On Purpose with Jay Shetty - Mark Hyman ON: How Food Can Heal or Damage Your Health & Biological Secrets to Longevity

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon.Today, I am talking to Mark Hyman, MD. Dr. Hyman is the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and founder and director of The Ultra-Wellness Center. He is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Eat Fat, Get Thin, The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, and The Blood Sugar Solution. Dr. Hyman talks about the ultimate benefit of eating the right food for our body. He explains the right ingredients we need to be mindful of for optimal health, the core systems in our body responsible for keeping it healthy, how healing doesn’t just involve one aspect of the body but the entirety to reformat your system, and how our social circle affects our habits and can potentially change our behaviors. Indeed, eating right is equivalent to living well. We are what we eat, therefore, improving our eating habits is one of the secrets to longevity.        What We Discuss:00:00:00 Intro00:02:27 The effects of ultra-processed food00:07:19 What is aging us faster?00:10:34 The foundational basics of self-care00:20:26 Your social circle affects your habits00:27:10 Link between inflammation and aging00:35:44 Damaged proteins00:41:44 Clean diet activates the body’s healing mechanisms00:48:07 The power of a healthy diet00:51:47 The core biological systems of the body01:00:07 Dr. Hyman on Final FiveEpisode ResourcesMark Hyman | WebsiteMark Hyman | TwitterMark Hyman | FacebookMark Hyman | InstagramMark Hyman | YouTubeMark Hyman | BooksThe Doctor's Farmacy PodcastThe Ultra-Wellness CenterWant to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Take good care. I am Jan Levan Zant, and I'll be your host for The R Spot. Each week listeners will call me live to discuss their relationship issues. Nothing will tear a relationship down faster than two people with no vision. Because you're all just flopping around like fish out of water? Mommy, daddy, your ex, I'll be talking about those things and so much more. Check out the R-Spot on the iHeart video app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Everything in our society automatically creates a disease. Our process, diet, our sensory lifestyles, chronic stress.

I was with this guy Silvio on top of this mountain in Sardinia, who was a 200 sheep's and goat and his family lived there for a hundred years. And so I said to him, I said, Silvio, so if you have any stress in your life, and he looked at me like it was the weirdest freaking question he'd ever been on. And then he said, yeah, you know, sometimes at night,

a goat gets loose and I have to go get it. I'm like, all the cops. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world, thanks to each and every one of you that are tuning in, who are here every week to become happier, healthier, and more healed.

And I'm so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out. And I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book. For you to listen to this book, I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eight rules of love.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love,

make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, love rules. Go to jsheddytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences, and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now, today's guest is one of your favorites. I am so excited because this is the first time we're in the same room and the same space together. But I've been a follower and a fan and an admirer of his work for a very, very long time. I'm talking about Dr. Mark Hyman, a practicing family physician, and an internationally recognized leader,

speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of functional medicine. Dr. Hyman is the founder and director of the Ultra Wellness Center, senior advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for functional medicine, a 14-time New York Times best-selling author and board president for clinical affairs

for the Institute for Functional Medicine. Dr. Hyman is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, the Doctor's Pharmacy, if you haven't subscribed, make sure you do. And Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS this morning, today, good morning, America, the view, and CNN,

he's also an advisor and co-host on many shows. And today we're doing my new book, Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest Healthiest Life. And I know this is what you want. So when you've got a grab, a copy of this book, it's available as we speak. Make sure got a grab, a copy of this book, it's available as we speak, make sure you go and order a copy of the book. This step-by-step program is to reverse disease, ease pain, and renew energy. Please welcome to on purpose for the second time, Dr. Mark Hyman.

Oh, thank you so much. It's okay to see you, man. No, thank you for being here, right? I mean, you know, your work is so practical, it's so accessible. I'm glad we get to finally be in person. And I remember last time you came on the show, everyone absolutely loved it. So I can't wait for this inhuman person connection. But I want to stop because when I was reading through his book, a lot of stuff came up.

This really stood out to me. Really stood out to me. I want to dive straight in. Go, let's go. You said for every 10% of your diet that is ultra-processed food, your risk of dying goes up 14%. So wait, I'll repeat that for everyone. For every 10% of your diet that is ultra-processed food,

your risk of dying goes up to 14%. You're saying that's for every 10%. That's 60% of our diet and 67% of kids diets today in America. And what's ultra-processed food? It's basically food like substances. It's not really food. I mean, processed food is not bad. Sour, processed food, miso, processed food,

you know, canned sardines and canned tomatoes. That's processed food. That's okay. But it's the ultra-processed food, miso process food, you know, canned sardines and canned tomatoes, that's processed food, that's okay. But it's the ultra-process food, which is where they take the raw materials from soy wheat and corn that are grown through industrial agriculture. They break them in part to the component parts. They reassemble them in food-like substances, which are all color size and shapes of chemically extruded foods that have no resemblance to anything we've ever eaten for most of our evolutionary history and are extremely triggering for all the ancient pathways to cause disease. So if you want to get sick and die early, eat processed food.

Yeah, well, with this conversation of how our diet and our gut health being linked to longevity and aging, it's something that's been around for a long, long time. But I feel like we're only really having this conversation now and more and more people are moving in that direction. Would you agree with that? I think it's true. I don't think, and honestly, I've been practicing medicine for over 30 years and I can't tell you how shocking it is

to somebody my well-educated patients that food has anything to do with how they feel. I mean, like, forget about disease. It's like, and most doctors, if you ask, just food having to do with arthritis, or rheumatoid arthritis, or cancer, or dementia, they're gonna know. But it's absolutely the biggest driver.

It's the single biggest thing we do every day, which is interact with literally pounds of form material that we have to digest, break down, and assimilate. And in the food is not just calories, it's information, it's instructions, it's code that regulates every aspect of your biology for good or bad. And so we now understand how these ancient systems in our body that either can activate longevity and healing

or can cause disease are influenced by the information and food. So food is medicine, but can also be poison. So ultra processed food is literally poison. It's addictive. It drives inflammation and accelerates every age related disease. We know from cancer to heart disease to diabetes, dementia, depression, and everything you can possibly imagine, even violence, indivisiveness and hatred in our society

are driven by food. And I talked about this in my last book, Food Fix, where in prisons, if they give prisoners healthy food, the violent crime goes down by 56%. If they give it in juvenile detention centers, their violence goes down by over 90%. The restriction that these news restraints goes down by 75% suicide goes down by 100%

That's a third leading cause of death in this population. So food is so important to so many aspects of our physical and mental health So we need to understand how our bodies interact with food and how we co-evolve with food and how to turn on the right signals in the body to activate well being and joy and and pleasure and also all these ancient longevity switches. So that's really a lot about my book, Young Freddis, about. It's about how do we activate these ancient longevity switches, these ancient healing systems? So the quote from the book, the Arjevadeic science was that when died is wrong, medicine is

of no use. And when died is correct, medicine is of no need. Yes, I think that's an ancient bit of wisdom from your culture, but it's as true as it ever was. Yeah, no, it's really interesting to me. So my wife's an Iroitic practitioner. So she's an Iroitic health counselor and that's kind of her field of study. And what's really interesting about what you're saying, and when you're doing my being young forever, And what's really interesting about what you're saying, and when you're drinking my being young forever, I think the challenge is when you are young in age,

you don't ever feel fallible. Like you almost feel, and I remember relating to that feeling of, yeah, I'm probably gonna feel like this forever, right? And then you start getting older, and I'm not, I'm 35 now. And... Age should. And yeah, but you start getting older and I'm not, you know, I mean, I'm 35 now. And it's, and yeah, and it's, but you start to notice different things. And you start thinking

about these things more often. Like I didn't have to think about my digestion until I was like 30. And then you start thinking about it or your energy levels or like what was possible and what wasn't. And I consider myself to be someone who wants to live an optimal life. Yeah. I don't just want to sit back and do nothing to live a long life. I want to live a life for a more service and I'm living my purpose and I'm being able to have deep experiences. So when you talk about being young forever, what are the things that we're doing that are aging us faster? I live so much. I mean, the first thing I say is that the purpose of being young forever is not to live a heated, sick life and seek pleasure

and just being narcissistic. It's about being able to show up in your life fully, being able to love and serve and do the things that you want to do to engage in life in a meaningful, purposeful way to be able to be present in relationships to show up for your friends and family and community to give them a bit of service. Like Neem Corolli-Baba said, love everybody, serve everybody, feed everybody. I think that's how to sum up for your friends and family and community to give them a bit of service. You know, like, Nene Corolli-Baba said, love everybody, serve everybody, feed everybody.

I think that's how to sum up the book. I think that there's so many things that we are doing unconsciously that are disrupting our ability to live well and age well and feel good. And there are many cultures around the world, like the Blue Zones, which I visited, like Sardinian Acarea, where the defaults are all automatically

making them healthy. If all you have to eat is your local wild foods and whole unprocessed foods, you're going to eat that. If you have to hike five miles a day up and down Rocky terrain to shepherd your goats and sheep, you're going to do that. You're not going to go to the gym, right? If you have to like lift big logs and build things, that's how you're going to stay strong. Their community and their relationships are such an embedded part of their whole culture. So they had these automatic defaults that create health. Everything in our society automatically creates disease. Our process diet, which we just talked about, our centri-life styles, chronic stress. I was with this guy, Silvio, on top of this mountain in Sardinia,

who was a 200 sheep's and goat, and his family lived there for a hundred years. And we had this beautiful dinner of all his food that he grew and he made and all this cheap cheese, everything. And so I said to him, I said, Silvio, so do you have any stress in your life? And he looked at me like it was the weirdest

freaking question he'd ever been asked. And he took him a while, he saw it, and he pondered. And then he said, yeah, you know, sometimes at night, a goat gets loose and I have to go get it. I'm like, all the cow. So we live in such a chronic wasteful life. We're sleep deprived. We're exposed to unnatural light at the wrong times of day.

We are exposed to an overload of environmental toxins. We have a hoard of drugs were being given that are destroying our microbiome, antibiotics, and all the things in our foods apply that are damaging our guts. So we have literally a disease producing culture, and we have a society that's focused on individualism and success and achievement. And you know, in Sardinian, yeah, where I was, people weren't like on this big goal to achieve, you know, something, they were just living.

They were just enjoying life. They were celebrating together. They were savoring the sweet things in life. They were just enjoying being as enough. And, you know, I think so much of our culture is about doing and making and creating, which is not bad, I do it. But I think I'm gonna cost

if we are unbalanced in how we do it. Where are the starting points for people in creating longevity in their life? Because I find like, well, you just said, you're so right. And sometimes what I find is that the world is overwhelming in the way that it's set up. But even trying to change your habits

can be as overwhelming as well. Where people go, I don't know where to start. Like, I don't know where to start with my diet. I don't know where to start with my stress lifestyle. I don't know, you know, so where do you encourage people to start figuring out what the root cause of their challenges are and where they go from there? Well, everybody is different, but I would say, you know,

it sounds maybe obvious, but the fundamental things that keep us healthy and keep us living long are really quite simple. And you know, there was a study many years ago by James Freeze, who we published in the New Ninja World Medicine, where he looked at what he called the compression of morbidity, the idea that we could have our health span equal our lifespan. Most of us spend the last 20% of our lives sick, right? So you might have lived to 80, but the last 20% of your life, maybe 20 years or a little bit

less, you're going to be unwell. That's not fun. If you just kept your ideal body weight, if you exercise and you didn't smoke, you live a long, healthy life, and you would die quickly, painlessly and cheaply. But if you didn't, you would die long, expensive, painful deaths that early, right? So I think where do people start? I think they start with the very foundational basics of self-care, which is food and exercise and stress reduction tools. Like you have in comm where you teach people seven minute meditations. You don't have to go to a monastery like you did for three

years, you know. You can learn how to increase your sleep quality. These are really foundational basic things that everybody needs to know how to do. And there's no difference in for everybody, but the food stuff is really pretty straightforward. Eat real food. If it's basically grown in a plant, eat it. If it's made in a plant, stay away from it.

Right? I don't have another, I used to do a lot of work with churches and faith-based healing and wellness, not faith-healing, but faith-based cultures and wellness, and although I'm not opposed to faith-healing either, and I used to say it's really simple to know what to eat. Leave the food that man made, eat the food that God made. It's something a five-year-old can understand. God made a avocado, yes, did he made it?

Trinky, no. It's not that hard. So stick with things that are close to what their original form was. E-foods that are rich in plants. I call it plant rich diet, which is all the phytochemicals in plants are medicines. Make sure you have adequate protein as you get older

because that is important for building muscle and muscle is the currency of aging. And we get frail and decrepit as we get older because we lose muscle. Learn some simple practices of exercise that work for you whether it's taking a walk, resistance training is pretty important as you get older which is either bands or body weight or weights or some there's all kinds of techniques out there. But Bill and I was lazy about this. I didn't start until I was 60 but I really transformed my body even starting at 60 years old

compared to where I was at 40. I'll show you a picture later before and after, but it's pretty impressive. And I think the other part is optimizing your sleep and all the practices of how to do that are in the book. And then there's extra layers of things you can do, which is the right supplements, and then there's all these emerging longevity therapies that are out there that are called hormesis, which means the things that are stressful to your body, but they won't kill you. So exercise is a stress. If you're lifting weights or tearing muscles, you're building muscles, everybody's familiar with that. And you get stronger. Basically, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And

there's phytohormises, which are these plant compounds that are the plants defenses that we consume, but that help our bodies activate healing responses. So like all the colorful vegetables, if I seat in in strawberries, there's things in pomegranate, you're a little bit A, the catechins in green tea, and I, you know, I've list goes on and there's listen list in them

in the book and how to optimize that. And then there's really simple ways to sort of optimize your timing of eating to activate repair systems. So one of the key strategies around food is to use it to activate these ancient longevity switches. So we weren't meant to eat all the time. We have hundreds of genes that help us adapt to starvation, but very few that help us adapt to abundance or excess,

which we have now. So when you have periods of fasting, which has been done throughout the centuries for various religious or spiritual reasons and various practices, but it could be just an overnight fast for 12 hours or 12 hours or 14 hours or 16 hours, that gives your body a chance to clean up. Imagine like being in your kitchen and cooking every night and never washing the dishes and never cleaning up and never ineligst. Like you wouldn't do that. Your body needs that repair system to be activated

and only be activated when you're not eating for a period of time. So that is a very powerful way to activate these ancient switches that show up inflammation, that increase your antioxidant systems that boosts your stem cell production, that cause autophagy, the cellular cleanup where you have the little Pac-Man cells going around and cleaning up old damaged cells and tissues and proteins.

It's a very important strategy for improving your overall quantity of life and health and metabolism. So there's a lot of hacks that you can use from a food perspective that I encourage. But there's also other treatments that are out there that are not just fasting for hormisists, but hot therapies and cold therapies. So, you might have heard about like saunas or cold plunges, and it's kind of all the rage now, but the upsides around this is really remarkable. Like in Finland, if you just take a saunas a few times a week, your risk of death goes down by 24%. If you do it four or five times a week, it goes down by over 40%. And that was compared to a control group in Finland, which took a saunas once a week, because everybody has a saunas

in Finland. I think there's enough sauna in Finland for the entire population to be one at once. That's right. And then that increases your innate immune system. It activates something called heat shock proteins that clean up all the damaged proteins and help refold them and make them work better. And one of the hallmarks of aging,

these 10 things that go wrong as we age, is damaged proteins. So there's all these benefits, cold plunges, also activate your mitochondria and brown fat and help stimulate all these longevity pathways. So that we can take a cold shower in the morning like I did, I'll have bath at night, if you have a sauna grade or a cold plunge grade. And there's even other therapies like hypoxia therapies or hyperbaric oxygen or even ozone, which is being used now for all kinds

of things. So we have a lot of very cool stuff on the margins, but the foundations are so key. These blue zones were like, I made a couple that collectively was 210 years old. Wow. I mean, they didn't have, they didn't have saunas andberec oxygen and ozone and supplements and they didn't have any of that. They had, they had these foundational things. So, you know, what I'm saying is, given given the basic things that we do know, we can easily get to 100. And when these people move to the West, they die at the same rate as everybody else.

So it's not some special genetic thing. And then these other advances and things I talk about in the book can probably get us to 120. And then what's coming down the pike might get us to 150 or even longer. So imagine a world where we can take advantage of the wisdom. I mean in this culture elders, there's not just the thing as elders, there's old people. The elderly, which is pejorative, but elders, I mean how valuable are they to society, the wisdom keepers? You know, we lost all that. And then imagine, like, now I'm like, gonna be 63 next week. You look incredible. You're there amazing. You're the best. I had four facelifts. Good.

No, actually, I think it's remarkable, because I feel like I finally figuring life out. You know, I finally figuring out how to be happy and have good relationships and live my life in a balanced way and take care of myself. And I've just kind of figured so much out, not everything obviously, but I feel like now I'm just beginning. And now most people at 63 are winding down.

And I remember as a kid, 63 was like an old person. Like, you know, but I'm going helly skiing this year. You know, I'm going, I'm learning about how to surf better in December. Well riding horses on the beach in Mexico next week. I'm doing all these things that I, you know, are just very physical, active things that you wouldn't think a 63 year old could do. But the body is capable of that.

With your journey though, when you said you started at 60, like doing strength or resilience based training, et cetera, was it help something that came very late in your life or was it like always, always mindfulness? No, not at all, no. No, you might not know the street, but I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I did not know that, yeah.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. So, yeah, I studied Buddhism and college, and I met as some as an afterthought. So I was living with a PhD student nutrition at Cornell, and I studied nutrition, learned about nutrition against the disease. I was a, as you're tearing for many years, and I studied nutrition, I learned about nutrition against the disease. I was a, as you're tearing for many years, and I basically was very focused on health

and well being, I ran five miles a day, I did yoga all the time, but I didn't do weights, I didn't do resistance training. So I was like, I can do yoga, I run, I buy, it gets fine. I play tennis, whatever. But I thought, I didn't like it, Jim's just smelly, and every time I do pushups, I would, my chest would hurt, I'm like, this is dumb.

But then I couldn't do 10 pushups when I was 50. And now I can drop and do like 75, 80 pushups without stopping. Wow, okay, that's impressive. Yeah, the body has the ability at any age to kind of recover. And my dad was 89, he couldn't get up out of a chair because he just kind of had gotten a little frail. So I got him a trainer at 89 for the first time. And he was able to get so much fitter and stronger and more functional.

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Yeah, I feel like the biggest challenge that I'm noticing in all of this is that I was saying to someone recently that if I asked everyone, how many of you want to eat healthier, everyone would raise their hands. If I asked people the question, how many of you want to work out more, most people would raise their hands. We don't have a challenge in desire, we have a challenge in habits where we don't know how to move away

from this compelling feeling we have to go with what feels good in the moment, right? Like when you look at food, it's like choosing a bowl of vegetables or a bowl of fries. Like you're gonna choose the fries out of habit. And I find that sometimes we can put our willpower together and we can kind of push through and have that.

But then as soon as we get access, we cave again. So how have you thought about, is your helping guide people in this journey? Like how have you found, even for yourself, you went from yoga to then being able to do eight e-pushups today, what were the key tenants in helping you change your habits? Because I find that we're in a habit's crisis right now more than anything. I mean, I've been always pretty self-disciplined. I think that the thing that I've really learned

though, Jay, is that it's your community that matters. That's your social, not your social network online, but your actual network in person that drives so much of your behavior. And I know I for decades studied the sort of molecular biology and physiology and biochemistry and genetics and I was sort of in deep into like the inner workings of the human body. And you know Einstein said, I'm not interested in the thoughts in the element and the spectrum of this Einstein said, I'm not interested in the thoughts and the spectrum of this or that element, I'm interested in the thoughts of God, the rest of your details. So I feel like I was so interested in the mind of God

by understanding the natural laws of biology, which is what functional medicine is, is what's described in young forever. But I had kind of missed something, which is how do we get people to change behavior? Because I can change biology, I can take someone with diabetes and heart failure and all these problems and I can reverse it.

And I went to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 and I met Paul Farmer who basically took care of people who were the most underserved people in the world. Haiti is the poorest civilization, the worst Western hemisphere, half of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. And these people were basically elected by the public health community and the TBN AIDS.

And he said, look, I can cure these diseases with drugs. These are easy, but people don't have the ability to take the drugs and they don't have the walk-learn water and they don't have a watch no one to take in. So he realized that the power was community. So he created this model of a company, man. We're gonna accompany each other to health. And so he used community health workers essentially.

And then I realized that, wow, you know, we call all these chronic illnesses of aging. We call them non-communicable diseases. They're not infectious, but there are contagious. We know that if you're overweight, your family's overweight, it's not as strong a predictor of obesity as if your friends are overweight. If you're friends are overweight, you're 171% more likely to be overweight than if your family's overweight. Wow, I didn't know that. Which is crazy.

This is Christoccus work from Harvard. And so it's our social fabric that determines our behavior. The social threads that connect us are more important than our genetics. So all your friends are drinking beer and having fries and burgers and watching football, which may not be a bad thing, but you might like that. And you might not be as healthy as if all your friends are drinking green juices and going to yoga every day, right? So it's a very different framework.

So I realized that the power of community is so important. So we did a program at this church, Saddleback Church in California, where we used the small groups that they already had built and we put a healthy curriculum, lebbing curriculum through those groups. And we thought a few, 100 people would show up, 15,000 people signed up the first week and they accompanied other health.

And they lost a quarter million pounds in the first year. And through this process, I really learned that it was the power of each other to help each other get healthier, to lift each other up, to inspire each other to hold each other accountable. It's like AA or it's like Weight Watchers. These things work because they have a community-connected component. And that was one of the things I learned from the Blue Zones J. That was so important. They were the nursing homes. They're whole society was built around relationships and community and connection and celebration together. So people weren't isolated and lonely and disconnected like they are in the society, but they were deeply connected. The Sangha, right, is like, the Sangha is one of the three pillars

of enlightenment, which is community that helps you build and work towards the right action and the right life and the right kind of loving and the right behavior, all these things. So I think we really underestimate the power of that. So what I would say to people is find to someone, a friend, a buddy, a group, you know, my friend Rick Warren, a pastor of Saddleback Church said, everybody needs a buddy. Yeah, and it sounds so simple when you say it like that. Like, you know, it can feel like such a complex question sometimes.

And then when you put it like that, you're like, oh, yeah, that makes so much sense. And I start thinking about the people I spend time with. And I think people struggle with points of transition in communities in their life. So it's like they built a community, they built a group of friends. Now they want new visions with their life,

they have new habits they wanna adopt. And it's like letting go of an old set of habits, which are linked to a group of people is the most difficult part. Right. If you're used to going and watching football with a group of people who you will drink together and eat unhealthy together, to you, you're not just giving up the food, you're almost giving up company.

That's what it feels like. My friends love me for a fear of alcoholic and you're hanging out with other alcoholics, you got to find new friends. Yeah, and that's the hard part. And I think that's what I found having made many transitions in my life of groups of friends and habits. I found that the first thing was don't try leave your friends or break relationships, but try and build new ones first. And so a lot of people spend time going, okay, well, I've got to somehow talk to this person about how we're not going to spend time together. And it's almost the other way around, find the new community first, find the new singer first. And the more you start associating with that group of people, it becomes natural for

these things to have less energy and less time for. And the second thing was that I found that the people who wanted to be in my life continued to be in my life. Right, that's right, they'll come along. Yeah, they'll come along. And you'll inspire them, like, God, Jesus, it's so good, he looks so good, he's feeling like, I wanna know what he's doing. What's he smoking?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. The people that want to be in your life will come along with you. And I think that we sometimes just get so tied in in those groups that we just can't break out of them. But I love that answer. I want to talk about some of the in the book, you talk about the 10 hallmarks of angels. Yes. And I want to dive into this because I think we're just again, and I comment this as a patient of the book, like as, as you know, and I'm reading the book, I don't count

myself as someone who knows, I count myself as someone who knows, I count myself as someone who is, considers myself quite uneducated when it comes to physical, biological, health. And when I'm reading this, I'm going, I don't even think most of us know, like we're just not even aware. So I wanna pick up a few.

Wait, you didn't get a handbook when you were born, this is how your body works. Yeah, I didn't at all. I mean most people can run their iPhone, like nobody's business, but they don't know how to run their body. Don't know how to run our bodies at all. And so I wanna pick a few that I don't really should out to. And we've talked about a couple of these,

but Hallmark one is disrupted, hormone and nutrient signaling. And I wanted to talk about the link between inflammation and aging, because I find that that's something that people are learning about slowly, or at least if you're not learning about it, you're experiencing inflammation.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, a lot of diseases of aging are inflammation diseases, right? Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. I think, you know, before we kind of dive into those, I just want to sort of set the stage, which is, you know, what's really exciting for the first time, and I talked about the mind of God.

For the first time, we're understanding these fundamental laws of biology, like we understand the laws of physics. And from a very few natural laws of physics, we can see and create an enormous amount of phenomena, right? Think about the things that we can create with physics, that's rocket ship going to the moon, you know, a bridge and build a building. And I mean, I talk on the podcast. It's all physics, right?

And that's amazing to me. And it's just from a few natural laws. What are those natural laws of biology that haven't really been described? So scientists for the first time are understanding these fundamental laws that describe all the disease phenomena we see. The diseases are way downstream. And menaces focus on whack-a-mall treatment. You just find the cure for heart disease and diabetes and cancer and dementia.

What if they're all the same? What if it's all the same disease with just different manifestations like leaves on a tree where the trunk and the roots are the same? So that's what we're finding. And the hallmarks of aging are these things that go wrong as we get older That cause all these diseases and if we just cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the earth Like how many years will we live longer and these are the number one and two killers? three to five years Which is kind of shocking right if we dealt with these hallmarks these causes we might get another 30 or 40 years

Wow, and what's important to understand is that, so I just are looking at how do we treat these? And that's helpful. But from my perspective, and I think what's unique about my book, Young Forever, is that I go to a deeper level. What is the cause of the hallmarks? Because if the hallmarks are the cause of disease, what causes the hallmarks?

Yeah. And it's really quite simple. It's either too much of something that our body doesn't like or not enough of something in our body needs to thrive. What are the impediments to health and the ingredients for health? It's a short list. Impediments for health are bad food, too much stress, physical or psychological. In my mental toxins, microbes can be, you know, got microbiome being messed up or infections

and also allergens, things that cause inflammation. So those are the fundamental things. And what does everybody need to thrive? We need the right food, the nutrients, right pounds of hormones, light, air, water, connection, meaning, purpose, rest, restoration, sleep, exercise movement. All these things are the ingredients for health. It's a very short list. So that's the framework of functional medicine. Either dying of too much or dying of too little, right? And so understand the information coming in from food and what to do with it. So when we eat protein and sugar and fat, our bodies know how to handle this. We have all these pathways that digest and metabolize these things.

When these sensing pathways are overloaded with too much of the wrong stuff, if you have, you know, we need glucose and sugar, or fine. But if you are eating like a pound a day of sugar and flour, or almost, which is what most Americans do today, that's like an av a day of sugar and flour, or almost, which is what most Americans do today, that's like an avalanche of sugar and flour. It's a toxic poisonous pharmacologic dose. So that overloads, for example, the insulin signaling pathway,

one of these four-long Jebadi switches that are part of our nutrient sensing system, that overloads it and causes you to have a cascade of downstream effects from inflammation, to increasing belly fat, to oxidative stress, to mitochondrial injury, to all these things that went to a rapid aging process. So that's the biggest one,

and that's kind of sugar and starch. So if you want to do one thing to extend your life, cut out or cut down dramatically on the amount of sugar and starch you're eating every day, and have more fat and have more vegetables and have more good quality proteins. Those will all help you thrive. The other is the pathway around the nutrient sensing.

It's something called amtore. This is something people have heard about, maybe, maybe not, but essentially it's kind of cool because there's this pathway that is so important in activating the cellular cleanup mechanism called autophagy. Now we've heard about this, which is why we talk about intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating or ketogenic diets or all these things that people are kind of tossing around. The reason those are important is they give your body a chance to do cleanup at night. And we need to clean up like the kitchen instead of leaving the dishes in there for a week or a month. So that process is so important.

So we need times of not eating to activate this autophagy process, and that happens by the inhibition of mTOR. Now, mTOR, when it's overstimulated by too much protein all the time or too much sugar all the time, we'll just keep making stuff in the body. And it's like, you know, if you just keep making food and your kitchen, it's going to overflow

and it's going to be a mess. That's what happens inside your body. So what we found was it was this compound that they discovered in Rapa Nui, which is Easter Island. Now, who knows, the aliens came down and put those things there. I don't know.

It's those statues that are on this island off the coast of Chile, right? They scraped off some stuff off the back of the statue and they took it back to the lab. They said, well, maybe this is an antifungal and it doesn't work so well. Maybe it has some immune properties and it's used in transplant medicine. But then it discovered it in inhibits emtora. In fact, the name emtora stands for mammalian target of rapamycin. Rapamycin is named after rapanui, our Easter Island. So the drug that they've developed is named after this,

and this inhibits mTOR, and is now being studied for longevity. And so we need periods of time to inhibit mTOR, of fasting, not doing anything, and we need times to stimulate mTOR to build muscle, so we don't get frail and to crepid as we age. And then there's other pathways like serotonins and NPK that are part of our nutrient sensing system

that detects scarcity, and we'll activate activate DNA repair and people have heard about it. For example, risk-fair troll and longevity and this is the work of Dr. David St. Clair. And this, you know, they work, but they gave them, you know, it was from red wine, the equivalent of 1500 bottles of red wine. So you don't want to practice this at home. But it was amazing. What they saw, these animals lived longer and they got healthier, even eating a bad diet. They were few activated these longevity switches. It's so powerful. And the beautiful thing is that a lot of the plant foods that we can eat, the phytochemicals that are rich in this plant foods, all activate these ancient longevity pathways like green tea or pomodgranate or or there's phytoform red grapes and the list goes on.

And so we have these ancient systems that we can play with. And so the book is really about how do we turn on the longevity switches? How do we activate those in the right way? How do we eat in a way to optimize each of those in the right time at the right way? When I hear that in my head, I've become more close and clear about this because of my wife.

So it comes back to me where it comes back to your point of view. You want the burgers as fries and she's like, yeah, for sure. For sure. Any day of the week, any day of the week. She's making you like, you know, you're so angry. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's, so I've been through this journey with her.

We've been married for six years and together for ten, but for the six years that we've been married, she's been on this journey with me of helping me transform my diet and my habits. And I've felt all the benefits you're speaking about having gone on that journey. And I've also felt some of the shocks that my body's had in missing out on some of those things that it's used to. Like my body loved bread. Like it still loves bread.

Like it feels great when I eat bread. And I'm not talking about gluten-free bread. I'm talking about bread that has gluten in it. And, but I know that gluten's, yeah, can be massively inflammatory, especially for me as well from the test that I've done. But I find it really interesting that sometimes I can feel great eating things that are bad for me, but there's something happening inside that I've done. But I find it really interesting that sometimes I can feel great

eating things that are bad for me, but there's something happening inside that I'm not wearing. Yeah, I mean sugar's a drug, bread's a drug. I mean, in fact, you might not know this, but one of the things that happens when you eat bread in your consuming gluten is that the gluten gets partially broken down into these things called gluteomorphins, which actually are like morphine.

And they bind to the receptors in your brain that make you feel good. So yeah, heroin makes you feel great. That doesn't mean it's good for you, right? And so it's very addictive. And it also gives you a jolt of sugar and adrenaline. So when you eat sugar, you get a jolt of adrenaline. Literally, your cortisol goes up, your adrenaline goes up.

So it's like being jacked up on steroids and adrenaline, which feels good for the moment. And then you crash. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Number four I wanted to talk about, you talk about damaged proteins. Yeah. And dysfunctional molecules, I think that was,

I think damaged proteins is something we're not very well educated on. No, I think, you know, what happens is, you know, your body has, it's just a miracle to me, Jay, that the body has the ancient systems to handle things that go wrong and to repair things and clean up things. So we are constantly making proteins.

People don't really realize this, but what does your DNA do? Right, your DNA, all it does is code for proteins. Proteins do all sorts of things from, you know, build tissues, your muscles and joints to building your immune cells, to being communication systems, and small proteins like peptides are messengers of 80,000 that tell your body what to do and regulate. All kinds of things from brain chemistry to hormones, the sexual function to metabolism, to mitochondrial

function. I mean, the list goes on. So proteins are so important. But as we age, those proteins can get damaged or they are injured and they are misfolded and they're broken. And so the body has to one address this and two, hopefully prevent you from making these. So one of the things that happens, for example, it's really dangerous, is when you eat sugar,

it kind of binds with proteins in your body and it damages them and causes glycation, which is basically just the phenomena that happens when you get a crispy chicken skin or crust on a bread or creme brulee and you get that like little crackle. That's so good, right? We all love that stuff. But that reaction happens in your body and that creates what we call ages, advanced glycation end product, which ages us, and that binds to rages, receptors for advanced

glycation end product. So that rages, literally, the aging and raging is what happens. So when you eat a lot of sugar and starch, you're causing these damaged proteins. So the measurement, for example, of your diabetes control, we call hemoglobin A1C, that's a measure of damaged proteins. That's sugar binding to hemoglobin and damaging it, and we can see that on a blood test. But this is happening throughout your body. And what's amazing is things like,

we talked about hormesis and these stresses like sonas, sonas create heat shock proteins, which are actually repairing proteins or cleaning up proteins. When you have autophagy, which are actually repairing proteins or cleaning up proteins. When you have autophagy, which is, we talked about, which is a self-cleaning mechanism, you actually clean up these old proteins and you recycle them. So, the body has a recycling system. Basically, it takes up all these old damaged things, glombs on to them like a packed man,

digest them, break some down its component parts, and says, okay, I got new parts, let's make new proteins. And you start over. It's pretty amazing actually. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I've never heard anyone say that before about how the body is a recycling mechanism. It does. It's amazing. I mean, that's what's so exciting to me is, you know, when I went to school, I, in medical school in their second year, we get a book called The Pathologic Basis of Disease, which is really great. It's like the foundational textbook.

But I didn't get the scientific basis of wellness textbook. I didn't learn anything about that. So how do you create health? You say to your doctor, I want you to treat this disease. Okay, take this drug. If you say doctor, I want you to make me optimally healthy. They're like, okay, well, eat better, take your size, take bite of it, I don't know, but they don't have an answer, right?

But it's scientific wellness, what is scientific wellness? Why is, what is the science of creating health? That's what functional medicine is, and that's really what I've given people is an owner's manual for their body, how to detect what's wrong, what test to do, how to find it, what's how to balance, and how to correct it, and how to optimize each of the systems

in your body so you can create health. And what's really exciting is now we have a metric called a biological age clock that we can measure. So before we kind of say, oh, is this working or not, maybe your blood pressure works better, maybe your weight weights are better, blood pressure is better, that's all in direct markers. But there is something that we now have discovered, which is a biological clock. And it's measured by looking at little marks on your DNA that are called your epigenome. Now, we all know what your genome is, which is your genes. And you got about 20,000 genes.

That's your DNA. That's not really changeable, except through gene editing or whatever. But your epigenome and the genes are like the keyboard and the piano. 88 keys, you can't change that. But you can play jazz, ragtime, Mozart, classical, whatever you want. Blues, it's amazing, right? On the same keyboard. Same thing with the epigenome. The epigenome is the piano player

and that controls what genes are turned on or off or expressed. And your biological age is a sum total of every influence, every food you've eaten, every type of exercise you've done, every thought you have, every relationship we've been in, all the talks we've been exposed to washing over your DNA, creating these marks that determine your biological age. So I've done my biological age, I'm 63,

but biologically I'm 43. That's unbelievable. Yeah, well it's really cool. I'm going for 25. I'm trying to get younger than you, Jay. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, we have so many technologies allowing us to now do this that are even beyond the diet exercise and lifestyle stuff.

So we now can measure the effective interventions on these things and check how we're doing through these epigenetic clocks. And our biological age doesn't have to match with and track with our chronological age. And I was born in 1959, I can't change that. I can't be chronologically younger, but I can't be biologically younger,

even as I get chronologically older. And what's amazing is it doesn't take that much. Like I've seen studies were using a dietary intervention, which is an anti-inflammatory Whole Foods diet, some phytochemical support, and a little bit of exercise and lifestyle support. Within eight weeks, they were able to reverse biological age in this cohort of patients by three years. And what if they did it for a year?

You know, so we have, we have the ability to do this to measure it out. It's very exciting science. I am MiYAMLA, and on my podcast, the R-Spot, we're having inspirational, educational, and sometimes difficult and challenging conversations about relationships. They may not have the capacity to give you what you need. And insisting means that you are abusing yourself now. You human. And that means that you're crazy as hell, just like the rest of us.

When a relationship breaks down, I take copious notes and I want to share them with you. Anybody with two eyes and a brain knows that too much Alfredo sauce is just no good for you. But if you're going to eat it, they're not going to stop you. So he's going to continue to give you the Alfredo sauce and put it even on your grits if you don't stop him. Listen to the art spot on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Shatekater, and to be honest,

I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast.

Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good, There is risk too far. And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

Not too long ago, in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, this explorer stumbled upon something that would change his life. I saw it and I saw, oh well, this is a very unusual situation. It was cacao, the tree that gives us chocolate. But this cacao was unlike anything experts had seen, or tasted. I've never wanted us to have a gun fight. I mean, you saw the stacks of cash in our office. Chocolate sort of forms this vortex. It sucks you in. It's like I can be the queen of wild chocolate.

We're all lost. It was madness. It was a game changer. People quit their jobs. They left their lives behind, so they could search for more of this stuff. I wanted to tell their stories, so I followed them deep into the jungle, and it wasn't always pretty. Basically, this like disgruntled guy and his family surrounded the building armed with machetes. And we've heard all sorts of things that you know, somebody got shot over this. Sometimes I think, oh, all these for a damn

bar of chocolate. Listen to obsessions while chocolate on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast Yeah, and let's let's talk about some of the things that people are feeling today Because I think that's how we get in touch with our health or we start I think people who read this book are gonna get that manual that you're talking about I want to guide people to this book through things that we feel. So what's really interesting to me is how commonly people are experiencing brain fog today. And I think as we experience brain fog, I don't think we often know what to do about it. We often also start going internal. This is also the same thing as connecting,

what you talk about in the book to our mental health. I think a lot of the time when we're experiencing mental health challenges, we're trying to solve it through the mind. Correct. And I think that that's not working, right? It's actually very difficult. And I recently had, and I know you know Mona Sharmawell, who I worked with. Mona worked with me on my diet and my plan and everything. And she's a functional medicine nutritionist. Yes, and so we, I did a vitamin D test, and my vitamin D was 10. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like very, and I'm still functioning,

doing everything I do. Sure. On vitamin D, and she was just like, Jay, most people who have that level are like, have forms of depression. Depression, muscle aches. And I'm not. Yeah, and I'm not having, you know,

the depressive aspect of that. And so, which was great for me, but my point being that there is this big connection between physical and mental health, or like physical, diet, sleep, energy levels, and then impact. So talk to us a bit about that. It's so huge, Jay, you know, I think, you know,

there's so much to work on on your biology, but I wrote a book probably 15 years ago now called the Ultramine Solution about how to fix your brain by fixing your body first. So you can meditate all you want, but if you're mercury poisoned or your thyroid's not working or you're vitamin B12 or vitamin D deficient or your microbiomes of mess, it's going to be hard to achieve the goals you want to achieve. So set yourself up for dealing with your soul's evolution, with your spiritual growth, with healing, your emotional life, and trauma, by setting your body up to function better. To help you.

To help you, right. And so, you know, this book isn't about getting to 120. It's about how to activate these health switches, longevity switches, to make you feel good now. Because most people have what I call FLC syndrome, which is when you feel like crap. Right? And so people walk around with all sorts of symptoms

and not realizing how good they can feel and how quickly they can feel good. And so by doing some of these practices, simply changing your diet and lifestyle changes, people can experiment even 10 days of it can have a profound effect. You know, I do workshops around the world where I take people through a 10 day or even a five, six day program and universally within a week, people have a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases by simply cleaning up their diet and how many days? Five to seven days. Where do you do this? Well, over. I'm going to come join you.

We're doing next one then, Sardinian, April. I love Sardinian. You should come. It's a little bootie hotel. I'm going to tour in April. When's the one after that? I might do one in June in Ibiza. Okay, June would be amazing. I'm going to join you. Okay, come. Yeah. Be great. Yeah, we can teach really too. No, I'm going gonna come as a patient. You can release a meditation. Yeah, I'll be happy. I'm being serious about that. For sure. That would be so fun. It's great. I want to come there.

It's so beautiful there. So we have this ability to activate these healing mechanisms through changing or diet and heal our mind. So there's an amazing psychiatrist who is at Harvard who wrote a book called Brain Energy, Christopher Palmer, who's just brilliant. And he basically was a traditional Harvard psychiatrist who had a patient with schizophrenia. And now schizophrenia is one of those conditions.

It's not like people's anxiety or depressed or emotional. This is like a pretty serious mental disorder, right? And we think it's not changeable. And he, on the medications, gave a huge amount of weight, which a lot of the psychotic medications cause weight gain. And he, this guy would just hide in his room all day and not come out and only see the psychiatrist. And he said, I want to lose weight. And the psychiatrist knew he wouldn't go to anybody else. So he said, why don't you try a ketogenic diet because I heard it it really works and maybe it'll help. And he did it and it gets a freaky went away.

Wow. And it's like, what's going on in the metabolic function of the brain that's affecting the mind? Right. The brain in the mind are not the same thing, but the brain function influenced the function of your mind. And so by healing the brain, you can then start to really deal with your stop with your mind. And so by healing the brain, you can then start to really deal with your stop with your mind. It's not gonna fix your thinking overnight or your mindset and all the things you need to work on, but it'll allow you the ability to do it so much better.

And it might even change your thinking. It might even change depressive thoughts, anxiety, a lot of even panic attacks can be caused by fluctuations in blood sugar, which I've seen patients. So I'm so excited. You asked that question because we have such a mental health crisis in this country. And we know from dietary studies where they they've looked at traditional diets, like the sat, we call it the sad diet, the standard American diet, which makes us sad actually. They swapped out that for a whole foods, basically a Mediterranean kind of diet.

And it was a very large study. It was a clinical trial, randomized control trial. It was a better at treating depression than almost anything else. I want to call it the glad diet. And we've seen in these studies, like I mentioned in prisons and other places where people giving a whole foods diet will dramatically reduce their their violent behavior or their mood will improve. And so these foods that we're eating are inflaming our brain. They're inflaming our emotions. They're inflaming our minds. And depression is an inflammatory disease of the brain.

Autism is an inflammatory disease. The brain 80D is an inflammatory disease. The brain Alzheimer's. All these things are brain inflammation. And how is this inflammation being caused primarily through our diet and lifestyle and toxins? So it's a totally fixable problem. Yeah, I mean, listening to you, it gives me a lot of hope in that anyone is listening to us today and goes and grabs a copy of the book, younger, forever, the secrets to living

your longest healthiest life, which I highly, highly recommend will put the link to the book in the forever, the secrets to living your longest healthiest life, which I highly, highly recommend will put the link to the book in the notes and the caption. As we're having this discussion, I'm feeling a great sense of confidence. And the reason why I have these conversations as well is because they remind me of why I'm trying to have a clean diet and why I'm trying to do the right thing. And I think it's so important to strengthen that why. Totally. Because it just becomes so easy to go back to our obvious habits so quickly. But I think the challenge is that for so long, we've been trying to deal with our health

in silos. So if we have a mental health challenge, we try and deal just with our mind. And if we have a physical health challenge, we try and just deal with our body. And we don't realize that they're so interconnected. They're not separate. There's no mind, body, body, mind. It's one thing. It's all one thing.

And try to separate out, doesn't make any sense. And so medicine is really bifurcated, psychiatry, and the rest of medicine. It just doesn't make any sense to me. And when I call myself the accidental psychiatrist, because I basically wasn't treating people's mental disorders, but I was treating your physical health. And I saw their brains get better,

and their mind get better, and their mood get better. And my polar disease go away, schizophrenia get better, autism get better, ADD get better, depression get better, I'm like, what is going on here? And it just blew my mind. Could you give us a few examples of those or people that you worked with in those spaces?

Because I think that's something we don't hear about as much. I think we hear a lot today about when people are struggling with those things that go into therapy. Yeah. But we're not doing this. We kind of had one patient who was just severely depressed and was struggling for years and years. And you know, I found out she had mercury poisoning. And we got the mercury out of her system and she got better. There was a patient, a really, really patient of mine.

It was someone who was part of the Daniel plan, this faith-based wellness program I mentioned, who came up to me after the six week part of the program. We started in six weeks later, we had another rally and a gathering and she said, Dr. Heimann, I don't get it. Like, I've been in a psychiatric hospital in my whole life. I've been in every psychiatric medication.

I'm about to get divorced, about to lose my job. I'm just was struggling so much, and I changed my diet, and in three days it all went away. And I feel so good now. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible. It happened to you, so it was clearly possible. So people don't realize how quickly we can see these changes.

And so that was really remarkable. I had a kid with ADD who was just so out of control and his behavior, you couldn't be attention, you couldn't focus, he was kicked out of kindergarten, you can imagine being that bad, and he kicked out of kindergarten. Wow, yeah. You know, it's a hand.

But he had all these other health issues. He had asthma and you had ear ol' bowel and he had all these headaches and cramps. And so I basically treated his biology, turned out he had a leaky gut and food sensitivities and lead toxicity. And he ate a total junk food diet. So we have so nutrition and efficient and omega-3s and zinc and magnesium and vitamins. And so we just fixed all that.

We just cleaned up his gut. We gave him good food. We gave him good nutrients. Two months later, it came back and all the sims were gone physically and all those mental sims were gone. And his handwriting, which we can show in the show notes and on the video, it's handwriting went from being illegible at 12 years old to being perfect penmanship.

And it wasn't because I gave him handwriting lessons. It was because his brain went from completely chaotic and disorganized to completely coherent and functional. Yeah, I hope everyone is listening to this. If you're struggling with anything based on your mental health, your brain health, I hope that you're also going to take some your mental health, your brain health, I hope that you're also going to take some time out to research on your diet, to of course read this book because I just want people to make that connection quicker.

And I spend years doing the opposite, Mark, and that's why I'm so fascinated about all the work you do. Because I spend years and I got to a place where I'd mastered my mind, but my body was just not catching up. Right, yeah. And so I could take care of my thoughts and my emotions and my feelings, but my body couldn't match that pace. And so I've kind of come the other way. Yeah, it's great.

It's great. Hey, I wonder where you get it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You talk to us about, and again, we're only doing a very high level of the book because I want people to get a sense of some of the depth of what you talk about in this book. Could you explain to us again at that top level what the seven core biological systems are? Yeah, so this is really important, Jay.

So, like I said, one of the laws of biology, what's the mind of God? And right now, we're going to go into a revolution in medicine that's as big as anything has ever happened in history, you know, from the discovery of the germ. It's remarkable how we're now understanding the body as an ecosystem. This is called systems biology, or functional medicine is the clinical model that applies this. And so the hallmarks of aging

are what these emerging scientists and lunges you're talking about that go wrong with aging. But what is causing them is what functional medicine is really good at figuring out. And what happens is that these seven core systems in the body that go wrong, they get out of balance. Just like in Arribaida, they have the dosha, you know, or in Chinese medicine, they have the five elements. Or we have the Yin Yang, and we have the, you know, imbalances and deficiencies or excesses. And this is exactly how the body works. These ancient technologies from thousands of years ago

figured it out. We just now were putting scientific language on it and understanding. And this is exactly how the body works. These ancient technologies from thousands of years ago figured it out. We just now were putting scientific language on it and understanding. And so there's instead of 155,000 diseases, there's these just germans in these core systems, many of which are also the hallmarks of aging, like your microbiome, your immune system,

how you make energy, your mitochondria, your detox system, how you get rid of toxins, your transport system, how you move things around in your body and through your circulation and lymph system, communication systems, which is your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your peptides, all the millions of chemical reactions that happen all the time, it has to be coordinated. And your structural system, from your biomechanical structure, and your skeleton to your subcellular structures.

All of those systems have to be in balance for you to be healthy. So as a functional medicine doctor, as a systems thinker, I look at how do we find out why they're out of balance? How do we take out this stuff that's causing you in balance and put back this stuff that's creating balance? So let's say they got, for example, well, you might have food sensitivity, you might have bad bugs growing in your guts. You got to remove those things.

You got to remove those foods like gluten or dairy and you got to get rid of, you know, the bad bugs that are growing in the gut, maybe you need some herbs or an antifungal or an antibiotic. And then how do you repair that? How do you give what it needs? You need pre-botics and probiotics and polyphenols and you need the right nutrients like zinc, and vitamin A and omega-3 fats to help the gut heal and glue to mean. So we know what the ingredients are for each to take out and put in. And so we apply that to each thing, including the immune system.

I mean, one of the most shocking things to me, we were in COVID, was that we are about 4% of the world's population in America. And we have an extraordinary healthcare system and spend twice as much as any other developed nation. And we were 16% of the cases of COVID in deaths. So a 4% of the population in the world, four times as many deaths as we probably should have had. And we probably should be even less than the rest of the world because of our healthcare system.

Why was that? It's because our diet is so bad that we're pre-inflamed. So, when COVID came, it was like throwing gas on the fire, and we were pre-inflamed because we were obese, which were chronicly ill, because we have all these diseases of inflammation. And so, that's really why. And it was sort of shocking to me that nobody who's talked about this. And, yeah because we have all these disease of inflammation. So that's really why. It was sort of shocking to me that nobody has talked about this. We have the power to regulate our immune systems by what we're eating. Sugar suppresses your immune system. You know, being overweight suppresses your immune system. Even the responsive vaccines.

If you're overweight or you're elderly because you're inflamed, your immune system doesn't respond to vaccines. I think everyone's experiencing a low immunity in general as well because of all these factors that you've talked about today as well. And I just want everyone to see, I want to point this out for everyone who's watching the show. If you're listening, then I'm explaining what I'm doing. I just want to show this to everyone who's watching because you can actually see how the book breaks down the young forever program, which is the program that Mark recommends in the book, young forever. And what I love about it is that as you're flicking through this book, you're just going to see

a very systematic and formulaic breakdown of the system. It's not just... It's a how-to manual for how your body works. So, yes, yes. If you didn't get born with that instruction manual, this is a good one. Yeah, I wanna point that out to everyone who's sitting there going like me,

often I can get, you know, I can often start thinking, wow, this is a lot of information, I don't know enough. Where do I start? What do I do? But the book to me, it does a great job at simplifying it. Yeah, I mean, the book is really, it's three parts. The first is the why. Like, why are we aging?

What's going on? A little bit of science geeky. If you don't like any of that, you can skip it. I love this. But I like to know why. And then there's the what, like there's the what to do. Yeah. And then there's the how to do it.

Yeah. So it really is, it's really, you know, I'm a doctor. I take care of patients. And so I get results by giving people a programmatic plan to follow. So this is what I've been doing for 30 years. And there's a lot of great long-jebody books out there, but they're often by academics,

and I've learned so much from them, but they're like, well, what do I do? How do I have to do? Exactly. But this just breaks it down exactly, even day by day, and what you can do. Yeah, Mark, is there someone that you've worked with that was so negative and felt that they were too late

to solve their challenges, but you were able to find some change in them? Could you tell us about some of your work to the logo? Oh my God, Jenny, yes. One of the most remarkable patients I had, and she was part of a group program. We had a Cleveland Clinic called Function for Life, which used the power of community

to help people change behavior. And she was a woman who was about to go on her way out. She was 66 years old. She had typed her diabetes for 10 years. She had heart failure. She had kidneys who were failing. Liver was failing in fatty. She had high blood pressure.

She had an apyla pills that her copay was 20,000. Who knows what she was costing the healthcare system? In an out of the hospital. Her body mass index was 43, which is severely obese. 25 or less is normal, 30 is obese, 40 is just like next level, right? And she came to the program, she changed her diet. She was a fairly educated woman, but she,

and it was a minister and her congregation, but she really grew up in a family that never ate real food. So everything came from a box of package you can, highly processed, and that's just what she did for her whole life at 66 years old. And she was on her way to a hard transplant and a kidney transplant. And you think, oh, from a traditional doctor point of view, well, you can't really do anything about that. Maybe you can manage these diseases and make her live a little longer

and make her quality life a little better. But I'm like, no way. I don't want to manage disease. I want to get rid of it. So we put her on a diet. It's a very anti-inflammatory diet. It's whole foods, plant rich, lots of good fats. We didn't even get her moving or exercising at the beginning because it's hard when you're that big to move, but just change your food. Maybe a few supplements, not a lot. Vitamin D, fishtriol, multi-bidemen. In three days, she was off for insulin. In three months, she reversed every one of her disease as objectively by traditional conventional medicine

biomarkers or heart failure reverse, her kidneys normalized, her liver normalized, her high blood pressure normalized, her diabetes or blood sugar went from A1C1 from 11, which is like probably should be in the hospital level, blood sugar of 3,400 to like 5.5, which is actually perfectly normal. She lost 43 pounds and a year she lost 116 pounds and I've got pictures of before and after I'll share with you. It's really remarkable. I had holy cow. You know, there is no drug on the planet that works as well as food. I mean, if I could give her a pill to verse all diseases

as a doctor, I'd write that prescription all day long. I'm agnostic when it comes to therapy. I don't care if it's exercise or extracism, whatever a patient needs, you know, I'm gonna give it. And so, I'm like, wow, this is such an eye opener for so many people to see it's possible. You know, another patient with kidneys, we're failing, and he did this whole program,

and he went to see his nephrologist, and then I was like, what are you doing? I've never seen a kidney failure reverse. What are you doing? And it couldn't believe it, because doctors don't get trained to do this, so they don't see it, so they don't believe it. They go, well, there's no evidence for this.

Well, maybe you haven't looked, because there is plenty of evidence. Even though there's so much evidence on lifestyle and diet, do we pay for food as medicine? No. And it is the most powerful drug. Yeah. Well, I hope that gives anyone who's listening and watching a sense of confidence as well that, you know, no matter how far you think you are, I mean, challenges you're going through

right now that hopefully this can at least be another alternative option to try. Completely. If you haven't tried it already, it's so needed. Mark, we end every episode with a final five, which are a fast five, so every answer has to be given in one word to one sentence maximum. Okay, got it. And so Mark, these are your final five.

Question one, what's the best health advice or diet advice you've ever received? It's probably Michael Pollan's eat food not too much, mostly plants. It's just so simple, so clear. And it needs to be defined like eat food, what food, real food, whole food. But yeah.

I love it. Second question, what's the worst advice you've ever had? Health advice you've ever had received or you give it? Oh God, eat a high carb diet. 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, sir, and pasta day to save your life, which has caused more deaths and more disease than almost anything in history, which is a government's food pyramid in 1992.

And that's so common in all meals today, right? Oh, it's terrible. Yeah, we're still, we're still, yeah, we're still promoting that stuff. It's not great. Question number three, what's something that you used to think was true about health, but now you've changed your mind about it? I think I used to believe, this is a very controversial topic, which was much healthier to be a vegan or vegetarian. And I think as I've sort of got to understand the science and the biology of longevity, we need adequate protein as we get older. And if we don't eat enough, we can't make muscle and muscle as the currency of aging. So I think it's eating the right stuff.

And I think if people have a moral issue with animals, we can work around it. But I think from a health perspective, eating regionally raised animals that are well-cared for, that are humanely raised, that regenerate ecosystems, increased biodiversity, reverse climate change, and create nutrient-dense food is really a big shift for me, from being a vegan vegetarian to kind of seeing what happened when I did that. Amazing, thank you for that answer, and I'll pick your brain about that. Please. Question number four, what's the smallest change someone can make today to experience some positive impact in there?

Where they feel I think it's do one small thing, you know, we they say floss one tooth Do one push up tomorrow dude to start with small things, you know You know, maybe you're drinking 12 coke today go to 11 You know, maybe you're drinking 12 coaxideg, go to 11. Go to 10. Do one small thing to improve your health and then that will build over time. Absolutely. And fifth and final question,

if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Oh, that's easy. I would make a law that would make food quality and I can define what that is. The most important determinant of all of our food policies and all of our agriculture, the most nutrient dense, whole-wheel food

we should be promoting and subsidizing and growing. I love that. That would be powerful. That would be so useful. Solve so many problems. I mean, you've talked about that in your previous book. I remember we discussed it like, just how much could change at a systemic level to transform the healthcare of the world?

Well, think about all the things we talked about from the mental health issues, to the physical health issues, to the cost of society, to the damage the environment. It's all driven by the production of ultra-process food and the dissemination of it and the eating of it, which is 60% to 70% of our calories. That has got to stop. It's just crushing us with the weight of that, the figure and literal weight of that. Absolutely. Everyone, the book is called Young Forever by Mark Hyman. The secret's to living your longest

healthiest life with a step-by-step program to reverse disease, ease pain and renew energy. Make sure you go and grab a copy of this book, order it right now. I highly recommend deeply reading this with a group. If you can get together with a bunch of friends, as Mark was talking about and to read this together and to support each other, maybe you're going to take a chap to reach and help teach each other. I just feel that when health becomes this collective responsibility in a community, it becomes a lot easier when we feel we're learning with each other, from each other and growing together as opposed to when we're trying to do it ourselves.

So my recommendation is go and make this your book club pick, go and follow Dr. Mark Heimann on Instagram and across social media if you don't already. And tag me and Mark with what you're testing, what you're experimenting with, what in the book is resonating with you, make you take pictures, tag us both, share it with us because I love seeing the changes you're making based on these conversations. Mark, any final words, any last thoughts you wanna share with us? Yeah, I think that you just said it all, Jay, I think that the beauty is that people are just

a few short days away from feeling better. It's not about living to 120, it's about feeling good now. This is not about a hedonistic, narcissistic pursuit of longevity. It's about optimizing your health and well-being, so you can show up in the world and love better and serve better and Be better and add value to the world and add your contribution to the world and not be caught in a spiral of dysfunction and disease that makes us kind of retreat from

Being part of the larger community of humanity. That's beautiful mark. Thank you so much for doing the work you do Thank you for showing up as you do and I'm so excited to join you hopefully next June. We need to plan that out. I'm very serious. I'm very excited. I'm doing very serious. I'm very excited and June 12 to 19th in Ibiza at six senses and you can all come if you want. Well, not all of you. I think it's only been for 45, but you know, I love it. Mark, thank you so much for this and I can't wait to have you back on the show again. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm Dr. Romani and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism.

This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting at narciss narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to navigating narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our 20s often seen as this golden decade. Our time to be carefree, make mistakes, and

figure out our lives. But what can psychology teach us about this time? I'm Jermis Beg, the host of the psychology of your 20s. Each week we take a deep dive into a unique aspect of our 20s, from career anxiety, mental health, heartbreak, money, and much more to explore the science behind our experiences. The psychology of your 20s hosted by me, Gemma Speg. Listen now on the iHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on I Heart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our experiences by tackling unusual questions. Like, can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain

steers your behavior, your perception, and your reality. Listen to Intercosmos with David Eugelman on the IHART Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.