Change Your Brain Every Day - What Can I Trust? Here's How the Food Industries Trick You- PT. 1 with Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

With all the information and misinformation surrounding nutrition these days, it can be really confusing figuring out what to eat. In this first episode of a series with best-selling author Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen go behind the food controversies and tell you how to know exactly which foods really are healthy for you, and which ones just pretend to be.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Welcome, everybody. Just could not be more excited to share this week with you with our friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, who is a good friend, who's our co-author in the Daniel Plan, who, you know, both Tana and I think is one of our mentors. Definitely. as one of our mentors. He leads functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. He has his own clinic in Massachusetts.

He is the director of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He needs a little introduction. The author of a brand new book called Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? Because there's this controversy around it. He's someone we dearly love and look up to. So welcome, Mark. I have learned so much from you over the years. So it's so exciting for me to have you back.

I'm thrilled to death. Vice versa. You guys always are a beacon of insight and learning for me. I've read your books and just great stake in the ground around how to take care of our brains better, which is something we don't really think about very often. Right. We don't think about it because you can't see it. And that's what the imaging work we do i mean it just changed everything for me because i'm a psychiatrist i got no training uh on food none even though i'm convinced now 40 years into this that food problems cause about half of the mental health problems in the united states yeah it's amazing amazing. I mean, just a quick aside,

I'm giving a lecture at the Martin Luther King Rally, talk at the Riverside Church. Oh, interesting. And I was sharing some of the data around violent crime in prisons. And I saw this research that showed that by changing prisoners' diets in prison who are already violent criminals,

you could reduce violent crime in prisons by 56%. And if you added a multivitamin, you reduced the violent crime by 80% in prisons. What does that tell you about the effect of food on behavior and the mind? That's so interesting. Yeah, I read one study about recidivism and where they planted a program that included radically changing the diet. They actually decreased recidivism by over 24% or something crazy. It was just unbelievable that more people aren't jumping on board with this. So food is medicine or it's poison.

So why did you write food? What the heck should we eat? Well, like you and Hannah, I basically get asked all the time by my patients about all the nutritional controversies. Should I go keto? Should I be paleo? Should I be vegan?

What about dairy? What about grains? Are they bad? What about lectins? And people are going crazy trying to figure out what to eat, and it's getting worse. And there's a reason for the confusion, which is, one, we have corrupt science. And Marion Nestle is coming out with a book in October about how our nutrition science has been corrupted by the food industry. We have corrupt public health organizations that are

funded by Coke and Pepsi and a lot of the food company. You know, 40% of our main nutrition organization that provides all the guidance for our dieticians in America, 40% of their funding is from food industry. You've got the American Heart Association, 30% of their funding is from the food industry. They say Trickster for Kids are heart-healthy food, despite the fact that it has seven teaspoons of sugar in a serving, and red dye, yellow dye, blue dye, and you eat it, you die. It's got all this crap. And on top of that, nutrition science is not, even if it's done well, is challenging, because most of it's around population studies. We look at people over many years. We ask them what they eat every year in a questionnaire. We see if it's done well as challenging because most of it's around population studies you know that we we look at people over many years we ask what they eat every year in a questionnaire we see if there's a correlation but it doesn't prove anything it just shows there

might be an association and most of the associations in nutrition science are really crappy they're like a 20 increase like bacon four times a day every day i mean four pieces a day every day for your whole life will raise your risk of colon cancer by 20%. Well, that means your colon cancer risk goes from 5% to 6% on the background level in the population. But 20% in a correlation study is not really that significant. You know, smoking studies showed populations who smoked got cancer, there was a 20 or 30 times increase, not a 0.2 increase, right? You're talking like 100 times the increase, and you don't see that in nutrition studies. And there's limited randomized trials, although they're there. And so it's really confusing for people. And the media jumps on

the nonsense. Coconut oil is bad. Coconut oil is good. You know, it's like meat's bad, meat's good. It's like very confusing for the consumer. So I tried to go through all of that data, sort of sort out the truth, and what are the controversies and share what we know today, what we don't know, and then what are the controversies and how do we sort through them, and then what do we do? Like what the heck do we eat? So in each chapter I go through the controversies and also the take home of if you're going to eat meat, here's what you should know, here's what you shouldn't eat, here's

what you should eat, right? If you're going to have dairy, probably better to have goat and sheep than factory farmed cows because of the different casein, different levels of inflammatory foods and other things. So there's really practical ways at the end of the day to figure out what the heck you should eat. So where should someone start? You know, I think when I think of brain health, I think it's like super simple. It's three things. It's love your brain, avoid anything that hurts it, and do things that help it. And so I imagine for food, it's sort of like something similar. It's what should you avoid,

and what should you eat? Well, you know, you and I and Tana were very involved in the Daniel Plant at the Saddleback Church, and I came up with this really simple principle, which is if God made it, eat it. If man made it, leave it, right? If it was made in a plant, eat it. I mean, made in a plant, don't eat it. If it was grown in a plant, eat it. It's basically eating stuff that's just food.

What is food? Well, people think Lay's potato chips are food because they're made of potatoes, but they're not. They're a food-like product made by industrial food corporations. So it's really about getting back to just understanding simple foods. Like if it has a barcode or an ingredients list or a nutrition facts label, it's probably not food. It could be, but it probably isn't because an avocado just is an avocado. There's no ingredient list, right? Twinkies have 37 ingredients, only one of which is food, which is banana puree at the bottom of the list.

So can I simplify that for one second for people because they still get a little confused. Like you said, the laced potato chips, they've got chemicals. They clearly have chemicals and trans fat and all these problems along with them. Acrylamide, I mean, they're terrible. But when you want chips, I mean, I know, and I know you do this because you're my mentor, and I know we agree on this. If you want chips and you slice up a sweet potato and you put it in the oven and you, you know, you bake them that way, that's fine. That's a real food. Absolutely. So that's the difference. That's what we're talking about.

I was like, if you want French fries, make them yourself and deep fry them in beef tallow. Right, right. You won't do it very often. Right. The word chip confuses people, and we just have to be clear on if it's made in a plant where they're using chemicals, stay away from it. Yeah. I mean, listen, if you can basically recognize what it is, and you have all the ingredients

in your cupboard, then you can eat it, right? You don't have butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard to sleep on your vegetables, right? You have salt and pepper, right? But this is in our food. There's 3,000 ingredients that are food additives in our food. We eat three to five pounds of these a year, and over 90% have not even been tested for safety, right? Right. So do you remember when we launched the Daniel Plan, we went to my dad's grocery store and we did this. He's still bitter. We did this video of shopping in a food desert.

Yeah. He's still bitter. We went by the corn dogs. They have 29 ingredients and most of them you couldn't pronounce. Right. Right. So eat whole food. Well, the reason we went in your dad's store and you didn't actually tell him what we were doing because he couldn't let us

is because it was your dad's store but the truth is that every other major team wouldn't let you walk through this is bad this is toxic don't eat this you know and then we had to hunt and gather for the good stuff which is all hiding on the bottom shelves around the grocery store. And there were a lot of good things. And I still have those videos. They still do incredibly well on my YouTube channel. And, I mean, people just get, they're so sensitive. People are very emotional about what you say is good or bad for you.

It's very interesting. You can see where people's attachments are to food, where they're addicted to it. Well, yeah, it's true. And I think what happened, and I'm going to speak on this at the Martin Luther King rally, is that, you know, we think these are our customs, our traditional foods, or our, you know, family foods, and we get very attached to them. But, you know, the fact that, you know, you know, your flaming hot chips are your family food and staple doesn't mean they're a traditional food. You know, I met this Native American guy who was a chief, a Hopi chief, and, you know, very traditional Hopi elder

he was massively overweight he was diabetic and we were on a rafting trip to preserve the green river in Colorado which was being destroyed by the tar sands mining done by this big corporation in Canada that's sort of doing the pipeline all that and I said Howard you don't have to have this you can fix this you can't you know he said what do I have to do well you don't have to have this. You can fix this. You can't, you know, he said, what do I have to do? Well, you have to give up sugar and starch and all processed food. He's like, well, what am I going to do? We have our traditional Hopi ceremonies and we have our traditional foods that we have to have. I'm like, what are those foods, Howard?

He's like, cake, cookies, pies. I'm like, no, those are not your traditional foods. No, they're not. Right. Those are the foods that Americans gave them. Yeah. No, they're still letting the white man kill them. I got to consult to the Yakima Indian Nation. And when I just looked at depression, suicide, alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, like you guys are letting the white man kill you still. Oh, it's a second genocide. It's a second genocide.

It is. It's sad. I mean, they actually, I was shocked. They have the government commodities. They ship to the Native American reservations, which is white flour, sugar, white sugar, and white fat, which is Crisco, basically. It's very sad. I mean, that's what their basic foundational diet is. And I can actually feel their pain.

I grew up, I mean, look, frosting on cake is my crack. It's just, it's terrible. That's why I stay away from it still because I know growing up, that and my grandmother's homemade Lebanese, the flatbread, the pita bread type bread, she'd make that and we would just smother it in butter and literally pour either honey or sugar over the top of it and I grew up eating that because and but it was terrible my grandmother was diabetic she died of complications from diabetes so so they have to have a word you know in the Native American group they have a word for what people who eat this food is they have called kamad bod oh my god each

caused body these big fat fat, round bodies. That's great. Called commodity bods. So they even have an insight that this is really driven from the food. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And so we have populations that are consuming these foods, African-American, Latino populations are disproportionately sick, and it's really, and the poor, and the food industry just targets them and keeps them confused and down. And that's really the problem. So that's why I really wrote the book was to help people understand what we know in 2018 about food, how to actually navigate all the controversies, how to come up with some simple principles that

everybody agrees on that are good eating. All right. So stay with us. When we come back, we're going to go through the simple principles in food. What the heck should we eat? Use the code podcast10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com or on our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. Go to iTunes and leave a review and you'll automatically be entered into a drawing to get a free signed copy of the Brain Warriors Way and the Brain Warriors Way cookbook we give away every month. Thank you.