Integrative Medicine – LIVETHEFUEL

Cortisol, Stress, and Adrenal Fatigue with Dr. John Neustadt

Scott Mulvaney — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000

Digging In On Health Impacts of Cortisol Levels, Stress, and Adrenal Fatigue:

Your host, Scott Mulvaney and today’s guest co-host Dr. John Neustadt discuss the importance of balancing health, business, and lifestyle. Dr. Neustadt, an expert in integrative medicine, emphasizes the impact of chronic stress on health, particularly cortisol’s role in bone loss and gut health. He advocates for personal responsibility in health, highlighting the inadequacy of traditional medical approaches. They discuss the benefits of whole foods, protein intake, and the pitfalls of ultra-processed foods. Dr. Neustadt’s company, NBI Health, focuses on high-quality supplements, particularly Vitamin K2 (MK-4) for bone health, which has shown to reduce fractures by over 70%. They stress the importance of reading labels and understanding bioavailability. The discussion focused on the differences between MK-4 and MK-7 forms of vitamin K2, highlighting that MK-4 has been clinically proven to stop and reverse bone loss, while MK-7 only slows down bone loss and may even increase it. Scott Mulvaney emphasized the importance of consumer education and informed decision-making. John Neustadt discussed the significance of clinical trials and the need for transparency in supplement marketing. They also touched on the benefits of vitamin C, the importance of genetic testing, and the role of dietary supplements in stress management and overall health. Neustadt shared his commitment to reducing fracture risk and improving bone health through evidence-based products and pro bono consulting.

Quote: “Cut through the confusion of alternative medicine’s promises, conventional medicine’s failures, fad diets and dietary supplement hype to help you get empowered, get energized and unlock your full health potential.”

Your Co-Host Today:

With us today is Dr. John Neustadt, ND, the Founder and President of Nutritional Biochemistry, Inc. (NBI). Dr. Neustadt earned his naturopathic medical degree from Bastyr University where he was awarded the Founder’s Award for academic and clinical excellence. Dr. Neustadt has published more than 100 medical articles, written four health and wellness books and is now a #1 Amazon Best Selling Author in the field of Osteoporosis. His most recent book is, Fracture-Proof Your Bones: A Comprehensive Guide to Osteoporosis. Dr. Neustadt was also an editor of the textbook, Laboratory Evaluations for Integrative and Functional Medicine, which was used across the United States to train and educate physicians on using functional medicine with their patients.

Today’s Top 3 Takeaways:

Understanding the impacts of stress on your health.
Exercise and its’ benefits on stress management, along with nutrition and supplementation.
Role of Functional Medicine vs the Healthcare System challenges.

Today’s Guest Co-Host Links:

Website: NBI – Delivering Health – NBI

Facebook: NBI

YouTube: NBIHealth

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-neustadt-nd-1553576/

Twitter: Dr. John Neustadt (@JohnNeustadt) on X

Watch us on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/iNzyUeDek1w

Timestamped Show Notes:

08:46 – Chronic stress is absolutely devastating to your health. I mean, even the research has been done with cortisol levels and normal “healthy people”, and just the high end of normal, meaning that they were not pathological. They didn’t have any disease. They were losing bone mass faster than the people whose cortisol levels were lower. Cortisol also changes the gut microbiome. When it’s elevated a lot of the researchers with medications like prednisone, which is basically cortisol on steroids itself, and high doses, but even low doses of short term create osteoporosis and increase fracture risk. But they destroy muscle microfibrils, and it decreases your body’s ability to produce collagen. The stress also makes the collagen that is present there even more fragile. So it’s just this recipe for this systemic breakdown throughout your body of the connective tissue, not to mention the gut health, and, you know, it’s drag on your energy and damage to mitochondria.

13:15 – If recovering from all this chronic stress, if they’ve got symptoms of adrenal fatigue and or we’ve tested it and it’s shown it, I like to have them exercise just to the point where they are sweating and then to stop. That way you get the cardiovascular benefits. It gets the heart rate up, it boosts the immune system, but it doesn’t over stress the the adrenal glands any further.

17:30 – A really insidious effect of cortisol and that chronic stress research has shown it actually shrinks brain size. It decreases the volume of your brain.

37:52 – In Japan, they actually prescribe forest bathing, grounding, i.e. go out into nature. It’s prescribed. The other thing is when you’re in that stressful situation, back to cortisol in a stressful position in your house, or you’re just wound up, it changes the blood flow in your brain. Your prefrontal cortex is for decision making and being able to understand the results of your actions. So if this is comprimised, it will impact your ability to gauge which is going to be the best decision, it decreases the blood flow to that area, and it increases the blood flow to other areas of the brain, where it’s more fight or flight, where it’s let’s get out of here. In fact, research has shown that when people are under stress, they cannot anticipate how the negative consequences of their behaviors, because they just want to escape, and so they make worse decisions.

01:01:20 – Bioavailable, so, what does that mean? It means you can absorb it better, and that’s true, MK7 is more bioavailable than MK4, but that doesn’t mean that it works better in your body. Does that guarantee a utilization? Not at all. So MK7 and MK4 are both forms of Vitamin k2 but they’re different molecules. So you know, as we know, in biochemistry, if you change just one carbon atom or one atom on a molecule, you can get overlapping but you also get very different effects. So I already mentioned, MK4 has been shown to stop and reverse bone loss and maintain bone strength. MK7, in all doses tested, has never been shown to stop bone loss or reverse it, only slow down how fast somebody loses bone?

01:14:00 – On the topic of accurate supplement labeling, I love that topic, and that’s we have three versions of that product. Each have the highest dose of MK4 available, 45 milligrams per day, with 2000 I use a vitamin d3 the dose shown in clinical trials to work, and then different amounts of calcium, because not everybody needs the same amount of calcium in a dietary supplement, and a lot of people don’t even need calcium as a dietary supplement. So that’s got the full dose of calcium, 1000 milligrams per day. Take two servings a day, osteo K minis, which is, I think, a better formula for most women. It has less calcium. It has 400 milligrams per day, right next to that. And the osteo MK4 has no calcium, just the MK4 and vitamin d3 for people who don’t need extra calcium.

01:27:00 – Final Words

Our Final Words of the Show:

The reason I started, aside from getting frustrated by not having the supplements that I needed for my patients, where I started focusing on bone health and osteoporosis, is because my mother in law, at the time had osteoporosis. I thought I was doing a good job with her and my patients. I was, you know, helping her with some dietary supplements and nutrition and exercise advice. And her doctor had her on fossamax. Her physician her bone density was going up. So she was happy. Her physician was happy. I was happy. My patient’s bone density was going up. So I was happy. Then my mother in law fell, tripped on a throw rug and broke her hip. And I thought to myself, something is wrong with this picture. So I started diving into the research on osteoporosis and bone health, and I was shocked by what I found, that a bone density test only predicts 44% of women with osteoporosis who fracture only 21% of men, and yet that number on that test is almost exclusively what’s treated and tracked conventionally. And in fact, when it comes to the Osteoporosis medications, the change in bone density is not even an indicator that that medication is reducing their fracture risk that’s well documented in the clinical trials. And so my passion for continuing to research on osteoporosis and bone health, lecture at medical conferences, write my book, create products to help people support their their bone health and their physiology in that way, if I can have an overarching legacy when I’m when I’m gone, my hope is that it will move the needle nationally in terms of how clinically doctors approach this condition, and the entire focus of it changes from just being addressing a number on a test to what can we do to reduce people’s fracture risk, because that’s the most dangerous thing with this condition, and fracture risk depends largely, mostly on factors other than bone density.

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241: Inflammation, Disease, BioTe Hormones, and Integrative Medicine

Scott Mulvaney — Mon, 24 Dec 2018 17:00:00 +0000

A Healthy Podcast on Inflammation, Disease, BioTe Hormones, Gut Health, Microbiome, Integrative Medicine, and More:

Stephanie Gray, DNP, MS, ARNP, ANP-C, GNP-C, ABAAHP, FAARFM, is a functional medicine provider who helps men and women build sustainable and optimal health and longevity so that they can focus on what matters most to them! She has been working as a nurse practitioner since 2009. She completed her doctorate focusing on estrogen metabolism from the University of Iowa in 2011. Additionally, she has a Masters in Metabolic Nutritional Medicine from the University of South Florida’s Medical School. Her expertise lies within integrative, anti-aging, and functional medicine. She is arguably one of the Midwest’s’ most credentialed female healthcare providers combining many certifications and training. She completed an Advanced fellowship in Anti-Aging Regenerative and Functional Medicine in 2013. She became the first BioTe certified provider for hormones in Iowa to administer hormone pellets also in 2013. She is the author of the FNP Mastery App and an Amazon best selling author of her book Your Longevity Blueprint. She is the co-founder of Your Longevity Blueprint nutraceuticals with her husband, Eric. They own the Integrative Health and Hormone Clinic in Hiawatha, Iowa.

Visit, YourLongevityBlueprint.com and use our discount code “THANKSFUEL”

On This Episode You Will Hear:

[spp-timestamp time=”00:30″] Introduction
[spp-timestamp time=”08:00″] I think because I’m in the Midwest and there are a lot of baby boomers here, we need more providers, we need what nurse practitioners are often called, which is a mid-level provider. They’re desperate for help. I think that’s part of why maybe we have more rights and more autonomy. Iowa has allowed me to really build an integrative or functional medicine practice. There’s no guarantee that I could have found a true medical doctor who would have allowed me to practice under them this in this manner.
[spp-timestamp time=”14:00″] A fireman versus a carpenter approach, describes conventional, or you could say traditional medicine, as being more the fire department. The fire department is used to put out the fire. A chiropractor is then the carpenter approach to move forward with.
[spp-timestamp time=”15:00″] You’re not always taught how to prevent future fires, right? That’s where what we do comes in, we’re a functional medicine provider, a contractor or Carpenter as I discussed in my book. We are helping patients build a healthier body using functional medicine principles because we want to get to the root cause. We want to determine if the patient has inflammation and figure out those triggers. We want to help put out that fire without hopefully having to use drugs and surgery.
[spp-timestamp time=”19:00″] A Carnivore Study? I want to go off on a tangent now. I am very curious what happens to hormones and what happens to nutritional deficiencies on that sort of diet?
[spp-timestamp time=”23:39″] I had endometriosis, which I’m going to talk more about in my second book. I did utilize some of the conventional medicine but I use a lot of functional medicine to help with fertility. I’ve been gluten-free for I don’t even know how many years, five years maybe. I’m not free of all grains but I am 100% gluten-free and I needed to go dairy-free as well.
[spp-timestamp time=”35:00″] Terry Wahls is a good friend and colleague, her working knowledge base is ridiculous. She’s someone who reversed her autoimmune condition. She was wheelchair bound with MS – Multiple Sclerosis and was essentially sent home to die. So she did her own research, being she was conventionally trained, she sought out functional medicine and now she’s in the best shape of her life. She feels amazing.
[spp-timestamp time=”43:00″] It’s all about gut health. It’s all about getting back to the inflammation. You mentioned punching that fire out and for autoimmune diseases specifically, that’s what Terry Wahls’ book is all about. It is getting the inflammatory foods out of her gut to really reverse her condition.
[spp-timestamp time=”45:30″] Chefs in the cooking world do not fully understand microbiome, gut biology, and how food allergies actually work. Sugar tastes good, sugars are addicting, so that’s why they want you to come back.
[spp-timestamp time=”53:00″] There are a time and place where with some patients, there’s not a lot they can do nutritionally. If they don’t have the organs necessary to produce the hormones in their symptomatic, they may need hormones. Topical gels and creams, they’re not my favorite, as they’re not the preferred forms. Injectables, those are all synthetic, so I do not like offer those. Then there are sublingual lozenges you can put on your tongue but with BioTe, I believe this is the most potent and safest delivery method. BioTe, Bio-Identical Testosterone Estrogen delivered in hormone pellets.
[spp-timestamp time=”01:12:00″] Final Words

Your greatest wealth is health! – Quote

[spp-tweet tweet=”Don’t give up, find a provider who can help you repair and rebuild your body. You won’t regret it. Your #Longevity #Blueprint with @drsbgray “]

Watch On YouTube:

Co-Host Links and Resources:

Mentioned Influencers:

Final Words:

I think we emphasized the importance of eating clean and reducing stress. Those are two awesome tips right there. So I think those are the biggest take homes.

I’ve also said this word a couple of times, HOPE, that’s in the back of the book. I list a lot of references for patients to find functional medicine providers near where they’re living. I think sometimes patients hear things or individuals may hear a message and it resonates but then they don’t know where to go from there. So if it resonates with you, share with someone you know or a family member who may need functional medicine.

Don’t give up, find a provider who can help you repair and rebuild your body. You won’t regret it.

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