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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie Wells from wellnessmama.com. And this episode goes deep on understanding the topic of GLP-1, especially GLP-1 activation in the body and natural alternatives. As you might imagine, I have gotten a lot of questions about this recently, especially with the rise in popularity of injectable GLP-1 drugs. And I thought it was important to address this with someone who is in the research side of this. So I am here with Dr. Edward Walker, who is a scientist and lecturer who believes that developing a healthy relationship with food is key for long-term wellness. He completed his PhD at the University of Auckland on the antioxidant effects of berry fruits, and he has continued to research how dietary plant compounds can improve health and wellness. He works at New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research, undertaking commercially focused research on nutraceutical products for human health applications with a focus on clinical validation of lab-based result. Specifically, he’s doing research on GLP-1 activation. And we delve deep into this topic today, understanding what GLP-1 is, what it does in the body, the fact that it is naturally produced in the body, and what happens when we artificially alter that by taking these synthesized, standardized versions in injectable drugs, and the difference between injectable versions and what our body naturally makes, and the cyclical way that our body makes that versus the standardized levels that happen when we inject it. We talk about factors that impact the body’s production, theories on how these drugs might suppress the body’s natural production of GLP-1. We talk about his research with the New Zealand government, and specifically plant-based compounds that he’s helped identify and do research around that might be natural alternatives, specifically in women. I was very encouraged to hear that they did studies specific to women, and that the effects were actually greater in women. So, women were not included in scientific research until the 1990s and are still not included at the same rate in scientific studies because of hormonal variables. They did research specifically on females. And found a much greater effect of these natural plant compounds on women specifically. But we delve into all of that in this episode. So without any further wait, let’s jump in. Dr. Edward, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for being here today.
Dr. Edward: Well, thank you for having me.
Katie: I am really excited to delve into this topic with you because it is a topic I have not yet talked about on this podcast, but I’ve gotten a lot of questions about. And obviously, it’s something that is quite popular in the mainstream right now. And I hear a lot of people who are experimenting with various forms of things that address GLP. And I think this topic is an important one. And I think you have a very unique and important perspective on this. I would guess people have heard of these sort of like GLP-based drugs that are floating around. But I know, at least for me, I don’t have a deep understanding of what’s going on in the body, what we’re trying to change with these GLP drugs, and sort of what’s physiologically happening. So if you’re willing, I would love to start out broad and have you explain to us a baseline of what GLP is and what’s happening in the body when someone takes or injects something that affects it.
Dr. Edward: Yeah, absolutely. So what GLP-1 is, it’s a, well, every time we start, every time you have a meal, what happens is the food will go into your gut, your gastrointestinal tract, and your gut will send signals to your brain to tell you that the food is there and that essentially that you’re full and also how to deal with it. And there’s a series of hormones that are involved in that. But probably the most important one is a hormone called GLP-1. So what happens is you have your meal, and GLP-1 will be released from your gut just after your stomach and then your small intestine. And it goes to your brain, and it triggers appetite centers in the brain to suppress your hunger urges. It also will change how your body handles the sugar in it. So when you absorb sugar into your blood, GLP-1 also signals your pancreas to produce insulin to deal with the sugar.
And so what happened was around 20 years ago, they sort of discovered these hormones, these gut hormones, particularly GLP-1. And they found that it had a role in controlling appetite and blood glucose. Now, the challenge for the pharmaceutical industry is that these hormones are quite short-lived. So think about having a meal. You don’t want to have a meal and then be full for days. So they’re designed to only last for a few hours in your body.
So the pharmaceutical industry got this hormone and they modified it. So they changed the structure of it to stabilize it. And in the case of what you call semaglutide or what you’d know as Wegovy for weight loss, they stabilized it so it’s half-life, or how long it takes for half of it to break down in your blood, is one week. And that’s different from the natural GLP-1 your body produces when you have a meal, which half-life is two minutes. So they’ve stabilized it and made an artificial version of it.
And so what they’re really doing is these drugs are just using this natural system, but using a, I guess, a modified version of your hormone that has a very potent effect, but a very, I guess, what you call unphysiological effect. Because when you think about what happens when you have a meal, your GLP-1 goes up, suppresses your appetite, comes down again after a few hours, then it goes up again and comes down again. And then it’s totally flat-lined over the course of when you’re sleeping. If you take an injectable, because it’s so stabilized, it’s high in the morning, it’s high in the evening, it’s high at night, and it’s high when you’re sleeping. So you don’t go through that natural pattern anymore.
Katie: That’s fascinating. And to highlight what you just said, so GLP-1 is something our body naturally makes. This is not some like miracle thing that the drug industry found that we don’t already have. This is something our body is capable of making and that it does in a cyclical way. As you were explaining that, I wondered, are there other hormone implications when GLP-1 is maintained at a high level that wouldn’t be the way that our body naturally does it that can affect other hormones? Like, for instance, it comes to mind, I know I’ve seen some at least anecdotal data that people who are taking the injectables can also lose muscle. So they might lose weight, but they might be losing muscle as well. But are there other hormone effects that are happening within the body outside of just that GLP-1 pathway?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so I guess it’s a relatively new drug as far as, I mean, it’s been around for a few years now, but there’s a lot of data we still don’t know. When you talk about muscle loss, yeah, there are concerns that the GLP-1s may lead to increased levels of muscle loss, the GLP-1 injectables. Now, we don’t know if that’s because of increased GLP-1 action or because people are losing so much weight so rapidly on them so that the weight loss is too rapid to really sustain. And because the GLP-1 injectables are acting for so long that you’re suppressing your appetite too much and you’re just not getting the food you need.
As far as other hormone systems go, I mean, again, there’s a lot we don’t know, but we do know there’s effects on insulin levels, and your insulin sensitivity. And so that’s a change that you wouldn’t normally have. And there’s also potentially feedback systems into your own natural production of these hormones. So you can imagine if you are taking a large amount of what you call an external or an exogenous hormone, we call it, that wouldn’t normally suppress the levels of your natural hormone that you’re producing. So there’s a lot of potential interactions. And we’re only really starting to get an idea of, of what they might be and how they might affect people.
Katie: That makes sense. And you mentioned that GLP-1 is created by the body naturally in response to food. Do we know of any factors that impact the body’s way of producing that either in a positive or negative direction? For instance, I wonder if things like ultra-processed foods in the modern diet that are hyper palatable can interfere with the body’s natural response that we would have, or do we know of factors that influence the body in that way?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so that’s a great question. And unfortunately, it’s another case of we haven’t really done enough research on this. But what I believe personally is that we are in a state of having our natural GLP-1 suppressed. And the reason for that is we’re not getting the same kind of foods that we used to have. So we’re not getting particularly foods which are very bitter and foods which have, I guess, a more diverse array of plant compounds, as these may be implicated in stimulating your body to keep its natural GLP-1 levels higher.
Katie: Got it, well, I’m, I guess, excited that we’re doing research now in this world. But to me, it’s also concerning that we don’t understand completely all of these things yet. And people are so willingly injecting things that seemingly we don’t know the full effects of yet. I also know you come from sort of the research side of this. And I would love to hear your journey and experience in what led to this research and what you found in your research, because I think this is potentially a very helpful piece that doesn’t have some of the downsides that we see with the injectable ones. But for people who aren’t familiar with you already, can you explain your background and the research you did in this area?
Dr. Edward: So I’m a scientist. I work for the New Zealand government at the New Zealand Plant & Food Research. So in New Zealand we, the government funds, I guess, most of our primary, what we call primary research or academic research. And so I’ve spent the last, oh goodness, 15 years now looking for plant-based treatments for health, primarily focusing on the gastrointestinal tract, so your gut. And on the regulation of appetite by trying to trigger some of these natural hormones that come out of your gut every time you have a meal to suppress people’s appetite. My history is I did a PhD also in Auckland. And that was on the health effects of berry fruit. So really looking how things like blueberries and black currants, etc., can improve markers of health in people.
Katie: And that ties in with what you said a minute ago about we don’t consume things like bitter foods or a lot of these more natural compounds that would have been more prominent in our diets probably historically than in the modern diet, which we know kind of centers in certain highly palatable food groups. From researching for this episode, you also did a study, I don’t know if it’s released yet at the time of this episode airing, but specifically on GLP-1 activation in females. And most of our listeners are women and moms. So I would love to hear more about that study and what you found in your research.
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so it’s probably, for the researchers, it’s probably best to start at the beginning. There’s a little bit of a story, and that’s that work in females and women is the last one we’ve done. So we started the whole, I guess, the whole journey of looking for a natural sort of product to help manage food intake and reduce weight back in 2009. And we got a research grant, which was a $20 million six-year research grant, which is huge for scientific research. You usually don’t get that period of time. And we were looking at how bitterness may affect appetite in people.
And so the reason for doing that was twofold. One was because at the time we started, there were no sort of good real drugs available. So no good pharmaceuticals available for weight loss. There’d been a couple, which had recently been pulled from the market. So a product called sibutramine, which was a sort of a hype you up kind of almost like an amphetamine. So it would stimulate your body and suppress your appetite. And it was pulled from 2005 because it was associated with cardiovascular events, so things like heart attacks.
And there was another drug which had been pulled from the market. Never been sold in America, but it was sold in Europe, which again was quite an interesting one. It was essentially an anti-marijuana. So technically it was called an inverse agonist of the cannabinoid receptor. But essentially think anti-marijuana. So marijuana gives you the munchies. So this gave you the anti-munchies that made you feel full. But it also, probably unsurprisingly, it also made people depressed because marijuana makes people high. And so that was pulled from the market for increased rates of suicidal thoughts.
And what it really led to, the research team thinking about saying, well the way we’re going about trying to suppress people’s appetite is wrong. We’re trying to, you know, almost corrupt these systems in the body with external drugs and we’re focusing very much centrally, so that means getting something into the blood, getting it into the brain to have an effect. Why don’t we look at doing something a bit more natural and stimulating these hormones in your gut, which already tell you you’re full? They respond to food, and they tell you you’re full after a meal. Why don’t we find something that’s present in food that’s really good at stimulating these hormones?
And that’s sort of where the journey started 15 years ago. We looked at a few different ways of doing it, and we decided that targeting bitterness to the gastrointestinal tract was probably the best way of doing it. There are a few reasons for that, again, but primarily because bitterness had been used for thousands of years to regulate appetite in people. So if you look historically, there’s cultures which will use bitterness to suppress appetite during times of famine. That’s true in the Kalahari Desert. It’s true in the Highlands of Scotland. And there’s also the use of bitterness to regain an appetite all through ayurvedic and Chinese medicine. So we sort of started there and then we did a very, I guess, thorough research program looking at how we can develop a plant-based solution that triggers some of these natural gut hormones, including GLP-1.
Katie: That’s so fascinating. So this is essentially an alignment with the body’s natural production of these hormones in no way that we would have been able to get them throughout history. And that can sort of activate those same hormones, but in the cyclical nature that the body’s used to them in response to food and not like artificially pulling that lever and keeping it high, even while we’re trying to sleep, which I could only guess might have an impact on sleep. I would guess we don’t fully know yet, but it seems like it could.
I feel like the other important distinction here is that from my understanding, these are not injectable forms. And so I think that’s an easier barrier of entry for many people, but also probably less of a chance of the negatives that we could see from injectables that can’t be really mitigated once they’re injected. But can you explain how is this dosing and what kind of dosing did you guys use in the studies? What kind of results did you see?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, yeah. So that’s one of the really, I guess, interesting points about the injectables is when you look at how the drugs were developed right so you say okay, they’re developing a drug, they’re taking your natural hormone, and they’re stabilizing it and they know it needs to be injected so there’s not just a scientific question of what’s the best you know dosage to give them best timing. There’s also a question of how frequently can we ask people to inject themselves you And so when they designed these drugs, they designed, or they at least chose one, which was a weekly injection. And I couldn’t tell you exactly what the pharmaceutical companies were thinking. But if I had to guess, I’d say there’s probably some marketing there saying, well, we can get people to inject once a week, but we can’t get them to inject every six hours. So they’ve made a decision there.
So we’re very much different in that we’re boosting up the natural response. So when we developed the product, we basically looked through a thousand different plant extracts, and we found one which we thought was going to be really effective at stimulating GLP-1 in the body. We did that with laboratory screening, so we were in the lab looking at cells, how to stimulate GLP-1 from the body. We then ran a study where we got essentially looking what happens to your GLP-1 levels when we gave a hop extract. So that’s a really, really bitter hop extract targeted just past your stomach to where all these GLP-1 cells are in your body and to see how much we can stimulate your body to release.
So normally when you have a meal, and again, we’d give people a meal, and if they took a placebo pill, so the empty pill with nothing in it, they’d get about a threefold increase in GLP-1, and that increase would last several hours. When we gave them this really, really potently bitter hop extract, we’d get a six-fold increase in GLP-1, and that would last around four hours, possibly a little bit longer. So we were able to show that we could boost GLP-1 levels up and not in a really unphysiological way, but boost up that natural response. So it’s still within a normal range, but it’s just at the top end of your normal range, and it’s lasting longer as well. So you can imagine that physiological process you get where your GLP-1 goes up and goes down, you’re still getting that when you’re taking this hop extract that’s just extended a little bit and raised a bit and still coming down again and still resetting at night.
So we did that study, and that was really, really interesting. We were doing dosing an hour before a meal. So you’re taking this bitter hop pill an hour before a meal, and it was allowing it to get to the right part of the gut to stimulate these hormones.
Katie: And I’m curious, I would guess we don’t have studies on this yet, but with the injectable ones that are artificially changing your body’s response, do we know what happens when people stop using them? Or like, is there a way to taper off of them? Do we have any data on that yet?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so what we know from the studies on the pharmaceuticals is that, and this was published in, I believe, The Lancet, which is one of the sort of really top journals, is that over, I think it was a 68-week weight loss program, people would lose 17% of their body weight, which is a very large weight loss. It’s highly effective compared to the placebo, which was sort of, I think, about 4%. Now, if they then stopped, they regain two-thirds of that weight in the next year. So there’s a big regain of weight that occurs.
And I think that’s a real challenge for people because what it’s saying is it’s saying, well, if you stop this injectable treatment, you have, pretty much most of your weight will come back within a year and probably all of it will come back within a few years, although we haven’t got data that far out. So we’re not quite sure why that’s happening. What I believe is happening is that those treatments have suppressed your natural GLP-1 and other hormones. And so, so part of what, one of the things we’re interested in is can you use a natural GLP-1 stimulator like the hop extract to boost up your body’s ability to produce GLP-1 and keep that weight off after you’ve gone off the injectable treatment. So imagine someone’s on the injectable treatment and they stop. Can you put them onto something like this hop extract and keep their weight off?
Katie: Yeah, that’s an interesting question because from a business model perspective, I can see the wisdom from the pharmaceutical industry of getting someone to take these injectables. And then now you have a subscription business model essentially, because in order for it to maintain, they have to keep taking it. So that’s interesting that you guys looked into, can this be used, this natural plant compound to help people taper off of that? Totally like my theory, but I suspect we’ll eventually see something called like some semaglutide syndrome or something where people have negative effects, especially when they try to come off of them or just negative effects down the road in general. So I love that there’s a natural alternative and that it might even have potential, like you were saying, in helping people taper off the injectables.
Dr. Edward: Yeah, and certainly the doctors and the medical practitioners who are using it, they’re using this bitter hop product three ways. So they’re using it as, I guess, an alternative for semaglutide. So for someone who’s not suitable for the injectable, doesn’t want to take what’s a very strong pharmaceutical, or has some sort of contraindication, doesn’t like injections, etc. So as an alternative.
There are doctors who are using it as a tapering off process. So they’ve had someone on a semaglutide. They come off the semaglutide and they go on to the hop extract, the bitter hop extract to stimulate all their natural hormones again and to help maintain that body weight loss. And then the third way it’s being used is they’re using it in combination as well. So what they’re doing is they’re saying, well can we reduce the amount of injectable semaglutide or injectable GLP-1 we give to people and give them some of this hop extract as well? So we’re boosting up some of your body’s natural appetite suppressing hormones, probably keeping your body producing its own GLP-1 and reducing the need for such a high amount of the drug.
Katie: Okay, that makes sense. I’d love to hear more about sort of like the dosage you mentioned in the use cases, but the dosage and are there any side effects to this hop-based one versus the injectables or like what have you guys found anything in the risk profile?
Dr. Edward: Yeah. So the dosage is, it needs a little bit of optimization, but the way it works is because you want to get the pill past your stomach into your small intestine, where it will open and trigger these hormones, it’s best to take it on an empty stomach, or relatively empty stomach. And it’s best to take it an hour or so before a meal, or an hour or so before you suffer from cravings. So if you’re someone who gets late-night cravings for sweet food, if you take it, say, 11 o’clock, say, just before you go to bed, as an example, if you take it at 9:30 or 10, you can kill those cravings.
So what we do is we recommend a, what you call a titration or dosing up over time. And you can do it usually over just a few days. And this is really just to figure out where your sensitivity lies. So just with taste, people are differently sensitive to levels of bitterness and some people won’t like bitter food at all and some people don’t mind it. Your gut is the same. So some people respond more strongly than others. So we start off taking one capsule a day, usually before your main meal. And then we increase it to two capsules a day before your two main meals. So just one before, say, your lunch and one before your dinner. And then you can go up to four capsules a day. And you can take them really any time your stomach is empty. But we recommend to start with that you take two before your first main meal and two before your second main meal of the day. And it just extends out how full you feel from that meal and stops you from snacking at the end.
Katie: Are there any contraindications to that? Especially, I know some people listening might be pregnant and breastfeeding. Are there times when you don’t recommend taking even these plant-based ones?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so I mean, there’s been no studies done on pregnant and breastfeeding women. So I guess there’s always a question mark there. What we do know is that the extract is, or the hop extract, most of it stays in your gut. So only a small amount is absorbed into the blood, which means that it’s probably relatively safe for breastfeeding. We also know that from similar hop compounds, they don’t make it into breast milk. So the answer there is we’re doing more research and we’ll know for sure in the future. But right now, that’s not a big concern. As far as pregnancy goes, I’d always consult with a medical practitioner about that.
Contraindications, because it’s a gut target, so it targets your gastrointestinal tract or your gut. So if you have a really major gut condition, something like inflammatory bowel disease, so Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, then that’s something you really have to consider. And I would recommend talking to your gastroenterologist about that. If you’ve had bowel resectioning done, so if you’ve had, say, parts of your intestine removed or a bypass surgery done, a gastric bypass surgery, then it’s not that it won’t work, but the information on dosage and timing is probably not suitable for you. And there’d need to be a little bit of optimization. So you’d need to look at changing the timings. Your stomach is likely to empty a lot faster if you had gastric sleeving done, which means your timing before a meal might need to be altered. And you also might be more sensitive as well. So there’s a little bit of tweaking around there.
As far as other contraindications go, they really relate to the potential side effects. So this product is mostly side effect free. So we see most people in the clinical trials don’t have any side effects at all. If you are going to get side effects. there’s really two that come out. The first one is a gastrointestinal flushing, which usually happens in the first few days when you take it and goes away. And that’s really what’s happening is your body is sort of, it’s almost like a detox, right? So you’re, and it really is a flush. Because of that, if you’ve got IBS, so irritable bowel syndrome, and it’s diarrhea predominant, because the most likely symptom is side effect is really increased, is diarrhea or increased bowel motility and water in your stool, that’s something to consider. It’s not a hard no for taking it, but it’s just something you need to be aware of.
The other side effect that some people get is a little bit of bloating in the stomach, right? A little bit of bloating. And that’s usually because the pill has opened in the stomach and not in the small intestine past the stomach. And so you can get rid of that by tweaking your timing or lowering your dose. So we see those side effects in around sort of 5% of people who take it, and for the majority of people, it goes away.
Katie: And I know also that obesity is on the rise even in children in today’s world. I know this is probably in the category of ask your doctor, but can older kids and teens take this? I’m obviously under the oversight of a doctor.
Dr. Edward: Yeah, so it’s a great question. And so obesity in adolescents and children is a really major concern. And so in New Zealand, we have obesity rates in children accelerating at sort of, I think, four times the rate that they’re going up in adults. And so, and if you’re obese as a child or an adolescent, your chance of being obese as an adult is virtually 100%. So it’s really important to tackle that obesity issue early on.
Now, can you take this product as a child or an adolescent? The answer to that is, again, you need to talk to your doctor. However, there’s no reason to believe that you couldn’t. So there’s no, there’s no particular reason why it either wouldn’t be effective or would be dangerous in children or adolescents.
Katie: And then to circle back to the initial part of this conversation, you said there could be some impact of the modern diet and the reason we’re not potentially making as much GLP-1 as we’re meant to. Are there any other lifestyle factors people can do sort of complementary to taking these plant compounds that can help the process? I would guess some of the basics that come up for, in general, metabolic health, like the right amount of light exposure at the right times of day, eating enough protein, eating enough fiber, that those things could all be involved. But has the research indicated any other things we can do that are helpful?
Dr. Edward: Yes, so it’s really early stages in the research. I mean, apart from taking something like this hop extract, so we call it a marasate, but it’s sold in a product called Calocurb. You can take that, and we believe that that will be boosting up not just your response to a meal, but also your natural level, so your capacity to respond. And we’re doing a study now that we’ll get information about that on. Like you said, fiber, yep. So there’s certainly data that shows that fiber will increase the amount of your GLP-1 producing cells in your body. And just general, all the good health advice you talk about, so I’m sure that diet and exercise, but really a diverse array of foods, I think is important.
Katie: Oh, yeah, good point. I feel like that’s not talked about enough and how diverse our diets used to be compared to how now they are like almost entirely just a few small categories of foods and how just even small shifts there seemingly through gut changes and many other changes in the body can be so helpful. Is there anything else related to this topic in general that we haven’t talked about that you feel like is important for people to understand, especially women and moms to understand?
Dr. Edward: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think if we if we go right back to the, actually to the thing you think you asked me right at the start, which was the study on females, is that I think that this product is I mean, it’s good for it’s good for guys, but it’s particularly good for females. And the reason for that is twofold. Firstly, is that there’s data to suggest that females are more sensitive to GLP-1 than guys are. So what that means is if you’re stimulating GLP-1, you can get a stronger appetite suppression from it. And we see that in the data with injectables as well, the pharmaceuticals. They have a stronger effect in females than in males.
The second factor is that females are more responsive to bitterness. So you talk about on the tongue, females tend to taste it more. But they’re also more sensitive to the appetite-suppressing effects of bitterness in the gut. And so in the study, which we’ve just recently done on females, we saw effects that were much greater than what we’d seen previously in males for suppression of appetite and reduction in food cravings. And I think that’s really, really important.
I’d also like to say that, I mean, I think that there’s one thing that I’m quite proud about with this product is that we did do a study on females because a lot of the time what will happen is that you’ll do all your research in men. And the reason for people to research in men is because you don’t have to deal with menstrual cycles. And just as an example, we ran two studies, so one in males, one in females, and they were 24-hour water-only fasting trials. So the idea was that we were basically getting people really hungry, and we were seeing if we could then suppress that hunger. So not just I’m a little bit hungry, but a real sense of making people almost starving.
And so what we did first was we did the study in guys and we monitored them over the last eight hours of a 24-hour fast. So they meet for 16 hours. They came into the laboratory. We gave them the hops extract capsule at 16 hours and 20 hours into the fast versus a placebo or a placebo capsule. And we watched how their hunger would change. And they had about a 20% reduction in hunger. And that’s quite big. So that’s definitely something they would notice.
We then did the study in females. And because it was done in females, we needed to sync the menstrual cycle. So what that meant is when they came in for the study, they had to come in on the same day of the menstrual cycle three times to take different doses of the capsule and also the placebo. And so the study took, I mean, sort of probably four times as long, more than the guy’s study. But what we found was that the female group had a decrease in hunger of 30% to 40%. So it was much greater in the females than in the males.
They also had a very large reduction in craving for food. So that craving for food value, so they were craving for food at 16 hours. They were actually craving for food less at 24 hours into the fast. So the capsules had reduced their craving for food below what the baseline level was. And so that’s huge.
And they didn’t just have these feelings, they actually acted on them. So when we gave them an eat till you’re full meal at the end of the 24-hour fast, they ate 14% less food. And then after that meal, they had to reduce craving for sugary food. So you think, okay, you’ve had your meal, you eat less food. But not only do you eat less food, you’re also craving less for dessert-type foods at the end of that. So we got these amazing results in females. So I guess relating the product back to female health, it’s more effective for females and males. And we’ve got just amazing results on that.
Katie: Well, that’s so encouraging for several reasons. And kudos to you for doing a study specific to females, because as you mentioned, I know women were largely or entirely excluded from scientific research until I believe it was 1993. And so I love seeing people actually doing research specific to women. It’s also really encouraging to me that women actually saw a bigger effect because it seems like in many areas, the opposite is true. Women will see a lesser effect or even in simple things like I have a workout group, it’s mostly guys and I am able to build muscle differently than men. They seem to respond more quickly to workout stimuli and that kind of thing. So it’s very encouraging to me that this is actually specifically helpful for women and that the effect is actually greater in women and that you included that in the research. I think it’s always very encouraging to see that. And I’m so grateful that you guys took the time and the extra effort to specifically look at it in women.
And like I said at the beginning of this episode, I think this is such an important topic because we know obesity is on the rise. I totally can understand the willingness of people to want to look for that sort of silver bullet injectable solution. But like you said, we don’t fully understand the long-term effects of that yet. And so I’m really grateful that you’re looking at plant compounds that have been in the human diet throughout history and their ability to impact that in a way that lines up with our physiology without hopefully the downsides that we might see from the injectable forms. Just such a fascinating concept.
I’ll of course linked to the compound we’ve been talking about and the product that it’s available in in the show notes, I believe there’s a discount for Wellness Mama for that product specifically. And the link is calocurb.com/wellnessmama for you guys listening. But that link will be in the show notes. Dr. Edward, any final thoughts related to this topic that you want to leave with the audience today?
Dr. Edward: Yeah, I think that there’s two things there. One is that as a scientist, I’ve been amazingly lucky to be involved in the development of this. So it’s not often in a scientific career that you get to go from here’s an idea all the way through doing all the basic research through to a product and then seeing the product, helping people and getting feedback saying, look, you know, I’ve taken this. It’s amazing. I’ve struggled with my food choices and my weight my whole life. Nothing’s worked. And then I found this and it was just incredible for me. So that’s been really rewarding.
And also on the topic of women’s health, we’re not going to stop with just one study. So we’re going forward and doing more. Hopefully next year we’ll be kicking off a study on post-menopausal women and looking at how we can prevent weight gain around the abdomen. So yes, I think that ongoing there’s a scientific commitment to really keep focusing on women’s health and make sure that we don’t exclude them on work going forward.
Katie: Well, that’s very exciting as well. I’ll have to follow your work and I hope to hear updates about that. And unrelated, but final question, in researching for this in your fun facts that I do as a preliminary for this interview, I found that you have a 10-foot transformer robot, and I would just love to hear how that came to be.
Dr. Edward: So, I mean, you may be aware of this, but secretly all men are 12 years old. And so some people try to hide that 12-year-oldness, but I’ve embraced it. And so what I did was I bought a giant man cave for all of my friends to play with cars and do man stuff. And we thought, well, what can we fill it with? And I was on the local auction site, and there was sort of a 10-foot-tall Bumblebee Transformer that was being sold from a car yard. And so they used to have it, and it was sold. And so I was like, oh, it’s made of car parts. That would be perfect for the man cave. So we’ve bought it, and it sits as the entrance to the man cave, and when people walk in it, it has a little sensor, and it detects them, and it says things to them. So it’s all its lights, flash, and stuff. The kids who come around love it, but yeah, it’s quite a bit of fun.
Katie: That’s so fun. And probably the only guest I’ve interviewed who has a transformer robot. But jokes aside, I’m so grateful for the research you’re doing specifically on women and for your time and being here today. I know you’re very busy and I’m so grateful for everything you’ve shared. Thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Edward: Well, thank you for having me.
Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable assets, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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