9, 10. Um, most people it’s in their teens. In his case, it was a little younger. It’s really easy for an adult to say, okay, I know I need to control my blood sugar. I’m gonna do these things.

Chris Reade [00:42:39]:
It is really a different thing for a 10-year-old.

Nick Urban [00:42:41]:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Reade [00:42:42]:
When every one of their friends is like, dude, have some Birthday cake. Let’s have some ice cream, dude. Let’s go to the, let’s have a Big Gulp, right? It’s really hard for that kid or a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, which is when a lot of people hit type 1 diabetic to go, oh wait, I can’t live like anybody else the rest of my whole life. Like that’s, that’s a tough deal, man. That’s a tough deal. And whereas type 2, like I said, almost always a disease of not, I mean, nowadays weirdly it’s not, but Traditionally has always been middle age. And, but I think also kind of like ulcers, I’m sure you know the history of ulcers, right? Where we thought it was just, you know, you’re eating bad food and blah, blah, blah. And it turns out it’s actually just a bacteria, right? And nobody wanted to believe that because we are a blame culture.

Chris Reade [00:43:35]:
Like we like to blame people for their problems. And as a result, it’s way easier to say the reason you have ulcers is because you drink too much, not because this bacteria that has infected your gut is eating holes in your stomach lining until somebody proved it. And then we’re like, oh, okay. Yeah, that actually isn’t related at all. Type 2 diabetes is like that. We’ve discovered that, like, what’s wrong with my pancreas? I can tell you what was wrong. I don’t know if it still is because my, it’s been so long, but 1 gram, 1 gram of fat, visceral fat on your pancreas is enough to take a non-diabetic person to type 2 diabetes.

Nick Urban [00:44:14]:
That’s all.

Chris Reade [00:44:15]:
1 gram. That’s like nothing. And you’re like, how can that be? But we’ve tested and tested and tested, and it is definitely the case. Why does all these different things work to reverse it? Because you lose weight. When you lose weight, there’s a reasonable percentage chance that you’ll lose it. on your pancreas. And this is also why everybody knows a 300-pounder who is not type 2 diabetic, and everybody knows or has met or had a friend of a friend of a friend who’s like a 120-pound runner who’s so, yeah, like 4% body fat and somehow comes up type 2 diabetic.

Nick Urban [00:44:50]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:44:51]:
You know, we, we know the answer now. It’s taken, you know, 100 years almost of study to figure it out, but eventually we figured out that That’s what’s actually going on. Well, that doesn’t help because I, in the sense it helps mentally, it helps you be like, okay, I know why, I know what’s going on. It doesn’t help in the sense that we don’t know why I put 1 gram more of fat on my pancreas than we know why I gain weight in my butt first instead of my gut. Right. We don’t know that. And as a result, it’s, it’s a great mystery, but it does help that to at least understand that it’s not my fault in the sense of, yeah, was I eating the wrong things? Yeah, but not that much were the wrong things. It’s just, okay, that happened.

Chris Reade [00:45:36]:
Now you gotta deal with it, kid.

Nick Urban [00:45:39]:
Visceral fat’s a really important topic, and that’s not the subcutaneous fat that you see. It looks like a little bit of extra belly fat. That’s the fat that envelops the organs, and when it presses against the organs and everything, it disrupts them. And it can be, I guess, as little as 1 gram is enough to cause diabetes and other complications, diabetes on the pancreas. And I’m sure there’s other conditions.

Chris Reade [00:45:59]:
Fatty liver disease that literally it’s in the name, fatty liver disease.

Nick Urban [00:46:02]:
Yeah, exactly. And I’m, I’m sure you can go across all the organs where it occurs and figure out what dysfunction is associated with it. I found it interesting because it’s considered widely to be like the hardest type of fat to remove. It’s very hard. It’s, it’s much easier to remove subcutaneous fat than it is visceral fat. There’s a few things that can do it reliably to the level that we want. And I think that’s my, in my own story, I was pre-diabetic in high school and didn’t make any sense to me and people around me because I was strong, I was highly athletic, I was playing sports all year round, and I was doing really well in them. I was excelling.

Nick Urban [00:46:37]:
But at the same time, I wish I could do some body composition scan to see what I was at there in terms of visceral fat. But what I did do is after my dry fast, I did a body composition before and after. And, my visceral fat specifically went down 70% after 5 days.

Chris Reade [00:46:52]:
Wow. Holy smokes.

Nick Urban [00:46:54]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:46:54]:
And, of course, it’s a big number.

Nick Urban [00:46:56]:
It’s one measurement. It’s an N of 1 also. So, it’s not obviously the most reliable, but it’s still surprising to see how much that changed because I read about the theory behind it and everything and I’ve looked into the literature around it, especially the Russian literature. But then, it was interesting to see after my own personal experience, oh, yeah, actually this did in fact change.

Chris Reade [00:47:13]:
Yeah, no, it makes a big difference. So what made you realize that that was going on in your teens? Like, how did you, how did you discover that? Because if you’re a young, healthy guy, you probably barely go to the doctor.

Nick Urban [00:47:26]:
Well, yeah, it was the annual physical that I was required to go to for football and other sports I was playing. And like, I would never have guessed. And I just kind of assumed that the things that I was experiencing, like the fatigue, the major energy swings, different random symptoms. I thought these were normal symptoms that everyone experienced. I didn’t realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. And it wasn’t until later, after I got the diagnosis, where I’m like, oh, I need to change things. But what do I change? I’m following the food pyramid. Right.

Chris Reade [00:47:53]:
I’m already doing what I’m supposed to be. Well, that food pyramid is, you know,

Nick Urban [00:47:56]:
Well, that’s what I realized. And then I started looking into it myself and I realized, oh, you know what? Like, this is the official recommendation. It’s led me to prediabetes in my teens. Something’s wrong here. I can’t, it probably is not gonna get worse and the trajectory isn’t good. So, let me look around and see what it is that I can do. And I realized having a big stack of pancakes, whether they’re whole grains or not, before school every day at 7 in the morning, probably not doing me any favors, especially when I drench them with organic maple syrup and things like that.

Chris Reade [00:48:25]:
Exactly. I got the organic syrup. What’s wrong?

Nick Urban [00:48:28]:
Yeah.

Chris Reade [00:48:28]:
Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:48:28]:
And so, I made some dramatic changes and ultimately, worked out pretty well.

Chris Reade [00:48:34]:
That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s actually really impressive to do that at a young age because if I think I didn’t have a lot of discipline today, man, my 18-year-old self certainly didn’t have any. But, you know, also health scares are, like I said, people ask, would you trade that? And I’m like, no way, man. Because even though that health scare did radically alter my life, Would I have got off my duff and done something without it? You know, if you hadn’t gotten that test that made you go, oh, that’s why I’m tired all the time. Oh, okay. You know, um, it’s, it is kind of amazing. It’s, it’s one of those things, those scares, if they are, if you address them the right way, those bad things can become good things. They become the reason.

Nick Urban [00:49:23]:
Yes.

Chris Reade [00:49:24]:
That you change your life. And, and that, that’s, man, what wouldn’t you give for that?

Nick Urban [00:49:30]:
Chris, if people want to connect with you to pick up your book, where do you want to send them?

Chris Reade [00:49:36]:
So the easy way is beatingdiabetes.us. That’s the website. That is also the Instagram handle, beatingdiabetesus, as well as TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all beatingdiabetesus.

Nick Urban [00:49:51]:
Perfect. And what will they find in your book aside from the idea of just consuming soluble fiber?

Chris Reade [00:49:57]:
So, you’re going to find a lot of very practical everyday advice and a plan, both studies that will tell you whether or not you need to believe what I have to say. You can read them yourself, recipes on things you can make and keep at home that will keep it easy for you. Also, ways to read nutrition labels. And lastly, and you’ll see this in the book, but also on my Instagram, which is real-life menus and where the soluble fiber is in restaurants on these real-life menus. So that you don’t have to wonder like, oh my goodness, how am I supposed to do this? It will literally be as easy as, okay, I’m in a Mexican restaurant. Hey, here’s the things that I want on this menu. Easy.

Nick Urban [00:50:45]:
I love it. And what I personally do, I think it’s a really helpful practice. I always just have a poison exposure to a certain poison. The emergency room had nothing to give her. Everything they tried didn’t work. And it was only through soluble fiber specifically that she was able to save her daughter. So, it’s pretty incredible, pretty medicinal, dare I say, what this can do for us.

Chris Reade [00:51:08]:
Wow.

Nick Urban [00:51:08]:
So, Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Chris Reade [00:51:12]:
Thanks so much for having me.

Nick Urban [00:51:14]:
And thank you all for sharing your time, your energy, and attention with us. Until next time, be an outlier. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outlier.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.