The #1 diet change to make today to fight chronic disease | Dr Mark Hyman

20:49Dr. Mark Hyman:And why is that? Because kids are eating crap and they can't focus, they can't think. Mental health problems don't get counted in those figures because they say, well, that's physical and mental. We have this weird idea that they're separate and we know they're not. But in the UK, I think they said just the health bill alone was$200 billion of the cost of bad food in a little country like the UK. And that's not counting all the agricultural damage, the environmental stuff, and the mental health conditions. Because we're having a mental health epidemic in young people at the moment. I don't know what it's like in the US, but in the UK, so many people are never working.

21:26They're just going on disability benefit because they're depressed and anxious.

21:30Dr. Mark Hyman:And a lot of that is down to diet and terrible food in schools. Yeah, and this is so important, what you're saying, Tim, because now at Harvard and Stanford, there are departments of metabolic and nutritional psychiatry, meaning that people who have insulin resistance, which is this phenomenon that you get when you eat a lot of sugar and starch, where you get resistant to the effects of insulin. Insulin is a fat-stored hormone. Your body makes more insulin. You store more belly fat, and it's a vicious cycle. You crave more food, and it leads to ultimately diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia.

21:59Dr. Mark Hyman:dementia is now called type 3 diabetes. This whole field now is exploding to understand how nutrition plays a role in mental health. And the costs are staggering. There was a macroeconomic analysis that was done a number of years ago looking at what are the costs over the next 35 years of chronic disease? $95 trillion in direct and indirect costs. And the biggest was mental health, not because of being hospitalized, but because of the loss of quality of life years lost. And Tim, I know this is something you study a lot. How do you understand today the way in which all of this sort of cheap food, very industrialized that Mark's been talking about, actually leads to all the health problems that we've been talking about?

22:43Given that they want to make profit above all, and they don't care what they put in the food really as long as people buy more of it, their aim is to get people to eat more of it and pay more for those products. So in doing that, they engineer the food to have properties that make it sort of unnaturally irresistible. So they are super tasty. So they'll combine combinations of salt, fat, and carbs in exactly the right ratio to override your normal instincts and make you overeat it. So that's probably the number one thing. You know, studies show it makes the same food. You'll overeat about, eat 25 % more of it calorie-wise than you would if it was not with that perfect combination.

23:29And they'll do anything to make it cheaper. So like you take out normal milk, which can be expensive in some ways. And so they take that out and will make it low fat. And then they can just use powdered milk. And instead of the fat, they add in lots of cheap other stuff. All that stuff is starchy mazes and things like this, which are also bad for you. there's never any fiber in it because that's expensive to make and it keeps retains the nutrients so it's much cheaper than to strip it off and store this stuff for years so it never goes off and then add in a few cheapest vitamins they can just to get the label right and you put all that together and then you've also got the chemicals that they're doing the artificial sweeteners the emulsifiers the preservatives the glues that stick all this fake food together they are really bad for your gut microbiome.

24:18And so that gives you dysfunctional microbiome, which would make you more likely to get diabetes and cause these metabolic problems. So it's not just one thing, it's the whole package, and it's all driven by this endless desire for us to eat more and they make more money.

24:32Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I mean, you're so right, Tim. Michael Moss wrote a book called Salt, Sugar, and Fat, and it was an investigative journalist from the New York Times and interviewed over 300 industry executives, food scientists, and he found that these companies created taste institutes where they hired craving experts. These are their internal terms to create the bliss point of food to create, quote, heavy users like a drug addict. These foods are biologically addictive. They put even two-year-old kids in functional MRIs to look at what's going on with their brain when they're shown different images or when they respond to different foods.

25:06Dr. Mark Hyman:They are designing these foods to be addictive and I'm not saying addictive in a metaphorical way. They are biologically addictive. The animal studies are clear on this. There's withdrawal. There's cravings. And the estimate is that there's 14 % of the global population that's addicted to these sugars and ultra-processed food and 14 % are kids. Now, 14 % of people are alcoholics. So it's about the same except it includes kids. These companies hire craving experts. Experts, yes. Well, they are the best food experts in the world. So they can pay top dollar to get the very best food scientists. That's who we're competing with.

25:42They want to create chemicals, mixtures, textures that make it hyperpalatable, soft as you can, so you can eat it as fast as possible before your body has time to feel full. They have this enormous box of tricks, unlimited budget, and they know that they can keep creating food that humans will just be irresistibly drawn to. I mean, you can eat a kilo of steak, but you could eat a kilo of cookies, right? I mean, one of the things that I'm struck by is that the average food in the US is significantly sweeter than even in the UK. And the UK has a big problem with all of this. This is, again, very different from being in, say, Italy or something.

26:21But just all the food has sugar added to it. Almost it's just a standard expectation of a level of sweetness. It's hard to buy a yogurt that doesn't have vanilla in it as a minimum, you know, or artificial sweetness. And this comes from almost just, is this from the food industry just sort of resetting everybody's taste expectations?

26:41Dr. Mark Hyman:Part of it was a long legacy of how we came to believe that fat was the enemy and sugar was fine. And this was a very deliberate effort to kind of vilify fat and to glorify sugar. And that's what happened when we were told to eat a low-fat diet in the food pyramid in 1992. to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day and fat sparingly. And that led to the hockey stick of obesity and type 2 diabetes in America and chronic illness. That's how I was brought up. You know, this pyramid had lots of potatoes and bread and all the rest of it, and maybe a tiny little bit of plant somewhere on it.

27:20Could you explain for a minute, both of you, why that's bad? Because I think lots of listeners will say, well, I understand that adding sugar and this weird Frankenstein food, that sounds bad. But what's bad with a potato or eating lots of bread? Well, we now know. Well, actually, not we now know. We knew 20 years ago, but the guidelines haven't really moved that much. The fact that the advice to eat lots of rice and bread and potatoes is basically just giving you more sugar. Because most people don't realize they are essentially sugar. They're starches, which is a form of carbohydrate where you store the sugars.

27:57but as soon as you cook it or eat it that sugar is released. Turn into glucose. And it's exactly the same. People just think oh well I'm not having extra sugar therefore it's okay but they don't see that in its stored form this is all these foods. So we've been told in the UK and the US to be eating much more of these and the perfect healthy plate you know had these healthy starches. We always think white rice is healthy and a nice crusty bread if it's you know looks nice and attractive, that's a healthy food because they look real. They are real and a lot of the world lives off them. But this was giving us a huge amount of available glucose when we were getting very little fiber and this was stressing our bodies, causing inflammation in the system, and overstressing all these insulin pathways Mark's talking about, leading to type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, obesity, and all those other complications, as well as the inflammation triggering things like mental health issues because the whole body is stressed dealing with this constant overload of sugar all the time.

29:04And it was just the wrong balance. We weren't meant to be eating that much starch without a balance from the fiber.

29:13Dr. Mark Hyman:You're so right, Tim. Below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of sugar and a bowl of cereal. You might as well just be eating a bowl of sugar. And that's something people don't realize. And we've created an agricultural system that is producing massive amounts and quantities of these refined starches. I absolutely love that. Below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cereal and a bowl of sugar. And I guess that's partly because the sort of cereal that we have, you know, which I totally grew up with. I could say a bowl of rice and a bowl of sugar.

29:41You first published Food Fix in 2020. You're just bringing out an updated version. and I'm just curious, so that's sort of like five years. Have things been getting better since that first version?

29:54Dr. Mark Hyman:Things have, from a health perspective, gotten worse. From an awareness perspective, have gotten better. Whatever your politics or your like or not, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy said, hey, everybody, we got a chronic disease problem. We have to pay attention to this. It wasn't part of the narrative or conversation. No other presidential candidate had ever said this. And I've known many of them and I've tried to get them to say this and like, no, no, no, we can't say this. And this is a pivotal moment where I think Americans and increasingly the world is realizing that, yes, we have a problem.

30:24Dr. Mark Hyman:Like we have a problem and we have to face it and deal with it. And what is the solution we need to figure it out? We need to address the food supply, the food system, the food we grow, how we produce it, how we process it, what's in it. We need to think about, you know, our guidelines and dietary guidelines, what we're recommending. All these things need to be reconsidered. So the policies are complex. I was friends with the Congressman Tim Ryan And I said, listen, I don't think anybody's looked at all of our nutrition policies and how they affect our health or the economic impact of that. And as a congressman, he could ask the government, what they call the Government Accountability Office, which is basically the watchdog over Congress, to do an analysis of all the policies.

31:04Dr. Mark Hyman:And I thought it was bad. But the report came out in July of 21. It said there are over 200 different policies and 21 agencies and departments, most working at cross-purposes with each other. So, for example, the U.S. dietary guidelines say we should reduce our added sugar and sugar intake. And yet, with our SNAP program, which is our single biggest food program, our food stamp program, which is now, I think, up to$125 billion, 10 % of that is soda. 75 % is junk food. And that includes the soda. it, but 25 % is, you know, meat, vegetables, whatever. So the government is paying for the people who are underserved to eat the worst food without any guidelines.

31:48Dr. Mark Hyman:And it doesn't have to be that way. They have another program called Women, Infants, and Children. There are strict guidelines on what mothers and infants can buy and purchase with these dollars that they get through this program. But they could apply that, the same thing, to the food stamp program. They The industry is so powerful. And they have all these, quote, hunger groups, like Feed America Now and others. And they are vociferously opposed to any changes in the SNAP program, the food stamp program. And when you look at who is funding those hunger groups, it's the food companies. That's fascinating.

32:20Because I can see an argument about, like, you know, when you're on low incomes, it's a challenge to look after your family. I find it hard to understand the case that you should be spending it on soda, given that this is clearly…

32:31Dr. Mark Hyman:And now with this movement, and I have a nonprofit called Food Fixed Campaign, and I'm working with a woman who, for the last five years, who now is the first lady of West Virginia, her husband's a governor. And they were the first state to ask for a SNAP waiver, which means they asked the USDA, the Agricultural Department in America, to allow them to prohibit the purchase of certain things on the food stamps, like soda. So, and now many, many other states have followed suit. And thank God the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has said, okay, let's see how it goes. So I think we're starting to see a revolution in this, but it's really unconscionable.

33:05Dr. Mark Hyman:And I'm actually planning to do very soon a demonstration of how on a food stamp budget of what you would get if you were on food stamps, how you can eat a delicious, healthy meal and do this for a week and show people how to do it. Because it's not that it can't be done. It's that people don't know what to do. They don't know how to cook. They don't know what to buy. I mean, you're not going to buy a$70 regeneratively raised ribeye steak, but there are cheaper cuts of meat. There are cheaper cuts of chicken. There are cheaper vegetables. I mean, my mother, we were Russian Jews and, you know, my mother was to make this soup, which was onions, carrots, cabbage, cheapest vegetables with flanken.

33:47Dr. Mark Hyman:We call it flanken, which is short rib, one of the cheapest cuts of meat and cook it with, you know, a little bit of raisins for sweetness and boil it up. And it was delicious. And it's probably, I don't know, 50 cents a meal. And I make a big pot and I have it for the week. So there's many ways to learn how to do this. And I've done this with families who worked and lived in some of the worst food deserts in America when family was in easily South Carolina. It's part of the movie Fed Up that you can watch on Netflix. And they were a family of five that lived in a trailer. They had$1 ,000 a month for food on disability and food stamps.

34:21Dr. Mark Hyman:The father was 42, already on dialysis for type 2 diabetes kidney failure. At 40? 42. The mother was, you know, 100 plus pounds overweight. The 16-year-old son was almost diabetic. And I said, look, let me not give you a lecture, but let's go shopping. I gave them a guide on how to eat well for less. It's called Good Food on a Tight Budget. And it shows you which foods to buy and recipes and things you made. We made turkey chili. We made, you know, salad from like actual, not iceberg lettuce, but real lettuce and olive oil and bitter dressing instead of this stuff. And I showed them everything that was in their kitchen and in their cupboards.

34:52Dr. Mark Hyman:It was all frozen. It was all packaged. It was all canned. It was processed. full of all these ingredients we were talking about. They never cooked anything in their kitchen. And I showed them how to make a meal. We had this delicious meal together. And I said, listen, here's the guide how to do this. Here's my cookbook. You can try this. And a week later, the mother texted me, she says, we lost 18 pounds. I literally lost 200 pounds as a family. The father lost 45, got a new kidney. The son lost a bunch of weight. The mother lost 100 pounds. So I get the chills just like telling that story because it shows that it's not that it can't be done.

35:22Dr. Mark Hyman:It's that we don't know how to do it. the American food industry has disenfranchised people from their kitchen. They've insinuated themselves in every aspect of our lives, and they've done it deliberately on purpose. And Michael Moss talks about this in his book, Salt, Sugar, and Faggot, about how General Mills aggregated all the food companies back in the late 50s and 60s because there was a movement to eat better and healthier food. And there was a woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher, was trying to teach families how to cook and do all these things. And they invented Betty Crocker. Now, I don't know if you know what Betty Crocker is in the UK, but it's basically a cookbook that everybody had in the 60s and 70s.

35:55Dr. Mark Hyman:And Betty Crocker was a fantasy. She was an imaginary character that they made up. And then they put the recipes, add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole, or add one roll of Fritz crackers to your broccoli casserole. All the crap they had in the recipes, they were all industrial food. And so they basically created a whole paradigm where, you know, if women's lib and you've got to liberate yourself from the kitchen and cooking is drudgery. And all this was a deliberate attempt to disrupt the American home, to get women out of the kitchen, to stop having home-cooked meals and to insinuate their products, I mean, in everyday life.

36:30Dr. Mark Hyman:And I mean, I grew up on TV dinners, Swanson's TV dinners. It was a big, fancy thing. You have a TV dinner and you heat it up and then you kind of, you know, open it up. And it was like Salisbury steak and these boiled green beans. And it was awful, you know? And yet that's sort of got even worse and worse over the last 50 years. That's funny. I mean, we've never taken our daughter to a McDonald's, but that somehow hasn't changed the fact that the idea of going to McDonald's is really exciting for her, right? So she's picked that up still through the marketing around her. And now these food companies have gotten so smart now in social media, and they're insinuating themselves everywhere.

37:06Dr. Mark Hyman:So Facebook, games, all our food companies are all funded by them. These kids see literally billions of ads. The average kid sees so many ads every day from all sources that if you're a parent, you can't compete by eating your kids. These kids are just being brainwashed. And these companies know how to target these kids. It's like Joe Camel with the cigarettes. They do the same thing with food. The cigarette companies bought a lot of the food companies in the 1960s and 70s. And they know a prediction and they know how to keep the money rolling in. That's right. People don't know when listening, it's not just a U.S.

37:39phenomenon. The lobbying is exactly the same in the UK. It's in a way less transparent because we don't have to declare things like how much people spend on lobbying. And it's not – I mean I say transparent. It's relatively transparent in the US. You can ask for those data and things like this and see which congressman has been taking money from so-and-so. We don't have that transparency in the UK. And we know that lobbying goes on at all levels, particularly anything to change our guidelines. our national health dietary guidelines do not mention ultra-processed food at all and every two years they meet and say oh should we say anything well evidence is not really that strong that you know heavily processed food is bad for you wonder why well you know a lot of that group of deciding it are also paid by the food industry and they have to also get advice from food industry before anything gets changed in law.

38:37It's crazy. And do we see the same thing also in the UK and elsewhere in terms of the taxes? Because I think there's definitely been the same situation across the globe around talking about taxes on highly processed foods. The English-speaking countries are way behind the rest of the world. So Scandinavian countries, South American countries have started to have rules on advertising for children. Packets of cereals aren't allowed. Cartoon characters, which you can understand is totally the wrong thing to be telling kids. They have black dots on things you should be avoiding. And they have taxes that are showing that you can use tax to reduce just the way, you know, we got cigarette smoking down just by incremental changes in tax.

39:23And we know we can do it. At least a dozen other countries that are leading the way on this, some in Asia, Scandinavia, and particularly South America, where they've just seen their economies absolutely go to shit because everyone's drinking sodas and getting diabetes and they can't afford it. And they've started to make changes and they're having an effect. But in countries like ours, that change is being blocked by the food industry and the lobby.

39:51Dr. Mark Hyman:It's quite amazing what happened in Chile, which was the first kind of country, because there was a president who was a pediatrician, a doctor, and who it was a Michelle Bachelet and, and Dr. Picard, who was a vice chair of the Senate in Chile. And they had the reins for a minute and they're like, okay, we're going to do it now. They put in an 18 % soda tax. They restricted food marketing from six in the morning, 10, nine for kids. They got rid of all the junk in schools. They got rid of infant formula advertising. They put these stop signs literally with black warnings for salt, sugar, fat, and calories on the front of packages.

40:22Dr. Mark Hyman:So if you go down there, it says, don't eat the S basically you're going to kill you. And it worked. Michael Bloomberg has spent a lot of money helping support this effort and researching it with Barry Popkin from UNC Chapel Hill. And they basically have shown that this really works, that the population gets healthier, that this consumption goes down, that people stop buying it. So we know the policies that can make a difference, but the amount of resistance to those are so massive. I mean, in America, you have the First Amendment, which is free speech. You say, well, you can't restrict advertising, but we have to protect our children.

40:51Dr. Mark Hyman:That shouldn't apply to our children. And the argument is not valid because you don't sell vodka and cigarettes to four-year-olds, do you? No. And for you both, I think what I'm hearing is like the sort of food products that have been made by these big food companies just shouldn't really be treated like food in a way. They should be treated like some product that's been created by anybody else. And so if they are a leisure drug, okay. But the problem is the food industry is so good at brainwashing everybody, including the healthcare system. It's all about calories in, calories out. It's all about moderation.

41:21Dr. Mark Hyman:It's all about exercising more and eating less. Bullshit. It doesn't work. We have to find ways to protect our population. And if another country was doing to American kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them. I mean, our kids are really struggling. 40 % are overweight, 20 % are obese. The rates of ADD and behavioral issues are skyrocketing. Depression, suicide is the third-leaning cause of death in these kids. They did a study I talked about in my book in a juvenile detention center where they got them eating real whole food. And there was a 97 % reduction in violent crime, I mean, violent behavior in the institution.

41:55Dr. Mark Hyman:There was a 75 % reduction in restraints. There was a 100 % reduction in suicide, which is the third leading cause of death in that age group, in teenage boys. That's remarkable, right? And the data is there. Same thing in prisons. If you take prisoners and you feed them healthy food, their violent crime goes down dramatically in prison. If you give them yes, 56 % reduction. And if you add a multivitamin, it's an 80 % reduction. The data is there. It's not like we have to do more research. And this comes back to what you were talking about before, about just how strong the links is between this sort of ultra-processed food and mental health.

42:26Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, and the food is just all your fault. It's your willpower. They basically shame you to say, well, you're overweight because you can't control yourself. It's just you're lazy and a glutton. Nonsense. When your brain chemistry, your metabolism, your microbiome, your hormones, your immune system is hijacked by the food that we're eating, you're helpless. If you have a friend or family member who you think might be interested in improving their health, share this episode with them now. These insights could change their path, and I'm sure they'll be grateful. It's all incredibly powerful. I'd love to talk about what a listener could do for themselves, because you always talked a lot about society-wide forces.

43:06What about someone listening and saying, well, wow, you know what? I eat a bunch of those, because who doesn't? So I'd love to talk about your overarching principles for eating healthily.

43:16Dr. Mark Hyman:The general consensus among nutrition scientists, except around the margins, is pretty much the same. Eat food. In fact, if you look at the dictionary definition of food, I encourage everybody to go on ChatGPT or Google or whatever and ask, what is the definition of food? And there's various definitions in different dictionaries, but essentially it's a substance that supports the growth and nourishment and health of an organism. Well, these are by definition not food. They do the opposite. They actually harm us. So the first thing that people should do is don't eat ultra-processed food. Don't eat food that's got ingredients you can't pronounce.

43:51Dr. Mark Hyman:They're in Latin that are full of things like high fructose corn syrup and trans fats and additives and colors because they're generally not going to be good for you. So eat real food, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, whole grains, beans, animal products. And no, meat is not bad. if you eat meat in the context of an oral healthy diet, fish, omega-3 fats. It's not that hard. And the problem is that people just don't know what to do anymore because we've raised a generation of people that don't know how to navigate the kitchen anymore, don't know how to navigate a grocery store. And we need to relearn that so we can actually start to support our health.

44:27Key things you would add on top of what Mark describes? From a health point of view, think of what food would your gut microbes like to eat? It's a simplistic way of thinking about it, but I think once you do that, it's naturally you can get all these foods to fit the right pattern. And the first one is eat a rich diversity of plants. Hit your 30 plants a week. The second is to eat the rainbow, because brightly colored things rather than beige. Most of the UK and the US population just go for one color, and we need to get people thinking that's bad. There's definitely something about when you're a child, I don't know if it's something to do with safety or something.

45:04They quite easily want to give up these things. There's something about the bread and the pasta and things. These are the things you naturally eat.

45:12Dr. Mark Hyman:We train them. What do kids eat in Japan? Raw fish and seaweed and pickles. It's what you train a kid to eat. It's not because they are naturally eating that. In fact, there's a great book called Nourishment by Fred Provenza. He's one of the most incredible scientists. He's a rangeland ecologist who studied the relationship between the soil and plants and animals and humans and interactions. And he talks about how animals naturally will go and eat all the different kinds of plants they need. They'll go and seek even medicinal plants that they need to upregulate their health. And there was a study done, I think it was in the 20s or 30s at an orphanage where they took these kids who had no parents and basically fed them liver and brain and organs and kidney and all this stuff.

45:50Dr. Mark Hyman:And these kids naturally were eating the things that were going to optimize their health. They weren't going for the candy and sugar. They were eating the stuff that was, Because we've lost our natural intuition and our natural nutritional wisdom about what to eat. Well, we feed them formula milk, and then they get these pouches. And so they never have to chew or eat anything. And everything they're seeing that is reassuring is this sort of creamy, browny, sort of soft, gooey color. And they'll carry on the rest of their life in that comfort zone. In the U.S., the formula is so bad that the average formula contains the equivalent of a full Coca-Cola soda drink for a baby.

46:30So very early on, they're getting hijacked, and it's in the form of corn sugar as opposed to lactose, which is what milk is supposed to be having in it.

46:38Dr. Mark Hyman:And there are formulas now that are using lactose, and there are companies now that are emerging to actually create better quality organic formulas for babies. But that may be part of why we're seeing this rates of obesity in kids and why these kids are hijacked very early on. And the companies, they know this. So, you know, the big companies like Nestle and others that are going into hospitals, giving free pouches and formulas, sort of dissuading women from breastfeeding and getting them hooked onto this food long term. And this is absolutely the worst, you know, excess of the food industry. And they're setting them up for life.

47:13So they've become addicts. The other thing I'd say is fermented foods. All the studies show that if you're eating three portions a day, you'll be able to reduce your inflammation by about 25%. You can really improve your gut microbes. Helps things like mental health. And it may be acting a different way to some of the other mechanisms. So it's sort of additive. And agreeing on the ultra-processed foods. But I wouldn't cut them all out because that's too drastic. 65 % of the U.S. diet is these ultra-processed foods. Some of them just have, you know, they're classed as ultra-processed, but they might just have vitamin C in it or something.

47:48So I think we need to be a bit more smarter about what we're calling the worst ones. And that's why we've got, you know, our app now that does a risk score and really highlights the 25 % of the worst ones to avoid. And I think we should be focusing on the sort of medium-high-risk ones first rather than banning everything. Because they're not all equally risky. They're not all equally risky. There's a huge difference. I mean, you can go to, you know, you get on an aisle, you know, three peanut butters that look identical, have the same government stickers on it for health and sugar and whatever.

48:20But, you know, one will be zero risk, one will be medium, one will be high risk. That's right. And it's really hard for the consumer to tell that difference. So I think that's a real area. So we need to fight the clever, you know, companies that are trying to make them all look the same. And we need to use things like AI and technology and apps to fight that. And I think that's really important. And Marcus, you hear Tim talk about the sort of the microbiome side and like the 30 plants and the fermented foods, which is obviously like the complete opposite, I guess, of what you've been talking about with these big food companies.

48:54You know, what are your thoughts?

48:55Dr. Mark Hyman:100%. I think, you know, you've got as many or more cells of bacteria in your body than you do. You've got 100 times as much bacterial DNA as your DNA. Basically, they're running this show. and they are producing all sorts of metabolites and byproducts and that regulate your health in a good or bad way. And they actually can cause diabetes. They can cause inflammation. They can cause autoimmune disease or they can create health. And we know that what you're feeding them is critical. So you're not just feeding yourself. You're feeding a whole army of bacteria in there that are determining everything about you, including your mental health, your immune health, your metabolic health, your cardiovascular health.

49:28Dr. Mark Hyman:I mean, it's quite astounding, even your cancer risk, all determined by your microbiome. So if you don't understand how to take care of those little critters, your health is going to suffer and so yes fiber yes fermented foods yogurt you know sauerkraut kimchi you know miso all the stuff that you know other countries have been using for centuries that are just part of their natural diet i mean there was a study in poland where women who move from poland to the u.s dramatically increase their risk of breast cancer in poland they eat about 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year and kefir as well yeah so it's like yes the microbiome is incredibly important And it is part of what the root cause is of why these foods cause such a problem.

50:08Dr. Mark Hyman:Many of these foods have emulsifiers, which now are understood to disrupt the lining of the gut. They allow bacteria and food proteins to leak in, and your immune system starts reacting to this and creates this inflammation. And all these chronic diseases we talked about at the top of the show, they're all inflammatory diseases. So our bodies are on fire, our metabolism are on fire, our gut's on fire, and our brains are on fire, and the heart's on fire. And that's what's causing chronic illness. And a lot of this is coming from the gut microbiome. Now, one thing we always get asked all the time is what's Tim's favorite breakfast?

50:38But since I've got you here and you've been talking about this so eloquently, what's your go-to breakfast?

50:45Dr. Mark Hyman:It depends. If I'm home and I'm working out in the morning, I like protein shakes. I'll often use regeneratively raised goat whey. Whey protein is, as I'm 65, I'm an old guy, and as you age, you need more protein to maintain your muscle mass. And so I like to get a good load of protein in the morning. Most people have sugar for breakfast. bagels, cereals, muffins, French toast, pancakes. It's dessert for breakfast, but it's important to eat protein and fat for breakfast. And so I have a protein shake. I put in some frozen fruit. I put in some creatine. A few other things I use for my microbiomes and probiotics.

51:19Dr. Mark Hyman:I put in urolithin A, which is actually a postbiotic that comes from promegranate. If you have a healthy microbiome, which most of us don't, and probably people listening out there, I can't imagine there's anybody out there listening that hasn't taken an antibiotic in their lifetime. And that destroys that. So I basically have that for breakfast. If I don't have that, I mean, I'll have an omelet or I'll have eggs or I might have a regeneratively raised sausage with eggs. Or sometimes I'll have like a sheep yogurt with lots of nuts in it and that's got a full fat yogurt with nuts in it. Well, I'm here in the U.S.

51:49Dr. Mark Hyman:People saying they won't eat any milk products. You know, we have an industrial cow system in America. Like we have an industrial meat system or grain system. And these cows are hybridized. They're not genetically modified, but they're just bred to be these hyper-milk-producing cows. They're Holsteins, typically. They have a form of casein, which is the milk protein called A1 casein, which is way more inflammatory, causes more gut disruption, more inflammation, more autoimmune disease, type 1 diabetes, and potentially even cancer, versus A2 casein, which comes from goats and sheep and some cows like Guernsey or Jersey cows or more heirloom cows, which are better tolerated.

52:27Dr. Mark Hyman:And those are the ones that, if you go around the world to these remote places, those are the kind of cows they have. They don't have American dairy. Plus, they pump them full of growth hormone and other things. They milk them when they're pregnant, so they're full of hormones. There's over 60 different hormones in milk. It doesn't sound very appetizing. It's nature's perfect food if you're a calf. There was a huge ad campaign in America called Got Milk. And it was funded by the government and the food and dairy industry that got together. It's called a checkup program to promote agricultural products.

52:55Dr. Mark Hyman:You had like secretaries of health and human services in them. You had sports athletes in them with the milk mustache. And the FTC said there is no data to support this at all. This is scientifically incorrect. It's not helping your bones. It's not doing all the things you say it is. You've got to take these ads out. And if you want to learn more about milk, go to the New England Journal of Medicine website, nejm.org, and type in milk and health. It's an article that was written by David Ludwig and Walter Willett to the top nutrition sciences at Harvard, We're reading all the literature on milk and dairy and showing how harmful it is.

53:27Dr. Mark Hyman:In fact, it increases the risk of hip fractures. And Tim, I know you have a view about milk versus fermented milk. Yeah, I'm not a fan of milk anymore. I mean, once you're no longer a baby, there's no evidence that it's useful. And overall, I'm agreeing with Mark about milk and fractures. And it's vastly overhyped for probably commercial reasons. But once you ferment it, it's a different matter. So fermentation means you transform it with microbes into something that tastes better, preserves longer, and is better for your health. And so if you look at regular cheese eaters, for example, they always do better in health outcomes than people who don't eat cheese.

54:09We're talking about proper cheese. All these ferments seem to have a benefit. So you can convert something like milk into something much more interesting by fermenting it. and this has health advantages. And you're then perhaps getting the advantage of the microbes in the food, but also you may have broken down some of these proteins into much smaller ones that don't cause that same irritation as well. So in the same way that sourdough bread cuts down the gluten into smaller bits so it's less irritant for anyone who's intolerant. So fermentation is a great natural way to make sort of unhealthy food healthier.

54:46So I'd love to leave our audience, maybe who's listening to this and saying, I'd like to make a change. Mark, if you were going to say there's like one piece of advice to somebody who they can maybe start doing today, who's worrying about this burden of disease, what would it be? That's easy.

55:05Dr. Mark Hyman:Dramatically cut down starch and sugar in your diet. Think of it as a recreational drug. If you want to have a tequila on the weekend, great. If you have tequila for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it's a problem. And we're having this for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So a treat, not a staple, starch and sugar, and in all forms. So it's anything, like unless it's a whole grain, like, you know, brown rice or buckwheat or, but, you know, beans. I'm talking about any refined grain or sugar in any form. And people say, well, what about honey? What about maples? I'm like, as, you know, Shakespeare said, you know, roses but a rose, sugar is sugar by any other name.

55:42Dr. Mark Hyman:And there's 100 names for sugar. Amazing. I'd like to do a quick summary of what we've covered. Hearing this, it always makes me think about what people must have said about tobacco, probably before I was really born, who were saying, this is really bad. And everyone was like, this is ridiculous. Like, my mom was taught to smoke when she was a child. How can this possibly be bad? And so it makes me believe that it's possible to make some shift. But, But the big thing on my mind is you just sort of said big food is maliciously and intentionally damaging society, including our children. It has people like cravings experts figuring out how to build exactly the most addictive food that you can imagine.

56:23And I think you gave me the statistic maybe like 14 % of people are addicted to food. It's just sort of similar to what happens with alcohol, which we know is very dangerous for some people who aren't able to manage it. That as a result of this, we started 100 years ago massively increasing our health span and lifespan as we dealt with all these infectious diseases. And now, you know, the last 20 % of our life, which is a lot, right, is spent sick, unable to enjoy it. And actually our health spans, it sounds, if I said rightly, in both the US and the UK are actually shrinking. I think you said this thing like food is the number one killer globally, which given that we have to eat it in order to live, there's something deeply wrong about that.

57:04It's actually technically not food. And you mentioned that because you said, what's food? Like food is something that supports growth and nourishment of an organism. And so if this is stuff that like actually just hurts us, it doesn't really deserve to be cold food. I love that. You also said something which I loved about, you know, if you eat a bowl of rice or a bowl of sugar, like below the neck, you can't tell the difference because you're both explaining just how rapidly this stuff is being turned into sugar. And therefore, you know, it's fine as a little bit of your diet, but if you're eating that all the time.

57:33And I used to think for many, many years that white rice was really healthy and that I'd made this great choice. But there are some countries that are fighting back, which I think is really interesting. We're all living in this English language environment. And I'm struck that you talked about between you both like Scandinavia and Chile, like really having an impact. Whereas I think we're living in this English language bubble and we feel that it's impossible to make any change. And then to finish, you talked about what to eat. And I think it was really interesting that you not only agreed, I think, a lot on the problem, but actually there's a lot of alignment on the solution.

58:05So start by eating real food. So you really want to cut out this ultra process, this high-risk processed food that is harming you. Cutting down the starch and sugars. And I know that includes like these sort of sugary drinks that you talked about, so many people buying on low incomes. And then like positively, you know, I think we heard Tim, 30 plants, eat the rainbow, eat fermented food, eat like these real foods that are out there. and allow us, therefore, hopefully to restore. And I think maybe that, you know, finish back to where you're beginning, this idea we're not stuck with our genes. It's possible.

58:41And if I'm listening to this and I'm 65 years old and I've been eating this diet since I was one, Mark, is it too late to make any change?

58:50Dr. Mark Hyman:Hell no. I mean, quick story. Had a patient at Cleveland Clinic, 66 years old. Sure, BMI was 46, which is huge, huge. 30 is obese and 40, or that is severely obese. She had type 2 diabetes for 10 years on insulin, heart failure. She had hypertension. She had multiple stents in her arteries. She grew up only on processed food. We put her in a program, a group program. Three days, she was off her insulin. Three months, she was off all her medication. Her A1C, which was her average blood sugar, went from 11, which is near death, to like five and a half, which is normal. Her heart failure reversed.

59:20Dr. Mark Hyman:Her hypertension normalized. Her fatty liver reversed. Her kidneys normalized. And she lost 116 pounds in a year. So it's possible at any age. As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily 30 to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily 30 yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over 30 high-quality, hand-picked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fiber.

1:00:05Better yet, it contains ingredients that support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives. Simply add one scoop a day to any meal for an extra boost of fiber and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life. becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily 30 as a good source of fiber, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants.

1:00:42So order yours today at zoe.com slash daily 30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

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