Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Mark Hyman - Megyn Kelly's "Double Feature" of Fascinating Interviews

26:36They're doing what the market incentivizes. But when it comes to their influence on the operations of the FDA, that is something that we cannot tolerate. We cannot have people who leave as regulators, go to the industry, and we've thought about an ethics pledge, we've thought about all kinds of things. It's non-binding because we live in a free country. You can't control someone after they leave an employer. But what we can do is create a culture here where people want to stay. We can ensure that people who leave don't have undue influence. And so many of the former... I have a suggestion for you.

27:12Yeah. If somebody leaves the FDA and goes to work for one of the drug companies, then you should look back to see whether they were involved in approving any of that company's drugs during their tenure over the previous five years. And it should kick in an automatic review on that drug and the approval. When I got this nomination for the job, I cannot tell you how many lobbyists, former members of Congress, the swamp reached out to me. This is the swamp. I mean, I was in the operating room and the next day I discovered what the swamp was. You were swampy, surrounded by the swamp creatures. Surrounded by the swamp creatures.

27:50And immediately, this is how it happens. We want to help you with your confirmation. We want to write a letter on behalf of our company to the senators on your committee. We know these senators. We're going to talk to them if it's OK with you. And you know what I said? Don't talk to the senators. I don't want your letters. They're not for free. Those are obligations that then you feel indebted to return once you're in office. And I'd rather not get confirmed into this job than have those obligations. Right on. And you were confirmed. You're the only Trump nominee that's had as many Democrats cross over to support you.

28:26You've gotten more than anybody, I think. Was it 56-44? Yes. It literally should be nothing political about the FDA. We're talking about values. Republican, Democrat, independent moms came out and voted for President Trump. and they believed in Secretary Kennedy's mahamish. There's literally nothing political about looking at the influence of food colors and ingredients and evaluating the grass standard and getting infant formula without seed oil and added sugar and rewriting our nutrition guidelines, which we're doing right now. These are the most apolitical things in society. Of course, you're going to have media try to spin things, of course.

29:04But I think people see through that. On the food, my daughter turned 14 this past Monday, and I was baking her a cake. And I went, I mean, I just got the Duncan Hines. I'm not going to lie. I can't do anything from scratch. But then I just took a moment to look at what was in the icing, you know, with which you would use to write happy birthday. Everything in there was red dye number this, yellow dye number that, green dye number this. And I thought, this could alternatively read carcinogen X, carcinogen Y. And that's where I drew the line. I'm sure there were tons of seed oils and so on in the cake itself.

29:44But my point is, how does that even make its way onto the shelf, where the vast majority of people have no idea that all those dyes that are in our food, but not in the Europeans, can cause cancer? And so I'm giving my child cancer for her 14th birthday, which is a no. What I don't understand is if there's enough preliminary data to suggest that there may be carcinogenic effects or genomic disruption or associations with attention deficit disorder, or a whole plethora of families that are saying, hey, once we started eliminating these petrochemical food colorings from the food of my child, their behavior improved.

30:24When you have enough of that, it's not, look, they're not giant randomized control studies over 10 years for each food dye. We're not going to get that. But when you have enough preliminary data to suggest these petrochemical food dyes are concerning, who then would conclude, you know what, let's just risk it. It's fine. We'll wing it. We'll be, you know, the kids will maybe fine. Why do that? When we have all of these chronic diseases increasing right in front of our eyes that were rare a generation ago, one in 22 boys in California now has autism. I mean, when you see these statistics, who says, you know what, it might be some of these ingredients have been suggested.

31:07Europe doesn't have them. They don't need them. The food prices are not higher because they use beet juice and carrot juice and watermelon juice. I know you had Vani Hari on. She's a great champion for that. We're taking a close look at this, and I think you're going to hear some action in the coming weeks on this. Before we go to the autism thing, because Kennedy made news on that too. On the drugs, it's fun to demonize drug companies because we're all kind of ticked off, I think, about the COVID vaccines and so on. Not all, but many of us. However, they're not all bad. They do make some drugs that have helped a lot of people.

31:39America's drunk on Ozempic. But, I mean, there are some actual serious drugs that can help people. And so one of the concerns behind people who back big pharma is how much is all of this, some of the stuff we're talking about, going to slow down the approval process for new drugs or drugs and testing? We're speeding up the approval process. We made an announcement last week that we are reducing the requirements for some perfunctory things, like animal testing. Why are we testing every single drug in chimpanzees and dogs, usually beagles, because they're obedient? That's so sad. It's sad, and it's unnecessary.

32:18Some of these drugs are already approved in other countries, in humans. So you have a drug already in use in humans in other countries, and we're requiring animal testing before. So we've put out a release that we are now taking steps to reduce the animal testing requirement. It's cruel to the animals sometimes. It's unnecessary. And we live in a modern world where we have computational modeling using AI that can evaluate a molecule and predict its toxicity in humans better than the animal testing. We also have something called organ-on-a-chip technology, where, say, liver cells are grown in the lab.

32:54Sounds like a terrible appetizer. Yeah, I personally cannot eat liver. I've operated on the liver too much. Oh, God. That's one food I cannot do. No one wants organ-on-a-chip. Yeah, organ-on-a-chip. So in the lab, they grow these cells, and then they introduce the drug. And you can actually see whether or not it injures the cells better than if you inject some bunny rabbit that is not going to talk to you and say, my liver hurts. So these new technologies have the promise of replacing some of this routine animal testing. You would cut six months out of that approval process. You lower R &D costs for pharma companies and inventors, which could lower drug prices for everyday Americans.

33:37And it reduces animal use. There's too much animal use. Are there any other areas where AI can come and help as we move into the 21st century? Yeah, we're bringing in a team that is really exciting. They're going to introduce AI into the review process to help the reviewer, to make the reviewer's work stream much more streamlined. And summarize things. There are parts of the drug application that are so perfunctory, that are outdated, that could be streamlined, that could be abstracted with AI to help the reviewer. So here, like all other aspects of government that Trump is taking on, you're saying there's actually too much red tape.

34:18And we're red taping the wrong things, it sounds like you're saying. Why does it take 10 years to bring a drug to market in the United States? Because of the regulatory steps. I mean, people are dying. People need cures and meaningful treatments. And my predecessor in this role was focused, as he stated, his number one goal was fighting misinformation. Well, our number one goal is delivering cures and meaningful treatments and healthier foods for Americans. That is our focus. And so you've heard about consolidation or changes or cuts at the FDA. Those were not cuts to scientists or reviewers or inspectors.

35:01Absolutely none. They were cuts to communications staff, FDA's lobbyists to Congress, and to the IT systems here where there's a lot of opportunity for efficiencies. Yes, definitely there's been pushback on the number of people who were ousted. I think it was your predecessor who said the FDA, as we know it, is gone, that the experts are gone, people with decades of institutional knowledge have been turfed, suggesting there might now be a safety issue here. There was a massive growth of FDA employees under the Biden administration. And when the media reports that there were cuts, which many were early retirements, people took early retirement, none were to scientific reviewers or inspectors or law enforcement at the FDA.

35:50They were to IT communications, legislative affairs. And so what you're not hearing in the mainstream media is that there was a 100 % increase in the number of FDA employees since 2006. You have about 18 ,000, and it's been cut about 3 ,500 since you and Kennedy got here. So you're saying we had more like 9 ,000? We had 9 ,500 employees at the FDA in 2006. Oh, wow. And so when you report that there were cuts, and you don't report that there was a 100 % increase in employees in the preceding years, that the number of employees doubled in the preceding years, that is misleading. And the people who we've gotten rid of, losing them is not going to slow down drug approval or safety procedures because they were, sounds like, more administrative people.

36:41There were no cuts to scientists, reviewers, or inspectors, or law enforcement. And my goal is to make sure that every one of those people has all the resources they need to do their job well. Now, cuts are never perfect. And so we have done an assessment and there are some individuals that we have invited back. There were a couple of people who were taking the early retirement and we were told of their sort of how well they performed here. And we encouraged them to stay. but to not report that the agency has doubled since 2006 before this cut, in my opinion, is not telling the whole story. No, it's dishonest.

37:22It's dishonest. Is it swampy here? And by that, I mean, we had a report that when Secretary Kennedy came over and addressed the troops last Friday, some people got up and walked out. They were disgusted by him, which seems like a bad sign. Yeah, I was in that room. Nobody got up and walked out. Now, we did stream it, so if somebody was watching it in their office and got up to go to the bathroom during the speech, maybe that constituted getting up and walking out. I don't know. I was in that room, and there was incredible energy in that room. Because he talked about how agencies that are set up to defend public safety sometimes become captured by the organizations that they are set out to regulate.

38:03And he talked about the EPA has had a history where they have cycled and at times have been captured by the industry. and he encouraged people at the FDA to speak up, think independently, and that he had his full support behind them. So it was an incredible talk. And of course, you're going to hear a clip or a phrase pulled out out of context. But I was in that room. Nobody walked out. It was incredibly a strong message. The FDA is strong and we're going to continue to be strong. And that's because we believe in the scientists. How's your relationship with Bobby Kennedy? It's good. You know, I got to know him during the nomination process, and I found that he always listens to me.

38:43He values scientists on questions where he has, you know, some skepticism or he has some honest questions that he wants to pose. And I think that's what we need. I mean, first of all, he represents America. there are president trump and robert f kennedy jr are the two most popular political people in the united states right now that's polling data that's not my opinion that's polling data and he is he represents the american people he has questions he wants the scientific process to run its course and so he's posing the questions and he values our opinion everything i put before forum he has valued my input on.

39:25And so we're going to see new studies come out. We're going to talk about chronic diseases. We're going to look at food and food ingredients. And he's provided some really great leadership. Are we redoing the food pyramid? We're redoing the food pyramid. Thank God. And no longer are we going to say it's, you have to have these calories. It doesn't matter how you get them. Doesn't matter if it's all ultra processed foods. It's just pure calories in, calories out. That dogma, which had no scientific support, was a massively underfunded endeavor. We let the industry tell us as a government what's healthy and what's not healthy.

40:01And even with the recent Biden administration suggestion to have front of package labeling, they picked sodium, saturated fat, and added sugar in there. I think they got maybe one thing right out of those four, but they ignored a giant sloth of food ingredients. And so when you ignore a thousand chemicals, some of which are petrochemicals that have been introduced into the food supply simply because the industry has self-deemed them as safe, when you ignore that, then you can't call something healthy just because it has a low amount of saturated fat. That's old dogma.

40:46Dr. Mark Hyman:Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles. Usually, you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla, not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken Menu while it's here. The participating U.S. Taco Bell locations for a limited time only. while supplies last. Contact store for availability. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

41:21Dr. Mark Hyman:Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home Secretary Kennedy said this week that we are going to know what causes autism by September. Is that crazy talk? No, people want to know. A lot of parents have been dealing with kids with autism.

42:00I mean, one in 32 kids in America today have autism. We can't just keep medicating every kid with attention. It was one in 10 ,000 in the 90s. It was unheard of. The sort of repetitive motions, the tics, the heavy, the complete nonverbal child. Where did you see that in the 1940s and 50s? And so we have to look at everything. When you do science, you can't say, hey, we're going to do a study of what is causing this epidemic affecting 1 in 32 kids. But you can't look at these potential causes. That's not how science is done. That's what we've been saying. And for the record, you're not saying it, but people are talking in part about vaccines because Kennedy has said it should be on the list of things we look at.

42:44Now, his critics will say he's blaming it all on the vaccine. He's blaming autism on the vaccine. I've talked to him personally. That's not what he says. It's not what he's saying. They're growing up in a toxic stew. That's one of the many things. And in particular, like the aluminum that they put in it as a preservative. We should be looking at everything they're consuming and we're forcing on them. I don't know what causes autism, but I'm deeply concerned about the rise. If I had to make a hypothesis as a scientist, not as a regulator, but as a scientist, and Dr. Bhattacharya is going to be launching a very impressive study using electronic health big data that we're helping curate.

43:19I think it is the cumulative burden of all of these exposures, environmental and dietary, that alter the microbiome. Remember, 90 % of the serotonin made, which is involved in mood and mental health, is from bacteria in the microbiome. That's where it's produced. And when you mess up the microbiome, when you carpet bomb the microbiome with all of these ingredients that don't appear in nature, these are novel chemicals, what are we doing? So we've known for a long time as a scientific community that kids with autism have different stool composition, different biodiversity. So when you look at the billion different bacteria that live in the microbiome, there may be an association between changing the microbiome and autism and things that are changing the microbiome that we've not yet fully appreciated.

44:12And that could be a whole list of things. I've heard you talk many times with me and others about, and this stuck out to me because I had C-sections, but about how vaginal births are in some ways much better for the baby because it will help their microbiome. Like going through the birth canal is very helpful to a baby's microbiome. But I was thinking about this because what we have now is a scenario in which C-sections are routinely pushed on mothers because it's easier for the OBGYN. They can schedule their life more easily. The nursing staff supports it. They can get a wink or two, whereas the vaginal birth is a different story, natural, whatever.

44:49So the kid comes out without that advantage. Then we're very quick to prescribe antibiotics for young kids. Carpet bombing the microbiome. Over and over, even when they're little. And we're not setting their microbiome up. Then we fill them full of processed foods, or maybe we give them infant formula that's riddled with processed or seed oils or added sugars that don't need to be there. And then we, for a long time, didn't expose them to peanuts or other potential allergens, which made them weaker and more susceptible to these allergies. And then, you know, there's all these antibiotics in foods and estrogen-altering chemicals in foods.

45:28And now the child is basically hobbled in a lot of ways through absolutely no fault of their own. And really the parents either. The parents wouldn't have necessarily known not to do that. Your kid has strep. Your doctor says give him antibiotics. you do it. And then on top of that, we've got all these vaccines and we've got all these processed foods and we've got all this weird stuff and, you know, your cow milk. And it's so much. And so it's almost like the system is set up to get your kids sick. And then we say, why is everybody getting colon cancer before they turn 25? Right? No one's even taking a hard look at that.

46:02Now it seems like for the first time we have a team that's saying, no, we're taking a hard look at all of that. All of it. We have to look at all of it. I mean, if you look at how much children are suffering, they're in pain, they're depressed, they're dealing with injecting themselves with insulin, something you would rarely see a kid have type 2 diabetes in their teenage years a generation ago. Now you got 20 % of kids who have diabetes or prediabetes. The vast majority are type 2 diabetes, right? We have only been talking about treating the rise in colon cancer in young people with new chemotherapy.

46:40New chemotherapy is not going to address the root causes. We need to do it, and we want to see new drugs come into market quickly, but we've got to talk about what is insulting the microbiome, driving general body inflammation. We've got to talk about the two underlying causes of so many chronic diseases, in my opinion, insulin resistance and general body inflammation. And it's all the stuff that we put down. The body's immune system is reacting and causing some inflammation. So we're not just going to be looking at new chemo for colon cancer. We're going to be focused on healthy food at the FDA.

47:17And we're looking at a school lunch grant program for schools that want to convert to healthier foods but don't know how and they need help. We want to help them. Is guidance coming out for parents on how to feed their child in a healthy way. Whether, you know, saying this to you before we got started, the American breakfast right now is, you know, especially for kids, cereal, bagels, English muffins, toast, French toast. It's all carbs, Danish, right? It's all starchy carbs. Then God knows what they get at school for lunch. And even when you make them lunch, it's hard. You don't know what, it's like, chicken fingers, good or bad?

47:56Fried, better than, you know, lunch meat, probably. well, what? Like, people don't know. They don't know. They've had no real guidance. Are they going to get some? So we are redoing the food pyramid. But this is a this is like the number one issue right now in health in America is people don't know how to switch to healthier foods. Right. And I wish, you know, there's zealots in every aspect of health care. And you'll you hear them. You know, the media gives them a lot of airtime and their issues are legitimate oftentimes. But I often look at these zealots and I say, I wish you would take 10 % of your enthusiasm over this little issue in health care and actually talk about school lunches and healthy foods and educating parents on what to feed their children and, you know, sugary drinks that are ubiquitous and microplastics and seed oils and chemicals in the grass and all of it, all of it.

48:52So we're going to see some guidance come out that I think is going to be helpful. Schools that want to convert to healthier, more organic, more local, when possible, foods don't know how. And they've got limited budgets. That's where we can provide some assistance. So on a pilot basis for schools that want to convert and don't know how, we're going to help them get off the cupcakes. I didn't realize how many schools feed breakfast to children. Donuts. Cupcakes. ding-dongs, French toast, as if, you know, it alludes to the French healthy living. Right, so it's more sophisticated. Right, more sophisticated, right.

49:32So this is where the entire medical establishment can pivot and focus on. And you're going to see grants coming out of the NIH. We're working in coordination with the NIH to make sure there's research in this area. You know, the NIH has really focused on genetics. and the entire culture of the NIH and thus the entire academic medical community in the United States has been a culture focused on the genome. Based on the Francis Collins era, that the gene is responsible for most of our health problems and the gene can solve most of our health problems. And you look at the NIH individual institutes within the National Institutes of Health, And it's geneticists all over the place.

50:20You look at the Institute for Child Health at the NIH, and it's run by a geneticist who parades around finding a gene involved in some ultra-rare gene disorder. That's good, and it's important, but nobody is talking about the food our kids are eating. By the way, there's not much we can do about our genes. The genes are not the cause of our chronic disease epidemic. It's what we're doing or what is being done to children by adults today, unknowingly, with good intentions sometimes. You go to the National Institute of Environmental Health at the NIH. Go to the website, and you'll see the director has on there that they were involved in identifying a gene that may be associated with obesity.

51:02What are you doing? I mean, there's value in that research. How about the ding-dongs and cupcakes and donuts and French toast that the kids are eating with government tax dollars every morning at school and nobody seems to be paying attention? And I've heard you say before, if you fix your microbiome, you actually might be less hungry, less prone to obesity. Like the things you were talking about are all to set people up for a healthier lifestyle that's a little easier. You know, that they may be victims to cravings that were created by this terrible food pyramid and them following the American diet that's shoved down our throats.

51:38Yeah, as a surgeon, I've had patients that would do everything to lose weight. They did all the right things. They switched to better foods and they would exercise. They couldn't lose weight. What was happening there? Can we learn from those individual patients? Maybe the microbiome was altered in a way that is not easy to fix by just switching back. Maybe all of those years, the cumulative insult to the microbiome was altered. Now, there are some researchers doing this. I met the microbiome researcher at the NIH, and it's like a tiny shop. Like, this should be the main focus. Yes. You know, the NIH has collected DNA, all the DNA information on 1.2 million Americans.

52:17And you'll say, I didn't know about this. What, you know, what, why? Why? They have been doing it for the last six or seven years in search of a genetic basis for health disparities. And that entire... What does that mean? It means they want to understand why certain populations have more chronic diseases than others. And they believe that it's in the genome. And so they collected this giant genetic library. They would pay Americans, say,$25. 80 % are African-American, Latino, or transgender because they want to unlock why they have different rates of chronic diseases. They have this massive library.

52:58When Jay Bhattacharya came into office, the previous director moved that entire database project to another office outside of the director's office. Maybe so he wouldn't touch it. Interesting. And what are they doing? Like, I'm not saying there's no value in that, but you're not, you can't even tell us how to lose weight. You can't even tell us how to, what foods are healthy for children. You can't even tell us about seed oils or food dyes or ingredients that are added just for shelf life. And so that has been the entire culture of the medical establishment. And when they launched that project, they went to the oldest African-American church in Harlem.

53:39They went to Atlanta, Detroit, and they recruited people from minority communities. And they told them, no longer is our medical recommendations going to be blanket. They're going to be custom-tailored to your population. Good luck doing that with trans people. Okay, a couple of quick things. One of your predecessors here has said you're going to have to expect massive pushback on all of this. Like it might be too pie in the sky that, for example, if we remove all ultra processed foods from school lunch programs, we might bankrupt a bunch of farmers. Like, are we too optimistic? You know, is it is the moonshot not possible?

54:25I think people are now discovering that they've been duped with an industry that has told them, don't worry, all this food is healthy for kids. It's low in calories. It has low fat. So, you know, go ahead and it's fine. That's sort of the between the lines message. And I think they're very suspicious and they want to find an ingredient that accounts for the chronic disease epidemic. I don't believe there's any single ingredient. I think it's the entire gamut of less exercise, food chemicals, not eating the right foods, micronutrient poor foods. We have foods now in the United States that are basically grown with caffeine, you know, potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen in the roots, and there's no nutrients.

55:14There's a deficiency of good soil, and so you get micronutrient deficient food, and you can eat a lot, but your satiety, that is your sense of feeling full, is not triggered because you're not getting those nutrients. And so what you do is you have this weird feeling after you eat where you're kind of full and bloated, but you're still hungry. And some of those chemicals make you more hungry. The food industry, they're not bad people. They're actually good people. They've done what we as a society have asked them to do, and that is focus on food insecurity and mass production. Now, however, seeing that these chronic diseases have skyrocketed in our country, in our generation, we've got to take a step back and ask, how can we get healthier foods out there?

56:04And I wanted to go back to the animal testing, because this is something near and dear to my heart. I'm a big animal rights person. I do eat meat and animal products, and I get letters from PETA all the time. But the animal testing is a heartbreaker, and what Fauci was doing to the beagles is really deeply disturbing. And what I never realized until you just said it right now, it's because they're compliant, which is just so sad. It's sad. So how do you stop that? Can we, as humans stay safe in the drugs we consume and the products we consume without torturing sweet little beagles and I will throw in a word for the bunnies and even the little lab rats, which, you know, animal torture just seems beneath us at this point in our evolution.

56:45But you tell me. God did not make these animals on planet Earth for us to do cruel things to them and subjugate them. It does not seem right. And so we are doing everything we can, and we're taking a lot of steps to reduce animal testing requirements and to stop unnecessary animal testing. A single monoclonal antibody that was developed for approval used 144 chimpanzees in the animal testing requirement. What are we doing? And these chimpanzees are not, you know, living with great sunlight and eating bananas. It's not, you know, there is a problem here. And when you realize that the computational models can do as good or better of a job in predicting, when the lab-based organ cells tested, or something called organoids, where you can actually grow an organ in a lab, and it's not a functional organ, but it has the properties of those cells, and you can test liver toxicity.

57:48or heart toxicity or myocarditis, those models should be replacing animal testing. So the first announcement we had when I came in as commissioner was to take steps to reduce unnecessary animal testing. Reduced by a lot? Almost entirely? With a goal toward hitting entirely or what? I'd like to see as much reduction of unnecessary animal testing as humanly possible. As a surgeon, we had pig labs at Johns Hopkins where the students and residents would learn how to do surgery on the pigs. I personally believed it had no impact on learning. They could have learned from simulations, computerized simulations.

58:31They can learn from watching us in the operating room. It provided no edits because they were unnecessary. And every week or so, they would have pigs anesthetized. It was big production. It was expensive. And in my opinion, it was unnecessary. We've got to modernize. Okay. So last but not least, 3 ,500 gone in cooperation with Doge. Will there be more cuts? There are no plans for any mass cuts. Now, if somebody has not logged on to their VPN in two years, we don't want them working. If somebody's doing an incredible job, and we measure performance down to 15-minute increments with reviewers that are doing scientific reviews, the reviews are highly tracked.

59:17And so if somebody's doing a good job doing that review, we want to encourage them and support. It's hard work. Doing the reviews is hard work. And so we want to do other things here at the FDA to support a great culture. Scientific forums, speakers, roundtables. We want to encourage them to spend some of their time doing creative work. And so we're doing a lot right now to create more of a teamwork culture and less of an individual siloed culture that is the culture that I walked into. It feels like you really want to make this a better place for people to work, more collegial, more of a feeling of camaraderie, a shared mission.

59:55Is it possible? You know, there are certain government agencies, I'm just going to say it, where they're hard left, they can't stand Trump, and there will be a natural resistance to his appointees trying to do anything to their agency. There are some of those folks here, but you know, they're all God's children, and I hope to work with all of them. So, you know, that's my job as a leader to try to win their confidence. And I hope to do it by upholding my mission to put out their gold standard science and common sense together. We can do both. Healthier food for children, rebuilding the public trust, and focusing not on the peripheral distractions, but focusing on cures and meaningful treatments for Americans.

1:00:39And when this is done, is there a chance you're going to a drug company? Zero chance. In terms of if there's an inventor that I might have the chance to work with, I have no idea. When it comes to the large pharmaceutical companies, I'm not auditioning for a job with them. At the same time, I love them. I believe in love thy neighbor. And I hope we can work with them to create a great user-friendly process to chop down that 10-year time frame to an approval to a much shorter time frame. and I'm committed to work with them to get that down. I can't wait to see what you do. Thank you so much. Thank you, Megan.

1:01:19Thanks for being willing to do the job. Thanks for being a champion for my bombs. My pleasure. Ah, so interesting. I love him. I feel so much better that he's here, right? I feel like we're in good hands. He's got his work cut out for him and we'll stay tuned. We'll keep you updated on what happens over here. Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa

1:01:39Dr. Mark Hyman:with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles usually you add sauce to the food but when the sauce is this good the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth that rolled quesadilla not a rolled quesadilla anymore now it's a sauce shovel taco bell's jalapeno citrus salsa get it with any item on the cantina chicken menu while it's here the participating u.s taco bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last contact store for availability hey chicagoland the wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators.

1:02:16Dr. Mark Hyman:Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

1:02:39Today, let's talk about the fact that we all have nothing if we don't have our health. And we have the perfect guest to discuss how you can take control of your wellness and life. If you're into Maha, this is the show for you. If you're into living, this is the show for you. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician and a leader in functional medicine. We'll talk about what that means. He is a 15-time New York Times bestselling author, the host of The Dr. Hyman Show podcast, and the founder of Function Health, a resource that gives you the tools to own your own health. Dr. Hyman was on with us back in February 2023 on episode 498, and I'm super excited to dive into him, with him for the full show today.

1:03:19Great to have you.

1:03:20Dr. Mark Hyman:Good to be here, Megan. Okay, can we just start with that? What is functional medicine? Because it's not the same as like traditional medicine. No. Traditional medicine is really about sick care. It's diagnosing and treating disease as as opposed to the science of creating health. That's what functional medicine is. It sort of reframes our whole perspective to get to root causes rather than just downstream symptoms. So medicine is sort of divided into specialties and different organs and different parts, but your body's one whole ecosystem. And now we begin to understand that and how things like environmental factors, toxins, our diet, stress, allergens, and so forth, interrupt our biology or lack of certain things we need, like the right food, nutrients, amounts of hormones, light, air, water, sleep, connection, movement, all these things are ingredients for health.

1:04:06Dr. Mark Hyman:So functional medicine is about identifying the root causes, which are the lack of things you need to thrive and too much of the stuff that your body doesn't like, whether it's heavy metals or whatever it is, and taking those away. And then your body has this natural intelligence and healing system that allows your body to repair, heal, and renew. And when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. So functional medicine is really about this new paradigm I'm dealing with a body as an ecosystem rather than going to a different doctor for every inch of your body. It should just be medicine.

1:04:34Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, it just makes sense. But it's not. It's not, it will be, it will be, it's coming. It's like, it's where the science is, it's where we're headed. It takes a generation or two to change science. I was doing some of these things like a year ago. I was like getting my life in order physically and in every way. And the woman who was advising me was like, we should get you a test for the heavy metals in your body. And my doctor was like, no, he refused. Like it was actually something he would have had to order, I guess. And he's like, we're not doing that. And like, he was not open-minded to it at all.

1:05:04Some of the other stuff he was like, okay, because I had mold in my apartment or my house at the beach. And he's like, I guess, you know, you can get tested for mold. But then he's like, do you really think it's an issue? He was like, if mold were killing people, everybody who lived in the jungle would be dead a lot sooner than people who live in the desert and they're not. So I've been like pulled between these two, you know, because functional medicine makes so much sense to me. And yet my very no-nonsense traditional doctor is like, no!

1:05:31Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, no, I mean, the two things that make us sick are our diet and environmental toxins. And those things are ignored by traditional medicine. My daughter just graduated medical school. I mean, she learned nothing about these things. And yet every day in my practice, I see people with chronic illness, whether it's autoimmune diseases or whether it's metabolic diseases or whether it's digestive diseases or neurodegenerative things like Alzheimer's. And they're all things that we now begin to understand the root causes. and we can actually change those and reverse those chronic illnesses. Like nobody ever heard of reversing diabetes before.

1:06:00Dr. Mark Hyman:Nobody ever heard of reversing Alzheimer's or reversing autoimmune diseases. And you can, and that's the beauty of what this approach does. It's really where medicine's headed. It's where major sort of academic institutions are researching, but it takes a couple of decades for science to become practice. With RFKJ, who I know is a personal friend, Callie and Casey Means, Callie in particular, like a big advisor to him. That's great. He's totally on board with all this. And then you mentioned Dr. Bredesen. He's the Alzheimer's doctor. I mean, he's an expert in Alzheimer's and dementia. He's been on the show a couple of times.

1:06:31And he's been saying, you don't have to get Alzheimer's. You can do things in your life to prevent Alzheimer's. But the so-called traditional community looks at him as like, oh, you know, not, I won't say snake oily. Fringe. But like, yeah, exactly. Fringe. And like, you can't listen to him. I first got introduced to him by Maria Shriver, who was having gone when she was on the Today Show. She's very into Alzheimer's. Absolutely. Anyway.

1:06:56Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, she's into stopping him. Yeah, yeah. She loves Alzheimer's. Yeah, but that's what's happening right now. In the same way we saw doctors who were like, you might not want to get your seventh COVID vaccine booster, who got dismissed by people like Fauci as fringe, Jay Bhattacharya as focus protection. That's fringe. Now we're having functional medicine doctors looked as fringe. but I think there's a different F word and it's future. That's right, it's future. That's changing. I mean, Toby Cosgrove, who's one of the most visionary leaders in healthcare, was the CEO of Cleveland Clinic for many years.

1:07:27Dr. Mark Hyman:And he invited me to come to Cleveland Clinic to establish the Center for Functional Medicine because he realized that the future is gonna have to look different when it comes to chronic disease. That the old model of looking for a drug for every disease or a pill for every ill is not gonna solve the problem. We saw this massive failure with Alzheimer's. We saw billions of dollars of money, federal money and private money and pharma money, going to researching the drugs that they thought would cure Alzheimer's and none of them have worked. Billions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of studies.

1:07:55Dr. Mark Hyman:Why? Because they weren't looking in the right place to solve the problem. They were looking at the pathology downstream, not at the upstream causes. And so the causes are not that hard to understand. It's our metabolic crisis. Prediabetes are calling Alzheimer's type three diabetes, which is because of the sugar and metabolic issues in the brain. That's why keto diets work so well for Alzheimer's. They're looking at environmental toxins and how they play a role. whether it's heavy metals or petrochemicals or other toxins. Mold may be a factor. Tick infections may be a factor. Nutrition deficiencies might be a factor.

1:08:24Dr. Mark Hyman:I had a patient who was diagnosed with early dementia, and she was an older woman who had absorption issues of B12 and also some genetics around vitamin B6 and folic acid. I gave her vitamin B12, such, and high doses of B12 and B6 and folate, and her dementia went away. Now, that's not saying all diseases with people with dementia have that as their cause, but you have to personalize medicine. And where everything is going is personalized medicine. And this is just where we're headed. Leroy Hood, who's the father of systems biology, which is how everything is connected and works together as the body is a network, he called it P4 medicine.

1:08:59It's preventive.

1:09:01Dr. Mark Hyman:It's predictive. So you can identify biomarkers or things along the continuum of disease, not wait until you get something. Say, well, you know, I have this problem and I don't feel good or my tests are abnormal. Well, you don't really quite have a disease yet, so come back when you really have a disease. Then I'll give you a drug. It's not how we should be doing it. So it should be predictive. I see this, I call it like the queen's medicine. How did the queen live to be in her mid-90s? How did the queen mom live to be 101 or two? Because they had personal care that was looking at them all the time on this level, not just like an annual.

1:09:29And honestly, having known some super rich, like mega billionaires in my media career, they all have somebody who's looking at this stuff all the time. I saw this one guy, super billionaire at this event I went to two years ago. and this is a swanky event. We were there for a few days put on by another billionaire but notwithstanding, billionaire number one had brought all of his food with him. He was at that level where he was being advised at that level on his health and the reason I'm mentioning this is because all these people who have money or royalty or whatever, they're invested in making sure it's one-on-one care.

1:10:05Someone's looking at their markers, advising them on what they're putting in their body. It's not just like, try to eat better, get a little exercise, don't smoke or drink so much right it's much more great much more creative yeah so that's but you're like with functional medicine and with your program too you can get this without being a billionaire without being royalty that's right it's basically 500 bucks a year that's right so

1:10:27Dr. Mark Hyman:function health is you know is look i'm one doctor and it's going to take a generation to change medicine or two maybe so how do we leapfrog over that we need to have business innovation and that's where we created function health which is a health platform that's personalized allows you to understand your own biology, be proactive, be the seal of your own health. And we're learning so much about what's going on underneath the hood for the population that never had been done before. We now have over, I think, 180 ,000 members. We have over 20 million data points on these people. We can see trends like the severe metabolic crisis we're having in America with high levels of insulin and blood sugar and A1C and also their lipids, which we do in a very deep way to look at their cardiovascular risk that traditional doctors don't do less than 1 % of all tests or for this special new advanced lipid profile and less than 1 % of all doctors measure insulin, which is the most important test you want to know if you're going to live a long time and be healthy.

1:11:17Dr. Mark Hyman:It's the underlying problem. That's the pre-diabetes thing. Yeah, pre-diabetes, but it's not just pre-diabetes. It causes heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia. These are all diseases of insulin resistance. When your body doesn't like sugar and it keeps blocking the effects of insulin, you need more and more insulin and then insulin causes storage of belly fat. It causes inflammation. It makes you hungry. It just creates this whole cascade. And so we're seeing all these amazing things that people didn't know they had, like inflammation is a big driver of disease. 46 % of our population has inflammation.

1:11:46Dr. Mark Hyman:33 % have an autoimmune biomarker, which is sort of amazing to uncover because I don't know what's causing it. Is it our load of environmental toxins? Is it our leaky gut? Is it the COVID, post-COVID phenomena? Well, the vaccine and even just COVID has led to this long COVID phenomena, which is often driving autoimmune disease. And we're also seeing nutritional deficiencies. Over 70 % of our population has deficiencies in nutrients at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. So how much vitamin C do you not get? You get scurvy, very little. That happened to my husband's good friend on Wall Street when he first started in investment banking.

1:12:20He was eating so poorly. He went to the doctor. This is a guy working in Manhattan. Went to the doctor. They're like, you have scurvy. Have you been on a ship for six months? He's like, no, I've just been at my desk. But I've heard you discuss this on your show where we have what percentage of the population now that's obese?

1:12:39Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, it's scary. And yet you're saying they're malnourished. Yeah. People are overfed and undernourished. So we see this double burden of obesity and malnutrition at the same time, especially in kids who are eating junk food. They have tremendous. We're seeing zinc deficiencies, folate deficiencies, iron deficiencies, deficiencies in vitamin D. These are omega-3 deficiencies. These are rampant in our population. and what people don't realize is that these nutrients are the basic lubricants that oil the wheels of your metabolic machinery so every chemical reaction in your body and there's 37 billion trillion every second has to be facilitated by a helper which is usually a vitamin or mineral and and we're deficient and it's because we're eating 60 percent of our diet is ultra processed food it's 67 percent of kids diet for every 10 percent of your diet that's ultra processed food your risk of death goes up by 14 so you do the math i'm not good at math but it's a lot it's a A lot of increase in mortality.

1:13:30Those omega-3s you mentioned, so you can get those in something like fish. Fish, yeah. And then the bad omegas are the 6s, which you can get in like vegetable oil.

1:13:37Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. And unfortunately, the average kid has a ton of omega-6s in their potato chips and all this. Yeah. They're not really necessarily balancing them out. And then if you do try to balance them out with seafood or fish, the odds are, if you just get it from the grocery store, it's riddled with mercury. That's right. And it may not even be worth the time. You have to get like wild caught salmon or like herring. It's the smash fish. Yeah, that's right. Salmon, mackerel. But not just any salmon. It has to be wild caught Alaskan salmon. Small salmon. Mackerel. Anchovies. Anchovies. And sardines. Sardines, right?

1:14:08Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I love those. I'm Jewish. I like all that. Wait a minute. Have you actually opened up a tin of sardines? Have you been to Russ and Daughters in New York? No, no. Have you ever opened up a tin of sardines and actually eaten fish right around there? A hundred percent. Every day. Is it the whole body? Like the little bones or anything? Yeah, the bones are great because sardines are one of the superfoods out there. I just threw up my mouth. No, come on. it's a super food. You've got an incredible amount of protein. You've got calcium from the bones, which is highly absorbable. Is it crunchy?

1:14:31Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, a little bit. You've got, you've got, you've got a rich source of omega threes that are great for your brain health and many other things. And you've got choline, which is also critically important for your brain. So it's an incredible food. Is this available to me via supplement? Yeah, you can say sardine supplements for sure. Well, that actually I just heard something interesting because I, I was taking fish oil capsules for a while since I eat no fish, but then somebody's like, you know, you got to watch that too, because be careful who you buy it from. Yeah. You need a reputable source.

1:15:00Dr. Mark Hyman:Right. Because they too could just be getting it from mercury infested fish. So you're basically taking two mercury capsules every night. Yeah. Most of them don't have that, but they filter it, they purify it, and you can look at the before and after testing and see if it's got. Okay. That's good to hear. Yeah. But anyway, so that's just one of the many lists that you gave that like your kids are doing. And I do worry about the kids a lot because you said something that I was like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. Bobby Kennedy's been talking about this too. I cross-examined him for four hours over vaccines.

1:15:32That's part of his resurrection story. And it was great. He was very strong. He had answers for all of his critics' questions about him, which is what I was fronting. And one of the things he was saying was, no, I have not maintained that vaccines cause autism, but I think that we need to look at the toxic stew the children are growing up in as a cause of potential, a potential cause of autism. And what's in the vaccines, like the extras in the vaccines, like mercury or aluminum should also be factored into that discussion. Made perfect sense to me. But he listed it for me in this discussion saying, look at all the things that kids are going through that were not present when I was a kid.

1:16:10He was talking about like tics and ADHD, like everywhere, autism spectrum diagnoses all over the place. Exploded, yeah. And so that made perfect sense to me. And then I listen more to you and you're even next level with it, I think, because you're like part of the toxic stew is those potato chips and the soda and the absence of cauliflower and broccoli and kale or any of the cruciferous vegetables that might help absorb some of the terrible shit we're putting in our bodies.

1:16:42Dr. Mark Hyman:They help you detoxify. and we're allowing it. I mean, I'm guilty of this too, in part. We're allowing the kids to treat their bodies like dumpster fires. Yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean, when you look at what happened from when I was born in 1959, it was a long time ago, about 53. Not that long. To now. The change in our chronic disease epidemic is staggering. The change in autism rates have gone from one in 10 ,000 to one in 30-something kids, depending on where you look at the data. The rate of neurodevelopmental issues is now affecting one in six children. We have rising rates of autoimmune disease and allergies in kids.

1:17:17Dr. Mark Hyman:We're seeing, obviously, obesity in kids, which you never saw before. I mean, when I was in medical school, there was no type 2 or type 1 diabetes. It was juvenile onset or adult onset. Then kids started getting it. Now 30-plus percent of teenagers have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. It's staggering. And so the question is why. Why has this happened? What's changed in our culture, in our environment, and in the food? Well, we've industrialized our food system. We've made convenience king. The food industry has basically taken over, and when I say food, I mean the food and ag industry have taken over our society in ways that are pervasive and actually measurable.

1:17:52Dr. Mark Hyman:They fund academic centers to do research. They fund 12 times as much, quote, nutrition research as the federal government. They fund academic associations like the American Heart Association, which gets$192 million from the food and the pharma industry. They fund the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which 40 % of their revenue comes from the food companies. And when you go to their meetings, and I've been there, and I've spoken there, there's like big exhibit halls that say no pictures allowed. Why? Because it's full of junk food. And they're promoting to the nutritionist as sort of healthy alternatives.

1:18:24Dr. Mark Hyman:And so you've got them creating front groups like the American Council on Science and Health that is actually some of those guys have been in jail for Medicare fraud. And there are a bunch of quacks who are funded by big tobacco, big food, big ag, and say they pesticide trans fats and fructose corn syrup are all healthy for you. And then they fund social groups like NAACP and Hispanic Federation to get them to oppose things like soda taxes, which we can argue is good or bad. But they want to lie themselves so they don't push back on them. And they target those groups more directly than other groups in society.

1:18:54By the way, Remiss, if we didn't mention, they also fund our lawmakers.

1:18:57Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. Well, I was about to say that. And they're their biggest lobby group. So they fund huge amounts of miseducation and misinformation. On both sides. Neither party is immune from this. The Republicans are just as corrupt as the Democrats are in taking money from these groups and voting accordingly. A hundred percent. I mean, Roger Marshall, who's now the head of the Maha Caucus in the Senate, I called him out in my book, Food Fix. I said, you know, there was a panel on chronic disease and a hearing in Congress. And he was emphasizing it was just exercise that was the issue. It wasn't diet at all.

1:19:26Dr. Mark Hyman:And he was, you know, funded by the Confectious Association. of the show. And now we've become friends. And I said, listen, Roger, I called you out in that book. Just hope you don't mind. He says, don't worry. He's seen the lights in. Yeah, yeah. So people have changed. No, there was an update today. Hold on, before it came to air. This just happened. Yeah, we're trying to get Cali Means and RFKJ are trying to make it such that people cannot use food stamps to buy soda. Yeah, that's a big one. To try to encourage our poorest Americans when they need food stamps to use them. for high nutrition foods and not the worst of the worst.

1:20:02And tooth and nail, the soda companies are fighting this. It's worth something like$60 billion a year to them. And this just happened in Arizona where there was a bill to remove soda from the things you could buy with food stamps, with Snap. And they wrote it against it. And the bill failed to make it out of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Arizona legislature by a vote of 6-6. And who cast the deciding vote against it? A Republican, Ralph Heap, voted against it alongside the Democrats. By the way, not for nothing, but here is, I think we have Cali Means. Yeah, here's Cali Means reacting to that in Sat One.

1:20:39So there's no correlation or causation between soda and obesity rates? If your concern is obesity, then we should be talking about obesity. We shouldn't be talking about obesity for SNAP recipients who have social determinants of health beyond just what they eat. The thing is that the general public would consider unhealthy. I mean, who knows what the general public considers unhealthy? The government tries to define in state statute what's a good food and what's a bad food. It's very, very complicated. We are not going to subsidize sugary drinks and candy for our kids. It's criminal. This is a no-brainer situation.

1:21:13And frankly, these two speakers before me should be ashamed of themselves. You're crossing a line right there. You're crossing a line. God bless him. Good.

1:21:22Dr. Mark Hyman:It's hard to imagine how those guys go to sleep at night saying what they say. Right? I mean, to say there's no connection between sugar and - It's social factors that's causing all the obesity amongst the poor. Yeah, it's not just poverty. And by the way, it's affecting all sectors of society, not just the poor. Last I checked, J.B. Pritzker is pretty rich, and he's morbidly obese by anyone's standards. That's true. But when you look at SNAP or food stamps, it's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But it's really about food security, which means you can have calories. So you can eat 2 ,500 calories of soda a day, and that's enough to fuel your metabolism.

1:21:58Dr. Mark Hyman:To keep you alive. But it's going to kill you. Yeah, for some extent. And it's not nutrition security, which is what we need in America, which is providing enough nutrients to people who have also food insecurity. And you look at SNAP, 20 % of Coca-Cola's U.S. profits come from food stamps. It's a big chunk of Walmart's profits. It's huge. And people don't realize that we pay for the problem multiple times. There's a new kind of concept called the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations privatize profits and socialize the cost of suburb public health.

1:22:34Dr. Mark Hyman:And so the taxpayer is paying the bill. We pay like probably four times, for example, for the food. We pay to buy that soda. That's right. We pay for the farmers to grow the corn that makes the high-fructose corn syrup that goes in the soda. Then we pay for the soda with SNAP. And then we pay for Medicare and Medicaid on the back end to deal with the chronic diseases like diabetes that result from it. And who's paying for the environmental consequences of how we grow the food using methods that disrupt our soil, the loss of soil organic matter. We've lost a third of all our topsoil. Soon we're gonna lose all of it.

1:23:06Dr. Mark Hyman:The amount of water resources we use to irrigate, which are because the farming methods don't retain water in the soil. For every 1 % organic matter, you retain 25 ,000 gallons of water per acre. So we're losing huge amounts of our water infrastructure. And we're also poisoning the rivers and lakes because all the neuroelectrician fertilizer flows down to them and causes the overgrowth of algae, which sucks all the oxygen out, kills the fish. And so we have dead zones the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico or America, whatever I call it now. And there's 400 of those around the world that feed half a billion people.

1:23:37Dr. Mark Hyman:And then we lose biodiversity. 75 % of pollinators are gone. So the list goes on. Who's paying for all that? Who's paying for the bees being destroyed? Who's paying for the water being destroyed? Who's paying for the fish being destroyed? So basically it's us. This is the part of the conversation where I just want to open up a bag of Doritos. I give up. I give up. I can't. Like there's no winning, right? We're probably inhaling enough microplastics to kill us right now. You know, it's like, by the way, that was another thing I learned in preparation for today. The average person, is it here? The average person now today has, this is from, it was in the New York Times today, on microplastics, the human brain samples from 2024.

1:24:13had nearly 50 % more microplastics than brain samples from 2016. They estimate there are five bottle caps worth of plastic in the average human.

1:24:24Dr. Mark Hyman:Can't be good. Can't be good. Five bottle caps? Yeah. Can't spare it. No. So it's overwhelming. Like the farming, let's just start there. You know, that's what like Casey and Callie have been saying. We need regenerative farming, which I don't really totally understand. But it seems like it's going to be really hard to make the farmers do that and really expensive. And when I sat in on those RFKJ confirmation hearings, even the Republican senators seemed to be like a little like, I'm chugging for you, except when it comes to the farmers. Yeah. Well, the thing is, the farmers are a big voting base.

1:24:54Dr. Mark Hyman:And so you don't want to lose them. But you also want to take care of them. Because when you look at farmers in this country, suicide rates are higher than almost any population. Chronic disease rates, Parkinson's, cancer, because of how they're farming. They're not able to make significant profits. They're really marginalized in terms of their way they're stuck between the bank loans, the crop insurance, and the seed and chemical companies that they have to buy the seeds and the chemicals from. So they're kind of stuck in the middle. And there is a way out. And it's been demonstrated. The science is there.

1:25:23Dr. Mark Hyman:The economics are there to convert farms that are industrial farms to regenerative farms. And that can be done at scale. And this has been well shown in a movie coming up called Common Ground. I think it's going to be released in about a week on Amazon. On regenerative farms. Yeah, and it shows how these big corn farmers can actually do this. And they make more money. They restore the ecosystem. And what is regenerative farming? It's basically mimicking nature. Gabe Brown was a farmer in North Dakota, a conventional farmer. And his farm was destroyed by drought and hail and all kinds of things.

1:25:53Dr. Mark Hyman:And he was like, what am I going to do? And he started reading Thomas Jefferson's journals. And in the journals, it explained how he used methods to restore the ecosystem, to use natural pest control methods, to actually use methods that actually restore soil, that retain water, that do all the things we want to do. And Gabe Brown has demonstrated this on his 5 ,000-acre farm in North Dakota and has actually makes 20 times as much money, restored the soil, doesn't use irrigation, doesn't need to use chemicals, produced much more food, much more nutrient-dense food. And it's all been well-documented through science.

1:26:25Dr. Mark Hyman:So it's possible. It's just a matter of how do we transition farmers? How do we support them to do that? And private equity is investing in this. I mean, private equity is in paying farmers to convert because they know they're going to get a return on the back end. To regenerate it. Yeah, they know it's a profit center and they're going to make more money than industrial farms. I was just thinking about wind turbines, which many of us absolutely hate. Yeah, they're kind of ugly. Most environmentalists hate them. Kill the birds, yeah. Yeah, they kill the birds, they kill the land. It's like they're full of toxins.

1:26:56The blades are as long as a football field. each blade is the longest football field and several tons and they're like just and you get up to hundreds of them in a wind farm anyway i we have a summer home along the jersey shore and they're about to get pummeled by one of these wind farms and it's just so disgusting thank god for trump for stopping most of them in progress i don't think he's that order was going to help us but in any event um all the money that obama and joe biden have been funneling into wind and solar energy, which is very inefficient. It costs so much. It requires so much land and toxins and reliance on the Chinese and so on.

1:27:34Why don't we funnel that into American farmers to help them switch over to regenerative farming? 100%.

1:27:40Dr. Mark Hyman:It's one of the best things we can do for the environment, for the climate, for energy. I mean, there's so much oil used in farming. People don't realize it's a huge amount of the inputs are all oil-based, of fertilizers, the pesticides, the amount of oil usage. I have the big machinery. All that is, you know, enormous amount of oil that we use just to grow vegetables and grow corn and grow soy and wheat. So that can be changed. By the way, my husband wrote a book on Rudolph Diesel who invented the diesel engine. They should be using diesel engines and powering them with corn. That's a place we could use good corn oil or vegetable oil.

1:28:14They can power the engines of the tractors.

1:28:16Dr. Mark Hyman:Better to use it in the engines than in their bodies. That's how the diesel engine was born. Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa. With bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles. Usually, you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla, not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken menu. While it's here. At participating U.S. Taco Bell locations for a limited time only. While supplies last, contact store for availability.

1:28:52Dr. Mark Hyman:Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood. at Eden's Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Eden's Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. Okay, so regenerative farming is definitely one of the things. Now, what happens when the average patient comes in to see you?

1:29:29Like you do the blood tests. And where do you start? Like what, for the average listener, like what are the top five? Because they don't know how to read their blood tests. You know, I consider myself a relatively sophisticated consumer in this department. I don't know how to read my blood tests. I know you're supposed to look at the HDL and the LDL and beyond that, I don't really know anything.

1:29:47Dr. Mark Hyman:Right, right, right. So what should the average person be looking at? What's one of the most important things? Well, I think we've had this edifice in medicine where the doctor is the gatekeeper and the healthcare system is the gatekeeper between you and your own biology. And I believe that needs to be changed. And people should be empowered to know what's going on in their bodies and to have the information to interpret it. And that's really why we co-founded Functional Health was to allow us to break down that barrier, to allow a personalized health platform that allows you access to your data and then to know what to do about it.

1:30:16Dr. Mark Hyman:What does it mean? Yeah. Do you give them a code? A code? I mean, like you have all the numbers now. if you get your blood tested through function. But like, now what do you do? Yeah, how do they figure out what it means? Essentially, we're building the engine and we have tens of thousands of pages of content that educates people about what it means, what to do about it, what the root causes are. So let's say you have a positive autoimmune antibody. In a traditional healthcare system, you say, okay, you're gonna go to the rheumatologist. They're gonna see if they can diagnose you with some autoimmune disease.

1:30:43Dr. Mark Hyman:And then they're gonna give you an anti-inflammatory drug that's gonna suppress your immune system, whether it's a steroid or a biologic that costs 50 ,000 dollars a year. They're not gonna go, why is this abnormal? So we guide you through an understanding of what it means and why is this potentially an issue? Is it because you have a leaky gut and your microbiome is messed up? Is it because you're eating gluten and it's driving that autoimmune biochemistry? Or is it because you're exposed to environmental toxins that are immunotoxic that affect you? So we begin to sort of sift through, or is it because you had COVID or because you have Lyme disease or whatever?

1:31:14Dr. Mark Hyman:And then you can sort of sift through and say, oh, gee, this is why I may be sick. And then we say, here's how you further investigate. And here's the kinds of doctor you want to see. and here's the next steps or here's things you can do on your own. So it's really about self-empowerment. By the way, this is all the stuff that Dr. Bredesen says about preventing Alzheimer's. This is so worth it for everybody's time. 100%. It's preventing everything because it's like there are a few common causes that drive all the chronic disease we're seeing. And it's not that hard. It's too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff that our bodies need.

1:31:43Dr. Mark Hyman:And when you take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff, which is essentially what functional medicine is, the body knows what to do. So I'll give you an example. So I had a patient come in and she had psoriatic arthritis. She had terrible inflammation of her skin and joints were swollen, you know, the heartbreak of psoriasis. But she also had terrible heartburn and reflux. She had terrible irritable bowel syndrome. She had migraines. She had depression. She had prediabetes. She was overweight. And she was, you know, a 50-issue business coach. And I said, gee, you know, what are all these things, how are all these things related?

1:32:15Dr. Mark Hyman:Instead of, you know, seeing the best doctors, which she did at Cleveland Clinic, the best doctors in rheumatology, the best migraine doctor, the best GI doctor, the best depression psychiatrist. And she was seeing the best of every class and got the best of the state-of-the-art current model of treatment, which was just pharmaceutical drugs. Nobody said, why is she having these problems? It's the medicine of why, not what. Why do you have this? Not what disease do you have? Not what drug do I give, but why? And then we investigated because she had all these gut issues. A lot of your immune system is in your gut.

1:32:43Dr. Mark Hyman:And so I cleaned up her gut. I got rid of the bad bugs. I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal. Restored her microbiome with probiotics. Gave her some fish oil and vitamin D. came back six weeks later and she's like doc everything's gone well i lost 20 pounds my psoriasis gone my arthritis is gone my migraines are gone my depression is gone i feel great my irritable bowel reflux are gone and i stopped all my medications i'm like i didn't tell you to do that she's like no i just was feeling so good i stopped them and so once you understand how to unlock someone's health and give them the roadmap they can do it have you seen this in children too yes of course i mean i'm a family doctor and i've treated you know thousands and thousands of kids and it's just so disturbing to me when I see the kinds of things that really are affecting these kids.

1:33:25I mean, I had one little girl who was 10 years old

1:33:28Dr. Mark Hyman:and she had this horrible autoimmune condition that was triggered by her eating crappy sugary diet that was causing tons of yeast overgrowth in her gut. She also had gluten antibodies that were causing some injury to her gut lining that can trigger autoimmunity. She also loved sushi, which was weird for a kid, but she loved a lot of mercury-laden tuna. She was eating a lot of that. She had mercury toxicity. and we basically reset her gut. We put on an elimination diet. I gave her some things to get rid of the overgrowth of yeast in her gut and I gave her chelation to get rid of the mercury. And she had something that was, she was on like 1 ,200 milligrams of solumedrol, which is like a horse dose of steroids.

1:34:02Dr. Mark Hyman:Whoa. Every three weeks intravenously. She was on chemo drug called methotrexate. She was on like drugs to help with her rain nose and other than her gut issues. So calcium channel blockers. She was on a whole list of things. Aspen because she had more blood clotting. She was on a pile of drugs. and she really couldn't function really very well. She completely fixed it. She was 100 % better. And I checked in with her 10 years later. She's doing great. She's gone to college and is really healthy. And so we see that we start to dig into the root causes and help people understand how their body is actually organized, not how medicine currently organizes it.

1:34:35Dr. Mark Hyman:We can do tremendous amounts. And that's really why I think function health is so important because it helps us leaf frog over the current medicine, empowers people with their data, and helps them understand what to do about it. I heard you talking with someone, and forgive me if you weren't the one with this story, but I think it was you, talking about a kid's handwriting. Oh, yeah, that was me. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we hopefully can show this on the show, but there's a kid I had who had ADD, and this is what first got me to realize that what was happening in the body affected the brain in a very profound way.

1:35:04Dr. Mark Hyman:It wasn't just the mind-body effect, but the body-mind effect. And many of our psychiatric illnesses are caused by dysfunctions that we can treat, not with ADD medication, which is now prescribed. We are going to definitely spend time on this. This is interesting. Yeah. I mean, and this kid had ADD, but he had also all these other issues. He had asthma and he had allergies and he had stomach aches and he had headaches and he had a whole list of stuff. And he was seeing seven different doctors. It's about seven different prescriptions. And he was on Ritalin. He'd been kicked out of kindergarten.

1:35:32Dr. Mark Hyman:He was that bad. Oh, boy. And his writing was terrible. These kids often have what we call dysgraphia. It means you can't read their writing, really poor handwriting. But like at 12 years old, you couldn't even read it. and his mother came to see me. We put him on a clean diet. He was only eating processed food. We did a nutritional testing and it was like so malnourished. I mean, he wasn't really overweight, but he was really malnourished. I don't know. Is it so strange that a mother who would be like taking all those doctors and like having - Oh, she finally got to me. She didn't like it, but she's like doing the best she could.

1:36:01Dr. Mark Hyman:As a mother, you don't know. And then she heard about - It doesn't even occur to you that maybe it's nutrition. I think for a lot of people, it doesn't even occur to you because you, especially with a child who you think can process anything no matter what you do. And two months later, the mother brings him back and he's doing better at every level and he's off all the medications but what was so striking to me was his handwriting before and after she showed me his handwriting from his homework and it was like a different kid and it was at that moment i go wow how did his brain going from being chaotic and dysfunctional and and not synchronizing properly to being kind of functioning and organized and structured so that he can actually function in the world and not have addd and his handwriting go back to normal because it wasn't like i gave him a handwriting class you know and i was like wow this is crazy and that led to me writing this book called the ultra mind solution which is how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first and this was like 15 plus years ago and now there's departments of metabolic psychiatry at stanford nutritional psychiatry at harvard guys chris parmer is a harvard professor as a psychiatrist discovered accidentally you could cure schizophrenia on a ketogenic diet and now you know there's three million dollar grant that just got given to mayo to study ketogenic diets and severe mental illness like bipolar disease and schizophrenia.

1:37:11Dr. Mark Hyman:And we had such a stigma against this. Instead of understanding that this is something that actually is because our biology is just not functioning properly. You know what I'm thinking about right now? After we had, did you watch that round table that they had in the US Senate with Ron Johnson and Callie and Casey were there? And the Atlantic did a big write-up of it after and called it the Woo Woo Caucus. Yeah, yeah. They were so dismissive and disgusting about these ideas being discussed in a serious way. And that's what we're up against is that you start to say like, maybe we can head off schizophrenia with diet.

1:37:46And they say, I'm out, you're crazy.

1:37:48Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, but this is actually looking at academic medical centers. This is what they're studying. Like they're looking at these things seriously because the data is there. And so Max Planck, who was a physicist said, no, scientist doesn't advance by convincing your opponents and helping them see the light. but because a new generation grows up that's familiar with it. In other words, medicine advances one funeral at a time. Yes, right. And so it's unfortunate. People get very ossified in their ideas. Thomas Kuhn wrote about this in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, how it's very difficult to convert people who believe a certain thing, like the earth is flat or the earth is the center of the universe or that species arise in their fixed state.

1:38:25Or that it was an insurrection.

1:38:27Dr. Mark Hyman:Whatever, yeah. People basically just have this very fixed view of the way things are, and it's very hard to change that. Paradigms are really hard to change. We just think autism was caused by refrigerator mothers, that ulcers are caused by stress. And the guy who actually was a gastroenterologist would notice in the biopsy, so the stomach that there was this bacteria hanging around. He's like, what is this? Maybe this is the cause. And everybody laughed at him. The whole gastroenterology field just made him a joke. And he said, well, I'm going to prove it. He drank a beaker of this bacteria.

1:38:54Dr. Mark Hyman:He got his partner to, like, he got an ulcer. He got his partner to scope him before and after. He took antibiotics, cured the ulcer, and then proved it. and he won the Nobel Prize for it. Oh, wow. So, you know, what one day seems like a quack and the next day is actually standard of care. To me, it just doesn't seem quacky at all. It seems like absolutely logical and sensible. It's just people won't accept it. And I think part of it is, it's so much easier to take a pill. You much rather be told, just take this drug and you're good. Totally. As opposed to completely change the way you eat and by the way, you need to move more.

1:39:25Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, it's so hard to do, Megan, in our environment because everything is set up for us to fail. We have a toxic wasteland of nutrition that we live in. We don't need to move our bodies at all if we don't want to. We don't get outside very much. We have so much stress. We have high levels of stress. We don't sleep well. These are just fundamental things that a human organism needs to have in order to thrive. And we take care of our dogs and our animals and our racehorses in ways that are so much better than we take care of ourselves. We wouldn't feed our million-dollar racehorse a McDonald's, big fries, and a Coke.

1:39:57Dr. Mark Hyman:We'd feed it to our kids. Right, right. Well, I was thinking about what you just said about how we're just not set up for success here. And the family went to Scandinavia in June. We did Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And they're all basically the same country, but in terms of their approach to lifestyle and so on. But in Denmark, they have it set up. There's some waterways there, and they have it set up so that almost every office building has a stairway down to the water. And it's encouraged that on your lunch break, you would go take a swim. You would go downstairs, you'd eat outside and it's cold there.

1:40:32They know that, but they all bike to work. First of all, everybody bikes, even the royalty in Denmark and Sweden, they bike around a very sort of mobile culture. And then think about it. If you went to the office and the office culture was during lunch, we eat healthy, we go outside, we swim in the water. And then there are showers to shower off when you get back into the office. You have a 90 minute break where you can do all of that. And then back to work. yeah we're the opposite we're like what the hell are you doing away from your desk for 90 minutes 90 seconds you know scandinavia no we're the usa we produce you know we're the envy of the world in terms of our production and so on that's our mindset there are some benefits to it but

1:41:13Dr. Mark Hyman:in the health department not not really no no it's it's uh it's very disturbing i mean when you look at it as compared to every other country we're we spend more than twice any other nation on health care which is almost five trillion dollars one in five dollars of our economy The federal government pays for 40 % of that, and it's one in three federal dollars. So we're footing the bill. And we're 48th in life expectancy. I think Cuba and Albania are better than us. Oh, my God. Albania? I think so. Maybe they don't have good records, but when you look at the list, it's like, what are we doing here at the bottom of the list?

1:41:45Dr. Mark Hyman:And I mean, Trump on Joe Rogan, he showed this graph. What's the number one reason for that? What's the number, if you had to pick one? I think it's our diet. Ultra-processed foods? Yeah, it's the takeover of the American food supply by the industrial food system. Chemicals everywhere. I mean, like within that, what's the number one culprit? Ultra process or chemicals all over what we eat? I think it's sugar and starch. Sugar and starch. And then you can add in the chemicals and all the rest of it. And by the way, is bread... Is bread bad? Is bread basically sugar? Yeah, well, actually, something called the glycemic index, which is how much a given food raises your blood sugar, is based on white bread.

1:42:22Dr. Mark Hyman:So that's 100. So that's the highest. Sugar is actually 80. Because it's made up of fructose and glucose. But it's a little bit trick because fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar. But they both have the same. Yeah, below the neck, your body cannot tell the difference between a bowl of cereal or a bowl of sugar. Wow. Or a loaf of bread? Or a loaf of bread. It's just the same thing. So when you eat white bread, you're basically eating sugar. And the American population consumes 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year. That's almost three quarters of a pound per day. You know, I mean, the diet care guidelines, which need to be fixed, and I'm working on that with a nonprofit, that 10 % of our diet, they say, can be sugar.

1:43:07Dr. Mark Hyman:That's 12 teaspoons in an average 2 ,000 calorie diet. For a kid, the average kid's eating 36 teaspoons of sugar a day. And that's a pharmacologic dose. I think it might have been Callie or Casey. One of them was saying at the turn of the 20th century, you know, the 1900 or so, the average, you know, recommended daily, or no, the average intake of sugar amongst American children was zero. Yeah. Zero on a day-to-day basis. Now they say you can have like 28 grams. Yeah, that's crazy. It was zero. Yeah. Well, you know, when the World Health Organization tried to reduce the recommended amount of sugar to 5 % of your diet from 10 % in the recommendations, Donald Rumsfeld, when he was under Bush too, flew to Geneva and said, we're going to pull our$400 million of funding from you if you do that.

1:43:53What?

1:43:54Dr. Mark Hyman:It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, that's how powerful the food industry is. They have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Oh, and, and. Not to mention that they're basically accounted for most of the marketing and TV besides pharma. Yeah. It's all junk food. I mean, I watched the Super Bowl last year. It was 11 junk food ads in the first half. They're pushers. Yeah. They're pushers. If they were doing this with heroin, we would see the danger. Well, it's addictive. I mean, the science is so clear in this, Megan. And 14 % of adults and kids are biologically addicted to food. This is according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale.

1:44:21Dr. Mark Hyman:It's a scientifically validated metric for looking at food addiction. And I'm not talking about just like, oh, I love cookies because I love cookies. But like people who really can't stop, like an alcoholic. That's staggering. And these companies know this. They've designed the food to be like this. The tobacco companies bought in the 70s a lot of the food companies like RJ and Hrabisco and Philip Morris Craft, right? Yes. And then they - They got out of cigarettes and into crackers. And they engineered these foods with taste institutes where they had craving experts to create the bliss point of food, to create heavy users.

1:44:51Dr. Mark Hyman:These are their own internal terms they use. And in fact, they actually take little two-year-olds and put them in MRI scanners to see which images will light up their brain in their pleasure center. So they'll say to their mommy when they go to the grocery stores, buy this, buy that, give me the cocoa pebbles or whatever it is, right? That is so dark. I was just thinking about my little guy today at breakfast who was like, mom, there's this meal service that will deliver the meals pre-made if you want to sign on to that. And I was like, well, they did a good job if they got to my 11 year old who brought it to me at the breakfast table, right?

1:45:18Like they're definitely marketing to the right people. That's right. But there's so much to go over. I wanted to say something about the food. Oh, is it true that Bayer bought Monsanto? Monsanto, yeah. So one of the biggest drug companies in the world bought one of the biggest chemical companies in the world that's spraying our food with everything,

1:45:37Dr. Mark Hyman:getting us sick by the day. And then where do we go? back to the medical companies. That's right. Well, it's actually there who makes some of the drugs for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Oh, wow. And there's been multiple lawsuits that have been one. Wasn't there just one? Yeah,$2.1 billion settlement for glyphosate, which is Roundup or basically an herbicide that is sprayed on 70 % of crops that is in most of our bodies and most of our urine. I mean, I tested this and you can see it. It's pretty scary. and they basically on one hand cause the disease and then they on the other hand treat it with the drugs it's a good business model really scares me because one of the things you don't think about even if you try to eat healthy back to that guy who's carrying around his food everywhere that billionaire is what about when you go out to eat you don't know what about when your kids go to school you don't know i mean it's true i mean you can you know have your own garden in the backyard but you want to eat if you're out on the road i mean like you and i are out there and doing stuff you can't always control where your food's coming from unless you're a billionaire with your own private chef and in your kitchen that flies around with you on your jet.

1:46:43Then I met with a super billionaire who had his own cows. He got his own meat from his own cows that were like, I mean, like there are so many levels of this, but keep going. You don't know, because like in the restaurant, those vegetables are probably treated with Roundup. You're not getting organic vegetables in the restaurant. You're probably not getting grass-fed beef. You're not getting pastured chicken. So it's like, you need to eat at home. That's expensive. It's harder. people are busy.

1:47:09Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. To the point of, it's also overwhelming. Yeah, it's all, but you know, Megan, it's not an accident that Americans have been disenfranchised from their own kitchens. This is a deliberate plan by the food industry to make convenience king. Happened in the early 60s. They were worried about the advent of this woman named Betty, who was a home ec teacher, was teaching about families how to cook and grow gardens. Miss Crocker? No, I'll get to that. I'll get to that. But there was federal extension workers that were teaching young families how to take care of themselves and actually do the things that are not that hard if you know what to do.

1:47:41Dr. Mark Hyman:And so the food industry freaked out about this and they invented Betty Crocker, who was not a real person. I thought she was a real person. I didn't know that. Yeah, she was not a real person. Next year you tell me Aunt Jemima's not real. She's not real. But Betty Crocker cookbook, if you remember it, because you probably had it in your mom's kitchen. Yeah, I remember. Add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole. Add one roll of Ritz crackers. They insinuated processes. It was delicious though. Okay, all right. But it was like they insinuated all this crap into our diet.

1:48:10Dr. Mark Hyman:And then they got TV dinners. And then we got, you deserve a break today. We got Fleischman's margarine and Tang and all these foods that were. Twinkies. Right, Twinkies. I grew up on that stuff. And it turns out that this was not an accident. This was a deliberate attempt to sort of, you deserve a break today. It was sort of the classic thing. And Women's Lib also kind of facilitated that because I'd get women out of the kitchen. and women's liberation. And then no one was in the kitchen at all. Right, that's right. And so we now have generations of Americans who don't know how to cook, who don't know how to cook, who don't know basic life skills.

1:48:43I did a movie years ago called Fed Up,

1:48:47Dr. Mark Hyman:which was, I think it's on Netflix. It was about childhood obesity and it was talking about these issues. And as part of the movie, I went down to South Carolina into one of the worst food deserts in America. In easily South Carolina, I worked with a family of five who lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. So they had very limited resources and very limited access to good food. and the mother was, you know, masculine weight. The father was already at 42 on dialysis for kidney failure from type two diabetes. The son was like 50 % body fat. A kid should be 10%. He was big guy. He's like, Dr.

1:49:17Dr. Mark Hyman:Eiman, am I going to be 100 % body fat? I'm like, no, you're not. He was so sad. And I said, I'm not going to give them a lecture. I'm going to go to their kitchen and I'm going to show them what's in their pantry. I'm going to show them what's in their freezer and in their fridge. And I'm going to help them understand the things that are harming them because they're thinking they're trying to do the right thing because they want the father to lose weight or they can't get a new kidney. So rather than give him a lecture, I taught him how to cook a simple meal. And it was from a little guidebook called Good Food on a Tight Budget.

1:49:42Dr. Mark Hyman:Food that's good for you, good for your wallet, good for the planet. And it was like cheaper cuts of meat, cheaper vegetables. I mean, stuff that would be considered sometimes peasant food that my family grew up on. And I did it with them and I didn't know it was gonna happen. And the mother texted me a week later. She says, we lost 18 pounds as a family. In a year, they lost 200 pounds. you know they didn't even have cutting boards and knives everything was you know microwaved or whatever and and they did it and they learned how to cook and they i gave them a cookbook and was just it was like i was like wow we're one meal away from transforming society i realized i had a bias i had a judgment i thought people who are overweight and i bought the implicit bias in medicine which is eat less and exercise more meaning it's your fault you're fat you're a lazy glutton and it's your fault so get your shit together yeah but that's not true because people are hijacked their biochemistry is hijacked their brains can't hijack their metabolism hijacked Their hormones are hijacked.

1:50:30Dr. Mark Hyman:Their immune system hijacked. Their microbiome is hijacked. And that drives you into this disease state that we have in America today. And so this kid was a 16-year-old. He lost 50 pounds, had to go get a job. And there was no place to get a job except fast food places on there. He gained 50 pounds back. He's just like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar. Yeah, totally. And then he texted me later. He's like, hey, would you help me? And I helped him. He lost 132 pounds. First kid in his family to go to college. Finished college. emailed me and said, hey, Dr. Hyman, would you write me a letter of recommendation for medical school?

1:51:00Dr. Mark Hyman:And now he's a doctor. Oh my God. Oh, I got chills. To me, that story is emblematic of the fact that we're literally one meal away from transforming the health of America. If we can go in, and Paul Farmer did this with TB and AIDS in Haiti. It was an intractable problem. They didn't have clean water. They didn't have sanitation. They didn't have watches. And these drugs are complicated to take back then for multi-drug There was just some TV and AIDS. And he was like, we can fix this. And he used community health workers, neighbors, helping neighbors. And so imagine if we created a workforce of community health workers to go out there and go into people's homes and show them how to do this.

1:51:36Dr. Mark Hyman:And we did this at Cleveland Clinic. We did this with groups there. Honestly, I have the idea we should take all the DEI instructors who are about to lose their jobs and train them in nutrition and send them into all communities and educate people on how to do well. I was shocked. I was at Cleveland Clinic and there was a hospital there that takes care of a big African-American community that's very underserved. And we had a cooking class. And I thought a few people would show up. 300 women showed up. Oh, God bless them. And we had this big cooking class. That's what I need too. I need it just to make food, period.

1:52:06Never mind healthy food. All right, we're going to take a quick break and we will be back with Dr. Mark Hyman after this. Plus a special function health discount for our audience. That's exciting. Stand by.

1:52:16Dr. Mark Hyman:introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos guajillo chiles usually you add sauce to the food but when the sauce is this good the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth that rolled quesadilla not a rolled quesadilla anymore now it's a sauce shovel Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken Menu while it's here at participating U.S. Taco Bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last. Contact store for availability. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

1:52:51Dr. Mark Hyman:Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Way fair, every style, every home.

1:53:43in there. Slash A slash Megan. Like Function Health on Megan. FunctionHealth.com slash A slash Megan. And that will get you$100 off your function membership, or you can just use the code Megan100 on checkout to get it. So doc, what does that do for people?

1:54:00Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, it gives you an unlock for your health in the way that you've probably never had it. And testing things that your doctor probably doesn't even know about. Doesn't and won't. It should be tested or that you might ask and won't test, right? Like your vitamin D level. Why should you know that, for example? And for$1.37 a day and less with your discount, you get deep insights about what's going on with your biology from your metabolic health and how your blood sugar regulation is to your cardiovascular health, your hormones, to environmental toxins like lead and mercury, to your deep analysis of your nutritional status, things that you're, I mean, we literally work with Quest and we broke their testing for essential fatty acids for omega-3 machines because we were doing such a volume.

1:54:43Dr. Mark Hyman:We're one of their number one clients. We do cancer screening, gallery screening, which is quite amazing to look at cancer detection. We found one in 180 of our members who's tested have an undiagnosed cancer, which you can detect in a blood test now. Oh, that's amazing. And it's more accurate than many other screening tests we have. And it's something that should be available to everybody. And we're one of the number one providers in the world for this. So it's unlocking things that you'd have to go through the firewall of medicine to get. and then on the back end, you not only get your results, but you get deep insights about what they mean.

1:55:14They give you like a printout of, this is what we, you're high on this and this is what you should look into.

1:55:19Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, it's a beautiful dashboard that you can track your data over time. And I know as a physician, when I see a patient, I have to pull up the PDF of the results and then look at the one from last year or the last month and it's a pain in the ass. It's not digital. It's not visually presented in a graphic way that helps you understand where your trend lines are and function has all that. But more importantly, it really has the deep insights that are informed by all the scientific literature in the world. I mean, imagine your doctor being able to read every scientific paper that was ever published.

1:55:46Dr. Mark Hyman:Right. Now technology can do that, right? Imagine having the knowledge experts informing what things mean from all domains. And imagine it being formed by your data, your personalized data, so you actually can understand what it means for you and what to do about it and how to act on it to up-level your health. What happens if I have a question? Like, who do I call? Well, we're still building the platform because we literally launched two years ago. We have a success that we never quite imagined. But we're building a chat where you can interact with your own data and ask questions. But you can go to your family doctor.

1:56:17Dr. Mark Hyman:You can go on to learn more from the platform itself because there's so much. You're not dispensing medical advice there, but you are giving people tools to go to their own. Well, we're giving them deep insights about what things mean. And there are medical insights, but we're not telling you what to do or not to do. Well, this leads me to my other important question, which is how do people find a functional medicine doctor? Good question. We need more of them. But I think part of the reason I co-founded Function was that there aren't enough. There's thousands. There should be hundreds of thousands of practitioners so that millions and millions of people can access this.

1:56:50Dr. Mark Hyman:But before I die, I didn't want to die not having functional medicine being accessible to everybody or having their own health data being available to everybody. And so it's a way of leapfrogging over a period where we don't have the infrastructure yet. And we will, I promise you, we will. Megan, have the future of medicine come to pass as the way it should be, just as we now don't any longer do blood leeches or all we do for some wound healing or we don't have like drill holes in people's skulls to let out the bad evil humors. I mean, we advance in medicine. And I think, you know, this new generation of the network systems medicine, it's going to, this scientific paradigm, it's going to come to pass.

1:57:26This makes it exciting. It's accelerated. I think it's like med school in today's day. For sure. This is a way of truly healing people and helping people get better as opposed to just you're going in, you're going to be governed by the insurance companies. You've been upper limited on how much you can make and how much you can help.

1:57:41Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. And doctors need to learn about – I mean food is the biggest cause of disease and the biggest cure. And doctors learn nothing about it. Nothing. Nothing. In Texas, I was testifying in front of the Health and Human Services Committee about a bill that was to actually start to educate doctors about nutrition and to mandate it in medical schools and in graduate medical education residencies. I'm so excited about that because that'll be a domino effect. Once state starts to do it, it'll sort of be a trend. And then we can actually start to train the new generation of doctors that is in the right paradigm.

1:58:12And nurses too. I mean, nurses can do this. Because there's so many people who can do this short of getting an MD, which would be more accessible and more affordable for a lot of people too. So you've mentioned it several times, the keto diet. I've had it mentioned to me many times. I don't understand this still. What is it? No, I think I've looked it up, but it says it's more like fat.

1:58:32Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, it's pretty easy to understand. So your body is like a hybrid car. You can run electric or in gas. Gas is dirty burning. Electric is clean burning. Gas is carbohydrates. So your body runs very well on carbohydrates, but there's a lot of downstream consequences of having a high-starch carbohydrate diet. For certain conditions, and this was first discovered in medicine with epilepsy, we found that if you took away all the sugar and starch and you increased fat to like 75%, you could actually stop seizures that no medications would touch. If you look back at the history of medicine and diabetes, treatment of type 1 diabetes, where your pancreas just shuts down, all these kids would die.

1:59:10Dr. Mark Hyman:And the way they would treat them would be putting them on a 75 % fat diet. Jocelyn - Saturated or unsaturated? Everything. You know, lard, butter, everything. Wow. And I mean, by the way, Megan, 25 % of breast milk is saturated fat. Yeah. It's gotten a bad rap. It's gotten a bad rap. I mean, we can go into that too if you want. But what was fascinating back in the teens and 20s was medicine was actually prescribing ketogenic diets for type 1 diabetics to save their lives. and now we see that we can actually reverse what is predominantly a carbohydrate intolerant society where we have 75 % overweight, 93 % metabolically broken meaning they have some problem with regulating blood sugar and insulin.

1:59:54Dr. Mark Hyman:93 % of us, I mean 6 % of us aren't. Probably you and me are part of that 6 % but it's not a lot of people and when you restrict carbohydrates and you increase fat you actually switch basically from a gas-burning car to a electric-burning car and it's clean burning but now we're finding it's effective for reversing type 2 diabetes for treatment of Alzheimer's for cancer Siddhartha Mukherjee may have heard of him he's a famous oncologist from Colombia written a book called the Emperor of all maladies when the Pulitzer Prize he's now doing research on ketogenic diets for end-stage cancer like melanoma pancreatic cancer and seeing complete reversals what because yeah because basically cancer runs on sugar, but it's not like a hybrid engine.

2:00:36Dr. Mark Hyman:It can only run on carbs. It can't run on fat. So you starve it of this carbs and cancer cells die. It's pretty remarkable. So across the spectrum, whether it's autism or Alzheimer's or cancer or type diabetes or schizophrenia or depression or bipolar disease. How does this jive with the old eat food? So mostly plants. Not too much. Not too much. Yeah. I think you can do it on a plant-rich diet and you can do it in a way that doesn't include a lot of junk. Just put a lot of olive oil over your salads. Olive oil, avocados, yeah, nuts and seeds. And even, you know, people do well. I mean, I think, you know, you have to understand that there are certain people who do better or do worse depending on their genetics.

2:01:20Dr. Mark Hyman:And so I had a patient who was overweight, who was struggling with lots of inflammation, who was pre-diabetic, whose cholesterol was like 300, which should be 200. Her triglycerides were 300, should be 100 or less. Her good cholesterol, we don't really like to call it good or bad, but the HDL was low, which is a sign of this metabolic dysfunction. And she was desperate to try to do something. This is in the pre-Ozempic era. I said, listen, why don't you try a ketogenic diet, see what happens, and let's follow your numbers and see how you do. Everything corrected. Her cholesterol dropped 100 points.

2:01:48Dr. Mark Hyman:Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. HDL went up 30 points. She lost 25 pounds, and she felt great. And her prediabetes went away. So depending on the person, it can be a very effective tool. But it's not like a one-size-fits-all. Why? Is that much fat bad for somebody who has heart disease in the family or something? There may be, but there's actually a paper coming out soon which looks at what we call lean mass hyper-responders. There are certain people who when you have perfect metabolic health, in other words, you have no prediabetes or insulin resistance and no inflammation, and you're a fit athlete and you have basically a lot of lean mass and not a lot of fat on your body, when they consume high saturated fat or ketogenic diets they'll have a really dramatic increase in their ldl cholesterol now this is something that doctors have been trained is bad and that you immediately have a knee-jerk reaction to prescribe a statin drug which is the number one class of drugs sold in the world now some of these people have ldls not under 70 which cardiologists would like or even under 100 which is their lab reference range but they have ldls of two 300 400 500 700 and they have no heart disease through imaging tests right because like the calcium score calcium score and so this is like a revolutionary new bit of data that's now emerging from the scientific literature like what is going on here how does this work well when you don't eat sugar you have to transport energy around the body and how do you do it through fat right and what is the biggest fat carrier it's your lipoproteins which are fat and and and water don't mix right so you can't just put fat in your blood you have to connect it to proteins so what is ldl it means low-density lipoprotein.

2:03:22Dr. Mark Hyman:It's a lipo means fat, protein. So you put fat and protein together, it can be transported through your body for energy and other sources. So it's really, it's fascinating. The science is constantly evolving. And I think for certain people, ketogenic diets can be life-changing, like life-changing. I've treated schizophrenia with it, treated Alzheimer's with it, autism with it, depression with it, obviously type 2 diabetes with it. And you can reverse up to 60 to 70 % of type 2 diabetes that's very advanced where people are on insulin. When I was in medical school, Well, chronic diseases were chronic.

2:03:52Dr. Mark Hyman:They never went away to reverse heart failure, to reverse diabetes, to reverse kidney issues, to reverse hypertension. These things don't happen in traditional medicine. What about the thought of mixing the keto diet with Mediterranean? Because that's the other one that everybody loves Mediterranean. Well, you can eat a Mediterranean diet, but that's not necessarily a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic is a very specific thing that happens in your body. Do you go on keto like forever? Some people do. Some people do and they thrive on it. Other people don't do well on it. So I think it's very individual.

2:04:23Try it for a month and get your inflammation under control.

2:04:25Dr. Mark Hyman:You need about usually six weeks to adapt to become fat adapted. Your metabolism shifts over and then you can see where you're at and then check your numbers. But there's a company called Virta Health that's reversing type 2 diabetes with an online program of ketogenic diets. And not only have they seen 60 % reversal, not only have they seen 12 % weight loss, which is massive. It's as good as any of these drugs that are out there now. that actually they've done a parallel study like comparing just their program to Ozempic and those drugs and they're equally effective in the outcome. So it's not something magic about Ozempic.

2:04:58Dr. Mark Hyman:It's the weight loss, you know, and it's the change in metabolic health. And so you can do it through various ways, whether it's a drug or whether it's a ketogenic diet. And they found their lipid biomarkers, over 20 different cholesterol and heart disease risk factors, all got better by eating a super high fat diet, right? And again, so you're saying, but also saturated fat. So that would be like red meat, like the fat that you get. I'm trying to think, what's good for you saturated fat? I know bad for you saturated fat is in the ultra processed foods. Well, trans fat is basically the worst saturated fat.

2:05:31Dr. Mark Hyman:That's the worst you can do. And that's basically vegetable oil, shortening. And they call it shortening because it shortens your life. You know how many things call for that, by the way? Having like a daughter who's in eighth grade, every time she has to make brownies or cookies for the school, all of it wants actual vegetable oil. Yeah. And like, she said, I don't know if you can use olive oil. I'm like, you're using it. It's olive oil cake. I mean, yeah, it's fine, actually. It tastes a little different, I confess, but it's healthier, I think. Yeah, you can. And so, you know, there's a tremendous amount of emerging data that saturated fats aren't the boogeyman we thought they were.

2:06:04Dr. Mark Hyman:You know, there was a long history of a scientist named Ansel Keys in the 60s who basically did this study called the Seven Country Study, would show that people who had higher levels of saturated fat had higher LDL and higher heart disease risk. But they left out the other 14 or 15 countries where their data didn't match that, like Switzerland or France, right? So they were like, I was cherry picking a little bit. And then we got into this era of low fat and that led to the food pyramid, which told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta day, which we did like a dutiful population.

2:06:37I mean, that was a nice time. Let's be honest. We did that. as dutiful citizens.

2:06:42Dr. Mark Hyman:And what happened to America? We exploded. Hand me that sourdough. I need more. That's right. Well, sourdough's not so bad. But the diabetes rates exploded. I mean, we've tripled the obesity rates. We've tripled the diabetes rates. You can see it. I mean, this is not a genetic problem. Do you see those memes online where they show Americans in the 1900s? And they're all, first of all, they're well-dressed. And second of all, they're all slim. All of them are slim. It's very rare to see an obese person, even in the United States 100 years ago. Not even 100 years ago. I mean, African-Americans in the 60s were healthier than white Americans.

2:07:14Dr. Mark Hyman:They were thinner and they had less disease. Now it's the opposite. When we saw COVID attack certain communities like New Orleans or Chicago, and there were 70 % of the deaths were from 30 % of the population, which was African-American. And when you've watched, there's a movie called Amazing Grace with Aretha Franklin. It was filmed in 1970 in Oakland. There wasn't an overweight black person in the audience, and she wasn't overweight. Wow. And you go like, whoa, wow, that's crazy. And now 80 % of African women are overweight and obesity rates and heart disease rates and hypertension rates and kidney failure rates far exceed the - And you can tie this to ultra processed foods and to the demonization of fat and elevation of sugar.

2:07:57Yeah, yeah.

2:07:58Dr. Mark Hyman:And that was the problem. And now we've kind of reversed that trend. And I think it's a big sort of tanker ship to move, but we have to do it because we're not only threatening our personal health, we're threatening our national security. 70 % or 77 % of recruits for the military are rejected because they're unfit to fight because they're overweight or other reasons because of their diet. You've got global competitiveness being challenged. We're like 30 something in math and reading in the world because kids can't learn in school because they're all doped up on these drugs and eating sugar and these chemicals in the food.

2:08:31Dr. Mark Hyman:They're causing ADD, behavior issues and all sorts of things. And depression. And depression. I've heard you talk about this too. This is like everybody, you go to a therapist today, whether it's you or a child, the first thing I wanna do is prescribe you something. They wanna get your college-age kid hooked on a drug like that. They're like, they've helped a lot of people. There's no explanation of, no one would ever ask, what are you eating? No. No one. No one, it's true, it's true. I mean, it's the most amazing thing to me because it's so obvious, but as doctors we learn that disease really doesn't have anything to do with nutrition.

2:09:02Dr. Mark Hyman:If you go to your rheumatologist, if you have an autoimmune disease, it's nothing to do with nutrition. If you go to a GI doctor, I mean, I'm like, what do you mean? A GI doctor. I mean, think about it. You're putting pounds of this foreign stuff in your mouth every day. How does it not impact what's going on in your gut? Right. Right? It's like, it's kind of crazy. So, I mean, if you're feeling depressed or you're feeling anxiety, rule number one should probably be take a look at what you're eating. What are you eating? Yeah. I mean, I have an incredible approach to one of my patients where I put them on a reset program.

2:09:28Dr. Mark Hyman:It's like hitting your body's factory reset button. So go back to your original factory settings. Yeah. And I call it the 10-Day Detox Diet. I've written a book about it. There's a website where you can kind of go and 10daydetoxdiet.com and actually learn about it and do it if you want to. And what's amazing is that in 10 days, there's a 70 % reduction in all symptoms from all diseases, which sounds crazy for me to say it, but I've done this so many times with so many people and track their symptoms and how they feel. And it allows them to see the connection between what they're eating and how they feel.

2:09:58Dr. Mark Hyman:Oh, I didn't know that this constant congestion I had was from when I was eating. I didn't know that this rash that I've got in my body all the time I can't get rid of is from what I mean. I didn't know that my stomach issues are related or my sleep issues or my depression or my migraines or whatever it is. Food is generally the first place to look. And if you can clean the deck and take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, you know, take out all the processed foods, all the sugar and starch, put in, you know, lots of vegetables, good healthy, you know, protein, lots of nuts and seeds and get out all the ultra processed foods.

2:10:28Dr. Mark Hyman:The body is so smart. It's like quickly changes. and I'm sort of shocked when I see it and it's repeatable every single time. Can we talk about red meat? Is there a lot of people who are on this carnivore diet? There's hardcore red meat all the time. Yeah, the vegans and the carnivores on one side. No, we've got a good friend who's Argentinian and he's like, every single member of my family had LDLs through the roof. And no heart disease. And they lived into their low hundreds. Yeah. And all they did was eat steak. Yeah, well, they had grass-fed steak in Argentina and so there's no industrial.

2:10:57But what's, I mean, when I was growing up in like the 80s, I remember because I was a young aerobics instructor. And my fellow aerobics instructors were shaming themselves for having meat more than once a week. And I was like, oh, I didn't even know that was bad.

2:11:09Dr. Mark Hyman:Well, that was a result of this demonization of saturated fat. The meat has some saturated fat. So if you eat that, you're basically going to kill yourself. So there's a whole era where people were eating very low amounts of meat. And their meat consumption has gone way down. And it didn't mean that all the disease rates went down. So something didn't kind of line up. And what happened with meat is that we kind of got confused because a lot of the population studies that were done at that time, and population studies do not show cause and effect. They just look at trend lines. And then it may be a cause or it may be a correlation.

2:11:44Dr. Mark Hyman:And what they found was that people who were meat eaters in those eras actually had more disease. But when you look at the specifics of their behaviors, the meat eaters in those studies, they ate 800 calories more a day. They drank more. They didn't eat their fruits and vegetables. They didn't eat more sugar. They didn't exercise. eyes they smoke yeah there you go that's why they were sicker it wasn't because the meat and when you look at studies for example when they've done this with 11 000 people who shopped at health food stores who were either you know omnivores and ate meat or vegans or vegetarians they both had their risk of death reduced in half it's because they weren't eating all the crap right so it's not the meat it's what you eat with it is it the is it the burger or is it the bun and the sugar you know i have to i just noticed this the other day but for example my kids love ice cream and i was just I was just looking at those.

2:12:29You can get those dark chocolate bars at Whole Foods. I like the one that's mint blackout. In any event, if it's over 90 % cacao, which is going to mean it has less sugar, you can have four squares of that chocolate, which is a decent size. If you're watching this on YouTube, it's about this big, maybe a little smaller, but about around there. And it's only five grams of sugar. like if you really have a jones for something sweet after dinner you could have that for five grams we could have a big bowl of ice cream which might have 30 even more grams of sugar

2:13:07Dr. Mark Hyman:people don't even know what a gram and i mean this is an example of how the food ministry has taken over our government in in labeling and we're trying to change front of package labeling and food labels but no one knows what a gram of sugar is if i say four grams is a teaspoon if i say this This soda has 15 teaspoons of sugar. You're going to like blink and look twice. If you say it has 39 grams of sugar or 40 grams, you're not going to know what that means. No. And that's on purpose. So a teaspoon is about four grams? Yeah. Okay. That's on purpose. Right. You know, I mean, you have to have a PhD nutrition to decipher one of those labels.

2:13:42They make it so hard for you.

2:13:42Dr. Mark Hyman:Make it really hard. So I think, you know, in other countries, they have better front of package labeling, which is either red, this is going to kill you, yellow, eat with caution, green, you can eat as much as you want of it. Yeah. You know, they put warning labels in South America. They have big like octagon stop signs with this. Scull and crossbones? Yeah, basically. I mean, I don't even know South America. On your Skittles? If you go on a plane in South America, you get your snacks. It's like you can't eat any of them because they all have like three different giant stop signs on them with basically warning labels.

2:14:09That's a good idea.

2:14:10Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I mean, on a can of soda, which is a diastole, they put in warning labels that says, this is going to harm your kid and this can cause neurologic issues and don't drink it, don't feed it to them. Oh my God. I mean. Great, more like it. Yeah. Our executive producer has a third grader. He has two kids, but one of them is in third grade. And he has a question I bet a lot of our listeners have, which is what can you pack in a lunch that is healthy for a third grade child? And frankly, for most children, because you try to send your kid to school with a bag lunch or send your kid on a field trip with a bag lunch.

2:14:43Yeah, they'll trade it with the other kid

2:14:44Dr. Mark Hyman:for the junk food. You know, and I too don't know where to begin. It's so hard. They're not gonna eat a salad, first of all. No, you don't need a salad. But, you know, it should be real food. And there's lots of yummy things that kids can eat that they like that aren't bad for them. And what we need to do is stop putting Lunchables and Go-Gurts and all these sort of industrially designed foods that aren't technically food. As my doctor says, yogurt is a lie. Right. He doesn't mean nonfat Greek yogurt. He's talking about. Or full fat Greek yogurt. No, no, he's not talking about that. He's not talking about, you know, yogurt that's not sugary.

2:15:18Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I mean, people don't realize that you can get your sweetened yogurt that's low-fat. That has more sugar per ounce than a soda. Yeah, but you can, you know what? I have this almost every day for breakfast. I have, I'll either get nonfat or 2%, the phage, phage, yogurt, Greek yogurt. You can get the full-fat, Megan. Can I get the full-fat? I don't know. I don't want to, you know, I'm a little worried. You can. And I'll put like blueberries in there, and I'll put some chia seeds in there, and I'll put some hemp seeds in there. I don't even know why. I'm just told those are good for you. their protein, I guess.

2:15:49Yeah, protein and good fats. And sometimes I'll sprinkle just a little low sugar granola in there, which you can get with no seed oils on it. You gotta like -

2:15:56Dr. Mark Hyman:They have paleo granola now, yeah. You gotta look for that, but not too much because you don't wanna like completely overload it with sugary products or whatever. But it's so good. Yeah. It ties me over for hours and I love it and I know it's good for me. And if you make your home a safe zone, you teach your kids about food, you cook with them, you show them what food's about, that's what they learn. Okay, but let's give them an actual possibility that could go in there. What could be in their school lunch? Yeah, what could go in there? I mean, you could put, I don't know. I mean, you can make a sandwich out of healthy stuff, right?

2:16:25Dr. Mark Hyman:You could have, I'm just blanking now because I haven't packed my kids' lunch. You can't do chicken nuggets, can you? Or can you do the organic ones that you get at a... Yeah, you could do that. I mean, you could do that that are not deep fried in the bed. But you can't get sliced deli meat, right? No, sliced deli meat's not good. That's the devil. No, the bologna sandwiches with mayo and... Bread, I mean, you shouldn't be putting a sandwich in there? I mean, you could if it's whole grain bread and you know the source of it. I think the kids need to eat real food. And the problem is that they're not eating real food.

2:16:52Dr. Mark Hyman:And there are great guides on how to do this. I'm like blanking on school lunches because basically - Well, an apple. An apple, fruit. Cheese. Cheese can be fine. We're okay with cheese? Yeah, cheese can be fine. I prefer sheep or goat cheese. What else, Steve? What else do we need to know? Hold on. See if there's a follow-up. What kind of meat? Yeah, what kind of meat in the sandwich? Like real - I'm eating a turkey, sliced turkey. roast beef real real like not deli no not deli chicken because that's like kind of ground up and mixed with all kinds of stuff like a chicken breast that you cooked yourself the night before in avocado oil something like that that's pasture raised yeah okay it's just so much harder than it should be you know it's like well the defaults are the wrong choices how do we make the defaults easy choices and the right choices yeah i don't know i like even in the summers i'm sure there are a lot of parents out there who can relate to this the summers the family eating goes to hell the kids daily eating, because they're all over the place.

2:17:50You know, our kids go to this day camp and then they swing by the ice cream place that has a great menu, like a diner kind of place. And they're all eating just terrible food all day long. I don't even know what the alternative is. You know, like without hiring a chef to live in your house and come up with healthy options for all three meals, you know, they're eating bagel with cream cheese in the morning. And then they're eating like a cheese steak for lunch. And then, you know, I'll get them for dinner, but it's so hard.

2:18:16Dr. Mark Hyman:It is, it is. And that's the whole point of what needs to change in our policies, to change the things from the top down so that we produce food that's healthier, that we have clear labeling on foods that people know what they're getting, that we have access in a way that we don't have now to healthier options. And so those things will take time. And I think that's what the Trump administration is trying to do. I hope they succeed. I think there's a sort of a tension between the USDA and HHS because the USDA basically is to support farmers and not necessarily support the health of Americans. And they essentially are creating all the diseases inadvertently that health and human services and Medicare and Medicaid are having to take care of.

2:18:54So we have to be aware of the USDA.

2:18:55Dr. Mark Hyman:Like the right hand is actually making the left hand jobs a lot harder. How do you like RFKJ's chances of succeeding in this job given all these forces? He's got a lot of forces right against him. I mean, there's a multi-trillion dollar industry that is basically wanting him to fail and it's threatened. the food industry, the farming industry, the pharmaceutical industry. It's not a small thing. And I think if President Trump gets behind him and supports him, I think if he's able to get clear on what his objectives are, if he's able to sort of get on the low-hanging fruit and have the easy wins, I think they'll win.

2:19:27Dr. Mark Hyman:So, for example, getting all the additives and chemicals out of food is starting to happen. Now, there's 30-plus bills around the country in different states. Some of them, 10 of them, I think, are Democrat-led. The most of the rest are Republican-led. and they're, for example, to get rid of the chemicals in Dyson food or to have SNAP waivers, to get rid of soda and SNAP. These things are happening. They get nutrition education like in Texas for doctors or stop punishing kids by restricting recess and jib. There's things happening. The Maha movement has sort of catalyzed this groundswell. I'm sort of shocked.

2:20:01Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, I never thought. It's awesome. I hear Callie Means drop it all the time. He's like, you're going to tell the Maha moms out there that you won't take sugar out. And they're like, it's great. He's using it and he should. Because the Maha Mom thing is real. Like they're out there and they're pissed off about what's been done. I'm 100 % Maha Mom, happily and proudly. Because I'm pissed off about what these industries have done to me, to my family, how hard they've made it for us all, how expensive they've made it for us. And the government's been sort of in collusion a little bit with it. That's the problem.

2:20:33Most people can't afford to shop at Whole Foods. It's very expensive. But it's so hard to get organic fruit and vegetable.

2:20:39Dr. Mark Hyman:Walmart is the biggest organic grocer in the country. It is? It is the biggest organic grocer. There's not a Walmart near me, that's why. There are Walmarts near most of underserved populations. So, I mean, I shopped at Walmart and, you know, during COVID, I was helping different people who couldn't get food. I would go get food. I was like, wow, I can fill up in a giant, like, grocery cart full of real food. That's good. For 500 bucks. Grass-fed beef and all that? Like a giant Walmart cart, not like a regular grocery cart. Yeah. Not grass-fed necessarily, but just like real food. Okay. You know, meat, vegetables, you know.

2:21:08How important is the grass-fed thing?

2:21:10Dr. Mark Hyman:In the hierarchy of things, I think it's less important. Okay. I mean, it's more important to have regenerative agriculture to rebuild our soil and to sort of rebuild farms. In terms of your health, I think the kind of trade-off between eating real food and eating processed food, I would skip the organic and I would skip that. Okay. I mean, this is my selling heresy, but in terms of like having a choice, if you can't afford it. Yep. I would always choose the - Their relative sense. Yeah, the real food versus the processed food. Back to RLKJ, they definitely want to destroy him. And so one of my feelings is for the next four years, hopefully he decides to keep the job that long, we need to be super wary of hit pieces on him because the odds are they've been planted by one of his detractors.

2:21:51Just in the news now, they're trying to blame him for this measles outbreak down in Texas in a community of Mennonites who don't take vaccines and never have. That's right. Long before Bobby Kennedy - Or he came on the scene, right? Yeah, nevermind became HHS secretary. It's like he went down there out of empathy to this little boy's funeral. And they're like, you're to blame. But I do wonder, like that kind of story gets amplified. And I don't think it's totally organic.

2:22:19Dr. Mark Hyman:Oh, it's not. I mean, it's really not. I mean, it's sort of insidious. I mean, with Dr. Oz, they did this. The New York Times published a piece on him years ago, taking him down because this group called the American Council on Science and Health wrote a letter to Columbia to take him off the faculty because he was a quack. And there was sort of eight or nine doctors on the letterhead that was from the American Council on Science and Health. When you look at who that group is, they're funded by the pesticide industry, by the big food manufacturers, by Big Pharma, by tobacco. Wow. And they basically say that pesticides, cigarettes, and trans fats are fine.

2:22:55Dr. Mark Hyman:We shouldn't worry about them. I remember this. And they've come after me. Is it because he was pushing supplements on his show like as an advertiser? I mean, maybe. That was their in. Maybe, but he also was challenging things about the food system. Oh, no, I'm just saying that's the excuse they found to come from him. And when you look at who that group was, like one of the guys spent years in jail for Medicare fraud. And I was sort of shocked that the New York Times is an investigative journalist outlet, I thought, and it wasn't. I mean, it took me like 10 minutes to figure out who these people were by Googling them and what their backgrounds were and why they had this opinion and what this group was about.

2:23:30Dr. Mark Hyman:And there's so many of these front groups out there that seem noble and high-minded. The American Council on Science and Health, who would not believe what they have to say, right? Or like in another lane, the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yeah, 100%. Which we used to trust and now should not. All of them, everything, whether it's American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, some of them are doing good things. But on the other hand, they're also funded in large part by pharma and food industry. Well, why are pediatricians still pushing the flu vaccine on us?

2:24:01And grown-up doctors, too.

2:24:03Dr. Mark Hyman:It's one of those things, Megan, that I do not understand. You know, in medicine and science, the whole point is to question your assumptions. And science is based on hypotheses that challenge given assumptions. So it's really about the questions. When you start to ask questions about vaccines, you're all of a sudden a heretic. And you're excommunicated. our video right now. For real information about vaccines, go to the CDC. Yeah, you're excommunicated as a scientist, as a doctor. When I was at Cleveland Clinic, I had written an article years before I joined about a kid who had autism that I treated.

2:24:38Dr. Mark Hyman:And in the history, I said, this is the history. And this is the kid had, you know, born by C-section or took antibiotics or had gut issues or had this. And, you know, the mother said, and she was actually a VP at Pfizer, said, you know, by the way, you know, my kid had this MMR vaccine and after that he seemed to get regressive autism. And I'm not saying it was a cause. I'm just saying I wrote about it as part of the medical history. And even at the beginning of the article, I wrote a disclaimer. I said, I'm not saying vaccines cause autism. I'm just saying like. This is part of the story. Part of the story.

2:25:05Dr. Mark Hyman:And this kind of got up through the drinks at Cleveland Clinic and the pediatric department said you have to write a letter stating that you are 100 % in support of vaccines or you're basically fired. What? Like that's the kind of thinking in medicine. and whether you're Jay Bhattacharya who got kind of blacklisted or you're people who start to question things, we should be asking questions. And when you look at vaccine history, there's great benefit. But also we should be honest. They're like any other medical treatment that has benefits and risks. With the COVID vaccine, we saw myocarditis and other issues.

2:25:37Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, young adults who got vaccinated more than once had a greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than they got from COVID. That's published in major peer-reviewed journals. This is not a heretic opinion. But what's so annoying about it, so now you can say it because it's been published and so on. But at the time, when we were first seeing signs of it and you had pediatric cardiologists coming forward to say, hold on, I'm seeing this. Even then, when they knew something might be developing, they completely stifled debate or outing of those concerns. That's when it was most needed, but also most banned.

2:26:12You know, where like you couldn't talk about that.

2:26:14Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, it's kind of nuts. I mean, I think it's just that we can't trust the American public to deal with a nuanced conversation, to teach them about the benefits and the risks, to help them understand the difference between sterile immunity and disease immunity. Sterile immunity is you get measles vaccine, you never get measles. Disease immunity is you get a vaccine like the flu vaccine or COVID vaccine, you reduce your risk of getting the disease or the severity of disease or hospitalization or death. That's a very different thing. So when they say it's safe and effective, that's a trope that doesn't make any sense.

2:26:41Dr. Mark Hyman:nothing in medicine is safe and 100 % effective or 100 % safe. Whether it's getting an injection for a procedure, you can potentially get infection, you can get bleeding. I mean, I had back surgery and I had a huge bleed into my spine. It wasn't, the doctor didn't do it on purpose, but it was a complication. No risks. Yeah, so there are benefits and risks to anything in medicine, to any drug, aspirin. I mean, we used to think aspirin was God's gift to mankind. People were taking it every day to prevent heart attacks. Everybody should take aspirin to prevent heart attacks. And then the data started emerging as doctors continue to ask questions.

2:27:13Dr. Mark Hyman:We should be asking questions. They go, oh, let's look at this again. So they looked at it again, and they thought, oh, shit. It's actually causing more deaths in people who are at low risk for heart disease from brain bleeds and GI bleeds, stomach bleeds, than from preventing heart attacks. So let's restrict the use of it to those who are at the highest risk, which is what we should be doing in medicine, constantly learning, evolving, growing. But when it comes to vaccines, you can't even ask the question. So I've been vaccinated. I had my kids vaccinated. I mean, I'm not anti-vaccine. I think they're an important part of our medical arsenal, but they're not like perfect and they have problems and we should be studying this.

2:27:48Yeah, nothing is above questions in medicine or shouldn't be. And you know what, we're in a new era.

2:27:53Dr. Mark Hyman:And when people say it's debunked, it's been settled, and even those things that are so anti-science. Right. It's amazing. Those words should be retired. Exactly. But I mean, look, now we've got Trump, we've got Bobby, we've got Jay Bhattacharya, we've got Marty McCary. Like we're slowly but surely turning this aircraft carrier around, but it's going to require like antenna for the attacks on them. And voices. We're going to have to get pissed off and follow the Cali Means method of yelling at everybody. I told him, he's got to calm down. I just get in the garden. He's got to like just chill out a little bit.

2:28:25No, never. I disagree, Cali. Don't listen to Mark. All right, Sam, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Don't forget, we are giving you discounts. if you would like to join Function Health and get one of these blood panels with all this information today. What's the URL, Steve? What is it? I'll stay by. Functionhealth.com slash a slash Megan, slash a slash Megan, Functionhealth.com slash a slash Megan, or just go to Functionhealth.com. And when you sign up for the package, I think it's normally like 500 bucks a year. You get a hundred bucks off. That is so well worth it. I know you may be thinking, no, I can't.

2:29:04That's like he said, about a dollar a day for your health, like actually to find out potentially if you have cancer, like this seems smart. Now let's talk about the weight loss drugs, because it seems like one of the first things that Trump did in the Maha lane was to take them off of the Medicare Medicare and Medicaid, too, options. But that seems counterintuitive because being fat causes everything.

2:29:30Dr. Mark Hyman:It's true. It's complicated. I mean, Medicare Part D is the drug benefit for Medicare. It's$145 billion. If you treated all the obese people in Medicare with those MPIC, it would be, I think,$267 billion just for that. But wouldn't it then lower the cost of all the other things they need? It might. It might. But the question is, is there a different way to go about this? and can you get the same benefits and what is going on with our food system and the causes of this. So it's easy to look for that quick fix or the quick jab that's going to solve all your problems, but it doesn't come without risk.

2:30:01Dr. Mark Hyman:So when you take these drugs, when you might feel nauseous and not feeling great, so that's probably how it works. It makes you not want to eat because you don't feel good. So who wants to rock around with that? And most people discontinue it after the first year. I mean, it's a big discontinuation rate because of the side effects. Not only that, those are short-term, kind of short-lived side effects, but we see a 400 % increase in bowel obstruction, which needs surgery. We see a 900 % increase in pancreatic injury. We see increases in thyroid cancer. Although people debate that whether it's just in animals or not, but it's still a concern.

2:30:33Dr. Mark Hyman:And you see people losing half their weight as muscle. Muscle is where your metabolism is. So here's the problem. You lose, let's say, 50 pounds. Half of that's muscle. You get off the drug because most people stop it. You gain back the weight. Now it's all fat. All fat. So then you could be the same weight you were when you started. Except a lot flabbier. But your metabolism would be slower because muscle from seven times the calories is fat. So you need to eat less at the same weight just to maintain that weight. So it's a slippery slope unless you are, and I think this is something that we've talked about in some of the policy conversations we have had.

2:31:10Dr. Mark Hyman:If you're going to give this drug, it must be delivered along with a nutrition counseling program that makes you eat at least a gram of protein per ideal body weight. So let's say per pound of ideal body weight. So let's say you're 120 pounds, you need 120 grams of protein. And a strength training program. So you keep your muscle. And if you don't do that, there's a huge risk on the backside of it. You're gonna be skinny fat. Skinny fat, it's right. I know, it's a terrible situation. Nobody wants to be skinny fat. It's like you look good in clothes, but then when you take the clothes off, it goes downhill fast.

2:31:41Dr. Mark Hyman:There's another word for it called toffee, not tofu. Thin on the outside, fat on the inside. Oh yeah, nobody wants that. That's fine until you get to beach season. These are an important advance in medicine, but they have to be prescribed intelligently. They have to be done in the right way for the right person. It's not a panacea for everything. And we have to fix our food system. And we have to fix the reason why we're fat. But if you had a morbidly obese person come in to see you, you wouldn't consider saying, you want to check out a Zempic? Yeah, I think, what did we do before this? There's a woman working with me who's been working on my nonprofit for years.

2:32:12Dr. Mark Hyman:She's now the first lady of West Virginia. She lost over 100 pounds just following some simple guidance that I gave her about what to do. She's a brilliant woman, but she didn't ever know about nutrition. I saw another woman in Cleveland Clinic who had heart failure, type 2 diabetes, hypertension. She had multiple stents put in. She had fatty livers. Her kidneys were starting to fail. I mean, she was on her way to a kidney and a heart transplant. And within three days, and this sounds crazy, but she was off her insulin by changing her diet. In three months, she reversed her diabetes. Her A1C, which is your average blood sugar, went from 11 to 5.5, which is normal.

2:32:42Dr. Mark Hyman:Her heart failure reversed. We call it the injection fracture was how much blood you can pump out per minute. Again, that got back to normal from being low. Her kidneys got better. Her fatty liver went away. She got off her medications. She saved$20 ,000 in copay. I don't know what Medicare was covering for her, but that was her copay. You save a lot of money. And it's just about teaching people the basics of what to do. And most people don't know. Like the family I was talking about, this was the pre-Ozempic era. A lot of people know and they just, it's very hard. Some people do and some people just don't know.

2:33:10Dr. Mark Hyman:And I think that's what I have changed over the years. I sort of believe, like I said earlier, that people who are overweight or who have these conditions, they know better, but they just don't do it. No, it's more than that. They don't know because the whole society has sort of made it hard for them to know. I got to ask you, this is a different category, but I got to get this in. EMF and RF. Should we be worried about Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? And so-called dirty electricity coming out of your outlets. Yeah. How big of an issue is it? I don't know. I don't think that there's a lot of good data. I think there's some data that there may be some issues in human biology.

2:33:49Dr. Mark Hyman:When you think about it, we're electromagnetic beings. You have your heartbeat, your brain waves. We can see those electrical signals. I mean, you know that if you go into certain areas, there's interference with your phone. So the stuff actually we know impacts our electromagnetic system. How it's linked to disease, how bad it is, I think it's very hard to understand or study because you can't do a randomized controlled trial with this. You can't like take part. Wouldn't we all be coming down with cancer if exposure to Wi-Fi caused it? Yeah. I mean, everybody. The thing is we are seeing increasing cancer rates.

2:34:22Dr. Mark Hyman:So people say, oh, heart disease deaths have gone down. Yes, because we have better treatments. But has the incidence gone down? No, we've seen more people with heart disease, more people with cancer, more people with every single chronic disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, you name it, autoimmune disease, it's getting worse. across the board and so it's multifactorial it's not just one thing and could it be a factor yeah but i i think you think twice about having wi-fi in your house uh no i do but i turn it off in my bedroom and i and i know and i noticed this i mean this is totally anecdotal but when i go camping or i'm sleeping outside like i sleep better my my whole well-being changes and it could be nature it could be a lot of other things but i always wonder if that or sometimes even when the power goes out because you know when the power goes out sometimes it goes out for three or four days like, wow, I feel a lot better.

2:35:04Dr. Mark Hyman:I sleep better. You know, I mean, it's kind of amazing. So that's anecdotal. But I think it's something we should study. Well, you see a headline every other day that young people, like people in their 20s are getting colon cancer at really alarming rates. Yeah, yeah. Is that true? And do you know why? Yes, 100 % true. I think the why is a question. My view is that it's related to the change in our microbiome from our diet and from the increased load of hormonal toxins. And that's probably driving most of it. what about antibiotics you know you're talking about the woman with the messed up microbiome and you mentioned you gave her antibiotics i thought antibiotics caused a bad well they can be good they can be bad so so she had an overgrowth of bacteria called sebo which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and she also had sifa which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth so sometimes you need to get rid of the bad guys like if you have a parasite you need an antiparasitic medication if you i would love to get a parasite every woman i know dreams of that yeah worms for weight loss.

2:36:00Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, exactly. It's our new company, worms for weight loss. No, we used to joke, my hairstylist and I were joking during the COVID pandemic. If Dr. Fauci would just say there's some Ozempic in those COVID vaccines, everybody would get them. Every single woman on earth would be like, I'll take it. I want all my boosters. It's true. But you know, antibiotics have a role in medicine, but we, you know, we way overuse them. I mean, there's 29 million pounds of antibiotics to use in animal feed to prevent infection from overcrowding. There's about a couple of million that are used for humans for therapy.

2:36:27Dr. Mark Hyman:So that creates antibiotic resistance. It kills 700 ,000 people a year. It's kind of a big issue and it's a big, big problem. But for certain indications, for example, like bowel overgrowth, there's specific antibiotics that are not absorbed, that can be taken, that are generally well tolerated, and that you have to then rebuild the gut after. So you have to use it. How hard is it to rebuild the gut after an antibiotics course? It's not that hard if you take probiotics, if you eat healthy diet, if you feed your microbiome, phytochemicals and fiber, it can come back. Okay. Yeah. I've been taking this shot, not for antibiotics, just because I was, I don't know, everybody says it's supposed to be good for you, of raw, it's like honey, what is it, apple cider vinegar and some lemon.

2:37:12Yeah. It is the most disgusting.

2:37:15Dr. Mark Hyman:You take it and you're like, oh, is this important? I mean, it can be good to change the pH of your stomach, but I'm not a big subscriber to that. It's so painful. But I don't really like all that fermented stuff they say that you should eat, like sauerkraut and pickled this and pickled that. I don't know. I don't like this. I'm not having sardines, and I don't love my vinegar drink, and I don't want to eat a bunch of sauerkraut. I do like the yogurt. But yogurt's good too, right? Can I do that instead of the apple cider vinegar? If it's not industrial yogurt, yes. It's industrial. What do you mean?

2:37:47Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean like factory-farm cows that are pumpable antibiotics, hormones, and it gets into the milk. I don't even know how I found that out. I didn't even consider that. Well, you can buy organic yogurt. I don't think mine is organic. I've got to go look at that immediately. And you've considered it. Okay, so in sum, we need to detoxify ourselves. We need to detoxify our environment. You mentioned mold. You mentioned lime, all the ultra-processed foods. Buy organic. Yeah, ultra-processed foods. I mean, if you could get a message out that's simple, It's like, you know, if it's a food that you can't recognize or make in your kitchen with the ingredients that you have in your kitchen, you probably shouldn't eat it.

2:38:27Dr. Mark Hyman:Don't eat it. If you don't have butylated hydroxy toluene that you put on your vegetables or you shrink on your steak, don't buy food with it. Yeah. Better safe than sorry. It's almost like you need to get rid of your pantry. I think we need a fridge biopsy for most people and a pantry biopsy, and we need to get rid of the stuff that's harmful. Yeah. And I think that's the thing that most people can do. They can look at their kitchen, go through everything. And I've written a lot about this in my books, but how do you actually have a healthy pantry? How do you get rid of those things that are harmful?

2:38:53Dr. Mark Hyman:And if you go through there and look at the ingredients, if it's stuff you don't recognize, get rid of it. If you can't pronounce it, if it's in Latin, don't eat it. Like it has weird ingredients like maltodextrin. You or your kids. Yeah, or your kids, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so what you're saying is that my mom serving me wild berry high C with every meal was not exactly the best choice. No, probably not. Linda! Probably not. This is where we went wrong. That's right. Dr. Mark Hyman, it's a pleasure. Pleasure. Function Health is the name of the company and you guys got to check it out again. It's Function Health, right?

2:39:24FunctionHealth.com or Function.com?

2:39:26Dr. Mark Hyman:Function Health. FunctionHealth.com slash A slash Megan. And that will get you$100 off your membership there. Well worth your time. Thank you all. Thanks. And we'll talk to you tomorrow.

2:39:42Dr. Mark Hyman:Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles. Usually, you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla, not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken Menu while it's here. The participating U.S. Taco Bell locations for a limited time only. While supplies last, contact store for availability. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette.

2:40:16Dr. Mark Hyman:Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for? Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home