Are You Nutrient Deficient? The Hidden Factors of Accelerated Aging | Rhonda Patrick - ENCORE

27:26Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in Function Health Labs. Yeah. It's great to see when we see that. Five-year increased life expectancy. If you think about Japan, they eat a lot of seafood in Japan. Their omega-3 index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%. Yeah, yeah. Their mercury levels are probably also very high. What's funny, it's funny that you say that, Mark, there's been studies in pregnant women. You probably remember this, that decades ago, women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. And that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega-3 fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for neurodevelopment.

28:04And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega-3 fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a high level of omega-3 and high mercury. those children had scored higher on intelligence tests, so IQ scores. Even if so, so high mercury was actually biomarking intelligence. It wasn't actually the mercury. It was high omega-3. That's crazy. But yes, you get the point. Although in Japan, they eat a lot of seaweed, which seaweed is a chelator for heavy metals.

28:41Oh, is it? So is green tea, by the way. I think garlic. Garlic, the beta mercaptans in garlic as well. But back to the omega-3 and this study I was talking about from Bill Harris. is so interesting because he also, this is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham, there's people that have all sorts of lifestyles, including smoking. And so he did a sub-analysis looking at smokers and non-smokers and their omega-3 index. And what Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega-3, so they had a high omega-3 index of 8%, they had the same mortality as non-smokers with a low omega-3 index.

29:21Okay, everybody, this does not mean you can smoke and take your fish oil pills. I don't get any ideas. Or if you're not getting enough omega-3, it's like smoking, right? I mean, if you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect. Yeah, fascinating. So having a low omega-3 index had the same mortality risk as smoking. Okay, so we're talking about 90 % of the American population is in that category. Yes, yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole host of randomized controlled trials looking at omega-3s being cardioprotective, right? So they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides.

30:03Yeah, there's actually prescription omega-3s, which you can pay much, much more than you would go get a basic omega-3 for lowering triglycerides as a therapy. Right. Yeah. And you mentioned inflammation, you know, so this is another thing they do. They play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's a driver of aging in many ways, brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging. So omega-3s are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in negating inflammation aside from exercise. Yeah. And they're just, they're so, well, like, I, like the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word, but essentially it means it does a million things, right?

30:42It's not just one thing. It's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer. I mean, it's, it's, it regulates inflammation. So these are, these are nutrients that do so many things in the body. Then they're worked differently than drugs. And they're, they're essential. They're called essential because they are essential. And one of the challenges is that we're looking for that quick fix, and we're trying to diagnose a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure you're familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin D researcher, and he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases.

31:25And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're a nutrient deficient at severe level, like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low, you'll get rickets. Or if you don't have enough vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, eat too much white rice and white flour, which they started doing in the third century, you get beriberi and pellagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies. The thesis he had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiencies of diseases.

32:01Like if you're low in folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia which is big cells called megaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it can cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. And same thing with vitamin D. In the short run, you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and die sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept. It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin, but otherwise you don't need them, right? And that's also very much in line with Bruce's triage theory, right? These micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function to repairing DNA.

32:40So there's a lot of, you know, you can look in the mirror and if you're vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've got scurvy. I've got scurvy, right? But like when you're magnesium deficient, like you're not going to see DNA damage happening. But you might feel muscle cramps and you might have anxiety. You might have constipation. You might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiencies. It might stimulate the loud noises. And so like as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at microdene deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency.

33:16and I think people sort of don't make that distinction. And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle. When you get the McPillade and the nutrients are deficient, so many things get better. I like it is insufficiency because most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification even in our ultra-possessed foods because of preventing neural tube defects, preventing pellagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in the early... Fortified, but it's like junk fortified. It is. It is. But it seems to stop some of those deficiencies, right? But it's the insufficiency.

33:52And with vitamin D, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called a vitamin D response element. It's so important. It's encoded in our DNA, right? Right. So to not have enough vitamin D. So 70 percent of the U.S. population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about 30 nanograms per mil. 70 percent. 30. Which would be. And if you add it up to 45 or 50, it's probably like 80 plus 90 percent. Right. Yeah. So and so that would be there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels.

34:36Of course, this is, again, observational. Lots of meta-analyses out there, even dating back for like 30 years. And it seems as though having at least 40 nanograms per mil seems to be a sweet spot. You know, 40 to 60 is a really good place to be where you're having a good level of vitamin D. But again, it's a steroid hormone. It's regulating over 5 % of the protein encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes. You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity. Brain function, it regulates genes that are important for converting tryptophan into serotonin.

35:12Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control. You know, so vitamin D... Maybe I need more of that then. Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D, typically you make it from UVB radiation exposure from the sun. Yeah. But... I'll tell the shielders house from the sun and sun's locked. And so we live indoors, work indoors. And yeah, it's a problem. And when you're all running around half naked hunting and gathering, we got a lot of vitamin D. And we ate, and we're coastal areas, and we ate, you know, fish, small fish like herring and sort of things that they're higher in vitamin D.

35:44Or if you're foraging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the Paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that. Right. Exactly. We don't. And so, you know, I do think, so people, the simple solution is a vitamin D supplement, right? And so about 4 ,000 IUs a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is 20 nanograms per mil up to a sufficient range. But you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin or what doctors will recommend. I am. I am. Because, yeah, you really do. It's about 1 ,000 IUs of vitamin D will raise blood levels between 5 to 10 nanograms per mil.

36:23But we have genes. We have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this, again, comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens. We're all different. We're all different. And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't doing, converting vitamin D3 into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone, 125-hydroxyvitamin D. You know, so. Well, let's go down this rabbit hole because I think, you know, there's a paper you just reminded me of that Bruce Hames wrote.

36:54it was published in, I think, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition years ago about how one-third of all of our DNA codes for enzymes. And an enzyme is a catalyst. It converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts or the coenzymes or the helpers are micronutrients. And so what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in the population's need for different nutrients. So some people might need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people might need 4 ,000 micrograms of folate. And so it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are.

37:32And it gets really fascinating that you can actually start to customize your own diet and your own supplement management based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are. And so I think there's this, it was sort of a wake up call for me, like, holy cow, when you think of our DNA and everything it does, if one third of it is coding for enzymes and And all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals. If we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made, right? So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery if you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body.

38:13And that's why we call it functional medicine, because it's about how do we optimize function, right? It's true. You know, these minerals and vitamins, so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins, like these are co-factors for these enzymes to make these enzymes run properly. And if you don't have, you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally, right? So in the case that we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. So B vitamins are involved in serotonin production.

38:53Magnesium is involved in vitamin D production, right? You were talking about nutrients working together. And it's very true. So I think a really great way to think about eating and diet is what do I need to run my metabolism, right? And when you say metabolism, what do you mean by that? Because it's not like my weight. You're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine. Yeah. Yeah. I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss. I got us on metabolism. Right. Right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes.

39:32You're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that are making proteins function. So they are producing energy. They are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis. They are causing, you know, your liver to function properly, your heart to function, the lungs, everything. So every chemical reaction all the time. Exactly. I don't know if I heard, I read this somewhere and I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule to another.

40:11And if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37 billion trillion chemical reactions may not work optimally. Exactly. So, you know, getting the micronutrients you need from food. And nature sort of color-coded them in a way, right? I mentioned, you know, chlorophyll. That's magnesium. You have vitamin K. Also the... What color is that? What color is vitamin K? I guess it's green, too. I would say green. Green, green, green. Vitamin K1. And then the orange ones. The orange, right? And then you've got like the phytochemicals, right? So that would be the purples. But, you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and fruits and then you need your protein, right?

40:54And fiber. When you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants. which are a great source of both fermentable and non-fermentable fiber, right? So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right? Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, paleo. And I do think paleo is the closest thing to what I'm talking about. But what I'm talking about is even simpler because what it really means is that you understand why you need food. What's the purpose of food, right? The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega-3 and protein and fiber to improve gut health.

41:36That's the purpose of eating. And fuel. Right. And so that means you don't need ultra-processed foods. That means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet, you're going to be missing out on a lot of micronutrients. It's going to be very hard. I have a theory, which is, like I have many theories. one theory i have is that is that you know we're so uh depleted in these nutrients and it dysregulates our appetite and so when you're eating ultra processed food there's no nutrients in there and and so when a kid is iron deficient it'll eat dirt it's called pica and try to get some iron from the dirt and i think so many people in this country are so nutrient deficient that they're just eating more and more of the ultra processed food it's like they're looking for love in all the wrong places.

42:25Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis? Yes. Yeah. So it's kind of the same thing where, you know, your body needs a certain amount of protein to run optimally. And if you're eating, there's been a couple of randomized controlled trials on this. I think it's like Steven Simpson is one of the proponents of it. It was like 2000s or something. And that essentially, if you're eating ultra processed foods, which are high in, you know, lot of refined carbohydrates, low in protein that you overeat to sort of try to get enough protein. So it does make sense if your body's looking for more of micronutrients, more vitamins, more minerals, more protein that you start to overeat.

43:04And are you familiar with Kevin Hall's study that he published a couple of years ago? You mean the ultra-proceded diet where they had 500 calories more? They had 500? Yeah. So for people listening, I mean - Ultra-processed food. Exactly. They had two diets. They had a whole foods diet, which was essentially mostly they were getting salads and they were getting poultry and lean meats and some fish, oatmeal. And then there was the ultra-processed foods diet. And they were trying to match them for macronutrient. Yeah. So they were matched for calories. They were matched for total sugar, although the added sugar in the ultra-processed foods group was, it was like a huge difference.

43:43I mean, it was like something like 70 or 80 percent versus one percent so the the sugars in the whole foods diet were coming from fruit which has a fiber matrix right um so they were matched for that exactly so the added sugar was not matched although total sugar was right and then protein was somewhat matched the whole foods had a little bit more protein it was like something like um 14 15.6 percent in whole foods diet versus 14 percent in the ultra processed foods diet and they were given so a lot of a lot of things were matched and they were given these foods you know in a sort of metabolic ward where they came in and eat and they had 60 minutes to eat the meal ad libitum right so they could eat as much or as little as they want yes you got you got a big as much like giant buffet eat as much as you want like you got 60 minutes right and then they did it and then they group that eat the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day and just to do the math on that 500 calories times seven is 3 ,500 calories.

44:38That's one pound of weight gain. So you add that up, that's 52 pounds of weight gain in a year. The order of America is overweight. Yeah. I didn't do that math. I know that I just read the results, which was they gained two pounds in two weeks, whereas the whole foods diet lost two pounds in two weeks. Well, let's say it's two pounds, right? Two weeks. It's like you do the math. It's like, but you add that up over a year and then you add that up year over year. It's like, That's why we're seeing this sort of just incredible level of severe obesity and diabetes. And I mean, it's just, you know, the latest data I saw was sort of shocking was that 38 % of teenagers have prediabetes.

45:11Wow. I was like, what? I mean, it didn't exist when I graduated. I'm old, but it didn't exist when I graduated from medical school. Like, we didn't have it. We didn't have a kid. There's been studies that have looked at, like, healthy individuals, and they've given them, and they're actually young men, They gave them a 20-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage, sort of akin to like a soda, Coke or something. And they did this for three weeks. And after that three-week mark, their C-reactive protein biomarker for inflammation went up 100%. Their small, dense LDL, so these are lipoproteins that are transporting.

45:47Yeah, they're causing more heart disease. Exactly, causing more atherosclerosis. They went up as well. This was just after three weeks. you know and healthy of a sugar sweetened beverage which is the ultimate right that's the ultimate the ultra processed but but the reality is is that it's gluten free it's gluten free yes but it's definitely it's causing inflammation massive inflammation at the level of the gut um and so you you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of of having you know this ultra processed foods these sugar sweetened beverages you know which again like and they deplete nutrients because i think people don't realize that one you're not getting them but two you actually need nutrients to actually run your biochemistry and so you're trying to burn these calories and burn the food but you're actually depleted in the very nutrients required to run them metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food so you're kind of you know getting it from both sides yeah like a two hit yeah yeah yeah so again it's It comes down to, I think, you know, thinking about why you need to eat is so important because then it's like I need to get micronutrients.

46:55I need to get my fiber. I need to get protein. When I say fiber, carbohydrates, right? But it needs to be carbohydrates in the form of fruits and vegetables, which have the micronutrients and the fiber, right? Nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds, yeah, and oats. And then avoiding ultra-processed foods. I think if people were to do that and think about eating that way, and then you have to move, right? You have to be physically active. Being sedentary is a disease. There's data out there that show people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness. So this is a marker of, you know, I mean, it's a marker of how physically active you are, essentially.

47:32That's an oversimplification. But people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness have the same disease risk as people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, smokers. So how do you measure your cardiovascular fitness? Well, cardiorespiratory fitness is something typically you can measure if you go into like a lab that measures them and they put that like a mask. It's a VO2 max. So it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. They put a mask on you and that's really how you empirically quantify it. However, if you have like a smartwatch, Apple watches do sort of measure it. It's not really entirely accurate.

48:07I like my Garmin because it says I'm 45, but I don't believe it. Well, you can actually do it. You can do what's called the Cooper test. And so that's basically you do a 12-minute run on a flat surface like a track. If you have hills, it's harder to run hills. And so you're trying to run as fast as you can maintain for that 12 minutes. So it's a maintainable 12-minute pace, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's a calculation. You can look it up, the Cooper test, and you can sort of get a good estimate of your VO2 max. Yeah, yeah. But essentially, you know, having— That's assuming you could run for 12 minutes, which most Americans can't.

48:42You know, there's an argument to be made for exercise snacks. You know, so these are short bursts of, you know, physical activity where you're getting your heart rate above, you know, 70 % max heart rate. So you're getting to more into the vigorous exercise, you know, range. And there have been some studies. They're called the VILPA studies. Are you familiar with these? These are vigorous intermittent lifestyle activity studies. And Martin Gabala, he's an expert on high-intensity interval training. I've had him on my podcast. He's involved in a lot of this research. Jump down and then tend burpees and then go back to work?

49:17Sort of, yeah. People are wearing these wearable devices that they can measure their heart rate. And so scientists can see when they're getting these bursts of high-intensity exercise. So this type of exercise is actually not structured. What you're talking about would be structured, right, where you get up and do burpees or air squats or high knees or jumping jacks. This is where people sort of take advantage of everyday situations. So they sprint up the stairs, right? And run, you know, they're running to some place rather than walking. So they're really using their everyday lifestyle to kind of get their heart rate up.

49:46Well, people that do that, do anywhere between three to nine minutes a day, have a 40 % reduction in cancer mortality, a 50 % reduction in cardiovascular-related mortality, all-cause mortality. So this is beneficial for people. And this is even in people that identify as non-exercisers. So just getting like some sort of exercise does have benefits for people in general.

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51:53I mean, you look at the data on mortality and longevity. one of the biomarkers that's the most correlated with longevity is vo2 max is your level of cardiovascular and respiratory fitness which is basically how fast your metabolism can run because it's basically an indirect measure of how much calories you can burn per minute and how much oxygen you can burn per minute because they're very correlated and your metabolism being having a slower fast metabolism is really about your vo2 max because if you have a high vo2 max you can burn a lot of oxygen and then you can burn a lot of calories because you need both to actually combust in your mitochondria the energy factories to actually produce atp which is the source of energy for the runs everything in your body so it's like you you actually uh you actually have this incredible system but but we don't really uh take advantage of it and we don't maximize our fitness which is so correlated and i think the other number that's sort of a little easier to get is your waist to hip ratio which you need to tape measure and that again is the the bigger your waist, the shorter your life, basically.

52:59Is that also for visceral fat, measuring visceral fat? Yeah. I mean, your waist to hip ratio is a crude measure of visceral fat. I mean, but yeah, if you did a DEXA scan or an MRI, you could look at body composition for sure. It's like, it's that belly fat. But again, that's all relates to insulin resistance and prediabetes and inflammation, which again, I want to getting back to the micronutrients, all those things actually accelerate your risk of many of these. Like magnesium is very involved in blood sugar regulation, right? So if you're talking about 45 % of America is being deficient and our 50 % being deficient in magnesium, that affects blood sugar.

53:33We have an epidemic of diabetes and prediabetes in this country. Are you familiar with some of the, there's some gene variations in the transporter that transports magnesium into cells and people with a gene variation that obscures the transport, so basically they're not getting as much magnesium into their cells are much more likely to have type 2 diabetes. So there's really some, I would say, more causal evidence there, right? Because one would argue, well, people that are low in magnesium are also eating a refined sugar diet and they're not exercising and all these other potential unhealthy lifestyle factors that could be contributing.

54:08But when you look at the genetics, right, I mean, it doesn't lie. So you're looking at someone that's not getting enough magnesium. They are, you know, insufficient and deficient in some cases. And their risk for type 2 diabetes just skyrockets. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think this is so important that, you know, we are walking around with a population that is got such treatable, cheap solutions for so many issues. And that we're looking for sort of drugs to treat this and drugs to treat. I'm not against drugs at all, but it's like we're missing the boat because, yeah, somebody doesn't have scurvy or rickets, but they're still insufficient and they're going to need these nutrients and actually to optimize your health.

54:49And you kind of started to unpack the degrees of different nutrient deficiencies. And, you know, as you're going through the list, you're going through the things that are the most common deficient in our country, right? Omega-3s, vitamin D, magnesium, and there's others, right? So there's other, you need every essential vitamin and mineral, right? You need all those for sure. But the ones that are really causing havoc are, you know, deficiencies in, you know, the methylation nutrients like the B vitamins, There's folate B6, B12 deficiencies in iron, deficiencies in zinc. Potassium. Potassium.

55:22These are like, yeah, because we did die this very plant poor. And that's where you get your potassium, which is from plants. And you need to actually not get as much sodium, which is what we're eating on lots of processed foods. So not like salt is bad. We need salt. It's just, it's all the salt added by corporations to your food to make you palatable because otherwise it tastes like cardboard. They had sugar and salt and fat and it makes you addicted to it. So we, and we, and we leave out all the key nutrients that are needed to regulate everything in our body. And so, so maybe you can kind of take us down that, that lists a little deeper.

55:56So we've got, we've got to get omega threes. We've got to get vitamin D. We've got to get magnesium. And, and literally we could spend a podcast on each nutrient and probably 10 podcasts on each nutrient, but, but we're just going to go through. So we'll understand like, these are the things that are non-negotiables that you've got to have and that you've got to test. You got to measure and figure out whether your levels are okay, because the average physician or a practitioner isn't going to do it. And they don't know how to do it. And they don't get taught this in medical school. And I'm working on trying to change that in Washington, but it's, it's, it's a, it's kind of a, it's kind of a travesty because it's, it's, it's, it's like a staring us in the face that we have this epidemic of micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies, and they're not being addressed and often worse for being told not to fix them.

56:39Yeah. So the vitamin D, magnesium, omega-3 we talked about, right? Believe it or not, a lot of people, I don't remember the exact percentage, but quite a bit of people are not getting enough vitamin C. Something like 30 or 40 percent or 40 percent or something like that are not getting enough vitamin C. Yeah. I heard that 10 percent are deficient at the level that would cause scurvy in America. That's unbelievable. Just not eating any vegetables or fruits because vitamin C is also in vegetables, not just in fruits. Calcium is another one. So, I mean, these are things that can be tested for and measured.

57:13Another one is vitamin E. People are not getting enough vitamin E. Again, that's also found in things like avocado, nuts, whole grains. And then potassium is a big one because it's so important for the sodium-potassium pump, which plays a role in blood pressure. And so when you're talking about too much sodium and not enough potassium, it's really exacerbating that not getting enough potassium aspect, right? Because that ratio is so important. And so not only are, I think it's something like 96 % of the U.S. population doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium. It's essentially everyone. And our potassium intake is hunter-gathered.

57:52It should be 10 to 1 potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around. It's the other way around. Exactly. And so there's, you know, all sorts of problems with blood pressure and, you know, gosh, it's like even like 30 % of like individuals age 20 to 39 have hypertension. Yeah. These are young adults with hypertension. And we now know that hypertension isn't just a risk for cardiovascular disease. It's a risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease, particularly if you start earlier, right? If you're like a younger person. So like it's cumulative exposure to hypertension. Yeah. But, you know, it's important because you have to get blood flow to your brain.

58:31And, you know, you've got all these tiny, like 90 % of the brain vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are like the smaller than the size of a hair in terms of diameter. And they have to get blood flow to them. So exercise helps that. But hypertension exacerbates the lack of blood flow going to those blood vessels. And what happens is they're so tiny, they start to sort of constrict and sort of fall off. And you can get mini strokes. Mini strokes, but also neurons don't get the nutrients and the oxygen they need. And so then you start to lose neurons, right?

59:04And you get brain atrophy. And so there's this connection between hypertension and dementia. And, you know, I'm talking about potassium here because potassium does play an important role in... Very linear blood pressure. Yeah. So does magnesium. So does magnesium. So does magnesium. It's a relaxation mineral. And then exercise, of course, is one of the best things that you can do. I mean, as a doctor, when a patient comes in with preeclampsia, which is a problem of high blood pressure in pregnancy, or has preeclampsic seizures or anything like seizures, the treatment is intravenous magnesium. Right.

59:40Right? Sure. Think about it. And so, like, this is something with uncontrollable high blood pressure. What do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium because all the drugs don't work. I think there's some evidence also I've seen that vitamin D plays a role in preventing that as well. And it's funny, like when I was pregnant, I asked my OBGYN for a vitamin D test. Do you want to know what his answer was? You don't need it. Why? It's going to be low. Why is it going to be low? Why? It's going to be low. Just take vitamins and just take it anyway. Are you kidding me? Right. Like you're telling me why do I need a test that's just going to be low?

1:00:15and you know and i'm like well i want a test and i yes i'm going to be supplementing but i want to know with how much i'm going to be you know she was supplementing with but it was just really astonishing to me that mentality you know and actually just recently i went in for um i didn't go to my normal doc i went into um it was like a you know a sort of er kind of urgent care doc and i wanted to get my vitamin d levels measured and he goes you know that's falling out of vogue now and i just i just gave him this long lecture i mean i was like i went in deep i looked at when he goes is this your area to area of expertise and i was like yes it is i've done research on it i've published studies on it and he kind of was like okay all right i mean it's not their fault i mean i i'm a physician and you know i don't fault them and um you know my daughter's graduating medical school this year and like zero nutrition it is it is like it's even micronutrients like I don't even think they covered any of that.

1:01:10And, and it, to me, it's like, this is the center of our biology. And if we don't, we don't understand how our bodies work and how to work with them and how to facilitate normal function. And it's not like the micronutrients are the only thing, but they're a very key foundational part of being healthy. And when you go through the litany of things that we're deficient in, you know, it's, it's a lot of things and, or insufficient and, and it's different degrees of insufficiency in the population for different nutrients, but, you know, widespread deficient you know iron zinc selenium a lot of things that iodine i mean it just i see this all the time in our testing that function health and i'm like kind of shocked and i've done testing for you know a lot of patients who've come to see me over the decades but this is like 110 000 people it's not like i can see 10 000 people or 20 000 in my lifetime but like this is a huge amount of people and it's sort of shocking to me and yet it's not really being talked about as a sort of critical step in helping address our chronic disease epidemic.

1:02:10And what you're saying is that, yes, you can get deficiency diseases like scurvy, but what's really the issue is how these contribute to our long latency deficiency diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and diabetes and osteoporosis and muscle aging and all the things that we don't want, right? Yeah, so one of the last papers that Bruce published, his second to last paper, was called Longevity Vitamins. And, you know, it was about these vitamins like vitamin D and magnesium and omega-3, taurine or some other like essential amino acids that play a role in the way we age and slowing age-related decline.

1:02:50Yeah. And, you know, there was just a recent study that came out on vitamin D, sufficient levels of vitamin D. People that supplemented with vitamin D were 40 % less likely to have dementia. Yeah. You know, so the reality is, is that - You mean vitamins don't just create expensive urine? They don't. They don't. You know, these micronutrients are running everything in our body. And when you have insufficient levels of them, you're not going to necessarily see it, although you probably feel it. You might have symptoms, but you don't attach it to that. Right. You don't attach it to that. But it's causing this insidious damage, right?

1:03:25This insidious DNA damage, a little bit of oxidative stress, a little bit of inflammation. Or just I get sick all the time because my vitamin D is low. Right. Or you're getting sick. Or my muscles ache, you know, because vitamin D is low. Or, you know, I have muscle cramps because my magnesium is low, right? Or I have depression because my, you know, methylation vitamins are low. Like, people have symptoms. They just don't correlate it with nutrient deficiencies. Depression is interesting. There's a pretty classic study that no one ever talks about where healthy individuals were injected with lipopolysaccharide.

1:03:58So for those listening, this is a component of your bacterial outer cell membranes. It's present in our colon because we have about, I don't know how many trillions of bacteria. Like so many bacteria in there, right? 40, 50 trillion. Okay, 40 or 50 trillion. There's about a gram of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off. And these are bacterial toxins. This is what pisses off your immune system to know it. It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases it. Right. It also known as leaky gut. It leaches the LPS into our bloodstream.

1:04:33Well, this study took healthy individuals and injected them with an amount of LPS that would be equivalent to something that you could get from intestinal permeability. Yeah. And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals. Okay. One, that links inflammation to depression. 100%. Two, if those individuals were given EPA, so this is one of the omega-3 fatty acids, it does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms like resolvins and mericins and the SPMs. These are all molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly. They did not experience those suppressive symptoms if they were injected with the LPS.

1:05:12If they got omega-3s. If they have the omega-3s. Yeah. So it comes down to like, again, you know. And omega-3s have been shown to actually help with depression. They have. And ADD. They have. Yeah. With depression, specifically EPA seems to be very important for depression. And I think that's because there's a really big inflammatory component to depression. Yeah. Where, you know, there's now studies showing that people that don't respond to classical SSRIs, so serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Like Prozac. Exactly. People that don't respond to that typically have very, very high levels of C-reactive protein inflammation.

1:05:53So there's like a subset of people. Some people respond and it helps them. But there's a subset, a quite large subset of people that have very high inflammatory biomarkers and do not respond to SSRIs. And so logically, the next question would be, should we lower their inflammation? How can we lower their inflammation? I read some paper that was like hypothesizing that we should use TNF alpha blockers, the biologics for depression. In other words, these are drugs that massively suppress inflammation in the body use for serious autoimmune diseases. And they're talking about using a red depression.

1:06:25I'm like, wait a minute. Like, how about we find out why there's inflammation in the first place and get to the root cause of it, which is really what we do in functional medicine. I think what you're kind of hitting on, just sort of prooffully, and I want to sort of tie the dots together, is that when you don't have enough of the right nutrients, and you don't have a proper functioning metabolism, there's a lot of downstream consequences. You get inflammation, you get oxidative stress, and you get damaged mitochondria, and you get DNA damage. And when you look at these processes, these are the fundamental things that have to be working for you to be healthy across every organ, across every disease state.

1:07:01And it's what we're now calling hallmarks of aging or including many of these things. And what you're talking about is, and Bruce Ames figured this out even before there was a word, hallmarks of aging. You figured out that these nutrients are critical in these pathways that degrade and become problematic as we age, but that we can offset that and actually take longevity nutrients and get a, quote, metabolic tune-up. And he's even talking about things that I think are, we don't think of typically as essential nutrients that are, we call conditionally essential nutrients. And whether it's carnitine or taurine or things that may not be kind of a typical deficiency disease, vitamin or mineral, but that are still really important for our biological functioning and we're still low on them.

1:07:39So I have this theory I want to come back to in a minute about, that I kind of made up called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've co-evolved with plants to borrow their phytochemicals to regulate key pathways in our body so we can stay healthy. And that without them, we don't get a deficiency disease. You don't get like broccoli deficiency, but actually we kind of do because the phytochemicals like sulforaphane or the glucosinolates or isothionates. These are molecules that regulate key pathways in our body. For example, liver detoxification or removing heavy metals or whatever, controlling oxygen stress.

1:08:18They work to actually facilitate these pathways. And so I kind of have this theory that it's more than just like essential vitamins and minerals. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's essential if you want to be really healthy. I completely, a thousand percent agree. They just made this up. So I think that humans, we evolved to eat plants and meat and things, but plants because of the phytochemicals. You know, there are, so you mentioned sulforaphane, right? So sulforaphane is present in a variety of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. It's much more, it's not present, I'm sorry, the precursor to it, glucoraphanin is present in it and it gets converted into sulforaphane when the plant matter is broken, chewed, because it activates an enzyme called myrosinase, which converts glucoraphanin into sulforaphane.

1:09:05Big mouthful of words, but essentially when you chew your broccoli, you get cool chemicals that help your body. Exactly. And if you go even further and chew the young plant, the broccoli sprouts, there's about 100 times more glucoraphanin in it. Damn, I'm trying to grow broccoli sprouts, and I keep trying to forget, and I think I got to get back on that. Yes. Broccoli sprouts are really, really high in glucoraphanin. I also take a supplement that's been used in a lot of clinical studies called Avmacol. I don't have any affiliation with them, but they've got a really great method of stabilizing that myrosinase enzyme, which is very unstable.

1:09:42It's also very heat sensitive. it. But before I get sidetracked, sulforaphane is the most potent dietary activator of what's called transcription factor in our body. It's NRF2. And this is... Nrf2. Yeah. It's a master regulator of, as you mentioned, detoxification enzymes. So they're called phase two detoxification enzymes. Also phase one biotransformation enzymes. So those are enzymes that will convert pro-carcinogens into carcinogens. So NRF2 activation will blunt that. It'll stop that from happening. So think things like nitrites being converted into nitrosamines. Nitrites are present in a lot of processed meats.

1:10:22So Nrf2 activation, typically it's like it gets activated every 80 minutes or so inside of our cells. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets, sorry, it gets activated every 130 minutes. But if you take sulforaphane, it gets activated like every 80 minutes, something like that, where it's like you're getting like a 60 % increase in the activation of this important transcription factor, which is regulating just hundreds of different genes that are antioxidant, involved in antioxidant function, anti-inflammation. Clinical studies showing that if you give someone broccoli sprout extract or sulforaphane or glucoraphanin plus the enzyme myrosinase, it increases glutathione in plasma and in the brain by fMRI.

1:11:05I mean, this is unbelievable. Glutathione, as you know, it's one of the major, major antioxidants that our body has. And it's very important for the brain. Other studies in China where there's a lot of air pollution show that people that take about 40 micromoles of sulfur-oophane, they start to excrete some of the chemicals that are in air pollution, like benzene, which is a carcinogen. They excrete it by 60 % after 24 hours. Again, because the activation of the phase 2 detoxification. I'm thinking of all the people in LA right now. Exactly. It's very, so I've been telling all my friends in LA to - The toxins get released into the air, dioxin and all organic compounds and heavy metals and plastics.

1:11:46I mean, it's pretty frightening. So I think people can protect themselves to some degree by upregulating these pathways and taking the right foods and the right supplements. I think the phytochemicals, again, I'm 100 % with you. I think we were supposed to eat these. These are pathways in our body that are activated by a little bit of stress. They're stress response pathways. And the phytochemicals provide that tiny bit of stress that activates them in a way that's powerful enough to not only deal with a little bit of stress, but to deal with the stress of aging. And anthocyanins from blueberries.

1:12:19I mean, this is another one. We've got so many randomized controlled trials now on giving people blueberry extract powder with actual anthocyanins versus the taste of it. So it's placebo. it improves cognitive function across the lifespan kids adolescents older adults it lowers damage to dna it improves blood flow to the brain you know these this is equivalent to like a cup of blueberries a day so it's so important to get these phytochemicals it's not only important to eat the fruits and the vegetables because of the micronutrients but the phytochemicals as well and bruce would argue that like these some of these phytochemicals they're longevity vitamins who need them.

1:12:59And he argues that. I mean, that's sort of striking to me as I sort of dug into this, you know, 25, 30 years ago, I was like, wait a minute, like, how do these molecules know what to do? And how do they know to bind to this receptor? And what's just from a plant? Like, so why is it working in my body? And how is it regulating all these different enzymes or pathways that regulate, you know, immune function and your microbiome? I mean, just it's the list goes on and on. And I, and I, And so it occurred to me that, you know, we, we, we grew, uh, through evolution consuming over 800 different plant species.

1:13:33And now I think we have three are the main staples, you know, corn, wheat, and, uh, soy and rice, depending on where you live. And then another 12, it make up the total amount of vegetables and plants. We typically like onions and cabbage and whatever carrots and tomatoes. But like when you look at the full array of plants out there, we ate all these plants and those molecules are not there for us. Like those plants didn't say, oh, gee, I'm going to I'm going to make this like sulforaphane so I can help my little human friend over there. They're the plant's defense mechanisms. So they're actually there to help the plants protect themselves against damage, predators, UV radiation from the sun.

1:14:13Like pretty much they're their immune system. And so they are a little kind of can be a little toxic. Right. But that's what you're saying. It's a little kind of tiny stress, the xenohormesis kind of concept where you're taking some form thing and stressing your body with like a sauna or a cold plunge or being up at altitude or being under the sea level, a hyperbaric chivalry. These are all stresses on the body that activate our body's own innate healing response. And so that's kind of how I see these phytochemicals. Exactly, exactly. The antioxidant response element, you were talking about DNA having, There's a sequence in genes in our DNA called antioxidant response elements that respond to this Nrf2 activation, right?

1:14:55So it is. It's evolved into our DNA, and there's ways to do it. Xenohormesis, you're talking about plants and phytochemicals, exercise, all these different ways that we're meant to basically stress ourselves a little bit, right? And not just sit and be sedentary and have all the calories we want and consume all the ultra-processed foods. Instacart. All of that. Terrible. I mean, it's crazy. You don't actually have to leave your house with Amazon, Instacart, you know, like Uber Eats or whatever. Like you don't need to go anywhere. Yeah. And we really do need to move. I mean, it's not an add-on.

1:15:37It has to be something that's part of your hygiene that you do every day, like brushing your teeth. You have to do it. Like it's not like, even if it's just 10 minutes of exercise, like you have to do it. It makes a difference and our bodies need it. Like you're depriving your body of it if you don't. Okay. So, so let's kind of back up a little bit. We were talking about all these incredible things and yes, exercise a hundred percent, but that's another podcast. This one is about micronutrients, the widespread deficiency we have in the population that's undiagnosed, that's not tested for, that people walk around with that's fixable for pennies a day at levels that are relatively infinitesimally small.

1:16:18Like when you, for example, eat a piece of chicken breast, it's four ounces, that's 30 grams. We're talking about milligrams or sometimes microgram doses, like tiny little bits of stuff in micronutrients can have profound effects on our well-being and our health and our mental health, our risk for chronic diseases. And, and yet most of us are walking around in this invisible cloud of insufficiency or deficiency and, and have no clue. And then you're not a doctor and a practitioner, but you're like a PhD doctor, uh, not like an MD doctor. Um, what, what do you recommend and, and, and does it have to be difficult and onerous and expensive?

1:17:00Uh, how do you sort of stack the deck? So you're like getting the basic things you need and, and not running into this trouble. Yeah, I do have some of the basic things that I think, well, that I take, but also that I think that would help a majority of people that are insufficient in a lot of these micronutrients. And first and foremost, vitamin D supplement. And again, I think generally speaking, vitamin D, 4 ,000 IUs a day, pretty, pretty, for the most part, gets people to a sufficient-ish level. You have to do a blood test to really know for certain. You may have to take a little more, you know, but starting at 4 ,000 IUs a day, which is the upper top of the board of the day, is safe.

1:17:43And this is actually by the National Academy of Sciences saying this is a safe level. Exactly. Number two, omega-3 fatty acids. And, you know, this is something where Bill Harris has published studies looking at how do you get someone who is low omega-3 index, so 4 % omega-3 index up to an 8%. Turns out it takes close to about two grams a day. Two grams of? Of EPA and DHA. So when you get, just for clarification purposes, if you get a pill and it says a gram of FISHWA, it might not have a gram of EPA and DHA. It would be like 300 or 200 milligrams. So you have to look at the concentration of EPA and DHA in the milligram amounts on the label.

1:18:27Otherwise, you know, it might take one pill or it could take five pills. Exactly. So that, I think, is a pretty simple solution. So one to two grams? 1.5 to two grams. You get most people that are in a 4 % low range to an 8 % high rate. And the balance of EP and DHA, does it matter? Not really. Is it 50-50? Usually it's like a two-to-one ratio. EP and DHA. Yeah. For the most part. Something close to that. Okay. But I wouldn't sweat the small stuff. Number three and number four are kind of tied. But I think a multivitamin is a really good insurance because, you know, there's selenium, boron, yeah, there's, you know, the B vitamins, you know, you're getting there's vitamin A.

1:19:10There's so many different micronutrients and that really covers a lot of the bases. So I think a pretty high quality multivitamin is good along with magnesium. So magnesium, because such a large percentage of people are not getting enough magnesium, it is so important for a variety of processes, DNA damage, brain function, muscle function. People that are physically active, they sweat out magnesium, so you might need anywhere between 10 % to 20 % more than the RDA. And stress and coffee also. Stress and alcohol. Exactly. So you're like, what is the American life? Stress, coffee, and alcohol. Exactly.

1:19:47That's exactly right. That's why we're all deficient. We're literally peeing out. Yes. And so you want to make sure you're getting an organic salt. So that would be something like magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate. Citrate if you're constipated. Right. So those are the organic salts, which are more bioavailable. Tell a funny story. I just said, I was in the hospital recently for a back surgery and I wanted to get magnesium and I talked to the hospitalist and he gave me magnesium oxide. And I'm like, that's not bioavailable. And I sort of went through this with him and like you did.

1:20:23It wasn't as confrontational as that, but, but he was like, oh, you're right. I look it up and actually, no, true. I'm like, yep. So, but that's the main nutrient form of magnesium that you get in a lot of the supplements that you buy over the counter because it's the cheapest form. So magnesium oxide, if you see that on the label, just skip over. Right. So that would be another one. And then I add to my essentials the sulforaphane. I used to sprout and I no longer do that because my excuses. Yeah, I'm, you know. You're busy telling the world how to eat better and be healthy. It's like the worst thing you can do for your health.

1:21:02But I trust the science that I've read looking at the supplement that I take, which again, it's a really good supplement, Avmacol. And they have about the advanced formulas. What I take, I take about two to four a day depending on. And we'll put the link in the show notes for that. They're great. And they like publish studies on them, improving autism. So it's affecting the brain. So it's approved autism spectrum disorder in kids with autism, adolescents with autism. but it's a very strong activator of glutathione right so nrf2 pathway um so that's my my phytochemical i actually wrote a blog about glutathione years ago if anybody wants to sort of find out more about glutathione go on hymen and glutathione and you'll find it and it's kind of the master detoxifier the master antioxidant the master immune regulator it's like it's it's so critical and you get it through some of these plant foods you get it by sulfur containing amino acids you know which are found often in animal foods or whey proteins, great source.

1:21:56It is. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's a major, major antioxidant in the body. So, um, I think those are really some of the, their vitamin D fish oil, vitamin D 4 ,000 fish oil, one or two grams of the actual EPDHA, a multivitamin and high quality, high quality, meaning it shouldn't be blue or purple or green or yellow and have titanium and dyes and should be just, you know, the right. And, and the, bioavailability, the form of the nutrient matters. I mean, I think you and I both done a lot of work on this and people can dig around, but it's, it's not just like go to get your, uh, you know, Walgreens or CVS multivitamin.

1:22:33It's a little bit more judicious. And then magnesium. And how much magnesium? Um, you know, it depends. So some people get a laxative effect and they want that. That's what's great. Um, even with, even with higher doses of, of other forms they can, but um yeah so i mean i think it depends on your diet like if you're not eating a lot of plants shame on you you need to increase that but you know you about three 250 300 milligrams you know is a good is a good range now if you're trying to treat like migraines and stuff you might have to go higher like some studies show like 600 milligrams and then there's the form of magnesium magnesium threonate that's thought to cross the blood-brain barrier more effectively for brain health because magnesium doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier very well.

1:23:18But magnesium 3NA isn't essentially, it's not necessarily going to do the DNA damage repair aspect of magnesium. So make sure you're getting both if you're doing that. Yeah. So like for me, I take like 250 milligrams, maybe 300 milligrams. Yeah. And it depends on you. I mean, I remember I had a big magnesium aha when I had a patient, you know, decades ago, who was a radiology resident. So I radiation oncology resident at Mayo Clinic and she had debilitating migraines. Like, I mean, she saw the best doctors at Mayo Clinic. She says everybody, she tried every drug, she'd done everything. And she came to see me and we took a history.

1:23:59Amazing thing to do in medicine these days is to take an in-depth medical history, but it's like critical. I'm being facetious, but like they don't, doctors, Yeah. I mean, I have a 32 page questionnaire. So I was like, oh, you're constipated. Oh, you have muscle twitches and muscle cramps and you have headaches and you have anxiety and you have insomnia and you have palpitations. Hmm. This sounds like pretty severe magnesium deficiency. So why don't we load you up? And so we gave her like 1200 milligrams of magnesium and like migraines just went away and she was fine and everything else kind of corrected.

1:24:33And so she had all these, quote, different problems, right? Everything from constipation to insomnia to palpitations, which you don't think are related, but they're all connected. There's the body's one system. And that's what I'm talking about. These nutrients have so many different functions and they're so critical. So anybody listening to you, you know, you can't really get away from the fact that we live in a nutritionally depleted world, no matter how hard you try, even the foods, if you're eating organic, may not have the nutrients that they did 50 years ago. and, you know, most of us, you know, should test.

1:25:03And that's why I created Functional Health with my co-founders to allow people access to this data because they weren't getting it. Like you said, the doctor's like, oh, you don't need vitamin D, you know, why bother testing? You know, that's what people are facing. And then, you know, just take a multivitamin, a fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, and then, you know, maybe a broccoli pill. Yeah, then there's a bunch of other things you could add to that list as you're going to test. That's a dollar or two a day, you know, and that's not an insignificant amount of money. but you know given the the benefits you know the the risk benefit cost benefit ratio is pretty good on this it is it's amazing i mean i i think i think it's a it as bruce would say you know it's a really um it's it's affordable it's it's easily correctable for pretty cheap and it will have a huge difference in the way you age yeah this is amazing so we're gonna link to a lot of these studies from Bruce Ames, from your work.

1:25:56I want people to follow you, to learn about what you're doing, to listen to your great podcast, Found My Fitness. You've got a great website. Tell us all the places that we can find you and learn more about your work and keep up with your science. Okay, great. Thank you. So I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness. I'm on, you know, YouTube. Which I hope you'll be on someday. Yeah. I'm on my aspirations. Let me know when you're in San Diego. Okay. All right. So Found My Fitness, it's on YouTube. It's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. I have a website, foundmyfitness.com. And I also, I'm on social media, Instagram, X as foundmyfitness, or you can look up Rhonda Patrick.

1:26:34I have some free guides out there. I have one on omega-3. We talked a lot about it. So how to choose a good omega-3 supplement. So I kind of have a guide on that in terms of like, and I talk about some of the science of omega-3. So you can find that at omega3guide.com. And then I have - Three guides on how to do this and go into your detail and have the scientific papers and yeah. And then I have another free guide on improving brain health through brain-derived neurotrophic factor and a variety of exercise protocols and polyphenol protocols that have been published to improve brain health. And that's bdnfprotocols.com.

1:27:07You can find that there. I have a new guide out, How to Train, from all the exports that I've had on the podcast. Oh, I want to see that one. It's a good one. It's How to Train. So it's like to improve VO2max. We talked about that. How to Train to Improve Muscle Mass, Strength, Function. and it's according to all the incredible experts that I've had on my podcast. And that is the howtotrainguide.com. So those are all just free information that people can get by going and downloading the guide. So thank you so much, Mark, for having me on the podcast. Very interesting discussion. We share a lot of common passions with nutrition and micronutrients.

1:27:42Totally, totally. And, you know, we didn't cover a thousand topics from protein to exercise to hormesis. So I think I can see three or four more podcasts. I'd love to have you back to talk about these things. Because there's so many people out there who are, quote, health influencers, who don't have a degree, who may be educated, some better than others. I'm not saying you need a degree to be smart or to have an opinion. But there's a lot of noise out there. And if people want signal and they want the kind of juicy truth, go to Rhonda. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mark. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it.

1:28:18You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions.

1:28:48Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient.

1:29:18It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.