#172 Insulin, PCOS, and Should Women Do Fasting with Dr Nadia Pateguana

Siim Land (0:00)

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Nadia Pateguana (0:59)

And that, I think, is a point that cannot be missed because there's a lot of diabetics who are highly insulin resistant, but they're very thin.

And so what we know, again, is the underlying problem here is insulin. It's not the weight, it's insulin. However, obesity is one other expression. So some people are overweight, yes, but they're not diabetic. And maybe they don't have PCOS, in the case of women, but they still have the insulin resistance and it still has to be addressed.

Siim Land (1:31)

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Siim Land (1:44)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Nadia Pateguana.

She's a naturopathic doctor from Canada, who also works at Dr. Jason Fung's clinic. Dr. Nadia, welcome to the show.

Nadia Pateguana (1:58)

Thank you, Siim.

Siim Land (2:00)

Yeah, we did our first podcast like two years ago, I think. And it's been a while. So you just said earlier that you actually moved into Portugal. So how's life in Portugal?

Nadia Pateguana (2:12)

Oh, it's great. We've been here for, I guess, a year and a half, or maybe a little over that.

So it must have been just after we spoke, but I didn't remember that it had been that long.

Siim Land (2:23)

Yeah, it's been quite a long time. But for those of you who are hearing from you for the first time, can you give us like a brief backstory as well of how did you got into medicine and being a doctor?

Nadia Pateguana (2:35)

Absolutely. My pleasure. So I actually don't remember if we got into this at all the last time we talked, but I remember we had a great podcast, a great interview, and I even posted it on my things as well. But I started, I've been a naturopath for 15, 16 years now. I graduated in Canada, as you said, from the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine.

And at the time, a couple of interesting things were happening. I think one thing was I definitely wanted to go into complementary medicine because I thought I would get the best of both worlds. And I believe that I probably did to a certain extent.

I also decided to move back to my home country. So I left Canada at the time, as you can tell, I like to hop around a little bit. But I left Canada at the time and I went back to Mozambique, which is where I am from, my country of birth. And I lived there for 10 years and I worked there. So my very first practice was actually in Mozambique. So for 10 years, I worked as a naturopath, but in Mozambique. And just because of circumstances, I ended up getting into the nutrition field.

As a naturopath, I didn't have much else to offer. And not just that, I was surprised that so many people in Mozambique actually were looking for help with metabolic syndrome. There were so many people suffering with, at least in the city where I'm from, it's a nice, busy city, full of, as I often say, I thought I was going to Mozambique to help the poor and starving people, and I ended up working with the affluent, very well-to-do sort of community. But unfortunately, people were dealing with the same concerns that the people in the Western world are facing, which is metabolic syndrome, right? A great big proportion of the adult population is struggling with obesity and diabetes and all the other expressions of metabolic syndrome. So very early on in my career, right away, I would say, I had to learn how to address this, because this is all people wanted from me. They wanted me to help them with metabolic syndrome. At some point in my journey, very interesting part of my journey as a naturopath is that we started to link another concern. It seemed that women that were struggling with fertility and reproductive health were doing very well when they followed this diet that supposedly was for diabetes and weight loss. All of a sudden, these women that were struggling with fertility were showing up and telling me that they were pregnant. And I have some very interesting stories from pretty early on in my career. And so it was interesting, but it wasn't something that I was interested in it, but it wasn't my focus. I wasn't a fertility doctor, and therefore I just kind of tossed it off as, well, this is a byproduct of detox, quote unquote. That was a word that we used quite a bit back then, right? Helping people to detox and elimination diets. And so it was kind of like a byproduct. I didn't really have a great explanation. I remember this one couple coming to me.