Tom Butler: 0:04

This is the Cycling Over 60 podcast, season three, episode 15, goodbye Diabetes. Author Dr Wes Youngberg, and I'm your host, tom Butler. The interview this week is a long one, so I'm going to get right into it. First, however, I do want to report that I'm very happy that I've done two weeks in a row of upper body workouts. The main message here is that it's important to keep trying. Despite massively failing last year to meet my upper body workout goal, I am now on track for a better year. Primarily, I think this is because I'm getting a lot of good support from those cheering me on.

Tom Butler: 0:48

No matter what habit you are trying to change, keep going, even if you stumble, and keep working on strategies to keep you on track. The interview this week is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to reversing type 2 diabetes. Wes Youngberg has a doctorate of public health and preventive care and is one of the founders of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He is the author of three books Goodbye Diabetes, hello Health and Memory Makeover. He has a private practice in Temecula, california, where he brings close to 40 years of clinical experience to help patients make crucial lifestyle changes that can restore healthy metabolic functioning. There is a lot more about his experience that comes out in our discussion, and here we go. I am extremely happy to be having the conversation with my guest today. Thank you, wes Youngberg, for joining me.

Wes Youngberg: 1:37

Hey, it's great to be here with you, Tom.

Tom Butler: 1:43

You have played a huge role in my understanding of diabetes and I am so glad that listeners of the podcast are getting to hear from you. I want to start out this way you have been interested in healthy lifestyles for as long as I've known you. I'm guessing that interest started early in life.

Wes Youngberg: 2:00

Yeah, you know, tom Chris, we've known each other since college days, you know, and then we were roommates at Loma Linda University. You know, we were together at what we call the Rain Swamp right, where a whole bunch of us students were living together, and boy we had quite the life, didn't we?

Tom Butler: 2:20

Yes.

Wes Youngberg: 2:21

We had our own Doberman mascots and life was good back then, just basically a band of brothers just hanging out together and supporting each other. But what really got me passionate, tom, about what I call lifestyle medicine now is my parents were Christian missionaries in South America and that's where I was born. I was born in Chile. I recently had a patient that was from Chile like hey, I was born in Chile, you know they're like what. And anyways, while there, my mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma brain cancer and that was at age 39. I was nine, 10 years old at the time and kind of I witnessed, you know, my mom going from a super dynamic, fit, exciting person to be around. I love my mom. I was a total mama's boy right, I loved her. And to witness her just go downhill so quickly with glioblastoma, I remember saying to myself, tom, I were actually I was raking leaves in Bering Springs, michigan, one autumn afternoon with my father about three years after my mom had passed away.

Wes Youngberg: 3:44

So I was about 13.

Wes Youngberg: 3:47

And you know you can only talk about the you know Chicago Cubbies and other stuff for so long before finally we got to some really serious conversation because a lot of leaves in our yard on Greenfield Drive there in Berrien Springs, michigan, and I said, dad, why did mom die of cancer?

Wes Youngberg: 4:08

I literally asked that question and you know he didn't know what to say. We were raking leaves together and he just stopped and you know, kind of was looking down the road and trying to come up with an answer for his 13-year-old son and I remember, before he had a chance to say anything I finally said I said, dad, I wish I knew right now what my risks are so I could start doing something about it now. And without realizing it at the time, that was literally the watershed moment in my life that kind of shifted my perspective into learning everything I could about health so that I could do my if I could be my best right at protecting myself against what happened to my mom. Because you know, my mom was this super healthy, well individual and all of a sudden she was gone from a devastating disease. So that really impacted me, tom, into, you know, wanting to figure this out. And of course that's how I ended up, you know, at Loma Linda studying health science, preventive care and lifestyle medicine.

Tom Butler: 5:22

Well, when you started there at Loma Linda it was called the Health Sciences Department at the School of Health. Now it's called the Doctorate of Public Health in Preventive Care.

Wes Youngberg: 5:38

Right.

Tom Butler: 5:38

And so what about that program? Kind of captured you, you know, coming out of this experience where, like you said, you wanted to learn everything you could about what risk factors and what to do about risk factors.

Wes Youngberg: 5:52

Well, you know it's interesting. You know we all got to know each other at Andrews University in Michigan and college and a whole bunch of our other roommates that we had had also moved from Michigan to California about the same time. I'd studied health and physical education in college and I wasn't planning to teach or to do that, and so I was always planning to go on to graduate education. So I was trying to decide what to do and most of our friends went into medicine and I had a lot of relatives, a lot of uncles and aunts and cousins that were in traditional medicine, going to medical school. And while that intrigued me, I kind of knew already that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to understand. I really wanted to get into understanding disease from a preventive standpoint. And of course, as you know, tom, there's three levels of prevention. There's primary prevention, secondary prevention, where you're dealing with, you know, risk factor management, and then you got tertiary prevention, where you already have a disease but you're trying to protect against progression of that disease, and so that in my practice I deal with all three levels of prevention. But, you know, the most motivated people are the ones that either have a serious family history and so they're doing primary and secondary prevention within that context. But really the most motivated are the ones that already have some major disease, already have Alzheimer's, they already have diabetes, they already have not to just equate the two as being of equal concern, or heart disease or whatever it might be and my role with them is to help them figure out how to reverse back out of that scenario and prevent further progression but also really improve and, if possible, reverse their disease. I actually moved to Loma Linda University to study physical therapy. That was going to be my second degree and I was really looking forward to it because I had an uncle who's a physiatrist, a medical doctor in, basically, physical therapy, so he had his own rehab hospital in Pennsylvania and he'd been instrumental in helping my mom when she was sick. We'd actually lived there with them for the first six months after her surgery. I actually got approved to go there and I went to the first day of orientation at Loma Linda and one one of my and my uncle who's the physiatrist he said, wes, you know, I always thought of you going into health science or preventive care and I said, well, you know, I thought about that orientation with two doctors, dr David Neiman and Dr Richard Neal, at the School of Health at Loma Linda University. Of course they were both being real political. Like oh, you're already enrolled in this program, why don't you finish physical therapy and then you can do the doctoral program? I go like hey, I already got a college degree.

Wes Youngberg: 9:02

After looking at the curriculum I was just like are you kidding me? Like are you just like keeping this a secret from the rest of the world? And because this was exactly what I wanted, you know as much as I would have loved and enjoyed doing physical therapy In fact I still teach in the physical therapy program from time to time. So I love physical therapy students. They're a great group of people. But I wanted to really get into lifestyle medicine more broadly and clinically. I literally transferred that day, that first day in my PT program, into what was called at the time the Doctor of Health Science program, which was essentially clinical preventive care. Some people would refer to it as clinical preventive medicine from a fundamental lifestyle medicine perspective. So yeah, that's how that happened. It was kind of like, you know, being in the right place at the right time kind of thing. You know, divine appointments all the way through.

Tom Butler: 10:02

Well, it's kind of funny because I know that the physical therapy program is like in the same building, like down the hall, Exactly.

Wes Youngberg: 10:09

It was like really strange you know that all the other doctors, the professors, were like, oh you know you should, you should just finish the program. I'm going like, listen, I know what you're doing, man, you should just finish the program. I'm going like, listen, I know what you're doing, man, this is what I want to do. And so you know, I had one prerequisite left that I hadn't finished, and that was actually organic chemistry. And so they said you got to have organic chemistry in order to get officially approved into this program. And you know, the program was starting at the end of the summer. And so, like in about eight, ten weeks or maybe eight weeks. And so they say, go down to Valley College there in San Bernardino and see if you can get into the organic chemistry program, because registration was that day.

Wes Youngberg: 11:06

Literally that day I day, I go like what so? So I, I rush over a registration table. There's dr anderson, you know the organic chemistry teacher, sitting at his table. And so I said he said I want to register for your class. And he goes like, young man, class is full, like like what.

Wes Youngberg: 11:22

So I? So I tell him. I tell him no, no, no, I got to take your class because I needed to get into my doctoral program. And he said you know, sorry, but you know we have, we're full, See. He said I tell you what come tomorrow morning eight o'clock and I'm going to read the roster and if one person doesn't show up, it's your spot, I go great, all right. So I literally get there first, I'm the first one in the door, I'm sitting on the front row, you know, and they just sweating bricks, you know. And so Dr Anderson read all the names off and one person hadn't showed up and he goes Youngberg, you're in. So that's how I got to be in the program that first year. Otherwise I had to wait a whole nother year to get in.

Tom Butler: 12:09

That's an incredible story. Now you had an interesting moment while in graduate school that I was there for and that's related to your own cholesterol levels. Can you talk about what happened and then what effect that had on your thinking about lifestyle disease?

Wes Youngberg: 12:26

It was interesting. I was actually taking a class called Lifestyle Diseases and Risk Reduction from Dr Richard Neal. He was this amazing statesman of a doctor. He was an African-American doctor, all good looking, most articulate professor that I think I had the entire time I was at Loma Linda University and he he was really great at talking about preventive medicine and lifestyle medicine and and and so one of the one of the responsibilities in that class a lot of people in that class were actually preventive medicine residents. They were doing their post-medical work and specializing in preventive medicine. So we had people fresh out of college like me that was just going into a four-year program on lifestyle medicine, college like me that was just going into a four-year program on lifestyle medicine. Then we had other people that literally had, you know, maybe five to eight years more experience than I did in the same class clinically, and so we had to give presentations. And so this was 1984. This is my freshman year in the program at Loma Linda and you may recall, tom, that in 1984, drs Brown and Goldstein won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for elucidating the role of cholesterol in promoting cardiovascular disease. Now, of course, this was because there was a lot of big pharma, big pharma money behind that elucidation.

Wes Youngberg: 14:10

Prior to 1984 hardly any physician believed cholesterol had anything to do with heart disease. Okay, and in fact you can go. I used to go through the paper charts and in the paper charts I'd go up. Before 1984, the reference range on a normal cholesterol level started at 130 and went up to 320. So if your cholesterol is like 310, you're normal, was like 310, you're normal. You know that was in the normal, that was in the what was considered to be the 95% which most labs that we do medically are based on. You know the normative, two standard deviations from the norm, from the mean right, and so if you fall within that 95% of the population, you're normal or you're within reference.

Wes Youngberg: 15:05

So it was only after 1984 that that was changed, that the cholesterol now needs to be under 200, which is less than halfway less than the median. So in other words, almost everybody, or 75% of the adult population at that point, would then be put on Mevacor, which was the statin of the day, and so a lot of doctors said this is a big scam. There's no way that 75% of Americans should just automatically qualify for a medication who's never been fully vetted long-term for more than four years, right, because of the cancer question. So, anyways, I got to give a presentation on this topic because I was, you know, I was learning, along with everybody else, so I talked about how you know, all the new research indicating that cholesterol was related to heart disease. You know, I have different perspectives now.

Wes Youngberg: 16:05

I mean, I think cholesterol has a role but, nowhere near as big of a role like what we're talking about, like blood sugars or even blood pressure, or there's so many other risk factors that are far, far, far more important in terms of causing heart disease than a high cholesterol. Okay so, but but at the time, you know, we, we knew what we knew and and so I actually was hired by the school there to actually start running basically screening cholesterol levels with a mobile monitor that was literally the big is like a computer, and I would go to the malls and other places and other departments and screen people's cholesterol. It's part of the National Cholesterol Education Program. So I was like, hey, you know, everybody's got to check their cholesterol. And so one of my classmates was a med tech undergrad and she said, hey, wes, a whole bunch of us, are getting together, we're going to get our blood drawn at the Loma Linda Medical Center and we're going to have a lipid profile, a full cholesterol profile, total cholesterol, ldl, triglyceride, hdl, so forth. So I go like, great, you know.

Wes Youngberg: 17:29

So I'm thinking I'm Mr Fitness, right, I'm thinking I have this inflated health ego like I'm super healthy. Because, you know, honestly, I was paying attention and I thought I was at least, and I was doing everything possible to be healthy, because that was my goal, that was my passion. So I went and had my blood drawn, you know, and I'm going like, yeah, this is going to come back good. And I already knew what all the charts said, that you know somebody, my age well, I was 24 at the time. Should you know, if I'm going to be in the healthiest 20% of the population, my cholesterol is going to be? You know the way I viewed it. At least my cholesterol would be about, you know, 140, 150 at the most. Right, because you know, all through college I had always worked out to be in the upper 95th percentile of fitness and I've been able to pull that off. I worked out regularly. So when I did my AFER testing, I actually was fitter than 95% of my classmates in the field of physical education. So I thought I was pretty fit, right.

Wes Youngberg: 18:42

So then I saw Lori was her name MedTech, that was in our doctorate program. I saw her at school, right At the School of Health, and so I was, you know, walking towards her, going like, great, I'm going to find out. You know that I'm really even fitter than I think. I am right, and she had this worried. Look on her face and she says Wes, I'm a little concerned about your cholesterol. I thought she was messing with me. I really did. I thought she was just pulling my trick. And so then she said no, look, look, she showed me the paper my cholesterol is 244. So I was off the chart. I was like way above 95th percentile, and only in this case in the wrong direction, right. And so that's what kind of popped my Mr Fitness and wellness bubble. It made me realize that maybe I wasn't as healthy as I thought I was.

Wes Youngberg: 19:45

And along the same line here, tom, especially as we're talking about how this relates to other conditions like diabetes and what we've been doing with you and so forth, about 10 years ago I actually decided to bite the bullet and do a 23andMe saliva test, genetic analysis, and I really didn't want to do it at first because I was totally aware about the privacy concerns and you know that eventually this was going to get into the wrong hands. You know I knew all that was going to happen, and indeed that has happened. You know, knew all that was going to happen and indeed that has happened. You know they've had major lab leaks and and, uh, you know, uh, basically, they got um totally hacked, uh, last year. But I I remember saying to myself even if the whole world finds out what my genetic mutations are, at least I'll know, and that's really the most important thing. And so I realized that if I don't know what my weaknesses are and therefore I don't know how to manipulate that information to my benefit, I'm losing out, so, regardless of what other people might do with it.

Wes Youngberg: 21:02

So when I did that test, tom, I discovered that I had a major blood clotting mutation called factor V Leiden, and because I found out, I shared this with my family and my extended family, my cousins and relatives, and many of them had the same mutation which, depending on what studies you read, up to an 800% greater risk of having a deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, a stroke, a heart attack, massive. So all of a sudden it hit me, tom. It hit me when I was in college. Before I found out. This was when I was like 22, before I found out that my cholesterol was sky high.

Wes Youngberg: 21:47

I went to the funeral of one of my uncles who was a physician, an ER doctor in Fort Worth, texas, who had a massive heart attack while working in the ER one night and he literally died on the floor of the ER. So you know, if you're a doctor in the ER and you die of a massive heart attack, that's a bad, bad heart attack, right? And so undoubtedly he had this type of mutation as well, but he didn't know about it. Later I discovered that other uncles had had blood clots in their legs and my grandfather died of a massive heart attack due to a blood clot. And so, like whoa, okay.

Wes Youngberg: 22:31

So because I did that genetic test, and only because of it, it actually made me aware of all the other issues. It made sense that I had such a strong family history of heart disease that's related to blood clotting, and so cholesterol really wasn't the issue Primarily. The issue is blood clotting risk and all the factors that lead up to that. And so I actually, when I discovered that time, I didn't go like, oh no, this is horrible. I didn't go, whoa, it's me. I actually smiled when I saw that test and I said, wow, this is great news, because now I have one more thing that I can do to fix, to prevent whatever otherwise might have happened to me or in the future.

Wes Youngberg: 23:20

So the reason this story from my youth, you know when I was 24 is so important is because a lot of us are hesitant to do testing, because we're a little afraid about what we might discover. And my point, all along with all my patients, is like hey, the more things we discover that are risk factors in your physiology, the greater the potential that we can improve your health. Because if I don't find anything wrong with you, I can't help you, right, there's nothing that we can do. But if I can find five things that need to be fixed now, you're going to be that much healthier. But if we find 20 things that we can fix, you're going to be that much healthier. So that's the goal is embrace, finding things that give us direction on what to do.

Tom Butler: 24:21

Well, I remember it really clearly in the things that you were saying at the time, because they were significant, because you were very fit, your diet, your activity levels, the, the choices that you made you. You were being thorough, as about anybody who's 24 years old would be at the time, and I remember you talking about. You know this is the power of genetics. You know now you wouldn't look at a 245 total cholesterol the same way today as maybe you were back then. But at the same time, I think that that moment of saying, okay, there's, there's an element in here when we're talking about lifestyle disease that also has to be considered, is there. We do have a genetic makeup that we bring to the table.

Wes Youngberg: 25:16

Right, no question about it. No question about it.

Tom Butler: 25:20

While you were in graduate school, there was the formation of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Today that's a really prestigious organization. Can you talk about that organization's beginning?

Wes Youngberg: 25:36

Actually, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine wasn't started until after I graduated. In fact it started in the year 2000. So I graduated in 1988. But around the year 1990, about two years after I graduated, I started an organization called American Preventive Care Association. This is mainly for many of my colleagues that had gone through that very unique doctoral program in lifestyle medicine at Loma Linda University. So there was at that time there's really only about 200, 300 of us, and so I started it for us and it served its purpose for three to four years until we started talking about making something big for everybody, especially my medical colleagues.

Wes Youngberg: 26:30

And so it was probably in 1999, year 2000, that Dr John Kelly, who was a older student that had gone through medicine, he had started medical school in his 40s and he was actually in insurance. He was in health insurance, so he was kind of a cerebral, you know, money cruncher type and he had a real passion to get into lifestyle medicine. So he went through medicine and we got to know each other that way. I was president of the School of Public Health Alumni Association at the time and so, which just meant I got to pick a lot of the speakers to come, you know at the yearly conferences and so we got to know each other during that time and he said hey, wes, can you help me put together a unique academic college, a society of doctors that's called the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

Wes Youngberg: 27:34

So he was our first president. He just got honored at the yearly meetings last year in Florida. We started out just like seven of us right, and now it's like we have like 5,000 members. It's an international society. You can become board certified in lifestyle medicine. While I was on the board, I was on the board of directors from the beginning for about 10 years. I helped set up the fellow. You know how to become a fellow and because I set it up, I was the first fellow right.

Wes Youngberg: 28:10

I got. Okay, I'm going to apply first here because I set up the criteria and so, yeah, it's a great organization that is primarily there for everybody that's in healthcare, not just physicians and not just people and physicians who have gone through preventive medicine residency. But really you can be in any specialty of medicine or healthcare, okay, and then subspecialize in lifestyle medicine. So we had ophthalmologists subspecializing in lifestyle medicine. Why? Because lifestyle has a lot to do with eye health. You know you can be an endocrinologist, obviously, and subspecialized in lifestyle medicine because you know we clearly understand that how you live has a huge impact on hormonal health and, of course, diabetes is part of endocrinology and so forth. So, no matter what specialty you are even we even have physicians that are er doctors or surgeons that sub-specialize in lifestyle medicine it applies to everybody and so right now, that's the unique draw into lifestyle medicine is that you can do it regardless of what your main specialty is. You just incorporate that into your practice of whatever you do.

Tom Butler: 29:58

When you step back and look at those early years, when there are like 300 of you getting together and talking about stuff, it's kind of hard today to really kind of grasp how different it was the conversations that you would have at your meetings.

Wes Youngberg: 30:17

Yeah, that's true. I remember you know I gave many of the keynote presentations because you know we're a fledgling organization. You know, at one point we almost went bankrupt and now I think we have like $20 million in the bank or something. You know like. You know it's a big organization. Now it's been well run, we have a great executive director that is taking us to whole new levels and so and of course it's an organization that it's time it's come right. The whole world needs and understands their need for lifestyle medicine, for addressing the cause of the problem, rather than just looking for, you know, fancier and fancier band-aids to put on the problem the problem.

Tom Butler: 31:19

Well, you know, good job to you for being a part of helping to create an organization like that. That has provided education for a lot of people, so I just think that that's a great thing you've done.

Wes Youngberg: 31:29

Yeah, thanks, tom. You know, just a couple weeks ago I was asked to give a couple hour lecture to family medicine residents at Loma Linda University, and so there was about about 35 first, second, third year medical residents there at my presentation and what I did is I focused on Alzheimer's and diabetes basically my two favorite general topics, and of course, to address those effectively you got to fix everything. You can't just fix a few things. You got to fix as many things as possible, including optimizing the immune system, which is really something that a lot of doctors haven't really understood. Effectively, if you don't have a really good immune system, you're basically you're destroying the beta cells of your pancreas and you're also destroying the cells in the hippocampi of the brain which are memory cells. So you got to have a good, strong immune system. But while there, one of the things that I'm really proud of that I was, just I was kind of the talking head for a program that's called Diabetes Undone, which was organized by a team of professionals that based on my experience from the last 30 years well, now, 40 years of experience with diabetes and so the Diabetes Undone program is a turnkey program that has 40 videos, has a workbook and a cookbook and basically it's how-to.

Wes Youngberg: 33:11

So I just had a patient today, tom, who was referred by his primary care physician because he's got diabetes and he wants to reverse his diabetes. Naturally, he doesn't just want to go on the latest and best medications, because he's concerned about some of those side effects, and so we had a really great session this morning. So I said here, just get on this Diabetes Undone class. You can watch it with your wife at home and that'll show you everything that you need to do to be able to reverse this. And, of course, I gave you that 11-page document that talks about reversing insulin resistance and trying to regain and restore beta cell function to the pancreas, the ability to make insulin as well.

Wes Youngberg: 34:03

And, by the way, anybody listening to this podcast that wants a copy of that just simply email, just go to my website, drjungbergcom, and all my contact info is there. Email me and we'll send it to you. We'll send you that PDF. You can share it with anybody you want. It's not copyrighted. It's basically 21 strategies on how to dramatically improve your blood sugars. And so I shared that with the residents, tom, and they like, loved it, like wow, yeah, this is what we need. You know, that goes beyond just. Here's the new medicine, you know. Good luck.

Tom Butler: 34:43

It's really interesting to me. You know this aspect of it. This is what we need. You know, if you go back when you first got out of school. Pretty soon after you got out of school I don't remember exactly when, but you ended up heading off to the island of Guam and my understanding is that being there allowed you to be a part of the clinical care team, maybe in a different way than you could have been elsewhere.

Wes Youngberg: 35:16

It kind of fast-tracked me. You know, I was really fortunate, tom. When I left academics at Loma Linda. My first job was I was director of corporate wellness at Loma Linda University School of Public Health. And then that whole.

Wes Youngberg: 35:33

There was a big upheaval politically at the university where and you know differences of opinion amongst the top echelons of administration they literally tried to close the School of Public Health down and when they finally realized that that was a really bad decision, they just kind of reframed it and so I ended up leaving my full-time faculty position at Loma Linda University. Because of that. And I always tell my friends and especially anybody anybody is like is struggling with maybe potentially losing a job, for whatever reason, I say you know, the two best things that ever happened to me professionally was losing my job. I kid you not, that's literally the two best things that could ever happen to me professionally. When I lost my job at Loma Linda, along with pretty much every other faculty member of the School of Public Health, because of what they were trying to do at the time. But that forced me out of.

Wes Youngberg: 36:35

I loved academics, I loved the environment, you know, stimulating, and I started all kinds of other programs while I was there, but it wasn't actually my main forte I didn't realize at the time. So that forced me into clinical work and so I started working with the Loma Linda faculty medical, a faculty medical group that was in Sun City, which is a retirement community on the way to San Diego, just just south of Loma Linda. So I started working there, and then also in Ocean Beach, which is also San Diego. So I started doing clinical work four days a week and in a medical group setting.

Wes Youngberg: 37:21

And so while at the Sun City office I met Dr Charles Brennerger, who is the director of the Diabetes Treatment Center at Loma Linda and had been for decades, and became close friends with him. He would refer a lot of patients to me and we ended up working together in Guam for three years. It was really cool While I was there and while I was involved with the school from a alumni association standpoint. As president of the alumni association during that time I was asked if I would be willing to go as a medical missionary to Guam. And I go, like Guam. Where's that?

Wes Youngberg: 38:01

You know, like I have no idea where Guam is, you know, and I was like, why would I want to do that? We were. I was working with some of my colleagues to set up a preferred provider organization in Southern California. We had all these plans, you know, to bring lifestyle medicine to all the groups. While we were doing that, I actually became very impressed that we should go to Guam. It's one of those things where you call them divine appointments. God made it really clear that that's where he wanted me to be, and so I ended up being there for 14 years, tom, and from 1994 to 2008. And yes, while there, I basically set up a department of lifestyle medicine for a large outpatient clinic. You know, we had like 300 employees, so it's a big medical group and I remember I went to when I first moved there, they set up a meet and greet session with other doctors in the community, and so they would come up to me and they say, hey, so you know what do you specialize in?

Wes Youngberg: 39:04

And I'd tell them and they would laugh. They'd be like you're going to, you're going to, you're going to try to change people's diets and reverse diabetes. To change people's diets and reverse diabetes. Are you kidding me? You can't reverse diabetes. You know we've never, ever seen anything like that. You know, I mean, you know they were, they were just being sincere, you know, like they go like, wow, you know that's. You know, good luck to you. They would say, you know, but you know, they just didn't believe it was possible and so, and so I took up the challenge. And what was really cool about Guam it's a very tight knit society where, where, what's what's unique about Guam is that you have, you have, you know, like the governor's wife and the senators hanging out with the lowest socioeconomic people too, in groups and they all get along great, you know, because they're like a big family, basically, literally that's what they are. It's just a big family and wonderful, loving people, and and so what I, what I realized, is that everybody was thirsty for, for knowledge. You know, they, they.

Wes Youngberg: 40:14

There was a diabetes death rate on the island of Guam that was five times that of the US mainland at the time and it wasn't that great here, right. So it was a very serious issue, but largely it was an issue of hopelessness, like, oh yeah, I got diabetes, so I'm going to end up with an amputation and go blind and have kidney failure, just like aunt mary and uncle joe did right. So they literally it was the defeatist mindset once you get diagnosed, you know it's over, okay, and um. And so my role was to change that perspective, and so I did a lot of education in the community. The government was calling me every week hey, can you give a talk over here? We're having a conference on Saipan, can you give a talk there? So I was literally going, I was giving talks everywhere, okay, around not just Guam, but all the Micronesian islands.

Wes Youngberg: 41:09

And then the governor of Guam, which was a brilliant politician, he realized that he was basically wanting to be a governor second term as well, and so he actually created certain initiatives, including one initiative which was the prevention of diabetes on Guam. Which was the prevention of diabetes on Guam. So they asked me to head up this task force, which was, you know, basically it was a political attempt to ingratiate himself with the population, right, you know, it was a really wise or smart, astute thing for him to do. But most of the doctors are going like, are you kidding me? Like who's going to believe that that's possible? Right, this is so funny, Tom.

Wes Youngberg: 41:59

I ran into this one guy who is he was an ER doctor from Laguna Beach who had been contracted by WAM Health and Human Services to run some workshops, and I forget for who, but somehow we hooked up. You know, I just ran into him somewhere and he goes like, hey, you know, we should do lunch, right? So he takes me out to Thai food and he's super funny guy, super you know, um neat guy to talk to, and. And so he says, hey, yeah, man, before we get the food, let me tell you something. I saw something in the paper that just cracked me up, so that there's this initiative. There's this initiative in the paper that it's all about, you know, reversing or preventing diabetes on the island. Can you believe that they would actually put that in the paper?

Wes Youngberg: 42:50

And so I let him go through that whole thing for about five minutes and then I said, hey, john, you know I'm the author of that initiative, I'm in charge of that task force. And he looked at me, he wasn't sure if I was messing with him or not. And then he goes like, oh well, I guess I got something to learn, don't I? And so you know, it was just kind of funny, but you know. And I say, hey, and so you know, it was just kind of funny. But you know, and I say, hey, john, you know, I totally get it, man, you're, you're just. You know, that's what I was taught in school too. You know, you're just, you're just rehashing what you learned.

Wes Youngberg: 43:23

And you went through school a lot before I did and said but the good news is that this is preventable and it's even reversible. You're like what this reversible? You know, because he's an ER doc. He said, oh, we've never even considered that possible. You know, because he sees all the polyopathies, you know, all the pathologies that come from out of control diabetes. You know, and that's what set me up to be able to write my book Goodbye Diabetes, because I'm not a writer per se.

Wes Youngberg: 43:56

My publisher hired a nurse to basically full-time spend a year with me and we would meet for three to four hours every other day, like three to four times a week, and she could type faster than I could talk. And so we met at Mr Kebabs right on Jefferson Street here in Temecula three nights a week. You know, he got lentil soup and a salad, you know, and falafels, you know. And we did that for a whole year and that's how the book was written. The Goodbye Diabetes was written, and she was a masterful writer, but she would always type out a manuscript of what we talked about. Bring them back to me. I'm like no, no, no, that's not what I said, you know we'd change it around. So it took us twice as long to write the book that we thought, but it ended up being an amazing book on the latest on lifestyle medicine strategies to literally reverse diabetes in most cases.

Wes Youngberg: 45:02

But the real goal isn't necessarily to reverse diabetes. The real goal is to prevent the complications of diabetes, because that's the only reason diabetes has a name because of its complications. Okay, so there are some people that are really more like type 1 diabetics, that have lost, you know, 98% of their ability to produce insulin, and so those people can still dramatically improve their health, but they may still have to take some medications to make up the difference. But I'm telling you, tom, literally, I believe at least 80%, if not higher, of people who currently are labeled as type 2 diabetics or basically, in other words, their blood sugar meets the criteria for diabetes in some way. At least 80% of them can reverse their diabetes, even if they've had it for 20, 30 years.

Tom Butler: 46:00

Well, I think that's really powerful because, again, it's coming from 40 years of experience of seeing, case after case after case after case.

Wes Youngberg: 46:08

And you know what got me into this, tom? We were actually roommates at the time at the Green Monster, this swamp, and it was literally a swamp. In 1985, that was my second year, In fact it was actually the end of my first year of training, so it was the 84-85 school year in the spring we had a special seminar series that was sponsored by the School of Public Health and they brought out Dr James Anderson, who was the chief endocrinologist at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, and he presented a lecture that just blew me away. You know that's when I realized that I was gonna be going into tertiary preventive care.

Wes Youngberg: 46:54

He basically treated brittle hardcore diabetics that were actually lean. They were not the obese, typical diabetic right, they were lean diabetics that were basically advanced and he reversed diabetes and 90 of them without even exercise. He just, in the hospital, put them on a, on a high fiber plant-based diet in 1970s, and so he'd been publishing studies on reversing diabetes. That you know, basically over 50 years ago. And so when I learned that in 1985, I go like, oh man, this is like, this is what I want to do.

Wes Youngberg: 47:39

Right, and I kept thinking why am I not hearing this from everybody? Why is this only coming from some guy from University of Kentucky? You know he's a top endocrinologist, but yet nobody's paying attention to him, at least not enough. And so I started becoming the evangelist about reversing diabetes, and so you know the rest of this story, how I got in to Guam and wrote the book and now have my own clinic helping people do the same.

Tom Butler: 48:11

Well, it's wild because you know you get that focus. Then you go to a place Guam that becomes a very unique laboratory for rolling out what you want to roll out, you know, from a perspective of prevalence in the population, from some of the social dynamics in the population. It really was like a great laboratory to kind of perfect things. What year did Goodbye Diabetes come out?

Wes Youngberg: 48:41

Oh, I think it was 2015. I think it was 2015.

Tom Butler: 48:44

Okay, so that's a number of years after this presentation that you heard that. You know that's saying, hey, we need to think about this differently. But when the book came out, did you get pushback, Was it?

Wes Youngberg: 49:00

Oh yeah, okay, oh yeah, I mean not as so. You know I was doing keynote presentations for the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, which of course I'm speaking to the choir there, OK, but even they're going like, really you know where's the evidence? You know I'm going like I'm showing to the evidence and then also you, know and I've always been an advocate of this.

Wes Youngberg: 49:21

you know. Stop saying you don't have enough evidence and do what you clearly know is most effective and show what happens in your client and patient population. Okay, so the majority of positive impact we get with patients is by just using our head and making clinical decisions based on what we know works. And when we're dealing with lifestyle medicine, I mean it's not like we're giving a medicine that is likely to cause cancer later on. You know, we're not giving chemotherapy here. We're talking about eating healthfully, we're talking about exercising, we're talking about paying attention to your stress levels, paying attention to your sleep habits and lifestyle in general things that are well understood intuitively, and there's a lot of scientific and basic science research on, and we're just putting it all together and so and there are actually a lot of randomly controlled trials now. But to actually wait until you have more's so powerful, right? So I mean I'm all for those trials, okay, but we need to follow our own observations and take advantage of that now.

Tom Butler: 51:00

I think it's such a huge thing because you're talking about do something that is only going to be healthy, and you could say, like, just do it for six months and see what it looks like. We're not talking about. You know, like you said, we're not talking about chemotherapy, but some cases I think people are more accepting of if you say, okay, you're going to have to do some chemotherapy with this.

Wes Youngberg: 51:23

If we tell them hey, you're going to take this, this should help you. I think it's going to help you. You're going to lose all your hair and you're going to feel horrible for six months Like, oh, whatever you say, doc, you know. But we start talking about changing the diet.

Tom Butler: 51:36

Like oh no, no, I don't want to change my diet.

Wes Youngberg: 51:39

You know, don't do that to me, doc. Just give me a medication where I don't want to eat again.

Tom Butler: 51:46

Yeah, that's right.

Wes Youngberg: 51:48

That's right.

Tom Butler: 51:48

Well, we could get really sidetracked in that conversation, but now I'm not particularly fond of the label type 2 diabetes.

Wes Youngberg: 51:56

Sure.

Tom Butler: 51:57

And it seems like an old term that needs to be abandoned. And if we were going to abandon the term type 2 diabetes, what, in your practice, do you replace that with?

Wes Youngberg: 52:12

I like what you're saying, tom, because I'm not a fan of labels either. In fact, I tell people, you know, relative to everybody has a certain blood sugar level. I'm showing you like you're way over here. You know, like prior to 1997, tom, if your blood sugar fasting blood sugar was 135, you didn't have diabetes. You know now, if your blood sugar is 127, you have full-blown diabetes. Okay, so they changed the criteria. Now, the rationale for that was actually a good rationale, because, in other words, risk factors should be tied to concerns or consequences. So they're saying well, you don't really have diabetes until your fasting blood sugar goes above 140. That used to be the criteria.

Wes Youngberg: 53:08

The problem with that, tom, was that even before people came close to meeting the criteria, they already had the complications of the disease. They already were getting neuropathy that led to lack of sensation in the feet, and then they would hurt themselves without realizing it. They would become ulcerated and gangrenous. And boom, now you got to have an amputation or else you risk death. Same thing with nephropathy or kidney damage. Basically eye, basically eye damage. You know heart attacks, strokes, etc. All these things were occurring even before the definitive diagnosis of diabetes could be met, and so that's why the research just says we got to change the criteria so that at the upswing of pathology you know of diagnosed pathology, where that upswing occurs with blood sugars, correspond to pathology. That's where the diagnosis begins. And then they also came up with a criteria for pre-diabetes which was basically establishing that there's an early pathology here, still a pathology. It's still doubling your risk for a heart attack or stroke. Okay, but prior to 1997, there was no definition of pre-diabetes and so you know there was no concern if your fasting blood sugar was 100 or 110 or 115, because you were way under the criteria for diabetes.

Wes Youngberg: 54:49

So that's where I came up with the five stages of high blood sugar, along with Dr Brennerger from Loma Linda, and we published that with this five stages to a conference in 1997. It was a conference on dealing with diabetes throughout the life cycle. And another speaker at the conference, loma Linda, was the chief endocrinologist at Kaiser. He was in charge of the diabetes programs for all of Kaiser throughout Southern California and so he saw that five-stage program. He goes like, hey, wes, could I use this in Kaiser? I go like, yeah, you know, cdc grant funded man, go for it. And so he said thanks.

Wes Youngberg: 55:41

And so a year later we're speaking at another conference and he comes up to me, says Wes, I got to tell you, man, I presented this to all my endocrinologists. They love it. We're using it as a clinical tool to show patients where they're at, but we're also using it as a early diagnostic measure. You know, because it was five stages rather than one stage, right, so I lost track of him. He's probably retired long ago now, but it was neat to see that that was making an impact in other areas as well. And then since that time, we expanded it to 10 stages that include five stages of diabetes, all the way up to critical diabetes, looking at the A1C, the one-hour and the two-hour post-prandial or after-meal blood sugar levels. So people that use a continuous glucose monitor are willing to check themselves more often, can actually see what works and what doesn't.

Tom Butler: 56:37

Well, it's interesting, you know, my career kind of took me away from health promotion and education and my wife has been more connected to health information than I have been for most of our marriage. But I sure wish that my doctors had had a different understanding, because I started showing evidence of prediabetes years ago, started showing evidence of pre-diabetes years ago, you know, and what I would call metabolic dysfunction years ago. And they were waiting, you know, they were waiting for it to become an issue. I would have really appreciated for them to say this is an issue now, not, you know, once we see a you know seven A1C or something.

Wes Youngberg: 57:30

Yeah, very true, tom. In fact, as we discussed previously, what really impacted me is even all the way back in 1997, when the criteria changed, there was already evidence. This is almost 30 years ago. Well, no, yeah, yeah, almost 30 years ago. It was already evidence. This is almost 30 years ago. Well, no, yeah, yeah, almost 30 years ago.

Wes Youngberg: 57:48

It was already evidence then that before somebody actually meets the full criteria for pre-diabetes which is stage three on my scale of 10 stages of high blood sugars they already have lost over half the ability to produce insulin.

Wes Youngberg: 58:06

That's not lost forever necessarily. We now know studies have shown that that can be regained if we address the underlying cause of the problem. You know, to actually recognize that while you're still at stage two high blood sugar, which is even before you're diagnosed with prediabetes You've already created a dysfunction of 50% in your beta cell production of insulin. That's huge right, especially since it's so closely related to the same thing happening in your brain, where you're literally, in this case, losing memory cells at the tune of a thousand memory cells a day because of the same metabolic phenomenon, Because insulin resistance is the main driver, or the most common driver, of dementia, especially Alzheimer's type dementia. The beauty of this is to fix one thing. We're actually fixing many things. We're dramatically lessening whatever risk you and I have of developing dementia later on in life is dramatically impacted by optimizing insulin production in the pancreas and minimizing damage to those cells and optimizing the body's utilization of insulin properly.

Tom Butler: 59:33

One of the things that you and I have talked about and not that this is a consultation for me right now, but I don't think I'm unique in this is the role of environmental toxicity. Yeah, so I'm wondering if you could talk about is that a big factor? Is that a rare factor? What are you seeing?

Wes Youngberg: 59:57

I really do think it's a big factor. It's one of those, you know, unsung factors that can lead to a problem. It's just not, you know, know, we have almost blinders on. It. Took so long for the medical community to acknowledge that fundamental lifestyle factors like exercise, diet, sleep, stress management had a role in this. Right, rather than just looking for the magic bullet, you know, just take metformin or just take, you know, glipizide, or just take some insulin, fix your problem. You know why change your lifestyle when you can just take some medicine to correct your blood sugar? You know, I mean, I've had many patients not that were coming to me. You know, because patients, by the time they come to me, they're, you know, they're already converted before. You know, I'm not the one that converts them per se. They're seeking me out because they understand what I can possibly help them with. Okay, but there's this view that it took so long for the medical community to even acknowledge that you could reverse diabetes through these fundamental strategies that it's going to even take that much more time for the typical clinical clinician to become aware. Number one, and then acknowledge the benefit of addressing environmental toxins and how that relates to the two main problems with high blood sugar relates to the two main problems with high blood sugar. In other words, a body working properly should never have a high blood sugar, no matter what you do. Okay, so, in other words, something is pathologically wrong when the blood sugars go up.

Wes Youngberg: 1:01:40

So Dr Charles Brinegar, the diabetologist that worked with me for years and I worked with him, he would say, wes, you could drink a whole two liters of Pepsi and eat a gallon of ice cream, and your blood sugar should never go up above 120. Now I don't recommend that, right, because I think most of us would fail that test. But his point was is that if you need more insulin, you just give more insulin? That was kind of the mentality on how he was trained back in the 70s. You know, you just give more insulin. You know, if you got to give a thousand units of insulin, give a thousand units. You know, do whatever it takes to control the blood sugars.

Wes Youngberg: 1:02:25

Well, that is not acknowledging the cause of the problem, right? And so what first turned me into the impact of environmental toxins on things like diabetes, for instance, is an NHANES study, which was the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey that is done every 10 years along with the US Census and so during that census evaluation they would take individuals with diabetes large cohorts of people with diabetes throughout the United States, and do different tests on them, including, in this case, measuring the level of environmental toxins in their blood and correlating that with metabolic dysfunction like diabetes or prediabetes, etc. And what they discovered in those studies is that the level of toxins these are like environmental toxins in their blood of diabetics was way more strongly associated with level of metabolic dysfunction than any level of obesity or sedentary lifestyle, etc.

Tom Butler: 1:03:37

Wow.

Wes Youngberg: 1:03:38

So I remember when I first read that I go like, well, that doesn't make any sense. You know how can a toxin do that? You know I can visualize. If you eat too much food it's going to mess up the metabolism. If you don't get exercise enough, the cells are going to get fat and sassy and they don't want any more sugar. So they shut down. They become resistant to insulin. Now the pancreas has to make more and more insulin to try to bring down the blood sugar and that's a never ending battle that just messes people up.

Wes Youngberg: 1:04:07

So at first it didn't make sense to me, but then I started understanding that, the more I studied it, that toxins create free radical damage. Toxins destroy beta cells in the pancreas. Toxins along with low grade infections both of those cause autoimmune changes to occur which further damage the target cells involved I started piecing together an understanding that even low-grade toxins that are exposed to over time, long term, have a powerful influence on damaging the pancreas and on damaging the brain. So again to tie in with Alzheimer's, which I oftentimes refer to as diabetes of the brain, or diabetes, which I refer to as Alzheimer's or the pancreas, because it's a similar pathology.

Wes Youngberg: 1:05:06

So that's when I, you know, at first I didn't want to deal with toxicity issues. I didn't want to. You know, I didn't want to get into all that because that it just seemed it was outside of this my expertise and the scope of what I did. And I finally I finally realized, unless I actually become an expert in this, I'm not going to be successful with a large percentage of my patients, because that's always part of the problem. It's not necessarily the biggest part of the problem, but in some people it is. In some people it is a major driver of both dementia and heart disease and diabetes.

Tom Butler: 1:05:46

You've brought up a couple things here. One is diabetes, and the book Goodbye Diabetes was really released out there to bring your experience. And now you're talking about the issue of memory, and I think you have a book out there Memory Makeover. That's right.

Wes Youngberg: 1:06:07

Can you talk about it? Prevent Alzheimer's and Reverse Cognitive Decline.

Tom Butler: 1:06:11

Okay, and then you have another book called Hello Healthy.

Wes Youngberg: 1:06:14

Yeah, you know I struggled on how to name that book or put a title on that book. This is a book for 20-plus years I did a 12-week series of seminars for new patients. Okay, when I was working in the medical group construct which was most of my life except for the last 15 years where I've been private practice I'd have lots of doctors that were within the group referring people for diabetes or for stress management or depression anxiety. So I literally had four different 90-minute seminars going on every week. You know, one every day I would do and so we'd have like 20, 25 patients come in for a 90-minute group consult and they would come 12 weeks straight and I would have 12 different presentations that I would give that are clinically oriented towards what do you need to know to be successful in reversing your condition? Stuff that we don't have time to go over in every visit, right In every individual visit. So it's a way to accomplish a lot more than we could by just seeing patients one-on-one, and so I did that for like 20 years so maybe 30 years in my practice of Guam and with the Rancho Family Medical Group here in Temecula, and so I had a lot of data from those 12 presentations.

Wes Youngberg: 1:07:44

And so, after we published Goodbye Diabetes, my publishers, hey, we got to come up with a new book and I said, well, you know, let's go ahead and take these 12 lectures, 12 topics that everybody needs to know about, and put them into 12 separate chapters. And so we literally had everything that were in those lectures that we videotaped put into 12 chapters. And then I spent 500 hours, literally. I kept track. I spent 500 more hours adding the latest documentation to each of those categories that came up with. You know, it's like a 250 page book called Hello Healthy. In other words, six months from now, if you run into a friend you haven't seen for a while, they go like whoa, hello healthy, like what happened to you Last time I saw you, you didn't look this healthy. That was the mindset of calling it Hello Healthy, and there could have been a better title. I still don't know what that would have been, but it's basically all the 12 things you want to know to be able to optimize your health.

Tom Butler: 1:08:50

Well, I like the title because I think there's this element of goodbye diabetes, goodbye, you know, memory problems or whatever, but you still want to say hello, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Butler: 1:09:07

So let me ask you this, and this is, you know, a bit of imagining things. But if someone were to embrace, hello, healthy, and employ those things, let's say that all of a sudden everybody became serious about those things and pursuing a healthy lifestyle. About those things and pursuing a healthy lifestyle, how would you describe what could happen individually and as a society if that happened all of a sudden?

Wes Youngberg: 1:09:34

Well, I know a lot of people would be very, very upset and I say that in jest, but it's unfortunately true. You know, the big pharma would not be very happy at all To be serious here for a minute. This is one of the challenges that when you're dealing with the business mindset within medicine, which is very strong, there's a huge push to make medicine financially lucrative. If everybody started living really healthfully I mean, just think about all the specialties that deal with complications of disease, which is most medical specialties they would like be, you know, standing in line at the food line, right. And so now, I don't expect that ever to happen because, as a theoretical construct, there's always going to be people that need help. There's always going to be people that need help. There's always going to be people that are making bad decisions. You know, because we are human For a lot of reasons, we were either not paying attention or we are. We are willfully avoiding learning what we need to do and even when we know what to do, oftentimes it's difficult because there's temptations everywhere. But specifically to answer your question, tom, it would just dramatically revolutionize the health and longevity and the happiness, the peacefulness of our society. It would be amazing what would happen. You know, depression and anxiety would dramatically lessen. Violence would dramatically lessen.

Wes Youngberg: 1:11:11

There's actually studies that have been published. When you change the diet in prisons to a healthy, plant-based diet, or you just offer that as an option, it revolutionizes the mental thinking of the criminals. There's all kinds of studies that point this out that a lot of criminal behavior has to do with nutritional deficiency. That is more manifest. In other words, they're at greater risk for nutritional deficiency because of genetic mutations and other factors than the average person.

Wes Youngberg: 1:11:46

So if they just simply could have their nutrition optimized, that they would potentially at some point get to that tipping point where they're no longer thinking pathologically and I mean it's literally a revolution in thought and action and behavior. So that's just you know. I haven't even thought about that for a while, but there's good evidence of that. If we really take advantage of these fundamental principles and stop making decisions in corporate medicine that just you know are beneficial to the bottom line, right to the finances, and start just making decisions that might decrease money coming into us, but it would dramatically improve the prosperity of the population, of the common person. I could only imagine what would happen, but it would be amazing.

Tom Butler: 1:12:44

And I hope that we can march closer to that. I hope things happen with that and I just want to point out again, you know, thanks for the work that you've done, because I think that you have made a difference with providers and got providers thinking differently, got primary care providers thinking differently. You know that's part of what needs to happen to move forward.

Wes Youngberg: 1:13:12

So you know what we say, tom, you know. Standing on the shoulders of giants. You know, for me, my background in gymnastics is doing a handstand on the shoulders of giants. But everybody has a role here. You know, the more people that can participate in what I consider to be an exciting opportunity to dramatically impact people's health, the better.

Tom Butler: 1:13:39

Yeah, awesome.

Wes Youngberg: 1:13:40

I appreciate what you're doing with this podcast because hopefully that'll resonate with many people listening.

Tom Butler: 1:13:47

You know, for me I'm in this period of after 60, I'm really interested in this period between 55 and 80, maybe, where people are starting to realize there's something to do, starting to have that motivation. I'd be wonderful to get some of these things going, you know, when you're 25 or 20 or whatever. But I think, you know, 55 is maybe an interesting time when people start seeing things and it's like that 25 year period between 55 and 80, you know, if you make the changes, then it's going to make a huge difference.

Tom Butler: 1:14:21

So I'm really passionate about that now.

Wes Youngberg: 1:14:23

You know, you just reminded me of something, tom. This happened like 25 years ago. So I'm really passionate about that now. You know, you just reminded me of something, tom. This happened like 25 years ago. So I'm seeing a patient who had been referred to me and she was. I remember she was like 62 years old, younger than I am right now. I'm going on 65 this year.

Wes Youngberg: 1:14:42

You know, I was asking her what are your goals, what are your motivations? What are you here for? You know giving was asking her what are your goals, what are your motivations? What are you here for? You know, giving her a chance to express herself. And she says I don't know, you know.

Wes Youngberg: 1:14:56

And I said well, you know, there's a lot of things we can do that dramatically improve your health and your longevity. And she says oh, I don't want to live a year past six. She said, like 64. You pick 64 for some reason. And I looked at the chart. I go like that's only two years away, mary. And she says I know. So I said why do you say that? She says because I look at my relatives and my family. She says about the time they turn 63, 64, they just become a huge burden on the entire family. Okay, and you know I don't want to be a burden on my family. I don't want to basically go downhill and just feel bad and be trouble for the rest of my family.

Wes Youngberg: 1:15:42

You know, it kind of shocked me at the time and then I said well, mary, what would you think if I can show you things that you can do so that when you're 64, you actually are healthier than you were 15 years ago? Would you still want to die then? And she looked at me like she'd never actually thought of that possibility and she goes like well, not in that case. I go like well, that's what we're going to do, mary, I really believe that you can do this. That's what I do. I help people accomplish that and ultimately you will do it, but I'll guide that process. You know, I basically started showing her that you can dramatically reverse these conditions so that even when you're 75, 80, 85, you're actually doing better than when you were 55. That's really true.

Wes Youngberg: 1:16:38

We've always said 60 is the new 40, or whatever you want to call it, and of course that's. You know, my goal is that 65 is to do, you know, 45. That's what I want. You know, that's where I'm headed this year, and so you know and I got to be on point too, because if I don't pay attention to what I'm preaching, then I'm falling back you know, I'm getting closer to my biologic age, rather than I mean my chronological age versus a biologic age that's based on the choices that I make. So we have an opportunity to dramatically alter the aging process the way we normally think about it. We're on that journey together, tom.

Tom Butler: 1:17:19

Yeah Well, I think that's a perfect way to wrap this up. And, Dr Youngberg, I want to say thank you so much for for coming on the podcast. I knew this was going to be a great conversation. I've been looking forward to it for for quite a while, so thanks so much for joining me.

Wes Youngberg: 1:17:35

Hey, tom, it's always fun talking to you.

Tom Butler: 1:17:38

Well, maybe we can do it again sometime.

Wes Youngberg: 1:17:40

Yeah, absolutely.

Tom Butler: 1:17:41

All right, take care now.

Wes Youngberg: 1:17:42

All right.

Tom Butler: 1:17:51

Bye, all right, take care now. All right, bye-bye. There isn't much to add to that discussion. Hopefully you got the feel for Wes's deep knowledge of the impact of positive health choices. It has been said by numerous guests on the podcast that it is never too late to implement positive health habits. I hope all of you are seeing the results of the choices. That is never too late to implement positive health habits. I hope all of you are seeing the results of the choices that you are making and continue to learn new ways of building up your health. And remember age is just a gear change.