Ben Fuchs (3:48)

Oh, yeah, sure. Okay.

Maggie Stasik (3:50)

It burns hot. I remember reading about a fire in a sugar factory in Florida. It was a little small town, and they had to bring in fire engines from, like, towns all over the vicinity. And they couldn't put the fire out for four days because sugar burns so hot. It's very explosive. When we were kids, I never did this, but I saw kids do this. They would put sugar in people's gas tanks. You ever hear this?

Ben Fuchs (4:17)

Oh, no.

Maggie Stasik (4:17)

Yeah. And it would destroy the gas tank. Yeah. Because sugar is just explosive, sticky stuff. And keeping your blood sugar stable or low is very important. We have a hormone in the body that does just that, because through. From an evolutionary perspective, the body couldn't have high concentrations of sugar. And as soon as sugar levels reach a certain point in the blood, insulin comes to the rescue and pulls out the sugar for the blood to keep the. Keep the blood sugar low. Today we have a problem with insulin resistance, which is, you know, if not the most important health challenge that Americans have To deal with. It's right up there. Insulin resistance is when your body doesn't listen to insulin. And so instead of pulling the sugar out of the blood, the sugar levels stay high, and this leads to increased glycation, increased advanced glycase, glycosylated end products, and increased disease and shortened longevity. So glycation is a huge health issue. And keeping your sugar down through intake, through reducing intake, is the most important strategy for reducing glycation. You can also strengthen your insulin. That's another important strategy. And there's wonderful nutritional supplements, and there's certain nutritional supplements that everybody should be using, whether or not they've been diagnosed as a diabetic. Diabetes, by the way, is the disease of elevated blood sugar. That's the disease where your blood sugar stays elevated and keeping or insulin resistance. Your body not listening or cells not listening to insulin is one of the reasons that happens. Of course, the crazy amount of sugar that we eat also has an impact on elevated blood sugar. Just to give you kind of a visual. And if you're healthy, you have maybe a teaspoon or even less, three quarters of a teaspoonful of sugar in your. Your entire gallon of blood, or so it's not quite a gallon, but you have a little over a gallon of blood, a gallon of blood in your body. You have maybe a teaspoon of sugar a little less than a teaspoon. If you drink a Coke, you now have drank 12 teaspoons of sugar. Most of it's gonna go into your blood. If you have two Cokes, that's 24 teaspoonfuls. If you have a bowl of Cheerios or cereal with sugar on top of it, that's another six teaspoonfuls. If you have a Twinkie, that's another ten teaspoons of sugar. I mean, the amount of sugar that we're ingesting and putting into our bloodstream, that's only supposed to have one teaspoon of sugar in it, approximately. When you think about it in those terms, you could see why we have such a problem with elevated blood sugar and because insulin is constantly working, why the cells stop listening to insulin, and why we have to deal with insulin resistance. So keeping your sugar low, your intake of sugar low, is critical. And it's funny, because glycation, as significant as it is as a source of aging as well as cosmetic distress, because it's this a source of wrinkles and accelerated aging of the skin, it's kind of voluntary when you think about it. I mean, yeah, we're addicted to sugar and it's delicious and we need a certain amount of sugar, but it's not like somebody's forcing us to ingest sugar. It's kind of like a voluntary thing. So keeping your sugar down, as hard as that is ensure ingestion down, is really important. Strengthening your insulin is also very important. Luckily, there's great nutritional strategies you can use. For example, and this is for anybody who's pre diabetic. And just because you haven't been, you've been told you're not a diabetic, doesn't mean you don't have what's called dysglycemia. See, diabetes is a met is a diagnosis based on a metric. So if you have a blood sugar level of around 120mg of sugar per deciliter of blood, you're officially a diabetic. But if you're at 119.9999-9999, the doctor will say, oh, you're fine, you're okay. Which obviously is pretty silly. You know, the spec blood sugar issues.

Benjamin Fuchs (8:02)

Occur on a spectrum.

Maggie Stasik (8:04)

It's not just cut and dry. Sometimes it's a binary. So yeah, diabetes is binary. You either have it or you don't. But dysglycemia, dys meaning disturbances, glyce, meaning sugar emia in the blood, dysglycemia, disturbances in blood sugar, disturbances of sugar in the blood, that is a progressive issue. And even today they'll call it pre diabetes. So even if you haven't been diagnosed as a diabetic, you very well could be dysglycemic. And one of the best things you could do if you're dysglycemic and you want to keep your blood sugar down, drink water that will dilute your sugar. And anybody who's dysglycemic or has diabetes or pre diabetes will know that if they take their blood sugar, test their blood sugar in the morning, they'll find that their blood sugar concentration's higher because in the evening you've urinated a couple times, you sweated out, you haven't drank any water for six or eight hours. So your blood is concentrated and the sugar is concentrated, the blood sugar concentration is higher. Drinking water is a great way to dilute your blood sugar concentration. Also, building muscle muscle is one of the best ways you can sensitize your insulin. So people who are diabetic should be going to the gym or dysglycemic should be going to the gym. That's another way to lower your Blood sugar. And then there's incredibly valuable nutritional supplements for helping with glycation. When I say helping with glycation, I mean helping with helping with blood sugar, helping lower blood sugar. Chromium, vanadium, probably I don't want to say the best, but one of the best is vitamin B1, thiamine, vitamin B3, niacin, sulfur, selenium. These are all great ways to either potentize your insulin or to help your body handle sugar, also fiber with your meals. In fact, one of the problems with Glyca or with elevated blood sugar is a lot of us are ingesting sugar with no fiber. You know, Jamba juice and these fruit juices, horrible in terms of blood sugar because you're getting a big dose of sugar that goes right into your bloodstream without the fiber. So you gotta be careful about that as well. And then there's things that you can use topically to slow down glycation. Interestingly, retinol is one of the best topical anti glycating agents. And if you're concerned about topical glycation, retinol is something you want to consider also alpha hydroxy acids. And people don't think of alpha hydroxy acids or retinol as having anti glycating benefits, but they do. Niacin, Topical niacin has anti glycating benefits. High hyaluronic acid may have some topical anti glycating benefits as well. There's also a, it's a. I don't know if you'd call it an amino acid, but it's similar to amino acids called carnosine. Have you heard of this?

Ben Fuchs (10:39)

I have, yeah.

Maggie Stasik (10:40)

Yeah. Carnosine is a great anti glycating agent. Vitamin C is anti glycating. Vitamin E might be anti. Actually these are antioxidants which will support anti glycation. They're not directly anti glycating, but antioxidants will help. Sun protection will also help slow down glycation because heat speeds up the glycation process. So using sun protection, I like zinc oxide. There's a really interesting substance called aminoguanidine which you can't really find because it's got a some side effects that might help. And then peptides, there's certain peptides like arginine and lysine. Peptides may help you with these are, these are for topical application. They may help you protect against topical topical glycation. Also, while glycation of proteins is the most significant place where you have to worry about these advanced glycan end products, lipids and fats can also glycate. So if you your blood sugar's elevated, sebum will glycate and that can accelerate the rancidity of sebum, which can cause inflammatory issues in the follicle for folks who are dealing with acne. So glycation may impact acne patients. Using vitamin E can help protect your sebum. Using selenium can also help protect your sebum. And then also if your skin barrier is compromised, you may be more susceptible to glycation reactions to strengthening the skin barrier. Again, using retinoids or alpha hydroxy acids can help there and that can also help stabilize the formation of the barrier vis a vis helping support effective differentiation or maturation of skin cells as they're rising from the bottom to the top. But the absolute best way to avoid glycation issues? Keep your sugar down. And as I said earlier, nobody's forcing us to eat sugar. So it's almost like it's voluntary. Advanced glycation and product formation is almost voluntary in the sense that we have volition in controlling how much sugar we're putting into the body and ultimately how much glycation is going to occur.

Ben Fuchs (12:41)

That concludes our show for today, and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's rogue pharmacist, you can find him@truthtreatments.com for more information on this episode, or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs or to learn more about ascp, check out the show notes.