Could Diet Reverse the Course of MS? Dr. Terry Wahls' Remarkable Recovery

24:04Dr. Mark Hyman:What I want you kind of to dive in on, and I think this is where I think most people who talk about, you know eating healthy or food is medicine don't really fully understand the the granularity of what that means in other words just as though we have hundreds of different drugs or thousands maybe now and there are different drugs for different problems in the same way food is a drug and it's not just a metaphorical drug it's an actual drug and there are many types of food and therefore there are many drugs and not every condition requires the same drug. And so with food, when you're treating patients with food as medicine, different conditions require different diets.

24:52Dr. Mark Hyman:And what you hinted at, and I think it's important to double click on this, and I think it was quite brilliant, which is you're like, how do I look at the potential pharmacopoeia in food and design my diet to maximize the levels of nutrients that I know I biologically need based on my condition. That was a profound insight. And I had one patient who was like, I don't want to take any vitamins and I'm going to eat to get all my nutrients. I'm like, all right, it's a lot of work. She's like, well, I'm going to have like 25 pumpkin seeds to get enough zinc, or I'm going to have like three Brazil nuts a day to get my selenium.

25:27And she had an old spreadsheet. I'm like,

25:29Dr. Mark Hyman:I'm like, okay, that's not that easy to do. But tell us about the categories of food that you realized were so nutrient-dense and had such unique nutrients that it wasn't just about eating a healthy diet that's plant-rich or that's got golly fats or protein. It was more than that. So I had 20 nutrients that I identified as really important. And some papers from Beal, from Bowman, from Bruce Ames. and when I first started, I wanted to maximize the intake of those 20 nutrients and trying to figure out where they were. I went to my dieticians. They said, oh, that's too complicated. I can't do it.

26:12I went to the library. It's too complicated. I can't do it. Ultimately, I found the Linus Pauling Institute for Micronutrients And that got me the way I could identify the key food sources for those 20 nutrients that I'm tracking. And then, Mark, so I used that for my recovery, and I had this food list that I was following. But, you know, when I had my own personal recovery, I wanted to use this in my clinics, Mark. And I had, in my traumatic brain injury clinic, I had 20 minutes with the veteran. when I was staffing residents with the primary care clinic. Now I only had five minutes with the veterans.

26:51So I had to think deeply. I wanted to create a memorable food role to help my veterans remember how to eat. And now it's ended up creating basically the Wallace diet, the Wallace paleo diet, a ketogenic version of the same, so that I could teach it in just a few minutes. Do you want me to highlight that for your audience now?

27:17Dr. Mark Hyman:Yes, yes. I think, like, you know, you talk about organ meats, you talk about mushrooms, you talk about, you know, specific foods. So I'm going to go through those big categories. The green leafy vegetables, they're great sources of vitamin K, great sources of some particular carotenoids rich in the blue-green pigments, zeaxanthin, mesozeaxanthin, lutein, which are concentrated in the macula that protect the eye from the blue light, and also protect the retina and protect the brain. Great sources of calcium and magnesium. Then we look at the cabbage family and onions. They induce glutathione, the master antioxidant in the cells, and help support detoxification and support the NRF2 pathways to lower inflammation.

28:14The mushrooms, which I also recommend, boost lower anxiety and depression, lower the risk of cognitive decline. What mushrooms? Colors. Mushrooms. All culinary mushrooms. You just want to be sure that they aren't poisonous. So don't go collect mushrooms on yourself unless you are a really expert mushroom hunter, because there are mushrooms that will kill you. So just be sure that you have culinary mushrooms and have a wide variety of culinary mushrooms. And then the brightly colored, you know, carrots, beets, peppers, tomatoes, these carotenoids are linked with lower risks of diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, all-cause mortality, particularly blue, purple, black.

29:03Again, lower risk of anxiety, depression, cognitive decline. So those are nine cups of vegetables, measured raw. You can have them raw or cooked. Okay, just to stop there for a sec.

29:15Dr. Mark Hyman:So nine cups of vegetables. Per day. Per day. And I was trying to help encourage the Dietary Guidelines to have like, you know, like at least nine servings, which is basically a half a cup. And they didn't recommend that much, unfortunately. But you're talking about 18 cups. So a serving of vegetables is half a cup. And you're talking about nine cups. That's 18 cups of vegetables a day. That's an enormous amount. And how did you do that? You know, it's super fascinating. When I first started doing this, I was probably having six cups of kale, collards, mustard greens every day. And I probably had that for about four years.

29:57And then after four years, I didn't need quite that amount. I'm guessing I had this huge nutritional deficit that I finally got caught up after four years worth. And remember, I'm practicing in the VA. I didn't want my men to be hungry. And so I wanted them to eat all these vegetables, have at least 6 to 12 ounces of meat, fish every day. They could have more if they wanted. And I didn't want them to have sugar and white flour.

30:27Dr. Mark Hyman:I think the specificity is really important, and the granularity of it is important. Now, there are some just general principles, but you're eating a diet that's supporting all your basic biological functions, that's supporting your gut microbiome, that's reducing inflammation, that's helping detoxification, that's enhancing your mitochondria, that's providing immune-modulating compounds in the polysaccharides and mushrooms. And so we have the science to understand these things. But again, it's something that's just a big black hole in medicine, which is completely ignored. And you'd think that your story, which is now widely known, and you have a popular TED Talk, you have best-selling books, you'd think that the NIH would be banging down your door, that they'd be like, here's$100 million, Terry, let's figure this out.

31:17Dr. Mark Hyman:It's just striking to me that it's such a resistance to change. And I see this in my practice too. I see miracles after miracle, but they're not. They're just the deliberate application of the fundamental principles of biology to chronic disease in ways that we're trained in functional medicine, but that are not widely appreciated. But I don't know if you know this, but maybe you should actually apply for this. Medicare, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, I've been helping and trying to advise them. They have now put forth$100 million to study functional medicine and lifestyle medicine for chronic disease.

31:56Dr. Mark Hyman:Oh, and you can apply for this. Yes, it's called Maha Elevate. And anybody listening who's a functional medicine practitioner. Okay, I'm taking notes here, Mark. Yes, who's a functional medicine practitioner who's doing research, who wants to do research. The government is now going to fund over the next three years, probably about 30 projects,$3 million each, to sort of show that, oh, wait. Rather than the, I mean, these drugs that you were talking about that you're on are so expensive. You know, the autoimmune drugs are just, you know, so. 90 ,000 a year. I mean, it's a huge cost savings and not just to mention cost savings.

32:29Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, look at your life, Terry. Your life is an example. You were in a wheelchair in 2007. Your life was, you know, I would say very reduced in terms of the quality of your life, your capacity to function, your ability to engage, your ability to contribute in the world. And look at just one person, what you've done in their recovery that you've had to actually change the world, like to actually make a difference in how people think. It's just extraordinary. And, you know, I was the same way. I was about to go on disability when I was 37 years old from chronic fatigue syndrome and I had mercury poisoning.

33:05Dr. Mark Hyman:I couldn't function. I was so ill. And I think God found the same thing. I started to learn about this and started to try it on myself and I started to slowly recover. And I went from doing all that to, you know actually being back back in better shape than i've ever been in my life in 66 and and that's really possible if you know how the body works i mean i i too was you know clearly expecting i was going to finally have to apply for medical disability in 2008 uh unfortunately when i just had my performance review you know my boss was asking so terry how long are you gonna work i said well you know i sort of like um linus pauling i want to be giving lectures to staying room only audiences in my 90s and continuing to change the world.

33:52So my goal is to thrive to 120. We'll see.

33:55Dr. Mark Hyman:The conditions that you're talking about are so prevalent, right? And you lump them all together. You're talking about Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Lewy body, front and temple dementia, all the dementias. You're talking about MS. You're talking about ALS. I mean, obviously the depression, anxiety, mental illness is just, the scope is amazing. You know, what I'm curious about is you're now expanding your work to include other conditions, right? You're not just focusing on MS. So can you talk about some of your work and how it applies and what you're seeing and what you're doing in the clinical world?

34:28Dr. Mark Hyman:Because it's one thing to be a doctor like me. You know, I was at Cleveland Clinic. We did a lot of work there, but mostly I'm on the outside of the traditional healthcare system. But you're in it and you're doing academic research and you're running groups and you're running research studies. Tell us what you're finding in the next evolution of your work since we talked to you last. So in the traumatic brain injury clinic where I practiced for three years, we saw people who had a traumatic brain injury, usually PTSD. And as I taught them to improve their diet, add some stress reduction, get a step counter, they remarkably stabilized their symptoms and improved.

35:08Then the VA, at that same time, saw I was having tremendous success in primary care and pulled me out of my primary care clinic and let me establish a new clinic, the Therapeutic Lifestyle Clinic. And in that, I got to design the clinic. So I had a dietician work with me, and I went to primary care specialty medicine and invited them to give me their most difficult cases, Mark, and said, you know, I'm not going to use drugs. We're just going to use diet and lifestyle medicine. And we had a handful of cases at first, had success, and then steadily grew and grew and grew. And I kept having to redesign my clinic from small group to large group to small classes to large classes to very large classes.

35:56Then I decided to leave the VA and begin teaching the world. What I saw was that people would come to the Therapeutic Lifestyle Clinic, usually on 15 to 30 prescription drugs. They would have multiple diagnoses, autoimmune diagnoses, obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, some sort of mental health problem. So many diagnoses, a wide variety of diagnoses, but the most common symptoms were fatigue, pain, anxiety or depression, and brain fog. So these were the symptoms that were causing the most suffering. And as we taught them, basically to either adopt a gluten-free, dairy-free, nutrient-dense vegetarian diet or a paleolithic diet, that within three months, their fatigue is markedly reduced, their brain fog is reduced, and their energy is improved.

36:57and we're beginning to see that we have to start dialing back on their prescription meds because they're improving because we're creating health. But I also learned to not offend my partners by focusing on, I'm going to just focus on work on creating health and we will watch your prescription meds and adjust them if things begin to improve. So I was very careful to not be treating any disease state. I'm simply working on creating health. in watching for side effects and adjusting meds as needed. And my partners were okay with that message. I did have to deal with some intense criticism, pushback, and so I had to learn how to massage those relationships.

37:43Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, Terry, what you just said is so profound, and I want to just take a deeper dive on this, because what traditional medicine does is diagnose and treat disease by some type of combination of therapies, whether it's surgery or medication or radiation to somehow block or inhibit or interrupt some pathway. Now, surgery is great. I think I have nothing to say bad about surgery for the most part. It's an incredible advance in technology and I've had, you know, saved my life many times. So I'm not opposed to surgery. And I think it's one of those areas of medicine where, you know, we do great at it's an acute care thing.

38:24Dr. Mark Hyman:We replace hips, we can replace knees, we can cut out cancers, we can, you know, fix backs, we can do all kinds of stuff. But when it comes to like, you know, traditional internal medicine diseases that most people suffer from, we really, I think, have it all backwards. And you kind of did a very kind of polite, nice thing. So we're just going to work on creating health and not really worry about the diseases, you focus on the diseases. But the reality is that the way to treat disease is by creating health and the disease goes away as a side effect. So it's like, it's kind of like a little bit, uh, a little bit surreptitious and sneaky to say that because it's not offensive.

39:11Dr. Mark Hyman:And yet it actually is the thing that has the most leverage when it comes to making people recover from things that are, quote, incurable. And I think I want you to double click on what do you mean by creating health? Because in functional medicine, we don't really treat diseases. We create health, and that's the focus, is one of those things that impede health and try to remove those, and one of those things that create health or one of the ingredients for health and how do we provide those. And that's what we become expert in. We become expert in identifying what you have too much of or too little of, what you have too much of that's disturbing your system or too little of that you need to get to thrive.

39:51Dr. Mark Hyman:That's what you did for yourself. That's what I've done for myself. And the results are amazing. The body wants to be healthy. Like the body's innate programming is to be healthy. And yet most doctors don't understand that. And they're trying to interrupt something or interfere with something rather than saying, okay, how do I create the conditions for health? And so talk us through how you think about this whole idea of creating health. In our cells, we're doing 2 billion chemical reactions every second. And so I can take a drug that interferes with one of those chemical reactions. But if instead I focus on how do I create better support for more of those chemical reactions to happen the way they should.

40:35So that means making sure my nutrition is as good as possible, that my sleep is as effective as possible, that my social connections are as deep and meaningful as possible, that I am moving more and exercising more, that that will allow more of those 2 billion chemical reactions that are happening to be happening correctly. And unfortunately, you know, our medical students are not taught the elements that are key for optimal health. They're not taught the key elements for nutrition. They aren't taught how to be more successful with helping people with behavior change. Mark, the WHO has identified that if my conventional, when you and I were our conventional clinicians, and we told physicians, told our patients to adopt a diet for a medical reason, 25 % of them would go home and would make an attempt.

41:46And at a year, 2.5 % would actually still be doing the diet that you and I told them to do. In my clinical trials, peer-reviewed published research, our adherence rates at 12 months are at 90%. And in our six-month adherence rates are 83 % to 85%. We are extraordinarily good at this because we understand behavior change and because when people implement the diets that we prescribe and the lifestyle programs we prescribe, they actually feel better. And I teach them to pay attention to, you know, when you have a good day or a good week, look back. What were you doing? Can you do more of it? If you have a bad day, look back to the previous 24 to 72 hours.

42:38Have an idea what was maybe the trigger. Was it a food you ate, a toxin exposure? a fight with your spouse or your boss? And could you have less of that? And so we teach people how to draw links between their environment and how they're feeling. And the more successfully they draw that link, the more adherent they are to the program.

43:03Dr. Mark Hyman:Part of that is also the magnitude of the change that you see with the recommendations. Because if you're a regular doctor and you say, well, I just want you to eat healthier and balanced diet and it's kind of vague and it's not really therapeutic. It's like saying, well, I have a headache. Here's a milligram of aspirin. Well, an aspirin doesn't really work, so I'm not going to take it. You have to have the right drug, meaning the right food and the right program for the right condition. And there are some similarities, obviously, to a healthy diet, but there's very much differences. If you're trying to heal a leaky gut or autoimmune disease, it may be different if you're treating a neurodegenerative disorder or different than if you're treating someone with depression or some diabetes, schizophrenia.

43:48Dr. Mark Hyman:So you have to kind of be very specific. And I think the fundamental principles of creating health are now pretty well known, but doctors don't really know how to prescribe those things or don't know how to identify the deviations from health and where you are in the continuum. And my guess is, Terry, that if you had looked at your life before you got sick, You could track the things that were happening or the insults that happened along your life that led to this moment where you started developing MS, right? It wasn't like this thing that just kind of happened out of the blue. And that's something we're not good at identifying.

44:23Dr. Mark Hyman:And I think we're going to get better and better at it as we have more data-driven healthcare. And part of the reason I co-founded the company Function Health was to allow people to gather large personal health data sets over time. so you can look for those subtle changes and clues that will lead to a problem if you don't deal with that. And then you can be proactive about it. Right. They can give you a lot of information and things to track that help you see like, okay, things are improving now. With the other diseases that you're seeing, you're seeing, you know, chronic illnesses like diabetes, like you're seeing Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, in addition to MS, right?

44:58What we see is, you know, the cognitive decline certainly declines. Brain fog resolves, fatigue resolves. In my clinical trials, we've added, we now study some, we have some online wellness programs. And we're studying fibromyalgia, long COVID. Those studies, we're still recruiting. So it'll probably be another 18 months before I have that data available. We studied cancer, fatigue in cancer patients. We'll be analyzing that data this summer, probably publishing that next year in 2027. And I've just put in a proposal to study progressive MS. And nobody wants to study progressive MS because those folks never get better.

45:52We have a study that's open right now for rheumatologic diagnoses, things like rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's, lupus, mixed connective tissue disease, psoriatic arthritis. We're recruiting for those folks. We're also adding anxiety and depression as well. And this morning, I had a meeting with my study team talking about pediatric onset multiple sclerosis because, you know, shockingly enough, we have children, young children that are now being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis as well.

46:28Dr. Mark Hyman:I recommend magnesium to most of my patients, and for good reason. It's involved in hundreds of biochemical reactions in the body, including regulating the nervous system, supporting muscle recovery, and helping your body transition to a restful sleep. Now, what's interesting is that newer research is starting to look at how certain forms of magnesium may support brain health and sleep quality. Now, one randomized clinical study, adults who took a brain-available form of magnesium reported improvements in sleep quality and daytime functioning compared to placebo. Now, magnesium is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies I see, and low levels can contribute to stress, poor sleep, muscle tension, and low energy.

47:08Dr. Mark Hyman:And the challenge is that most magnesium supplements only contain one or two forms, and they're not always well absorbed. And that's why I recommend Magnesium Breakthrough by Bioptimizers. It's a full spectrum formula that includes seven different forms of magnesium designed to support your brain, your muscles, your stress response, and your sleep. I take it as part of my evening routine. Try it today and go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use the code hymen at checkout to save 15 % off your order. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com slash hymen and use the code hymen. People often assume I love cooking because I'm a doctor and focused on food as medicine.

47:45Dr. Mark Hyman:But the truth is I love cooking because it's creative, it's grounding, and it connects you to what you're eating. In fact, last night I cooked one of my favorite recipes, our Mediterranean lemon chicken soup. It's simple, nourishing, and it's built around whole anti-inflammatory ingredients. Nothing complicated, just real food prepared well. Cooking isn't about talent. It's about confidence. And confidence comes from having the tools that actually work. And that's why I use Made in Cookware. The heat distribution is incredibly even, whether I'm sautéing aromatics for soup or simmering broth. Made in creates professional quality, chef-trusted cookware that's designed for the home cook.

48:21Dr. Mark Hyman:It makes the process seamless. And when your cookware performs well, you're not worrying about hot spots or uneven cooking. You're focused on flavor and nourishment. Try it today. Visit madeincookware.com and use the code HYMAN10 for 10 % off your order. So Terry, this is all incredible work you're doing. You know, you've been at this now for a while. We met a decade and a half ago, probably, I don't know, a long time ago. And I think it was early on when you were just sort of working, doing this work and you had mostly recovered by then, but I'm curious in the sort of intervening time you've been working in this field, what is most exciting to you now that is emerging in the science?

49:00Dr. Mark Hyman:What are the bright lights that you're looking towards and things that you hadn't understood before that you now understand about how to actually begin to treat chronic disease more effectively. So one of the really interesting observations that we had, when I looked at the WAVES study that was comparing the low-saturated fat diet and the modified paleolithic diet, we saw that the microbiome that you had at baseline could predict if you were going to respond better to the low-saturated fat diet or better to the modified paleo diet. So I think what diseases I develop are dependent on my genetics, the food I'm eating, and the microbiome I have.

49:44And so I predict there'll be a time, and you'll probably do this in your function health, and maybe I need to help you think about this, Mark, is that we'll be able to give some saliva, some blood, some urine, some stool, and then in three to six weeks, you'd be able to give a report back to me and I could tell my patient, given your genetics, your microbiome, and your underlying medical conditions, these are the diets that you'd be most helpful. These diets would be the least helpful and these supplements would be helpful and you may also want to take these additional probiotics. That will be the future of medicine.

50:31I'm very excited about that. I think AI will help us get there. We are doing more microbiome research right now, so we will be probably having some really interesting papers come out about that in 2028 and 2029.

50:48Dr. Mark Hyman:Particularly around MS or around autoimmune disease? Well, that'll be around the interaction of the microbiome diet and clinical outcomes in multiple sclerosis. Because, you know, in my current study, we've got microbiome data. We have, you know, clinical data. We have patient-reported outcome data. We'll also have metabolome data, so metabolites, and brain structure, and brain metabolites as well. As we're talking about, you know, MS and the microbiome, I remember a patient I had probably 20 years ago who said, you know, whenever my gut symptoms get worse, my MS gets worse. And I was like, oh, maybe there's a connection there.

51:34Dr. Mark Hyman:And I think, you know, the microbiome plays such a role across such a diverse array of conditions. You know, we talked about mitochondria. We talked about inflammation indirectly through autoimmune disease. we're talking about, now the microbiome, these are the fundamental systems that exist in human biology that are the foundations of most chronic disease. And there's a few other things as well, but these are really core. And in functional medicine, that's what we focus on, not the diseases, but on these biological processes. And the way I often talk about it is, you know, we in medicine are young science.

52:13Dr. Mark Hyman:Lewis Thomas, I read his book when I was in med school called the youngest science. And E.O. Wilson wrote a book called Consilience, the unity of knowledge, where he's talked about how medicine has no theory. And it's just a bunch of reactive reactions to things that we observe and observe phenomena, but it's not a coherent strategy of how to approach a problem. It's just like, try this, try that, or there's this pathway or that pathway, or let's block this or block that. Like amyloid is a great example. You can say, oh, amyloid's in the brain. Let's find a drug to block amyloid and dementia, but it doesn't work.

52:43Dr. Mark Hyman:and we spent billions of dollars and hundreds and hundreds of studies and have had no positive outcomes. And that's because we're thinking about it wrong. You know, what we're talking about today is developing a new theory of medicine, a new theory of human biology that's based on the laws of nature. And so when we talk about the microbiome or mitochondria or inflammation, these are things which are fundamental to human health. And if these systems aren't working, if your immune system, if your microbiome, if your mitochondria aren't working, you're not well. And depending on your genetics, your predispositions, the various insults, it might manifest as different diseases, but the common roots are the same for so many of these conditions.

53:22Dr. Mark Hyman:And that begins, we need to figure out how to treat these things and how to help people, like you say, create a healthy immune system or healthy microbiome or healthy mitochondria. When you say creating health, that's what you're talking about. Yes, I'm working on, and what are the things that can create health? How do we create meaningful, healthy social connection? How do I create a healthy sleep? How do I create more healthy movement? How do I have better nutrition? So, you know, step by step. And when I talk with my patients, I will, I used to always insist I start with diet. Now I'm a little more open to, in which of these domains do you want to start first?

54:08I think diet's particularly powerful, but if there's a different domain you want to start in first, that's fine. And if you want to do them all at once, we'll give you a big complicated plan. Or if you want to have one simple next step, we can do that.

54:23Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, yeah, you have to sort of match the approach to the person. But like you said, you know, the magnitude of the improvements in health often is determined by the dose, right? The dose of the intervention. The frequency of the treatment, right? So like, you know, if you're drinking a case of coke every day, if you have half a case, that's an improvement, but it's probably not going to move the needle, right? It won't move the needle much. Right. But what you're seeing is, just to kind of loop back on your story, is you're seeing your story repeated over and over. And this is not just an N of one, Terry's an anomaly, and a rare case, and we don't know why.

55:01Dr. Mark Hyman:You're actually repeating this over and over in your I repeat it over and over clinically, and I repeat it in my peer-reviewed published research. So when people would attack me early on, again and again and again, and I'd go on these neurology podcasts, and I'd be thoroughly attacked. I'd say, okay, let's just assume, we'll take me out of the equation. Let's look at my peer-reviewed published research where other people have verified the diagnoses. We followed people prospectively, and we published our research. and so we see this again and again in research we see this again and again in clinical practice mark sees it in his practice the wall's practitioners that we train they see it in their practice as well so imagine imagine you got invited to go to the nih and meet with the head of the nihayi bhattacharya and you were able to lay out a case for the type of research we need to focus on and invest in heavily, what would you advise him?

56:01We need to do multimodal interventions. You know, for the law, and that's why I keep writing grants. What does that mean in English? So multimodal, oh, thank you. It means that you fix as many of these systems as you can. So we're going to fix nutrition. We're going to fix meaning and purpose in life. We're going to help people identify a stress-reducing practice that they can embrace. We're going to help them add exercise and movement. We will track their sleep. So we're going to work on using systems biology to create health. And I would want to track these measures of nutrition, ideally using 24-hour recalls, track sleep using wearable technology, and there are a variety of wearable technologies that can do that, so that we can track how, as people implement, again, these multiple interventions, better nutrition, better sleep, better movement, stress-reducing practice, purpose and meaning, that that can translate into improved cellular function that we can measure with physiology using things like heart rate variability, using things like VO2 max, how well we use oxygen, using the quality of our nutrition based on 24-hour recalls.

57:25Dr. Mark Hyman:And these are biomarkers of health, not biomarkers of disease. Biomarkers of health, that we will track biomarkers of health. And by improving health, we can stabilize. And I'm writing a new book that talks about these concepts as a way to prevent disease, stabilize the disease you have, regress most chronic diseases, and many genetic diseases if you focus on these multimodal interventions. I mean, that is so key, Terry, that, you know, when you realize what does it take to create a healthy human, it's not just a single drug. And most of the problem with our research enterprise in America, and the reason we're not getting the answers we really should be getting, is that the entire infrastructure is designed to show whether this or that drugs work for this or that disease.

58:25Dr. Mark Hyman:And that's what a randomized controlled trial does. It's isolating all variables except for one. It's homogenizing populations, and it's giving them the same thing to look for a single outcome and trying to not do anything else except this one thing, like this one drug. But that's not how the body works, right? Right. They want to focus on one receptor. But remember, it's 2 billion chemical reactions per second. We want to have as many of the elements of the modifiable lifestyle factors, of which you and I have some control as individuals, that we want people to improve those. those are the studies that we need i keep writing those grants uh the nih doesn't fund me the ms society funded me once but what i do have mark are grateful patients whose lives i've transformed who have been extraordinarily generous with my lab and that's how i do my clinical trials yeah it's through philanthropic support i mean we need that for sure and thank god for those philanthropists who see this and who've been helped, but we really need billions of dollars focused on this.

59:36Dr. Mark Hyman:Not a few hundred thousand or a few million. And I think that, you know, I was at Cleveland Clinic and tried to do a study on Alzheimer's and the head of the LeRouval Center at the time, Dr. Sabah, was amazing. And he really understood the need for a more comprehensive approach to these conditions. He said, okay, this is not just one disease. There's many root causes. There's many different kinds of treatments. We can't just do one thing. We need to look at it all holistically as a systems of model of research. We call multi-modal treatments, which means a lot of different things at once versus just one single thing.

1:00:13Dr. Mark Hyman:And for multi-causal diseases, it's not just one cause often. It's not just one thing or one receptor that's wrong. I mean, you mentioned 22 billion reactions in every cell. there's 40 billion cells that's 80 quintillion which is like 19 zeros that's a big freaking number and so that's a lot of stuff going on and we can't just do one thing and i i said well let we want to do a comprehensive study we want to change diet we want to exercise we want to optimize sleep we want to optimize nutrient levels we want to detoxify we want to help the microbiome because you you have to do all that stuff to to help someone with with the dementia because it's a pretty serious illness and she's like no no no first we have to do a study to see if vitamin d works.

1:00:52Dr. Mark Hyman:Then we can, just alone. And then we have to do a study to see if exercise works and just that alone. Or then we have to do a study to see if optimizing sleep works and just that alone. And I'm like, she goes, how will we know what else is working if we just do it all together? I said, well, you may not, but when you're growing a plant, you just say, you don't go, well, I'm just going to give it water, but no soil or sunlight, or I'm going to give it sunlight, but no water or soil. Like, you know, how do you create a healthy human? It requires all these different inputs and they have to be optimized.

1:01:24Dr. Mark Hyman:And there's ways of identifying what those disturbances are. And we're becoming better and better at identifying those through history, through diagnostics, through genetic testing, through metabolomics, through lab testing. That's what function health is allowing people to do is get really deep personal data sets on themselves. And that's really the future. I did want to kind of double back on something you said because it kind of struck me. And I think maybe people listening would go, oh, wait a minute. You said, you know, we can reverse lifestyle-related diseases. Okay, people can maybe come to terms with that.

1:01:56Dr. Mark Hyman:But you said we can also potentially reverse genetic diseases. So can you talk about what you mean by that? You know, what is so wild, every week people are reaching out to us to tell us that their son or daughter who has genetic disease, whose physician said, you know, like, there's nothing more I can do, and someone sends them my book and I say, read this book and implement what you can. And so they read my book, maximize the nutrition and all the lifestyle factors, and these little boys, little girls begin improving for the first time. And little boys who had, you know, really profound demyelinating disease begins hitting his milestones and sits up and starts crawling and is able to walk and talk again.

1:02:51People with muscular dystrophy who are far more functional. People with cystic fibrosis who are far more functional. And then people with a wide variety of genetic disorders that I did not learn about and I have to go look up to figure out what they were. And so it's not that we stop the genetic disorder, but if you actually eat a better diet and address the modified lifestyle factors, that genetic disorder is nowhere as negative as it was previously. So the person still has their genetic disorder, but we have regressed the severity of it.

1:03:31Dr. Mark Hyman:I think this is such a radical idea. And Terry, I'm so excited you're talking about it because it's something that I've noticed in my practice, and I haven't heard many people talk about, but I know it's true. I'll tell you, the person who got me fired up to think about this is Bruce Ames, who said, with targeted high-dose nutrition, you can prevent and reverse many genetic disorders. And so now I'm actually talking about that in my next book as well. Well, I want to unpack this a little bit for people listening, so they understand what we're talking about. it's not if you have someone with sickle cell that you're going to edit their gene and then cure them that's something that is going to happen in medicine and thank god that there are people who have very serious genetic disorders they can have a very advanced technology to edit their genes and change that that's great you can't modify the genes other than through genetic but you can modify the expression of the genes and this is something we know every baby who's born in every hospital in the world, or maybe not everywhere, but most places in the world, gets a heel stick.

1:04:38Dr. Mark Hyman:And they check for a blood test called PKU, phenylketonuria, which is a common inherited genetic disorder that if you have it and you don't stop the consumption of an amino acid phenylalanine in your diet, the kids turn into highly developmentally delayed, handicapped, mentally challenged, you know, physically, physiologically deformed people. And yet if they don't consume this one amino acid, they're normal. So you're not changing their genes. You're changing the expression of the genes based on modifying some factor that you can change. And I've seen this over and over, even with Down's patients I've had, you can't cure Down's syndrome, obviously, but you can change the quality of your life.

1:05:23Dr. Mark Hyman:You can improve their functioning. You can perhaps delay some of the complications like dementia, or diabetes that happen with these patients. And then I've seen this with many other genetic diseases where you understand that when you have a gene, it's making a protein. So if there's a problem with a gene, it's gonna make a funny protein. Well, what does that protein do? How do you work around it? What other pathways does your body have to compensate for it? How do you optimize the various nutrients that are involved in regulating those protein interactions? And like you said, Bruce Ames talked about this.

1:05:54Dr. Mark Hyman:He talked about how one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes and every single enzyme requires a helper and all the helpers are vitamins and minerals. And all of us need different varying amounts of those in order to function properly. And so this is, this is really deep science. And yet it's, it's just heartbreaking to me that it's not applied. And, and I, when I see somebody or a friend who's got a kid with a genetic issue, I'm saying, Hey, don't be hopeless. Like, let's look at the biology here. And now with AI, it's amazing. Like I saw a friend of mine had a kid who had a mutation and I was like, well, I don't really know much about this.

1:06:26Dr. Mark Hyman:I read about it in medical school, but let me do some research. And I inquired about it and I was like, okay, what is the proteins? What are the pathways? What's the biochemistry? What are the workarounds? What should be the dietary interventions? What supplements could help? And I was like, oh, wow, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do. And I'm like, you can actually do something and be proactive about it. You know, and that is what I want everyone who's listening today to understand is there is so much that we can do to create health, to have the best possible life that is possible for you and the people you care about.

1:07:01Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, that's it. It's really the future of medicine, I believe, is what you're working on, Terry, and what you're researching, which is less about the science of disease and more about the science of health. I love that. I've always said that when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. You don't have to treat all the diseases. I mean, when you see this, If you just like, I was part of this church called the faith-based wellness program called the Daniel plan. And we got a church of 30 ,000 people to do this lifestyle change program. And it was, you know, healthy eating and exercise and, you know, they already had the community aspect and, and it was amazing to see the transformation, not just a quarter million pounds of weight loss, but depression going away, autoimmune disease going away.

1:07:48Dr. Mark Hyman:People, you know, having hospitalizations 10 times a year, not going to the hospital, at all, getting off medication. It didn't matter what the problem was. When you create health, it's like disease can't find a place to rest. And we saw this with COVID-19, right? People who died were the ones who were unhealthy, who were diabetic or overweight or who had some kind of chronic illness. It wasn't necessarily just the virus, it was the host. And so what you're really talking about is bringing back the idea of how to create a healthy host, how to create a healthy human beings so that disease doesn't have a place to take root.

1:08:21Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, what's next, Terry, for you? What's kind of on the horizon? What are you most excited about? Well, actually, I'm most excited about... I mean, you're going to be 120, so you're just like in middle age right now. I'm just in middle age. We're going to keep having more medical students. We're going to have more postdocs. The research grant that we sent off for progressive multiple sclerosis, I'm very excited about that. Well, I plan to start that study in October. And as I mentioned earlier, I am working on developing a protocol for pediatric onset multiple sclerosis. I think that is what I'm excited about.

1:09:02And now, after you've mentioned MahaElevate, I'm going to have to go look into that and develop a proposal for that. because, you know, really it is this multimodal lifestyle intervention that optimizes nutrition, stress reduction, sleep, exercise, deep social connection that is the biggest lever for creating health and therefore excluding disease. When I get off this podcast, I'm going to have to go look up Maha Elevate. So I can talk to my team about that proposal because...

1:09:37Dr. Mark Hyman:You're going to be blown away, Terry. Imagine a Medicare website that says functional medicine on it. That just blew my mind, honestly. And I think I'm going to meet with the head of the NIH in a few months. I want to talk to you about maybe sharing some of your proposals and ideas with him because I think he'd be very interested. Yeah, because, you know, I think there is less and less resistance to what basically I investigate in research, which is these multiple modifiable lifestyle interventions at once to create health. And as you say, as a side effect, we stabilize and then regress chronic disease.

1:10:14Dr. Mark Hyman:Incredible, Terry. Well, thank you for your work. I'm so glad you recovered. I think that you've taken your own suffering and transmuted it into something incredible in the world and have given so many people hope and inspiration. And also not just hope, but you've helped so many people recover. And I've met many of them and I'm just so grateful for your work. And like you, I also suffered from many chronic illnesses and had to recover. And that's really why I can't stop myself from going and going and going. Yeah, we have to keep letting the world know that if you can recover, if I can recover from such profound disability, there is absolutely hope for you as well.

1:10:57Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, there is hope. There is hope. I want everybody to leave with a message of hope and possibility and don't stop looking, searching, asking, and don't take no for an answer. because there is often a way, if not to cure, certainly to dramatically improve whatever is going on with you if you understand how the body works and how to work with it and create health. So thank you, Terry. Thanks for being the inspiration to hear that you are. It's been an honor to know you all these years and to be on this path with you and keep the, you know, the edifice is cracking. I feel like we've been in this game for a long time and I can see, you know, the old edifice of medicine is starting to crack and there's this opening to these new ideas at major academic centers and I'm really thrilled.

1:11:45Dr. Mark Hyman:So thank you again, Terry, for what you do and for your work. And where can people find more about you? Where can they learn about your studies? So go to terrywalls.com. That's T-E-R-R-Y, Walls, W-A-H-L-S, dot com. and if you add forward slash trials, you'll see the studies that we're at and terrywalls.com forward slash diet. You get a one-page handout for the Walls diet and if you follow me on Instagram at Dr. Terry Walls, D-R-T-E-R-R-Y-W-A-H-L-S, you get to see what I'm eating and doing and occasionally I get to see me run out after my sauna and roll in the snow. So there's lots of fun stuff there.

1:12:28Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, thanks, Terry. And thanks, everybody. Make sure you check out her books, her website, her program, her research. If you're somebody out there who cares about this and has some philanthropic dollars, send them her way. She's going to make good use of them, I promise. And everybody listening, I hope you got some hope from this conversation and understand that there is a way out of the darkness that you may be feeling around some type of chronic illness. It just takes pointing in the right direction. And I think, you know, we're helping you see that hopefully with the information we shared today.

1:12:59Dr. Mark Hyman:If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You 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.

1:13:30Dr. Mark Hyman:This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither 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.

1:14:03Dr. Mark Hyman:It'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.