Open Forum in The Villages, Florida
This weekly podcast will cover in detail, people, clubs and activities here in The Villages, Florida. Each show will run 10-30 minutes. Become a Supporter of this show for $3/month. Supporters will have access to all episodes. Our newest Supporters will get a Shout-out during a show.
Open Forum in The Villages, Florida
The Power of Barley and Oats: William Shang, MD on Lowering Blood Sugar and Triglycerides
Is your health a priority? Need solid advice on how to keep your blood sugar levels in check and shed those extra pounds? Look no further! We're bringing you a fascinating discussion with the acclaimed author, William Shang, MD. His book, "The Thin Prediabetic: A Plant-Based Approach," have been great game changers. In our chat, he highlights the crucial role of plant-based supplements and fiber in maintaining blood sugar levels and weight loss. He'll reveal a study that illustrates how whole barley can significantly lower blood sugar, triglycerides, and LDL. Plus, we'll discuss the effect of stomach bypass surgery on blood glucose levels.
But wait, there's more! We're also thrilled to share about the remarkable mission of Dr. Craig Curtis, who has devoted his career to teaching the community how to live healthier, longer lives. Interested in Alzheimer's prevention tips or eager to learn more about community health? Dr. Curtis has got you covered! Check out his website and don't miss his free seminars. As a bonus, we're excited to announce upcoming episodes featuring Dr. Curtis himself. Join us on this journey towards improved health, and if you know someone who would make a great guest on the show, let us know. We thank you for being a part of our community!
Open Forum in The Villages, Florida is Produced & Directed by Mike Roth
A new episode will be released most Fridays at 9 AM
Direct all questions and comments to mike@rothvoice.com
If you know a Villager who should appear on the show, please contact us at: mike@rothvoice.com
Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to give perspectives of what is happening here in the villages Florida. We hope to add a new episode most Fridays at 9am. Our host, mike Roth, has been a Villages resident since 2017. He is the leader of three lifestyle clubs and created a fourth. Mike joined 20 clubs in the first year he was here in the villages. Mike is a strong leader. Before coming to The Villages, mike was a successful business leader and had a successful podcast in Cincinnati called Cincinnati Business Talk. That shows 300 episodes are still available and has over 90,000 lessons. Mike is an instructor at the Villages Enrichment Academy teaching podcasting 101 for beginners. This podcast is a listener supported podcast. You can become a supporter for as little as $3 per month or you can choose to pay more. To become a supporter, go to Open Forum in the villagesflorida. com and click on support in the black box. There will be shoutouts for supporters in episodes. As a supporter, you will get a direct email link to Mike.
Emily:In our new season 5, we are making significant improvements and changes on an ongoing basis. First is our new and better logo upgrades and recording equipment to allow easy access for remote guests. Second is a continuing increase in the use of AI in the creation of each episode. These include a transcript of each show. Please understand that there may be errors inserted by the AI that may not be caught before the transcript is published. However, this is a dramatic step forward. In fact, all the show's announcers are now all AI voices, including me. Emily Open Forum in the Villages, flora, that has been publishing new episodes on YouTube for the last several months. If you have a book that you would like to turn into an audiobook, let us know via email to mike at rothvoice dot com. Hope you enjoy today's show.
Mike Roth:This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages. Welcome to season number five. I'm here today with Dr William Shang. I have two books right, we hope.
Dr. William Shang:What's the name of the second book? The second book? It has this title called the Thin Prediabetic, which I wish I probably should rewrite the contents then, because I was thinking about somebody who has a high glucose level and they go to their doctor and the doctor would say, well, I can put you on metformin or you can lose weight. Oh, you don't need to lose weight. Then what can they do? But most of the book actually has to do with these plants and other supplements that might work.
Mike Roth:Mm-hmm, and is the easiest way to find it, by saying prediabetic.
Dr. William Shang:Oh, the thin Pre-diabetic, "The Thin Pre-diabetic.
Mike Roth:Mm-hmm. Are there any other plant-based herbals that you mentioned in the book that are of significance?
Dr. William Shang:Absolutely. Let's talk about fiber. Okay, silium husk, silium husk that's one type of fiber. What is interesting is that there's different types of fiber. There's three different subcategories of fiber.
Mike Roth:Three different subcategories.
Dr. William Shang:Right. So in other words, the one that comes to mind is soluble, in other words, it dissolves in water.
Mike Roth:Mm-hmm Okay.
Dr. William Shang:Another one is it forms mucus, mm-hmm. Okay. And the third one is that it's edible by our bacteria, in other words, our bacteria will digest it. And those three categories.
Mike Roth:Yeah.
Dr. William Shang:Those three categories will help you figure out which fiber is best for you. So how would you do that? How would you do that? These studies have been done. It's just not. This is actually an American study. It was done by a cereal company.
Dr. Darig Curtis:Mm-hmm.
Dr. William Shang:And they wanted to see whether certain cereals increased GLP1. This is the weight loss drugs we're talking about, right? So GLP1 is the one that, like Wigovi and Ozempic and all these super expensive drugs $1,000 a month. That's right.
Mike Roth:Quite a disincentive for most people not to take it Right.
Dr. William Shang:So this cereal company, the original research and said what cereals can we eat that will increase GLP1? Great, and one of them that was well studied is whole barley. Whole barley, yeah, really yeah.
Mike Roth:So you don't see that around too often.
Dr. William Shang:No, you don't see it too often. You can order it on the internet. Mm-hmm, whole barley will decrease blood sugar. And it will also decrease triglycerides and LDL.
Mike Roth:Mm-hmm. So someone who eats more barley is likely to lose some weight.
Dr. William Shang:Absolutely Okay, especially if you substitute that for rice or starch. So, in other words, let me back up a little bit. Years ago there was a study that was done.
Mike Roth:You know that they did the bypass, the stomach bypass surgery In which, oh yeah, there was a lot of them, and when it first came out, one of my clients, whose dad was a doctor, was making some tremendous claims that it would reverse diabetes if you had the stomach bypass.
Dr. William Shang:Yeah, it was well. Those surgeons are really hurting nowadays. It's going to be what? Oh, so let me, so I'll tell you the story. So, basically, what they do is they take the outlet of the stomach in one of these type surgeries and they reroute it downstream in the intestines.
Mike Roth:Mm-hmm.
Dr. William Shang:So the outflow from the stomach doesn't go to the duodenum, it goes a little further downstream. Now, what was really interesting about this study is that the blood glucose improved before the person lost weight, and so it was like how is this possible? They're supposed to lose weight first and then blood glucose improves, right? But all we did was rerouted the plumbing as the blood glucose improved, and that was the impetus to discover GLP1. What was happening was when we eat highly processed food, it gets absorbed by the body very quickly. Now, as you know, our intestines is very, very long.
Mike Roth:Yeah.
Dr. William Shang:That's because we're eating. Our ancestors ate this diet, which was a lot of roughage and it took a long time to digest. What's happening is that when we eat highly processed food, it gets absorbed upstream quickly. All the digestion that's supposed to happen for the entire length is getting very much shortened, and so our body is not producing that much GLP1. So when they rerouted the intestines, what happened was that segment, in conjunction with the bacteria of that neighborhood, was cranking out the GLP1. And therefore they were improving their blood sugar and they were losing weight.
Mike Roth:That makes a strange recommendation for a certain operation.
Dr. William Shang:Right. But the good news is that you can do the same thing. You can raise your GLP1 levels by substituting cold barley or, if you like, if you can only get your hands on the cold barley for the standard starches, how much, how much? So the studies were done with half a cup of cooked barley with the meals.
Mike Roth:Once a day.
Dr. William Shang:So if you had lunch and dinner, for example, you take a half cup of this cooked barley before you eat lunch and same with dinner. Oh, that's interesting. Are you doing that?
Mike Roth:personally, I don't eat rice because you said barley is a substitute for rice, that's right, so I substitute barley for rice.
Dr. William Shang:I don't eat rice, okay.
Mike Roth:Well, if I went to my nearest Chinese restaurant and said, hey, hold the fried rice, give me a cup of barley instead, they're going to look at me like I'm nuts, right.
Dr. William Shang:Do you know where the fastest growing diabetes population is in the world?
Mike Roth:You're going to say China.
Dr. William Shang:It is China, really, yeah, it's because it wasn't that long ago. It was two generations ago that people started eating processed rice before they ate brown rice or minimally processed rice, because they didn't have the machinery to do it. It's the processing that removes the husk that makes it diabetic or causing diabetes. The white rice, the white rice, it's just like processed white flour versus eating whole grain.
Mike Roth:Okay, when you talked about the cereal companies trying to create a healthy cereal, I thought for sure you were going to talk about oats. There are so many cereal companies promoting oats in their cereal or Quaker oats. Not that there's anything wrong with Quaker oats Even I have a bowl of that once a week or so but does oats really work as a dietary supplement?
Dr. William Shang:They do. Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. Oat bran is in the same category as barley Barley bran. They have all three characteristics they're soluble, they produce mucus and they're fermentable. They're digestible by the bacteria, and so those two particular, I think, are something that your audience might want to think about. Let me just add a caveat to that it's not instant oatmeal, okay.
Mike Roth:So quick erodes the traditional, old-fashioned one that you have to cook up in a pot for 20 minutes. You can microwave it for three, but yeah, okay, my wife doesn't particularly, she wants it in a pot. Is there a difference between that from a health perspective and the steel cut oatmeal?
Dr. William Shang:It's the degree of tumbling and processing. I think that you can get most of the way there with steel cut or old-fashioned.
Mike Roth:Just the instant has just been cooked already and so it's hard to find, especially the instant without flavor and so you're saying it's either the steel cut or the traditional oatmeal Right and other cereals that I've added to them are good.
Dr. William Shang:Depends. It mainly has to do with how highly processed it is and whether there's added sugar. The World Health Organization came out with a sugar recommendation of 30 grams. 30 grams a day, it's very low.
Mike Roth:So 30 grams would be how much of a teaspoon.
Dr. William Shang:I believe one teaspoon is four grams, so it's seven teaspoons If I'm not mistaken. I probably need to double check that.
Mike Roth:Okay, so in medieval Europe or England, they said they had equal to one tablespoon of sugar per day.
Dr. William Shang:Let me put it this way If you have one can of coke, you're done.
Mike Roth:You're done for the day. That's how much sugar it is. I don't drink coke anymore, so I guess I'm okay.
Dr. William Shang:Good for you. I think for many people getting rid of the sugar in the drink or something sweet in the drink is very, very hard. And what happens with sugar and those type of sugary foods is that you get this kind of rebound effect. That right, it goes up and down and that.
Mike Roth:I was going to say high and then crash. That's right, that's what happens to me.
Dr. William Shang:Right, there's a term. It's called "Hangry. Have you heard about that Hangry? No, it's hungry and angry at the same time.
Mike Roth:And that's what happens when you're out of sugar.
Dr. William Shang:That's right. We need another hit, that's right.
Mike Roth:Give me a candy ball. I can appreciate that. I've walked through airports and stopped at the candy counter and picked up a Hershey's or an Amonjoy. It calmed me down a lot. So before we go, Dr Shang, are there any less pieces of information that you think our listeners should have?
Dr. William Shang:Let's see. We talked about fiber. I'll leave you with this. This is an interesting story. When I went to medical school, there was a group of Indians in Arizona that called the Pima Indians, and the Pima Indians were said to have the highest genetic level of type 2 diabetes in the world. It's about 30%. Wow, and we were taught that it was genetic.
Dr. Darig Curtis:Okay.
Dr. William Shang:So now that I don't have to necessarily believe everything, I'm told I couldn't research this and it turns out that the Pima Indians, when they had the settlers move into the area, the settlers diverted the Gila River.
Mike Roth:And the.
Dr. William Shang:Pima Indians had to change their lifestyle. They were normally eating corn, squash beans. Then they nearly starved to death until the US government came in and said well, don't worry, we'll save you by giving you this food. And it was all pre-processed food. And so the Pima Indians no longer farmed, they no longer had the daily glers, and they eat this.
Mike Roth:They lost the exercise component.
Dr. William Shang:They lost the exercise component and they got all this food that was packaged that would last for a long period of time, and so they had this very high level of diabetes by the 1930s. What subsequently was found is that there's another tribe, the Pima Indians, except they're not American, they're Mexican Indian. Okay, genetically the same.
Mike Roth:Okay.
Dr. William Shang:Except they didn't have that unfortunate set of events happen to them.
Mike Roth:So they didn't get the processed food.
Dr. William Shang:That's right. They didn't get the processed food, they kept their lifestyle, and their diabetes is a fraction, it's about 5%, not 30%, and so I think that's what I want to leave with your listeners is that there are things that you can do. It's lifestyle dependent, it's exercise dependent. These are things that, in your power to change at the most basic level, that will do much more for you than medication. And now we're in a stage in our lives we're in control over our time, we can control our destiny, as it were, and there's no other better time in our life we don't have to punch a clock.
Mike Roth:I appreciate that and again, titles.
Dr. William Shang:The two books that are available on Amazon are oh, the first program fight insulin resistance with strange training. And the second is the thin pre-diabetic.
Mike Roth:The thin pre-diabetic that's available on Amazon. All right, thank you very much, dr Shen for being with us.
Dr. William Shang:Thank you for having me.
Mike Roth:And let's take a quick break here and listen to a Alzheimer's tip from Dr Craig Curtis. Dr Curtis, I've heard that exercise can help your brain. What type of exercises should people be doing?
Dr. Darig Curtis:Well, the good news is it doesn't take a lot of heavy exercise to make the brain healthier. Right now, the US government recommends approximately 150 minutes per week. So 30 minutes, five days a week, of a moderate intensity exercise such as walking. So something as simple as walking 30 minutes a day, five days a week, can improve your brain health. Dr Curtis's goal is to educate the village's community on how to live a longer, healthier life. To learn more, visit his website, craigcurtismd. com or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar.
Emily:Remember our next episode will be released next Friday at 9am. Should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions, please contact us at mikeatrothvoice. com. This is a shout out for supporters Greg Panjian, Tweet Coleman, Dan Kapellan, ed Williams, Alvin Stenzel and major supporter Dr Craig Curtis at K2 in the villages. We will be hearing more from Dr Curtis with short Alzheimer's tips each week. If you know someone who should be on the show, contact us at mikeatrothvoice. com. We thank everyone for listening to the show. The content of the show is copyrighted by Rothvoice 2023, all rights reserved.