Pursuit of Wellness - Exposing the Broken Healthcare System: How It’s Failing You w/ Dr. Marty Makary

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Ep. 149 On today’s episode of Pursuit of Wellness, I sit down with Dr. Marty Makary, a healthcare advocate, surgeon, and New York Times best-selling author, to dissect the complex web of our current healthcare system and its impact on everyday health. Dr. Marty pulls back the curtain on major blind spots in healthcare, from women's health to food safety issues like food dyes and seed oils in baby formula. We dive into the powerful effects of chronic illness and lifestyle choices, discussing the influence of school lunch programs, hormone disruptors, and the hidden dangers of ultra-processed foods. Dr. Marty also shares how cultural obedience within the healthcare system can delay necessary change and offers practical steps for optimizing family health, especially for children. This episode is an eye-opener on preventative care, the root causes of chronic issues, and the importance of community and purpose in maintaining overall well-being. Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Mari’s Newsletter click here! For Dr. Marty Makary’s Instagram click here! Sponsored By:  Jaspr is offering an exclusive deal – get $400 OFF with code POW at checkout or go to Again, that’s code POW at jaspr.co for $400 OFF your Jaspr air purifier! Visit BetterHelp dot com slash POW today to get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com/POW Treat yourself to the best bras and shapewear on the market and save up to 50% Off sitewide at honeylove.com/POW this month only. Inventory is limited and the sale ends soon so don’t miss their best deals of the year. After you purchase, they’ll ask you where you heard about them. PLEASE support our show and tell them we sent you.  Go to boncharge.com and use coupon code PURSUIT to save 15%. That’s boncharge.com and use coupon code PURSUIT to save 15% Visit clearstemskincare.com and use code POW at checkout for 20% off your first purchase. Again, that’s code POW for 20% off your first purchase on clearstemskincare.com. Show Links: Blind Spots (Book)  The Italian Store Topics Discussed  00:00:00 - Introduction  00:01:32 - Inspiration behind Blind Spots  00:03:04 - Major blindspots in healthcare 00:05:24 - Blindspot in women's health 00:10:34 - Puberty 00:16:58 - Dr. mentality around modern ideas 00:23:37 - Medical revolution 00:26:33 - Implications of C-sections 00:33:54 - Helping microbiome of newborns 00:36:03 - Seed oils in formula 00:37:21 - Food dyes and Kellogg’s 00:40:33 - Spreading the word to vulnerable populations 00:42:10 - US food 00:47:21 - Advice for children’s diets 00:48:54 - First steps to take towards getting healthy 00:51:03 - Wellness to Dr. Marty

all of the chronic diseases that we treat are on the rise. And are we really preventing anything? Are we really stopping anything or just prolonging illnesses and prolonging life with chronic conditions? This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. Hi guys, welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness. Today I am sitting down with Dr. Marty. He's a healthcare advocate, surgeon and New York Times bestselling author. He dissects the complex web of our current healthcare system and its impact on everyday health.

This was such a mind blowing episode, tons of information and things we can do to change the healthcare system. He pulls back the curtain on major blind spots in healthcare from women's health to food safety issues like food dyes and seed oils in baby formula. We dive into the powerful effects of chronic illness and lifestyle choices, discussing the influence of school lunch programs, hormone disruptors and the hidden dangers of ultra processed foods. Dr. Marti also shares how cultural obedience

within the healthcare system can delay the necessary change and offers practical steps for optimizing family healthcare, especially for children. This is such an eye-opening episode on preventative care, the root causes of chronic issues, and the importance of community and purpose in maintaining overall wellbeing. Another fantastic episode all about our healthcare system, a

mind blowing one, but a really important one. Without further ado, let's hop into this convo with Dr. Marty. Dr. Marty, welcome to the show. Good to be with you, Mari. Thanks for having me. So excited to chat. You recently launched your book, Blind Spots, which was on the best

seller list for all five weeks. Correct? Congratulations. Thank you so much. I feel like a lot of the topics you're covering in this book are a Blind Spots, which was on the best seller list for all five weeks, correct? Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you so much. I feel like a lot of the topics you're covering in this book are a big conversation right now as they should be. What inspired you to write Blind Spots?

Well, I'm deep in the medical ivory tower of academics and the world of research and guidelines and making national recommendations and critiquing studies. And if we stop for a minute and just put our head up and look around us in medicine, all of the chronic diseases that we treat are on the rise. And are we really preventing anything? Are we really stopping anything or just prolonging illnesses

and prolonging life with chronic conditions? So we have this huge blind spot. We talk about demonizing saturated fat, you know, low fat. We move the whole world to a low fat diet. And we ignored ultra processed foods and chemicals engineered to be in the foods to make them addictive and some of these are very dangerous. Seed oils, micronutrients, microplastics, pesticides, we've ignored all of it. I didn't get a wink of it in medical school and it turns out all of

these things are central to health and so I really wanted to talk about the latest medical and scientific research on the issues that live in our blind spots. What would you say are the issues that live in our blind spots. What would you say are the major blind spots in healthcare today? I would say, first of all, a lack of humility. It's creating a tremendous amount of distrust. When we get something wrong in medicine, you need to apologize. You need to correct the record. You need to say, gosh, we gave the wrong guidance

on the food pyramid for 70 years, we feel terrible. Half of our nation's children are sick or pre-diabetic or diabetic or obese. That is a catastrophic report card. We feel terrible, we wanna correct the record. There was industry corruption and it still continues with nutrition guidelines. We ignored the role of ultra processed foods and other chemicals. We are now going to change the way we do research. We're going to correct the

record. We're going to talk about not just fat but sugar. And you don't hear, you really don't see that. And it's creating a tremendous amount of distrust. The numbers are not good on our profession right now. Trust is down from 71% to 40%, trust in doctors and hospitals. New study just came out. We have the highest rates of burnout and suicide in our profession of medicine. Doctors hate being on these hamster wheels where they just have to bill and code and see patients quickly.

We haven't given doctors the time to get into the root causes. Talk about lifestyle, what's in the fridge, how are you eating. So we need a new focus. We need to talk about these big issues we haven't talked about with some humility and recognize that we have been trained in a way that makes us entirely unprepared to take care of addressing root causes of diseases. And the worst thing in medicine is not just being unprepared to talk about the root causes of illnesses, it's being unprepared and perceiving that you're the expert and totally prepared.

But I can tell you, we dismiss things so quickly in medicine that now there's a big body of research that are answering these questions that we have to listen to. Yeah, I think a lot of people listening and myself included have had experiences of walking into a doctor's office, having questions that go unanswered or seem to not be a concern to the doctor or wanting tests or even just wanting my results back and having an understanding of what's going on and kind of being told no. And it's a pretty intimidating relationship

because when you're talking to someone in a white coat who's kind of an authority, you almost don't wanna push back too hard and you wanna just do whatever they're telling you to do. Do you feel like there's a blind spot in women's health? Absolutely, if you look at, first of all, historically it's been a male-dominated paternalistic culture in medicine that fought home pregnancy testing because

doctors believed women can't handle this information on their own at home. They blocked HIV testing without a doctor giving you the results. You had to make an appointment to get the results. You couldn't just get the results on your own or self home testing. They blocked home COVID testing for the first year. So there's a strong paternalistic culture. So I think we can benefit a lot from recognizing that our medical education is flawed.

Our research models have been myopic. So unless there's a randomized, controlled, five or 10 year study of something, we generally have disbelief that there's anything there. And how do you compare, how do you address the fact that Europe has much lower rates of chronic diseases, depression, lower rates of infertility. We're seeing an epidemic of these diseases.

You'll have patients come into the hospital, and I've seen this, with chronic abdominal pain. We order a kitchen sink a test, nothing works. We do procedures, biopsies, we give them these sort of nebulous gray zone diagnoses. Nothing works. They go to Europe, live in Italy for the summer and come back and say, I've never felt better. Yeah. There's no randomized control trial that is going to tell you what's going on there.

But we can use common sense. We can use deductive reasoning and scientific logic to say they don't have a highly poisoned food supply. They are eating healthy foods from healthy soil. They are not contaminated. They've banned pesticides and many other things over there that we are staple, common in the United States. The average school lunch program right now has 38 different pesticides in the school lunch.

That's from one study down in the Washington, D.C. area. It's showing up in the urine of children. It's showing up in the cord blood of newborn babies. So you don't need a 10-year randomized control trial to be able to say, look at what we're doing. What have we done differently in the last 50 years that has ushered in all these chronic diseases? Kids didn't suddenly get lazy or disobedient to instructions.

Now, we've given them highly addictive foods, loaded it with refined carbohydrates, added chemicals. So I think we have to step back and ask what's going on. We need to talk about school lunch programs, not putting every overweight kid on ozempic. We need to talk about treating diabetes with good food and cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at people.

We need to talk about environmental exposures that cause diseases and cancer, not just chemotherapy. We've got to take a new approach. And these topics have lived in the blind spots, but we are seeing new momentum now in medicine, because doctors are recognizing we have had a flawed education that has made us entirely unprepared to deal with the biggest health issues of our day. Do you think doctors are waking up to this? Or do you feel like majority of them are still stuck in the past?

I think they are waking up. There's a group of us now that are going directly to the public talking about health. Peter Atiyah, Casey Means, we all have books out now that are selling very widely. They have a big podcast presence. So we are starting to see, you know, Peter Atti, who was with us at Johns Hopkins,

a doctor I respect a lot, he was with us at Hopkins and was highly respected. He has an incredible, curious scientific brain, and he is synthesizing many of these topics that we never talk about in medicine, and doctors are learning from it. Lots of doctors are now talking about what he is saying, what he's learning, the studies he's citing. And it's really just a compliment to our broken medical

education. These are the issues. I don't think anyone in medical school talks about, has I never certainly never heard a wink about any one of 20 major health topics. Topics you've covered on your podcast, topics that are serious. I mean in medical school I remember that they said the age of puberty is going down every year. Why is that? Well I asked that question medical school and it was basically, yeah, we don't know. Just, you know, here, you got to memorize these drugs in the next lesson. Put your head down, get back to work.

But it's pretty obvious to me. What we never talked about in medical school is the fact that pesticides have hormone-like binding properties. Microplastics have hormone-like binding properties. Microplastics have hormone-like binding properties. The pesticide atrazine is known to be such a strong hormone disruptor. This is the number two herbicide in the United States. Can you say the name of it again?

Atrazine. Atrazine, okay. Banned in Europe. It has hormone-like effects, hormone disrupting effects that will convert a male tadpole to a female frog. Okay. Where they will actually produce eggs and like it's unbelievable what's happening. Yeah. And so you look at and all of the contaminants of the different hormones that are in our water supply, everyone taking oral contraceptive pills, where do those pills go? They go into our water system where you can detect estrogen levels.

I'm not saying any one of those is the smoking gun, but you've got a bunch of things now that are known to have hormone disrupting effects that are new in our society that didn't exist before the rapid decline in puberty rates. And no one talks about it. It's pretty obvious. You're not gonna get your 10 year randomized control trial. I mean, sperm counts are down 50% in the last five decades. Atrazine is known to lower sperm counts.

Some of these food dyes are known to have hormone disrupting effect. No one talks about this stuff. We need to talk about it. These are major topics that should be front and center in healthcare. And what are we doing as doctors? We're just focusing on billing and coding and throughput,

and we are not talking about these big topics. and throughput, and we are not talking about these big topics. Pursuit of Wellness is sponsored by BetterHelp. Therapy is something I have done pretty consistently since I was 14 years old, and it has really benefited me throughout my life through the ups and downs. I think it's so important that we get our feelings out to someone else. I think when we hold things in, it can really start to affect us negatively. It's a safe space to get things off your chest and figure out how to work through whatever's

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skin. I also love that they have their Ac lab test on the website which is helping thousands of people get to the root cause of their acne through comprehensive lab testing and lifestyle-based recommendations. That has been a huge part of my acne journey and getting to the root cause. Visit clearstemskincare.com and use code POW, P-O-W at checkout for 20% off your first purchase. And is that because of the money that's going to be made from prescribing medications? I don't think it's that intentional. I think it's more a culture in medicine, a culture of obedience, a culture of a small group of doctors at the top set the agenda for all the doctors nationwide. They write the exams.

For example, in medical school, there's one small private company that writes the curriculum, basically sets the curricula for all the medical schools, writes the exams for the medical students. And so there's really little innovation. So they're just saying they need to learn what they learned when they were in medical school in the 1970s. And so this is a vicious cycle. You see it in other industries, you see it in the military, you see it in government, you see it in business, you see it in politics. Well, this is the way we've done it in the past and this is the way we're going to do

it now. And so that disconnect, I think, is one of the reasons why we've got this guild of doctors that are, they come in intellectually curious and we beat that curiosity out of them. They memorize and regurgitate, they bill and code, they are obedient, they are rewarded for those things, but enough of them are now saying, hey, we can't keep doing this. We are not talking about the root causes of all of these chronic diseases, all these cancers going up in young people.

We can't just keep talking about doing surgery for cancer. We wanna talk about the cause of cancer. Alzheimer's, I think you see this, one of the most explicit denials of obvious common sense, basic medical research, you've got to focus on the billion dollar Alzheimer's drugs that are making a lot of people rich on Wall Street. And almost a complete ignoring of research that the Mediterranean diet reduces the risk of Alzheimer's, probably any healthy diet, maybe not the

diet itself, it may be more what you're avoiding from the bad diets. Hormone replacement therapy with estrogen for perimetaposal women reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by 35% in good studies. The role of quality sleep and reducing Alzheimer's risk, food as medicine. So no one talks about the cause of Alzheimer's, only the billion dollar drugs to treat it, and I think as a result we're watching Alzheimer's go up at massive rates and mostly among women, two-thirds are among women because there's some hormonal connection, it's believed. And no one talks about the root causes, just these billion dollar drugs that barely work.

Let's be honest, they barely work, but they make a lot of people rich. And it's this myopia that I think we're seeing now push back on to say, what are you doing at the NIH, at the National Institutes of Health? You're supposed to be advancing health. That's what the H stands for. Not just drugs. But we have this medication dominated culture. And when in these short visits, I've been in that situation as a doctor, people are coming demanding a medication. And it's easy just to prescribe but it's harder to talk about these root causes. Yeah. But if you take a step back we have the most medicated population in the history of the world. We're not on a good path. We're going down a very bad path. 20% of our nation's children are on prescription medications. 40% of adults, nearly half of children, 40% in total,

will have a mental health diagnosis as kids. Just like the Alzheimer's example, here's another one. We take a kid and mess up their circadian physiology by waking them up very early. Not because it's good for their health, but because it's convenient for adults. We drop them off at school. We feed them an ultra processed load of food in the morning, including all these chemicals and food dyes. Then we tell them to sit sedentary at a desk. And then we hit them again with refined carbohydrates and added sugar at a

very high dose. They go into this kind of sugar food coma after lunch, have trouble paying attention and sitting still. And what do we do? We medicate them in response, right? You have attention deficit disorder or whatever. My favorite is oppositional defiant disorder. I haven't heard of that one. That's a new one.

It's probably the most bogus of all the medical diagnoses in medicine. What's that mean? A child disagrees. The child says, hey, I don't want to sit sedentary for seven hours. Well, you have oppositional defiant disorder. Shut up and take this medication.

I mean, you think about what we're doing, it's insane. It's insane. So we're seeing a revolution now of doctors who are taking a fresh new approach, educating themselves about the root causes of diseases. It's all the same stuff. It's food, toxins, insulin resistance, general body inflammation. A lot of stuff boils down to that.

Look at all these chronic diseases, autoimmune diseases among women skyrocketing right now, now affects one in five adult women. Why? They're the same root causes. We're changing metabolism. It's affecting mitochondrial health. It's permeating the entire body. When you take food chemicals in your mouth and they go down the GI tract, the immune system in your body that is adjacent to the GI tract, it's embedded. We have a strong immune system in the GI tract because that's the front lines of new things we eat.

It reacts with an inflammatory response, but it's not an acute inflammatory storm, it's a low grade, constant inflammation that's always there. And it just makes you feel sick, it makes you feel sad. And so this is going on all the time. We know seed oils are pro-inflammatory. We know ultra processed foods change the gut health and the microbiome increasing inflammation sometimes. So there's a movement now in medicine to say,

we're not gonna just study what the NIH tells us to study. We're not gonna study what big pharma tells us to study. We're gonna study what we believe is important to health. Big top is we're not talking about that we need to talk about. The holidays are coming up and I know we all have a ton of events to go to, lots happening, and this year I'm so thankful for Honeylove because there is nothing worse than suffering from an uncomfortable bra or shapewear. Honeylove has revolutionized the bra and shapewear game.

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and we're bringing them to the office as well. Jasper is offering an exclusive deal. Get $400 off with CodePOW at checkout. Again, that's CodePOW at Jasper.co for $400 off your Jasper air purifier. To go back to kids, I want to kind of start at the beginning. I've heard you speak about the implications of C-sections on Peter Atiyah's show. And I think this is really interesting

because it's something that I've heard from a couple of my guests and kind of thought about, why could C-sections be impacting our health later in life? Like if we were born through C-section, I wasn't, and I feel like I'm a pretty healthy person, but I've met people who were born through C-section and have a ton of allergies, and I've always wondered if it was connected.

What's your view on that? Well, there have been studies now associating a C-section birth with all kinds of future health issues, including asthma. So what's happening there is the microbiome is being altered. Your microbiome is different with a C-section. The microbiome, of course, your viewers, I'm sure know this, millions of different bacteria that align the inside of the GI tract that are involved in digestion, producing vitamins, they produce

serotonin involved in mood. Most of your body's serotonin is made in the gut. They train the immune system, they trigger the immune system, they produce, they deconjugate estrogen. It's an incredible organ system. These millions of different bacteria that line the GI tract, we call it gut health or the microbiome, it's different when you're born by C-section because when you're in utero, when a baby is in utero, their gut is sterile. So where do those millions of different bacteria come from? I'm not talking about millions cumulative of the same bacteria, millions of different bacteria.

Where do they come from? Well, it begins when a baby passes through the vaginal canal. Their gut is seeded with microbes, with bacteria. It's then augmented with bacteria in the environment from breastfeeding, from skin, from kisses, from grandparents. It's been going on for millions of years. And that is how the microbiome will become formed in the first few years of life,

based on the foods kids take in. And the different bacteria live in a balance. They live in a harmony. Now you take an antibiotic and you rip it down. There's carpet bombing some of those bacteria and it's altering the microbiome. In a C-section, a baby does not have the same route of formation of the microbiome. A baby can is often extracted from a sterile operative field and the baby is sterile. The gut is often still sterile. It depends on how long the mom's been pushing but the gut is often

sterile. So here you have a baby extracted from a sterile operative field. What may seed their gut microbiome are not the bacteria from the birth canal. It may be the bacteria that normally live in the hospital, especially when the baby's whisked off to some other room. Babies should be held by their mother the vast majority of their time. They're more likely to latch breastfeed, which also results in a different, better, healthier microbiome from breastfeeding. It's politically incorrect to say so. It's scientific truth. So all of these things, for all of these reasons, a baby born by c-section

is different. Higher rates of asthma in some studies, a study in JAMA surgery, JAMA is our top medical journal, by the way, JAMA, the surgery branch journal, just came out with a study that babies born by C-section were more likely to have colon cancer early in life. The increase in colon cancer we're seeing in people under age 50.

Wow. You know, people in their 30s we're hearing about now, we're seeing in the hospital. And association with being born by C-section. Now I don't think that's the biggest association out there. I don't want to scare people. C-sections save lives. Yeah. If the doctor feels it's important, do whatever the doctor says in any emergency, in any setting,

not just the delivery. But 40% of C-sections are unnecessary according to experts in the field. 80% of antibiotics are unnecessary in my opinion, 60% in most studies. I've been forced to give antibiotics because the hospital protocol requires it many times. And I've known, I've tried forced to give antibiotics for, because the hospital protocol requires it many times and I've known, I've tried to fight it. Like I don't want my patient to get antibiotics, but it's the protocol. So all of these things are changing gut health.

At the same time, as chronic disease is going up. Now, you can't assume that's a causal relationship unless you do a proper study. But at the Mayo Clinic, they did a really interesting study where they looked at kids who got an antibiotic in the first couple years of life versus kids who did not. Amazing study. The kids who got an antibiotic in the first few years of life had a higher rate of obesity, 20% higher increased risk.

Farmers have been noticing that for decades. You give antibiotics to animals, they're fatter. It increases their yield, and that's why they do it. It's terrible. They shouldn't be giving it routinely. But it's the world expert in the microbiome, who I interviewed for the book Blindspots, he said, if this is what we're noticing in animals,

and routine antibiotic just makes them more obese, what's it doing to children? What's it doing to adults? What about these situations where an adult will eat the right foods, exercise, and they can't lose weight? Maybe their microbiome has been altered. We tend to blame people for their conditions in medicine, but maybe this is something that was done to their microbiome early in life. And so in this incredible study by the Mayo Clinic, they found that it wasn't antibiotics didn't just result in an increase in obesity, likely related to an altered microbiome with the antibiotic, but also a higher rate of asthma, 90% higher risk of asthma, nearly a 300% higher risk of

celiac. These are all new things, right? They didn't exist a generation ago. This is all in the modern post-World War II era where antibiotics have been used at mass. A 32% higher rate of attention deficit disorder. Remember that connection between the serotonin and the brain that affects mood, the microbiome affects mood. The more antidepressants we prescribe, the more depressed people are, the more ADHD meds we prescribe, the more ADHD there is, the more obesity meds we prescribe, the more obesity, the more diabetes meds. What are we doing? We've gotta stop and talk about the root causes.

I'm not saying these meds are causing these diseases. I'm saying we're not addressing the root causes. And this study I may have claimed was pretty compelling because the more courses of antibiotic a child took, the greater the risk of each of those chronic diseases, what we call a dose-dependent relationship. That suggests a cause and effect relationship. Let's say a woman has a C-section. Is there anything that they can do to help their baby's microbiome in the moment?

Yes, in the moment a couple things. One, now I don't know for certain if this helps, but at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, they're actually taking vaginal fluid swabs and wiping it on the skin of the babies. Okay, that's what I've heard, near the eyes, right? Yeah, so they put it somewhere near the area where it's believed to grow in and form the microbiome.

There's no need to wash a baby in the first few hours or the first day. Some of the best practices now in childbirth that I go through in the book, Blindspots, these medical centers will now wait a couple days because that sort of protein coat over around the baby from birth is healthy. It's got the bacteria that help ingrow and form the microbiome. It's a bit of a thermal coat. And why are we washing babies? Just to give mom a shiny baby? So the vaginal swab, that's a theory. It's unproven, but that's the rationale to it. rationale to it. The study should be done soon.

Skin to skin time. So one enormous positive thing for a newborn baby is for a mom to hold that baby immediately upon birth for hours. Skin to skin, it's an incredible magical incubator. The babies have less stress when the moms are holding baby. How do we know that? It's been noticed that their glucose level is more normal

and the reason is that their stress hormones are not spiking as high. So we know that their baby's less stressed, the baby's more likely to latch and breast feed, which can be difficult when the baby's been separated. And avoid unnecessary antibiotics. Some premature babies are given antibiotics for no reason. And that's an old practice that we're trying to call out.

So there's a lot of things in the short term. And then what the baby eats, of course, is of critical importance. You would not believe the amount of seed oils in infant formula. I mean, most infant formula. And by the way, these are companies who have given millions of dollars to the American Academy of Pediatrics. They are the primary sponsors of some of these Pediatrics Association conferences. So people need to look for foods for the baby that have healthy natural ingredients. Seed oils of course sound natural, but they're not.

Vegetable oil, canola, soybean, corn oil. They are heated at high temperatures and denatured and then changed chemically with a solvent. So you're basically consuming chemicals. Isn't there a shortage right now of the healthy formulas? Kendamil? I've heard that. All my mom friends are freaking out because there's a big shortage since the,

I don't know the name of the, I think you were there speaking to Congress, correct? The Senate roundtable on nutrition. Yes, and someone brought up baby formula and ever since that, the Kenda Mill has been sold out. Isn't that crazy? Well, I'm glad this is what is supposed to be happening. We're, you know, educating the public will drive consumer behavior.

Yeah. And so. Yeah. Back to food dyes. This is a big topic of conversation right now. I think I saw a video of you with the cereal. Why are we putting food dyes in kids food? What impact is it having? I felt like it was in discussion to have it be illegal, but that never happened. What's going on there?

Many of these food dyes are illegal in other countries, Canada, parts of Europe, because they sound cutesy, food dyes, but they're really chemicals. For example, yellow dye number five is a chemical called tartrazine. It's a chemical, it's synthetic, it's made in a laboratory,

it was made from coal tar, which is a byproduct of the coal industry. And they found it had this bright, vibrant yellow color. And so they added it to fabrics. And you have these bright yellow colors and fabrics. And then they just thought, you know what, let's just put it in food. Is that what M&Ms are? I'm sure they have yellow number. I'm sure they've got yellow five, yellow six,

red 40, blue one, BHC. I mean, all of these things are banned in many parts of Europe and in Canada. So Kellogg's will make two versions of their Froot Loops. One with these food dyes, which are these chemicals, just to make it look pretty and bright to the kids. And another version of Fruit Loops without the food dyes and chemicals for Canada,

for Canadian kids. An American company making the same cereal two different ways. And so a bunch of us led by Vani Hari and Mr. Karp and Callie Means went to the Kellogg's headquarters recently and said, hey, American children deserve the healthier version of a cereal made by an American company. Why are they getting the less healthier version

of the version that's, some of these, so tartrazine has been associated not just with hormone disruption, yellow number five, but with attention deficit disorder, with changes to a gene. So what are we doing? I mean, you look at many of these crises are increasing. They're not increasing in Europe at nearly the same rate. You don't see this mass obesity epidemic

in many parts of the world. It's increasing as they're adopting some Western foods, but in Japan, the obesity rate in children is like three to 5%. In the US, it's like half of our nation's children are obese, overweight, or pre-diabetic. So that's why there's a special interest now to say, here's something we can fix.

It requires educating parents, purchasing healthier cereals, saying no to Kellogg. Kellogg was the company that tried to suggest hey why don't you have cereal for dinner? No because the economy was doing rough and here's an idea, cereal for dinner and they you know put that out there. I mean this is unhealthy food that is behind so much of our chronic disease epidemic. We never talk about it in medicine. We have to talk about it. How do we get the word out to vulnerable populations? Like, I mean, I've traveled to certain areas of Arkansas for work, and I've been in the middle of Arkansas for work and I've been in the middle

of the country and I feel like the information that maybe I have or people in New York or LA have just isn't as readily available there. And they're also buying their kids food from the grocery store. How do we get the information to them? Yeah, we need to get the word out. Some of these school lunch programs need subsidies, because the healthier foods might be a little more expensive. Today, we've heard this resistance like, Oh, we can't afford this. Well, try the price of insulin, or

metformin or any one of these drugs long term, or an ICU stay in the hospital. So we have the highest rates of inflammatory bowel disease. What's going on? Well, we're putting chemicals down our system and the body is getting inflamed. So we've got to connect the dots. They're so obvious. Got to get the word out. We have to educate the public. We have to change a lot of these programs to enable them to buy healthier foods. We need to prioritize where our food health priorities should be because you can get fixated on any one chemical or ingredient. But as Dr. Casey Means has said, it's the cumulative burden of all of these things going down our GI tract that is causing

this inflammation and our bodies are reacting. I always think about, I know you said you were born in the UK. Yeah, Liverpool. Yeah, Liverpool. I moved to America when I was 10 years old and it was an interesting age to move because growing up, I mean,

my family isn't particularly health oriented, but we ate pretty much whole foods, like cooked at home every night. I had definitely a lot of bread, but it was like baguette and butter and ham and cheese and that kind of thing. And then I remember moving to the US and going to a normal school, fifth grade and seeing Wonder Bread for the first time, Pizza for lunch every day, Gatorade. It was my first time seeing Gatorade. A lot of color. I felt like

the food didn't look real. It felt like cartoon food. It was just the first thing I noticed. Also, the amount of allergies the kids had in my school, like the peanut allergy, which I've heard you talk about, that wasn't really a thing when I was growing up in the UK. I don't know where the UK is at now in terms of obesity numbers. And I don't know how strict the rules are there now. But when I was growing up, it felt quite different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have to ask ourselves, why did we not see this rash of allergies, polycystic ovarian disease, inflammatory bowel disease, autism, autoimmune diseases, early onset Alzheimer's. That's gone up by like threefold in the last 10 years. Why did

we not see them a generation ago? And why are we not seeing them in many parts of Africa where say they're not using ultra processed foods? The Wonder Bread you're talking about, and by the way, I was too young to really notice a difference when I came to the United States. What we do to bread is a crime. We strip it of its fiber, something that's critical for digestion, because fiber slows down the absorption

so the body can extract the carbohydrates and the fats appropriately. We strip it of its fiber, chop it up mechanically, bleach it, and then call it bread when it's really just sugar at that point. It's acting like sugar. It's refined flour and it's acting like sugar on the body. So what's happening is the pancreas which produces insulin gets the sugar load. It can taste it. It can taste the sweetness. It can even start producing it thinking about the sugar that's about to hit. It's called the pre-dromal response. You can even salivate thinking about food. And then it gets all these refined carbohydrates

down its system. And so the insulin levels spike. Now, normally in a natural world, insulin levels are increasing gradually with meals, where we chew the food slowly. We're eating healthy foods that are bound to fiber. And we have low levels of insulin that are sort of rolling as we eat.

Not snacking all the time like kids now at school, you know, they have to have a snack, you know, every class. It's like, where'd this come from? So insulin levels are spiking. The human body has never seen insulin levels spike this high, this frequently before in human history. I mean, unless people got into the sugar cane and started just frequently before in human history. I mean, the less people got into the sugar cane and started just eat that incessantly, but even sugar cane is from a plant,

it's got some fiber bound, it's the refined sugar. Watch out for the high fructose corn syrup where they just pack the sugar. It's not different sugar, it's just packed in. It's creating this super ultra sweet sensation that's stimulating dopamine. And so what we do is we create food addictions among children and then we blame them for being disobedient. Well we've given them these addictions. This is something adults have done to children and so

bread is a big piece of it. Of course pizza you mentioned pizza is using the processed bread. So we found a great store near our house where they have products imported from Europe. Oh, I've looked for that. I found a website, what's the name of the store? Well, it's called the Italian store. It's not here in Austin, but it's a great source of pasta. And so, I know people who will say that is the only pasta I can eat and not feel blah afterwards.

Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, I like sourdough bread. I actually make my own now. How do you feel about sourdough? Yeah, sure. You're good about that? Yeah. Okay, great.

Amazing. Yeah, I love sourdough bread. I also feel like when you're talking about this, I'm thinking about on social media, just how, you know how social media will show you what you're interested in? So for me, yeah, when I go on Instagram or TikTok, I'm kind of on this sector of social media where people are making their own sourdough bread. They're feeding their babies like anchovies and liver and but that's like what I'm interested in. That's what

appeals to me. But I also wonder what someone's social media looks like if they don't have those interests. You know what I mean? Yeah, just thinking about how that might impact someone's, you know, buying habits for their kids. What do you think what should a kid's diet look like? Look, I think the basic principles of whole foods that are natural, that are grown from good regenerative soils and clean meats, I think we've demonized natural fat way too much in the United States.

It was mostly driven by the industry and some ignorance by a couple political doctors in the 1960s and 70s and propagated by the United States government which has been in my opinion one of the greatest propagators of misinformation when it comes to health, food pyramid being at the top of the list. Avoid chemicals, avoid and you can't do it a hundred percent but avoid ultra processed foods. Look at the ingredients. You're going to see a lot of seed oils. Cook with avocado oil or coconut oil or extra virgin olive oil.

Choose organic, especially when you're talking about the surface of a fruit or vegetable. Because there's a lot of pesticides in the environment. They're doing a lot of damage in my opinion. Don't rely on the EPA to tell you what's a healthy and not healthy level. I believe in good filtered water because there's a lot of heavy metals

and other contaminants in water. There's also atrazine in water, the herbicide we talked about. So these are all things people can do to try to get back to a restorative gut microbiome and healthy foods. For anyone listening who's maybe wanting to take this step into living a healthier lifestyle, they're thinking about these things, but they may be overwhelmed. They don't know how to ask their doctors questions. They're intimidated. What do you recommend? So a lot of good resources out there. Good podcasts. There's

Max Lugavere, Real Foodology, you probably know some of these folks and have maybe had them on. Peter Ati, I'm a big fan of Casey's Kitchen, Mark Hyman, The Book Good Energy, I'm a big fan of, Casey's Kitchen, Mark Hyman, The Book Good Energy. I'm a big fan of Casey and Callie Means and what they're doing right now. He was on the show and it did really well. People were very excited about it. I mean, this guy is a modern day prophet, really talking about the importance of looking in our blind spot and addressing the big topic that no one is talking

about that we need to talk about. And that is we have a poisoned food supply and no one is talking about the connection between food and health, only medications and health and operations and health. And so that's a very good message. I've enjoyed listening to Casey and Kelly Means on a lot of podcasts, including I saw some of that one where Kelly came on your show. So you're doing good work. I mean, we need to get the word out.

In the past, it was just three corporate media stations. And you had a medical establishment that would guard what was in their medical journals. And the medical schools had a uniform curriculum that was locking arms and walking off a cliff together when it came to food and nutrition and corrupted health science. And then now you have information

that is being shared openly through books and podcasts. And now somebody can actually become an expert on many areas of food that doctors are not even educated on simply by reading and listening to some of these podcasts. So, you know, of course there's a range of quality of content out there, but there are some really good sources and some good respected physicians that are coming on shows like yours. Absolutely. Final question is the one I ask every single guest.

What does wellness mean to you? Hmm, look, I think you wanna feel great. I think when you exercise, we can talk about the physiologic benefits, but the reality is when you exercise, you feel good. And you feel good immediately. When you walk out of the gym, when you're having a meal an hour or two later,

you feel better, mentally you feel better. I think we don't talk about community enough, purpose, connection, complimenting someone in a very intentional way affects your own brain chemistry. Seeing someone in a very intentional way affects your own brain chemistry. Seeing someone and saying, you know, I noticed you brought us that x-ray to the clinic. You pulled it up. Thank you for doing that.

If I say that to one of my students, I really appreciate what you're doing here and it's good to have you with us. Not only is it kind and humane and it's going to have you with us. Not only is it kind and humane and it's gonna make help their culture of intimidation that they're dealing with at work but it's going to have an impact on me greater than an antidepressant. And so you want to feel good and a lot of times health is about feeling good and when you feel good in the short term, over time, you will feel good and live longer, long term.

I agree with you 100%. Thank you so much, Dr. Marty. This was fantastic. Where can they find your book? Where can they find you online? Oh, thank you, Mari. The book, Blind Spots is available wherever books are sold. I think they sold out in America on opening day, but it's now restocked.

And I'm on social media on all the platforms. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mari. Thanks for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. To support this show, please rate and review and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player. You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favorites at marieloellen.com.

It will be linked in the show notes. This is a Wellness Lab production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona Attucks and Kelly Kyle. This show is edited by Mike Fry and our video is recorded by Louise Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Mari Fitness. Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. See you next time.