Habits and Hustle - Episode 401: Dr. Mark Hyman: Why Only 6.8% of Americans are Healthy + His Recommended Anti-Aging Solutions

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

Is 93.2% of America metabolically unhealthy? According to Dr. Mark Hyman, yes. In this Habits and Hustle episode, I am joined by functional medicine pioneer Dr. Mark Hyman, to discuss America’s declining health due to our ultra-processed diet and lifestyle choices. We dive into why we need simple changes to food quality, his practical approach to supplements, and controversial topics like Ozempic. We also discuss an exclusive discount code for listeners to get early access to Dr. Hyman’s comprehensive health testing. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy. He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Doctor’s Farmacy with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN. What We Discuss: (00:00) Longevity, Aging, and Wellness (10:16) Functional Medicine and Inflammation Reset (15:47) Protein, Strength, and Cardio for Aging (25:25) Personalized Nutrition and Health Monitoring (35:23) Comprehensive Personalized Health Testing and Insights (48:00) America's Obesity Crisis and Chronic Disease (01:02:02) Body-Mind Connection in Longevity …and more! Thank you to our sponsors: AquaTru: Get 20% off any purifier at aquatru.com with code HUSTLE Therasage: Head over to therasage.com and use code Be Bold for 15% off  TruNiagen: Head over to truniagen.com and use code HUSTLE20 to get $20 off any purchase over $100. Magic Mind: Head over to www.magicmind.com/jen and use code Jen at checkout. BiOptimizers: Want to try Magnesium Breakthrough? Go to https://bioptimizers.com/jennifercohen and use promo code JC10 at checkout to save 10% off your purchase. Timeline Nutrition: Get 10% off your first order at timeline.com/cohen Air Doctor: Go to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSTLE for up to $300 off and a 3-year warranty on air purifiers.    Find more from Jen:  Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/ Instagram: @therealjencohen   Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagement Find more from Dr. Mark Hyman: Website: https://drhyman.com/  www.functionhealth.com use code HUSTLE100 to save Podcast: The Doctor’s Pharmacy

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it! Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage. Their Tri-Lite panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where honestly I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles

on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therisage Trilite everywhere and all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to Thererasage.com right now and use code BEBOLD for 15% off. This code will work site-wide.

Again, head over to Therasage, T-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E.com and use code BEBOLD for 15% off any of their products. You guys, this is a, this is a big treat for me. I wasn't just saying that on the story, the Instagram story. We have Dr. Mark Hyman on the podcast today and guys, I'm sure you know who he is. He's probably the most famous doctor. I think I know I've known about you for a hundred years.

At least a hundred. At least a hundred. He's written 18 New York Times, 19, 19 New York Times bestselling books. He is an MD and a functional medicine doctor. Right? Same thing. Yeah.

Same thing. Well, I mean, it's, you have the both, you have the Eastern and the Western. Well, functional medicine is fully Western. It's fully science-based. It's not, you know, acupuncture and Ayurveda. I'm gonna explain that if you want. Yeah, well, only explain it because people always, I know it's maybe changed a little bit

in terms of the perception, but like people are like, oh, I'm an MD or I'm a whatever I am. But I wanna go on about all your accolades. The biggest, by the way, is he walked in, he looks like he's like 30 years younger than he actually is. So everything you're doing, I need to know about it. It is unbelievable.

He's like a fountain wealth of information. So I don't even know where to begin, except for what are you doing every day to look this good, this young? You are a walking longevity poster child. He'll only be 113 next week. So, it's really... No, no, but do you mind saying how old you are a walking longevity poster child. He'll only be 113 next week. So it's really, no, no, but do you mind saying how old you are? No, it would be 65 in a month. Yeah.

And you, do you feel like you are aging backwards? I am actually, I just, uh, in the last two years, I did my biological age test, which is measuring your DNA methylation, which looks at your epigenetics, which is how your genes are controlled and are influenced by your environment and your lifestyle. So they're highly modifiable. You can't change how old I am on the birthday calendar, but I can change what's going on under the skin. And so when I was 62, I did my biological test and I was 43,

which I thought was pretty good. And then I did a whole bunch of things over the last few years. I wrote a book bunch of things over the last few years. I wrote a book called young forever, which helped me actually get deeper into the science of longevity and I implemented a whole bunch of treatments. And I redid the test at 64 and I went backwards four years. So now I'm 39 biologically. Are you kidding me?

Oh my God. So like, so like Brian Johnson has nothing on you, right? Like, well, I got a bigger spread in my age, but he's younger. So I don't know. Well, he's yeah. That's my whole point. Like that's a, that's a massive difference. So what did you do different in those few years? Well, I ramped up my strength training, my protein intake.

I increased my intake of a number of compounds that have been well researched around longevity, like urolithin A and NMN. And I did also a whole bunch of senolytic herbs and treatments like vicetin. I also started to do various treatments like plasmapheresis. I started rapamycin. I did a whole bunch of things that I think are, are, you know, still in the research phase. I'm my own guinea pig.

I don't necessarily recommend them to all my patients, just to try it, but I, I'm always willing to sort of put myself out there and see what happens. So I was like, wow, that's pretty good. Wow. Okay. So you said a bunch of things. So you're, you're a lithin A. I was told by them actually, that it actually helps to build muscle after 30 years.

Is that true? Yeah. So yeah. So, you know, it's, it's fascinating story, you know, backing up a little bit, you know, as I began to dive into the research around longevity, it was really clear to me that there was a biological system that we all have that's all built in from basically worms and yeast organisms, all the way to humans that are conserved, that are survival pathways that are pathways designed to heal, regenerate, repair, renew, and upgrade our biology. So whenever we had stresses and we were starving, when we didn't have enough food or too much

of this or that, our bodies learned how to adapt in a way that made us stronger. And so I call these the longevity switches. And, and they only recently have been mapped out and how they interact has been mapped out. And what affects them has been mapped out. And they're part of what we call the hallmarks of aging, which are these fundamental things that go wrong as we get older, that

underlie all disease. So if I, if I said to you, what are the biggest killers in the world? You'd say, oh yeah, heart disease and cancer. And I said, well, if I had a magic wand and I could just get rid of heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, how much longer would we live? Well, probably only five to seven years longer.

But if we address the root causes of aging itself, which is not a, you know, normal phenomena, like the process of getting older, we can't do anything about on the clock, right? I was born a certain date. I'm getting older every year, but the biological process of aging in the way we experience it in the West is not normal.

You know, you see people who are a hundred years old or riding horses or hiking mountains, running races, you know, we know these are outliers, but no, they are people who actually are taking advantage of things because of what they've learned in their lifestyle to actually activate these longevity pathways. So, you know, we, we see people become

decrepit, frail, diseased. People spend the last 20% of their life in poor health, their health span is shorter than their lifespan, meaning they, they, they are okay for a bunch of life and then they get sick and the last 20% of their lives are spent with chronic disease, which is affecting so many people now. lifespan, meaning they, they, they are okay for a bunch of life and then they get sick and the last 20% of their lives are spent with chronic disease, which is affecting so many people now.

And, and when you address these hallmarks of aging, these fundamental mechanisms that we can talk about, you actually can extend life by 20 or 30 years, right? So major for me, that would be maybe getting to 110 or 120, right? So from moving 40 years. So we're now discovering what those are.

There's been billions of dollars now spent on aging and longevity research. It was a neglected science. It wasn't even something that people thought of studying. It wasn't considered a problem, but it is. Yeah. Like the decline, decrepitude, disease, frailty that happens as we get older is not an integral part of aging. It's a consequence of bad inputs that cause our biology to malfunction

that we think is normal. So just at a high level, these longevity switches are part of these hallmarks of aging. And one of the key pathways is we call in longevity sort of hallmarks of aging is deregulated nutrient sensing, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means how our bodies regulate different phenomena that have to do with what we're eating, right? So inflammation, insulin resistance, muscle building, autophagy or cell cleanup, antioxidant

pathways, DNA repair pathways. So there's all these incredible longevity switches, and there's four of them. And one has to do with insulin signaling and blood sugar. One has to do with mTOR, which has to do with basically building muscle or inducing autophagy, which is cellular cleanup. One has to do with AMPK, which is also involved in blood sugar, or sirtuins. These are the things that are now well studied. And so a lot of the interventions that I did were to regulate these

longevity switches in a scientific way. So now backing into your question, ureolithin A is a molecule that works on these longevity switches. And this is kind of mind blowing when you think about like nature and how we evolve. Like how does a molecule from a plant, like a pomegranate end up changing our biology in a way that actually makes us live longer, that reduces inflammation, that builds muscle, that increases our exercise performance, that increases our VO2 max, that helps reduce muscle loss, that has all these

incredible benefits. How does that know what to do? What happens when you eat pomegranate or similar plants like berries, they have something called the lactic acid. And when you have a healthy microbiome, which most of us don't, that becomes converted by healthy bacteria into a molecule called urolithin A. Now most of us don't do that because we, even if we eat pomegranate, we have a messed up microbiome because, you know, I did a talk the other day with a thousand people and I asked everybody to raise their hand if they'd never taken antibiotics. It wasn't a single person that raised their hand.

Everybody's taking an antibiotic at some point, somehow. And so, when you destroy your microbiome because you take an antibiotic or you affect it, then you can't make this. So if you take this as a supplement, it induces mitophagy, which is cleaning up of your mitochondria that make energy. It reduces inflammation. It helps build muscle. It inhibits mTOR, which uses autophagy.

So it has all these incredible benefits. But is there things we can do without supplementing? I know you wrote a book about food for medicine and all these things. Like if we just eat a bunch of pomegranates, I know that's not going to be the answer, but at the core root, you said something and I was going to even ask you about it, was at the core, the root cause of a lot of problems, I was under the impression is inflammation, right? Yeah, for sure. And so what can people do who don't have access to supplements, who don't have access to all the fancy latest and greatest, What are like easy strategies?

Let's just say like simple things that people can do to help reduce their inflammation. Great question. So as a functional medicine doctor, which we can talk about what that is, but essentially by looking at root causes, it's looking at the science of creating health is asking why, why do you have this problem? Not what disease do you have and what drug do I give? It's understanding the body, the network as a system and restoring the ecosystem of your body to be healthy.

And we go to doctors for every different part of our body. Every organ has a different doctor, right? Exactly. But they're all connected, your body's one system. And so functional medicine is really systems medicine and it's a way of thinking. It's not a particular specialty or modality or treatment. It can be anything from, you know, exercise to

exorcism, whatever the treatment is that works for the patient, I'm going to use it. So in functional medicine, the framework really that we use is looking at these fundamental systems that go wrong. And one of them is our immune system. And inflammation is really the underlying biology of almost all chronic diseases and most

diseases, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, autism, depression, autoimmune disease, allergies, gut issues. I mean, the list goes on skin problems, it's all inflammation. So the question is, you know, what's causing inflammation? That's really what functional medicine does. It gets to the why, what's the cause. And, you know, the big cause for most of us is really our diet and our gut microbiome. It's got aye and environmental toxins.

Those are the big three. Toxins are harder to deal with. You can really address your gut microbiome and the diet is the biggest factor. And so I, I, I am practicing functional medicine for almost 30 plus years now, more, more than 30 years, I guess. I've, I've really come to understand that, you know, if you do a short term reset with an elimination diet, an anti-inflammatory diet that supports your microbiome, lowers your blood sugar, that gets rid of all the extra inflammation in your

body, that so many things get better. So I wrote a book 10 years ago called The 10 Day Detox Diet. Do you remember all the titles of the book? There are so many. Barely. Barely. Barely. I know.

And essentially it grew out of my experience with my patients where I was treating people with complex chronic illness and it was trying to get them to reset their body to the original factory settings. See if we clean up their diet and took away every possible thing that could be driving inflammation, what would happen and how fast would they get better? And so it was so profound in the results

that I just, I wrote a book about it so that everybody could access it. Yeah. And actually it's fun, in January, they should be launching a online program It was so profound in the results that I just, I wrote a book about it so that everybody could access it. Yeah. And, uh, actually it's fine. And in January, they should be launching a online program to help people do this together in a community called the 10 day detox and, uh, and you can go to

drheimann.com to learn more about it. But basically, basically what, what this is, is eliminating the foods that, that are the most inflammatory. So ultra processed food, which was 60% of our diet, which is not really food by definition. It's just science projects, sugar and starch, which are really the drivers of so much inflammation in our body. Gluten and dairy, which are the other two big

factors and also we get rid of grains and beans. Not that they're bad, but for some people they create inflammation and it's like just trying to get everything off rather than just doing incrementally. Do you do it one at a time or everything together? No, everything together because you know people do, oh I'm just going to like do one thing and then see what's happening. Do nothing but if you have three or five things that are bothering you, you just take out one or two, you're not going to feel better, right? There's a rule in functional medicine called the TAC rules. My mentor Sydney Baker, basically we're standing on a TAC, it takes a lot of astra to make it feel better.

So take out the TAC, get rid of the cost. And you're standing on two TACs, taking one of them out doesn't make you 50% better. Right? So if you're, if you're allergic to gluten and dairy, or you have sensitivity to gluten and dairy and you take out gluten, you're not going to get 50% better because you're still reacting to dairy. Right, right, right. So this diet is really a way to reset everything.

Those basically protein, veggies, lots of good fats, nuts and seeds, berries, whole foods, delicious, non-deprivation diet, not a calorie restriction diet. You can eat as much as you want. And what happens is in 10 days is remarkable in terms of inflammation. Not only do people lose a ton of fluid and weight and inflammation, but they have a reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by between 60 and 70%. Whether it's a migraine or irritable bowel or depression or joint pain or headaches or whatever it is, congestion, sinus issues, it's remarkable how fast it works to just

get inflammation out of your system. So you can just do this food based and after 10 days, you'll know. Now if you don't get better, there's something else going on. You could have Lyme disease, you got a mold exposure, you're going to have metal toxicity. You could have severe gut issues that need to be treated more directly, you know, but most people will get a significant improvement. So what are they eating instead?

If they're taking out, that's like everything. If you're not eating good. Not giving me everything. What are you eating? Air? Drinking water? Oh, you eat what, what basically, you ask how I'm like, look what I look like.

Yeah, so you tell me what you eat every day what, what basically, uh, you asked how I'm like, look what I look like. Yeah. So you eat what I eat. Tell me what you eat every day. Yeah. In the morning, what are you eating? In the morning, I have a protein shake, usually after a workout.

What do you put in the protein shake? Well, I use goat whey, which is dairy, but it's a very low, uh, inflammation type of dairy, but you can use other forms of- Goat whey. Yeah. Where'd you get this from? Amazon.

Really? Yeah. We're generally raised goat whey. There's Mount Capra, there's Naked Goat, there's a lot of brands out there. And what's the benefit of goat way versus regular? Regular way. Regular way is usually factory farmed cows, which is just criminal. Yeah.

Two, it's got lots of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides they use in the growing of it. Three, it's got, it's coming from cows that are more modern cows that are hybridized to produce a certain type of casein in the milk, which is A1 casein. It's very inflammatory. So goats have A2 casein, so the sheep less inflammatory and better tolerated. So that's what I, but then you don't have to have deer. You could make it with nuts and seeds and- Oh wait, hold on. Let's don't make questions. I mean, there's so much information. Okay. So goat whey, how about like, what would you say compared that to let's say almond milk or, you know, cashew milk, alternative milks? Well, those are really just not high protein things. Protein is

key. So as you get older, you need about a gram per pound of ideal body weight, which is a lot more than people are eating. The RDA, the recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams per kilo, not per pound. Oh wow, yeah. Right, so it's far less. Now you have to understand how they came up with these guidelines. These guidelines are designed

to prevent a deficiency disease. So how do you not get protein deficiency? You don't need that much. How much you need for optimal health, very different number. How much vitamin D do you need for optimal health, very different number, right? How much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets, not much 30 units. Rickets is when your bones bend and you get,

you know, which is vitamin D deficiency. Yeah. How much vitamin D you need not get osteoporosis or to build your immune system or not get COVID or the flu, probably four to 5,000 over a hundred times that dose. Wow. Right.

So, so the deficiency, the numbers for the recommended dietary intake or allowance are based on deficiency disease. How much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Not what you need for optimal health. Right. Optimization and deficiency is very different. Very different.

Right. And so protein is really key and you need bioavailable protein, especially as you get older, you need a certain amount of an amino acid that stimulates one of the longevity switches called mTOR to make muscle. Muscle is a currency of longevity. Without muscle, you become frail and weak and disabled. The reason people end up in nursing homes is not cause they're sick. It's cause they can't have their shoes or get up out of a chair, get up out of bed, right? It's because they've lost muscle. If you don't do anything, you will lose muscle steadily and progressively every year, starting in the year thirties.

Right. So you've got to get on it. And strength training and protein is the magic sauce. So, so you got to do that. Yeah, you got to do that. That's my breakfast. So, but you got to. Well, what are you putting in it?

You're putting the. I put in, yeah, I put in my whey protein. I put in a mitopure actually, the pure Lathine A, I put in creatine, which helps to muscle. I also put in, you know, nut milk, like macadamia milk I like. Put in berries and then blend it up.

Every day. Every day. Do you eat eggs? I eat eggs. So for example, I'm traveling, I'll eat an omelet or I'll have eggs. So that'll be my breakfast. So I'll have more, more other proteins in the

morning and then, you know, lunch and dinner can be like just tons of veggies and proteins. So like lunch, I can make a salad. It's really quick. I can make three meals and half an hour total. So like I'm busy. I got a lot going on and I like to cook. So my shade takes me three minutes in the morning. All the ingredients are there in my kitchen.

Make it easy. Set myself up for success. Right. Lunch, you know, get pre-washed arugula. I'll get little cherry tomatoes, organic. I'll throw in pumpkin seeds. I'll throw in avocado. I'll throw in olives.

I'll throw in a can of wild salmon or mackerel or sardines as my protein. And then pour olive oil, vinegar, and you've got a lot of fat. I call it my fat salad. Yeah. Lots of fat and lots of veggies, different cucumbers, whatever you've got a lot of fat. I call my fat salad. Yeah. Lots of fat and lots of veggies, different thing about cucumbers, whatever you want in there, carrots. And then dinner is usually a piece of

protein and, and, uh, regeneratively raised meat, if I can get it bison, elk, venison, or just to regenerate beef, chicken, pastries, chicken, small fish. And then usually two or three side dishes of veggies. So my main courses are veggies, meats, a side dish, but it's, it's at least, you know, six ounces to something three side dishes of veggies. So my main courses are veggies meets a side dish, but it's at least six ounces to some,

the eight ounces of protein. And then I'll have roasted mushrooms, I'll have usually every day some form of the cruciferous vegetables, so two or three cups of broccoli or collards or kale or Brussels sprouts. And then usually like a Japanese sweet potato, like a purple sweet potato.

And that's kind of what I eat. And then, you know, a little dark chocolate, if I want something sweet. But this is, if you're like, this is for people who are home 24 hours a day. Most people travel, they're working, they're going, you especially, you're probably doing business schedule.

You know, I have, I always carry, if you look at my bag, I've got, I mean, I've got enough calories in there, but I don't have to worry about eating anything the rest of the day. I've got macadamia nuts, I've got, you know, other nuts and seeds in there. So I have basically enough food in my bag, so I don't get about eating anything the rest of the day. I've got macadamia nuts. I've got other nuts and seeds in there. So I have basically enough food in my bag, so I don't get in the food emergency.

So I don't have to eat crap if I don't want to. Right. And you don't get that feeling of like, yeah. And then usually wherever I go, you can order protein and veggies. Give me a salad, give me extra veggies, three sides of veggies. It's not that hard.

You just have to ask. Right. You just have to ask. What about fruit? You didn't mention any fruit. Fruit's fine. So I have berries in the morning, I'll have fruit. And I think fruit can be fine.

You know, I think, I think, you know, fruit juice is not good. Right, right, right. Of course. Yeah. You can eat an apple, but don't have apple juice. Right. But in terms of like grapes, mangoes, like

things that are high, high, high sugar. If you're eating fruit, you know, it depends on the volume, right? Especially there's like grapes and certain melons and pineapple and things like that. Bananas are higher glycemic index. So you wanna be careful with those. You can enjoy them, but don't like pig out.

Right. Well, I ask because you know, there's that controversy kind of, because people are like, don't eat fruit because it's very high in sugar, obviously. Others are like, you never see a fat person who only eats fruit. But I will say, I'm a massive fruit eater.

I love fruit. And I do gain weight'm a massive fruit eater. I love fruit and I do gain weight. If I eat, like I love grapes, I can have five pounds of grapes in two seconds. You gain weight. That's a problem. Right. So it's just a dose, the dose. Right.

Yeah. It's all about like how much you're eating of everything. Right. Okay. So let's go back then. So that's what you eat every day. That's, that makes sense. Now, what about strength training?

You say you're doing it how many times? Cause you're very, very lean and thin. Well, I mean, I do probably four times a week. I have a routine. I do different bands and I do a whole bunch of different routines. So I travel with it. So when I'm home, I have a home gym. So I have equipment, I have weights, I have all this stuff. But when I travel, I just bring my bands, which basically takes about a pound, maybe or less, takes up this much space. I put in my suitcase and all I need is a door and a floor. So if I can hook the thing to the doorknob,

I can get resistance. That's what you're doing? Yeah. How about cardio? There's all this controversy over cardio, especially as we age, right? People say that cardio breaks down muscle mass, right? So as we age, do do believe that cardio is something

that we should all be doing. Absolutely, I mean, you can't just pick one form of training. You know, VO2 max is a really important number. This is a number that measures your mitochondrial function. Your mitochondria are the key to healthy aging, partly why your Lithine A works and exercise works and strength training works. VO2 max is correlated directly with longevity.

So if you look at your ability to burn oxygen per minute, which is a measure of how they see, like if you look at Lance Armstrong, for example, he had a VO2 max in the nineties. I mean, he could just go, go, go like, uh, you know, like Energizer bunny. Whereas, you know, the average 30 year old has a VO2 max in the thirties. Right, right, right. Exactly. By the way, Lance still has a crazy VO2. I think he's.

Mine's like 45. Even at 65, you can train to get it to go home. Right, right, right. Exactly. Right. By the way, Len still has a crazy VO team. I think he's. Yeah, mine's like 45. Wow. Even at 65, you can train to get it to go up. And the longer, the higher it is, the longer you live. And the order to do that, you need to do cardio and you do interval training. So you kind of push and stress yourself. So you can do half an hour, two or three times a week of that.

And that'll get you pretty good. You do as fast as you can for 45 seconds to a minute, then slow for three minutes. Do it again. You can do a treadmill on a bike. It's like sprinting, you know, we just call wind sprints in high school. Right, right, right. Remember that.

Do you still, okay. So let's just talk about the law about, and we're still on inflammation. Okay. So for inflammation, that make you said all the things about that. Is there anything else we can do? Cause like supplements, I know, like, you know,

is there, let's. If you just take multivitamin fish oil know, like, you know, is there. Yeah. Let's. I mean, let's say if you just take multivitamin fish oil and vitamin D, you know, less than a dollar a day, you can do all these things. Yeah. I mean, dollar a day is not nothing, but you know, think about what people spend on their coffee or their just junk or their Netflix subscription.

I mean, like, what do you want to invest in your, you know, invest in your health? You pay now or pay later. Well, I think the problem is that right now we're, we're so inundated with information, right? Especially with social media. Everyone talks about this supplement, that supplement, do this, don't do that, do more of

that, like, and things ebb and flow and trend. Right? So like things that we talked about, remember when carbs was a thing that we should be doing and not eating all this protein. Yeah. Are there things that kind of like you've learned in your whole, in your evolution

that you're like, wow, this is, I was totally wrong about this. I was completely, this is the way. And what are things like intermittent fasting, for example, like what is your, what's your thoughts on things that are so trendy now that I feel have had a little bit of a backlash to some people? Well, you know, I think what sells books and what gets people to click on social media is extremes. So you've got carnivores on one side, the vegans on the other side, and it's kind of extreme.

And I think I take a more middle of the road position based on the science, which is one, there's certain principles that you follow that are, allow you to have a wide variety of diets, culturally different diets, personal preferences, differences that you might like, but the principles should be the same. One, food is medicine.

So you have to understand every bite you take is information and is regulating your biology with every single bite and changing your gene expression, your epigenome, your hormones, your brain chemistry, your metabolism, your microbiome, immune system, everything is literally affected in real time by every single bite of food you have. So the quality of your food matters. Second is, and that food is information and it can upgrade your, downgrade your biology with every bite. Second is that we should think about nutrition from the perspective of personalized nutrition, because everybody's different. Some people are great on a vegan diet.

Some people get really sick on a vegan diet. Some people need more proteins. Some people need more fats. Some people need more carbs. And there's no genetics we can do to actually see what, what people do better on or worse on and what people respond better to or worse to. And then, you know, thirdly, it's really a simple principle to eat real food. Like don't eat stuff that's not food.

Like, you know, ultra processed food is not food. A pop tart is actually not food. It's made from deconstructed science ingredients that have been processed from commodity crops, broken down to their chemical individual components. The chemical structures have been changed. So it's not actually even the same molecular structure and it reassembled into all sizes, colors, shapes of chemically extruded food-like substances that have nothing to do with nutrition.

Don't actually meet the definition of food. If you look at the Webster's definition of food, it's basically something that supports the health and growth of an organism. Well, these don't, they do the opposite, right? And so technically we're not actually eating food. So eat food. Right, eat food. I mean, Michael Pollan said, eat food, not too much, mostly plants, you know?

Yeah, that's what he, but he says all plants and there are people who think. No, he didn't say all plants. Mostly plants. Mostly plants. He said, he said mostly plants. What about microwaving your food? Cause it changes the molecular structure. You know, heating stuff up for a few seconds is fine,

but like if you're cooking food in micro is bad idea. Cause you get the production of something called ages or advanced glycation end products. Essentially it's like, think about like a crispy skin on a chicken or crème brûlée. And this is the proteins and sugars combining in a way that creates a harmful inflammatory compound in the body. And so a lot of aging is caused by these compounds and hemoglobin A1C the proteins and sugars combining in a way that creates a harmful inflammatory compound in the body. And so a lot of aging is caused by these compounds and hemoglobin A1C,

which is your blood sugar average is an example of one of those, but there's many and they bind to receptors, they activate inflammation and so they just create this vicious cycle. So for sure don't cook in a microwave for sure. Don't even heat up anything in plastic in a microwave. That's a disaster. You can put in a microwave stuff in plastic with the plastic cover on it's like, oh my God.

It's terrible. So bad. But would you ever microwave your food for like a minute? Like that's. Yeah. So like if I'm lazy and like I'm in a hurry, I'll might like throw a sweet potato in there or something for this that's already cooked.

I might warm it up or something like that. But I got rid of mine thinking that it was like very dangerous. I mean, listen, ideally probably no, but like, or something like that. But I got rid of mine thinking that it was like very dangerous radiation. Ideally, probably no, but like, you know. Okay, so you're not so crazy one way or the other. No. Like you are, you do seem a little bit more like

middle of the ground. Yeah, I mean like, here's the deal. You wanna optimize your health, you wanna become resilient, you don't wanna live in a bubble. Right. Like you don't wanna be a bubble boy. No.

And so there are people who are so fragile, like they can't go anywhere and they can't travel, they can't stay in a hotel room. There may be people who truly have chemical sensitivities and are that sensitive. And I'm not saying they're crazy, I treat them as patients and you can get them better. But if you're resilient and healthy,

your body can handle a lot. So for example, if you're a diabetic and you have a can of Coke, it'll send you over the limit. But if you're like someone like me and you work out five times a week and you're strength training, your diet's predominantly like super low sugar and starch, you're insulin resistant, super dialed in,

you have my insulin level's two, my blood sugar's perfect, my A1C is very low. I can have some sweets once in a while. It's not going to kill me. So you saying all these numbers, right? Which means that you're monitoring all these things and stats. So that tells me that you are a big believer in wearables, right? Like, are you wearing a glucose monitor?

Are you wearing an aura ring or a whooper? What is your. Yeah. Test don't guess is my motto. I like that. Yes. And, uh, in fact, I co-founded a company called Function Health to allow people to go deeper. The oral rings are great, CGMs are great, Apple Watch, all, but skin deep.

They're just skin deep. Google sponsors a little better because you get a continuous shoot of your glucose, but there's so many other biomarkers. So what I realized was that most doctors aren't checking these things. Most patients don't know what to ask for. Right. If they do, they have to argue with their doctor to order it because they

usually don't know what it is. And then they have to argue with their insurance company to pay for it, which they usually don't. Totally. So we co-founded a company called Function Health that allows people for a dollar and 37 a day to get twice a year testing of over 110 biomarkers. It gives you a profoundly deep view of your health. That's a lot.

Yeah, and it's a bunch of tubes of blood, but basically it's giving you a deep insight in your metabolic health and it's checking things that don't get checked that are the most relevant things. Like what? For example, your metabolic health. People get their cholesterol checked and they just look at the basic numbers.

So today I had a patient this morning before I came here who had perfectly normal cholesterol on the regular cholesterol test, but she had severe metabolic dysfunction because she had high numbers of lipid particles and cholesterol particles and small particles. And so we look at a more advanced cholesterol test to look at the size and number

and the quality of cholesterol, not just the weight. We look at, let me call it APO-B and L-A, which are really the most important and the most important biomarkers for your risk for a heart attack, not the ones you're getting at your doctor's checkup. That's like a 50 year old test. We're looking at inflammation.

We look at autoimmune markers and 30 plus percent of people have an autoimmune biomarker, 13% of autoimmune thyroid disease. We have 46% with high levels of CBR protein, which is inflammation. So we check your immune system, we check your toxin levels of heavy metals, like mercury and lead.

We check your hormones, like male sex hormone, female sex hormones. We look at your cortisol and we look at your metabolic health, ensuring insulin, which, you know, we're working with Quest as our provider of the lab testing. So it's not some, you know, it's not some crazy thing. This is like the biggest lab in the country.

In the world. So basically how does it work? That's what I'm curious about. Do you, do people walk into a Quest? I'll tell you, yeah, I'll tell you, it's pretty easy. I just want to finish with the testing. So we do, we do a nutritional testing. 67% of people have nutritional deficiencies

at the minimum level. We're seeing, you know, so much going on in the, in the, in the dysfunctions that are not being looked at. So the process is very easy. Just go to functionhealth.com. We're in beta now. So you, with your listeners, we provided

an early access code, which is hustle 100. So you go to hustle 100, the first hundred listeners to sign up will skip the wait list, which is 300,000 people. Okay. Well, listen to that guys. That's very big. So if you guys use a code hustle 100, you

skip the 300,000 people guess wait, wait, wait list and you get, you get early access. Yeah. And then you, once you sign in a few minutes, question here to sort of get your basic demographics and everything. And then you'll get a text from our team. They'll say, okay, you're living this zip code.

Your closest lab is a mile away. When do you want your appointment? Okay, Tuesday. Okay, I'll go in at Tuesday, eight o'clock. And you go in, you show them your, there's a little scanning machine, you put your driver's license in there. They register your second, you walk in, they draw your blood. 10, 15 minutes, you're out.

And then the date, all the data gets loaded up into your dashboard, which is data you own. It's your, it's your data. You can track it over time. I mean, I mean, I, it's so frustrating for me as a doctor because medicine is so analog. Yeah. You know, we don't use tech in medicine at all.

Like even in electronic medical record, it's just a paper record in the office. Yeah. And so, you know, if I want to know, okay, let me look at your cholesterol. What was it last year and or the year before? And what were the trends? I have to like open a PDF.

I have to look at it, try to remember what it said, then come to the new one and look at that one, compare them all in my head or write it down, which takes me time. It's just a pain in the ass. So this is a beautiful dashboard. You can see your trends over time. You get a deep set of insights. So it's not just a data because that, you know, the average person doesn't know what to do with their data, right?

Doesn't know what the tests mean. But we spent, you know, enormous amounts of time sifting through all the scientific literature, bringing knowledge experts in, including me, and writing, you know, tens of thousands of pages of content that are then become delivered to you based on your biomarkers. Let's say you have an inflammation and your CRP's high,

okay, what does it mean? Why does it matter? Why would it be high? How do you figure it out? What do you do about it? What would you do from a lifestyle perspective, from a self-respective? What are the diagnostic tests might you need? When do you figure it out? What do you do about it? What would you do from a lifestyle perspective? From a self-respective, what are the diagnostic tests might you need? When you need to go to the doctor and what do you need to be informed with to

be able to actually be the best advocate for your own health? Cause I believe you should be the C of your own health, not abdicating that to the healthcare system. You know, my friend, Chris Carr had cancer and she's an incredible woman. And she, she was like, she had some really weird, rare cancer and they told her she was going to die. And she's like, she, she's an incredible woman and she, she was like, she had some really weird, rare cancer and they told her she was going to die. And she's like, well, that's not okay.

Yeah. So she, she sort of said joke that she started a new company called save my ass technologies, Inc, you know, like, basically her owning her own health. And that's what we all need to do. And our goal at function health is to help people do a hundred healthy years, which I think is achievable for most people.

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comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So if you don't love it, just send it back for a refund minus the shipping. Head to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSSLE and you'll receive up to $300 off air purifiers. Exclusive to podcast customers, you will also receive a free 3-year warranty on any unit, which is an additional $84 value. Lock in this special offer by going to airdoctorpro.com and use promo code HUSSLE. That's airdoctorpro.com promo code HUSSLE. So wait, so after you get all the testing and you have the dashboard, do you have someone who helps you kind of understand?

Like, do you get like a doctor assigned? Or is it all just your own Adam? Well, you get a doc clinician summary of all your results that's generated. And then you have the insights that are delivered to you personally. Like what should you be eating? That says this is what you should be doing. What lifestyle changes do you need to make? What toxins do you need to avoid?

What do you need in terms of exercise? How do you optimize your microbiome if you need to do that? How do you, what supplements might be helpful for a particular issue you have? If your vitamin D is low, how do you know which vitamin D to take? What form of vitamin D? What dose do you take?

How do you pick the right supplement? We don't recommend products. Right. We're just, we're not selling anything other than the service of owning your own data. Yeah. Just, we don't selling anything other than the service of owning your own data. Yeah. Right.

So we're not like hawking different companies or product stuff. And, and so it's, it's, it's just provides you the scientific information. Everything's deeply referenced with scientific literature, all the data is there. You can look at it yourself, and then it guides you into a personalized program.

And then, you know, there's an interactive app that we're about to launch, which will kind of help support you in implementing the recommendations. That's amazing actually. And I can't believe how many biomarkers you're checking for, that's a lot. And then of course we added almost another 200

that if you want to do extra stuff you can, for example, let's say you have a family history of Alzheimer's, you've got blood biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease, which you don't even need a brain scan for and you don't have to wait to have memory issues, but you can actually detect things and then do interventions that will reverse those biomarkers and normalize them. Wow. We were also measuring, for example, cancer screening.

We offer one of the biggest providers in the country of something called Galleri, which is a multi-cancer detection test using fragments of DNA that kind of come off cancer cells that you can detect in the blood. It's like a liquid biopsy. And it picks up about 50 different cancers, 75% of the time it'll detect it. There's only half a percent false positive rate, which is much better than all their current screening tests.

In other words, well, I'm gonna do this test, is it gonna show positive, but it's really not a cancer? Very rare to have that happen. One in 188 people who we've been testing actually has a cancer we've identified and we've saved people's lives that they didn't even know because we're picking up early and this takes the text cancer a year to three years before it

shows up anywhere else. By the way, just in that alone is worth doing it. Yeah. I mean, you know, my sister died of cancer, my father died of cancer. You know, they would have not both had died of cancer if they'd had this test. So you can pick up cancer,

you can pick up potential Alzheimer's. Yeah, and we're, you know, we're doing a whole bunch of stuff on autoimmune testing, on nutritional testing, on toxin testing. We're now able to test things like PFAS, forever chemicals in your blood, heavy metals, BPA, other chemicals that are pretty common. I'm gonna get this set. I'm gonna, seriously, I going to, by the way, even before you were on this show,

podcast, I was told about your program, like a few people told me about it because I was told it was way above other programs out there. Because everyone now is all jumping on these bandwagons, right? Like personalized health, telemedicine, all the things, but yours does sound like super extensive. Yeah, it's very deep. Yeah, I mean, it's cause I sort of am the kind of intel inside. Yeah. You know, my background has been, you know,

as a doctor at Canyon Ranch, which is a health resort for almost 10 years. And there we did, you know, five to 10,000 miles for the testing and everybody. Is that how you started at Canyon Ranch? Yeah, I was. Yeah. My joke is I'm a resort doctor because I worked at a health resort and the doctor of last

resort. That's funny. So that's how you started. Yep. And then I, 20 years ago, I started my own practice after that. And again, had a clientele who could afford to do deep testing and we've done really extensive testing and I've seen millions and millions and millions and millions of biomarkers on tens of thousands of people. And so I really understand what's going on in there

and things that doctors were not checking. And we're always like looking to the future. Like what does the science say? Because in the scientific literature, this discovery is getting made. And you know, for example, we've known about lipoprotein fractionation, which is the test we do at function health

for your cholesterol. This is the standard of the care. This should be the state ofof-the-art test that everybody gets. It's not expensive, not hard to get. And yet we ask Quest, how many cholesterol tests that you get are from doctors around the country, then you're the biggest lab, are for this test?

What do they say? Less than 1%. And this test has been around for decades. I've been doing it personally for 30 years. The science is over 40 years old on this. So what happens is it takes decades for the science to turn into clinical practice. That's crazy.

You know, it is crazy. So my daughter's in medical school now. She's not learning anything about insulin resistance, nothing about the microbiome, nothing about nutrition, nothing about environmental toxins. These are the things that are causing people to be sexist, nothing about how to take care of mitochondrial problems. I mean, it's just, nothing about environmental toxins. These are the things that are causing people to be sick.

She knows nothing about how to take care of mitochondrial problems. I mean, it's just, it's astounding to me. Where's she going to medical school? Well, it's a very good medical school. It's the University of Utah. It's a great medical school. And it's pretty much what is going on because we have a pharmaceutical driven healthcare system that, that is in large part

funded by the pharma industry. Yeah. So a lot of academic centers, you know, they're not getting money from the government. Sometimes they're getting NIH grants, but a lot of their funding comes from pharma that is funding the professors to study a statin or study the Ozempic or study what. Yeah. Ozempic is a great example. You know, we've got, you know, a drug now that's like the panacea for weight loss and everything, everybody's sort of like, we should be know, we've got, you know, a drug now that's like the panacea for weight loss

and everything, everybody's sort of like, we should be all taking this and, you know, they're studying it for everything. So they're studying for depression, for autoimmune disease, for neurodegenerative disease, for obviously heart disease, for obesity, for diabetes. And, and this, these companies, these pharma companies are just raking in the money and Novo Nordisk, which is the maker of Zempig in Denmark, is the single biggest contributor to the gross domestic product or GDP of Denmark.

That is crazy. And yeah, it's a huge, huge, and it's like, it's the, Eli Lilly, the number one selling drug is one jarro. There are billions and billions of dollars a year from these drugs, and they're pouring billions into research to prove the benefit of

these drugs across a wide range of health conditions. They work not because there's some magic to the drug, they work because they give people the least weight and the weight loss is what's working. It's like a study that they did on gastric bypass. They said, well gee, gastric bypass, you can reverse diabetes in two weeks when someone has a gastric bypass. It's a miracle. Even if they're still overweight and you're still 400 pounds, two weeks later, after you do the surgery, you don't have diabetes anymore. And your inflammation goes down. Your numbers get better.

Well, how does that happen? It's because of the food they're eating. Cause they don't eat what they were eating. They don't eat what they were eating. But they did a study where they just, instead of giving them the gastric bypass, they did a randomized trial where they gave half the people a gastric bypass and another match control group. Not the bypass, but just fed them the food as if they would

have had the bypass. So on the same diet, same result, no different. So it's not the ozempic. And so, you know, I was talking to my friend who was the head of cardiology at Harvard and he's like, I said, no, why don't you study lifestyle changes in heart disease because they work better than the medications. He's like, Hey said, no, why don't you study lifestyle changes and heart disease because they work better than the medications. He said, hey, no, Mark.

He says, but I can't get $5 to study diet and lifestyle. I can get $150 million from Pharma that funds my department, that funds my programs, that funds my fellowship, that funds everything. So I'm gonna do that study that they want me to do because they're paying the bills. That's how it works, it's super corrupt. That's so crazy to me.

And the funny, that not funny at all is that now you have people who are on these, these, these Ozempics and Grigovies who shouldn't be on them. They're like thin people. Yeah. It's like, Oh God. And I see it. It's like, Oh, wow.

I can tell, you know, they get that, they get that look. They get that Ozempic face. Is that a true thing? Oh, 100% Ozempic face? Yes. And you, you lose subcutaneous fat and you lose muscle and this is it.

This is a catastrophe because I do not think, I think it's personally, I think it's malpractice to prescribe one of these drugs unless that person has diet counseling and understands they need to eat a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. And they're taught how to do it and that they do it and two, that they commit strength training at

least three times a week. Because if you don't, what happens is this. You lose the weight, but up to half of the weight is muscle. Now muscle is your metabolic engine. It burns seven times the calories of fat. And when you lose muscle, your metabolism slows down. So then what happens? Then you stop the drug because of side effects or you can your metabolism slows down. So then what happens? Then

you stop the drug because it's side effects or you can't afford it forever and then what happens? You gain back the weight. So let's say you start out and you lose 20 pounds and then you gain back the 20 pounds. When you gain back the 20 pounds you're going to gain it back all as fat which means your metabolism is going to be slower, even at the same weight that you were when you started, which means you need to eat less in order to just stay at that weight. So you'll gain more weight even. And it's a disaster. So there's got to be a, listen, these drugs, like any drug are a tool, you know, a gun is a tool. You can go hunt a deer and get dinner, or you can kill somebody.

Exactly. It's a great analogy. I'm not opposed to these drugs. What I'm opposed to is their widespread use is the lack of research on other interventions that work better. And there's really clear data on this. I mean, Virta Health is a company that a friend of mine started, Sammy Immiken, that basically uses ketogenic diets

for reversing type 2 diabetes. And they've scaled this up, they're covered by Medicare Advantage. They save an average of $6,000 for a patient and they've compared the results they get using that for type 2 diabetes. They reversed completely type 2 diabetes. It's pretty advanced in 60% of patients.

The average of 12% weight loss, which is a astounding amount of weight loss. And they have 100% get off the main diabetes medication, almost 90 plus percent get off insulin or dramatically reduce your insulin and all the lipid bar marks improve and the, all the secondary things that are being measured by these drug companies that are saying they're the benefits of Ozempic, all those get better. It's not the Ozempic, it's the diet.

It's the diet. And so it always, so it basically does come down to what you eat, your food and how much you eat of it. It's not- How much is not as, it is a, it might have an issue. It's really the quality of what you eat. The quality. Because if you eat the right food, you can't overeat. In other words, if I said, you know, I want you to eat 10, 12 ounce steaks.

No way. If I said eat 10 avocados, no way. If I said eat 10 chocolate chip cookies, no problem. If I see a quart of ice cream, no problem. You know, and, and, and our bodies, when we eat this stuff, that's not really food, doesn't know how to regulate it. And the studies that have been done on this, the NIH study by Kevin Hall, looked at this very carefully and he did what we call a crossover

trial which is one of the best types of study designs where he took the same people, gave them a diet and then let them have a break, call a washout period and then give them another diet for a few weeks and then measure what happened. First part of the diet was eating real food. Well, yeah. Match for protein, fat, carbs, calories. Then they gave them ultra processed food and they can eat whatever they want. Eat whatever you want, eat as much as you want, there's no restrictions.

When they were eating ultra processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day because their biology was dysregulated. Right. You know, kids who are iron deficient will eat dirt. The body is going to crave more food and want more food because it's looking for nutrients, but we're looking for love in all the wrong places, right? Yeah. And so what happened is that you get dysregulated. And think about that, 500 calories a day in a

week is 3,500 calories. That's a pound of weight gain if you don't offset it with exercise. In a year, that's 52 pounds of weight gain. If you eat all your processed food, why is America the fattest country in the world? Like we have 75% of us that are overweight, 42% are obese. It's increased four fold since I was born. And you've seen diabetes increased 400%.

I mean, it's in the last 30 years, it's insane. And the metabolic dysfunction, even if you're not overweight, cause you could be skinny fat. In other words, you look thin, but you're actually fat on the inside. Right. Your percentage is fat. Yeah. Your body fat, where the fat is, if it's in your belly, visceral fat, that's 93.2% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction. That means that 6.8% of us are healthy.

And what does that mean? That 93.2% has either high blood sugar, high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, all by the way, caused by too much starch and sugar in our ultra processed diet, or they've had a heart attack or stroke or they're overweight. So that is unbelievable. It's unbelievable. And so we're, we're killing ourselves and it's the costs are staggering.

I mean, the government, the U S government pays 40% of the national healthcare bill, which is now $4.9 trillion, probably a good 2 trillion of that is, it's totally preventable and is now being added to our federal deficit every year. And imagine what that 2 trillion can do for the economy, what we could do with social programs, how we could improve our infrastructure,

how we could improve so many innovation, how we could fund different kinds of research. I mean, we're wasting that money. And most people don't realize that. It's one out of every three taxpayer dollars is for healthcare. It's unbelievable. What I find to be unbelievable is that everyone seems to look

for these quick fad diets or quick fixes, but yet like it's pretty, again, what you're saying is pretty basic, right? Like it's the same things that like if they watch what they eat, quality of the food, inflammation, like these- It's not that hard. It's not that hard, but yet people are trying to over, or they're overwhelmed with like all this like noise. Yeah. You know, the other thing I wanted to ask you about Ozempic or any of these or Gove's or whatever,

can your body acclimate over time anyway? And so you end up even eating what you ate before you even started taking it. Sometimes, these drugs affects people differently. I had a patient who I didn't prescribe it, but he was telling me he lost, you know, he did Ozempic for six months. He lost two pounds.

It didn't really make him feel great. He had all these side effects. He switched over to what I told him to do. He lost 60 pounds and he's reversed his diabetes and, you know, he's on his way back to full, full health. You keep on saying patients. Do you still see patients? Yeah, I saw two this morning.

I had a whole patient day yesterday. Yeah. So you actually still see like one of them. I'm a doctor, yes. I don't just play one on TV. No, you don't see like one of- I'm a doctor, yes. You know, but this is- I don't just play one on TV. No, you don't just play one. No, listen, this is very refreshing.

I thought of all the people, of all the doctors, you wouldn't have time because do you know how many times I've seen doctors sit in the same chair you are and they are, they're doctors, yeah, I guess they have a certificate, but they don't practice, they write books and they like to do media and they like to do all these other things. It keeps it real. It keeps you humble. It keeps you learning. But people don't like, they write books and they like to do media and they like to do all these other things. It keeps it real. It keeps you humble.

It keeps you learning. But people don't like to do it. Like it's impossible to find, like the big joke is that you can't find a doctor. I love it. I mean, I love taking care of people. It's so, I mean, it's amazing. You actually are like, would you take another patient? I need a doctor because there is such a shortage of doctors.

You're a lie girl. I know. I know. Like what is the waiting list for that? Like, do you have like a crazy waiting list? I wish I could see everybody. I really wished. I mean, it's the heartbreak of my life and I can't tell you, I probably get five to 10

texts, emails, requests every day. Oh, easy. My mother this, my friend this, I'm sick this and like people who are close to me and I'm like, I just wish I could help everybody and I can't. And so that's really why I co-founded Function Health was to take what I know and make it accessible, not to a few hundred or thousand people, but to millions and millions, even eight billion person problem.

That's exactly true. And what I, what we're creating at Function is something that is revolutionary. It's why we're the fastest growing healthcare company in the world. We're creating something called medical intelligence. You know, you have chat, GPT, and all this. But think about where you take all your own data and all your data is sorted through with the use of technology.

Because now we can process, I mean, just in your microbiome alone, there's 100,000 terabytes of data. I don't even know what a terabyte is, but it's a lot of information. A lot, I guess, yeah. I guess, I would say. So no human mind can comprehend all that.

So, we're able to take all this data and actually understand what's happening to you and input it all into the system and then gives you a predictive model of where you are in the trajectory from wellness to illness, because things don't happen overnight, right? For example, we were mentioning some of these Alzheimer's tests, like P Tau 217 or 80, 42, 40, or neurofibrillary light chain. There's other biomarkers. And we're now able to see from a blood test that, you know, you could be developing early, early cognitive injury,

brain injury that you don't even know about because you're not symptomatic. You can tell with brain imaging up to 30 to 40 years before you get Alzheimer's that you're starting to get trouble in the brain. But now with these blood tests, we can detect it. And then you can do something to intervene and actually reverse that trajectory. That's never been possible before.

How is it even possible? I thought there was no cure. You couldn't, well, can you give us a couple? Well, there is, of course there is. I mean, you know. Like what? Give us some things that we can do for our brain health. Well, this is not my opinion.

This is, this is, this is actually fact. I mean, if you look at the studies being done out of Europe, the finger trial, the pointer test, some things that we can do for our brain. How great fog. This is, this is, this is actually fact. I mean, if you look at, uh, the studies being done out of Europe, the finger trial, the pointer trials, these are large scale clinical trials using aggressive lifestyle intervention, risk factor modification, and actually slowing that showing that just

reverse, uh, slowing down or, or delaying the progression of Alzheimer's, but reversing. How? How can we reverse Alzheimer's? What you eat, I mean, exercise, dress management, sleep optimization, the right nutritionals optimization, hormone optimization, addressing all the root causes, toxins, the gut microbiome.

I mean, it's a process, it's a deep, involved process. And I've written a book about this called The Ultra Mind Solution about 15 years ago. It was way ahead of its time, still ahead of its time. And colleagues of mine like Dale Bredesen had taken that and really upgraded it. And he's got a recode program now. He's written a book called the end of Alzheimer's, which talks about the root causes. This is not just happening in a vacuum.

It's not just random event. Why have we seen Alzheimer's increased by 150%? Why? Tell us. Why? Because we, we have the shitty diet, which is sugar. I mean, they're calling Alzheimer's type three diabetes now, which is insulin resistance, why we have 93% of the population have some degree of insulin

resistance, toxins, environmental toxins. There's more education out than ever before. Right? We're more educated. You'd think that there's information out there. How is it instead of getting less obese, we're getting more obese. Instead of getting healthier, we're getting more sick. When all we are overloaded with people and information, like the health

industry, longevity industry, it's a trillion dollar business. Yeah. We live in a toxic cesspool of food and toxins. I mean, it's just the truth. I mean, the food industry has produced a food that is making us sick and making us die early. And, and we also have completely unregulated environmental toxins in the society that people are just polluted, polluted.

You know, if we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat as human beings are so polluted. Why is it different here than the UK? Well, in the other countries, they don't allow the same ingredients. I mean, you might've heard the recent, uh, you're thoughtful about Kellogg's and these are friends of mine. I mean, you might've heard the recent, uh, waffle about Kellogg's and these are friends of mine.

And it's like, yeah, I mean, like, you know, it's ridiculous. Like in, in Europe, they have regulations. They have something called the reach legislation in the European Union, which limits the use of chemicals. So here, the way it works is you, if you're a company, you get to use whatever you want and you get it approved as generally recognized as safe. And then you only get to have it taken off the market if it's shown later to be harmful.

So, innocent until proven guilty. As opposed to you have to prove this is safe before you put it in the food. For example, trans fats is a great example. Crisco was invented in 1911, shortening. Yeah, I remember it. You know why they call it shortening? No, because it shortens your life. Shortens your life, Yeah. I remember it. The way they call it shortening. No, cause shortens your life. Yeah.

That's not why they call it that way. Oh, I thought that's why you call it that way. Okay. Why they call it that then? I don't know. Oh, but anyway, um, that was a joke. It was a joke. A doctor joke.

A doctor joke. Okay. It's like a dad joke. It's like, yeah, I don't eat red meat. I only eat it well done. Yeah. So the reality is that the science started coming around in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And it was just really a compelling data that it was killing people, hundreds of

thousands of people a year, and the FDA still did not change its policies. And there was a scientist that was researching this for 50 years. Wow. He finally in his 90s sued the FDA and based on that suit, they changed the regulations to recognize it as something that was not safe. So they took it off the safe list and then they encouraged companies to remove it from the food supply, but it's still out there. And again, we should have never had that for that long on the food.

So we're having, you know, butylated hydroxyphthalate and different dyes and additives and colors are added to food here. Like Kellogg's Fruit Loops that you don't get in Kraft macaroni and cheese in this country. It's got all kinds of dyes. And if you go to Europe, it's got, you know, basically carrot dyes to make an orange, not orange, you know, neon.

All these chemicals. Yeah. Which of course I grew up on Kraft macaroni. Me too. Right. We all did. I mean. That was the first thing I learned how to cook. Me too. I think that was like, kind of course I grew up on Kraft McQueen. Me too, right? We all did. I mean. That was the first thing I learned how to cook.

Me too. I think that was like, kind of like every child, you know, like my, my daughter. You boil the noodles and you put the cheese in and the milk in. And then. Totally, totally. Where did you grow up? Uh, I all over.

I was born in Spain. We grew up in New York city and Queens and then moved to Toronto. And, uh. I'm from Toronto. Canadian? No, my mother married a Canadian after my parents were divorced. I met, you grew up in Toronto? Yeah, from eight to 18.

Yeah. Where? Debut in York Mills. Really? Oh my God, that is hilarious. Where'd you go to medical school? The University of Ottawa. I'm from Ottawa.

Are you serious? Does anybody know this about you? All the Canadians. So are you surprised, I have to ask you, because like when you started all this stuff, your career, it wasn't like trendy and cool to be a doctor. It wasn't like a massive industry like what we were talking about earlier. And then it blown up to be like the hot thing. You know how there's all these different trends. We're about, entrepreneurship, health, longevity.

Like, are you surprised at how like you've become so popular in the trajectory of your career? Did you expect this all to happen? I don't know. I don't know. I just, I just saw the issues way. I mean, I studied nutrition 45 years ago and college and wrote a book called Nutrition Against Disease by Roger Williams that got me thinking about this.

It was given to me by a PhD student on nutrition that I was living with. We shared a house together. And so I got kind of- In Ottawa? No, in Cornell. Okay, Cornell. Yeah, when I went to undergraduate.

And I just got into health and wellness and herbal medicine and yoga. And I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. You were? Yeah. And also I know you're teacher before I was a doctor. You were? Yeah. And also I know you're into Buddhism and all that stuff too, right? Are you still into that stuff?

I mean, it definitely has very much informed my way of thinking about the world and my mind and suffering and, you know, compassion and why are we getting all the mess we get into? Right, that's a good way of putting it. What do you think about all the other modalities that can help like meditation, all the other things that help with like lowering your, I guess, your stress levels that help us? I mean, look, functional medicine is a way of thinking.

It's an operating system and it's agnostic and it's whatever the right set of tools. So there's a whole bunch of tools, the toolkit from meditation and yoga to breathwork to acupuncture to drugs, to supplements, to diet, to plasma free system, whatever. What is that? You said that in the beginning of the podcast. Plasma free system. Yeah. It's basically filtering your blood to get all the crap out.

And it's one of those therapies that's being heavily researched for longevity. It says we can older, it's like, you know, think about your car. If you don't change the oil, crap in it. And it's sort of like that. It's like you filter your blood out, you take out the cells, you take out the plasma, you throw it out, you put a new fluid. How do you do it? You take blood out of one arm, you put it through a machine that filters everything out. It's like dialysis, you know? And it goes back in the other arm. And so how accessible is this to the average person?

Not that accessible. It's expensive. It's between five and $10,000 time. It's going to come down in price and it's going to be more accessible. And there's a lot of research going on now. Irina Convoy is one of the leading researchers out of the Palo Alto area in this field. And it's pretty exciting. So I think it's one of those therapies that can be used for long COVID, for autoimmune disease, for cognitive issues, for Alzheimer's, for longevity. So I think we're just beginning to understand it's been around forever in medicine. Yeah.

Like the dialysis that you were saying. Like. It's not dialysis. It's, it's used for, it's used for different kinds of autoimmune diseases and neurologic problems in hospitals. But this is, this is a broadening the use of it to different kinds of indications. And it's a, I think it's one of the most exciting therapies. And I know it helped me for a long COVID,

not super long, cause I caught it early, but I basically had COVID and I developed arthritis afterwards, my hand blew up and I felt like crap and I was exhausted and my brain wasn't working. And I just did a course of plasma freezes. And the next day I woke up and I was completely better. In one session? One session, yeah.

Wow. And how long does it take to do it? Usually two to three hours to put it in your brains. An hour and a half, two or three. Wow. A friend of mine developed long COVID and he had a horrible gut problem. And, and it was terrible. Yeah.

Would you suggest, would this type of thing that you just said be good for all different sorts of long COVID? A hundred percent. In fact, there's some good data out of Europe, Germany, where they looked at long COVID patients and they measured all the autoantibodies and all the inflammatory compounds before and after they did plasma free cysts. And then they looked at their clinical outcomes and they found that actually it worked to actually help people recover and to reduce all these biomarkers of long COVID. Wow. Okay. And then you said something else in the beginning about what you do. You said

you were riffing off a few. You said that and you said another thing that you do that's kind of on the cutting edge. What was that? Rapamycin? No, not rapamycin, but you can talk about that too. Isn't that just a supplement though? No, it's a drug. Oh, wait, isn't that the drug that people take for COVID though? No, rapamycin is a drug that's used for immune suppression for transplants, but in low doses, intermittently, it seems to work for longevity. Really? So would you suggest people take trying it?

I don't think the data is there for the average person to take it, but like I said, I'm willing to try it on myself as a guinea pig, and if they're a longevity enthusiast and they understand the risks. Is there risks? I mean, there are some risks. It can suppress immune system function,

if taken in certain ways and it depends on the person. So you have to monitor. Okay. Where was the other thing that you said that you're doing that's a little bit more unique? I don't know. Exosomes. What do you think about exosomes stem cells in the US versus outside the US? Are they different? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of regulation in the United States that makes it difficult to different? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of regulation in the United States that makes it difficult to get younger stem cells or umbilical stem cells. Exosomes are easier to get, but still not quite regulated. And I think, you know, it's unfortunate, but in other countries, they're doing far more advanced work than we are. Yeah. Yeah. And so, okay, so exosomes, anything else that you do?

Oh, I do a lot of stuff. I exercise, take all my supplements, do all my stuff. What supplements are you taking? Oh, I take a cocktail of stuff, you know, my malty, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, but then I also take my longevity stack, which is urolithin A. I take Himalayan tartar-e-buckwheat, which is incredible. It's a compound that has coarse skin and all these amino rejuvenating properties. I take a sprout powder I put in my shake every morning. I take probiotics. I take this senolytic compound, which is a cocktail of different herbs

and things like Ficetan, curcumin, green tea that helps you kill zombie cells. Yeah, where'd you get that from? Company I used to call Qualia. I don't have any relationship with them, but they're. Yeah, I know them. Okay. So, uh, and I take, um, I take NMN and I take. Why NMN and not NR? Like why don't you. They're interchangeable.

I think. You think they're similar? Yeah. Really? Cause I, I heard that NR from what I understand it gets into your cells easier. Is that. It depends who's doing the research and making money was telling you. Exactly.

I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it understand, it gets into your cells easier. Is that not? Yeah, it depends who's doing the research and making money. I was telling you. Exactly. That's a good point. And who's selling what. I know, but that's isn't an NMN Sinclair, right?

Yeah. Okay, you must be friends with Sinclair. Are you friends with him? I'm friends with David, yeah. He's a Gary Turbot. I love him. Okay, so that's why. Okay, so you're taking that.

What else would you say you're doing besides all those stacks and I wanna listen to it. I think one of the killers that is really not talked about a lot is loneliness and isolation and disconnection. And when I went to the Blue Zones, it was amazing there. There were no nursing homes.

Right. Even if people didn't have kids, they were taken in by their niece and nephew if they were older. It was just quite an amazing thing. And they had the deep sense of connection and community and belonging, meaning, purpose. Those are more sort of intangible things, but investing in your friendships, in your relationships, in your community is one of the most important things for longevity.

I actually think that loneliness is our biggest pet. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Yeah. People can die from loneliness. So I could, I totally agree. I know you need to get out of here. Is there anything else that you want to, we can talk about that's a little bit. Like what's the number one question people ask you?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, what's the one thing that you hear the most people say, like, is it, is it the gut? Is it brain? What's like the one thing like right now that you're getting the most text messages, the most DMs about, not like even maybe check your own DMs. I mean, it's just chronic illnesses. People have autoimmune diseases, you know, have mood disorders, have gut issues, have just people are just struggling in our traditional healthcare system.

We're getting sicker and sicker. We're making more and more drugs which aren't working and we're spending more and more, we're getting less and less. You know, we're now spending, you know, more than twice any of the nation in healthcare costs per capita. And we also are 48th in life expectancy. It's crazy. So I have one question, focus on ADHD.

Do you think that that's a real thing? Do you think that we can eat better to actually have a better focus, being more alert? Oh my God, yeah. I mean, ADHD now affects about 10% of kids. It's something that's now diagnosed in adults. There's a lot of reasons for it, nature deficit disorder, nutritional deficiencies,

microbiome issues, environmental toxins. Nature deficit disorder, is that more like you're on your social media too much? Yeah. And technology. You've got out there playing and being in nature. 100%. This is why I'm asking the question, because I have kids.

And I think, you know, it's a real problem. And I wrote, again, I wrote a book about this called the Ultramind Solution, same book, talking about the brain. So how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first, right? So your body affects your brain. And I had a kid I talked about in that book

who was severely ADD, on Ritalin for years, kicked out of kindergarten, you know, like his behavior. Had all these other health issues, had asthma and allergies, had gut issues, had headaches, had this and that, totally crap diet, processed food, did a bunch of testing, had severe nutritional deficiencies, had totally messed up gut, had bad crap diet, processed food, did a bunch of testing, had severe nutritional deficiencies, had a totally messed up gut, had bad bugs growing, too much yeast, had lead also in his system.

So he basically just got his gut healthy, put him on a donation diet, kind of got his body. He was 12 years old at the time, and it was like a miracle. Like two months later, he came back completely normal. And what was amazing, and you can get to the link to look at the imaging, but you can see his handwriting before and after two months. And it was the thing that got me going, oh my God, what's going on here?

Because his handwriting was illegible. A lot of these kids have what we call dysgraphia. They can't, they're writing this terrible penmanship. And then two months later it was perfect writing. It wasn't because he had occupational therapy and handwriting lessons. It was because his brain went from being chaotic and dysfunctional and coherent to being synchronized

and coherent and functional. And that was what got me to really understand that the body was influencing the brain in ways that we could modify and change, whether it was depression or ADD or OCD or autism or Alzheimer's, whatever it was. And so much, you know, the joke in medicine is that, uh, you know, neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. They're both wrong. Right? There's no brain, there's no brain, mind thing. It's all one thing in the body, brain, body, mind, mind, body. It's just, it's all the same. And so, you know,

basically what happens below the neck is pretty much ignored by most other kind of neurologists or psychiatrists or psychologists. And you can't talk your way out of, you know, a gluten intolerance is causing brain dysfunction or heavy metal toxicity or vitamin deficiency. You've got to treat that. Yeah. And also exercise overall, this moving your body, going outside, all these things are so good for your overall productivity. Mark, you're amazing. Thank you for being on the show, on the podcast. You guys, so we said for Dr. Hyman's new and most, his new

company Function Health, which is probably now the fastest growing health company, you said, on the planet, he's giving everybody, the first hundred people, the code is a hustle 100. You're gonna skip the line and you are gonna get early access. Yes, functionhealth.com. Functionhealth.com, tell them everything.

Tell them everything. All your 90,000 books and all the things, you know? Well, that's where I'd go. I'd get yourself checked because most people don't realize how bad things are under the hood. And so that's really important. So just, you go to functionhealth.com,

you can log in and bypass the wait list in the beta. And it's easy to do, just use the code HUSTLE100. If you wanna learn more about me, you can go to my website, drheimann.com, social media is Dr. Mark Hyman, and podcasts is The Doctors Pharmacy, although it might be changing names soon, so. They know all about you,

like you're like a million followers. Okay, thank you so much. You're an awesome, awesome guest. And I appreciate you being here.