EAT THESE FOODS To Reverse Aging, LIVE LONGER & Feel Better! | Dr. Mark Hyman

We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour. Every hour? Every hour. We lose We lose a country the size of Nicaragua and North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left according to the UN before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, a giant in the health and wellness space. He's not only written 11 number one New York Times best-selling books on a wide range of health-related topics, but he's also the director of functional medicine at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. Additionally, he's consulted for the Surgeon General and testified before Congress on the issues of health care reform and functional medicine. And further proving that healthy living apparently makes you essentially superhuman, he also founded and serves as the medical director of the UltraWellness Center, acts as the chairman of the board for the Institute for Functional Medicine, and somehow has time to be the medical editor of the Huffington Post. And quite honestly, all of that is just the tip of a very large iceberg of incredible accomplishments. It really is crazy, dude. Doing the research on you, like seeing how many things you're involved in, and it all seems to revolve around a couple of core things. One of them being shocking, we'll get to that one in a minute around Buddhism and connection and love and all that, which I was really blown away by. Yeah. But the the core notion of the body as ecosystem. Yeah. Talk to me about that. What does that mean exactly? know, I I went to medical school and we learned about the body as a bunch of separate parts. There was your heart and your cardiovascular system, your GI system, your nervous system, and on and on. And there's all these specialties that are all siloed. And you go to the doctor and you have a whole bunch of different symptoms, and when you basically ask about, well, you go to the cardiologist, "Well, I got this rash." "Oh, don't talk to me about that. I want Go to the dermatologist. Or you feel like a little depressed. Oh, go to psychiatrist. You know, you've got a doctor for every inch of you. And the truth is the body is one ecosystem. And I discovered this by myself becoming really, really sick and having to reverse engineer my way to health. And I discovered this model of thinking that was basically a systems model. Um And it it it helped me to understand the root cause of disease and how the body works together and everything is connected like a web. So, when you pull on the right strings, you don't have to treat everything separately with multiple medications. You can get to the root cause and everything goes away. Now, one thing, so having lived through this myself with my wife and seeing how complicated it becomes when you start thinking of the body as an ecosystem. Cuz she's had massive um microbiome issues, digestive trouble. And where it all starts, right? So, we started trying to use traditional Western medicine. So, it was like, okay, what is this? How do you And maybe you walking us through what you did in your own life, cuz I know that you ran into uh very catastrophic health problem. How do you begin to figure out what is the root cause and then actually take steps to repair? So, functional medicine is basically a methodology. It's a an operating system. It's a way of thinking differently about disease. And it's becoming a medical detective to connect the dots between all these disparate things. And so, I basically look at a person's story and try to get a sense of how they got to where they are. So, for your wife, I'd want to know, oh, was she born by C-section or vaginal birth? Was she Did you go all the way back to that? bottle-fed or breastfed? Did she take early antibiotics? Did she have a gastroenteritis? Or was she traveling to foreign country? Or did something happen where her gut didn't develop properly? And then I want to know what other exposures she's had and whether she's exposed to toxins, heavy metals. So, I ask a lot of questions. I want to know everything she eats, exactly her lifestyle, what she does, how she sleeps, exercises. So, like I'm looking at whether the body's in balance in these systems. So, functional medicine has a map, they call it the matrix. And essentially as we look at, you know, you know, your genetics and triggering factors, we look at your lifestyle, you know. Give me an example of triggering factors. you exposed to a moldy house? Like I got really sick living in a moldy house. I lived in China, got exposed to mercury. That's a triggering factor, right? You could have got Lyme disease, you could have eaten bad sushi and got something, you know. So, all that is relevant as a triggering factor, but then there might be predisposing factors like she had a gut that wasn't so great in the first place. She might have had, you know, again, more my C-section, not a bottle bottle fed, not not taking antibiotics. And then we see where where are the things are in or out of balance. When you have too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff that your body needs, you know, sleep, exercise, nutrition, relationships, connection, love, meaning, all that stuff. When you have too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good stuff, your body breaks down. So, we look at these seven systems and how they're in balance or out of balance. And that relates to all the So, there's your gut and they're all connected. They're not really separate. They're like a web, but we just break them out for the purposes of thinking about them. So, there's the gut and digestion and the microbiome, there's your immune system, we call it defense and repair, your energy system, how you make energy from oxygen and and food, your detoxification system, how you process your metabolic toxins, environmental toxins, your transport system, which is circulation, lymphatic circulation, your communication system, which is hormones, neurotransmitters, messenger molecules that communicate, and then your structural system, which is everything from your biomechanical skeletal structure down to the structure of your cell membranes. And all those are influencing how you feel at any moment, influencing whether you're getting more disease or less disease. So, when your gut breaks down and the gut is really the central thing because when your gut breaks down, everything breaks down because the microbiome is this extraordinary ecosystem of bugs within you that control a lot of what happens in your body. And when they're out of balance, you not only have digestive symptoms, but you can have everything from dementia to cancer to heart disease to diabetes to autoimmune diseases and lots more. So, I know you've talked a lot about the need for coaches and getting a health and wellness coach involved in your life. If somebody right now is at home listening, so now they understand the seven systems that are working together, um how can they begin to diagnose what's going on? Are there like simple questions that they can ask themselves? So, like in Lisa's case, we sort of backed into there were probably several problems including um bordering on an eating disorder when she was younger. Yeah. And then That'll mess up your system. Yeah, for sure. And then a lot of antibiotics. And the threshold event um ended up being she just got some sort of bug of some kind. Um but it was because she had taken antibiotics I mean a lot. She was taking antibiotics like four or five times a year for years. Uh she had chronic chest infections. Right. And so then she hits this bug whatever here in LA. Yeah, yeah. And That was a tipping point. That's the triggering factor, right? Yeah. So, they the whole the whole point of functional medicine is about creating health. You know, regular medicine is about diagnosing and treating disease. I don't really care what disease you have. I want to know how do we create health? How do you get the best microbiome on the planet? How do you create a healthy inner garden? What do you have to do to do that? How do you diagnose what's out of balance there? You get rid of the bad bugs and then put in the good bugs. But it's not just as simple as taking probiotics. You know, I actually had a Do you think probiotics work? They they're like tourists. You know, they come through the economy, they affect, you know, things a little bit, but they're not they don't stick around that long. So, you have to keep taking them, which is not bad necessarily, but what what's really extraordinary is that I recently developed ulcerative colitis as a result of taking an antibiotic for a bad tooth I had, tooth infection. Wow. That led to C. diff, which is a deathly intestinal infection. It then spiraled into colitis. And you know, in doing what I do, I was like, "Okay, well, this is kind of messed up. I got to rebuild my gut." And I, you know, took all the things I knew and I put together this cocktail of stuff. And there was one particular bug called Akkermansia, which is really important in regulating immune function and cardiovascular health and lots of things. And it protects the biofilm. It restabilizes your gut. And this is all really relatively new research. If you have If you have low levels of this, for example, if you get those new checkpoint inhibitors that are anti-cancer drugs that are immunotherapy, they don't work. inhibitor? It's It's an immunotherapy drug which activates your immune system Okay. to kill the cancer. And this is like an 100% like, if it works, you're cured. You have melanoma like Jimmy Carter, that's stage four melanoma, you're going to be dead in a few months, you take this drug, you're cured, and he's still building houses at 99 years old or something. So, that's the These are amazing drugs, but they don't work on everybody. And turns out if you don't have a healthy microbiome, they don't work. So, all this research is going on, I started looking at it, and I realized, you know what? Taking prebiotics is good. Take which is fiber, feed the good bugs. Taking probiotics is good, but they also like polyphenols, which are these extraordinary compounds in colorful fruits and vegetables that the microbiome needs to to grow. And so, think about creating healthy soil. You can put all kinds of chemicals on, right? Fertilizers and this and you have a damaged soil, it doesn't really grow good food, but if you have a healthy, you know, rich soil, you can you can create health. And so, we put in all these things like cranberry, pomegranate, green tea, and they are really great for Akkermansia. Okay. And then I used prebiotics, fiber, like acacia fiber, to help feed the good bugs. And I also used a form of colostrum, which is immunoglobulin, so it's like passive immunity, helps regulate immune system. And I used a little collagen peptides. I took some something called tributyrate, which is a product that helps with fats in the gut. And this is a general cocktail that I take. It's a shake, take it every morning, and within 3 weeks my ulcer class was gone. Like gone, and now I'm like best poops in my life. So, that's uh that's very interesting. So, first we had to kill the C. diff, then we have our magical cocktail. What if somebody has SIBO? Is would you recommend doing a round of antibiotics to kill the SIBO first? Yeah, SIBO for everybody that's listening that doesn't know what that is, it's basically where the bugs migrate up in your small intestine and you from your large intestine. So, you normally should have a sterile upper gut, and your lower gut, your colon, is where your poop is and your bad bugs are or good bugs. Uh when they migrate up, that's when you get bloating, distension, I call it food baby. You know, you know, like every time you eat you just feel bloated and full after. That's often a sign of bacterial overgrowth, really common. Uh so, you can you have to figure out why it's happening cuz it's if you just treat it without knowing that, it can come back. That's interesting. Why would it happen? Well, it can happen because uh you have motility issues, you have low magnesium, you have a parasite, you know, you there may be some reasons why. You could have babesia, which is a tick infection. So, you have to figure all that out. But then um you can take herbs or you can take uh especially antibiotics that are only in the gut. And I also use antifungals to clear out the bad bugs. It's kind of I call it the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. You weed out the bad bugs, then you seed it with good bugs, and you feed it with all this good stuff. Okay, so if we're doing weeding, seeding, and feeding, um what do you use to identify what the current state of your microbiome is? Is there a particular test that you recommend? Yes, there's so many tests out there, but clinically I think the most useful one, I've been doing this for 30 years, and it is it's called GI effects from a lab called Genova, and it looks at not just the microbiome from from measuring the bacteria cuz you can do that. You can measure with new um you know, DNA testing, which is really actually RNA testing for bugs. You can actually measure all the bugs in there, but then what does it mean? How clinically relevant is it? So, I I look at the function of the gut. Are there are there the products, for example, in there that are made by healthy bugs called short-chain fats? If they're low, you know that there's no good fats, and that's the fuel for the colon. I want to look at your are your digestive enzymes working? Are you absorbing food properly? Is there inflammation in your gut? What's your immune system doing in your gut? What is growing in your gut? Do you have a parasite or bad bugs? So, I look at all that, and then I can come up with a sense of what's going on. And often people have leaky gut and food sensitivities and this vicious cycle of these bad bugs and food sensitivities, and it it's what makes so many people sick. How long would you expect, when done well, how long would you expect this repair protocol to take? If you combine it with diet, cuz you also have to eliminate the things that are in your diet that are driving gut problems, right? Cuz think about it, you're eating pounds of food every day, and that is what's landing in your gut and feeding your bugs. And if you're eating processed food, sugar, starch, bad fats, it's going to be a problem. You're not going to get better. So, you need a whole foods diet. I call it the Paleo diet, which is kind of a joke, but it's like, you know, less extreme, more inclusive, but whole foods, focusing on quality, not so much worrying about quantity. And uh and sometimes eliminating things like gluten and dairy and and other things that can be trigger food sensitivities. And combined with a diet and this protocol, within a few weeks people start to feel significantly better. And it takes about 3 months to really kind of reset the whole thing. When somebody has a stubborn problem, like Lisa's is insanely disciplined. If you tell her to do something, she's going to do it for sure. Um her diet is clean. In fact, I would probably consider that one of the things that um became her problem was it was too restrictive. Too restrictive. So, and then once the SIBO kicked in, once she encountered the parasite and had the threshold event, it's like the the weed, seed, and feed thing, I don't know that we've ever gotten perfect. Like is there um is there any particular thing that creates a stubborn problem when when the person is being disciplined, but it continues to not go away? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, 30 almost 30 years ago I had another problem, which was mercury poisoning. And that messed up my gut big time. And I I got a triggering event, which was some bug I picked up somewhere in a lake in Maine. And then my entire gut broke down. And I literally had diarrhea, bloating, pain for years. And a whole and I developed chronic fatigue syndrome, my whole system broke down. And it wasn't until I got rid of the mercury that my gut sorted out. So, she has mercury poisoning, if she's mold toxic, if she has a tick it can impede people getting fully better. Yeah. So, now let's say that we've identified the problem, we've done the weeding. Um, what should somebody be eating? So, obviously in your new book, uh What the Heck, um you go into it's all whole food based, but there's obviously a lot of whole foods in the world. So, what should people be aiming at? the thing. You know, there's so many diet wars. We you know, nutrition is often based on ideology, uh not on good science. And there's so much conflicting information, and people are buffeted about by the media. One day that meat's bad, then it's good. One day eggs are bad, then they're good, then they're bad. I mean, it's just it kind of makes people crazy and give up, and what are scientists doing, and what's just a mess, right? But, you know, I've I've been studying nutrition for 40 years, and I've been not only studying it in a book, I've been using food as medicine for 30 years as a doctor. And I I'm humbled by it, because I realize everybody is different. Everybody needs different approaches based on their genetics, their preferences, and so forth. But, there are some common principles, I call them the Pegan principles, that are universal, that no one will argue with. And I, you know, I was sort of joking, cuz I was I was on a panel with a friend of mine who was vegan, who was a cardiologist, and another guy was a paleo doc, and they were fighting, and I was in the middle, and I'm like, well, if you're peg paleo, and you're vegan, then I must be pegan. And it was like just kind of a goofy joke, and and I realized, wait a minute, they they agree on about everything, except where you get your protein from. So, they all agree that we should be eating whole foods. They all agree we shouldn't be eating any industrial processed foods. They all agree we should uh be eating a ton of vegetables, uh lots of good fruit, lots of nuts and seeds, lots of good fats. Everybody agrees that. Um the things that are different are, should we have our protein from animals, or from beans and grains? That's the only difference. And I thought, you know, well, not everybody has a problem with beans and grains, and not everybody has a problem with animal protein. In fact, it can be a very important source of food for most people. The question is, what, right? What grains? What beans? What meat? What fish? And so, that's really what those principles are about, is focusing on quality. So, for example, do you want to eat a feedlot burger? Heck, no. Because they're raised on grain? For many reasons. One, um they're they're raised in a way that is inhumane for them. They're raised on foods that uh create, you know, bad metabolic profiles in the animal, so you're eating a lot of inflammatory stuff. They feed them, you know, chicken [ __ ] They feed them candy. They feed them corn. And then, there's how they grow the food for the animals, which it creates massive environmental destruction, you know, loss of biodiversity in the soils and animals, uh loss of of water resources, cuz of all the irrigation to grow the crops for the animals, the deforestation that results, the destruction of our soil, the use of fertilizers, pesticides. The fertilizers run off and destroy all the rivers and lakes and oceans and create dead zones the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 212,000 metric tons of fish a year. And there's 400 dead zones like that the size of Europe around the world that are in coastal areas that are killing the food supply for half a billion people. You know, that's because of the consequences of how we're growing our food. And not only that, it's a giant source of climate change for all those reasons. So, no one should be eating factory farmed animals. On the other hand, you look at regenerative animals, which means regenerative means you you farm or grow animals in a way that is bringing the ecosystem back to health, which is restoring soils, reducing water use, reducing or eliminating fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. And there was a an interesting analysis. Everyone's eating these plant-based burgers now. And you know, I think yeah, it's better that we eat plants and that's great. But what plants? Should it be a highly industrial product like Impossible Burger for example? It's GMO soy. So, it's grown in a way that you're getting lots of glyphosate, which is not good for you. Destroys your gut. Your the food is grown in big monocrops intensively with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, destroying the soil, using up water and so forth. It's way better than a feedlot beef. But when you compare it, this was done by an independent life cycle analysis company Quantis that looked at both Impossible Burger and a an regeneratively raised beef burger from White Oak Farms in I think Missouri. And they found that you literally had to eat one regeneratively raised burger to offset the carbon emissions of a plant-based Impossible Burger. To offset it. In other words, the the soy burger added 3 1/2 kilos of carbon to the environment. The grass-fed burger took out 3 and 1/2 kilos of carbon from the environment because soil is the biggest carbon sink on the planet. It can hold three times the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere if we took care of it and built organic matter in the soil, which only happens through the use of animals. Right. That dig and pee and poo and move around and chew down the grass and that builds soil and this and that doesn't use fertilizer, doesn't use pesticides, doesn't use herbicides, uses rain water, so you're not using 1,800 gallons for every pound. It's a great called green water and producing higher quality meat with high levels of antioxidants, high levels of omega-3 fats, better for the animals, and you're not destroying ecosystems. When you when you grow soy, you're destroying ecosystems. You know, you're destroying the habitat of animals and rabbits and mice and birds when you're making these giant mega farms. So, I mean, probably eating a regenerative grass-fed burger is probably the most vegan thing you can do. So, you know, it's like and and and I think it's just we get in this false dichotomy. I mean, like all meat is bad or only vegan or, you know, oh, you should only, you know, eat be paleo. That it just doesn't make sense, you right? That's really interesting. The green argument is um is fascinating seeing sort of the the balancing out that's going to happen between whether there is some amount of farm raised that's actually necessary. I've heard you talk about the topsoil before and that that's actually something that without animals you're going to erode the soil and that in and of itself causes some dramatic issues. We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour. Every hour? We lose We lose country the size of Nicaragua and North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left according to the UN before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans. Forget climate change. This is sounds relatively problematic. And by actually using the strategy of regenerative agriculture, we can draw down carbon, not add to the carbon in the environment. Even if we stopped all fossil fuels tomorrow, we still would be screwed. We need strategies that draw down carbon out of the environment, and the food system is the number one set of solutions. Let me ask you. So, even just forgetting anything ecological, why plants? So, that when you were saying everybody agrees we should eat more vegetables, obviously I would say Steven Gundry probably doesn't agree that we should eat more vegetables. Maybe if there's certain Yeah, the right vegetables. Do you have a take on that? Like what's your vibe about lectins? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I think it's it's really personalized. And so, for some people who have serious illnesses, getting off of inflammatory foods, including lectins, can be helpful. Um but, you know, look, 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. That's the first priority I have is get people off that stuff. Don't restrict vegetables, you know, cuz like unless you're really sick and you want to try it as a therapy, fine. But I I'm really not uh you know, a big fan of telling people to not eat vegetables, cuz I think there's so much value in them, and I think if we actually have the problem of of restricting unnecessarily for people, it's it's not great. Well, let's talk about So, um what do you think about the carnivore diet? Is there any logic there? Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, that you know, like Jordan Peterson's doing that, and his daughter did it to cure autoimmune disease. And yes, if you are really sick, sometimes it can be profoundly helpful. I mean, if you have autoimmune disease, if you have um severe obesity, I mean, it there can be real benefits. But I again, you know, we used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter-gatherers. We ate animal products when we could find them, you know, or hunt them. And it was a part of our diet, it wasn't a staple. Some cultures, like the Plains Indians, like the Dakota, they lived mostly on buffalo, and they were the longest-lived people in history. They were had more centenarians per capita than any other population at the turn of the century, yeah. So, you've talked about, you know, one thing that medicine really has got to start doing is looking at the laws of biology. So, you know, physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology? How does that play out in terms of um plants? Because I can walk you through it's admittedly like a layperson's understanding, but when I walk through the notion of the plant paradox and you start thinking of a plant as having a basically a chemical um evolutionary advantage or the way that they stop predators is by creating these chemicals that either upset their stomach or they're bad for them or they are bitter tasting or whatever. It's like, oh, that makes sense. When you have something, it has to have a mechanism against predation. Yeah. And humans are one of the predators. And so, okay, it didn't develop claws or whatever. It developed like these chemical signals. You've talked about food being signals more than just calories. So, it's like, okay, well, there's actually some logic. Whether it's true or not is a totally different question. But there's a a followable chain of logic to why plants potentially have issues. And so, it's like, is there anything that they all share that for somebody with the sensitivity they're, you know, they're an issue? Or no, no, no, like there's so many other nutrients in vegetables. If you're not eating them, you're kidding committing a cardinal sin of the laws of biology. Well, if you're eating nose to tail, like you're eating the liver, which has more vitamin C, more vitamin A than any vegetable on the planet, right? Um you know, you can get by, but You can get by or it's ideal? I don't think it's ideal. I mean, I think your gut m- the microbiome feeds on carbohydrates. Feeds on phytochemicals. So, it feeds on fiber, right? Which is What does happen to your microbiome if you're only eating a carnivore diet? Nose to tail? changes. a bad way? Potentially. Uh potentially. I think you know there's there's some interesting experiments. I think we're still in the exploration of like what happens when you eat different diets. But I have a little different view about vegetables. Um and I call it symbiotic phyto-adaptation. Which is a fascinating concept. But essentially, yes, there are defense mechanisms in plants that help the plants, but also can help us, right? So for example, we don't make vitamin C. We get it from plants. We need things to help us detoxify. So when we eat broccoli, you upregulate the glutathione the pathways of detox in your liver through phytochemicals called glucosinolates. Your microbiome loves the polyphenols in pomegranate and cranberry, right? So I think we have evolved co-evolved with plants. So we use these compounds these phytochemicals to regulate all sorts of biological functions from inflammation to our microbiome to detoxification to brain function or transmitters and so on so on. So I think we there are plants you wouldn't want to eat. You don't You don't want to eat poison mushrooms, right? You don't want to eat foxglove which kill you. But there are a lot of plants that we've evolved with that we use in our bodies to regulate our biological functions and I think they're really necessary. Mhm. Talk to me about soy. I heard you say something which I'd heard before, but I don't know there's something about the way you said it that really hit me that um you see women drinking or young girls drinking like soy milk like it's going out of style and then it it will put them into premature Yeah, happened to my stepdaughter. She you know, soy milk was the big rage and she liked to drink I mean she was allergic to dairy. So she just like drank, you know, quart of soy milk a day and and she ended up like at 9 years old getting little boobs. Whoa. And we're like, "Oh." Because it's upping her estrogen? Yeah. So so soy soy is a a very controversial topic for many reasons. There's all the environmental issues, obviously big monocrop fields, of tearing down rainforests in Brazil, of all the consequences of climate change, and all that. But, uh from a dietary perspective, it's been a staple in diets for millennia in Asia, and it's always been processed in a way that makes it more digestible. Tofu, tempeh, right? Miso, soy sauce. Mhm. Those are traditional foods. When you start, you know, making soy hot dogs, and soy burgers, and eating all these, you know, processed things. Even soy milk is not something we used to consume. It It It You get one, trouble with digestion. Two, increased risk of allergy. And three, you get extra hormonal effects when you have these massive quantities of these things. Yeah, thinking of food as a signaling molecule, and then the all the talk around soy, what is the mechanism that's happening that makes soy trigger an estrogen response? I've never understood that. Well, you know, all all food is information, not just calories, it's all information. It's instructions. It's literally like code that programs your biology with every bite. So, at like an epigenetic level, it's it's level. So, every bite of food you take can change your gene expression across a whole range of genes. So, you eat green You drink green tea or eat broccoli, you upregulate the gene called glutathione S-transferase that helps you detoxify heavy metals, environmental chemicals, metabolic toxins. Um so, so it it it regulates your genes. It regulates your hormones. So, if you lie start eating sugar, it increases insulin, lowers testosterone, increases estrogen, for example. Uh it affects your brain chemistry, and what your hunger hormones are, your craving levels are, uh and what foods you you know, you're attracted to. It affects your immune system, and it regulates inflammation, or it's anti-inflammatory. It regulates your microbiome with every bite. So, every single system of your body is regulated by the quality of the food you eat. And when you realize you shouldn't just focus on calories, you should focus on quality and the information you're eating changes everything. So, that's really what I have people focus on and I think when people do that, then you have a different relationship to your food. You go, well, I'm eating Am I going to eat toxic information or am I going to eat healing information? So, if you were to put together a few groups of the sort of healing signals, what would they be? Like, what would be if if you were so In investing, there's a saying called the all-weather strategy. And they say, okay, look, I'm sort of blindly talking to my grandchildren. I'm, you know, going to pass away and all I can leave behind is a strategy that will work in in any environment. But, if you had to just put together an all-weather eating strategy, what would the ideal, in air quotes, diet I wrote about it. I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? And it's about these principles I call the Pegan principles. Well, it's really focused on quality first, right? Nobody thinks we should be adding additives and hormones and antibiotics and pesticides and glyphosate to our food. Like, it's in it, but nobody's like, yeah, let's do this. it at the grocery store. Uh, you know, you if you look at the label of something, if it has something you can't recognize pronounce, uh, then you shouldn't have it. Or if you don't have it in your cupboard at home, like butylated hydroxytoluene, which is in almost every processed food, is BHT, so illegal in Europe. You wouldn't sprinkle that on your salad, would you? No. No. So, that's a good rule. Uh, the second principle is, you know, we should be eating a plant-rich diet. Uh, and and across the spectrum from fruits and vegetables to Do you treat fruits and vegetables as sort of one in the same or should be vegetables and fruit, right? So, it's like we should You don't want to be consuming only fruit cuz that's full of sugar and and if you're diabetic or you're overweight or have issues, you might want to cut back on the sugary fruits or eat berries, which are less glycemic. Um, lots of nuts and seeds. Everybody agrees we should be eating lots of nuts and seeds. You want to soak them or reduce lectins, that's fine. If you're going to eat beans and grains, pick low starch ones, right? And and also examples of low starch. rice, which is like the blueberries of rice, quinoa. What does that mean? Well, the black rice was called the emperor's rice or forbidden rice and it's full of these dark It's black. So, anytime you see color in nature, there are polyphenols and phytochemicals in there. So, it's got more antioxidants per serving than blueberries. And then And then you want to make sure if you're eating, you know, grains like gluten grains are are interesting. So, most of the gluten we eat is is wheat. Um, it's 133 lb per person per year. That's a pharmacological dose and is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar. Really? Yes. What? Yes. When you look at the glycemic index, which is how much the fixed amount of the food will raise your blood sugar, table sugar is 80, bread is 100. Whoa, I had no idea. Why? Because it's so processed and so quickly absorbed. And if you want to eat like If you're not gluten sensitive, you want to have farro or einkorn wheat or, you know, spelt, you might tolerate those cuz those aren't highly altered genetically. But, the new The wheat we eat is super starchy, has a lot more gliadin proteins, create more gluten sensitivity, is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest to to de- defoliate the plants and it's also has preservative called calcium propionate, which caused autism in animal models and is shown to cause behavioral problems in kids. So, ADD, all that stuff could be all the flour. So, I'm not a big flour person, plus it's just like sugar. So, if you want to have have other grains if you're not gluten sensitive, like rye or barley, that's fine. And then beans again, you know, lima beans, kidney beans. If you're If Look, 75% of Americans are overweight. So, most people should be eating a lot of starch and that You know, you have to eat three cups of beans to get the equivalent of like four 6 oz of protein. Uh so, I have this lentils and things like that, um which are lower-starch beans, adzuki beans, other kinds of beans. I talk about them in my book. And then if you're eating animal products, you want to eat animal products that are not going to hurt the animals, not going to hurt you, and not going to hurt the environment, right? So, for beef, it should be regeneratively raised, ideally, which is hard to find, but you can actually get more and more of that around and there's ways to do it by by looking online to get it, looking Thrive Market is a great resource for uh regeneratively raised beef. Um and again, chicken should be pasture-raised, pork and all that should be raised in ways that are are more organic or sustainable. Uh fish, you want to eat fish that's sustainably harvested or, you know, sustainably organically uh aquacultured, uh cuz we over-harvest the fish and then we don't want to eat big fish that's like full of mercury and tuna and swordfish. Just cuz they've lived longer? Well, what happens is the coal and all the fossil fuels go in the ocean, go in the algae, get stored in the algae, that the little fish eat the algae, then the little little bigger fish eat the little fish, and it goes on up the food chain, and then you got a swordfish or a tuna. Um these are monster fish and uh they bioaccumulated all this. And so, you want to, you know, eat the right animal products, you want to eat the right grains, the right beans, the right vegetables, the right fruits, And so, give me the right vegetables. Are we just looking for color spectrum? vegetables. If you want to cut out nightshades and get rid of lectins, that's fine. You know, I don't care. But I love tomatoes, so I'm not going to do that. And they don't make me feel bad. Uh so, there's no point in restricting your diet necessarily if you're not sick, right? Talking really fast just cuz you mentioned that you eat nightshades, which are problematic for a lot of people. I've heard you say that your body is the best doctor. What do you mean by that? So, yeah, you listen and watch my stuff. That's impre- I'm impressed. Uh so, the the whole idea is that you can listen to all the nutritional advice you want, but pay attention to how you feel. Your body's going to tell you. If you go vegan and you stop having your period, you lose muscle, you feel tired, you're B12 deficient, you feel like crap, you develop autoimmune diseases, you gain weight, whatever, maybe it's not for you, right? Uh I mean, I literally just did a whole analysis on a very well-known celebrity and he's a vegan and he's massively nutrition deficient. No omega-3s, extremely low vitamin D, extremely low B vitamins, extremely low zinc, selenium. I mean, it was it was frightening to see in a young guy how depleted he was. Uh but other people it works really well for. Um and then uh see how you feel. If you get rid of gluten and dairy, do you feel better, right? So, I have people do a detox, but essentially a dietary cleanse, which is get off all the junk, get off all the sugar, get off all the processed food, eat whole foods, get rid of gluten and dairy, even getting rid of grains and beans for a while and see how you feel. And if you don't feel good, you know, try to add things back. If you feel amazing and your autoimmune disease goes away, your digestive problems clear up, your brain fog is clear, your migraines are gone, well, then that's probably a sign that your body likes that way of eating, you know. Walk people through really fast your 10-day detox. Like, what does that entail? How do they um take advantage? of the essential, you know, therapeutic approaches of functional medicine is food as medicine. And um in that thinking, one of the ways we treat people is taking away the most inflammatory foods. So, gluten and dairy are number one and two for most people for a lot of reasons, but then there's a whole host of other ones like eggs and soy and some nuts for people. Um so, the 10-day detox essentially is whole foods based. It's high-quality animal protein, lots of veggies, but non-starchy veggies. So, it's extremely low glycemic, so there's not starch and sugar and flour. It cuts out grains, cuts out beans, cuts out fruit except for berries. And it's got a lot of good fats. Avocado fruit except for berries. Just you're trying to get Well, the diet is designed to be like it's not one size fits all, but it's close cuz it's low glycemic, so it helps you lose weight. It's anti-inflammatory. It fixes your gut. And it's highly nutrient-dense and has lots of fiber or lots of phytochemicals, lots of good fats. So, it's high fat, low starch and sugar. So, it works for autoimmune diseases, for gut issues, for weight issues, for diabetes. I mean, I should show you this picture of this woman who literally had type 2 diabetes for 10 years, on insulin, heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, high blood pressure, tons of medications, 65 years old, on her way out. She came into one of our group programs at Cleveland Clinic, one of the 10-day detoxes. Took a basic supplements like a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, not a lot of stuff. And within 3 days she was off her insulin. Woah! In 3 months she reversed her heart failure, her kidney failure, her liver failure, her high high blood pressure, got off all her medications, lost 43 lb, and in a year she lost 116 lb and is off everything. Wow. And she saved $20,000 a year in co-pays for her medications cuz insulin is so expensive. And And that was food. I mean, it was you know, she was seeing so many doctors, she was seeing the best in the field, and they were managing her disease, and I don't really want to manage people's disease. I want to get to the root of it. And for so many people food is really the root. What I like about that approach is that it's a detox, right? So, it's more about what you're removing even than what you're adding, and and I find a lot of times That's interesting. I want to hear more about that cuz what I find a lot of times is that people want to just add like, "Oh, if I add uh broccoli to my Twinkie diet that I'll be fine. So what where do you think that balance is? Like how much of this is a removal, how much of this is an addition? Um I think, you know, we we have the most inflammatory diet in the world right now. And all the diseases that people suffer with, it's gut issues, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, these are all inflammatory diseases. So the foods that we're eating, 60% of our diet is considered ultra-processed food made from corn, wheat, and soy, mostly in the form of white flour, high fructose corn syrup, and trans fats or soybean oil now. And the people who eat the most of it are the sickest. And the people who eat it for every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed foods, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So we eat 60%. And and so we have to get rid of that stuff that's destroying our biology cuz we're it's like literally putting poison in our body. And and our bodies don't die immediately. It's a slow, long, prolonged, painful death, right? Yeah. So it's taking out all that stuff. It's taking out things that are often inflammatory. Like the wheat we eat isn't the wheat that our ancestors ate, right? The dairy we eat is not the dairy that our ancestors eat. It's been highly altered through genetic breeding. It changes the quality, the the fats, the proteins, the the allergens in there. So like we used to have heirloom cows which were, you know, if you travel around the world and you see these cows you're like, "Wow, that's a weird looking cow." You know, like cuz they're like I never saw a cow like that cuz they're all like these same cows in America. They're like these white and black Holstein cows. They're all bred by like three bulls and they're all pretty much genetically the same. And they have high levels of A1 casein which is super inflammatory. Whereas heirloom cows don't. Or sheep and goat also have A2 casein which is less problematic. Uh wheat, same thing. They the way they've created the dwarf wheat, they breed the wheat for all these properties that are drought resistant, more starchy, and so forth. And the guy won the Nobel Prize for this, but the unintended consequences is when you breed plants, it's not like humans. You get your 23 pairs of chromosomes, every every human has 46. If you were a wheat plant and you have 46 chromosomes and you breed with another wheat plant with 46, you get 90, you get 92 chromosomes. Right? And then, but that means is you're making extra proteins cuz chromosomes, genes make proteins, and you're making way more gluten proteins that are much more likely to cause celiac, which is why we've seen such an increase in celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. That's really interesting. Okay, one thing I want to go back to you is where you started and like your whole thing around love and community and how if you really want to make change, it's about connection and getting other people that are around you to change their lifestyle as well and then it self-reinforces. One, walk us through like how did you end up going so deep on Buddhist studies? What did you draw from that? Yeah. And then as you were having really a near-death experience, but I mean, you were in a risky place there the first time you had that medical emergency. Like the peace that you had during that whole process, which I found very interesting. Yeah, well, you know, um, I was always a weird kid. I always like didn't really have any friends. Just read a lot of books. Couldn't really relate to anybody except grown-ups. And you know, then I got to college and I was like, "Wow." And I read I read Walden when I was like 14, 15. And I just like studied it like a Bible. And I then I What specifically is hitting you? Like at 15 to encounter those ideas, which would be very, run very contrary to a standard American upbringing. But what specifically were you like, "Wow, that that resonates." just, you know, I I I remember being like free and you know, just feeling so much love for everybody and just feeling in a state of love all the time. And I remember noticing how all the grown-ups were just so weird and why were they so disconnected and and I always felt that sense of love and I think when I began to understand what Buddhism is about it was about understanding compassion and kindness and service and also like wisdom, you know, how do how do we see the world? So Buddhism isn't a religion. It's It's It's basically a a phenomenology of the mind. It's a description of how our perception works, why we suffer, and how we can break down that you know, sort of in slow motion like the Matrix, you know, like break down the the the ways in which we get into this suffering pattern of getting attached to our meanings we put on things and that creates all this misery and suffering. It's all created in our head. And I and I really was looking for a way out of my own suffering as a kid and it just was really spoke to me. And how does that become so important as you look at wellness and think of that as as sort of a a critical pillar of actual wellness? Do you talk in functional medicine when somebody comes to see you, do you talk at all about the need to meditate or yeah, 100%. So what is that? What's the connection there? What's the mind-gut connection? Like how does this all play out? I said before, we're one system. So your brain is connected to everything else and when you're stressed, you're dysregulating all the functions in your body, right? It's fine if you're running from a tiger, but if you're stressed all the time, your gut shuts down, your immune system doesn't work, you're you know, you're constantly a state of of vigilance and stress, which is just degrades every system in your body. So it's a huge component is both dealing with your mindset and your way of thinking to sort of be able to unhook from all the meanings we attach to things, all the the perceptions we have that aren't really true, and the suffering we self-generate. And then I also peop- teach people tools and techniques to help them reset, right? So we're we're all stressed. Like I'm running around in LA today, you know, doing my TV shows and this and that, you know, for my new book, but like I make sure I meditate. Like I meditated this morning, you know, soon as I'll be able to squeeze in a yoga class, like I'll I'll, you know, You used to be a yoga instructor. I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. Yeah, I was kind of weird I told you I was weird. It's it's so interesting, man. Here's the problem with where you're at today. Functional medicine is no longer like this alien notion, but the fact that you've had your finger on this for as long as you have is really interesting. The fact that it was born into the mind of somebody that was so into Eastern philosophy does not surprise me. a sys- it's a systems view, right? Mhm. And and we you know, what is what is you know, Buddhism is sort of a description of the laws of the mind, right? And so functional medicine is is a description of the laws of biology. For we have no theory we have theories of physics, right? We have the laws of physics. We can we can build a bridge or a spaceship based on the laws of physics, right? And it works because they're natural laws. Well, what are the natural laws of biology? There are natural laws. In in medicine, we've not thought about that. We were like, well, this hurts, so fix this, you know, it's like a knee problem. The knee problem might be related to your gut, right? And and how do we think about that? So so functional medicine attempts to describe what are those natural laws, what are those essential elements. So when I I look at, you know, traditional medicine, there's now 155,000 diseases. Woah. If you look at your code book, it's ridiculous. And it used to be 12,000, and they used to subcategorize them. So say you have depression, it's just the name of the disease. It doesn't tell you the cause of the disease. So functional medicine, what are those natural causes? And you can have a few natural laws that that describe it immense number of phenomena that you see, right? So, that's like the laws of physics, immense number of phenomena. So, the same thing is true in biology. And and functional medicine I think is an attempt to codify what those natural laws are, how the body actually works, how it's connected as a web, how what are the root causes of diseases? And there's not many, right? It's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, microbes. And what are the things we need to create a healthy human? It's a short list, the right food, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, love, meaning, connection, purpose. Those are the things that we need to thrive. And you just take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, and you know, miracles happen. Dude, that is such a powerful way to explain all this. Yeah. That was [ __ ] amazing. Thank you for that. Where can people connect with you? Uh they can go to drhyman.com. I've got a podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy, which is killing it. I don't know why, but people love it. And uh you know, I'm uh yeah. Very easy to answer why people love it. It's absolutely amazing, high quality, as is everything that you put out there. Dude, it's amazing. What you're doing is really really extraordinary. I can think of few voices that would be able to to match yours in the space. And so, the fact that you've stepped out front and are doing all this is really incredible. And just the knock-on effect with you getting involved in regulation and everything I think is really got We all got to We all got to save ourselves here because nobody's coming to save us. And I think we have to understand that that our food system is generating most of the problems we see in the world. Chronic disease, the burden on our economy, our $22 trillion debt, a lot of that has to do with the food we're eating and how it's causing chronic disease. It's burdening our our government, climate change that results from it, the environmental degradation, violence, poverty, injustice, malnutrition. I mean, it's all It just goes on and on. a web. It's all connected. That's the beautiful thing. It's like functional medicine. When you see how it's all connected and not in silos, you can actually fix one thing and everything gets better, right? Yep. All right, if you could have people make one change that would have the biggest impact on their health, what change would you have them make? It I It's pretty simple. I mean, eat whole, real food. I mean, follow the Pegan diet. Okay, my cookbook. I mean, it's pretty simple. I mean, I I I kind of laugh because I get paid a lot of money to tell people to eat real food and I'm like, you know, it's sort of obvious, right? I think it is a very effective answer. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you. Guys, go check out everything that he does. The books, he has so many, they're so good. You can literally pick them almost at random, but starting with the one that he just released, I think is a very good start. And then, be sure to check out his podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy with an F. Uh it is really fantastic. Everything that he does, I think is incredible and is leading everything in the right direction. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.