How to Improve Your Vitality & Heal From Disease | Dr. Mark Hyman

23:29Hence functional medicine. What is it, what is it's bugging you? What's pissing your system off? Is it, and there's a short list, Andrews, it's toxins and it can be internal endogenous toxins or external toxins like heavy metals or pesticides or glyphosate or many other things. It's infections or microbes so it can be, you know, post -COVID syndrome with prosthesis spike protein, it can be Epstein -Barbriethis, that leads to MS, it can be Mime disease, it can be your microbiome being off, which is the truth for most of us. It's allergens, which are things that your body is reacting to both environmental allergens or it can be food allergens or food sensitivities, which is not truly an allergen, but it's more of an adverse reaction to food from leaky gut.

24:11It can be poor diet, which I think most of us understand what that is. It can be stress and that can be physical, mechanical stress like being hit by a car or psychological stress or you're the meaning you make from a psychological stress, which is really what caused you to be sick and you've had Gabor on your podcast. No, not yet. We haven't had Gabor on it. But we've had a number of people talking about the relationship between mind and body and stress and certainly it's a profound connection. Yeah, so you have this list of five things. That interacts with your genome and it's really what we call the expose on, but what your genes are exposed to is far more predictive than your genome.

24:47Your expose them includes some tone of everything you're exposed to on the positive and negative, all the things I just listed, but also all the ingredients for health. So I identify what are the impediments for health and then what are the ingredients for health and the ingredients for health are not complicated. We're biological organisms, right? Despite trying to live outside of our biological constraints, we need the right kind of food. Right? What does that look like? Michael Pollan said, eat food mostly plants not too much, right? Or not too much mostly plants, something like that. And it's basically eating foods that's as close to nature as you can find it.

25:20Groud of the ground or how to pulse. Yeah, yeah, basically, right. He says, eat food that's grown on a plant, not made into plant. And I used to lecture these churches and I said, it's really simple to figure out to eat. Ask you if you have the God make it or did man make it? Did God make it twinky? No, did you make an avocado? Yes. Would your ancestors recognize it? Yeah, like would your great grandmother know what a luncheon bowl I was or a gogurt was? So this generally means eating foods that are single ingredient foods or foods that combine only single ingredients. Single ingredient foods.

25:49Like you look at label, you gotta read the labels. You look at it, do I recognize this? What I have this in my kitchen? Do I have butylated hydroxytol? You mean in my kitchen or red, I number three? Probably not. Right? Unless you're a grandma making cupcakes that are really red. But so food. Fruit. Vegetables. Yeah. Meat vegetables. Yeah. Quality dairy. Yeah. I've written so many books on this, the pecan diet food, but then I wanted to call it food with the function aid, but my publisher wouldn't let me. But nowadays it probably would. I feel like it cursed everywhere. So there's like we can we can dive into nutrition, but just assume like you need depending on your age and your sex and your what you're doing with your life, you need the right nutrition of whole real food.

26:29Can I just ask you, we'll just quickly double click into there. What's your view on seed oils? Wait. I'll just, you know, I'll say mine. I like olive oil and butter. Yeah. Coconut oil and things like avocados and some Brazil nuts and walnuts and stuff. So since I don't count calories, I kind of have an intuitive sense of what I'm taking in, how much fat, how much protein, how much starch, how much fiber, fibers, etc. So for me, like I wouldn't pick canola oil because I could pick olive oil. Right. Right. And then I make sure it's real olive oil. And, but I don't think sea doils necessarily will kill me, but guess why they, I know they won't kill me because I don't eat them.

27:10We should be eating whole food fats as much as possible, right? Avocados, coconut nuts and seeds, you know, omega three fats from fish, olive oil, which is minute the most minute process oil you can get extra virgin olive oil. And, and we're eating nuts and seeds. We're getting a lot of omega sixes. So the big theory behind sea doils is that it's omega six rich. It's in balance with omega three's, it causes inflammation. The way they're produced in grown is problematic. There are usually GMO crops like canola oil. They spray lots of chemicals on them. Most chemicals get in the oil. They're manufactured in an industrial way that oxidizes them, that uses hexane to get rid of sort of some of the compounds in it.

27:53The odorizes them, bleaches them. And then they're easily oxidized. So what I want to eat in industrial food product, probably not, do we know for sure that it's a problem? I think the data is mixed. You know, there's some studies that show epidemiologically that, you know, people eat more of these plant -based oils or seed oils have reduced risk of diseases. So we don't know what they're doing and there's food frequency questionnaires and there's studies are proving correlation, not causation. And what it's replacing, sorry to interrupt here, but you know, I'll see the data that seed oils are better for people than butter.

28:26Okay, I like grass -fed butter, but I don't eat it in excess. Yeah. I once joked about that and I like, I made some jokes early on and having a podcast not realizing the implications. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I am very careful. Now, I have some butter in moderation. Yeah. But so I could imagine that if you're eating a lot of lard and butter and bacon fat and you replace it with seed oils, you'll get healthier. But maybe. Maybe. But you could imagine, I guess it depends on what else you're ingesting. Because the carbon, the starch fat combination is the one that gets people in my opinion. That's right.

28:55But right, somebody could be eating a lot of meat and fruit and you know, don't eat like your butter with a bagel, put it on your broccoli. Because that, the saturated fat refined starch combo is what's killing us. I wish people would really hear you on this. It's not fat per se. It's not starches per se. It's the combination of fat and starch and in particular fat, starch and sugar. Yeah. Well, starch sugar, starch sugar, I mean, below the neck, your body can tell if it's a bowl of sugar or a bowl of corn flakes or a bagel or a bowl of sugar. So if I put a pad of butter on a bowl of white rice, is it that bad?

29:35No. Not okay. But if I put a pad of butter on a muffin, it's bad news bears. Yeah. It's double, you're doubling down on this sugar. And I think, you know, to answer your question with the seed oil, the data is not really completely answering this. And it's part of the problem of nutrition. It's not of nutrition science. The one large randomized controlled trial that was done on like 9 ,000 people, not on 90 people or 50 people or 30 people, which a lot of these studies are, but on 9 ,000 people that were randomized in a psychiatric hospital would be unethical to do today. It was done by Ansel Keys.

30:10It was the Minnesota coronary experiment funded by the NIH, where they basically gave half the group butter and half the group corn oil. That corn oil is a pure omega -6 oil, as opposed to soybean, which is mixed omega -3, canola, mixed omega -3, six oils. And what they found was striking. They found that the group that had the corn oil, for every 30 point drop in LDL cholesterol, the risk of death from heart attacks or strokes, went up by 22%. Which is completely the opposite of what we think in medicine, which is LDL is the bogeyman that's, LDL is the bad cholesterol or L for lousy cholesterol.

30:50It's not so simple. And I think, I think, the oversimplification of, you know, let's say, these C2L's lower LDL, therefore they're good, is just too simplistic. But if, would I, for example, have a corn oil that was expel or pressed or that was organic or canola oil that was or sunflower, South or all, yeah. I mean, I'm not worried about those in small amounts. But that's not what most people are doing. Most people are eating, most of their diet is ultra -processed food. 60 % of the adults, 67 % of kids is basically junk food. And the major oil in those are these refined oils. So is it the oils?

31:26Is it the junk food? They're just a vehicle for this. And we've increased our consumption, for example. The main seed oil or bean oil, it's not really a seed, is soy bean oil, by 1 ,000 fold since 1900. Now, I'm sort of an evolutionary thinker. I'm like, what did our, how are our bodies designed? And what should we be doing with them? And like, you know, you talk a lot about light, and that's like, you know, you went to sleep with the sun, you woke up with the sun. It was just how things were. And you had circadian rhythms in our home biological clocks, and rhythms are screwed up because of how we live.

31:57Yeah, we evolved under the major constraint of sunrise and sunset. That's right. And artificial lighting is a wonderful thing. But I think there's highly processed light. It's devoid of long wavelengths. The eradication, basically, of incandescent bulbs and all these LEDs. And like, they're like saving times. It's really messing people up. Yeah. I mean, is it just an hour? No, actually, it's your mental health. When it comes to the seed oil thing, I actually predict that seed oils will lose. I think in the end, it's just obvious. Like, why wouldn't people just say, you know what? The seed oil thing may or may not be a problem.

32:32I'm just going to eat olive oil in a little bit of butter. Yeah, that's kind of my view. It seems so simple to me. It's kind of my view is if you have a new to nature kind of compound or a naturally high amount of something that we're having in our diet, I mean, sugar was always around. We would get honey, we would whatever. But we'd have 22 teaspoons a year as hunter -gatherers. Now we have that every day for every American. If you had a magic wand and you could get rid of seed oils or you could get rid of highly refined sugars in modern American diet, which one? Yeah, no contest. It's starch and sugar that's driving our metabolic crisis, like by a huge factor.

33:10By a huge factor. Does that mean no pasta, no bread? It doesn't mean no, no anything. It just means the volume of stuff we're eating is like we're eating pharmacologic doses. It's 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour, which has a higher glycemic index than sugar. Really? Yeah, well, that's how it's set. It's set at white bread as 100 and these sugars 80 because it's fructose and glucose. You have to break that apart. Your glycemic load, which is how it affects your blood sugar, fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar, glucose raises your blood sugar. So where do we go wrong? Because I was a teen in the 90s.

33:45Until I discovered fitness, I didn't eat poorly at home. My mom cooked it. I did. Pop -tars, craft -mechery, and so we weren't allowed that stuff. But, like, tang, yeah. Ice was margarine. We weren't allowed that stuff. But we had our like honey nut Cheerio. We had our honey nut Cheerio and things like that. But we ate mostly whole foods and then not from there wasn't whole foods market back then, but a whole unprocessed, mineraling process foods. But I ate my fair share of pizza slices and burritos and college and stuff like that. But, and I was active, but I wasn't a serious athlete. But then somewhere around 2010 forward, I feel like everything, you know, again, just to be very direct, there was probably one kid or two kids in my school that were obese.

34:32Now depending on where you live, you see 60, 70, 80 % of kids are obese. So I mean, what happened? I want to answer that and then I want to come back to the loop of what I was trying to complete on your big thought of like, how does the body work and how do you create health and what do you do? Because you asked me that question. I want to lose that question. What happened was there was this rise in cardiovascular is in America and there was this thought that saturated fat and fat was the bad guy. And this was the McGovern report in the 70s that went on to be dietary guidelines, that went on to be the food pyramid.

35:11And the food pyramid essentially told us that fat was the enemy. So it's only the very tippy top fat and those sparingly. Bottom of the pyramid was 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal and pasta a day. Which sounds like a recipe for being hungry all the time. And being obese. Right. Now we didn't know at the time, but it became really clear that that was a bad idea. Pretty quick. And the hockey stick rise in obesity type 2 diabetes tracks perfectly with that information. The American public trusted the government. They trusted the scientists. And when they said fats bad carbs are good. Everybody listened.

35:51Eggs are bad. Eggs are bad fats bad cholesterol. Red man's beat so people ate less red meat, they ate less eggs, they ate less fat. And then we got snack ball cookies. You know, we got like low fat ice cream and like and the sugar just went through the roof. And so that's when you see this this explosive rise. And then there's other factors are microbiome effects are weight, environmental toxins, effect dermatabolism. So this is a whole bunch of things happen in tandem. But that probably is the single biggest thing. So if someone asked me for me, should I worry about soybean oil or sugar and starch, it's 100 % sugar and starch.

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39:55That's roka .com and enter the code huberman to save 20 % off your first order. Again, that's roca .com and enter the code huberman at checkout. So the 90s low fat thing was a disaster. And I wrote about what I eat fat get then where I catalog the whole history of how we got there and what the problems were and what the science is telling us about what we should be eating about. The reconsidering saturated fat being bad. It's bad if you're eating it in the context of starch and sugar. For most people, it's not. And if your obesity or metabolic and healthy, it actually can be better for you. There's a lower risk of diabetes and epidemiological studies with butter and milk fat.

40:35So I don't I think I think we have to kind of like, I know nutrition is a very complicated subject, but we're not right. I don't know. I'm beginning to think that nutrition is a very straightforward subject. It should be. It should be. Yeah, and I confess I've had some pretty diametrically opposed views from guests on this podcast. We'd Robert Lusted on the podcast. We'd Lane Norton on the podcast. Yeah, those two on separate podcasts and they are like at loggerheads with one another. Now, Lane's correct in that total caloric load matters. Yeah. It's not everything, but it matters. I would say many people have a hard time limiting their intake of starchy carbohydrates, especially if you put a little bit of fat on there.

41:14It just becomes a different food entirely. Eating a bowl of white rice is pretty tasty. Eating a bowl of white rice with a patty butter and a little bit of salt on there is a completely different experience. A piece of sourdough bread is one thing. A piece of sourdough bread soaked in a little bit of olive oil with some salt. I mean, half the love. I'm good. Right, and I'm pretty good self -control. So, so this is where I think like we, there's the debates have become almost silly. And I appreciate that you're being very direct with us here. So, let's take us back. So, you said they're ingredients for health and they're impediments to health.

41:45So, the ingredients for health are not, again, not a long list because we're, who means we need the right food, we need the right amount of nutrients. And it's different for different people. You might not know this, but Bruce Ames did an incredible paper who would recently jied one of the giants of science, saying that one third of our entire DNA codes are enzymes. All enzymes require cofactors. Most cofactors are vitamins and minerals. And there's a huge genetic variability in how much people need. Some people need a thousand units of vitamin D. Some really need 5 ,000. Some people need 400 micrograms of folate.

42:17Some people need 4 ,000 micrograms of folate. And so, he kind of explained that very carefully. To find the right amount of nutrients for you, you need the conditionally essential nutrients. Those people don't think are absolutely essential, but things like coq 10 and various things that the body requires that we may not get enough. Then you need light, you need water, you need clean air, you need movement, you need rest. And I would say that in the parasympathetic state, kind of what I mean by rest, you need sleep, you need connection, love, meaning, purpose, these are all ingredients for health.

42:49And any one of those can make you sick, whether it's just being icy in the loan or not having a purpose in your life. If you have a meaning in purpose in your life, there's a jammed paper published that you're likely to have seven years longer. Now, if you cut out all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, the extension of life expectancy seven years. The mind is incredible. I have a colleague at Stanford who works in the sleep division, sleep medicine. And he said, and I shouldn't tell people this because everyone's supposed to get enough sleep, right? But he said, if you positively, they've done, he has a study that shows it if you positively anticipate next day events, your sleep need is actually reduced, and the quality of sleep that you get is remarkable.

43:30That's why it's a bit less than I was looking forward to this. Exactly. Well, they small things, because we all know the experience of like, I only saw it. Five hours, but I got this thing today. I'm really looking forward to you. You feel great. And so I'm not, I don't think people should only sleep five hours. So, once people need more than that. So the idea is basically with functional medicine, you take out the bad stuff and you put in the good stuff. And each person has a different set of bad stuff and a different set of good stuff. And you have to be detective. And it's the opposite of traditional medicine, which is just to use a single drug to treat a single mechanism with single disease in a single outcome.

43:59Like you have high blood pressure, take a high blood pressure drug to lower your blood pressure. We need multimodal treatments for multi -causal diseases. And so what English that means is we need to do a lot of different things. Like if you want to garden, you don't just say, I'm going to put the plant in the air and not water it and not give it soil. Or you're saying, I'm just going to plant it in the soil, but no light and no water. I mean, you know, and this is the way science is. I remember trying to do a study on Alzheimer's at Cleveland Clinic. And the top scientist there was like, we wanted to study this multimodal dimensional approaches to call it a black box approach.

44:35Okay, everybody's getting a different treatment. It's super personalized customized based on their own unibology. There's no one such thing as Alzheimer's or different Alzheimer's. I don't know if that's a word, but you know what I mean? And that's why we fail so miserably with the emily hypothesis because we're just looking at the end stage phenomenon, which is plaque going into an area that's inflamed to kind of steal with the inflammation. What caused the inflammation is really the question. And it can be variable things. So we start to kind of map these out. And when you do that and you actually get to the root causes and you try to treat all the things that are out of balance, people get better.

45:09So if you have a vitamin D deficiency and a folic deficiency and you have a, you know, tons of small bowel overgrowth and you have heavy metals and you have all these different problems, you can't just treat one thing and expect the person to get better. You've got to look at all those things. And some are more primary, some are secondary, but that's the job of a functional medicine doctor. It's a detective. And for me, what's exciting is, you know, you said, how many people do this? Not that many. How many people are like experts who've done this for decades and have seen thousands of patients?

45:37A few hundred. Well, you know, have we trained a hundred thousand people? We have 3 ,500, I think, certified another, I think, three or four thousand in the pipe to be certified. Not that many people who can do this. And this part of the why I created this company called Function Health, which you've been so supportive of, which is to allow people to understand what's going on their own biology, to be empowered to be the CEO of their own health. And to get the data that's going to help them identify the different things that are going on to actually do something about it. Before we move to health metric monitoring, I do want to ask about ingredients for health.

46:13You talk about them. They're your protocols. You don't talk, you don't use that framing, but that's the framing. It's taken the best of putting the good stuff. The body knows what to do. It's got an eight -healing system. Just give me the chance. I think what's so terrible about traditional medicine, it has many wonderful features, is that at least the way it's communicated in this country is that it assumes that people are lazy and uninterested in their own health. And I fundamentally disagree, hence this podcast, your podcast, it's incredible. I agree, too. I believe people want and are willing to take care of themselves if they know how.

46:46Okay. So let's just assume that the pillars of health, like sleep, sunlight, exercise, nutrition, social connection, stress modulation, microbiome, etc. Okay. Assuming that people are making some effort to do those things correctly or a lot of effort, what are some of the things that you believe cannot be accessed through diet and behaviors that warrant supplementation? And I've been interested in supplements and taking supplements for 35 years. So to me, when people say, oh, supplements aren't regulated, I say, actually, they are regulated to some extent, right? Like they're monitored. You want to find ones that are third party tested.

47:28Indeed, there are a lot of junk supplements out there. There are probably a lot of supplements that don't do much. There are probably a lot of supplements that are only use cases for certain people who have a major deficiency. But what are some of the things that are just very difficult to get from food and from sun? Because we hear, you know, the soil is depleted magnesium. It's hard to get enough D3. Like if you were to list out, let's just say about 10 things that you feel like, listen, you probably could get it from food, but it's just hard to get these micronutrients. What are those things?

47:59And by the way, folks, this is not a preloaded conversation. We've never had this conversation. No, no. I know what I take, but I'm just curious. What would you, because people will try hard to get things from food. But what are the things that they can't get from food or can't get from food easily that you believe everyone should take? Great question. I thought you were going somewhere off. I thought you were going, we're one of the things that you did everything perfectly and you're still sick. What do you do? We'll get to that. We'll get to that. That's the list of those things. We'll get to that.

48:25You can take care of it. There's something you need help. We can talk about that. I think because of how dramatically our diets changed after the industrial revolution and because of urbanization and our disconnection from nature, we have a lower nutrient intake than we did as hunter -gatherers. I just came back from Africa and went to the HODZA tribe, which was one of the last hunter -gatherer tribes, and I got to spend a few days with them. The nutrient density of the diet was so much higher, omega -3s, a vitamin D or outside running around a loincloth, or if you're not, you're living in some coastal area where you were eating extremely fatty fish, which is going to the great sources of vitamin D in the food.

49:02They were eating phytochemicals at an incredible rate through eating 800 different species of plants. Now, we have three main ones, and 12 of them are altogether comprised, probably 95 % of our diets, instead of 800 plants, with all kinds of phytochemicals and vitamin D minerals. The soils we're growing food in have depleted the organic matter because of industrial farming and soil erosion. The organic matter, the living soil, is what actually helps to allow the plants to take up the nutrients from the soil, so that there's a symbiotic relation between organisms in the soil and the plant, and it uses them to help get nutrients free so they get into the plants where there's less magnesium, there's less zinc, there's less all these things in their diet.

49:46When you look at the surveys of the American population, there's an ongoing government survey called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It essentially goes around the country with vans, says people's blood all the time, and says, like decades old survey, and it's incredible because you get all this data. They find that like 90 % or low on omega -3s, probably 80 % are insufficient or low in vitamin D, 50 something percent are magnesium deficient, about the same iron, zinc a little bit less, the lending a little bit less, and it depends on where you live and what you do, and also a little bit more than your diet, and what your stage of life is and what your age is and how your absorption is.

50:24For example, when you're older, you get decreased ability absorbed nutrients and decreased ability absorbed, for example, vitamin B12, so at different ages you might need different things. One of the basics that I think everybody should take, I think everybody should take omega -3 fats, at least a gram or two of EPA -DHA. Most people need between two to four thousand international and so vitamin D3. I think a good multivitamin can cover the rest for most people, and when I say good multivitamin, I mean with the right bioavailable forms of nutrients. I was in the hospital recently for back surgery, and this resident came by and he was attending a saying, well, I think I need some magnesium because I'm taking all these painkillers for my surgery and I don't want to be constipated.

51:11He says, oh, you can get this one. I'm like, I said, that's magnesium oxide. That's not well absorbed and it doesn't not the greatest. For magnesium citrate. Yeah, so I said, and I was like, oh, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. He wrote it down. So I think - I have a lot for your physicians and I'll tell you, they come to me for health advice. So that tells you something. That's right. I'm not an MD. Yeah, folks, magnesium, magnesium citrate, great laxative, galley for muscles, glycinate, and threonate for brain and sleep. Yeah. And glycinate for also if you're not, you know, tend to be constipated, it's one that you can tolerate and not be constipated.

51:45It's also helps detoxification and sleep and other things. And so those are the big ones. And I think, you know, I've been diagnostically testing people for decades of nutritional testing with function. We do deep nutritional testing, including omega -3 testing and humocysteine looking at methylation, which is a really important thing you've talked about in the podcast, B12, folate B6. We do vitamin D testing. And we see over 67 % are deficient. This is important to understand, Andrew, 67 % are deficient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. Not the optimal level that you might think is good, like vitamin D over 45 or a ferritin iron store over 45.

52:22They're like, oh, if you're vitamin 30 or more, you're okay. Or if you're a ferritin 16 or more, you're okay. Well, if you're a ferritin 16, you're going to be tired, you're going to be brain fog, you could have potentially hair loss, you could have insomnia. And that's just having low iron stores. And so when we're looking at that, we're seeing what an incredibly depleted population we are in terms of the nutrients we have. So I wish we wouldn't need them, and I wish we didn't need them. But the fact is that unless we're eating a very structured diet, and I had a patient once, I was at OCD, she's like, I don't want to take any vitamins.

52:57I said, okay. This is about, I'm going to, I know there's pumpkinsies have zinc. So I'm going to have like 14 pumpkinsies a day. And I need 200 microamps of selenium. So I'm going to take four Brazil nuts a day. And she went on. And I'm like, I know I need this nutrient. So I'm going to have this much liver a day. And so she, she was able to figure it out. But it's not easy. So it sounds like magnesium getting a gram of EPA omega 3, 3000 IU minimum of D3 per day. Some iron, some zinc, selenium. Sounds like the basics. Yeah. And would that be true? And teens, twon. Well, you're an older guy. You don't want to take a lot of iron because you're not getting any bit.

53:38You can get iron toxicity. So if you're menstruating, one may need more iron. But what I think is the key is figuring out what's right for you. Test don't guess. Most people don't know. And some people may need 10 ,000 units of vitamin D to get the same level as somebody else with 1 ,000. And that's because there's different vitamin D receptors in there. Genetically determined. And you can't know by just guessing. Right. I totally agree. But I also totally know that a lot of people won't blood test. So the argument against supplements has always been you just are creating expensive urine, which is a silly one because that's based on water, so I'll solve a little bit of vitamin only.

54:18And by the way, it's a stupid argument because you're like, why drink water? I just pee the rest out. I mean, like, I'm crazy. It's a silly one. But so, but the list that we just talked about, D3 omega magnesium, maybe some iron if you're not an older guy, zinc, selenium, it seems to me those would be good things for most everybody to add to their already healthy diet that has enough prebiotic, yeah, you know, postbiotic fiber. And we're seeing iodine interesting because people are eating the iodized salt, so they mean sea salt and timelain salt and then we got too fancy with our salt. And so we're eating a table salt.

54:53We're not eating iodized salt. Now, iodine is not normally found in salt, but it was added to salt as to fortification to bring goiters or thyroid problems. But a lot of people have thyroid issues. One in five women and one in 10 men have low thyroid function and 50 % are not diagnosed. And sometimes just the little iodine supplementation can help or you can eat seaweed, you know, or fish. But a lot of people don't eat seaweed or fish. So, you know, that's how you would get iodine otherwise. So I think people need to kind of figure out what's going on with themselves and based on their diet and their preferences.

55:26And if you're vegan, I mean, I think, you know, we're seeing tremendous deficiencies in vegans if they're not supplemented. We hear a lot nowadays about methylated B12. I decided to just start taking methylated B12. Is there a danger to taking methylated B12 if you, quote unquote, don't need it if you're not a poor methylated? It depends on what you're taking, mostly not. But you can over -methlated or under -methlated. And so you don't want to be doing too much or either the other. And there's genetics that are involved in actually assessing how your methylation pathways work with genetics are on B12 or on B6, around folate.

56:03And you have multiple genes that regulate all these different pathways. So it depends as the answer. And, but for most people taking a good multibitamin, and when I say good, I mean, it doesn't have any fillers or binders or additives. It's not blue. That's not the rotating obtoxide in it. It has forms of the nutrients that actually can get utilized in the form better by the body. We talked about magnesium oxide versus glycinators to trade. And that you make sure the company has integrity that they've third party tested for the purity and the potency meaning if it says a thousand units on the label of the thousand units, not 10 ,000 or 2 ,000 or, and then it hasn't have any cross contamination with adders or chemicals.

56:44So sometimes you get something with an herbal product from China that the company didn't realize it was full lead or whatever. And I'm like, we're now we're seeing all these plant proteins with lead in them. Yeah, I want to make sure that we talk about the impediments, things like mold, air, water, cleanliness, things of that sort. But I want to spend just a little bit longer on this supplement thing, maybe because it's so near and dear to my heart. And because it has sparked a lot of confusion for me, not supplements per se, but the reaction to them. By traditional medicine. Yeah. Why is it that supplementation has received so much pushback from the medical community?

57:29And yet I would argue that since 2020, you're going to find vitamin D3 and Omega's essential fatty acids and magnesium in many, many more people's kitchens, meaning they're taking it then prior to that. And this reminds me of yoga resistance training. Yoga was for yogis. Resistance training was for bodybuilders and people in the military. Now everybody knows that men and women, maybe even young people should do it. Is there some argument that they should? I have my thoughts about young people lifting really heavy. But in any case, the breath work, there's a lot of science now, meditation, there's tons of science.

58:13So these things that at one point were considered niche, biohacking, woo, and unsafe, inevitably have seemed to become mainstream. And I think supplements is starting to happen now. Yeah. Well, it was interesting. When I got to clinic in 2014, I said, let's do a survey of 3 ,000 physicians. Let's do a survey of the physicians about their beliefs, practices, desires, goals, needs around supplements. I was shocked. We got a lot of answers. And I'm not remembering the exact percentages, but I'll give you the sort of ballpark. It was over, like, do you take supplements yourself? Like over 70 % of the doctors did.

58:56Do you recommend supplements to your patients? Probably like 20 % or less did. Would you like to have a source where you knew the quality and had recommendations about the safety? Yes, we desperately want to do that. Would you prescribe them to your poor patients more if you did? And it's used, if you look at every medical specialty cardiologists are using COQ10 and Fischoyle. And you've got gastronologists using probiotics. And obviously, OBGYNs recommend supplements for prenatal vitamins. And you've got pediatricians recommending certain vitamins for kids. So you look across all the specialties and you're like, well, they're already kind of integrated, kind of on the margins, but integrated into their practices.

59:35I think this is kind of weird thing where you go to a conference. Now it is doctor, how many people recommend supplements to their patients? And you know, a few hands have go up. How do you guys take supplements that are like, mostly the audience would raise their hand? And I thought that was so peculiar because in medicine, we're told from a scientific perspective that they're probably expensive urine. And yet, most doctors personally want to take them for themselves. That says a lot. And I think we're entering an ear where I think there's more and more science for understanding more about the complexity of individuality and biochemical individuality.

1:00:10And this was, you know, this personalized precision medicine. This is where we're all headed, right? And one of the, one of the fathers of sort of the thinking and functional medicine was Roger Williams, who discovered pan -tathetic acid or vitamin B5. He wrote a book called Biochemical Individuality. And actually his book was the one that got me interested in this in college. Because I lived with a nutrition PhD student who was talking about the, basically, the gut flora of cows, which he was studying to understand fiber and the microbiome. And he gave me a book called Nutrition Against Disease by Roger Williams.

1:00:39And this was like a 1980. And I read it and I was like, oh, wow, this is nutrition is such an important thing. So I think doctors are beginning to understand the value nutrition, the value nutritional, it sort of supplements the value of testing for nutrients. It's still slow, but I think we're going to get there. There's a whole generation of physicians and scientists that I do think in the current shift in funding for science, different conversation entirely are going to retire. And I'm not sure it's a bad thing. I don't mind saying this. I mean, I don't mind saying it. I think they've done a really wonderful job and now it's time to pass the baton.

1:01:19The younger generation and the forward thinking, you know, people in their 60s and 70s are changing the game. It's a very different game now. And I think it's hard for them to understand that. And it's got to be scary. But the younger generation is much more versed. I will say that I actually would like your reflections on something for someone that's listening to this conversation and they think, oh goodness, now I have to buy organic foods and buy all these supplements. And let's say somebody has a limited budget. Yeah. Do you think it's fair to say, okay, if you have a limited budget, you would be very wise to get cardiovascular exercise at least three days a week, do some resistance training, which can be done with body weight.

1:02:01And could you say eat, you know, eggs, fish, meat, fruits, and vegetables? Not just eggs and olive oil. And you're there. Right. And if you look at the cost of buying food out versus that, you're probably coming out ahead. Because I'm thinking about the college student. Yeah. I'm thinking about me and college or as a postdoc or graduate student. So I think for people that have more disposable income, it makes sense, you know, you eat as well as you can, organic, you supplement, you do, you blood test. And I want to talk about those things. Let's talk about some of the impediments. And I do want to keep budgetary restraints in mind.

1:02:36Because I think people fall into the category of poor, some disposable income and lots of disposable income. And all too often in the bio, you know, the biohacking sphere, we're talking about that last category. And we don't want to lose anyone along the way. So air, we had fires here in Los Angeles. It was dreadful. The beach now all the way down to Marina Del Rey. I ran down there yesterday. It was completely littered with chunks of charcoal. They mow it under the sand. It's going out to ocean. Most people don't listen to this probably. Don't live in Los Angeles. How bad is our air in the United States, northern Europe, Australia?

1:03:20Like, is there any clean air left? I mean, yeah, maybe in the mountains, you didn't color out. Okay. So the air is dry. I think, you know, compared to what is the answer? Like, if you go to India or China or some of these developing nations or not even developing anymore, the air is so bad. I mean, they have all kinds of petrochemical products. They burn. They have coal factories. I mean, it's just, it's really bad. So in America, I think the air quality in general is much, much higher. I think when you have things like wildfires, it's a different bulging than just the wood smoke itself. If it's just a tree's burning is bad enough, but then you burning houses and batteries.

1:03:59And plastics and fire. You've got PFAS chemicals and we actually found that those chemicals go up on their function testing and people living in the LA who've actually been in the fires. Yeah, I need to get tested again since, because I haven't been tested since the fires. I mean, I feel fine. Yeah. But I got out of town. I drove up to San Luis Obiscus. Yeah. Parked myself at a, at a big pink hotel called the Madonna Inn and looked at the horses and worked on my boat. That's good. But the air felt clean. But is the air clean when there isn't a fire? I mean, that is certainly, I mean, for example, and it just, just help people understand that air, air moves.

1:04:37It's not like there's just LA air or, you know, Colorado air. In Seattle, they had a big mercury problem in the air because of China. Because Northeastern China, like Beijing and Harbin, in the winter, they just burned huge amounts of coal and it goes up in the air. And it goes across in the, in the Gulf streams and the, and the, and the air streams, I would really call them. And it gets all the way to Seattle and it rains heavy metal rain. And so no matter where you live, you're, you're kind of exposed to the collective air. There's some for sure areas that are much cleaner, but, but I think that most people that have an air filter in your house, we spend to the most of your time, you're probably okay.

1:05:16So is this a separate unit air filter? Yeah, or not? You can get one for your house, which most houses have, make sure you change the filters, or you can get a special air filter if you're living a more, you know, urban area or more environmentally toxic area. I love to exercise outside is running and breathing harder outside. In LA? Well, in general. Well, I like to do that wherever I go, but like when I'm in New York City, I love to run along the, yeah, the freeway. Yeah. Probably breathing in a lot of junk. You are. Yeah. I mean, the question is, what's going to be a problem for you? Like all of us are toxic soups, right?

1:05:50So it's just the amount over time that builds up and then eventually sometimes things can happen. It causes cardiovascular disease or causes dementia, causes cancer, causes diabetes. So toxins are direct causes of these things, among other things, diet and other things. So I think, you know, you can't go crazy about it. I mean, we living in the 21st century, you know, we are where we are unless you want to move to like some remote island in the South Pacific. I personally think looking pretty nice. I think that's like, yeah, I mean, like Greenland soon to be the 51st state. I mean, maybe is that going to happen?

1:06:19No, I don't know. I'm just joking. I'm making fun of it. But I mean, you know, like there are places, but I think for most of us, we have to just manage it. And like we filter our water. I mean, you know, I wouldn't drink tap water. There's an out of your 37 or eight wastewater contaminants, including drugs, including pesticides, including glyphosate. I mean, in hormones, like hormones, if women are taking the pill or taking hormone replacement therapy, where does that go? If some amount that gets extruded in the urine, it goes into the water treatment plant. They don't filter that stuff out. I mean, they get the bugs out, but you're getting all that stuff in your water.

1:06:54So having a reverse osmosis water filter is a good idea. But I think the cost thing is really important. And I think one of the people, the problem people think about is that it's expensive to be healthy. And I think that's a myth. I think you mentioned a lot of foundational things like eating real food, exercising, getting up sleep, managing stress, breath work. These are things that are free. Your breath is free. You know, you can move your body. You know, you can do body weight if you can't even, you know, afford bands. Food is interesting because a food industry has been very good at brainwashing Americans that they need highly processed, cheap junk food.

1:07:30Not accounting for the actual cost that food, which is $3 for every $1 you spend on that food. You're going to spend $3 in collateral damage to your health, to the economy, to the environment, to social fabric. I mean, this is a Rockefeller report on the true cost of food. But if you actually just look at the actual price of the food, if you eat real food, it doesn't have to be expensive. Now you might not be getting a $70 rib eye that's grass fed from New Zealand. You might be getting like a short ribs that aren't organic or grass fed. That's okay. Like whole grains, beans. I mean, I grew up, you know, like, poor and we used to have, you know, liver and onions.

1:08:07You know, we used to say the cheapest. I mean, that's chicken liver. Chicken liver, yeah. Chicken liver. Job liver, you know, what do you get? Chicken liver, not for me. You know, there's been studies that it may cost the same or maybe 50 cents extra a day to E .Well. And there's a guide from the environmental working group called Good Food Under Tide Budget, which is how to eat well for you and for your wallet and the planet. And there, you know, we grew up, we have borscht. Like it was short ribs, which is like the cheapest kind of meat. Onions, cabbage, carrots, tomato, canut tomatoes. It's pretty darn cheap and you can feed your, like, a family of like six for a few bucks, you know.

1:08:42So, and there's been a lot written about this, but the food industry is great at convincing us that it's elitist, that it's expensive, that it's all organic. Forget about organic, not organic, regenerative, not regenerative. If you don't have a lot of resources, just focus on eating real food. And you will do better and feel better and be more productive and walk around not feeling like crap. Do you think that one of the reasons food and nutrition is so complicated in this country is that with the exception of the hamburger, the hot dog, apple pie, and ice cream, that there isn't really an American cuisine, you know, it's from all that.

1:09:17Years ago, a dog hamburger, a little pie. Right. Years ago, I, I had a girlfriend who was from the South of France. She did, she grew up very modestly, did not have wealth at all, but her family ate very well. They put a lot of effort into food. They put a lot of time into food. And she knew about, she was in early 20s, I was in my mid 20s, and she knew probably 200 recipes for soups and soups and plays. And I mean, it was, it was amazing. I ate very well. So I feel like one of the things that's really missing in this country is a sense of pride in the healthy food that we can produce here. And there's never really been a history of it.

1:10:02We have kind of a picture of the farmer and the rancher. And then on the west coast, you have more of the kind of like natural food movement, the healthy food movement, Alice Waters and Michael Paulin and that kind of, but that's considered kind of hippy -dippy. I lived in Berkeley so I can say that. And so, and they've made great effort to try and popularize that. But I think that's one of the reasons that we've commoditized food now. And so American food is junk food. Cotton candy. That's true. You know, what happened was, and it was the after the World War II. And because my mother and grandparents were pre that generation.

1:10:36So they had an incredible food culture. Have real food. And my grandmother tells me stories or told me so she died of, you know, flucking chickens at the local butcher. So she could get a nickel to go to the movies, you know. But I feel like that came by way of people's ethnic past because they were first and second generation. It's fair enough. But still like what happened was the industrialization of the American food systems. So after World War II, there was all these bomb making factories and all these biochemical biological warfare factories. So they got turned into bomb factories, got turned into fertilizer, which was nitrogen.

1:11:08And the biological weapons were pesticides and herbicides. So basically pesticides are biological weapons. They're neurotoxins. That's how they kill the insects. They're or sterilized. And then we thought everything industrial is good. You know, remember in the 60s, you probably remember they had like better living through chemistry, through DuPont and didn't realize it was killing everybody, right? And the world's fair. And I mean, I grew up in Queens. And then the world's fair was in Queens in 1965. And I went and I didn't, I didn't remember that. It's a skit, but I've seen things about it. So the industrialization of the food supply, the agricultural industrialization with mechanization, the destruction of the soil, the grover growing up, starch -y carbohydrate crops, the feed and growing hungry world, we wanted that.

1:11:52Like we now produce 500 calories more per person in America than we actually indeed. And we export a lot of that. So the industrialization was a thing. And then in the 50s, the food industry started to make a lot of processed food. And they were completely taken off guard because there's this woman named Betty who was a homeic teacher who was part of the federal extension workers that was paid for federal program to send people out to young families to teach the mothers how to, and it was sex sex because it was the mothers, how to cook and how to garden and how to grow their own food and how to be independent and how to eat real, it was like really great.

1:12:30And there was a big meeting in Minnesota around that time, General Mills sponsored with all the big food companies came and they decided convenience had to be king. And we had to make that a value. They invented Betty Crocker, not a real person. Betty Crocker cookbook, you might remember that cookbook, but it was like, oh, one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole or and one row at one row of crits crackers to your broccoli casserole. So they insinuated that and there were TV dinners and I grew up in that area. And then there was like, you know, the food of astronauts like tang and flashments margarine better than butter and so it was cup of noodles.

1:13:04Yeah, yeah. So it gave me this whole culture of like convenience and then you deserve a break today from McDonald's we basically disenfranchised people from their kitchens. We have a whole generation of Americans who don't know how to cook, who don't know anything about shopping or where vegetables come from. I mean, Jamie Oliver don't know what a tomato was. And they saw it a tomato or a carrot or they couldn't name a vegetable right because they had never seen one. And now most Americans like that. And so they have succeeded in disenfranchising ourselves from our kitchen. We need to they've hijacked our kitchens, our brain chemistry and metabolism, our hormones.

1:13:40We need to take it back. And it's like the body snatchers like we need to take our bodies back own our own biology, understand they were in charge, understand that we shouldn't advocate our help to anybody else, including the doctor. You have a doctor as a partner as an advisor as a collaborator, but like they're not God and they don't know everything. And now with the advent of, you know, self -testing like like function health is like $1 .37 a day. It's still money, but it's affordable for most people and are less than a lot to. Yeah, it's like and we do 15 ,000 dollars for the test for four, nine, nine a year.

1:14:11And you get a panel of tests that tells you what's really happening and people can own their data and own their biology and be proactive and preventive and actually understand what's happening way before they get into real trouble. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012 long before I even knew what a podcast was. I started taking it and I still take it every single day because it ensures that I meet my quota for daily vitamins and minerals and it helps make sure that I get enough prebiotics and probiotics to support my gut health.

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1:16:08Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to get the free one month supply of omega -3 fish oil plus a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 with your subscription. The confusion for me has been the pushback on self -directed health. That's something come to mind as you're saying all this, which is that I do believe that until health becomes a point of national pride for Americans that we're going to become the sickest nation in the world. We are, really. Well, we're going to continue to be, right? But there's this thing that happens when you start taking care of your health. And I know this because in college I decided to stop drinking as much as everyone else or on me drank.

1:16:49It was insane. It was unbelievable the amount of binge drinking and just the frequency, like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I was like, this is crazy. And I got really into working out and sleep and studying. And I had to be a bit lonely in order to preserve that life. But I got teased a lot for being healthy. But the point being that it still takes some self -confidence, rigidity and kind of determination to push off the people like, oh, it's so self -focused to focus on your health. You're spending money on these on vitamin D3 or, oh, you can't have a slice of pizza. It's like, no, you can, but the point is maybe you don't want to because you have a certain amount of self pride, not because pizza can't be amazing.

1:17:36There are some amazing pizzas, by the way. But most pizzas crap. And some pizza is amazing. And it's worth it to wait for the amazing pizza, in my opinion. So I guess the idea here is what we really need, it seems, is it's kind of a psychological, cultural, medicine revolution. And true revolution, given the way things are going with the obesity rates. And so I do want to talk about Maha, make America healthy again. I'm not formally involved in Maha. I know people involved in it. No people who know people. And I am in discussions with them. They've asked questions. I've provided answers where I could provide answers.

1:18:16But the pushback on Maha is what I'd like to understand, because you and I sit from a unique vantage point in you in particular, where you have a lot of colleagues and understanding of the traditional medical community. So as they always say, that's not the guy you got to get. You don't need to get the guy that's watching podcasts and taking supplements. But what about the guy or gal who was like, I don't know, my doctor says this is crazy. They want to get right of vaccines and they want everyone doing push -ups and you know, and they don't want to go to them. They don't want to go to them. And so maybe because I see you mark as somebody who can potentially bridge this device, knowing people on both sides, I really see you as somebody who can do that.

1:18:57I'm not saying that just because you're sitting here and large part you're sitting here because of that. So how do you change millions of people's mindset about health when now Maha has become a red label thing? How do you do it? The Republicans are going to get healthy and Democrats aren't. It's crazy to me. Or there's an opportunity here. And I do think that I know they're drawing you in for this and I'm so glad they are, because I do think that you're somebody who really believes in inclusivity in the real sense of the word. So what do you think it's going to take to make America healthy? And this is not Maha propaganda.

1:19:33This is just can Maha do it? What do they need to do better? What can you do? What can we all do? It's a great question. And it was funny to me as you're talking about how, you know, when Michelle Obama started her Let's Move campaign, it was a blue issue. A lot of the people who were like pushing this agenda was Shelley Pingri, who's a Democrat from Maine or MacGovern, Tim MacGovern, who's from Massachusetts, or Cory Booker, who's just all these bills about food safety, and the last Congress, and all of a sudden it flipped and became a Republican issue, which is staggering to me. And we now see bills in a few dozen states or more actually.

1:20:12Now, every day I hear about new bills that are helping push forward and agenda to fix our food system. And before you dive in, I just want to see this answer with one thing. Forgive me, audience. They don't like it when I interrupt. But the goal of the left, if I may, seems to be to make anyone associated with health and Maha on the right, a jock, not a scientist. Yeah. That's what I'm seeing. They're trying to take away their science credential and make them a jock. Now, Bobby Kennedy is not a formally trained scientist, but the scientists that are going into NIH directorship, who I can't share who they are besides Jay, it's been announced, the other ones, but you know who they are.

1:20:50These are serious scientists. Yeah. These aren't jocks. No. These are people that may or may not lift weights. These are people. But there seems to be this effort to say, we're going to strip Maha of its power by making it a bro science biohacking, jock thing, real sciences about reductionist stuff. And I just say, listen, it's all valuable. Yeah. And so I'm fundamentally frustrated and it hasn't even begun. No, it is. Educate us. I mean, listen, you know, my friend Rick Warren said, I'm not left wing or right wing. I'm for the whole bird. Otherwise you'll fly around in circles. I like that. And who said that?

1:21:24Rick Warren. You know, we just Rick Warren said, I heard this head of South Back Church, which is an evangelical church in Southern California. We did a whole program with this church. We got a 15 ,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year by doing health together in groups. And it was amazing, actually. I love that quote. It was a great quote. And, and you know, health isn't red or blue or purple. It's like a human issue. And it's to make it partisan. It doesn't make any sense to me. And yet, we live in a partisan world. And anything the Democrats do, the Republicans are going to hate.

1:21:55And I think the Republicans are going to do the Democrats are going to hate. It's like, hey, guys, can we just talk to each other and have civil discourse and agree on the things we can agree on and disagree on the things we're going to disagree on? And I know that I know behind the scenes, there's collaboration by partisan on these issues. There's bipartisan caucus that... Well, on the psychedelic issue, I was at a meeting where, you know, governor Rick Perry, former governor Rick Perry, Texas, like who describes himself as a knuckle -dragging Republican. Those are Rick's words, by the way. Rick's a very nice guy.

1:22:23And there were several members of the... The Dems there. And you got Rick Doblin, who was like a, you know, counter -culture conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. And they're all up there being proponents for psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD and veterans. So they've joined hands. I think that's one area that's very exciting. It's not happening in nutrition. No. It's not happening on this thing of get exercise. Those have become red labels. Yeah, it's unfortunate because, you know, Americans are suffering. You know, Americans are really suffering. 90 % of us have some metabolic dysfunction.

1:22:57Psychiatric illnesses on the rise in both kids and adults. Autoimmune disease or skyrocketing. I'm going to say obesity is a huge problem. Diabetes is a huge problem. You know, heart disease. Deaths are going down, but the incidence is going up. Meaning you're... There's more people getting it, but because we have better treatments, they don't die from it. Same thing with cancer. So we're not winning on the health front in the war on chronic disease. We're losing disasterously. And so we have to come together as a country to solve this. And it's unfortunate, and been polarized. I think the good part about COVID was that people became aware that this edifice of science and medicine had cracks in it.

1:23:36And that they needed to be more empowered around their own health and to start questioning things. And I think that's part of the genesis of this beer -water movement around make America healthy again. And why Bobby Kennedy was able to catalyze huge base. He was democratic candidate at first, then he was independent. Now he's in the Republican administration. It doesn't mean he shares all the ideology that they have, but he cares about this issue. And so I think what's happening behind the scenes is that there's a lot of bipartisan interest in how do we begin to address this. Look, the health care bill is $5 trillion.

1:24:12Of that, the government, federal government pays 40%. It's one in three federal tax dollars. So one in three dollars you paid for your taxes goes to health care. Of that 80 % is mostly for chronic disease. It's either preventable or reversible through intensive lifestyle therapy. And, you know, some things around the margins. If insurance is private, how does that work? Like, how is it that my money is going to take care of somebody who has... For example, for example, like if you get on to Medicare Advantage, that's a government program, but it's administered by Hubana or by Signal or by these insurance companies kind of deploy federal resources to deliver health care.

1:24:54But if you actually look at the end to end, Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, federal employees, children's health program, you just add up all the things that the government pays for. It's almost $2 trillion a year for health care. Most people don't realize that. So the government has enormous levels. And when I was sitting in my office treating my patients who are, you know, just endless stream of people with chronic illnesses coming in diabetes, obesity, autoimmune disease, this is the other thing. Like, why is this patient sick? Well, it's mostly because of the food they're eating.

1:25:29And if that's the problem, then what's the cause of the food they're eating? Well, it's our food policies. And what's the cause of our food policies? It's food industry that has pressured our government into creating a food system that's harming us. And we have very different policies than they do in Europe. For example, they don't allow many GMO foods or glyphosate. They have their... Typhurctose corn syrup? They have it there, but it's limited. I mean, more limited. There are 10 ,000 additives to food in America. There's 400 that are allowed in Europe. Okay, let me ask you a question about toxins.

1:26:03Because I've been watching this very closely online recently. And folks who are more of the traditional science background who are kind of like to spend a lot of their time trying to debunk folks like you. Or people that talk about food additives say that these are infinitesimally small amounts of these dyes. That the amount required to kill a rat, like the, you know, is 3 ,000 times higher. My stance on this is the same as going through the X -ray machine at the airport, which is true. You can walk through and not get cancer. There's no sequencing. But if you're going through it multiple times per month or a year, then, you know, and it's compounding with other things.

1:26:44So it's, like you said, does frequency and duration. And the interactions, like, you know, when these things are studied, they might be studied one at a time. But what if you put thousands of them together, whether it's environmental chemicals or food additives? And I don't think the food out of themselves, although there are many that are problematic, that are linked to cancer, linked to allergy, linked to ADD. I think there are a lot of data about this. But the real issue is, where do you find these? You find these in extremely low quality health destroying foods that are ultra processed foods, that are high in starch and sugar, high in refined oils, high in these additives.

1:27:23But they're not creating a lot of mistakes. Yeah, you're not getting these chemicals when you order broccoli at a restaurant, right? So how do you tease out all of it? How do you do human trials on this? But in Europe, they have the precautionary principle was you have to prove it's safe before we add it to the food supply. Crisco is a great example. Crisco was invented in 1911. It was shortening because there was a butter shortage. And so they basically created this product, which is blowing hydrogen atoms into liquid vegetable oil that makes it act like an animal fat, like lard or butter. And it was cheap and it was good.

1:28:03So it was in the supply from 1911 to 2015. It wasn't until 50 years after the data became clear that this was a cause of heart attacks. This was very dangerous. We shouldn't be eating margarine. I remember a tub of that in our cupboard. Yeah, I grew up on Fletchens margarine. And it wasn't until the scientists who've been studying for 50 years, was 90 years all the time, sued the FDA and forced them to really do something about it. That it got taken off the generally recognized as safe list, which is called the grass list. Now, yes, my mom, one of the first things Robert, every if Kennedy did and I helped advise him on this was to help address the grass problem, because there's something called the grass loophole.

1:28:43If you're a food company, you can go to the FDA and say, Hey, I got this great new chemical. We checked it out, totally safe, not a problem. We're going to add it to the food. Just take our word for it. And you have to go, right, no problem. You go right ahead. Imagine if a drug company did that and said, Oh, we have this great new drug. We've done all our tests. It's perfectly safe. It's very effective. Can you please give us approval and we're not going to give you any data? That's exactly what happens in America. Now, that's different than in Europe, which they do the opposite. You have to prove that it's safe before it's added to the food supply.

1:29:18Here, you're you're innocent until proven guilty, which is fine for humans, but not for chemicals we put in our food. The other day, I saw something on X that if true, and I'll put a link to it, was probably the most troubling thing I've ever seen in public health discourse. And I want that to lead to a question for you. This was an example of a hearing in Washington where a young woman, I believe she's from Austin, who's a kind of like health health food. Inflammative. Yeah, advocate. But with training from a university down there was lobbying against soda in the government funded lunch program.

1:30:04Lunch or food stamp? Snap program. Snap is the food stamp. It's called supplemental nutrition assistance program, but there's no end in there. Our goal is to put the end back in snap. Okay. Because that would just have to be this. Yeah, please food security is having enough calories, nutrition security is having a nutrients. We provided for food security, meaning you can get all your calories from soda and sugar. But that doesn't mean you're having nutrition security. And we see many of the people who receive these federal aid programs are the ones of the most sick, right? The most using our healthcare system.

1:30:39Thanks for that clarification. This young woman advocating for healthier food was arguing for getting a sugary soda. This wasn't diet soda, sugary soda out of the snap program. And she made her case, was terrific case, what well articulated I think and was well received by both the blue side and the red side of the room. Yeah. And then someone tapped into the microphone. This was a gentleman representing the American Heart Association. Oh. The American Heart Association. And he proceeded to say that he opposed the removal of sugary soda. Do you know why? I thought, okay, this has got to either be AI generated, it's fake.

1:31:19But then one of the women on the panel who was listening, okay, one of the people making decisions or at least running it up the flagpole for decisions said, wait, do you realize what you're saying? And he just kept repeating this like a broken record. And I thought, okay, the American Heart, if it was the American Soda Association or Beverage Association or Hydration Association even, I would have thought, okay, maybe there's something here, but he was there representing the American Heart Association. I have no skin in this game. Okay, I don't know if I should answer that question. And I was shocked.

1:31:50Yeah. And I will provide a link to this in the show no caption. I was shocked. You shouldn't be. And I thought to myself, this guy is arguing for sugary soda on on behalf of the American Heart Association. And these are sugary sodas that the American taxpayers paying to try and help some of the least healthy and lowest income people in the country drink more soda. And it wasn't like take away soda and don't replace it with anything. It was, you know, replace it with some other food. There's double bucks for fruits and vegetables. Right. Or even water. Right. So I was shocked. Yeah. I verified it's real.

1:32:26Yeah. And okay, so I'd like your thoughts on that, but I'm guessing what they are already. But here's what I want to know. Is the FDA and our government so strongly impacted by these food companies? You hear this, but it always sounds like a bunch of conspiracy rules. Like it's general mills and really like lobbying behind scenes. I mean, is there really a network of people trying to harm us? 100 % profit. 100 % yes. So I was telling the story about housing, my office, seeing patients with diabetes. I'm like, what caused the food policy? And then I started to go down that rabbit hole. And I wrote a book called Food Fixed, How to Save Our Health, Our Communities, Our Economy, Our Communities, and our Planet one by the time, where I mapped out from field to fork.

1:33:09The problems with our food industry, how it's making us sick, how it's costing us $1 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 ,000 Large cohesive strategy by the food industry to undermine science, under manipulate public trust and information to control the government and academic institutions and many things.

1:33:37So I'll just kind of lay it off. Sounds conspiracy. It sounds like it is. And it kind of, I want to say it's a conspiracy. It's just their business strategy, right, which is to circle the wagons. Okay. They fund the American Heart Association. So the food and farm industry spent $192 million that they give to the American Heart Association. What does the American Heart Association do with it? They educate people about nutrition, they hold meetings, they have scientific panels. But what is the basis for sugary soda? Like there can't, there's no single argument for sugar soda. If you get, if you get $20 million from the soda industry, I mean, it's like that, Andrew.

1:34:14I'm not. And they die at soda of all. And then we could, we could argue artificial sweeteners, but at least we know it can help people lose weight. They're adjusting less sugar and no, this is like 40 % of the academy of nutrition and diatetics, which is the national nutrition organization comes from the food industry. The American Diabetes Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Family Packers. This has to do. I mean, there was a, there was Coca -Cola gave a multi -million dollar donation to the American Academy of Family Practice. And they were family doctors that quit in droves because of this.

1:34:44When did this start? I think it's been growing. And so, so there's multiple strategies they have. One is massive lobbying. Two is funding professionals. What was this in the 80s, the 90s? I think it's been slow creep. And over a lot since probably the 70s is my guess. If you look in the 60s and the beach pictures, like there's nobody ever weighed, right? When I was growing up, there were probably two fat kids in school. Yeah, yeah. They've done all these strategic things around lobbying and about funding professional associations, funding academic research, 12 times as much academic research on nutrition as the federal government spends, they co -op social groups like NAACP and Hispanic Federation so they won't oppose things like things that they care about or they'll oppose things they care about like soda taxes and they fund fake science groups like the American Council on Science and Health.

1:35:28It's attacked me, maybe attacked you too. I am sure they will have like a bunch of science. I'm not sure they will have like a bunch of science. I'm not sure they will have like a bunch of science. And all these great sounding organizations that are simply front groups for misinformation, crop life. And so they have a whole strategic approach that is very detailed and I'm at the whole thing out in my book and how it's so insidious and how it happened while everybody else was asleep. And I know personally now that the some of these big associations that are the lobby groups for these big food companies and ag companies, he comes, that they're circling ranks, that they're creating a war plan, that they have a complete strategy of how to put forth mis -miss kind of, I would say manipulative science.

1:36:10They have grassroots lobby efforts where they're activating fake grassroots movements. They're lobbying, they're looking at how to pressure state governments to not do what they're doing. I mean, I know personally the governor of West Virginia who has him now, there's a state bill to actually, which probably hopefully passed by the time this podcast comes out, that gets rid of chemicals in the food in West Virginia, which is the fad of state and the nation. And they know the amount of pressure, millions and millions of dollars of pressure they're putting on him to not do what it's going to do, their businesses, it's going to destroy the economy, it's going to create the people of West Virginia suffering.

1:36:43I mean, so much pressure on politicians who don't actually understand these issues. And so they're like, and you know, I remember what I was confusing, even as somebody who is fairly versed in health and nutrition, like I'm, I mean, it's not going to be using the other example. So I was working on a bill that was with Andy Harris, who's a doctor in the Congress to do a pilot study to see the impact, not to change policy, just to study impact. And what would happen if you took soda off the list of acceptable things you could buy with food stamp dollars, just to do a pilot in a couple of states.

1:37:18We think, well, let's just do a scientific study and see what happens. The Democrats were completely opposed to it. They shut the whole thing down on what grounds. The hunger groups, it's based on this idea of like, we're going to take care of the poor, it's discriminatory, it's aggressive, it's going to hurt the poor. And the hunger groups that are these big groups that I try to deal with hunger in America are funded by and their boards of directors are staffed by people from big food. So if you just follow the money, you see how it all is connected and how it all flows together. And what are big food?

1:37:53So like, what are the companies? Okay. So there are, there are companies you know about. There's even things like Primal Kitchen, which you think is like a great natural brand and started by Marxists and in its salad dressings and ketchup without high fructose corn so it's been a great product. It was, they're all bought up by the big food companies like Mondelays or by Kraft, Kraft Heinz, for example, bought that or Hugh Chocolate, which thank God we'll stay the same forever because Jason Carp was a friend, made sure they would, but they bought Hugh Chocolate, which we think is a natural brand.

1:38:21It's the biggest selling premium chocolate in America. So they buy all of their company. So it's Nestle, it's Juneliever, it's the Known, it's Mondelays, it's Kraft Heinz. So it's a few companies that really probably attend near -so companies that basically are the big companies. And then there's all the Ag and Seed and Chem companies. It's all consolidation. So there used to be like hundreds of seed companies. Now there's five. There used to be like dozens of fertilizers companies. Now there's just a few. If I take a step back from this, I say, okay, well, Marx, I haven't tried Primal Kitchen but I hear good things, right?

1:38:50Marx seems like a very health conscious guy. So Marxism, right? So if his brand was bought up by one of these major companies, why aren't they promoting the healthier foods in their catalog? Well, they do. They do. But also, without, if there's like Jason Carp for with Hugh Chocolate, made them in the contract promise they would never change the ingredients ever. I see. And when you often get these other products that have been bought up by these big companies, they modify the recipes, they make it cheaper, they squeeze their margins to be bigger. So it's not like you're going to get like, you know, amies, whatever pizza or whatever sounds like great, healthy pizza, but they modify it.

1:39:29I see. And so I think, you know, as a whole, they still get most of their profit margin from their legacy products of junk, right? So they don't want to cannibalize that, but they also want to suck up the rest of the market so they have them in the monopoly. I see. And but it's probably a few dozen CEOs of crew that are in control of everything from what seeds are planted to what chemicals are sprayed to the food companies that process the food to the fast food companies. It's not that many companies. And it's a few dozen CEOs that control the biggest industry in the plant that employs more than everybody else because everybody eats.

1:40:04It's like $16 trillion. And so are you and Bobby going to change the way that works? I mean, that's the goal. I mean, the idea is to raise awareness, to create transparency, to help people understand what's what and to take the veil back and say, you can choose whatever you want to eat. We're not taking away your McDonald's. We're not taking away your soda. But like at least you should know what's going on. If you go to South America, you're from Argentina. I'm sure you've been there not too recent past. You know, if you pick up something that's not good for you, it tells you on the label. It's like black warning signs and tazer signs and stop signs.

1:40:39Well, there the opposite problem exists, you know, as as the child of a first generation immigrant, my dad always said, you know, the United States is the one country where the poor are overweight because calories are cheap. You go to Argentina and you see these neighborhoods are a bit of immense poverty, right? And people are not overweight. People are struggling to find food. Some are. So if you look at, there was a whole series of New York Times a few years ago about how, for example, Nestle went into the ghettos of I think Peru and Colombia and they were just Brazil and they were just pushing through local like community members and reps with drive around like with little cards or push the cards around them.

1:41:16There's no even a street to sell this crappy processed food to people for pennies, right? And so that's what they that's what they've done. They've infiltrated everywhere in the plant. I was far back as 1986 and I did a public health expedition with Johns Hopkins, Cinepau. We got off the plane. It's a remote airport on a grass trip and then we walked for a week up into the almost to Tibet. And you know, there were no roads. There were no cars. There was no electricity. There was no running water. But there was Coca -Cola. And you see these sharpas literally with like probably I don't know, a hundred, two hundred pounds of Coca -Cola on their back, climbing up the mountains bringing into every little village.

1:41:57Right? I mean, there's even a Ted talk on this by I think I was some more millennia gates or something about how Coca -Cola is a business model for how we, you know, get safe stuff around the world because they had the incredible distribution. So even where you can get water, you can get Coca -Cola. Where they actually need quality. It's often protein is what scares. It's often cheaper than water in many countries like in Mexico. So I think we have to face the fact that we've had had this sort of unadulterated, un -inhibited run from the industry. And now there's somebody talking about why they need to think about doing things differently.

1:42:31How they need to reformulate, how they need to be partners. I mean, there was a big meeting with the Consumer Brand Association of Environmental Kennedy last Monday in the White House where he said to them, essentially, here's what you need to do, do it, or we're going to make you do it. You know, get the crap out of the food and let's get focused on the harm that this is causing in terms of the amount of stars and sugar and processing and products in there that are not good for human health. And if you don't, we're going to do something about it. They can create better front -of -package labeling to transform people's perception of what's good or not.

1:43:04And labels are super confusing in this country. I mean, I know how to read them, but you have to be a PhD or so. This whole life to understand how to read the nutrition facts label, how to read an ingredient list, what it means, what the serving size is, what the calories are, what the this and that is. It's like, you know, it's not easy for the average American. It should be easy. You should be intentionally confusing. 100%. Well, single ingredient or minimal ingredient food solve that. I'd like to take us from one controversial topic. And thank you, by the way, I should say before moving on from that, for being involved and staying involved.

1:43:32I know your inherent goodness and your desire to keep things nonpartisan and to do what's best for people and to keep it out of the politics as much as possible. I mean, these are not, these are the, I mean, working on for years. And so I'm just, whether you're just being you. I'm just being me, whether it's medically -canned meals or raising the awareness from chronic disease or the effective toxins in our environment or the role of sugar and starch in our metabolic crisis. I mean, these are things that are not new. I've talked about these for decades. Now, all of a sudden, it's a political issue.

1:43:59I don't understand why. You're not putting on a new hat. You're not putting on a new hat. Governments putting on new hat, getting involved in these things. I'm hopeful. They've always been involved, but they just have been involved unknowingly by allowing policies to be implemented that support things like soda and junk food. If you look at other countries, food, food, and systems programs, you can't buy that shit. Right. Let's talk about something almost as controversial. One, something that I have kind of a neutral opinion on that I think is a beautiful scientific story, which is GLP1, agonist, discovered on the basis of the helomonstur, which doesn't need to eat very much.

1:44:39We're synthesized a lot of this peptide, which emits its hunger and it works at the level of the brain and at the level of the gut. There are, however, lots and lots of cells, including neurons, outside the appetite system that use and bind GLP1. The drugs that increased GLP1, we had a guest on here, so Zachary Knight came out on here, beautifully explained how the drugs that increased GLP1 increase at many thousandfold above natural levels to have it exert its effect of reducing hunger. It is reducing obesity. Yes, people lose muscle. They break it down for us. Let's assume that somebody has just had a terrible time losing weight.

1:45:25They don't even feel like they can exercise for other motivational reasons or they're structurally. We all know they should exercise and maybe they'll get there, one would hope. But you can't exercise your weight of a bad diet. Right. Do you think there are use cases for GLP1 that warrant its prescription? What's the controversy with GLP1 all about? Is it the dependence, the insurance? We don't have three hours to parse this, but... I can give you the quick. What's your view on GLP1? Because I think some people have clearly benefited from it. Other people probably don't need it at all. I don't take it.

1:45:58I wouldn't take it, but I'm pretty good at regulating what I put in my mouth. Look, I mean, like you said, this is a molecule that the body naturally makes to regulate appetite, but it's being giving it doses that are far greater than that which our body naturally makes. And when you overdo something, there are downstream consequences. Insulin is a peptide. OZEMPIC is a peptide. GLP1, these drugs are peptides. These are small mini proteins. Think of that as what a peptide is. And insulin, if you take too much of it, will kill you. Like literally you'll go into hypoglycemic shock. So when you start messing with big doses, it has not side effects.

1:46:38We call these side effects. These are just effects we don't like, and we call them side effects. They're effects of the drug. And they can lead to everything from things you mentioned, like muscle wasting, which is a big problem because you lose the weight and you lose muscle and fat. And if you lose half of it as muscle, then your metabolism slows down because muscle burns seven times as much calories as fat. And when you gain the weight back and you stop, which over 65 % of people do, is that right? Yeah. People come off and gain the weight. 100%. They just start eating more again. Yeah. And they have lower muscle mass.

1:47:08And then you're in a worse situation because you have a lower muscle mass. So you could eat literally the same amount of calories as you were before you lost weight and gain weight because your metabolism was messed up. What if they exercise using resistance to... I personally think it should be illegal to prescribe these drugs unless they're combined with a nutrition consult to educate people about their protein requirements that are increased and with an exercise or a physiologist or a trainer to help them develop a strength training program. And then I'd be more okay with it. And I think doses also, do we need the doses that people are prescribed to pharmacologically approved drugs or there's a whole black market of GLP1 peptides you can buy for 20 bucks a month, not 16 or 17, 100 bucks a month.

1:47:51People are starting to discover those. They're very inexpensive. They're very inexpensive. And you have to know what you're doing and you have to probably get the guy in the position and there are doctors who do prescribe these sort of sub pharmacologic doses that are being given and they work. And they can be a useful tool. But they're a tool like anything else. And I was mentioning my nonprofit food fix. You know, the woman who's working with us there lost 112 pounds in the last years working with me without GLP1s. You know, I've had little probably dozens and dozens and dozens of patients who've lost 100 pounds or more without these drugs and naturally keep their weight off and regulate their appetite when they understand how to use food as medicine to regulate their hormones, their peptides, their brain chemistry, their microbiome, all of which regulator appetite and weight.

1:48:37So there's ways to do it. It's harder and some people are stuck and I'm not opposed to using these drugs. But we have to understand they come with risks and they have increased risk of bowel obstruction, increased risk of pancreatitis, increased risk of potentially thyroid issues, of kidney issues. And I think people need to, if they're monitoring their cells, fine, you should get a dexascam before and during and after you should be checking your kidney function test and your amylase and your lipase because it's a gonzoz pancreatitis, you'd be checking what happens to your other hormones and to happens to your liver function test which can be affected by these drugs.

1:49:09And the longer you take them, the more the side effects are. So for example, initially we're seeing very little data and then the data started coming in. And for example, if you're on it for four years, your risk of bowel obstruction goes up by four and a half fold. That's by 450 percent or your pancreatitis goes up by 900 percent. That's, you know, seems like a lot. It is a lot but pancreatitis is a more rare condition. So, but it does have an adverse impact and a lot of people have nausea, vomiting, all kinds of other side effects that are sort of more mild, not as serious, but they come with side effects.

1:49:40So I think can maybe use this part of an overall strategy with nutrition counseling, exercise counseling and integrating lower doses and modifying the dosing regimen. Yeah, but I don't think most people need it if they understand how to change their hormones and their brain chemistry and their biology without that. And that's the power of food is medicine. And when I say food is medicine, I'm not saying that as a sort of a general, oh, food can be healthy or not healthy. I'm saying food literally can be used as a drug and different foods have different properties. And again, you don't use the same drug for every disease.

1:50:13You would prescribe different diets for different problems for such as, for example, if you look at the crisis in mental health in this country, we have a severe mental health crisis. And we've used ketogenic diets in neurologic conditions like epilepsy and medicine for decades. We now know, for example, that ketogenic diets can be very effective for schizophrenia for things like autism, Alzheimer's for people with bipolar disease or depression or anxiety. And this has to do with its effect of the metabolism and the way it affects our brain and our mitochondria. And I wrote a book about this ultra -mind solution.

1:50:50I say, I say this, I wrote a book about everything. I pretty much have. You read a lot of books. I read like 20 books. I'm impressed. I'm impressed. You're working on one, I know. Obviously. I mean, it's big enough to serve as a workout for lifting it. No, it's not that thick. It doubles as a advice book. It's got a lot in there. It's got a lot. But you have an impressive catalog of really terrific books. But Mayo Clinic just got funded over $3 million to do research on the role of ketogenic diets in serious mental illness. As you mentioned, Stanford has a department of metabolic psychiatry at Harvard.

1:51:26They have a similar department of nutritional psychiatry. What about other diets? So ketogenic, a lot of people think of that as high protein. It's really more high fat, moderate protein, very low starch. What about for cancer and cancer avoidance? Again, when you look at the data, cancer rates are going up. And it's because our metabolic crisis is going up. And many cancers are obesity -related. Coling cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, many, many prostate cancer. And they're driven by insulin resistance. And we know the cancer has a metabolic capacity to only burn carbs. It can't burn fat.

1:52:00So if you stop carbs and you eat fat, you can often change your trajectory of cancer. Is that true for all cancers? Are there any cancers that react negatively to the blood? No, I don't think that's true for all cancer. For sure, lymphomas, I probably don't think it is. But Sudartha Mukherjee, I don't know if you've had them on the podcast, but he's an incredible giant in the field of medicine, brilliant scientist at Columbia. I was actually a oncologist who wrote a book called The Emperor of All Malatites. And he wrote that book. Yeah, he wrote that book. He wrote the cell. He wrote the gene.

1:52:27That was a book about cancer. Yeah, he wrote a book called The gene, The Cell. And he talks about his research on ketogenic diets for reversing stage 4 melanoma, stage 4 pancreatic cancer, very impressive stuff. You probably couldn't like it. Well, I remember the Emperor of All Malatites. I read that and I read the eighth day creation in the same, roughly the same time period, both super impressive books. I didn't realize he was involved in a ketogenic diet. Yeah, but there's a whole metabolic theory of cancer. So I think that's key. And certain cancers like brain cancer responds incredibly well.

1:52:58If you have a glue of blastoma, which there's really no treatment for, it can be very effective. You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money? Yeah, now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to experience. You're a big financial friend. It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save, and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what? It's totally free. So go on. Download the Experian app. Trust me, having a BFF like this is a total game changer. Yeah, I'll tell you, having lost some friends to cancer, pancreatic cancer and glue of blastoma are the two, I mean, I want any cancer, but those are the two I really don't want to get.

1:53:39These are all super important topics. It seems to come back over and over again to these pillars of health, food, circadian rhythm, meaning sleep wake cycles. Obviously, the last 50 years in this country were characterized by like smoke less or don't smoke. We now know alcohol is problematic for cancers and other things. It's not to say that one can't enjoy a drink every once in a while, but I don't personally drink, but I don't have a propensity for alcohol either. So it's easy for me to say. I've had to come a little bit softer on my stance on this because I think like if you told me that caffeine was bad, I'd tell you I'm drinking it.

1:54:15I'd say how long do I have? Yeah, it's like Martin Buffett is, I don't care if I eat the shit, it makes me live. Right. A couple of years less, I'm still going to do it. Right. So, you know, some people like to drink now and I can't. And I'm sure, I would say do as you want, but know what you're doing. Yeah. But I'd like to talk a little bit about markers that are an outgrowth of this conversation about food, so blood markers. So apob is one that gets a lot of attention nowadays. For years all we heard was you want your HDL high, you want your LDL low. Now we also realize that elevated apob can be problematic.

1:54:53Yeah. And I and many people I know who eat some meat, it's not meat, heavy diet, but some good quality meat, we're not talking about deli meats and things like that. Fruit vegetables and limit starchy carbohydrate intake to some extent, maybe not completely, but to some extent have observed elevated apob when we do that, including olive oil butter, coffee or bramate, this kind of thing. So healthy diet, largely anti -inflammatory diet, noticed elevated apob as compared to when some of that red meat, even if it's grass fed meat, is replaced with things like fish or chicken and so on, which makes me wonder if there really is a red meat, again, quality red meat, apob link.

1:55:43And should I worry if my apob is elevated? My apob is a little bit elevated, but I haven't yet gone on any prescription drug to lower it, I'm taking some other approaches. Yeah. It's a great question. And I learned that from function and yes, the response of this podcast, but I hadn't had an apob test. That was the problem. I go to the doctor, I get a blood panel and it didn't include apob. You got like your 19 tests and the same old stuff and you get your regular clinical high weight, right? I mean, the regular cholesterol panel is what most doctors use to manage cardiovascular risk, which is your total, your LDL, HDL and triglyceride levels.

1:56:17That's just like so 20th century. The way we look at cardiovascular risk now is way more complicated and we need to look at the quality of the cholesterol, which is the particle size and number. And we were talking earlier about sugar and starch and some resistance. In some resistance is essentially a metabolic state where your body can't respond like it normally should to insulin and you need more and more insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. That has secondary consequences, which causes your cholesterol to become abnormal. So it may not raise your LDL per se, but it'll lower your good cholesterol or triglyceride or HDL, which there's good and bad HDL.

1:56:56So it's a little more complicated than that, but it'll raise your triglycerides and it will raise your apob. It'll raise your particle number of LDL particles and it'll make the size of those particles small. These are all things that people should be testing to do all these biomarkers, including apob. But apob, all you can get is an apob from your doctor. Even the American Heart Association recognizes this is a better predictor of your risk of having a heart attack than your LDL cholesterol. And yet they're trying to include soda. Sorry, I had to go back. I know. And the way I think about apob.

1:57:27The way I think about apob. There's really cool tests now. You can use mass spec to look at CPEPTIT and insulin to look at your insulin resistance, which is really cool. But if you can't get that, you can ask your doctor for an apob because it's a sort of a surrogate marker for every non -good type of cholesterol particle. So what do you advise somebody if they're apob? No. Because it's 90 -year -old. Yeah, so you can test yourself, everybody's the end of one. So the next thing I was going to say was that we treat all lipids as sort of a uniform approach, which is everybody should drive their LDL number 70.

1:58:01Under 70. That's what cardiovascular recommendations are. How do you do that? Exercise, nature. It can be diet, it can be exercise, it can be drugs. And are you a fan of statin? Not a big fan, but there are tools. It's like in my fan of like hammers. Well, yeah, when I need one. But not for everybody. And I think the key thing to understand is that for you're looking at cardiovascular risk, you have to look at the quality of these cholesterol particles. And there's also a large amount of variation or heterogeneity in the population in the response to the exact same food. And I'll just tell you a quick story.

1:58:39I had one patient, she was overweight, couldn't lose weight, prediabetic, inflamed, and she was really struggling. And I said, well, look, let's try a ketogenic diet. There's good data on it. Let's see what happens. Her cholesterol dropped to 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her HL went up 30 points. She lost 20 pounds. She felt great. Her inflammation level is normalized. She did great. Another guy, heard about a ketogenic diet, who was in this 50s? One of my patients, a lead athlete with like writing this bike 50 miles a day, who was in his mid 50s. Super fit. Then lean. He said, I want to try it.

1:59:20I heard it's good for performance. I'm like, okay, but let's monitor your numbers. And we did. And the opposite happened. His total cholesterol went through the roof. His LDL went through the roof. His particle number went up through the roof. I'm like, wow, same diet, different response. And I've talked to Ron Kraus about this. He's from Oakland. You might know about him. He discovered the particle size concept. He basically used MRI machines, and I just got a different technology, which measures the quality and the number of your cholesterol particles. Not just the weight of them, which is what you get with a regular test.

1:59:52And so we saw this variation, and we realized now in the population, it depends on who you are. So there's a whole category of people called lean mass hyper responders. You're maybe one of those where you're fit, you're healthy, you're athletic, and you eat saturated fat and boom, you know, your number's kind of go wacky. Or you could be an overweight diabetic person, and they do the opposite. Like you'll lower your LDL, like this woman. So it depends on your metabolic type, on your level of insulin resistance, on your overall health, and people can switch over. So let's say you're an overweight diabetic, and you become ripped and healthy and fit, then the same food might have an opposite effect on you at that point.

2:00:32And it all has to do with cholesterol, transport, cholesterol. Since this is a liver, it's kind of a little complicated scientifically. I know you might have a guy named Nick Norwitz from Harvard on the podcast, who's great. He could talk about this all day long. It has great online content. Yeah. And folks should check out Nick Norwitz's ex and Instagram handle. Very smart kid. Very smart kid. Very spirited. I've encouraged him from the first time I saw his content to keep going. Yeah, he's like, he's an Oxford PhD in metabolism. Harvard MD's graduating medical school this year. And you're not afraid to go against the grain.

2:01:02He just goes with his experience and the data. Yeah, I'm just saying about different diets for people. He had colitis and almost died. He went on a carnivore slash keto diet and actually ended up curing it and his fit. And healthy now, right? But his cholesterol is LDL, I want up to 500. Is that where it sits now? Yeah. And so there's a whole group of these people that have LDLs that are through the roof who would make most cardiologists have a heart attack just looking at the number. So what do we do? Let's say someone takes a APOB test. What we do? Or from their doctor and they've got an APOB, let's like, 110.

2:01:36What do you do? Well, the NIH basically is great. They now said that the end of one research is among the highest quality research. And that what that means is you compare to you, right? I don't want to compare myself to a 70 kilogram white male from Kansas or some, you know, a five foot tall woman from like, you know, I don't know, like Afghanistan, like we're all different. And so we need to see what happens to our biology. That's why I believe test don't guess and do something, follow it up and track it. How often? Depends on what you're doing. Lippets change very quickly. Typically, typical person.

2:02:07Lippets can change within a month. So I give people a month of changing a diet or changing the lifestyle or behavior to see what happens. Vitamin D can take longer. If you're low, it can take up to three months to rebuild. If your iron is low, it can take three months to rebuild your ounce. It depends on the test. But you know, you can quickly see changes in your insulin resistance, in your insulin levels, in your blood sugar levels, in your lipid levels, by changing diet. But you have to be systematic, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I had a patient who was, I have a program called the 10 -day detox diet.

2:02:36That essentially is a whole foods diet, which eliminates a lot of the inflammatory foods that are problematic for people. And it creates an incredible, like, quick response. Like, I call it setting your body back to its original factory settings. And she was like, I want to check my blood out of your 10 days. I'm like, no, it's going to waste the money. We shouldn't do it. Your numbers aren't going to change that much. But she insisted. And I was like, okay. And she did. And the numbers just dramatically changed. Your lipids are insulin or blood sugar, inflammation levels. So body is like, you change the inputs and the outputs changed dramatically.

2:03:08So I think it's really about finding out what's going on for you. So Andy, I say, well, try to go off of me and see what happens to your apobie or try to add more this kind of fat. I started eating more tuna and eating a little bit less beef. And then I get a function test and I discovered my mercury was elevated. By the way, I learned something in the hard way also a few years prior to that, which is, I know this sounds crazy, but check your dishwasher. Some of them have mercury thermometers that are leaky. Now, I was told the mercury from the mercury thermometers in dishwasher is biologically inert.

2:03:43But I'll tell you, it's not pleasant to see a bunch of little mercury beads floating around on your dinner. I mean, considering it's the most potent toxin known to humans other than plutonium, I would probably avoid all forms of mercury. So do you eat tuna? Rarely. I love tuna. And rawly. Okay. But I actually have little hacks where you can take a key leading drug after you go to a sushi restaurant. Like what? DMSA. It's FDA -proof drug for heavy metal key laces prescription, DMSA. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What dosage? Depends. You can do like 500 milligrams or two. You'll take that after you go out to sushi.

2:04:19Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like a doctor hack I can do, or you can ask your doctor for it. I don't recommend it. It's like, you know, well, as long as we're on this side. I like, I love the range of topics we're touching into today, by the way. I was dying from mercury poisoning. So I know how to manage it, how my body works. I've checked my genes and why I don't detox. This is from the China. Yeah. I know how to upregulate my detox pathways through food, through supplements. Are you a fan of sulforophane? When I did the episode on my caplastics and epithelases. Yeah. I started taking sulforophane and increasing my cruciferous eventually into it.

2:04:51Upregulates fluidity, which is the body's main detoxifying compound. So do you also take an acetylcystine? Do. How much? 600, yeah. Okay. I'll do three or four times that if I feel cold coming on, but I don't take it daily. I should probably take it daily. Well, considering we'll limit a toxic soup. Yeah. I mean, we just can't get away from it. In the air. And so for the food. Anacetylcystine, we already talked about the omega's in the basics, magnesium, et cetera. What are some things that when people start to hit their 40s, 50s, 60s that you think they should add in for their health? And is there anything female specific or male specific?

2:05:35For sure. I mean, you know, what's really frightening, Andrew, is that because of the diet, we have, which is hormonally regulating sugar and starch tend to screw up both men's and women's hormones. It makes women more like men and men more like women. So you get PCOS and women, which is hair growth on your face, loss of hair on your head and, in, in, Andrews and Andrews. And then for men, their testosterone goes down the bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone. So when you start your sugar, you get belly fat. So I mean, young men have low testosterone. I would have said, if you asked me 20 years ago, I said, well, you know, you start checking in your 40s and seeing the changes that happen.

2:06:19But now I think we got to start looking earlier. And a lot of guys are getting on TRT young. I'm on a bit of a campaign now to discourage that. Yeah, I don't know. I think that if they're doing everything right, like eating, right, and exercising, and that doesn't mean overexercising. If you over -trained, like you're running, running, running, your testosterone is going to be, going to be diminished for sure. But encouraging them to do everything they can with behaviours and include nutrition and some supplementation before getting on TRT because of the reduction in sperm count that comes from TRT unless you offset it with HCG.

2:06:52So, you know, I've said before the podcast, I took 25 milligrams of SIPPYNA every other day, staggered with HCG, 600 IU every other day. I've been open about that from the beginning. But I started at age 45. Yeah. And I do freeze sperm every year, just because there's some age -related effects on sperm. And like, why not? It's very inexpensive to cry or preserve. But I think young guys are, it's scary that their testosterone is so low. Especially if they're not overweight. Yeah. So what's going on? Well, also the endocrine -disrupting chemicals. So, herbimetals, pesticides, a lot of these are what we call zenobiotics, meaning they're foreign, kind of compounds that are biologically active.

2:07:33And there's a whole book on this that I read, like almost 30 years ago called Our Still in a Future by Theo Colburn, which lays out, it was kind of like the Rachel Carson Silent Spring version of a few years ago, which talked about the reproductive effects of these petrochemical toxins that are everywhere in our food, in our water, in our air. And they affect fertility rates, they affect birth rates in terms of male and female. And Sean and Sean and Sean is on this podcast. And gosh, if it wasn't for her and her incredible work and the fact that she's such a skeptic of any data, that I don't think people would respect the data on pesticides as much as they knew, because I think it took somebody with her kind of front -facing image to, you know, she's not, like she talks a lot about the environmental working group, and the real hardcore science types are like, they're anti -environmental working group.

2:08:26I was shocked to learn that a lot of people in the scientific community are like anti -environmental working group. I thought, how could that possibly be? They call it woo science. I mean, the politics and all this are really complicated, but what do you do to remove heavy metals? Just to answer your question about what you should be testing. I think most people should be testing, you know, depending on where you are with age you are, but your hormonal panels and a regular basis. So sex hormones, male would be free testosterone, total testosterone, estrogen, estradiol, DHT as well. DHT sometimes we have hair loss that can be treated for men, for women, same thing.

2:09:01They need, you know, FSH, LH, sex hormones, I guess, for dial, progesterone testosterone for women as well, DHA sulfate, which can be an indicator of PCOS, and we're seeing with our function, it could be about 150 ,000 members now. We have literally 10, 150 ,000. We have tens of millions of biological data points, and we can see anonymized data showing the trends in the population, and it's not good. And then the good news is you can do something about it. Can insurance cover a blood test like foaming? Yes, if you get your health savings account or your FSAs, you can use those for function health testing, but if you don't have that and you can't use that, regular insurance doesn't cover yet.

2:09:44I'm hoping we can change that. Is that in the cards? That's in the roadmap for sure. Because once we can prove that we create value, and we're seeing this, when people use function, they get their lap test done, and then we follow them for, you know, every six months, and we can see the changes in the biomarkers toward the positive, how many people go from abnormal to normal, and it's not just by knowing their tests, and there's tens of thousands of pages of content that have been highly curated and scientifically referenced on what to do if you have this or that normal biomarker. So you ask me, what do I do for mercury?

2:10:13If you get a positive mercury, and you double -click on that, you would get a very deep analysis of what you need to do. Here's the way to reduce your exposures through your water and air. Here's how your producer exposures to food by reducing these kinds of fish eating more. Are these kinds of fish? Are you a fan of using charcoal as a key later? I don't think charcoal is great for having metals now. I think it's good for binding anything. How does one take charcoal? I've been a little bit cautious about taking charcoal. You take it as capsules. When I was in the ER, we used to use it when people came with a drug overdose.

2:10:43We'd make them drink a cup of charcoal. Literally, their teeth would turn black. It was awful. If you're trying to kill yourself and it's punishment for trying to kill yourself. This is Gallow's humor. Only a physician could laugh at this. I know another physician's and they all have this Gallow's humor. I think it's a survival type. You have to because you're like in situations where you otherwise go crazy. Let's say I want to remove some heavy metals and toxins from the body. I could take a charcoal tablet. No, you can take a tablet, but I wouldn't do that. What I would say is one, reduce your exposure.

2:11:13Number one, add your eating tuna, big fish. It's basically the bigger the fish, the more the mercury. I don't eat much tuna anymore. So small fish, Sam, I call it the smashes. Small wild Sam and Macro, anchovies, sardines and harry. I hate all those fish. All your favorite fish. Is there anything I can take? Here's what I would do. I would, you know, there are, there's a, there's a, I'm not on any relationship with this company. It's called Ctopia .fish. It sources fish around the world from regenerative. I have seen their stuff. Regenerative fish farms. So it's farmed, but it's healthy. And it doesn't have all the heavy metals and you can get good fish.

2:11:51There are some small tuna farms that are like smaller tunas, where they actually do this too, but they don't source from there. Second is I would, I would upregulate all of your endogenous detox pathways. So this, your body has a system of elimination. Dr. Say, detox is bullshit. Bologna, you poop, you pee, you sweat, you sweat. Like this is your liver has a whole series of pathways that are detoxification pathways. Your kidney does, your gut does. I mean, this is what your body does, right? Your poop, pee, sweat, you know, all these things. So you have to upregulate your body's own system. So you need to take foods that are upregated or whatever.

2:12:30You mentioned eating more Christopher's vegetables. You could have more garlic. You could actually juice cilantro as a great hack for getting rid of heavy metals. Really? Yeah, it doesn't taste great. I like cilantro. By juicing like a couple of bunches that every day will help bring it down. And then there are things like fiber to help bind it. So you talk about charcoal that's a binder, but just eating a higher fiber diet will help you eliminate things faster through your colon, like heavy metals. And then you believe in gut cleanses. There's this, I don't know if I'm gonna just talk about it.

2:13:00There's this fermented plum product. Embellishable plum? No, it comes in a beautiful packaging, like this orange and black packaging. It's a fermented plum or pomello that a friend of mine said, listen, you have to stay home the next day, but you take this before you go to sleep, you drink like, you know, 16 ounces of water, you go sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you're not going anywhere that day, except a few trips to the bathroom, but you completely empties your digestive tract. I'm gonna come ask me and get that too through the prep. It's not something that I tried it because I was like, I'll give this a try.

2:13:37Is it healthier, unhealthy, or neutral to do a complete digestive tract? I mean, I think it depends how you do it and what's causing it, like, you know, but it can disrupt your gut flora. So your gut will really repopulate often with the flora that it had. But part of the reason we're so sick is our gut flora is so harmed by C -sections, antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding. The infant formula itself is a microbiome harmful compound for many reasons. It's not saying women shouldn't use formula, but there's better formulas and worse formulas. And so we kind of like had a lot of gut issues. We've taken antibiotics.

2:14:14We've eaten food this harmful to our microbiome. We were exposed to toxic... So somebody might want to flush their system? I think it can be helpful. And for example, we do this, for example, people have liver failure, and you're an alcoholic and you have liver failure now. Liver failure comes mostly from eating sugar and starch. They change the name, by the way, from non -alcoholic fatty liver disease to metabolic associated fatty liver disease, which is just kind of... So yeah. And so those people, if they come in with liver failure, they get crazy. Literally, it's called hepatic and cephalopathy.

2:14:47You get delirium, they have seeing things, they literally go nuts. The treatment, you give them a sterilizing antibiotics. You kill everything in their gut, called neomycin. And then you give them lactulose, which makes you poop your brains out. And then they basically flush all that out, and all the toxins that you can't metabolize from your microbiome, get flushed out, and you come back to normal cognition. Wow. And it's a standard medical treatment. It's like basically what you learned in medical school. Wow. So there is an argument, and I've done this with autistic kids. We've had gut issues, with certain different issues.

2:15:19Parkinson's, if your constipated goes up by... Your risk goes up by 400%, and that's a toxin -related neurological disease. Well, this thing is a hammer. But it was sort of given to me as a joke, and I thought, all right, well, this is going to be no good deal. You're going to be fine. I only did it twice, on separate occasions. And I was like, okay, that wasn't super pleasant, but I just want to know, is it a valuable tool? Yeah. And I wasn't interested in taking a drug, and it's like this fermented fruit, or something like that. I did hear that from a colleague at Yale, who studies the microbiome, that if we fast, or if we evacuate our digestive tract in kind of an aggressive way like that, that the healthy microbiome needs some time to replenish itself.

2:16:05It's not like you... Like, when you fast, you start eating away at the unhealthy and healthy microbiota, or they aren't fed. And so it's not across the board a good thing necessarily. Yeah, okay. So you want to be careful of that. But I think, in terms of answering your question about metals, so you want to upregulate your... You reduce your exposure, you want to upregulate your pathways by food. And then you can upregulate the pathways by nutrients. So we talked about NSEALs, cystine, so anything that boosts glutathione, like poic acid, all the methylating B vitamins, B12, folate, B6, making sure you have enough protein, because a lot of the phase two pathways in your liver that help you detoxify are dependent on amino acids, like euclidonidation, and glutathione.

2:16:45It's an important detoxifying compound, and you want to basically open up all the pathways to your ribs. So I have very specific detox protocol for heavy metals, and includes all that, and sometimes DMSA, and binders. But I use silica, I use alginates from seaweed and others. I don't use charcoal for that. But you can safely remove metals from your body. That's what happened to me. I was able to do it, and I'm not demented anymore. And I don't have chronic disease syndrome. And if you look at pictures of me in my 30s, you're like, wow, you look terrible. Well, I met you 10 years ago. Yeah. And you truly have aged backwards.

2:17:20And you look great then. You look super vibrant then. Like you have a ton of energy. I mean, I think you embody a lot of the things that people would like for healthy aging. And I know you also exercise, and you do all the things. I'd like to talk about some of the kind of more cutting -edge things that are happening that I've not tried, but that I'm curious about. And you want to know if I've done the runoff? Well, or maybe, or just what? I've tried everything, but I'm not sure. Well, let's actually, something I have tried, but that I'm not an expert on, but we've done a couple of podcasts about.

2:17:51But I'd like your thoughts on peptides. What are some of the peptides that you think can be useful to people if they can afford them and work with a doctor where they can get it safely? Let's just assume all that. What are the peptides that you think are of real value to people who aren't really sick, but are doing everything they can? Optimization. Yeah. Optimization and just, yeah, generally trying to point all the boats in the direction of health. And it depends on what your needs are, what's happening to health and like anything you're using, it should be used for a purpose, right? And peptides are simply mini proteins that have biological effects.

2:18:25And I think of them as the, your body's superhighway of information and connectivity that drives everything. So they regulate your sex hormones, your growth hormone, your metabolic health, nerve function. I mean, sexual desire. I mean, these are million peptides, like GLP1 is a peptide. Insulin is a peptide, right? So there are tens of thousands of peptides that are made by the body that are used to regulate everything. And so there's a number of them that have been available that have been studied well. Some of them are on the market like, you know, it was at Baker, insulin or by Lyce, which is something called PT141.

2:19:03It's for high sexual, sexual, sexual, and women, right? Yeah, for women, but you guys are for men. It works for women. But it's FDA -proof for women. It's FDA -proof for women. Yeah. It works for men too. Is it Kispeptin? Is that okay? No, it's not Kispeptin. It's a, I'm going to butcher the name. It's like, it starts with a B, lemon of the tide or something like that. And, you know, it does make you nauseous. So you need to take, it's very careful. You want to throw up all you have in sex. Definitely not. Not too sexy, but it doesn't work. But there's a number depending on your needs. For example, if you're athletic and you're, you know, in the gym, you want to increase recovery and repair.

2:19:38There's peptides like BPC157 and TB500 and GHK that are regulatory peptides of a tissue repair and healing. There are peptides that you can use for immune function, like thymus and alpha -1, which is great if you're getting a cold or you have an immune issue or you have COVID or... What's the pathway for thymus and alpha? We don't want to go through every biochemical step, but is the logic there that you're increasing the number, excuse me, of T cells and B cells? Yeah. So basically, you know, when you're born, you have a giant thymus gland, which takes up your whole chest. Really? Yeah. If you look at a baby, you can take it at Google Image and put it up there.

2:20:19It's like, basically, like your whole sternum, it's like this big. But it invulutes or shrinks as you get older and it kind of becomes smaller. But it's still a source of your immune function and it helps with building your immune resilience. And as we age, it gets worse and worse. And so thymus and alpha -1 does increase your white blood cell function and number and it helps improve that. Then there's peptides that are like a great like PT -141 for sexual function. There's peptides like Kisopeptid increases testosterone. There's ones like Ipa morlin that intestine morlin that may help growth hormone.

2:20:51You don't have to share what you take, but do you think any of these are kind of mainstays for people over 40 if they can afford them? Some of them, I think. But you have to be careful because they're not just taking on vitamin. I mean, if you're taking overdose of vitamin E, you're getting trouble. Or if you have other fat -soluble vitamins like vitamin A and trouble. Most water -soluble vitamins are not going to get in trouble. Although, be sick, you have to be careful with it overdose. And magnesium, if you take too much of it, just poop your brains out. So, vitamin C, the same thing. So your body can manage.

2:21:23But peptides are very powerful compounds. I mean, look at ozempic. I mean, look at insulin. I mean, these are very powerful compounds. Not to be messed around. No, so you really need someone who's educated in it well. And they should be usually a doctor or some licensed professional who has studied and understands this. And they should be used with monitoring to the side effects, the effects on your lab work and hormones. What about cycling them? Yeah, so you don't want to necessarily take them all the time. And you want to do cycle them. For really ones that are extremely like growth hormone.

2:21:51You don't want to be on that all the time. I worry about BPC157 because in my experience, it is effective at treating minor injuries and things like that. But people now just take it continuously. And it increases angiogenesis, growth of capillaries and vessels and things like that. And if you have a tumor, you do not want to increase angiogenesis to the tumor. You just wouldn't know if that was happening. There's no way to know until that tumor starts creating problems. Right. Although that's another thing, cancer screening. It's so antiquated, right? We do such poor jobs of cancer screening with colonoscopy, pap test and...

2:22:26What's a better cancer screen? There's a new technology that has been developed using fragments of DNA that are released into the bloodstream from cancers. Way before it ever shows up on a scan or an imaging, which you can pick up cancers a year, two or three before they ever show up on any kind of other test. And it's called gallery. It screens 50 of the most common cancers, many of which there's no screening test for. And the false positive rate, which is what you worry about, is very low, like half a percent. That means it shows you have a cancer when you actually don't, which can be very terrifying.

2:23:03It's about 75 % accurate and finding the cancer if early if you find it. And it's great. I mean, we've picked up so many people with issues. One in 188 of our members who've tested with this test have a cancer that they wouldn't know about otherwise. And they can catch and only stay before it kills you. The pushback on this early detection was surprising to me, not this one in particular, but like a few years ago I paid for a Pernovo scan. Yeah, yeah. Then I started seeing some of the pushback on whole body MRIs from people in the standard medical community. So I asked my good friend, a neurosurgery at UCSF at each angle, I said, hey, what do you think of these whole body scans?

2:23:40And he said, I get people coming in all the time who have identified brain tumors and aneurysms and issues that they were completely unaware of. They probably be dead in the next five to 10 years. And by the way, I don't get paid by Pernovo. I don't have any deal with Pernovo or any other of these whole body imaging things. And I realized there's a cost. So I think the implication is from the people that give pushback, like, oh, these things are expensive. And we're going to kind of push back on them as a tool because we don't want people to feel badly if they can't get them. We don't want to make them.

2:24:11They're going to become commoditized. They're going to become cheap. Just like we're able to get like 15 ,000 long -term tests for four and a nine. We're going to be able to get a whole body scan for 300 bucks. It's happening. It's not, it doesn't number three thousand bucks. So that's coming. Great. I think we're going to lean into that and function in the future. But it's really, it's really important to understand that you want data on your body as much as you can have. And as much as you can afford. And the healthcare system should pay for it. They don't because they don't understand the value of this because they don't see the benefit as the people transfer insurance companies so regularly and jobs so regularly that they figure if I invest in somebody's health and the next guy is going to get the benefit.

2:24:46You know, if I'm united, then at and we'll get the benefit or signal get the benefit. And I see. You know, it's kind of like a it's a perverse incentive system. But I think, you know, data driven healthcare is the future. Really, imagine, imagine a place where you can have all your personal health data. This is where we're going where you can have all your biomarker testing, where you can have all your wearable data, your full genome, your microbiome, all imaging data, not just the whole body scan, but looking your body composition, looking a hard scans it till how much plaque you have and and much more.

2:25:18With your medical history, with all the world's scientific literature, informing it with knowledge experts also overlaying their knowledge and expertise on to it. In a platform that allows you to query it. So think about like an AI chatbot that's just based on you. Like it's your data. And what now in medicine is so amazing is we try to like make diagnoses and understand what's going on with people with such limited data sets about them about them. They're so antiquated. And so you've got guys like Lee Hood, who's literally imagining thousands of thousands of data points on patients. And he's using his project called the phenome project.

2:25:58I think it's called phenome health, where he's being able to say, oh, geez, I can detect this from a few molecules in the blood. I can see what's going on with your microbiome or a few molecules in your blood. I can see if you're going to be at risk for Alzheimer's. And now we offer this for for you think there was no test for Alzheimer's right. You had to do a brain bobsie or you had to wait till you're got you know, you forget your you know, name of this for that other thing. And now we can through blood testing looked for things like P tau 217 and amloid 4240 maybe amloid 4240 ratios. Well, can you give a response to that?

2:26:29Let's say somebody is a good question. I mean, Alzheimer's is a tough one. I followed this this field for a long time. I had people working in the bench right across from me as opposed to there was there've been so many hypotheses. Yeah, not just the plaques and tangles thing. I'm not just the beta amloid hypothesis. But I'll tell you my friends who are neurologists are not optimistic. They're not, but they're not looking at the problem the right way, right? It's sort of like the blind men in the elephant. They're looking at their one thing and they don't see an answer. But you guys like Richard Isaacson who was at Cornell and now he's in Florida.

2:27:04Who who if you haven't had on your podcast, you should. It was a neurologist studying Alzheimer's and looking at deep diagnostics and personalized approaches to address the root causes and seeing remarkable outcome reversal. So he had a special on I think CNN was Sanjay Gupta where they look literally showed that you can take these biomarkers and you find them early enough. You can intervene. And again, I've done this with dozens of patients who had dementia who were able to stop a reversal. We die it. Not just diet. It's everything. So Alzheimer's is it's like it's like saying it's like just saying you can't remember stuff.

2:27:41Like, you know, we have all these fancy names we give to diseases and then we say, oh, I know why you can't remember things. You have Alzheimer's. No Alzheimer's is the name we give to people who can't remember things. It's a certain specific type of problem. It's a constellation. But then the question is what causes it? And there are multiple causes. It's called type two diabetes. These are the type three diabetes of the brain or caused by insulin resistance. We know diabetics have four times the rate of Alzheimer's. It could be caused by environmental toxins like heavy metals. It could be caused by mold or could be caused by Lyme disease like Chris Christofferson had or could be caused by change the microbiome or bi -nutritional deficiencies.

2:28:14I had one moment who was like diagnosed with early dementia and she had she was older, a brilliant woman, but was starting to lose it. Turned out she had severe methylation issues and be brought be vitamin deficiency and fully deficiency. And I treated her with a vitamin B12 shot and some B vitamins and she came right back. So it's a multi again, multi causal multi modal treatments. You got to figure out all the causes and you got to treat all the problems. If someone has mercury issues and mold issues and they have Lyme disease and they have gut issues and they have prediabetes and they have methylation issues, you got to treat all those things.

2:28:50And then you can see real change in people's biomarkers. Key to genetic diets have been affected but it's not like a keto diet will fix every week Alzheimer's or the keylation will fix everybody Alzheimer's or that fixing their diabetes will fix everybody Alzheimer's. You have to find all the things and treat all the things. Like if your roof has 30 holes in it and you plug 25 of a minute range it's still going to get wet in your house. And that's the opposite of how medicine is practiced. And I ran into this at Cleveland Clinic and we were trying to study Alzheimer's and we had a guy who really wanted to look at the black box of functional medicine.

2:29:19People come in, you do personalized care out the other side, what happens. And the head of science there was like, no, no, we can't do that. We can only say one thing at a time. Vitamin D will do that study. Then we'll do fish all study. Then we'll do diet study. Then we'll do exercise study. Then we'll do whatever study. I'm like, it's not how the body works. You need, you know, if you want to grow a plant you can't just say I'm just going to give it water in soil but no light or I'm going to give it light but no soil or you know, it just doesn't make sense. So the whole context, yeah, functional medicine is really about understanding this model and how do you apply it in a personalized way and Richard Isaacs has done it, deal, and I personally have seen this in my patients where they either stop progressing or they reverse it.

2:30:01Now sometimes they do progress in this hard but I've had patients who've done incredible for years and years and years and years. Well, about a year ago somebody who's probably one of the finest cardiologists in North America contacted me of all people and asked, what do I know about ketogenic diet for the treatment of Alzheimer's? And I said, well, I've known him since I was a kid because he a family friend, a phenomenal cardiologist. And I said, you know, this is an odd moment because I remember years ago I said I was going to go into neuroscience and he said, why would you go into neuroscience?

2:30:31Like there's nothing like, like, neuroscience is a ridiculous field. Why would you do that? The joke about neurologist is you diagnose an adios, like there's nothing to do. You could did diagnosing problem but you can't do anything about it. Exactly. So, but he was very curious because his father had Alzheimer's and he was exploring the ketogenic diet for the treatment of Alzheimer's for his dad and he was observing some really impressive results. So here's a cardiologist among the best asking me what I've seen about this. And I said, well, I know Dale Bredeson's work and I'm learning as I go and we will cover this on the podcast.

2:31:05This is very informative. I want to make sure that we hit the other kind of cutting -edge things. I'm curious if you take anything to augment NAD. I take sublingual NMN every day. I don't get paid by a company that makes NMN. I take it the most noticeable effects that I've observed are increased energy. My hair grows super fast when I take NAD and my nails grow super fast. Those are not effects I was trying to achieve but that's what I've observed. Do you take NMN NR or do you do NAD infusions? Yeah, I do. And why? I think, you know, when you look at the data and I wrote a book called Young Forever and talk about longevity and the pathways.

2:31:44And when you look at the fundamental regulatory systems in the body around cellular repair, healing, renewal, regeneration, we have a built -in healing system. Like everybody understands that if you cut your skin, you don't go, oh, would you please heal and please recruit these stem cells and read this angiogenesis factors and bring side of kinds over here to do the body knows what to do. So you break a bone. It's like it's got its own healing system. So in the body, there's a call these longevity switches and but they regulate not just longevity but they regulate chronic disease and much more.

2:32:17And they're embedded ancient pathways that exist from worms to humans, mTOR, MPKs or two ends and insulin signaling pathways. And NAD in the body works to activate one of those longevity switches called Sir Toins which are involved in DNA repair. So when you get 100 ,000 hits a day to your DNA, it's unraveling and re -ravelling and it's got to get damaged. You need an army to go out and fix it, right? A bunch of carpenters kind of like repair that broken DNA. NAD stimulates that. It also stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis forming pneumatic conjure, improves mitochondrial function, improves insulin sensitivity, improves mTOR, atophagy.

2:33:00And it induces atophagy. So there are a lot of redundancies in these pathways but it's really quite amazing when you see how the body is organized. And so NAD is one of the things that's not going to make you live forever or cure every disease. But it's an optimization tool because as you get older NAD levels decline. And so you're mitochondria decline, you're energy declines and it's great for all of that. So I take it and I think... I get a thousand milligrams of NMN. Okay, so you take that daily? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I do the sublingual in a man and occasionally I'll get an NAD infusion but it's so unpleasant.

2:33:33As it goes in, it's like you're getting stomped on by an elephant. Slowly, slowly. But you do feel great afterwards. Exosomes. Have you had them? I've had them. What are they and why would you get them? So again, the body has this amazing healing system and it's part of the body's healing system. And this is hopefully you're talking about whether it's peptides, whether it's exosomes, there's NMN. It's part of this field of regenerative medicine. How do we regenerate and heal and repair by activating our body's own built -in system? So it's way better and way stronger and work way faster than most medications if you know how to use them.

2:34:12So exosomes are essentially the little packets of healing information that are inside stem cells and there's thousands of them. And they get released, think of like little kind of like when you blow bubbles on your kid, it's like these little bubbles of stuff that go out into the body and then they go to where they're needed and then they release the packets of information that contain growth factors, healing factors, anti -inflammatory factors, tissue repair factors. And that's how the body tends to repair and heal. And so I remember once I had COVID really bad and I afterwards I've never really felt depressed.

2:34:47I might have been sad. I would see my life and lost parents and had things happen. They were life issues. But I felt physiologically depressed. Like my brain felt terrible. I couldn't think. So I felt COVID. Yeah, cognitive issues. I was like, I'm an idiot and I'm depressed and I want to kill myself. And my higher self is like, this is not me. And I took a load of exosomes. I be I just got them because I'm a doctor I can get them and I gave them to myself. And literally within hours I was resurrected. It was it was amazing. Yeah. And I've used it for my knee. I have a meniscus syndrome. I've used them in my knee.

2:35:22I've used them in my back. So I think they can be very effective. I use them intravenously for. Is it done in the United States? You can you can give exosomes. So it's FDA approved. Yeah. But you know, they're approved for skin issues or this thing. So there's like an off label uses what they what they use them for. A lot of things like stem cells have to go out of the country to do it. And there's a regulatory issues or safety issues. I'm still scared to do so. I understand. I mean, it's you want to not play with this stuff. But you also, you know, can be it can be used effectively. Like my wife, for example, was a runner and she kind of tore knees up and had to tell femoral syndrome and could walk.

2:35:58And I mean, she's younger than I am. And she shouldn't be feeling that like she's eight years old in her knees. We went to Costa Rica to a very reputable center. And I knew the founders of it. I expected the laboratory with the scientists who know harvest them, who grew them, what they did their testing practice. I did my homework. And she ended up having no knee problems after she got her stem cells in her knees. I was like, that's amazing. And she just like, you know, probably close to two years later. That's awesome. I mean, I've heard great things from many people. I haven't felt a need to do stem cells.

2:36:30So that's why I haven't done it. But I'm curious about exosomes and been, you know, cautiously exploring the peptide space. We talked about some other supplements. Look, Mark, we've covered a ton. It was a whirlwind. And at the same time, I mean, we talked about food as medicine. Yeah. We talked about core supplements that people really should perhaps not even think about as supplements anymore. But that's sort of up to the, that's in the year of the behold. My joke on that is this. I said, people say, do you need supplements? I know you don't need supplements, but only in a certain conditions.

2:37:04You drink pure clean water. You breathe pure clean air. You wake up with the sun. You go to bed with the sun. You have no chronic stress. You're exposed to no environmental toxins. And you're only hunting and gathering your own wild food. If that's you, you don't need any supplements. And it's the 1930s. Right. So yeah, things like D3 Omega's, I like that answer. Negnesium, salineium iodine, a case you made a case for table salt in addition to all the fancy salts that we all enjoy. Or just having seaweed and fish, you know, seaweed and fish, but not tuna. And thank you for touching on air and lack of cleanliness and air.

2:37:39Heavy metal poisoning, things to be cautious about. There's ways to detox and and for illustrating that detoxification is possible through known pathways that anti aging longevity, whatever you want to call it and bodily repair pathways are inherent in us. And so we're can encourage them. Yeah. And I also really want to thank you for being willing to wade into the swamp. The swamp that is the public health debate right now, but especially the corner of the swamp that is for lack of a better way to put it, the big food FDA relationship and what you and Bobby Kennedy and others. I hope they will recruit from from the left.

2:38:21I know Corey Booker has been actively involved in this. He's on the route. He's on the left clearly. And trying to clean up the food supply, give people options. What I heard is that it's not about forcing things, but it's about giving people options and knowledge transparency. Yeah. So like I really appreciate you and the entire population of people that care about their health, whether they realize it or not, they appreciate you because you're a real pioneer in this field. And you've tried some really challenging waters. And I happen to know and I feel very good saying that it is your inherent good nature.

2:38:55I think that's allowed you to go through one swamp after another after the other with your like optimism and your your kindness of spirit intact. So you know, thanks. You're a real role model to everyone who cares about their health and who's trying to help others care about their health. Yeah, I'm a pathological optimist, but the good news is that this live longer, even if they're wrong. I was seeing about this the other day and met your new dog. And forgive me for saying this, but but Lenny's got a great attitude. You know what my first thought was? It's kind of like Mark. He like came in the he crawled up on my lap, although you didn't crawl up on my lap.

2:39:26I just want to make the point that he has no stranger danger. He was very buddy, but he's a he's a really wonderful and beautiful dog, by the way, is an impressive dog. And you just have that good nature about you. And I know you want the best for people. I just don't like people suffering when they don't need to. I feel like I'm having glass of water. They're thirsty. And there's a giant glass wall between us. And that's why I've been working my whole life to kind of get the message out about how people can heal, whether it's on their own or whether through my books or through a free education, my podcast, like your stuff.

2:39:56I mean, it's is a public service because people are suffering and they don't need to. I feel that I know everyone listening feels that and thank you for everything that you've done. And again, for being such a pioneer and keep going. Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Mark. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Mark Hyman to learn more about Dr. Hyman's work and to find links to the various sources discussing the course of this episode. Please see the show note captions. If you're learning from Ender and join this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

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