The Dr. Hyman Show - 7 Signs You Need A Health Makeover

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

This episode is sponsored by Rupa Health and InsideTracker.   So many of us are just managing to get by day-to-day. Maybe you’re super sluggish, your digestion is off, you can’t think clearly, you have brain fog, or just feel run down. Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet solution. There is, however, a systems-based approach—a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to feeling this way.    In this episode, my guests and I dive into this topic and explain the importance of what you put at the end of your fork, improving your sleep, how the gut can affect your health, and so much more.  Lewis Howes is a New York Times Bestselling author of the hit book, The School of Greatness. He is a lifestyle entrepreneur, high-performance business coach, and keynote speaker. A former professional football player and two-sport All-American, he is a current USA Men’s National Handball Team athlete.  Shawn Stevenson is the author of the international bestselling book Sleep Smarter and creator of The Model Health Show, featured as the number #1 health podcast in the U.S. with millions of listener downloads each year. Shawn has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Muscle & Fitness, ESPN, and many other major media outlets.  Dr. Jay Lombard is an internationally acclaimed neurologist, author, and keynote speaker specializing in neuroimmunological conditions and medical mysteries. He was Chief of Neurology at both Westchester Square Medical Center and Bronx Lebanon Hospital and clinical assistant professor at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Stephanie Seneff is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She has a bachelor’s degree from MIT in Biology with a minor in Food and Nutrition Science, and a master’s degree, an engineer’s degree, and a PhD degree, all from MIT, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the author of a new book on glyphosate titled Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate is Destroying Our Health and the Environment. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured in a variety of publications and media.  Dr. Cindy Geyer received her bachelor of science and her doctor of medicine degrees, with honors, from the Ohio State University. She completed residency in internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y. and is triple board certified in internal medicine, integrative medicine and lifestyle medicine. This episode is sponsored by Rupa Health and InsideTracker. 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.    If you’re curious about getting your own health program dialed-in to your unique needs, check out InsideTracker and get 25% off here.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Doctors, yeah, a lot of the time I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food. Oh my God. Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food. And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. That's what I, food is the most powerful drug on the planet. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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and your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed into your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now they're offering my community 25% off at InsideTracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's Dr. Hyman. InsideTracker.com. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Sometimes you just know when your health needs a makeover. You feel like crap, can't sleep and have digestive problems that disrupt your day-to-day life.

These signs are your body's way of asking you to shift something to help you get back into balance so you can feel good again. On today's compilation episode, Dr. Hyman talks to Lewis Howes, Sean Stevenson, Dr. Jay Lombard, Dr. Stephanie Seneff, Dr. Elizabeth Boham, and Dr. Cindy Geyer. You'll learn about the importance of a clean diet, how your gut health impacts your brain function, what to do if you can't sleep, and much more. Let's jump in. What I realized is that, you know, I think many people who are sick do better when you take out certain things that can be inflammatory or high glycemic. So if you're, for example, carbohydrate intolerant and you're diabetic, which affects a lot of people, I talk about how do you find out if you're carbohydrate intolerant in the book, which is a questionnaire you can tell if you actually know if you're someone who's

carbohydrate intolerant, like someone who's gluten intolerant. That means if they eat a lot of starch, if they have like two cups of rice, even if it's brown rice or two cups of beans, it can adversely affect their sugar. So, I talk about like having less, like having smaller portions of beans and grains. Sure. And non-gluten grains in particular because gluten can be very inflammatory for many people. I think for some people who don't react to it, it can be fine, but not in large amounts. And then I think, you know, meat is the big issue, right?

So, meat is the big issue. So, should we be eating meat? We just had dinner the other night. Right. We both had meat, right? We had fish. We had fish, yeah. Black cod.

Yes. Which was awesome. I had a mahi-mahi. You had a black cod. Is that what it was? Yeah, I had the black cod. Yeah. Yeah, I had the black cod.

The guy next to me had meatballs. Yeah. The guy next to me had carne asada. But, you know, so the issues around meat also, I think, are everybody agrees, and fish, everybody agrees that if anybody eats meat, it should be humanely raised. It should be sustainably raised. It should be grass-fed. It should be not harming the environment.

The ethical and the environmental issues around animal eating are big. And they're real. I mean, I have many Buddhist patients. I have a Buddhist monk who's like an abbot who's a diabetic. And he's never going to eat an animal. So I need to help him understand how he's never going to eat an egg, how to eat a higher fat protein diet, which is low glycemic. So we can do that.

Okay. Right? So more nuts and seeds, less rice, more beans. There's strategies for doing that. And he did great. He lost 35 pounds, reversed his diabetes, and now I have tons of bun people you know praying for me that's great yeah and uh and then the the uh the meat thing is tricky because uh you know it's also um an environmental risk if you're eating factory farmed animals there's antibiotics in that and there's a runoff from the pesticides

and fertilizers that damages our water supply and rivers and lakes there's uh climate change that happens from the methane produced it's more more toxic to the environment than carbon dioxide there's so and there's high energy use one-fifth of all our fossil fuels are used for growing animals for human consumption uh you know our water is is being used up at incredible rates for feeding animals. There's basically, I think, 70% of all water use. And there's basically only 5% of the world's surface is fresh water. It's usable.

It's fresh water. 1% is in Russia. Wow. And at least 4% for the rest of us. And 70% of that is being used for feeding animals for human consumption so there's real environmental issues so i think you know a factory farming just should be not supported in any way we need to change that and that means we need to to change our patterns of consumption around me we need to downsize our meat consumption i call it having condom meat condom meat condom meat as

opposed to like a condiment. Like condom meat. You know, it should be a side dish or a dressing if you're going to eat it. Sure. And I think. Not a full plate of steak, you mean? You know, I think there's three issues with me, right? There's environmental issues.

There's moral issues. And there's health issues. So, we kind of talked about the moral. I think that's. Yeah. People are entitled to their beliefs. And they should be able to Follow whatever they want And be healthy

The environmental issues are real And I think everybody would agree Whether they're paleo-vegan That we need to stop Harming the environment And I think even if you're not paleo-vegan Everybody really believes that In fact the dietary advisory committee

That was advising the government Said we should limit meat consumption Because of the environmental impact. Right? Now, if you have grass-fed meat, if you have sustainably raised meat, you can't, it's not as abundant. You can't produce as much. And so, we all have to eat less of it. Right.

And it's more expensive. So, I mean, that's okay. And I think that from a health point of view, when I really looked at the literature, and I did this in Eat Fat, Get Thin, I looked at all the research that I could find on meat. Because I was like, well, I don't know. You want to know for yourself too. Yeah. I'm like, I'm recommending to my patients.

I'm a human too. And I want to live a long time. And I don't want to be doing something stupid. Yeah. So, I wanted to find out what does the science tell us about meat? So, you did all the research. So, I looked at all the research and I wrote 8,000 words in the book on meat.

Wow. That's a lot of research in there. And I address all these issues, you know, environmental, moral, and the health issues were quite interesting. You know, when we look at the studies on meat

and anybody can quote anything saying anything, right? Right. So you want the paleo people like a meat's healthy, here's all the research and the vegan, like a meat's going to kill you,

here's all the research. So it's like, and then you're at the average Joe, you're totally confused and your average doctor, you're totally confused because we had no training in nutrition and they haven't done the research themselves no they're going off of their opinion or their theory yeah they're like average people like the rest of us in terms of nutrition science they don't know because it's not what we learn right i mean i i just am at cleveland clinic and

we implemented a nutrition curriculum for the first time in the medical school there that's integrated in which is so great and that's all i i helped team ryan who's a congressman from ohio introduce him he's great he's been on your show he's been on here yeah he's great you know introduce a bill called the enrich act which was a bill that is funding 15 million dollars to fund nutrition in medical schools nutrition education for doctors That's what we need the most because doctors, a lot of the time I feel like could heal a lot of their patients through food. Oh my God.

Well, food is the cause of most chronic disease. It's the cure for most chronic disease and yet doctors know nothing about food. And they just medicate a lot of the time. I mean, listen, it's so bad. I mean, I use food as medicine. Food is the most powerful drug on the planet. I mean, that's why last week I was in Cleveland at the hospital teaching 300 black women how to cook in a cooking

class like that's what doctors should be doing because that's how i'm going to get that's real medicine that's real medicine now just just a quick side note what is your involvement with what is functional medicine and what is your involvement at the cleveland clinic can i finish my meat yes go ahead i was still i was still rolling on the meat and then we'll talk about functional medicine and then we'll talk about functional medicine, and then we'll talk about Cleveland Clinic. Perfect, perfect. Because people want to know. They're like, well, what about meat?

They're probably listening. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So the science- 8,000 words. I'm not going to give you 8,000 words, but I'll give you a few hundred. Perfect. So the science of meat was fascinating.

So when I looked at the studies that showed it was harmful, here's what they were. They were mostly population studies, meaning they looked at groups of people follow them and then they ask questions of them what did you eat last year what did you last week what did you last you know month you know and they basically do these food frequency questionnaires and then they correlate that with the risk of disease and i try to control for all the confounding factors but it's very tough so the people who ate meat yeah they had more heart disease and more cancer and more death but what else was they're smoking they're drinking exactly so sleep right exactly stressed out so if you look at the data they ate 800 more calories a day yeah they almost eat no fruits and vegetables

tons of sugar get tons of sugar and processed food lots of fried foods drank more smoked more didn't exercise and didn't take any vitamins and minerals well guess what they weren't as healthy as the other people. So, most of the studies were like that. Now, there was a few studies that were interesting I found. One was a study of 11,000 people who shopped at health food stores. And they found there were like a lot of vegetarians and a lot of meat eaters. So, who are the people who are like healthy meat eaters who only eat grass-fed meat or

who... Because most of these studies were not on grass-fed meat either. They were on factory farmed meat, right? So, then again, how do you generalize that? Sure. But then there were these 11,000 people and they followed them for many years and they found that the meat eaters and the vegetarians, there was no difference in their health outcomes. Exactly the same.

So, if you're a meat eater who basically eats a healthy diet and has grass-fed meat versus a vegan or vegetarian, no difference in your health. And you have a healthy lifestyle. Healthy lifestyle, then there's no difference so there's other factors like how it affects your gut flora and so on and i think you know those are more complicated issues i address all of them in the book but at the end of the day i think it's okay if you have no moral issues and you can eat sustainably raised meat and not in great quantities and as part of your diet i think it's okay yeah bottom line so what does your daily diet look like oh god doctor himself so today i had uh i was uh uh i had a i had a protein shake because i went to this friend of mine's uh company called essential

foods living foods and he had this uh it was like a hemp uh coconut chiainga, like coconut cream, like protein powder with lots of, yeah. And I had a couple of that with a spoon of coconut butter for fat and almond butter for fat and blended that up. That was my breakfast. And then lunch was a big salad with lots of avocado, olive oil, and some wild salmon, which has fat. So that was, and dinner I haven't had yet. So, and dinner I'll usually have, you know, a small wild salmon, which has fat. So that was, and dinner I haven't had yet. So.

Cool. Awesome. And dinner I'll usually have, you know, a small piece of protein and like I'll put 75% of my vegetable plate is vegetables. Really? So if I go out to eat, I'll order like three sides of vegetables. Right. And if you look at your plate, you know, by volume, 70 or 80% of your diet should be plant foods and non-starchy veggies, right?

Not potatoes. Right. And by calories, it should be like 50 to 60% fat. But fat doesn't take up a lot of space, so you can get a lot of calories in a little space and still eat like you put a lot of olive oil in your thing or even coconut butter. So you don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat. And the trick is I don't have to worry about it. You just have to eat.

And, you know, the trick is I don't worry about how much I eat. I just worry about what I eat. And I make sure I have stuff. Like, I know that I'm going to be, like, here and I know how long it's going to be. So, I always bring stuff in my pocket. Almond butter. Almond butter. So, I just have a pocket. I know I'm never going to be in a food emergency.

So, I'm not going to have to eat something crappy. And I think, you know, I eat very little grains, very little beans. I do eat them. I eat mostly vegetables and some low glycemic fruit and I eat lots of nuts and seeds and I eat, you know, good quality fish and animal protein. What's low glycemic fruit? What does that include? So, I'm not eating like tons of pineapple and grapes and, you know, like those are sugary

things. Gotcha. And I eat like berries and I eat, you know like those are sugary things and i eat like berries and and i eat you know um a lot mostly berries and then like i'll eat like an apples or pear sometimes or kiwis or grapefruit or mangoes or papaya things like nice okay uh so let's go back to functional medicine yeah what does that actually mean so functional medicine is is compared to regular medicine yeah yeah well you know i don't know if people listening really have a great understanding of what's happening

right now in science, but it's profound that the shift that's happening in our understanding of the body is, it's like Columbus going, hey, the earth isn't flat. Wow. Right now, the last few years. It's just like the last decade or two with our understanding of the human genome, of systems biology, of the body as a biological network, as a system. It's like an ecosystem where everything's connected working together and so the way we organize medicine is

according to these organs you know you've got your cardiovascular system your neurologic system your gi system your you know and so you go to all these specialists right and everybody treats their part of your body if you have a migraine we're actually learning that might be related to gut flora but or if you have heart attack, we're actually learning that it might be related to gut flora. Wow. Or if you have heart attack. I mean, now we know that you might be getting cancer because of your gut bacteria. Well, no oncologist is asking you what's going on in your gut microbiome.

And so, now we know, for example, like the microbiome is a great example of this disruption that's happening in healthcare. You know, the microbiome, which is your gut flora, it's really, it's like 10 times as many cells as your own cells. It's a hundred times as much DNA as your own DNA. So, we're kind of lazy. We have about as much DNA as an earthworm. Okay. But we borrow the DNA of the microbes in our gut to do things for us. And we borrow things from plants to do things for us, like, like for example glucosinolates so the the microbiome is this huge thing that's got two to three million genes we only have 20,000 genes and it regulates your weight you can swap out poop from a thin person into someone with

diabetes and reverse it right wow amazing we've seen we've seen people i've heard stories of fecal transplants not only curing things like that, but like autoimmune diseases. Really? Parkinson's and people with MS and like crazy stories that I'm starting to hear. And there's research now going on aggressively in looking at fecal transplants for all sorts of diseases. Transferring poop from one person to another. Yes. What is that?

How do you do that? What's that process? Well, they collect the poop. There's actually a… I've never heard of this. Yeah. You've never heard of this? Never heard of this. Yeah, you've never heard of this? Never heard of this. Oh, my God.

This is huge. So, the... What's it called? Fecal transplant. Okay. FMT, fecal microbial transplant. The way it came about was some doctor had a bright idea that there was this condition called C. diff, which is an infection of the intestines, happens after antibiotics, is

life-threatening, and there's a huge amount of people that are resistant to antibiotics. All the antibiotics in our feed, in the animal production. So the drugs don't work. People die. Wow. And somebody thought,

well, gee, if I put the poop from a healthy person into a sick person, let's see what happens. And the doctor did it, and the person was cured. Shut up. 98% effective. 98% effective. How do you do this so understand this process you want to get into it give me the 10 so basically they take like they take a fecal

trans uh transplant specimen like a donor specimen from a healthy person and they screen them for all sorts of diseases and then they spin it up with some saline and then they inject it in with a straight catheter or a colonoscope and then they're actually also like shit it just heals inside or what's it do it when it goes in it's like it's like massive probiotics right oh interesting yeah and so like a diffusion of probiotics and also they're actually pills now they actually are making special encapsulated pills poop pills and it's not i mean mean, this is published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I'm not talking about like stuff that's wacky. I'm talking about serious medicine that people are doing.

But it's not just for that. Now they're looking into for all sorts of things. People are cured right after one infusion. Yeah, it's amazing. So functional medicine is really understanding the body as a system and network and understanding that the focus should not be on treating disease,

but on creating health. So it's the science of creating health. It's the ultimate biohacking tool. And it's interpreting all the data and the stories from your body that it tells through testing we do. For example, you don't have to do testing, but you can look into the body and look at your immune function and allergies and your gut flora and toxins and nutritional status. It's like doing a soil sample.

So I'm like a soil farmer, organic soil farmer, rather than an industrial agriculturist. I don't put all these chemicals on my plants to make them better, like herbicides and pesticides. I create a healthy soil, and then the disease doesn't occur, right? You just, disease can't land in a healthy soil. So that's exactly what functional medicine is. We help people get in balance.

We take away the things that cause balance. We take away the things that cause imbalance. We put in the things that help create balance. So for example, I had a woman come, she had a whole list of problems. That's why I call myself

a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. So she had like psoriatic arthritis, was on a drug that cost 30 grand. Oh my gosh.

Called Stelara. And still was miserable. She also was overweight, had prediabetes, migraines, sinus problems, irritable bowel, reflux, depression, insomnia. She had was overweight, had pre-diabetes, migraines, sinus problems, irritable bowel, reflux, depression, insomnia. She had, like, this whole list of things.

Of course, she saw all these specialists, the sinus doctor, the migraine doctor, the autoimmune doctor, the skin doctor, the depression doctor, the gut doctor. Like, you know, everybody's treating her with their best practices. Their best drug probably. But, I mean, she's being seen at the top medical center. Yeah. Right? They're not doing bad seen at the top medical center. Yeah. Right? They're not doing bad medicine.

They're doing standard of care. In fact, they're doing excellent standard of care. Right. But the standard of care is not the way we're going to fix these problems. It's outdated or it's not. It's not. It's totally outdated. So rather than thinking about how all these were separate, I said, how are these all connected?

Interesting. Right? How are these all connected? And so there were connections. It was all inflammatory and i said well why don't we put you on an anti-inflammatory low glycemic diet the pegan diet basically right took away anti-allergens and i and i cleaned out her gut because her gut was causing huge bloating and she had yeast reactions on shit like vaginal yeast and anal yeast and itching and itchy ears and yeast everywhere from the yeast on her mouth and thrush and so i gave her an antifungal i gave her stuff

to clear out the bad bugs in her gut i put in good bugs i put in enzymes i put in things to heal and gut the gut lining i gave her fish oil vitamin d just some basic stuff probiotics yeah but it's really eliminating eliminating the bad foods eliminating the bad bugs in her gut and putting putting in new bugs and putting in nutrients to help her body heal, two months later, she comes back completely symptom-free. No way. No more arthritis, no more $30,000 drug, no more skin psoriasis, no migraines, no sinus problems, no irritable bowel, no reflux, no depression, no insomnia, and she lost 20 pounds. It was all from food.

Totally. And what was food and her gut flora. Right. I focused on her gut flora. Why? Because 60% or 50% of the immune system is in the gut. Interesting. Yeah, why?

Why is it in the gut? Why is it there? Because you're sticking pounds of food, of foreign material every day in your body. You've got to fight it off in your gut. Yeah, and you've got, you know, you've got all the bugs in there and poop. It's like the danger zone, and poop it's like it's

like the danger zone right it's like you're you're like and it's one cell away because you're one cell away from a sewer every minute really yeah it's one cell between you and that mass of food and poop right so your immune system is like if anything happens like right there so when people have autoimmune disease it's often a gut issue it's often a gut issue people didn't know this before did they no no so now like now all this is really coming to light and functional medicine is the operating system to interpret the data. It's a new set of lenses to think about how to solve it. And it's a system of treatment that helps people get back in balance. That's what's powerful. And then at Cleveland Clinic, you know, the CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I

call him the Wayne Gritsky of healthcare. He goes where the puck's going to be, not where it is. Smart. Right? And he basically came after me to go set up a center there. Functional medicine center. Yeah. I'm like, I'm not going to Cleveland Clinic.

It's like a, you know, it's like, I'm not going to go to a place where I'm going to have to bang my head against the wall, where it's traditional medicine, where they don't get this, where they're in the dark age. It's also known as one of the top hospitals in the world. Of course, but it's the top hospital in the old model. Yes. So I'm like, but he knows what's happening. He sees where it's going. He knows what's happening.

He's like, we need this here. Wow. And so he's investing tons of money, millions and millions of dollars building this. We're building an 18,000 square foot facility. We started with a little space and we just outgrew it. We're hiring doctors. I have an interview with the doctor right after this. And we're basically growing. We're doing research in all sorts of conditions. We're changing medical school education. We're changing policy. We're doing community work. So, he's really putting us on the map in the traditional world. Because he's going to go out of business if he doesn't start doing this.

But what's amazing to me, Lewis, I thought when I got there, people would be skeptical, negative, make it difficult for me and my team there. But it's the opposite. And last week when I was there, I had two deans of medical schools, two chairs of depart, two chairs of institutes, which are like big deals. Right.

And another doctor as patients. No way. Yeah. They're coming as patients. They're not being cured with the medicine. The executive team, the C-suite team, uh,

is sending all their family members to come see us. About 20 some years ago, I was quite ill. I went from being very, very healthy, bike 100 miles a day being able to remember 30 patients at the end of the day without any notes and dictate all their charts to not being able to walk up the stairs not being able to remember where i was at the end of a sentence and i didn't know what happened to me i was 36 years old and my whole system collapsed i'd been a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. I ran five miles a day. I ate a healthy diet, which I thought was a healthy diet.

And something just went terribly wrong. And I had to literally reverse engineer my health because every single doctor told me that I was depressed or I had chronic fatigue or I had fibromyalgia or whatever I had. And no one actually helped me figure it out. And it turned out that my entire system broke down from living in China, having mercury poisoning. I had mercury poisoning because I lived in China, which has the worst pollution on the planet, and I have poor genes that help me detoxify, so I couldn't get rid of the toxins. And in that discovery of my biology, I literally cell by cell, molecule by molecule, system by system, had to understand what was going on. My immune system broke down. I developed sores and rashes all over my body. I developed terrible gut issues. I had

digestive bloating and diarrhea for years. I had severe muscle pain and aches. I had cognitive dysfunction. It's like I couldn't remember anything, focus, pay attention. I was depressed. It was like I had depression, ADD, and dementia all at once. And I was desperate to figure out what was going on. And through my own unwinding of my biology, I was able to figure out this model of functional medicine. And I found pioneers in that field. And I went and learned at their feet. And I began to discover there was a whole field of thinking that was reorganizing our thoughts because we don't actually have a model to describe disease today. It's really backward. For example, today we're learning that the microbiome has the capacity to connect to so many different diseases.

It can cause heart attacks, right? The bacteria in your gut are a whole living organism that can create so many diseases, heart attacks, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, allergies, asthma, fibromyalgia, all these things can be the result of changes in your gut flora. And yet, when you go to the doctor with arthritis, they don't ask you about your poop, right? When you go to the heart doctor, they're not asking you about what's going on with your gut flora. You have three pounds of bacteria in there. There's ten times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. There's a hundred times as much bacterial DNA in you than your own DNA.

And that's dynamically interacting with you. You have 20,000 genes. You have about 2 million bacterial genes. And they're dynamically interacting with you. You have 20,000 genes. You have about 2 million bacterial genes. And they're dynamically interacting with you all the time. And when you don't understand that the definitions that we have of disease don't make sense, we can't fix it. So I was able to repair my biology, to fix myself, and to transform my biology by using the science of functional medicine, which helps me map out the way the body actually functions. And instead of looking at the signs and symptoms and the organs at the top of the tree, I go down into the roots. What are the fundamental drivers of disease? What are the underlying causes of illness? How do we actually get to what's making us sick? And for one in two Americans,

pre-diabetes, and about 70% of us obese. And by the way, this is not just an American problem. 80% of the world's type 2 diabetics are in the developing world. China's number one, India's number two. The Middle East has the most per capita diabetics, about one in four to one in three of the population is type 2 diabetic. So we really need a new way of thinking about this. And so I, rather than going down to the branches and the leaves and the organs, I go down into the roots and I look at the fundamental factors that are driving disease. What's the underlying lifestyle factors, the environmental factors? What's your diet? What's your stress level?

What are the ingredients for health? So it's actually quite simple. Rather than just focusing on the symptoms, I go to the cause. And this is a timeline we use to help us map the story of your life. I want to know what happened in the womb. I want to know what happened with your mother, whether she was sick, whether she took antibiotics, whether she had immunizations, what she ate. I want to know what happened at your birth. Was it a C-section? Was it something that had trauma? Were you breastfed or bottle fed? Did you have early antibiotics? All these things set up

the conditions for your life. And what were the insults or traumas along your life that led to you having this problem in this moment? And then we map this out in what we call the matrix. Now, this is the model that we use to basically biohack any disease. So people say, Dr. Hyman, do you treat X or Y? And I'm like, well, yes, I treat the human body. I don't actually treat disease. The extraordinary thing about functional medicine is that you don't have to know the disease that you're treating in order to optimize health. You follow this model, and you can see tremendous transformations in biology. For example, there was a guy who came in to see me I mentioned yesterday who had dementia. He was seven years old. He was pretty desperate. His wife was very upset and basically went from being a CEO of his company

to not being able to basically almost tie his shoes or function in any way, had to quit work, and was at home basically drooling and depressed and demented. And he came in and it turned out he had a whole series of problems that were causing his brain to not function properly. He had heavy metal poisoning because he lived in Pittsburgh and there was coal burning there in Pittsburgh because of the steel plants. He had insulin resistance or prediabetes because his diet was high in sugar and starch. He had severe gut issues. He had bacterial overgrowth and inflammation in his gut that was leading to his brain dysfunction because his gut bacteria weren't working. And he had a

bunch of genetic things that set him up for problems, problems with methylation and sulfation, which are these basic biochemical reactions that have to function for you to be healthy. And rather than say, I'm going to treat your dementia, I said, why don't we optimize your gut flora? Why don't we optimize your biochemistry and methylation with the right foods and nutrients? Why don't we fix the insulin resistance with the right higher fat, low glycemic diet? Why don't we help get rid of the heavy metals

and get your feelings replaced and chelate you and get you full of glutathione, all the things you need to upregulate your detox system? And I said, let's see what happens. Well, he had this extraordinary transformation where he went from being basically demented and depressed to being back to work functional and happy again and having his ability to be in life.

And his grandkids weren't scared to be around him anymore. And it wasn't because we were treating the dementia. I was simply optimizing his biological systems using this model. So on the left-hand side, there's the predisposing factors, all the triggers. And on the bottom, there's the underlying fundamental lifestyle factors, which are all the things that help us to provide inputs into the body to create health. So Dave talks about biohacking and all these little things that he's tweaking in the body. It's all based on this model. His next book is on mitochondria, which is one of the systems, energy system. JG talks about eliminating the seven foods. That's based on dealing with your gut and food sensitivities and allergies that create inflammation in the body. We're all

basically coming from the same paradigm. And yet, this is not something that's something I invented or that it's a new trick or technique or some little biohacking thing. This is the future of healthcare and medicine. This is actually now being invited into the center of Cleveland Clinic where the CEO of one of the greatest healthcare centers in the world has invited me to come in and create a model that transforms healthcare because he knows that we can't solve our current problem of chronic disease using the same system. And it's very powerful. So I want to sort of go into a little bit of a story about a recent experience I had and then share with you why I think it's not the whole story. I went to this place called Health Nucleus, which is part of the Human Longevity Institute,

which is started by Craig Venter. Now, Craig Venter is the guy who decoded the human genome. He basically took our genes, and he analyzed every gene of his own, sequenced it, and he did it faster and better than the NIH, the National Institute of Health. And he did it for $300 million. And now, at Health Nucleus, you can get your genes decoded for $1,000. Soon it'll probably be $100.

And I went through an entire workup where I had my genome mapped. I had my metabolome mapped, my microbiome mapped. I had all sorts of blood tests, 20 vials of blood. I had a full-body MRI scan, a total measurement of my echocardiogram, my body composition. Everything was measured. And it was a lot of data. And the problem with a lot of data is that you have to make sense out of it. How does it connect? Where are the dots that connect everything together? Well, functional

medicine is the filter. And someone said to me, you know, how do you actually think about this differently? Well, if you think about physics, you know, we have laws of physics that can explain the workings of the universe, gravity, the rotation of the planets, all these phenomena that are quite extraordinary. We can interpret to the filter of math and physics. But human biology, we don't have any natural laws that we've discovered about how the human body works. It's very descriptive. It's like you have these symptoms, you have this disease. It doesn't talk about why or what the mechanisms are, what the causes are. So functional medicine is like the natural laws of biology and you can explain a whole host of different phenomena by means of a very few number of general laws. So when I went to Craig Venture's institute, I had this whole thing mapped out and

yet I got all this data and unless you have a filter to understand how it all connects and what to do with it, you can't actually create health. And so I kind of had my whole genome map. This is my genome here. This is all me. You can see everything right into me here. And what's more interesting to me than this is actually what I call the super gene. Now, the super gene is much more important, which is not what is your genome, but how is your genome working? What is causing genes to get turned on or off? You can't change your genes,

but you can change the expression of your genes. You can change how those genes work, which ones are turned on or off. And there are a whole host of things that influence that. And it's not just your genes. It's the food that you eat that changes your gene expression. It's your social interactions and connections that change your gene expression. We now know that if you have somebody who you're with and you have a deep heart connection with them and a positive interaction, you literally can change each other's gene expression in the moment.

And if you have a negative interaction, you can change your gene expression in the moment. The same thing with food. With every bite of food, you're changing your gene expression in the moment. The same thing with food. With every bite of food, you're changing your gene expression. So we talk about the exposome, which is what are your genes exposed to, right? It's the environment. Toxins and light and air and water and community and connection and food. All the inputs that we're constantly feeling, EMF, everything around us is always giving us input into our gene expression. That's called the exposome. And that accounts for over 90% of the result that we see as our phenotype, which is who we are in this moment, whether we're sick or healthy, is related to these inputs to our genes. So you have control over those inputs most of the time, and you can change your gene expression

very quickly. Someone said, you know, how can you reverse disease even at late stages? Is it possible? I said, well, yeah. I had a guy named George who came to see me. He was 300 pounds. He was 63 years old. He had heart failure, diabetes. He had angina. He had reflux. He had prostate problems, erectile dysfunction, and sinus issues, and, you know, all kinds of problems. I always say I'm a holistic doctor because I take care of people with a whole list of problems. So he said to me, can you help me? I said, yeah, I can help you, but you have to do everything I say. So he did everything I said. A year later, he was 300 pounds. He came back, he lost 150 pounds. Every single one of his diseases was gone. Now he's 70 something years old and he's starting a bathhouse in New

Mexico. So the power of biology to change at any age is really remarkable. You can reverse aging. And I see this over and over. So the super gene is your genome. It's your exposome. It's your microbiome, as I said, because your microbiome, those two million genes are constantly interacting with you and your own genes. And it's called the hollow gene. But it's also your nutrigenome. What are the foods doing that are affecting you? And how are those affecting your gene expression? It's your proteome, which are the proteins that are produced from your genes. Your metabolome, which is all the metabolites that are produced from your genes. I had my metabolome measured there. Instead of like 20 blood tests, there was 2,500 blood tests I had measured. So that's really more important is how are your genes being

influenced and how do we map all those influences in a system that makes sense? That's what functional medicine is. It's sort of an operating system. It's a way of thinking. It's not a new test or modality or specialty. It's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of disease. So this is some of my genes here. You know, I was happy that I had more genes than mostly anybody else. I had over 7 million or 6 million variants. So we all have variations in our genetic code. I had more than average. I was happy about that. And I had a telomere length of 43 years, and I'm 56 years old. So that made me happy. So what I'm doing clearly is working. And I found out that I actually genetically am more diverse than I thought. I thought I was a Jew from the Middle East, and that's where I came from. But it turns out I am from the Middle East, I'm more diverse than I thought. I thought I was a Jew from the Middle East, and that's where I came from.

But it turns out I am from the Middle East. I'm also from Asia. I'm part Asian. I'm from West Africa. And I'm even half a percent Native American. And I'm one, I think, and a half percent Neanderthal. So that explains why I have a big butt like Chinese food, like sweat lodges, good filth deficiency, and I pull women's hair out.

And you can see, this is interesting, they can map your dad's, you know, ancestry. So my dad's from West Africa. My mom is from the Middle East and all over Asia. And here's my Neanderthal genes, you can see right there. It's kind of exciting. Now, this is my metabolome. Now, my metabolome is this map of 2,500 metabolites, but it's just data. How do you make sense out of all this data? How do you make big data small? How do you create big insights out of big data? Well, that's the beauty of functional medicine. So one of the things that I learned was that I have areas of my mitochondria that are not working as well. And I know that's probably true as a sort of consequence of the mercury poisoning and the illness that I had. And so I know how to tweak this by basically

biohacking my biochemistry and using a few nutrients to upregulate various pathways. Now, that's kind of cool. But at the end of the day, what really we need to know is how do we undo the things that often are happening to our biology? Now, this is Clayton. Now, Clayton was a little boy who had severe ADD. He also had asthma. He had anxiety. He had abdominal pain. He had anal itching. And that was just the A's. He had a whole list of other problems. He had eczema and hives and insomnia and muscle cramps. And he had severe ADD and dysgraphia. He couldn't write. His penmanship was so bad. So rather than give him Ritalin and rather than give him asthma medications and medications for stomach pain, he was on seven medications. You know, he was on a pill for every ill. Instead of asking the question,

why? These doctors are like, what disease do you have? What drug do I give you? And with Clayton, instead, I said, what's going on? Why is he having all these different diseases? Why does he have so many different problems at 10 or 12 years old? Why is this going on? So I began to dig into his story, and we found all sorts of imbalances in his biology. We found that he had severe gut issues. He had overgrowth of yeast in his gut from eating a diet that was full of sugar and processed food and taking antibiotics for years. He had lead poisoning from having lead in his environment. He had severe nutritional deficiencies, which were from his diet. He ate a processed food diet, processed meats, lots of sugar, trans fats. He had trans fats. He had

no omega-3 fats. He had low levels of zinc, magnesium, antioxidants. He had low levels of B vitamins. And we were able to map all this stuff out. He had food sensitivities. He had reactions to gluten. He had all this total system breakdown. So rather than treat his ADD and rather than treat his asthma or his irritable bowel or his hives or his eczema or his anxiety with all these different drugs, which is what we learned to do in medicine, I simply got his system in balance. And what was really shocking to me, this is sort of when the light bulb went off in my head, this was his handwriting when he came in to see me. He was 12 years old. You couldn't read anything, right? And after two months, his mother brought his homework back and it looked like this.

Now, I didn't try to biohack his handwriting or treat his brain. All I did was basically take out the things that were creating imbalance and put in the things that were creating balance. So it's really a very simple equation. When you want to create health, if you want to biohack your health, it's actually quite simple. I only ask two questions when someone comes to the office to see me. One is, what do I need to take away that's bothering this person? Is there something that's pissing their system off, that's irritating them. That doesn't work for them. That isn't right. That I need to remove. And it's a short list. These are the causes of disease. It's toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet, stress. There's five causes of all disease. And those interact with your genes

to create imbalance. And then there's ingredients for health. What are the ingredients for creating a healthy human? I mean, whoever here is in healthcare, you probably didn't have a class in school that says creating a healthy human 101. Did you? Probably not, right? So we have to actually go back and say, well, what is it that creates a healthy human? What are the inputs that create health? I mean, if you have a racehorse, you know how to get that horse to a high performance level. You have to feed it the right food.

You have to exercise it the right way. Get it the right amount of rest. All those things are scientifically designed to create phenomenal performance in racehorses. But we don't treat ourselves that way. I mean, you know, I mean, most of the stuff that we eat, we shouldn't even be considered food. It's like a food-like substance. So with ingredients, we have to think of what are they? It's the right food. You know, when you heard a little bit about it just before, about what our indigenous foods were, it's just low-process, real, whole, fresh food. It's low in sugar, high in the right fats. I've written a dozen books about it. It's pretty straightforward. Everybody has the basic same concept of what is a healthy diet. The second is the right nutrients. It's also light and air and water. You're going to get a lot out

this afternoon. And love and connection and community. All those are ingredients for creating a healthy human sleep, restoration. And when we don't have that input, we actually get sick. Now, with this kit, I used a powerful new drug that I didn't tell you about fully. This drug has the power to optimize dozens of hormones, to improve the expressions of tens of thousands of genes, to optimize hundreds of thousands of protein networks, to balance your immune system and cytokines, to optimize your gut flora, and it works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug I ever

discovered. It has no side effects, since available to almost anybody on the planet. You know what drug it is? Love. Well, it could be love. It's actually food. Food is the most powerful drug. It's not like a drug. It actually is a drug. And if I had to go to a deserted island, I only had one drug to use. It would be this drug to reverse disease. It's the most powerful drug. I wrote something called the 10-Day Detox Diet, and in that program, I basically synthesized functional medicine. I eliminated the foods that create disease, put in the foods that create health, and gave people a few simple practices to do. In 10 days, their scores on the FLC quiz, which is when you feel like crap, went down by 62%. That means all diseases improve. Migraines, asthma, irritable bowel, depression, joint pain, insomnia, anxiety,

whatever it was. Autoimmune disease. One guy came up and said, I have rheumatoid arthritis. In 10 days, I feel better. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug. I had one woman said, Dr. Hyman, I had type 2 diabetes. I got off 56 units of insulin in three days. How is that possible? Another one said, I've had lifelong depression, on and off medication, in and out of psychiatric hospitals in three days. I don't feel depressed for the first time in my life. Is that possible? I said, yes, it's possible because food is the most powerful drug on the planet. And it's not just calories. Food is actually information. It's literally instructions, like code. So you can upgrade or downgrade your biological software by what you put in your mouth every day. So next time

you take a bite of food, just remember that it's not energy. It's not just fuel. It's actually instructions. It's information. And what do you want to be telling your body to upgrade or downgrade your biological software? Now, there's one more thing I want to share with you, which is, yes, food is medicine. And yes, we can understand functional medicine and go into the details of biological networks and understand how everything connects together. And I've spent my life studying biochemistry and physiology and genetics and the connections and the patterns and everything. And I've seen more data than most physicians because for 20 years, I've had a unique practice where I've

been able to do $5,000 worth of testing on almost everybody and see millions of data points on tens of thousands of people and look at the patterns and connections. And I was just so focused on this. And then one day the earthquake in Haiti happened and it changed everything for me. To make a long story short, I basically ended up in Haiti after the earthquake. And it was pretty intense. We arrived in this massive destruction in the main hospital. And I met a guy named Paul Farmer. Paul Farmer is an extraordinary man who went to Haiti when he was in medical school in one of the poorest countries in the world. It's the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where most people live on less than a dollar a day and don't have clean water or sanitation. and most people have given up on these people because

they had tb and aids and there was no way to treat these people because you need complicated drug regimens and he said no no we can help these people we can solve this problem what seemed insoluble we can solve and it wasn't by better drugs or surgery that paul fixed these people it was by the power of each other. He called it accompaniment. We accompany each other to health. He used friends, neighbors, community health workers that he trained who were just their neighbors to help each other,

to go to each other's houses and make sure they had enough food to eat and water to drink and took their pills on time and had a place to sleep and just basically took care of each other. And it was through the power of that social connection that was able to drive this transformation. It's been used for the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Foundation. It wasn't through better improvements in medicine. It was just through the power of our social connections.

And I realized that it wasn't our genetic threads that were making us sick. It was our social threads that were making us sick. That just as our social connections can make us sick, they can also make us well. I realized that this was also true of chronic disease. That actually not just infectious disease was contagious, but actually so was chronic illness. Diabetes is contagious. Heart disease is contagious. Obesity is contagious. And this work has been shown over and over to be true. This is the guy from Harvard named Chris Dacus, who's looked at the social networks and our patterns in life. And he's found that when you looked at huge amounts of data, that there are clusters of people who kind of group together in social networks that drive

disease. So he found that if you're overweight and your friends are overweight, sorry, if you're overweight, if you have a friend who's overweight, you're more likely to be overweight than if your family's overweight. If you have a friend who's overweight, is a close friend, you're about 170 times, 70% more likely to be overweight than if your sister or brother's overweight, you're only 40% more likely to be overweight. So it's those social threads that connect us that are more important than our genetic things. But there's also the happiness clusters. So people who actually cluster together and are happy together do better. So what really became evident to me was that we have to reframe our idea of how we change biology using the understanding of functional medicine and

biological networks. But we have to change behavior by dealing with the social drivers of disease. Because I know when I go out to eat with somebody, they're worried about what they're having for dinner, whether they're going to order dessert or not. And I don't have to say anything, right? Because it's that power of peer pressure. When I'm around Dave Asprey, I'm not going to be eating bread, right? So I think we all feel that experience.

So if your friends are having all these bad habits, you're going to have those habits. If your friends have good habits, you're going to have those habits. If your friends have good habits, you're going to have good habits. So I'm pondering all this. And then one day, this guy comes to my office who was very overweight. And this guy named Rick Warren,

who you might have heard of, he wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life, which sold 32 million copies. He put 10 million people in small groups around the world who live better lives. Purpose Driven Life, which sold 32 million copies. He put 10 million people in small groups around the world who live better lives, purpose-driven lives. And he was very overweight. He's like, I want to get healthy. Can you help me? I'm like, sure. So I said, let's have dinner afterwards. We had dinner. I said, tell me about your church, because I'm a Jewish doctor from New York. I don't know much about churches in Southern California. I said, what's going on with your church? He said,

well, we have 30,000 people. I said, wow. He said, we have 5,000 small groups that meet every week to live better lives. I'm like, oh my God. And the light bulb went off and I said, why don't we create a healthy living program delivered to these small groups and see what happens?

And we thought a few hundred people would show up. 15,000 people came to church. We had to turn 2,000 people away. They signed up for this program. We created a 40-day program, then a year-long program. In the first year, they lost a quarter of a million pounds. And all sorts of diseases went away, right? People's diabetes went away.

Their autoimmune disease went away. Their reflux went away. Their migraines went away. Their autoimmune disease went away. It wasn't because we treated disease. It wasn't one doctor treating one patient. It was one doctor, it was a couple of us. It was actually Dr. Oz, another doctor, Dr. Amen, and me. It was a Jewish doctor, Christian doctor, and a Muslim doctor. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. But it was quite extraordinary. So we wrote this book called

The Daniel Plan. I wanted to call it The Jewish Doctor's Guide for Christian Wellness. And it won the Christian Book of the Year Award last year, which is really cool. I think I'm the only Jewish guy to ever win the Christian Book of the Year Award. Well, there was this one other guy. There was one other guy. And I found this profound change because when people started to do this together, when they connected together, when they worked together and played together and ate together, everything changed. They changed what was acceptable in the culture. They no longer had ice cream socials and pancake breakfasts and donuts and soda everywhere.

It was like they were trying to get their people to heaven early eating all that stuff. I went on stage in the church. I said, listen, if you had Jesus come to dinner, what would you feed him, a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke? I said, listen, if you had Jesus come to dinner, what would you feed him, a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke? I said, listen, if you believe God lives in you, why are you feeding him crap? I said, what you have to eat is very simple.

You just leave the food that man made and eat the food that God made, right? Did God make a Twinkie? No. I actually have a slide in one of my lectures I put up, which is showing that label of a Twinkie. And I said, have a slide in one of my lectures I put up, which is showing that label of a Twinkie. And I said, if anybody can guess what this food is, I'll give you a thousand dollars. And nobody's been able to guess because you can't tell what it is if you cover up the

front of the package, because all the ingredients are the same processed stuff. Today, more than ever, there's an epidemic for sure with sleep deprivation and we're seeing this show its face in so many different areas. I think the first step is actually understanding the value of sleep. And so for example, you know, real talk, nobody's waking up in the morning, like, you know what, I want to look terrible today. You know, everybody wants to look good. And if we understood just how much our sleep quality affected affected our body composition i think it would start to push that conversation forward so there was a really cool study that was done so sleep and weight are connected oh my goodness university of chicago did a really

fascinating study so they took folks and they put them on a calorie restricted diet which is what i was taught to do in university setting which doesn't necessarily work by the way exactly but they put them on this calorie restricted diet. And during one phase of the study, they allow them to get eight and a half hours of sleep. So sufficient sleep, another study, another phase of the study, same people, same exact diet. They're not cutting any more calories. They're not exercising more or less, and now they sleep deprive them. So then now they're getting five and a half hours of sleep. They take three hours away. At the end of the study, they compiled all the data. And they found that when folks were getting a sufficient amount of sleep, they lost 55% more body fat just from sleeping.

Yeah. Right. And I didn't say weight. They lost actual fat mass. Not muscle. Which is crazy. I'm not saying you're doing like eight days a week CrossFit. Right. You're just sleeping better. Like how, I'm not saying you're doing like eight days a week CrossFit, right?

You're just sleeping better. And the question for me is immediately like, oh my goodness, how, how is that happening? And so it's during sleep that we release, this is crazy, melatonin, just super glorified sleep hormone, which it really isn't that. It's kind of a regulator of your circadian rhythms period but it actually is a really profound fat burning hormone as well so the journal of pineal research found that melatonin is that gland in your head that releases melatonin it's like the pineal gland correct which that's not the only place so we'll get back to that in a moment that's like your third eye

gland basically so the pineal gland and the response to light and you know all the artificial light and the fact it suppresses it it's about it has to have darkness right so the journal pineal research found that melatonin increases your mobilization of something called brown adipose tissue or brown fat and this is a type of fat that actually burns fat that increases your metabolism yes and the reason it's brown versus the white adipose tissue is kind of the stuff we think about when we're trying to get rid of fat that actually burns fat that increases your metabolism yes and the reason it's brown versus the white adipose tissue is kind of the stuff we think about when we're trying to get rid of fat brown adipose tissue is brown because it's so dense in mitochondria right these kind of energy power plants i know you've talked about many times on the show but it's such a metabolically active tissue and so if you're not getting adequate sleep you're not producing that hormone

nor you get your greatest secretion of human growth hormone during sleep. Yeah. And this is the most, it's also known as the youth hormone in a way. It's the repair hormone. Kids have so much HGH. This is why they have so much energy. It's muscle sparing. And also it's a big component of you healing and recovering.

And so you're missing out on that. And cortisol, that's another one. So if you're sleep deprived, one of the very first things we see is an increase in your cortisol levels. That's the stress hormone. Exactly. Exactly. And cortisol has this interesting ability to literally break down the muscle that you're

working so hard to build. It's terrible. Gluconeogenesis, a process called gluconeogenesis, break down your valuable muscle tissue and turn it into fuel because it's this stressed hyper alert cautious dangerous state your body thinks you're in because you're sleep deprived and i can go on and on i'll show them share one more stuff for the i always say stress is is bad because when you have high cortisol it does everything you don't want right it shrinks your memory center your brain causes alzheimer's it causes you to lose muscle and gain fat it causes your sex hormones to get screwy uh it has so many horrible effects and it's not worth getting stressed about stuff yeah it doesn't matter you know like stuff there's stuff that

does matter that you have to worry about but the truth is most of the things we react to and stress about are just our beliefs or thoughts they're not not really real, right? Yeah. And I even focused on that as well because a lot of folks have what we call clinically just a lot of inner chatter. You know, the brain is a very vocal and kind of noisy organ, you know? And so, the great thing is a lot of our needs are met, especially if people are listening to this right now. It's like the crazy ant that lives in your head, you know? Right. But we have so many things covered in our lives that our ancestors didn't have to worry about, but the human mind is so expansive. So we can manufacture things to worry about. And that worry can push us. And I often tell people, people coming into my clinic that you can overeat your way fat you can under exercise your way fat or

under move your way fat you can under sleep your way fat and you can also overstress your way fat for sure it has a huge component for our overall health and our body composition too so but i was going to share stanford university yeah they found that just one night of sleep deprivation has a dramatic effect on suppressing leptin. Yeah. Right. And that's that kind of glorified hunger hormone. I mean,

I'm sorry. Satiety, satiation hormone and ghrelin on the other side has this uptick and that's that hunger hormone. Yeah. Right. So just one night and I'll, and it makes you crave a ton of carbs.

I want to ask you this. I was going to say, I know you've been up late before, but I don't know if it's me or if anybody else listening have you ever been up at like two o'clock in the evening maybe at a party maybe just kicking back watching tv and you're like you know what i really want a salad right now nope no no if that's ever happened please inform me i don't get a craving for broccoli i want salty sweet crunchy like i want carbs yes yes because your brain is literally starving for glucose just one night of sleep deprivation we're seeing about a 14 reduction

in glucose reaching your brain yeah i know it's true i remember working many nights in the emergency room delivering babies being up all night and the next day all you want to do is eat carbs and sugar you know i'd go to mcdonald's and get the apple turnovers and the french fries it's like the middle of the night it was was the only thing that was open in the hospital. So, between, it was only closed between two in the morning and six in the morning. Otherwise it was open 20 hours a day. It was the only thing open in the hospital. Can you believe it? And I would go, you know, be sleep deprived and stay up all night. And I totally craved carbs. Wow. And you did that work on that food. And now what you're made of now and the work that

you're doing is just like exponential like you see that i thought about this the other day we're putting folks in space on vending machine consciousness right astronaut just imagine if we can get people on really healthy real food and what we can create as humanity it's exciting so what's exciting about your book about sleep is that you break it down. You talk about 21 strategies that are very specific to actually fix your sleep. Yeah. Because I'm sure many people listening, maybe even half or more, have sleep issues. Whether it's not enough sleep, whether it's disrupted sleep, whether it's poor quality

sleep, whether it's other more serious things like sleep apnea. People often don't know they have it. So can you walk us through some of the key strategies and and what really matters sure so i've been really working to press this into public awareness for about five years now and this was because seeing people in my office coming in and you know they're struggling with their blood sugar for example and we had about right around 75% success rate with, you know, getting folks off, you know, lisinopril and metformins and all this and working along with their doctors. Those are blood sugar and blood pressure pills, right?

Yeah. And here's the thing that 25% of folks who weren't getting those results, ironically, that would really bother me. And I know you've probably felt the same thing. Oh yeah. Yeah. Ironically kind of keep me up at night. It's that 20%. What are you missing? Right? And so it took about five years in practice, maybe a little longer before I had the audacity to ask, how was your sleep? And what people would tell me blew my mind. I couldn't believe they're even sitting there. And so, and this is another thing that we know is that folks don't really want to change too much to get the result they

want. And I knew that. And so I just dug into the research and I wanted to find clinically proven strategies that people don't have to turn their world upside down. And once I implemented those with the patients I was working with, it's like the floodgates would come off. The weight would finally come off. Their blood pressure would finally come down. Their symptoms of depression would start to dissolve. And I was just like, this is really something special. I need to tell more people about this. And so eventually it's compiled into

these 21 strategies. And for me, again, some of these things are going to be a reminder for folks today, but I want to talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of. And this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. So your poop and sleep are of your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. So your poop and sleep are connected? What a concept. In a way. Okay, let's dig into that one.

Don't do the two together. No, that's not good. You know, that's called accident city. That's going to blow people's mind and even my mind. Tell us how the microbiome and your gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it. Absolutely. So let's start with the basic component. And I know, again, these are going to be things people have heard about before,

probably on your show, but let's start with serotonin. Okay. So it's pretty well known. By the way, there's more serotonin in your gut than there is in your brain. Exactly. Upwards of 80 to 90% of your body serotonin is actually located in your gut, produced by your enterochromaffin cells, by the way. All right. So those are, those are special cells in your intestinal lining. Yes. I'm just translating all the big words. See, I like that. We're like flipping places because I would do this for you. So here's what's so interesting is that serotonin, we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep and our circadian rhythm. Serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin. So already right off the bat, your gut environment, these cells in your gut are helping to make

this compound that's related to your sleep quality. And with melatonin is what I want to liken it to. It's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered. You need melatonin to be produced and we'll come back to that. So's number one serotonin you can't just take melatonin i'll answer that in a moment okay that's tricky okay so well i'll just i'll just tell you so i looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that and this was just a theory that if you take supplemental melatonin it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself. And that's actually, I couldn't find that anywhere. There was no evidence of that.

What I did find was taking supplemental melatonin, taking too much or too frequently can downregulate receptor sites for melatonin. So your body can still produce it, but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get downreg regulated. So the key is there, but the lock isn't. Yeah. So we do need to be mindful of that and we can come back and talk about that. But here's the biggest, probably aha moment, hopefully of this episode is that it's not just serotonin is producing the gut. And so check this out. And I just came across this. I'm going to share this with you today. This was in the World Journal of Gastroenterology. Listen to this. They found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain.

Because you talked earlier about the pineal gland. That's what I was taught in school. It's produced by pineal gland in the story. This study found that you can actually have a pinealectomy, which is a removal your pineal gland which i don't recommend by the way don't do that but it's like a frontal lobotomy you know go there and you don't and you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut all right so you're a gut brain and a brain brain exactly and that that's that's something really important to understand too your gut is really it's often referred to as a second brain.

You know, we can call it the enteric nervous system. There's like 30 neurotransmitters, just like your brain. It's like a mass of nerve tissue. 60% of your immune system and most of the genes in your body as well. Yeah. That vagus nerve. So UCLA researchers found that the vagus nerve, which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating more, telling the gut what to do. 90% of those, the, the communication from those nerve fibers, from the vagus nerve to the brain is your belly, your gut telling your brain what to do in many

ways. Totally nuts. And the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed, not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation storage belly fat but it actually blocks your cells ability to burn calories because the nerves from the vagus nerve help you metabolize your food which is a relaxation nerve it also has the effect of of decreasing absorption of nutrients so not only are you not absorbing but your your metabolism just slows down which is amazing it's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function so profound but this is just getting out of that isolation thinking you know this is what i was taught in school as well it's like well that's functional medicine the body's a system yes everything is interconnected and it's like- Well, that's functional medicine. The body's a system. Yes. Everything is interconnected and it's just beautiful symphony if everything's working

well. So Caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect, they discovered that, and this was just, I mean, it's been around for years, but this is more of a recent like, okay, meta-analysis. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep- related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? How do we protect or support

our microbiome? And that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality. So let's just go through a couple. The biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up. All right. So one of those would be eating processed foods. So that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic opportunity bacteria. Right. So that's one thing, avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics. They have a place, but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles right and that's literally what when i was a kid just give them some antibiotics right we would even like if my mom had some antibiotics you know just totally negligent yeah give them whatever's in the cupboard also um pesticides herbicides uh rodenticides metals

yeah these things side literally means to kill by the way, but these have a pretty, because they're meant to kill small things. Guess what your microbiome is made of, you know? And so, and how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers, which also terribly disrupt your gut microbiome. Yeah. We're looking at that the wrong way as well. And so just avoiding those things, but also what I want people to do is support their microbiome by, you know, and this should be just Captain Obvious at this point. And me working at a university for so long as a strength and conditioning coach before I did my clinical work, I work with people from all over the world and I would ask them about their fermented foods and every culture had something.

Yeah. Right. So whether it was like some kind of kefir or like pickled whatever right and so making sure that we're getting a at least you know every couple of days get a serving in of some fermented food or beverage gotta eat the kimchi yeah i got a jar in my fridge i love kimchi and my my mother-in-law makes it for me and she's from kenya so they had like uh fermented um a fermented like kind of similar to kombucha like she knew about this like 20 years ago and i'm like what is this weird stuff she's growing in the kitchen it's freaking me out she had grass like first time i came to visit and they were growing grass you know like it was wheat grass but i was like hey why's your mom got grass in here she's like did she get it hi i didn't know so

anyways um we got a grass i didn't know but that is a big component here is like shifting gears and having a more targeted perspective about supporting that gut microbiome but also and this is a really cool takeaway for everybody today is making sure we're getting in servings of what i call good sleep nutrients every day. Yeah. What is that? Because eating for sleep, nobody really talks about that. So what does that look like? The first one I'd share, and this one is from the public library of science. And so they found that vitamin C, which we know about vitamin C, we tend to associate it with the immune system, right? It's a powerful antioxidant, but they found that folks in their in this particular

study that were deficient vitamin c had a tendency towards waking up more frequently and getting vitamin c levels elevated reversed their symptoms all right so that's just one example so i is the other one if you have a little fair and there's another one yeah that's oh my goodness that's huge and especially more so for women, it tends to be. And another one, this was published in the journal Sleep. This is the big journal. And what they found was calcium. And so this goes back to that story that I was told about calcium.

It is important for sure. But folks who are deficient in calcium had more interrupted sleep patterns as well. and so by getting those calcium levels up but how do we go about that i'll just pass it over to you yeah rather than drinking like homogenized glowing dark you know like from a mutant cow like what other sources of calcium calcium do we have oh my god you know it's when you look at the data on calcium it actually isn't as great as we thought for bones. But the best absorbability and use is actually from greens like arugula and greens that we can have dark green vegetables. Also, there's some great sources like tahini, which is basically ground sesame seeds. Also, different things people might like. I like which is sardines with the bones in them and salmon with the bones in them, like canned salmon.

Those are really great to eat because they have a lot of great absorbable calcium exactly calcium is kind of like an end product from this like biological transmutation so bones have a great source of it but you know people say well you don't you need you need milk i'm like well where do you think a cow gets their calcium from and has strong bones they're seeing a cow bone they eat grass and so it should eat grass anyway this is really fascinating process it's kind of like like a biological transmutation of sorts where certain things come together to create bone right so like you need silica you need boron boron right in k2 yeah all of these things come together to make this magic happen so by way, I want to give some sources with vitamin C. Obviously we know about citrus, um, fruits like strawberries, uh, sweet peppers, but there are these quote

superfoods as well. Like camu camu berry. Um, this might be the highest botanical source of vitamin C, uh, super tart, tangy fruit. It's like a Amazonian thing. Uh, amla berry, acerola cherry. Those are super, super high sources of vitamin C. Another one, and this was, this is the last one I'll share. There's a whole list in Sleep Smarter. So this was a study conducted by University of Oxford found that omega-3s can help folks to get deeper, more restful sleep. All right.

So it helps with those modulating those rhythms, which makes sense because it has to do with your brain. Yeah. Right. Your brain has these gates. modulating those rhythms which makes sense because it has to do with your brain yeah right your brain has these gates you know you have the blood-brain barrier but the gate allows in certain vips yeah and it's only like 30 things right and one of those is a mega although you can have a leaky brain and then you get more trouble oh my goodness you know about the leaky brain this is like you're

already you're getting into some territory here this is super fascinating stuff right leaky gut leaky brain who knew yeah right who knew so exciting and also there's some um research just came across the brain kind of has its own nerve um immune system in a way yeah it does it has its own lymphatic system which is like to clean the brain every night and guess how you do that sleeping yep it's 10 times more active yeah i mean we know if you if you don't sleep you're a much higher risk of alzheimer's because you can't clear out the garbage and your brain gets toxic yeah it's fascinating it's run by the glymphatic system yeah so that's like a little shout out to the glial cells that help to run it

the body is just incredible so eat plenty good good sleep nutrients every day magnesium though oh that was the last one actually okay i was like that's the first one i go to the patients this is the big one i was saving the best for last i first learned about the benefits of magnesium probably from you okay this was again like you've been talking about this for like 15 years i'm getting old and um i was like holy crap because it's responsible for so many biochemical processes. Oh my God, 300 enzymes. Yeah. And so what that means for people, it's just like, so magnesium is responsible for these,

well, now we know like over 325 processes. What that means is there are 325 things your body can't do or can't do properly when you're deficient on it. Yeah. And by the way, magnesium deficiency affects 48% of Americans. And it's caused by stress. Chronic magnesium deficiency. It's caused by stress.

It's caused by coffee, alcohol, and not having enough in our diet, which comes from mostly plant foods, beans and greens, nuts and seeds. Yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the things that we can do something about. But like you said, it's kind of like an anti stress mineral. Yeah. And so just the amount of stress that we're exposed, even even to even our environment is stressful. It's different. You know, we're indoors a lot more processed air and we're not getting access to sunlight. Like just our reality is more stressful. But then put on top of that are work demands, relationship demands. How would you know if you're magnesium deficient? You can get a test done, you know, but I really always... By the way, most of the tests are very inaccurate. Red cell magnesium is better, but it's mostly symptomatic. And actually the way we really have to diagnose it is called a magnesium load test where you give people a high dose of IV magnesium and then you collect the urine for 24 hours.

And if nothing comes out, it means their body sucked it all up. And if it all comes out, it means they have enough. So I think, you know, magnesium testing is tricky. So you got to go by the symptoms. Exactly. Exactly. That's the thing. And what I was going to say is I always err on the side of how do you look, feel and perform, you know, and in my practice, there were only a couple of supplements I would recommend. Magnesium was generally, and maybe for 80% of the people that came in, because there's such a tendency for people to be deficient in it. And so, but here's the issue. So food first, obviously, anything green is going to be a good source of magnesium. So just keep that in mind, kale, collard, mustard greens. But outside of that, supplementation can be tricky because we have this bowel tolerance yeah right so even if you take a little bit more than your gut can handle at that moment

and you might need to really get your magnesium levels up you're going to activate what we call clinically disaster pants which means the poop potentially pooping in your sleep yeah like the whole thing we this goes full circle accident milk and magnesia right magnesium citrus what they give people before there you go they have colonoscopies to clean out their bowels right it works so and there's different forms and some are going to be better for different people but what i i don't know if you've done this or looked into this but like topical magnesium yeah you can use topical magnesium yeah that's what i do even brought some with me when I travel, you know, keep it in my, in my bag and I love it.

I think it's fantastic. It's important. And people can, you know, overlook symptoms that are all caused by magnesium deficiency, right? Sleeplessness, insomnia, anxiety, palpitations, muscle cramps, menstrual cramps, seizures, you know, arrhythmias, palpitations, all those things are caused by magnesium deficiency. And it's interesting in medicine, we don't really think about it, but it's used as a quote drug in the worst cases because drugs don't work.

For example, preterm labor, someone comes in having a baby too early, you give them intravenous magnesium. Someone comes in and they're having high blood pressure and seizures in pregnancy, they give them intravenous magnesium. People have cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency pressure and seizures in pregnancy they give them intravenous magnesiums people have heart cardiac arrhythmias where their heart is beating crazy beats in the emergency room and none of the drugs work you give magnesium it's pretty interesting and it's something we use all the time in medicine we don't think about it in this way but it is probably one of the most powerful

things for sleep for people absolutely you're saying there's one cause which is c diff for all neurodegenerative diseases in order to that hypothesis, two things have to happen going forward. Two things. The first is we have to establish that there is C. diff in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Guess what? That study's been done. Yeah. It also showed that there was some...

Poop for brains. Poop for brains. Is that like a true website or something? I thought Rudy made that up. Poop for brains. brains well there's another way to say it but but more importantly clinically clinically i mean look people can say oh it's an epiphenomena right like the brain is you know already decomposing of course you can have the bacteria emerging when the person's dead they are argument right maybe it's not that clustering is causing the disease but it's just it's there for the ride as it eats your brain up after you're dead right that's that's sort of the meaning meaning they find an autopsy but maybe it's like it doesn't

mean that it was there when they were living yeah right so fair enough that what that means is that we have to demonstrate so they ran for the hills as soon as the person died. Is that it? I guess. I don't know. It's true. Probably unlikely, right? Yeah, unlikely. Exactly. Yeah.

But in fairness to that sort of counterpunch, what the medical community would ask for going forward is, especially clinically, if we make a decision that we think that this is definitely c difficile in you know a patient with a disease like alzheimer's right to make that conclusion clinically you have to have absolute 100 evidence that that bacteria is actually causing that disease with some with some you know yeah obviously not every disease is going to you know test positive and not only are is a challenge here that the majority of patients who test for C. difficile, who have dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and what have you, have negative tests for C. diff. In their stool.

In their stools, right. And so, people that are sort of looking at this picture with me, if you will, are saying exactly that. Well, it can't be C. diff because we're testing C. diff in the stool and it's not there. I say, well, guess what? It went uptown. Okay. It used to live downtown, but it likes uptown more. Why? Because A, we give them PPIs, which they love that alkalinic environment. Acid blockers. Acid blockers. Like Pepsid.

And what do we give them that they love most of all? Antibiotics. C. diff loves antibiotics. It's actually an antibiotic associated infection. Exactly. That's how I got it. It is, of course. I took an antibiotic for my bad tooth and I ended up getting C. diff.

Yep. I mean, if that's not a word of warning to all the listeners i don't know what it is yes exactly right c is basically it's called antibiotic associated c diff so i started asking patients with neurodegenerative diseases if they had a prodrome when they first started getting sick and all across the board i mean like symptoms that happened before they got of course well you ask you ask questions like that like i want to know like what they did as a as a baby basically you know even though they're 70s old why ask i don't know i've asked my mom that question but you know younger patients you could ask them that question because they're with their parents uh and i say to them you know i asked them

three questions i go did you have a lot of antibiotic exposure before you got sick sick 100 it's like not it's like it's like i could i know the answer for even ask the question it's just a question of how many antibiotics they had yeah and what course antibiotics they had and the second question that's worthwhile to ask clinically is do you have trouble actually mounting a fever so that's that's a that's a question that i was surprised by the answer that most i mean not most but most my patients basically have said no you know what i've i've noticed i really never get a fever i'm like oh okay so which is not necessarily a good thing that's right it's not a good thing at all because the only thing that actually will treat spores

right is is heat heat if you look at if you look that's why we get a fever right which is you get a fever because it's your body's mechanism for killing infections. I make a joke with people. I say them all the time. I say, name one disease that humans have cured. Cured. Like, oh, you know. And they always mention infectious diseases because that is the truth.

We've cured infectious disease. But the only thing that actually cures disease is our endogenous mechanisms. You know, fever actually, fever and sleep basically are the two endogenous mechanisms of holistic medicine. And endogenous means stuff that you do yourself, your body does itself. Your body's doing it for you. Yeah. But you have to help the body do that. You can't be staying up late and taking PPIs to watch, you know, Seinfeld episodes.

You can't have your like pizza followed by your Prilosec and stay up all night watching Game of Thrones. Correct. Now, in perfect disclosure, I've done all of those except I actually do eat the pizza when I'm watching those shows. I got to work on myself, basically.

Doctor, treat yourself. But anyway, yes. So this this whole conversation is fascinating to me because from a functional medicine perspective you know many roads lead to Rome in other words just because you know the name of the diagnosis of the disease you have doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you exactly and the truth is there can be 10 or 20 causes for the same disease. Right. And I think that's probably true even of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

I just want to make sure that we're not saying that every single person with Alzheimer's has C. diff. Right. Or that that's the cause because it could be something else. Exactly. It could be Lyme disease. 100%. It could be heavy metals. But the point is, no. Or it could be something else. Exactly. It could be Lyme disease. 100%. It could be heavy metals. But the point is, no, I think the sort of like the devil's in the details, if you will,

right? Meaning that, yes, I think there's very strong compelling evidence at this point that bacteria are the cause of neurodegenerative diseases. Not my research. Yeah. We talked about Rudy Tanzi, who's a Harvard scientist, one of the discoverers of some of the presenilin genes, which are the genes that show that people are at risk for early Alzheimer's.

He actually said they were discovering all these microbes in the brain, which we thought was sterile. And that we had this blood-brain barrier that protects us. And you're saying, and he's saying saying that that barrier is not always 100%. And that stuff can leak through. Not only can you have a leaky gut, but you can have a leaky brain. Look, bacteria, not to scare people, bacteria love the brain. Why?

25% of the body's glucose is used by the brain. They know where to eat. They're going to, you know, Le Pen or that fancy restaurant that's downtown. Like, everyone else is eating downtown. They're getting to you know le pen or the fancy restaurant is downtown like everyone else is eating downtown they're getting you know our brains they can bacteria live on ketones a hundred percent but not but not wait that's very important they prefer simple sugars why because they're lazy right they want you know they want instant gratification so they like sugar better than ketones like ketones and ketotic diets work for some of these neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and even LS and brain cancer. That's right.

That's right. And I think one of the mechanisms, to be honest with you, is that ketones actually improve, first of all, they improve mitochondrial function. But they're not a good substrate for bacteria. They're a great substrate for us bacteria don't like them because they like they like eating fast food basically yeah so eat them sugar and we eat fat that's right okay so so this is just a breakthrough idea and and this isn't just an idea you've actually treated patients using this approach you've seen some really extraordinary things. Yes.

So, can you share with us, you know, a little bit about this case you were sharing with me earlier about ALS, which is a horrible condition. Stephen Hawking had it. It was called Lou Gehrig's disease after the baseball player. Essentially, it's where your nervous system is affected by the killing of the neurons in your spinal cord, which makes you basically paralyzed. You get fasciculation, which is twitching. You eventually can't move your arms and legs. You're in a wheelchair.

You can't breathe. You need a respirator. You wouldn't worship on your worst enemy. You would not worship. It's like a slowly getting paralyzed. Yep, that's right. And never has there been a treatment that has stopped or reversed it. Right.

And you're saying that you've seen patients where this has actually happened. So, well, we are in the process of validating that sort of, that data, yes. So, yes, we need more studies. Yes, we need to do research on multiple patients but even if there's one patient right where you've seen a change it raises the question oh it may it's by the way it's made me go crazy by the way because you know i am so i'm finally glad to be a neurologist you know being a neurologist is like being a nihilist or a masochist diagnosis right what's worse than that it's like diagnose and let me, you know,

let me not tell the patient that they have ALS. Let me treat them for, you know, like a CIDP picture because they don't want to actually make that diagnosis for people. It's the hardest diagnosis you can make for a patient because everyone knows ALS is incurable disease, right? I mean, it's 100%. Even pancreatic cancer is better. Well, you have a 5% chance of living with pancreatic cancer you have zero chance of living through this

disease zero so based on your hypothesis that it's infectious yes that plays a big role if not is the main role right um you know i personally shared on this podcast that i went to a place in mexico called santa viva where i and my wife both went through this treatment called hyperthermia which essentially is where they heat you up to 107 degrees which sounds crazy and is scary but actually we did both fine and it killed a lot of infections that we had like lime right my wife her viral loads of uh very tough to treat treat infection called CMV came plummeting down. She felt much better. I felt much better.

And so this is a therapy that is not much used in the United States, but is used widely in Europe, is used in Mexico and other countries. It's a therapy for some of these types of infectious diseases and even cancer. Right. So, how does the theory work behind this with something like ALS? Well, the idea is that, you know, fever is the way of actually denaturing spores. Okay, that's a big sentence. Can you unpack that? Sure. spores so that's a big sentence can you unpack that sure so so human cells have their proteins that that you know either fold properly or not fold properly at a certain temperature

right bacteria have their own temperature zone like their ideal climate and spores have another ideal climate right meaning that to kill a spore a spore is like a baby bacteria is a baby bacteria and that's what i believe personally is the reason that patients have amyloid accumulation that the spores are are creating this protective cover against antibiotics that actually is in fact the amyloid being produced amyloid is like the armor for the bacteria yes they're like the you know the the uh bomb shelter yeah the you know, the bomb shelter. Yeah. The biofilm is the bomb shelter for these little baby bacteria.

Yep. And so how does hyperthermia work to disrupt that? And what is that procedure? Well, so it works, hyperthermia works by, it's a very narrow window of temperature. Meaning if you give too much temperature, you can actually hurt normal cells as much as bacterial cells. If you don't give enough temperature, you've done nothing. So it's like Goldilocks. It's like Goldilocks.

You got to get it just right. You have to get it exactly right. And that's part of the way that the hyperthermia technology has been developed is by really understanding that the brain itself can provide feedback on the tolerability for human cells because brain cells are going to tell the brain, hey, this is pretty hot in here. You don't want to fry your brain. Right. Can you turn the thermostat off now? So, part of the device actually is to get the brain temperature back into the feedback system where it's self-regulating so that you never reach a point where the temperature is harmful to your own cells.

Hmm. And so, you know, often in places where they do this, they'll give, at the peak of the temperature, they'll give antibiotics or antivirals. Right. Does that make sense? To give antivirals? Yeah, to give antimicrobial treatment to patients when they're at the peak of the fever, because the idea is that it sort of flushes out the- Oh, I see. Yes, for acute infection, yes.

I would argue that- Like Lyme or- Well, if Lyme is acute, certainly. I mean, I don't think that, I mean, I think you'd be weary of the issue that by, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul, for instance. Let's say that C. diff is, let's say, let's for obvious sake say this is a polymicrobial disease, okay? As opposed to a. Like lots of different bugs.

Lots of different bugs. As opposed to just one ringleader that everyone else is following. Okay. So, Lombard believes that C. diff is the ringleader. Okay. And all these other guys, Lyme, HSV, they're tagging a ride because it's such a great killer. That's like, okay, great. We'll take the leftovers. No problem here.

We'll take the leftovers. So, my concern is clinically that if we start treating patients with bacterial drugs like Rocephin, whatever it is for chronic Lyme, yes, you're addressing chronic Lyme. I mean, the C. diff gets worse. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So the heat alone is enough to disrupt the C. diff?

Well, we haven't demonstrated that yet, to be quite frank. But what's been demonstrated is that by applying hyperthermia, that we're able to actually see improvement in clinical symptoms of patients with ALS. People's muscle strength. This is a progressive disease, so it gets worse and worse and worse. Every visit, they're worse. You're seeing patients, it stops or gets better, which never happened. Correct. So this is a major breakthrough.

I think so. Major breakthrough. And this is not something new. This has been around for a long time. So where in the world is most of the research being done on hyperthermia? For ALS? Period. I mean, it's...

So most of the research on hyperthermia actually is cancer research. They call it chemothermia, chemohypothermia. So people can look up a lot of data on how hypothermia affects cancer. But as far as I know, there's zero data until now applying hypothermia for ALS. We will be the first people to actually talk about applying hypothermia for treatment of ALS. What about things like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or MS? Well, the difference in those diseases are that um in alzheimer's right it's very difficult to induce hypothermia in a patient with alzheimer's disease

why because you need to be compliant the treatment itself is you know it's fairly rigorous as as you you know from you they put me asleep they put you to sleep right we don't want to put them to sleep though right because we're concerned about protecting their brain. So, you know, if you have a patient who's got, you know, end-stage Alzheimer's disease, for instance, I don't see how this is going to be helpful for them. But early. But early, 100%. Early.

Early. In fact, I will talk later, not about the case now, because we're really just in the beginnings of this case. But, yeah, I think it would be applicable for Alzheimer's disease as well. Have you seen any patients reported or or in the literature anywhere no but you serve as a theory yes still a theory an ms what about ms uh ms there's data on actually uh the opposite right which is how do you induce hypothermia right because an ms it's a you know it's an inflammatory disease obviously right uh which by the way i also believe is caused by clostridium but not not c diff where it's especially important to actually identify at that stage that this is bacterial so there i don't know

what they're yeah so what what what is the idea with ms that you you wouldn't want to use hyperthermia that you wouldn't want to use heat because it makes it worse? Well, because remember, when you heat up a patient with MS, what happens? They usually get worse. So the trick is... But maybe not enough, right? Maybe it's not enough. That's right.

Maybe you haven't reached the threshold to actually, you know, use the body's fever mechanisms against... Because there's links to MS and Epstein-Barr virus and other infections. There's links to Alzheimer's and herpes virus infections. Right. So, yes, the whole principle is applicable for all those diseases. But we don't know yet if it is applicable yet until we clinically demonstrate that. Right.

But, yeah, I think that this is going to be a treatment that's going to be very important for a lot of different diseases, Mark. So, there's this whole theory that the body has a mechanism for dealing with this and it has these own proteins that are produced in response to heat. And there are things we learned about in medical school. They're called heat shock proteins. I learned something very important about heat shock proteins from Dr. Lessler. Because remember that, you know, people are looking at how to induce hypothermia, right? So, there's all sorts of research. There's actually even a drug in clinic for ALS that is the mechanism of action is based upon increasing heat shock protein through a pharmaceutical agent.

So, I was at this lecture and I you know i thought i thought i knew everything basically and i learned that actually you can induce you thought md stood for medical deity is that it medical deity yes i was yes exactly we all got that training yeah the truth is we know close to nothing that's why i said the beginning of this talk i you know like thanks for inviting me but i really know nothing just disclaimer but anyway so yes actually in ms the the goal is to induce heat shock protein through hypothermia hypothermia so you get people cold not people the brain the brain right how do we do that chill the brain chill the brain how do you do that yeah ice blocks around the head? No. No.

Well, I'll invite you up and you could see for yourself what that looks like. All right. Dunk your head in ice water? Nope. Nope. Nope. None of the above. Okay.

So, we have to be in mystery here? A mystery about what the device looks like, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's basically the same concept as building a hyperthermia device, except remember now that technology itself is was developed basically for anesthesiologists so this was developed at yale by dr abreu who's the the person who actually discovered a way of measuring brain temperature objectively externally okay so that that's kind of where this whole thing started from to be honest yeah and we don't just

stick electrode in your brain you can literally map it out from the outside you can map it out from the outside so the the ability to do that now allows a clinician to not only you know heat the the body to create hyperthermic states but through other types of modalities to actually cool the brain safely externally with the same in the same way meaning that you can actually apply a small device to a region of the of the skin it's peri-orbital location and you can actually change the temperature of the brain through this what's called the brain thermal tunnel and that also creates protein 70 and i didn't know that until i was in australia that's amazing so you're hopeful about the future

of neurology it sounds like it's the first time i've been hopeful about anything in my life to be honest with you that's a big statement yes it's true if you're exposed to glyphosate it harmfully affects the bacteria in your gut that produce really important amino acids that regulate your gene expression. And the pathway it disrupts is a shikimate pathway. And that leads to abnormal gene expression and not being able to actually do the things your body is supposed to do and it also seems it also seems to deplete glutathione which you mentioned which is a critical molecule for regulating inflammation detoxifying antioxidant it's it's really the center of our biology and if it disrupts that we're kind of screwed right glutathione is so important and we're seeing so many people talking about you know taking glutathione as a supplement

taking anacetylcysteine to as a precursor to glutathione. Methionine is the core essential sulfur-containing amino acid, and it is a precursor to cysteine, which goes to glutathione. Methionine synthesis is disrupted by N-E-coli, by glyphosate. There was a study that showed that. So it prevents the microbes and also prevents the plants from producing methionine from inorganic sulfur so this gives you again a deficiency in the sulfur containing amino acids so we have a deficiency both in the aromatics and in the sulfur containing amino acids

and they're so important for so many things it's just uncountable practically the ways that that would impact particularly your metabolism of course also protein synthesis and of course all the hormones you know that that are affected and the b vitamins all of those things are going to be affected by these disruptions by glyphosate and i mean you're an mit scientist this is not some crazy fringe idea uh this is you're you're you're an evidence-based scientist it's looking at hard at hard at the data and coming to these conclusions why why well before we get into why why the government hasn't figured this out yet um let's let's talk about you know other diseases and how good the evidence is how good is the evidence around cancer for example or diabetes

or autism or any of these autoimmune issues that you're talking about? Yeah, cancer is actually the hardest one to explain and maybe the weakest one. In fact, I would say cancer, of course, evolves out of mitochondrial dysfunction. So eventually it causes it. Studies have shown that it enhances other chemicals effects that would lead to cancer. In other words, a secondary effect. There are studies that have shown that it enhances other chemicals effects that would lead to cancer in other words a secondary effect there's there are studies that have shown that and there are also studies that have shown that it causes um cancer cells uh breast cancer cells in vitro to proliferate at when it's exposed when they're exposed to extremely tiny levels in parts per billion

per trillion parts per trillion levels of glyphosate induced proliferation and cancer cells i think it does cause several different cancers but the um it's a much more difficult thing to explain than some of the other diseases liver disease is quite easy to explain if you accept my theory which we maybe should get into at this point because that's crucial my theory for it's extremely unusual mechanism of toxicity so just to back up for people a liver is your detoxifying organ and and you hinted at how glyphosate interrupts sulfur metabolism there's a critical part of our biology and in functional medicine you know there's there's a real focus on our sulfur biology because it's critical for detoxifying all the environmental compounds are exposed to for metabolizing our own internal toxins.

And people who have low glutathione, which is the sulfur based compound, are sicker. I remember reading one study that if you looked at people who are hospitalized versus not hospitalized, you know, if you, if you have this general, lower levels of glutathione based on a gene that is important in regulating it, you're, you're, you know, 50% of the time you're going to be more likely to end up in the hospital. So it's kind of a marker for overall health and wellbeing. And I I'm personally a lot of experience with glutathione because I had mercury poisoning and it gets very depleted.

And I had to learn how to restore my sulfur metabolism and also something called methylation, which is the B vitamins. Cause they're very interlocked. And you, when you think of your biochemistry for those listening, it's, it's like this big network of biochemical reactions, but right at the center of it is this two core systems that run all the time, literally every second, millions and millions of times a second, billions of times probably called methylation and sulfation. And these pathways,

I've written a lot about them in books and articles, but this is, this is the key to health. It's a key to gene expression, to immune function, to detoxification, to cognitive function. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So when this is screwed up, it's not just like some, you know, sort of minor pathway that gets disrupted in human biology. It's a major pathway. So with that background, can you explain how glyphosate disrupts sulfur metabolism a little more clearly and explain, you know, what really the role of the sulfur is in maintaining health and why we should be terrified about glyphosate and sulfate. Right. I mean, I think glyphosate disrupts sulfate synthesis, sulfate activation, sulfate transport and sulfate delivery. It disrupts every step of the way for sulfate. And as you mentioned, mercury actually gets sulfated to detox it. If you can't sulfate the mercury, you're in trouble. I think that we have a systemic

deficiency in sulfate in the glycocalyx, which is this lining of all the cells, like in the blood vessels. There's all this sulfate that populates these sugar molecules, complex sugar molecules lining the blood vessels. Those need to be heavily sulfated to have the blood circulation work correctly. And also for the cells to be able to receive signals and to bring in different things they're going to take in to digest. It's just really central. Having enough sulfate around the exterior of the cell, it also gives the red blood cells

negative charge, which is important for the zeta potential in the blood. There's all these things that are connected to sulfate. And I talk a lot about sulfate in my book. It's actually been central to my understanding of where biology has gone wrong. And I felt sulfate was in trouble with autism and with heart disease many years ago, long before I knew about glyphosate. So the sulfate and the glyphosate really came together very nicely for me for me to recognize how glyphosate is causing autism and probably heart disease through sulfate issues and as you mentioned the sulfation sulfation

is very important for detoxing many of these fat soluble chemicals that they go to the liver takes it's the liver's job to detox them and it takes them up it adds sulfate oxidizes them it adds sulfate the enzymes that the cype enzymes that take that do that first step of detox are also suppressed by glyphosate that's been shown in multiple studies it suppresses the enzymes in the liver that modify these fat soluble molecules to make them to detox them and to make them water soluble so they can be removed through the urine so what you're saying basically is when toxins come in the liver they have to be detoxified by the liver and there are enzymes that do that that are like the helpers what you're saying is that glyphosate screws up those enzymes so those chemicals can't get processed down the assembly line of detoxification yes and of course then those chemicals become much more toxic.

So glyphosate makes many, many other chemicals much more toxic than they would otherwise be because it disrupts the liver's ability to detoxify them. And of course, glutathione is part of that problem. Cause a lot of things get glutathione, glutathione dilated to get removed as well. There's methylation, glutathione dilation, sulfation. These are all steps that are taking the liver to change these molecules

into something that's less toxic. And that process gets broken down by glyphosate. So it's really quite remarkable, all the things that it can do to disrupt your health. The whole sulfate story has, in part, it's because these shikimate pathway, because the shikimate pathway produces those aromatics. For example, serotonin gets produced in large amounts in the gut, actually, and also melatonin. They both are produced in large amounts in the gut. They are sulfated before they're shipped out. And then

they arrive in the brain in a sulfated form. So I think the serotonin is actually transporting sulfate to the brain. This is something I talk a lot about. There's all these molecules that get sulfated in transit, not just the toxic chemicals, vitamin D, cholesterol, various sex hormones. They're all sulfated when they're shipped out. And then all these aromatics that come out of the shikimate pathway. So those molecules become deficient, which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient, which means that the brain doesn't shikimate pathway. So those molecules become deficient, which means that the sulfate transporters become deficient,

which means that the brain doesn't get enough sulfate. And autism is very strongly linked to heparin sulfate deficiency in the brain ventricles. That's really been a core feature of autism that's been shown in both mice and humans. And I think it's just because there's not enough sulfate being delivered to the brain. And the body does something very interesting to get around that, which is quite fascinating and also quite disturbing, which is that it produces hydrogen sulfide gas in the liver,

in the gut. The autistic children produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which then floats up to the brain and then gets oxidized in the brain to make sulfate. So it's a way to transport sulfate, a very sneaky way to transport sulfate by turning it into a gas, turning the sulfur molecule into a gas, hydrogen sulfide. It also makes the kids' poops really smelly and stinky. Yes. And it also gives them brain fog because the hibernation is, is all involved with hydrogen sulfide gas. And it's basically people go into hibernation because they've got hydrogen

sulfide floating in their brain their brain is and then of course you have to have oxidizing agents to oxidize it to sulfate which gives you the inflammations the inflammatory process in the brain that's characteristic of autism this kind of you know chronic low-grade encephalopathy that's a feature of autism is because the autistic brain is constantly trying to make sulfate from hydrogen sulfide gas. Wow. This is just so much information. I'm just loving this. I think just to unpack it a little bit for people, you know, when you eat foods with glyphosate,

which is 75% of all or 70% of all crops and often it's used on GMO foods like soy, but even non GMO foods is used on like wheat. It's a whole host of different ways in the body that it screws things up, right? So what you're saying, it screws up this pathway that makes the neurotransmitters that help regulate gene expression important for cognitive function. It disrupts glutathione, which is critical for detoxification. It regulates immunity and oxy of stress. It also affects protein synthesis and immune function and can create a

leaky gut and destroy the microbiome so you've got all these mechanisms not just one but many mechanisms by which glyphosate destroys human health right yeah and people say how can one chemical cause so many diseases i mean i showed all those charts nancy swanson was the first one who started doing those charts i don't know know if you saw those of rising to various diseases strongly, absolutely, practically, perfectly correlated with the rise in glyphosate usage on court crops over time. And it was just stunning. And P values are 0.000000, several zeros before the first significant digit of the correlations between these two trends in disease versus the rise in glyphosate usage. And, you know, people would say, well, they would say correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. And then they would say, how could one chemical cause so many diseases? And I was wondering that myself, but now I understand how, and it is this

metal, it disrupts the whole minerals are completely messed up in iron, manganese, zinc, they become both toxic and deficient at the same time because of its ability to bind to them and hold on to them, prevent the natural system from transporting them properly. And then it's the sugar mate pathway getting wrecked, and that's all these aromatic amino acids and all the derivatives that are so important for our health are getting reduced. And then it's actually the cytopenzzymes in the liver. These have all been

shown in multiple studies that it's doing this. The cytopenzymes in the liver are getting suppressed, which is cytochrome P50 enzymes, which is stage one detoxification depressed. And then this inability for the gut microbes to convert inorganic sulfur into organic sulfur, which is going to give you methionine. And methionine, of course, is the methylation pathways. It's the sulfation pathways. Those are all going to be disturbed because of deficiency in methionine. And instead, the sulfur gets reduced to hydrogen sulfide gas, which then causes all these other problems.

Wow. So it just jams up your biochemistry is the bottom line. It's just like it's like throwing a sand in an engine, basically. Right, right. Yes. Amazing. it's like throwing a sand in an engine basically right right right yes amazing and there's a few other things i want to sort of touch on which is uh glycine glycine is yes you need to touch on and and uh and it does affect our protein synthesis and and tell us how our body uh has swapped out glyphosate for glycine and what that does. Yes, and that's a central topic of my book.

That's almost the point of my book is to try to convince the audience that that's true because I've been saying this. Anthony Samson was the first one who suggested to me that might be happening, that it's substituting for glycine during protein synthesis. And at first I was skeptical because it has an extra piece attached to its nitrogen. It is a complete glycine molecule and it does disrupt glycine in various ways. That's known. But it also potentially could be substituted for glycine during protein synthesis. And there's no reason to stop it. It turns out because proline is a coding amino acid that also has an attachment to its nitrogen.

And it's still able to find there's another linkage that the nitrogen can hook up with the other because the, the amino acids have to hook up in a chain and the nitrogen is involved in the hook. They're like paper dolls, holding hands, hands and the nitrogen needs to hold hands. It has something in the way, another molecule in the way, but if there's enough room around, it can fit. So it turns out there's specific circumstances under which it will substitute. And this gets a little complicated in terms of the science, but it's quite, quite interesting because the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that gets disrupted by glyphosate has a

glycine residue at the site where it binds the phosphate piece of phosphoenolpyruvate. So that enzyme binds that molecule at a place where glycine is highly conserved. And if you take that glycine out and replace it with alanine, which is just an extra methyl group, very small change, glyphosate can't affect it at all. All of a sudden, it's completely immune to glyphosate once you remove that glycine. And they've shown that it is at that place where that glycine is that it disrupts the protein. They've shown that that's the spot. And they know that they can either remove that glycine or they can crowd it. They can put in other amino acids close by that'll crowd the

glycine and then the glyphosate won't fit anymore. So the argument they say is that glyphosate is replacing the substrate, PEP. What I say is that it's replacing the glycine. So we have a very different view of how that enzyme is getting disrupted. If you say it's displacing the glycine, and if you say it can displace the glycine in other enzymes that have the same property, and there are many, many enzymes with very important functions that have glycine at a place that's highly conserved that binds phosphate, even that binds PEP, the same substrate. And I suspect it's affecting many of those enzymes. It's that particular group of enzymes that are getting extremely disturbed by glyphosate and that have enormous roles in metabolism.

And that's how you're going to get mitochondrial dysfunction, all kinds of things. So it screws up your immune system. It screws up your mitochondrial energy. It screws up your gut. It creates oxidative stress. It screws up your detox system. It screws up your mitochondria energy. It screws up your gut. It creates oxidative stress. It screws up your detox system. What doesn't it do? That's the big question. Cancer is an interesting one. And there are cancers that are going up dramatically. Pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer, liver cancer, and kidney cancer.

It definitely affects a lot of the endocrine system, basically the glands. That's what I want. Yeah, it's huge. So there's 9 million kilograms of this stuff sprayed around the world. 300 million pounds or kilograms in the United States is a lot. We're exposed to this in significant quantities, right? And so what is the amount that is going to cause harm? Oh, I know.

That's the real question, right? I think need zero. I think we need to ban it worldwide and we need to work hard on figuring out how to get it out of the soil and out of the air and out of the water. You know, we have a huge problem right now. We've got all kinds of life is a gathering up because it takes it a long time to, well, it can get broken down quickly under optimal conditions. And of course, Juan Santo says that that's what's always there. Two weeks later, it's gone. That's what they say. It is definitely not true.

Experimental in many different kinds of soils. It'll last for, for years. There was a study that showed that after two years, 60% of it was still there. So it, you know, and it stays in the ocean. If it gets deep and there's no sunlight, sunlight helps to break it down. There are certain microbes that can metabolize it, but most microbes can't. So it has to be specialized microbes. I think we need to do research to actually figure out which microbes can be safely put in the soil to help break it down.

Because actually many of the pathogens can break it down. Like the fungus, we have all kinds of problems with fungus infections in both animals and plants and fungus can break it down. So I think that's a reason why it's thriving. Incredible. So the amount we need is not very much, right? If you were going to look at the data, is there any data on how much glyphosate is in people? And if you look at the population, have they studied what is the body burden of glyphosate?

And is it in amounts that are really relevant or not? Yeah, that's a big question. Of course, it's a question of what you think is relevant. And one thing it has been found in people, it's been found in large amounts. And in fact, it's been found in in large amounts in uh and in fact it's been found correlating with disease there was a study that showed um people who had um liver fatty liver disease which is an epidemic and the people who had fatty liver disease they were tested for glyphosate in the urine and they said had statistically more than the ones who didn't have the disease and among the ones who had it the ones who had worse disease had statistically significantly more than the ones who had less worse disease.

Less is fatty liver. And there was a study. 90 million. By the way, 90 million people in America are affected by that. Yeah, it's huge. And I think life is really dead on. And the study on rats exposed them to levels of glyphosate that were below regulatory limits and caused fatty liver disease in those rats at those levels. The other thing that's coming out at least lately, which is really shocking, is extremely low levels of glyphosate causing endocrine effects that are long lasting.

There are these amazing experiments coming out recently where people expose pregnant rats to glyphosate at levels that are so low the rat doesn't look like it has any problems. The rat is perfectly fine. The babies are born. Everything's good. The pups grow up. They have their own offspring. They grow up and you see it has any problems. The rat is perfectly fine. The babies are born. Everything's good. The pups grow up. They have their own offspring. They grow up and you see all kinds of problems.

So in other words, it's showing up in the second and third generation. So in the grandchildren of the rats that got exposed, there's the epigenetic changes that are passed through the lineage to other generations. So you're not only dealing with what you're exposed to, you're dealing with what your grandmother was exposed to.

Yes. And of course, we're now getting second third generation showing up because it's been since 1975 yeah it's pretty terrifying so it really is i mean i feel we have to i feel we have to ban this chemical worldwide right now i mean if we have any hope for the future i feel like we really need to wake up and realize this is the thing that's causing all the problems that we're seeing. And it shocks me that we see all this obesity like this country is just, you know, so many problems with obesity. And we just think, oh, we're just watching too much TV, eating too much popcorn. I mean, that's just like really ridiculous to think that could be the reason why we have such a tremendous inability to keep the weight off. Yeah. Well, there's a whole science field called the study of obesogens. And obesogens are environmental chemicals that cause obesity.

I've written a lot about this over the years. Even 15, 16 years ago, I wrote about it because I used to see it in my patients. And when you start to improve their detoxification and get rid of these chemicals from their body, they actually do better. Their metabolism improves, their weight loss comes off. But what you're really saying is that most of us have levels of glyphosate in our bodies, including you and I, that do impair human health. Absolutely.

And I'm sure people listening are wondering, what the heck can I do about it? Other than, you know, like if Dr. Hyman and Stephanie, who's an MIT professor who's made her life works to study this, have high levels, what the heck am I going to do? I know it seems really hopeless. I was so depressed when I found that I was really shocked, actually, that I was contaminated. It wasn't high, but it was there and it was measurable. And it's just really depressing that you can't avoid it, which I think is the case.

If you live in America, I mean, there are places in the world where you probably can, but it's very difficult to find a place here that without it, it's in the rain. It's in the rain, it's in the water, it's in the atmosphere, it's in our food. Yeah, there's a study in Brazil found it in the, in the atmosphere, found it in the nanoparticles in the air in, you know, in Brazil. Is the majority though, from our food that we get it? I think so, but i'm not sure

i mean that's been my big question i think people who live next to uh fields where it's being sprayed are in serious trouble and they're going to get uh things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease because they're breathing breathing glyphosate but i think most of us are getting it through our food and possibly through our water i mean there's a question of a water supply and it could also be from the air. And I'm concerned about that with respect to biofuels, because I'm really quite wondering if biofuels are introducing glyphosate into the air in cities where they're being burned,

because they're coming from, like, for example, ethanol. Bioethanol is coming from GMO Roundup Ready corn or sugar cane sprayed with glyphosate right before the harvest. So it could be in the atmosphere. I mean, it is in the atmosphere and it could be from the air that you're getting exposure into to the lungs. And that's another word that I have. So is there a way for us? Is there anything we can do, eat, take supplements, anything that can help us reduce our glyphosate levels?

Take a sauna, wheatgrass enema? What are we going to do? Yeah, I mean, I'm a big fan of sunlight. And of course, vitamin D is so important. But I believe sunlight also helps you to make sulfate in the skin. I talk about that in my book. Quite fascinating science. And so sunlight exposure, I think, is extremely useful for improving your immune function.

Your immune function is really central to your health. Many people in America have a weak innate immune system, and that's causing a lot of their diseases. Their diseases are actually there to help boost the immune function. They serve the immune cells to help improve their health. I believe all these diseases like arthritis and things, gut dysbiosis and et cetera. So we'd be taking, for example, sulfur-producing compounds that help boost glutathione like lipoic acid and inositol cysteine. Yes, right. We'd be taking the methylated B vitamins to help with that sulfur.

Right, to make sure you have enough of that. Of course, I like to just eat really, really healthy foods, you know, certified organic, whole foods, lots of green vegetables, lots of. Is that enough? I mean, is that enough? Because I don't think you've been doing that already. So so I'm thinking, OK, from my functional medicine perspective, how can I fix these problems? So I give glycine is another one, you know, taking glycine. That's one that I've talked to functional medicine specialists who like glycine as a supplement. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's going to help to counteract the glyphosate substitution for the glycine which

is so important to try to prevent you can take amino acids of glycine you can take sulfur boosting compounds like nac and lipoic acid selenium milk thistle epsom salt baths vitamin d these are all things people can do And plus just cut out your exposures as much as possible. And then probiotics. Yeah. Yeah. Cut out exposure is crucial. Try everything you can to cut out exposure and then probiotics, especially it's curious that there was a study on cows that found that sauerkraut juice was beneficial for cows that were, I can't imagine these cows eating sauerkraut,

but they were sick and they had glyphosate in their urine and they gave them several things. But sauerkraut juice was one of the things they gave them. And I don't know how they thought to do that, but I found that quite interesting because I was wondering whether, and it hasn't been proven, whether the microbes in the sauerkraut juice were able to metabolize the glyphosate. I feel like if you could get microbes growing in your gut

that can metabolize glyphosate, you would be a lot better off. And so acetobacter, there are species of acetobacter that can metabolize glyphosate you would be a lot better off and so acetobacter there are species of acetobacter that can metabolize glyphosate so one could hope they might be in apple cider vinegar you know fermented foods it's a possibility hasn't been proven but it's something that i find appealing so i need a multi-pronged approach when somebody comes in and they complain of abdominal pain, maybe they get fullness or bloating after they eat. Maybe they have diarrhea after they consume or just diarrhea during the day. And they may feel nauseous or have excess gas. And so then you get a good detailed history of what they're eating. Sometimes people, it throws somebody off because they may not have had problems with dairy prior to when they, you know, at a younger

age and then they developed. And so they're confused as to why they have started to have problems now. But as I mentioned, you can develop problems with lactose, issues with lactose and digesting dairy at any point in your life. It increases as we get older and it often can increase after we've had, you know, some sort of infection or inflammation or antibiotics in our system. And so, you know, you want to just figure out what are they what with, the abdominal pain, the bloating, and gas. And then you want to say, okay, when do your symptoms occur? Because typically when there's problems with lactose, it's half an hour to two hours after you consume the lactose-containing food, so the dairy. And the symptoms usually resolve five to seven days after you've removed the dairy from the diet. And what's happening is there's low levels of this lactase enzyme in the small intestine.

Then the the carbohydrate component of dairy, the lactose, does not get broken down. And when it's not absorbed as it should be, it goes into the colon. And in the colon, it gets consumed. The bacteria in the colon eat it and produce a lot of gas. And a lot of water goes into the colon to deal with these food particles that are too large. And as a result, you get a lot of gas and bloating and diarrhea. So it is a very hard food to digest and absorb. We see it all the time. And so the reason we wanted to talk about it and do this podcast is because it's so common. And patients are really struggling with it all the time. And even though to you and I, it's like, okay, we see, you know, of course go off dairy.

People often come in in denial. They're like, oh, no, it's not the dairy. You know, and I'm like, yeah, you got to give it a try. You know, one of the things that's often people wonder about is, well, what about lactase-free milk? Or what about yogurt? Or what about cow or sheep? Or what about A2 versus A1 casein? How do we figure all that out?

And how do we determine, you know, what people should be doing if they want to include dairy? Because I know, for example, if I eat regular milk, I'll be in trouble. But if I have goat or sheep yogurt, I seem to do okay. So I wonder, how does that work? And can you explain a little bit about that? It's such a great question. I mean, what we often start with is pulling away all dairy for somebody, because that's how we can see, okay, how much is this going to improve your symptoms? But you're correct. There are some better quality dairies like the A2 milk that people tolerate better. If the dairy is fermented like yogurt, it's broken down.

And so many times people can tolerate some plain whole fat yogurt without problem, but they couldn't drink a glass of milk, for example. And because that fermenting process breaks it down for other people, they can't tolerate anything. So they can't, they, they, some people even have to be a little, they have to watch even butter intake and they have to go with something like a ghee instead. So there's many ways you can react to dairy. So we're talking about reacting to the lactose in dairy, which is the carbohydrate component of dairy. That's what we're talking about here. But people also react to the proteins in dairy and they can have food sensitivities or food allergies to that dairy as well. So there's multiple ways people can react to dairy.

But so we always start with pulling it all out and then maybe adding back in some easier to digest dairy if somebody really wants it and they don't have a problem with it, such as a full fat, you know, non-sweetened yogurt. 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 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, 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 now back to this week's episode and so what about people taking enzymes like lactase or is that a good idea should people just avoid dairy?

You know, are there other issues that happen? And, you know, what are the consequences of sort of consuming dairy if you are lactose intolerant? You know, that's a great question. So the enzymes that are in that, like the lactase enzyme is the enzyme in lactate is a beta-galactosidase, and that can help people break down their dairy and tolerate it better. But that's a good question. I typically recommend that people don't consume a lot of these enzymes if they're having problems and just to avoid the food. But some people choose to have some of these digestive aids and then have a little bit of the dairy from time to time. Yeah. Sometimes I cheat and eat ice cream and then of course I pay for it later. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think that these enzymes may be helpful for some people, but I think the reason that we're so focused on dairy is, you know, everybody was like, you got to get your calcium, you got to get your calcium. It was a huge marketing campaign to promote the amount of dairy that we needed to consume. And so it's really important to remind people that there's so many

other ways to get their calcium. Almonds, almond butter are great sources of calcium. Sardines, great source of calcium. Salmon in a can has bones in it, it's a great source of calcium. Broccoli and your greens are a good source of calcium. And so there's lots of ways you can get good calcium in your diet and you don't have to feel like you need to be getting it from dairy products. Yeah. And I would just underscore that anybody listening who wants to hear about dairy should listen to the podcast I did with David Ludwig, where he dug into the article that he wrote with Walter Willett, who's one of the leading scientists at Harvard, called Milk and Health. And if you want to Google it, it's New England Journal of Medicine, Milk and Health. We'll put it in the show notes.

But there's also a great Medium article he wrote about it as well. The bottom line is that all the propaganda about milk, meaning for your bones, it actually increases fractures. It doesn't do a lot of things that it was promoted to do by the Gary Council and the Got Milk ads. It's not a great sports drink. It's not great for weight loss. It's not great for osteoporosis.

In fact, it may cause osteoporosis. It may cause allergies, digestive issues, as we mentioned, even autoimmune diseases, cancer. So I think there's a lot of reasons to be cautious about dairy. And, again, I think just to underscore the fact that when we're talking about dairy, we're talking about sort of modern cow dairy. Sometimes heirloom cows have different, you know, or grass-finished cows have different properties and it's better tolerated. Some of the sheep and goat is better tolerated.

So it really depends on sort of you and a personal decision. But it's not nature's perfect food unless you're a calf. And it's also, you know, problematic in many, many ways. Absolutely. As we see here with some of these cases, like this first one here was a 25-year-old gentleman who came to see me. And, you know, he was relatively, he was really healthy, actually. And he was doing well until about a year ago. And he had like a stomach bug.

He was traveling and he got some stomach bug. He didn't really think much of it. He recovered from it. But at the time, he had like a fever and some diarrhea. He recovered from the bug. But then since that point in time, he still had episodes where he was rushing to the bathroom and had diarrhea and bloating and gas production. And he really couldn't figure out what foods were involved at all. And he didn't think any food was involved. And he was, you know, so he wanted to figure it out. So, based on his timeline of symptoms and, you know, that we gathered from him, we said, you know, even without any testing, we said, let's just do a trial off a dairy and see what happens. And within a week, his symptoms got all better. And he thought I, you know, was just, you know, did a wonderful job. I know, right. I fixed his diarrhea and, and gas and bloating. And, and, you know, he's, he just avoids really most dairy because he feels

better at this point in his life. So it's, you know, it's sometimes can make a huge difference and something that we really encourage a lot of people to give a trial for. Yeah, I think, you know, we've all been sort of brainwashed that we can't live without milk and dairy. And then it's important for all these reasons, which turns out not to be, I would say that, you know, clinically practicing functional medicine for plus 30 years and you also, you know, it's one of those foods that is really problematic for a lot of people, not just lactose intolerance, but eczema, asthma, just general digestive discomfort, acne, autoimmune diseases, all kinds of problems clear up when you stop dairy. So if you've never done it, I would encourage people to think about just taking a holiday for three or four weeks and just then adding it back and seeing what happens. You'll know, your body will tell you very quickly

whether or not you are intolerant of dairy. Well, I mean, because it may not cause lactose intolerance, but you can get other reactions like congestion, sinus infections, you know, all kinds of skin issues, eczema and so forth. And we did a we did a pecan diet challenge with Katie Couric and she has eczema. She's like an arthritis and she got off all that junk and and it got better. Oh, good for her. Good for her. You know, it is amazing. Like you were mentioning, you can have a hard time digesting the carbohydrate in the dairy and have the lactose intolerance. And you can also have a sensitivity to the proteins in the dairy. And with a sensitivity with the proteins, a lot of times that will cause acne or it'll cause the eczema or asthma or inflammation in the skin. And of course,

you can have an immediate reaction to dairy too. You can have an IgE allergy. So you can have an allergy, a sensitivity, or a lactose intolerance. There's so many ways that people react to dairy. And my second case here was a 20-year-old woman who came in and she got bloated every time she ate. She felt full and she sometimes had diarrhea and stomach pains. So she was just really struggling with her digestion. It would sometimes be constipated, but then sometimes diarrhea, sometimes rushing to the bathroom, really feeling bloated a lot. And when we got her history, we realized that she had this long history of acne. Well, she's only 20, so it wasn't that long, but a history of acne. And so she was placed on

antibiotics for the acne at age 18. And she had been on antibiotics for a couple of years. And what we know is that even though those antibiotics may clear up the acne for, you know, immediately at that time, long-term, that's a huge concern because it's getting rid of all the good bacteria on our skin that prevents acne in the future. And it's also getting rid of all the good bacteria in our digestive system that is keeping our digestive system working well. And so that can really mess up the microbiome and result in lots of issues. And for her, you know, over time, she started to have a lot more issues being on those antibiotics with her digestion. So, you know, for her, we did a dairy-free trial just for both her skin and her digestion. And, you know, we saw a good improvement in her digestion

and her skin, like her digestion got about 50% better. Her skin got 60 to 70% better, but she was not a hundred percent better. So then we need to do more testing. We did testing for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We did stool testing and we found that she had this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that we needed to treat. And so, you know, I think a lot of times those long-term antibiotics like that can result in this overgrowth of bacteria that then, you know, that then just snowballs into more and more problems. And so we needed to treat that with an herbal approach. And it was at that point when we kept her off of the dairy, treated her bacterial overgrowth, that she started to get much better in terms of her digestion. Her skin improved,

her digestion improved, and her pain in her belly improved significantly as well. And, and you know what, she, she sometimes at this point cheats with a little bit of, you know, healthy yogurt, but, but she mostly stays off of all dairy and is doing much better. Well, I mean, you know, and basically the message you're saying is when in doubt, cut it out. There's a lot of the chemical sunscreens like Avobenzone. I don't even know all of the names of them, the chemical sunscreens. And many of those are potential endocrine disrupting chemicals as well. The flip side is, Mark, I'm one of those people who grew up in the South, had more than my

share of sunburns, had my first skin cancer when I was 37. So I also want to slow down skin aging and wrinkles and skin cancer. So we kind of have to say, well, how do you get the protection you want without putting yourself at risk? I personally am a real fan of the zinc and titanium, the mineral based sunscreens or even just a hat covering your skin, staying out of the sun in the middle of the day. I mean, I think there's a lot of other things we can do that are going to be safer for us and safer for the planet. One of my favorite one-stop shopping places to learn more about safety levels and which either skincare or sunscreens

contain things we do or don't want is the Environmental Working Group. And I know you've been a big supporter of their work for years. I think they were some of the pioneers at really raising awareness. And what I love about them is they have a safe cosmetics database that you can search by type so you can search sunscreens or you could search by brand plug in your favorite brand and see how it rates to others on their list what about

the sort of things like the tick stuff? Because people are worried about ticks and DEET is really common, which is a terrible toxin. It's used to kill insects, but also is a neurotoxin that can affect humans. And they say not to touch yourself, don't put your mouth, but when you put it in your skin, it goes through everything. So tell us a little bit about DEET and what to do about that. Yeah. So that's another one. I mean, you know,

Mark and the Berkshires ticks are everywhere. So for those of us who love to be in the woods, you always have to be mindful of enjoying your time in the beautiful woods and hiking without putting yourself at risk for getting a tick-borne illness. So how do we navigate that balance as well? You know, for people who are super concerned, I don't know how you feel about this, but, you know, if you tuck your pants into your socks and put a little deed around where they join, maybe that's enough. I don't know. I don't do it. I mean, I hike all the time. And, you know, the other nice thing about being in

the Berkshires, I can come home, strip on my front porch, leave my clothes on the outside, go in and do my tick check, because I think that's probably the most important thing. The other interesting piece, though, is there's emerging science-based evidence that some essential oils may be almost effective at repelling ticks. There's been some research on lemon eucalyptus oil, on thyme oil, on citronella. So I think that is another reasonable option to try to get some of the tick repellent benefits without causing harm. So those essential oils are basically plant chemicals that are repellent benefits without causing harm so those essential oils are basically plant chemicals that are repellent and it sort of moves back to it you know the sort of view of functional medicine

which is that plants are highly intelligent they they're in fact sentient beings believe it or not they have 20 different senses and they do all kinds of smart stuff that we you know we don't really attribute to plants but they produce these molecules to deter insects from the cells. And they communicate with other plants. So if there's a caterpillar eating a plant, that plant goes, ooh, I'm getting eaten by a caterpillar. I'm going to produce this molecule. And by the way, I'm going to send a message to my neighbor

and plant friends over there through the mycelium rhizome network that you should secrete this chemical too. And so these plants produce all these wonderful chemicals that we use, you know, for our own benefit, but they're really for their benefit. And, and, and I think the essential oils are great. And there's a lot of natural alternative products out there that are for insects, for pollen, for skincare, for makeup. You don't want to realize a makeup there's like lead, you know,

a lot of makeup and a lot of lipstick is lead. Yes. Oh my gosh. And those things are really avoidable. It's just a matter of education. And I think the beautiful thing about it as we move in the right direction, as people start to become conscious, as we push those companies by our financial choices. We actually can drive the marketplace into a better set of products.

And that is really what we need to be doing. Okay, so it's a big deal to think about what you put on your skin. I remember learning that basically if you wouldn't eat it, you shouldn't put it on your skin. And you and I both know that when we were in medical school that we delivered all kinds of drugs to the skin i mean one of the quickest ways to get someone relief from chest pain if they came into the emergency room with an engine or you know heart disease was to slap a toothpaste tube full of like nitroglycerin cream and put a put a bandage over it and that kind of went right through the skin you know there's hormone patches for women there's pain patches there's all sorts of patches that people use because the skin is a

vehicle for delivering medicine so it makes a logical sense to think that we should be aware of what we're putting on our skin in terms of sunblock insect repellent makeup you know body care products and yet most of us never give a thought about it so tell us any why why should we really care and i think it's it is you know because this is it seems to be like maybe a trivial issue but how big of an issue is this and why should we worry or should we well i'm glad you pointed out that we absorb things through the skin so we think we put it on our skin and it's just going to stay on the outside, but it can potentially get inside our bodies. And one of the challenges, Mark, is trying to do good research to actually prove cause and effect when you're looking at some of the carriers or preservatives that are added to the things like the cosmetics that we put on our skin. You know, our old model of what happens with toxicity is the dose makes the poison. You know, you have to have massive amounts for it to have a negative impact. But there's so many things that

are in our skincare products like phthalates or parabens that have been dubbed endocrine disrupting chemicals. And what that means is even tiny amounts, especially at critical windows, may actually mock up hormonal signaling and have long lasting impacts that's less related to the dose, but the cumulative exposure over time. So it's hard to tease out. I mean, you might be having exposures every day in teeny tiny amounts that don't seem immediately problematic. But down the road, when you're struggling with insulin resistance or breast cancer or uterine fibroids or thyroid issues, it could be related to these endocrine disrupting chemicals that have wreaked havoc on our hormone balance. I mean, why are all these compounds used in these products?

I mean, why do we need all these petrochemical, endocrine-disrupting, hormone-busting, disrupting compounds? Why are they there? It's a great question. So parabens typically are added as a preservative to extend the shelf life of your skin creams or your topical creams. They lay in taro. Yeah, so local rancid.

So you can keep it on your shelf for a year or two and it won't smell funny or it won't go bad. And so you don't get bacteria. I mean, some of them are trying to keep contaminants out. Phthalates tend to be embedded with fragrances to make things smell pleasing to us when we put them on our bodies. And those are also endocrine disrupting chemicals. And is there a way to measure in the body whether there are these chemicals that are there from these products that people are using? That's a great question, Mark.

In studies that are trying to tease out how they influence our health, they often look at urinary levels to see how much people are exposed to. It's a little bit challenging, however, because it turns out that all of us show evidence of exposure to these chemicals. So it's a little bit hard to know what to do with measurements other than trying to do it from a scientific standpoint, say, do the levels track with health outcomes in clinical practice? I have not done that. I don't know if you found it helpful or not. And when I was first looking at it, we ended up coming back to the same recommendations anyway. We need to reduce exposure and find ways to support your body's getting rid of them. Right. I mean, everybody should cut out toxins from their life and everybody should do all the things they can to upregulate their biology to detoxify these compounds for sure but sometimes it's really helpful like you know people just don't know about

their exposures i had one woman who was using a sunblock for years in her makeup we checked her super high levels of parabens i'm like oh this isn't good and other people have high levels of phthalates because they're drinking plastic water and other people have high levels of phthalates because they're drinking plastic water bottles or people have BPA because they're not aware of where it's coming from which is best phenol a that comes from credit card receipts or restaurant receipts or you know just all kinds of you know gas station all that stuff it's just it's a lot it's in plastics and bottles so I think I think we really can raise awareness by seeing that it's in your system you know I think I think I find think we really can raise awareness by seeing that it's in your system.

You know, I think, I think I find that often helpful for people to change their behavior too. Cause like, and, and then, then you can actually track it and see that it's coming down and see what's happening. And I think, you know, it is a little amorphous because, you know, when you look at, you know, on an individual level, it's hard to draw the connections in a one-to-one level of whether this caused the problem or not but if you but if you look at a population-wide level these toxins clearly are linked to all

sorts of harmful effects in terms of endocrine disorders heart disease cancers and more and and i think it really is important people understand what they're doing what they're putting on their body right so the the um now the other thing you know i'd love you to talk about is some of the the epigenetic effects of the toxins on the fetus when the mother is exposed to the products that could cause these hormone destructive chemicals to get in the blood of the baby yeah i think that's really important to understand that there are critical windows or critical timeframes that it's even more important to reduce exposure. And one of those classic timeframes is when a woman is pregnant. Even little bits of exposures in utero may affect the fetus. And then those impacts persist into adolescence. A study a few

years ago, what they did, a lot of the data has to be correlative, but they measure urinary levels of phthalates and parabens in women at two different points in their pregnancy. And then when their babies were born, they tracked them for 9, 10, 11 years. And they found that higher levels of phthalates and parabens in the urine, the daughters of women with those higher levels ended up going into puberty earlier, which now that doesn't prove cause and effect. But, you know, sometimes you can't ethically design a study. And when we see research like that, that it does correlate with endocrine challenges down

the road, we have to take that seriously. We have to take that seriously. We have to take that seriously. There's been some other research linking exposure in utero in particular or early childhood to phthalates and parabens to higher incidence of ADHD-like symptoms in adolescents. So even neurodevelopment. Again, a lot of the data is correlative and epidemiologic, but we can't really design a placebo-controlled double-blinded trial to willingly expose one group of women and not expose another and track their children for 20 years. issues behavioral issues later stage symptoms of um you know obesity even diabetes heart disease cancer when they're exposed to these compounds in utero which is kind of striking because i think people don't seriously think about what they're putting on their skin but it is one of the most important things that you do every single day literally you're doing besides eating most of

us put stuff on our skin every day whether it's shampoo whether it's face cream whether it's makeup whether it's sunblock whether it's insect repellent like these are things that we use a lot of in america and and unfortunately they're really problematic so um let's say you say you go oh geez i've been using this stuff for a while i'm going to switch to all these other products but what do i do to get rid of these embedded toxins because if we did a fat biopsy of every american you know we wouldn't be too pretty I do to get rid of these embedded toxins? Because if we did a fat biopsy of every American, you know, we wouldn't be too pretty. There'd be a lot of these compounds in there.

They're stored in there. How are we going to help get them down? And we've done podcasts on detoxification, but we're not talking about like a water fast or some crazy thing. We're talking about you supporting the body's natural built-in detox pathways. How do we do that?

You know, Mark, before we jump into that, i want to come back to something that you just said about the fat biopsy um and i know that urine levels can sometimes be really helpful at motivating people to say oh my gosh i need to look at this but we have to be aware that even if they're not showing up in the urine if we've had old exposures they do tend to get deposited in fat and we're not doing fat biopsies on people. I just want to point that out. So don't use an okay looking urine to say, okay, not a problem for me. Right. Right. For sure. And it's been a, it's been a concern as well. If those are all residing as deposits in fat tissue if somebody really rapidly loses weight and starts to mobilize all that all those stored toxins it could potentially put extra burden on a lot of different processes in the body so it's just food for thought um and you have and you have done a

lot of podcasts on detoxification and it really is coming back to the basics. I mean, how do we get rid of things? We sweat. We break a sweat by going out in the woods or exercising or sitting in a sauna. We really have to focus on optimal gut function, hot, fiber-dense diet, a healthy microbiome, and specific foods that support all of our detoxification pathways. We can talk about a few of those. Drinking enough water. I mean, it's really, I don't know that there is a super magic for these endocrine disrupting chemicals,

except it's really important to make sure our detoxifying enzymes have the nutrients they need to do their job. And what are those things that our body needs most of to actually get rid of these toxins? Yeah, we need B vitamins. We need magnesium. We need the sulfur containing amino acids that are rich in foods like broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, garlic, onions, the allium family. Antioxidant rich foods can kind of fill the gap with some of the deeply pigmented fruits and vegetables. You know, similar theme, I think, that's come up in other areas. But those are some of the foods that are most important.

Prebiotic rich foods that can select out a healthy, robust, diverse microbiome that can also kind of, if we have detoxified and mobilized things, can help us get rid of it and clear it out of our system. No, it was the same with other, other practices that we can do to help our detox system, like saunas, exercise, drainage, and infrared saunas, hot and cold therapy, all those things help mobilize toxins from our system. Right. Right. Do you have any favorites yourself? I do have any favorites. I, I have any favorites? I do have a lot

of things that I do to actually mobilize my toxins every day. I make sure that I eat brassicas every day. So last time we had a big bunch of broccoli rabe for that night, Brussels sprouts, lots of garlic and onions. I use a lot of spices in my cooking and I also make sure I do saunas.

I do ice baths. I sweat. I actually like to sweat a lot. So my exercise is great. Yoga is great for lymphatic drainage, getting massages is great to mobilize tissue, lymph stores. So there's a lot of techniques you can use to actually help. And then I take the right supplements. I make sure I take a cocktail because I've had mercury poisoning. I have weak detox enzymes. I take N-acetylcysteine. I take all the methylation vitamins. I take a lot of the things that actually help to mobilize these toxins, even the sulforaphane, boosting compounds. I even use indole-dihendomethane as a way of sort of helping with, you know, some of the effects on hormone metabolism. So I I'm sort of pretty fanatic about it.

I've been so sick from being toxic and I don't want to be toxic anymore, but you know, it's the truth is it's, it's hard. Like I, you know, I didn't stop eating fish and I, you know, I've got my mercury levels down years and years ago from like almost 200 to like, you know, eight or five. And I was like, Oh, you know, I've got my mercury levels down years and years ago from like almost 200 to like, you know, eight or five. And I was like, Oh, you know, it's been a bunch of years and I've been sort of a little bit lazy about fish. I don't eat tuna. I don't eat swordfish, but occasionally, occasionally I'll have a piece of tuna when I go out.

Occasionally I'll eat halibut. I never eat swordfish. Occasionally I'll have, you know, more fish than I would think. And I thought, Oh, I'm good. But I just checked my levels. And I, again, my level was super high. I had like 37 on a challenge test. You know, like, I think it were just, it was just in such a toxic world. And it's hard. It's hard. I mean, last night I made a delicious, you know, Spanish sheet kind of Greek baked cod with tomato sauce, but like cod is not

terrible. It's not the worst, but it's definitely got mercury. And I'm just like, what am I doing? Like, what are you going to eat? You know? So I've come to believe that, you know, grass fed regenerative meat or wild meat is probably the safest protein on the planet. I know it's maybe controversial to say that, but you know, even, you know, even you've got, unless you've got really well grown whole grains and beans that are generally raised and have no glyphosate spray in them and are not, you know, genetically

altered. I mean, there's like a lot of messy stuff in the plant world. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. 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 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 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 have to 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. 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, 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.