Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #159 Dr Mark Hyman on Getting Real About Food

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Today’s conversation is all about food and my guest is world-renowned medical doctor, Dr Mark Hyman. Mark has spent decades in clinical practice and we share a real passion for empowering our patients with practical information that they can use to improve their health. As well as his clinical work, Mark is an educator, author and campaigner and is committed to changing policy for the betterment of public health. Last time I spoke to Mark back on episode 98 of the podcast, we spoke about how the food choices we make can impact our health, the environment and climate change. We continue that conversation in today’s episode by talking about the content of his brand-new book, The Pegan Diet. Despite the title, this is not a diet book – it outlines the core principles of nutrition that underpin good health and can be followed by anyone, whatever your dietary or cultural preference. In our conversation, we take a deep dive into concepts like food is medicine, personalised nutrition and the unnecessary conflict between many diet ‘tribes’ – who Mark and I believe actually have more in common than you might think. Mark explains that scientists have identified upwards of 25,000 different phytonutrients, not just in plant foods but also in grazing animals, which our bodies can process and use in complex ways. He explains how our ultra-processed Western diets are contributing to the chronic disease epidemic and that our current food system isn’t just driving poor health, it’s one of the biggest causes of climate change. We also discuss the importance of reducing our food waste, the need for regenerative agriculture and the harm caused by factory farming. Mark’s simple, back-to-basics approach is within all our reach. It’s a myth, he insists, that eating well takes time, money and effort. He argues that the food industry has hijacked our kitchens and convinced us we need to outsource our meals, and it’s time to take back control. I always get a lot from my conversations with Mark and this one is no exception. I love his message that we can all be part of the solution – for our own health, that of society and of the planet. I hope you enjoy listening. Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/159 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

So your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet. So I wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues. I would double down on eating what we've talked about today on the show and it will have a profound effect on your immune system. People don't understand that within a very short time, a couple of weeks maybe, you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health. The smartest doctor in the room is your own body. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Today's conversation is all about food and my guest is the world-renowned medical doctor,

Dr. Mark Hyman. Now Mark has spent decades in clinical practice and has a real passion, like myself, to empower his patients with practical information that they can use to improve their health. As well as his clinical work, Mark is an educator. He's an author, having already written an incredible 13 New York Times bestsellers. But he's also a campaigner and is committed to changing policy for the betterment of public health. He's previously testified before the

Senate Working Group on healthcare reform and participated in the White House Forum on prevention and wellness. This is Mark's second appearance on my podcast. He first appeared back on episode 98 to talk about how our food choices impact our health, the environment, and climate change. And we continue that conversation in today's episode by talking about the content of his brand new book, The Pagan Diet. Now, despite the title, this book is not actually a diet book. It's a book that outlines the core principles of nutrition that underpin good health and can be followed by anyone, whatever your dietary or cultural preference. And in our conversation, we take a deep dive into concepts like food is medicine,

personalized nutrition, and the unnecessary conflict between many dietary tribes who both Mark and I believe actually have much more in common than you might think. And Mark explains that scientists have identified upwards of 25,000 different phytonutrients, not just in plant foods, but also in grazing animals, which our bodies can process and use in complex ways. He explains how our ultra-processed Western diets are contributing to the chronic disease epidemic and that our current food system isn't just driving poor health, it's one of the biggest causes of climate change.

We discuss the importance of reducing our food waste, the need for regenerative agriculture, and the harm caused by factory farming. Now a term that Mark uses a lot in our conversation is feedlot meat. That is a US term and essentially is a form of animal feeding operation which is used in intensive animal farming. Mark explains how toxic this practice is but just a quick note to say that this is much more of a problem in the US compared to the UK, where farming practices are considered to be very different. Mark has a simple back to basics approach that is accessible for all of us. It's a myth he insists that eating well takes time,

money and huge amounts of effort. He argues that the food industry has hijacked our kitchens and convinced us we need to outsource our meals. It's now time to take back control. I always get a lot from my conversations with Mark and this one is no exception. I love his message that we can all be part of the solution for our health, for society and for the planet. I hope you enjoy listening. for society and for the planet. I hope you enjoy listening. Now, on to my conversation with Dr. Mark Hyman. See, that's the whole point of the Pagan diet is that we let our ideology trample over our biology. In other words, we let our ideas about what we should do get in the way of what our bodies need us to do and what they prefer. So, you know, as a

theorist, you can say, well, everybody should be vegan or everybody should be paleo, everybody should eat carnivore or eat raw or keto or whatever, all those crazy diets. And as a doctor, and you know this, as a doctor sitting in the office seeing thousands and thousands of patients are running even more umpteen blood tests, lab work about what's going on with their biology, you become very humbled when you realize that we're not all the same. You know, a study can show X or Y. It might be applicable to that person in that study in that day day but not necessarily to everybody and so really it's about finding what works for you a precision personalized nutrition and the

pecan diet in my book i talk about how do you eat in a way that's personalized how do you figure out what is right for you and among many other things but it's really driven off of the two foundational principles of food is medicine and personalized nutrition and when you combine those two uh it's a recipe for a great life yeah you mentioned ideologies and that's really what food tribes have become haven't they you know they start off in a place of wanting to help people but nutrition has become very divisive now it's become actually quite toxic now and quite scary for people to enter that world and you know was it always this way or is it a reflection of everything in culture and the world these days that we've become polarized and everything's

black and white you know tell me how the landscape has changed well that's a very interesting question i went to a talk once when I started Cleveland Clinic by Peter Orszag, who worked for Obama. And he showed these graphs of voting records in the Senate and Congress in the 60s, the 70s, 80s, 90s, to show what was happening. In the 60s, there was this complete overlap of Republicans and Democrats. And as time went on, these sort of, these Venn diagrams sort of split and they're two separate, completely camps. And I think, you know, very much in the same way in nutrition, we've had this divisiveness that is really so unnecessary because we agree if we look at the science on a few basic principles. But when I started out of this, you know, there was the vegetarian diet for a small planet, whole foods kind of movement.

And then there was everything else. There wasn't, you know, 14 different fad diets or approaches. Now, they all have a role, right? Keto is a therapeutic diet I use in my practice. So if people, you know, want to be vegan, we can figure out how to do that. But the truth is that most of these dietary approaches are focused on how do we create health? How do we help the planet? How do we do something good? There's no bad intention. And they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet, which is 60% processed food. So I would say, let's stop fighting each other. Let's agree on some certain basic ideas and principles. And let's go up to the real problem, which is our

processed American diet that's killing so many of us. And it's causing six out of 10 people to have chronic disease and around the world that kills 11 million people a year. It's driving the huge economic costs and makes us susceptible to COVID because of our poor health and poor immune function when we're overweight or poor metabolic health. And it's, you know, the economic burden of it. And it's just everything has to do with, with, um, our current food system, which is driving so much of our global crisis, even things like climate change, which people don't connect with us, but it is current food system which is driving so much of our global crises even things like climate change which people don't connect with us but it is the food system is the number one driver of climate change around the world what drives you mark because you have written so many books now

and we spoke about a year ago or so or just over a year about your last book, Food Fix, which is brilliant, right? And what is it that drives you to keep producing content to help people in all these different corners around the globe? I'm trying to keep up with you. Every week there's a different book and a new podcast you see it's some cover of some newspaper it's awesome i'm kidding that what really drives me is is um is this is this desperate almost evangelical feeling like i have found the truth and no one's listening and i need to tell the world about it and what i mean by that is you know when i was sick in um you know 35 years ago i was really sick with chronic fatigue syndrome from mercury poisoning and i was desperate to get better i wasn't you know um

getting any help from traditional doctors and i heard jack bland speak who's the father of functional medicine and i think this guy's crazy or he's a genius and i better figure it out and so i started applying it to myself i started using these principles on myself and started healing myself I started using my practice and healing patients and I I was sort of shocked like wow your rheumatoid arthritis went away when you did that or your migraines went away you've had you know three times a week for 20 years or your bowel or diabetes just went away or memory got better if you had alzheimer's I'm like what is going on here? And so I began to sort of really deeply dive into this and not because I was trying to, you know, write books or do anything. I just, because I felt that there was this incredible

secret of functional medicine that, you know, didn't, didn't fix everything, but it was such a better way of addressing health and disease. And that so many people were suffering needlessly, millions and millions needlessly, that we're really missing a very straightforward and easy solution for most part. So I feel like I just get so frustrated when I see people unnecessarily suffering. I mean, listen, a lot of suffering, you can't do anything about you. You know, my parents died last year or a couple of years ago. COVID is causing great tragedy, economic hardships. There are certain things we can't do anything about,

and they're challenging. But this is easy. I mean, within a few days, and you know this from your work, in a few days, people have health transformations. Their diabetes can get better in a week if if people are aggressive with their diet so we see we see radical transformations we just as traditional doctors we don't really know about it and that's really what's driven me for the last 35 years it's this overwhelming drive to help tell the world about this incredible gift that

we've learned about which is how the body actually works rather than how it was taught to us in medical school yeah i mean you mentioned food is medicine and it's something you've been talking about for many years it's you know it's written within the brand new book as well and i love i'd love to hear your thoughts on that i don't know if it's the same in the States or not, but there is a growing number of doctors in the UK who are sort of rebelling against that and saying that food is not medicine. And so what would you say to that? We're doctors, we do medicine, we don't do food, right? So yes, I get that. I mean, you know, we were trained to not just to ignore food, but to explicitly determine that it wasn't related to the conditions that our patients were suffering from. We were

taught that diet had nothing to do with autoimmune disease or cancer. I mean, maybe if you eat too much fat, you get heart disease or too much sugar, you get diabetes, but that was about it. So I think we're really in this paradigm shift right now where where science has allowed us to dive into what are the components in food and how do they interact with their biology in ways that we've never really understood and it turns out you know we know that what's in food right it's protein fat fiber carbohydrates vitamins and minerals and that's true but that's not all that's in there. It's all this other stuff that turns out is really important. It may not be causing an acute deficiency disease like scurvy, but if you don't have enough of these powerful medicines and food over your lifetime, your own biology doesn't work quite well. And for example, when you get grass-fed animals, they can forage on a hundred different plants and they eat this plant to get this phytochemical and this medicine. They eat this plant to get this nutrient. And over time, they

really are able to modulate their health through a robust array of a wide variety of different plant foods. It turns out there's 25,000 plus molecules in food that are medicines, these phytochemicals. And the Rockefeller Foundation is spending, I think, $200 million trying to map out the periodic table of food, of phytochemicals, and how they interact with our biology. And the concepts of these chemicals in our biology is really quite interesting. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a big mouthful. But essentially, it means that we've evolved symbiotically with these plants and have adapted our biology to use their compounds for our own benefit, which is, you know, we do this all the time. We, you know, we take a vitamin

from vitamin C from an orange. We don't make vitamin C, so we use it for our benefit. Well, it turns out that, you know, if you want your detoxification system to work well, you need certain classes of compounds in broccoli family called glucosinolates and sulforaphane. It turns out if you want to clean up your mitochondria and recycle all the old parts so you have healthy aging, you might need a compound that comes from pomegranate called urolithin A. Maybe if you want to regulate your gut and have no damage to the barrier, and it can lead to autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, and you want to grow a bacteria called acromancy,

that bug likes certain things like cranberry, pomegranate, and green tea. Or maybe you have these zombie cells running around from your white blood cells that have been damaged from various kinds of insults over years, and they're causing aging. And maybe if you eat these phytochemicals, there's over 132 phytochemicals from this buckwheat that Jeffrey Bland has rediscovered that are somewhere 100 times more potent than any other food source. And you eat these, it kills the zombie cells, these phytochemicals. So the question is, how do we begin to incorporate all these principles into upgrading our biology and healing disease? Yeah. I mean, just hearing all those powerful compounds that exist within foods, you know, it's mind blowing, really. And I'm sure we're

going to discover more. There's probably plenty out there we don't even know yet. We don't even know the names, what they do, but that time is coming. But you know, I think about this concept, food as medicine, and philosophically, I think in a culture where 80% of what we see is driven by our collective modern lifestyles, I kind of feel philosophically as doctors, I feel unless we give it the same priority and call it medicine, it's not going to have that same impact, right? With our patients, so we prioritize the drugs and say, oh, we've got to give it that weight. But then culturally, I feel, well, hold on a minute. Well, I grew up in an Asian family and an Indian family where we grow up with the concept of food

as medicine. You know, if we're not doing so well, or we've got a cold or something, our mom might give us more food with turmeric in and, you know, with the South American cultures where they talk about the concept of food as medicine. So I kind of find, I find there's a slight arrogance when we try and say food is not medicine. And it almost, there's almost this kind of attitude of, oh, you know, we now in Western medicine, we figured this out in 2021. We figured out actually that food is not medicine. Okay, great. I'll go and tell my grandparents that and everyone else who's done all that research for years. Do you know what I mean? I kind of feel,

I feel it's a no brainer. Yeah, it's pretty striking. You know, there's a quote from R.D. Lange, who was a psychiatrist back in the 60s, that scientists can't see the way they see with their way of seeing. In other words, paradigms are really hard to break. When you're a doctor and you're saying, well, eat better and exercise more, or eat less and exercise more, and it doesn't work, you go, well, nutrition doesn't really work. But that's not really helpful. As I was saying, why don't you just fly to fly to london well how do i fly there do i need a plane like how do i get there do i swim you know

like and and what's what's really striking is that is that most doctors don't know how to apply food as medicine so if you have a headache and i would say well i'm going to give you like one milligram of aspirin you think it's going to work right it's like you need 600 milligrams of aspirin to get your headache to go away so we said well you know food didn't work well it didn't work because you didn't know the right medicine which foods to use you didn't know the dose you didn't know the frequency you know like it's really sophisticated that's why theekin diet isn't really like a fixed diet. It's really a set of principles that allows you to sort of eat in a way that meets your dietary

preferences and cultural preferences, but also helps you to figure out which are the foods in each category that you should be eating that have the most medicine. And what are the principles that we might want to learn about personalized nutrition or how to eat like a regentarian, which we can talk about, or how to eat for your mood or longevity or how to feed your kids or how to eat in a way that's affordable. So it's a really practical guide. It's sort of one of those things you can kind of refer back to over and over again to see exactly what's the digestible bit.

It's sort of like little snacks of information that allow you to really get the point and and follow through on it um there's a ton of theory i've written about before in the science but this this is there's a lot of science in it but it's really very very practical book yeah and on the book i i agree it's it's really good uh digestible read for people who want to learn more about foods the various properties more about foods, the various properties and different foods and the various principles. As you say, it's called a vegan diet, but it's kind of not really a diet in the conventional term, right? It's the way we think about diets. It's really not that. As you say, it's 21 foundational principles, which frankly,

are going to be helpful for so many of us yeah i mean that's sort of the joke of it all that's like when we're in these different diet wars and diet camps we're all fighting with each other and i that's how the this whole name came i was sitting on a panel with a vegan cardiologist and a sort of a millicent paleo doctor and they were fighting and i'm like hey if you're paleo and you're vegan i must be peeing and everybody cracked up and i thought okay well there's something here and i went home and thought about it as i was flying home and i was like wait a minute they're they're identical they're exactly the same principles except for one which is where you get your protein which is animals or grains and beans otherwise and no dairy no sugar no processed

food whole foods vegetables good fats you know all, all the same principles except that one. And the truth is they have far more in common with each other than the traditional American diet. And so I began to sort of realize, well, maybe we can all come together with a movement that actually helps to, you know, crystallize what we do know and then personalize it. And that's really the whole point of the vegan diet. It's sort of an undiet. It says, wait a minute, if you're focusing on, I mean, the traditional American diet, yes, that's an easy sort of win. But even if you're, you know, keto or vegan, I mean, how do you be a healthy vegan? I see people running into trouble with that all the time.

And so, you know, I talk about how to do that in the book. So I think it's really kind of a fun little sort of kaleidoscope. And it's actually someone has said to me after, Dr. Hyman, there's no chapter on weight loss. And I said, that's right. I said, there's no chapter on weight loss because I never tell patients to lose weight. I just don't, I don't actually think it works. And I don't think it's helpful advice. And I think what I teach them is how their body works, how to work with it. And the weight loss is automatic. I don't, I don't say starve yourself, restrict calories and eat these foods, don't eat with it. And the weight loss is automatic. I don't say starve yourself, restrict calories, eat these foods, don't eat these foods. This is really what is going to

help you thrive. And people just have the most amazing results. I mean, literally 100 pounds, 50 pounds, 75 pounds. It's really pretty amazing, but it was never a goal. And I think it was sort of shocking to people that there's a book on diet no no no mention of weight loss but that's how it goes yeah no absolutely so there are all these principles in the book i want to sort of dive into some of them uh and you mentioned eat like a regeneratarian and i think that would be i think it'd be a good place to go into um before we do that though, Mark, can we just sort of set out the foundations of the vegan diet? You sort of touched on a few of those principles. So for people who are coming to your work for the first time and are trying to understand, well, what is the component? Is it paleo? Is it vegan? What is it? What are these sort of foods that you're recommending how would you sort of simplify the concept for them yeah it's it's really pretty easy i mean it's embarrassingly

easy actually because it's like people aren't going to really be able to sort of disagree with anything because it's all pretty common sense and straightforward so the first thing is you know really use your food as your pharmacy so when you are eating think of what you're eating as medicine are you eating a french fry it's fried in rancid oils that's you know got 14 different ingredients in it uh that is going to kind of fry your arteries and you know cause all kinds of problems or you're going to eat let's say a wild blueberry and it has all sorts of phytochemicals and so forth so how do you how do you begin to sort of think of food as your medicine? The second is you want to eat a lot of medicine. So eat the rainbow, which is essentially all the colors in plant foods are where all the benefits are. So the more deeper, darker colors and pigments, that's where all the phytochemicals are.

And also think about your diet as mostly vegetable. Like it should be 75% non-starchy veggies, which is really what the majority of your plate should be, a little side of protein. When you're picking any kind of category of food, whether it's beans or grains or nuts and seeds, it's important to understand which one's in each category the best. For example, peanuts might have aflatoxin, which you want to stay away from or be careful when you source it.

Or you probably don't want to eat a lot of the gluten and grains here, but if you're having heirloom grains like rye or maybe heirloom wheats, that might be okay because they're less inflammatory and so forth. Or maybe you have gluten issues and you shouldn't eat at all. Or which beans are the best beans or which seeds are the best seeds and so forth. And then I have a whole section there on meat, which is I think a little shocking for people, but it's talking about how to eat your meat as medicine.

And some of the research on this is just stunning that these grass-fed animals have high phytochemical contents, just like plants, and they have all these health benefits. So we're learning more about it, but this is out of Duke. So whether you're eating any kind of protein, how do you pick the best eggs or chicken? How do you understand what are the right fats to eat? How do you think about dairy, which is, you know, really often a big problem. And the modern cows we have are pretty harmful. And then there's some, you know, just guidelines on how to eat in a way that's good for you, but not only good for you, but good for the planet and good for society. Like eat like a vegetarian or, you know, think about sugar is fine, but it's like recreational drug.

You know, how do you personalize your nutrition or detox or eat for your gut or eat for longevity or mood or or how do you afford what you're what you're doing in a way that actually is makes it doable because it doesn't have to be expensive so it really guides people through a way of thinking about food that it will last them as a roadmap for their life you mentioned meats meat there, you mentioned phytonutrients. So let's just start off explaining what phytonutrients are. And then I agree that that selection on meat is really fascinating. And meat has become one of these controversial items as well. And one thing I do know, Mark, like myself, you're very respectful of people's

individual choices, their ethics and how they choose to live and their cultural beliefs. So yeah, just walk me through phytochemicals, but then also let's then go from that into meat and how meat potentially might be medicine for some people. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and

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I mean, before we get down in the weeds, I just want to say that, you know, my personal goal is to live healthy and vibrant to be 120 at least. So I don't want to eat a meat or anything else if it's going to hurt me. So I took the time to really dive into all the research. I locked myself away for a week with, you know, a stack of stack of scientific papers you know four feet high and went through it all and these are the i mean there's a hundred thousand papers online on meat on the national library of medicine but if you just find the major ones you can find you know what is it saying what is it not saying really there were three issues one was um moral and ethical um and and the other is in climate environment and the last is health.

And so they're all kind of smooshed together, right? So if you want to be taming the planet, if you want to be healthy, and you want to do the right thing morally and ethically, you should be a vegan. And everybody should be vegan, because that kind of deals with all that. But unfortunately, it's not so simple. And, you know, kind of getting back to like what is meat and phytochemicals, it also sort of speaks to the theme of the book, which is meat is not meat is not meat, right? If you're eating a feedlot cow, it's different than eating wild elk in terms of your health, the well-being of the animal, you know, the effect on the environment and climate. So people need to understand that quality matters in every aspect of what you're eating and that's the whole premise of the pecan diet is how do you pick quality in each area so in terms of meat you know most of the meat that's eaten and

consumed and even that we have done research on is feedlot industrial meat which is fed all kinds of weird garbage uh and is is really full of of antibiotics, and it's mostly corn. But wild or grass-finished animals can forage on hundreds of different plants, each with additional properties. And those chemicals from the plants, these phytochemicals, we call them phytonutrients or phytochemicals, phyto means plant, they get absorbed and they start to become part of these animals' tissue and you eat them. You actually get for example for example goat milk if the goats are foraging on the shrubs you can have the same level of catechins which is the powerful anti-cancer antioxidant detoxifying compound in green tea as green tea so so it's like drinking green tea when

you're drinking goat's milk that's fed on certain bushes. That's just an example. But we're learning more and more about these powerful medicinal properties and how it affects your biology. And if you look at kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat, in a study in Australia, they found that when they eat the feedlot meat, same portion, they got inflammation. When they eat the kangaroo meat, their biology was totally different. They actually reduced the inflammation. their biology was totally different they actually reduced the inflammation so that's kind of striking to me when you see you know eating identical amounts of food kangaroo beetlot profoundly different effects on biology on that mark in the in the spirit of the book which is um you know pegan bringing in you know paleo and vegan and where the similarities are and where do we all agree, I think one thing we

can all agree on, no matter what side you sit on and the dietary wars potentially, is that factory farming is a bad thing. Would you agree with that? I mean, listen, the moral ethical issues really have to do a lot around that. But, you know, factory farming is an abomination. It's bad for the cows and the animals that are raised in these confined animal feeding operations. It's bad for the environment. I mean, just Tyson chicken alone is the second biggest polluter in the United States after U.S. steel. And the health of the animals, the moral ethical issues and the health of the

meat that it produces or lack thereof so i think you know it's sort of a triple whammy for for the planet for the animals and for humans and it should be banned and there's no question about that and i do i do think that there's a evidence that uh it's moving in this right direction that there's a bill produced by i think um, a couple of senators who put forth the idea that we should get rid of factory farming by 2040, which is, you know, 20 years from now. So I think we're heading there. But I think, yeah, it's an abomination and we should never eat factory farming. So I think the other consideration around eating animals is what is the effect on ecology and climate.

And I think we know that factor farming is a huge contributor that traditional farming and is is probably the number one contributor to climate change when you add in deforestation soil erosion factor farming the animals food waste transportation refrigeration all of it end to end probably half of all climate change and and so the question is you know um is it is it all animals that will do that and i think that there's a whole movement of regenerative agriculture which sort of focused on a really simple idea which is not the cow it's the how right so it's not it's not the fact that you're actually raising animals it's how you're doing it and the truth is that most of the land we we now

farm is used to grow food for animals um about 70%. And it is soy and corn, all the sort of stuff that we feed them, that's highly different than their normal diet, which is grass. And it creates all sorts of secondary problems, changes the quality of the meat and so forth. But the way we grow these foods actually destroys the soil, uses tons of water from irrigation, causes a collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity because of use of pesticides

and herbicides. The nitrogen fertilizer runs off into the rivers and streams and oceans and kills hundreds of thousands of tons of fish every year. So we really have this sort of destructive agricultural system that often used to produce food for animals. And then that's just a bad idea because the way we grow it is the number one cause of climate change and how we do that. So I think we need to sort of change what's happening with the animals and put them back where they belong, which is on rangeland. And 40% of our land of agriculture says, oh, we should just grow vegetables. Well, you can't. 40% is not suitable for growing crops. It's only suitable for grazing. So what do you do with that? Well, you have to put animals on it. Turns out that they will build soil, they'll conserve water, they'll reduce it

or eliminate the need for pesticides or besides, and they will draw down carbon out of the atmosphere because the soil gets built and produce better quality and even more scalable than traditional agriculture right now for animals. So we have this potential and everybody's talking about it. There's movies like Kiss the Ground, there's books on it. There's conversations that are happening in Washington, D.C. now about it. So I think we're on the precipice of a real sea change around thinking about how we grow food in a way that's regenerative. And meat has got to be a key part of that. You can't have an ecosystem on a farm that actually builds soil without actually having animals poop and pee and,

you know, put their saliva on the grass, which makes it grow. It's like actually a growth factor for the grass. So we want to keep building roots and building soil. And that's really through the kind of reuse of animals rotating through a farm ecosystem. So I think we have to sort of think about all these pieces. Now, the last piece is health. So if people are thinking, oh, well, meat's going to kill me. I don't want to eat it. It causes heart disease and cancer. Pretty much you can go and find any study that, you know, supports any belief that you have and you can ignore all the rest. But when you look at the totality of the evidence and you look at the kind of ways that what studies were done, you know, I'm not convinced that meat is

bad for you. In fact, you know, there are many larger views recently that sort of refuted that idea and looked at all the data. And when it turns out, when a lot of studies were done on meat, they were population studies. They looked at groups of people over time. They really can't prove cause and effect. They say, well, what did you eat for the last 30 years? Oh, you ate more meat than this guy. Okay, you had more heart attacks. It's probably the meat. But you can't prove that. It doesn't create proof. And it may be something else right when you look at the habits of the meat eaters in those studies because this was done when we were told meat was bad so if you ate meat you you were basically somebody probably didn't care about their health right so yes it was

true you smoke more drink more ate less fruits and veggies more processed food more sugar you know didn't exercise so didn't take your vitamins so of course you had more more disease was it the meat or was it all the other stuff so and then when they looked like as i mentioned when they looked at people who shopped at health food stores um who both were were eating healthy food some ate meat in the context of a whole foods diet others just didn't and there was the same reduction in death in both groups by half and when you look at cultures like the messiah you know live on milk and meat they live very long they have very healthy but they also do something really interesting was they actually

it's not even necessarily how you how you raise the animals it's maybe how you prepare the meat if you're cooking it on a high char grilling that's probably not good it's slow cooking with tons of spices those spices have phytochemicals that alter any kind of harmful reactions that can happen from cooking meat. So there's a lot of incredible science around how we actually can include meat as a helpful part of our diet. In fact, probably for most of us, we probably need to, especially as we age,

because it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein. Yeah, I mean, super fascinating. we age because it's very difficult to build muscle without adequate protein yeah i mean super fascinating and this is one of those very emotive and divisive topics uh meat plant-based eating you know veganism these are things which are becoming people are becoming very you know very solid in what they, very sort of entrenched in their views, to the point where even saying something like that, Mark, is potentially going to really inflame some people who believe that actually everyone on the planet should only be eating plants. And, you know, something you said right at the start of this conversation, Mark, and it's

something that's been very clear to me from observing you for many years, is that you are a clinician. You have seen tens of thousands of patients. And I'm certainly, I'm only 20 years into my clinical career. You've got a lot more clinical experience than I do. But within that time, if you are a practicing clinician, and you have seen thousands of thousands of patients, they teach you, you soon, very quickly learn that I cannot subscribe to one ideology, because the patients are proving that ideology wrong all the time. Different people are coming back saying, oh, really, that's working for you. Well, I didn't think that would work, but this is working. And so, you know, if somebody is 100% plant-based

and they're listening to this conversation or watching it on YouTube and they're thinking, well, you know what, people shouldn't be eating animals because actually, you know, it's compassion to animals. We shouldn shouldn't be killing animals what would you say to them listen i like i said i have monks and abbots that are my patients and i don't force them to eat if it's against their religious or spiritual or moral beliefs and i think that's a perfectly fine choice that anybody can make um however i would make sure that people fully understand that if you're a human being or living on this ecosystem called planet earth that there are consequences to everything including any type of agriculture so unless you're gathering all your wild foods you're basically in a destructive act right so so most traditional agriculture was they they destroy natural habitats they till the fields they use machinery to harvest

your cabbages or your grains or your beans or whatever you're eating. And guess what? There's a lot of animals that live on in those ecosystems. Rabbits, moles, mice, you know, birds. I mean, 50% of the bird species have been killed through agriculture in this country. 75% of our pollinator species are gone. And there's been estimates that, you know, just growing vegetables in this country for people to eat healthy food, you know, and plants vegetables in this country for people to eat, healthy food, you know, and plants kills over 7 billion animals a year. And is the life of a rabbit any less valuable than the life of a feedlot chicken or a pig or a cow? I don't know. So we're just going to have to be real about, you know, what we are doing in terms of our behavior as humans. We can't

avoid the cycle of death and life and birth and renewal. I mean, it's just sort of what we're doing. And I think that fooling yourself to think that you're not part of that, even if you're at distance from it. It's like, well, people say, well, I'm not going to go shoot an elk, but I'll eat a cow. I think we were so divorced from the sources of our food and what we're eating. But I think if we kind of drew the chain back, we'd see that, you know, we're all involved in this essentially destructive agricultural system, whether we're eating, vegan or not. And that may be a problem. And, you know, there may be sort of other levels of destruction.

For example, if you're looking at these brand new fake meat companies, and some of them are okay. looking at these brand new fake meat companies, and some of them are okay, but some of them are like using GMO soy, which is highly destructive to soil, uses tons of glyphosate that creates harmful effects on humans, destroys the microbiome of the soil, uses lots of irrigation and causes all sorts of issues as a consequence of growing these GMO soybeans

that we're using for plant-based meats. So I think we still have to kind of get the whole picture instead of just kind of looking at a sliver of the truth from here and there. Isn't what you just said there that we're divorced from where our food comes from, isn't that, it strikes me that that's at the heart of this problem that, you know, I grew up completely divorced from where my food was coming from. You know, it arrived in packets. You know, if you go out, let's say to an extreme, to a hunter-gatherer tribe, they know where their food is coming from. They know that's their raison d'etre every day is to acquire food to live.

Their diet is dictated by geography, by the climate. They don't have the choices that we've got, whereas we're just disconnected. We're disconnected from so much in we're just disconnected we're disconnected from so much in the world but we're disconnected from our food supply which leads to these ideologies and these kind of these sort of theoretical concepts that actually when you go out into nature maybe they're not quite as clear-cut as we might have thought. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, this, the divisiveness, and I don't understand it. I just, you know, I'm like, hey, we're, we're all here just trying to do our best. And let's work together to find out a way to live better for ourselves, live better

for the planet and, and the world. So I think I think everybody has a good intention, for sure, when they're trying this or that or different approach. But the advice I'd give to people is don't let your, you know, ideology trample your biology and end up in trouble. And I've seen many people who do this. I think I should be keto and that's what I need to do. And then it doesn't work for them or something. I should be vegan. And it's like, well, it doesn't really work for them.

So I think we need to be honest about it and actually listen to our bodies. As I say, the smartest doctor in the room is your own body yeah and that's the theme i get from the pegan diet mark is that you know you you are you're trying to give the reader the ownership those those those foundational principles say hey look this is the science these are the principles play around with it a little bit find out what's working for you right that's kind of you know because you know we can talk about therapeutic diets for example so um you know let's say somebody comes to see you in your clinic and they've got type 2 diabetes right you may i guess approach that differently from someone who just generally

wants to eat better for their overall health and their longevity or is it the same no it's totally different i mean if someone comes in with diabetes they're they're it's like they need a rescue mission as opposed to someone who's just generally fit and healthy can have a more robust resilient metabolism will be able to tolerate a wide variety of foods for example if i'm riding as opposed to someone who's just generally fit and healthy, can have a more robust, resilient metabolism, will be able to tolerate a wide variety of foods. For example, if I'm riding my bike three hours a day, I might tolerate a lot more starch. I might tolerate more sweet potatoes or rice or even a little sugar. But if my metabolism has screwed up for 30 years of eating sugar and soda and starch, and I can't even regulate my blood sugar and my insulin goes sky high, then I'm really carbohydrate intolerant. I should really avoid those.

So it's really about looking at what is each person's biology doing? What's their gut doing? Do they have a leaky gut? Do they have food sensitivities? What is their metabolism like? Are they tend to be more carbohydrate intolerant, kind of pre-diabetic spectrum? Or are they more sort of a lean kind of guy who sort of maybe doesn't do that well on saturated fat. So I think we have to really understand that we're all so different. And the dietary approaches can be customized based on what really is needed. And I talk about that in the book. And there's many other resources in functional medicine that are available to help people understand how to personalize diets if you have an autoimmune diet for example there is an autoimmune diet that

actually works really great for colitis but that's a very specific diet it might be very different than i'd give a diabetic for example or someone with alzheimer's right so it's very it's very important to understand it's personalized yeah there's a theme in the work over the last years, Mark, that there's a real big mission I sense from you about talking about food, not just for individual health, but for wider population and planetary health and the environment and the climate. climate clearly you went in a deep dive in your last book food fakes on that um but that theme still is is very present in the pegan diet it's something that is clearly very important to you you mentioned regenerative agriculture um in the book you also talk about food waste and just how problematic that is um i wonder if you could expand a little bit on food waste and what that's doing for the climate sure you know i mentioned that you know when you look at the food system end to end it's probably the number one source of greenhouse gas

emissions estimated 30 to 50 percent or more and and one of the biggest contributors is not just soil erosion and factory farming animals and deforestation is food waste. We throw out about 40% of our food around the world. If we actually would have to grow that food again, we'd need to landmass the entire size of China. We throw out $2 trillion over more food every year. It's different reasons in the developing world versus developed world. The developed world is mostly what we It's different reasons in the developing world versus the developed world. The developed world is mostly what we throw in our trash in the house. And the developing world is often lost in the food chain because there's no refrigeration and it's often difficult to transport food. But when you think about it, when you look at

food waste, just for example, if it were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. That's how bad it is. If you think, well, those factory farm animals and the methane and that's causing greenhouse gases from the cow farts. Well, guess what? The greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, from the off-gassing of the rotting vegetables, which produce methane, is three times as much methane, three times as much methane as cows. So if you're vegan and throwing out all your vegetables that you let rot in the fridge, or you maybe are just drunk over food scraps, that actually adds up. And it is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. I encourage everybody to compost.

We should not be, I mean, in certain countries, you cannot, you cannot throw out your garbage. In San Francisco, you can't throw out food waste. You have to put in compost. In the airports, there's a compost bucket. It's not that hard to do. It's just another track. We have recycling, we have garbage, and we have like compost. And it can be a huge benefit.

And it's something that the government's working on across America and across the world. There's governments that are really focusing on food waste. In France, I think you can't throw out your garbage. You have to recycle it. Or if you're a company, you can't just throw your food waste out. And you do, you get a fine. I think you get a five-year jail sentence or something, a big fine. So it's really important. And in Europe, they have the anaerobic digesters which they don't have so much here but um there's ways to handle it not just you know for example you making compost but there are large companies that can be mandated to actually deal with food waste differently so in massachusetts they're like hey if you make a ton of food waste

a week from your you know grocery store restaurant or whatever you can't throw it out you have to do something with it you have to give it to the farmer you have to compost it to something and and so they the company was developed called vanguard renewables that built these anaerobic digesters basically like a big kind of furnace they throw in the food scraps they throw in manure and it kind of cooks and it provides electricity for 1500 homes. The dairy farmers who are losing money are now making 100 grand a year. The Vanguard Renewable sells the excess electricity up the food, up the up to the grid. And so basically it's a win win win for everybody. And there's only five of them here.

There's like 17000 of them in Europe. So there's a lot of ways to solve the food waste problem. But it is it is a huge problem. And I think i think also you know we're so strange in this country we only want to eat perfectly shaped vegetables or perfectly shaped fruit i mean i don't know what it's like in the uk but you know if there's funny shaped things they just go they go in the garbage like if it's a funny shaped apple or funny shaped carrot or if it's got two legs or you know it's like it's like a potato that's not perfectly round or but it's it's like what we were saying before isn't it that we we're divorced from where the food comes from because if you had grown it

yourself you would know that they're not all perfectly round beautiful um that's half the problem isn't it we're presented shiny pestic-laden fruits and vegetables in stores. And we, from a young age, think that an apple should always be perfectly round and ripe and red. You know, it's interesting that when I was a kid, my mom had a garden. And we had fruit trees in the backyard. And we lived in the middle of suburbs. And in America, during World War II, and I know it was like in the middle of suburbs. And in America during World War II, and I know it was like in the UK,

but we were implored to grow our own food. And so 40% of food in America was grown in victory gardens, literally in people's backyards. So I think we need to get back to figuring out how to have a better, closer relationship to our food. If someone's listening to this, Mark, and they've never thought about their food waste before, because it's just not the cultural norm, I think, in many countries still. Certainly, I think in the UK, it's, yes,

we're talking about it, some of us, but we've not been grown up, we've not grown up with that as a concept, as something that we do. So people might be listening and go, yeah, okay, so if something's rotten in the fridge, I might just throw it into my regular dustbin. Can you explain to them why that's problematic and what they should be doing instead of that? Because yes, there's societal, there's things that companies can do, but individuals can play a role here as well. Absolutely, yeah. And there's legislation helping with compost and there's companies that are made to change their ways because of these regulations, which is all a good thing. And there are cities that have ordinances for compost.

So that's all happening. for compost so that that's all happening but at individual level you know it's one of the most powerful things you can do to sort of help address climate change is just don't throw your food scraps in the garbage start a compost pile now if you live in the country it's easy just you just can build like a little two by four little box and just throw the stuff in there and you can throw in leaves or garden waste or whatever in there and then over time it just like i'm really lazy about it but over time it just turns into this incredible soil There's, there's ways to do it in a more sophisticated way, but it's pretty simple. And if you live in the city or an urban environment, there are Amazon or other places you can buy these, these home composters where you just put the food scraps

in and it's a little thing. It doesn't smell in your house. And then it turns into soil and you can drop it off at the local farms. I mean, even in New York City, you can drop off your compost scraps in the local farmer's market. So there's definitely a way to sort of help encourage people to start to think about doing this. Because, you know, this is one of those things, particularly in the developed world, where we have control over it. And the food is often most of it, 30 plus percent is wasted in the home. is who often most of it, 30 plus percent is wasted in the home. It just strikes me that there will be some people who are fighting on social media about the climate and what we should be eating and what we shouldn't be eating, but at the same time be throwing out their food waste into their dustbin. And it's, you know, and I don't say that with, I'm not judging

anyone for that or criticizing. I'm just saying sometimes we just can't see the perspective, can we? That actually, you know what? This will make a huge difference if I could just start doing it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's other ways to join in. For example, there's a company, a couple of companies, one's called Imperfect Foods, which basically takes all the ugly food from farms that are going to be thrown out and sells them, you know, direct to delivery. So you can get funny shaped carrots and potatoes and veggies that are kind of weird looking, but they're the same veggie.

They just taste the same. They're just different shape. And there's other companies as well that do the same so they there's a lot of ways for us to get involved whether it's you know buying ugly food or whether it's uh composting or whether it's just being more careful or using various strategies because a company called appeal that creates a second coating on the plants vegetables so they last longer or fresh paper which is actually like this is a an indian woman who developed this concept because she would go, she went home to India and she got very sick from, I think, traveler's diarrhea or something. She ended up getting her grandmother to give her all these like spices and herbs and fixed her whole system.

running vegetables and she put this herb infused with cloves and all these you know and medicinal herbs into this paper and put you put in the drawer of your of your fridge and the vegetables last two or three times longer so there's all kinds of innovation happening but you can all be part of the solution one of the sections in the book is about children. Feed your kids what you eat. And as you talk about the environment, you talk about compost. Of course, these are great things that we can start to instill in our kids, which means that they're much more likely to be engaging with that as they get older. But it's also about what we feed our kids. And you were, like myself, very passionate about this. And I love that. Feed your kids what you eat. When did that start to become

so controversial? When did we start having kids meals and happy meals? I mean, what happened when we actually give our children different foods to what we give ourselves? what we give ourselves. Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of

happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method

that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal In it you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes But the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely

fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. It's true. I mean, you think like what kids eat in Japan, they eat raw fish and seaweed, you know, and what kids eat in, you know, India, they eat spicy curries. Right. And I think we've kind of gotten away from what our traditional knowledge and wisdom is, and we feel like we have to feed our kid Go-Gurts and Lunchables and snack packs and goldfish,

and I don't even know what else. Like, I'm so out of that world now, and it's a giant marketing scam, and it's frightening to think, you know, you wouldn't feed your kid, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke, but you't feed your kid, you wouldn't feed your dog a Big Mac fries and a Coke, but you'd feed your kids that. You wouldn't feed your dog chicken nuggets and fries or pizza, but you would feed your kids that. And I think we really have to take a look at, you know, what we're doing to our future generations, because the level of malnutrition in the youth is so high, and not just vitamins and minerals, but just their overall poor quality diet leads to poor

intellectual development violent behavior inability to actually have good academic performance to to to be a bit of security as they get older because if you know they're overweight or unhealthy i mean they're less likely to get a good job or get married or be happy and if you're overweight as a kid your life expectancy is 13 years less. So I think, you know, my joke in my house was, you know, there was no menu. There was only two things on the menu, actually take it or leave it. You know, they're going to eat it or you're not. And my mother taught me that. She's like, well, you know, when your sister didn't want to eat her eggs for breakfast, she didn't make her eat them.

But she gave the same eggs to her at lunch and at dinner and figured out she was pretty hungry. She ate them and never refused food again. So I think we coddle our kids in that way. And, you know, I had a friend who fed his kids macaroni, cheese and pizza until he was 16 years old. I'm like, what are you thinking? Like, this is not good. And, you know, the kid has all kinds of health issues and consequences for that. So I think we have to understand that we need to cultivate our kids very early to real food. We should be making our own baby food in a blender or Vitamix. We can give kids the food that we're eating from the table. We can maybe mush it up a little bit.

But it's really pretty important to feed them real food. mush it up a little bit but it's really pretty important to feed them real food uh and and when you think about the these baby foods which are full of sugar and the formula which is you know given these kids and sometimes you know mothers can't breastfeed but you know there there's lack of the key things that we don't even know we're missing for example like dha for brain development or oligosaccharides which are these powerful um undigestible starches that feed good bugs that aren't in formula. They're only in breast milk. So we really kind of have to get back to getting our kids sort of out of the lure of the food industry,

which is tough because, you know, they spend billions of dollars in ads trying to hook these kids. I think in Facebook, there's over five billion with a b as you know on on social media for various junk food things which are often invisible they're called stealth advertising it's not like it's a commercial on tv and you're so when you're my kids not watching tv but i get guarantee they're probably on their phone or their computer and they're getting all this stuff served up to them so i you know getting your kids eating right from the beginning is so important. Getting them in the kitchen. You know, we had a book called

Pretend Soup, a cookbook, which had all these yummy, delicious, healthy vegetarian recipes we used to make together. And I have a picture of my son literally sitting in a salad bowl in the kitchen or, you know, a video of him making, you know, like he's like maybe a year old and he's like just making a huge mess with all the flour and my daughter's, you know, like he's like maybe a year old and he's like just making a huge mess with all the flour and my daughter's, you know, cooking, but I got them cooking. I got them planting gardens. I got them harvesting. And now they're both very much, even though they strayed a little bit, very much focused on healthy eating. Yeah. I think it's hard for parents these days in so many ways, you know, you mentioned the stealth advertising but i think also you know

parents feel so busy they're they're rushing around trying to do so much obviously we're talking in a time of this uh you know these sort of lockdowns and these restrictions so certainly here in the uk at the moment there's a full-on lockdown across the entire UK. Most people are at home. Parents are really struggling with trying to homeschool their children and do their jobs. And I think it just highlights the pressures that many parents feel. And then when you add in some stealth advertising, it seems just too hard for people to actually change things. Or, you know, a lot of people say, well, my kids won't eat that stuff, you know, because I mean, you know, they've been eating other foods. And it's really hard, isn't it? When they'd be conditioned into eating

more processed foods, it can be quite hard that initial transitional phase to try and change that and get them back onto real unprocessed whole foods oh it can't be worse than that i mean some of these foods are highly addictive so these kids will literally go bonkers uh fits tantrums banging raiding the kitchen i mean these stories it's like whoa it's like a crack addict trying to find the crack in the kitchen uh and so you know if you make your home a safe zone you can't control what your kids do once they get the car keys or go out, but you can definitely control what's at home. And so I think it's important to make your home a safe zone. There shouldn't be anything in there that

the kid can eat that's going to harm him. I mean, you wouldn't leave medicines out, you wouldn't leave poisons out, you wouldn't leave all these things that we worry about. But the truth is that what we feed our kids every day is far more harmful and deadly than any of these other things in terms of the impact on the population. So I think we have to really sort of as a family come together and go, what do we want? How do we live the life we want? And how do we meet the values that we have as a family? And a lot of that has to do with health and well-being and being able to do the things you love. And that has a lot to do with food. And so when people sort of connect the dots, they can begin to really start to just sort of bring in a different way of

thinking and being around food. What you said before just reminded me of when I was a kid, Mark, you know, my parents both came over from India to the UK. I was born and brought up in the UK and my brother and I and my family, every other summer, we'd go to Kolkata in India and spend six weeks there with our cousins and our family. And I remember two of my cousins, I've got this vivid memory. I must've been around, I don't know, eight years old, something like that. And they were all in their school uniform, dressed, ready to go out to school for the day. And they'd be sat down at 7.30 in the kitchen with a full plate of rice, dal, vegetable curry, two or three different vegetable curries, like a proper real food meal that they would have in the evening. Parents were giving that to them because it's like, okay, here you go.

Here's your breakfast. Then you're off to school for the day. And then when I started to go in my early 20s, not with the same cousins, but I noticed how things had changed that a lot of my family were, that there was marketing from various, a lot of Western companies actually were marketing, you know, bread that's easy to toast in like 30 seconds and cereals. And I saw, you know, over 10, 12 years, I saw that change. Yeah. But literally you would change because that was an aspiration. It was like, oh, that's what they're doing in the West, the aspirational Wester. That's what people eat when they're busy and they get out. And it's amazing how quickly through advertising and through perception that these age-old habits that we've had for donkey's years can just change.

So we're starting to have these high sugar, highly processed breakfasts, and that's considered normal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, the whole invention of cereal was one of the biggest scams propagated on humanity. invention of cereal was one of the biggest scams propagated on humanity. I mean, when you think about it was Kellogg and others, we wanted to take, you know, grains and turn them into cereals, but the, you know, the cereals we're eating now are mostly sugar. You know, like 75% sugar, some of them in terms of when you look at the carbohydrate, they might have six forms of sugar in them. And they are what think of quote as a healthy breakfast when we feed our kids you know cereal and milk is a good breakfast but it's really toxic and it leaves them nutritionally depleted

it makes them gain weight it causes them to sort of probably not be able to focus and you know often be hungry before lunch so i i joke often joke i say I'm a cereal killer. I don't think we should be eating cereal. We need protein and fat for breakfast, not sugar. For a family or a parent listening, Mark, who thinks, okay, I get this. I want to change how I feed my children and feed myself. But they feel it's too hard, right? They feel, I don't know where to start because this is how we've been doing things for the last four or five years. Dr. Hyman, tell know where to start because this is how we've been doing things for the last four or five years yeah dr hyman tell me where to start what would you say to them well it's like anything else you know if you don't know how to do it it's hard right but last night i had some friends over and um you know i was busy up until they showed up and

um you know i threw some sweet potatoes in the oven an hour and a half before they came, let them cook. And then we made really simple salad. I made some stir fried mushrooms and some grass fed steak. And literally the whole thing took 15 minutes and it was super easy. So I think it's really about skill and it's about knowledge. It's about understanding how to navigate the grocery store, navigate your kitchen, to have the right tools in place, to have things ready and easy for you. So I think it's often, you know, we don't know the skills of how to cut vegetables or how to shop or how to prepare food or how to cook. And so we really have lost these arts and it's important for people to start to learn them back. But once you do,

it's really pretty simple. And I, you know, I have no problem feeding myself really well and have for years, even in a very, very busy life. So I think in the book, I do talk about how do you, how do you make it easy? How do you make the habit stick? How do you make it affordable? And I think the messaging that we've gotten is that it's, it's complicated. It's difficult. It's time consuming. It's expensive to eat well. And it's just not true. I mean, when you look at the data on affordability and whole foods, you know, maybe it costs 50 cents more a day. Other studies show it may not cost any more at all.

So I think we have to sort of understand that the propaganda of you deserve a break today, you know, leave the cooking to us, you know, outsourcing our cooking to corporations is killing us. And we need to take back our kitchens. They've been hijacked by the food industry. And we need to take back our kitchens. They've been hijacked by the food industry. And we need to start enjoying at home. And I think COVID has had that silver lining. A lot of people are starting to cook at home. And people are getting a little trouble because they're not necessarily thinking they want to eat healthy stuff. They want to bake. But you don't want to

have that COVID-19 or the quarantine 15 pounds. You want to make sure you stay metabolically healthy. Because if you don't, you're more risk for getting sick from COVID and more risk for dying. So I think, you know, we have to sort of get over this myth that it's difficult, time consuming, hard, and just understand that there are some basic skills you need to learn. And it's not hard. I mean, I had a family of five who lived in a trailer, disability, food stamps, never cooked a meal in their life, all seriously overweight. The father was 42 on dialysis from kidney failure because of diabetes. I mean, type two diabetes at 42. And the son was, you know, a hundred pounds overweight. It was

pretty, pretty bad scene, desperate to do the right thing, desperate to lose weight. He couldn't get a new kidney if he didn't lose the weight. So they were all struggling, and they never cooked a meal. So I said, let me not give you a lecture, but let's go to your house, and let's go to shopping, and let's get some simple food. And I gave them a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget, and we made food from inexpensive ingredients that are whole foods. You don't have to have a 70 grass-fed ribeye steak but you can have you know ground turkey that's organic so we had ground turkey chili uh we had stir-fried asparagus from the salad roasted some sweet potatoes they didn't have knives or cutting

boards and within within a few minutes i realized this is fun and two when they ate it they were like this is delicious and someone's like do you cook like this with your family every night? And I'm like, yeah. And then I was like, I don't know what's going to happen. So I gave them a guide on how to eat well for less. And then I gave them my cookbook with some recipes. And I said, you guys can do this. And on the way home, I bought him a cutting boards and knives.

And I sent him to their house online. And the first week she texted me back, we lost 18 pounds. The mother lost 100 pounds in the first year. The son lost 50, gained it back and went to work at the Bojangles, which is a bad fast food store. But then ultimately ended up, lost 138 pounds going to college, into medical school. I wrote him a letter of recommendation because of a simple meal that we cooked together that changed their lives, right?

Just think about that. It's not like you need, you know, 10 years of culinary education. Just here's how you chop things. Here's the principles of stir frying, baking, roasting, like it's just really simple. And it was just so powerful for me to have that insight that people don't really know. It's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of knowledge and people don't really know it's not a lack of desire it's a lack of knowledge and skill and again it's not that hard to to get those skills so i i think uh you know we're really only one meal away from a real food revolution jamie oliver really has talked a lot about this you know if we can just get a couple people to cook everything's going to change and i agree yeah it's it really is something, isn't it?

The skill of cooking that, I don't know when it was, when we probably couldn't have lived without the skill of cooking until, I don't know, 30, 40 years ago. If you couldn't cook, you probably didn't have access to takeaways and all these cafes to give you that food. You had to figure it out. And I do want to, I touched on this in my last book, Mark, I touched on this, the rise of the influencer and the Instagram influencer. And again, nothing wrong with that at all. But sometimes I feel that people who don't know how to cook and they're a bit scared and a bit intimidated. And then they follow food influencers and they see this gorgeous meal that is picture perfect. So we think they

just whip that up in their kitchen. We don't realize that a lot of food photography is set up over two, three hours to actually get all the lights right. So it actually looks the right way. And then they think that their standard um leg of lamb broccoli and potatoes is like somehow a failure compared to what they see around them so there's there's that myth to sort of bust as well i think absolutely you know it's so funny that it is it is um you know listen if you want to be a five-star chef, fine, a Michelin chef, I'm not looking for that. I'm looking to make simple ingredients into delicious food. And it just doesn't have to be hard. It just doesn't have to be hard. If you get real food and good ingredients, the food itself

just tastes good. You know, I just made a beet salad. I just took the, and beets aren't that expensive. I just cut the beets, boiled them, chopped them up, and then put in like olive oil, lemon, dill, parsley, cilantro, salt and pepper. It was just a delicious beet salad. It's super simple. And the beet greens, I chopped them up, stir fried them with little onions and ginger and had this beautiful, you know, beet green side dish of cooked greens. And it's easy. Like it's just you don't need fancy recipes.

I mean, I've written five cookbooks, but like honestly, it's like i don't really use a recipe book it's just once you learn the it's like learning the scales you know once you're a musician you've gotten really good at the scales you can play anything right so i think that's sort of how it how it works with cooking as well we're having this conversation at my dinner time mark and you talking about those foods i can i can feel my stomach juices just uh you know i know you've just woken up it's morning time but i'm i'm getting super hungry as you say that so me too i'm like i'm like it's breakfast time it is breakfast time but um you mentioned covid and um you know looking after your diet and the way you live was important 18 months ago was very very important already it's almost been heightened in the last 12 months

in terms of what we're seeing around the world. And in some ways, this could be the biggest wake-up call to say, hey, look, you know what? It is time to really start putting our wellbeing, our health, our lifestyles first. I mean, what's your experience been of that? And can you talk about some of those real risks with covid and how your food choices how um you know how it can impact that potentially

yeah i mean i i i would hope that we're going to have a wake-up call around this run again but i'm not hopeful i don't know what it's like in the uk but in america it's like crickets here except for bill maher who screams on television about how we need to face the fact that the reason in America we're overwhelmed by COVID is because we're metabolically so unhealthy. 88% of Americans have poor metabolic health, which means that they're like in the spectrum of prediabetes, which means they have belly fat, which means they have inflammation. And so when the COVID lands on them, it's almost nine out of 10 Americans, they're like a sitting duck. And so it's almost nine out of ten Americans they're like a sitting duck and so it's like putting gasoline on a fire and all of a sudden you get this cytokine storm

that ends up killing people and and and wherever you are on that spectrum we know that the poor metabolic health is a driver for for for really bad outcomes with that said people don't understand that within a very short time a couple couple of weeks maybe, you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health. And I'll just give you a quick example. We had a type 2 diabetic on insulin for 10 years, heart failure, angina, liver, kidneys failing. I mean, she was a mess. She had a body mass index of 43, which normal is under 25, over 30 is obese obese she was in the severely obese category uh 65 years old and um taking insulin every day and tons of medications uh within three days of changing her diet like three days she was off her insulin completely within three months she was off

all her medications and her metabolic parameters were all normal in blood sugar, cholesterol, blood pressure, everything, kidneys, liver. And so it doesn't, it might take 30 years to get there. It can be very quick to get back. And even if you don't lose all the weight, I mean, if you're, for example, gastric bypass patient, and you have diabetes, you get your gastric bypass, within a week or so, your diabetes is gone. You're still very overweight because it takes a little longer to lose weight but your diabetes is gone so your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet so i wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues i would double down on eating what we've talked about today on the show the pegan diet or just a similar whole foods philosophy approach and and it will have a profound effect on your

immune system yeah i just wanted to touch on you one of the principles is around habit change one of the chapters which is uh super interesting and there's a few things in there i really liked but one of the things that you wrote was friend power is more important than willpower and you shared how at the cleveland clinic how you guys use groups and how powerful that can be. And so, you know, for people listening who have tried to change before, struggle to do it by themselves, I think this could be quite a helpful tip for them, right? Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, for years I studied the minutiae of functional medicine. I was sort of a nerd about the biochemistry the genomics

the physiology the microbiome i just want to know every little aspect of our cellular functioning and bio all this sort of nerdy stuff and i was really good at getting people healthy if they did what i tell them but often you know we know in medicine that half of people don't fill the prescriptions they get and half the do don't take them so you know we know in medicine that half of people don't fill the prescriptions they get and half the do don't take them so you know the doctor writes prescription for statin 25% of the people take it and 75% don't so that's not a good odds and I think in in medicine and nutrition and what we're doing is maybe even harder so uh you know I had this epiphany a number of years ago well over 10 years ago um when I went to Haiti and met Paul

Farmer, who was able to deal with TB and AIDS in one of the worst places in terms of healthcare and poverty in the world, Haiti, not by better drugs or surgery or technology, but just by the power of community. He called it accompaniment and he trained thousands of community health workers to help each other, accompany each other to health and make sure they took their medications. Because we know how to cure TB and AIDS or essentially treat them using the right cocktails and medications. But these people didn't have a watch. They didn't have running water. They didn't have often a place to be. I mean, so it was dealing with a lot of these fundamental, we call structural violence issues, the social, economic, and political conditions that drive disease.

We see that in this country, you know, with food swamps and food deserts. I'm sure it's like that in the UK too. And I think we have a tremendous sort of deficit of understanding how we really create an environment that supports people to health. And so the big epiphany for me was, okay, I know how to change biology, but I'm going to fail unless I understand how to change behavior. And so I realized at the same time when Paul was treating infectious disease using this model, I was like, wait a minute. I said, wait a minute. Chronic disease is also contagious, right? Obesity is also contagious. You're far more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family is overweight. We know that your social threads that get you are maybe more important than your genetic threads in determining your health outcomes. We just know this from the science.

So if that's true, you know, if you're bad behavior, it goes along with, you know, bad habits. In other words, if all your friends are, you know, eating at McDonald's and smoking and drinking beer and having Coca-Cola, you're probably going to be doing the same thing. But if all your friends are, you know, drinking green juices and going to yoga, well, you might be doing that. So there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure that we all are subjected to because we're social animals. That's how we live. We have to be social or else we would die as humans. We're not like a wild, you know, lion that can roam around by himself or whatever and just eat whatever he wants. We just, we're not, we're not like a wild, you know, lion that can roam around by himself or whatever, and just eat whatever he wants. Like we're, we're dependent on each other. And so what we know is that it's much more effective to use friend power than, than to use willpower when you want to change behavior and particularly for chronic

disease. So, so I kind of had this experiment that we did with this church in Southern California where we got 15,000 people to sign up for a six-week healthy living program, a sort of faith-based wellness program. And it was striking what happened. People just did so well. They lost over the course of a year, they lost a quarter of a million pounds, probably like, I don't know how many stone that is, but it's a lot of weight. And I think we saw that the power of these community-based solutions was so massive. And it wasn't even

an expert. They had these groups that they had in the church that were met every week to support each other. So they would meet in six to eight people and would have these little learning sessions. And we just sort of substituted in the curriculum for the healthy living. And they support each other. They encourage each other. They held each other accountable. They had jogging for Jesus, you know, like all kinds of stuff that they did to actually do stuff together. And that was really was an insight for me that was like, wait a minute, this is how we have to change medicine. And so at Cleveland Clinic, we're doing the same thing. And we're about to publish our data in the British Medical Journal, actually, soon, where we show that the group visits, the community support was more effective than one-on-one visits with a functional medicine doctor, which were more effective than with a traditional doctor.

So we've got some interesting data about the power of this model to really accelerate change, the speed of recovery and getting better but also the adherence and the the level of change so i i'm excited about using this model and we're trying to scale this up around the country and and use this power of community i call it love is medicine so food is medicine love is also medicine yeah i love it mark mark you you've just you know you're someone who has been dedicated to the cause of empowering and inspiring people, both patients and physicians, all over the world for so many years. I can't imagine what it's been like for you. I'm sure you've faced all kinds of opposition at various times, but you're driven in that mission. And it's fantastic to see. It it's very inspiring i know for many uh you know for many of my colleagues or myself we see what you have been doing and how you have paved the way for many of

us to start spreading our messages i want to publicly acknowledge you for that i say thank you and just to finish off mark you know it's as i say it's the peak of diet is a brilliant book i think it really helps to simplify nutrition for people. Some really, some core principles there. I always love to leave my listeners with some actionable tips. So we covered a lot of ground today. Phyto-nutrients, we covered the climate,

regenerative farming, kids, all kinds of things. But just to bring it all down for people at the end, this is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. What are some of your top tips for people listening to the show right now? Well, I try to synthesize this at the end of the book and sort of getting started. And it's just some simple things that are easy to remember. First, when you're going to eat something, ask yourself a simple question. Did God make this or did man make it?

If you don't believe in God, is it a nature made? So did God make an avocado? Yeah. Did he make a Twinkie? No. If God made it, you can eat it. If nature made it, you could eat it. But if man made it, you probably don't want to eat it, right?

Second is a similar idea is, you know, try not to eat food with labels or if it has a label make sure you read very carefully what the ingredients are if it's broccoli it just says broccoli if it's a piece of chicken it's chicken if it's an egg it's an egg if it's an almond it's an almond it doesn't have a label or nutrition facts and so most of the food i like to use without labels now sometimes you know if you want to buy a package of nuts it might say a label on it and then it has your little nutrition facts on it. It might say salt or something. Or if you buy a can of sardines, it might say olive oil and sardines and salt. That's okay. But just try to avoid foods

with labels. The next kind of principle is if you don't have it in your kitchen cupboard and you can't pronounce it, you probably won't want to eat it, right? So if you have a jar of butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your stir fries probably not but it's otherwise known as bht banned in most of europe but available here in the united states and it's a it's a carcinogenic preservative so you don't want to eat that stuff also when you go shopping don't go down the middle of the aisles stick around the outside where there's just real food vegetables and the produce and the dairy and the meat section uh if you're eating just focus on plants like i i always focus on two or three servings of plant dishes at each meal whether it's just syrup asparagus or mushrooms or

salad so last night i had beets we had mushrooms i had salad and we had sweet potato so we like four four vegetable dishes and you know a small piece of meat on the side. So that's why meat is a condiment or a condiment. And fat is so important. So remember to eat good fats. Olive oil, avocados are my favorite, but there's other good fats too. Make sure you eat a lot of phytonutrients. You want to pick your medicines and your food. So learn about some of the colors and what they have and try to eat like the rainbow as a way of getting phytochemicals. It's an easy thing to do. And, you know, enjoy nuts and seeds and, and, and certain beans are fine. So I just enjoy your food. I mean, it's just gotta be fun and delicious and pleasurable. So I wouldn't really get crazy about

following a particular thing. I don't, I don't count calories. I don't count carb grams, fat grams, protein grams. I don't, I don't think of any of that. I just think about what I eat. If you focus on what you eat and quality, you don't have to worry about how much you eat, literally. I mean, I could eat a giant bowl of salad until I couldn't move and nothing would happen, right? So I think you can find out what your natural rhythm is in your biology by just getting

on real food and then and then actually just focusing on quality and if you focus on quality all the rest takes care of itself diseases weight metabolism all that yeah love it mark mark thanks for coming on the show thank you for all the great work you continue to do and uh yeah i look forward to the next time we get to have a conversation. Thank you, my friends. Great to be here. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. There were a lot of tips there from Mark. And as always, I would encourage you to think about one thing that you can take away from this episode and apply into your own life. For me, it's definitely been a good reminder on the importance

of reducing food waste and composting what is not being used. If you enjoyed listening and found the content useful, please do take a moment to share it with your friends and family. Doing so, especially if you send them a personal note at the same time, is something that has benefits for you both. It's going to make your friend feel good. It's also going to make you happier because you've done something kind for somebody else. It's most definitely a win-win all round. Before I sign out today, I do want to let you know about Friday Five. It's my brand new weekly newsletter that contains five short doses of positivity. It's a practical tip for your health. It could be a book or an article that I found inspiring, a video that I found uplifting,

a quote that's caused me to stop and reflect. Basically anything that I feel you would enjoy receiving. It started at the start of 2021. Your feedback has been incredible. I keep getting messages from you on social media saying how many of you are enjoying it and that you are really looking forward to receiving that email every Friday. If that sounds like something you would like to receive, you can sign up at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. And if you do sign up, I hope you enjoy it. Don't forget, if you are new to my work, I have written four books now that are available to buy all over the world. They cover all kinds of different topics like

mental health, nutrition, sleep, stress, behavior change, and weight loss. So do take a moment to check them out. They're available in paperbacks, eBooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. A big thank you to my wife for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering. Have a wonderful week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.