Episode #17: IV Therapy

Summary

In this episode, Coach Kyle and Dr. K discuss IV therapies, specifically IV vitamins. They explore the depletion of nutrients in food and the benefits of IV therapies for those with gut issues or nutrient deficiencies. They also delve into the history and formulation of IV vitamins, the importance of dosage and quality, and the effects of vitamin C, magnesium, and iron supplementation. The conversation highlights the need for individualized treatment and the importance of consulting with a knowledgeable practitioner.

Takeaways

  • The soil is becoming depleted of nutrients, leading to a decrease in the nutritional value of our food.
  • IV therapies can be beneficial for those with gut issues or nutrient deficiencies, as they bypass the digestive system and provide maximum bioavailability of vitamins and minerals.
  • The quality and dosage of IV vitamins are important factors to consider, as not all IV therapies are created equal.
  • Vitamin C has both antioxidant and pro-oxidant effects, while magnesium is involved in over 3,000 reactions in the body.
  • Iron supplementation should be approached with caution and individualized based on lab markers.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

00:51 Dr. K Beginning IV Vitamin Therapies

02:24 The Problem: Nutrient Depleted Soil and Food

05:56 History of IV Therapy and The Myers’ Cocktail

07:16 Saline Amount vs. Vitamin Concentration

08:14 Common Vitamins and Minerals 

11:55 The Role of IV Therapy During Chelation Protocols [Heavy Metals]

16:22 Doing Your Own Research: How to Choose Where to Get Your IV Therapy

21:13 Dosing Examples: Vitamin C

25:31 Magnesium

28:13 Iron

29:46 Conclusion

Sponsors

This episode is sponsored by Toxic Roots.  The optimal resource for online health coaching for optimizing performance and removing toxins. Click on the link below to get started on finding your toxic roots. 

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People

Peak Performance 

Dr. K 

Coach Kyle 

Transcript

Kyle Hulbert (00:00)

Welcome to the Peak Performance Podcast, where your host, Coach Kyle and Dr. K, share the number one health hacks and facts to optimize your life.

Kyle Hulbert (00:11)

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Peak Performance Podcast. I’m Coach Kyle.

Ben Kosubevsky (00:15)

And I’m Dr. K, thank you for joining us today as we discuss IV therapies, specifically IV vitamins. Who are they for? Why should you do them? Why should you not do them? And where should you do them?

Kyle Hulbert (00:28)

This is going to be a fun one, Dr. K. I mean, I’ve got a lot of, uh, interesting experiences with some IV vitamins in a lot of different places. So, uh, I can’t wait to dive in, but before we dive in, is anything new with you going on? We can update the audience about your life.

Ben Kosubevsky (00:36)

Yeah.

I don’t really have any updates, but I do want to give a little story. When I first met the owner of the practice, I’m at Dr. Goddard, and I was like, hey, I want to work for you. The very first thing he does is he sends me a PowerPoint, and this PowerPoint is 900 slides long. And he says, okay, well, if you want to work here, then you have to learn this PowerPoint. It was just a PowerPoint about basically every single vitamin IV that you could do and how the combination, how they work. And so it took me like a couple of months to get through that thing, but eventually I got through it.

Kyle Hulbert (01:12)

That is a wild goodness. I mean, I guess that’s one way to train. I actually just finished a, I’m actually going through a supplement certification program so I can be like a supplement master, if you will. And so it dove a lot into vitamins and specific types and forms and interactions and contraindications. It’s very interesting stuff. But for me, I mean, I guess I’m a nerd. I guess most people wouldn’t like.

Ben Kosubevsky (01:15)

Right.

Kyle Hulbert (01:41)

care about the specific forms.

Ben Kosubevsky (01:44)

I mean, I feel like the people that are taking time out of their day to listen to this probably care a little bit more than the average person.

Kyle Hulbert (01:51)

That’s true. You heard it here, folks. If you’re listening to the Peak Performance Podcast, you are more nerd than the average person. Or maybe you just care about your health a little more. That’s fair. Okay, well, let’s rock and roll. So I go to your office and plug in an IV in my arm and you pump me full of vitamins. What’s there to talk about?

Ben Kosubevsky (02:01)

I think they do both those things already.

Sure.

Um, all sorts of things. Here’s where I actually, where I’m going to start this. Before we talk about IV vitamins, let’s talk about food. And I feel like we’ve touched on this in the past, but our soil is getting depleted. So let’s say you eat a potato. Our potato is roughly 100 times less nutritionally dense than it was a hundred years ago. So you have to eat so much more food to get these same vitamin and mineral levels out of the food. And that’s the problem. So there’s actually a, it’s like a.

No one really knows about this unless you start looking into it, but there’s a quiet race right now to figure out how to nutritionally replete the soil of all the vitamins that we need without having to interrupt crop cycles. Because if you interrupt crop cycles, then farmers lose money and also our food production slows down.

Kyle Hulbert (03:05)

So you give the soil a vitamin IV.

Ben Kosubevsky (03:10)

I mean, I guess you could. I don’t think you’d get more bunny.

Kyle Hulbert (03:11)

That’d be expensive. Yeah. There’s a lot of work being done here in permaculture and crop rotation and things like that that have synergistic effects to rebuild the soil. And animals are actually a big part of that, rotating animals into your crop fields. It’d be interesting if we come up with a scientific solution or easy way to do it without physically moving massive amounts of animals and crops around.

Ben Kosubevsky (03:36)

Right, yeah, instead of spraying Roundup, let’s spray vitamins, see how far we get.

Kyle Hulbert (03:41)

There you go. You got to be able to patent it though, because if you can’t patent it, you can’t make money on it.

Ben Kosubevsky (03:46)

That’s true. Well, that’s not for us. I don’t think either of us has enough money to ever make it that far.

Kyle Hulbert (03:51)

So the soil is depleted of nutrients, which means our food is depleted of vitamins and minerals. So how does that affect our daily lives?

Ben Kosubevsky (04:03)

Well, so now there’s a second part to it. Sure, the average person, so they’ve done studies on how much someone retains of the food that they eat. A healthy 18 -year -old will keep roughly, I think it’s 30 -something percent of the nutrition that they consume through their food. Someone with gut issues or older people, because your gut ability declines as you age, keeps even less. We’re talking like five to 10%.

So now you’re really out of nutritionally depleted food, you’re keeping less of it and now really what are you getting? So that’s the two, that’s the two part problem to it. And that’s where IV therapies come in. For those of you that have done IV vitamins in the past, I’m sure you realize, hey, you feel really good. You may feel like not hungry after doing it because you gave yourself, you gave your body everything it needs to function for a while, just like eating lunch.

Kyle Hulbert (04:37)

Not much more, I think.

Yeah, I like that. So there’s an issue with our food and there’s an issue with basically our digestion and ability to absorb these nutrients into our body. And so by going IV route, we skip that absorption. We also skip the food and then we get maximum bioavailability of these vitamins and minerals.

Ben Kosubevsky (05:20)

Yep. So a lot of my patients with gut issues, especially in the beginning, I’ll start them on IV vitamins while we’re getting into the process of treatment, just to get them feeling better and ready for the next step, which is usually, I call IVs one of the two things, either positives like vitamins and ozone, or negatives like chelation, which are removing things from you. So I like to give them a whole bunch of positives first to get them ready for the negatives.

Kyle Hulbert (05:42)

That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s a good approach. I think so often we’re hit with medicine in a way that’s like, hey, this is going to solve the problem. I don’t care about the side effects, do it. But if we can prepare ourselves, we’ll come out the other side much better and the process won’t be as grueling.

Ben Kosubevsky (06:01)

Um, so when we talk about IV vitamins, let’s talk about IV vitamins and their history a little bit and all that stuff. So the original is called the Myers cocktail, um, founded by Dr. John Myers from like the seventies. Um, and he kept actually his formulation really secret. And when he passed away, his daughter, about 20 years later, released his formulation, I believe her name don’t quote me. I think it was Ashley Myers.

But she kind of ended up releasing his book and all the vitamins. So what is a traditional Myers cocktail? A traditional Myers cocktail is vitamin C, magnesium, B complex, B12, and the original original formulation, those were put into a syringe and direct pushed. I found most people can’t tolerate that, so now it’s put into a bag of saline and dripped into you.

That’s the original formulation. And now pretty much every practice you go to has shifted it somewhat. People add zinc, people add glutathione, people add different minerals and vitamins, whatever they think is appropriate. So I can talk about the way we do it at my practice, the osteopathic center, because the very first thing people are surprised by is I show up with a bag of vitamins and you know, they’re paying $200 for this bag and it’s like this.

because it’s 100 milliliters of saline. So what we’re doing is we are super concentrating our vitamins. If you go and they’re offering you your vitamins in a liter of saline, they’re diluting them. You’re not getting the same effects as when you do them hyper concentrated. And I always put it to people like this. Your car needs a gallon of gas, right? If I give you a gallon of gas, your car’s gonna do great.

But if I take that gallon of gas and I’m still giving you a gallon, but I put it into six gallons of water, your car is not going to be happy. It’s still getting that same gallon, but it’s not the same effects. Does that make sense?

Kyle Hulbert (08:00)

Yeah, actually that’s a really good metaphor. I never actually thought of it that way. That’s pretty cool. Um, before we move on, so you’ve, you’ve hyper concentrated these vitamins and they have a specific effect in the body, but I do want to kind of give like a 30 second snapshot of vitamins and minerals overall. So vitamins and minerals, you know, you’ve got the big ones that you hear. You’ve got macro vitamins, uh, macro minerals and all breakdowns of like how much you need some super small amounts, some medium amounts.

The hot ones are magnesium, calcium. You hear a lot about the B complex. The fat soluble vitamins are your vitamins D, A, K, and E. And then you go into kind of mineral complexes, which are, there’s a lot of them, but malignant, selenium, iodine, copper. But one I really want to mention on here, and we’ll probably talk about it later, is iron. And that one is often overlooked.

in relation to how bad of a problem it is. And it’s estimated that up to 33 % of the population of the United States has iron deficiency currently. Something I’m suffering with and trying to figure out right now. So it’s a mineral that’s not very, not widely, I guess it’s a metal, not widely talked about, but it is a very big problem. So that’s my 30 second snapshot on minerals. And we probably need to do individual podcasts on certain types of minerals, like the bee complex would probably be a great.

breakdown and magnesium and other things, but I just wanted to give an overview. So continue.

Ben Kosubevsky (09:34)

Yeah, where should I continue to? Because I kind of lost my train.

Kyle Hulbert (09:37)

So you, yeah, I know you hyper concentrate into a small bag of saline. This has a specific beneficial effect in the body. What is this beneficial effect? What can people expect?

Ben Kosubevsky (09:46)

Well, basically like you just alluded to, different vitamins have different purposes and you can’t actually overdose on any of the things that we’re giving you. Anything extra, you’ll end up peeing out. Most people know that their pee is really, usually brightly colored. The B complex is yellow. Every other vitamin, just for the record, is clear. B12 is red, B complex is yellow. Vitamin C has a slight tint to it. It’s like almost orange, but not really. Everything else is clear. So just so you all know.

Yeah, so they have different effects based on different things. So vitamin C, for example, that’s easy to talk about. In low levels, it’s an antioxidant, it’s an immune boosting agent. In high levels, it has a pro -oxidant effect. It supports tissue building, it fights cancer, supposedly, little sorts of things. Magnesium has other benefits.

Magnesium is used in our blood vessels, it’s used in our brains, used in a whole bunch of organs. And the list goes on and on. So as a general…

Kyle Hulbert (10:49)

over 3 ,000 functions of magnesium in the body.

Ben Kosubevsky (10:53)

Yep. And there’s like, was it 30 different types of magnesium?

Kyle Hulbert (10:58)

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Ben Kosubevsky (11:01)

So what happens is when we give your body a bunch of vitamins, and so I talked with Meyers cocktail, the osteopathic center formulations 14 different vitamins and minerals. So we really went above and beyond because what Dr. John Meyers did was figure out what are the six things that most people are deficient in and given that, took it further and whether it be like 10 most things people are deficient in. Yeah, more is better usually when it comes to vitamins.

Kyle Hulbert (11:24)

Gotcha. I like that.

Ben Kosubevsky (11:31)

So yeah, usually people feel really good. If you don’t feel good after vitamins, there’s something that needs to be explored.

Kyle Hulbert (11:38)

Yeah, so I’ve actually, I’ve actually ran into this with a couple of my clients, especially my sister and some another client I’m working with now. They’ve been put on vitamins and minerals and they like get this like tingly sensation. They feel kind of off and maybe like one of my clients has like, like loss of feeling in her hands and crazy things like that. And my theory on that is they’ve been deficient for so long.

that the body is now firing up detox pathways and firing up systems that haven’t been activated in forever. And so there’s this kind of Hertzheimer die off strange effect that’s happening.

Ben Kosubevsky (12:19)

I can’t disagree with you because I really don’t have a better theory, so I guess we’ll just go with that. I think the other theory you have is the sync effect.

Kyle Hulbert (12:24)

Ha ha.

Mm -hmm. Yeah, that’s actually, that’s actually a pretty cool one. There’s certain vitamins and minerals. Um, namely selenium is selenium and malignum, I think are the big ones that come to mind for mercury. Selenium has been shown to take mercury and essentially move it down the sink effects. So it sinks it into your body from your brain, allowing chelation to be more effective. So strategies like DMPS can then effectively pull it out of your body. It also mitigates the negative effects of.

of heavy metals, but it does not remove them. That’s key. So you’re not going to remove heavy metals from your body with a vitamin IV.

Ben Kosubevsky (13:07)

Okay, yeah.

Kyle Hulbert (13:08)

Speaking of chelation, what is the importance of vitamins and minerals while you’re doing chelation?

Ben Kosubevsky (13:14)

Oh, they’re super important. So as you are chelating, you know, most of what they’re removing are good or bad heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, whatever, but they’re removing a percent of good minerals and vitamins. So you have to be sure to supplement with, I use orals for all my patients, but every day that they’re not chelating while they’re in the process of chelating, they’re taking oral vitamins and minerals.

And you know, it’s not a crazy amount that they need to replete so oral is sufficient for most people. I have some people that have really bad GI side effects that have to IV supplementation with.

Kyle Hulbert (13:51)

So this is, this is actually an important point and it might go back and you might reference our podcast on why isn’t a multivitamin enough. Um, when you’re doing chelation therapy, there are certain levels. And if you get a good multivitamin, it should have almost all of the vitamins and minerals you need in it. However, if you’re undergoing chelation therapy, those dosages are not quite sufficient to replete. They are just dosages to keep you, um, like not deficient. Um,

So basically the individual formulations are much more effective when you’re going through something like chelation. Higher dosages in D, A, K, E, and then vitamins and minerals separately, water soluble.

Ben Kosubevsky (14:29)

So just as you brought up the fat soluble ones, D, A, K, E, you can’t do those IV.

Kyle Hulbert (14:36)

Correct, those are horrible. Or injectable, there you go. I’m sure the biohackers out there have a suppository somewhere. I don’t know why you would ever do that, but.

Ben Kosubevsky (14:39)

or injectable.

We can do it.

I don’t recommend that you can do an IM injection of any of them or you just take them orally and orally is the easiest unless you’re super deficient. If you are super deficient, you want to do one or two IM injections to catch up and then go to oral.

Kyle Hulbert (15:02)

Yeah, I do like, um, most multivitamins that people are not efficient in vitamin D, um, and those other, those other fat, cellular vitamins, most multivitamins will cover it. But if someone is deficient, getting them back up is not going to be covered by a multi. You need to do specific supplementation with it.

Okay. So vitamins and minerals, IV, you do a concentrated blend of somewhere between 10 to 14. It is, um, concealed because it is your specific blend and it’s highly efficacious. Right? So people need to fly from all over the country to get your blend. There we go. You heard it here. No, it’s just, they’ve done, they’ve done some testing and things and, you know, looked at what is most effective and most efficient. Most people.

Ben Kosubevsky (15:38)

That’s right.

Kyle Hulbert (15:49)

They’ve made a certain blend for the osteopathic center that they found out to be highly efficacious. And anecdotally, I can speak to the efficacy of it. I feel amazing after those things, unless I screw up my dosages on some things, because last time, this was interesting. You gave me one of those IVs. I did not decrease my dosage of my thyroid, my natural thyroid, NP thyroid. And I was like, thyroided out. I was like,

Heartbeat, anxiety, because I believe you have selenium and iodine in your, in your IV.

Ben Kosubevsky (16:24)

Selenium, yes, iodine, no. You can’t IV iodine.

Kyle Hulbert (16:26)

Okay. Okay. Then it was, then it was the selenium and it just sent either that or it was the detox. It sent my thyroid through the roof and I had, I actually took it down to a third, a third of my dosage. I was on after one e -boot and one vitamin treatment with Dr. K

Ben Kosubevsky (16:43)

you are more sensitive than the average person, but yeah, that’s about right.

Kyle Hulbert (16:46)

Yeah, that is worth mentioning. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of these things for a very long time. So now I can bring the best of what I’ve learned to my clients, but I am very aware of the things I’m taking and what they do and how they affect me.

Ben Kosubevsky (17:01)

So you mentioned anecdotally, so you’ve done IVs with me, you’ve done IVs at other places, can you talk about the difference?

Kyle Hulbert (17:07)

Yeah. I mean, I’ve done, um, I’ve done all kinds of IVs all over the place and it’s, um, I found it’s like a 50 50 on how I feel. Sometimes I feel great and sometimes I don’t feel much of anything. Um, and I was actually wondering why this was, and then we had a chat a little while ago and you kind of explained it to me. So why don’t you explain to the audience of why I would feel differently based on where I got an IV.

Ben Kosubevsky (17:33)

And so specifically where he got an IV, he’s not saying, you know, if he comes to my office five times in a row, three times he feels good, two times he feels bad. He’s saying if he comes to my office, five out of five, he feels good. If he goes somewhere else, it’s a 50 -50. So there are a few different reasons. Quality is really, really important. Same as everything else. You want to, just like you want to eat good quality food, you also want to do good quality vitamins.

Kyle Hulbert (17:44)

Yes, it’s a 50 -50 shot. Yeah.

Ben Kosubevsky (17:59)

So we get everything compounded specifically for us. Preservative free is a big thing. You don’t want preservatives in your vitamins. Most preservative agent places use benzyl alcohol. Not the worst, not the best. If I have to get something made with preservatives, I just have them use EDTA as a preservative because why not? We’re probably doing that on you anyway if you’re in my office. So the big thing is quality. The other thing, like I mentioned,

we hyper concentrate our vitamins. Unfortunately, not every place does. I’ve heard places that will say, oh, well, you know, we’re going to give you some vitamins and do you want half a liter or a liter of saline? And it’s kind of the illusion of choice, unfortunately, where they’re asking, you know, how much water do you want? And we’re just going to dilute out your vitamins. Makes you feel good briefly because when you get really hydrated, yeah, it makes you feel better. And I have no problem hydrating my patients either. I would do a…

usually before the vitamin IV, we’ll give them a liter of saline, get them really pumped up and then give them the vitamins.

Kyle Hulbert (19:05)

Gotcha. Yeah. But I think, I think you touched on this, but the dosage is very important. You hyper concentrate, but if you dig into a lot of these, a lot of these pop -up clinics that you just drop in and get an IV, a vitamin IB, and you actually start asking them about their dosage. One thing is they often don’t even know. They don’t even know if they’re using preservatives. The people there, they, a lot of times they just don’t know what’s going into it. And then.

If you actually, if they do know a lot of times the doses are way below what is needed to be efficacious.

Ben Kosubevsky (19:37)

Right. Yeah. Do you remember you and I were together at one time and we got IVs and I was like, I’m just curious. And, you know, I don’t really talk about what I do when I go to random places because that ends up me teaching. But I remember asking the person, I like, how much vitamin C is in here? And she very proudly goes, what was it? 10 milliliters of it. I’m like, okay, but what’s the dose? She had to go find the bottle and look it up. So what you guys have to remember is you can get this stuff formulated in any, um,

strength you want. And obviously the more concentrated it is per milliliter, the more expensive it is. So 10 milliliters of vitamin C from place A is not the same as 10 milliliters of vitamin C from place B.

Kyle Hulbert (20:18)

Yeah. And this is, this is a big distinction on like wholesale versus like pharmaceutical, like going to Walgreens. Cause a lot of times when you get a prescription from Walgreens in a, in a liquid form or CVS, almost all of those prescriptions are mixed at very, very similar milligrams per milliliter. And when you go wholesale, things change. You can get it any way, any, which way you want any dosage per milliliter.

So that’s why I’ve kind of felt the difference between where I go. So if you go get a vitamin IV, you need to just do your research on the place, really go ask them a bunch of questions and make sure that what they’re giving you doesn’t have preservatives. One and two is efficacious dosing levels. Any advice on how to do that? How people can do that?

Ben Kosubevsky (21:03)

So the honestly price is the biggest thing. If you go somewhere and they’re offering you IV vitamins for, IV vitamins for 99, I see $99 as a special all the time. I can’t make it for $99. So I don’t know what they’re putting in there, but it’s nothing you want. Price is the number one thing. Number two, if you call over there and you ask, hey, what’s your dose of vitamin C? And they don’t know, that’s also a red flag.

Kyle Hulbert (21:21)

Ha ha.

Yeah, they should be, the personal answering should be able to say, Hey, this standard vitamin IV comes with five grams of vitamin C. I mean, that should be, they should know that that should be a good thing for them to know. That’s a good test. I like that. Um, so we talked a little bit about B vitamins, um, where you should go, where you shouldn’t go a little bit about pricing. Um, I think, I think we should talk a little bit. I think you talked about vitamin C, but I’d like to talk about dosage a little bit more. Cause you mentioned this.

antioxidant and pro -oxidant effect.

Ben Kosubevsky (22:01)

Vitamin C probably could be its own 30 minute talk, but we’ll kind of surface view it for now and see how that goes. So vitamin C, we all know to take it orally when we’re sick. You take one or two grams a day when you’re sick. And when you do that, it has an antioxidant effect. It boosts your immune system a little bit, and that’s pretty much it. But the higher you go, the more effects you get. And so this also comes down to absorption, right?

So vitamin C, one gram orally is not the same as one gram IV. So if we agree on that, then the rest of this continues. So the standard in a Myers cocktail, I believe is six to eight grams. There’s not really a standard standard, but mostly we’ll do six to eight grams of it. Once you get above 15 grams, which is considered high dose vitamin C at this point, I think over 15, it turns into what’s called a pro -oxidant effect.

So it’s no longer just reducing inflammation turning on your immune system. Vitamin C is the building block of collagen. Collagen is what makes up a lot of our tissue. So vitamin C, when you go into high levels, it starts becoming a tissue building block. So I give a high dose vitamin C. I love patients. My injection protocol is we do ideally you or some form of ozone right before, and then we inject.

And then the next day they come back and do high dose vitamin C IVs. And that’s like the perfect combo for it. Clean out the body, super oxygenate it, do our regenerative injections, and then give more vitamin C for tissue building, which they need to recover from the injections.

Kyle Hulbert (23:39)

I like that. I like that. From my experience too, and I want to speak about this pro -oxidant effect a little bit. It seems to be, you mentioned 15 grams, but it seems to be individual to people. So some people might have an antioxidant effect of much higher if they have that huge need for the scavenging of the free radicals. And some people vice versa might have that pro -oxidant effect kick in sooner if they have a less need for the antioxidants. That’s what I’ve heard and seen from people. Is that track?

Ben Kosubevsky (24:10)

That sounds about right. Yeah, so 15 grams is starting to us. I can take people as high as 200 grams.

Kyle Hulbert (24:17)

What’s like, what is the, what is the benefit of doing 200 grams or what can someone feel or, you know, if.

Ben Kosubevsky (24:23)

Honestly, if we’re doing it over 50, it’s probably for cancer. And I don’t really want to get too much into that. Call your doctor that does vitamin C to talk about cancer because it’s a highly disputed subject. A lot of overview, a lot of red tape on it.

Kyle Hulbert (24:39)

Gotcha. Wise, very wise Dr. K, keeping us reeled in as ever. That’s why Dr. K is here to monitor us, not make sure we’re crazy. And I, on the flip side, is here to make sure that we’re at least a little crazy to stay relevant.

Ben Kosubevsky (24:53)

Yep. So a couple of things I want to point out, vitamin C, because I’ve had people do this. They forget my warnings. Vitamin C, it actually competes with glucose for the same receptors in the body. If you guys follow that, you can track it out yourselves. But to go back to my point being, diabetics, I was born with diabetics. Most of them remember. You cannot, a glucometer is ineffective.

for six to eight hours after doing a high dose vitamin C IV. It will read super high, it will read three to 400. Do not take insulin. You just have to judge it by how you’re feeling. And most diabetics can do it by how they’re feeling, but don’t let someone else give you insulin. Because your actual sugar is probably like 90 to 100. If you take insulin, it’ll drop you.

Kyle Hulbert (25:45)

Yeah. And I’ve seen this, um, cause I’ve done vitamin IDs with you, um, on my CGM. I’ve gotten up to 800 and the thing freaks out. Um, it says my blood sugar is 800 and my blood sugar is clearly not 800. It’s just the vitamin C causing that reaction. Um, another good thing to know is if you were doing a CGM, um, for kind of lifestyle improvement, making sure your blood glucose is regulated, um, not from like a di diabetic perspective. If, if you have that on.

And you’re taking even lower doses. So I was taking a gram in the morning and a gram at bed. Um, and my, my glucose was reading like 125 all the time. And I was like, Oh my gosh, am I approaching diabetes? No, it was just the vitamin C. Um, so make sure that when you do a CGM, you cut out your vitamin C supplementation and it hides in a lot of things. Um, so that can throw off your numbers. Um, we have two more things I’d really like to hit and then we’ll wrap up. Um, next one is magnesium.

Can you speak a little bit about magnesium and kind of the effects, basically the general effects, the big ones?

Ben Kosubevsky (26:52)

How about you start this off?

Kyle Hulbert (26:54)

I’ll take it. So let’s start with the fact that most people most likely are deficient in magnesium. Um, and this leads to muscle cramping, fatigue, weakness, generalized pain, malice. Um, it’s just, it’s a very, it’s a very wide reaching, um, it’s a, it’s a mineral, right? Yeah. Yeah. Very wide reaching mineral to used in over 3000 reactions in the body.

And a lot of times it can also manifest as mental health issues and anxiety being the main one. So many people are deficient in magnesium and there are so many ways to supplement with it. The moral of the story here is if you can get it IV, again, it’s going to be more bioavailable. Your body’s going be able to use it more effectively and you’re not going to get GI disruption effects. If you’re taking serious doses of magnesium that have not been specifically formulated,

to avoid diarrhea, you will have those GIFX. Anything people should know about magnesium and IV?

Ben Kosubevsky (28:00)

So like we mentioned that there’s 30 different types of magnesium the IV kind is sulfate So people know actually one one tip it can tank your blood sugar or not sugar pressure it can tank your blood pressure So if you already run low, you know, your doctor should be checking your blood pressure before they give you this But just be aware it can drop your blood pressure

Kyle Hulbert (28:06)

OK, so.

And there you go. So if you’re doing magnesium in an IV and you have low blood pressure, maybe take a little bioidentical cortisol. You didn’t hear that here, folks.

Ben Kosubevsky (28:32)

No, don’t do that. No.

Kyle Hulbert (28:34)

No, it’s a terrible idea unless you need it and you’re basically being watched over and cared for by a very knowledgeable practitioner. I just want to put that out there. So magnesium supplementation orally, there’s a lot of good products out there. I like the BioOptimizers one. I’m able to take a gram a couple of times a day and it does not affect me negatively GI -wise. I will say anecdotally the one thing I’ve felt…

When doing IV magnesium, if I get over two grams of it, I just want to get a nap. I mean, I’m just like, well, is that your, your patients have that.

Ben Kosubevsky (29:10)

Yeah, it opens up all your blood vessels, so it runs a bunch of blood towards your brain, towards your gut, towards all these places. It turns on your parasympathetics, makes you sleepy.

Kyle Hulbert (29:19)

Yeah, yeah, so I literally had an IV of magnesium with a lot of magnesium in it once and I was like, I gotta go home and sleep. I don’t know what’s going on here. So one last thing I wanna hit before we wrap up is iron. So iron is not in your cocktail, is that correct?

Ben Kosubevsky (29:34)

Correct. Now it has to be its own IB.

Kyle Hulbert (29:37)

There you go. And why is that?

Ben Kosubevsky (29:39)

I think it interacts with other, interacts with other vitamins, minerals, and then it has a bunch of side effects on its own, usually GI side effects. And then IV iron should not be given lightly. It should only be given if you’re deficient in iron.

Kyle Hulbert (29:58)

Yeah, I think the main point here is, you know, a lot of people, estimated 31 to 33 % of the population have iron deficiency. Also, a lot of people have iron overload. So you can cause toxicity if you go too far on the high end. So this is one of those things that you need lab markers on before you get an IV of, you don’t just do this lightly.

Ben Kosubevsky (30:23)

And it’s not lab markers from last year. It’s lab markers from like yesterday.

Kyle Hulbert (30:28)

Yeah, Dr. K called me on this one. I sent him my lab results from three months ago and I was like, hey, like, can we do some iron? And he was like, hey, no. And I was like, fine, I’ll go back to the lab. So you can do it orally. It’s hard for a lot of people to supplement iron orally. If you have gut issues, you know, you start low and slow and you always take it with a gram of vitamin C to increase absorption.

If you’re very deficient, IV is the option. But if not, going low and slow orally is probably a good way to do it, as it’s much safer, I think, in the long term than doing IV dosages.

Ben Kosubevsky (31:03)

Yep, I agree. I think you should be a last resort, not a first option.

Kyle Hulbert (31:07)

Yeah. And we’ll probably have, we’ll probably have deep dives into each of these vitamins and minerals on other podcasts. If you guys have a preference of which ones we hit first, there’s something you really want to know about, or even questions that you want us to answer. Please hit us up on our Instagram, send us a DM and we’ll either get you on or we’ll answer you directly. But we definitely know we have this information we want to share with people. If you want Dr. K’s opinion on something, send us a message.

He’ll give you an answer. It’s like, it’s like a free doctor console. Obviously it’s not medical advice, so don’t take it that way, but he can advise you. And if you want my opinion for what it’s worth, you could have that too. So that’s it guys. Thank you so much for joining us. You can find me on Instagram at toxin free Kyle.

Ben Kosubevsky (31:53)

and I’m Dr. K or TheOsteoDoc on Instagram. We’ll see you guys next time.

Kyle Hulbert (31:58)

See ya.