Stop Blaming Salt: Fixing High Blood Pressure by Treating the Root Cause

25:12And they're all treatable. So you're kind of treating patients. And I want you to sort of present this case here of your patient who had high blood pressure and what you kind of thought of, what you did diagnostically. and to kind of unpack some of the things we do at the Ultra Wellness Center, which is doing a deeper dive on your biology, not just taking at face value. Oh, your blood pressure is high. Here's a pill. But we go into why. Like what's going on underneath the hood? How do we find things and search for things and hunt for things that may be treatable and modifiable factors that are driving?

25:41You touched on a bunch of them, you know, whether it's pre-diabetes and insulin resistance, whether it's sleep apnea, whether it's nutritional deficiencies like magnesium or omega-3s, or whether it's environmental toxins, some of which we can measure, some of which we can't, but heavy metals have been linked to high blood pressure. So we kind of have to look for all these things. And that's what you did with your patient that I'd love you to sort of share her story. Actually, Mark, I think I love this idea of personalizing the story and the recommendations because you can have 20 different people with high blood pressure and there may be different combinations of those variables that are playing a role for any individual patient.

26:19So we have to go back and understand who the person is sitting across the table from us. If you see one person with hypertension, you've seen one person with hypertension or any condition, whether it's autism or depression. And that's one of the fundamental principles of functional medicine. You know, one disease can have many causes and one cause can create many diseases. We call it end of one medicine. What is that person in front of me doing? What are the risk factors? What is their lifestyle? What are the other factors that may not even know about? And how do we dig into those? And that's what we've been doing for decades at the Ultra Wellness Center.

26:49By the way, if anybody wants to learn more about what we're doing, go to ultrawellnesscenter.com. You can learn more about how to become a patient. But now let's sort of dive into that in that case. And how did you think about this case? Sure. So this was a 56-year-old woman, and she had a long history of so-called white coat hypertension. We'll unpack that in a few minutes. She also had a strong family history of high blood pressure and late onset memory concerns. Her mother had recently been diagnosed with cognitive impairment at the age of 80, who also had a long history of white coat hypertension and then sustained hypertension.

27:21And she was starting to get concerned about, you know, what is this white coat variable telling her about her vascular system? How can she do everything she can to try to optimize vascular health and prevent disease down the road? For years, she'd been told with her blood pressure, don't worry about it. She'd go into the doctor. It would run 120s, 130s, maybe as high as 140. And she was told not to worry about it. So what do we do in conventional medicine? either tell them not to worry about it, or you think about the case of, oh, your blood sugar's borderline. Come back and we'll check it in a year.

27:58Well, no, we wanted you better than that. Or decide, okay, now we need to put you on a blood pressure medication. So what's different in functional medicine, as you already talked about, Mark? We really want to go upstream. We want to see what the variables are that played a role with this particular patient. Why is she showing up with this reactive blood pressure? What are the things we can do to modify those risk factors and hopefully delay or prevent her from ever needing medication? And at the same time, keeping her heart and her brain healthy. And it starts by gathering a story. It's important to get into the story because, you know, like I think of my parents, my mom and dad just obviously didn't listen to me.

28:36They ate crappy and they both run high blood pressure pills. And I'm 65 and my blood pressure is like 110 over 70, which is really highly unusual for someone my age. but it's not an anomaly. It's just because I understand what to do to regulate my biology and stay healthy as they get older. And most people don't do that. And our default in our society is basically leading us all to have these problems. That's why one or two Americans have high blood pressure and prediabetes. And by the way, I don't think it's an accident that one or two people in America have diabetes or prediabetes and also one or two people have high blood pressure because they're very related.

29:09Going back to her story, I mean, she had a pretty uneventful early life. She was born vaginally. She was breastfed back at a time when it wasn't a common thing to do. She didn't have a lot of infections, not a lot of situational stress. All of those early life exposures that we know can prime the vascular system to be potentially more reactive. She did have a history of allergies, but kind of unremarkable other than that. Started birth control pills at 19 and interestingly enough, developed hypertension on the birth control pills. Why is that? Well, the blood pressures, that can be genetically determined.

29:45It may be that it unmasks a potential for oxidative stress. I don't actually have the answer to that one, but I think there's some clues later. Yeah, I mean, the birth control pill is interesting because estrogen does make you retain a little more fluid and that may be part of it. And the progesterone can also make you gain weight sometimes. That may be part of it. So there are things that, you know, medications that may also, like the birth control may actually drive increased risk of hypertension. That's true, especially through the renin-aldosterone system that we know plays a big role. And they're much higher doses in the birth control pills than what a woman would have made with her own natural cycling hormones.

30:21Other than that, pretty healthy until she had her first pregnancy at 35. It was a twin pregnancy and it was complicated by low amniotic fluid, preterm labor, and pregnancy-induced hypertension. She went on to carry her babies to term. She had a vaginal delivery. She nursed them for a year and a half. And that was when she started having the white coat periodic elevations in her blood pressure. Again, she was told, don't worry about it. It was attributed to the stress of being a young mom with two kids and maybe some sleep deprivation and working as an emergency room nurse. Fast forward, in her early 40s, because she was snoring, probably related to her allergies, and she had some daytime fatigue, she was set for a sleep study that did not show sleep apnea.

31:11It showed a pattern that's called upper airway resistance syndrome. More common in women. That is a pattern we'll talk about in a few minutes. But it's where the airway becomes a little bit more collapsible or there's a restriction in the ability to get air into your body, maybe because you've got nasal allergies or you've got a small jaw. But you're not actually stopping breathing and you're not really dropping your oxygen level. So back then, there was no treatment recommended other than to work on her allergy symptoms. Just to double down on that, a lot of people who have high blood pressure have undiagnosed sleep apnea.

31:47Yes. You know, if you're snoring or your partner says you're snoring or you gasp for breath or you have other symptoms of sleep apnea, meaning you fall asleep easily watching TV or when you're driving, you feel tired. I mean, these are these are clues. And it's important that people get this diagnosed because, you know, it's treatable often with weight loss and other things. But sometimes you need to take a breathing machine at night and that can often resolve high blood pressure. So when I sleep someone, the first two things I think of are prediabetes and insulin resistance and sleep apnea as both causes of.

32:15Absolutely, Mark. And I'm so glad you said that because I think what's emerged is upper airway resistance syndrome isn't just benign. I mean, that's another area where it's like, don't worry about it. It's not sleep apnea. There's really nothing to do except treat your allergies. But what do we know about even that pattern? If you're having these subtle disruptions in the continuity of your sleep, even if you're not stopping breathing, you wake up tired. You have trouble with daytime fatigue and it's associated with high blood pressure. This is also a more common pattern for women, and it gets overlooked all the time because we have a stereotype about who's the more likely person to present with sleep apnea.

32:53And it's usually an overweight man with a big neck circumference who snorts really loudly. It gets missed in lean women in particular. And then what else did you find on her? Well, the next piece was she went through a pretty significant menopause, lots of heavy periods. last period was finally around 49, tons of hot flashes and night sweats. Why is that important? Well, guess what? There's now been a recognized association between women who have more of those vasomotor symptoms also being associated with more vascular reactivity and higher risk of cardiovascular disease. But at the time, again, nobody was thinking along those lines.

33:35She had a conversation with her OBGYN and decided to go on an estradiol patch and progesterone. She had good relief in her symptoms. Another really important thing, though, about the menopause transition is the changes in estrogen that happen can also unmask more effects of stress on the vascular system. We also know that insulin resistance tends to get worse in the menopause transition. So it's a potential window of opportunity to think beyond just should you take hormones or not. Because, again, fitting into her story, looking way upstream and trying to put things into place that are going to keep her heart and her brain healthy.

34:15She's always been physically active. Another piece of her story that I think is going to be relevant down the road, she's always been physically active. In fact, one of the main things that she sort of hung her hat on in terms of trying to keep her heart and brain healthy was to stay physically active. And she periodically would be plagued by multiple soft tissue injuries. She'd had plantar fasciitis. She'd had posterior tibialis tendinitis. She'd had epicondylitis. So she'd had a lot of these soft tissue injuries, which would periodically take her out of commission from her exercise. So that's sort of her backdrop.

34:47And it leads us to some interesting clues of some other things we might want to think about related to her blood pressure beyond just medications or not. And think back to her original goal. She's really concerned about future risks for cognitive decline. What's the connection between blood pressure and cognitive decline? We know that the blood-brain barrier, that critical interface between the body and the brain, it is really vulnerable to the effects of any kind of vascular risk factor, whether that's prediabetes, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, oxidative stress, inflammation. that blood brain barrier can become more permeable or leaky.

35:25And it plays such an important role at selectively letting in the nutrients to the brain that we want getting in, keeping out toxins and microbes that we don't want getting in, and then also supporting the brain's waste removal system, the glymphatic system that removes waste from the brain. Antivascular insults are potentially going to contribute to that leaky blood brain barrier. So optimizing your blood pressure, looking at those upstream factors is gonna be really, really important for her to meet her goals. One of the things that's interesting with your diagnostics is that you look at genetics related to high blood pressure, which we can now do.

36:01So these are tests that we do at the Ultra Wellness Center. It's a cheek swab. You can look at your full sort of panel of risk genes. And we don't look at your entire genome because it's like too many things, 20 ,000 genes. We look at the ones that are common that we can do something about that are probably affecting your health in an immediate way. and we can actually modify. And so you found a number of things there. And I think there are a lot of variations and we can use the science of genomics and our understanding of the biology, what happens when you have certain variations to modify your risk factor.

36:30So the genes, like you said, load the gun, the environment pulls the trigger. And there are certain people have salt sensitivity, which we can pick up through genetic testing. But not everybody with high blood pressure has a salt issue. I think there's a real issue there with how many people are salt sensitive. And it's probably maybe, you know, 40 % of people who have high blood pressure are salt sensitive. But a lot of people aren't. And there's, you know, real controversy about salt, whether it's the issue or not the issue. And there's been large population studies that kind of show that there's maybe a slight risk.

37:04There's an inter-salt study, for example, in 1988. It was just a tiny, tiny little risk. And the question is, you know, is it the salt or is it, and this is just a question I have, Is it the salt or is it the salt in connection with certain genetics or the salt in connection with prediabetes or insulin resistance, which makes you retain more water? Hence, you'll get high blood pressure because you have bigger fluid in your system. So what are your thoughts about that? You know, it's a great question, Mark, and I think it's not simple, right? So we know that that subset genetically of people who are sensitive to salt, it's less than 50%.

37:39But there was an older mouse study that found that high sodium intake actually increased oxidative stress. So there may be another mechanism that it's not just about the sodium's effects on the renin, aldosterone, angiotensin system and fluid retention, but it also creates more opportunity to produce these free radicals that directly impact vascular health. So also, nobody talks about the fact that historically, we had 10 times as much potassium as sodium in our diet as Hunter gathers. Now we have 10 times as much sodium. So it's not just the excess sodium, it's the lack of potassium. And where does potassium come from?

38:14It comes from all our vegetables and fruits and stuff. So we're not eating enough plant foods and those have really high levels of potassium. And magnesium. And magnesium, yeah. Magnesium is the other nutrient where probably 45 % of us are deficient in. So is it the salt or is it the balance of all these other electrolytes like magnesium and potassium and calcium that we tend to ignore, but that we do look at in functional medicine. The traditional doctors won't look for that and they won't modify that. But it can be really a huge factor. And you can give people potassium supplements. You can increase their potassium in their diet.

38:48You can do the same with magnesium and in terms of dietary magnesium as well as supplements. And same thing with calcium. So we have to be really aware. It's not just such a simple reductionist view that, oh, salt causes high blood pressure and so you should eat less salt. I find that most people have never connected the dots between how they feel and what they eat they walk around with what i call flc syndrome that's when you feel like crap and that is a big problem for people what do i mean by that well you might be tired sluggish you might have brain fog maybe i have digestive issues reflux heartburn irritable bowel maybe i have nasal congestion sinus issues muscle aches joint pains headaches insomnia should i go on rashes acne i mean it goes on and on and on and and many of these things are caused by food and the only way to know is to do a total body reset like hitting the reset button on your commuter when all the systems are jammed it's a complete reboot so how do you do a reboot it's very powerful and most people have never experienced this and this is why i love to do with people and I actually then tell them all around that we're angry or people can come and actually experience this.

40:05We do programs where we have people do this just in five days, not even 10 days. People have a 70 % reduction in all symptoms of all diseases. Now, I'm going to put in the show notes the medical symptom questionnaire that I use in my practice, which essentially gives you a score based on the degree and frequency and severity of symptoms. So if you have a headache, it's at zero meaning never, or it's at four, I get it all the time, it's really bad, or some version in between. And then you get a score at the end and people have a score of 60, 70, 100. It should be less than 10, maybe even zero ideally.

40:36I mean, should I have symptoms? It's not normal for human beings to suffer this much. And that's really why I created this book and the program, The 10-Day Detox Side, because I was doing this with my patients and seeing such incredible results. So I do this personally regularly. I do it at least two or three times a year, four times a year to really reset my system to kind of get my body back on track, to get rid of all the bad stuff, put in all the good stuff. I want to walk you through how to do this. I'm going to teach you how to hit the reset button, reboot your system, and to optimize your biology to help your gut, to help your detox system, to help your immune system, to help reset your nervous system.

41:14And it's powerful. So if you want to really see how your body can feel and get rid of what we call FLC syndrome, I would do this. Most people are like a frog that's in cool water where you turn the heat up slowly and it starts to boil to death. We just kind of get used to it and think it's normal. These symptoms are not normal. My fan. I remember I wanted to do this with a junior high school once, and the teachers were like, well, we might have to get permission from the parents to see if it's safe. Maybe they don't want their children doing this. I'm like, what, is it safe to eat fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and protein and cut out sugar and starch and processed food?

41:55I mean, they should get a note that it's permission to eat the junk food that they have. It's the opposite. So anyway, yes, it's very saying anybody can do this. And some people, by the way, need more certain things or other things. But basically, this is a very universal approach to resetting your system. A second pillar, aside from what you eat, the food is really important. And by the needy approach in the morning, you need to make sure you get rid of sugar and starch in the morning. Super important. Many people start their diet, their day with carbs, which is the worst thing you can do. Sugar-sweetened coffees, teas, cereals, muffins, bagels, breads, donuts.

42:31Second pillar are your daily habits. This energy involves a pattern of eating and living that puts your body back in rhythm. It helps you reset your nervous system. And there's two really important habits as part of the 10-day detox. One is when you eat and also when you sleep. So let's talk about when you eat. Now, when you eat might be as important as what you eat. So many of us don't eat in the right pattern. We tend to eat all day long. We tend to snack. We tend to eat before bed. We snack late at night. It's kind of bad. So basically when you eat is very important. Research shows that doing that can really be bad for your health.

43:11I don't know if you eat at night. So the first is make sure you give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast. So dinner at six, breakfast at eight, that's a 14-hour fast, okay? If you eat at six and then you keep snacking all night, that doesn't count, right? And it's the most simple form of what we call time-restricted eating. And it's basically giving your body a rest and giving the body to reset. And I wrote a lot about this in my book, The Young Forever. But basically, there's a whole process at night that happens called autophagy and clean up and repair. You want to eat your body, the ability to do that.

43:46The next is food. Now, you can do a breakfast if you're eating, you know, for example, dinner at 6 and breakfast at 8 or so. That's a 14-hour fast. Really important to have protein in the morning, but not carbs and sugar. Also, not eating three hours before bed is really important. So most people eat snack after dinner. Don't do that. Have at least three hours of time you eat and you go to sleep. That way you will lose weight. Your body can repair and heal instead of trying to digest and store the food. What about sleep? sleep is one of the most underrated pillars of health it's probably even before exercise meditation maybe even before nutrition because when you don't sleep well you're going to eat sugar and carbs you're going to crave more um so you want to focus on sleep and restorative rest we know that um getting in a routine of waking and sleeping can help with them deeper and restful sleep so try to pick the same bedtime every night try to get off your screens for an hour two before bed keep your room or use blue blocker glasses keep your room dark and cold that would probably like 65 to 68, really important because your body does much better with sleep at night.

44:50Try to relax at night with meditation, do a gut imagery, do breath work, stretching, journaling, gratitude practice, whatever you like, but do something very important. So your evening routine should be like set a bedtime in six, over 10 days, turn your phone off and get out of your bedroom, turn the TV off for at least an hour or two before you go to bed. And then use the time at night to read, to journal, to meditate, to connect with people you love and just kind of wind out. The third pillar is extra support we need on the journey, right? Now, we all need nutrients. They're called vitamins because they were vital amines, vital to life, right?

45:31And so we've seen a dramatic reduction in the nutrient density of our food. Our organic matter has gone out of our soil. Nutrients can't be extracted. Food has traveled long distances. We have commodity crops, which are bred, to actually breed out the nutrients and end the starch and yield. And so foods aren't as nutritious as they once were. And probably 90 % of Americans, according to the government-owned surveys, are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiencies. How much vitamin E you need to not get rickets? Not very much, like 30 units. How much you need for optimal health?

46:09Probably 3 ,000 to 5 ,000. So we need to really probably focus on nutrients and even with a perfect diet, you know, because none of us are hunter-gatherers anymore or eating all kinds of food that we never ate and nutrient depleted. We need the basic supplements. So we need a basic set of supplements. It's a multivitamin and mineral foundational. Magnesium, a lot of us are deficient, probably 45 % or low are deficient in magnesium. It's involved in over 300 different enzymatic reactions. Sleeper important helps relax your nervous system at night, help you calm down. also people get constipated sometimes they change their diet so taking magnesium citric can help and lastly vitamin d it's also fish oil but vitamin d is really important vitamin d over 80 is lower deficient in vitamin d that's it's involved in so many different things in the body so really important and helps your mood helps your muscle function helps your brain energy helps inflammation autoimmunity it's just super important and most of us are low fish oil is also important and i i recommend fish all the people or omega-3 fats so what are the program steps in the 10-day detox what should be the tips and then we're going to go through this first step is to eat from the 10-day detox approved list for 10 days so eat what i tell you it's right whole foods uh you know whole food uh based shake in the morning you could add you know protein powder aggressive protein if you want i have aggressive protein called super simple protein but you really need to make sure you have good breakfast second is um commit to daily habits right pick your designated eating window right uh you want a 12 to 14 hour night fast which means eating right at a 10 or 12 hour window um don't snack before bed try to have the same bedtime get off your technology an hour or two before practice some active relaxation huge impact on your health step three is adding the supplements that you don't have to do this but i really encourage you to have a multivitamin magnesium vitamin d and potentially fish oil and we're going to list which uh products you should take in the show notes you have it all listed there um also what you should eat and what you should avoid during your 10 aging talk let's go through that um so here's the full food list um you can you know we're going to have it in the show notes you can take it with you in store it's in the book the 1080 talks in the 1080 cookbook but essentially uh here's what you should eat and what you should actually get rid of uh what you should eat is um protein you need right protein right so grass-fed or regeneratively raised uh meats is great you can have a past raised lamb beef bison venison elk grass-fed beef pasturized chicken turkey duck all that's fine what you should avoid is conventionally raised chicken and poultry and eggs and so forth and by the way you can also have eggs they're past-trained eggs um meat get rid of all processed meats deli meats all conventionally raised feedlot meats get rid of all that stuff um but about fish and seafood lots of small fish are good big fish are bad right big fish like swordfish tuna sea bass halibut most farm-raised fish are pretty bad for you what you should be consuming are things like the i call the smash fish small wild salmon uh sardines anchovies herring and mackerel um you can have black cod shrimp scallop trout those are fine eggs as i said uh pasturized eggs are fine not organic regular eggs are not fine what about nuts and seeds very important almonds brazil nuts cashew nuts haydell nuts macadamia pecans pine nuts pistachios walnuts all that's great um you can even have cacao nibs chocolate not chocolate but where chocolate comes from uh seeds are great chia seeds flak seeds hemp seeds pumpkin seeds sesame seeds sunflower seeds pumpkin seeds all great uh nut butter is also great so um unsweetened nut butter so almond cashew pecan macadamia i love macadamia a walnut oh that's great um you also eat beans if they're if you're a vegan and you want to do this you can use gmo free or non-gmo tofu or tempeh as your protein.

50:14Um, what you should avoid are nuts there with sugar. They have cooked in oils, uh, that are basically candy and stuff. A lot of nut butters have sugar, hydrogen, fats, uh, peanut butter, peanuts, uh, can be okay, but I wouldn't say mostly avoid peanuts because, uh, they're have aflatoxin, um, often a ranch. Uh, and so you want to be careful with that. um about oils and fats well the ones you want to use are organic avocado oil you can use organic coconut oil for cooking grass-fed ghee if you want to use tallow lard duck fat chicken fat that's okay as long as they're they're um a path race or regenerative race for salads and you can use various oils like almond oil flax oil hemp oil macadamia oil it can work with olive oil um and you can cook with olive oil but only like tomato sauces and things like that things are not high heat sesame oil tahini is great as well great fat uh sesame seed kind of paste walnut oil other flavorful oils they're not made well but you want to avoid the traditional oils all the seed oils like canola oil partially hydrogenated oils margarine peanut oils soybean oils sunflower oil saffron oil trans fats vegetable oil vegetable shortening all that stuff's bad what about veggies What should you eat?

51:31Well, you want to stick with lots of non-sargy veggies or arachokes, organic if you can. I use the Dirty Dozen guide from the Environmental Working Group, BWG.org, tell you which are the clean 15, meaning you can eat things when they're not organic, or the Dirty Dozen, which you definitely not eat if they're not organic. But I love asparagus, arachokes, avocado, bean sprouts, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, cucumber eggplant garland ginger hearts of palm kohlrabi leaching greens mushrooms of all kinds onions peppers radicchio radish rutabagas all the kind of stuff seaweed is great lots of minerals shallots summer squash tomatoes turnips zucchini list goes on we have all in there you can have some uh things like sweet potatoes i like the japanese purple sweet potatoes winter squash carrots pumpkin all that's fine i mean carrots are fine because unless you're doing carrot juice that's a problem but basically try to limit it to like one serving, which is like half a cup a day.

52:29What you should be avoiding is corn and potatoes, mostly. A little, you know, some of the little fingerling potatoes or the Peruvian potatoes, purple potatoes, which can be fine. What about dairy? You can eat pasture-raised butter or ghee, but I encourage you to get all dairy, including sheep and goat, which are mostly fine for people, but I encourage you to just get all other dairy. If you're having, I encourage you to have, make sure it's breast fed or regenerated raised and what about beans well uh you can have green beans you can have green peas uh you can have a non-gmo organic soy that's just tofu or tempeh uh you can have snap beans you can have snow peas um but otherwise definitely no no beans uh what about grains no grains at all so uh even healthy grains quinoa buckwheat things like that i and really get off all of that.

53:22Why? Because it just shuts down the insulin response, helps you lose weight, reduce inflammation. Not that these are necessarily all bad, but eventually you can add them back. But basically get rid of all the other, all grains. Weed, barley, rye, rice, amaranth, millet, oats, everything. Get rid of it. Fruit. Fruit can be okay, but small amounts of non-hyglycemic grains. So organic blackberries, blueberries, cranberries, kiwi, lemons, limes, raspberries, all that's fine. uh not too much right you know what i mean like you know two pounds of blueberries but you can have a top half company want to get rid of all the other fruit all the high glycemic fruit like bananas pineapple melons cherries grapes is the worst even foods that fruits that you think you know may be good for you are actually good for you right whether it's you know peaches pears nectarines uh cherries for example but you don't want to eat them while you're on the 10-day detox just want to really shut down the blood sugar and some response uh what about sugar sweeteners sorry the tip you can sometimes have a little bunk food or stevia you have in the shake uh we have but generally tend to avoid all that stuff um also just get all the other artificial sweeteners sugar all that stuff if you have to ask the answer is basically right um then what should you be drinking well lots of water herbal tea green tea uh let's look caffeine that's okay a little green tea is fine it'll help you get a coffee uh sparkling water mineral water all this moisture void alcohol coffee bottled water it's plastic soda obviously sugary beverages basically that's the program so if you eat that way for 10 days if you use those simple elements your body is going to totally transform and you're going to see just how food is impacting your health which i think most people don't have a clue about and that's why i love this so much now after the program it's really important if you do it for 10 days or 21 days or 10 weeks or 10 months you have to be smart about getting off it where you can get into big trouble because when you go off with foods that are inflammatory foods they're allergic to and then you reintroduce them you can get a lot worse symptoms.

55:37Let's say you had migraines before and they're gone. Wow, you're going to get a doozy of a migraine. Unless you had gut issues before, you'd get a real problem. Or let's say you had sinus congestion or eating dairy and then you eat it again, you might get a sinus infection. So you really have to be smart. So if you're feeling great and you want to continue and you, let's say you have a lot of weight to lose, let's say you have an autoimmune disease, let's say you just feel great and you want to continue, no problem. You continue it, continue to do it. You can do it for another 10 days. You can do it for another 10 months.

56:03It's fine. Totally safe to eat. That's pretty much how I eat most of the time on the occasion grains and meat. Also prioritize sleep and obviously your fasting window, not eating before bed. And then eventually people can transition slowly to the vegan diet, which incorporates a lot of the principles of the 10-day detox diet, but it gives you more flexibility in your diet. 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.

56:37Hyman 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. 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.

57:09This 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. 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.

57:45Thanks so much again for listening.