Hey, friends, Peggy hall, back with you from thehealthyamerican. org. You know, I love to bring on expert guests from time to time. And today I have Dr. Bruce Fong, and he is going to be helping us understand how to really age gracefully and naturally, preventing illness, feeling our best, improving our quality of life without having to rely on the pharmaceutical products that I know, you know, and I know that we want to stay away from and to hopefully prevent undergoing unnecessary knee replacements and other things.

So, Dr. Fong, welcome to the show. I’m going to give you a little more of an introduction, but I’m glad to have you here. Thank you, Peggy. It’s a pleasure to be here. And thank you for that intro. I think that I love to educate people. I like to spend time with my patients, especially to make them understand that really, as a physician, I always like to have it be a team effort between myself and my patients.

Our clinic here, the Sierra Integrative Medical center, we’re an integrative medical clinic. Myself, I’m an internal medicine doctor, but I like to call myself an integrative internist, meaning that I’ve done my three years of internal medicine training, but yet I have, I guess, my feet in both sides of the fence, so to speak. I like that. And I like to offer my patients anything that is really about maintaining their health, because the oldest adage is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Or actually, we had a slogan for our clinic before it was called no success can compensate for the premature failure of our bodies. And I think that’s a Confucius saying from ancient China. So again, these are all things, I guess, are kind of segue into what we want to talk about today. So I’ll let you. Well, that’s great. Dr. Fong, I just want to give you the little background here for those, want to give those a little bit of background on you as well.

So he was introduced to natural medicine, homeopathic medicine, as a young child. And my audience is really interested in that. They want to steer away from what I call the mainstream medical merry go round, where you can get on the merry go round, and it’s hard to get off. So he follows this tradition today of the natural medicine that we all are interested in. And Dr. Fong is rooted in the belief that we must heal and prevent human disease and suffering, which that has to do with our well being included.

So he’s really a pioneer in integrative medicine, and he’s been at the forefront of alternative therapies for immune related diseases. And he pulls together information and treatment plans from a broad array of homeopathic, integrative, chinese, osteopathic and traditional medicine that is a breath of fresh air. Dr. Fong, so often we are just getting written up prescriptions and we want to learn how we can age gracefully, naturally, prevent illness.

And we were going to be talking about this sarcopenia. So I want everybody to listen carefully. If you have heard of that, maybe you know somebody that’s been diagnosed with that. It’s been called the silent thief of mobility and robs you of the quality of life. What is sarcopenia and why do we need to be concerned about that? So the article you referred to, it’s a recent article that talks about its natural process where as we age we start to not have as good of an ability to maintain our muscle, whether that’s skeletal muscle, sometimes even smooth muscle.

But the article really focuses here on the skeletal muscle. And everybody talks about, hey, I hit my, I’m putting on weight or I’m getting flabby or I’m just not as good. And everybody talks about hey, my metabolism is slowing down and it probably is a lot more than that and we’re going to get into the more of the biochemical part of that. But to directly answer your question, the word sarcopenia means muscle loss or muscle wasting or basically I think people are familiar with the term osteopenia as opposed to osteoporosis.

It’s where you have the thinning of the bone before the bones start having these big holes in them. So in a similar way the muscle starts to degrade and the ability to maintain the muscle volume, maintain the muscle mass, maintain muscle strength is what we call sarcopenia. Now. Right now because of this article, I think a lot of people recognize is this is a natural process that happens all the time under the medical circles, from my brethren there in the medical circles who are listening, of course, we always talk about sarcopenia as being this really bad pathologic process.

We always think about, hey, this person’s got cancer or some really bad disease and they’re wasting away in front of us and they’re watching the muscles waste away. Now that is an extreme case of the sarcopenia. We’ll watch due to an accelerated pace, we watch somebody waste away. Now unfortunately that process is happening in all of us, especially after our mid thirty s. And again, one of the big things that we see in our thirty s is a lot of people quote unquote slow down their metabolism slows down, whatever.

The truth of the matter is, one of the major things that occurs in that particular period in our life is that we hit a critical point where we stop producing a number of different growth factors in our body and directly related to the level of growth hormone in our body. Growth hormone, of course, triggers the production of multiple growth factors. One of the big ones is something called insulin like growth factor one or igf one.

And it has really got a lot of the, so we say, everybody talks about, oh, I need, I need growth hormone. What benefits I get. Well, igf one is probably the motivator for most of those benefits. And we do know biochemically, we’ve looked at patients and looked at people in various studies, have looked at people. I should say that we do see a decline of the amount of insulin like growth factor one or igf one, as we age.

And we probably hit that critical mass where it’s no longer helping us to maintain. It’s not quite enough for us to stay the way we want to. And so we start to see the ability of our body to maintain muscle, be able to keep strength up, decline after a certain period, and usually in our thirty s. Oh my gosh. That was a couple of decades ago. But I think that is why people feel weaker.

They’re unable to do their everyday tasks, feeling loss of strength that can lead to balance issues, mobility, overall physical function. Maybe you want to go out and be active, but you’re not feeling as strong. And then increased risks of falls and fractures. I know that is of concern to people. And then my understanding when I was reading this article is the sarcopenia also can impact your metabolic health.

I know my audience, including myself, we definitely are concerned about wanting to stay healthy, not wanting to become pre diabetic or diabetic. And so I just wanted to mention some of those side effects that can happen when we are aging like that. Yeah. So think about this. Now, again, we primarily talk about it in the article about skeletal muscle, these things where we’re working out, we can see the gains in our muscles, et cetera, but we also have what are called smooth muscles.

So skeletal muscles under voluntary control. If I don’t want to do that curl coach, I’m not going to do that last curl. But what or when I said, hey, go feel the burn. If I don’t want to do that, maybe I won’t want to do that. But the point, in other words, I’m in control of that. But we have other muscles in our body which are equally affected by this, that we don’t control.

We call these smooth muscles because of the way when we look at them under a microscope, they don’t have striations and things like that, but they’re just smooth muscle. And some of these smooth muscles, of course, control things like the ones around our blood vessels, actually how tight they constrict. That’s how much blood pressure we have. So that’s something there. Now, other muscles that we don’t think about that are skeletal muscles are.

Here we are. I don’t want to stand up, I guess. I don’t think I’ll be in the camera, but say, like, we’re walking, we always think about the big muscle groups, our quads, basically, our hamstrings, et cetera, and, of course, the lower leg with the gastrocs, et cetera. But there’s other muscles there. There are smaller muscle groups that actually help us maintain balance. You have things in the hips, in the pelvis that actually help to balance you out.

For every step that we take when we walk, there’s probably hundreds of signals going through our brain that say, hey, dude, you’re going too much to this side. Okay, let me just adjust you this way by pulling these tiny little muscle groups to keep the big muscle groups from falling out of bounce. In other words, hey, here’s this big piston that’s moving you forward. But what’s holding that piston in that orientation are some of these smaller groups.

And because they’re smaller groups, they’re going to deteriorate faster than the big groups, and that’s where you can get the balance issues. And so, again, these are real important things to think about. And then, of course, the loss of active muscle tissue. Now, it’s not 100% accurate to say, hey, I got more fat and less muscle. I’m more prone to. I don’t have the right tissues to burn up the sugar, so I’m going to become more, basically move myself towards diabetes.

It’s a good way to think about it, but it’s not 100% accurate. So I want to make sure everybody who’s medically oriented knows that I know better than that, but the whole point is for the audience to understand a little bit better. Think about it. If you got muscles, those are active tissues. They can take in the sugar, they can actually utilize it and actually have normal metabolism.

The more fat and everything else that you have, or in this case, the diminishment of the amount of the active tissue, the muscles can result in deposition of fats and what’s a little bit more frightening is something called glycosylation, because our american diet is just full of sugars. The sugar, actually, believe it or not, begins to replace tissues that are not as active or to replace things and make them bad for us, for lack of better term.

Again, that’s a whole lecture I can give for an hour to students and things like that. But the whole point is when you start doing that, it’s like, okay, so we’re now sacrificing the muscle or active tissues for inactive tissues. Yeah, now we got more sugar roaming around. Now the insulin isn’t able to put it anywhere, or even the receptors for the insulin on the cells are no longer very good with the process we call insulin resistance.

And the bottom line is the loss of the muscle tissue plays a role in making us more insulin resistant or ultimately can lead us towards that direction. So the reason I mention all these things, we talk about something called metabolic syndrome. We’ve got insulin insensitivity. We have the high blood pressure. Again, these are all things that are very real, and they’re leading us down a road where we’re getting further from where we’re supposed to be, where bodies are very active, our ability to maintain ourselves, we start to lose that.

In essence, sarcopenia is a natural process. Yes, but it’s because of these various factors that we have, and we can talk about that in a second about how we can kind of offset it and help. Let’s talk about that. I’m sure that’s on everybody’s mind. So we have natural aging that’s going on, and there is some loss of muscle tone and strength and so forth, but that can be accelerated through lack of exercise, poor diet.

So tell us some of the solutions that we’ve got for this. Everybody kind of knows, hey, okay, so I guess I’m in the right age. We remember back when we were growing up, it was like, hey, you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it. Well, unfortunately, that’s really true. And so when you don’t use your muscles, you have actually something called disuse atrophy. So things, the body doesn’t maintain as much blood flow to them.

The body doesn’t maintain the nutrients to them because of the lack of blood flow. Ultimately, you do start to shrink a little bit just from not using it. So the corollary to that, as we have this process that is trying to naturally diminish our muscles, is that training or exercise with resistance training in particular, is going to stimulate our body to increase blood flow to those muscles, increase the ability to bring those nutrients to those muscles.

Of course, what builds muscle? Well, it certainly ain’t sugar. I mentioned that earlier. That’s a bad thing. Okay. By the way, I’m not proposing that you shouldn’t eat any sugar. You obviously need some, but it’s all about balance, and your diet really should be more about proteins and good fats and things like that. Yeah. So, again, that’s a whole other discussion we have another time. But in regards to muscle health, most people know this already, especially if you’ve ever trained.

A lot of people use what? Protein supplements. So, good proteins are things that can actually help to give you the building blocks, so to speak. We call them amino acids that help maintain and build new muscle fibers. Again, there’s all kinds of different opinions on what’s a good protein. Again, just realize that if you’re going to use plant proteins, you have to work with a combination of them to get what we call the essential amino acids on board with those things.

The oldest adage was beans and rice. So beans alone wouldn’t do it. Rice alone wouldn’t do it. But to get the eight essential amino acids, you had to be beans and rice. So really, just to understand that if you’re going to use a plant based protein, that’s okay, but make sure that whatever you’re using covers all the various amino acids. And the beans and rice is very budget friendly also for those who are worried about inflation.

And. Yeah, that’s so interesting. People are using the protein supplements, wanting to stay engaged in their exercise, and I just wanted to sneak in before we kind of get to the big reveal here, I want everybody to know that I wanted Dr. Fong to come on the show because I’ve actually used the products from his lab. And you know that I am all about the natural way things know Mother Nature and provided by the earth.

And I have been satisfied with the results, especially from this sleep spray that I hope we’ll talk about in a little bit. But tell us specifically about improving the human growth factor that we were mentioning earlier. I know you want to tell us about that as well. You make it sound like I should open an envelope and say the winner is. The winner is. Well, it is because we want to give solutions.

Yeah. So the big reveal is, what we’ve been hinting at this whole time is that you’re losing something called insulin like growth factor one or igf one, possibly other growth factors. So the whole point about this is that we want to build that back in the body. And study after study, specifically on igf one itself, shows a significant loser, like 30% or more versus a control group that doesn’t get it.

When you’re training that you’re putting on muscle, you’re able to work out harder and faster. So again, this insulin like growth factor one is the major thing. That is the activator of all the effects we see with growth hormone and insulin like growth factor one. Igf one, for short, has been proven in study after study in athletic performance studies and sports physiology things that it is clearly showing a significant increase in the amount of muscle fibers that are being laid down, showing an increased size of the fiber and an increased ability to put new fibers down.

And so it’s a huge thing. And again, these are studies, believe it or not, even conducted by everybody’s going to say something about this, but like the Russian Olympic guys, they clearly showed that this was something that helped their athletes maintain, put on muscle faster. More importantly, every time we do resistance training, we probably are actually causing micro damage to the muscles, and that’s a stimulant to grow more muscle and make the muscle fibers bigger.

So, again, that particular thing that comes along, the igf one, has been proven to improve that repair quicker and to be able to lay down these muscles better. So the long story short is that having something that has insulin like growth factor in it, especially insulin like growth factor one in it, is going to help maintain your muscles, your muscle mass, make it easier for you to put muscle on, so you can actually increase that muscle mass to kind of offset all those other things we talked about earlier and even more.

So, it’s going to actually help you to overall maintain your health better, feel better, prevent some of those metabolic things we talked about. So the product we’re specifically talking about is the neutronics labs, IGF one, which I have. Yeah. Okay, great. And I was going to share. Oh, yeah, let me come off the screen, share for a moment. You can go ahead and show me what you’ve got there.

I thought that was my computer again. Sorry. There you go. I want to show them the website. So we’ll hop on over there. I’ll have a link. Friends, if you think this is something that would be a good fit for you, if you are interested in increasing your strength, your well being, and just want a little boost from Mother Nature, it’s neutronic labs. And I’m going to have that for you.

Spelled nutronics labs. com. And you can actually buy one of these. You get one free. And I would also like you to put in my, I’ve got a code there for you, which is the healthy American there is. For those of you that want convenience, there’s an autoship. It’s just an option. And you also get an additional bonus off that if that sounds like something that would be good for you.

So you get 50% with autoship. And actually, I’m going to have the website for you, naturaligf. com. That’s even easier. Naturaligf. com. And you’ll use the code, the healthy American. I’ll have all of that for you in the description box. Know, I like a natural approach, Dr. Fong, and I know we’re talking about IGF and how great that is. But you also mentioned, I think, before we came on the air, how important sleep is for your body to heal and repair.

But a lot of people, including myself, can have those sleepless nights where we’re tossing and turning. We feel restless. It’s weird. It’s like you’re tired, but you can’t fall asleep. And I want to tell everybody that I actually was using, and it helped me get my sleep back on track. I was using the sleep aid. I know we’re not really talking about this too much today, but I would love if everybody wanted to try out that sleep aid.

Can you tell me why that’s so effective? I just do a couple of sprays. It tastes good, and I actually gave it to my husband as well. You got to make it taste good, for sure. It knocked us out. And for me, the best part of it is I did not have any grogginess in the morning, like with melatonin, which I’ve taken in the past, or maybe it was too much of a dose or something.

I would fall asleep, have weird dreams, and I was groggy in the morning. When I do the sleep supplement spray, I just feel relaxed and sleepy and I wake up refreshed. So what is going on in that? That is working for me. So with all the products from neutronics labs, even the one I just mentioned about the igf one plus, which, by the way, is a complete growth matrix with all the different growth factors in it, not just igf one.

Yeah, I’m going to share that screen again. Sorry to interrupt there, but yeah, so here’s the buy one, get one free. The IGF plus. Definitely check that out. And I’m just pulling up the sleep miracle also, because go and roll that down so people can see. Go ahead and click on that. Scroll down. A little bit. There’s like another picture with the actual ingredients in there. So scroll down just a bit more.

Oh, for the sleep eight? Yeah, just go and click on that. It should actually come up. I guess it’s not. Oh, there it goes. I don’t know if everybody can see that, but. Okay, so let’s talk about sleep miracle real quick. So again, I mentioned that number one, everything from neutronics labs, any sort of liquid spray drops, et cetera, they’re prepared in what’s called a liposomal delivery system.

It means that especially with the growth factors we talked about in the previous product, they get in the bloodstream right away. You try swapping them and doing everything else, they’re going to get destroyed by the GI pass metabolism. You’re just not going to get it in your body. You got to get it as quickly as possible into the bloodstream for maximal benefit anyway. Similarly, I’m not sure if everybody got a chance to see that, but the different ingredients in the sleep miracle, they’re actually the things that most of us already associate with sleep.

So, again, there it comes up. Now, again, you mentioned melatonin. Melatonin is actually in here. We got the chamomile. We have hops, we have valerian root, we have passion flour, you have GABA. These are all things that people have individually taken for sleep to help them get into a more restful sleep at night. And I’m going to talk about that in a second. But again, it’s this combination of the melatonin, and I believe the IGF is also in there, the growth matrix to a small amount as well.

Why that’s important is that, again, this liposomal delivery system delivers every one of these ingredients right into the bloodstream. So you talked about earlier when you took this, there wasn’t this hangover effect. There wasn’t this grogginess that was left over because you took one or more of those particular ingredients, especially like melatonin. And basically, that’s because it all got in the bloodstream. You used it all up, and when you were done sleeping, it was already used up by the time you woke up.

It got right into the bloodstream to help you. So this is why. This is a very excellent way of doing things. And again, that proprietary blend of all those various things. Again, we have a specific amounts and ratios. The whole point is that those are pretty common things most people use. We just happen to find a better combination. It’s kind of like when, if you’re a bartender, you put too much this or that in there, the drink doesn’t come out right.

But I think we found the perfect combination of things and the ratios to use them. So that in itself is why that’s a great product. And just for a second here, let’s talk about sleep. Sleep is a critical component to maintaining your health. One of the most easy ways to describe things is that when we’re awake, when you talk about the nervous system, right. We tend to be in the more sympathetic part of our nervous system, meaning we’re a little bit more on the fight or flight side because we’re trying to be active when we actually sleep and we get into a deep sleep.

And I’ll explain that in a second, we’re supposed to go into what’s called more of a parasympathetic tone, where we actually have rest, repair and replenishment. And if we don’t get into that deep sleep, if we don’t rest, we don’t replenish, et cetera. Guess what? We start to wear ourselves out. Everything doesn’t seem to work. Everything starts to kind of grind down, like you ran out of oil in your engine or something like that.

So that’s why sleep is so important. And the easiest way for people to think about it is if you can remember your dreams, you’re probably getting into a deep sleep, which is really weird. So you start from being awake. You go to a level one sleep. Level two, which is deeper. Level three, you’re starting to get into deep, deep sleep. Level four is where you want to be, but it’s really weird.

It’s like a medieval castle. You have to get level four. Then you go all the way back up to just above level one, but below being awake, that’s where you’re actually dreaming. But the only way to reach that dream state is to actually get into the deepest part of sleep. So that’s why most of us, when we talk about what our patients do, we talk about two things.

Did you dream and do you wake up feeling rested? Because if you’re accomplishing those, then you’re getting into that deep sleep. That reparative replenishment type state in your body is necessary. And in those places, again, things that happen, receptors get reset in the body. We are able to reset even secreting organs for various hormones and other compounds that are necessary in the body. And so all those things can be reset, rebalanced while you’re in that sort of inactive, resting, reparative, whatever.

All the various r’s. I call it the r state replenishment repairs et cetera. So if you get into that, that’s critical for your health. In fact, the sleep society folks here, I’m sorry, I forgot, American College of Sleep Medicine, I think, is what they’re called now. They’ve done studies in the past where it’s shown that if you don’t get into this deep sleep, you actually start to put yourself at risk for all those other things we said, insulin resistance, even increased risk for heart attacks and strokes.

So again, sleep is vital to maintaining a healthy aging. Yeah, I think we probably don’t even need the studies to tell us because we know how we feel without getting that good night’s sleep. It’s what everything else is based on. So I just want everybody to know I use that. I sprayed it for my husband as well, and I remember him. He will from time to time say, where’s that sleep spray? Because it works quickly.

I do it about 30 minutes before I want to go to bed. And over time, it’s almost like I trained myself to go to sleep again because I felt more relaxed. It wasn’t like, oh, no, I’m going to lay there and be restless again. So a lot of my audience members, I know that they are very active mentally, emotionally, physically, and it’s kind of hard to wind down at the end of the day.

So, friends, again, if you’re interested, I do have a special link, and that is you can go to the, I want to make sure I give it to you correctly here, naturaligf. com. Use the code, thehealthy American. You’ll see everything there that you can sign up for. And I’m sure Dr. Fong would be happy to answer you. There’s a place at the website if you have questions. And we’re going to wrap up here.

Dr. Fong, thank you so much for coming on the show. First time guest. I hope that you’ll be back. I love to talk about natural healing, natural remedies, stepping away from kind of the pharmaceutical products that can have all sorts of other side effects that we don’t want. The only side effect we want is a healthy, happy life full of well being and energy. That’s what I’m looking for.

Exactly. And again, not just to plug the product, because I really believe in the product, but again, to have this complete growth matrix in your body. It is all the growth factors that are associated with having human growth hormone in our bodies. And obviously, all the various studies show that growth hormone helps to maintain or help to repair different things, but it’s ungodly expensive if you wanted to actually take growth hormone.

So this is probably a very. I wouldn’t call it cheap, but for certainly a much less expensive alternative that will allow you to have a lot of the same benefits. And as far as we’ve seen, no real significant negative side effects. And if I can have a second, I wanted to share a. Yes, yes. Share a story, please. Our founder, Rick Lintini, he actually was the one looking at this research about basically where this growth matrix comes from.

And he actually had a cousin, unfortunately, that was dying from ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. And the doctors were basically saying, hey, get your fares in order. You got a couple of days. Rick was like, no way. So he actually got what would eventually become the igf one plus product, got it, started using it on his cousin. Not only the cousin lived for many months after that, but for most of that time, had actually a pretty decent, good quality of life.

So, again, there is a lot that has to do with these growth factors. And I certainly think that in medicine, these are way understated. These are things that can maintain our health. They can actually prevent us from getting sick. They can help us to repair and recover from illness should we get sick. I see a lot of patients in my clinic for a lot of chronic issues, including Lyme disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

And a lot of times after we do our main therapies, or even, excuse me, when we’re on this, and after we get our treatment protocols for these various illnesses, we put every one of these patients on these growth factors, the igf one plus, and that entire growth matrix, igf one plus, igf one, igf two, like, 13 other growth factors. Those really make the difference in helping somebody recover.

So I just want to share a few anecdotes about that. Well, that is very powerful. And, of course, friends, we’re not talking about injecting yourself with steroids or anything. This is as simple as a spray. A couple of sprays a couple of times a day, or those drops. Mine’s are a drop. Okay. I just take a few drops under my tongue, right? Yeah. Now, I’m supposed to hold there for, you can’t understand me, so I’ll do it, but I’m supposed to hold it under my tongue for at least 30 seconds and to let that absorb into the bloodstream through those capillary beds.

And then basically, I personally do them three times a day. But as a physician, I always recommend use the lowest effective dose. And there’s a good number of doses anywhere from 10,000 nanograms all the way, 300,000 nanograms depending on what you need. And the website kind of explains that a little bit better. Great. But feel free to always ask questions again, we’ll guide you the best we can.

And if there’s any issues that you have, we can try to answer questions, but should always probably run this by your own physician, too. But the bottom line is, I’ve never seen anything ill effects with the product. This product has been around for almost 30 years. That’s a good track record. It’s a great track record. Great. This is going to be something that can help any person, not only age healthy, but any person to help them live their life to the fullest, as the old says, to be the best that they can be.

So whatever you’re looking for, just everyday health, you’re actually training really hard. These are all facets can be covered by the utilization of these growth factors. Well, that’s what my healthy american audience is all about, living each day to the fullest in a natural, healthy way. So I really appreciate that. Friends, if this is something that you think would be helpful for you, check it out. I’ll have the link for you and the information.

Thank you so much, Dr. Wong. Stay on with me for just a moment. Friends, I’m going to see you in an upcoming video. Remember, you can always find me over at peggyhall substack. com where you get a lot of the written and analysis of the issues that I cover here. And it was my pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Fong and to see if you’d be interested in some of these products that I personally use and have benefited from as well.

All right, see you soon, everybody. Take care. Bye. .

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