Change Your Brain Every Day - What Does a Doctor Eat in a Typical Day? PT. 3 with Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

Once we know the types of foods that are actually healthy for us to eat, the next step is to figure out what that looks like in daily eating habits. In part 3 of a series with Dr. Mark Hyman, best-selling author of the new book Food: What the Heck Should I Eat, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen talk about what his diet looks like on a typical day.

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 back. We're here with Dr. Mark Hyman, his new book, Food, What the Heck Should We Eat? Along with writing the Daniel Plan. One of my favorite books from him is the Ultramind Solution. I actually bought it for all the doctors here at Amen Clinics. It's really taking

a functional medicine approach to mental health. It has just had a huge impact on what we do here at Amen Clinics. You don't know this probably, but I love that you become friends with all of these guys because the minute that you bought that book and gave it to all of the people in the clinics, I'm like, oh, yay. I'm going to use your relationship with him to meet him because I've been following you for so long. Yeah, no, I meet rock stars. She doesn't care at all. I could care less. I'm a total geek. I follow you guys. So same with Dr. Perlmutter. No, I actually not. I had a very famous patient who was a rock star and she's like,

man, you're a rock star. I'm like, no, you're a rock star. She's like, okay, you're a doc star. I like that. A doc star. So yeah, interesting. That book was an accidental book. I call myself the accidental psychiatrist because I never intended to do that. And I just was treating people's physical issues. And as a side effect their mental issues got better I'm like oh my god what's happening here like I didn't understand this before and I saw people with ADD change I mean I have this example my book of this kid who was just so messed up and so sick and I

treated his physical issues and his ADD went away and his handwriting changed you know when you see this handwriting example, it tells you the brain is so responsive to its environment. That's what you teach, Daniel, that take the bad stuff that hurt your brain and put in the good stuff that helps your brain. It basically functions the same. We kind of do the opposite.

We treat people for the brain issues, and all of a sudden their diabetes gets better. Fibromyalgia. We treat whole people, which is what Mark does. But when we started out, we were doing brain issues, and we noticed, oh, my God, they're out of pain. What's going on? Bidirectional, right.

Yeah, it's fascinating. So before we get into your diet, talk to us about your docu-series, Broken Brain. I was in it. A number of my docs were in it. It was wildly popular. I heard from people all over the world. Tell us about it.

Well, you know, I wrote the Ultra Mind Solution like 10 years ago. So, but I really feel like it was sort of a download from the universe, like functional medicine, the way I see things, the whole paradigm. And it kind of wrote itself like in three weeks. And it's been, you know, a decade has passed and we've really, it's almost been the decade of the brain and you've been a big part of actually helping us know that and learn about

the brain. And I felt like I needed to kind of an update. And so I figured why don't I get, you know, 50 or 60 of the top world's experts in the brain, including you. And why don't we have a conversation about what is going on in the science today, about how we can fix our broken brains. And that's what motivated me, and it turned out to be wildly successful. We had like 640,000 people sign up for it all over the world, like you said, and had so many people say to me, like I was in a sort of Russian steam house the other day in New York, and he was like, this guy goes, thank you for doing that. I saw it, and I was able to get up my add medication and just you know it was like really

gratifying to see that so i think that's why i created it it's awesome all right what do you eat you know what do i know everything you know in a day what do you typically eat in a day so i typically focus on fat a little little protein, and lots of veggies, just as a theme. And what I do for breakfast, I have a couple options. So I have a couple eggs, poached, for example, or lightly sauteed. I slice up an avocado, slice up a tomato. I'm kind of lazy, so I don't want to take a long time cooking. So it takes me five, maybe 10 minutes at the most. Salt and pepper, olive oil. So I put, it's like fat on fat on fat. I fat from the eggs, fat from the avocado, fat from the olive oil. And then I put maybe vinegar on if I want, and that's my breakfast. Or I'll make a fat shake, which I put

in a lot of nuts and seeds. I don't put in like protein powders usually, although sometimes I might, like a bone broth protein powder, collagen protein, but mostly just nuts and seeds, almond butter, coconut butter, lots of berries, wild blueberries because they're lower glycemic, or blackberries, which are lower glycemic and more phytonutrient dense, a little macadamia nut milk, and that's my sort of breakfast. Or, you know, for for lunch i'll make a fat salad often i'm pretty lazy so i'll just like buy washed arugula washed cherry tomatoes i'll open up a can of sardines or wild salmon i'll throw olives in there without the pits like i'll just make it really easy for myself i'll put in some pumpkin seeds so i have fat salad which is fat from pumpkin seeds fat

from olive oil fat from sardines or, fat from avocados and the salad. And that keeps me going. And then for dinner, I'll usually have a piece of protein, maybe four to six ounces, grass-fed meat or organic chicken or a piece of fish. And then I'll have two or three servings of vegetables. So the meat is the side dish and the vegetables are the main dish. So I'll make like a salad again, or I'll have stir-fried broccolini, I'll have roasted mushrooms, I'll have, you know, sweet potato, so that kind of stuff. And it's pretty simple. And when I go out, I eat pretty much the same way. You know, I travel all over the world, and sometimes it's harder. But often you can eat really well, if you focus on, you know, low glycemic, I leave the bread, I leave the rice, I leave the starch, and it's just super easy. And when you go to a restaurant, you feel empowered

to have them adjust the recipes. Well, what I recommend to people is be in charge. Like, like I am the guy who picks the restaurant because, you know, I want to bet it. I look at the menu. I just have an algorithm that I go through my my head of like what is a safe place to eat and then I and then I find great places so they my friends know me as a restaurant whisperer and I like nobody's ever unhappy and I use my Zagat app to kind of screen through the quality of the food and it usually works sometimes it's bomb but usually it works pretty well and then I also bring you know food with me and you can be annoying. It's fine to be annoying. Say, I don't want this. I want that.

Leave this. It's like, you know. My sister was like that. She was like, can you hold this? Can you put that? I'm like, I told her, Carrie, I'll take you out to the most expensive restaurant in New York in only one condition.

You can't ask any questions, and you can't change anything on the menu. Oh, yeah. With that, forget it. So I remember when we were doing publicity for the Daniel Plan, and we were eating at a restaurant in New York, and the first thing they did was bring a lot of bread. And Pastor Warren was having trouble sort of figuring out what to do.

We'd done a gazillion interviews, and he was really hungry. And as soon as they brought the bread to the table, I went, take that away. Right. Because we make one decision, not 30. Because you develop a relationship with whatever crappy food is on the table. You're slathering butter on your body. What about dessert? Tana is a total sweet freak.

Actually, I'm worse because my grandfather was a candy maker. Yeah, I remember you told me that. And so sweet things are sort of like love. And at BrainMD, our other company, we make sugar-free, dairy-free chocolate and chocolate and coconut. What do you do for when you have a sweet tooth? Well, there's a couple of things. One, you know, there's a couple of things. One, you know, there's a couple of interesting rules. One is, you know, you have to frame it as a recreational drug, like as a treat. It's not a staple, right? And if your overall diet is

low glycemic, you can tolerate that depending on your biology. If you're on insulin, type 2 diabetic, you want to reverse it, no, right? Until you get fixed. So often we have what we call metabolic degrees of freedom. You lose those freedoms when you are assaulting your body with junk food your whole life and you have diabetes. So you have less freedom. If you're someone who's running five miles a day and doing yoga and eating basically a plant-rich, low-glycemic diet, a little bit of sugar once in a while is not going to bother you. So it's really the dose that makes the poison. And I think that what I recommend for people is to eat stuff not only, you know, on an empty stomach but mostly with a meal.

And the reason is when you have high-glycemic foods at the beginning of a meal, like bread, or, you know, on an empty stomach, it actually is far worse for you than if you eat it in the context of a meal. So having a little bit of dessert at the end of a meal may not be the issue. And then what desserts do you have, right? So last night I went to this vegetarian restaurant in New York and they had like roasted pineapple with macadamia nuts

and some like chickpea whipped cream. Like, now it was pretty, it was ended up being pretty sweet and I couldn't even finish it, but the pineapple itself, roasted pineapple is pretty sweet, but it's a fruit, it's full of fiber, It's got antioxidants. It's more nutrient dense. So I'll choose that. Chocolate is a great option. I think stevia probably is okay, although I'm not sure the whole world is in on that yet. But there are a lot of data that artificial sweeteners are really a problem. And I think sucralose

has just published the data on sucralose, looking at how it adversely affected cells and causing insulin resistance and lipid issues and activate all these disease pathways by using an artificial sweetener even though it had no calories. Right. So I'd rather have people have sugar. I'd rather have people have a little bit of real sugar, honey, maple syrup. That's okay. It's not the sugar you add to your food. It's the sugar that's added by corporations.

You know, the first thing I did when I started learning how to cook and writing cookbooks was figure out because it's one of the things people struggle with. A little bit of fresh organic berries, I create a sauce with full fat coconut milk. You take the fat off the top and blend it up with some macadamia nuts. It's sweet. And you put that over the top, it's actually really tasty. Really good. Or avocado gelato. Yeah, with some raw cacao and avocados. It's delicious. How do you sweeten that?

So I use a little bit of stevia or you can use, I'll use like a tablespoon of honey. It doesn't need much. People are really surprised with just a few drops of stevia. Children love that. Children love the avocado. Because the cacao makes it rich. What about juices? I was at a health club yesterday, and they had all these juices,

all these smoothies that were loaded with fruit juice. So talk to us your thoughts on fruit juice. Well, fruit is okay. It's in moderation if you're overweight or diabetic, because it does spike insulin a little. But it's not the fruit that's the problem. You wouldn't have five apples or six oranges,

but you can easily drink down one glass of juice. And I think most green juices or healthy juices often have huge amounts of sugar. If you go to the store and you look, here's a green juice, and you look at the label, it often will have more sugar than a can of Coke. People don't realize. They usually put a couple of apples in it or whatever, and that spikes it like crazy. I get mine with no fruit in it.

Generally. Green juice is fine. You can make kale, cucumber, celery, ginger, lemon, all that's fine. Then you don't like it. I make a smoothie, a vegetable smoothie. I'll throw in everything like celery, ginger, lemon, all that's fine. But then you don't like it. I make a smoothie, a vegetable smoothie. I'll throw in everything like celery, cucumbers, ginger, lemon, spinach, kale, whatever. Avocado, right. Put it in the blender, avocado, throw it in the blender and it's like a Vitamix.

They're expensive but it's the last blender you'll ever need, trust me. It's like the lawnmower engine on that. Right. All right. So kill the fruit juice vegetable juice is great um yeah what about snacks what do you do vegetable juice has a lot of fruit in it yeah well people think of tomato juice as a vegetable juice when it's really a fruit juice right and it has sucralose like like va for example has sucralose in it so you're like it's

just why do they put sugar in an already sweet drink? I think it's because, you know, Americans are so addicted to sweet taste that anything that doesn't taste sweet doesn't taste like food. So we have, we have, you know, for example, artificial sweeteners have a thousand times the sweetness of regular sugar. So our taste buds have literally been hijacked. I do these detox retreats. And after I don't tell people what I'm doing, I just say, we're going to eat really good food. It's amazing, delicious food. There's no sugar. There's almost no starch.

And after a week, we give them a treat, which is coconut cream, blueberries, raspberries, no sugar. They're like, oh my God, this is so sweet. Right. Blueberries start to taste sweet again. It's crazy. Right. Because-

You got to retrain your taste buds. And, you know, I think it's really important that people actually have whole fruit and not fruit juice. And especially when green juices have a lot of fruit juice in them, which is not great. Okay. One more. Snacks. What do you do for snacks? Now, I know you and I both take stuff with us when we travel.

I have a whole bag just for food. Yeah. I basically have a day bag just for food. Yeah. I basically have a day's worth of food in my bag at all times. As I joke, I never want to be in a food emergency. And most of the snacks in America are carb snacks. They're sugar, they're chips, they're starch snacks. I have protein and fat snacks in my bag. I have little packets of cashew butter and almond butter.

I have nuts and seeds. I have bars. I have my Tonka bars I love. They're bison bars. Yeah. I like those too. I have protein-fat, very low glycemic. I'll use sometimes the Primal Kitchen bars, which are sort of gooey, but they're collagen and nuts and seeds. So I find that I don't really have to worry. Sometimes I'll have like jerky sticks. I'll have beef jerky, grass-fed, or I'll have salmon jerky, and I'll keep that in my bag. I have elk jerky I bought in the Denver airport.

They have this great jerky there. It's called Climax jerky, and they have elk and bison and deer. Like it's pretty awesome. And, you know, I put that in my bag, and it's always there. Like I'll show you right now. I have it. It sounds like my bag actually. It's really funny.

This is my buffalo jerky that I have in my bag. I keep all the time like in my bag, actually. It's really funny. This is my buffalo jerky that I have in my bag. I keep all the time in my bag. I have protein and fat snacks that are pretty dense and pretty awesome, and they just keep me going. I don't have to worry about being in a food emergency, so I have to go eat some crap because sometimes there's nowhere else to get food and just jump. One of my favorite things is my coconut wraps.

My bag sounds just like yours, but I keep coconut wraps in there because they're basically fat and fiber. And so I keep those in there with the little nut butter packs. Just spread that on there, roll it up. It's like the best. And on your website, you actually have a list of snacks. And it sounds just like yours. So stay with us. When we come back, we're going to talk about the food fight and food politics.

I'm excited about this one. 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.