Dr. Mark Hyman: How To Reclaim Your Health In A Food System Designed To KILL You

26:33So it's going to take some sweeping changes, and I think some really committed politicians in Washington Hopefully the next president will take this on. There's a lot of pushback from the industry. It's, like I said, the biggest industry. It's the biggest lobby group. I mean, just one bill to label GMOs. And by the way, I think us and Syria are the only countries that don't label GMOs. China does. Russia does. Not known for transparency, right? Those two countries. But they label GMOs. The GMO labeling bill in this country, the food industry spent$192 million dollars lobbying for one bill you know how much pass it to not pass it not pass that to say you go against yes you cannot label foods with gmo because that's going to make people not want to buy it oh my gosh right yeah and then they did the same thing they put in a bunch of them colluded which they got they got actually sued for by the attorney general of state of washington and they had to pay the biggest fine ever assessed because they colluded to actually put a ballot initiative in that was anti-GMO labeling.

27:43Wow. To get people to vote against the labeling of GMOs in Washington. This is what's going on and it's very dark. And it's not like, oh, gee, we don't know. Like there's a lot of actually malicious intent. There's also people who are just trying to do their job and make better products and do the right thing. But, you know, look at Mark Schneider, who was the CEO of Nestle, the biggest health company, I mean, the biggest food company in the world got fired because he was pushing things too much in the health direction. And I was working with him. Really? Yeah. And there was the head of Pepsi, Indra Nui.

28:13She got a lot of flack and got canned for trying to push Pepsi to be a healthier company. Wow. Yeah. So it's very complicated. And I think we do need a strong leadership in Washington. We need an educated consumer base. We need grassroots movement. We need clear research to actually show what works and what doesn't work. I mean, you know, I mean, okay, $46 billion is spent on the NIH budget. The amount spent on nutrition is 121 million. It's 0.02 % or 002%. I'm not good at math, but anyway, that's not my choice, but it's very little. And most of that is not actually for the nutrition research about chronic disease.

28:52It's other stuff. So it's almost nothing. And yet it's the number one cause of death and illness. And we're not even studying it. it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that this is not something that's gonna happen overnight that's gonna take time it's gonna take time to take make changes I mean it takes time until it doesn't right the Berlin Wall came down in one night sure so it takes time it takes decades and then it happens right so I'm kind of you know hopefully I'm gonna try to I wrote a book called young forever on how to stay healthy and I've reversed my biological age four years in the last two years so I'm counting on staying alive long enough so I can see this it sounds like it's not gonna happen anytime in the next four to eight years.

29:29It might. It might. It does. It might, Lewis. I see consumers are carrying more about their health. But people are sicker than ever. People are sicker than ever. You know, I co-founded a company called Function Health, which allows people to access their own lab data, kind of disrupts the healthcare system, so you don't have to go through a doctor insurance company. And people are flocking to that. We've had over 80 ,000 members, 300 ,000 people on the wait list. We have, you know, over 110 million biomarkers we've now tracked. And we test like five times what you get in a normal doctor's visit and look at everything from your metabolic health, hormones, and your nutrient levels, toxin levels, things that you should be looking at.

30:04And people are wanting this because they get that the healthcare system is broken. They're not getting the answer from their doctor. They want to get healthy. They want to be empowered. And so I think there's a grassroots movement. We saw the 400 ,000 people on Bonnie Harrell's petition. That's significant. Yeah, there's movement, but it's still most people have chronic illness. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't know they don't know they don't have to. That's the thing. They don't know this is optional. Even if you have it, you can reverse it with food. Food can heal and food can harm if you know how to use it.

30:33So then what are the most dangerous foods that cause chronic disease that we should be avoiding? Well, as a class, I think what's come to light in the last decade or so is this concept of ultra-processed food. And what is ultra-processed food? Well, everybody that says whole food, that's an apple or an egg or a piece of chicken, right? Then there's minimally processed food. So if you make sauerkraut, while you're taking cabbage, you're chopping it, and you're fermenting it, it's still pretty much whole food, but it's got some processing. Then there's, you know, maybe some little more extra processing that can happen.

31:06It's not so bad, like, you know, canning or something like that. Those are all real foods. Like if you buy a can of tomatoes, it says tomatoes, water, and salt. You know what it is. Then there's ultra processed food, which is not actually food. And it's, it's, this is based on the NOVA classification, which they developed out of Brazil. And it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good barometer for what to eat and not to eat. So ultra-processed food essentially is industrial foods like commodity crops, corn, meat, and soy. They get chemically broken down. So the molecules are just completely disassembled.

31:38They're reassembled, but not in ways that our body recognizes or probably can process. They're incredibly inflammatory. They destroy microbiome. They disregulate our appetite. Kevin Hall at the NIH did a study where he took a group of people and he gave him whole foods diet for a few weeks and then gave him a washout period and then a few weeks of an ultra processed diet. And they were pretty matched for calories in what they were available. They were matched for fat, protein, carbs, fiber. And what they found was that when these people were eating ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day.

32:14Now, if you do the math, in a week, that's 3 ,500 calories. That's a pound. That's right. 3 ,500 calories is a pound of weight gain. And so in a year, that's 52 pounds. Holy cow. Right? So this is what America's eating. If you're not burning those calories in some other way, you have to work out more. If you, here's what happens. This is, it's a fuel partitioning issue. This might be a little too technical for you. I'll try to break it down. Part of the problem is that these foods are extremely starchy and sugary for the most part. and they have bad fats and they have other additives, ingredients and weird things that make you addictive.

32:48But when you eat sugar and starch, it causes your blood sugar to spike. Then your insulin goes up and then the fuel goes into your fat cells. So it basically drives all the available fuel. So you store the fat in your belly, but then in your blood, it feels like you're starving. So you need more. You want to eat more because you're actually not regulating your fuel properly. So it's a fuel partitioning issue. And so you're basically starving in the midst of plenty. So it's really crazy. And so you want to eat more and more. That's how people can get to be two, three, four, 500 pounds, you know, because they're so dysregulated by these foods.

33:29I had a patient who was eating these foods for most of her life. And by the time she got to be 66. She was educated but didn't know anything about food. She was from the Midwest. And she had heart failure. She had type 2 diabetes. She had multiple stents. She had high blood pressure. She had fatty liver. Her kidneys were going. She was on a pile of pills. Her copay was$20 ,000 a year. Who knows what we were paying for Medicare. She was on her way to a kidney and a heart transplant. Terrible. And we put on a program. It was a group support lifestyle change program, put her on a very cold foods, anti-inflammatory diet, essentially what I wrote in my book, the 10-day detox diet, which is really great for just resetting the body.

34:09And in three days, she was off insulin, which sounds crazy. In three months, her A1C, which is a measure of blood sugar, went from 11 to 5.5. 5.5 is normal. 11 is like you should be in the hospital, right? Her heart failure, which was significant for those doctors listening, it was 35 % injection fraction, went back up to 50%, which is normal. So basically, that doesn't happen in medicine. You don't see that. Like these are one-way diseases. Once you have high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, you can manage them. You can't reverse them, but you can, right? So she reversed her diabetes.

34:42She reversed three months. She was off all her medications. I'd lost 43 pounds. Everything was normal. And then in a year, she lost 116 pounds and got her life back. Wow. And she was on her way to the grave and she was able to resurrect herself just by using food as medicine. So food can heal or can harm. And if you understand how to use food in the right way, it has incredibly creative powers so yes food got us into this but it can also get us out of this so ultra processed foods are sounds like the worst the worst yeah but that's where the food industry makes the most money I think 73 % of what's on the grocery store shelves it's all you know it's stuff that looks like food that isn't like Froot Loops is not food you know like and top tarts and Lunchables and I mean how did the USDA allow Lunchables to be in school lunches I mean this is just criminal you know and And these foods are driving most of the problem.

35:31Now, a lot of these foods have also starch and sugar, which is the other big driver. So you mentioned sugar is your Achilles heel. It's not an accident, Louis. There's nothing wrong with you. It's how we were designed. You know, think about bears, right? They kind of starve all winter, and they eat a lot of salmon at the beginning of the season when the salmon are running. They have a lot of protein and fat. They don't gain that much weight a little bit. Then it's berry season, and they go to town. And they gain 500 pounds. Literally 500 pounds of fat because they're eating sugar. Pretty fructose, which increases fat a lot.

36:05And then they go to sleep and they sleep all winter and they burn off. We just keep eating all winter, you know. And so our bodies are programmed when we find something starchy or sugary to eat it and to eat as much as we can because we don't know when we're going to find our next root or berry. We don't know when we're going to find our next animal to hunt and kill. Like we didn't have grocery stores and Uber Eats, you know, 100 gatherers, right? Yeah. And so we're programmed to eat sugar because it's stored quickly. And that's good in a situation where there's scarcity, but not in America. I mean, it just seems like there's going to be more and more conveniences in life, you know, with the ability to push a button and have ice cream in your door in five minutes or go to the grocery store and see all the...

36:49Even if they stop all the marketing, even if they put the labels on there, there's still going to be foods available that are not good for us. I was talking to Casey Means about this this morning about how she was saying that society, humanity is spiritually broken also. And we need to find spiritual healing so that we can just have awareness and make better choices. I don't know if that's a different mindset and being disciplined to just not take the action to have the easy fix or the thing that's going to make us feel good because we're in a fight or flight state or we're going through a breakup or we're going through stress at work or whatever it might be.

37:30And this is going to make us feel comfortable, comfort foods. Or if it's a spiritual brokenness. brokenness and because we're spiritually broken or emotionally broken we don't have a we don't feel whole and therefore we need to refuel things to try to make us feel better that's right but those things aren't healthy for us no and if we could start to heal ourselves spiritually it's huge could we start to see and notice things and say i don't need this right now yeah or i'm going to have this once in a while and that's okay yep but it's not going to be every day constantly to fuel something inside of me where i feel wounded broken less than unworthy guilty shameful needing this to feel quick fix and then take me to my grave that's right i would say it's not what you're eating it's what's eating you that's the problem yeah you know and and if you understand what's eating you and it's the stress of our modern life it's the political division it's the conflict around the world.

38:32It's the threat of nuclear war, the threat of climate change, the economic instability, the pressures to work hard. I mean, there's so much going on. The social media has created such a bunch of chaos in our life. Technology, which should have freed up time, seems to suck all our time, right? And so we're kind of in a state where we're disconnected from nature. We're disconnected from each other. We're isolated. And so what do we do? We have to feed the emptiness. we have to fill that hole and so i get it you know yeah when i feel like crapper i've had a stressful day i want a pint of chunky monkey bin sure man tell me about it tastes amazing it's great i just try not to have it in the kitchen and sometimes i'm always having a bad night and she's like orders a pint of ice cream and then she orders me another pint of the sicilian van lewin pistachio which is my favorite but i'm like i don't want that and they're like oh i just got it for you i'm like no you got it so you didn't feel bad that you're eating all right Exactly.

39:28But I really feel like it is, you know, something to what you were saying about the, you know, the spiritual brokenness of our society of feeling empty and needing to fill something up because we feel broken or empty or less than. And trauma is a real thing, Lewis. I mean, of course, we've talked about this before. When you look at the ACE questionnaire, which is, I think everybody should go and check this out. It's available online. It's adverse. I said like 15 or 16 different things. It's adverse childhood events. And it's essentially instead of a few questions, You fill out, you get a score.

39:56Like, did my parents get divorced? Was any of my family an alcoholic? Did anybody go to jail? Did I get hit? Was I neglected? Sexual abuse, all these things. Right, sexual abuse. I think I hit every one of these things. Yeah. And it's real. Yeah, it's real. And so when you have that, and the more you have, it's almost more correlated with chronic illness than anything else. Wow. Smoking or diet. I mean, if you look at the risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, suicide, I mean, you name it. Mental health issues, all of it, it's related to these traumas we have. And we don't really have a great way of thinking or dealing with it.

40:30And I look at my parents' generation. They just didn't have a language for it. Now we do. We're talking about psilocybin therapy and MDMA therapy and trauma. And there's got people like Gabor Mati out there talking. And so there's a really interesting conversation happening around that. And I think, for me, we're a traumatized society, you know. And all of us, to some degree or a little degree. He talks about big T traumas, little T traumas. Big T would be sexual abuse. Little T would be your parents just didn't understand you and neglected you. We're just too busy and self-absorbed. It doesn't matter.

41:00They all have an impact for us. And they drive our behaviors. And the healing spiritually is a key part of this. And the challenge is, if we're raised as a child, there's so many things to go in here. It's like, were you born through a vaginal birth or through a cesarean birth? Did you have multiple shots as a kid? Did you not have shots as a kid? Were you given sugar right away? Were you breastfeeding? It's like all the decisions from birth could compound and impact you over time until in your 20s and you could be chronically ill not knowing how you got there. That's right. Because your parents influenced what you ate and the environment and everything.

41:40It's like you have to unlearn it all and learn how to get healthy in your 20s or 30s when you finally start waking up to it. That's right. Right? It's like you're not aware when you're 8 that I'm like, you know, I don't know, unless you're getting picked on or bullied. But it's like the food is available for you to eat that. Your parents are taking you out. You're eating sugar or junk food or whatever it is. They're not educated. And so you're in your 20s and you're just sick. Yeah, that's right. It's quite astounding how many people are unwell. and you know as I mentioned this company Function Health we've done you know tests now on 80 ,000 people and this is a health forward population and like over 95 % have some metabolic dysfunction which means they have like abnormal cholesterol to small particles 46 % have high inflammation 33 % have an autoimmunity problem and these are people that are actively focused on being healthy yeah 67 % have a nutritional deficiency and this is at the level the lab says is deficient not what I would think is a good level of vitamin D or iron or whatever right it's like vitamin D level should be over 50.

42:40Well, there's under 30 is, is over 30 is okay. Well, I'm like, 30 is not good. It should be 50. And so there's such a prevalence of people having all these low grade things that they don't know about. And illness doesn't just happen, Lewis. It's not like one day you get dementia or heart disease or cancer. I mean, these are slow progressive things that happen over decades. And so there's a slow transition from wellness to illness. And we have not paid attention to that medicine at all. We're like, you know, come back to me when you're sick i'll give you a drug like literally i had a patient i saw him and his lab tests showed how to high blood sugar was like 113 which is pre-diabetes i said did you did your doctor you know talk to you about this oh yeah i said what did the doctor say said oh well he says when it gets higher and i get over 126 i have diabetes and he can give me medication oh my gosh this is straight up not talking about how to prevent it or reverse it or like prove it right oh you're not your autoimmune disease isn't so bad, but when you get worse, come back and I'll, you know, I'll give you a drug.

43:36It's like, that's nuts, Lewis. And so the doctors also aren't incentivized to help prevent people from being sick. They're not because they don't make a living. So that industry is a little bit off. Oh, for sure. I mean, that's one of the things we're working on in medicine now is how do we, in Washington with a food fix campaign is how do we reimburse for nutrition services and health care how do we get doctors paid to do the right thing instead of the thing that's paid for right i mean you can get paid for doing an angioplasty but you can't get paid for a lifestyle change program that will prevent them from eating the angioplasty right my daughter's in medical school no nutrition education 40 years later i was i had none she's got none right less very very few medical schools provide any nutrition education and and we're working on that for example we spend 17 billion dollars a year it's a federal government paying to support graduate medical education programs there's no strings attached we're like hey maybe you should have some minimum compensated requirements for nutrition hey maybe on licensing exams for medical school you should have nutrition questions because that's what's killing all your patients yes and so we're trying to change reimbursement we're trying to change education these are the kinds of things we're working on changing snap policies changing uh food packaging labeling changing dietary guidelines paying for medically tailored meals you know basically getting the NIH to have a in a national institute nutrition we don't have that sure sure other countries have it yeah it's meant there's many levers to pull front of package labeling at the fda regulation getting junk out of there's so much to be done yes and it's not going to be one thing you know ending food marketing to kids i mean just like why should we i mean if we were doing to our kids i'm sorry if another country was doing to our kids what we're doing we'd go to war to protect them right think about it wow I mean, it seems like there's a lot of levers to pull a lot of different industries, policies, companies that need to make changes.

45:28But say that never happens. And each individual on this planet has to make their own decisions and own changes and take full responsibility of their health, no matter what these companies or governments do for them. what would be the three to five things that an individual listening or watching right now can say, I'm going to take back responsibility and control of my health and my family's health. We'll start with myself and my family. And we're going to start implementing only three to five things. Because anything more than that is overwhelming. I don't have the time, but it's already a struggle.

46:01We're already, you know, chronically ill or on the way there. It's tough. Life is tough. Yeah. Responsibilities are hard. Managing it all. making money totally relationships are challenging marriage is tough kids are not easy there's ups and downs parents are dying all these different things I don't have much more energy although I know when I do this I'll have a lot more energy that's healthier that's right so I need to get through a three-month window to take actions on three to five things to help me reverse chronic illness and be the difference maker in my family to say I'm the one who stood up to this suffering.

46:41I'm the one who took responsibility and took ownership back in my life. And therefore, I'm going to change my family's generational history because of decisions I make today. That's right. Based on what you say here, what would you say are three to five things that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness forever in their family? Yeah, I mean, that's a beautiful question. I mean, I've thought a lot about. and I think it's not as complicated as people think. Yes, it would be easy to do if we didn't live in a toxic food environment. Yes, it would be easy to do if the systems around us support us to do the right thing.

47:16But even against all those odds. We have the easy choice being the bad choice for us, the unhealthy choice. We have the hard choice being the healthy choice. We don't want that, right? And I'll just tell you a story that kind of illustrates how this could be done. And I think, you know, I had a belief, and I'm just going to be upfront about it. I had a belief that people kind of knew what to do. They just didn't do it. They were lazy. They just liked to eat the junk food. They didn't really care. And I was like a little bit arrogant, honestly. And about 10 years ago, or more actually, I went down to a place called Easley, South Carolina, as part of this film called Fed Up that we did with Katie Couric and Lori David, who did Inconvenient Truth.

48:00and I got introduced to this family of five that lived in a trailer. They were on disability and food stamps. The father was 42, already had kidney failure on dialysis from type 2 diabetes, which is usually you get later in life, but he's already so bad. The mother was easily 100 pounds plus overweight. The oldest kid was about 16 and he was 50 % body fat. Now a guy should be 10 to 20%. Okay. He was practically diabetic, almost diabetic. And I rather than give him a lecture, I said, why don't we cook a meal together? You know? And here's the truth, Lewis. The food industry has hijacked and disintermediated us from our kitchens.

48:45They're basically like, you deserve a break today. Convenience is king. You know, don't bother cooking. We'll do it for you. Right? And most people, families don't have meals together. They don't cook together. they eat from a different package made in a different factory cooked in a microwave all while they're on their phones or watching tv right not exactly conducive to help right so i went down to this family and i said let's look in your let's let's cook a meal together let's get some simple ingredients i'm on the board of the environmental working group and there's a guide called good food on a tight budget which is how to eat well for you well for your wallet and well for your planet right and uh i they had some turkey chili recipe in there and i salad recipes and roasted sweet potatoes, simple stuff.

49:29And cheap ingredients, roasted cheap ingredients. And they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America. When you look at something called the retail food environment index, how many fast food and convenience stores are there to a grocery store or healthy food? It was like 10 to 1. It was like really bad. And I said, let's look at what's in your cupboards first. And so we took out all the packages and the stuff in the freezer and the cans and the packaging. And they were like, you couldn't tell if it was a Pop-Tart or a corn dog by looking at the label. on the ingredient list. I mean, it's just the same processed ingredients.

49:58We were talking about all the ultra, you know, the 2 ,500 things you see on a label, right? That you don't even know what they are, how to pronounce them or where they came from, right? See, you know, maltodextrin or butylahydroxy toluene. You don't know what that is. Like, that's not something you sprinkle on your salad, right? Right, right. And so I started showing them this is not good for you and they had, oh, cool whip. It's good because it's a, you know, low fat dressing says zero trans fats, but yes, it's all trans fat because the FDA was under the thumb of the food industry and when they basically made them label trans fat, they said if it has less than half a gram per serving, you don't have to label it.

50:31And it says zero trans fats, but it's almost all trans fat because it's like mostly air, right? Sure. So it does all this crap. And so I showed them with her and they're like, oh my God, this is a tarot we didn't know. So we cooked and didn't have cutting board, didn't have knives. We were cutting garlic and sweet potatoes with like a butter knife. And we did dinner. It was fine. It was delicious. And we all ate together. And the son was like, Dr. Hyman, do you eat with your family like this every night? I'm like, yeah, I cook and eat. every night like this so I'm hailing and he's like this is amazing and they love the food I said listen I don't know if you can do this but here's the guide on heating it well for less here's a cookbook that I wrote just follow it on how to balance your blood sugar and on my way home on the plane I ordered them cutting boards and knives because they didn't even have them and the first week the mother texted me she's like we lost 18 pounds this week together wow in a year they lost over 200 pounds the mother lost 100 the father lost 45 was able to get a new kidney which was their motivation the son lost 50 went to work at bojangles after that and that's like a fast food store in the south and he says it's like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar and he gained back the weight and then some and then he reached out to me says dr hyman will you help him like sure it's i coached him and he lost 132 pounds he then a few years later he was the first kid in his college to go to family to go to college wow a few years later he wrote me he said Dr.

51:53Hyman, would you be willing to write me a letter of recommendation for medical school? Now he's a doctor. No way. So that taught me something, which is that... You thought they knew the information. I thought they knew. But they didn't know. And so it's not that hard. So what I would say to people is a few things. One is make your home a safe zone. Like, just, if you want to eat crap, do it. Make it the hard choice, right? You have to go to McDonald's, drive there. But, you know, in the home, only have stuff that's going to support your health and well-being. no ultra processed food in the house so that's really straightforward simple honestly that doesn't even look like food to me anymore like if i see m &ms like i'm at an airport and i'm craving sugar i see a package of m &ms or a hershey chocolate bar i'm like it doesn't look like food it's like a rock so i'm like why would i eat the rock or why would i eat that camera or like i always want sure but you know i might eat like real good chocolate i might do that some dark chocolate Yeah, so I just, you know, ultra-processed food has got to go.

52:51If you really want to be healthy, you've just got to cut that out of your diet. The third thing is don't drink your liquid sugar calories. Sodas, sweetened coffees, sweetened teas, energy drinks, sports drinks, Gatorade. That's just got to go. And artificial sweeteners aren't a whole lot better, really. Even if it says zero sugar, it's got artificial sweeteners. They're problematic. The sugar alcohols can mess up your microbiome. There's some real research that's concerning that they might be increasing the risk of diabetes, obesity, affecting your microbiome. Some of them may be okay, like stevia or monk fruit, a little bit here and there.

53:29Not anti-sugar. Like, if you want... Look... What about this whole... If you get a 20-on soda, you're having like 15 teaspoons of sugar. That's a lot. You're not going to put 15 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. So put a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee. That's fine. Right. Don't put 15. Yeah. What about this allulose sugar? That can be a little better. That can be a little better. So there's little hacks. But I think that's the addict in you talking, Lewis. Yeah, yeah. How can I get around it? Negotiating. Exactly. Just don't do it. That's okay. I'm not a yes or no extreme person. But it's just like understand that liquid sugar, calories, ultra processed food are bad.

54:04Keeping your home safe zone. And then I think the other thing that people don't realize is getting healthy is a team sport. Right? Find a buddy. Rick Warren, who I did this program with, this church with, called the Daniel Plan, where we got 15 ,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year, did it together in small groups. Wow. He says, everybody needs a buddy. He wrote Purpose Driven Life, right? Yeah. Purpose Driven Life, so more books than any nonfiction other than the Bible. It was like 30 million books or something crazy, right? Yeah, crazy. That was huge back in the day. Huge, huge, yeah.

54:36So he's great. And we did this whole program. And it was the same thing. We used the community. So community is medicine. Love is medicine. just as food is medicine. So if you understand that part of the drivers of chronic illness is loneliness, is disconnection, is isolation, is focus on cultivating your friendships, cultivating your relationships. Invest in those. Those are the most important things. Even if you have two or three, it doesn't have to be a million people, but how many people in America don't have somebody to pick up the phone and call when shit goes down and they're struggling?

55:11a lot of people a lot and men it's even worse most men don't have real friends you know it's like hey bro let's go have a beer watch some you know football that's fine nothing wrong with that but like can you talk about it your marriage or can you talk about the stress you're having with your kids or you can talk about your worries about money or you can talk about your struggle with like i'm sick and tired of this job and i want to figure out what to do with my life like there are things that we we need to be in community to thrive and so in terms of health loneliness is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day yeah so getting healthy as a team sport what would you say is the the fifth thing if you could have one more thing oh you let me roll huh i think you know um we have to live in our bodies so many people are disconnected from our bodies and you know you're an athlete yeah i'm not an athlete but i i i definitely love to exercise and i think you know it doesn't have to be a lot going from zero to something you see most of the benefit.

56:11So going from zero to a half an hour walk a day, you get enormous benefit, especially if you walk after dinner, because it helps to regulate your blood sugar and insulin, because you basically control your blood sugar through your muscles, and even without insulin. So even if you're insulin resistant, you can dispose of the sugar and fuel. So I think exercise is, again, such an incredible medicine. If you look at all the benefits of it across every aspect of health, it's as good as Prozac for depression. Wow. It helps him prevent reverse diabetes, heart disease, cancer, just walking prevents dementia, cancer, arthritis.

56:47I mean, just the list goes on and on. So in every metabolic biochemical level, and I can give you all the science-y parts of it, but the bottom line is exercise is medicine. And if it was a drug, it would be a multi-trillion dollar drug. Literally. It would be like, you would buy stock in that and you'd be a billionaire overnight. Wow. Because of all the things that it does for the body. And what about, you know, the business of supplements is a massive business. You know, I don't know how many supplement companies there are in the world. What is the science of supplements in terms of helping us prevent chronic illness?

57:21Yeah. Is there any research on it helping us? For sure, for sure. Or is it like all just kind of... No, no, there's a lot. There's a lot. I mean, there's a guy named Robert Heaney who was one of the pioneer researchers on vitamin D. and he wrote a beautiful paper. It was sort of a thought piece really but with a lot of scientific evidence behind it that was called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. And what did he mean by that? Well, if you don't have enough vitamin D acutely, you get rickets and your bones bend and you, you know, what the kids used to get from being out of the sun and not having vitamin D, right?

57:56And you get vitamin D from the sun or from, you know, wild fish and certain things like wild mushrooms. so you don't need very much like 30 units but if you don't have optimal levels of vitamin d let's say 50 uh uh nanografts deciliter of your blood right and and that would maybe require a thousand to five thousand units so anywhere from like you know 20 to a hundred times more than than we typically think you need to prevent the division disease if you don't have that you're going to get osteoporosis you're going to be more prone to infections you're going to die from covid We had a big meta-analysis that just came out about COVID and vitamin D that prevents hospitalizations and deaths.

58:36So we need to have optimal levels of nutrients. Now, why don't we? And why do we need vitamins? I mean, why should we? It wasn't a design flaw that all of a sudden God or whoever, nature, whatever you believe in, made us and we're screwed up and we have all these problems. No. if you look at the nutritional density of the hunter-gatherer diet, it was humongously more nutritious, really, in terms of vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, all the things that we are deficient in now. And when you look at, you know, I was actually talking to Bill Gates such a long ago, and he was telling us about this bullion that he created for, this bullion cube with extra vitamins in it for the developing world, because there were so many vitamin deficiencies.

59:17And I said, you know, Bill, there's a lot of nutritional deficiencies. I mean, oh, there's no deficiencies He's got plenty of food and protein. I'm like, no, Bill. Just because he has it doesn't mean everyone else does. Yeah, yeah. Well, no, he just didn't know because he's focused on the developing world and that's great and whatever you think of him. But he just didn't quite get that in America, we're also nutrition deficient. Wow. When you look at the NHANES data, it's the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It's a government research project. It's ongoing, which tracks blood work and tests and diet and everything.

59:46They found that over 90 % of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrient at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets right and and so we've got probably 90 percent deficient omega-3s 80 percent insufficient efficient vitamin d 45 percent deficient or insufficient magnesium probably 30 percent in zinc up to 40 percent in iron you know folate because there's no well there's no vitamins in ultra processed food no there's not so that's what our diet is we're not you know unless you're outside in the sun getting vitamin d you're not getting it from your food no I mean I had a patient once she was like I don't take vitamins but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get my nutrient nutrients like great okay well I want to get 200 micrograms of selenium okay you need to eat four brazil nuts okay I want to get 30 milligrams of zinc okay you need to eat 45 pumpkin seeds or like you know she was like that she had all a spreadsheet of everything and I'm great good for her you know like I need to do this many Kansas sardines a week to get my omega-3s and I need to so it's fine but most of you aren't going to do that those are whole foods they're whole foods those are whole healthy foods right it's That's right.

1:00:44And so, you know, and also we have more toxins in our environment. We have more stress. We have more dysregulation of our circadian rhythm. We have foods, even if they're eating whole food. Like if you're eating a broccoli today, the soil has gotten so destroyed that it's got 50 % less nutrients than it did 50 years ago. Wow. Even the broccoli. Really? 50 % less nutrients. Yeah. If you go to Europe, like I was in, when I did my research for my book Young Forever, I was in Icaria and in Sardinia. And they have the old food ways that they haven't changed in thousands of years. And you eat a vegetable there or you eat something there.

1:01:20It tastes totally different. Yeah. What's it taste like? It just, it's like, you know, like when you go to the garden and you pick a tomato at the end of August and it's like this cherry tomato explodes in your mouthful flavor. It's like, it's like that. Or you got a wild strawberry. It's like it's just, and flavor always follows the nutritional density and the phytochemical richness of the food naturally. So if you have to put a lot of stuff on food to make it taste good, which is what ultra processed food is, you won't taste, it just tastes like garbage. But natural whole food tastes amazing if it's grown in the right way.

1:01:53And so it has to do with the soil health. It has to do with the soil microbiome. It has to do with the ability to extract nutrients. I mean, it was amazing. There was a guy who served me this pig meal, this nose to tail meal. I even ate the lung, which was kind of weird. But I've never done that before. And he's like, his name was Olinto. He says, Mark, we flavor the meat before we kill the animal. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, we know if we give it acorns and we give it this carob thing and we give it this plant and this thing that it tastes better. Wow. They're not doing it because it's good for you.

1:02:25They're doing it because it tastes better. They go, oh, we have all these goat and sheep. They're sheep herders. they know if they feed the sheep and the goat these certain wild plants at certain times of year like myrtoe and other plants that the cheese and the milk taste better but they're full of phytochemicals and now we know for example you can get like catechins or in green tea or they're a great compound for longevity for health or antioxidants detoxifying that's why green tea is so great for you you can get as high levels in the milk and the meat and the animals as you do from the green tea if the animals are eating that food well so it's not only what you're eating it's what you're eating ate the food yeah yeah yeah this is fascinating this is fast so supplements you feel like i think we need them we need them i mean i think minimum a multivitamin vitamin d fish oil magnesium for most people and probably a probiotic because of all of the i mean i gave a talk the other day to like a thousand people and i was like who's never taken antibiotic in this room and like one person raised their hand you know right antibiotic you said yeah so pre-pre-biotic no antibiotic in other words people's guts are messed up yeah you know one dose of antibiotics you're changing your microbiome so so pre-biotic or probiotic probiotic probiotics yeah so i think those are you know multivitamin fish cell vitamin d for sure magnesium probiotic would be kind of rounding it out but you know that's you know a penny a day or two i mean a dollar a day or less you know and you can you know it's it's a fair bit of money but yeah it's doable it's doable uh there's one other thing i want to ask you about and i don't want to scare people necessarily but the the belly fat that i mean i have belly fat but the belly fat that a lot of people have how dangerous is that for them their for their health long term terrible as a doctor you've been in this field for how long 30 40 40 something years for 41 years how in medicine 41 years 41 years um you've seen you know people extremely obese you've seen a couple people with just some you know belly fat and everywhere in between right what is the link to belly fat and i guess overall just long-term health or how much is belly fat linked to chronic illness and disease It's the main thing.

1:04:47So if you look at it. I don't want to scare people, but I want to wake people up. No, please. I mean, people need to know. Like that fat around your middle is not just holding up your pants. It's a metabolically active organ that's spewing out harmful chemicals all the time. That's dysregulating your appetite, making you hungry. It's slowing your metabolism. It's causing inflammation. It's screwing up your hormones. It's bad. And what drives it is this sort of pharmacologic doses of sugar. As a hunter-gatherer, you know, we would maybe get 22 teaspoons of sugar a year if we got lucky to find some honey or something, right?

1:05:25Right, right, right. We eat that every day in America. We eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year. Wow. That's 152 pounds of sugar? Uh-huh. Per person per year. That's almost a half a pound, sorry, three-quarters of a pound of sugar and flour. by the way flour is no different than sugar in your body below the neck your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cornflakes and a bowl of sugar that's almost three quarters of a pound a day per person now I'm not having that much so some people are eating a lot more maybe you are but the bottom line with this belly fat is that is that you know it was a good thing when we were hunter-gatherers if we could eat a lot of sugar berries whatever honey and we'd store it now we just keep it on and what happens is that That fat is causing something called insulin resistance, which we talked about on the show, I think.

1:06:16That's like a form of prediabetes, or I call it diabesity, which is this continuum from optimal metabolic health to poor metabolic health. Now, this stat is terrifying to me. When you look at this recent data that came out, 93.2 % of Americans have this. 6.8 % of Americans don't have it. That's frightening to me. Wow. That means they have high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or overweight, or have had a heart attack or stroke. 93.2 % of Americans. And what that means is that they're all somewhere in that continuum of pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. Wow. And why is that connected to everything?

1:06:55It's the biggest driver of cancers. Pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, many cancers, prostate cancer, heart attacks, probably two-thirds of all heart attacks caused by this. Dementia, they're calling type 3 diabetes now. and of course type 2 diabetes. These are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, as you get older. All of them, every single one of them, is driven primarily by insulin resistance and this metabolic dysfunction, which is caused by belly fat, which is caused by starch and sugar and ultra-processed food. It's not that complicated.

1:07:30That's the root cause, yeah. Yeah, the root cause. The challenge is, you know, in the last year, I've lost close to 25 pounds of fat, and I've been putting on muscle too, so i've lost 25 pounds and i remember i i you know i still have belly fat a little bit of belly fat right it's like i'm not where i want to be necessarily i feel like and i can speak for myself but i feel like others might have a similar feeling if they look in the mirror and they see belly fat they might feel a little shame yeah they might feel a little guilt yeah a little shame it's what i felt not your fault though that's the right right it's not your fault but it's it can feel so hard for people to make that change and see results because it doesn't happen in a week or a month or a few months to like lose all the belly fat it takes time it took time to build it on and it takes time to get it off and then keep it off it is a complete lifestyle shift it's a complete identity shift of saying I'm gonna kill off the person I once was for 20 30 40 50 60 years yeah and I'm gonna to become a new identity yeah and that is a big change it is I mean the question I always ask people is why like Simon Sinek was her friend goes why what's your why you know why do you care I want to feel better I want to be able to show up and do the work I want to do and not feel like crap and watch tv all night you know I had a patient recently it was like you know she was working really hard she was a med student she was eating crap to get through coffee sugar gained all weight and she said look i would come home and all i want to do is lay in bed watch tv i would want to exercise i wouldn't do anything i just want to eat more sugar and crap and she was in this vicious cycle and within like two or three days of changing her diet she was like my mood's better i have energy i just wear my bike 30 miles i'm like wow yeah so it's it's i always say we're only a few days away from feeling better most people don't know how bad they feel until they start feeling good and if you can start to feel good you can you can stay more consistent that's So then you know, oh, if I'm doing this, I'm going to feel like crap.

1:09:32Most people don't connect that to what they eat and how they feel. It's just astounding to me. And I have very smart, educated patients in my patient cohort. And I'm like, God, really don't know that this is making you feel like this. And people don't know. They just don't know. And that's part of why I created this program, which is basically an elimination diet where you put in whole foods, you take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff in 10 days. And most people can do anything for 10 days. and we see a 70 % reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. Wow, that's amazing.

1:10:02Migraines, irritable bowel, depression, joint pain, congestion, sinus issues, whatever. Just biting the whole foods for 10 days. Yeah, but it's a more extreme version. It gets rid of sugar, alcohol, all grains, all beans. Sugar drinks, yeah, yeah. All starchy foods. All grains, all beans. All beans, yeah, for a short period of time. Just see, because a lot of you have gut issues and just can have inflammation from gluten, and people don't know. So what do you eat? Get rid of dairy. Lots of veggies. Protein. Nuts and seeds. Berries. That's it. Some sweet potatoes. Ten days. Yeah, ten days. And it's the most unbelievable thing.

1:10:39I lead these spreadsheets around the world, and people just have the most unbelievable transformation. So I would say to people listening, if you want to do something, just see doing something like that for ten days, what you'll do. And I'm going to be running, starting in January, we're going to be launching an online ten-day detox course. you can find it on drhyman.com but essentially it's a way for you to just hit the reset button the way i explain it is like imagine if you could you know put your body back to its original factory settings you know like when your computer's not working you got to reboot it or you got to reinstall the software it's kind of like that and it's sort of you can upgrade your biological software so fast like i said this woman had type 2 diabetes on insulin in three days she was off insulin.

1:11:22And three months, she reversed everything. And she lost 43 pounds. So it's possible if you know what to do. And you have the right information. And for you, you know, the question around shame and how you feel, I'm going to tell people something. This is a message that's been put out there by our culture, by the food industry, by doctors, by nutritionists, by our professional associations, whether it's the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, it's the prevailing message out there that it's your fault, you're overweight. You're a lazy glutton is the subtext.

1:11:57Just eat less and exercise more. Subtext, you're a lazy glutton who doesn't want to do anything, right? It's not about eating less and exercising more. It's about understanding what you're eating is more important than how much you're eating. And the quality matters more than the quantity because The quantity will take care of itself. Could you eat 10 ribeye steaks? Well, maybe you could. But you could eat 10 giant chocolate chip cookies in a minute. Easily. You could eat a quart of ice cream, no problem. But you could eat 10 avocados, no. You feel full. Your body will self-regulate. And so it's not your fault is number one.

1:12:38It's not about blaming yourself. It's about understanding that you're in a toxic food system that's set up for you to fail. and then the food industry has these talking points there's no good and bad foods it's all about moderation just eat less and exercise more you know it's okay you're getting coca-cola as long as part of your calorie you know a lot for the day nonsense it's it's it's it's basically the food industry talking points and they're wrong they're just wrong because when when you start to accumulate this belly fat, it's hungry fat. It's literally hungry fat. That fat is going to make you crave and want more food.

1:13:18And this is a startling statistic. When I learned about this, there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a validated scientific scale of questions that you can take. You can find it online. You can link to it in the show. I'm sure it'll have show notes that tells you whether you're a food addict. like you have biological addiction based on the definition of substance abuse whether it's heroin or cocaine or nicotine and 14 % of the population are food addicts 14 % of the adult population are alcoholics what's even worse is 12 % of kids are food addicts I was at an obesity conference a childhood obesity conference not too long ago and there was a hepatic surgeon there I'm like what are you doing here?

1:14:05He said, oh, yeah, well, we're seeing the need for liver transplants in kids now. Wow. Because their livers have cirrhosis from drinking so much soda. Right? That's what's going on. So this is not their fault. You know, a 3-year-old with type 2 diabetes, it's not their fault. Right, right. Okay? This is just ridiculous. The fact that 40 % of kids are now overweight. I mean, there was that one kid in my class when I was growing up, Erica. And she wasn't, by today's standards, wasn't even that overweight. hey, just a little chubby, you know? And I'm like, and now, I mean, you see kids who can barely walk.

1:14:40We're all skinny growing up. There's a couple things I want to leave people with. One, what you said is getting healthy is a team sport. Yeah. I think it's probably the hardest thing to try to do it on your own. 100%. And maybe if you're watching and listening, you may not have the support you want or people may not want to get on board with you, but it's whatever you can. Enroll a friend. Yeah. Hire a coach. Yeah. Find a nutritionist. someone to support you. If you can't afford a coach, find a friend and beg someone. Whatever it might be, find the healthiest person you know and say, hey, can I just keep you accountable and you keep me accountable and we go to the gym a few days a week and we just try to help each other.

1:15:20Getting healthy is a team sport. It doesn't even have to be your healthiest friend. It can be anybody. You both feel like overweight or struggling. Getting healthy is a team sport. That's something I think that everyone here should be thinking about. Do not do it alone. The second thing is your your new company that you're part of called functionhealth.com it gives people data yeah i think when you get tested you know everyone's talking about glucose monitors or or rings or just something to get data yeah if you can get data about what's off inside of your blood work and you can say oh i have the information how can i just improve it a little bit here over time to improve the data inside of me that's right and functionhealth.com offers a process where people can get blood work and have the information is that right super easy it's like five minutes sign up online you get to skip the wait list of 300 ,000 people greatness 100 is the skip the wait list code greatness 100 if you want and you know it's five minutes to sign up you'll tell you a lab near your house it's all on the top of quest labs so it's thousands of draw centers you go in it's 15 minutes in and out you get your labs in a beautiful dashboard that not only tells you your lab results but you're not a doctor how do you know what they mean but the results are interpreted based on knowledge input from world's leading physicians and from all the scientific literature about what it means and what to do about it so well okay my blood sugar is high now what or my thyroid is not right now what well it gives you a very clear idea of insights and education about what you can do and how to be an empowered consumer.

1:16:55And aura rings are great. I have one. You know, it's fine. But it's only skin deep. The blood work is what you do. It's only skin deep. And you can pick stuff up. It's causing you to feel like crap and you don't even know it, right? Like a patient today. She had low iron. Her hair was falling out. She was tired. Her thyroid was off. She had all these different things going on that she didn't know about. They were easy fixes. They're easy fixes. And sometimes it's more serious. You have diabetes or you have high blood sugar or whatever. I mean we've had people actually you know just come up to us in a restaurant we're having dinner the team from the company and this guy walks up Dr.

1:17:29Hyman I'd use function I found out I had all this metabolic issues and I changed my diet based on what you guys said and I did all these other things and now I lost 20 pounds and I feel great all my numbers are great so you know we don't have to wait for the health care system to catch up right we don't have to go through insurance and your doctor's visits it's a dollar 37 a day for twice a year testing you can add another stuff if you want. In fact, we're doing cancer screening now because, as I mentioned earlier in the show, we're seeing a 50 % increase to 60 % increase in cancers, significant colon cancer, in people under 50, even in 30s.

1:18:01And so there's now a screening test called GALLERY, which is a blood test for cancer. It's like a liquid biopsy. So rather than having to do a colonoscopy or a scan, it's pretty good at picking stuff up early. And out of the people we've tested, it's 1 in 188 if had a positive cancer signal, which means then they can go get checked out. And early stage cancer is pretty much curable. But if you wait too late, it's not. Right, right, right. And so we're thinking these early stage cancers that people can get cured of. So it's really empowering. And I feel like for me, it's a way for getting people to be the CEO of their own health, to understand what's going on in their bodies and to be empowered with the data.

1:18:37That's what I think is going to be the future is having accountability and having your own data accessible and affordable and it's something that functionhealth.com offers and again if you guys use greatness 100 as a code the first 100 people that use that will get early access to it you'll skip the line 300 ,000 people on the wait list so functionhealth.com for that and then and I think having that accountability it's like okay twice a year I'm getting blood work or quarterly or something where you can at least know the decisions I'm making are either helping me or hurting me and you take back responsibility you don't need government to change policy you don't need a politician to make some changes you don't need the food industry to change maybe they will, maybe they won't but at the end of the day you've got to take back the power and I think having data is extremely helpful and you being aware of like okay my decisions now are hurting me moving forward and I'm going to get the blood work again and oh well I did continue to eat processed foods my sugar's going up so it's on me at the end of the day to take responsibility with the actions I'm taking once I'm informed that's right and at your website dr.

1:19:45Hyman calm you've got a ton of free resources to continue to educate people your Instagram is amazing with just quick free resources as well and content did you say you have a program in January I attend a detox 10 day detox straight so people can sign up for that yes sign up it's a it's a cold coach program it's like this he goes for a month of support and it's really it gives people really a transformation it's starting in january so um dr hyman.com at dr mark hyman on social media uh function health.com and use code greatness 100 if you're not sick of listening to me you can check out my podcast dr hyman yeah doctor's pharmacy doctor's pharmacy you got another one health hacks right yeah health hacks so you got a couple great podcasts how else can we support you or get involved now you're doing it I think I think for people actually taking ownership of their health is so important because you know once we people start knowing what's going on with themselves they start to kind of change and when you create that change it starts to create change in the system you know one of the one of the best stories I ever heard recently was that one of the CEOs of those big food companies called up the CEO of Nova Nordisk and saying we're in trouble because with Ozempic, people are not eating as much in the crowd.

1:21:03Wow. Sales are going down. Now they're going to start fighting the drug companies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's a whole other conversation. But Dr. Mark Hyman, make sure you guys check him out, follow his work, get one of his 15 New York Times bestselling books, all the things. We appreciate you, Mark. Mark, thanks for all your support and your service in helping us continue to heal from all this sickness that we have. We appreciate it. Thanks, buddy. Well, it's great to be here and love you, man. You've been doing this together for years now. Of course, man. Let me too. Appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness.

1:21:40Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

1:22:19And now it's time to go out there and do something great.