The Dr. Hyman Show - 3 Things Causing Inflammation In Your Body & How To Prevent It

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   If you have a chronic illness, you’ve got inflammation. Inflammation is often hidden or silent, something that we can’t see or feel, but manifests itself as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression, and more. Typically, inflammation has been raging inside for a while before you even notice there’s anything wrong. The three biggest drivers of inflammation are all lifestyle factors—gut health, diet, and chronic stress. In this episode of my new Masterclass series, I am interviewed by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, about inflammation, what’s causing it, and how to reduce it. We discuss the critical component of gut health and how 60-70% of our immune system is in our gut, as well as tests to identify inflammation in the body, foods to avoid, and the importance of restful sleep.   Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30+ million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account here.    Right now, Athletic Greens is offering my listeners 10 free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman to take advantage of this great offer.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What is inflammation? (4:40 / 1:10)  Three biggest drivers of inflammation (6:00 / 2:46) Detecting inflammation in patients (25:02 / 21:31) Conventional medicine approach to treating inflammation (28:16 / 24:50) Foods that are inflammatory (30:43 / 27:11)  Sleep apnea’s association with inflammation (34:55 / 31:21)  My personal experience with gut dysfunction and its connection to inflammation (44:25 / 41:02) Testing for inflammation (50:30 / 46:59)  Supplements to reduce inflammation (53:50 / 50:28)  Your questions on addressing grains, hormones, genetics, and more (59:25 / 55:50) 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you have high cholesterol and no inflammation, there are very little risk for heart disease. But if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation, those are the people who are at risk for heart disease. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine

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to get worse and worse and receive a diagnosis of disease before taking any kind of action. This is not the path to health. We can live longer, healthier, happier lives if we just prevent imbalances in our bodies in the first place. And nutrition is a key part of this. Many of us don't get the optimal amounts of key nutrients through diet alone, even with a whole foods diet. And then when you add in all the stressors we're up against, like work demands, toxins, lack of sleep, we're even more

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gives me a nice energy boost without feeling overstimulated. I like to think of it as a huge leafy green salad shrunk down into a simple glass of water I could take anywhere. Right now, you can get 10 free travel packs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman. That's A-T-H-L-E-T-I-C-G-R-E-E-N-S.com slash hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to a new series on The Doctor's Pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive deep into popular health topics, including inflammation, autoimmune disease, brain health, sleep, aging,

and lots more. And today I'm joined by my guest host, my good friend, business partner, and host of the Drew Pruitt Podcast, Drew Pruitt. And we're going to be talking about what chronic inflammation does to your body, what causes it, and how to prevent it. And why are we doing that? Because inflammation is the biggest driver of all the diseases we see in modern society. So welcome, Drew. Mark, so excited to be here. I don't know if you know, but on YouTube and Google, one of the highly searched terms, one of the top terms in health is what is inflammation or what causes inflammation? People have a lot of questions. Let's jump right in with a lot of value. What are the top three things that people are doing, the root factors that are contributing

to the chronic inflammation epidemic that we're facing today? I'm going to get to those things. But first, I don't know if people actually know what inflammation is. Let's go into it. People know that if you have a sore throat, it's red, painful, swollen, and that's inflammation. And it hurts, right? The ancient description of inflammation was rubor, cholera, dolor, and tumor. So tumor is swelling, rubor is redness, dolor is pain, and cholera is heat, right? So we have to understand that those are the cardinal features of inflammation. But then you go, well, I don't really feel inflamed.

My throat doesn't hurt. My joints aren't swollen. I don't have a rash. What do you mean by inflammation? It's what we call hidden or silent inflammation. And that is the problem. It's the inflammation that we don't see, that we can't feel, that's causing all the chronic diseases that we see today. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, depression, not to mention obviously autoimmune disease, allergies, and so forth. We know there's inflammation in those, but I mean, do people think of being overweight as an inflammatory state? Do people think of diabetes as an inflammatory state? Do people think of depression as an inflammatory state? No, but inflammation is causing all of those chronic diseases. So back to your question,

what are the biggest drivers of inflammation? Well, it's something that has been only recently a phenomena in traditional medicine and has been ignored pretty much forever except by functional medicine, which is your gut, your microbiome. Turns out that 60 to 70% of your immune system is in your gut. Why is it there? Well, it's the place where you're exposed to all the foreign materials every day more than anywhere else. The purpose of your immune system is to identify friend from foe and to get rid of the bad stuff. So when you're eating pounds of a foreign material, namely food, and you have three pounds of foreign material in there, namely bacteria, that's a lot to handle. So the ability of the gut to sense what it should take in to keep out the

things that shouldn't be in there is so important. And so having a healthy microbiome allows us to properly regulate our immune systems and to let in the nutrients that we need, proteins, amino acids, the fatty acids, the sugars and carbohydrates that we need, the nutrients we need, but it keeps out all the bad stuff. It's the first line of defense. First line of defense. So when that barrier gets broken in the gut, all of a sudden your immune system is exposed to a sea or actually more accurately exposed to a sewer. And so that starts to piss off your immune system, and you start to create systemic inflammation.

So the microbiome is really important, and we're just beginning to understand how to identify what's out of balance in there and how to correct the system. Traditional medicine is still very much behind the eight ball in this. Functional medicine is way ahead by 30, 40 years on understanding, one, how to identify dysfunction in the gut, how to repair a leaky gut, how to reduce inflammation, how to restore a normal microbiome. Now, before we go to the other two, just to jump in, the ancients knew a little bit about this. Yeah, yeah. Talk about that. There's a famous Ayurveda quote that really says, if your gut's not healthy, you're not healthy.

And if you want to fix disease, focus on the gut. So this has been known for a long time. Actually, this idea wasn't new. Eli Metchnikoff at the turn of the 1900s was a scientist who first came up with the notion of the gut as a source of chronic illness. They had some wacky ideas about how to deal with it, which was take out your colon, which I wouldn't recommend. But they were on the right track, which is problems in the microbiome and the gut cause systemic disease. And the solution is not cutting out your colon, it's fixing the gut. But it's not something that new. And Hippocrates says, health and disease starts in the gut. Absolutely.

That was the first one that you wanted to go into. What are two other ones that you want to mention? And there's a lot of them that are out there, but we're talking about the top three. What are two other ones you want to mention? The other big source of inflammation is our diet, and not any random thing from our diet, but the amount of starch and sugar in our diet

that drives a dysfunction in our metabolism called insulin resistance. It's essentially like where we become resistant to the effects of insulin and our bodies need to make more and more insulin to regulate our blood sugar. And that is because we're flooding our system with pharmacologic doses of starch and sugar, about a pound a day per person, which is just historically unprecedented. And that insulin resistance causes the development of specific kinds of fat cells. They're called adipocytes. They're specific kind of fat cells in the gut around your belly, your belly fat, that produce a class of compounds called adipocytokines. Cytokines you might've heard about with COVID or

the cytokine storm. These are the messenger molecules of your immune system. And when you have a lot of these belly fat cells made from eating starch and sugar caused by too much insulin and insulin resistance, it creates systemic inflammation. So it literally puts your body on fire. So if you're overweight, if you have diabetes, if you have high blood pressure, if you have heart disease, if you have dementia, these are all related to this phenomenon of too much starch and sugar and it's systemic inflammation. We now know that, for example, if you have high cholesterol and no inflammation, there are very little risk for heart disease. But if you have high cholesterol and high inflammation, those are the people who are at risk for heart disease.

So when you start to look at inflammation in the body, it's not what we can feel, but there are ways of measuring through laboratory testing the amount of inflammation in our body. And we're going to become more and more sophisticated about this. David Furman at Stanford, who's a scientist and doctor, developed through technologies only recently available, big data analytics, giant throughput analyses where you can look at thousands and thousands of blood markers. I mean, we go to the doctor, we get 10, 20 lab tests, right? 30, 40, maybe 50. There's thousands of molecules floating around in your blood. And most of them we completely ignore. So he was like, I don't care what we're actually measuring. Let's look at what actually matters. And so he put thousands of these chemicals through an analytic machines

correlated with people's clinical history and was able to find four biomarkers of inflammation and immune dysregulation that are highly predictive of aging, highly predictive of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, all those diseases. So we are going to become more and more sophisticated at our ability to look at inflammation. People want to know more about it, they can go to Edifice. I think it's Edifice Health is the company, which is actually commercializing this test. But there's other tests we do like C-reactive protein that help to look at inflammation. But insulin resistance is a big driver of inflammation because it makes your belly on fire, literally. And these fat cells are just pumping out tons of inflammation throughout your body. The third thing that is really important

to understand is that stress is inflammatory. Chronic stress causes inflammation in the body through a number of different mechanisms. One, stress makes you insulin resistant, so it'll contribute to just making you overweight and belly fat. I mean, I had a patient once where this was so clear. She had a daughter who was in Israel. It was during the time of sort of the infatah, the uprising, maybe a few decades ago. And she was terrified every day that her daughter was going to get killed in some kind of bomb or some kind of attack during this Palestinian uprising. And so she couldn't sleep. She wasn't even overeating, but she just gained all this weight. And as soon

as her daughter came back from Israel, she lost 40 pounds. Just like that, without changing anything. So sometimes stress can be a very big factor in insulin resistance. It also affects your inflammatory response and creates an increased inflammatory response. And this is interesting. If you look at the data on what we call sociogenomics, which is the ways in which our social interactions cause changes in gene expression, you can be having a conversation with someone and if they're in conflict with you, if you're oppositional, if you're having an emotionally charged negative interaction, it will turn on genes of inflammation. If you have a loving, connected conversation with someone, it will turn on genes that shut off inflammation. So your mind, really your brain is the most potent pharmacy

ever. And it will drive either inflammation or it will stop inflammation simply by your thoughts. So you have to kind of look at that. And that's something we haven't talked about a lot, but it's how do we master our minds? Most of us are victims of our mind's activity and we train our muscles, we train our body, we increase our metabolism. Nobody knows us are victims of our mind's activity and we train our muscles, we train our body, we increase our metabolism. Nobody knows how to train their brain to actually function better from the perspective of being in control of your thoughts. And that's not an easy one. It's a whole nother topic for a podcast. How big of a challenge is the topic of inflammation? Like really, like put it in a sense of a scale

in terms of all the things the world is dealing with when it comes to problems with health. How directly tied in is inflammation with those problems? It's probably the number one driver of all the misery we see in the world. There's a beautiful new book that was written by Raj Patel and Rupa Maria, who I've had on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast called Inflamed. And it's about

the biological, the social, economic, and political consequences of an environment and a diet that's driven systemic inflammation throughout society. And it's staggering when you start to look at it. Oppression is inflammatory, and there's so many people oppressed and struggling in this society. The diet's inflammatory. The social structures we have are inflammatory. And so inflammation, when you look at all the problems that are facing humans in terms of health. And even in terms of some of the socioeconomic issues, that inflammation is such a big driver. And understanding how we calm that down is so, so important. One of the things that it does,

which I think is something people don't understand when you look at our society, we see so much conflict, so much divisiveness, so much hatred, so much intolerance. I don't remember it like this growing up. I mean, I just don't. I mean, the diet wars are terrible. The Republicans, Democrats are no longer working together in any meaningful way. You know, we've got religious conflict, political conflict. We've got the divisiveness in this country where we had sort of a takeover of the capital by a whole bunch of people who were, you know, hopefully making the world a better place. But really that was not a very helpful act. So why is that happening?

Well, it turns out that your brain, when it's inflamed, doesn't work. And all the things that we see as behavioral disorders, as violence, as depression, anxiety, mood disorders, the opioid crisis, turns out that a lot of these things are driven by inflammation in the brain. And what's happening often is that the inflammatory process diet that we have, the changes in our microbiome because of our diet, because of C-sections, antibiotics, and toxins, and all the things that damage our gut microbiome because of glyphosate, all that leads to inflammation. And when you have inflammation like that in the body, it disconnects the ancient limbic brain, the reptile brain, the fight or flight response from the frontal lobe, which is basically the adult in the room,

your executive function, your higher self. So when your higher self and your lower self are not talking to each other, when your survival brain and your sort of mature grownup brain that makes sure you don't do or say or act in ways that are damaging or harmful to other people, that connection gets weakened or it breaks. And so when you look at, for example, diet studies in prisons or in juvenile detention centers, it's so impressive because simply swapping out healthy food, an anti-inflammatory diet for an inflammatory diet in prisons, causes a violent crime by 56%. They add a multivitamin by 80%. In juvenile detention centers, these kids are violent. 91% reduction in violent behavior, 75% reduction in

restraints, 100% reduction in suicide rates in this group, which is the third leading cause of death in adolescent males, and you reduce it by a hundred percent simply by changing the diet. Why does it work? It works because it cools off the inflammation in the brain. It's causing a disconnect between people's ability to have executive function, to have the grownup in the room, to have the higher self show up and say, gee, maybe I shouldn't punch this person, or maybe I shouldn't cut them, or maybe I shouldn't shoot them, or maybe I shouldn't be in this violent oppositional life. And I think, I don't know how much it's contributed to the divisiveness in our society from the food, but I think it's way more than we think. And we've

had David Perlmutter and his son, Austin, on the podcast talking about their book, which describes this phenomena and the science and the neurology behind the way our diet affects our brain and disconnects our limbic brain from our frontal lobe, driving violent and disruptive and divisive behavior. Well, one of the unique things that's happening in today's world that is built on top of all the different things that you're talking about is that there are a lot of people getting rich off of creating this inflammation. We have the food companies that are getting rich by marketing and selling high sugary foods to the public. We have the news media that's literally making

incredible millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars by driving inflammatory style news, which drives inflammation in people, creates more stress. And then- And the advertising is all about inflammatory products, right? All about inflammatory products.

Food, right? Food. And many other factors that are out there too. So a unique thing that's going on in the world today that's important to highlight that has really never been there at this level is that through really the hijacking of media and the use of media to grow these large companies, we now are able to spread inflammation so rampant and there's a very few and small group of individuals that are getting dramatically wealthy off the process. I think a lot of stuff started off with good intentions that had bad consequences.

In the post-World War II era, we needed to scale up agriculture to feed a hungry world, a growing population, to produce a lot of cheap carbohydrates, starchy calories. And we did a great job. We did a great job. The average American has 500 more calories than they did in 1970 available for them to eat. And they're eating it, which is why we're all so unhealthy. That was a good idea, but the unintended consequences have been devastating, not only to human health in terms of diabetes and obesity. I mean, when I was born, there was a 5% obesity rate. Now it's 40. It's an eightfold increase in obesity in my lifetime. But we've also created unintended consequences for the environment and climate and the changes

in our biodiversity and loss of species and the damage to the soil and our water system because of how we're growing food. So we've created all these unintended consequences. In the same way, you know, these food companies, we're not actually designing foods to drive all these problems, but we're locked in a system where the status quo is trying to be preserved so they can maintain their market share and their profitability. And they're trying to navigate and figure out how to shift because culture is shifting, demand is shifting. But we have a tremendous amount of money that goes into preserving the status quo, how we grow food, what we grow, the processed food industry, the marketing of the food. I mean, we spend billions of dollars from the food industry gets spent billions of dollars marketing and advertising bad foods.

And the worse the food, the more money they spend advertising. And what's worse is it's hidden advertising now that's really a problem. And so these algorithms on these social media drive you into more and more of the same. So if you click on a conspiracy, one conspiracy theory, you're going to get fed 10 other conspiracy theories. So I met these people that believe in all these weird, seemingly disconnected conspiracy theories because that's the universe they live in. So we live in these self-reinforcing information bubbles that are driven by algorithms. And the algorithms were there designed to give people stuff they like, to show them if they want a nice pair of shorts or a bathing suit that they might like. Again, well-intentioned. Well-intentioned, but the consequences now, we sort of let the genie out and it's out of control. And so even

the people who develop these systems, I mean, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is evil or had an evil intent to create more divisiveness and conflict and disruption in the world and violence. No, I don't think so. But I also think that the incentives now are to keep doing it and not to stop. and create different forms of communications and media and social media that are not driven off of these algorithms that tend to cause more disruption, more divisiveness, and are incentivizing the wrong thing. I mean, one of the things that's just shocking to me is forget all the ads on TV that kids see, and there's about $10 billion spent on all that. There's 500 billion ads, 500 billion ads in one year directed at children for junk food on Facebook. That's terrifying to me because the parents don't even know it. It's like you can say, oh, don't watch your TV kids or don't watch those commercials

about Fruit Loops, but it's all the hidden stuff, and it's all stealth. It's embedded in games. There's free games for these kids on social media, and they play these games, but in the games, they highlight McDonald's or they highlight Coca-Cola or they highlight these different kind of food companies that are paying for it. And it's really co-opting these kids' brains.

It's co-opting their own free will in a way. And I think that's what scares me more than anything is the usurping of free will by this digital persuasion economy that's using algorithms to target us in ways that it seems to be things that we like, but it actually keeps, it spirals out of control. And so we have to get a way to solve that, whether it's inventing parallel platforms that people can use where that's not happening, social media platforms, or whether it's regulation or legislation. This has gotten to be quite dangerous.

It's multifaceted, but most importantly, we have to have a dialogue about it. And even more important than that is that you, the person that's watching, the person that's listening today, you have to be the CEO of your health. You have to be the CEO of your family's health because ultimately, you know, regulation can do a lot, but it can only do so much. We at the end of the day have to drive education for ourselves and for our family. And that's what this podcast and your work is all about. So let's continue down the topic of inflammation. Patient comes to you today, right? What are the signs and what are the ways that the patient says, ouch, that are an indication to you that they have rampant chronic inflammation that is taken over and hijacked their body?

It's not that hard. Pretty much anybody with any chronic disease, inflammation is a player. And so whether you have the typical things that we understand as inflammation, like autoimmunity or allergy or eczema or skin disorders, or it's the silent inflammation that's causing heart disease and cancer and diabetes and obesity and Alzheimer's, anybody with a chronic condition is typically inflamed at some level. So my job is to then navigate and figure out what's causing it. Because when you get to the root of inflammation, you don't actually have to treat the diseases directly. I don't really treat diabetes. I don't treat Alzheimer's. I don't treat

heart disease. I don't treat cancer. I simply change the biology of the body to normalize function, to reduce inflammation. And as a side effect, these things go away. And I think that's a really important concept because if we don't understand that root cause medicine is the way we need to go forward, then we're going to just be constantly spinning out on all these new drug treatments and spending billions of dollars to address this. I mean, they found out, oh, Alzheimer's is an inflammatory disease of the brain. So what do you have to do? Well, they did a whole study taking Advil. It didn't work and it caused all these side effects. Why? Because they didn't get to the root of the inflammation. Recently,

a big study came out on aspirin. Doctors have been saying, take aspirin to reduce inflammation to prevent heart attacks. Well, if you read my stuff over the years, I've always said that idea. There are maybe some people who would benefit, but aspirin is not a side effect-free drug and kills as many people as asthma or AIDS a year because of bleeding, stomach bleeding, gastrointestinal bleeding, brain bleeding, strokes, hemorrhage. So the recent studies show that, oh, sorry guys, we were wrong. You can't just take aspirin to reduce inflammation and prevent heart attacks because it's going to kill you. It's more likely to kill you than the heart attack. So stop taking it, which was a huge shocker because if you talk to any cardiologist or talk to any primary care doctor, everybody was on board. And I was kind

of shocked because I looked at the actual science that was supporting this. And I even look at the American College of Cardiology risk calculator. There's actually a calculator on the American College of Cardiology website to put in whether or not you would either get harmed or have benefit from aspirin. And most of the people who are on aspirin actually don't even qualify or didn't qualify according to the previous guidelines. Now there's a whole bunch of people who shouldn't even, according to those guidelines, be taking it. So I think it's backwards to say we're going to shut off inflammation with anti-inflammatories or immune suppressants. I mean, they're talking about using drugs like Humira, which is a $50,000 a year anti-inflammatory

drug that's used for autoimmune disease for depression. Why? Because depression is inflammation in the brain. The key isn't to shut off inflammation with the drug, it's to get rid of the source of inflammation. How does traditional and conventional medicine, again, well-intentioned, how does traditional and conventional medicine look at and treat chronic inflammation? Where do they think it comes from and then how do they decide how to tackle it?

It's just shocking to me that there really isn't a conversation about why. Oh, we know Alzheimer's is inflammatory. Oh, we know depression is inflammatory. We know heart disease is inflammatory. We know cancer is inflammatory. Okay. So we need to give you anti-inflammatory drugs. There's no questioning of, gee, why in the first place is your immune system so pissed off? What's creating inflammation? And we know so much about it. It's not hard. It's our diet, our inflammatory diet, it's stress, it's our microbiome issues, it's triggers that, for example, might be from latent infections or allergens or toxins. All these drive inflammation. So as a functional medicine doctor,

my expertise is in being an expert in understanding toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, and diet, because those are the things that drive inflammation. And so every individual has a different cocktail of things that are off. But my job is to figure out what is their particular triggers and get rid of them and then help their body, on the other hand, calm the inflammation down. So there's a whole bunch of things that cause inflammation, but there's a lot you can do to reduce inflammation. And it's not by taking Advil or aspirin or steroids or some chemo drug or a biologic that costs 50 grand a year. It's by the simple things that we know how to do. Food is medicine, anti-inflammatory. Exercise is medicine,

anti-inflammatory. Sleep is anti-inflammatory. Meditation is anti-inflammatory. Exercise is medicine, anti-inflammatory. Sleep is anti-inflammatory. Meditation is anti-inflammatory. Yoga is anti-inflammatory. And then there's a whole bunch of supplements you can take to help reduce inflammation, like omega-3 fats and vitamin D and probiotics and zinc and all the phytochemicals you can eat in your food that actually help reduce inflammation, all the spices and all the colorful fruits and vegetables. So there's so much you can do to reduce inflammation in the ways that we see. Now, if you have some latent thing, right, if you have a lot of heavy metals or if you have a terrible bug in your gut or bacterial overgrowth or you have some particular gluten sensitivity, you're going to have to deal with those things too. But for most people, the basics just work so well. Well, let's talk about those basics. You talked about food

and you talked about some of the foods that help and we'll chat a little bit more about that. But what are some of the examples of the foods that might hurt? What are some of the foods that are out there that could be driving or at least supporting the process of chronic inflammation? And why do they support that process? Well, it's both what we're eating and what we're not eating, right? So we're eating too what we're not eating, right? So we're eating too many inflammatory foods. 60% of our diet in America is ultra-processed food. And what is that?

Talk about the stuff that you see on the shelf. What is an example? Because one thing I've realized and why I want to break this down is that if you go to Times Square, if you go here in Santa Monica where we're recording and you go up to most people and you say, hey, do you eat healthy? Most people are going to say, yeah, I eat healthy because everybody has a different definition of what it is. Or you ask somebody, do you eat a lot of processed foods? And most people say, no, I don't eat that much.

A little bit here and there. So describe it. What are we talking about here in ultra processed foods? There are a few commodity crops that are supported by all our government supports from the Farm Bill that are the raw materials for processed food. Corn, wheat, and soy. And they're turned into all sorts of weird products. The corn is turned into all sorts of food additives and high fructose corn syrup. The wheat is turned into highly pulverized flour, which is highly inflammatory. The oils that come from soybeans and corn are often highly processed

and inflammatory. So we're eating a lot of ingredients that are derived from these commodity products and ultra-processed food that we're not even aware of. So when you read maltodextrin or something on a label, you don't know where that came from. That's a byproduct of corn from a science project in the factory. When you eat high fructose corn syrup, same thing. So we're eating ingredients that are made from commodity crops. They're basically the same three ingredients made into all sizes, colors, shapes of chemically extruded food-like substances. So if you actually cover over the packaging and look at the ingredients, you literally would see the same ingredients on almost every processed food. We know with a few little tweaks here and there.

And you can actually even tell what it is by reading the ingredient list. That's an ultra-processed food. If you buy a can of tomatoes and it says tomatoes, water, and salt, you know what that is. If the ingredient list is, you know, 14, 15, 35 items, and half of them you can't pronounce, don't recognize, and wouldn't have in your medicine cupboard or your kitchen cupboard, then you should not eat them, right? I mean, why should we be eating butylene hydroxy toluene or orthodextrin or all kinds of weird compounds that are not our natural food supply. So those are ultra processed foods. And it's a huge component of our diet and it's highly inflammatory. So that's 60% of calories on average. And when you think of all the people

who don't eat that much processed food, the people who are eating it might eat 70, 80%, right? When you average it all out over all Americans, it's about 60%. And kids, it's even worse. It's 70%. 70% for kids. I think 67 and something. It's like terrifying to me. So that is really what we should be focused on not eating. It's driving inflammation. And sugar and starch is number one, two, and three. All the food additives, we eat about five pounds of food additives a year, and they can be inflammatory. For example, all the thickeners, emulsifiers, things like carrageenan and gums that are used in processed food, they often have something called microbial transglutaminase, which is a gluten product that

they use to hold the food together. And all these emulsifiers, they cause leaky gut. So these damage your gut. And when you have a damaged gut, then guess what? The floodgates open. Like we talked about earlier in the podcast, you start getting food proteins and bacterial proteins leaking into your bloodstream. Your immune system gets all pissed off and it creates this vicious cycle of inflammation. So eliminating all that weird stuff is so important. If you read the label and you don't know absolutely everything that's on there and you can't pronounce it, you wouldn't have it in your medicine cabinet, don't eat it. Let's talk about next another category that is directly connected into inflammation and

that is sleep. And one of the biggest drivers of sleep that is affecting so many people is sleep apnea. Talk about sleep apnea and its direct connection to inflammation for most people and how it can increase weight gain and a whole list of other things that are there. It reminds me of this guy, actually. Sleep apnea is basically where you have multiple episodes of stopping breathing at night. So you will snore, you might stop breathing for seconds or minutes, your sleep's interrupted, and it's often not diagnosed because you're asleep and you don't know you're doing it. Your partner might yell at you or scream at you or move to another room or put in earplugs. But you can actually use devices. One of them is a great little app. It's called Sleep Cycle. And it just records your sleep on your phone and you don't

need anything. It's just you put your phone by your bed and you can have it on airplane mode even. And it records your breathing and your sleep and your snoring. And so you can see and hear your snoring from the app. So I know my stepfather was a big snorer. He never believed it. He had severe sleep apnea. And I literally recorded him with my cassette recorder back in the seventies because he didn't believe me when you can hear him just snoring like an elephant, you know? So it's really common. It's often associated with being overweight, with having a thick neck, with sometimes structural issues, narrow palate, various things with your teeth. So you can be thin in habit, but there may be airway issues.

There can be central sleep apnea, obstructive sleep apnea. So it can come from your brain or from your obstructive airway. And what that does have those repeated wakenings to the night and the decreased quality of sleep. It actually causes insulin resistance. It actually causes diabetes. It actually makes you crave more sugar and eat more sugar and carbs. And you can often fix weight issues or diabetes or obesity unless you fix sleep apnea. And it reminds me of a patient I had when I was at Canyon Ranch who was a lawyer. And he's like, look, I can't lose this weight. I'm 50 pounds overweight. Can you help me? I'm like, okay, well, talk about your life. Well, I'm a lawyer. I'm like, okay. And started getting into it. How do you sleep? Well, okay. And I said, well, I'm tired all the time. I said,

well, what do you mean? He said, yeah, well, I have to have a standup desk. This is before standup desks were possible. Or I mean, were popular like, you know, 25 years ago, because if I don't, if I don't stand up, I fall asleep at my desk. I'm like, okay, well, how about we check for sleep apnea? And he had terrible sleep apnea. We gave him a treatment for it, a CPAP machine, and he lost 50 pounds like that. And his insulin resistance went away simply by sleeping. So sleep is so important in regulating your metabolism and inflammation. And, you know, we think of snoring as kind of like a funny thing,

and we might hit our partner or laugh at our parent or grandparent. But really, as a dear friend of both of ours, Dr. Stephen Lynn, a dentist down in Australia, and he says snoring is choking. So you have to think of snoring as choking at night. So if you know if you're snoring or anybody else is snoring, you're choking and you're choking and that prevents you from getting the right amount of air. And another version of that that's milder is breathing through your mouth. You've done some episodes on this. I've done some episodes on this. If you're breathing through your mouth at night and not through your nose, which is how we're designed to, that's also a sign that you might have a mild form of sleep apnea that needs to be addressed because it's directly tied into promoting inflammation in the body. Let's talk about another category of things that is a driver of inflammation, and that's

our sedentary lifestyle. Talk to us more about that. Yeah. I mean, sitting is inflammatory as we sit here and do our podcast. And that's why so much of us are struggling is because when we don't move, we are actually increasing the poor metabolic function that we have, increasing the risk for muscle loss, increasing the risk for insulin resistance, increasing risk for just chronic inflammation in our body. So being sedentary is a huge risk for inflammation. On the other hand, exercising

enough, but not too much, right? If you overexercise, if you're an ultra marathoner or marathon runner, it creates more oxidative stress and inflammation in the body. But if you do regular exercise, you literally can reduce the inflammation in your body. And that's one of the most important things besides your diet for regulating inflammation. You talked about stress. When you sit down with your patients and you talk to them about their lifestyle, what are the biggest contributors that you see over and over again, top level,

that are the big factors that drive chronic stress individually from patients? You know, what is it? Is the relationship, is the lack of meaning and purpose? Like what are the things that are out there that you see time and time again that are really the drivers of the stress that everybody's dealing with? It's a great question. You know, why are some people more resilient than others? Why do people roll with the punches and others just get completely knocked off center? One of the things we use in our practice at Cleveland Clinic and Lenox and Delta Wellness Center is called the ACE questionnaire or adverse childhood events.

And it's essentially a set of 10 questions or so that you get a score for that tracks trauma. Were you abused as a child? Were you unsafe? Just a whole series of questions that help understand if as a child you experience lack of safety or worse, abuse, trauma, incest, so forth. The higher your score, the more chronic disease risk you have, the more inflammation risk you have, the more likely you are to have autoimmune disease, to have allergies, to have chronic illness. So looking at someone's childhood is so important and those impacts of trauma. And I think we're just beginning to understand how widespread that is. And for example, one in four Americans is a victim of sexual abuse as a child. Think about that. One in four Americans is like 80 million people.

That's a lot of people. I wonder if that's the 80 million that has autoimmune disease. I don't know, but it might be. And so as we begin to look at how do we manage the inflammation response, that's the first place I start. And then I look at how do people navigate their minds? Because your mindset plays a huge role in chronic disease. And so if you're able to regulate your thoughts, if you're able to not be constantly triggered and activated by your environment, if you're able to have a level of equanimity, which can be cultivated and developed through practice, right? That's what meditation does and yoga does and prayer does. And there's a whole series of practices of whatever it calls to you that you can do that really helps to reduce the level of stress in your system.

If you don't learn how to do those things, then you just kind of have this unregulated, unmitigated stress response that drives so much chronic disease and that keeps you inflamed. So yes, I mean, we have to one, look at the original sources and we have to look at, you know, how we navigate our lives and how our thoughts are and how our relationships are and how our community is. And so there are a lot of ways to work through that. And I think it's so important for people to understand that they need to build the structures in their life that are constantly battling inflammation. So what is that for me? It's basic practices that I do. I meditate every day. I exercise. I eat an inflammatory diet. I take the supplements that

help my gut microbiome stay healthy. I make sure I have low levels of toxins that I'm exposed to. I make sure I connect with people I love, build community, have deep relationships. That's, to me, what I do to mitigate and to discharge the stress and inflammation. Because if you don't intentionally do it, it just accumulates and it's tough because we live in a bubble. So it's sort of like being in the Truman Show. We don't even know we're in it and we're just victims of or in the matrix and we don't know we're in it. So how do you get out of that and go, okay, I'm just going to pause for a minute and kind of reset. And I think that's a really important set of practices that we can all be doing. And it can be fun. It doesn't have to be difficult or stressful. One of my favorite

is hot and cold therapies. So sauna, steam, ice plunge, it's amazing for discharging stress. Literally your whole system will sort of reset. I remember working in a residency and, you know, we had an enlightened residency where we only had to work 30 hours in a row, not 36 hours. I would get off noon the day after call and I'd drive up to this hot springs in California and I would soak in the hot springs and then I would go in the ice pool and the hot spring was super hot and the icing was super cold. And I'll go back and forth, back and forth. And I just know all my fatigue, all my stress from working on the hospital and the call and the trauma just would go away. And I would like reset. And you know, now it's a thing, but back then we were just kind of was weird, but it's so powerful. So you have to learn for yourself.

What are those things that you can incorporate that you like into your life on a daily basis that help regulate you? Let's go back to the gut microbiome. You listed it as one of the top things that a disrupted gut microbiome or a dysregulated gut microbiome is one of the key drivers of inflammation. You have in your lifetime on multiple occasions had a gut that's been messed up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We won't get into the whole journey.

We made a couple documentaries about it. If people want to watch them, they're at drhyman.com slash plus sign up for a free trial. You can watch them broken brain longevity docuseries. We've talked about them all, but high level, what was missing for you when your gut was dysregulated and how did you begin to take the steps to bring it back into repair? I mean, I, you know, I didn't have the usual things. I was always a weirdo. So for me, the first time was mercury poisoning and mercury is powerfully damaging to the gut. It will bind to all the enzymes. It'll cause leaky gut and it creates bad bugs growing and yeast overgrowth. So for me, I developed chronic diarrhea, bloating, irritable bowel, bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth. And that was really, really, really hard to treat until I got the mercury down.

That was my first foray into bad gut. Then I kind of corrected it after I got the mercury out and rebuilt my gut. And then about five years ago, I had a bad tooth and ended up having a root canal. The root canal went bad, got the tooth pulled, and the dentist, who was a holistic dentist, said, you better take this antibiotic. And I'm like, okay. And I just was a little nervous about it. And it's a particular antibiotic that's great for dental infections called clindamycin, but it's also the biggest cause

of what we call C. difficile, which is a terrible intestinal infection that kills 30,000 people a year and very difficult to treat. And they're using fecal transplants to treat it almost a hundred percent cure. And the typical antibiotics that are used don't work that well. So I basically developed C. difficile, which was a terrible intestinal infection, colitis, and that caused colitis. And then that developed into inflammatory bowel disease. And I was having 20 bloody bowel movements a day, severe pain. I mean, it was just, I lost 30 pounds. It was bad. And all my normal tricks didn't work. Why? Because my whole system was so screwed up by the mold in my house and by this infection that took over that even,

even taking prednisone didn't work. And I was, you know, next step was taking a biologic and I didn't want to do that. And so I began to sort of figure out how do I really reset my system? And sometimes you just need a powerful set of tools to drive the body out of a stuck inflammatory cycle. And I, based on my experience in the science and what I understood, I use a combination of things that just almost immediately flipped my system. One was ozone therapy. That was hyperbaric oxygen therapy. I used high dose intravenous vitamins and vitamin C and also stem cells. And those four things, and exosomes, those four things really flipped my system out of this stuck inflammatory cycle. But that was weird and that's rare. And most people I don't need to do that with,

but I'm a weirdo. So I get all the worst of everything and then I have to figure it out. And then I kind of learn how to sort of make my body work better. Well, one of the unique things that came out of that is that once you got your system back to baseline and it was really bad, right? It was really bad. We've talked about that before, but once you got it back to baseline, you went down this whole rabbit hole of how the power of phytochemicals, as you talked about earlier, phytonutrients, phytochemicals, these plant compounds on a regular basis can help you maintain this level of where you're at. So talk to us about that. How is this that food is really information in this category of phytochemicals? Yeah. So for decades, we've known that prebiotic

fibers are healthy and prebiotic foods are healthy. What is a prebiotic? It's something that feeds the good bacteria. So it could be various kinds of fibers that are in plant foods, special foods like artichokes, asparagus, plantains, Jerusalem artichokes, all have these special fibers that are really good food for the microbiome. We also knew the probiotics are important to probiotics. There's all kinds of strains. We also knew the probiotics are important, took probiotics. There's all kinds of strains. We also knew that we need to make sure we have the right amount of just general fiber as well. So those are things we understood. But what I didn't understand was the importance of the phytochemicals in food to feed the good bugs. Because not only do they eat the

fiber, but they also are stimulated and love certain phytochemicals. For example, there's a really important bacteria that I had almost none of, which is called Ackermansia mucinifilia. Mucinifilia means mucin loving, right? Mucin is mucus. Why do you have that? Well, you want to protect your intestinal lining and not get a leaky gut. So this bacteria creates this incredible thick mucus layer that prevents bad stuff from getting in. But if you don't have this bacteria, you can't get that. Well, when I had this problem, you couldn't actually take an acromantia probiotic. Now they have them. But acromantia love polyphenols, which are these colorful compounds in fruits and vegetables. They love cranberry. They love pomegranate. They love green tea. They love curcumin. They love all these incredible plant compounds. And so that was a huge

insight. So we need prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols to create a healthy gut, which is why eating a colorful diet is so important. Beautiful. And you've written about acromantia. We'll link to the blog post that you have there. You even talk a little bit about this kind of shake, which includes pomegranate concentrate and a bunch of other things. Cranberry and green tea. So we'll link to that as well. That really helped me, by the way, that really helped me reset my gut. I created this cocktail of stuff that was designed to incorporate all the knowledge that I had over 30 years of functional medicine. And it was a lot of different things in little containers and things. We've now created something called Gut Food, which will soon be available on getpharmacy.com, which combines all these

things into one simple powder that you can mix in water or in something else and actually consume it. And it will help to provide the food for your gut. We're calling it gut food. Let's talk about testing when it comes to inflammation. Are there tests that you use and recommend both with patients that you work with, but also if people don't have access to a functional medicine doctor, are there tests that you recommend they ask their doctor for to help them understand how inflamed they are? Yeah. I mean, there's two aspects to this. One is checking for inflammation to see if you're inflamed and then checking for why you have inflammation. It's two different things. So why your inflammation may be imbalances in your gut flora, it may be toxins, it may be allergens,

it may be your diet, it may be stress, right? gut flora. It may be toxins. It may be allergens. It may be your diet. It may be stress, right? So we have to go down those rabbit holes. In terms of the actual measure of inflammation, we're getting much more sophisticated about it. So there's a common test that your doctor can do called C-reactive protein. And that's really important. It has to be high sensitivity C-reactive protein. That can help you determine if there's a generalized level of inflammation.

It's good, but it's not perfect. Then there's a generalized level of inflammation. It's good, but it's not perfect. Then there's a sedimentation rate, which is an age-old test. It looks at how long it takes your blood to settle. If it's got a lot of inflammatory proteins, it doesn't settle the test too very fast. That can be a sign. So there's common things we use. We can also look at cytokines. We can look at interleukins and we can look at two-in-a-crosis factor alpha and other biomarkers of inflammation. But that's just scratching the surface. There's a whole, as I mentioned earlier, there's this scientist at Stanford who's measured these unique analytes in your blood that doctors normally don't test that are the most predictive

of aging and chronic disease. So we should probably be testing things like that. So those are the ways we kind of measure inflammation. We can also look at autoantibodies. We can look at allergens. We can look at immunoglobulin levels. There's a lot of ways we can look at what's going on with the immune system. We look at T-cell function and lots of things. So the basic tests are available through conventional medicine, but the key is not just seeing if you're inflamed. The key is to ask why you're inflamed and then go down the rabbit holes of looking for the causes.

Can you share a case study from your practice of anybody? Because we have so many different names for modern diseases that are driven by inflammation. But if you can think of one person who had the right mixture of a lot of different root factors that you helped and worked with to get their inflammation under control and then get back to health. Absolutely. I'm just thinking of so many patients that are flooding my brain right now, but I'll just share one story of a woman with rheumatoid arthritis, terrible migraines, and a lot of gut issues. And typically she was seeing her rheumatologist and getting all my rheumatology drugs and really struggling. And so I said, well, okay, these are all inflammatory

problems, migraines, gut issues, rheumatoid arthritis. Let's look and see what's causing it. So it turned out she had very high antibodies to gluten. So she was gluten sensitive. And quite significantly, she had bacterial overgrowth in her gut and she had super heavy metals. So systematically, I got gluten out of her diet. I healed her gut. I got rid of the heavy metals and she had complete recovery. And all the things that were abnormal, her C-reactive protein, her rheumatoid arthritis

antibodies, her migraines, her leaky gut, all normalized. And now it's 20 years later and she's still amazing and got rid of all those diagnoses because they were all caused by inflammation. You talked about diet. You talked about additional therapies like sauna, hot and cold, other things like that. We talked about exercise. Talk about supplementation. How does it play a role and how can it be helpful on the topic of inflammation? Well, just the most basic things can be helpful, right? So there was a study published that showed that if you take a multivitamin, your C-reactive protein level goes down, which is awesome. But

that's just one thing. And what is the mechanism of that that you think? Yeah. So we have a system in our body to control inflammation and that system requires nutrients. And many of us are nutrient depleted. So for example, a multivitamin will reduce C-reactive protein and it does so by activating all sorts of enzymes. So what are vitamins and minerals? They're basically helpers. One third of your entire DNA codes for enzymes. What enzymes do? They turn one molecule to another molecule, one chemical to another chemical in your body. And all the enzymes we have require coenzymes or cofactors, helpers. And what are those?

Those are vitamins and minerals. And so some of us need a lot more of this one or that one. And if we're low, which a lot of us are, this is not my opinion. This is the government's own surveys and diagnostic testing and giant studies of tens and tens of thousands of people, that over 90% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level you need to prevent deficiency disease. So not how much you need for optimal health or immune function, but how much vitamin D do you need to not get scurvy? I mean, to not get rickets? Not very much. How much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Not very much. But how much vitamin C or vitamin

D do you need to regulate your immune system and reduce inflammation? A lot more. So many of us are deficient in nutrients. That's the mechanism. And then there's specific nutrients that are really important in inflammation. Omega-3 fats, number one. We need the omega-3 fats like EP and DHA that typically come from fish oil. We need the vitamin D levels to be adequate and not low because vitamin D regulates hundreds of genes that regulate inflammation. We need to make sure we have adequate amounts of things that help to boost detoxifying compounds in our body like glutathione, which comes from the, for example, broccoli family. When you eat these compounds, they help to increase glutathione, but also you can take for supplements to do that, like

N-acetylcysteine, which I think the government is now restricting in some ways, which makes me very nervous, but this is a substance we've used for a long time, decades and decades since I've been in medical school in medicine as a therapy to help recover people from Tylenol overdose and liver failure, from kidney failure, from dye contrast and many other things. So for asthma and lung inflammation, so it's one of the most powerful anti-inflammatories in our body. So I take supplements to increase glutathione, which really helps. So there's a few things we can do strategically. And then, of course, there's things like curcumin,

and there's polyphenol supplements, and various other things you can take. But those are the most important. Talk to us about the role that fasting plays. Fasting in all its different forms, when it comes to chronic inflammation that plagues so many people. So our bodies were designed to deal with scarcity. And we have hundreds of genes that help control starvation and put our bodies in a healing and repair state when we are lacking food. We have almost no genes that help us deal with

abundance and excess, like the 500 extra calories of corn syrup that every American is exposed to since 1970. So when we are in a state of scarcity, our bodies kick into action a whole set of mechanisms that reduce inflammation, that increase antioxidant systems, that build muscle, that get rid of fat, burn fat, which is good in the case of starvation, and that help to increase stem cell function and many, many other beneficial factors and improve mitochondrial health, clean up your cells, get rid of waste. I mean, it's just, it's quite amazing what happens when you have scarcity, when you starve, which is a good thing because you want to keep alive as long as possible. So everything that's in your body is like, I'm just going to fix everything so I don't die. So how do you get

to that state? Well, there's a lot of techniques that are now being talked about and they all have the same mechanisms, whether it's time-restricted eating, which is eating within an eight-hour or 10-hour or 12-hour window, whether it's intermittent fasting, which is having a 24, 36-hour fast once a week or more prolonged fast, whether it's intermittent fasting, which is having a 24, 36-hour fast once a week, or more prolonged fast, whether it's fasting, mimicking diets, which are calorie-restricted diets for five days of 800 calories, whether it's a ketogenic diet, which restricts carbs and increases fat. That's actually what we get in when we're not eating. We get in a ketogenic diet. When we don't have food, our bodies go on ketosis, but you can do that by eating more fat. So all those ways of eating actually activate the body's own healing mechanism. And what happens?

Well, you reduce inflammation, you increase antioxidant systems, you increase stem cell production, you increase muscle, you increase bone density, you increase cognitive function and brain chemistry and neuroplasticity. You do all these things simply by activating these ancient healing systems that are designed to protect us from starvation. So it's kind of like controlled starvation in a way. And that's a good thing. And I think it's really important for us to think about how we do those things on a regular basis. And I try to incorporate those strategies regularly in my life. So now we're going to go to our community, our YouTube comments, our Facebook comments, Instagram, and podcast community that emailed in. We're going to take a few questions here and we're going to start off with the first one. And the first one we have here

is what role do grains play when it comes to inflammation, chronic inflammation in the body? Can grains help or hurt chronic inflammations in the body? Great question. Depends on the grain. White flour surely is one of the most inflammatory foods on the planet. Whereas ancient grains like Himalayan tartary buckwheat may be one of the most anti-inflammatory foods on the planet. So it's not grains as a whole, it's which grains, in what form, how are they grown, where were they grown, what were they grown with, are they full of pesticides, are they full of glyphosate? I mean, there's so many layers of things that will actually determine the answer to that

question. In general, though, the way we eat grains in this country is as white flour. 90% of the grains we eat in this country is white flour. Very few people eat whole grain foods. Maybe there's a whole wheat bread, but if you look at the label, it's mostly white flour with high fructose corn syrup with a few flakes of whole wheat thrown in there, right? It's not like the dense breads you get in Europe or Germany. So I'm not against grains, but I do think that there are challenges for people who are eating a lot of flour. It's probably one of the most inflammatory foods. And if you have a leaky gut, if you have an imbalance in your microbiome,

if you're not having an intact system in your gut, grains can be a problem. So I tend to eliminate grains if I'm really aggressively trying to reduce inflammation, not forever, but for a short period of time to try to reset the system to heal the leaky gut and get people functional again. And if you do that, you also do a number of other things because grains are starch and depend on how much you eat, right? Having a half a cup of black rice or a half a cup of buckwheat may not be a problem, but typically we eat huge amounts of grains and that drives another pathway for inflammation, which is insulin resistance or prediabetes or blood sugar problems. And so we have to understand that we have to reduce the starch and sugar in our diet. And one way of that

is actually reducing grains. But whole grains can be part of a healthy diet. It's just when you get to eat them, who gets to eat them, in what context, with what other foods, and where those grains come from. And are they modern hybridized grains that are full of starch and sugar, or are they ancient grains that have all these phytochemicals and other beneficial properties? Next question, how does hormonal balance or imbalance related to inflammation? So the biggest driver of chronic inflammation is stress, which drives all kinds of hormonal dysregulation. It screws up your hormones, the sex hormones, your insulin, blood sugar, cortisol, adrenaline, and it really drives huge amounts of inflammation. So if you actually are highly stressed, that will drive a

lot of the pathology. I mean, insulin is another hormone. That is a big one that drives inflammation. That's one of the biggest ones. We talked a lot about that. You'll see people who are taking hormones, for example, estrogen or the birth control pill. And it depends on what you're taking. If you're taking, for example, Premarin, it raises inflammation in the body. It causes a high CRP. So does the birth control pill. So a lot of people are taking the birth control pill. I'm not saying people should stop the birth control pill, but you want to make sure you mitigate the effects of that. And I recently did an Instagram live with the founder of Even, Sarah Morgan, talking about the ways in which, for example, medications deplete nutrients and affect the body adversely. So for example, if you're on the pill, the birth control pill,

you may need to take certain nutrients to mitigate the effects of that and help reduce inflammation. So certain things I would never take like Premarin, which is a hormone that drives inflammation, but I certainly wouldn't tell everybody to stop the birth control pill, but I think you have to know what you're doing and actually offset the harm by taking the right nutrients to actually mitigate the damage and the inflammation that comes from that. Last question here before we go into final thoughts and conclusions. Can inflammation be tied to our genetics? Are some people more prone to developing markers of inflammation, especially chronic inflammation?

Absolutely. I mean, we're all heterogeneous. We have 20,000 genes. We have about 5 million variations in those genes. And some of those variations predispose you to inflammation. And we test those. I do that in my actual practice, looking at saliva swabs that measure DNA, and we can look for variations in certain genes that affect the cytokines like interleukins and TNF-alpha and other genes. And we can see, oh, you're someone who, if you get some trigger, is way more likely to be inflamed. So there are people who are predisposed to inflammation, but that doesn't mean they're predestined to inflammation. So they need to identify, one, the sources of inflammation in they're predestined to inflammation. So they need to identify, one, the sources of inflammation in their life and get rid of them. We talked about those.

And they need to include anti-inflammatory strategies in their life, an anti-inflammatory diet, more polyphenols, probiotics, antioxidants, and obviously other anti-inflammatory strategies like adequate sleep and exercise and stress reduction and so forth. So hot and cold therapies. We just need to upregulate the anti-inflammatory system and calm down the inflammatory system. So yes, there are people who are genetically predisposed, but it doesn't mean they're predestined. So not everybody will have access to a functional medicine doctor. Obviously, if they do, that's fantastic and amazing. You can go to ifm.org and find somebody in your area. It is often expensive. Insurance doesn't cover it, and it's not available to everybody. But if you can, it's a great thing. If you can't, and for example, they wanted to explore the topic of

genetics, a lot of people have 23andMe data. Are there any of those websites that you like or would recommend to people that they can plug in their raw data and get back some of these unique markers that they have to pay attention for their own genetics? I mean, there is a genetic genie, which is sort of an interpretive guide where you can plug in your 23andMe data, which can be helpful for looking for problems with methylation and glutathione and detoxification and some of the inflammation genes. 23andMe only does a small slice of your genome. It doesn't look at everything. So we do more clinical testing and I tend to do that and focus on that. So there may be, there's so much going on right now in the space. I may not be familiar with it, but there probably are companies that are looking at inflammatory genes that are

available to consumers. The question is, what do you do with that information? And I think that's the challenge for people is how do you change your diet? What supplements you take? What do you avoid? I mean, it gets a little granular. So it's usually better to work with someone who's experienced to understand these tests, how to mitigate your risk and to, to create a lifestyle, uh, that actually helps to reduce inflammation. Mark. Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. A lot of material in here on the topic of inflammation. People are so curious about this topic and have so many questions.

And I think that we touched on at least a good chunk of those questions. I'm going to pass over to you for some concluding thoughts and to wrap it up. Well, and I'm so happy we got to talk about this, Drew, because inflammation is the final common pathway for almost all chronic disease, including depression, including Alzheimer's, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and the list goes on and on. And it is our modern scourge. And if you want to learn more about it, I encourage you to check out that book, Inflamed, which is about not only the biology of inflammation, but the sociopolitical, economic drivers of inflammation, which is a little, you know, more on the edge, but is a very important book. And I would say that if you feel inflamed or if you have any diseases or problems that you should get checked out and go down the rabbit hole and figure out why, and not just sort of accept that this is your fate or accept that

you have to take these drugs that shut off inflammation and learn a little bit about how functional medicine can help to unravel the causes and create a plan for you that is anti-inflammatory in your life. If you're listening and you love the podcast and you really know someone or you have inflammation, share this with your friends and family. We'd love to get everybody to know about this. Leave a comment. How do you manage your inflammation? What tricks have you learned?

And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's this. Leave a comment. How do you manage your inflammation? What tricks have you learned? And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And 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. And 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. Hi, everyone. 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 other 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 their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner

who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.