Alan Christianson, NMD The Metabolism Reset Diet To Improve Blood Sugar

Dr. Mowll: Hey, welcome back to the 2019 Diabetes Summit. This is Dr. Brian Mowll, the Diabetes Coach. I'm your host for the Sixth Annual Diabetes Summit. And my next interview today is with someone that I know you love. It's Dr. Alan Christianson or Dr. C, as people call him for short.

Dr. Mowll: Dr. C is a very good friend of mine, and an expert in functional endocrinology. Dr. Alan Christianson is a New York Times bestselling author and a Phoenix, Arizona-based naturopathic medical doctor who specializes in natural endocrinology, with a focus on thyroid disorders.

Dr. Mowll: He's the author of The Adrenal Reset Diet, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Thyroid Disease, and The Metabolism Reset Diet. He frequently appears on national TV shows like Dr. Oz, CNN, The Doctors, and The Today Show, as well as in print media like Women's World, USA Today, Newsweek, and Shape Magazine. So, enjoy my next interview with Dr. Alan Christianson.

Dr. Mowll: All right, so here with my good friend, Dr. Alan Christianson, who is just, I think, one of the go-to docs really in the world, when it comes to natural health, and especially in the specific area of endocrinology.

Dr. Mowll: Dr. Christianson, welcome here and glad to have you with me and excited to dive into your new book and some other topics today.

Dr. C: Hey, Dr. Brian Mowll. I'm jazzed to be with you, should be a lot of fun. Always happy when we can hang out.

Dr. Mowll: Absolutely, always a good time. Yeah, let's just dive in and talk about this new masterpiece that you have, the new work that you have. What's it about, and what can you tell us about it?

Dr. C: For sure. This is The Metabolism Reset Diet, and it's the story about how someone can end their career of being dieters. It's about really regaining a flexible metabolism, not just fast or slow, but we never get the exact amount of fuel our body needs on a given day. And if you've got a flexible metabolism, you store the extra in harmless ways, and you pull it out later on when you need it. So your weight and your energy always stay where you want them to.

Dr. C: But that often gets lost and people think that they need to try harder or whatnot. But no, you've got to just regain that flexibility back again.

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Dr. Mowll: What is metabolism?

Dr. C: It's really just how we take fuel from our diet and make energy out of that. Right now in this moment, for example, we're talking, and we're not consuming anything, but we're using energy. We only consume our fuel at set points during the day, whether it's three meals or five meals or you know, one, whatever it is, you're not consuming it constantly, but you're using it constantly.

Dr. C: So your metabolism is the ability to sync up those thing, and a lot of this comes down to how well your liver can store extra fuel and release that later on in the right amounts.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah, good. Well put, I should say. So a lot of people feel like they have a slow metabolism because they have a hard time losing weight or will look at certain people, especially teenagers, and say, "Boy they have a fast metabolism! They can eat anything they want and they don't seem to gain a pound."

Dr. Mowll: How much truth is there to that? And what are the factors that go into, the quote, unquote speed of the metabolism?

Dr. C: Yeah, so the speed, the overall basal metabolic rate, it's largely a function of two things: thyroid hormones, [dhatus 00:04:11] and lean body mass affect that more than anything. And we often expect that people have a slower metabolism as they age, and I can give you a great example of teenagers

Dr. C: We now know that make people, when they age, they lose their lean body mass, but it's not inevitable. And those that can hold onto more lean body mass, despite aging, keep a better metabolic rate.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah, perfect. So, so when you talk about resetting the metabolism, what does that involve, and what does that really mean?

Dr. C: So what happens is that, I've talked about how your liver and can deliver energy on command when your body needs that. And I think about there being two different ways the liver is storing that energy. There's one compound called glycogen and one called triglycerides.

Dr. C: Now think about these as like you want to keep a campfire going throughout the night to stay warm, right? So you want big, thick, solid logs to be burning cause they're gonna ... You don't have to wake up every five minutes and put more stuff on there. It's going to go for a while and keep you warm for quite awhile.

Dr. C: So that's like the triglycerides. They're extremely energy dense. They're quite packed in, they've got some mass to them, and they can generate energy for long periods of time. But like the log analogy, they don't sell ignite. You've got to have something that burns easier to get them going well. In the body, we call this beta-oxidation.

Dr. C: So the kindling, the stuff that helps those logs could going, we call that the glycogen, and healthy liver, inside the cells, there's space for triglyceride, there's some stored triglyceride, and there's some stored glycogen.

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Dr. C: And what we're seeing is that there's medical conditions in which this is severe, but short of medical conditions, it's easy to get too much triglyceride in the liver cells. And now imagine you've got like one bucket to put all your stuff for the campfire, and you've got so many logs in that bucket, you've got no space for kindling. So that's what's going on, is that the body has ample fuel, but there's the inability to really ignite this beta-oxidation process and start utilizing it.

Dr. Mowll: So then that's gonna have an impact on the metabolism in some way. It's gonna make it harder to burn a energy, or it's going to slow the metabolism? What effect does that have?

Dr. C: Yeah, more so more so the former. So what happens is that, which should be a two way street of fuel in energy out becomes a one way street. The body can store, there's almost no limit to how much triglyceride we can store. But if there's too much of it relative to that kindling, we can't pull it out again that easily. So it gets easier and easier to store anything extra as that in the organs and around the organs. But it gets harder to pull that out to keep the body energized.

Dr. C: So we'd get this weight-loss resistance. We get poor maintenance of energy. People often become more reliant on sugar or caffeine given a temporary boost, and they get stuck into a rut from that.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah. So the liver fat is associated very closely with insulin resistance, and one of the main contributors to type II diabetes. And we see that building up, there is a very close connection between a nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and that liver fat and type II diabetes and prediabetes.

Dr. Mowll: So this is a key issue, for most of the people listening to this, even if you're not obese or even significantly overweight. If you carrying a lot of extra fat around the belly, or there's some populations that it's hard to even notice from the outside, but they have this fat accumulation in the liver.

Dr. Mowll: So this is a key thing, and I'm curious as to as is to how this builds up. So you talked about if you have too much triglyceride, it builds up, and there's almost an infinite amount that we can store. So how do we end up in that situation? You know, what leads to too much fat in the liver.

Dr. C: There's three facets to that. And to draw that out, I don't know what these are called, but I've seen these, these fountains in the Midwest. People have the yard fountains. They'd run him in the, when it wasn't freezing out, and so the top bowl that would fill up a smaller one, and that would fill up and you got it right? The lower next roll down and fills it up and you've got like a cascading four or five bowls or something, right?

Dr. C: So that's what the body does for energy management, and the first bowl, you can think about that as like skeletal muscle mass. So when your muscles are healthy and they're activated and they've got room in their prime, they've got good GLUT4 receptors, they'll take up fuel, and they'll store that, and they'll utilize that.

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Dr. C: When they've lost their filled up or don't really need it, then we think about adipose tissue, the subcutaneous adipose tissue, the fat below our skin. The next bucket is the visceral fount, the stuff around the organs. This is a wild thing, but I've found some hard data showing that visceral adipose tissue and it's inflammation is completely productive. So inflammation and visceral adipose tissue allows it to form a fibrinogen, and that allows it to grow new cells in larger cells.

Dr. C: Once it can't do that, once the fat can't get any fatter, once there's no more room, we're spilling onto the next bucket, and now that's the liver, and that's the hepatocytes. When they're filled up, then that's now what we're talking about, this whole disease process.

Dr. C: So how this happens, the buckets overflow, and there's three facets to that. One of which is you've got just too much you coming in, and in the book I talk a lot about carbs, fats, even ketones and alcohol.

Dr. C: In this discussion relative to the liver, they're all providers of oxaloacetate. And if the body can use oxaloacetate for fuel, it's awesome, but when there's just too much, any of those can lead to excess formation of triglycerides. They all can.

Dr. C: And so one thing is there's just too much you will relative to your needs. The other scenario is that your body's higher buckets, your muscle mass, your subcutaneous fat, they're unable to take that up. And that can be relative to the health of your muscle mass, or it can be from there be just the inability to form healthy collagen tissue. Ironically, when you can gain fat in safer ways, it doesn't affect you as much metabolically.

Dr. C: And then the third part about that is there can be some reasons by which the body is not doing a great job at actually lighting that fire. And we can think there about micronutrient status. We can think about the role of environmental toxicants. We can think about thyroid hormones, stress hormones, things along those lines. But yes, some combination of those three factors creates just so much junk in the liver that it can't burn.

Dr. C: And in that case, then insulin resistance is a protective mechanism. In your body, if you didn't resist your insulin and you jam the fuel in the cells and the cells are too full already, they will die. Their power generating portions can no longer function, so the body's doing that to protect itself.

Dr. Mowll: Wow. So the cells are already too full, and the insulin resistance, as you said, is a protective mechanism to stop the body from stuffing more into those cells and and causing more cellular damage. Interesting way to look at it. Very true.

Dr. Mowll: So I want to hit on each of these just briefly, and then maybe we'll talk about some solutions here. But the idea of too much fuel coming in, that that sounds very obvious and apparent, but it can be harder I think in practice because there's different ways to figure out how much fuel you in.

Dr. Mowll: It'd be nice if we could just say eat when you're hungry and don't eat when you're not hungry. But unfortunately there's food addiction, and there's Leptin and insulin resistance and other factors that play into our appetites that it's

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maybe not a perfectly accurate, especially for people who are more metabolically challenged.

Dr. Mowll: So how do you recommend people figure out how much fuel they really need to be taking in? How much food to eat and maybe short of counting calories, what are some of the practical ways that we can actually do this and figure out how much fuel we should be consuming?

Dr. C: That's a really awesome question. I agree about the counting calories not being an effective strategy for many people. The other problem about the calories and why talked about fuel instead of calories is because protein, fibers, different categories of fibers, resistant starch, they don't work the same way as the other fuel sources do, and yet they can still contribute to the calorie load. You can incentivize the wrong things by restricting some of those good things.

Dr. C: So how does someone manage that? And that's the exciting part about what I've seen with our, with metabolism reset is that when someone gets that good resilience and that flexible metabolism back again, those things tend to sync up better. I think about the appetite energy levels and the waist.

Dr. C: Something that you mentioned that I'd love to I think is worth expanding on, it was really great, it was about how you mentioned some people may not be heavy, but have the same issues, and that's the thing that really comes down to the waist to height as being the biggest predictor. The terms needed to research sounds derogatory. I don't love it, but the term they've used over-fat, and that comprises people who by their body mass index, by their height and weight, are overweight or obese, plus those who have too much body fat relative to their overall weight.

Dr. C: Some people that are at a good weight but too little muscle mass, and if you put those all together, that's now projected to be about a 70 to 88% of the adult population falls under one of those three categories. So it's a, it's a huge thing. The exciting thing about the idea of a reset is that when you get that metabolic flexibility back again, those three things sync up better, and it becomes easier to have it level out.

Dr. C: I think everyone knows someone that seems to do nothing, right? And those things seem to work for them, and that's probably getting rare that most of us know someone like that. Maybe we despise them in a roundabout way, but that's it. If you've got to be on 95-100% perfect to function, just basically all right, something's wrong.

Dr. C: And the goal is to get it back to where, if you do 80-90% of the things that Dr. Mowll tells you to do and you take care of yourself properly, your body should be able to take care of that last few percent when things are working well.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah, perfect. So the second thing you mentioned was the muscles and our adipose tissue even being able to take up any extra fuel that is coming in and store it safely or stored for later use. And so obviously we want to make sure that that's working well because when it's not, that spills over to that third bowl that you mentioned.

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Dr. Mowll: So how do we optimize that? How do we optimize our muscle's ability to take up glucose and other fuels and convert to glycogen and have a good balance going on there, and the same thing with the adipose tissue.

Dr. C: It's pretty cool. So a lot of those do become conditional upon how much space the liver has for triglycerides. There's a thing called IMAT or intramuscular adipose tissue, and it seems that it has a strong correlation with hepatic triglyceride buildup, so kind of a bizarre thing and not intuitive, but the 28 day reset program that I outlined in the book, I really discourage intense long exercise, because I've got competing goals.

Dr. C: One goal is I want to lower triglycerides in the liver, but I want to make sure glycogen's adequate, and exercise is the best thing in the world. It's the best thing in the world for maintenance and your metabolic health and offsetting diabetes risk, yet during this brief reset phase, we find that smaller amounts are more conducive to the recovery and less apt to trigger high amounts of stress hormone.

Dr. C: We intentionally do a low fuel regime, and if you're lowering your fuel intake and training hard, many will find that this, the cortisol distress challenges may outweigh some of the metabolic benefits. So short term, we do less. Longer term, I encourage lots of variety and great amounts of that, and that's part of keeping the muscles active and having room.

Dr. Mowll: I think that's important. A lot of people want to exercise themselves into weight loss, and very rarely do people who are heavy lose the weight that they want to lose, I think, through exercise alone. A lot of it is ... the majority of it is diet. Most people would probably agree with that.

Dr. Mowll: Now exercise is very important, as you said, but you've got to do the right type of exercise at the right time to sort of balance what you're doing with your diet, I think.

Dr. C: Yeah, in the 20 day process, we do micro workouts, so there's about three to five minutes sessions. We encourage people and guide them through, and it's enough to keep the muscles activated and engaged, and we encourage some, some walking, some stretching. So yeah, during that process, the goal is to have the muscles stay present and have the weight loss be primarily waist loss, and that's the exciting thing we see.

Dr. C: We've had a bunch of folks go through this and gotten their feedback. Most data suggests that for a woman to lose an inch around her waist, she would need to lose about six to 10 pounds. But our average ratio was closer to one to two, meaning one inch to two pounds. So the bulk of people's weight loss is specifically waist loss.

Dr. C: And you know this well, you've talked about this, someone can lose weight and end up metabolically less healthy if they're just giving up their muscle mass. But when it's your waist that the focus of the weight loss, you're coming out in a better place.

Dr. Mowll: Right, yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Losing weight is not really the goal. It's losing that extra fat. So if we can burn fat, even if we maintain

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our weight or lose less than we think we need to, but we're replacing a lot of that fat with more muscle mass, we're going to actually improve the health of the metabolism over time. And as you said, lose waist, which is fantastic. I love that.

Dr. Mowll: So the last thing you mentioned was your core lighting of the fire. So in other words, not being able to stoke the metabolism and kind of get it going. You, you did talk about a couple of things. There are thyroid hormone and some other features, but maybe we could circle back and talk about that again in a little bit more detail

Dr. C: For sure. So the four big factors there were the thyroid, the cortisol, macronutrients and burning all toxicants. The thyroid, you know, big thing. Got about a quarter of the population with some propensity towards autoimmune thyroid disease, and in those cases, even before they develop full blown underactivity of the thyroid, they can still be just not using those hormones efficiently.

Dr. C: It's kind of a double whammy because a healthy liver is a big part of regulating many hormones, so your thyroid and your adrenals, they both make the bulk of their hormones in an inactive state. So your thyroid makes primarily T4, which is important, but also it's really more of a precursor and your adrenals mostly make cortisone, which same thing, it's more of a precursor going inactive hormone, and your liver then takes those hormones and activates them as your body sees on a minute-to-minute basis.

Dr. C: So when the liver is off in some way, it doesn't always activate those hormones as well, especially the thyroid hormone, and the other paradox is that as thyroid hormones lower, the total amount of fuel burned by the body, that metabolic rate we talked about, that becomes slower.

Dr. C: So it's easier for fuel to build up, and now you've got this vicious cycle where an unhealthy liver is doing a worse job converting an activating hormone. And another part of that is that if someone does try to crash diet, and they drop a lot of food categories are a lot of macro nutrient categories and the total food intake, the liver will intentionally suppress metabolism by inactivating, higher amounts of thyroid hormone.

Dr. Mowll: So that's why perhaps in, you know, maybe when people do Ketogenic Diet, especially longterm, we see suppression of thyroid activities. Is that kind of what's going on there?

Dr. C: For sure. And what we see in that, there's actually a study I just read earlier showing that your loss of muscle mass in terms of how much muscle mass you Mus during a food-restrictive diet is largely conditional upon how much active thyroid hormone is present. So the extent to which somebody can suppress their thyroid hormone, they have less muscle loss, but they've suppressed your thyroid hormone. So now their total fuel requirements are much lower. And then the other issue, if this is someone who is in that 25% that's susceptible to thyroid disease, that may then instigate an autoimmune process, which now it keeps going on by itself.

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Dr. Mowll: Hmm, okay. Wow. So one of the things I love that you talk about, which I totally agree with, is that the liver is really central and type II diabetes, prediabetes and, and all these metabolic dysfunctions or disorders. I think there's not enough focus on the liver. There's been a little bit more recently with the rise in a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and the connection there between that and diabetes. But you know there's still too much focus on, I think, whether the pancreas is working or not and in other parts of the body. But the liver is really where it's at here.

Dr. Mowll: So if we can really focus on getting the liver healthy, it sounds like it's going to have an effect on how we use cortisol, thyroid hormone, certainly insulin, how we regulate our blood sugar levels and how we detoxify our bodies and many, many other things,

Dr. C: You know, spot on and great point you made too about how when the liver has so many roles to play, the more effort it puts into one, the less you can put into managing the others. And just to expand for a little bit to the listeners about the liver and diabetes, so a couple points on that.

Dr. C: We define diabetes, one of the ways by high-fasting glucose levels. And if you think that through, someone wakes up and their blood sugar's high, that's not how they responded to a meal. That's really what their liver put in their bloodstream. And there's an emerging concept of leaky liver towards it's so stuffed full. Imagine I got a trip tomorrow and if you hear over pack and like break the zipper on your suitcase. So that's, that's kind of what happens. You got so much triglyceride and glycogen in your liver, it's so jammed up that stuff is leaking out.

Dr. C: And so throughout the course of the night, your body says, Hey, I'm not eating. Liver, give me a little more glucose from the glucose stable. And the liver says, Oh you want glucose? I got something to spare. So it just pours all this stuff out.

Dr. C: And we've even seen now that after meals, many people who have diabetes or they're on the continuum towards that, we can now differentiate in laboratory studies, not like clinical studies that we do in medical offices, but laboratory studies. They can differentiate blood sugar from a meal and what the liver released.

Dr. C: And it turns out that for many people, when they have high blood sugar after a meal, that's not even from the meal. That's what their liver was pouring into their bloodstream. That was like 80-90% of it.

Dr. Mowll: Huge, huge concept. So hopefully you guys are hearing this and getting this, because this is a big deal and I can't tell you how many of my clients and patients will say to me, "I don't understand why my blood sugar was so high this morning. I ate really good last night." Or they'll say something like, "I had a little bit of ice cream last night, but my blood sugar was fine this morning."

Dr. Mowll: And one of the most important lessons that I try to convey to them is that it's not really about what you ate last night for your morning blood sugar. There's much more to it in the liver and the adrenals and that hormone balance, how

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you slept, stress levels, all of those things play a much bigger role in the morning blood sugar than what you had for dinner.

Dr. C: That's a great point.

Dr. Mowll: So let's talk more about the book and if people want to pick up the book The Metabolism Reset Diet, what they're going to learn. So can you talk maybe a little bit about what you do or what you teach in the book to help people to reset the metabolism?

Dr. C: Yeah, pretty exciting stuff. We walk them through a 28-day process, and we make it really simple. The goal is to get adequate amounts of healthy protein, a nice variety of fibers from different categories. There's actually like 17 categories of fibers that are all pretty important. So I want folks to cover the bases on that. And then also just keeping it simple by not having a lot of different meals to prepare are a lot of different frequency of food. So the idea is that when it's done right, the liver can regain its ability to break down those old triglycerides, like the old wet damp logs.

Dr. C: And when that switches, then you get the appetite, energy, and waist, they stay lined up again better. And we've done a clinical trial around that. We've had tens of thousands of people complete this. We first started it actually for a process in our clinic for reversing diabetes, and we just saw such exciting changes in liver function and waist parameters that we've rolled this out from more general use, and it's a great benefit for those particular reasons.

Dr. Mowll: Very cool. Is there anything in the book that you think might be surprising to people or maybe new that they haven't sort of read or heard before? Maybe you have a different way of kind of looking at something? I know we've talked about probably a lot of that already, but anything related to maybe diet that maybe you look at things a little bit differently than what they may have read already when it comes to improving the health of their metabolism?

Dr. C: I talk a bit about maintenance ideas, but the cool thing is that there's a lot of different valid food choices and ways people can eat, and my goal is to get it to where someone can eat reasonably healthy and do things well. There's no way around that. There's no way that anyone's going to thrive long-term eating junk food or eating too much of those things.

Dr. C: But if someone's diligent about their diets and their thoughtful about their food quality, their food quantities, their movement, their sleep, 80-90% of that should get things right, and the goal is to really transform their bodies to where the efforts, probably the efforts they're putting in already, can just be more effective for them.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah. Yeah. And so it sounds like it's a pretty balanced approach, and maybe a good way to reset the metabolism without having to go to extremes, without having to completely cut fat down to zero or cut carbs down to zero in a more balanced and sensible way.

Dr. C: We've done it too, when people are committed to a particular dietary lifestyle, like if they're Paleo, or AIP or Vegan, they're welcome on board. We've got ways they can do fine with this and have it still fit with those plans for themselves.

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Dr. Mowll: Okay. Very cool. One last thing I want to talk to you about before we start to shift towards wrapping up is the thyroid. You've talked about thyroid and how important it is, thyroid hormone from metabolism. You talked about how the liver can affect the conversion of thyroid hormone, and I know you've written a whole book about this as well, and I consider you really one of the leading experts when it comes to thyroid health.

Dr. Mowll: What are the some of the things that people should watch out for when it comes to thyroid health and making sure that it's not their thyroid that is really the main thing slowing down their metabolism?

Dr. C: Yeah, so in terms of being aware of that, that's a great point. Many do have early versions of thyroid disease, and it's not always evident. I've looked at so many papers that talk about just how we test thyroid function, and the pitfall is that we put a lot of weight in normal reference ranges, and there's many cases to where reference ranges are really thoughtfully put together. Diabetes, they look at people where their blood sugar is, where it probably is going to be in five or 10 years. And they adjust those ranges every so often. They could probably go a little more aggressive on fasting blood sugar. You've talked about that too.

Dr. C: But in the case of thyroid disease, they've pulled out population averages, and there's a big disconnect because there's a lot of healthy people that will get their blood pressure and their blood sugar screened and they're fine. They're just being checked for screening purposes. But the lion's share of people who get thyroid tests are doing so because they're known to have thyroid disease.

Dr. C: They're dissatisfied with how they're feeling on thyroid treatment, or they're suspected of having thyroid disease but their doctor, and they greatly outnumber the healthy people minding their own business who are getting a physical and get their thyroid screen.

Dr. C: So the normal range becomes much more representative of those who have thyroid problems than those who do not. And that's especially true for the TSH [inaudible 00:29:17] in thinking about screening now. So most labs stated at 0.4 to 4.5, some say 5.5 is normal range, but there's so much evidence saying that if you're having suspicious symptoms, that upper level's probably more like 2.5. And if you're on thyroid treatment that upper level's probably more like two. So now the TSH is backwards. So when it's higher that means that you're suspicious of being hyperthyroid, or that could be the culprit behind your symptoms.

Dr. C: So you have first thing is just being aware of that, and if you are at the higher end of that normal range between two, 2.5 and 4.5, it still could be a factor, and it might be worth digging deeper for you.

Dr. Mowll: What are some of the other symptoms, other than maybe gaining weight or feeling tired that someone with maybe an inadequate amount of thyroid hormone or perhaps a thyroid conversion issue might be experiencing?

Dr. C: Those are big ones you mentioned. And some other ones that are also very relevant are going to be unexplained, diffuse hair loss. So you know guys, we have like male pattern thinning that I don't think we can completely get around, but not so much that. But moreso when it's diffuse and even, and then

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also unexplained muscular pain, digestive symptoms, menstrual irregularities, drier skin.

Dr. C: And one really big differentiating point is that the Colorado thyroid prevalence study back in '95, they screened about 20,000 people for symptoms, and then statistically tied the symptoms to thyroid scores. And it was interesting because they worded symptoms in two ways. Like you mentioned weight gain, they mentioned that in terms of have you had weight gain or have you had recent weight gain? Have you have a hoarse voice or hoarser voice? And one big predictor is symptoms that you can point to a time frame in which they seem to emerge. You know, you could say that, yeah, I've always had this sort of these where muscles, as long as I can remember, or since last November, I don't know what's up, but my muscles are randomly sore and my weight's been going up.

Dr. C: So especially if your symptoms have like some timeframe, like wow, that's switched around here. That's even a larger red flag.

Dr. Mowll: All right. Excellent. Well, I always love to finish these interviews with three questions, which I'll ask you in just a minute, but before I get to those, how do people find out more about you and your work? Maybe where your website and blog is and also how do they get a copy of this awesome book, The Metabolism Reset Diet?

Dr. C: Easy thing: drchristianson.com: D, R, C, H, R, I, S, T, I, A, N, S, O, N. You just put it in drchristianson, Google will sort it out if you can't spell it exactly right. There are a lot of ways to spell it, but yeah -

Dr. Mowll: We'll link it up to for sure.

Dr. C: And where to get the book, or if you're lucky enough to have a wonderful independent bookstore and your community, give them some love. They need it. Amazon's always there. Barnes and Noble. Anywhere you buy books, you can find it as a sort of answer.

Dr. Mowll: Highly recommended. I love the focus about the liver and metabolism, bringing in toxins and thyroid health and cortisol, these hormones and how all of these things play together. Really, really important. And I think anybody with type II diabetes or prediabetes has some metabolism dysfunction and could benefit from reading this.

Dr. Mowll: So go grab that. So first question here, Doc, is do you have a thought or idea or maybe a favorite quote that kind of best characterizes your work or something that you'd like to really leave people with today?

Dr. C: You know, the exciting thing is that your body is so resilient and as central as the liver is, like Doctor Mowll said, is to many facets of your health. The cool flip side of that story is that it's also very regenerative. The cell turnover rate is really fast. So as, as dire as things can sound when it goes wrong, the beautiful side of it is that in the course of about 28 days, you make a brand new liver.

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Dr. C: So yeah, the exciting thing that people will always hang on to is that wherever you're at, your body is always fixing things. And if we can just give it what it needs and make sure nothing's holding it back, it can do some awesome stuff.

Dr. Mowll: Man, that is awesome. Brand new liver in 28 days.

Dr. C: That's right.

Dr. Mowll: That is a gift. So question number two. I'm an avid reader. I love books. I'm sure you do too. Is there a book that you've read at some point in your life that you feel like really changed your life, or perhaps a book that maybe changed or shaped the way you practice today, and really helped to make you kind of who you are?

Dr. C: Boy, yeah, great question. Lots of good ones. You know, one that jumps out at me a lot is, well actually I should reread, it's been a few years, but it was called How We Know What Isn't So. There's a lot of ways in which things that seem intuitive or our brains really latch onto things, can be just dead wrong. So I try hard thing ... I read somewhere about the two most important rules in doing a good job with things: Number two is to not fall for someone else's BS was how they phrased this. But the number one rule was not to fall for your own BS

Dr. Mowll: I like that.

Dr. C: Yeah. So I always try to just know that the things that seem quite evident could be wrong, but just to keep an open mind and keep on reading and yeah. Not Get attached to any particular stance or that than just trying to keep moving towards the best answers.

Dr. Mowll: Perfect. Okay. Last question. If you had a friend or family member, someone personally came to you and told you that they were just diagnosed with type II diabetes, and they asked for some advice and you had maybe just a minute or so, you're in the corner of a get together or something and just wanted to share a few things with them, what would you tell them to do?

Dr. C: Oh boy. You know, we used the program in the book a lot for reversing that. I'd probably guide them toward that. And we built it out doing vegetable protein-based shakes, two a day, one evening meal, some veggie snacks between those times. So really simple, but I would encourage them to do that and then afterward pick up some kind of an athletic hobby.

Dr. C: My son's 15 and we talk a lot about career goals and what he loves in life. And I said, look son, there's few career goals that will meet what your body's real physical needs are. So embrace some hobbies that take care of that side of it and get passionate, get obsessed about that. So I guess those two things.

Dr. Mowll: Yeah, perfect. Those are great. Great recommendations. So, okay, perfect. Well, Doctor Alan Christianson, thank you so much for taking your time and for being here with us to share really some important and exciting information.

Dr. C: Yeah, my pleasure. Glad we got to hang out.

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Dr. Mowll: Okay. I hope you love that interview with Doctor Alan Christianson. Again, some controversial information in there. Get the comments going. Let's have a little discussion about what you heard today, and we'll get those questions answered for you. Thanks again for being part of the Diabetes Summit 2019. I really do appreciate you. This is doctor Brian Mowll, the Diabetes Coach, and we'll be back again with another expert interview very soon.

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