Show #2677 PART 1
Thrive State
with Dr. Kien Vuu
Carl Lanore:
Welcome back to another episode of Super Human Radio. Today is March 9th, 2021. We have a guest coming on today who's an enlightened physician. We’re going to be talking to Dr. Keon Vuu about his new book and his journey, which many of you will be fascinated by.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Thank you so much. I am pumped.
Carl Lanore: Let’s talk about your beginning. How long have you been a physician?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
I’ve been a physician for over 16 years now. So I was trained in a specialty called ‘interventional radiology’. For those who don't know what that is, radiology is medical imaging. So ultrasounds, CT scans, x-rays. Diagnostic radiologists would take a look at the imaging and then diagnose what's going on inside the body. Once we're able to see what's inside the body, an interventional radiologists is a minimally invasive surgeon that uses radiology technology to do minimally invasive procedures. So as a physician, I was basically doing these minimally invasive surgeries on people with end-stage chronic disease, such as diabetes, hypertension, or cancer. I basically opened up blood vessels for people who've closed their blood vessels through years of diabetes. I’ve treated cancers by putting in electrodes to burn them or freeze them. I've really had a chance to really know what chronic disease is. But unfortunately I wasn't really enlightened until I started getting chronic disease myself.
Carl Lanore:
You fell prey to type two diabetes, right?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Exactly. About five years ago. I thought I lived the ideal life. I bought my dream house. I bought a fancy car. I was going around the world talking about interventional radiology and all the high-tech stuff that modern medicine has to offer. But underneath the white coat, I was overweight. I was diabetic. I was hypertensive and I was on prescription medications. And I was really starting at the early stages of the diseases that I was treating. And I told myself, there's got to be a better way.
Carl Lanore:
So you said you were overweight, but I don't want people to hear that and think, ‘well, I'm not overweight. I don't have to worry about this’ because I know a lot of people who are of normal weight with type two diabetes. When we talk about type two diabetes, we don't really talk enough about insulin and the role of insulin to damage the body. And we talk about glucose. But the reality is it's the insulin that causes senescent cells to become senescent. It’s the insulin that damages the blood vessels that feed the nerves that lead to neuropathies. Unfortunately the medical orthodoxy has not caught up yet. We check blood sugar, but not insulin. That's a huge mistake. Should shouldn't we be looking at insulin? How much insulin someone's producing to control their blood?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
That's exactly right, Carl. There's a lot of additional lab tests that you can do earlier on to catch people with pre-diabetes. If you're just looking at blood sugars, if you're just looking at hemoglobin A1C, your hemoglobin A1C isn't going to b p up. And so you’ve had this condition now for awhile. Unfortunately, when I was diagnosed with diabetes, my hemoglobin A1C was already at seven. The good news is that I was able to reverse all that in a matter of six months. The thing is people should find it out a little bit earlier. And what are some of the tests people should be doing? We're looking at fasting insulin. Instead we want that level less than 10 and people that might have regular to slightly above fasting glucose levels. Well, what are your insulin levels? Because if they are 15, if they're 20 or 30, then you're really moving in that direction. Then there are also additional tests, like a pro insulin that you could do. You could do C-peptide and then also a DePaul Neptune is another lab test.
Carl Lanore:
So sticking with insulin for a second longer, I have to ask you, were you a big coffee drinker?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
I was a huge coffee drinker, and I still drink coffee today. I don't drink it as much, but the problem with my coffee drinking was that I added six pumps of International Delight to each one of those coffees. In addition to a bunch of monster energy drinks. And that just wrecked my health.
Carl Lanore:
I have to say, my audience knows that I've suspected I had an autoimmune disorder and I actually thought it was multiple sclerosis. But it's not MS at all because the neuropathy in my hands and my lower legs is bilateral and rarely is multiple sclerosis bilateral. It turns out that, after some lab work, I’m putting out way too much insulin. And I discovered that my excessive abusive caffeine is actually at the root of why I am having the problems I'm having. And my audience knows I've given up caffeine so many times. It really is like a drug to me. I give it up and then the next thing I know I'm using pre-workouts two or three times a day. And just the exact scenario that you just spoke about. There's a lot of people out there who live on high caffeine levels, day in and day out, and this could be leading to insulin resistance. Caffeine actually not only makes the receptor less sensitive to insulin, but it also does a couple other metabolic tricks that cause you to become insulin resistant faster.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah. I definitely think that people react to caffeine differently. Just like people react to different types of foods differently. And certainly if you do have symptoms, take a look in an inventory of some of the suspects that are out there. And I think it's very important to work with a functional or integrative doctor to be able to look through your lifestyle, what you're putting in your body, what you're exposing to your body. And if you do have symptoms, see if one of those things could be the culprit.
Carl Lanore:
So you had type two diabetes and you reversed it in six months. You have to feel like you looked behind the curtain and you found that Oz is not who he thinks. Why are we treating people with Metformin? Lifelong? Why aren't we just curing them of their type two diabetes?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah. Once I reversed in a matter of six months, at that point, I said, this message needs to get out there because we really have a great ability to heal ourselves. Unfortunately with our modern day lifestyles, people forget how humans are supposed to live, how they should be sleeping, how they should be eating, how they should be approaching the world. I take this new stance: I tell myself now that I actually chose my diabetes. I chose that because of my choices and because of my lifestyle. And why do I say that? Because at that point, you can be empowered in, you can choose your disease and potentially you can choose not to have your disease and you can take new choices, new actions that can reverse the situation, which is what I did for myself.
Carl Lanore:
It's funny you say that because years and years ago, I started to call type two diabetes “acquired diabetes” because you have to give it to yourself. And I pissed off a lot of people. You have to do those things to trigger those mechanisms, to give it to you. If you look at more primitive cultures, you'll find that they tend to be able to become insulin resistant faster. Why? Because they are so metabolically flexible. They've been designed through evolutionary pressures to function at higher levels with less when you drop them into the United States of America, where they're eating quarter pounders. They become insulin resistant overnight. It's because their bodies are actually superior. Their bodies are designed to be more flexible to be able to go long periods of time without food. What do you think about that?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
That’s a great point and it's a point on epigenetics because if we look back at areas where there was huge famine in the world, the people outside of the famine and the next generation had an increased propensity for diabetes and for getting chronic disease. The reason for that is that you've actually set your genes up in such a way to be able to handle these stressors of not having an abundant amount of food. And all of a sudden you get this food out to them, their body can't handle in that way, and they start getting diabetes.
Carl Lanore:
So we are endowed with, for lack of better terms, artificial intelligence. And what I mean by that is if the environment that the mother and father is this way, the germline will be encoded to produce a baby that will be able to thrive in that environment. So if you look at populations who didn't have a lot. Their babies were built to survive on not a lot. I don't think medicine pays enough attention to evolution at all. Did they give you any classes on evolution when you were in med school?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Not a lot and really, eventually later on in the conversation, I'm sure we'll talk about epigenetics, but what you have talked about just now is something called transgenerational epigenetics. So that's when your parents are going through something and they've changed their gene expression in such a way to adapt to that environment, but they pass that adaptation onto their offspring. There's an example of this. They looked at these mice that they exposed to the smell of cherries and then they shocked them. Pretty soon what happens is these mice, even without the shock, with the smell of cherries, they start to quiver in fear. Well guess what? When these mice had offspring, these babies, that were never exposed to the shock, were then exposed to the smell of cherries and they started to quiver in fear as well. We have to be conscious of these things because we can pass on certain traits to our children kind of based on how we think and feel. And that's a big part of my program too, is really understanding how our thoughts, our mindset, our emotions are actually affecting us.
[16:18]
Carl Lanore:
Let's talk about your book, Thrive State. You talk about bioenergetics. Explain what you mean by bioenergetics.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah. Bioenergetics is really the study of the transfer of flow of energy within a biological organism. So it's really the study of the transference of energy. We are all energetic beings and every form of energy is neither created nor destroyed. It's just transferred to a different form of energy. Right now when we start talking about performance longevity, we want ourselves to be at its optimum. When our cells are optimal, functionally, what I call the “thrive state”, then we've get our telomeres longer. Then we get basically all our biological functions happening. However, if our cells are actually not given the right energetic cues, then they'll hunker down, proceed, and be besieged. They'll think they are in stress. And in those modes, there's an increase in inflammation. There's a decrease in immunity that puts you prone to chronic disease. And unfortunately, here in America, dealing with COVID-19, those are also the same patients that have adverse effects because they've got a low bioenergetic state. So here's the cool thing though: what controls whether or not our cells are in this optimal state, the thrive state or a stress state, is the energy or the epigenetics we give to ourselves. And the good news is this over 90% or 95% of how our genes are expressed are actually controlled by the things that we feed ourselves. We could actually control the environment of our cells by actually being conscious in seven areas. They are sleep, nutrition, movement, stress and emotional mastery, our relationships, our thoughts and mindset, and purpose. If we can master those seven things, we're giving ourselves the energy to turn on the good genes, turn off the bad genes so that we could live in optimal health, longevity, and peak performance.
Carl Lanore:
Why do you think, at least here in America, we pay so little attention to managing stress?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Well it's because we are a “go, go, go” type of society. And unfortunately we are always taught growing up that there are things outside of us that are going to make us happy. The Dalai Lama had this quote that he was quoted for when he was asked what he found most interesting about humanity and he said, man, because he would sacrifice his health in order to make money and then sacrifice money to recuperate his health. And I was a prime example of that.
I'm going to go back and tell you a little bit of my origin story. I was born in Vietnam a couple of years after the Vietnam war. My parents took me, when I was only a few months old, and we escaped on a refugee boat. So I was on a refugee boat for eight months, crammed with 2000 other refugees. I was the only baby to survive. In fact, I had dysentery and almost died. I spent another three months in a Philippine refugee camp, and then we were sponsored to America by a Catholic church. And one would think, Hey, a kid who has survived, dysentery has come to America must live life with a bunch of gratitude and feel great about his life. Well, unfortunately I grew up as a core Asian immigrant kid and I was bused to a more affluent area and I was constantly being teased. And I constantly felt this feeling of “I'm not enough”. I remember my heroes like Tony Robbins at the time, or Robin Williams or Mick Jagger. These people in the media that had a strong voice. Nobody looked like me. And I carry that feeling of not being enough, that I needed these outside things to make me feel worthy. That actually gave a lot of stress to my life. And so many men and women feel like they need to achieve so many things that are outside of them, whether it be a successful business, whether it be a bank account with X amount of zeros behind it, all of these external things. I just had a new daughter. She's beautiful. And I look at my nieces and nephews. They are in a state of joy where they're just being themselves. Unfortunately over time, you might learn through your parents, through society, through the world, telling you that maybe the things that you thought made you happen. No, you’ve got to do your homework, not this other type of thing. And you pick up all these things, these new ways of living. Which are “work hard. You can sleep when you're dead”. All of these new belief systems that make you not be who you're meant to be as a human being. And unfortunately, when you do that, that drives a lot of stress and that stress is going to additionally drive a lot of negative behavior and they'll keep going on that cycle. That's how I got chronic disease. And when I started to awaken from that, that's how that chronic disease started to leave me in a matter of six months.
Carl Lanore:
Interesting! So if someone goes for a stress test, they put them on a treadmill, they check their heart rate. But when someone is incapable of doing a treadmill test, they inject them with the catecholamine. I think it is some sort of a stimulus.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah. It actually increases your heart rate. It's called the Domuniomene means stress test.
Carl Lanore:
So how has caffeine doing anything different? Isn't caffeine basically liquid stress? We're just pouring it in our bodies from the morning to the evening and then taking something to go to sleep and doing it again the next day.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah. Certainly caffeine is a stimulant. Some people will use it as a nootropic and people respond to it very, very differently. I don't want to villainize it. When I was diabetic, I had lots of coffee with lots of sugar and a lot of energy drinks that all had a lot of caffeine. I enjoy one to two cups in the morning and I'm doing great right now. And so I would just like to say, listen to your body, be very intuitive. There's not going to be the same diet that's going to be right for everybody. There’s not going to be the same life routine you have to have. You have to be very intuitive, listen to your body. Your body knows what's best.
Carl Lanore:
Yeah. I know. I want to promote your book real quick. The book is called Thrive State and you can go to thrivestatebook.com to learn more. It launches April 6.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD: We do have the Kindle version that just came out for a select in-crowd, but it's still out there now. So people who want to grab the Kindle version, you can jump to thrivestatebook.com and get the Kindle version right now.
[26:44]
Carl Lanore:
So, you talked earlier about purpose. Is it my imagination or do people die shortly after retirement?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
There are some people that when they lose a sense of belonging to something, they change their health state, which is why so many people die shortly after they lose their partners. Some people, again, when they come out of retirement, they don't have that sense of living anymore. They will also maybe bring up some additional health problems that they had. So that is a very important point. Purpose is something that when they studied it, they noticed in America that people with a deep sense of purpose live seven years longer. They actually have a lower risk of cardiovascular events, such as heart attack or stroke. Also, if you happen to be hospitalized, if you have a deep sense of purpose, you spend fewer days in the hospital. So having that deep sense of purpose and being connected to something greater than yourself actually has molecular changes in your body that makes you live longer.
Carl Lanore:
You told the story about the rodent that was a shocked when they smelled cherries. So obviously that's an emotion, right? Fear. So emotions do affect us epigenetically.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Emotions are basically how our body talks to ourselves. And what we've studied is this: we know that emotions like anger, hate, resentment, all those negative emotions actually drive something in our DNA called the conserved transcription response to adversities or CTRA. And when those emotions are on, you're either running away from a saber tooth tiger or you're falling from a 20 story building. It's the same type of things that happen. And what happens in those cases is when that CTRA gene set is on, it actually raises inflammatory markers, such as IL six, IL 12 and TNF alpha. And it also lowers your immune system. It's actually shown to decrease natural killer cell activity. Here's the flip side of that. There are emotions like love, like connection, like gratitude, which is the highest vibrational emotion. Those emotions are actually anti-aging and they’ll actually shut down that CTRA transcriptional response. And you'll do the exact opposite of what those other lower vibrational emotions will do.
Carl Lanore:
Has modern medicine done a good job at making the average person think that's nonsense? I remember when doctors didn't think that diet played any role in disease and there's still a lot of doctors that think that. Now there's a lot more enlightened doctors that are like, wow, the ketogenic diet suppresses seizures and has been linked to shrinking brain tumors. So we have a lot of doctors that are going well, maybe diet plays a role, but I don't think a lot of doctors really think that about emotional stability. Has modern medicine missed an opportunity to help their patients?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Well, we have really an awakening now. I would probably say 20, 25 years ago, people always knew there was a mind body connection. But when you started to say, okay, gratitude actually leads to decreased stress levels and things like that, we didn't have that data yet. But now there is digital media and our ability to be able to speak has rapidly transformed, disseminating information and information is getting out there a lot sooner. And our benchtop and our research is also improving. So people are starting to look at what does meditation do to your telomeres and these anti-inflammatory markers. And then also, what do some of these other emotions do? And now we've see tons and tons of studies where laughter could actually improve insulin sensitivity. We could also show that power poses and just getting in your physical body and feeling a certain way is going to increase testosterone levels and lower cortisol levels. So now we're getting more and more data and our ability to communicate that data is so much greater that I think people are starting to awaken to the power of our emotions and our thoughts and having that sense of purpose is to our physical bodies and health.
[31:29]
Carl Lanore:
So one of the mechanisms that I believe that this is facilitated through is a hormone called oxytocin, which has been very misunderstood. In fact, I've done a series of shows over the past decade that have linked everything from faster muscle healing and protein synthetic response, to changing the diversity of your gut, flora. Now we know that it's oxytocin, that increases bone mineralization in post-menopausal women and not estrogen oil. When I talk about oxytocin, I hearken back to evolution. And I say before Maslov, before any of these edicts, there was one job: perpetuation of the species. And before religious connotations and morality constructed that you should just stay with one partner, the job was to create and procreate and improve the trajectory of the species. So that means that sex is job one. It's the only important job that we have as a species on the planet. And oxytocin is the reward hormone, because the more sex you have, the more oxytocin you produce. And I have actually been using injectable oxytocin in very high doses for the past few years.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
You bring up a great point. All the biological effects that you mentioned are spot on. It's great for our hormone balancing and it actually lowers cortisol levels and lowers our blood pressure for people who have high blood pressure. So great hormone. Now, when does it get bumped up? Well, it get bumped up through connection. So actually when you're on the phone with somebody, your oxytocin levels will go up. It'll go up even higher if we could actually see each other. If we're actually holding each other oxytocin then goes up even further. Certainly when we're having sex. So this is such a great hormone for tons of health benefits and the fact that it increases as we increase our human connection tells us that we are really primed as human species to be able to help each other. But also when they study those with higher levels of purpose, those people tested with higher levels of oxytocin in their bodies as well. So pretty interesting stuff.
Carl Lanore:
When you put it into perspective, we are rewarded for doing things that are beneficial to humanity. I started calling it the “human reward hormone”. And as far as blood pressure goes, I have horrible white coat syndrome. I check my blood pressure at home. It's always very good. But whenever I go to the Red Cross to donate blood they put that cuff on and I can feel my heart stopped. So now I take 60 units of oxytocin, a half-hour before. And by the time I get there, I have model blood pressure. I'm just so relaxed. I just feel so good. So it's really fascinating. Or you can hug a baby right before you go. But if I hug some stranger’s baby, I'll get put in jail.
Neonatal genes are really fascinating to me. There's a lot of new research that finding proteins that turn on neonatal genes to repair cardiac muscle, for instance. Is any of that stuff in your windshield right now? Are you looking at things that actually enhance neonatal genes to take over and fix stuff?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Not so much neonatal genes. However, I do use in my practice, perinatal products that have growth factors that are in high concentration that actually a baby needs as they're developing to actually help repair and help speed the process of healing and growth. So, I'm aware of those, but not so much those neonatal genes that you talk about.
Carl Lanore:
A study was just published. They’ve discovered a protein that flips on neonatal genes and the pancreas, and they believed that they could actually reverse type one diabetes by getting these cells to start to produce insulin again.
[37:37]
Carl Lanore:
Addressing type two diabetes is so important is because the number one cause of death in the United States is heart disease. Number three is cancer. And when they list all these different things, they're disingenuous because the number one cause of heart disease is insulin resistance. The number one cause of cancer today, it’s always people suffering from type two diabetes that developed neurological Alzheimer's dementia cancer. So I really feel like modern medicine is not being honest with people. You don't have to be on drugs for the rest of your life because you have type two diabetes. You can change the way you eat. You can change the way you sleep. You can change that your level of activity and you could be rid and you will live longer.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
That is such a great point. When you read my book, you will understand something called a bioenergetic state. So when I look at all these chronic diseases, they're all just sort of symptoms going on in different parts of the body. When their cells are optimally functioning, we noticed a great performance. We also live longer. All those great benefits. Improved immune system. Everything's running fine when a cell is suboptimally functioning. So just imagine your lung cell, not optimally functioning. It's not going to extract enough oxygen and then it's not going to then deliver it to the rest of the body. Guess what? The rest of the body now doesn't have enough oxygen. So each one of those cells now lacks some of that nutrient. Then it's going to function less. So these are the cascading effects of how as cells start to function suboptimally, it'll lead to an energetic state where you'll start to lose function in different systems. What happens if you have a dysfunction in your endocrine system? That's diabetes. When you have a dysfunction in your immune system, that's when you're susceptible to COVID. That's when you have cancer. That's when you have auto-immune disease. When you have a dysfunction in your cardiovascular system, that then gives you things like asthma, sclerosis, stroke, dysfunction in your neurological symptoms, that's dementia and Alzheimer's disease. So I look at it as chronic low elevations in your bioenergetic state starts to then tell your cells we are in a stress state where you are in danger. Let's increase inflammation to decrease immunity, not functioning at our best. So that's why I think all these things are related. And that's why you'll find that people with cancer, people like cancer, with heart disease, also have that linked in with insulin resistance and diabetes as well.
[41:05]
Carl Lanore:
So I know that you're familiar with Livon labs, correct? I've been using their R-alpha lipoid acid. Do you use that with any of your patients?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah, I think R-ala is great. It’s one of these things that people have forgotten. It's a super antioxidant. If you're pre-diabetic or diabetic, it actually improves glucose metabolism. It's also great for neurons. And I really love the lack of Samoan capsulation. They did a lot of studies, particularly with vitamin C, that just demonstrates how much better absorbed these nutrients are when you have a lyposomal encapsulation. If you take your vitamin C in an oral form, a lot of that's going to get degraded into the gut. However, if you package it with liposomes our cell membranes are will be protected against digestion. They’ll be up-taken into the intestine a little bit better. And then they'll also be delivered into inside the cell where the nutrients are going to do their work a lot better.
In fact, I think Dr. Thomas Lee did a comparison on oral forms of vitamin C versus lyposomal and you get at least 50% better absorption with the liposomal form. You would think with IV you would probably get a good amount into your bloodstream, but it turns out if you package it into a liposome, those cell membranes fuse, and you can get that nutrient into the cell. So it's actually probably a better mechanism for intracellular delivery of a nutrient, versus IV.
Carl Lanore:
Because passing through the cell with antioxidants actually oxidizes. So vitamin C is actually spent, if you will, entering the cell, but because the liposome is kind of like a Trojan horse, it delivers the vitamin C into the cell completely ready to quench ions and do its job. And the same has to be true of R-ala because R-ala is first and foremost, an antioxidant. I'm taking their R-ala now because I'm actually noticing change. I've found some research that shows that our alpha-lipoic acid may actually improve insulin sensitivity, as opposed to, I know that a lot of people considered a glucose disposal agent, but it appears to act like insulin in some cases, but it also appears to improve insulin sensitivity, which is the goal. If you're insulin resistant, you want to do everything. You can change your diet, change, how you move and use supplements that are going to the end will be improved insulin sensitivity.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
100%. I find that A-alpha lipoic acid is great in the supplemental arsenal, particularly with people with insulin resistant issues.
Carl Lanore:
So the book is called Thrive State. You can get it at thrivestatebook.com. You can pre-order it there. It'll actually be available April 6th. You can also go to his website, kienvu.com to learn more about him. Do you see patients outside of your marketplace now with telemedicine being all the rage?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD:
Yeah, I'm licensed in a few states. So for the states I'm licensed in, I do see some clients via telemedicine.
Carl Lanore: Do you want me to promote that in the states that you're licensed in for the audience? Maybe they want to reach out to you?
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD: Yeah, sure. I am a licensed in New York, Massachusetts, Arizona, and California.
Carl Lanore: Yeah. Very good. I want to thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr. Kien Vuu, MD: It is my pleasure. Really, really fun.
