Vonda Wright

  • Orthopedic surgeon and internationally recognized authority on active aging and sports medicine
  • CEO of the Women's Health Conversations
  • Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Credentials

  • MD
  • Fellowship in Sports and Exercise Medicine

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts in Biology – University of Chicago
  • Doctor of Medicine – University of Pittsburgh
  • Fellowship in Sports and Exercise Medicine – Harvard University

Affiliations

  • University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
  • Women's Health Conversations

Research Focus

  • Active aging
  • Sports medicine
  • Mobility and musculoskeletal health in aging

Notable Publications

  • Fitness After 40: How to Stay Strong at Any Age (2008)
  • Guide to Thrive: 4 steps to Body, Brains, and Bliss (2012)
  • Masterful Care of the Aging Athlete (2018)

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Awards & Honors

  • Orthopaedic Research Society’s Achievement Award (2012)

Key Contributions

  • Developed a unique program for senior athletes to maintain their high level of physical activity and mobility.
  • Authored several books providing insights into active aging and the maintenance of mobility and health in later years.

Contact

[email protected]

The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 0:00 0
“Runners who only run are hurt a lot and it's usually due to emotion imbalance so I always do this test to show them whether your butt muscles are strong enough to keep your pelvis straight and whether you're strong enough to keep your knee from falling into this position.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 0:31 0
“In the United States at least 50% of women will get osteoporosis along with 2 million men.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 2:50 0
“Every meal from breakfast, lunch, dinner, every meal on the planes were prepared because when it comes down to split-second agility, top of brain thinking, every little bit counts.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 4:54 0
“I put sleep first, sleep and Recovery first because you can't do any of these other things without a well recovered brain.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 6:03 0
“you can train the physical brain like a muscle”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 7:39 0
“now that we've sequenced the human genome we can develop Health Plans your health plan my health plan it's not generic”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 9:14 0
“I'm going to tell you what heart rate you need to work out in”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 12:01 0
“that can have dire effects for women but that is all due to the role of estrogen on controlling bone density”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 12:45 0
“with chronic exercise such as these people did you can maintain your bone density at a very high proportion into your 80s”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 13:32 0
“impacting bones causing them to build up over time is critically important for maintaining bone density”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 13:40 0
“loss of bone density doesn't have to result in osteoporosis, fracture, and frailty”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 18:33 0
“cells in your bones released osteocalcin it goes to the testes and that organ the litig cells under stimulation of osteocalcin will produce testosterone”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 22:47 0
“estrogen which then helps us lay down bone”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 24:23 0
“a woman breastfeeding will lose 20% of her bone density in the first 6 months of breastfeeding”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 25:16 0
“estrogen is critical for controlling the absorption of bone and without estrogen controlling the absorption it just keeps breaking down bone faster than the osteoblast the building cells can build it”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 25:41 0
“if you do Impact Sports when you're younger especially some of them there's other consequences like injury or hitting your head so you're saying that we should be running or jumping when we're younger to build our our bone strength absolutely to build everything”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 26:52 0
“for breastfeeding mothers uh you will lose about 500 milligrams of calcium a day as you're making milk for your child you must replace that I like people to replace their calcium with whole food right with prunes and dates and and high calcium um Dairy if you will if you simply cannot do that okay take a supplement”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 28:04 0
“osteocalcin works to decrease that oxidative damage to repair cells in the brain so that's number one number two it stimulates the release of something called brain derived neurotropic protein bdnf factor which stimulates the growth of neurons in a part of the brain called the hippocampus which is involved in memory”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 31:53 0
“V2 Max is the measure of it's the ultimate measure of fitness, how much oxygen you are capable of pulling out of the air and diffusing across your lungs into your blood.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 32:31 0
“once we hit midlife we will decline 10% a decade if we don't consistently build it up.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 34:23 0
“osteoporosis is the word we use to describe low bone density.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 37:49 0
“smoking is a poison to Bone healing whether it is fracture will heal more slowly in fact we have a very a much higher rate of non-union which is where we fix a fracture and it still doesn't heal in smokers.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 41:29 0
“Alzheimer's disease is thought of as the third phase of diabetes right and so everybody is aware of diabetes and it means you don't process sugar and you have glucose intolerance and your pancreas is no longer functioning and the bad sequella that can come with that.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 43:51 0
“we can prevent you from getting to diabetes in the next 10 years if we're really really serious about lifting weights about cardio Health about anti-inflammatory nutrition following”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 45:39 0
“I always eat a lot of protein that is my lifestyle and my blood sugar is 85 when I do that and I'm a midlife woman and you know the metabolic things that happen to midlife women even backing off a little bit starts to creep up my blood sugar.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 48:14 0
“I eat 130 grams of protein a day there's no upper limit on how much protein you can eat in a single setting I try to get at least 30 because there is a lower thresholds for 30 and so if I do that uh it takes three meals and a couple SN a day”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 49:07 0
“I don't eat fruit except blueberries fruit is Nature's dessert so if we're going to eat fruit eat it as dessert I eat I eat blueberries with my yogurt”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 50:22 0
“you're um a very big advocate of muscle you know when we talk about longevity something that you continually come back to as the most important thing for people's longevity I think I would put muscle and bone near the same category because you can have all the muscle you want but if you break your hip you still have the downstream effects now you're much less likely to break your hip if you're strong but I think muscle or bone are really important”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 51:00 0
“it is never too late your body will always rise to the Strategic stress you place on it so there are a lot of and growing number of what used to be anomalies all over the Internet of people in their 60s 70s 80s and Beyond in a gym powerlifting becoming uh competitive bodybuilders so even if you're starting not being able to get up out of a chair over a very short amount of time 6 months a year you can reverse the trajectory of your Frailty but it takes consistency”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 53:52 0
“even with a 10 week Hiatus from let's say you're lifting consistently even with a 10 week Hiatus uh you will retain muscle memory so that you don't make serious declines which is little relief to me because it's been a little while with this book so you retain muscle memory and you can quickly once you get started again get back up to the place you were”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 55:39 0
“Lighter weights, higher reps is uh will function for hypertrophy for bigger total muscle but not necessarily power and strength. Lifting for power is lower reps, higher weights.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 56:45 0
“Muscle is a metabolic endocrine organ, it releases when it releases um you know one of the things that releases is skeletal muscle contraction by curls causes the transcription of a protein called clo which is the longevity protein.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 59:56 0
“You need to feed your muscles. I always quote people one gram per ideal pound because people need really specific instructions and they can't be confusing.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:00:33 0
“High quality protein has the greatest percentage of an essential amino acid called Lucine. Lucine is not made by the body, it has to be taken in from the outside.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:01:06 0
“There's a lot of research for creatine supplementation for both men and women. Steadily five grams a day will help build muscle, it will help build brain.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:02:09 0
“it's good for like cognitive performance skin hair muscle bone etc etc and now she takes it every day”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:04:13 0
“vitamin D as well as crucial isn't it for bone health I was reading that there it is it is magnesium vitamin D magnesium uh lesser known things strontium zinc Boron and micronutrients but big thing vitamin D magnesium”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:05:32 0
“Runners who only run are hurt a lot and here's why running builds a big cardiovascular engine but it does not build muscle mass below your belly generally unless you're running uphill all the time and you're building glutes”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:07:24 0
“have someone stand you on one leg and look at the way that that one motion pattern is different from the other because if it's predictable like that there's an imbalance in you and so it can likely be trained”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:09:00 0
“to test whether we have muscle imbalances that could cause injuries when we run because I had said Runners are very hurt athletes that I take care of this is called the Trendelenburg sign and it tells us whether your glute your butt muscles are strong enough to keep your pelvis straight and whether you're strong enough to keep your knee from falling into this position”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:13:55 0
“the more weight we're carrying the more harm it's doing to our bones in a really disproportionate way”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:15:02 0
“if we're carrying around a lot of heavy extra weight and we don't have the muscles to support that instead of muscles actually like a shock absorber and protecting our cartilage we're banging more”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:15:19 0
“we want to make sure that we have a healthy weight so that we're not exerting so much load because it's 7 to n times body weight pressure across the joints”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:18:33 0
“I've talked quite extensively on this podcast about menopause... people have not heard of perimenopause, they've never heard of hormone replacement therapy and they don't know what to do about it.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:20:11 0
“You can take hormones while you're still menstruating and there's no reason not to; in fact, that's what birth control is. Birth control is 10 times the dose of hormone replacement therapy.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:21:35 0
“Estrogen on bones acts to control the cell that breaks down bones... replacing hormones helps rebalance bone breakdown and bone rebuilding.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:22:16 0
“If we lose our estrogen around the time of this perimenopause, menopause, we can lose 15% of our bone density.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:25:06 0
“you lose your estrogen we've talked about loss of bone density we have increased incidence of tendon and ligament problems Achilles tendon tennis elbow patellar tendon because the collagen fibers of Tenon and ligament have estrogen receptors on them and so everything starts to work less well without the presence of estrogen”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:29:31 0
“every musculoskeletal tissue has Alpha and beta estrogen receptors we know that when those sit empty you will manifest some of the muscular skeletal syndrome of menopause 80% of us do”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:31:38 0
“70% of people do no meaningful exercise any time of the week so we never rebuild it so we get low back pain due to muscle weakness.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:33:03 0
“I do and walking treadmills because there's so much work that we do during the days that isn't deep work we're emptying out our email we're returning some phone calls we're doing the less heavy brain heavy parts of our job all can be done standing or I've encouraged groups of people that I work with to hold their meetings doing wall squats just don't sit at the board table pull up a wall everybody's squat better be a pretty quick meeting because that that takes a lot of strength but to build in that kind of Mobility.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:33:46 0
“Studies have shown that if we're trying to learn something it's better to be moving as we learn because the kinetic energy of learning is better for our brain.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:38:41 0
“Last week I was speaking at the American Diabetes Association and talking about midlife and menopause and all the metabolic changes that go on when estrogen walks out the door.”

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The Truth About Creatine & Exercise! 30% Of People Will Die From This! The Healthy Ageing Doctor
Optimize Your Health: Essential Insights on Nutrition, Exercise, and Hormones 1:38:53 0
“We've already talked today about pre-diabetes and how we need to put on a big alarm because of all the metabolic changes that will lead to diabetes and Alzheimer's.”

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