The Relationship Between Blood Sugar Imbalance And Chronic Inflammation with Dr. Ritamarie

Welcome back to the Healing Pain Podcast with Dr. Ritamarie

Blood sugar balance is critical for our cells to get nutrients and energy. Every single organ and system of our body will be affected when there blood sugar imbalance. A symptom of this is brain fog, where the brain just goes offline because it is not getting all its needed nourishment. This imbalance also affects the liver. Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo explains more on how blood sugar can affect the body and how it is even related to chronic pain. She shares that the first step is to dampen the need for sweets and not take it away entirely all at once.

If you know someone who is pre-diabetic, has diabetes, is overweight or maybe someone who has developed or is at risk for developing Alzheimer’s or perhaps someone who’s struggling with painful neuropathy in their hands or their feet or maybe you’re the one who’s struggling, then this podcast will be an eye opener and provide you with some simple tips and strategies you can access on perhaps the single most important factor that influences your health and that is your blood sugar. On this podcast, we’re talking about how to balance your blood sugar naturally. The question you might be asking is, “Dr. Joe, I have chronic pain. What does my blood sugar have to do with pain?” For others, you’re probably thinking, “Bring it on. This is the podcast I’d been waiting for because when I eat, especially when I eat too much sugar, I can feel those aches and pains in my joints start almost immediately. The next day, the first few steps out of bed can be excruciating. To prepare you and before we ease on in podcast with our special guests, I want to share one very important fact that perhaps no other practitioner has mentioned. It’s that each time you eat, you have the ability to either balance your blood sugar and with that decrease the amount of inflammation in your body, as well as reduce your waist size. Who doesn’t love a smaller waist?

Joining me on the podcast is Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo, who is the Founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology. Dr. Ritamarie specializes in a functional approach to restoring health. In this interview, her and I talk about how insulin resistance or imbalanced blood sugar can lead to diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, pain, as well as Alzheimer’s disease. When it comes to an interview or discussion on how to regulate blood sugar, you know that it will involve a deep discussion about food. What I love about Dr. Ritamarie and her approach is that she doesn’t just focus on what foods you should not be eating, but places all the energy and emphasis on what foods you should be eating. She even provided us with a great guide as to what these beneficial foods are that you can access and start using. She calls it her guide to the foods that can reverse belly fat, fatigue and lack of focus. To access that free guide, all you have to do is go to www.DrJoeTatta.com/74Download for download. If you’re on your cell phone, you can text the word ‘74 download’ to the number 44222.

 

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The Relationship Between Blood Sugar Imbalance And Chronic Inflammation with Dr. Ritamarie

Dr. Ritamarie, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here.

I’m excited to be here, Joe. It’s been so exciting to follow all the work that you’re doing, the great stuff you’re doing and your great podcast. I’m just excited to be a guest.

Thank you so much. You’ve been on two of my summits, which people loved your work and information. I’m excited to have you on the podcast. This is an important topic out of all the topics that we talk about. You love to go into the real nitty-gritty of some of the nutritional endocrinology around things. Blood sugar is so important for everyone, whether you’re healthy and well or whether you’re sick and trying to recover. The best place for us to start is why is blood sugar so important for all of us and why did you decide to tackle this when no one else has quite tackled it in the way it should.

It’s because it actually controls everything. Why do we eat? To get energized and to bring nutrients into our cells. Blood sugar balance is critical. We get the blood sugar from the food into the bloodstream, but then we have to get it into the cells. We have to get it into the cells so the cells can do their fun stuff and make energy and energize and nourish all the parts in the body. If your blood sugar goes out of balance, it can impact every single organ and gland system in the body. Down to joints, down to muscles, brain, everything is impacted. Why it’s not looked at, I have no clue. That’s what fires me up. People need to be told this from the time they’re this high because it’s impacting our kids, our teenagers, as well as adults and seniors.

So often people think, “My circulatory system is over here and my nervous system is over here.” We’ve done a great job at piecing things out. Oftentimes in school, that’s how we learn it, unfortunately. When someone hears that blood sugar affects every single cell in your body, that they’re thinking, “How is that possible? How can it actually affect every single cell?” But the truth is, there are insulin receptors on every cell.

When I went to school, they taught us that the brain was immune. The brain didn’t need insulin to get the sugar in, but all the latest research is saying that majority of parts of the brain actually need the insulin just as much as every place else.

Let’s talk about the brain and the nervous system first. I like to tell people, “No brain, no pain.” I say that jokingly. If you didn’t have a brain, you wouldn’t have pain because you probably, for lack of a better word, would be dead or wouldn’t be functioning very well.

Your body would be eating itself alive and you wouldn’t even know it and then you’d drop dead.

The scenario that most of us see in clinical practice nowadays is that people have such imbalanced blood sugar that it’s affecting their nervous system. What kind of symptoms do people develop when the imbalanced blood sugar is affecting their nervous system?

This biggest one we hear all the time is brain fog. That didn’t used to be common. We didn’t learn that in school. It wasn’t one of the diagnoses or the differentials or whatever. I first started using it back in the 1980s when I started experiencing it. There was no other way I could explain it. Anybody who’s ever experience brain fog gets it when you say it. How else would you describe it? You feel like there’s this thick fog between you and whatever the outside stimulus is. You’re either trying to interact with outward or inward and you’re foggy. People experience it all the time. The brain goes offline and it makes it really slow and sluggish to try to talk and act and think through the fog. Brain fog is huge. The other one is those little memory blips. I don’t mean you’re at the end state of Alzheimer’s where you don’t even recognize your own kids. You just put the keys down and you completely forget where they are. You walk into a room to get something and it’s like, “What was it?” I have to go back to where I started and start all over again to figure it out. Those are all signs that the brain is not getting the support, the nourishment that it needs.

What’s so interesting is that if you take a basic Biology class, Biology 101 you can probably take in high school, they teach you that your cells need sugar for energy. The flip side of that is when you have too much of it, you’re actually destroying your energy and you’re causing things like fatigue.

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It’s so sad when you see people who are high achievers, really brilliant people who suddenly can’t think straight.

The fatigue is huge. That’s part of why the brain gets sluggish like that. It is fatigued. Most people think of fatigue as, “I’m too tired to go running. I’m too tired to do this activity.” In reality, every single cell in your body can become fatigued. What that looks like is sluggish bowel movements when your gut becomes fatigued. Labored breathing when your lungs become fatigued. Poor circulation in your circulatory system and that poor thinking and memory and cognition. It’s so sad when you see people who are high achievers, brilliant people who suddenly can’t think straight.

I want to talk about the liver. We’re going to go from right from one organ to the next. From the brain to the liver, which is a big jump for people. People are going to be like, “What is Dr. Joe and Dr. Marie talking about? Why are we talking about the liver?” Basics of the liver is that it’s an organ of detoxification. You might start thinking, “When I think of sugar, I think a pancreas.” Why is this so important when we talk about the liver?

Detoxification is one of its functions. It has so many. It stores hormones. It stores nutrients. Here’s how it affects sugar. It actually takes the excess sugar from the blood and it gets stored into the liver as glycogen. When the blood sugar goes low, like middle of the night or a long term not eating, the pancreas sends a signal via a hormone called glucagon to the liver to say, “We need some of that stored sugar. Can you give us some?” The liver has to be able to respond. If the liver is toxic, if it’s fatty, if it’s congested, then it can’t respond to the way it should. You’re eating a lot high-fructose corn syrup, which gums up that mechanism. We can’t access some of that fuel that’s there, that’s supposed to be ready and able to be mobilized.

We have an obesity problem in this country. People make a link easily. “It’s okay if you’re fat, then you’re not going to be healthy.” You said something about the liver getting fat. How many Americans have what’s called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease?

I don’t know exact numbers, but it’s a lot. I see it a lot on labs where we just look at the regular conventional labs that we run on people. We see this and they go, “I’m not an alcoholic. Why would I have cirrhosis?” It’s not cirrhosis yet. Cirrhosis is when there’s the thickening and the hardening of spots in the liver. It’s fatty and it’s congested and it happens all the time because of the diet and the lifestyle that we lead. The high-stress lifestyle contributes hugely. The high-sugar, high-carb refined food lifestyle that I would say 95% of our society is on.

The world too is not exempted, depending on which country we land in. Here’s the biggest question is people going to their physicians. They’re having annual physicals. Some of them are wonderful physicals with practitioners who know what to look for. Others are physicals that people are just skimming over things and not looking at things. What are things that people should look for? When they go to the doctor, should they ask for a specific test to start to test for these things? How early in life should they look at these things?

What happens is most doctors, when they’re looking for blood sugar imbalance, they look for fasting glucose to be elevated. When they’re looking for signs of liver problems, they’re looking for these liver enzymes to be very elevated. You and I know better that there’s what’s called functional ranges like the ideal range which people should be in and there’s the pathological ranges. The doctors are only looking when people go outside and into the pathological range. By then, that’s when you already have some cirrhosis happening in the liver, when you already have some plaque buildup in the vessels, when you already have severe insulin resistance. I like to look at fasting glucose, but my range is much tighter. If it goes above 90, that person is at a much higher risk, four times the risk of cardiovascular disease. That’s huge, but doctors are saying, “As long as you’re up to 100, you’re okay.” It used to be 110, now they’re saying 100. Once you get into 101 to 120 or 119, you’re in the pre-diabetes stage.” Then magically, the day you wake up and it’s a 120. Suddenly, you have diabetes.

Basics of the liver is that it’s an organ of detoxification.

It’s been happening for decades. I like to help people to detect it before it even becomes diagnosable as insulin resistance. Because by the time you get that blood sugar above 100, by the time that happens, there’s so much damage that’s been done thickening of the blood vessels, inelasticity of the blood vessels. Maybe there’s hypertension there. There’s a condition called metabolic syndrome, which is the combination of insulin resistance and cardiovascular type, the lipid abnormalities, high triglycerides, low HDLs, etc. For those who don’t know what insulin resistance is, it is when we’re eating the standard American diet, which I grew up on, I know you grew up on, especially the Italian-American diet. It was loaded with white pasta, three, four, five times a week and Italian bread. Delicious stuff but we didn’t know at the time what it was doing to our bodies. We ate a lot of those carbs, which caused the blood sugar to go very high.

We have a lot of resilience in our bodies. When it first does that, no big deal, the body makes more insulin. The insulin then carries the sugar into the cells, but over time, the cells, they know better. They know that the insulin is damaging to them. They put their hands over their ears. They say, “No, I’m not taking you anymore.” They become resistant to the insulin. What happens is the blood sugar starts to creep up. It creeps up and creeps up into dangerous ranges where it can stiffen the retinal nerves. It can stiffen the peripheral nerves in the hands and the feet and people get what’s called peripheral neuropathies. It’s causing severe danger. The doctors won’t detect that until the fasting blood sugar, first thing in the morning, goes up. Most of them don’t pay attention until it actually is diabetes. I had people come to me who said when they went in to the doctor and they’re fasting blood sugar was 119 and she said, “Isn’t that pre-diabetic? My mom had diabetes. What should I do?” He says, “No worries. Come back in six months and if you’re diabetic we’ll put you on medication.”

That’s the old ‘we’re going to monitor it’ which they actually did with my dad for about a year and then they put him into Statin-lowering medication, which had bad side effects. The phrase ‘we’re going to monitor it’ to me, I know it may have a certain beneficial place in things like cancer. From where we’re looking at these lifestyle-type diseases, you’re monitoring someone’s declining because the average patient doesn’t know, “What do I need to do to heal myself, to help myself?” It’s so important. You brought up neuropathy, which is a really important topic. For those that are pre-diabetic or diabetic, some people just develop what’s called idiopathic neuropathy, which the word ‘idiopathic’ makes me think. Maybe we should dig a little bit deeper into what the cause should be. Talk about that for a little bit.

Neuropathy is when there’s damage to the peripheral nerves. What happens is people lose sensation. They may get tingling and that thing, but the dangerous part is they lose the sensation in their extremities. They can step on a nail and not even feel it because of the damage to the nerves and then they end up with an infection, which they don’t feel. A lot of people end up with amputations because it’s too far gone, and they have to amputate. It’s very dangerous. Here’s what happens. Every time the blood sugar goes above a 120, we damage those nerves every time. When the doctor says to a diabetic or pre-diabetic, “Monitor your blood sugar before you eat. Monitor it two hours after. If it’s down to 140, you’re good.” I just go, “It should never get above it. You should never get anywhere near 140.” That’s when they’ve very well-documented that the retinal damage, the damage to the eyes, which causes diabetic retinopathy, which leads to blindness. We need to be aware of this. When you said idiopathic, I had to laugh because it’s probably insulin resistance that nobody’s checking for. It can be detected early on.

You asked the question, “What should be tested and how early in life?” There’s something called hemoglobin A1c that’s used to monitor people once they become diabetic. Unfortunately, once they usually start to monitor is after their blood sugar fasting is over 120. Then they test hemoglobin A1c and it’s already seven, eight, nine, which is dangerous. What if on a routine exam, you went into the doctor and they tested your hemoglobin A1c and they said, “Your blood sugar is good at 85, but there’s something happening here because your hemoglobin A1c is 6.1.” What that means is that after you’re eating, because you’re fasting is good, while you’re sleeping, it’s fine, but somewhere in that range after you eat, there are some foods that are causing it to go skyrocketing. If it’s 6.1, it means your average blood glucose is around 120, 122. That’s average. If you take the 85 and that’s there for twelve hours or eight hours or whenever you were sleeping and you average that, you’ve got some mighty high numbers during the day. Those high numbers are what’s damaging the insides of your arteries, the retina and the peripheral nerves.

What if we started testing that routinely at whatever age anybody’s getting routine annual blood tests? Maybe when they’re teenagers, they get them every three, four years. Teenagers should have them done. We can capture it. This is scary. I know people whose kids were diagnosed with diabetes when they were nineteen or twenty because nobody had ever tested anything before that. Suddenly, they went into diabetic ketoacidosis because they had no idea they were diabetic.

Just look at the obesity rates in kids that have been rising and rising and rising. It doesn’t look like they’re going to slow down anytime soon. These are things that we have to not wait until someone is 40, 50, 60 years old before we say, “Here’s the range.” What I love about your work is that in many ways, it’s so simple for people to pick up. These are complex endocrine type activity in the body, but you’ve broken it down to be where it’s, “Here’s the range. Here’s what I want you to look at. Here’s what we’re testing for and now I’m going to show you how you can affect this.”

How you can monitor it and keep getting it to come down and come down quickly. There’s another couple of tests too that no docs look at, fasting insulin. They say, “Your fasting glucose is okay. We don’t have to look at fasting insulin.” There are people walking around with their insulin while they’re fasting, meaning no food in their body, meaning the insulin should be around three, maybe five at the high end. People are running around with fasting insulins of fifteen to twenty. That insulin is damaging the vessels, that’s damaging the body and nobody’s picking it up. These simple tests, which both of those together probably they’re $30, $35 test each, added to routinely, maybe not every year. You tested, it looks good. Maybe you talk to the person about good diet and lifestyle and then keep a monitor on it every three, four, five years. Another thing though that people can do at home is monitor their own blood sugar. There is a gadget that you can buy for $15. You can buy it at Walgreens, on Amazon, anywhere you want, and you measure your blood glucose. Not just the fasting, you measure the impact of the foods you’re eating.

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Do that glucose tolerance test at home. Save yourself a lot of money, a lot of time and get more accurate results.

A lot of people go into the doctor’s office and get what’s called the glucose tolerance test. They make them drink all this gross syrupy sugar stuff and then watch their sugar go nutty. People can pass out during that test. There are a lot of bad things that can happen. I teach people to do that glucose tolerance test at home. Save yourself a lot of money, a lot of time and get more accurate results. You take the highest carb meal that you usually eat. Maybe for some people, it’s sweet potatoes and broccoli. For somebody else, it’s going to be their toast and the pasta and the Italian bread or whatever it is. Whatever your highest glucose meal is, you eat it. You measure your glucose before it and you measure your glucose every fifteen to twenty minutes at the beginning and just watch what happens. If you see that sugar goes sky high, I did this with pineapple and my sugar went up to 167. That’s super high. I don’t eat pineapple anymore and I did what I call a metabolic reset. I took my group through it and I had to do it myself because I realized I had the problem too. Now, I can eat pineapple, but I can only eat smaller amounts of pineapple and I eat it with a big salad with greens. I teach people how to adapt. I’m not going to teach you how to eat M&M’s safely. We don’t do that. But how do you eat a high-sugar fruit like pineapple or mango safely without causing your sugars to go up? We all have our genetic predispositions. I have a lot of markers for insulin resistance, which is why I have to be super careful. There are other people who don’t have those markers and don’t have to be careful.

Unfortunately, they don’t get the early warning signs and they have problems with other things. Those are the people who lead a pretty abusive lifestyle but still live long. There are no old people in my family, so we have to be careful. How about you? Do you know that about your family? Do you know that about yourself? This little device, when you learn how to use it properly, can change your world. That’s what people say. This thing changed my world. It totally rocked it.

Let’s talk about what some people deemed as a controversial topic, which you and I can put in the trashcan: artificial sweeteners. What place do they have in someone’s diet, especially if you have diabetes or insulin resistance or blood sugar problem?

There are mixed reports on that. They’re chemicalized. Generally, there’s stuff in them and we always find out later that they cause cancer or heart disease. Let’s just say we’ve got one and it seems like it’s not going to cause cancer. Why is it not necessarily the best thing? First of all, there are receptors in your mouth that pick up that sweet taste. This is the controversial part. There have been a number of studies that show that when people eat that artificial sweetener, they still want more. It causes the craving for more. You could say that while there are some natural sweeteners that are low-caloric, low-glycemic, stevia, and Luo Han, which are quite good. For some people who have more of that emotional connection to sweet, those might not be good either. It’s a matter of tuning in and figuring out for each person. What they found with those artificial sweeteners is huge effects on the microbiome, which is where all of our food gets digested and the signals come back and the insulin-like growth path. There are all kinds of hormones that get secreted in the gut that get disrupted. Artificial sweeteners, I say, “No way.”

The best thing is to start to dampen the need, the taste for the sweet. What I find is that we can put somebody on a set of supplements that help the sugar get into the blood. In this particular case, I start with adding foods that help to restore the insulin sensitivity and add these supplements that help restore the sensitivity, then we’ll take away. If we start with trying to take away, we’re just sitting there in craving city and going, “I want bread with butter,” and then you finally cave and do it. Whereas when we supply some of these foods that have specific chemicals that help to restore insulin sensitivity and we do it with the nutrients, then it makes it easier to get rid of the offending substances.

So many people try and they do try to take sugar out. All of a sudden, they’re craving and they’re fighting this primordial urge we have to feed our bodies and support ourselves with some energy in times when there wasn’t so much. That’s not the case. You mentioned food. You have a free guide for all of our audience. It’s a free guide where you discuss foods that reverse belly fat, fatigue and lack of focus.

We put this together. I had a checklist and I said, “I want it to be more memorable.” We created this group of foods. There are about seven pages of different foods. A lot of them are maybe some of your favorites. A lot of them are foods you go, “I haven’t tried that but that looks interesting.” Some of them you may not have heard of. Alfalfa sprouts, most people have had that. Avocado, basil, berberine, maybe not but that’s a good one. Bitter melon’s not a common one; in Asian markets, you can find it. Blueberries and broccoli. It goes on and it’s in alphabetical order. What I recommend people do is download this guide and just start playing around with it. What can you do and how can you combine some of these? If you go to my Facebook page, I did a little show on, “I’m going to take this and I’m going to take some of these foods and make it into something yummy.” I made an avocado chocolate mousse and I put cinnamon in it and we put vanilla. We put a lot of the things that are helpful for the receptors and we made this delicious thing, which tasted good. It tasted sweet and it satisfied. It was very filling. It had a good substantial amount of avocado, which is a good fat. People loved it. It’s so easy to do when you have the tools and when you have the guidance.

It is easy. It does not have to be difficult. Once you find someone like Ritamarie to show you how simple this can be, you’re going be able to balance your blood sugar, reverse insulin resistance you have. We’ve even seen people with Type 2 diabetes reverse the diabetes. That is possible. It can happen. I’ve seen blood values in labs that changed dramatically. There’s one last piece, which I want to talk about and that’s inflammation. Inflammation is at the root of so many chronic diseases, many of which you’ve already spoke about. When we talk about inflammation, we probably should start with insulin, it’s a hormone. What is so important about that hormone and how does it affect inflammation in our body?

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Some people are more scared about Alzheimer’s than cancer because it’s like you still have your body, but you can’t even remember who you are or who your kids are.

That hormone is important for getting the sugars into the cells, getting the nutrients into the cells. What happens is there have been numerous studies that show that when insulin resistance occurs and the cells become resistant to the insulin, that the buildup in the extra insulin in the system creates an increase in C-reactive protein. C-reactive protein is linked to cardiovascular disease to brain inflammation, lung inflammation and dementia even. There are numerous studies that show that as the insulin goes up, we get more and more dementia. We talk a lot about Alzheimer’s and people are scared about Alzheimer’s. Some people are more scared about Alzheimer’s than cancer because you still have your body, but you can’t even remember who you are or who your kids are. What happens is there’s this insulin degrading enzyme that when the insulin goes high that the body has to secrete. That’s the same enzyme that breaks down the neurofibrillary plaques that we’re finding connected with Alzheimer’s. Every time you eat that high glycemic meal, you sit down with that pasta and Italian bread like we grew up on, every single time you’re causing an influx of high amounts of insulin and you’re decreasing your body’s ability to protect you from the damage that leads to Alzheimer’s. Think about that the next time you go to chomp on that Italian bread.

I love the connections you can make on the biochemical level, which as a nutrition geek, I love it. The other thing is that once people understand how all this works, it empowers them to make some of those changes and to change their life. Most people know I shouldn’t have a plate of pasta three times a day. Once you explain that to them, then they say, “Now I can connect the dots because Ritamarie said this is what happens.” It hits people on a totally different level.

That’s why I explain it that way. I remember one of my clients said to me one time after she’d lost 60 pounds and she’s looking great and feeling great. She said, “You ruined Cheetos for me.” I said, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “I always knew Cheetos were bad for me but whenever I went to my little gatherings with my friends and they’d serve Cheetos, I’d just be mindlessly eating them anyway.” She said, “Once you explained the whole thing with the fats and how it affects inflammation and how it was affecting my risk for recurrence of this cancer, I can’t even look at them. There’s no desire in my body to even try one of those. You ruined Cheetos for me.” She was happy that I did.

Out of all the junk food out there, Cheetos would not be the one that I would choose as the most tasty or desirable. It’s a smelly, processed, yucky thing.

They were one of my favorites back in my junk food days: Cheetos, M&M’s, Pringles. Now, I learned how to make Pringles with chia seeds so I’m happy.

Tell me about that.

Chia gels up if you add water. Chia’s a little tiny seed. It’s dry. When you add water to it, it swells up. If you put about five times the amount of water to the chia and you add salt or whatever other flavorings you want. If you have a dehydrator or very low temperature in the oven, I put them on. I take a measuring quarter cup. I scoop them out and they’re like little crackers. Here’s the thing that was about Pringles. They had that bend to them. They came in a can and they were bent. That’s what happens to the chia chips when you leave them in the dehydrator for about 12 to 24 hours. Sometimes I like to fancy them up so I’ll put basil and tomato powder in them. I’ll put cumin and other kinds of spices in there so I have all these different flavors. It’s crunchy, crispy, a little bent around.

Almost every single that someone craves for is having sweetness that they’re addicted to or used to eating, there is a healthy version that we can whip up in a recipe.

I have made healthy versions of everything. The only things I haven’t been able to come up with were angel food cake and lemon meringue. They require very specific chemical constituents, but I’ve made chocolate cake. I’ve made chia Pringles, I’ve made candies, bonbons, ice cream. When people download this booklet that I put together, they’ll also get access to my brain boosting chocolate bonbon recipe.

Are those ketogenic?

Yeah, everything I do is pretty much ketogenic, low-carb, medium fat. I don’t believe in super high. Mild nutritional ketosis is what helps to reverse insulin resistance.

That’s why I included a whole chapter in my book about ketosis. Not everyone needs it, but if people can start to move in that direction, it’s beneficial for them. You know that as well as I do. I’ve been talking to Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo. She’s a good friend and a brilliant practitioner. You can download that free guide. It’s about foods that reverse belly fat, fatigue and lack of focus. I want to thank Dr. Ritamarie. You can check her out on her website at DrRitamarie.com. She has great information there for you as well.

Stay tuned for the Healing Pain podcast each week. We’ll have great guests. Make sure to hop onto social media, share this episode out with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever you communicate great information and we’ll see you next week.

About Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo

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Dr. Ritamarie is a licensed Doctor of Chiropractic with Certifications in Acupuncture, Nutrition, Herbal Medicine, and HeartMath®. She is a certified living foods chef, instructor, and coach. She has trained and certified hundreds in the art of using palate-pleasing whole fresh food as medicine.

As the founder of the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology, she specializes in using the wisdom of nature to restore balance to hormones with a special emphasis on thyroid, adrenal, and insulin imbalances.

Best-selling author, speaker, and internationally recognized nutrition and women’s health authority with over 23 years of clinical experience, Dr. Ritamarie offers online courses, long-distance coaching, counseling, and informative live events.


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