Episode 442: The Truth About GLP-1s and Peptides for Weight Loss

0:01Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and hustle. Crush it. Are there hidden benefits to GLP-1s that the FDA just isn't talking about? In this Fitness Friday episode of Habits and Hustle, I sit down with Dr. Tina Moore to break down the truth about GLP-1 medications and the hype surrounding them. Dr. Tina is an expert in holistic regenerative medicine. She shares why these drugs are more than just weight loss tools and how the conversation around them has become very polarizing. This is a short clip from our full interview, where you can find the full episode linked in the show notes below.

0:42Please listen and comment with anything you'd like. Enjoy the episode.

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2:17Are you telling me that GLP-1 and let's say a samoralin peptide, they're not the same peptide, but they're both in the same class or both peptides? They're both peptides, but they're not at all the same. They don't do the same things in the body. No. They both may have some anti-inflammatory and some regenerative impacts, but they have different mechanisms. What does semoralin do? That's a growth hormone, I believe, releasing hormone peptides. So that'll help you. Your growth hormone declines as you age. And back when I was starting practice, you could still prescribe patients growth hormone, but they would get all pink and puffy.

2:52And we don't want to crank growth hormone. So a lot of people, I think, probably in their maybe 50s and 60s, if they've been going to longevity doctors for a long time, probably got some growth hormone at some point. But the FDA put a snafu on that. And so when I got into practice, I was licensed as a naturopathic doctor in 2008. And my mentor was like, do not prescribe growth hormone. You will get in trouble with the FDA. So I never prescribed it. But I knew people that still were. And I knew doctors that were still taking it or putting their patients on it. And those people would get pink and puffy.

3:21And then came peptides many years later, which would help support your natural pulse of growth hormone at the appropriate times. GLP-1s support natural pulsing of insulin at the appropriate times. They actually work on your pancreas to help heal the pancreas and support natural release of insulin when needed. And also on the cellular level, they help the cells, if you will, in the kindergarten version, hear it better. They help the tissues respond to insulin better. And that's just but one mechanism. And so samoralin, you said, so when would someone take samoralin? If they've had an injury, if they're, I'll use it when someone's really burned out.

4:04I'll use it when someone's trying to alter body composition and they just can't get up on it. So this is a great time, I think, as we hit middle age, you know, when people are like, okay, I'm lifting weights, I'm doing all the things, but I'm just not having that anabolic response to the work I'm putting in anymore. We can put them on bioidentical hormone replacement and estrogen and testosterone are going to be supportive to muscle protein synthesis, but sometimes we need to get that growth hormone up a little bit. And so there might be a myriad of reasons. Somebody may have gone through a terrible illness and they're just fried on the other side of it.

4:39You know, long COVID, I'm not saying it's a specific treatment for that, but I think of these post-viral syndromes and people coming out the other side of a big whomp with a virus. That might be a time to give them a leg up, but we cycle them and we pulse them. We aren't just putting people on them forever and saying, hey, good luck. We're using it as part of a comprehensive protocol and we're making sure that we're checking off all the boxes and we are making sure that we aren't cranking them up on especially one thing alone. I mean, imagine going on just estrogen or just testosterone or just progesterone only.

5:11You'd mess up the whole system, right? But I think this is what people are doing. They're going just on testosterone and or the samoralin. The reason why I'm asking about samoralin was I've heard a lot of people be, a lot of people are prescribed samoralin in my world. You said another one, Tresamorlin? Tessamorlin. Are they different also? They're a little bit different, yeah, but they both work similarly in that we're trying to get a good pulse and activity out of some growth hormone. Most people, and I feel like it doesn't work for some people, it works for other people. Is that with every peptide?

5:44But then GLP-1 seems to work for everybody. It doesn't unless, so what's happening is people are cranking the dose into crazy high levels in the standard dosing. In the standard, you know, big pharma pen version, people are going up to these really high, and some people need that though. Are you talking about GLP-1? Yeah. I'm talking about the samoralin and the other one. Right. Well, peptides are going to work or not. I mean, it's all individualized. Not everything works for everyone, but also you get much better results when somebody's metabolically optimized. So if you were to come in and take a peptide, we would be able to likely keep, or hormone for that matter, any hormone.

6:22If you walked into my office, I'd be like, oh, this is going to be easy. And this is like, you've got good muscle mass. I can tell you're doing all the things. Your skin's glowing. You have good vitality. Wow. Okay. Oh my gosh. Should I pay you? That was for free. I didn't pay her to say anything. Well, you take care of yourself, you know? I try. So a little bit of hormone, a little bit of peptide is likely going to have a really powerful impact on you. And there's other people who are really not very well metabolically optimized, and peptides don't work as well on them. Do we still use them? Yes, we probably need a higher dose and it gets a little muckier.

6:54It's not as clean and easy on my end. Can you take too many? Can you take, if someone's taking the testosterone, the samoralin, or do people take samoralin instead of testosterone? Or like, my question is like, if someone wants to like change their body composition, I'm gonna ask the most basic one that most people wanna know about. They wanna like get lean, lose weight, change their body composition. what would be the cocktail that you would prescribe? I think it's tricky because I don't want to get in trouble with my board or anyone else. Yeah. I'll tell you what I do. I'll tell you what I do.

7:26First, I'm going to run labs, obviously, and see where we're at with everything. Second, I'm going to do a very in-depth analysis of what their lifestyle is like, because if they're fucking around with a bunch of alcohol and they're eating, you know, not the right foods that are conducive to longevity and we're dealing, Or honestly, in my world, I can't tell you the amount of people who came in who were just balls of stress, like high-level CEOs that were just burning the candle at all ends. Then we're just trying to supplement to keep up. We're not even getting any headway. You're not getting any headway, yeah.

7:58So it really depends on a lot of factors. And then lifestyle factors, how well-muscled they are matters a lot. And then I'm not going to ever put anybody on anything forever. I think that that's the problem is all of these potentially are pro-grow. And I'm conservative, in my opinion, taking something like PPC-157 even all the time every day. I think that's a bit of a danger. I think we want to cycle those, right? We want to go on them and come off of them. We want to use them as we need and come off of them. But I'm conservative with use. And I'm also concerned about all of these, including GLP-1s, about receptor sensitivity.

8:36Are we going to basically, any cell that gets bombarded with a peptide or hormone or anything for that matter is going to start cleaving off receptors. And so you're going to start, the cells are no longer going to hear what we're doing for it. They're not going to hear the hormone in the system anymore. And so we have to start using higher and higher doses. I don't like that cycle. I think that gets really messy. And so I'm looking for folks who are really well optimized. Those are much better candidates, I think, for peptides. Do the other folks out there need it? I mean, the argument I get all the time when I say this from people is, well, you know, 70 % of Americans are obese or overweight and, you know, 94 %—2018 data showed close to 94 % were cardiometabolically busted.

9:17So what about them? And I'm like, here's what I say. We use peptides whilst they're getting their lifestyle in order because it does give you a leg up. And some people need a leg up. So that's where I come back to this obesity conversation and, oh, is it the easy way out? Well, why wouldn't we give somebody a leg up? Why wouldn't we give somebody the opportunity to have a window open where it's actually inducing some neuroplasticity and they can make the appropriate lifestyle changes with good counseling, right, with actually good guidance from their physicians or their health coach or whatnot.

9:48And they can start to rewire different pathways with good lifestyle habits. I'm all for giving people a leg up. So I use peptides differently for different categories of patients. Okay, so let's just say, let's just get back to the Ozempic because there's so many questions I have for it. The microdosing or the doses, can everybody microdose it and get a benefit from it? I suppose it would matter on what their personal history is, what their family history is. So I've got a patient who's got a pretty severe family history of cardiovascular disease, history themselves of high blood pressure. They're just using it at a very low dose to keep their blood pressure mitigated.

10:27And it does seem to have some impact, but only if they're doing all the other things, right? If they start messing around, and we're doing other things in there as well. I'm using different herbs, different nutrients, different supplements, different lifestyle interventions. but it is one of many in a toolkit. I've got people on it who have found it to be really spectacular for boosting their mood and their neurocognition and allowed them to go off antidepressants and allowed them to discontinue some of the things they were doing. It's really, I think this is the problem and I think this is maybe what got me in trouble is the need for a lot of other pharmaceuticals may go by the wayside in certain people depending on how impactful this GLP-1 is in their body because it not only potentially is abating some of the pathology.

11:10I mean, we have hard data showing its impacts on the cardiovascular system as well as what it's doing to the cardiovascular cells, the cells of the heart. Actually, the damage that's done when there's pathology is being abated and potentially reversed. And mitochondrial function is returning. And we're seeing this in different organ systems of the body. So this is where I'm like, who has something to lose? Which industries have something to lose? Who turned off my Instagram? Was it Big Food? Was it Big Food? Because Big Food has a lot to lose. And they've come out recently and like different CEOs have come out flat out and said, go look it up on Forbes.

11:46They're concerned. Like their snack food sales are down. McDonald's fast food sales are down. Big Pharma might have something to lose because those big Pharma companies who don't have a patent on a GLP-1 who are doling out lifestyle drugs like high blood pressure medications and statin drugs, that's their bread and butter. Type 2 diabetes and obesity is very profitable to a lot of industries. So maybe people aren't needing those medications anymore that are on GLP-1s. The companies that make the joint replacements are concerned because hip and knee replacements are a massive, massive industry right now because all the boomers are just, the obesity problem is really causing havoc on these joints.

12:29I mean, most people in our age, I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing we're somewhere in there. 29. Always. Forever. I'm 28 forever. Find 39. Go on. I mean, hip replacements are a thing, right? Coming down the chute. Dialysis clinics potentially have something to lose. They're popping up on every corner because long-term metabolic dysfunction is, you know, a 15, 20-year process. You get to type 2 diabetes, and they're like, oh, you've hit the magic number, but the damage has been being incurred to the microvasculature, to our joints, to our brains, to everything else, to our kidneys for that entire time.

13:04And so now they're at type 2 diabetes. The path beyond that is dialysis. If you make it, if the cardiovascular disease doesn't take you out, it's dementia and Alzheimer's, right? Like that's the path that most Americans are headed down because of our system. And I'm with everyone who's like right now we see Callie and Casey Means and they are banging the drum on that fact that we need to change the systems. And I completely agree. And I know Dr. Mark Hyman has been trying to change the systems for a long, long time. I totally agree with that. And that has been my platform as well for decades. But I'm over here like, okay, the house is on fire for a lot of people in this country and the world.

13:45And we can talk all we want about how the drywall's flammable and the wood's flammable and the foundation's not built right. We can go on and on and we need to change all that. I completely, we've got to make it earthquake-proof. Totally agree. but there's a freaking fire right now on this individual and I need a fire extinguisher.