The Chris Cuomo Project - Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

In this week’s episode of The Chris Cuomo Project, Dr. Mark Hyman, physician, bestselling author of “Food Fix” and “The Pegan Diet,” and podcast host of “The Doctor’s Farmacy,” joins Chris for an extensive conversation about how food is both medicine and the number one killer on the planet, why processed foods contribute to America’s obesity problem, the relationship between eating real food and how you feel, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/chris. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you are dealing with processed ingredients, and over 60% of our diet comes from ultra-processed food, and for every 10% of your diet, it's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. Food is the number one killer on the planet today. Turkey time. Chris Cuomo here. Thank you for joining another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project.

Feliz dia de accion de gracias. That means happy day of action of thanks. Or feliz dia de pavo, which is happy Turkey Day. Greg Ott is loving this, but mostly because of my pronunciation of Spanish. And in Italian, they would say nothing because it's not a big deal there,

but Turkey is Taquino. So I guess it'd be Giorno di Taquino, Turkey Day. I love Thanksgiving. It is my favorite holiday slash holy day every year. And I'll tell you what, this episode of the Chris Cuomo Project is lining us up for it, but in a different way, different way. I'm going to talk to you plenty. I'm going to do a special edition of the podcast about what it is to be thankful for me and what a high priority that is and what it means for me, especially this year, because I ain't never had a year

like the last 12 or 14 months that I've been living through. And it's taught me things and it's changed me. And I want to share that because I know about the struggle and I'm flawed and I'm flailing and I'm trying,

but you got to be thankful. And I want to talk about why. But I want to introduce you to a different spin on where we are. Thanksgiving, if it is about nothing else, it's about food. And I'm telling you, we've got to think. I have to think more about what I put in my face. I am telling you, the food that we're eating, and I know it's common sense on one level, but it's so much more important than just, oh yeah, garbage in, garbage out. You eat bad food, you're going to be fat.

It's more than that. It's about why there's obesity, why there is cancer, why there is disease, why they are now saying that processed food is more like nicotine than it is something from nature, that it may actually be a drug. And it's why I'm really big on Dr. Hyman, okay? You're gonna meet this guy. He's got a big following online. But the way he looks at food and health

is going to be new and different for you and really, really impactful. So subscribe, follow. Don't forget the free agent merch because it helps us do better things together. And that will start pretty much in earnest in the new year because I want to build up enough money where the contributions feel good for us.

But Dr. Hyman's going to talk to you now about how to feel good, period. And it absolutely begins and ends with what you put in your face. And this isn't about fun facts. It's not about better or worse. It's about live or die. And I mean that, you know me.

I'm not into hype, okay? I'm not here to fake the funk. But there's a reason that he's petitioning the government and that we need change in a big way. You want to know why and how? Listen to Dr. Hyman. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70.

I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care. Why? Because it's giving you access to affordable and discreet sexual health treatments, and you do it right from your couch. HIMS provides access to clinically proven generic alternatives to Viagra or Cialis or whatever. And it's up to like 95% cheaper. And there are options as low as two bucks a dose. HIMS has hundreds of thousands of trusted subscribers.

So if ED is getting you down, it's time to pick it up. If ED is getting you down, it's time to pick it up. Start your free online visit today at HIMS.com slash CCP. H-I-M-S dot com slash CCP. And you will get personalized ED treatment options. HIMS.com slash CCP. Prescriptions? You need an online consultation with a healthcare provider, and they will determine if appropriate.

Restrictions apply. You see the website. You'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Look, no shame in my game. I've been using AG1 for over five years. Why? It works, it's easier, and it's less expensive. That what happens with the facts, they never shift. This is the opposite. Oh, prebiotics work with probiotics, but in this way. D works with K and this type of B works with that. They have the scientists doing it, so I don't need all the bottles. I don't have to spend all the money and I don't have to figure out when to take what and why.

More importantly, it's not just the regular list of vitamins. It's the extras, okay? The adaptogens, the prebiotics, the probiotics that support your body's universal needs. Gut optimization, immune support, stress management. That's what foundational nutrition is about. And these are the people at AG1 who've been doing the work to get it right. Okay. I tell friends, I tell family, I get no complaints. Okay. If you want to take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1. You get a free one year supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs.

Okay? That's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash CCP. Drinkag1.com slash CCP. Check it out. First of all, thank you very much. It's great to have you here um finally somebody that my wife

and my ep will respect being on this show it took me a few episodes to get it but finally i got somebody hyman they like let's talk about the success your podcast has had how many downloads since you started it? 150 million. How many? 150 million. A hundred and fifty million. What does that mean to you? You know, it means that people care about things they're not hearing in the traditional media about health, about the food industry, about our food system and politics. So I feel like I can say anything and get anybody to talk about what really matters

and things you're not hearing about in the traditional media because it's really co-opted by the advertising that drives the sales, pharma and big food. And unfortunately, that honestly precludes actually talking about the things that really matter. You really believe that there's so much corporate and commercial influence on the things that we eat that we shouldn't, that there's so much corporate and commercial influence on the things that we eat that we shouldn't, that it's hard to break through that and talk about what we should. Absolutely, because look, look at COVID. We have 4% of the world's population, but 15% of the cases and deaths with the best healthcare system in the world. Why? Because nobody's talking about the role that food plays in making us unhealthy and predisposed to

COVID. 63% of hospitalizations and deaths for COVID were because of chronic diseases attributable to bad food, like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and autoimmune diseases. These are the things that drive people to die. Being overweight is one of the biggest risk factors for death and hospitalization from COVID, whatever your age. So we're in a terrible crisis now, and nobody's really talking about it. Nobody talks about the role that food plays as a nexus in all the things that we care about. Chronic disease affects six out of 10 Americans. 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, meaning they have either high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, have had a heart attack or stroke, or overweight.

That means 6.8% of us are healthy. So why is it complicated beyond the, yeah, you're fat and all these bad things are going to happen. So if you eat good food and eat less and move more, everything will be okay. Why do we need to know more than that? Well, because Chris, you just said the party line of the food industry, of the government, and most of healthcare, which is that the key to losing weight is eat less, exercise more. Meaning, it's your fault you're fat. It's your fault that you're either a sloth or a glutton, or both.

And that's what's driving the problem. So if you had the responsibility for yourself, you would actually eat well and take care of yourself. It ignores completely the built and structural environment that is driving this. Paul Farmer, who just died, talks about structural violence, the social, political, economic conditions that drive disease. This is a social disease. This is not a personal responsibility disease. Why? When you have 20% of kids who are obese, you have one in four teenagers who has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. You have two to five-year-olds who are obese who have diabetes, adult onset diabetes, at two to five years old.

That is not their responsibility. The argument back is personal responsibility. What do you mean it's not their responsibility? Doc, you control what you put in your face. We all know that if you don't eat processed foods, if you don't eat a McDonald's, if you eat your greens and you eat lean proteins, you'll be better off.

Absolutely. You know it. So if you don't do it, it's on you. Well, absolutely. But you'd be surprised at how little education people have about what's good or not good for them. I was part of a movie, Fed Up, with Katie Couric and Laurie David.

They produced it. And it was striking. I went to a family in South Carolina, in Easley, South Carolina, one of the worst food deserts in America. What's a food desert? Food desert is basically where there's very little access to healthy food. So they have something called the Retail Food Environment Index. How many fast food and bodegas are there compared to grocery stores and get healthy food? It's 10 to 1 in that area, which is one of the worst in America.

By the way, I just took the doctor to a bodega and got sandwiches for me and the producer. And I was like looking at him. I wanted to see how he was looking when I got it. How bothered were you by whole wheat? Not too bad. I actually looked at protein shakes. Turkey breast, not a loaf. No, it's okay.

It's okay. Lettuce, tomato, mayo, mustard, pickled peppers on one. Yeah, it's all right. It's all right. It's all right. I think the key. It wasn't all right, is it? You don't like it at all.

You can be honest. No, I mean, listen, that's actually food. He looked like I took him into a crack den. I didn't even look at what you were getting. He didn't even touch the, he didn't touch the ice. But in this town, the father was 42 on dialysis from kidney failure from diabetes on disability and food stamps. The mother was huge, well over 250 pounds. The son was 16, almost diabetic at 16 years old. They lived in a trailer, family of five on food stamps, disability, that $1,000 a month to eat.

And they had no clue what they were eating. And I went to their house rather than give them a lecture about, you know, eat this or don't eat that or exercise more. I said, let's, let's cook a meal together. Let's look in your fridge. Let's look in your freezer. Everything was processed. They thought it was healthy because it was low fat this, or it was cool whip and had zero trans fat. They had no clue what they were eating. And I showed them how to cook a simple meal from a guy called good food on a tight budget, how to eat well for less from the environmental working group. And the myth is that it costs a lot, that it's elitist,

that poor people can't do it. It's just nonsense. You can eat well for less. You're not going to be eating a $70 ribeye grass-fed steak, but you can eat cheaper cuts of meat, cheaper vegetables, cheaper nuts and seeds. It's doable. And within a year, they lost over 200 pounds as a family.

The father was able to lose 45 pounds, get a new kidney. The son lost 50 pounds, but went to go work at Bojangles because that's the only place that kids could work in fast food places down there, gain the weight back, end up gaining a lot of weight, and finally reached out to me again. He lost 138 pounds. He's the first kid in his family to go to college. How did he lose all that weight? By actually just eating real food and getting rid of the junk. He said, when I go into a fast food restaurant or work at Bojangles, it's like

putting an alcoholic to work in a bar because it's addictive. You say, why isn't it personal responsibility? Because these foods are designed to be addictive, Chris. And in this kid, lost 138 pounds, went to college, and then asked me for a letter of recommendation for medical school. He went to medical school and now he's a doctor. And that woke me up to the fact that people often don't know. And they don't know how to cook. They don't know how to choose the food that's healthy for them. They don't know what's healthy or not healthy. You and I sitting here in New York, it's obvious we know what healthy is. But most Americans aren't clear. And we really have a pretty screwed up system where, yes, there's some level of responsibility

that people have to take on their own and take initiative. But if you're in a situation where you can't buy a vegetable, in Cleveland, there was this woman I met who was in the culinary school, was a community college. She said her mother, a black woman, she said her mother had to take two buses an hour each way to buy her family vegetables. Even if you want to do the right thing, it's hard to do it. When you go into areas, really, it's not just impoverished areas, but probably, and I've done the research that you outline, there is a density issue.

That when you go into low-income areas, there is a density, multifactorial, not single explanation, that if poor, you'll have more fast food restaurants. That happens to be true, but the real estate's at a different price point. These chains target that. But you're saying a significant factor not to ignore is those companies want fast food in those neighborhoods. Why? Well, because people are eating a lot of that food. They're cheap meals. They think they're easily accessible for them. And they just target those areas more than others. Because if you're in the suburbs, people don't want to eat McDonald's.

So in the suburbs, you know, you see these places. For sure. I mean, even out where I live, out on the island, you have them. You do not have them in the way that you have. But you have grocery stores. You have places to get healthy food. You have restaurants that serve stuff. You have alternatives.

You have alternatives. You have options. You have restaurants that serve stuff. You have alternatives. You have alternatives. You have options. You're saying that there's an illusion of choice, that we see all the different fast food restaurants and we see all the stores, but you're not necessarily able to get what you need to avoid illness. That's true. And the problem is the foods are designed to be addictive, right?

So they have these taste institutes that are run by craving experts that seek to create heavy users. This is their own terminology. Michael Moss's book, Salt, Sugar, and Fat from the New York Times, he did extensive research of 300 different food company executives, scientists, food scientists who were kind of whistleblowers. And it was shocking to see how deliberate they are about trying to find the bliss point of food that creates that perfect mouthfeel, perfect taste that triggers a dopamine in your brain, just like heroin or cocaine. But why wouldn't somebody making a food want it to be as tasty as possible? When you are dealing with processed ingredients and over 60% of our diet comes from ultra processed food. And for every 10% of your diet, it's ultra processed food. Your

risk of death goes up by 14%. Food is the number one killer on the planet today, by far. One of the bases of criticism, probably a coefficient of your success. I think if you weren't getting so much reach, people would not consider you the same way, but you have great reach. They say that you ignore germ theory. Oh, really? For you guys out there like me, germ theory is what it sounds like, that we get germs from outside, they get in our body, they make us sick, we get disease, we die. That is so funny. I mean, I've never heard anybody say that.

Of course there's germs. Of course there's bacteria. Of course there's viruses. How can you dispute that, right? What I'm saying is that the host matters too. It's not just the germ. And there was a great debate between Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur in the day. Louis Pasteur was the germ theory guy and

Claude Bernard, well, he called it the biological terrain, the host. And we see this with COVID. If you're healthy, you don't end up in the hospital and die from COVID. If you're unhealthy, you do. The host matters. And so yes, you have to take care of the host. And how is that? By eating well, by exercising, by getting up to sleep, by dealing with stress, by making sure your nutrient levels are good. There was a big study in Israel. If your vitamin D level from previous studies was low, your risk of getting in the hospital was like 70% higher. If your vitamin D level was over 50, there was zero deaths. But you don't hear this talk about in the news. There should be, we're talking about vaccine mandates.

What about a vitamin D mandate for pennies a day to reduce the risk of death in America? And why doesn't it happen? I think because the focus has been on pharmaceuticals, on vaccines, on drugs, and not on the things we know actually help to strengthen immunity, which is, I mean, we know that sugar suppresses your immune system. We know that if you're overweight, your immune system response to vaccines is lower. We know that you're more likely to get the flu and die. We know all this.

These are just standard medical facts. This is not in dispute. And yet no one has stood up from any federal or state political podium and said, America, we are bearing the brunt of COVID because we're an unhealthy nation and we need to fix our food. Boris Johnson did this.

He realized he was overweight and sick. That's why he ended up in the ICU. And he eliminated a lot of food marketing that was in London on all the subways and the, I call them the tube there, I guess, and the buses and food marketing, which works. A lot of it is messaging and virtue signaling in a good way, not in a bad way. You know, last president loved fast food. It's not exactly the picture of what you want to see in the mirror. It's well-preserved. Right. And it kind of fed, pun intended, this idea that I'm going to eat what I want.

Yeah. And it tastes good, and it's all the same shit at the end of the day. I don't care. Now, the new president is more of a fitness guy, but he's too old to be a fitness model. I mean, he's a good symbol of aging well physically when he does his pushups and stuff. That's impressive for a guy at his age. But people aren't going to vibe off wanting to look like Joe Biden. No, for sure. So you need your leaders and influencers to be talking this talk, but they get a lot of money

from these businesses. Yeah, that's the problem. The food and ag and healthcare lobby is the biggest, combined as the biggest lobby in America. You know what my beef is with them right now? Pun not intended that time, but it wasn't a bad one. Our migrant situation, not your bailiwick, but you want less migrants because they're mostly economically motivated, asylum cases aside, and the laws that need to change their side. Go these agribusinesses they're the ones hiring all of them they're the ones that organize them to come over illegally but for the same reason we don't hear about them in the bad food argument you don't hear about them in immigration because nobody wants to mess with power if it affects their pocket and you say that's at play here on the food side for sure i mean honestly

the the uh citizens united and the amount of money in politics is driving so much of what's wrong. Citizens United, he's referring to the court case that allowed money to come in through PACs and what they call dark money. So now it's not illegal money that's the problem in politics. It's legal money. It just drives the political agenda and what people are willing to do and talk about. But I do think there's a lot of great people in Congress and the Senate and in the White House. I've spent a lot of time working on that recently with a campaign that I created called the Food Fix Campaign, which is a nonprofit I created after I wrote my book, Food Fix,

how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. Talking about the nexus where food is driving so many more crises, right? From chronic disease to the economic impact, to kids' learning ability, to national security, because 30% of kids get rejected because they're overweight, and 70% get rejected because they're unfit to fight. Social justice issues, health disparities, climate change, environmental degradation, all driven in part by our food system. And nobody's really talking about how these are all intersecting. And in that campaign, really focusing on educating lawmakers about these issues. And it's amazing how they're open to it, how they're interested in it, how they haven't heard this side. Half a billion dollars gets

spent on the farm bill, which is really a misnomer. It should be the food bill because 75% of it is food programs. SNAP, which is food stamps, school lunches, all the dietary programs we have, which is good. The White House is having a conference, but they really haven't included even agriculture, which is the foundation of our food system. That's because it's very political. That's right. There's an institutional bias there. Farms in general.

Farms get supported in a way, of course, we need to make food. But there is a corporate welfare infrastructure that doesn't exist for anything else. And a lot of it is just because of in the heartland and between the coasts, but the coasts also, that industry has mattered so much over time in terms of political clout. A headline. One, I have you right before you go to Washington. And this is a big deal. What are you hoping to achieve when you go to the Capitol? So 53 years ago under President Nixon was the first White House conference on nutrition. This is the second,

53 years later. And it's a very different environment. Their hunger and food scarcity and insecurity were huge issues. It's still a big issue. It still affects 10% of American households, about 30 something million people. we have 75 of us overweight that's over 200 million people overweight this country is a much bigger problem wait a minute now is this that all right let's talk about why that's true because when i go to the doctor yeah if you're not watching this you're just listening to it hyman skinny all right he is lean he's like six three or something like that he's in good shape okay when i go yeah they bmi me out the door my doctor you have high muscle mass but why isn't that like translated through you know my i have a really great doctor that i go to but she says

oh bmi is like 28 really should have you losing some weight. I've been like the same kind of weight for like 25 years. And so when you say 75% are overweight, is that a little bit of a fugazi factor? Because if you're a big muscular guy, they call you fat. No, you're very few and far between, Chris. The amount of people who are skewing that. And that's a good thing, Tom.

One of me is too many. But I mean, listen, the amount of people who are skewing the bell curve because they're super muscular and fit is very low. Like I said, 6.8% of Americans are metabolically healthy. It means everybody else is on their way to diabetes and heart disease. That high?

93, yeah, 0.2%. And that's not being like hyper-technical or too sensitive in the measurement? No, it's actually, in my view, it's probably even low. I mean, I think my metrics are much more tight for what's healthy. It's not just what the standard metrics are. So I think your blood sugar is normal under 100. It should probably be 75 to 85, right? We know that after 85,

your risk of heart disease goes up. So what are the normal ranges? They're for a sick population. If you are a Martian and you land in America, what's normal? It's it's normal to be overweight right it doesn't mean it's optimal right it's just how it's true i remember you ever hear that joke of when you're in europe how do you tell who the americans are look for the fat people who are poorly dressed it always bothered me and then i'm over there last when i heard the joke i was over there a while ago i was like it's not that far off no uh and now we have this weird pendular swing and look american change is often pendular and that is you know okay in quotes because that's just how we seem to do it here culturally but now it's like you really have to be careful about

telling somebody that they're overweight at the same time at what point do we own the reality and call it out as something that is not just suboptimal, but that is a problem? Well, I think you hit the nail on the head, Chris, because the conversation we had earlier is about whose fault is it? If you're just a lazy glutton, it's your fault that you're overweight. So why should anybody else care about it except for you? But if the truth is different, that the foods are addictive, that the food environment you live in is like a toxic food carnival, that 60% of our diets are processed food, that the government supports that food, promotes that food, gives that food to the poor through the SNAP program, whose fault is that? It's a much bigger social problem than just an individual problem.

Couple that with saying everybody's okay no matter how they are. Right. everybody's okay no matter how they are. Right. I mean, the whole body positive thing, I think it's important to not shame people, but the whole idea based on the narrative we said earlier is that we're blaming the victim. If someone's addicted to processed food and it is a biological addiction, in fact, in animal studies, the rats will work eight times harder to get sugar than cocaine. Even if they can just hit a button and get cocaine IV, they're going to work eight times harder. If they put them on electric, and this is a terrible experiment, but they put them on electric shock floor, they gave them sugar and they kept shocking them,

and they would keep shocking and shocking and shocking, they'd keep eating the sugar. If we look at human studies, we see that even the biology based on a functional MRI imaging of what happens when you eat sugar compared to, let's say it was a milkshake study where they took a milkshake that tasted, looked the same, same protein, fat, carbs, calories, fiber, everything, but the kind of carbohydrate was different. One was fast acting like sugar, one was slow. The fast acting one lit up the area in the brain called the nucleus accumbens, which is the area that gets lit up when you have cocaine or heroin or anything that's highly addictive. And so they were able to see the differences in insulin, blood sugar, the hormonal effects.

So food is not just calories. And so the message really is all about calories and energy balance. Well, this is just a big bunch of baloney because I can tell anybody are a thousand calories of broccoli or a thousand calories of soda the same. And they're going to go, no, but that is exactly what our government says. It's exactly what the food industry says. It's exactly what most medical societies and nutrition societies say. It's all about energy balance. Exercise more, eat less. And that just does not understand the very simple fact that food is information. It's not just

calories, that it has instructions like code that regulates every aspect of your biology, your gene expression, your microbiome, your hormones, your immune system, literally in real time, your brain chemistry with every single bite. So you believe eat better and then the amount isn't as relevant. It's easy to eat a whole bag of chips or cookies. It's not easy to eat a whole bag of avocados. Nobody's binging on a bag of avocados, right? Or a bag of carrots. You know, you just can't overeat that stuff. So I don't ever restrict my patients' calories. I don't ever tell them to eat less. I tell them to eat real food that their body loves and that actually they love too. And that's what makes the difference.

And also the difference, Chris, is that our food has become so bland and not tasty, even fruits and vegetables, because of how we grow them in this country. If you go to Europe, they taste so different, right? And so flavor follows the medicine in the food. Because they're more nutrient-dense. Yeah, they're more nutrient-dense, more phytochemicals. If you take an August vine-ripened tomato, a cherry tomato from your organic garden, take it off the mine and put it in your mouth. It's like an explosion of flavor. If you go get a tomato from the store, it's like cardboard. And I went to Sardinia when I was researching my book on longevity

called Young Forever, coming out in February. And this one guy, Linto, said, we flavor the meat before we kill the animal. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we feed it acorns, we feed it carob, and we feed it these wild plants. And it's like they know that it tastes better. You ever talk to anybody who's like in the cheese world? They call them fromages, right? Yeah, yeah. My French sucks, but that's the word. And when they talk to you about cheese,

I actually had to look this up because I thought I was being scammed. I'm a little paranoid. And the guy's like, oh yeah, we really want this one right now because it's in season. I was like, it's season. Yeah. Isn't it aged? No. And he's like, well, yeah, but it's a rare process. But the flowers that the sheep feed on that give the cheese its flavor are in season right now.

So this is the time to be making this cheese. And I had never even thought of that before. That's right. That's exactly right. But the continuum is so real. Yeah. And we ignore it because we love shortcuts. Yeah.

That's really, at the end of the day, if you told me, lather this on your arm or give yourself, needle, I probably would never do. I'm too much, you know, I'm too squeamish. But rub this on or take this. Yeah. And you will get jacked twice as fast with Twitter.

I'm doing it without any more explanation because that's who we are. Yeah, yeah. And so if you tell me, eat this, and it's easy, and it's tasty, and it's cheap. Flavor in the food comes from the phytochemicals, which are the medicines. Real food. Real food, yeah. Not happy meat. No, and that's why most processed food is just full of salt and sugar and processed fats. So

it can be palatable. Otherwise it would be ineligible. What do you want to do with the capital? So you're going there 53 years, my lifetime since Nixon did this. Now there's another one. And what are you close to getting done? So I'm thrilled that we're having this conference because it's the first time we're going to actually bring these issues to the table around both the chronic disease and food problem and obviously food security and how this is affecting our country economically in every other way. So my hope is that from this conference, there'll be the beginning of a set of regulations and policies that will get implemented that will set the stage for really a new framework for how we think about our food system and food system transformation. It's really doable. Tim Ryan and Rosa Delorio commissioned the Government Accountability

Office, the GO, to do a report on chronic disease and our policies and nutrition. They did the report, took a couple of years, published in August last year. They did the report, took a couple of years, published in August last year. There were over 200 different policies, 21 agencies, most completely not coordinated and often working at cross-purposes. For example, the dietary guidelines from the USDA, the Agriculture Department, says cut down sugar, process food, don't eat all that, soda. 10% of the SNAP budget, which is the biggest food program of the ag department, is soda. 75% is processed food. So on one hand, we're telling them, don't eat it.

On the other hand, we're paying for it. Or we say, we should eat more fruits and vegetables. 50% of your plate should be fruits and vegetables. But 2% of crop subsidies are for specialty crops. Specialty crops are fruits and vegetables. We say the right things, but even when we do say the right things, we don't do the right thing. Yeah, I mean, 0.45% of subsidies are for fruits and vegetables, and 50% of our plate should be fruits and vegetables. How does that sync up? That's the same government

agency doing this. Because they're using corn for everything. Right. And that's why they put it in. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo. It's embarrassing.

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Temperature-regulating. Gets softer with every wash. I'm not kidding you, all right? Now, so if you go to CozyEarth.com and you enter the code, enter the code CHRIS, and you can get up to 35% off your first order. CozyEarth.com, and the code is Chris. Let me ask you a hot button. Ozempic, am I saying it right? Yeah. so ozempic is a diabetes drug yeah that has a peptide that has become all the rage for losing weight and i just it's one it was one of those like

tipping point you know from the gladwell book i see this about ozempic and I realize that I have been hearing about people taking this drug for months. What's the deal? Listen, everybody wants a shortcut and it can help. And for sure. Why does it help? Because it can inhibit appetite, helps with metabolism, helps process your blood sugar. So it's actually very helpful in dealing with the fundamental problem, which is insulin resistance that affects 90 plus percent of Americans, which is we're eating too much starch and sugar. And that can help. But it's not going to fix the problem if you don't fix the other things, right? So you can lose weight with chemotherapy too, but that doesn't make it good for you.

That's right. And so when I called to find out about it, I was like, hey, should I take this? And I was like, absolutely not. There's side effects out the yin yang. You're not diabetic. You're not pre-diabetic. When you take something like that, there has to be what they call, described to me as an externality, which I thought was an economic term. But the doctor said, no, it's going to do something to you that is not intended because you're not what it is intended to treat. Right. What does that mean? I mean, listen, like everything else, we call them side effects with drugs because we don't like them, but they're not side effects.

They're effects we don't like, right? And so it's easy to want to take a pill or an injection to solve a problem without addressing the real issue, which is our food system. So you're not prescribing those? No, I don't need to. I mean, I had a woman come into Cleveland Clinic and we, it's a long story, but we created a wellness program with Rick Warren. It was a faith-based wellness program where we got people to work together in groups and lost a quarter million pounds, 15,000 people

in a year. It was quite amazing. And I secularized that at Cleveland Clinic. We created this group model of care because people get better together. Getting healthy is a team sport. If your friends are all drinking green juices and doing yoga, you're going to be healthy. If they're all eating McDonald's and watching football all day and drinking beer, you're probably not going to be as healthy, right? So we got this group model. This woman came in on her way to a heart transplant and a kidney transplant. She was 66 years old. She had type 2 diabetes for 10 years on insulin, high blood pressure, had multiple stents, heart failure, kidneys failing Kidneys failing. Liver failing.

Three days she was off her insulin by changing her diet to food as medicine. Three months she was off all her medications. Her co-pay was $20,000 a year. She lost 116 pounds in a year and reversed every single one of her diseases. There is no drug that can do that. If there was, I'd prescribe it. I'm agnostic. I'm not against medication.

I prescribe them all the time. But it doesn't work compared to lifestyle and diet and food. And we know this, Doug Geisinger did an incredible trial. I mean, you think this would immediately change all of our reimbursement, our food policies, Medicare's, the single biggest line item in Medicare's budget is diabetes. But it's still preventative, what you're saying. No, this is not preventative. Help me understand the difference. Taking someone with type 2 diabetes and heart failure and kidney failure and reversing it is not preventive. That's treatment. Because they're already sick. But then the criticism becomes, well, if someone has cancer, you're not going to feed them out of cancer. Who knows? Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee here in New York has done tremendous research on ketogenic diets and cancer and shown in animal studies reversal of stage four pancreatic cancer, stage four melanoma,

and is doing these trials in humans now. So it remains to be seen, but diet plays a huge role in cancer. In fact, the thing that's causing a lot of cancers that we see is sugar and starch. It's insulin resistance that's driving the cancer. It's driving heart disease, dementia, diabetes, obviously heart disease. And in Geisinger, when they did this, they took food insecure diabetics. It was about 100 of them. They gave them free food for them and their families. Two meals a day, five days a week. So it was 175,000 meals.

It was 60 cents a meal. So not expensive. They were able to reduce hospitalizations and deaths and serious complications by 40%. They were able to lower their blood sugar, double what any of the best medication can do, and they reduced the overall cost per patient, Chris. Now, get this. From $240,000 to $48,000, $192,000 savings per patient per year. That's insane.

But that's a reason for certain, not to be cynical, but for certain actors within the dynamic to not like the fix. Absolutely. And you're not saying that you're anti-medicine. No, I use them all the time. People need prescriptions and they're great to use, but they should be used in the right context for the right person at the right time, not when something else is better that's going to work better. Detoxes. You are in the right context for the right person at the right time not when something else is better it's going to work better detoxes you are in the detox business you are in the supplement business but sometimes we say detox yeah and we think that that means something really extreme yeah where you're going to have me on the toilet for the next three days and somehow that's supposed to be good and you got all the gastroenterologists and stuff who say that's not good you shouldn't be flushing everything out like

that what's the reality of what you believe when i say detox what i mean is get rid of the crap you know i i wrote a book called the 10-day detox diet but i don't know 10 years plus ago and essentially is getting rid of sugar processed food eating real food it's not a deprivation not drinking something that you can only get from you and three gallons of it every day. No, no. It's just eat real food. Cut the crap out. That's detox.

See what happens. People in one week of doing this, in 10 days, they lose weight, obviously, but they have a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. We've done not randomized trials, but we've tracked these people and it's unbelievable to see what happens. People's migraines go away. Their digestion gets better, their sleep gets better, their mood gets

better, their puffiness and swelling goes away, their congestion gets better. Simply from, people don't understand the connection between food and what they eat and how they feel. It's even the smartest people don't have any idea that what they're eating is making them feel like shit. Well, they've also rarely been told the thing about it. Yeah. Culturally, you know, look, I'm Italian, right? I'm Italian-American. Food and eating a meal is everything to us. Of course.

I'm Jewish, the same thing. You know, rushing a meal, eating, you know, it's how you prepare it. Yeah. It's very, very important. Yeah. And I think part of the virtue of it is you take it seriously, you make sure it's made with care, you make sure it's very very important yeah and i think part of the virtue of it is you take it

seriously you make sure it's made with care you make sure it's good stuff yeah and then you enjoy it the right way that is not a big cultural symbol for us right we're all uber eats right you know getting something in a tin wolfing it down and moving on to the next thing that makes you uh super productive yeah no we've disintermediated people from their own kitchens i don't know if you know this story but in the late 50s, the food industry was very concerned that there was this woman named Betty who was a home ec teacher that was going around the country talking as part of the federal extension workers and teaching young mothers

how to cook and grow gardens and eat real food. Crocker? No, not Betty Crocker. Her name was Betty, actually. And that is actually how Betty Crocker came to be. The food industry says, we have to make convenience king. And they created the Betty Crocker cookbook, which my mother had. I don't know if you remember that.

Oh, I remember it well. And if you read the recipes, it's like, oh, add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, or take one row of Critt's crackers and sprinkle it on your casserole, or one thing of Belvita cheese. So it was insinuating all these processed foods into the American kitchen and making convenience king. And then, you know, you deserve a break today. The whole idea that it's a drudgery and a problem to be in the kitchen cooking.

Was there an innocence to some of this that early on, at least, people thought processed was progress? There was an amazing article in the New England Journal a number of years ago that, or maybe it was in JAMA actually, because I don't think it was, but there was an article published in the New England Journal in the late 60s by the top nutrition scientists at the time at Harvard, which basically said that it wasn't sugar, it was fat that was causing people to be sick from heart disease. And that was the beginning of the end of us. And that article, those people were paid the equivalent of $50,000 to write that article.

This was before peer review. And these were Harvard scientists, paid the equivalent of $50,000 to write this article saying it wasn't sugar, it was fat that was causing heart disease. Now, that whole thing has been turned upside down. We now understand that fat is not the enemy, that it's really the sugar and the starch that's driving so much of the chronic disease. Where are you on cholesterol? Because I'll reveal even more to you in a minute, but I want to test these propositions because that's the job and that's what helps you make better decisions. But I've been on this for a long time, eggs and cholesterol. And the starting point was eggs give you cholesterol, keep it really low.

Cholesterol is a problem. Then the research started to say that cholesterol and heart disease are correlated, but not necessarily connected. Well, there's dietary cholesterol and then there's your blood cholesterol, right? So there's cholesterol in eggs, which, I mean, you basically maybe get at the most a couple of hundred milligrams of cholesterol in eggs if you eat a bunch of eggs. You've got 20,000 milligrams of cholesterol in your blood. It's not going to make a meaningful difference. And the dietary guidelines from 2015 came out and said, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, meaning eat eggs. But what about this whole industry of giving you stuff to lower your cholesterol? Well, that's second, which is your blood cholesterol. Now, what causes abnormal

cholesterol that causes heart disease? There's a type of cholesterol, it's called atherogenic cholesterol or atherogenic dyslipidemia. And what is that? It's high triglycerides, it's low HDL, and it's very small, dense cholesterol LDL particles. What causes that? Sugar and starch, insulin resistance. And most doctors do not know how to diagnose this problem. We don't get taught about it in medical school. My daughter's in medical school. I asked her, what are you learning? She said, I'm learning about reproduction, metabolism. I'm like, oh, what are you learning? She said, oh yeah, we had a lecture on it. I'm like, this is the fundamental problem that's causing almost every disease that is

killing us in america today and that is the biggest driver of most doctors but they don't teach you guys about food no there's not a big nutrition aspect to most medical schools no so i talked to my doctor and again i have a great doctor and i say i don't get this but you know you want me to take this uh these statins for my cholesterol i'm not taking them because I don't buy the causation. And I don't buy the causation because when they did my calcium score, which is where they put in this dye and they measure your heart to see how much buildup there is, it was a zero. Zero, right.

And I was like, look, it can't be that this number is so high. But when you look for the proof of the number as its impact, it's zero. Well, 75% of people who go in the ER with a heart attack have normal cholesterol by current standards, normal. But they probably don't have a zero calcium score. No, they have normal total cholesterol and LDL, but they don't have normal triglycerides and HDL. Triglycerides and HDL or the good cholesterolcerides and HDL, or the good cholesterol, are screwed up by sugar and starch. We eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year in America. That's almost a pound a day per person. That is a pharmacologic dose we never consumed. We eat 22

teaspoons of sugar a day per adult in America, 34 per kid. We used to eat maybe 22 teaspoons a year as a hunter-gatherer if we got lucky and find a bunch of honey somewhere, some berries, whatever. Meat. You like it? Do I personally like meat or what do I think about it from a perspective of medicine and health? It turned in the last century, the 1900s, the number one group of centenarians in the world were the Plains, Lakota Indians, the Native Americans. They lived only pretty much on buffalo, on bison. So our bodies know how to deal with it. The processed factory farmed meat is bad for you. And there's been some interesting studies looking at the information in that food,

protein gram for protein gram versus, for example, wild meat or generally raised grass fed meat. And they're very different. For example, the feedlot meat will raise inflammation and cause all kinds of problems, whereas the other stuff won't. So you believe in the grass fed thing? Yeah. I think meat is not the problem. We shouldn't be over consuming it. We shouldn't be doing factory farming at all. That should be banned from the face of the planet. It's destructive for the animals, for us, and for climate and the environment. I mean, just on every level, it's a disaster. But scaling up regeneratively raised animals is the key to providing healthier meat, providing more nutrient-dense food, to actually helping restore soil, which we've degraded.

And one-third of the carbon today in the atmosphere comes from denuded soil, from soil erosion, from the loss of carbon in the soil. That's amazing, right? And we can put it back in through actually using regenerative practices. And in the IRA bill, one of the things our food campaign worked on was, our food fix campaign worked on was getting provisions in the new IRA bill for regenerative agriculture. And there was 20 billion set aside for that, which is amazing. So that's a huge step in the right direction where farmers can get trained to do this kind of farming, where they're not penalized for doing it, where they get supports for education to do it. Right now, farmers, even if they want to do the right thing, they can't.

If they want to plant cover crops, if they want to actually grow things that aren't from the crop subsidies, they get penalized and the banks won't give them loans. They can't get crop insurance. I mean, it's a whole kind of prison for them, but they're breaking out of it with some of the new policies. How easy is it for somebody to make the adjustments with their food that will show relatively quick gains? Quick. Like I said, the woman who came to see us at Cleveland Clinic, in three days, she was off insulin for her diabetes. In three months, her diabetes was gone. Like her A1C, if anybody's out there listening as a doctor, was 11, which is like your blood sugar is 300, 400. It's dangerous. That's an extraordinary result. And it went down to five and a half, which is normal. I had a patient do the 10-day detox.

She said, you shouldn't call it the 10-day detox. I have diabetes. It was a two-day detox. My blood sugar came to normal. So food has immediate effects. We think it's prevention. We think it takes a long time. We think the payoff is decades down the road. It's not. And most doctors don't understand this because they haven't prescribed food as medicine, right? They just don't know. If I give you a powerful cholesterol drug, I take your labs and I see the cholesterol going, okay, great. But if I say, oh, eat better and exercise more and the patient comes back and they don't have any real information about what to do or how to do it, they're not better. Well, they see food as relevant but immaterial to disease finding. Yeah, for sure. That medicine is what you do when you have a disease.

Well, it's understandable. Food is what you do when you have a disease. Well, it's understandable. Food is what you do to avoid getting a disease. Which is actually not true. And I've been practicing for the last 25 years using food as my primary drug. I'm probably the only doctor back then, at least when I started. You could not see me or get a consult unless you also a nutritionist. At Cleveland Clinic, when we set up our clinic, the same way. You could not get a doctor appointment unless you agreed also to see a nutritionist.

Because if food is medicine, how can I practice without nutrition, right? And it's obvious. We don't have reimbursement for nutrition in our healthcare services. We don't pay for food. We don't pay for nutrition education. We spend $17 billion for graduate medical education in this country from the government, from the federal dollars. We have no strings attached, and there's no provision for any kind of education about food or anything else. That all has to

change. That's what we're working on in Washington. We want to get food embedded into the healthcare system and reimbursement for medically tailored meals, reimbursement for nutrition education, for healthcare providers. We want to get a system that actually addresses this and deals with the root of it because we're just going down a terrible path. And I don't think that anybody's really talking about it in a coherent way. So people understand that if we just kind of took a serious look at most of our problems we're facing now, our incredible expenditures on health care, it's one out of almost five of our GDP dollars. Most of that is caused by chronic disease.

Most of that's preventable. Imagine if we had an extra $3 trillion a year in this country. We could have free education, free health care, all kinds of stuff, right? I'd like to think so. You never know what we would do with the money. What is your take on vaccines? I believe they're one of the greatest advances in medicine. I mean, vaccines have helped us.

No, I just read that you're an anti-vaxxer. Really? Yeah. Oh, well. You know, this is what happens though, Doc. When you start challenging norms, you are going to be a target, okay? Listen, listen, here's the deal. Nobody wants to have a conversation about science. And what's striking to me is that we can have debates about all kinds of things, but we can't have debates about the scientific data about vaccines. They're like any other medical intervention that has pros and cons. There are tremendous benefits to most vaccines, but there are also harms that can happen. It's not something that we have actually lack of information about. The government has identified

vaccine makers to incentivize them to produce vaccines, which is a good thing. And they have a vaccine court that's a federal court to review vaccine injury cases. They've paid out over $4 billion, might be $5 billion by now, in vaccine injury. So to say vaccines are safe, to say vaccines have no side effects, to say they're universally effective, it's just not true. I mean, even look at COVID. We over-promised and under-delivered. Why do we need a booster every three months or every six months? Because they're not like a polio vaccine or a smallpox vaccine. They're like a flu vaccine. It works.

It reduces your risk, but it's not as effective as just preventing it forever. And we saw this very early on. So I think vaccines are a huge advance in medicine. And I think they're often kind of, I mean, I remember going to this medical conference where I was recertifying for my board exams and there was a pediatrician talking about all the vaccine schedules.

He's like, look, I have to share this with you. But like, there used to be like eight vaccines. Now there's like 27 different vaccines that kids get. It's a lot, you know? So he wasn't saying not to do it, but it was, it's just, we don't have data. And when we talk about evidence-based medicine, you look at one vaccine at a time

and you look at its efficacy and its safety, great. But what happens when you put 20 vaccines on a little baby? Nobody studied that. Is that evidence-based? Not from my perspective. Right, right. Also, you know, sometimes there's a little bit of a catch-22 here. Functional medicine is what Doc calls, you know, putting food first, basically.

How do you get your body to function better? Critics will come after and say, well, there's not a lot of science behind it. Well, first of all, nobody studies it as a methodology for dealing with any kind of illness. You know, it's not even considered that. It's taken for granted. for dealing with any kind of illness. You know, it's not even considered that. It's taken for granted. And yet at the same time, everybody knows that the better the food is,

the better the result. Well, we do need more money pouring into it, for sure, for research. And at Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, who was a legendary CEO, invited me to start the Center for Functional Medicine there because he realized that this was the future. And we raised lots of money and we funded a number of studies and we've shown, I mean,

they're not large studies, but we started to show the evidence, right? So we compared ourselves to the top rheumatology department for autoimmune disease. We did better. We compared ourselves to the top clinics in Cleveland Clinic for family practice and we did better. We compared ourselves to ourselves with groups versus one-on-one visits. We found that group visits were three times as effective in fixing the patients compared to one-on-one visits for the same doctor for the same disease. All by adjusting food. And at lower costs by adjusting food, but also the social issue, right? We change in community.

We have a need to actually belong and we have supports. Why does AA work? Why is there Weight Watchers? Why do those things work? Because people do better together strength in numbers on vaccines i think you're making a very interesting point so i am obviously no scientist but i had a brilliant scientist say to me you know how you know when you're dealing with somebody who's not a great scientist i said no he said because they keep telling you that they know things. Yeah. He's like, science. It's the question. Yeah.

He said, science is the question. It's the quest for knowledge. Yeah. As a scientist, he says, I know certain things. I do not know everything. And I know what I don't know. And I'm trying to pursue it. That's science.

He said to me, here's your problem with vaccines. Because I was getting worried. First of all, I was worried because COVID knocked me on my ass. And I've never been sick like that in my life. And I was like, why is this happening to me? And why do I still have long COVID stuff? Which I've learned as we've learned about the virus. But then the vaccine came out and he said, this isn't about science. He's like, this is all politics. He's like, this technology that brought the vaccine is good. It's going to be a shortcut to getting this vaccine. They will not know how it works on people for a while.

They will be, he told me this over almost two years ago, like when it was first, he said, they will be chasing this virus the same way we do with influenza because that's what it is. It's a virus. And I said, but what about like smallpox and things? He goes, different kind of virus. He's like, it's different. He said said but what about like smallpox and things different kind of virus he's like it's different he said now here's their problem i'm fine with everything i just said

as a function of science yeah and i'm saying you should take the vaccine based on your own physical characteristics that you have to check with your doctor make sure there's no vulnerabilities but in politics you guys are arguing on the basis of certitude. Yeah. And your ability to say, there's stuff that we don't know. We don't have all the data yet. No. That has been made equivalent to don't take the vaccine.

It's heresy. Like it's heresy. And that's, but that's, you're not saying don't take the vaccine. You're saying, don't tell me the vaccine is perfect. And then politically people are saying,

well, then I'm not taking it. And what the scientist are saying, well, then I'm not taking it. And what the scientists said was, well, then you're not going to take anything. Because we can't give you with 100 degrees certainty pretty much anything that you're given by doctors through a needle. So that's not the standard that we know 100%. You take the flu vaccine. You know, you get your kids inoculated. If we do the polio vaccine, that only has has 80 efficacy yeah and we don't know these things but we

weaponize these there's some vaccines that are basically going to prevent you from ever getting infection and some that will help reduce the degree of infection so that's what this one is yeah so smallpox polio measles you get the shot you're done you're never gonna get it but the way we weaponized it was i got the vaccine i still got sick this is bullshit that's politics because they weren't they weren't able to create a conversation that included the american people in the nuances of what it was well nuances weakness nuances weakness really it's called science not not in politics nuances weakness it was? It's called science. Not in politics. Nuance is weakness. There's a great article in the New England Journal once that said,

be sure to use new medications as soon as they come out before the side effects develop. I remember when we were dealing with antidepressants on the first wave when they wanted to give them to kids, but they weren't really testing them on kids where they couldn't admit that they were. And they said, well, please don't say side effect. It's unintended consequences. And I was like, what a bullshit marketing ploy this is. And they don't even work that well. I mean, the antidepressant is going to help severe depressed people. And there are a lot of cases where they can be very effective, but the data is really clear. They're really not that effective. And actually diet works extremely well for mental health issues.

Also, look, one of the reasons I was excited to have you on the show is, there's definitely, and you can go on and look, there are definitely different points of controversy about this stuff. And a lot of it is unimpressive to me. But I like that, how can this go wrong? You're not telling anybody, don't get chemo, don't take diabetes medicine, don't do anything. How can it go wrong if you eat a better diet? Like, what is the downside to eating better foods and seeing better results? The downside, there's no more horse and buggy makers.

There's no more eight track tapes. There's going to be a lot of losers in the game, right? If everybody in America stopped drinking soda tomorrow, which they've decreased it, thank God, but it's increasing in the rest of the world. If everybody stopped eating processed food, there'd be a lot of losers. And they're fighting hard against any change. One of the biggest challenges around this White House conference is because it's also focused on hunger and food security, which is really important and affects so many families. And yet nobody wants to restrict or reduce soda in food stamps because it's seen as punitive or against the poor or discriminatory.

Instead of actually helping people understand that this is killing them, right? Yeah, it's poison. And that this is actually not controversial scientifically. And yet, and I understand that there's nuances in the conversation. and yet, and I understand there's nuances in the conversation, but the main driver of the agenda of many of the hunger groups working on this White House conference

is to prevent any restriction on SNAP for soda or processed food. That's about somebody's pocket. Yeah. That's about somebody's pocket because it doesn't make any sense on any other level, but that's usually the only level. It's a sole criterion, you know,

is this person putting money in your pocket that helps you stay in power. What'd you eat today? Gosh, what did I eat today? Well, I worked out this morning and I went to. What kind of workout? I did a Tom Brady's band workout. TB12. Great. TB12 is just awesome. It's made me so ripped and I'm 63 in a month and I'm like a better body than I had when I was 40. I'll show you the before and after picture. So you're doing the band stuff. I love that. I do that. And then I had a juice press was down the street. I'm in New York, standard friends place. So I basically had a

protein smoothie, plant-based protein and some fruit. I think they put some berries in there, nut butters, and I had a cheese seed pudding and that was my breakfast. And what about lunch? Well, I was running around, so I had another protein shake because I was just running around. It's like a quick thing that I'm not going to eat. But that's good food, right? Yeah, I mean, it's not what I normally would eat, because I'm just running around the city.

Why? Because you want more fiber? No, no, because I would rather eat a meal, but I think in a pinch. But that's important. Why would you rather eat a meal? Well, I like a more, you know, diverse set of ingredients from plants that are actually rich in phytochemicals that are, I like to eat my medicine. Because people think you should just eat that all day.

Have four or five of those shakes. No, no, no. I like to eat my medicine and I like to have it taste good. And, you know, I think like you were talking about in the cheese, I remember being in Sardinia as well. And they had all these sheep and goat herders. And they were like, they knew at this time of year to take them to eat this kind of wild plant and this herb and this thing. And I'm like, that's amazing. And actually what scientists have now found, Chris, is this blow my mind, which is that in animals that eat wild plants or have a diverse variety of grasses that they can eat

on a regenerative farm, that they have high levels of these plant-based medicines called phytochemicals in their meat and milk and cheese, which is amazing. We know green tea is super healthy, but the same compounds that protect you from green tea are also found in goat milk or cheese when the goats eat certain shrubs or plants. So it's quite an amazing thing we start to dig into us and now the rockefeller foundation has uh it's been a hundred couple hundred million dollars to create the periodic table of phytochemicals in food right which you know then these things work on our ancient biological systems and all the side effects

are good ones uh that you can google i am going to put all the information about what you've done but if people can read one thing that you've put out what do you want them to I am going to put all of the information about what you've done. But if people can read one thing that you've put out, what do you want them to read? Do you want to wait for the next book? Well, if they're interested in this food issue and food policy, I've written Food Fixed. It really is more of an understanding of the problems that our food system creates. Food, What the Heck Should I Eat is a good book to just understand what to eat, what we know, what we don't know. It's sort of an honest conversation to help you choose what to eat. And my new book, Young Forever, is coming out on longevity in February 2023. So that is my favorite book so far that I've written because I'm more and more interested as I get older. You should be. So I chase you about some of the controversies and

to kind of make the point about why these things work. Personally, I have been a devotee of this for many years now. I personally research all of these things. And over time, I've taken less and less things, not more and more things. I believe. I believe in what you're saying. I do not believe that there's anything to the criticisms, except if you want to get into

a matter of degree. And even that I don't know is, uh, is really that fair people coming after you, but that's what success breeds. So yes, I'm questioning it. Yes. I'm chasing Hyman about some of the controversies and to explain the theories that's for you. Yeah. I've done the homework already. I'm a believer. And I have made this a big part of my personal life. Your decisions are your own. But this was a good decision. Doctor, thank you so much for being with me. Great to be with you. I wish you good luck.

Thank you. I hope to follow up with you after you go to our leaders. Doctors, stay well. All right. Doctors, stay well. All right. I told you, this stuff is too obvious to not be true and not be real and not be something we should take more seriously. And what kills me is that I still don't.

And I actually know the guy. And, right, I'm like, I have the information. Information is not enough. We have to have information. We have to not enough. We have to have information. We have to have repetition. We have to have collective will. We have to have collective conscience. We need to have willpower.

We need to have drive. So at least Hyman will help us with the informational part, okay? And look, if you don't like it, you don't have to like it, but that doesn't mean it's not true, okay? And we need to draw that distinction. And I believe Dr. Hyman is a good step in that direction. So thank you for watching. Please subscribe. Please follow. Let's keep the momentum going. Don't forget the free agent merch.

Great for the holidays. I'll see you next time. you