Rethinking ADHD: Root Causes, Real Healing, and the Power of Functional Medicine

22:41Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I think that's right. And I think we end up causing trouble with the overproduction of excitatory neurotransmitters that stimulate pathways, like you mentioned, or the lack of neurotransmitters that help us with mood, like dopamine or serotonin, right? And one of the tests we do in functional medicine is called an organic acid urine test, which seems like a crazy thing to do is check your urine. if you're having psychiatric issues but in in my patients is one of the most important tests that i do and it's something we used to do only for people with inherited metabolic disorders and you can get it a lot but it's really about the more subtle changes that occur in the biomarkers that relate to what's going on in your body and and you know one of the one of the things we see is an increase in kinuric acid which is a sort of a marker of a pathway that increases up in terms of inflammation and is also a marker looked at when we're looking at neuroinflammation and it changes tryptophan and these are all precursors for things like serotonin um so chironin pathway is also a marker of uh concern when it comes to neuroinflammation so you can see like a that's sort of a sign of b6 to functional deficiency and that is b6 is required to convert tryptophan from your diet into 5-hydroxy tryptophan into serotonin and then when that's not working or when there's inflammation, it also blocks an enzyme.

24:03Dr. Mark Hyman:Can you talk about that enzyme, the ideal enzyme? Yeah. So, so it blocks the enzyme that's going to help with, um, it's causing more of the increased metabolism to, like you said, in terms of the five HIA, in terms of serotonin. So it's going to impact that pathway directly, which is going to be increasing up inflammation. But then again, the ones that are helping with things like anxiety are now getting blunted or impacted negatively where it's actually interfering with the production of it. And one of the biomarkers we see on the organic acids is quinolinic acid. A lot of big words I know out there, but this is a biomarker you can check in your urine that indicates that the serotonin is getting shunted down a different pathway, which then leads to more anxiety, more depression.

24:48Dr. Mark Hyman:And you're getting this byproduct, which is highly inflammatory in of itself. And it's a toxic kind of metabolite in the brain. And you can see it in the urine. And I can tell when my patients' brains are inflamed, they have high levels of this, whether it's a neurodegenerative disease or whether it's ADD or autism or depression. And so, you know, we can start to understand the biochemistry of this and the neurobiology of this in ways that allow us to actually directly intervene with therapies that can fix these problems. Exactly. And the chironoidine pathway is like kind of the precursor to all of those ones that you just discussed.

25:22And so also the great thing with like the oat test, which you mentioned, there's also a section that tests for catecholamines. And those are all connected with norepinephrine, epinephrine. It checks for like HVA and all of those pieces in terms of your dopamine. And also even like fatty acid metabolism because we know fatty acids help to drop down CRP, which we're talking about with inflammation. And so if you don't have a good balance of omega-3, omega-6, omega-9, you're going to be, again, more pro-inflamed, which also is going to negatively impact your mental state and your physical body, obviously.

25:58But there's been tons of studies on just omegas as well just for the mental health. And part of it is that down regulation of decreasing of the CRP levels.

26:06Dr. Mark Hyman:So, you know, one of the things that I have been reading about, which I find fascinating, and it sort of kind of comports with what we're seeing in our society, which is this increase in dysregulated social behavior, right? Aggression, divisiveness, friends can't talk to each other anymore. Families are breaking up over political issues. There's just whatever's going on. There's just something happening where our social cohesion is breaking down. I mean, I think most Americans are pretty middle of the road and are not on the extremes, but the extremes are what we see and hear about. But there is still a level of real divisiveness in our society and a real level of like increased in aggression and school shootings and violence.

26:47Dr. Mark Hyman:And now, I mean, we see it every day and I become almost immune to these stories, which, you know, if you ever had had one, it would have been a big deal. And we didn't have this when I was growing up. It wasn't like every day or every week, there's a new shooting in some school. and the level of just sort of oppositional behavior and anger and hostility. And I mean, it's like I have a social media account. I just like sometimes I put stuff up that's sort of benign and you get like a litany of hatred. And I'm like, what is going on out there? And why are people acting like this? And part of it's, you know, they can hide behind their social media handle or whatever.

27:19Dr. Mark Hyman:But I do think there's something fundamental happening to the brain. And I mentioned this before in the podcast, but when I was writing my book about the food system and the way our food was affecting us, I wrote a lot about the social aspects of it. And particularly, so studies that I came across around prisoners who, when fed a healthy diet, would decrease their violent crime in prisons by 56%. And I think a multivitamin reduced it by 80%. And in juvenile detention centers, when kids were fed healthy diets versus the crap that they were eating, the violent crime went down by 97%. The research restraints went down by 75%.

27:55Dr. Mark Hyman:suicide which you mentioned went down a hundred percent in an age group of teenage boys which is the third leading cause of death and it's just simply cleaning up the diet which is moving them from an inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory diet so I have this theory which is that a lot of our our social disruption right now is is really related to some level of neuroinflammation and when I was sort of reviewing your work you you were talking a lot about the that what happens to the adult in the room which is sort of the person that knows we shouldn't go punch somebody in the nose, right? That's in charge.

28:29Dr. Mark Hyman:The adult in the room gets disconnected from the ancient limbic reptile brain. And there's this weird disconnection that happens for the adult is gone. And so it's like we call it the amygdala hijack, which is the hijack of our behavior and our thoughts by this ancient part of our brain, which is all about survival, fight or flight, right? So can you talk about the science around this phenomenon that we're seeing around neuroinflammation affecting the connection between the kind of grown-up, mature person who's supposed to know how to conduct themselves socially and in life with the ancient part of our brain that just, you know, would kill anybody or do stupid shit.

29:10Dr. Mark Hyman:So what is the science behind that? Can you unpack that? And also the trauma. Like when you look at kids, what they said have shown the trauma from all these events that you were talking about, There's just long-term, we don't even know yet, longer-term issues with things like anxiety and depression as a result of the trauma that's happening during that time. Yeah, there's epigenetic. Exactly. There's complete changes. So we have what's called the prefrontal cortex that develops for kids up until 26 years of age. We have what's called the amygdala. That's why the car rental companies don't rent cars to anybody under 25.

29:46Dr. Mark Hyman:Because of that reason. Because they know their brain's not fully developed. The grown-up in the room is not in the car. It's not actually going to be the one driving, right? Yeah. So we have the hippocampus, which is like for memory. And those actually both take a hit for anxiety and depression, which makes sense because you look when somebody has like significant depression or anxiety, you'll see like a lot of memory issues like flightiness for people with anxiety, brain fog, forgetfulness. Yeah. We even call it pseudodementia. When people get older, they get pseudodementia and depression. Exactly.

30:16And actually, even the risk of dementia is up higher for people with mental health issues as well, likely because of the neuroinflammation. So you'll see those areas. Amygdala is more connected with anxiety, and that's what controls emotions and that piece with the nine-year-old driving the bus versus the adult driving the bus. And so if you're constantly getting taxed with that in everyday day-to-day trauma, that is going to be more dysregulated. I mean, they've had studies that show women passing, like in terms of being anxious during pregnancy, having an impact on their babies that are born, the baby, the child having more anxiety and things like that.

30:55So the development of the prefrontal cortex, which is like impulse, impulses can develop up until 26 years of age. Other areas of the brain that get affected, amygdala, like I mentioned, hippocampus, and other centers that help to regulate our emotions. So if there's constant inflammation on those areas or constant stress, which causes a dysregulation of cortisol levels, those could potentially impact those long-term, too. well.

31:25Dr. Mark Hyman:So do you think, like my theory is right, that a lot of the social discord is happening as a result of brain inflammation that's caused by all the factors we talked about? Yeah, I mean they have tons of studies on technology's impact on dopamine and that every time you have like a hit, like even a ring on your cell phone or you know, like when you get your text, you get a dopamine hit for that. So one of the pieces is the more and more you have it, the more of a reserve, like you're having less, your body's constantly needing to push out dopamine for everything with technology. One example I had, it was great because I did a urinary test and I was trying to get the person, I was actually working with someone that I didn't know was a big gamer.

32:07And so we did the test and at the evening, the cortisol was like, was the same that you would have in the morning to wake up because your cortisol should be higher in the morning to wake up. And then I said, what were you, and I knew right away, I'm like, were you playing like video games. And she looked and was like, how did, how did you know? I'm like this number, there's just a lot of like hyperactivity or dopamine levels were high, norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol was through the roof. So of course she's going to have sleep issues, which she was having. So you'll see that too. I mean, a lot of young people that are also on technology, they're staying up till late at night, as you know, and it interrupts their sleep.

32:43And if they're not getting good quality sleep, of course, they're not going to be able to focus in class. Of course, they're not going to be able to emotionally regulate as well. So all of those things have these kind of added effects that can cause issues. But definitely technology with dopamine and as much as the parent can work with reducing it in small bits, I don't try to say stop completely. I say let's cut 15 minutes at a time so it doesn't seem as significant. But that's what the great thing about tests are because you can actually see and show and demonstrate and then it's easier to get people to say, oh, okay, this is why.

33:20Dr. Mark Hyman:It's true. I mean, I had a nephew who was a super addictive gamer and just didn't have a life other than gaming. And long story short, he lived with me for a while, and I took it all away. I literally just hit it. And it was literally like watching someone go through heroin withdrawal. Oh, yeah. Like he went ballistic. And I was like, wow, this is like a highly addictive thing. So I think that, and he had ADHD and it just made it worse. It made it a lot worse. And I think we have this incredible moment happening in the field of psychiatry where we're beginning to understand the brain in mental health, not just the mind.

33:58Dr. Mark Hyman:And talk therapy can be helpful. Sometimes psychiatric medication can be helpful. But it's a pretty limited tool set. And now we have a whole new set of tools. so when you when you see sort of someone come in and you know they can have anything or anything from schizophrenia to bipolar disease to depression there's a process you go through to try to figure things out you know like like you know because depression is not a prozac deficiency right and and you know it's kind of how we treat it right we we i call it the naming blaming and taming game this came from my mentor sid baker he says we we name the disease by the symptoms and then we blame the name for the cause and then we tame it with the drug.

34:39Dr. Mark Hyman:So we say, oh, the reason you're hopeless and helpless and have no interest in life and can't sleep and have no interest in sex and no appetite and you feel sad and you want to cry all the time is because you're depressed. That's what's causing your symptoms. Well, no, that's just the name that we give people who share those symptoms. The cause could be you're eating gluten and that's causing brain inflammation or you've been having a bad diet and had reflux because you eat too many fried foods and end up on an acid blocker for 10 years which depletes your B12 and zinc and magnesium. or because you maybe have no vitamin D and that causes depression.

35:10And you're looking to see like, where does it land? I always say that for autoimmune conditions, it's like, to me, it's all the same thing. There's different names, you know, but it's like, where does it, I say like land? And that's why people have like three autoimmune conditions. And I'm like, is it really three different ones or is their system just attacking itself and it's finding the very weakness? Right.

35:29Dr. Mark Hyman:It's like aspen trees, you know, like they all look like separate trees, but they're all one underneath. Exactly. Still the same. And so that's kind of how most diseases are. They're not comorbidities or not things that just happen to be randomly showing up. I'm like, you know, this, you know, kid that I was mentioning before at ADD had like 12 different diagnoses, like, and was on seven different medications and was seeing five or six or different specialists. And no one asked, how are all these things connected? Like, when did it start and how did it start? Exactly. like that. The beauty is that we can start to actually think differently about how to approach these problems and start to think about the common root causes and how to, one, do the diagnostic evaluation, which can pick a lot of these things up, and also the treatment strategies.

36:17Dr. Mark Hyman:And it can be something simple, like I mentioned with depression. It can be a B vitamin deficiency. And I was writing my book, and I think I was talking to somebody on the phone about it, whatever, and he heard me over talking. It was like I was fixing my TV in my office, and he had happened to be working when he was there and he's like oh yeah i was listening what you're saying and you know i was really severely depressed and and then i took you know these b vitamins like b6 folate b12 and it went away and and and actually methylfolate or depilin is actually a prescription drug quote drug which is a activated form of folate that psychiatrists use for treating depression yes but it's all like kind of this like one thing at a time it's like still the drug model it's not really a holistic view of the body as a system so so what dr hansman when someone comes to you see you and they're suffering from whether it's depression or whether it's more ptsd or maybe they're having some psychotic kind of borderline issues or bipolar where do you start and then how do you kind of find the things that are driving the problem and then what what are the sort of steps you take to help resolve that i think my most important thing is to also meet people like where they're at so initially i'm trying to do extensive i just want people to do what i want to do i know how to get you better that would be what i say you don't get to choose that would make life a lot easier right i'm pretty i'm pretty i'm pretty actually convincing because like i said look let's try this for 10 days that's that's what i say i'm like let's try removing this food for a week and see how you feel and then people come back and they're like oh yeah it worked so i think the one thing when people see like naturopathic doctors functional medicine and doctors, they're going to get tons of lab work done initially.

37:55That's always really important to me in the assessment because I'm going to look at environmental factors like I mentioned, like metal, lead. You mentioned when you were saying about juvenile delinquency of like changing food. There's studies that even show there's a higher rates of schizophrenia after the age of 14 being or actually juvenile delinquency and schizophrenia if they've drank from like private well water and poor water. So even when you're talking about food, it's like, what is the quality of their water? What is their environment by way of pollution? I've had children that we've had -

38:29Dr. Mark Hyman:You've got some parasites who - Exactly, even parasites where they've had ADHD and then they found that there was a lot of mold in their bedroom and they removed that and all the kids' symptoms were gone. Or I've had even adults that were exhausted and then when I did the assessment, I find out they drink four ounces of water and I'm like, okay, if you try to drink water and they come back, they're like, I feel completely new. like how is your body eliminating toxins so that's what i said meeting people are the app because there could be just basic things that people aren't even aware of but typically with assessments going to include like their metals it's going to include things like you said like oat tests i'm going to look at other infections organic acid uh tests i'm going to look at and especially if someone's like uh that rule of like ever since of like i got sick at this time and then ever since then this happened for women a lot of times hormones so like after they have a beat after they have a kid you'll see those hormones drop down which hormones actually are like estrogen um can be if it's in a high amount more pro-inflammatory and testosterone more anti-inflammatory so you'll see when there's a shift of that or um the cycle or perimenopause autoimmune conditions will go up too so i'm looking to see like what that pattern is of like when it actually became dysregulated and and getting as much like laboratory assessment but but really having deep, in-depth conversations of their story.

39:46Dr. Mark Hyman:Because you can, oh, yeah, I was fine until I moved to that house. Exactly. Tell me about that house. Well, you know, it was okay, but it was a little damp basement, or I think we had mold in the bathroom, or something. And you get these clues. And I think in traditional medicine, we sort of ignore most of those clues. Like your psychiatrist didn't ask about mold or how much tuna you ate. That's true. Or were you inflamed? Yeah. No, it's true. And I think you mentioned lab testing. I co-founded a company called Function Health, and we do a full panel of lab testing and we look at a lot of things that do affect psychiatric health from your nutritional levels of vitamin d of evaluation of the b vitamins through homocysteine and methamalic acid which are ways that are looking at b12 folate and b6 we look at red cell magnesium we look at zinc we look at also other factors like metabolic health insulin resistance which can affect depression look at sex hormones can affect mood we look at heavy metals so we we got to really and we look at inflammation you know we've i don't It's mind-blowing to me, but in our population, we've done 5 million biomarkers on over 40 ,000 people, and 46 % have high CRPs.

40:52Dr. Mark Hyman:Oh, wow. 30 % have high ANA. 67 % have a nutritional deficiency, whether it's iron, like you mentioned, or homocysteine problems, or magnesium, or omega-3s. We look at all these things as part of a fundamental panel to see what's going on. It's amazing. If you start to fix these things, people get better. and sometimes you have to go deeper right it's not just always just cleaning up your diet and and and eliminating inflammatory foods and adding a number of nutrients that may be helpful for your brain or a nutrient deficient in it may also be like okay well i gotta deal with the heavy metals or i gotta deal with lyme disease or i gotta deal with babesia or i gotta deal with mold and those are those are things that we don't really deal with well with traditional medicine but if you're seeing a functional medicine doctor um you know they can see you in your practice in connecticut they can come to our our center in the in lennox massachusetts the ultra wellness center and we deal with all these kind of complex issues uh and we deal with the the sort of the crises in mental health and i i i you know i did a documentary series years ago called the broken brain uh and it's really about you know how most of our brains are not working properly and we don't really have a great way to deal with brain disorders because our whole thinking has been completely wrong i focus and i mean i have so many like i feel like over half my patients you ask about brain fog or focus it's like more than half of them have an issue it's this yeah like of the activity with their brain and managing everything that they're doing and rates of what ADHD going up and anxiety.

42:15Is it truly that, or is it, you know, we're just doing too much as a, you know, as a society, part of what I talked about in the presentation giving for IFM too, where the other things outside of like even diet is like the, the, the benefits of like sauna and how that showed to decrease CRP levels. And also in studies that they did in Europe for men that there was like decreased chance of like things like schizophrenia, forest bathing. That's crazy.

42:40Dr. Mark Hyman:Wait, we just want to stop there. You just said take a second sonic and help reduce psychiatric symptoms and even schizophrenia. Exactly. Schizophrenia. Yeah. And this, this was a study of men at large for like decades. And they showed that there were lower rates of things like schizophrenia. If you look at also it decreases CRP levels, which we keep talking about with inflammation. You also look at like forest bathing. There was a study in Japan to show that the CRP levels went down significantly with more forest bathing and lasted for a period of time. So these are all the things that you can get people to do in small steps that just shows there's that lack of connection, like loneliness, I think is a huge factor.

43:22And that's one of the biggest things we're always trying to work at in our office. Even with anxiety, they've shown the most effective is doing that with group therapy,

43:28Dr. Mark Hyman:like treatment plus therapy. I think it takes a community, but it's like you doing things to detach yourself from technology, like grounding, sauna, those things, but then also your community of people around you to be able to support you as well. When you look at ADD and ADHD, it's basically described as a set of symptoms. The way we diagnose in medicine is based on basically, I think, a very outdated model, which is describe the symptoms, and if somebody fits those symptoms, they have the disease. We say, oh, you have trouble focusing or paying attention. You're inattentive. You're hyperactive.

44:09Dr. Mark Hyman:I know what's wrong with you. You have ADHD. No, that's just the name of the disease. It's not the cause of the disease. And so we describe every disease, including particularly mental diseases, mental disorders, through this lens of describing symptoms, not causes. Functional medicine is about causes. So what are the causes? Well, I'm going to take you through a case, because I think it'll be a very interesting way to think about this story. And this is a case that really blew my mind. The mother brought in her kid to see me, who was 12 years old, and then two months later brought him back. And the transformation was remarkable.

44:46Dr. Mark Hyman:But she brought his homework, and we're going to put it in the show notes so you can actually see graphically changes in brain function in just two months with a kid who had severe brain disorder. he had a broken brain and he could not write legibly to save his life. It was like chicken scratch or a three-year-old writing versus a 12-year-old. And then within two months, his handwriting totally normalized. And the question is, what happened? So I'm going to take you through what happened. I'm going to explain you a story and I'm going to actually help you understand how we need to start approaching these disorders in a very different way.

45:23Dr. Mark Hyman:So basically, one day, this woman walks in my office, a professional woman, businesswoman, with her 12-year-old son, who had multiple psychological and physical diagnoses, who were seen by many doctors, seven different doctors, right? He had a psychiatrist. He had a GI doctor. He had an allergist. He had a pulmonologist. I mean, the list goes on. So nobody was talking to each other, and they were all treating different things. So he was diagnosed with ADD. And no one seemed to sort of say, how does this one kid have all these problems, right? Is it just bad luck or are they connected? And so functional medicine is about looking for the patterns in the connections that give rise to the clues about the cause.

46:09Dr. Mark Hyman:So basically he was diagnosed with ADD when he was a little kid. He couldn't focus in school. He was zoned out. He was disruptive. I mean, he was kicked out of kindergarten. I mean, who's kicked out of kindergarten, right? He had terrible writing. We call it dysgraphia. He was pretty good in math, but basically was a disaster. Behaviorally, academically, socially, was just not thriving. And physically, he had all these issues, right? He had asthma. He had environmental allergies. He had sinus problems. He had post-nasal drip. He had sore throats. He got skin issues, eczema, nausea, stomach aches, diarrhea, headaches, anal itching, which we'll get to why that is.

46:51Dr. Mark Hyman:He had canker sores, which are immune things, right? All this immune inflammation, muscle aches, muscle cramps. He was hypersensitive to loud noises, to smells. He was sneezing a lot. He had hives, itchy skin, bumps, frequent infections. He couldn't sleep well. He had trouble breathing when he slept. He had anxiety. He was fearful all the time. And he had tons of sugar cravings. Now, that is a long list of problems. My joke is I take care of patients and I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. And he had a whole list of problems. And nobody says, how are all these connected?

47:23Dr. Mark Hyman:They're all inflammation. And what we now know is that ADD, autism, depression, dementia, Parkinson's, these are inflammatory diseases of the brain. Even schizophrenia, bipolar disease, all these are inflammatory brain disorders. So doctors were treating, and all these specialists were treating, all the symptoms with seven different medications from five different doctors. Ritalin for ADD, allergy medicine, inhalers for his asthma, acid-blocking medicine for his stomach, painkillers for his headaches. I mean, it's quite a drug cocktail for a 12-year-old kid. And he didn't really get that much relief anyway on any of his symptoms.

47:59Dr. Mark Hyman:And no one said, you know, how is this connected, right? How is this connected? And why is this kid suffering from all this? And so really, this is just how medicine is. We see specialists after specialists. We get pill after pill. We get a pill for every ill. And it was just kind of a mess. So most psychiatrists are trained about the brain or really the mind, right? They don't really learn much about the brain. They think, you know, it's basically, you know, their job is from the neck up and it's all emotional, psychological. But we often misappropriate psychological or psychiatric diagnoses to physical things, right?

48:35Dr. Mark Hyman:If you have mercury poisoning, it can cause depression. If you have huge amounts of inflammation from an altered microbiome, you can have ADD. So you need to figure out what the root causes and not just be slapping on different drugs for different diseases. So it's important to understand what the physical things are, but not to get stopped there and not to just say, let's treat each one separately. We have to see how they're connected. So the medications he was on were kind of nuts, and they weren't helping much. But he's not alone. Most kids own tons of medications, from allergy medication to antidepressants to stimulants.

49:14Dr. Mark Hyman:And we're seeing kids with mental, behavioral, emotional problems like Clayton had. And they're now getting drugs like antipsychotic medications they give to schizophrenics, like Risperidol, or antiseizure medications, Trileptil, or antidepressants, like I said, like Prozac or all the stimulants like Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, or Vyvanse. Now, when we dug below the surface with Clayton, we found all sorts of stuff. Now, in functional medicine, I don't actually treat disease. I don't really care that much about the name of your disease. What I care about, what is going on in the systems in your body that is out of balance, and how do I figure that out?

49:50Dr. Mark Hyman:And one of the basic categories of things that matter, right it's our lifestyle and all the nutritional exercise sleep relationships it's various factors that cause us to get out of balance toxins allergens microbes poor diet stress all these things wash over these systems and create imbalance so my job is a detective to figure out where this particular child's imbalances were and fix them and see what happens right i just kind of put things back in balance like tuning up a car and then you kind of hope crush fingers and usually at work. Sometimes you kind of get stuck or there's something else you missed, but it's actually quite effective.

50:25Dr. Mark Hyman:So the first step was nutrition. I mean, Clayton had, which was his name, had the worst diet. All he ate was junk food, processed food. I don't think he ever saw a vegetable in his life. And it's typical of a lot of these kids who were on the spectrum of autism or ADD. They typically have very finicky dietary habits. They typically eat tons of carbs. They love gluten and dairy. But he wasn't just eating whole wheat bread and sheep cheese. He was eating junk food, trans fats, food coloring, additives, tons of sugar. And all these things have been associated with ADD. Now, when we looked at his lab testing, we found some really interesting things.

51:01Dr. Mark Hyman:And I think most people do not dig below the surface to look at labs. And we did a deep dive. We found he had omega-3 fat deficiency, EPA and DHA, which are incredibly important for brain function. 60 % of your brain is DHA. And if you have low levels, it's associated with ADD, as well as eczema, immune deficiency, a lot of the things that he had. We looked at his vitamin levels. We saw low levels of amino acids like tryptophan. We saw metabolic pathways that were indicating he had a deficiency of B6, which is important for making serotonin from tryptophan and helping his mood, right? His mood was unstable.

51:39Dr. Mark Hyman:He had sleep issues. And so that, you know, B6 was a big factor. And it's often with kids with ADD or autism. And we see, you know, also vitamin A deficiency, which is important for immunity. And the omega-3 deficiency and vitamin A deficiency led to little things like bumps on his backs. We call these hyperkeratosis pilaris. So I could touch his skin. I could see little bumpy things. That was because of these nutritional deficiencies. He was low in vitamin D. He was He's low in vitamin E and beta carotene because he's eating vegetables, right? So he's a diet very high in junk food, which is nutrient poor, and very low in nutrient-dense food.

52:17Dr. Mark Hyman:He had low levels of zinc. And zinc, we know, is important for immune function. It regulates hundreds of enzymes. It's important for getting rid of heavy metals. It's important for ADD and autism. And it was really consistent with his symptoms of frequent infections, of eczema, allergies, hyperactivity. He also had low magnesium. Magnesium deficiency is really common. and it led to headaches, anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, spasms, aches, hypersensitivity to loud noises. All these are signs of magnesium deficiency. And we do testing. And I recently started a co-founded a company called Function Health to help people get access to their own labs and to be able to look at some of these deep nutritional testing as well as metabolic testing and many things we're going to talk about with Clayton, things that are often missed by a traditional doctor or not checked.

53:03Dr. Mark Hyman:When was the last time your doctor checked your omega-3 level or vitamin A or magnesium or vitamin D. These are all part of our standard function health panels. And I think it's really important for you to think about. So go check out functionhealth.com. You can sign up for the wait list. It gives you really great guidance on how to optimize your health using personalized recommendations. So the next thing we looked at besides nutrition was his immune system because he has so many inflammatory things, right? He had infections. He had asthma. He had sore throats. He had allergies. He had all these inflammatory things.

53:34Dr. Mark Hyman:So it was like flashing red light, inflammation, inflammation. Inflammation is at the root of so many problems, including brain diseases. So we looked at the factors that cause actually inflammation, such as food allergies, environmental allergies, molds, toxins, chronic low-grade infections. Maybe he had a whole bunch of these things. We found some testing. We looked at food sensitivity testing, and he had a lot of foods he was reacting to, about 18 different foods, including dairy, peanuts, yeast, citrus, foods, gluten, especially gluten, and he had gluten antibodies, which, again, are not checked by most doctors, but actually were elevated.

54:13Dr. Mark Hyman:And so we found he really was sensitive to gluten. So gluten basically is a huge factor for these kids often with ADD or autism. It triggers this low-grade chronic inflammation in the brain, an immune response, it makes leaky gut worse causes canker sores so when he had canker sores i was clued in that he might have a gluten issue it can be celiac disease or gluten sensitivity and his he had elevated anti-glide antibodies uh which is basically an autoimmune reaction to the proteins found in gluten um and that and that are uh found in wheat rye barley spelt and oats now so massive inflammation and we knew we had gluten issues we knew we had food sensitivities and uh and some other things that were causing it.

54:54Dr. Mark Hyman:He also had tons of gut symptoms, right? So we looked at his digestive system, nausea, diarrhea, stomach aches, anal itching. He had a sensitive stomach. He had lots of antibiotics for sore throats and he had then yeast overgrowth because of all the antibiotics and abnormal gut flora. We looked at his stool test. He had leaky gut, which basically creates a damage in the gut that allows food proteins and bacteria to leak in. And his immune system was just so pissed off. And it wasn't just affecting his asthma and allergies, it was also affecting his brain. The next thing we looked at were toxins, because we take a look at nutrition, we take a look at gut, we took immune issues, we look at the causes.

55:32Dr. Mark Hyman:And so we started to look at, you know, whether or not he had any environmental toxins, which we know can cause ADD and even autism. And heavy metals were an issue for him. He had high levels of lead and mercury. And he had, you know, similar probably exposure to other kids, but they're often not looked at and not treated. They might check up blood lead level. They don't ever look at a challenge test. And genetically, nutritionally, he couldn't really detoxify these. And we know mercury and lead are associated with GI symptoms, autoimmune issues, cognitive problems, that lead has been actually very well linked to ADD and behavioral issues, cognitive problems.

56:08Dr. Mark Hyman:And there's no doubt about the data on this. You don't have to believe me. Just go to PubMed and put lead and ADHD, and you'll come up with plenty of scientific papers to explain how this actually is all working. So basically, maybe, you know, the world is polluted, right? We have so many cement factories, coal-burning factories, all of which spew out lead and mercury. It goes into the soil. Kids are playing in the dirt. Or maybe there's toys made from China that are covered with lead paint. Or maybe the people have leaded paint in their house or even lead-covered glasses or, I mean, crystal glasses or fancy plates.

56:43Dr. Mark Hyman:but basically he was exposed to all these dangers of the industrial revolution and he also had a little bit of mold in his house and he had food additives that you know we can't measure those things but i'm sure they were causing a problem so basically his problem wasn't riddling deficiency or bad parenting right the cause was in his diet it was environmental toxins It was in his microbiome. And so we basically constructed a very simple treatment. So we think, oh, my God, there's so many things. You know, he's got 25 different diseases, right? Well, what do you do? So it was quite simple. We basically looked at the causes.

57:23Dr. Mark Hyman:So we basically looked at the nutritional deficiencies, the toxic environmental toxins he was exposed to, the food sensitivities, all the processed food we got rid of, the gluten, all the yeast overgrowth. and we found out what sort of was causing him to be out of balance, right? So basically the body is a system of equilibrium. And either you have too much of something that's causing you to be out of balance or not enough of something that's causing you that you need to be in balance, right? He had all these deficiencies of nutritional stuff, all these other things like yeast overgrowth and heavy metals and gluten.

57:56Dr. Mark Hyman:They were irritating his system. So we can't just do one thing. And I think in medicine they go, well, let's do one thing and see what happens. Well, we won't know unless you do a randomized controlled trial with one intervention and one outcome. Well, that's just BS because, you know, if you want to grow a plant, you know, well, I'm just going to give it water, but no soil and sun and see what happens. Or I'm going to give it soil, but no, you know, water or I'll give it sun, but no soil and water. You know, it's just the whole thing is an insane backwards antiquated framework for thinking about disease.

58:27Dr. Mark Hyman:And it's why we are in this really powerful transformation in medicine right now and hasn't quite caught up to the clinic in most cases, but it really is where we're all going. 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.

58:56Dr. Mark Hyman: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. 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.

59:28Dr. Mark Hyman: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. 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.

59:58Dr. Mark Hyman:Thanks so much again for listening.