Mark Hyman: Struggling With Brain Fog, Weight Gain, and Low Energy? It’s Likely Hidden Inflammation! (Do THIS to Reverse It)

26:38We're looking at this physical attribute when actually the inflammation is all happening on the inside. Yeah, like he was jogging every day. He was eating healthy. He was active. Yeah. He's doing all the right things. Yeah. But there's this hidden part. One of those hidden things is sugar. I find it really shocking when I was playing pickleball the other day. And someone said to me that, oh, let's have this drink. We didn't have any water accessible at the time. We were all feeling thirsty. It was pretty hot. Yeah. And he had these packs of drinks. And so he handed it to me. My wife has trained me to look a label.

27:11So I turned it around and it was like 40 % of your daily sugars in this little pack, right? It was tiny. It was, I don't even know what it was called. 40 % of your daily sugars had all these other non-natural ingredients that I didn't recognize at all. Yeah. Massive list. And I said to him, I said, dude, like - I'm not drinking this. Yeah. I was like, I'm not going to have it. I was like, I'm not going to have 40 % of my sugars in this. And I try and avoid refined sugar anyway. Yeah. And, but to him, that was crazy. He was just like, oh, dude, it's fine. Like we're running for like three hours.

27:41Like, you know, it's just a hydration. And I was like, yeah, but you don't need the sugar with it. And I find that sugar is something I still get a lot of pushback on. Really? Yeah, people, that's my reaction. Because I feel like I've been so like well-educated by yourself, the other experts on the show, my wife, who constantly, because I used to be addicted to sugar. Well, easy to do. And all of a sudden you get, so talk to me about sugar, because I think there's a way in which we've been brainwashed to think it's okay. Yeah, no, actually, Jay, we know alcohol is addictive, right? But there's been large studies done using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a scientifically validated metric that measures food addiction, and it's primarily sugar and starch.

28:22And 14 % of people in this country are alcoholics, but 14 % are also addicted to food, and 14 % of kids, which is a lot of kids. So it's biologically addictive. A little bit is not going to hurt you. If you're healthy, if you're fit, you can have some. It's just the volume that we have in this culture. I mean, it's something that our biology doesn't know what to do with. Historically, we were hunter-gatherers. We had 22 teaspoons a year. Now the average person has 22 teaspoons a day. Wow. Yeah. That is mind-blowing. Yeah. 22 teaspoons a year. So you were a hunter-gatherer. You'd like get some honey.

29:01Oh, my God, I found honey, you know? and you'd eat it. But it was hard to get sugar. And you were more active then too. Yeah, and you were running all the time. Because you were looking for that jar of honey once. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No jar, sorry. Actually, I was in Hadza tribe, which is one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa. And they eat a lot of honey. They eat like about 20 % of calories of honey, but they're super fit and healthy because they're just like eating tons of fiber. So they basically, all the roots and the tubers have massive amounts of fiber. Americans eat about eight grams of fiber a day.

29:34We were historically, as hunter-gatherers, having 150 grams a day. And fiber basically is like a sponge. So for example, if you take your Coca-Cola and you throw in a bunch of Metamucil, it's going to have a very different effect on your blood sugar. It's going to turn to gel, first of all, if you leave it there for long enough. And then if you drink it, it's not going to cause the same spike. So it's just the whole context of our diet has become highly processed, lots of sugar, and it drives the visceral fat. So sugar and starch, and by the way, below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cornflakes and a bowl of sugar or a loaf of bread and a bowl of sugar.

30:10It's the same. In fact, sometimes in terms of glycemic index, the bread is worse because it's pure glucose, whereas sugar is fructose and glucose, which has different effects on your blood sugar. But basically, they're both the same. And what that does is that drives the deposition of belly fat. And that belly fat, which is not just holding up your pants, it's metabolically very active. It produces tons of inflammation, screws up your hormones. It causes infertility. It causes Alzheimer's disease. It causes cancer. It causes diabetes. It causes heart attacks. It causes aging itself. And when you look around in America, 93 % of us, well, 93.2 to be exact, have this metabolic dysfunction.

30:57That means 6.8 % of us don't, which is frightening. Frightening, yeah. Frightening. And that's not how humans evolved. We didn't evolve like that. People are the Native Americans, they're genetically diabetic. Well, no, they're not. Like the Pima Indians 100 years ago had no diabetes, no obesity, no heart attacks. And now they get 80 % get diabetes by the time they're 30. And even two-year-olds get type of diabetes because they're just drinking tons of sugar, sodas and flour and all the commodities that we send to the reservations that are all the crap we shouldn't be eating. So, so yeah, if you put your genes in the wrong environment, the genes may load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.

31:36I want to give a shout out to this incredible company that you brought my way, Function Health. When you first brought it to me, I was so impressed at what it does because I think everything we're talking about, the challenge is we don't know until we feel something in quite an extreme way. Right? So we just don't know as humans, we don't know these things. We were never taught them. If I didn't meet my wife, if I didn't have this podcast, I wouldn't be educated. I just, how would I know this? And when you talk about the 93.2%, that's all of us who just don't know. And then you, my wife and you and people like that are the 6.8%.

32:13I love your wife, by the way. She's great. And all of a sudden you get educated and then that's what Function Health does. The fact that you can take these tests. You look under the hood. You can get all the results. You know it from being at home or, you know, popping to get a test done. You have access to actually know what's happening inside your body. Yeah. And I became a proud investor in the company when you first brought it to me because I'd never seen someone make that kind of data available at mass. and at scale. I was going to some concierge services, which I'm very fortunate to have access to, but I didn't see how the world, the 93.2 % could have access to these things.

32:54And that's what Function Health's doing. Yeah. I mean, imagine driving your car. You don't have any dashboard. You don't know how fast you're going. You don't know how much gas in the car. You don't know how much oil's in there. You don't know if the engine light's good. You don't know if your tire pressure's good. I mean, think of the amount of sensors and information you get from your car these days, right? We practice medicine today, like listening to the noises of car makes and hoping we can figure it out instead of looking under the hood. And so, you know, I believe we should be testing and not guessing on what's going on with our health.

33:21And the wearables are great, you know, or a ring or a Fitbit or, you know, Apple watch, awesome, boop. They tell you a lot, but they don't go under the skin. And so you need to know what's happening in your biology. And the truth is a disease doesn't just happen like that one day, you get a heart attack. It's a slow progression over decades. And you can see the continuum of what happens. And you can see slight changes and variations that will compound over time and make you ultimately very sick. And the beautiful thing about functional health is you can actually get your biomarkers done. There's over 110 biomarkers, your initial test.

33:54You do a second test mid-year. You can add on tests for looking at other things, whether you want toxins or allergens or Lyme disease, whatever you want to know about yourself. And then you get this beautiful dashboard that shows you exactly what's going on. And like, you know, you get it like in a car dashboard and you can see the change over time and then you can learn what to do about it and what's going on with your body and how to make adjustments and you get all the information that's supported by all the scientific literature in the world by knowledge experts by your own personal data set and it's really medicine designed for you and it's it's really quite a remarkable thing and people seem to have taken to it because we have you know hundreds of thousands of members and people are learning so much about their health and i've been shocked at the data that we're finding you know like we found all these cancers.

34:38I was just reviewing our cancer screening. And God, you know, people don't know they have cancer. I mean, I had a friend who just died like a month ago from breast cancer at 45 years old. It was heartbreaking, you know? And now through the blood tests you can get through function health, you can actually see like a liquid biopsy for 50 different cancers. And I was reviewing the spreadsheet of all the people and what they found and a follow-up. And like, they didn't know they had cancer. And then they found it in the early stage. and then it saves her lives as opposed to waiting until too late.

35:10So, you know, it's always, and the whole thing about the metabolic health, I mean, most doctors don't check insulin, which is extremely important to know about because insulin is what goes up first, not your blood sugar. Most doctors don't look at the right cholesterol test. ApoB is the most important. I just had a friend send me an article. He said, Dr. Hyman, look at this article. It's about this latest new test for predicting heart attack risk. It's better than any other test. I'm like, what is it? And I'm like, I looked it up and I was like, oh, it's called ApoB. I'm like, I've been testing that for 30 years.

35:41It's the most predictive. But people check your LDL cholesterol. That's not the thing that matters. And so we do that and we do deeper analysis of your metabolic health, your nutritional health, looking at toxins or hormones. And we're finding autoimmune diseases. I mean, I looked it up before I came on the podcast. I was curious because about 8%, according to the CDC, of Americans have an autoimmune disease. But when I looked at our data, we're seeing 33 % have a positive autoimmune antibody, which is incredible. I mean, that's a third of Americans have some either autoimmune disease or pre-autoimmune disease.

36:22And there's stuff you can do about it and get to the root cause. and what's beautiful about it is that we use root cause medicine, not just, oh, you have an autoimmune disease, take this drug, or you have high cholesterol, take this drug. It's like, well, how do I solve this using all the world's scientific knowledge about how to best do this through lifestyle and dealing with root causes and creating health rather than just mitigating symptoms or suppressing symptoms. So it's pretty exciting. And I think we now have full body imaging for$4.99. You can get your whole blood test for$4.99,$1.37 a day.

36:57I'm really impressed by what you offered. And I love what Function Health has done so much that I didn't just invest. I got every member of my team a membership. That's amazing. Because I couldn't think of a better gift to give people than accessing their knowledge and knowing what's happening inside their body. If I want people to perform at work and feel their best and care about their health, to me, it felt like the right thing to do. And I know you've actually created a discount for our community. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you doing for us? It's functionhealth.com slash jshetty, and you get$100 off your membership.

37:32It's a membership. Twice your testing. So it's$400 or$399. And you get to know what's going on. And the gift of health, what you did for your employees is amazing because there is no better gift than the gift of health. Yeah, you only realize that when it goes away. Yeah. And I've had many episodes in my life where my health has not been great. Yeah. And that's when you realize just how valuable it is to know sooner, you know, earlier and know before. And, you know, I'm glad. So that's great. So functionhealth.com forward slash Jay Shetty. That's right. $100 off. Yeah. And as I said, I'm an investor and, you know, really proud to be involved and really excited to get it out.

38:11I want to talk about the autoimmune diseases. Yeah. Because it feels like, I feel like right now I'm at that age where I'm either hearing about autoimmune or cancer or sadly people dying more than I ever have in my entire lifetime. That's not just because I'm getting older though. No. It's becoming more prevalent. It is. I mean, the hockey stick of chronic diseases is going like this. It's really striking. I mean, things that were rare 150 years ago or 120 years ago, turn to the 1900s, if you had a heart attack in a hospital, it would be like seeing this rare case of malaria in Manhattan. All the doctors would rush around to see this unusual case.

38:57Diabetes wasn't even a thing, type 2 diabetes. If you look at the records of Mass General in the 1850s, it wasn't even a diagnosis. People didn't have it. So why are we seeing this explosion? And autoimmune disease, there are over 100 different autoimmune diseases, everything from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which is affecting one in five women. That's an autoimmune thyroid condition, one in 10 men. Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, MS, colitis, Crohn's disease. There are over 100 different autoimmune diseases, and people are suffering from these things. And the drugs that we use are incredibly toxic.

39:33They basically suppress your immune system. They have all these side effects, and they're extremely expensive, and they don't necessarily always work that well. And the question then is, why are we doing this? I mean, this is what functional medicine is about, is what function is created on the basis of this idea of why. Not what disease do you have and what drug do I get, but why? And the reason why we're seeing such an explosion about immune disease is a combination of different factors. One, our diet has changed dramatically over the last 50 to 70 years because of industrialization of agriculture, the use of pesticides, herbicides.

40:06The increasing rates of C-section means you don't colonize your gut and 60 % of your immune system is in your gut. And a lot of autoimmune disease is caused by trouble with the gut. The increasing rates of formula feeding, you know, not breast milk, which protects the baby's immune system is necessary for the development of the, I mean, 25 % of the calories in breast milk is not digestible by the baby. It's to feed the microbiome, which is amazing. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy. That's amazing. And when you have formula, you don't have that in there. And so the microbiomes are disturbed. And then you get leaky gut.

40:44We use lots of antibiotics in children. We have accelerated vaccine schedules. Vaccines I believe in. I think they're important. But like when I was a kid and when my kids were kids, which was that long ago, there was a limited set of vaccines. And now it's free for all. That's like you got to take 15 or 16. Yeah. It's like 72 different jabs of shots. And so that affects your immune system. And they do things that affect your immune system by putting in irritants like aluminum. And then the exposure to environmental chemicals has exploded. Heavy metals, pesticide. The average newborn baby today, Jay, has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood before they take their first breath, including stuff that's been banned for years like DDT and dioxin, PCBs, phthalates, flame retardants, lead, mercury, pesticides, herbicides.

41:36I mean, you name it, it's in there. And so all that has an impact. And they're called autogens. There's a whole science around this. These are environmental toxins that cause autoimmunity. And I've seen many patients with autoimmune diseases that we cured by getting rid of their heavy metals or detoxifying their bodies. And so these toxins are a huge factor. And then you've got all the modern stresses. We don't sleep. We're under too much chronic stress. Light pollution. Who knows what? EMF. I don't even know if that's a thing, but I'm not saying it is. I'm saying it's all this stuff that we never had to deal with.

42:10And we're just seeing our immune system become so dysregulated. And the ultra-processed food revolution has been another huge factor because in ultra-processed food, there's all these emulsifiers. Emulsifiers are basically the things that make stuff creamy. And, you know, like if you ever got some of the, like, nut milks and they separate out when you put in your coffee, it's because they don't use emulsifiers, right? And emulsifiers basically make things creamy. And they're using almost all ultra-processed food. And they damage the gut lining. And they cause what we call a leaky gut where the cells come apart.

42:39and then food and bacteria leak in between your cells and then right underneath your cell lining, which is just one cell thick, is most of your immune system. And think about it, why is most of your immune system in your gut? Well, it's because we're exposed to most of the foreign stuff every day. You're putting pounds of foreign food in there and you're putting all the bacteria from your microbiome. There's three pounds of bacteria in there that is basically a sewer. And it is like you're one cell away from a sewer. And so when that breaks down, your immune system will go, this isn't me. What's going on?

43:17And it starts attacking things. And then it creates just a lot of mistaken identity, things we call molecular mimicry, where it thinks it's attacking a bacteria or food, but then it'll attack your joints or your eyes or your nerves and get MS and your thyroid gland. So basically, we're seeing this explosion. And the beautiful thing is by understanding the root causes, you can actually reverse it. I had an autoimmune disease. I actually had mold in my house. I've gotten everything known to man. I've got Lyme disease, mold disease. And I lived in an old barn. I got really bad mold poisoning. And then on top of that, I had a root canal, had it removed, had an antibiotic.

43:57The antibiotic called something called C. diff, which is a bacteria that causes really bad gut infections. that turned into ulcerative colitis. My whole intestinal tract was just one big red mess and I had to heal it. And so, you know, there is a methodology for creating health. And that's, that's, that's, that's what I want people to know. That's why functional health is so important because it teaches you how to turn on your own innate healing system. You've got a healing, regenerative repair and renewal system. That's why I could come back from the dead because I knew how to turn it on, you know, and that's what I want everybody to know.

44:31And that's really why I do what I do, why I have the podcast, why I write books, why I travel around speaking like you. It's the same movie, different story. What are the signs for someone who's listening of a weak immune system and a strong immune system? How do they tell? I mean, the inflammation immune system are a little bit different because you can be inflamed but have a weaker immune system. So frequent infections, frequent colds, feeling run down. I mean, there are signs that your immune system's not working. And you get less resilient to stress. You get sick more easily. And so those are signs that there's problems.

45:13And one of the things we find through function health is that so many people have nutritional deficiencies. And nutrients like zinc and vitamin D and iron, these play a big role in your immune function. It's actually, even supplements is such a bad word for supplements. Because it sounds like something that, you know, you're just supplementing. but it's like - Like it's not necessary. Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean, right? The word supplement in and of itself feels like it's an add-on rather than like, this is necessary. Right. Right? Like I think we're still living in this time where supplements haven't become the norm.

45:44Yeah. People see it as some health hack tip as opposed to, no, this is just what your body needs as nutrients. My joke is, I don't think anybody needs supplements but only under certain conditions. They have to hunt and gather their own wild food. They have to drink pure clean water, be exposed to no environmental toxins have no chronic stress, sleep nine hours a night, go to bed with the sun, wake up with the sun. Then if you do all that, you might not need something. I'm good with the last six, but bad with the first three. You haven't gone hunting today? Yeah, I didn't go hunting today. And so our soils have become damaged because of the soil.

46:19The soil, right? And the way your plants get nutrients is because of the organic matter in the soil. It has a symbiotic relationship with the microbes in the soil. And with the plant roots, then it allows it to extract the nutrients. But if you basically grow plants in dirt, not soil, where there's no nutrients, or they're not accessible because the plants can't get them because they don't have the right organic matter to create the symbiotic relationship, your broccoli today is 50 % less nutrients than it did 50 years ago. Plus, we do a lot of things to cause more stress for our bodies. We need more nutrients.

46:56and like magnesium is a very big nutritional deficiency because when you're stressed you pee out magnesium and then we don't eat a lot of magnesium rich foods like nuts and seeds and beans and leafy greens right it's not a big part of americans diet so a lot of people are low in magnesium uh and low in vitamin d we see 80 percent of people being insufficient or deficient in vitamin d which is incredibly important for immune function and i mean covid if your vitamin D was low, you were 75 % more likely to end up in the ICU and die. Whereas if your vitamin D was over 50, this big Israeli study, there were no deaths.

47:30So it's that powerful. There are things that regulate almost every biochemical reaction in your body. And you've got 37 billion trillion chemical reactions every second happening. Every one of those, and that's a big number. How many zeros that is? I think it's 27 zeros. And every single one of those reactions requires is a nutrient to work as a co-fractor for the enzymatic reaction. And most of us are deficient. In fact, with function health, we do deep nutritional testing, omega-3s, vitamin D, all the B vitamins, iron, so forth. And we find 67 % of our members who you think would be forward thinking about their health are deficient in nutrients, not at the level that I would think would be optimal, but at the level that prevents a deficiency disease.

48:14So like not the ideal amount, but the bare minimum so you don't get like rickets or scurvy. And that's 67%. So if you've expanded the criteria to be what's optimal, it would probably be even more. Yeah. It's scary to think about it, but it's so important to start being aware right now. Can someone know that they have some symptoms of an autoimmune disease? Like, is it possible? Well, there's pre-autoimmune disease, like there's pre-diabetes or pre-hypertension. And I don't like those terms because they imply that you haven't gotten into trouble yet. But you are in trouble. There is something bad happening.

48:53And so you have to actually look at the blood work to help you identify if you're heading in the wrong direction. And you can see. But then you could be somebody who's suffering from low-grade symptoms. You might not know it. Like thyroid is really common. You might be a little bit tired. You might be a little constipated. You might have a little dry skin. Your nails might crack a little bit. You might be losing the outer throat of your eyebrow. You might feel a little depressed. You might have lower sex drive. And these things, people don't really, getting a little bit of weight. People don't think of these as a disease.

49:21But when you add them all together, it's an autoimmune thyroid issue, right? And even gut issues, irritable bowel, a lot of people have digestive issues. And it's really a continuum from irritable bowel to autoimmune bowel disease, which is where you get colitis or Crohn's disease. And so it's a continuum. A lot of people have this low-grade inflammatory stuff going on in their bodies. And it's really, it's unfortunate because we know how to fix it. And this is really what we do in functional medicine. It's why I think testing and understanding what's going on with your body before you get in trouble.

49:53It's like, you know, the first symptom of a heart attack, you know what it is for most people? For 50 % of people with heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death. Updates of heart attack. Like this guy I was telling you about, he was jogging and he kept having chest pain. And he was ignoring it. And then he finally decided to go check it out because his girlfriend made him go. and turned out he had a 9 % blockage and he wouldn't know anything. He could have literally just dropped out of a heart attack like that. Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors. One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time.

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53:43Simply visit vitacost.com forward slash J and start saving today. Vitacost.com. Experience the power of wellness for everyone. Thanks for taking a moment for that. Now back to the discussion. What are the shifts we should be making right now? If someone's listening, they're going to go get the test if they can. And if they can't, because, you know, for whatever reason, they don't live in the States because we're not available internationally. No, not yet. Yeah, I get a lot of that in my comments section. There's a lot of people I know in UK and Europe who really want it and Australia and other places.

54:19But you've got your results. You know what's going on. Where would you encourage people to begin if they don't have anything serious right now, but they want to make sure they get this right? Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to sell anything here, but I think doing a short-term reset is powerful. The way I think about it is how do you turn your body back to its original factory settings? When a baby comes out, it's generally perfect, right? It's beautiful, it's healthy, everything works, right? And then things break down. But imagine if your computer is not working or it's on the fritz and my WhatsApp wasn't working today and I just had to reboot it, right?

54:57Or reboot my computer. how do you do that with your body? And that's really what this dietary change that I call the 10-day detox diet is about. It's about really putting your body back to its original factory settings. For most people, it will create a dramatic shift. If you don't get better from it, it's usually because there's something more serious, like you have Lyme disease, you have mold exposure that's causing toxicity, you have maybe environmental toxins or Lyme disease or something serious that needs another treatment. But for most people, just a simple 10-day approach to resetting your system by getting enough sleep, by cutting out the bad stuff, by taking walks, by doing a little breathing exercises and radically changing your diet, you go, oh my God.

55:42You could do that at home. This isn't, you don't, you know, you can't afford to go on a retreat or you can do this at home. A hundred percent. Most people do it at home. And it's so, it doesn't really cost you any extra. Maybe it'll cost you less because you're not buying all these extra crap. And so. 10 days. 10 days. Commit. And if you try it, it's like the body just has this desire to be healthy. And illness is just your body's best attempt to deal with a really shitty set of circumstances. Change the circumstances, meaning what you're exposed to, your diet, lifestyle, and then you'll change.

56:15Because 93 % that's been determined of our health issues are not genetic. They're from our collective environment, what we call the exposome, not our genome. Our exposome is what it sounds like. It's everything that we're exposed to. It's what we eat. It's movement. It's sleep. It's stress. It's our gut microbiome. It's environmental toxins. It's our thoughts. Our thoughts actually transform our biology, literally. It's the biggest pharmacy between your ears. and so all those things you have control over which is what's so exciting to me it's about being empowered to actually make those changes and and people just suffer so badly i mean i think i told you maybe that i did a program with a faith-based wellness program with rick warren at this church where we got a quarter of a million pounds lost out for 15 000 people in a year by doing a faith-based wellness program and the amount of people that had radical changes and their health was just so remarkable.

57:09This one woman had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She'd been on every psychiatric medication you could imagine, from antidepressants to anti-anxiety medications to antipsychotic medications. She was about to commit suicide. She was also overweight. And she did this dietary change. Essentially, I did the faith-based wellness program. We included the 10-day detox diet. And she's like, I'm completely cured. I don't have antidepressant. I'm off all my medications. I feel good. How is that possible? And, you know, that's the other thing, Jay. You know, there's so much mental illness. There's so much depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, you know, more serious things like severe OCD or even schizophrenia.

57:53These things actually are physiological problems or not always emotional problems. So sometimes they are. Like, you know, your spouse dies, you're depressed. Yeah, I get it. But a lot of times, and for many people, there's actually a physiological reason. We talk about the mind-body effect, which is how the mind affects the body, which is profound. But there's also the body-mind effect. So if you're magnesium deficient, you can be anxious. If you're vitamin D deficient or omega-3 deficient, you can be depressed or you can have ADD. If you don't have enough folate or B12, you can get depressed.

58:32I mean, these are things that you can fix if you have heavy metals, which I did. It can cause you to have depression and insomnia and anxiety. I mean, I'm treating a little girl right now who's got severe OCD, and it turned out she had a strep infection that turns into this autoimmune reaction against your brain that's causing her to have OCD behaviors like tics and weird things that we think is psychological. So I think, you know, I often call myself the accidental psychiatrist because I was treating people for all these physical things, and then these psychiatric problems will get better. And I wrote a book about it called The Ultra Mind Solution, How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First.

59:07And you can just get that off the table. And then if you have other deeper trauma or things, yeah, I think the revolution now in metabolic psychiatry, nutritional psychiatry, and then psychedelic medicine and psychiatry are, I think, going to change the face of mental health care for the long term. Absolutely. What are some of the mistakes you see people making and curing autoimmune diseases. What are some of the mistakes? What are the things we get wrong? Well, because they don't treat the cause is the biggest thing. I had a patient when I was at Cleveland Clinic who was a business coach who was 50 years old, and she had a lot of problems.

59:40And I jokingly call myself a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. And she had everything. She had irritable bowel, She had reflux. She had migraines. She was depressed. She had prediabetes. And she had this horrible autoimmune disease called psoriatic arthritis, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis. These horrible, thick, scaly, red, itchy plaques on your skin. And it also can attack your joints. And it was attacking her joints. She was on a drug. And she was seen by the top doctors. And she was on a drug that cost$50 ,000. And it wasn't really fixing her.

1:00:15and she was seeing the top specialists for neurology for her migraine, psychiatry for depression, gastrology for her gut, an endocrinologist for her prediabetes, a rheumatologist for her arthritis, and her skin issues, a dermatologist. I was like, why should a doctor for every inch of her? And I said, gee, you're getting all these medications. You're not really better. You're mitigating your symptoms a little bit. Maybe we think about treating the root cause. And so because she had so many digestive symptoms and she'd been on lots of antibiotics, she'd been on lots of steroids for arthritis, that really messed up the gut too.

1:00:51I said, you have reflux, you have bloating after eating, you have all these gut issues. Why don't we treat your gut? So I basically gave her an antibiotic to kill off all these bad bugs that were in her gut. And I gave her an antifungal because she had a lot of fungal overgrowth from all the steroids and the antibiotics to kill off the bad bugs. I gave her some probiotics. I put her on the 10-day detox diet, basically. Got rid of all the inflammatory foods. Got rid of the sugar, processed food. She comes back in six weeks, and she's like, I'm all better. I mean, what do you mean? She says, well, I stopped all my medication.

1:01:24Well, I didn't tell you to do that. She's like, no, I just was feeling so good. I stopped everything. I don't have migraines. I'm not depressed. I lost 20 pounds. My skin's cleared. My joints don't hurt. My reflux is gone. My irritable bowel's gone. And so if you treat the root, which was her gut in this case, I just gave her the initial diet and I gave her the antibiotics and the antifungals. I gave her probiotics, vitamin D, some fish oil, not a lot. And in six weeks, not only was she feeling better, but she saved the healthcare system tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah. It's almost like it sounds like magic when you're listening to it and you go, yeah, no, it's not because we've just been trained to believe that this way makes sense.

1:02:05Yeah. It's funny. We're more convinced that a manufactured pill will solve our body than the things that our ancestors have lived off for years and years and years. That's right. So if you don't know how to turn on the body's healing system, then yeah, you need medication. And what's so exciting to me, Jay, is we're in this revolution in medicine right now where we're finally understanding root causes. and it's in the scientific literature, but it takes decades for that to get into clinical practice. I mean, to change medical education, to change reimbursement, to change how doctors practice. It's just such a, it's like, it's like we're all walking around thinking the earth is flat when it's really round.

1:02:48And so this paradigm shift is such a profound change in how we think about disease that it's going to revolutionize everything we do. And it's only now accessible to people through things like function because we're able to, through technology, be able to get the amazing amount of world scientific literatures. You know, AI can read it in like five seconds, right? And it can synthesize it. And then it's your own personal health data set. It's not like your doctor's treating you based on a study that was on 70 kilogram white men from Kansas, which doesn't apply to an Indian guy, you know, or somebody who's in like, you know, Vietnam, right?

1:03:26And so basically we are treating to the masses where we should be treating to the individual. We call this precision medicine, personalized medicine, but medicine should be personalized. It should be predictive. It should be preventive. And it should be proactive that you actually don't have to react like we do in medicine, but proactive. And that's really my life's work is not only taking people with very serious illnesses and reversing them, but actually getting people earlier. I mean, Benjamin Franklin said it, right? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And so I can give a pound of cure, but it's a lot harder than an ounce of prevention.

1:04:00What are you most excited about at the forefront of medicine and functional medicine at the moment? Yeah. Is it AI? Is it? Yeah. Well, you know, I said to you, like, there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body. The body is so complex. Physics is complex. Think about how complicated a rocket is. Like, I can't even understand that. But that's a knowable thing, right? Scientists and physicists can figure it out and then send a guy to the moon or build a spaceship that goes to Mars like Elon Musk. But like the body is so infinitely complex. And we see it in this reductionist way where every different organ has a different specialist and the body has all these different parts.

1:04:40But that's not how we're designed. Everything's an ecosystem. Everything's connected. You know, we're one whole web-like organism where everything's interacting with everything else all the time. And so that paradigm of thinking that way, and functional medicine isn't a test. It's not a supplement. It's not a new specialty. It's literally a meta framework for thinking about the nature of health and disease based on root causes and based on the body's system and based on asking the question, why not what disease do you have and what drug do I get, but why do I have this and how do I create health, not treat disease?

1:05:14And when I create health, disease goes away as a side effect. And so that scientific paradigm is now emerging. And before, it was frustrating for me doing this work for 30 years because it was hard to convince people. Like, look, the earth is round. I'm like, no, no, no, it's flat. See, right there, it's flat. And they go, there's that disease and it's real. I'm like, yeah, you know, rheumatoid arthritis is a thing, but it's not how we think about it. We're thinking about it the wrong way. And so I'm so excited now because of AI and the ability to synthesize massive data sets. I mean, you have 100 ,000 petabytes of data in your microbiome.

1:05:49A petabyte is a million gigabytes. Okay, your computer has four terabytes maybe, right? Which is a thousand gigabytes or something. I mean, it's just such a massive amount of information. That's just your microbiome. And so your body is so complex, and we need technology and AI to help us start to understand that and then apply it to you as an individual and then help create a roadmap for looking at where your weak points are and how do you correct those and then how do you optimize. And so that's what I'm so excited about. And that's why at 65, I'm like doing this startup. I mean, I was with one of the investors on a panel, and I'm like, she's like, somebody said, well, how do you figure out what companies to invest in?

1:06:33They go, well, we invest in the founders. And I'm like, well, have you ever had a founder that's been on Medicare before? That's so funny. And I'm like, what am I doing? I mean, I hope to live to be 100 and something. But, you know, I'm doing this because I don't want to see so many people suffering that don't have to suffer. And I get these calls every day from friends. and would you help this one? They helped that one. No one can help me. And I'm like, I'm only one guy. I could like work 24 hours a day for the rest of my life and I wouldn't make a dent in the amount of suffering there is in the world.

1:07:04But imagine if we could put, you know, a thousand or a hundred thousand doctors in your pocket that are trained on the future paradigm of medicine and make it accessible to you in real time on a day-to-day basis to guide you and coach you and support you. That's what Functional Health is aiming to do. And I'm so excited about it because it's like, wow, we couldn't do this before. We couldn't take this amazing complexity of human biology and help a single doctor understand it's just hard. Like I see the pattern, so I can look at something quickly and I know in a few minutes like what to do. But it's only because I've seen tens of thousands of patients and millions and millions of biomarkers that I can make those connections.

1:07:44And I'm not that good compared to like what technology is going to be able to do. Yeah. What do you wish doctors were taught today? Oh my God, don't get me started. My daughter just graduated from medical school. She's brilliant. And she's now going to be an orthopedic surgeon, which I think is great because you need that. Like, you know, if you break your hip, you need a new hip. So that's the kind of medicine that I think we're really good at is acute care medicine. But what she didn't learn about was nutrition, which, okay, we have a chronic disease epidemic in this country. It's caused primarily by food.

1:08:25It can be cured mostly by food, and yet doctors know nothing about food, right? So nutrition. Didn't learn about the microbiome. Didn't learn about environmental toxins. didn't learn about how to create health, didn't learn about the body's networks and systems, didn't learn about mitochondria. I mean, yes, she got like her first semester, she learned about the Krebs cycle and biochemistry, but didn't understand how to diagnose people with mitochondrial issues, which is our energy powerhouse and how everything works in our body. So those are the things that doctors don't learn anything about. Didn't learn about how to optimize your immune function.

1:09:00Didn't learn about how to treat gut issues in the right way by fixing a leaky gut. So there's so many areas that are part of the framework of functional medicine that they don't learn anything about. Yeah. So no wonder when you go and talk about how you're feeling, you're not getting the information that you need. No. I mean, you go, doctor, I feel this and that and the other thing. And they go, well, I did your exam. That's OK. Your lab tests look OK because they do a very limited set. And you're fine. Just go home and take Prozac. But there's only one of two things that's true. So one, either you're crazy and making it up or your doctor's missing something.

1:09:38And nine times out of 10, they're missing something because they don't know how to think. They don't know how to think about the human body except in a very reductionist way. And it's just not how things are. We are a dynamic ecosystem and everything is interacting with everything else in real time and changing. And how do you play with that? How do you, as a practitioner or even as an individual, learn how your body works? I mean, most of us have no clue how our bodies work and how to create a better functioning body. You know, we take better care of our animals than we do our health, right? I mean, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac fries and a Coke, would you?

1:10:13Definitely. And a milkshake. No. We give that to our kids. Yeah. Right? As someone who grew up in London, England, and had the National Healthcare Service, and then you moved to the United States, and of course, most of it's private, and there's not really any healthcare available as far as I know, you know. What do you think the US healthcare system needs to be focused on? Yeah, 100%. Well, I'm excited. I mean, I'm working right now with Medicare and with the NIH on how do things need to change because they're very open and they're very interested in changing the way we look at things. And I think, you know, even having access to good healthcare, which we don't in this country, I mean, in the UK, you have the NHS, Yes, the National Health Service is great, but maybe the quality isn't always as good.

1:11:00The reality is that most of your health is not happening in the doctor's office. 80 % to 90 % of it happens with things that you can have control over. It happens in your kitchen. It happens where you play and eat and pray and work. That's where health happens. My wife's now studying at Columbia for her master's in public health, and she's just so excited telling me that how she's learning about how they're talking about the real drivers of disease. And it's like 80 and 90 % is not stuff that the doctor has control over. It's the environment that you live in and it's your choices every day. And so those things you don't really need healthcare for.

1:11:38And so I think if we can build a health system that activates people around that, then you won't need the doctor most of the time. And then they're there for acute care medicine. You know, if you, like I had back surgery, thank God there's some guy who knows how to deal with a spine infection and can put in hardware and like, you know, kind of build my backup. Great. Thank God. But, you know, but if I, if I said to him, like, what do I do to recover and become stronger than I was before? He's like, I don't know, just do physical therapy or eat better or not very helpful. How do we hold ultra processed food manufacturers more accountable for getting away with putting excess sugars, emulsifiers, unidentifiable objects into our food?

1:12:26Yeah, yeah, good question. I mean, I think, you know, we've had a pretty lax system of regulation in this country. And, you know, we have, I think, 10 ,000 chemicals that are allowed in our food here. And Europe has about 400 chemicals. And they go through a very different standard of regulation in terms of ultra-processed food. And they're very restrictive around GMO and around herbicides and lots of things that we don't do here. And I think, you know, that's changing. There's this whole Maha movement. People are waking up. And, you know, I was with my friend a couple days ago, Jason Karp, who really founded Hugh Chocolate, if people like Hugh Chocolate.

1:13:01And he was very vociferous writing a letter as a shareholder of Kellogg's to the company saying, you have Froot Loops that you make in America that have all these dyes and chemicals that are known to cause hyperactivity or immune issues or other problems in kids. And in Europe, they don't allow it. And you make the same Froot Loops, but with natural colorings, like from blueberries or whatever. And basically, they were ignoring him. And then my friend, Vani Hari, they all went to Battle Creek, Michigan. And they had a protest in the fall in October of 24. And finally, this week, Kellogg's agreed they were going to actually take all that crap out.

1:13:43Wow. Yeah. And the FDA has now said they're working with food companies to either voluntarily or mandatorily have them remove food additives and colors and dyes. That's brilliant. I mean, I have a nonprofit called the Food Fix Campaign. I wrote a book called Food Fix. I remember. A new one's coming out called Food Fix Uncensored next February. And it basically talks about how this problem needs to get fixed from field of the fork and what regulations need to happen. But I've been working with my nonprofit for the last five years, and it's been amazing. And the woman who was my key person, who was my seeing eye dog in Washington, is now the governor wife of West Virginia.

1:14:20She's the first lady of West Virginia. And that was the first state, because of her, to ban food dyes. Wow. And then they also got SNAP waivers, which means they are going to limit what you can purchase with food stamps to not be allowed to buy soda or certain kinds of junk food. And this is happening across the country. There's like over 30 plus states where now there's uprisings. And I'm living in Texas right now. And this woman, Senator Kohlkos, is the head of the Health and Human Services Committee. She listened to my podcast. She was a huge fan. And she got so excited about this that she insures a bill called SB25 in Texas that limited the crap in the food, that limited crap in schools, that mandates nutrition education for doctors, that starts a chronic nutrition advisory group.

1:15:13And it passed the Senate. It passed the House there. And it got signed by the governor into law. And I testified at the hearing. And so there's this movement happening now, which I never thought would happen in my lifetime, that there's a shift. And I think the food companies want to do the right thing, but they're all in competition with each other. So no one company can act independently because their competitors will eat their lunch. So literally. And so now that this is happening at a nationwide level, they're fighting and they're kicking and screaming. But it's going to happen. And the new dietary guidelines are going to come out, which I've helped advise on.

1:15:48And that is really exciting to me to actually have something out there that's going to help guide people on what to eat. Food labeling is changing. I'm working with the FDA on food labeling. Hopefully, we can make progress on food marketing. That's a big one. Like in Europe, if stuff has some diet in it or that's going to cause a problem with kids, it'll say, this is bad for your kid. And if your kid eats it, they'll get ADD and whatever, hyperactivity. And so the food companies don't want that. So they change their formulations. So food marketing is a big driver of behavior. And these companies know it.

1:16:23and they spend$13 billion marketing junk food every year. And there's a lot of ways to fix that. The First Amendment might prohibit us from limiting the advertising, but they could have warnings like they do on drugs. They could prevent them from having a tax deduction for spending all that money on food marketing. And there's a lot of ways to put pressure. Changing medical school education, also important, because the doctor is more engaged in this. So it's a multi-headed hydro that needs multiple solutions across a lot of government policies. and also people making different choices at the checkout counter.

1:16:57You can vote with your fork. Mark, I am so grateful that you survived. Oh, me too. I got more work to do. Yeah, you've got so much work to do, and I'm so thankful that you're doing it because, you know, you are a startup founder at 65. You've got so much renewed energy and enthusiasm. It's such important work, and I'm so grateful that you came back on the show to share it because it's important work all the way from the micro level of the individual to the macro level of talking about government level change and national level change. And I'm so excited for people to listen to this conversation because I think there's some really quick fixes that people can take.

1:17:40And there's been a lot of warnings in this episode that I really appreciate you share. Just, I think sometimes we need to feel a sense of just how challenging it will be. if we don't make changes now. And I feel like you've really headlined some of them for us. So thank you so much. I mean, you know, Jay, for me, it's like people have all these things that they suffer with and they just think that they're - They've got to live that way. Yeah, they've got to live with that. And to me, I've been sick so many times from so many different things and I've had to recover. And I see so many millions of people suffering needlessly.

1:18:17I mean, I can't end war. I can't end floods and famine. But this is a solvable problem. And they're not hearing about it. They're not learning about it. And that's why I'm obsessed. And that's why I'm a founder of a company at 65 years old. Yeah. Well, I'm so grateful, Mark. Thank you so much. And again, I'm encouraging everyone to head over to functionhealth.com forward slash Jay Shetty to get$100 off to get all your 110 biomarkers. Of course, as I said, I'm an investor in the company. So very excited to give access to the knowledge and information that you need to manage your health better, to take to your doctor, to have healthier conversations, to actually be aware.

1:18:59And I think all of our change, as we know, starts at awareness. And that's the baseline. That's the foundation. So very excited for you all to check that out. I hope you'll make the most of it. I want to give a big shout out to Dr. Mark Hyman again for being here. And thank you so much for sharing so many incredible insights. Hope you keep coming back. Please. I hope you stay well. And again, let me know what you're trying, what you're testing, what you're giving a go. Maybe you're going to try the 10-day detox, whether you're going to do it at home or with Dr. Mark Hyman. Maybe you're going to go off and get all the access to the data through Function Health, and you're going to take a look at what you can avoid for you and your family.

1:19:36Or maybe you're going to start making little changes, whether it's to your diet by adding more fiber, taking out ultra-processed foods, getting better sleep. All these tiny shifts can make such a huge difference. Tag me and Dr. Mark Hyman on Instagram, X, TikTok. Let us know what you're changing, what you're shifting, what you're working on. I love seeing how you're turning these episodes into action. And I'll see you again on another episode of On Purpose. Thanks for listening. And thank you, Mark. Thanks, Jay. If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

1:20:12If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged. This episode of On Purpose is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. I believe that travel is one of the greatest gifts that we've ever been given. And Chase Sapphire Reserve has been my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. When I use my Chase Sapphire Reserve card, I get eight times the points on all the purchases I make through Chase Travel and even access to one-of-a-kind experiences, experiences like music festivals and sporting events.

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1:22:02This is Jay Shetty from On Purpose. If you've ever felt off balance, sometimes a change of scenery is the best reset. Delta invited four creators to explore one idea. What if travel isn't just movement, but recharging in motion? And the results? Based on their Aura Ring sleep scores, everyone met the day feeling more rested. and a sense of clarity stayed long after the trip. With Delta, fly and live better. Explore the whole journey on Delta's YouTube channel. This is an iHeart Podcast.