Why Our Food System Is Killing Us| Dr. Mark Hyman EP 808

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us? Oh, that's easy. It's designed to kill us. Really? A hundred percent. It wasn't starting out that way, Lewis. I mean, we had, after World War II, a need to feed a hungry, growing population around the world. And so the huge push to industrialize agriculture, to produce more calories, more starchy carbohydrate calories that could feed a growing hungry world. And the unintended consequence of that was two things. One, producing massive amounts of sugar and starch. We actually have about 500 calories more per person in America than we did in 1970.

0:50Wow. Two, we also increased the amount of starch and sugar. And three, we industrialize agriculture in a way that has destroyed the environment because of the tillage that's destroyed the soil. The soil, yeah. That is now, you know, one-third of all the carbon in the atmosphere comes from the loss of soil carbon, which is the life in the soil. We destroyed our rivers and waterways because of the runoff from nitrogen that's caused eutrophication and has dead zones the size of New Jersey and in the Gulf of Mexico. There's 400 around the world of those that feed a half a billion people. What's a dead zone?

1:24Dead zone means, you know, when you have too much fertilizer in the water, it makes the algae grow. Sucks all the oxygen out of the water and all the fish die. That's a dead zone. So there's no fish. Dead fish. And so people are depending on that fish to live. And then, you know, we have the pesticides and the glyphosate, which is destroying the cell microbiome, our microbiome. It causes cancer. And so we have all these downstream consequences, not to mention how horrific factory farming is. So the whole industrial food system from field to fork is completely effed. and and I've actually had a non-profit called food fix campaign that's based on my book food fix that's was entitled how to save our health our economy and our planet and our communities one by the time and it was really laying out from field to fork what's wrong with our food system with our food policies and and you know we really have to address this because it is why we're gone from you know a relatively healthy nation if you look even back in the 70s you know you can't healthy pretty fit.

2:23Yeah, I mean, you can't see that many overweight people. Now you can't find a skinny person. If you look at the data, we've gone from about 5 % to 10 % obesity when I was born to now 42%. It's so interesting you say that because I was in Mexico City with Martha, my fiance, the other week, and then we flew into St. Louis. And as we landed in St. Louis, which I lived in for about eight years, I grew up in Ohio, lived in St. Louis for a while at high school, college. and as we landed I said notice what you see when we get off the plane yeah and if we're walking through the terminal I said what do you see she knows people a little bit bigger here yeah it's hard to find like it the majority was a bigger set of individuals yeah walking through the airport and I go unfortunately as much as I love the Midwest the people in the Midwest are the best that's right kindness the best values yes ma 'am yes sir let me open the door how's your day like beautiful people but it just seems like a majority are leaning into chronic disease pre diabetic diabetes everywhere and I don't know if this is your stat or if this is something else online but I saw that six out of ten Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime is that correct six out of ten Americans today have a chronic illness six out of ten have it now Four out of ten have more than one.

3:40If you're over 65, it's 83%. Well, have a chronic illness. Has a chronic disease. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, autoimmune disease, you name it. And what is a chronic disease? What is the root of all chronic illness? Well, we're going to unpack that, but it's primarily our food and our lifestyle and our environmental toxins. I would say those are the big three things that are driving it. And we can unpack that. But I kind of would love to just help people understand the problem we're in. And it's sort of the frog in the boiling water. When you turn the heat off slowly, you kind of don't notice it.

4:16It's kind of where we are. We went from a relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations in the world. We've seen not just sort of this rise in obesity and diabetes. We've had a huge rise, for example, in heart disease. We think we're improving heart disease treatments, we're getting better and better healthcare. We went from spending$1.3 trillion in 2000 to spending almost$4.9 trillion in 2023 on healthcare. Most of that's for chronic disease, most of it's preventable, most of it's caused by dying lifestyle. And so we've seen heart disease go up by 50 % in the last 50 years, cancer go up by 30%, it's gone up by 50 % in those under 50, like colon cancer.

4:58We're seeing young kids getting cancer now. Not the typical kid cancers like leukemia, but like adult grown-up cancers. And it's the root cause of that, our food? 100%. Type 2 diabetes. When I went to medical school, Louis, which I'm ancient, but not that old, right? It's, I'm going to be 65 next month. There was nothing that was called type 2 diabetes. It was called adult onset and juvenile onset. Juvenile onset is basically an autoimmune disease requiring insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease because of too much sugar. Now they threw out those terms because kids as young as two or three years old are getting type 2 diabetes.

5:32Kids as young as 15 are needing liver transplants from drinking soda. Wow. Yeah, this is a big problem. We're seeing autoimmune diseases, a 100 % increase in autoimmune diseases. We're seeing 100 % increases in mental illness. What illness? Mental illness, depression, anxiety, especially in kids. 20 % of kids have some type of mental illness, autism, ADD, depression, anxiety. We've seen the rates of autism go up 1 ,000%. We've seen digestive issues go up doubling to 100 % increase. So we've seen dementia go up 150%. And we're spending more and more money. And we're getting worse and worse and worse.

6:11And we're spending more and more on drugs. That's even the other thing that's sort of shocking to me. How much are we spending on drugs a year? Collectively, I haven't done the math. But just for example, statins alone is almost a$40 billion a year industry. That's the number one selling class of drugs. But if you look at the drugs that are sold, it's the lifestyle drugs we're selling. Heart disease prevention like statins, acid blocking drugs, mental health drugs, which are often lifestyle related. Now we understand there's a whole role of nutritional psychiatry, metabolic psychiatry. You had Casey Meade on the show, but she talks about brain energy.

6:46But Christopher Palmer, who's a psychiatrist, talks about brain energy. How the loss of metabolic health in the brain causes psychiatric illnesses. Everything from depression to bipolar disease to schizophrenia to autism. So these are things that are... And brain health is affected by what we eat also, right? 100%. 100%. The brain is... This is a famous saying in medicine. Psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. And neurologists pay no attention to the mind. Right? And so they're connected. And often the mind doesn't work because the brain's not working. And the brain's not working because in large part we're eating a diet that's full of sugar and starch that causes insulin resistance in the brain.

7:27It creates a metabolic crisis in the brain. It creates inflammation in the brain. And all these diseases are inflammatory diseases. Even things that aren't like allergies and autoimmune diseases. And we've seen allergy rates go up dramatically in kids. And we've seen all these problems and we're spending more and more on all these drugs. We're spending more and more. Like we've seen a 400 % increase in use of diabetes drugs. A 300 % increase in the use of cardiovascular drugs. We've seen a 400 % use of psychiatric drugs increase. We've seen an increase in cancer therapies and 500 % increase in the use of autoimmune drugs.

8:01And respiratory drugs, 200%. Pain drugs, 400%. GI drugs, 300 % increase. So we're pouring more and more drugs on everybody. We're getting sicker and sicker. We're spending more and more money. It's$1 in$5 in our economy. Wow. And nobody's asking why. It's like we're just trying to plug the holes in, like if you've got 100 holes in the boat, or we're trying to bail the boat while the boat's sinking instead of going, why are the holes in the boat?

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9:24Again, have an amazing day and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.