207: Taking Your Health to the Next Level (with Josh Clemente of Levels)
Episode introduction
Josh Clemente, co-founder of metabolic health company Levels, felt fatigued, shaky, unwell. Little did he know, he was on the precipice of pre-diabetes. The thing that brought him back: a continuous glucose monitor. Now Josh and his team are making this tool available for anyone who wants to improve their health and prevent disease. Josh joined Austin Peek on Millionaire Interviews to share how Levels is breaking new ground in the wearable tech space. They discuss how health problems arise, the truth behind how the body treats sugar, and why personalized lifestyle choices based on data are the way to bank for a healthy future.
Show Notes
Key Takeaways
0:48 – Create a personalized lifestyle with feedback from your body
Levels Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) is a wearable device that links lifestyle choices with the impact on the body in real-time. Their app rates choices around diet and exercise against the body’s response, showing which will lead to better health.
“I am the Founder and President of Levels Health, which is the first metabolic fitness company seeking to help people answer the question: ‘What should I eat and why’ by using real-time biometric data with an insightful software platform. So essentially you wear a full-time little patch on the back of the arm, which is measuring molecules of glucose in the body. And then we create a closed feedback loop with that through our smartphone app, which tells you minutes after consuming a meal how your body responded to that meal or is responding to that meal. And then eventually scoring that response and helping you to understand whether that was positive or negative and what other opportunities there are to improve both a meal like that or lifestyle actions around it. Like exercise, take walks, sleep quality, stress, et cetera. To string together a lifestyle that is personalized for you and is going to benefit your overall metabolic health in the long-term.”
02:49 – When you put the wrong fuel in the tank, the engine breaks down
The body uses both glucose and fat for energy. When you make the wrong choice about what you’re putting in the body, the long term result is hormonal and metabolic breakdown. The worst part is, you might not notice right away. Levels closes this gap.
“What is happening is your body takes the food we eat, and then other factors like sunlight, and we convert that into energy. And the way that happens is your digestive system breaks your food down into basically two types of molecules: glucose, which is sugar, and fat. And those are the molecules that your cells can use with oxygen to create energy. When that’s working well, your blood sugar levels and blood fat levels are really well controlled and they stay in a tight bound. But when things start to break down, either through bad decisions or poor quality decisions, we aren’t understanding that they are poor quality because we don’t really have any way of knowing that for a long period of time. They can compound and essentially hormones have to respond to these molecules when they’re getting out of line. And it starts to kind of wreak havoc on the body.”
06:13 – The body is one giant chemistry set
Energy isn’t produced by just any old calories. You need to combine the right ingredients to get the result you want. Eating spinach or a snickers bar will have completely different results. The more there’s a negative hormonal response, the more likelihood of a failed experiment.
“What we ended up with was the calories theory. Which is basically that you’re eating energy and no matter where that energy comes from, it’s all energy. That is just not the way the human body works. We’re not this perfect machine where you put in some fuel of any kind and it will just burn cleanly and you’d end up with the same amount of energy. What we are is like a giant chemistry set. As I mentioned, we have these molecules that we can get energy from, sugar and fat, but the way that we get energy from them is through hormones, which are other chemicals. So certain molecules generate different hormones…So spinach has mostly fiber, some vitamins and minerals, a lot of water and basically no carbohydrates. Whereas Snickers is almost entirely processed sugar. So when the spinach goes into your body, it’s going to break down slowly. It’s got a lot of fiber, which is insoluble, which is going to help clean up the digestive tract. But the energy that comes from there is going to be very slow release. It is carbohydrates, still, but they’re a very slow release variety because they’re bound with fiber. Whereas the Snickers bar breaks down immediately. It’s essentially already processed sugar and it’s going to go right into the bloodstream and that’s going to create a massive amount of insulin, which is a metabolic hormone that has to get sugar out of the blood, into the cells. So the difference between those two is going to be that insulin response.”
8:03 – That sugar habit could lead to weight gain, dementia or infertility
When eating sugar, insulin is released to store that sugar into the cells as fat. If this pathway is weaker, then the insulin keeps circulating and can end up affecting various organs like the brain or reproductive system.
“If you’re constantly in a high state of insulin, because you’re eating processed sugar or processed carbohydrates, your body is constantly having to store that as fat. That’s essentially how the system works. And the interesting thing is that different people process these things differently. So some people, it seems, just can’t produce body fat very effectively. Which seems like a good thing, but that hormone is still being released in high quantities. And what you can end up with are other factors. You have secondary systems break it down, and this is where mental function gets affected. Your brain enters this sort of insulin resistant state. Something most people don’t know is Alzheimer’s dementia is currently being taught in medical schools as type three diabetes. Because the way that the brain starts to change is that it’s not able to process insulin effectively anymore. So for people who maybe aren’t, and this isn’t exclusively people who don’t gain weight, but just generally speaking, these hormonal dysfunctions start to affect different systems differently.”
9:43 – Building revenue in beta mode
Levels has been trialling with a limited number of users to build a program based on customer experience and feedback. Still, they’ve already generated over $2 million in revenue on top of over $12 million seed funding. They are primed and backed to launch a tool for individualizing health.
“We’ve been slowly increasing volume. So far we’ve had about 5,000 people use the program. We’ve exceeded about $2 million in total sales thus far, but we’re not growing actively. Our focus is still heavily on development on product milestones and we’re limiting access to the product such that the number one thing that we care about, which is customer feedback, is what we’re optimizing for rather than revenue growth, et cetera. That’s kind of where we are today. We’re planning to finish up those product milestones in the coming months, and then move to a mainstream launch and then start our growth mode. In terms of capitalization and team, we raised about $12 million in seed funding from angels and then new money from a16z. And that round came together over a fairly long time. We were initially raising from strategics and angels on safe notes, brought on some strategic investors, some angels. And then later in 2020, when the COVID uncertainty had passed and VCs were doing deals again, we raised that full round that larger round and Andreessen Horowitz came in as our lead. So we’ve been moving quickly primarily because we’re a remote first company.”
12:20 – Turning a tool for diabetics into a metabolic fitness tracker
CGMs have been around for many years to help people with diabetes manage their lifestyle and medicines. Levels is utilizing the same technology to help anyone who wants to improve their metabolic health and reduce potential disease.
“This technology, continuous glucose monitoring, was developed for people with diabetes to keep an eye on their glucose in real time and be able to monitor it and manage it effectively. We are using these devices, which have been developed over a very long period of time and have been approved by the FDA for the management of metabolic dysfunction. And we’re moving it to a new space, which is general wellness and information, better metabolic awareness and ultimately for metabolic fitness. Which is the focused effort and repetition that you take to the gym or to mindfulness for people who practice meditation, you kind of have to put in work over time to get better. Same thing for this metabolic health. We need better information and then we need to use it to make better decisions. That’s where we’re applying it.”
18:25 – Millions of Americans are compounding negative interest on their health
Each decision can add to your future health fund, or reduce it. Years of decisions slowly add up to disease, which is why millions of Americans are now presenting with pre-diabetes or diabetes. Some without even realizing. The way to reduce this is understanding the body.
*“These sorts of issues build very slowly over time. You can think of them as compounding interest, either positively or negatively. If you’re making bad decisions every day, that can compound over time into steadily worse blood sugar regularity. And then ultimately it can really break down and that’s when you have diabetes. But if you’re waiting until that happens to start measuring it, you never see it coming… I thought, man, I must be one in a million that this happened to. And then I looked into the statistics and it turns out ***there are 90 million adults in the United States alone with pre-diabetes. And the CDC says that 70% of those will end up with type two diabetes if they don’t make changes. But the kicker is that 84% of those 90 million don’t know they have pre-diabetes. This is based on random testing, but they don’t understand that there’s a problem because they’ve never tested for it. The situation that we have in our current society is that about a third of the people walking around currently are at high risk of type two diabetes, and they don’t know it. And we have 10% of the population with type two diabetes and that’s increasing at an increasing rate. So it’s important that we change this philosophy around who should get access to their own body’s information.”
27:59 – Switching on the lights and seeing the path to health
With accurate moment to moment data, it is possible to see exactly how choices are affecting the body. Like switching on a light, it becomes clear which choices are healthy and which are causing problems.
“When you first put on this device, you have that closed feedback loop. You eat something and within 15 minutes you’re seeing a live data update from your body on how that’s affecting you. It’s completely transformative. We call it a magic moment, but like it’s a light bulb. You’re like in conversation with your body, you’re able to see something. And that builds confidence. Even if you end up being betrayed by some of your favorite foods, you’re betrayed and you’re happy about it because you’re like: ‘now I know, and I’m not going to keep doing that to myself, or if I do, I’m going to do it on my own terms. I’m going to decide to indulge in that energy drink or in that dessert that I know isn’t great for me, but I’m going to do it on my own terms.’ And so that’s really unique and it’s something that changed my life. I kicked my candy habit in two weeks just using this device.”
31:15 – Identical diets do not produce identical results, even for identical twins
Studies have shown that each individual will react differently to foods. Even if those two individuals share DNA, lifestyle factors play a part in determining how the body responds to food.
“There’s also some really cool research that’s been done and I’ll just touch on one of these studies, but there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening in real time. One study was done in 2015, they took 800 people who did not have diabetes. They put continuous glucose monitors on them and fed them a whole bunch of identical foods. And they showed that two people can eat the exact same two foods, in this case it was a banana and a cookie made with wheat flour, and they can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. So a big spike to the banana and a flat line for the cookie for one person and the exact opposite for the other person. What that means is those two people are probably having exactly opposite hormone responses too. So the insulin, the weight gain, all those downstream effects are probably different. And we need more research to confirm that. But more research is being done, which is showing that not only is that effect true, but it’s also true for people who share all of their DNA. So identical twins who share a hundred percent of their DNA have that same amount of variability. You and your twin can have very different responses to the same foods. So genetics isn’t everything.”
36:18 – That healthy choice might not be so healthy after all
There are foods that seem inherently healthy, like juice. However Josh found a fresh pressed juice was the worst sugar hit he could experience.
“I was going into an investor meeting. Let’s see, I slept really poorly. I was preparing all night, took a train up to New York and I’m walking into this office building and I saw this little organic juice cart. You know about press juice, this is all the rage. It’s a really healthy thing. You press a fruit or vegetable and just get that clean, healthy juice. So I ordered from the menu this drink called ‘health drink’, and it was just a green apple, some carrots, and celery. And they were all pressed. There was no sugar added. I watched the lady make it right in front of me. And I took this into the meeting and I’m drinking it. About 30 minutes after I finish this healthy drink, my blood sugar was at 210 milligrams per deciliter… Let’s just say that the highest you should go after a very sugary meal, if you are healthy, is lower than 140 milligrams per deciliter and you shouldn’t exceed 180 unless you have diabetes. And I was at 210. Now a year later, my goal is to stay below 110 after every meal, all the time. So I was basically double the blood sugar concentration that, based on the research, I believe to be healthy. From a drink that’s called ‘health drink’ that has just pressed fruits and vegetables.”
49:39 – Stress is like a self-made sugar high
Just like sugar-rich food, stress interacts with the insulin response. This compounds over time; the more stressors, the greater the impact on metabolic functioning. Even one night of poor sleep can lead to insulin resistance.
***“*Stress is a state probably best defined by cortisol levels. So cortisol is a fight or flight hormone. It’s released in response to stress and it primes your body for a fight or a flight. The way it does that is it interferes with insulin and other hormones in the body and causes you to produce a ton of energy… It’s not just nutrition that can have major physiologic effects, but this stress thing and the way it’s impacting us. Both acutely in that moment where you’re in that meeting, and long-term where you are constantly in a state of stress because of either psychological concerns. Or because you’re sleeping poorly, or not enough, and your body is never recovering. And so it’s always in this elevated state of readiness almost because you’re never allowing the full process of deep restorative sleep to happen. So that can compound over a long period of time. And people are ending up with a lot of weight gain issues and a lot of adrenal issues. And a lot of frankly, metabolic dysfunction, that is blatantly due to their poor stress management. ”
53:30 – Health is a game, you’re constantly pulling levers without knowing which will win
Everyone is playing with four levers: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress. A CGM gives a clue which ones are being pulled correctly and which need some work. Josh uses the analogy of banking for the future by making good health decisions now.
***“*Every person is actually playing around with these controls all day, every day. And they just don’t know the effects of them other than every once in a while you’ll be like, ‘man, I really feel bad right now’. Or ‘I feel really great right now. I wonder what it is,maybe it was that health drink that I got from the juice cart yesterday.’ It’s like we don’t have the ability to connect the dots between all of the things we’re doing. And these are the four big things that we can control. There are of course systems that will break down that are out of our control. There are illnesses that won’t be prevented by managing glucose. We’re not curing cancer with this. It’s certainly not a cure for really anything. What it is, is a tool to help us better understand how our bodies work and what the implications of our choices are. And then we can use it kind of the way that we use financial information. You don’t open a bank account and then say, I’m never going to check this balance, but I don’t want to overdraw. That’s kind of the situation with metabolism. It’s like we’re flying blind. We don’t know the deposits and withdrawals that we’re making every day, but we’re trying not to overdraw. And end up in bankruptcy.”
Episode Transcript
Josh Clemente:
That’s when you’re going to go get that pizza and finish it off with a half gallon of ice cream.
Sir Austin Peek:
That’s a lot of ice cream, bro.
Josh Clemente:
I love ice cream. Every person is actually playing around with these controls all day, every day, and they just don’t know the effects of them. And I was right that I was having these hypoglycemic episodes, but I was wrong about what the problem was. The problem is not I needed to eat more. We’re flying blind. We don’t know the deposits and withdrawals, so to speak, that we’re making every day, but we’re trying not to overdraw and end up in bankruptcy.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, you don’t have to check your bank account. You got like 15 million, right?
Josh Clemente:
Well, let’s continue building this business. My name is Josh Clemente. I’m 31. And I’m currently in Strathmere, New Jersey on the Jersey Shore. And I am the founder and president of Levels Health, which is the first metabolic fitness company seeking to help people answer the question, “What should I eat, and why?” by using real-time biometric data with an insightful software platform. So essentially, you wear a full-time little patch on the back of the arm, which is measuring molecules like glucose in the body.
Josh Clemente:
And then we create a closed feedback loop with that through our smartphone app, which tells you minutes after consuming a meal, for example, how your body responded to that meal or is responding to that meal. And then eventually scoring that response and helping you to understand whether that was positive or negative, and what other opportunities there are to improve both a meal like that or lifestyle actions around it, like exercise, taking walks, sleep quality, stress, et cetera, to string together a lifestyle that is personalized for you and is going to benefit your overall metabolic health in the long term.
Sir Austin Peek:
And what’s the website in case anyone wanted to check it out?
Josh Clemente:
The website is Levelshealth.com. And the blog is on there as well, which I highly recommend. Levelshealth.com/blog.
Sir Austin Peek:
There’s an app too if they wanted to download that. I mean, I imagine they’ll probably still need your arm device, right? But if they wanted to, is there an app that they would just get from any App Store?
Josh Clemente:
The app is still in development. We’re in TestFlight mode, which is invite-only, but we will eventually be rolling that out the App Store and to Google Play.
Sir Austin Peek:
I tried to sign up for the invite, but you denied me.
Josh Clemente:
Oh, did I?
Sir Austin Peek:
No, I’m just kidding.
Josh Clemente:
I was going to say we got to fix that.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah. Okay, tracks your blood glucose. For anyone who’s not kind of even understanding that, I mean, can you make it even simpler to understand? Is it just going to tell me my health overall or is blood glucose like 100% correlated with that? Just give me a bit more oversight.
Josh Clemente:
Essentially what is happening is your body takes the food we eat and then other factors like sunlight when we convert that into energy. And the way that happens is your digestive system breaks your food down into basically two types of molecules, glucose, which is sugar, and fat. And those are the molecules that your cells can use with oxygen to create energy. When that’s working well, your blood sugar levels and blood fat levels are really well controlled and they stay in a tight bound.
Josh Clemente:
But when things start to break down, either through bad decisions or poor quality decisions, we aren’t understanding that they are poor quality because we don’t really have any way of knowing that, for a long period of time, they can compound. And essentially, hormones have to respond to these molecules when they’re getting out of line and it starts to kind of wreck havoc on the body overall.
Josh Clemente:
It can affect cognitive clarity, memory, all the way down through the physiologic effects, which are eventually insulin resistance, which is also called type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, all the way through to infertility and PCOS, which are the leading causes of women’s infertility in the United States. There are all of these kind of syndromes associated with poor or metabolic function, and they’re connected typically to blood sugar dysregulation, so glucose irregularities.
Josh Clemente:
And so by tracking these levels specifically associated with the choices we’re making every day, we can surface these insights for the first time. So rather than you doing things every day, eating lunch, eating dinner, formulating a meal plan that you think is going to work out, but not really having any feedback for a long period of time until the bathroom scale starts to climb or until the doctor says something’s wrong, we can instead surface this information immediately and help you understand both what’s working well and what could be improved.
Sir Austin Peek:
Sure. Yeah, you might have to let me sign up. I’m ready for this.
Josh Clemente:
Cool.
Sir Austin Peek:
It says request access. So I guess people could sign up on Levelshealth.com just to get on a waiting list or something like that.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. We’re still in development mode right now. And we’re building this behavior change software on top of the devices themselves to help make this sort of raw data easily interpretable. Most people don’t know really that there is sugar in the blood or what it means when you know how much is in there. We’re building this software that abstracts that away, and instead you have simple scores for your meals and for the sum of your day to help you understand the positive negative. It’s like a grade point. We’re still rapidly iterating on that. And so we’re in this invitation-only mode. You can sign up for the wait list on the website. We are inviting people basically as quickly as we can, but looking to launch more fully later this year.
Sir Austin Peek:
Sounds good. I mean, so if I’m looking at it … Or I’m just thinking out loud. Tell me if I’m wrong in here. People used to always think of looking at our health as like overall calories, right? “I’m only supposed to have so many calories.” But over the last, let’s just say 20 years, maybe people have become higher educated that, “Okay. 200 calories of a snicker bar versus 200 calories of spinach is way different.” Right? So we’re looking at, I guess, the ratios of fat, carbs and protein.
Sir Austin Peek:
I think that’s kind of the level I’m understanding and look at. Whenever I’m eating something, I just always want more protein. Especially if I’m working out, then the carbs to me is the worst, personally. So I’m like I’ve always looked at that. And this is another … Oh, wow. I didn’t even mean to do this. This is another level, if you will, as far as understanding this.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. Historically, we haven’t had a good way of easily measuring and explaining these things to everyone. Right? They’ve been measured in labs and they’ve been measured in the medical field, but we tried to simplify as much as possible down. And what we ended up with was the calories theory, which is basically that you’re eating energy, and no matter where that energy comes from, like you said, it’s all energy.
Josh Clemente:
That is just not the way the human body works. We’re not this perfect machine where you put in some fuel of any kind, and it will just burn cleanly and you’d end up with the same amount of energy. What we are is like a giant chemistry set. As I mentioned, we have these molecules that we can get energy from, sugar and fat, but the way that we get energy from them is through hormones, which are other chemicals. So certain molecules generate different hormones. And in your example of spinach versus, I can’t remember your first one, but-
Sir Austin Peek:
Snickers bar.
Josh Clemente:
… Snickers bar. There you go. So spinach has mostly fiber, some vitamins and minerals, a lot of water and basically no carbohydrates, whereas Snickers is almost entirely processed sugar. When the spinach goes into your body, it’s going to break down slowly. It’s got a lot of fiber, which is insoluble, which is going to help clean out the digestive tract. But the energy that comes from there is going to be very slow release. It is carbohydrates still, but they’re a very slow release variety because they’re bound with fiber, whereas the Snickers bar breaks down immediately.
Josh Clemente:
It’s essentially already processed sugar, and it’s going to go right into the bloodstream. And that’s going to create a massive of insulin, which is a metabolic hormone that has to get sugar out of the blood into the cells. The difference between those two is going to be that insulin response. And when over time we’re continually eating foods where the energy is coming from these very processed sources that are creating large swings in our hormones, we experience those as changes in our quality of life and, or changes in our physiology.
Josh Clemente:
If you’re constantly in a high state of insulin because you’re eating processed sugar or processed carbohydrates, your body is constantly having to store that as fat. That’s essentially how the system works. And this is like the interesting thing is that different people process these things differently. Some people it seems just can’t produce body fat very effectively.
Sir Austin Peek:
Which is a good thing to most people, right?
Josh Clemente:
It seems like a good thing. Right. But that hormone is still being released in high quantities, and what you can end up with are other factors. Like, you have secondary systems breaking down, and this is where mental function gets affected. Your brain enters this sort of insulin resistant state. Something most people don’t know is Alzheimer’s dementia is currently being taught in medical schools as type 3 diabetes, because the way that the brain starts to change is that it’s not able to process insulin effectively anymore.
Josh Clemente:
It’s like for people who maybe aren’t, and this isn’t exclusively people who don’t gain weight, but just generally speaking, these hormonal dysfunctions start to affect different systems differently. It can be the brain, it can be the body. For women, it can be ovaries. For men, it can be sexual dysfunction that leads to low testosterone. Basically, there’s just all this mayhem that can happen. And all of it comes down to the fact that what we eat very specifically matters.
Josh Clemente:
And the calories hypothesis, although it’s true, like calories are a unit of energy, not all calories are the same and the effects on us are very, very different. And we have to know that with better detail. And luckily we can with this new technology.
Sir Austin Peek:
I still want to dive deeper into this real quick. But overall, just business wise, can I ask about that first and then we’ll dive back more into this science? Because I’m kind of fascinated by it. But you said you’re going to plan on coming out late 2021, so I imagine your pre-revenue.
Josh Clemente:
We’re actually not pre-revenue. We’ve been doing a paid beta program for about a year now. We had like an early prototype concept of basically bringing this hardware, the continuous glucose monitor, and then connecting it into our software suite. And we’ve built a business model that includes access to the devices, which are prescription controlled in the United States. We have a relationship with a 50 state pharmacy provider. We have a relationship with an independent telehealth network of physicians who can take consultations with our members and determine whether or not to write a prescription for them.
Josh Clemente:
And then we can fulfill our Levels kit with the devices from the pharmacy to the end user. It’s kind of like a direct to consumerized version of getting access to this medical technology. So that’s kind of the business model and then our software is built on top of that. We’ve been testing that model for about a year now. We’ve been slowly increasing volume. So far we’ve had about 5,000 people use the program. We’ve exceeded about 2 million dollars in total sales thus far, but we’re not growing actively.
Josh Clemente:
Our focus is still heavily on development, on product milestones. And we’re kind of limiting access to the product such that the number one thing that we care about, which is customer feedback, is what we’re optimizing for rather than revenue growth, et cetera. That’s kind of where we are today. We’re planning to finish up those product milestones here in the coming months, and then move to a mainstream launch and then start our growth mode.
Josh Clemente:
In terms of capitalization and team, we raised about 12 million dollars in seed funding from angels and then new money from A16Z. And that round came together over a fairly long period of time. We were initially raising from strategics and angels on safe notes, brought on some strategic investors, some angels. And then later in 2020, when kind of the COVID uncertainty had passed and VCs were doing deals again, we raised that full round, that larger round, and Andreessen Horowitz came in as our lead.
Josh Clemente:
We’ve been moving quickly. And primarily because we’re a remote first company, we had actually made the decision to be distributed before COVID hit. It wasn’t a major disruption for us and we could continue to hit our cadence. This time last year we were at seven people full time, we’re now at about 17. Burn rate is quite low bringing revenue. We’re in a good position to capitalize on our product objectives, and ramp out of this development mode and use our funding that we’ve raised to really start hitting our growth phase.
Sir Austin Peek:
If someone was interested in this, they can’t really get it yet without going to the doctors. The people who are still in the trial phase who are being given access, are they people with diabetes where this seems like it might affect them more? Or if someone wanted to get this now before whenever you actually roll out with a public offering, how would they do that, or who are your normal clients for that?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, so a quick history on the technology we’re using. We didn’t develop the patch itself. These are devices that were developed for specifically the management of diabetes, which people who aren’t super familiar, it’s a disorder where it kind of is the effect that I was just talking about where glucose and insulin, the hormone that responds to glucose, that feedback loop is broken and blood sugar levels are out of control. This technology, continuous glucose monitoring, was developed for people with diabetes to keep an eye on their glucose in real time, and be able to monitor it and manage it effectively.
Josh Clemente:
We are using these devices, which have been developed over a very long period of time and have been approved by the FDA for the management of metabolic dysfunction, and we are moving it to a new space, which is general wellness and information. Better metabolic awareness and ultimately for metabolic fitness, which is the focus, effort and repetition that you take to the gym or to mindfulness for people who practice meditation.
Josh Clemente:
You kind of have to put in work over time to get better, same thing for this metabolic health. We need better information and then we need to use it to make better decisions. That’s where we’re applying it. Actually, our use case is not for diabetes and our earliest adopters are typically non-diabetic. Now, I do have to clarify that Levels doesn’t decide who ends up using the product. Because we have a telehealth organization, because these are prescription only, physicians are reviewing information about each person that comes into the program and ensuring that CGM, specifically continues glucose monitoring, is right for that person.
Josh Clemente:
And if they determine to do so, they will write a prescription for of them. It’s a little bit of a unique scenario because there is medical technology involved, but for the most part, people are using these to just learn more about themselves and understand, with confidence, the connection between what they’re doing every day in terms of diet, nutrition, sleep, stress and exercise, and then what they could be doing to improve.
Sir Austin Peek:
We’re all looking for ways to save money, right? Especially now. So let me ask you this, how would you like to keep an extra $961 a year in your pocket? That’s how much Gabi customers save per year on average, on car and home insurance. That’s why when I was shopping for insurance, I used Gabi. This is the time of year we go shopping for insurance and hope Gabi takes the pain out of shopping for insurance by giving you an apples to apples comparison of your current coverage with 40 of the top insurance providers, like Progressive, Nationwide and Travelers.
Sir Austin Peek:
Just link your current insurance account, and in just minutes, you’ll be able to see quotes for the exact same coverage you currently have. That’s what I did and it literally took less than a minute to fill out the comparison survey. So for less than a minute, don’t you think it might be worth seeing if you could save $961 a year. As an entrepreneur, you know that every dollar counts, and you could easily take that savings and start a new side hustle this very weekend.
Sir Austin Peek:
Like I mentioned earlier, Gabi customers saved $961 per year on average. I bet that’d be nice to have in your pocket every year. If they can’t find you savings, like they did for me, they’ll let you know so you can relax knowing you have the best trade out there. And they’ll never sell your info, so no annoying spam or robocalls. You know what, you’re probably over paying on car and home insurance, and so why don’t you see how Gabi can save you money? It’s totally freed check and there’s no obligation. Just go to Gabi.com/millionaire. That’s Gabi, G-A-B-I.com/millionaire. Gabi.com/millionaire.
Speaker 3:
I was looking for are some sort of community where I could get some ideas on business, I could find motivation, inspiration to pursue my own things. I’ve technically had my own business for 12 years now. But it’s a really small operation, and I’m trying to do something bigger. Being told, “Just go out there and do it,” is very helpful. And that’s why I joined.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah. I mean understanding that, like you said, the doctors are writing the prescription, people have to note, I guess, to ask for it. Most of those people, are they the ones going in not very healthy? Because that’s what I was thinking when I’m looking at your website. And maybe people who are super fit who want to get one of these, but I don’t know if I would qualify, or someone who’s really fit would qualify to easily get a prescription and it’s like, “How many hoops do I have to jump through to get it at this point?”
Josh Clemente:
It comes down to just a few things. The physician wants to ensure that if someone has a concern, they already have a disorder of metabolism, they should probably work with their personal doctor in a much tighter format to get healthier. That’s kind of the thing is that this program that we’re building is for general awareness and general insight for people who are kind of flying blind today and they don’t yet have a concern, a metabolic health issue. That’s what the Levels program is for.
Josh Clemente:
And you may be an athlete, you may be someone who wants to lose weight. You may just be the average person who’s just trying to make better choices for better health. It’s not specifically for any category. We’re trying to build this such that it can hit the mainstream to really elevate our awareness of just how bad metabolic health is at the societal scale and get people taking the lead in their health. So right now there isn’t any criteria that you be a certain type of person. And ultimately, as I mentioned, it comes down to the physician. But it’s just the belief that people who already have a concern that needs to be very rigorously cared for should work with their doctor one on one.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, I’m feeling you on that. I mean, maybe years down the line where I understand that no one’s going to be necessarily the perfect customer or you have a specific niche of a type of person. But for me now, if I went in and went for the doctor and I think I’m pretty healthy, what are the chances they say yes to this versus no? Again, I know it depends on doctor to doctor, but I like testing myself and it’s like, what happens if I eat a whole bag of candy versus, again, just talking about spinach, I would want one of these just to kind of see what it does because then I would know versus like now I don’t know. I mean, I can kind of feel sometimes an energy rush and then a crash, but just for a regular guy like me, the way I’m thinking about it, it’d be fun to know, but I could see my doctor saying like, “Austin, you don’t need this.”
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. So some background there for me, I started out in a similar situation. I’m a CrossFit trainer as well. I’m an engineer, but also CrossFit trainer. I’ve always kind of thought that if I’m physically fit, I’m really healthy. And I’ve had this lifelong obsession and addiction with candy. My friends in college will tell the tales. I would eat peanut M&M’s for dinner. And I would just eat enough of them that I was full. And I would feel that energy rush, I would love it. Inevitably, I’d crash out an hour later.
Josh Clemente:
I never really connected that to health. I, through my work, ended up getting more familiar with human physiology and metabolism, and started to understand that diet and nutrition are huge. They have these massive implications, the way our bodies function. And what we’re made of is what we put in our bodies, and it does matter. And so I tried to get access to a continuous glucose monitor myself through my doctor, and early on, he did exactly what you had mentioned there and he just kind of said, “You don’t need this. You’re not diabetic. You don’t need to measure blood sugar at all because that’s for people who already have a problem with blood sugar.”
Josh Clemente:
That struck me as very strange because I knew that these sorts of issues build very slowly over time. You can think of them as compounding interest either positively or negatively. If you’re making bad decisions every day, that can compound over time into steadily worse blood sugar regularity, and then ultimately it can really break down and that’s when you have diabetes. But if you’re waiting until that happens to start measuring it, you never see it coming. So it felt to me confusing. And that’s kind of why ultimately I wanted to do what we’re doing here with Levels.
Josh Clemente:
And there’s a piece in between here where I did end up getting a continuous glucose monitor, and I discovered that I did have blood sugar dysregulation. It was very erratic, it was well outside the normal range, and I was heading in a bad direction. And I had this gut feeling, and then my fears were confirmed when I got the device. And so that’s one of those strange situations where I was just experimenting, and I thought, “Man, I must be one in a million that this happened.”
Josh Clemente:
And then I looked into the statistics and it turns out there are 90 million adults in the United States alone with prediabetes. And the CDC says that 70% of those will end up with type 2 diabetes if they don’t make changes. But the kicker is that 84% of those 90 million don’t know they have prediabetes. This is based on random testing, but they don’t understand that there’s a problem because they’ve never tested for it.
Josh Clemente:
That’s the situation that we have in our current society, is that about a third of the people walking around currently are at high-risk of type 2 diabetes and they don’t know it. And we have 10% of the population with type 2 diabetes, and that’s increasing at an increasing rate. It’s important that we change this philosophy around who should get access to their own body’s information and when.
Josh Clemente:
And we need to start putting it earlier and earlier so that ultimately we are all well aware of how our bodies function and we’re making data-driven decisions instead of random emotional decisions. Kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, but that problem does exist. The access issue and Levels exist to resolve it by connecting with physicians who are very open to the concept of real-time biological information being used to make better choices.
Sir Austin Peek:
Did you get your glucose monitor in the black market?
Josh Clemente:
Well, it’s funny. In other countries, these monitors are available over the counter. You don’t need a prescription. So I actually got in Australia where they’re readily available.
Sir Austin Peek:
Okay. So I just got to get on to Mexico. I’m in Florida right now, so I know where I’m going.
Josh Clemente:
You’re close. Yeah.
Sir Austin Peek:
I mean, yeah. We’re two peas in a pod, man. We’re thinking the same thing. I think how fucked up it is that you’re trying to be proactive. And I’m thinking the same thing, I already know what the doctor is going to say, because they say it too. When I go in they’re like, “You’re healthy,” I’m like, “Dude, I still don’t feel like I’m that healthy.” Overall, if you consider to me the most Americans, I’m probably in the top 10%, but put me back 50 years ago, I might be average. Right? Just because I’m not obese, right?
Sir Austin Peek:
So I was just like, “I want to be proactive like this.” And it’s funny a lot of people who are business people are proactive in general. It’s funny that you said that doctor said that to you because I feel like that’s exactly what they would say to me if I go in.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, it’s definitely individual. And there’s so much difference across different physicians who have different perspectives, and so that’s why we have partnered with the network that we did. It’s a forward-thinking network of physicians who basically believe in telehealth, which is the idea that you shouldn’t to go to a specific office in order to work with a doctor. You should be able to work with a doctor that works with you and you should be able to do that from anywhere. So that’s the first thing, is just making this telehealth possibility real, and then secondly, working with doctors who believe in the individual right to access their own information.
Josh Clemente:
What I think is strange is that we ever limit someone from knowing data that is being produced by their own bodies. That’s the first thing that has to change is just recognition that if my body’s producing this signal, and I measure it, that is my data to own. And then I should share it with my doctor who I trust to help me get to better health. But the first step is just making sure that we don’t have an unnecessary gatekeepers situation, where a person is blocked from understanding something about their own body.
Sir Austin Peek:
You’re saying that it’s that hard to get it and you can go to other countries to do it. I mean, I imagine it’s because big pharma might want people to be on diabetes, it seems like. I’d go into ketosis, and do you know about that, I imagine?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, totally up to speed on ketosis too. I didn’t realize you were a keto guy.
Sir Austin Peek:
No, I go back and forth. Like I said, when I just try to be like less carbs or whatever, I’m just pointing out is like if I could measure something, you could buy keto sticks, which you just piss on and it shows you whether you’re in ketosis or not. Right? I can’t tell you like how much more momentum that would have me on not eating as many carbs if I saw that. Right?
Sir Austin Peek:
So it’s like that would make me want to be excited, be like, “Okay, I ate this. Now I can see what it actually did to me.” And when I can measure it, I might only need this thing even for a month, it would seem like, for me personally to be like, “Okay, I knew what that did to me, that spiked it up and that ain’t good, Austin.” So it’s just like people, again, trying to be proactive, like you were saying. It’s like that would make it so much better in the future as far as people getting in diabetes and whatnot. But it’s just frustrating to even think that doctors, when you went in for a glucose monitor, were kind of like giving you shit, it sounds like.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. It’s something just we have to slowly change. It’s just a matter of recognizing that this technology exists, it’s ready, people can access it. It’s not super affordable yet, but with wider adoption we can make it affordable. And by doing so, we can kind of change these crazy statistics that I was talking about. Here and globally, metabolic dysfunction is on a rampage. So it’s really important that we recognize that and equip people, the people who are responsible for maintaining their own health.
Josh Clemente:
I think that each individual is responsible for maintaining health. It’s not the doctor’s responsibility for me not to get sick. That’s just a personal belief of mine. And I think that everyone, if we adopted that philosophy and gave everyone the responsibility and the tools to keep themselves healthy, we would quickly change the situation we’re in. And that would only benefit doctors.
Josh Clemente:
I think the medical industry is not equipped to both cure people who are sick with disease while simultaneously preventing everyone else from getting it. It’s just not how this is going to happen. So we’ve got to really shift the responsibility metric and get rid of any regulations that are limiting that.
Sir Austin Peek:
I’m going to keep just asking about this, because I don’t know how far we’ll get into until we discuss business. We might have to do that on a part two later on, if that that’s okay,, because I’m just so fascinated by this. Because I mean, I mostly listen to business podcast, but every once in a while do health, especially again type A personalities or whatever, you want to strive to be your best self.
Sir Austin Peek:
And I was talking about ketosis in case anyone doesn’t understand that and tell me if I’m wrong, right, is just you’re trying to make your body burn fat. I’m trying to have less carbs and have higher protein and fat, and so my body’s going to use that instead of the carbs for energy, is that right first?
Josh Clemente:
I mentioned at the beginning there’s basically two molecules your body can use for energy, fat and glucose, and there’s kind of a third one, which is ketones. But ketones are a fat molecule, but they can dissolve in water. And what that means is that it’s a little bit tricky, but there’s a barrier or around your brain and you have to be able to get energy molecules across that barrier. And ketones can cross that barrier to be used by the brain for energy. So usually glucose is the only molecule that can be used by the brain for energy.
Josh Clemente:
And when you’re in ketosis, you’re producing this Ketone molecule, which is fat, but it’s fat in a format that can be used by your entire body, including your brain for energy. So it’s a really unique, specific and kind of a really cool molecule that does, yeah, exactly that, burns your fat and makes it available to every tissue.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah. And most people aren’t in that state. I don’t know how … Maybe 1%, if that gets to that. And it’s because everyone’s eating so many carbs, right? So your body’s going to only use that if they don’t have the carbs as the energy, like you were saying?
Josh Clemente:
Exactly.
Sir Austin Peek:
Because here’s one of the things, I mean, I started hearing, and I think Dr. Mark Hyman I think I heard it from him. Yeah.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. We’re working with him.
Sir Austin Peek:
Because I like to have an energy drink every once in a while, but every once in a while, I mean, every day. But it says zero sugar on it, right, so I’m like, “I’m going to get the zero sugar,” because again, I try not to eat too much sugar, but they keep sneaking sugar into stuff. And especially, I think he said something about this is that it says zero sugar, but really if you go look at the ingredients, they have all this other shit in there that’s basically hiding, and it’s basically is sugar, they just don’t have to put on the ingredients label.
Sir Austin Peek:
And then that makes sense to me because why I’m becoming addicted to this. It’s just frustrating and that’s why I’m looking at your thing, I’m like, “Dude, I really want to know if this other ingredients that they say on this can right now that I’m even looking at, is this really 30 grams of sugar, but they’re just hiding it?” That’s why if I had your Levels Health right now, I’m like, “Okay, that would help me figure that out.”
Josh Clemente:
Exactly. Yeah. I think what you’re feeling right now, which I don’t know if you’ve feel out this before, but like it’s certainly for me when I first dug in and realized, “I don’t know anything about what’s going on in my body, like what I’m putting into my body.” There’s all of this marketing, but what it is is just marketing. And nutrition labels don’t tell the whole story. And I had no confidence in what I was doing.
Josh Clemente:
And so when you first put on this device and you have that close feedback loop, you eat something and within 15 minutes you’re seeing a live data update from your body on how that’s affecting you. It’s completely transformative. We call it a magic moment, but it’s a light bulb. You’re in conversation with your body, you’re able to see something and that builds confidence.
Josh Clemente:
Even if you end up being betrayed by some of your favorite foods, you’re betrayed and you’re happy about out it because you’re like, “Now I know, and I’m not going to keep doing that to myself. Or if I do, I’m going to do it on my own terms. I’m going to decide to indulge in that energy drink or in that dessert that I know isn’t great for me, but I’m going to do it on my own terms.”
Josh Clemente:
And so that’s really unique and it’s something that changed my life. Again, I kicked my candy habit in two weeks just using this device. I just realized how bad it was for me. It was so much worse than I had ever imagined before now that I knew what the human body, where it should be in terms of blood sugar ranges and then where it was going just from regular foods, let alone from candy, which is just pure sugar. So I just decided not to do that to myself anymore. And I stick to richer desserts that have fats and proteins and are more balanced meals.
Josh Clemente:
And I did that because I have data, I have an objective source of truth now. And so one of the beautiful things that I think wide adoption of this technology will lead to, we will be able to eliminate, or at least push back misleading marketing. So what you’re talking about, hidden sugars, putting molecules, ingredients in something that aren’t recognized by the USDA as added sugar specifically so that you can get that nice zero sugar label all over your marketing materials, but you know very well that it’s having similar or the same hormonal effects on that person.
Josh Clemente:
Those are the types of things that are happening. And once we have this technology out there, we’ll be able to identify them and then people will make different decisions. Consumers will buy other products and that will force, I think, our food supply to change. The marketing will change and the options will change and we’ll have across the board, I think, healthier opportunities to eat for more affordable prices.
Sir Austin Peek:
This is what I’ve decided too. I mean, you can tell me if I think I’m wrong between listen to Mr. Hyman and understanding basics, I guess, hopefully of nutrition and whatnot. But when all these energy drink companies, what do they have, like 25 different flavors, they must be making profiles that get some people addicted, because there’s only one flavor that I like versus the other 24. And I feel like there’s certain profiles for …
Sir Austin Peek:
And it’s not just the energy drink, right, there’s other … Like candy or whatever it is. And it’s like you almost get hooked into it and I need to see what it actually does because now I’m just used to it, and then you’re kind of just addicted to your habits. And I don’t feel horrible, I still think I’m “healthy,” but I know I can be like a better healthy me. And if I saw that, “Hey, this thing was really messing me up,” right, by using your app, I just feel like it would change the habits, kind of like you’re saying.
Josh Clemente:
I can’t speak to the formulations of the products, but I know what it’s like to be addicted to certain things like sugary. The taste was so rewarding. And there was nothing to tell me not to do it, it was like I wasn’t getting overweight, I wasn’t gaining weight and it tasted delicious, so why would I not do it? Calories are calories. And that’s what the food system had led me to believe.
Josh Clemente:
But the reality is that I was wrecking havoc on my metabolic function. And historically, my family does not have a lot of overweight and diabetes, but we do have heart disease and we do have cognitive decline, dementia. At the time that I discovered this tech, I was burning out mentally and physically. My mood was terrible. My mental clarity was just shut. I felt like I was walking around in a fog all day long.
Josh Clemente:
And I think the effects for me are different than the effects for other people, like you’re saying. There’s lot of individuality. And because of just probably my genetic makeup, I manifest metabolic dysfunction differently than other people. And so all of the negative effects of that candy was hidden from sight because I couldn’t see into my body. And now with just this one data stream, you can do so much with it to better understand yourself and understand what choices you can make to live a healthier life.
Josh Clemente:
There’s also some really cool research that’s been done. And I’ll just touch on one of these studies, but there’s a lot of fascinating stuff happening in real time. One study was done in 2015, they took 800 people who did not have diabetes, they put continuous glucose monitors on them and fed them a whole bunch of identical foods.
Josh Clemente:
And they showed that two people can eat the exact same two foods, in this case it was a banana and a cookie made with wheat flour, and they can have equal and opposite blood sugar responses. So a big spike to the banana and a flat line for the cookie for one person, and the exact opposite for the other person. What that means is those two people are probably having exactly opposite hormone responses too.
Josh Clemente:
So the insulin, the weight gain, all those downstream effects are probably different. And we need more research to confirm that, but more research is being done which is showing that not only is that effect true, but it’s also true for people who share all of their DNA. So identical twins who share a hundred percent of their have that same amount of variability.
Josh Clemente:
You and your twin can have very different responses to the same foods. So genetics isn’t everything. It seems to be like context, your body composition, how much fat you have, how much lean body mass, how much stress you have, how well slept you are. All of these things affect how a person processes their food. Ultimately, the only real solution for someone to know exactly what they should eat is to have more information in real time until we at least crack the code. And at that point, maybe you don’t need to continue measuring, but some of us like myself prefer to anyway.
Sir Austin Peek:
Hey guys, energetic Austin here. Are you looking for a historical safe investment vehicle that is recession and COVID resilient, or are you worried about the erratic stock market, the long term effects of inflation or the new increases in taxes? As a smart and savvy business entrepreneur, you know there has to be a good option out there for you to invest your hard-earned money. Well, one of our Patreon members, Mr. Jonathan Tuttle, out of Chicago has all the answers to your problems.
Sir Austin Peek:
He runs a real estate fund called Midwest Park Capital, and they invest in mobile home parks. Mobile home parks, you say? Well, yes. Did you know that mobile home parks have been one of the safest real estate investments over the past 50 years? Plus, you get all the best tax benefits of all real estate property types by investing in mobile home parks. Plus, they help hedge against inflation. And guess what? You can all this done by a season investor without you doing any of the work.
Sir Austin Peek:
How? Well, just contact Jonathan Tuttle at Midwest Park Capital. Again, that’s Midwestparkcapital.com to learn how you can invest in mobile home parks today. One more time. Go visit Midwestparkcapital.com. I know this past Friday was your first group call. Did you get the answer you were looking for?
Speaker 4:
Actually, I got a really good answer that led to more questions of, “Those are like the best answers.”
Sir Austin Peek:
Awesome. Yeah. I try to make sure all of our new members get their questions answered first.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, that was perfect. That was definitely perfect. Yeah. I was like, “Okay. Now I’ve got to research this and ask my team this.” It was perfect. Yeah.
Sir Austin Peek:
Again, even if someone used it for a week and understood like … Because people get regular eating habits, right? And then you at least see what it does then. I think there’s certain people, like maybe you and me, who love maybe measuring things. Right? There’s maybe other people who won’t as much, but I could see I’ll be benefit long term, but even short term for people who have no idea. I was kind of going Alex Jones on the flavor of profile ideas.
Sir Austin Peek:
But I have a feeling a couple years, because there’s certain things that … I ask people if they like are hooked to something, they’re like, “Yeah, I’m hooked to that too.” But again, like you’re saying, two people might have opposite responses to one energy drink, like you were saying earlier. I mean, what are craziest things that since you got the put on the Levels patch? Do you call it the Levels patch or what do you call it exactly?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, Levels patch is good. The Levels device.
Sir Austin Peek:
Okay. Yeah. Once you put that on, what’s your craziest responses that you weren’t expecting?
Josh Clemente:
Well, one of the craziest was just very early on in the project, I was actually trying to raise money. I was going into an investor meeting. Let’s see, I slept really poorly. I was preparing all night, took a train up to New York. And I’m walking into this office building and I saw this little organic juice cart about pressed juice. This is like all the range. It’s a really healthy thing. You press a fruit or vegetable, and just get that clean, healthy juice.
Josh Clemente:
So I ordered from the menu this drink called health drink, and it was just a green apple, some carrots and celery. And they were all pressed. There was no sugar added. I watched the lady make it right in front of me. And I took this into the meeting and I’m drinking it. About 30 minutes after I finished this healthy drink, my blood sugar was at 210 milligrams per deciliter, which for people who don’t know-
Sir Austin Peek:
Which is like almost everyone listening.
Josh Clemente:
… Yeah.
Sir Austin Peek:
So don’t feel dumb if you don’t know, because I don’t know either. So tell me Josh.
Josh Clemente:
You shouldn’t know. Nobody talks about this stuff. But let’s just say that the highest you should go after a very sugar meal if you are healthy is lower than 140 milligrams per deciliter. And you shouldn’t eat 180 unless you have diabetes. And I was at 210. Now, a year later, my goal is to stay below 110 after every meal all the time. I was basically double the blood sugar concentration that based on the research I believe to be healthy, from a drink that’s called health drink that is just pressed fruits and vegetables.
Josh Clemente:
And I think what’s happening there is that we’re stripping out all of the fiber from these healthy plants and these vegetables with the intent of getting more of them into our bodies, to get more of that health stuff in. But what we’re doing is we’re actually completely changing the way that our bodies can digest and metabolize these things. And it’s causing a really unhealthy response, at least for someone like myself. I don’t know how everyone else responds, but I know for me that is not a good choice and I will not be making that. And it was alarming to see it happen in real time. Another interesting one is oatmeal. Oatmeal is, if you Google the healthiest breakfast.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah, I see that. I fucking hate oatmeal. My wife likes it. I’m like, “I hate it.”
Josh Clemente:
That’s funny.
Sir Austin Peek:
I wouldn’t even try this. Yeah.
Josh Clemente:
I’ve never been a big fan myself. I’m more of a cream of wheat guy. But anyway, you Google the healthiest breakfast, and top three I guarantee you is going to be in any list oatmeal. And I don’t know how this ended up happening. It’s some sort of slate of hand or marketing, but at the end of the day, oatmeal is a processed grain. And when I ate oatmeal, which I thought to be a very healthy meal, completely plain, I did not add any syrup, any brown sugar, my blood sugar was again in a diabetic blood sugar range. It was way out of control.
Josh Clemente:
The thing is, is that blood sugar spikes, and what we call variability, the number of spikes and crashes is very closely associated with inflammation and with cardiovascular disease. People who have diabetes and prediabetes are at a much higher likelihood of having a disease of their arteries or cardiovascular dysfunction. Oatmeal is marketed as this healthy food that everyone should have every morning, especially if you want to maintain cardiovascular health, yet for someone like myself, if I were to eat that every morning, I would be driving myself daily closer and closer to a cardiovascular condition.
Josh Clemente:
It’s a very real and concerning problem that I can’t entirely say that it’s fraudulent or anything like that. I don’t know the whole history of how heart healthy ended up on oatmeal, but it’s certainly not heart healthy for everyone. Those are two examples that definitely changed my perspective on food. And I believe that they made me healthier in the long run, because it’s one thing to find out that something that you thought was unhealthy really is unhealthy.
Josh Clemente:
It’s another thing to find out that something you think is healthy is actually the opposite. I now eat a much higher fiber protein and fat breakfast. I’ll have eggs or avocado toast, or I’ll even do like chia seeds and pudding. And like this chia seed pudding, which is like these seeds are high in fiber, high in healthy fats. I’ll mix some protein powder. I’ll have this really tasty breakfast dish, that’s kind of similar to oatmeal in consistency, which I actually like the consistency, but I think it has much better flavor and it has absolutely no response. It gives me energy all day long. And those are the types of things that I would only know through better information in real time.
Sir Austin Peek:
I might even ask for some more examples, if that’s okay. Because the reason I was wondering, especially the surprising ones, recently, I’ve had a sugar kick where I’ve wanted candy. We all know candy is not good for you, but I guess there’s some people who still don’t understand that. But it’s the surprising things that, especially if I’m forcing myself to eat oatmeal, and I hate oatmeal, and it doesn’t do well on this glucose spike, I’m like, “No way I’m going to touch that again.”
Josh Clemente:
Right. Yeah. And again, it’s individual. There are people on my team who have no response to oatmeal. They just don’t have a big spike from it. And so again, we don’t really understand the mechanisms well enough yet. We will in the future, and that’s what Levels research is working on, is better the dots between all of these interesting variables. But other examples that even go beyond nutrition, I also tested fasting. For a long time, I thought that I was a person who got hypoglycemic.
Josh Clemente:
Just like I felt shaky and I felt hungry, and I would feel irritable, and so I was like, “Oh, I must have low blood sugar because I haven’t eaten.” And this was when I was eating … I used to be like one of those proponents of kind of the body building mindset where you need to eat six meals a day, right?
Sir Austin Peek:
Six meals a day.
Josh Clemente:
Six meals a day is healthy.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah, I did that in college. It would even be hard to do. Like I did … I forget the guy’s book. I’m going to have to look it up, but it’s like the perfect ratio of carbs or proteins to fat. Something body. I’ll have to look that up. But yeah, I know exactly where you’re talking about.
Josh Clemente:
And I did the same thing in college in that I tried to kind of keep that up after school. And I would just assume that any time that I was feeling the sensation like, “Oh, I need to eat again.” But once I got the device, I started to see that I was having these meals that I thought were really good. An example would be like sushi, right? I would have brown rice sushi, or I would have a burrito bowl with brown rice and black beans and a tortilla on the side, and I’m like, “I’m getting in a lot of carbs, a lot of protein, a lot of fat. This is a great meal.”
Sir Austin Peek:
And I was going to say too real quick is that you were even trying your best to make sure it wasn’t white rice. Right? So people understood that, the difference between brown rice, the slow burn versus the fast burn of white rice. So you’re trying to do everything that everyone says.
Josh Clemente:
Exactly. Yeah. That concept there, the brown versus white rice is the glycemic index. It’s the idea that there’s this list of foods and it’s like ranked by how sugary it is or how fast it will affect your blood sugar. So that is why I was eating brown rice. Yeah, I’m like, again, I’m a CrossFit level trainer. I’ve taken fitness seriously my whole life. I’m trying to eat in such a way that it will fuel my body and give me muscle and give me energy.
Josh Clemente:
And I’m seeing with this device that after these meals, my blood sugar is skyrocketing. It’s staying elevated where I feel this kind of strange, kind of fluttery like weird chest sensation, a little tingly in my face, a bit strange. Nothing that I would call home about typically, but when I see that data and connect it to the sensation, I start to recognize it.
Josh Clemente:
And then two hours later, my blood sugar is crashing. So my body has flooded my system with insulin to try and get control of the blood sugar situation, and I just get this plummeting glucose level. And that is when I feel that shaky fatigue situation where my mood is dropped out from under me. I’m irritable. I’m immediately hungry, desperately hungry. I feel like I need to sit down. And I was right that I was having these hypoglycemic episodes, but I was wrong about what the problem was.
Josh Clemente:
The problem was not, “I needed to eat more,” the problem is that I was eating the wrong things, which were causing this rollercoaster. When I tuned my diet and pulled back heavily on really all carbohydrates, because I’m very carbohydrate sensitive, and replaced them with high fiber, high protein and moderate fat, my blood sugar levels completely flattened out.
Josh Clemente:
Right now where I am is like I stay within plus or minus 10 points all day long with all my meals. And that sensation of shakiness of fatigue and irritability is just gone. I don’t experience that anymore because I’m not experiencing the highs that come before the lows. And that has also connected me with fasting, where I can now see I’ve done 72 hour fast at this point and learned that what I thought was hypoglycemia, I need to be eating six times a day is not real at all.
Josh Clemente:
And in fact, my body will produce exactly how much blood sugar I need to not only survive, but perform from the fat stores I have and the sugar stores I have already in my muscles and liver. And so I can just cruise and my glucose will be nice and flat, consistent, no weird elevations and crashes for three days at a time without eating a single calorie. And so seeing that, it’s pretty powerful to see and recognize like your body’s a pretty fine-tuned machine.
Josh Clemente:
And as long as you’re not kicking it repeatedly, it will perform well. And it brings about a lot of freedom when it comes to food to recognize you can eat once a day, if you want. It’s just a matter of getting as much energy as you need. And most of us don’t need that six meal thing.
Sir Austin Peek:
And I looked it up. I don’t know if this was the book that did it for you too. I was somewhat right. I knew body was in it. It’s called Body For Life by Bill Phillips.
Josh Clemente:
I never read it, but I think I’m familiar with what you’re talking about. I know that it’s the same content, right?
Sir Austin Peek:
Same concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically just, yeah, make sure you have the same amount of carbs. And he wasn’t even low carb then, this is before I kind of started doing lower carb, but they were just like the same ratio of carbs, the proteins, the fats. Right? So at least I was on a level of understanding that, again, versus like, “Just don’t have too many calories in a day.” I’m like, “Dude, I’m bigger than most people. I need more calories, so that makes no sense.”
Sir Austin Peek:
And so I would eat exactly … And when we say six meals, they’re supposed to be “smaller”. But at the end, dude, when you have to time every three hours to eat, and I’m doing that in between classes, and trying to have the protein drink and eat an apple with it so my levels are equal, and I’ve done the whole route of like … And now if I could me measure it, like you were saying, I don’t do that anymore.
Sir Austin Peek:
But that’s the reason I brought up spinach, because from my understanding, that’s probably the healthiest thing you can have. So it’s just like, I try to make sure I eat some of that stuff. I’m not going out and eating McDonald’s. Luckily, I don’t even like that stuff, to be honest. But if I had even a better way of measuring, there’s certain people, even if you take a personality test, I think I mentioned it’s been a long time since I did, but there’s like traits that you look at.
Sir Austin Peek:
And one of mine is like being a competition or achievement. Those are my top two, I think. And if like, dude, if I can see that I’m achieving certain things and not going too high or too low, like you were saying, I know that could take me to another level. If you’re looking back, can you tell us the difference you feel as far as if you’re a able to keep it level all day versus before when you were eating oatmeal and whatnot? Can you remember the difference?
Josh Clemente:
For sure. I mean, when I was going through the early experiments, just trying to measure this myself for the first time, I actually went to my doctor prior to getting this device and I said, “I think I have a terminal illness. Something is very wrong with something, because I don’t feel healthy. And every day I’m struggling to get through the day.”
Josh Clemente:
I was remembering back to when I was in college or just out of college, and I just had a lot of energy all the time. And my mood was upbeat and I felt like I was cruising. And then this, now six years on, I was just like every day I would get hit by these waves of fatigue that I was describing. And it was not just physical, it was mental and it was mood.
Josh Clemente:
And so now, the difference is dramatic. And primarily, I think the major benefits. I don’t want to say that I’ve got nitrous oxide in my veins, and I’m flipping cars over and flying around on like Superman, it’s more so just I don’t have those low lows and I have a consistent output of energy. And the biggest thing for me is mental clarity. My mood and my ability to just recall words, and maintain a steady output of mental and physical energy all day long is restored.
Josh Clemente:
I certainly feel like, and I think this is just standard aging, I’m a decade later after school. I’m not the same as I was when I was 20, but my consistency and performance daily, and my ability to just get up and work out and then do a 18 hour work day and feel good is back. And that is what was completely broken just a year or two ago. I really put all of it on this metabolic dysfunction that was developing.
Josh Clemente:
And it wasn’t just nutrition, and I’d love to touch on some of the other stuff, but the ways that I was breaking myself down previously were the nutrition I was eating and the fact that I was too sensitive to it. And then also just like the sleep and sustained stress that I was putting myself under, which stress of course is related to hormonal releases like cortisol and those have direct implications in metabolism. So connecting all of these dots together, I’ve changed a huge number of things about basically every decision I make every day.
Sir Austin Peek:
See, I mean, if I would monitor my glucose right now, I would have been able to remember it was called body for health instead of … Body For Life. See, I can’t even remember, dude. I went over to a different tab. I’m like, I’d almost remembered it, but if I had been eating right and measuring everything, I wouldn’t have to even use Google anymore.
Josh Clemente:
Maybe.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah. So I guess what are the other points of it? Again, I’m just fascinated by the nutrition, but I think that’s the foundation of everything. If you start eating a little bit better, that’s almost going to fix everything else. That was the most interesting thing to me. And when I’m just looking at it, what else does it do?
Josh Clemente:
I was always kind of the person that believed that you could sort of sleep when you’re dead. I’m competitive.
Sir Austin Peek:
You’ll sleep a long time. I was really wondering too. I was like when you said 18 hour work days, I’m like, “Maybe you don’t have to sleep anymore if you can monitor your glucose levels.”
Josh Clemente:
No, no, I should take that back. I don’t like doing 18 hour work days anymore. That’s not good for me. But I didn’t learn that lesson really until I had the feedback from a glucose monitor, because I was finally able to see the negative impact of the stress that I was producing for myself. Basically, stress is a state probably best defined by cortisol Levels. Cortisol, it’s a fight or flight hormone, is released in response to stress and it primes your body for a fight or a flight.
Josh Clemente:
The way it does that is it interferes with insulin and other hormones in the body, and causes you to produce a ton of energy. So the goal is like get your body ready for an endeavor. Once I put on this device, I recall specifically like going into a very stressful meeting, preparation, presentation. It was all really important. And my blood sugar skyrocketed like I had just drank a health drink, one of those pressed juices.
Josh Clemente:
It went up like 50 points and stayed elevated for about 35 or 40 minutes during the most stressful part of this presentation. That was one of the first lessons where, holy cow, it’s not just nutrition that can have major physiologic effects, but this stress thing and the way it’s impacting us both acutely, like in that moment where you’re in that meeting, and long term where you are constantly in a state of stress because of either psychological concerns or because you’re sleeping poorly or not enough, and your body is never recovering.
Josh Clemente:
And so it’s always in this elevated state of readiness almost, because you’re never allowing the full process of restorative sleep to happen. That can compound over a long period of time. And people are ending up with a lot of weight gain issues and a lot of adrenal issues and a lot of, frankly, metabolic dysfunction that is blatantly due to their poor stress management.
Josh Clemente:
You can be eating a good nutrition-filled diet, but just a single night of short sleep, sleeping four hours instead of eight hours can cause people to have 40% higher insulin requirements to clear the same amount of sugar out of their blood. Basically, a meal that you ate yesterday, after eight hours of sleep can be 40% worse or more taxing on your insulin resistance system or on your metabolic system the next day if you only get four hours of sleep. And that’s been studied repeatedly, and I’ve seen that relationship.
Josh Clemente:
I’ve taken red eye flights, and I sleep terribly, get off the flight, and the whole next day, my blood sugar is at a constantly elevated mode, just 10, 15% higher than it normally is. And every response to every meal is dramatically worse. This is like this lesson taught me that, A, sleep matters, recovery matters. I need to start prioritizing it. And then B, when I am compromised, when I’ve had that poor sleep, I tend to be more likely to cheat on my diet. When you’re all stressed out, you’ve had a tough day and you haven’t slept well, that’s when you’re going to go get that pizza and finish it off with a half gallon of ice cream.
Sir Austin Peek:
That’s a lot of ice cream, bro.
Josh Clemente:
I love ice cream. But the reality is that the present of your metabolic health matters most when you are so compromised by sleep. It’s like you have these four levers, nutrition, exercise, sleep and stress. When you’re compromised on one of them, it’s more important to make up for it on the others. It’s the opposite of what we tend to do. We tend to bit ourselves while we’re down with the poor sleep followed by the poor nutrition. And we need to be more mindful and more that we have to start doing the opposite. And if you’re going to be indulging in a meal or getting poor sleep, you should make sure that you’re doing everything you can to keep things on the straight and narrow on the other parts of your daily lifestyle.
Sir Austin Peek:
And so if I have one of these patches on while I’m sleeping, can you just make me exercise while I’m sleeping so there I’m like getting that balance?
Josh Clemente:
We haven’t gotten that far yet, but it’s on the roadmap.
Sir Austin Peek:
Version 2?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, exactly.
Sir Austin Peek:
Yeah. So you’re saying exercise, nutrition and stress. Were those the three things that you kind of were alluding to? If you have balance in all those, you’re going to feel much better?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. I mean, I consider sleep to be separate from stress, but it really is the same thing. It’s a stress control mechanism. These are the four big levers that we’re pulling on every day. Every person is actually playing around with these controls all day, every day. And they just don’t know the effects of them, other than … Every once in a while you’ll be like, “Man, I really feel bad right now,” or, “I feel really great right now. I wonder what it is. Maybe it was that health drink that I got from the juice cart yesterday.”
Josh Clemente:
It’s like we don’t have the ability to connect the dots between all the things we’re doing. And these are like the four big things that we can control. There are of course systems that will break down that are out of our control. There are illnesses that won’t be prevented by managing glucose.
Sir Austin Peek:
You’re not curing cancer with this.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. It’s certainly not a cure for really anything. What it is, is a tool. It’s a tool to help us better understand how our bodies work and what the implications of our choices are. And then we can use it kind of the way that we use financial information. You don’t open a bank account and then say like, “I’m never going to check this balance, but I don’t want to overdraw.” That’s kind of the situation with metabolism, is like we’re flying blind. We don’t know the deposits and withdrawals, so to speak, that we’re making every day, but we’re trying not to overdraw and end up in bankruptcy.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, you don’t have to check your bank account. You got like 15 million, right?
Josh Clemente:
Well, let’s continue with building this business. But that’s kind of the metaphor, is just like we’ve got to make it more financial information, where we’re using it to plan a strategy. All of us, or many people have their retirement plan, and they’re slowly but surely building towards that end goal of being financially secure, and being retired and being able to enjoy their lives. But guess what, most of us don’t know whether we’re going to be healthy enough to be around for that retirement, or to be able to take advantage of it.
Josh Clemente:
And we’ve got to get to that point where we’re using health data to plan our daily decisions, the way that we’re going to compound positive actions to make sure that not only are we financially secure in retirement, but we’re also healthy enough to live and enjoy it.
Sir Austin Peek:
Can you measure your heart rate too and all those other … I don’t know if there’s any other functions on there that it actually measures that would help throughout the day.
Josh Clemente:
Well, we’ve got integrations built with Apple HealthKit and Google Fit. We do auto-import exercise activities and heart rate data and sleep data. We’re building feature sets on top of each of these to really bring together all of your lifestyle choices combined with CGM, and allow you to see in the context of metabolic information or in the context of blood sugar information how different activities affect your metabolic response, how your heart rate implications affect response, and how your sleep quality and duration affect you.
Josh Clemente:
So definitely building all of that in. We consider all of those to be kind of secondary to the main metric, which is glucose, but they can contribute pretty significantly to understanding like if you eat a piece of pizza or something, or you have a whole pizza for that matter, and then you sit on the couch for two hours …
Sir Austin Peek:
So you’ve been watching me?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, we got eyes on you. But that’s an example. You eat a whole personal pizza or a whole pizza and sit on the couch for two hours, and then see how your blood sugar responds. And then we’ll prompt you to try the same thing, but eat that pizza and then go for a walk, go for a 24 or 35 minute walk around your neighborhood. And we’ll pull in the activity information knowing that you took that walk, and then we’ll bring all of those together, the two insights, where we compare pizza plus no activity with pizza plus activity right after it.
Josh Clemente:
And you can start to see that what happens is your muscles in your legs as you’re walking are immediately pulling in the sugar that’s flowing into your bloodstream from the pizza and using it for energy. That is changing the way that your body’s metabolizing this pizza. And it is actually improving your overall exposure to high blood sugar and tends to, for most people, give you a much more favorable response.
Josh Clemente:
It’s a tiny thing. It kind of intuitively makes sense. More activity is better, we’ve been hearing that our whole lives. But when you see it in that moment and realize, “Wow, that’s kind of a really powerful little micro-optimization I can make,” and you can get a little receipt from Levels that shows you, “You made a better choice by taking that walk, and it improved your response over doing nothing.”
Sir Austin Peek:
Appreciate you doing the call here.
Speaker 5:
Yeah. Favorite podcast by far. I love it.
Sir Austin Peek:
Oh, yeah. Why is that?
Speaker 5:
I graduated in 2017 from Michigan. I heard that shout out the other day. That was pretty cool. Basically, two months after I graduated, I started listening to this podcast, loved it. I think there were maybe 30 episodes or something out by that point. And I consider myself to be pretty entrepreneurial, started a business last year. It’s hell of a time. And it’s hard, I think, to find entrepreneurs. I was just looking for entrepreneurial meetups, and I think, wow, this is more of an awesome opportunity to talk with other entrepreneurs. The value, I mean, it’s insane. People make these types of entrepreneurial insight things are thousands of dollars. This is 12 per month, but 12 per month is like nothing.
Sir Austin Peek:
I mean, for you personally, since do you have one on right now?
Josh Clemente:
I do. Always have one.
Sir Austin Peek:
I figured. It’d be good marketing, regardless. You make sure that people can see it.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah, never take it off.
Sir Austin Peek:
You have it on your forehead for every Zoom video.
Josh Clemente:
It’s my barcode on the back of the neck.
Sir Austin Peek:
There you go. Just future wise, 50 years from now, they’re talking about putting chips in people’s brains, right? Like your boy Elon, which I would be down to too. I told my wife, “Hook me up.” This thing makes a lot of sense to me of like, okay, this is kind of a stepping stone to that at least, right? You want to know. How addicted is everyone to their phone? Basically, I mean, it’s in your brain now, to an extent of like you won’t drop that.
Sir Austin Peek:
But this is something that’s on you that’s actually going to help you. But I was wondering, for you personally, do you even look at like the nutritional facts anymore? Because it seems like this is the highest level of understanding your fitness, if you will. I mean, unless I’m understanding that wrong. Are you even looking at proteins, fats and carbs and all that other stuff?
Josh Clemente:
I do. I pay attention to it, but what I do is I actually look at ingredients more than I do nutrition facts. As you mentioned, the nutrition facts don’t always translate. And so I now know how I respond to most specific foods, like corn versus flour versus cassava flour or coconut flour. All of these different ingredients that will show up on a label as fiber or carbs, I respond differently to all of them.
Josh Clemente:
I’m going to pick foods that I don’t have a personal sensitivity to, and I’m going to look at the ingredient label and then I’m going to look at the nutrition facts. But I will try to avoid foods that require a nutrition label. And what I mean by that is that if you’re making your own meals and you’re making them from wholefoods, you don’t need a nutrition label on the beans or on the rice.
Josh Clemente:
If you’re going to eat that, you know what’s in it. And you can understand that, that’s like entirely carbohydrate. And then the meat that you’re using is entirely protein for the most part, with some fat. I guess what I mean is that I try to get further away from foods that are unknown combinations of ingredients and more towards meals that I’m preparing. And it’s been a very slow process. By no means am I someone that is a great cook and enjoys the process.
Josh Clemente:
It’s tricky. It takes time. It’s something I got to make space for, but I’ve just realized through this process how important it is to be knowing what’s going into my body and controlling it. The most important thing to me is quality and choosing ingredients that I know I’m not specifically sensitive to. And then the secondary thing is trying to hit ratios that work. And like the rough ratio for me is … I won’t even give numbers. It’s more so like I prioritize protein above all.
Josh Clemente:
I’ll eat moderate, healthy fats, like a lot of avocados, a lot of cashews and almonds and other nuts that have high fats, chia seeds. And then my carbs are fairly low. I tend to keep my carbs probably at 20% of calories or below, and kind of eating them around workout times mostly. And then just a ton of green vegetables and fiber is really important.
Sir Austin Peek:
I mean, I have to imagine that you’re in the top 1% of understanding that and eating to that perspective. But I mean, what happens if they are eating Wheat Thins and they think they’re good when it’s a lot more processed? But is it really that much better than a bag of Doritos? Right? And maybe it’s even worse. Or like you’re saying, even if you’re cooking, what happens if people are using certain types of oils? You think everything’s good, but I want to go use avocado oil instead of olive oil, what’s the effect? That’s the kind of stuff I would want to test with it.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. Right now we’re measuring a specific molecule of glucose, and that is really important because it’s so rampantly broken in society today. It’s such a problem. Glucose metabolism and insulin resistance is a really big problem. But it’s not the only molecule that matters to your point about avocado oil versus olive oil. We wouldn’t be able to determine the difference or the quality of those two different foods or oils very effectively with just glucose.
Josh Clemente:
I mean, it could show up, for example, if you’re having like a really bad seed oil of some kind that’s causing inflammation in your body, like maybe that would show up because the inflammation would induce stress and the stress would cause blood sugar to rise. But the point is just that glucose isn’t everything, it’s a lot, but we’ve got to get to the point where we can measure multiple molecules in real time to provide this same degree of insight across a number of factors.
Josh Clemente:
And I’m just super optimistic. I think we’re going to be a part of that innovation and bringing that future to reality where we can understand not just sugar, but also hormones and other proteins and molecules in our bodies that really affect health.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, maybe that was a bad example, but I mean, but I guess I was trying to think of something that … Because both those are really good for you, it seems like, right, overall. Do you have another example where something’s like good and bad?
Josh Clemente:
No, I think you’re totally on the knows with the idea, it’s just that being able to compare different foods to each other. I mean, the brown rice versus white rice example, or the corn versus flour tortillas or … Yeah. All of these are great examples. And something that I dove deep into at the beginning, and everyone does as they come into the Levels program, we have these things called challenges in the app which make specific recommendations. “Try a meal with red beans and then the same meal with black beans, or-”
Sir Austin Peek:
Exactly.
Josh Clemente:
… Yeah. All of that. And then other different factors. Vinegar tends to have a digestive slowing effect, it seems, which can slow the rate at which glucose makes its way into the blood. So we’ll kind of recommend either try taking a shot of apple cider vinegar before you have that meal.
Sir Austin Peek:
Oh.
Josh Clemente:
Or-
Sir Austin Peek:
Dude, I just bought some of that and tried that shit, it is horrendous.
Josh Clemente:
… It’s bad.
Sir Austin Peek:
I bought these little detox thing, because again, my wife just recently kind of with a couple months went vegan, and so I’ve been trying to eat better. Again, I’m doing the spinach, whatever. Not that I ever ate that horrible, but it’s like, for me, like you were saying, I’m like, “Honey, I didn’t get all these muscles for no reason. I’m not going to let these protein … I need more protein.” And I go get my own meat, and sous vide it and do all that, and it’s just like, “I need the protein.” But she doesn’t really care as much. But sorry, that got me on a rant about … I forgot where-
Josh Clemente:
Well, the vinegar effect is like … I mean, it’s tough. I mean, for sure. So maybe like make a quick dressing with apple cider vinegar and put it on-
Sir Austin Peek:
… Oh, apple cider vinegar.
Josh Clemente:
… Yeah.
Sir Austin Peek:
Oh God. Sorry. Yeah. I remember it, because I tried it before anybody. If you tried it before, because it’s buy one, get one free and now I knew why.
Josh Clemente:
… Yeah. But it’s interesting to see that effect. If the difference between having vinegarette on a salad, like a cold salad with noodles, it may affect how fast those noodles break down and make their way into your bloodstream. So you can see that and understand that vinegar is a really good way, that if you like the vinegarette, you can incorporate that into your dietary approach. So yeah, we have just kind of a ton of these, the walking after meals, the sleep quality, the effects of alcohol, which are counterintuitive.
Josh Clemente:
All of it is coming together into just experimentation so that each person comes away with a better understanding of not just like a very small number of things, but also the edge cases, the things they otherwise wouldn’t have tried. And you can see these new tools that, that person can use.
Sir Austin Peek:
I was going to say that eventually, I’m glad you brought it up, the alcohol thing. A patch on me, I’m like that would make me feel way better about like, okay, if this really did make it that much worse, I’d feel bad and then I would be like, “Okay, you need to stop doing that.”
Josh Clemente:
The process you’re describing though is like that’s the accountability that this device provides. It is amazing, the reason I continue to wear it. I mean, obviously beyond the branding piece, but just like, “I wear it.”
Sir Austin Peek:
On your forehead.
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. But I wear it because it is the most amazing accountability device ever. Because I know that if I’m going to eat that thing, that I know I have a sensitivity to because I’ve tested it many times, I’m going to have to see the data. And I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact like I just did a little bit of damage to myself. It’s like I smoke that cigarette effectively nutrition wise.
Josh Clemente:
I don’t know, it’s just like it’s the small nudge I needed to not make those little decisions that go against my goals. And everyone’s different, their goals are going to be different, the way they use the technology will be different, but the accountability piece, I think, is the same for all of us. In terms of alcohol, the way it kind of works is that ethanol is the molecule in most alcoholic beverages that does the work.
Josh Clemente:
And so your liver can only process alcohol or ethanol in one way. It has to turn it into triglycerides or turn it into fat. Ethanol can’t be used by the cells for energy directly. It has to be converted into fat and then it can be used for energy. But it is also a toxin. What seems to happen is that your body goes into high alert when there’s ethanol, and it stops producing glucose from the liver, which is called glucogenesis, which is where your body is basically constantly producing, when you’re not eating, it’s producing new glucose from the fat and glycogen, so the stored glucose in your body, and releasing it into your bloodstream, just to make sure that there’s energy available for your brain and for your muscles.
Josh Clemente:
So when you drink alcohol, your liver stops that and starts just producing fat. It’s converting the ethanol into triglycerides. What happens is that because your liver stops producing that glucose, your blood sugar starts to drop, and this is different for different people. And I think there are kind of a bunch of different factors, like what the alcohol is mixed with, how many carbohydrates are in the beer along with the alcohol. Or if you’re having a cocktail or margarita or something like that, all of that will have different effects.
Josh Clemente:
But for most people, if you just were to have some gin or vodka or whiskey or something like that, you would see this effect where your blood sugar will start to actually drop, which is confusing for people because they think, “Huh! I thought this was all carbs. I thought it was going to put me through the roof.” I don’t think the effect is a good one, meaning I don’t think people should be like, “Oh, it drops my glucose. It’s good for me,” because-
Sir Austin Peek:
I’ll have a 12 pack right now.
Josh Clemente:
… Because what was happening behind the scenes is that increase in fat production, and specifically triglycerides which are not something we want in high quantities in our blood. I’m looking forward to being able to obviously produce the real time triglyceride monitor that will allow us to add that data stream, but for now I just think it’s a tool, it has …
Josh Clemente:
Alcohol is helpful for definitely stress relief for some people in moderate quantities. I certainly am not a person that says, “Never drink alcohol,” but I do think that, that counterintuitive piece, it’s a really fascinating thing to learn about your body. And it’s something that’s good to know and probably fine in moderation.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, Josh, I got to give you some advice here then.
Josh Clemente:
What’s up? I’m ready.
Sir Austin Peek:
Well, if you’re this into nutrition, you probably should stop smoking.
Josh Clemente:
No, I don’t smoke. I was saying-
Sir Austin Peek:
That’s just a example, right? I think at least we all gave that up, it seems like, at least everyone in Florida. I know when I go to South Carolina and stuff, when I was in college, I think I went there, everyone who was there was smoking. I guess, because it’s tobacco region. They get those kids hooked. They’d come down to Florida and they’d ask all the kids when I was in college, “You all got cigarettes?” We’re like, “Dude, people don’t smoke anymore. What are you talking about?”
Sir Austin Peek:
Because there’s always a balance of like, “Okay, are you the anal guy who’s never going to have fun?” right? But again, the main thing that you brought up, and I think that’s going to be most helpful to anyone once this is easier for everyone to get involved with is just the accountability factor.
Josh Clemente:
… Yeah. I think that’s what it all comes down to.
Sir Austin Peek:
If anyone is interested, is the best way for them to, again, go to the website and just sign up?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. So levelshealth.com. We got the wait list right there. We’re still in invitation-only, but we’re expanding quickly and we’ll ultimately be opening this up later this year. So definitely sign up, stay in the loop. Definitely check out the blog. We touched on a lot of stuff here on this episode, but if you go to the blog, we break it all down sort of in article format to help you kind of understand these mechanisms and how they might be affecting you day by day.
Sir Austin Peek:
And if someone wanted to say thank you for doing this episode, is there a best way for them to personally reach out to you to say thank you?
Josh Clemente:
Yeah. I’m on Twitter @joshuasforrest with two Rs, and also on Instagram @Josh.f.clemente. So you can hit me up there, would love to hear from you.
Sir Austin Peek:
Cool. Well, thanks for coming on Josh.
Josh Clemente:
Thanks a lot, Austin.
Sir Austin Peek:
Let’s see, I’m looking at our new … What are we doing now for Patreon for our group calls? Oh, we’re doing two a month? Yeah, we are. And the membership price is still the same? Unbelievable. So if you want to become a member, join our Patreon membership by going to Millionaire-interviews.com/patreon. And again, the price is still the same. I’m not going to keep it this way forever. We’re now doing two group calls a month for the price of one. You’re welcome.