Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 286: Feeding the Mind | Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Today we’re going to get a deep take on the old cliche, “You are what you eat.” Usually that expression speaks to the impact of food on our bodies, but what is often overlooked is the impact nutrition has on our minds. Dr. Mark Hyman is the author of a book called Food Fix. He studied Buddhism in college and then went on to become a practicing family physician and a leader in the field of Functional Medicine. He’s written thirteen New York Times Bestselling books, including his new one, and is also the host of a podcast called The Doctor’s Farmacy. In this episode, we talk about the impact of food on our mental health, and Dr. Hyman’s view that food is a social justice issue that impacts everything from chronic diseases to climate. Where to find Dr. Mark Hyman online: Website: https://drhyman.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/drmarkhyman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drmarkhyman Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drmarkhyman/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ultrawellness Books: Food Fix by Mark Hyman, MD: https://foodfixbook.com/ Other Books: https://drhyman.com/about/#section-6 We care deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice, and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the Ten Percent Happier app say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers, and the deep wisdom they impart, to help them deepen their practice. For anyone new to the app, we've got a special discount just for you. If you're an existing subscriber, we thank you for your support. To claim your discount, visit tenpercent.com/reward  We would appreciate it if you can take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey. The team here is always looking for ways to improve. Please go to tenpercent.com/survey. Thank you. Other Resources Mentioned: Robert Thurman: https://religion.columbia.edu/content/robert-f-thurman Suzuki Roshi: https://www.lionsroar.com/remembering-shunryu-suzuki/ Jon Kabat Zinn: https://www.mindfulnesscds.com/ Paul Farmer - Partners in Health: https://www.pih.org/paul-farmer Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH: https://hcp.hms.harvard.edu/people/nicholas-christakis Pastor Rick Warren: https://pastorrick.com/ The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren: https://bookshop.org/books/the-purpose-driven-life-what-on-earth-am-i-here-for-expanded/9780310337508 The Biggest Little Farm: https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ Grocery Manufacturers Association: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/ag-grocery-manufacturers-assoc-pay-18m-largest-campaign-finance-penalty-us Sustainable Food Policy Alliance: https://foodpolicyalliance.org/ Vanguard Renewables: https://vanguardrenewables.com/ Sam Kass: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/author/sam-kass Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dr-mark-hyman-286 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

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From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. One last thing before we get to the episode, we care really deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the Last thing before we get to the episode, we care really deeply about supporting you in your meditation practice and feel that providing you with high quality teachers is one of the best ways to do that. Customers of the 10% happier app say they stick around specifically for the range of teachers and the deep wisdom these teachers have to impart. For anybody new to the app, we've got a special discount for you. And if you're an existing subscriber, we thank you for your support.

So to go claim your discount, visit 10% dot com slash reward. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash reward. And if you're already a subscriber, thank you for your support. Hello. Today we're going to get a deep take on the old cliche you are what you eat. Usually that expression speaks to the impact of food on our bodies, but what is often overlooked is the impact of nutrition on our minds. Dr. Mark Heimann is the author of the new book Food Fix.

He studied Buddhism in college and then went on to become a practicing family physician and a leader in the field of functional medicine. He has written 13 New York Times bestselling books, including his new one, The aforementioned Food Fix, and is also the host of a podcast called The Doctors Pharmacy. In this episode, we talk about the impact of food on our mental health and Dr. Hyman's view that food is really a social justice issue that impacts everything from chronic diseases to climate. Before we dive in, I should say that we recorded this right as the pandemic was taking off, but we held it just to deal with all of the breaking news. All of it remains extremely relevant and deeply interesting. And so here we go with Dr. Mark Heimann.

So how and why did you come to meditation? Well, I actually was introduced by my sister to meditation when I was 15 in 1975, because her boyfriend was a TM teacher, and she also called him a Blistening, but I didn't listen to him. Blistening because he always liked to meditate and be a Blist.

And I started TM back when I was 15. And got very interested in Eastern thought and religions. I heard Robert Thurmond give a talk in Amherst in 1970s, X or something. And when I went to college, I just happened to sit next to this guy at lunch at my dorm the first day of classes. And he said, you've got to take a class with this guy, Alan Grapard. It's on Asian studies. It's amazing, this guy's amazing.

I'm like, all right, so I dropped a class and I took his class and that was the end of that. And I started taking every class and Buddhism in Eastern thinking and Asian religions and got really steeped in it and sort of practicing and sort of doing Zen meditation, sort of sitting with Sasaki Roshi would do 10-day sitting meditation retreats back in the 70s when it was pretty weird and became a yoga teacher

before I was a doctor, actually very very focused on sort of that whole thinking. And I began very sort of innocently, but it really led me down the path of inquiring about how the mind works and why we suffer and how we get into cognitive binds that disrupt our happiness and how do we get out of it. And I think that's really been the foundation of my life. And as far as Buddhism goes, I mean, it really is a healing technology for the mind. It's not really a religion unless we come that. And it's sort of informed my beliefs about how to be in the world, passion, service, and that's why I ended up becoming a doctor. And it's sort of informed my beliefs about how to be in the world, passion, service,

and that's why I ended up becoming a doctor. So it all sort of is connected in a circuitous way. I've heard John Kabat's in make the case that, and I don't know if this is true, I suspect it's true because it's coming from him and I've never heard him say anything untrue, that the root of medicine and meditation are the same and that's not a coincidence. Yeah, yeah, I imagine that's true. I think it's all about healing. I mean, meditation is a healing tool for the mind, right? Do you think that your interest in meditation

fueled your subsequent interest in medicine and decision to go to a level? 100%, 100%. I mean, I took a class in Cornell with this guy, Raoul Bernbaum and I was Jewish boy, who wrote a book called The Medicine Buddha. And I took the class in The Medicine Buddha. And it sort of got me thinking about what I want to do with my life and where am I going? And I mean, I got a degree in Buddhism.

What am I going to do with that? I'm not going to become a guru. So I just really thought a lot about what I wanted to do. And I did not want to become a monk. So your degree was in Buddhism? My degree was in Buddhism. I didn't remember. I remember. I was in afterthought. Yeah, my degree was in Buddhism. I just, they're like, okay, you have to have a major.

I'm like, what do you mean? Well, yeah, you have to major a lot of Asian studies classes. So when I become an Asian studies major, I'm like, okay. And then I had to study a language. I'm like, well, a billion people speak Chinese. Am I supposed to try that? And so I studied Chinese in Buddhism. And that's what I did at Cornell.

So how about now, look what's your practice look like these days? Well, I do twice a day, they take to the primordial sound meditation, basically TM, you know, it's a version of TM. So you switched from Buddhism to Hindu meditation. Yeah, yeah, sitting for 45 minutes twice a day, it just was a lot in a quiet spot on a cushion. And I have a crazy life.

So I need to be able to meditate on airplanes and subways and back at cars. And I just found it a really easy way to drop deeply in in a way that was quick and powerfully restorative and helped anxiety stress. I didn't think I was anxious. I didn't think I was stressed. I didn't think I was on edge. But when I started digging back into it after many years of being crazy in my life, I didn't think I was anxious. I didn't think I was stressed. I didn't think I was on edge, but when I started digging back into it after many years of being crazy in my life, I actually found it a game changer and I can't win without it. So you meditated for a while seriously to teach yoga, and then your life got crazy,

weren't in it, you got back in through Vedic medicine. Yeah, then it became a doctor, a parent, just crazy life. And it really has been one of the biggest gifts. I mean, I've focused clearly on nutrition and lifestyle and medicine healing. And I always sort of gave lip service to stress reduction and healing. And my daughter was yoga, so I've been doing yoga for 40 plus years.

And I thought that was enough. Like, oh, that's my meditation emotion. And I sort of justified, you know, why I wasn't meditating to myself. And I hear this a lot. I'm like, I do yoga, I'm good. And it's just a totally different experience. In fact, yoga is just the preparation for meditation.

That's how it was originally designed. So I think I kind of was conning myself and I stopped doing that. And it really has transformed my cognitive abilities, my energy, my joy, my happiness, my reactivity, my ability to get with stress, my focus, my mission in the world. It's just, you know, it's like, wow, I don't meditate to get better meditating. I meditate to get better at life. So, let's go into your mission.

How would you define what's been the overarching theme of your career? It's pretty simple. I was very sick early on in my medical career and I had to figure out how to get better. And I found a system of healing called functional medicine that is about understanding the root causes of illness that often are have to do with lifestyle, diet, as a big factor of food is medicine and genetics and so forth. And I was able to heal myself and so many patients through this approach,

which is in the periphery of medicine. Although now we have a center cleavng clinic that I was asked to come and establish by the CEO there Toby Cosgrove. And I would say my mission is sort of end needless suffering for millions of people through the power of functional medicine and food as medicine and the power of functional medicine and food is medicine and the power of community and love, which is basically what I'm trying to do.

So, okay, there's a lot there. There's a lot there and needless suffering through functional medicine, which I think I need you to define again. And food is medicine and love. Yes. The floor is yours. Okay, so more. So a functional medicine is essentially

a systems thinking approach to looking at the root cause of disease and health. It's actually the signs of health. And it's where medicine is going. You might have heard of the microbiome, everybody talks about. My wife has done a lot of study in the microbiome. So the microbiome is blowing apart our notions of disease.

How does your gut bacteria get linked to autism or that heart disease cancer, depression, and all these autoimmune diseases can be linked to your microbiome? It doesn't make any sense. You go to their metallurgists like, how's your poop? You go to the cardiologist, how's your poop?

They don't ask you that, but that's really how the science of medicine is advancing to understand the body's one interconnected ecosystem. And that functional medicine is advancing to understand the body's one interconnected ecosystem, and that functional medicine is a way of thinking about how to create health and restore balance and systems. It's really an operating system for sorting through all the data we have now that we didn't have around systems biology and how to apply that clinically to get people better.

One of the critiques of modern medicine is that doctors often are just treating symptoms and treating the whole patient. Exactly. So this sounds much more holistic. 100%. It's treating the system, not the symptoms. It's a different treat, an industrial agricultural farm and a regenerative farm, which I hope we can talk about.

An industrial farm is putting chemicals like pesticides and herbicides and fertilizer and intensive methods and using all these sort of technologies to grow food which destroys the soil and the environment. And modern medicine very much like that whereas functional medicine is like regenerative medicine that's about restoring the health of the ecosystem. And when you do that, you have a healthy plan. I have more questions about the three pillars

you listed of your sort of mission. But just put comment on the microbiome. So for those who don't know, you think of yourself as it's all you. Actually, there's like a trillion other beings living in your gut. It's called the gut microbiome. I know of it, but it's only because I'm married to somebody who's very smart. And she's explained it to me. Interesting, just anecdote.

I don't, this is not dispositive in any way. In other words, this is just an anecdote. There's no scientific validity to what I'm about to me. Interesting, just anecdote, I don't, this is not disposited in any way. In other words, this is just an anecdote. There's no scientific validity to what I'm about to say. But interesting nonetheless is that my wife and I, even though we had flu shots, both got the flu this year. Knocked out, knocked out, and four, five, six weeks later, we were still not feeling well. And we started taking probiotics. Yeah. And within days, both of us started feeling better. I have no idea if that's correlation or causation. Don't know, but it is interesting. It's very powerful. Our guts are

the center of our health. And like you said, we're only basically 10% human. The rest of us is microbiome or bacteria. Well, genetically, we only have 1% of our DNA and there's 99% of bacterial DNA in terms of the number of genes in us. So if you look at your blood tests, there's all these microbial metabolites probably far exceeding our own metabolites, which is crazy. And we don't even know how to make sense of that. So, functional medicine is essentially a framework. It's a sort of theory in sense of medicine that we never had before. It's all been reactive.

And the fundamental theory is that food is medicine. And the food is both the cause and the cure for most of what else people say. So say more about that and what should we know about this and how would we live our lives once we know what we need to know? Absolutely. Well, you know, you're talking a lot about meditation and the mind on your show, but the truth is if you're eating crap, you're not just affecting your body, you're affecting your mind, your ability to think, focus, be attention, meditate.

It's been said that gut health is mental health. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they know they've taken antibiotics, at least more depression, right? Because it destroyed your microbiome. So food is such a powerful drug that modifies everything in your body in real time. And if you have the wrong food,

it's going to turn on the wrong signals. If you have the right food, it's going to turn on the right signals. So what people need to know is that food is not calories only or energy, it's information. And its instructions are like code. It can upgrade or downgrade your biological software with every bite in real time.

So when you have a bite of processed Doritos, let's say, that's gonna affect your microbiome in a very specific way that's bad and make bad bugs grow that make you sick and gain weight. When you eat, for example, whole grains or lots of veggies, lots of fiber or prebiotic foods like artichoke hearts is gonna turn up the good bacteria in your gut which gonna have the opposite effects. It's gonna help you lose weight, feel better, do all the things foods like artichoke hearts, it's going to turn up the good bacteria in your gut, which

going to have the opposite effects. It's going to help you lose weight, feel better, do all the things like, you know, you sort of just said, you felt better. So food is information, it changes your gene expression, it changes your hormones, it changes your brain chemistry, it changes your microbiome, it changes your immune system, literally every bite. And when you understand that, it changes your relationship to what you're eating. Because you're not just eating for energy. You're eating for actually up-regulating or down-regulating all sorts of things and upgrading or downgrading your health. And so then when you, you know, I want to grab some junk, you go, well, made a minute, what am I actually doing to my biology, and how does it make me feel? Because people don't connect the dots between how they feel and what

they eat. They feel like crap, but they don't get it's because they're eating crap. This is a vehicle and vehicles run on fuel and the food is the fuel. It's fuel, but it's also programming. Yes, yes, it's more than just fuel. Yes, yes. But I think, you know, this is an area where meditation can be useful. I notice often, it doesn't really change my eating habit, but I notice often how I feel. Actually, it has changed my eating habits. I'm not giving myself enough credit. How I feel after I eat certain things and it can really change the decisions you make about what you eat. Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, the Buddhists know this. This way you shouldn't eat garlic or you should eat onions when you're meditating, because it might affect your meditation. I don't know why exactly, but there are a lot of theories about how to eat and fasting. In Thailand, the monks meditate a lot and they're deep in their practice and they fast a lot, but they were finding they were just having exploding rates of diabetes and they didn't understand why. And it turned out that to keep your energy up all day, they were sipping soda. Yeah, it's a big factor. So, okay, we've hit two of the pillars of your mission, functional medicine, food as medicine. Yeah, it's a big factor.

So okay, we've hit two of the pillars of your mission, functional medicine, food as medicine. Third one is the one I'm curious to see how you're going to justify this as a scientist. Go. Love is medicine. So, there are two things that we know. One is that food is both the cause and the cure of everything, pretty much, is wrong with the world and certainly with chronic disease. And two, that it's very hard to get people

to change their behavior around it, right? And we also know that the science of behavior tells us that people change with community, with the power of peer pressure, whether it's good or bad, right? And I discovered this when I went to Haiti after the earthquake, I got lucky enough to have one of my patients who had a jet say you wanna go to Haiti, and we flew down there

with a whole medical team where the first ones on the ground, we brought Paul Farmer, who created Partners in Health. And in Haiti, which is the second poorest country in the world, the worst in the Western hemisphere, where there was tremendous TB and AIDS, which was basically given up on by the public health community because it was too complicated to deal with. They were poor, they didn't have water,

they never watched, they don't take their medication, it's complicated. He's like, we can fix this. And he created community health workers, basically peers, friends, to help each other be accountable. And he did this successfully. It's been a model scale across the world. He's by the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation. I went there and I said, wait a minute, chronic disease is also a contagious disease. Obesity is also contagious. Not just thing you be in AIDS because we know,

for example, from Christachis's work at Harvard that if you're friends overweight, you're more likely to be overweight than if your parents or your siblings are overweight, right? Like 170% more likely to be overweight. And that's a very interesting fact. And so I took that fact that I went to work with a guy named Rick Warren who wrote the Purpose Real Life. Yeah,. Pastor Roy, yeah. Big evangelical pastor. Yeah, and he came into my office, you know, said, you know, I want to get healthy. And can you help me?

I'm like, sure. So I did my thing. And afterwards, I'm like, let's go to dinner. So we had dinner. And I said, start telling me about your church. Because I don't really know much about churches. I'm a Jewish guy from New York. What do I know about evangelical churches?

And he's like, well, we got 30,000 people. I'm like, wow, that's a big church. He's like, well, yeah, we have 5,000 small groups that meet every week to help each other live better, healthier lives. And I'm like, oh, I said, this isn't a mega church. This is thousands of mini churches. And I'm like, the light bulb went up.

It's like, Rick, why don't we put a healthy living program in your groups? I want to hijack his groups to actually try this out. And he's like, great idea, because I was baptizing my church last week and after about the 800th one, I'm like, we're a fat church and I'm fat and we're going to do something about this. And so we did. We created the Daniel Plan.

We launched it. 15,000 people signed up the first week. They lost a quarter million pounds by doing this together in small groups. And now we're doing this at Cleveland Clinic where we're using small groups to actually help people change behavior. And we're seeing the same results where incredible change becomes from the community and from support and from love and from connection. That's the biggest problem is loneliness.

I know you have Vivek Murphy here talking about loneliness. And it's such an epidemic and we're so isolated and disconnected and often we use food to help a swajar suffering suffering coming full circle now. Yeah, and so putting all that together It's just a power recipe for health. Yes, it's much more as I said before holistic then just treating whatever symptom You're presenting with right now. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about this new book food fix I don't have a encyclopedic knowledge of your over-to-date of all of your books to date, but my understanding is that they've been very sort of how to, you know, here's how to eat certain things to work with

your blood sugar, et cetera, et cetera. This book seems like a radical departure. It is. Talk about it. It is. I remember I did something with you on my 10-day detox diet, and I gave you the book, and I don't know if you remember I signed it. I said, this will make you 10% healthier. We've done this. I put you on GMM. We've done a number of.

Yeah, it's still fun. So this book really is resulting from the same type of thinking that functional medicine is based on, which is looking at the root cause. So I'm in my office seeing patients after patients with chronic disease, and I feel like I'm in the boat that's sinking, bailing the boat with a little paper dixie cup, and it's just hopeless. So I begin to think, okay, well, if my patients are sick from food, then why are they eating

the food that they're eating? Well, maybe it's the food system. And then like, why do we have the food system we have? It's because of our food policies. And why do we have our food policies? It's often because of the influence of food industry. And so I began to start look broader at the scope of how do I heal my patients and in suffering? I can't do it by sitting in my office. I can't cure diabetes in the office. It's cured in the kitchen in the grocery store on the farm. That's where those diseases are cured. So I began to dig in the rabbit hole of the food system. And it became clear to me that it's probably one of the biggest misunderstood invisible factors

that's driving so many of our global crises from chronic disease, which is obviously caused by ultra-process food. In fact, six out of 10 Americans, four out of 10 Americans have two or more, and within 10 years it's going to be 83 million, have three or more chronic diseases. And 11 million people die every year from eating ultra-process food around the world. It causes 250 million years of disability every year across the world. A lot of suffering there. I'm like, well, that's not a good thing.

And then the economic burden of that is staggering. You know, we have one out of three Medicare dollars is for diabetes. Medicare is one out of three federal dollars spent. By 2025, it's going to be 48 percent, almost one in two dollars on the federal budget. Mandatory spending is going to be for Medicare. And Medicare, for all, sounds like a great idea. But unless we figure out how to stop the inflow of people into the system, we're screwed. So the economic impact, then I started sort of digging deeper and looking at how food affected mental health.

You know, mental health is such a huge issue in this country, but suicides and depression and the opioid epidemic and why are we having this? And if everybody meditated, I think it'll be better, but I think a lot of it has to do with how food is affecting cognitive function, and affecting mood and brain and behavior. And I discovered some striking things there

in terms of even things like violence and prisoners, by giving prisoners healthy diets in prison, they will reduce violent crime by 56%. And they have a multivitamin reduced by 80% and the same thing in juvenile delinquents are seeing tremendous drops in aggression and use of restraints and suicide, 100% drop in suicide in these 3000 juvenile study that was in detention centers, which is a controlled

environment where you give half them good food and half them bad food where they're usual food, they had a 100% drop in suicide rate. So that's standard. What's the mechanism there? Great question. They actually did a study where they looked at kids who were aggressive, violent, so forth in these detention centers, and they found that they were extremely nutritionally deficient

in vitamin B12, vitamin D, zinc, all sorts of things. Omega-3 fats, which all affect brain function and neurochemistry. And they did EEGs on them before and after, they changed their diet and did the supplementation and they dramatically changed their brain chemistry and their brain function. So you know, you are what you eat. I mean, if you're eating crab, your brain's going to be crab. And you know, in the book, I show a graphic of a kid who had ADD and his handwriting was illegible before and he was eating the most processed

diet you could imagine. I tested and it was severely nutritional deficient. I got a meeting Whole Foods, gave him some supplements that replaced the nutritional deficiencies and his handwriting went from illegible to perfect penmanship. And you can see this, you know, you can't see it on the podcast, but it's pretty impressive. And it's like, well, what's happening there? How does the brain go from dysfunctional chaotic, disorganized to actually functional and synchronous, and coherent? And this isn't just my idea.

This is a CDC-produced and incredible report called Health and Academic Achievement, where they detail that there was a tremendous thing between nutrition and academic performance. I mean, we're 31st in reading and math and the world, the ENOMs, like 21st. These kids had lower test scores, they had lower grades, they had poor cognitive function,

they had less alertness, less attention, problems with memory, visual processing, and problem solving and increased absenteeism. I mean, I went to a school in Cleveland in one of the really underserved areas because I were doing a lot of community stuff in Cleveland with this African-American Hispanic school and The superintendent there told me they had a 40% absentee as in rate

1% we're ready to go to college. I walked down the hall. There was a very overweight young girl walking by with double fisting a slushy in one hand of 32 ounces and a soda and another and And the kitchen had only deep friars and microwaves. And we see this over and over. We think we're having behavior issues in kids, one in 10 kids have 80D. Where is this all coming from? And I think we have to come to terms with the fact that our food system is driving so many of these crises. And the last few really environmental climate.

I didn't realize this. I started digging in, but the food system is the number one driver of climate change through all sorts of mechanisms from deforestation. We kill seven billion trees a year. We denude an area the size of Costa Rica every year through a factory farming of animals and the methane and the manure to the goons and the methods of farming through our farming practices that destroy soil through food waste, which is a big issue. But I didn't realize that the way we're growing food not only produces terrible food, right? Process, commodity driven food, which is 60% of our calories, but the way we grow food

destroys the soil at 30 to 40% of all the greenhouse gases in the environment have come from the loss of organic matter in the soil. And people think of rainforest as a carbon sink. But the soil is a bigger carbon sink than all the rainforests on the planet. And we've lost a third. And according to this UN, we're projected to lose all of our top soil within 60 years, 60 harvest, which means no soil, no food, no humans. Right. So this is a big crisis. and then there's all the other things, like destruction of our waterways, impact our fertilizers on dead zones, and climate change and fracking, and the loss of water through irrigation that uses up a lot of our fresh water resources,

the loss of pollinators and biodiversity just through the poisoning of our farms. So there's so much that's connected to food in the food system. I'm like, if I want to heal my patient, I can't do it in my office. I have to start thinking about these big issues and working to change them. And we are. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Mark Heimann right after this.

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I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Okay, so on food and mental health. Yeah. I clearly get that you look at certain populations, you look at children in school or people who are behind bars and you can draw a link, apparently, between the food intake and behavior and performance. But there's also a huge problem in our culture of people having a problematic relationship to food, overeating, under-eating, eating the wrong things, getting in their head, comparing

themselves to other people via Instagram, et cetera, et cetera. What about all of that, and do you address that here? Yeah, I think the world would be a better place if we blocked the selfie function on all of that. Yeah, it's not just the selfie function, it's the fact that you can go and edit out your computer, give yourself a app or whatever. I think, you know, we live in a very media- driven culture where the messaging is causing all sorts of emotional distress to people. And, I mean, look, clearly mental health is complicated. It has to do with childhood environments, with trauma and stress and all sorts of things.

Clearly, it's not only food, but it's like I always say, it's very hard to become enlightened meditating. If you're B-12 deficient or vitamindeficient or you're eating, you know, Doritos six times a day, it's like, it's very hard to have your brain work well. So give yourself an edge by fixing your biology so you can fix your emotional and psychological and spiritual life. But again, it's not just about what you're putting in your body. It's also how you feel about yourself as you're eating.

Yeah. And how much time are you spending, you know, feeding yourself up for what you ate at the last meal and obsessing over what you're going to eat at the next meal? For sure. Those seem like really big issues. They are. I mean, I often ask my patients, like, you know, not what you're eating, but what's eating you?

Yeah. And I ask them to put on the fridge, two questions. What am I feeling and what do I need? Am I feeling angry? Do I need to yell at somebody? Am I feeling lonely? Do I need to call a friend? Am I tired?

Do I want to take a nap? My hungry, maybe I should eat. But most of the time, the reason we eat is not because we're hungry. And then I think our food environment is a carnival of horrible foods that are driving all these problems. So it's not like it's easy to make the right choice.

It's easy to make the wrong choice. And that is part of the challenge. So for those of us who hear what you're saying and buy it and are thinking, okay, well, I need to think of food as medicine. What are some broad outlines for how to eat? Better how to, how to program ourselves via the fuel we're putting in our body. It's very hard for people

because there's so much misinformation and confusing marketing. I was getting some things at the CVS this morning. I walked, you know, the checkout counter and it was a freezer with ice cream in it and Hagen Doss. Now, I'm a weakness for Hagen Doss, but I was like, it was a dairy free Hagen Doss.

I'm like, oh, that's good. I'm gonna go check it out. And I looked at it and said, gluten free, plant-based, dairy free. And I'm like, oh, this is good, right? And then I turned it over and it was like corn syrup and all these processing ingredients made by Nestle. And I'm like, you know, it's really hard for people to do the right thing. So I talk about in

the book something called the peak and diet and it's kind of a joke. Peagin, peagin, paleo vegan. Okay. As a sort of spoof on all the diet worse, right? And all the craziness around food. And what do we actually know? What's common sense? And it's not that hard, Dennis. Eat real food, right? If your great grandmother ate it, it's probably okay, right? They all ate organic food, they all ate unprocessed food. And if it comes from whole foods, it's probably okay. So look at the ingredients. If there's something you recognize on there, eat it.

If it's something you don't recognize or wouldn't have in your cabinet or can't pronounce, it's probably not a good idea. Do you have butylated hydroxy-tolubane in your cabinet? Did you sprinkle on your salad? Probably not, right? And yet, that is something that's a common preservative that's banned in Europe, but it's in everything here. So I think it's eating tons of food that is plant rich, not necessarily plant based,

but we eat a lot of plants, non-Sarcheavedges, lots of good fats from avocados, nuts and seeds, whole foods, lots of whole grains and beans. And I mean whole grains. I don't mean whole grain flowers, like wheat bread that's made of finely ground flour, which acts just like sugar in your body. And that's a pretty common sense way of eating. And then get rid of this stuff that's causing all the problem, which is a lot of the sugar

and the starch, the chemicals, the adiv, the average person eats three to five pounds of aditives. And many of you have been shown to be psychoactive in their effects in Europe. and the starch, the chemicals, the adiv, the average person eats three to five pounds of aditives. And many of you have been shown to be psychoactive in their effects in Europe. They don't allow a lot of these things. They've done studies where they look, for example, at certain dyes, they'll get a red, kool-aid dye drink

compared to like a pomegranate dye drink. It looks the same. The kids who have the one with all the adivs have behavior issues, aggression, ADD, focus problems. So I think there's really a real simple principle of eating real foods, eating on processed foods. Don't eat the commodities that we produce from our farms, like corn, wheat and soy, and there are forms of high-propose corn, serpour, fine soy, binoil, and white flour. That's a good place to start. You specifically say, should we go vegan?

No. So I was curious about that because I'm a vegan. I'm not a militant vegan, but any stretch. I only did it because I'm not down with the cruelty. Yes. That's the only reason I did it. I didn't do it for health reasons. I didn't do it because I thought it was going to affect climate change.

Yeah. I did it because I was feeling bad for the animals. Yeah. I'm a soft. That's fair. So are you saying that's a bad call from a health standpoint? It's complicated. There's three issues.

You name them all. Moral, environmental, and health. There are different reasons people choose to be vegan. My Buddhist, among patients, fine. I'll help them find a healthy way of eating vegan diet and supplement where they're deficient. That's pretty easy. The data is pretty clear. If you are consistently vegan, over time, you'll supplement where they're deficient, right? That's that's pretty easy. But the data is pretty clear. If you are consistently vegan, over time, you'll become omega-3 deficient. You become often more deficient in iron, zinc, and other nutrients. So as long as you

supplement and you're smart about it and good about it, I think it can be a healthy way of eating. But the truth is that is an environmental issue, which is mostly often what it's played as that if you avoid animals, you're going to save the planet, it's not completely true. And here's why. So, if you take a traditional factory farm, 100%, it's bad for the animals, bad for humans, bad for the planet. So we should not be eating any animals that come from factory farm, and you can't be a purist, but that's the goal.

The second is that a form of agriculture that actually can reverse climate change is called regenerative agriculture. And what that means is regenerating the soil, regenerating the ecosystem, conserving water, and it's done through specific techniques that are varied from cover crops, crop rotations, not using chemicals, and actually integrating animals

into the ecosystem. Now, with the eat them or not, that's up to you. But if you look at how we got 50 to 80 feet of topsoil in the Midwest, it was because we had 60 million bison running around pooping, peeing, digging, eating, and they weren't causing climate change. We have about the same number of cows here in America now, but they are causing climate change because of the way they raised. And when you look at some of the plant-based alternatives, like Impossible Burger, which sounds good, and now you can get a big Whopper with Impossible Burger, it's made from GMO soy, which is certainly better than factory-farm animals.

But it's still grown away, it's monocrop soy, that as Glyphosate, that actually contributes to climate change, it adds 3.5 kilos of carbon for every burger. It's a soy burger, but on the other hand, I've regenerally raised beef burger, and this is a life cycle analysis done by the same company, reduces carbon by 3.5 kilos. So from an environmental point of view, we need to actually create a different form of agriculture

and integrate animals, and then you can eat them or not. It's up to you, but it's better for the animal and it's better for the human, the better for the planet. And the truth is, even if you're a vegan or not. It's up to you, but it's better for the animal, it's better for the humans, it's better for the planet. And the truth is, even if you're a vegan of vegetarian, people don't realize this, but I read a study recently where they looked at agriculture, and it's an inherently destructive act. You're destroying the habitat of animals.

You're destroying moles and rabbits, and it's estimated that just vegetable and plant agriculture kills seven billion animals a year, which is far more than the 29 million cows we kill over here. So wherever you, you never get, you never get out eating anything without killing something. So that's just sort of a fact of life. No, I hear you. I hear you.

But let me just go back to the impact of making a vegan lifestyle choice on the climate. Are you saying there's no benefit? There is. A hundred percent, if you're not eating factory farm animals, you are making a huge contribution to benefiting climate change. However, if you go to regenerative agriculture, which incorporates animals,

and you can invest in those from regenerative farm too, the biggest little farm is a great movie that goes through how that all works, the biggest little farm. The biggest little farm is a great documentary that talks about how they took a degraded piece of land and turned into this rich ecosystem with all these plants and animals and production. If you really want to save the planet, you need to do regenerative agriculture. The UN has said that if we take the 2 million of the 5 million degraded

hectares of land around the world and convert converted to regenerative agriculture, which would cost $300 billion, which is less than America spends every year in Medicare on diabetes or less than the total military spend of the world for 60 days, that we could stop climate change for 20 years because of the benefits of drawing down carbon into the soil and out of the atmosphere. You can't do that just by growing plants. You have to include animals in the ecosystem. This is a little bit different from what we've been talking about before, but I wanted to highlight it in this interview.

I find it personally of interest is you really take a run at big food. So I want to let you sound up on that. Yeah, sure. I'm actually helpful, believe it or not, burger king, released an ad that showed a big gupper over 45 sections in time lapse photography, turning into a moldy rotten burger over 34 days. And the tagline at the end was no artificial preservatives. Big food is changing in response to consumer choices. Kellogg's announced they're gonna get glyphosate out of their food by 2025.

General Mills committed a million acres to regenerative ag. The known and General Mills are funding farmers, paying them to convert their farms from conventional to regenerative ag. So I see a lot of hope. I've been to Nestle's headquarters in Cleveland. They are changing the formulations, improving better ingredients despite my haggen-dust story at the beginning. So, I think just to start with that note, there's a sea change happening, and these companies are getting it.

But we're still in a bad situation because our food policies and the food industry are often working across purposes with what we need. I knew the head of Nestle for the USA and he said, we pulled out of the grocery manufacturer of America because they were trying to obstruct all the policies that were trying to advance important improvements in our food system. Just a quick example,

grocery manufacturer America was the big trade association for all the big food companies. Just a quick example, Grocery Manufacturer America was the big trade association for all the big food companies. And they went to Washington State because they were about to pass a GMO labeling law. And they spent millions of dollars in an illegal way, violated campaign finance laws, and the attorney general found out and sued them. One, the suit was like an $18 million judgment against them. Of course, for them, it's 18 million compared to billions of sales, so it's nothing. But what it led to was a lot of the companies bailing on grocery manufacturer America and forming

the sustainable food policy alliance, which is impressive. And GMMade literally just folded and became something else. So I think the food industry acts in nefarious ways sometimes, but I think there's a shift, but they oppose things like changing food stamp regulations, right? They'll do a number of activities, and I'll end the book that are across the sectors that are designed to shape opinion, shape policy, and shape activities of various groups.

So they number one spend more than any other group in Washington by far on lobbying. Just one bill alone, more than any other group in Washington by far on lobbying. Just one bill alone, the GMO labeling bill in Washington, they spend $192 million in one year on that one bill. They spend half a billion dollars just lobbying the farm bill. They fund $12 billion of nutrition, quote, science, which shows that candy is a great weight loss tool for kids. No joke, reference a study in the book. And of course, the NIH only spends a billion dollars, so we have a lot of misinformation out there in the science.

They fund professional organizations like the Academy Nutrition Diatetics, and the Americans' aside nutrition is funded by the big food companies, and they came up with craft singles as being a health food. I mean, you can't call it craft American cheese. Why? Because it's not 51% cheese.

So the food industry funds science, they for quote science, they fund lobbying, they get in professional associations. So it's hard for Americans to understand what's true or not true. So they're hijacking the narrative. Hijacking the narrative. So last you try wanted to ask you about, and this is not unrelated, and it's also not unrelated to some of the things

you talked about earlier about the impact of food on vulnerable populations like children and inmates. But you also use food as a lens to investigate so many aspects of our society, but social justice. You talk about food as sort of a social justice issue. So can you say some things about that? Yeah, I think, you know, most people don't understand the link between poverty and food.

And I think, you know, if you look at these poor communities, is it a chicken or egg thing? But the food industry specifically targets minorities, of course, in children. The average African American or Hispanic kids, he's far more ads for junk food. Those places are far more prevalent in their communities for fast food and for soda and all the food deserts are, they shouldn't be called food desert, they should be called food swamps because they're just, you know, horribly burdened with processed food. There are all sorts of ways in which these populations are targeted directly and they're

affected by this far greater than the rest of the population. You look at African Americans, they're twice as likely to have diabetes, they're four and a half times like they have kidney failure or three times more like they have their legs amputated. And part of its genetics isceptibility, but not really only that. It's really the food culture they live in, and Hispanic is the same way. They're much more targeted.

And I think we have to sort of come to terms with a lot of the health disparities in our country. Turns out your zip code is a bigger determine of your health than your genetic code. I mean, one study I saw in shock me was they took people who were diabetic and overweight from a sort of a very poor underserved neighborhood and they put a slightly better area,

slightly better apartment, better neighborhood, their blood sugar and their weight went down with no other intervention. Didn't come to eat better, didn't come to exercise, didn't get medical advice, nothing. Just simply moving from a worst to a better zip code. Is there anything I should have asked, but didn't? That's a great question.

I think the real issue is, this is a problem. It's the big invisible problem. But the question you didn't ask is, how do we fix it? Because the book is called Food Fix, not Food Apocalypse. And the idea is that there is an effort going on, somewhat disorganized to change the food system, and there's so much that we can do as individuals, there's so much that business innovation can do,

and there's so much that government can do. And I think the map is clear. There's some things we can't solve. We can't end natural disasters, we can't end war, but this is a problem that has solutions. And I think we need to do it through citizen action. I mean, that's why Burger King and General Mills and Kellogg's and Denon and Nestle are changing because we are asking for different products and we are making choices with our wallets that affect

them. So I think we have enormous influence. We need to work on the business innovations and there are a lot of there's billions and billions flowing into the food and ag tech sector to actually improve that. And I just give you a great example. There's a group called Vanguard Renewables in Massachusetts that is taking advantage of a law that Massachusetts put into place. Or if you make a ton of food waste a week, whether you're a food service company or your whole foods or, you know, safe way, whatever, you can't throw on the garbage.

You have to figure out whether to give it to a farmer or whatever. The Vanguard Renewable is partnered with dairy farmers who are losing money. Nobody's drinking milk anymore. Their economics are terrible. The average farmer loses $1,600 a year. They created these anaerobic digesters where they truck in three tractor-trailer loads full of food from whole foods and other places every day. Throw some manure in there from their dairy farm cows,

and it turns into electricity for 1,500 homes. The farmer makes $100,000. You end the problems from the manure and the methane, and you end the problems on the food waste and the methane. The white food waste is the problems, because when you throw it in a landfill, it actually off-gases methane, and if it were a country,

it would have been the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And we throw away 40% of our food, basically taking like your groceries home and throwing away 40% and it's about a pound a day per person in America, about $1800 for a family for every year. And it's a global problem. We have more than enough food to feed the world. It's just being thrown in the garbage. So we have to fix that.

And this is a solution, partly that, and there's other innovations that are happening around the food waste system. So I think we have to be encouraged, we have to leave there's action, and action working on a campaign, nonprofit we started, and an advocacy group, otherwise known as a lobby group,

because there's no lobby for the good guys, to change policy. And yesterday I met with our team, which is a bipartisan team, Republicans, Democrats, and Sam Kass came in who was the former senior policy advisor for Obama, and he walked in the room to sort of be part of the discussion. Everybody went around in Tuesday. They were the former chief of staff for a Senate majority leader, a former top legislative aide to the minority leader in the Congress, and this one of that one.

Republican Democrat, he looked at, I don't understand what's happening here. I, you know, it was in the White House for a years and I never saw this happening. I never saw Republicans and Democrats working together on this issue. And I'm so encouraged. It's like a unicorn. So our goal is to really catalyze all the good things that are happening to leverage the movement to actually be a movement. Because now it's just a bunch of people

trying to do good things, and drive change in policy, which drives change in everything else, and I think it's gonna happen. Great, I like your app, and I appreciate your app. You know, I'm glad it's not food apocalypse. I'm a pathological optimist. Well, actually, the studies are really clear on this. You live longer if you're an optimist, even if you're wrong.

That's like a dual noted. You've got to rewire my stuff. Before we go, I like to do a little thing called the plug zone, of course, people to plug. So remind us about the book, remind us about any other books you want us to know from you and where we can learn more about you on the internet. Absolutely.

So for the one learning about the book, go to foodfixbook.com and you can watch a free video on five steps of healthy plan and healthy you, you can access the action guide, which will tell you how to eat better and how to take care of yourself, your family, all kinds of things. And you can get the book anywhere you get books, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble's and bookstores. And I encourage people to sort of learn about this issue because it may not be going to fix them, but it does. And everybody's such by it in some way and everybody needs to be a part of the solution.

So that's one place if you want to learn more about me, drheimon.com. I got a podcast, which is always neck and neck with your podcast. The doctor's pharmacy. The doctor's pharmacy. Would you have been on? Thank you. And that's really, I think a good place to start. And you have a bit, you're of a big operation on Facebook. You do a lot of Facebook stuff for it. Facebook, Instagram, all Instagram Facebook. It's just Dr. Mark Heimann on every platform, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. We do a lot of fun stuff on Instagram. So it's all there for people interested.

Great. Great job. As you can tell, I'm a man on a mission. Yes. A busy guy, no wonder you need meditation. I do. I can't function without it. Great job.

I really appreciate it. Thank you, Dan. Big thanks again to Mark. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Dan. Big thanks again to Mark. Really appreciate it. One last thing before we go, we would appreciate it if you would do us a solid. If you would take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey, the team here is always looking

for ways to improve. So if you want to help us out, hook us up. Please go to 10%.com forward slash survey 10% dot com forward slash survey. Thank you. And as always, a big thanks to the team. These people work incredibly hard on the show. Samuel Johns is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boynton and Ania Sheshik from ultraviolet audio. Maria Wartell is our production coordinator. We drive a lot of wisdom from our TPH colleagues, such as Jen Poient, Nick Toby, Ben Rubin, Liz Levin,

and of course a big thank you and salute to my ABC News colleagues, Ryan Kessler and Josh Koham. And we'll see you all on Wednesday of our fascinating episode. We're going to talk to a scientist who's been researching fear and whether overcoming fear is a trainable skill. Her name is Abigail Marsh, that's coming up on Wednesday Hey, hey prime members you can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music Download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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