The Dr. Hyman Show - 14 "Foods" To Avoid For Better Health

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and AG1. Food is literally the most powerful medicine we have available to control our health. When we choose to eat quality foods, we gain a whole host of benefits. Our body gets the nutrients it actually needs to function well. We get more energy, our mood improves, we avoid a long list of adverse health effects, and we will overall just feel better. Yet, it can be surprisingly hard to know what to eat and what to avoid, especially with all of the overly processed, chemical-laden “food” in stores and restaurants. In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I walk you through what foods and food ingredients are most damaging to your health. This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox and AG1. For new members of ButcherBox, you can receive New York Strip steaks for a year PLUS $20 off your first order. Go to Butcherbox.com/farmacy and use code FARMACY. Head to drinkAG1.com/HYMAN to receive 10 FREE travel packs of AG1 with your first purchase. Here are more details from the episode (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What is ultra-processed food? (5:26 / 3:08) “Good” vs. “bad” processed foods (6:48 / 4:30) 14 “foods” to avoid for better health  (11:24 / 9:06)

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When you're eating a lot of fructose, it takes a lot of energy in the gut, and that actually causes the gut to weaken and become leaky, and then you get these holes in your intestine, and that causes food and bacteria to leak in, causing inflammation throughout the body, which leads to heart disease, diabetes, obesity,

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with your first purchase. Go to drinkag1.com forward slash Hyman. That's drinkag1.com forward slash Hyman. Check it out. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're wondering what kind of junk food you shouldn't eat, you're going to like this podcast because we're presenting a list of 14 different things that you should pay attention to when you're deciding what to eat that will keep you out of trouble. And it's presented today as one of our health bites, little nuggets of health information that are going to keep you healthy by making small steps every day to change your life. And I hope it works for you. So listen, we know food is medicine.

Food is information. Food is instructions. It's code. It regulates every single aspect of your biology. It's what you're made of. It regulates your hormones, your immune system, your brain chemistry, your gene expression, your microbiome. I mean, literally everything that is going on inside of you is regulated by food. So if you're putting the wrong information in, you're going to get corrupted biological software. And we don't want that because that drives disease. It drives not just disease, but it drives you feeling like crap. It drives you to actually have all sorts of weird symptoms that we don't need to have, whether it's just sluggishness, brain fog, digestive issues, pimples, whatever it is.

You don't need it because it's often connected to food. And the quality of the food you eat matters more than anything else. And yes, we need protein. We need fats. We need carbs. We need vitamins, minerals, fiber, et cetera, phytochemicals. But how we eat them matters. How they're constructed, which food shouldn't be constructed, it should just be food, right?

It matters. And we're going to talk about what I mean by that in a minute. But if you don't actually have the right food, you're not going to actually create the right biological instructions that tell your body what to do every minute, minute to minute. So what do we need to know to stay out of trouble? What foods do we need to eat and to avoid without getting all the bad stuff in? How do we avoid the danger zones in the grocery store, in our kitchen, in restaurants. And so for this sweet's help, I'm going to walk you through what foods and ingredients are the most damaging to

your health. And if you just avoid these things, it's going to help you a lot. And now some of the, some of you may know this, some might be obvious, but it's worth a refresher and it's good to sort of circle back. And I'm amazed that sometimes I even get into trouble because I think something's healthy. I pick it up off the shelf. It's a convenience food. It's not always bad to have convenience foods. And I'm kind of thinking, this sounds great on the front of the package. And then I kind of go with the ingredient list and I'm like, uh-oh.

And I put it back on the shelf. So it's really, really important to think about what you're eating. There's a big conversation now around ultra-processed food. And there's a lot of data coming out around this concept of ultra-processed food. And what does that exactly mean? It means food that's deconstructed from its original form, basically pulverized, the molecular shape structure of the molecules are changed, and it's reassembled into things that look like food but aren't actually food, and that actually make you sick and die faster. And I'm not just saying this. The data is really clear. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. In one study that Kevin Hall did at the NIH, if you

eat ultra-processed food and you can have as much as you want versus healthy whole foods and you can eat as much as you want, the people who are offered the ultra-processed food, and this was the same group, just a crossover trial, actually ate 500 calories more a day when they were allowed to eat ultra-processed food because it dysregulates your biology in such a way that it turns off the satiety singles. It makes you feel like you need more. I always say people who are deficient in nutrients want to eat more because they're looking for the nutrients. Your body is intelligent like that. Kids who are iron deficient will eat dirt to get iron. We eat more and more food to try to get the nutrients. Your body is intelligent like that. Kids who are iron deficient will eat dirt to get iron. We eat more and more food to try to get the nutrients that are not in our food. So processing itself is not bad. We as human beings have been processing food forever. Cooking

is a form of processing, right? Fermenting is a form of processing. Drying foods like dried strawberries or beef jerky is a processed food. Fermenting foods, yogurt or sauerkraut is a processed food. That doesn't mean it's bad, right? But this stuff has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. We've processed olives to make olive oil. That's okay. But it's really about these frankenfoods that are not really food, that are deconstructed from wheat, corn, and soy into ingredients and things that you don't even know where they're coming from.

If you say maltodextrin on the label, well, who's got maltodextrin in their cabinet and eats that with their salad, right? Nobody knows what that is. That comes from corn. It comes from, well, basically GMO corn. And it's very full of chemicals and pesticides, and it's highly glycemic. And you get all these weird things like mono and diglycerides. And like, what is that stuff? Well, it's a kind of fat, but it's extracted from soy, and it's processed in ways to create a mouthfeel that makes you want to eat more. And basically, actually, there was an

article that came out, I think it was in Forbes a few days ago, that talked about how the tobacco companies were actually food companies for a while. Like it was RJR Nabisco, right? Philip Morris Craft. So they kind of merged. And then when they owned those companies, when the tobacco companies owned the food companies, they actually re-engineered foods to make them more addictive just as they re-engineered cigarettes. And it was very nefarious. It's not like just a bunch of, you know, kind of conspiracy theory stuff. It's actually very well documented. And this was well documented actually by Michael Moss in his book, Salt, Sugar, and Fact, who was actually the first guest on the Dr. Sarmacy podcast.

You can go way back to episode one and listen to that if you want. So we need to make sure we're eating foods that are processed in ways we want to eat processed foods. They're good. So for example, yesterday I had a can of mussels for lunch and it was basically water and mussels. And I opened a can and it was a BPA-free can because I made sure it was BPA-free, which is a toxin that's used to line cans. So it's not terrible. Or I had, you know, I made a tomato sauce the other night and I had a can of tomatoes. It was tomatoes, water, and salt. That's okay.

But it's really important to understand that, you know, having whole foods that are processed in ways that preserve them and maintain their nutritional value is okay. Like frozen foods are actually okay because they're processed, but they're frozen, but they're actually very nutrient dense. If you take berries, they're actually much better if you get frozen berries than if you go to the store and buy them because they're picked ripe and flash frozen. So they actually have much more nutritional value on some foods. So you want to get rid of all the food-like substances, all the industrial food. Michael Pollan said, don't eat food that was made in a plant. Eat food that was grown in a plant.

So get rid of the food-like substances, the frankenfoods, the chemicals added, preservatives, food dyes, artificial sweeteners. There's no reason we should be consuming these things. And we can argue, is artificial sweetener bad? Is it good? Does it cause cancer? Does it screw up your microbiome? Does it cause diabetes, weight gain? And there's scientists on both sides who will argue to the end of time about whether it's good for you or bad for you. But basically, in my view, is eat real food. We know that's what we evolved with. We know that works and everything else, you know, we may or may not find out it's harmful, but increasingly we find out things are harmful after the fact, you know, Crisco was invented in 1911. It wasn't until like 2005 that the, or was it 2015? No, I think it was 2005. I can't remember. I'm old now so i forget things i got old timers disease and basically uh it was a long time ago that that they invented it but it was almost a century

before they actually uh said it's going to kill you if you eat it but by the way it's still in food believe it or not because uh because of the way the food industry and the fda are tied in together there's all these loopholes allowed them to still have it in the food. It's sort of ruled as generally recognized as safe, which is called GRAS, G-R-A-S. It was GRAS, and a lot of things got grandfathered in. But they say it's a non-GRAS food, not generally recognized as safe. So it doesn't mean it's banned exactly. So it's kind of a little weird thing.

Anyway, let's talk about the 14 foods to avoid for better health. And there could be 14, 15, 100. But we're going to just kind of play with this a little bit today. First of all, if you read something on a label and you don't know what it is and you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. I mean, if it's got, you know, butylated hydroxy toluene, boy, do you have that in your pantry? Is that something you sprinkle on your salad or on your sweet potato at night? Probably not, right? Butylated hydroxy toluene, otherwise known as BHT, is a known carcinogen that's banned in most countries, except the United States. Nope, still in the food. So don't eat stuff like that.

It's not a chemistry project. It's food. If it says sterol lactate, what's that? Is that something you have in your salt shaker to put on your, you know, tomatoes when you're having a salad? No. So basically, if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. Second thing is, what did people eat historically? And that's probably a good bet from a traditional point of view about what you can eat.

If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, probably not a good eat. Or probably these days, it might be your great or great-great-grandmother, right? So do they know what Lunchables were or Go-Gurt or Pop-Tarts or Mountain Dew was? Probably not, right? So I think it's a really simple thing to think about. Like, what did they eat? People say, oh, organic this and grass-fed that. I have news for you folks.

Everything. I mean, I'm old, right? So my grandparents were born in like 1898, 1900, 1903, right? Everything they ate was organic. Everything they ate was grass-fed. There wasn't anything else. That's all they had. There were no pesticides, herbicides, chemicals,

fertilizers. All that stuff came after World War II, a little bit after World War I. So basically, those things were not even around. So eat real food, eat whole food, eat unadulterated food. And it's good we're kind of moving back towards that. Next, refined oils. These are, you know, controversial and there are many scientists who believe that these are healthful, that they lower the risk of heart disease. And I think, you know, we have to be very careful because the science is really mucky around nutrition. A lot of it's population studies, a lot of it is, you know, trial, clinical trials, but how they were designed, what foods were, what was included, what was not included, really makes a difference. So, you know, there was a big study that was actually, wouldn't be ethical today, where they took 9,000 people who were

committed to mental institutions and they split them into groups and half got butter and half got corn oil, which is an omega-6 oil. They followed them for years and they found that the, and this is actually an interesting story, they found that people had the corn oil even though their LDL was lowered and their cholesterol was better than the people who had the butter and the saturated fat,

had a high risk of heart attack and death. They did not publish a study because it contradicted their diet fat hypothesis. Ansel Keys, I've written about this in Eat Fat, Get Thin. They contradicted their diet fat hypothesis. Ancel Keys, I've written about this in Eat Fat, Get Thin. They contradicted this hypothesis and they basically didn't publish it. And there was an NIH scientist who knew about this study because it was quite a big study. And it was like, why was this published? He went and found the son of the original researcher. And he said, hey, do you know if there's any data from this or where all the data is?

And he said, well, gosh, I don't know. My dad died recently. And I think it might be in the basement. So he drove 100 miles to go to his dad's old house. And he went in the basement. And he found these old records and data. And he handed it over to this guy. And he published it a few years ago.

So I think we have to sort of try to figure out what makes sense. Now, some of the oils like soybean oil is 10% of our calories. It's industrial soy, it's GMO soy, it's sprayed with glyphosate. You can argue that GMO is good or bad or whatever, that the actual plant that's produced by GMO is good or bad, but there's no argument that glyphosate is bad. There's just none. It's not good for the soil. It's not good for your microbiome. It may cause cancer. And we're eating it in large quantities. It's in most people's urine. I tested mine. I thought I eat healthy, but I travel a lot, so I can't always control what I'm eating. And basically, I was in the 50th percentile for glyphosate, which is pretty freaky. I don't like that.

And I'm trying to, you know, improve that. But it's still, you know, this is Roundup or, you know, what we call, you know, Roundup ready soybeans made by Monsanto. The people who brought you dioxin, Agent Orange and DDT, great company. Now, most people don't even know that they're eating it, right? It's not like, oh, I'm taking soybean oil and, you know, But yeah, you can put it on your salad or you can cook with it. But most people are getting it in processed foods. It's the main oil. It's industrial soil oil that's used in processed foods. So you really want to stay away from that. It's in fast food, grains,

desserts, packaged snacks, muffins, potato chips. It's actually in conventionally raised meat. It's probably what they're using when they cook in restaurants, cafeterias, potato chips. You know, it's actually in conventionally raised meat. It's probably what they're using when they cook in restaurants, cafeterias, diners. And so just stay away from that. Stay away from any of these refined oils. I always say better safe than sorry. There's a lot of great fats out there. Olive oil, avocado oil, you know, nuts and seeds, oils.

Those are fine. You know, canola oil and soybean oil have a mixture of omega-6 and omega-3, which may offset some of the effects on the heart that the corn oil had, which was just omega-6, but I would definitely avoid all the omega-6 oils. And you can eat them, right? You can eat them from the raw food. They're fine to have, you need them, but not the massive quantities we're having. I think it's like 10% of our calories. That is a thousandfold increase in soybean oil intake in the last 100 years. Okay, hydrogenated now most soybean oil in foods is hydrogenated they've sort of changed it because of this grass ruling but basically hydrogenated uh fats means they've

chemically altered the fat it's a plant oil that that is liquid at room temperature and they've injected it with hydrogen uh to bind to the fats uh because and it's kind of a chemical thing saturated just means saturated with hydrogen atoms right unsaturated means no not as many uh or polyunsaturated right which may be a lot unsaturated or monounsaturated right that's what it means and so means. And so they basically inject these hydrogen atoms into the plant oil to make it solid at room temperature and have properties like butter, right? That's what shortening is, but they call it shortening because it shortens your life, basically. So you want to stay away from that. There's no doubt. There's no controversy there's no nutrition scientist no professional association no government uh that says that this is something we should be consuming anymore like it's just it's

just a hard no so i would say if there's one hard and fast rule make sure nothing you're eating has hydrogenated fats in it and you have to read the ingredient list. You can't just look at the front of the package. The next hard rule, I would say, and I heard this from Andy Wild, you know, he was one of my mentors, really amazing guy who sort of led the integrative medicine movement. And I heard him, I think on Larry King or something about diet and nutrition. It's really simple. Just don't eat anything with high fructose corn syrup or hydrogenated fats. And that'll cure like 90% of your dietary problems. And I think he's right. I mean, if you look at, you know, high fructose corn syrup, again, it's one of those things, well, is it bad? How bad is it?

Does it really cause a problem? It's, you know, basically, you know, just sugar and how is it different? And, you know, we can talk about that in a minute. But basically, if it's in a food, it means it's a highly processed industrial food product. It's not whole food. So just that alone just should make you put it back in yourself. Now, the high fructose corn syrup is basically, again, deconstructed food. They take the corn and they kind of process it with alkali. It actually has some mercury in it some of the ways they process it causes have mercury and there was a actually a study on this which was quite

interesting they it was from colleagues of mine who who called up you know the the archer daniels midland who makes high fructose corn syrup and they said hey can we have a that is you want to study and they're like oh no you can't it's proprietary they called up as a change in the story that hey we're starting a new beverage company we want to use their product can we try some and they sent them a barrel of it and then immediately they tested it and they found it actually had fairly significant levels of mercury but that's not the real issue the issue is it's basically deconstructed so in normal sugar glucose and fructose are bound together in high fr fructose corn syrup, they're not. They're free, and it's free fructose. Now, it can be anywhere from 55% to 75% fructose.

Now, fructose doesn't raise your insulin levels or your blood sugar levels, but it does go into your body in a way that actually causes insulin resistance, causes inflammation, elevates uric acid, which is something that's an important blood test to check. And as I mentioned before on the podcast, I'm a co-founder of Function Health and functionhealth.com. And it's one of the tests we do as part of the Function Health panel to look at uric acid because it's so important as an indicator of your overall diet quality and the level of this problem that can interfere with your metabolism and in many ways be very harmful.

And my friend David Perlmutter wrote a book called Drop Acid, and it doesn't mean LSD, it means drop your uric acid. So that's a deep dive. And there's a scientist named Richard Johnson, he's actually giving grand rounds at Cleveland Clinic soon, who's been a pioneer in this research. But it's really not great for us. So the other thing is that it's energy using. So in order to absorb fructose, unlike glucose, it requires a lot more energy. And so when you're eating a lot of fructose, it takes a lot of energy in the gut and that actually causes the gut to weaken and become leaky. And then you get these holes in your intestine and that causes food and bacteria to

leak in, causing inflammation throughout the body, which leads to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, Alzheimer's, you name it. It's really bad. So you don't want to do that. Next is if you see it advertised on TV, probably bad for you, right? When did you see an ad for almonds or broccoli on television? Probably never, right? But the data is really interesting on marketing. The worst foods for you have the most dollars spent on marketing and particularly television advertising. So basically, don't eat anything that would advertise on TV. Also, you know, if it has a health claim on the label, it's bad for you likely, right? I saw a bag of potato chips recently and it said gluten-free. Well, does that mean it's healthy? No. It's like, I saw, I saw what I saw, a brownie at some

concert I went to and I was like, no dairy, no gluten, no blah, blah, blah, whatever it was. And then I'm looking at the thing, it's like so much sugar. And I'm like, this is not a health food, right? So basically, if it has a health claim on the label, don't eat it. If it says, you know, lowers your cholesterol or high fiber or low fat or, you know, no added sugar or whatever the freaking thing is, I guarantee you it's just covering up something that's really bad for you. Also, you know, just no brainer. Don't go to fast food restaurants. Like, just don't. Like, you know, I think a chicken nugget has like, I don't know, 27 or 37 ingredients and one of which is chicken, just don't eat that food.

It's made in ways that are really bad. In fact, a burger at McDonald's is actually, I think, only 50% beef. And then the rest of it's all this weird filler and stuff that we shouldn't be eating. Another thing you should pay attention to, which is used a lot, and there's many names for this, so you have to be really diligent. And I'd encourage you to Google MSG and all the names for MSG or monosodium glutamate. Now, this is an excitotoxin. This is something that glutamate is an important neurotransmitter that regulates something called NMDA receptors in the brain. And if you over-stim simulate these, it actually can lead to all kinds of brain issues and cognitive dysfunction. And, you know, many people get the Chinese restaurant headache, you know, because they get too much MSG in their food.

It can be called hydrolyzed vegetable protein, which might sound good or vegetable protein or natural flavorings even sounds great, right? It can be spices. So, you know, you don't want to do that. Now, why, you know, I mean, you could say, oh, Dr. Hyman, you're being extreme. What's a little this or that or whatever. It's not going to hurt you. But, you know, how do they actually induce obesity in lab rats when they want to study obesity. It's very fascinating. They give them MSG because it makes them hungry and gain weight. Also, the most obese population in the world, and I learned this from a nutritionist who went and studied their diet and lived with them in Samoa. And she found that they, for breakfast, had ramen noodles, I think, with sugar on top and then MSG on top of that. So they put MSG on the ramen noodles as a way of flavoring them,

but it really led to them being the most obese population in the world. They had like 90% diabetes rates. Also, if you're looking at aerosol cans, there are certain spray cans that are okay, but aerosol is just bad for the environment. It's bad for the ozone layer and I wouldn't eat it. Also, you have to be careful when you're eating cheese. First of all, dairy is a problem in itself for many reasons. We have hybridized cows. Essentially, we breed them to, you know, create certain properties, but it's led to high levels of something called A1 casein in most modern dairy, which is inflammatory. But, you know, they're often, you know, fed all kinds of weird things and their milk while they're pregnant. There are lots of hormones. The modern dairy is really bad. But as I say, like goat cheese or sheep cheese or A2 cows or

heirloom cows can't be okay for people who tolerate dairy and many people don't. But there are many cheese-like products out there like Velveeta cheese, maybe you remember that, or Kraft Singles. You know why they call it Kraft Singles? Because they can't call it cheese. Why? Because it's not more than 51% cheese and the government says you can't call it cheese if it's not got 51% cheese. So if it has 51 or 2%, it could be a cheese-like product, but it's not cheese. So stay away from all that weird stuff. Also artificial sweeteners. I'm going to take this one on and we can talk a lot about this, but, you know, there are population studies that indicate that, you know, it increases obesity, diabetes, but those can be confounded because people who drink diet drinks may be already overweight or prone to it and trying to lose weight.

So there's that. It does affect your microbiome. There's no doubt about that from the research that can create inflammation and we call metabolic endotoxemia, and that's work out of Israel. And there's many other studies on the microbiome. I mean, know when these first came out someone gave me a chocolate bar i said there's no sugar in this chocolate bar and i was at work i was like i'm gonna eat this chocolate bar it's like really yummy and i was hungry and i think i ate the whole thing and uh and it was a disaster you know uh my friend dave asprey calls it disaster pants it was kind of like that so

it has a huge effect on your microbiome. It causes fermentation, bloating, distention. And I would really encourage you all just to stay away from the sugar alcohols for that reason. The other things like, you know, saccharin or sucralose or aspartame, you know, they're usually in processed foods. They're usually in poor quality foods. They're usually in foods with very little nutrients. You know, there can be in some things that are okay, but I think you better stay away from them. I think stevia may be all right. Monk fruit may be all right. We're still

trying to figure that out, but I would really stay away from all the other artificial sweeteners. Also, anything that's like funky additives, preservatives, dyes, you know, we eat about two pounds of these every year. I mean, this is crazy. I mean, pounds of this stuff. So you know it's a little bit, but actually when you add up all the processed food people eat, which is 60% of our diet, it's literally pounds of this stuff every year. So you want to not eat that stuff.

And in many countries, by the way, the things that we allow here are banned. We get stuff in this country that is kind of based on this kind of idea that you're innocent until proven guilty, which is actually okay for law and for people, but not for food. You should have to prove safety before you actually introduce it in the food supply. So a lot of things got grandfathered in, whether it's BHT or BPA or certain dyes and chemicals. We know that these are problematic and I encourage you not to eat them. And also just try to eat food with not too many ingredients, right? If they're all ingredients you recognize,

like, you know, on a tomato, like tomato water, basil, oregano, salt, fine. But that's a good rule. Although some things with more than five ingredients are okay. Like I have recipes with obviously more than five ingredients. So, but it's just like, if it's a processed food, just be very diligent, learn how to read the labels.

The nutrition facts is super confusing, but just turn the thing over and read the actual ingredients. And, oh, this is an interesting thing I should just mention. I wrote about it in Food Fix. In most countries, you know, they put the percent of the thing on the food ingredient label. So if it says like sugar, it'll say 32%, right? In America, you know, what they said is you have to put the ingredients in the order of the amount, right? Which, okay, that's fine. But what food companies do then is they'll, instead of like saying sugar is the number one ingredient, they'll put in five different kinds of sugar. They'll put in brown

sugar, brown rice sugar, white sugar, you know, corn syrup, this, that, and then they, and it adds up being like the most sugar is the predominant ingredient. But, but since it's broken down to these five different types of sugar, it actually doesn't look like that. So be really smart about it and, and just, you know, stay away from all that crap. So I know it seems like a lot, but it's really simple. Just don't eat processed, ultra-processed food. Don't eat high fructose corn syrup. Don't have hydrogen fats. Don't eat things you can't pronounce or ingredients you don't recognize. And don't eat things your great-grandmother probably wouldn't eat, and you'll be fine. So I've written a lot about this. You can check out my book, The Pegan Diet, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?

My PBS show, Eat Your Medicine. It's great. It helps you walk through this. Walk you through how to do a kitchen makeover, teach you what to avoid, and what in each category of food, what to eat. So in dairy or meat or whatever, I put in like, okay, like this could be okay,

but this definitely don't eat this, right? So it's very, very, I think, helpful and practical and hope you enjoyed this. So that's it for today's Health Byte. Be sure to share this podcast with your friends and family. Leave a comment. How have you noticed your health improve as you've avoided these processed foods?

What other kind of tips and good hacks have you come up with to stay safe in the grocery store, the restaurant, the kitchen? And we'd love to hear from you. We'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy.

I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do, introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff

from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you

my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search Thank you.