The Dr. Hyman Show - Are You Nutrient Deficient? The Hidden Factors of Accelerated Aging | Rhonda Patrick - ENCORE

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

This week, in another holiday edition of The Dr. Hyman Show, I’m highlighting a conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a leading expert in nutritional science and aging — a discussion that still feels incredibly important today. We dig into how hidden micronutrient deficiencies can influence metabolism, mood, longevity, and long-term health. Here’s to supporting our health in the year ahead. In this episode, you’ll learn: • Why vitamin D is essential for longevity, immune health, and mood • How magnesium influences metabolism, blood sugar, and brain function • Why even “healthy” diets can leave us undernourished • What it takes to test and personalize your micronutrient intake Better aging starts by giving your cells what they’re missing. When your body has the right nutrients, it can repair, renew, and thrive at any stage of life. Here’s to a healthy start to the new year — I’m excited for what we’ll explore together. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman https://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal https://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcast Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Healthhttps://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Join the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Resultshttps://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Seed, PerfectAmino, Function Health, AirDoctor, LMNT and Pique. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 20HYMAN for 20% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Go to bodyhealth.com and use code HYMAN20 for 20% off your first order. Join today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code MARK2026 to get $50 OFF toward your membership. Get cleaner air. Right now, you can get up to $300 off at airdoctorpro.com/drhyman. Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any order—just head to drinklmnt.com/hyman. Receive 20% off FOR LIFE + a free Starter Kit with a rechargeable frother and glass beaker at piquelife com/hyman.

Hi there, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. I just want to start by saying how grateful I am that you're here. Every week, you choose to spend a little of your time with me, and that means more than you know. As we wind down for the holiday season, we're going to be taking a short break, but we didn't want to leave you without something great to listen to. So today, we're revisiting our most popular episodes of 2025, my conversation with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, she's a leading expert in nutritional science and aging, and in this episode,

we break down by nearly 70% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, and what that means for longevity. We look at the overlooked role of magnesium and metabolism, blood sugar, and brain function, and why our current food system leaves so many of us malnourished, even when we think we're eating a, quote, healthy diet. We also explore the best ways to assess and correct micronutrient imbalances so you can support optimal health from the inside out. When we think about healthy aging, we often think about our external appearance. But beneath the surface, proteins like collagen, elastin, and keratin play a big role in keeping tissue strong and resilient. All of these proteins are built from amino acids, especially the essential ones

our bodies can't make on their own. Getting enough of these building blocks help support not just muscle, but also the structural proteins that support skin elasticity, thicker hair, and stronger nails. Perfect Amino provides those essential amino acids in carefully balanced ratios to support protein synthesis throughout the body. It's a simple way to help your body do what it's designed to do, repair, rebuild, and maintain your body's strength and resilience from the inside out. You can learn more at bodyhealth.com. And don't forget to use code Heimann 20 for 20% off your first order. So, Ron, it's so great to have you on the Dr. Heimann Show.

Welcome, and I've been looking forward to this for a long time. I think you're one of the few scientists out there in the public sphere who's actually communicating science and data in ways that have a lot of integrity and adhere to kind of some common sense principles that, you know, a lot of things out in the blogosphere or the podcast world are often, you know, a little bit, you know, extreme. And you kind of really take a very science. based approach. So I'm really thrilled to have you on the podcast. And the topic I want to really dive into is micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, maybe some phytochemicals. But, you know, there's so much

confusion and controversy. And, you know, the medical professions historically said, you know, you don't really need multivitin mineral if you're eating a healthy diet. Well, first of all, most of us don't eat a healthy diet. And second of all, you know, the idea that vitamins and just cause expensive urine doesn't quite make sense. I always say, if you know, you say, why should you drink water? You're just going to pee it out. It's like your body uses what it needs. And I think there's, there's a lack of understanding of the widespread insufficiency and often deficiencies of nutrients in, in America. You know, we're overfed and undernourished. And so there's a problem that I think we're facing, which is people don't understand the need to actually

obtained the right nutrients and the right amounts for not just preventing a deficiency disease, but for optimizing health, preventing disease of aging. And I want to sort of dive into that with you. Where I want to go through sort of the overall framework of like, you know, where we're at in terms of the nutritional status of American population, what things we should be worried about. And, you know, can dive into the science of each of the key nutrients and what they do and how they affect us. And, you know, one of the things that kind of really got me excited when I was sort of, you know, when I have you on was that you studied with a scientist named Bruce Ames, who, as someone I've, you know, really admired, has been someone who inspired me and a lot of

my work and thinking has come out of a lot of his work, which was really looking at how do we really understand the nature of aging and micronutrients and how do we get a metabolic tune-up? You know, he wrote these incredible papers that were, I think, landmark papers. And, you know, you had the privilege of actually working with him, studying with him. So maybe kind of you can share with us how you sort of got into this with Bruce and what, you know, what you've learned from him and what the sort of whole idea of the role of micronutrients is in health and wellness. Well, first of all, Mark, I want to thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate what you do as well. And I also appreciate the kind words.

So, sorry. Did I make you cry? Bruce Ames. passed away a couple months ago, and he was my mentor and a very good friend, mine. Unbelievable guy. And it kind of a funny story about how I ended up in his lab. You know, I was when I was wrapping out my graduate research, my PhD at St. Churchill's Research Hospital, while I was there, I really got into health and for just wanting to be healthy. And also, I had done some previous research before graduate school in an aging lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

And so I was already very interested in aging, you know, even though I was in my 20s when I was working in that lab. You know, there was always... I was saying people think about when they were 20s is living to 100, but yeah. I was definitely thinking about it. And specifically, I was thinking about, like, things that I can do in my diet and lifestyle because I had done some research on how insulin affects aging and, you know, glucose, metabolism. And so it was very real to me that there's a very strong connection between our diet and lifestyle and the way we age. And so that led me to reading a lot of Bruce's studies on mitochondrial health, on micronutrients. And I continued reading him throughout grad school.

And I started a blog at that time. I was, you know, blogging about vitamin D and omega-3. And I kind of decided I didn't want to be a professor necessarily. I didn't necessarily want to go and write grants and, and, do the sort of classical pathway that a lot of scientists do when they're doing their training. And I had told that to my mentor and my mentors at the time. And they were very distraught about that because they were saying that I was a very good scientist and I was completely going to destroy my scientific career. They begged me to please at least go

interview for some postdoctoral positions. And so I did. I said, okay, well, I'll go ahead an interview. And I went on a few interviews and some very prominent labs. I interviewed for very, even aging labs. In fact, one of the guys that I interviewed with at Stanford looked me up and saw that I was blogging and said to me, you can't do this if you're going to come to my lab. You need to work for me. So then I go to Bruce and I meet Bruce and he is absolutely just, he blew me away with not only his excitement for science, but his excitement for, science communication and what I was doing. And he was so enthusiastic about it. And he was basically like, oh, you need to continue doing. This is a very important thing you do.

Now, remember, Bruce, you know, he kind of switches fields every few years or so. He started out looking at enzymes. And then he developed this test known as the Ames test that is a very, very simple test for testing for mutagens, things that can damage your DNA, which is the precursor for cancer. It's still widely used today. And he had done a lot of you know, research back in the late 70s and early 80s, and he found that chemicals that were in things like women's hair dye, children's pajamas were mutagensens and carcinogens. And he published this paper on it and nobody was doing anything about it. And so he was on the phone calling up these companies. Have you seen my paper? And he was responsible for getting these chemicals out of

women's hair dye, out of children's pajamas. I mean, he has had an amazing impact on public health continues to have an impact on public health. Isn't he one of the most cited scientists of all time? He is. He is. And then, you know, he got into, you wonder, what he's doing this, cancer research. And then he gets into micronutrients. So, you know, these are about 30 or 40 essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids that we need to get from our diet.

We need them to survive. But as Bruce would argue, we also need them to age optimally. And he got into this field quite. I would say it was an accident. He had a guy in his lab doing a sabbatical, Dr. McGregor, and this guy was a cytobiologist. He was looking at red blood cells and doing a lot of experiments with red blood cells. And it turns out he used a media that didn't have folate. And all of a sudden, he started noticing all these double-shranded breaks in DNA.

DNA. The DNA was like being damaged. And so he was like, oh, what's going on? And he finally traced it down to, oh, we have this media that we use that doesn't have folate. So then he decided to do some animal work. Well, let's see what happens if we don't, if we deprive, you know, rodents of folate. And sure enough, widespread DNA damage, just completely, you know, double-shranded breaks and DNA are the precursor to basically on. Oncogenic mutation. Cancer. Exactly. Cancer. So Bruce, of course, was like, wow, this is amazing. Not having an important micronutrient can potentially cause cancer. And that's kind of what it was doing in the rodent studies.

And then he had found some humans that were low in folate and did some experiments as well, found a similar thing, gave them back the folate. DNA double strand of breaks went away. He worked out the mechanism, which was folate is a precursor. for making DNA. And so if you don't have that there, your body will put something there from RNA, a uracil, instead of a thymine. Those are like nucleotides from the DNA that built DNA.

Right. And so it basically causes these double-stranded breaks. So, long story short, that's how Bruce got into micronutrients. And he started to really dive into understanding how these vitamins and minerals are affecting the way we age because cancer, you know, is a disease of age. For the most part. There are some childhood leukemias and childhood cancers, but those are mostly linked to genetics. Aging in general is a major driver of cancer. Bruce came up with this theory called the triage theory.

Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah, this is a, it's a theory that he came up with that posits that vitamins and minerals that we get from our diet, they get triage to essential functions in our body that are important for preventing basically acute death, right? So if you think about blood coagulation, vitamin K1, very important. Like, you need to have your blood clot. Otherwise, you could have, you know, a pretty severe injury, and you could have a hemorrhage, and that would be detrimental, right? So vitamin K is one example, and there's some other examples like selenium that Bruce has published and showed there are proteins that have a stronger binding to vitamin K1 that are important for coagulation.

So these are proteins in the liver versus, for example, other proteins that stay in circulation and are activating proteins that are important for calcium signaling and trafficking, moving calcium out of the bloodstream, moving it to muscle. moving it to bones, right? So he's published a couple of papers showing that. So the idea is that your body will triage them to essential functions to prevent, you know, short-term death at the expense of these long-term sort of health functions, right? Your body hijacks whatever nutrients we have to deal with the immediate needs you have, but then it kind of misses the boat on what they're doing to protect us long-term from the ravages of aging. Exactly.

And so magnesium would be another one. Magnesium is essential mineral. It's involved in over 300 different enzymatic, you know, processes, and ATP production and utilization is one of those. And ATP is the energetic currency of our cells. We need to make energy to survive. Right. So runs our cells is energy, everything. Exactly.

But it's also essential for DNA repair enzymes. They use it to repair damage to our DNA. Every time we make a new cell, whether that's a skin cell or a liver cell or a blood cell, There's damage that occurs even with just the process of cell division, right? Let alone the external processes that were exposed to UV radiation, unhealthy diet, things like that. So we need to repair that damage. But magnesium is essential for those DNA repair enzymes. And so if you don't get enough magnesium, it's only going to those essential roles of ATP production and not the DNA repair enzymes. And this is important because about 50% of the U.S. population does not have have adequate levels of magnesium. 50%? Close to 50%. Yeah.

And, you know, magnesium, as Bruce would say, is at the center of a chlorophyll molecule. Chlorophyllatell. Yeah. So magnesium is very high in dark leafy greens. Yeah. You're supposed to eat your greens. You get your magnesium. Yeah.

And so people aren't eating enough of their greens and they're not getting enough magnesium. Yeah. Greens and beans. Greens and beans. It's an oats. Almond. Exactly. Things that aren't typically staples of American diet,

which is 60% ultra-processed food, right? Right, exactly. So, you know, the magnesium RDA is about 350 to 400 milligrams a day, depending on if you're male or female. Males are probably a little bit more. And so you're really supposed to be getting the majority of that from your diet. People aren't getting that from their diet. And, you know, just in terms of, we talked about triage theory in cancer,

there are a variety of studies that have looked at, these are observational studies, so it's always difficult to establish causation, of course, from observational data. But nonetheless, there are studies that I found a dose-dependent effect of low magnesium. So for every 100-millimeter dose, 100 milligrams less intake per day, was associated with a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer incidence. Wow. Of magnesium. Of magnesium.

So eventually, and that's dose-dependent, right? So let's back up a little bit. Because years ago, my 20, God, more than 20 years ago, I wrote an article called Paradigm Shift, really about the sort of end of normal science, which is this sort of our current view of how things are in medicine and how the body works and shifting more toward a system's view

and understanding the body as a network as a sort of an integrated organism that requires basic raw materials to function optimally. And what I wrote about in that article was that, you know, micronutrients are really kind of miraculous because back in the turn of the century, we didn't really know about them of the 1900s, not 2000s, but we still don't know much about them from the consumer and medical point of view for sure. The amount of serious deficiency to Jesus,

like Pelagra and Berry Berry and Ricketts and, you know, Xerophthalma, which was like a vitamin A deficiency and causes blindness, just widespread, you know, zinc deficiencies. And, you know, it was in ink deficiencies, and these cause really significant, serious diseases. They could literally be cured almost in minutes with infinitesimally small amounts, you know, milligram amounts of nutrients. There's no drug that can do that. And you were talking about magnesium having 300 different enzymatic reactions. When you take a drug, it usually has one target, like one receptor and one action. But nutrients have our pleomorphic, which means they can do many, many, many things, and they do many things. And each nutrient literally can have hundreds of

different reactions in different systems of the body that regulate almost everything we can think of. And what's really frightening to me as a physician, and we do testing of this. I co-founded a company called Function Health, and we do a lot of micronutrient testing as part of that, which is not typically done, whether it's, you know, methylation testing for homocysteine, methamalic acid, you know, with the B vitamins. We're talking about like folic acid or the, you know, vitamin D or mega-3s and, you know, zinc, in the selenium, and the list goes on. And we see iodine, the tremendous amount of deficiencies that exist in red blood cell magnesium, you know, that exist within the population that are being undiagnosed.

I mean, and what we're seeing, I don't, I'm just, we have 110,000 people on our cohort, 67% in the last time we looked at the data of the cohort, which is, I think, a more health-forward cohort who would be, like, proactive about their health, going to function health, getting room dives done, 67% have a nutrient deficiency, iron, omega-3s, vitamin D, home assistant, whatever, at the level that the lab reference range says, not at what you or I would think would be optimal, right? So like, you know, we probably would think vitamin D should be over 45 or 50, but they're levels 30 or ferretin. I think they're level 16, which is your iron store, probably I think it should be a 45 or more for alcohol. So we're talking about 67% being deficient at like a level

that I think is already pretty low. So what about the general population? And maybe you can talk about the degree of nutrient deficiencies and then talk about like how how these things actually do their magic and why they're not just causing expensive urine. And then I want to sort of get into you know, what should people be taking? Because that's how we're going to get into at the end. And I think it's important to know what are the foundational things that are going to protect you long term, you know, for pennies a day that could actually save your life. Well, I want to start out with the multivitamins and vitamins don't do anything in their expensive urine, which you also mentioned earlier, because this is a pet peeve of mine, I guess. I mean, no. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you.

About Ray, it was funny that you, I just going to introvers, like, sorry, I go to these medical conferences. And I'm like, I ask, okay, doctors, you know, how many of you recommend supplements to your patients? And, like, a few hands will go up, you know? How many of you personally take supplements? I'm like, almost everybody's hand goes up. Oh, really? Yeah, it's very funny. That's a great question.

Yeah. So. There's no evidence, but I take it. But I take. Here's a big flaw with a lot of those studies that are cited by journals. Yeah. Great journals, like JAMA, for example. They're poorly designed. They're poorly designed.

So, you know. They're designed like drugs, I guess. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So the problem is when you have a drug trial, randomized control trials are the gold standard, right? You have a drug and then you have a placebo. But the thing is is that with a drug, everybody has zero levels of that drug in the start of trial.

That's right. So you don't have to measure anything, right? Because there's nothing to measure until you take the drug. There's no, like pre-OZempic level, although actually the way the ozempic is true. You have a GLP one. Yeah. Bad example, like statins. So, you know, but when you're doing a... You don't have a normal blood level of lipitor, right?

Right, exactly. When you're doing a study on vitamin D or omega-3 or fill-in-the-blank vitamin mineral, everybody has varying levels of these micronutrients in their body. And so you have to measure things. You have to measure things at the start of the trial. You might have someone that's already got sufficient levels of vitamin D. They may have 50 nanograms per milliliter levels. vitamin D. And so you give them a vitamin D supplement and it's not going to do anything because they're already sufficient, right? Or the converse is they're so deficient and you give them a supplement that's 400 IUs or 800 IUs, which doesn't raise their blood levels hardly at all, that it doesn't really do anything. And so you won't know. Dose is wrong. You don't measure who's sufficient. Like, yeah, I mean, like if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do anything, right? So it's like

if you, if your levels are great of omega-3s and you add omega-3s, you won't see a change in your health, right? Exactly. So that's the fundamental flaw of clinical trials in nutrition. That right there is that the MDs that are running these trials are running them like their drug trials. And they're not. You have to measure things. With that said, there have been some well done trials. And in fact, I remember. It's just been trumped. The other thing, the other flaw is that they will use a single dose of a nutrient that usually works as a team. like and they can actually make things worse like the beta carotene trials and smokers show that it can cause cancer but oxidative stress is managed by a whole team of nutrients so like i would say you could be you know uh you know michael jordan but if you're playing one against five on a basketball team you're going to lose every time right even if he's the best player in the world so you need a team of of these nutrients particularly in terms of the oxidative stress cascade to actually modulate for radicals

And if you give a high dose of one nutrient, you're going to kind of screw up the whole chain. Yeah, that is possible, not to mention the fact that smokers, I mean, if you give beta carotene to non-smokers, it doesn't cause cancer. But smokers are doing so much oxidative damage and they're getting DNA damage that a high dose of something like beta-carotene, which can be an antioxidant, may then allow, you know, some of that. It's basically, it's allowing some of the cells that would otherwise die from the oxidative stress, you know, not. to die, right? And so, yeah, it's a very complicated thing when you're doing things like that. But, you know, I think, like, it was about 10 years ago. There was a huge study in the annals of internal medicine, and it was called enough is enough. Vitamins and mineral supplements, not only don't do anything that may be harmful. Yeah. I think that was, do you remember that

study? Yeah. It was about 10 years ago. Yeah. And, you know, I was, I just dug in and it was a meta-analysis, and I went and looked at all those studies, and I found that all these flaws, again, coming down. You look to the actual studies that they made their conclusions from. So they do a review and they go, we're going to look at all these studies and we're going to make a summary. And that's called a meta-analysis. And then from that, you didn't just take their conclusions. You actually went and looked at the data itself from the original studies. Exactly. Yeah. And I put out a video about it like years and years ago. And all these files that we just talked about were there. And here we are 10 years later. And the Cosmos trials was

just published. Right. So this is another meta-analysis of a couple randomized controlled trials where older adults were given a multivitamin, they had about 20 or so essential vitamins, essential minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, right, magnesium. This was all present in this multivitamin, and they were given it for two years. Yeah. What the study found, these are randomized controlled trials, placebo-controlled, right? The multivitamin actually did improve brain aging. So they were less people taking the multivitamin mineral supplement,

were less likely to experience cognitive dysfunction memory loss. And in fact, they experienced a improvement in their brain aging that was equivalent to reversing two years of brain aging. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Brand mice control trial. Here we are, 10 years later.

Yeah. And there's many, many other studies that show the value of nutrients in many, many different conditions, right? Exactly. Yeah. You know, I think that it comes down to, yes, you should try to get your micronutrients from diet. However, taking, you know, a multivitamin supplement, taking vitamin D, taking omega-3s, like, these are insurance, right?

This is insurance to make sure you're getting your optimum levels. So you asked about deficiencies and what are some of the common ones. Well, omega-3, okay, so about 80% of the world's population and 90% of the U.S. population does not meet the requirements for omega-3 fatty acids. Yeah. That's a lot. Which is basically what your body's made of, you know, the cell membranes, your brain. shoot how a nervous tissue runs regulatory inflammation. I mean, it's critical to everything.

Exactly. So when the check engine light comes on in your car, do you ignore it? Of course not. You take it to the mechanic and fix it before it's a bigger problem. Your body is no different. It's constantly sending signals. Inflammation. Blood sugar is rising.

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far smaller than what traditional hepa can handle. Plus, the smart sensor automatically adjust to keep your air consistently clean without the noise. Better air means better breathing, better rest, and better overall health. Thousands of families are already using Air Doctor to create safer, cleaner homes. I think you'll notice the difference, too. Right now, you can save up to $300. Go to Air Doctorpro.com slash DR Hyman. That's Air Doctorpr.com slash Dear Hyman. better, sleep better, live better with Air Doctor. And there's been a lot of work by Dr. Bill Harris. So I'm an associate professor at the fatty acid research institute with Bill Harris.

And so I'm involved in a lot of research on omega-3. And he's published just an array of studies that are quite convincing. So looking at the omega-3 index, so this is the omega-3 level. So this is the omega-3 levels in red blood cells, which is sort of like a long-term marker for omega-3 because they take about what... What does the index actually measure? It measures the EPA and DHA levels along with a bunch of other fatty acids if you're interested in that. But it's really the EPA and DHA level in the red blood cell membrane, which gives you the index and you want a certain number. Exactly.

So he's published studies using like the Framingham cohort. So these are large cohort studies. with a lot of people, and he's looked at the omega-3 index and correlated with all-cause mortality, so dying from a variety of different causes. And what he's found is that people that have what is defined as a high omega-3 index, so this would be 8% or more, have a five-year increased life expectancy compared to people that have a 4% omega-3 index, which is low. And actually, the average omega-3 index of the U.S. population is about 5%, pretty close to that 4%.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why we actually measure that in function health labs. Yeah. It's great to see when we see that. So five-year increased life expectancy, if you think about Japan, Japan, who they eat a lot of seafood in Japan, their omega-3 index on average is like 10%. So they're above the high, the 8%. Yeah, yeah. The mercury levels are probably also very high.

What's funny, it's funny that you should say that, Mark, there's been studies like in pregnant women. Yeah. You probably remember this, that decades ago women were advised to stop eating fish because of the high mercury. And that actually had a detrimental sort of effect because omega-3 fatty acids, as you mentioned, they're so important for the brain, very important for neurodevelopment. And there have now been a whole host of studies that have come out showing that omega-3 fatty acids actually protect from any potential mercury toxicity in the developing fetus. And in fact, there's been studies looking at children that were born to mothers that had a

high level of omega-3 and high mercury. those children had scored higher on intelligence tests so IQ scores even like even if so high mercury was actually biomarking intelligence it wasn't actually the mercury was high omega-3 it's crazy but yes you you get you get the although other in in uh Japan they eat a lot of seaweed which I seeweed is a key later for heavy metals oh is it so is green tea by the way I think garlic garlic garlic the beta beta macapids and garlic as well but back to the omega-3 and this study I was talking about from Bill Harris is so interesting because he also, this is a huge cohort of people, the Framingham, there's people that have all sorts of lifestyles, including smoking. And so he did a sub-analysis

looking at smokers and non-smokers and their omega-3 index. And what Bill and his associates and colleagues found was that smokers with a high level of omega-3, so they had a high omega-3 index of 8%. They had the same mortality as non-smokers with a low omega-3 index. Okay, everybody, this It's not mean you can smoke and take your official pills. I don't get any ideas. Or if you're not getting enough omega-3, it's like smoking, right? I mean, if you learn. That's another way I look at it.

If you look at the graph of this, I mean, it's incredible. The overlay is perfect. Yeah, perfect. Fascinating. So having a low omega-3 index had the same mortality risk as smoking. Okay, so we're talking about 90% of the American population is in that category. Yes, yes. And, you know, there's also been a whole.

whole host of randomized control trials looking at omega-3s, being cardio-protective, right? So they're very important for cardiovascular health, triglycerides. Yeah, there's actually prescription omega-3s, which you can pay much, much more than you go get a basic omega-3 for lowering triglycerides as a therapies. Right, yeah. And you mentioned inflammation, you know, so this is another thing. They do, they play a major role in lowering inflammation. And so that's a driver of aging in many ways, of brain aging, you know, cardiovascular aging. So omega-3s are, I would say, one of the most profound lifestyle factors that can play a role in negating inflammation aside from exercise.

Yeah, and they're just, they're so, well, like the word I use is pleomorphic, but it's a big medical word, but essentially it means a dozen million things, right? It's not just one thing. It's great for your skin, for your hair, for your nails, for your brain health, for preventing dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer. I mean, It's, it regulates inflammation. So these are, these are nutrients that do so many things in the body, then they work differently than drugs. And they're, they're essential, they're called essential, because they are essential.

Right. And, you know, one of the challenges is that we're looking for that, you know, quick fix, and we're trying to diagnose a real disease that's directly connected to that particular problem. So I'm sure if you're familiar with Robert Heaney, who was a vitamin D researcher, and he wrote this beautiful paper years ago called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. And the basic thesis was that in the short term, if you're a nutrient deficient at a severe level,

like we used to see, you know, in the 1900s, if your vitamin D is super low, you'll get rickets. Or if you don't have enough vitamin C and you're a sailor, you get scurvy, right? Or if you don't have enough, eat too much white rice and white flour, which they started doing at the center of century, you get Barry, Barry, and Pallagra and all these horrible B vitamin deficiencies.

The thesis you had essentially is that you can correct those vitamin deficiencies in the short term to fix those deficiencies. If you're low and folate in the short term, it'll cause anemia, a form of anemia, which is big cells called megaloblastic anemia. But in the long run, it could cause cancer and heart disease and dementia. And the same thing with vitamin D. You know, in the short run, you'll get rickets. In the long run, you'll get osteoporosis and cancer and disobey.

sooner. And so medicine hasn't really gotten that concept. It's like, yeah, if you're deficient, take a vitamin, but otherwise you don't need them, right? And that's also very much in line with Bruce's triage theory, right? These micronutrients are running our metabolism, which runs everything from our heart pumping blood to neurotransmitter function to repairing DNA. So there's a lot of, you know, you can look in the mirror and if your vitamin C deficient and your gums start falling apart, you can see, oh, I've got scurvy. I got scurvy, right? But like, When you're magnesium deficient, like, you're not going to see DNA damage happening. But you might feel muscle cramps and you might have anxiety, you might have constipation,

you might have muscle twitching or headaches or a million other things that are symptoms of magnesium deficiencies. Right. Right. I mean, the loud noises. And so, like, as a functional medicine doctor, I take a deep history to look at microRNA deficiency symptoms that are not necessarily pure true deficiency, but more like insufficiency. And I think people don't make that distinction.

And I think when you treat people, it's often a miracle. When you get the pleat in the nutrients are deficient, so many things get better. I like it is insufficiency because most people are not deficient. We do have a lot of fortification even in our ultra-possus foods because of, you know, preventing neural tube defects, like preventing pelagra, like all these diseases that were sort of cropping up, like you mentioned in the early. Fortified. But it's like junk fortified.

It is. It is. But it seems to stop some of those deficiencies. right? But it's the insufficiency. And with vitamin D, it's a really big one because it is converted into a steroid hormone. So this is something that is going into the nucleus of our cell and binding and interacting with DNA. It has a little sequence of DNA called a vitamin D response element. It's so important. It's encoded in our DNA, right? So to not have enough vitamin D, so 70% of the U.S. population doesn't meet the sufficient levels of vitamin D, which is about

30 nanograms per mill, 70%. 30, which would be... And if you added up to 45 or 50, it's probably like 80 plus 90%, right. Yeah. So, and so that would be, there have been studies looking at all cause mortality and vitamin D levels. Of course, this is again, observational. Lots of meta-analyses out there, even dating back for like 30 years. And it seems as though having at least 40 nanograms per mill seems to be a sweet spot. You know, 40 to 60 is a really good place to be where you're having a good level vitamin D. But again, it's a steroid hormone. It's not, it's, it's regulating over 5% of the protein

encoding human genome. That's like thousands of genes. Yeah. You know, everything from immune function, it plays an important role in preventing autoimmunity. Brain function. It regulates genes that are important for converting triptophan into serotonin. Yeah. Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter that regulates mood, cognitive function, impulse control. You know, so vitamin D... Maybe I need bore of that then. Well, and the problem is, is that, you know, vitamin D, typically you make it from UVB radiation exposure from the sun. Yeah.

But... We're all told to shield ourselves from the sun and sun's locked. And so we live indoors, work indoors, and yeah, it's a problem. And when you're all running our half-naked hunting and gathering, we got a lot of vitamin D. And we ate, and we're coastal areas, and we ate, you know, fish, small fish, like herring and sort of things that they're higher in vitamin D. Or, you know, if you're foraging mushrooms, you're high in vitamin D. So there's ways in which our historical population got it, the no paleolithic ancestors, but we don't get that.

Right, exactly. We don't. And so, you know, I do think, so people, the simple solution is a vitamin D supplement, right? And so about 4,000 I use a day will generally get someone from a deficient range, which is 20 nanograms per mill up to a sufficient range. Okay, but you're just talking about 10 times what's normally in a multivitamin or what doctors will recommend. I am.

I am. Because you, yeah, you really do. It's about 1,000 IUs of vitamin D will raise blood levels between 5 to 10 nanograms per mil. But we have genes. We have different variations of our genes that are able to do this. And this again comes down to these clinical studies showing that, you know, nothing happens. We're all different. We're all different.

And so some people actually have to take a much higher dose, right? Because they have genes that aren't doing, converting vitamin D3 into 25 hydroxy vitamin D, which is this circulating form of vitamin D or the steroid hormone. 1, 25 hydroxy vitamin D. You know, so. Well, let's go down this rabbit hole because I think, you know, there's a paper just reminded me on that Bruce Ames Row that was published

in, I think the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition years ago about how one third of all of our DNA codes for enzymes. And an enzyme is a catalyst that converts one molecule to another molecule. The catalysts or the co-enzymes or the helpers are micronutrients. And so what he said in that paper was that there's a huge variation in,

the populations need for different nutrients. So some people might need 400 micrograms of folate. Some people might need 4,000 micrograms of folate. And so it's really about personalized nutrition. It's about testing, not guessing. It's about figuring out what your body needs, what your genetics are. And it gets really fascinating that you can actually start to customize your own diet and your own supplement management based on what your own particular genetics and your levels are.

And so I think there's this, it was sort of like a wake-up call from you, like, Holy cow. When you think of our DNA and everything it does, if one third of it is coding for enzymes and all those enzymes require vitamins and minerals, if we don't have enough of those nutrients, it's like an assembly line in a factory. If you don't have one station, the thing can't get made, right? So you gum up the whole works of your metabolic machinery if you don't have the right levels of nutrients to optimize the function of your body. And that's why we call functional medicine, because it's about how do we optimize function, right? It's true.

You know, these minerals and vitamins, so you're talking about magnesium, zinc, calcium, B vitamins. Like, these are co-factors for these enzymes to make these enzymes run properly. And if you have, if you don't have, you know, sufficient levels of those vitamins and minerals, what happens is those enzymes do not work optimally, right? So in the case, we talked about DNA repair enzymes, they're not going to be repairing damage. as well. Zinc is also involved in DNA repair as well. You know, so B vitamins are involved in serotonin production, magnesium's involved in vitamin D production, right? You were talking about, you know, nutrients working together. And it's very true. So I think a really great way to think

about eating diet is what do I need to run my metabolism? Yeah. Right. And when you say metabolism, like, what do you mean by that? Because like it's not like my weight. You're talking about metabolism as sort of a bigger concept in medicine. Yeah. Yeah, I guess when people hear the word metabolism, they think about weight loss. I got us on metabolism. Right, right. What I'm talking about is much more a biochemist definition of metabolism, which is all these enzymes. You're talking about, you know, one third of the protein encoding genome that are doing enzymatic reactions that have, they're making proteins function. So they are producing energy. They are, you know, running neurotransmitter synthesis. They are causing, you

know, your liver to function properly, your heart to function, the lungs, everything. So every chemical reaction all the time. Exactly. I don't know if I heard, I read this somewhere, I can't find the original citation, but that there's 37 billion trillion chemical reactions in the body every second. It's just like an insane amount of activity is going on chemically and biochemically and converting one molecule another. And if you don't have enough of these nutrients, that whole 37 billion and trillion chemical reactions may not work optimally. Exactly. So, you know, getting the micronutrients you need from food.

And nature sort of color-coded them in a way, right? I mentioned, you know, chlorophyll, that's magnesium. You have vitamin K, also the... What color is that? What color is vitamin K? I guess it's green, too. I would say green. Great, great, very.

Vitamin K one. And then the orange ones. The orange, right? And then you've got like the phytochemicals, right? So that would be the purples. But, you know, you really do need to get a lot of vegetables and fruits. And then you need your protein, right, and fiber. When you're getting your micronutrients, you're also getting the fiber because a lot of the micronutrients are coming from plants.

Yeah. Which are a great source of both fermentable and non-fermentable fiber, right? So I think it's a really simple way. There's so many fad diets out there, right? Carnivore, keto, vegetarian, palaeaeae. Yeah. And although I do think paleo is the closest thing to what I'm talking about. Yeah. But what I'm talking about is even simpler because what it really means is that you understand what it, why you need food. What's the purpose of food, right? The purpose of food is to provide you with these essential vitamins and minerals and fatty acids like omega-3 and protein and fiber to improve gut health. That's the purpose of eating. And feel. Right. And so that's what's that means you don't need ultra-process foods. That means, you know, if you're eating something like just carnivore diet,

you're going to be missing out on a lot of micronutrients. It's going to be very hard. I have a theory, which is, like I have many theories. One theory I have is that, you know, we're so depleted in these nutrients. And it disregulates our appetite. And so when you're eating ultra-processed food, there's no nutrients in there. And so when a kid is iron deficient, it'll leave dirt. It's called PICA and try to get some iron from the dirt.

And I think so many of people in this country are so nutrient-deficient that they're just eating more and more of the ultra-processed food. It's like they're looking for love in all the wrong places. Have you heard of the protein leverage hypothesis? Yes. Yeah. So it's kind of the same thing where, you know, your body needs a certain amount of protein to run optimally. And if you're eating, there's been a couple of randomized controlled trials on this. I think it's like Stephen Simpson is one of the proponents of it.

It was like 2000s or something. And that essentially, if you're eating ultra-processed foods, which are high in, you know, a lot of refined carbohydrates, low in protein, that you overeat to sort of try to get enough protein. So it does make sense. If your body's looking for more of micronutrients, more vitamins, more minerals, more protein, that you start to overeat. And are you familiar with Kevin Hall's study that he published a couple of years ago? You mean the ultra-prose was a year, but they had 500 calories? always more. They had 500. Yeah. So for people listening, I mean, processed food. Exactly. They had, you know, two diets. They had a whole foods diet,

which was essentially mostly they were getting salads and they were getting poultry and lean meats and some fish, oatmeal. And then there was the ultra processed foods diet. And they were trying to match them for macronutrient. So they were, yeah, so they were matched for calories. They were matched for total sugar, although the added sugar and the ultra processed foods group was, it was like a huge difference. I mean, it was like something like 70 or 80% versus 1%. So the sugars in the Whole Foods diet were coming from fruit, which has a fiber matrix, right? So they were matched for that. Exactly. So the added sugar was not matched, although total sugar was, right? And then protein was somewhat matched. The Whole Foods had a little bit more

protein. It was like something like 15.6% in Whole Foods diet versus 14% in the ultra-processed foods diet. And they were given, so a lot of, a lot of things were matched. And they were given these foods, you know, in a sort of metabolic ward where they came in and eat, and they had 60 minutes to eat the meal, add limit them. Right. So they could eat as much or as little as they want. Yeah. So you got a big, as much, like, giant buffet, eat as much as you want. Like, you got 60 minutes. Right. And then they did it. And then they group that eat the ultra-processed food, ate 500 calories more day. And just to do the math on that, 500 calories times seven is 3,500 calories. That's one pound of weight gain. So you add that up as 52 pounds of weight gain in

a year. Now, order America is overweight. Yeah. I didn't do that math. I know that I just read the results, which was two pounds. They gained two pounds in two weeks, whereas the Whole Foods diet lost two pounds in two weeks. Well, let's say it's two pounds, right? Two weeks. It's like, you do the math. It's like, but you add that up over a year. And then you add up year over a year, it's like that's why we're seeing the sort of just incredible level of severe obesity and diabetes. And I mean, it's just, you know, the latest date I saw was sort of shocking was that 38% of teenagers have pre-diabetes. Wow. It's like, what? I mean, it didn't exist when I graduated. I'm old, but it didn't exist when I graduated from medical school. Like, we didn't

have it. We never saw a kid. There's been studies that have looked at, like, healthy individuals and they've given them, and they're actually young men. They gave them a 20-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage, sort of akin to, like, a soda, Coke or something. And they did this for, three weeks. And after that three week mark, their C-reactor protein biomarker for inflammation went up 100%. They are small, dense LDL. So these are lipoproteins that are transporting. Yeah. The ones that are causing more heart disease. Exactly. causing more atherosclerosis. They went up as well. This was just after three weeks, you know, and healthy of a sugar-sweetened beverage, which is the ultimate, right? That's the ultimate. But the reality is that it's

gluten-free. It's gluten-free, yes. But it's definitely, it's causing inflammation, massive inflammation at the level of the gut. And so you can take healthy people and dramatically change their profile within a matter of weeks of having, you know, this ultra-processed foods, these sugar-sweetened beverages, you know, which again, like- And they deplete nutrients because I think people don't realize that, one, you're not getting them, but two, you actually need nutrients to actually run your biochemistry. And so you're trying to burn these calories and burn the food, but you're actually depleted and the very nutrients required to run the metabolic pathways to actually metabolize the food.

So you're kind of, you know, getting it from both sides. Like a two hit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, it comes down to, I think, you know, thinking about why you need to eat is so important because then it's like I need to get micronutrients. I need to get my fiber.

I need to get protein. When I say fiber, carbohydrates, right? But it needs to be carbohydrates in a form of. fruits and vegetables, which have the micronutrients and the fiber, right? And nuts and seeds, yeah, and oats. And then, and then avoiding ultra-processed foods, I think, I think if people were to do that and think about eating that way, and then you have to move, right? You have to be physically active.

Being sedentary is a disease. Yeah. Like, that's, like, there's, there's data out there that show people with a low cardio-respatory fitness, so this is a marker of, you know, I mean, it's a marker of how physically active you are, essentially. That's an oversimplification. But people with a low cardiorespiratory fitness have the same disease risk as people with diabetes, cardiovascular disease smokers. So how do you measure your cardiovascular fitness?

Well, cardiorespiratory fitness is something typically you can measure if you go into like a lab that measures them. And they put that like a max. It's a VO2 max. So it's measuring your maximal oxygen uptake under maximal exercise. They put a mask on you. And that's that's really how you empirically quantify it. However, if you, you know, if you have like a smart watch, outwatches do you sort of measure it.

It's not really entirely accurate. I like mine Garman because it says I'm 45, but I don't believe it. Well, you can actually do it. You can do what's called the Cooper test. And so that's basically you do a 12-minute run on a flat surface, like a track. If you have hills, it's harder to run hills. And so you can't, you're trying to run as fast as you can maintain for that 12 minutes. So it's like a, it's a maintainable 12-minute pace.

Right. And that is, and there's a calculation you can look it up, the Cooper test, and you can sort of get a good estimate of your VO2 max. Yeah, yeah. But essentially, you know, having. That's assuming you could run for 12 minutes, which most Americans can't. You know, there is, there's an argument to be made for exercise snacks, you know, so these are short bursts of, you know, physical activity where you're getting your heart rate above, you know, 70% max heart rate. So you're getting to more into the vigorous exercise, you know, range. And, um, there have been some studies. They're called the Vilpa studies. Are you familiar with these? These are vigorous, intermittent lifestyle activity studies. And Martin Gabala, who he's an expert on high-intensity interval training. I've had him on my podcast. He's involved in a lot of this research. Jumped out and then 10 burpees and then go back to work? Sort of. Yeah. People are wearing these, you know, wearable devices that they can measure their heart rate. And so scientists can see when they're getting these burst of high-intensity exercise. So this type of exercise is actually not structured. What you're talking about would be structured, right, where you, like, get up and do burpees or air squats or high knees

or jumping jacks. This is where people sort of take advantage of everyday situation. So they sprint up the stairs, right? And run, you know, they're running to some place rather than walking. So they're really using their everyday lifestyle to kind of get their heart rate up. Yeah. Well, people that do that, do anywhere between three to nine minutes a day, have a 40% reduction in cancer mortality, a 50% reduction in cardiovascular related mortality, all? cause mortality. So this is beneficial for people, and this is even in people that identify as non-exercisers. So just getting like some sort of exercise does have benefits for people in general. When you're low on electrolytes, it can lead to headaches, cramps, fatigue, and

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It's shaded longer than typical matcha, boosting L-Pheonine and chlorophyll for calm, focused energy that lasts without the crash of coffee. I love how one simple ritual keeps me centered, boosts my metabolism, and even nourishes my skin from within with detoxifying antioxidants. Transform your wellness from the inside out and get up to 20% off for life plus a complimentary gift. Explore Peek's radiant wellness products at peaklife.com slash hymen. That's P-I-Q-U-E-Live.com slash hymen. I mean, you look at the data on mortality. and longevity, one of the biomarkers that's the most correlated with longevity is VO2 max,

is your level of cardiovascular and respiratory fitness, which is basically how fast your metabolism can run, because it's basically an indirect measure of how much calories you can burn per minute and how much oxygen you can burn per minute because they're very correlated. And your metabolism, being having a slower fast metabolism is really about your VO2 max because if you have a high VOT2 max, you can burn a lot of oxygen and then you can burn a lot of calories because you need both to actually combust in your mitochondria, the energy factories to actually produce ATP, which is the source of energy for the runs everything in your body.

So it's like you actually have this incredible system, but we don't really take advantage of it and we don't maximize our fitness, which is so correlate. And I think the other number that's sort of a little easier to get is your waist to hip ratio, which you need a tape measure. And that, again, is the bigger your way. waist, the short of your life, basically. Is that also for visceral fat, measuring visceral fat?

Yeah, I mean, it's a, I mean, your waist to hip ratio is a crude measure of visceral fat. I mean, but yeah, if you did a dexas scan or an MRI, you could look at body composition. For sure, it's like, it's that belly fat. But again, that's all relates to insulin resistance and prediabetes and inflammation, which, again, I want to getting back to the micronutrients, all those things actually accelerate your risk of many of these things. Like magnesium is very involved in blood sugar regulation, right?

So you're talking about 45% of Americans being deficient and are 50% being deficient of magnesium, that affects blood sugar. We have a epidemic of diabetes and prediabetes in this country. Are you familiar with some of the, there's some gene variations in the transporter that transports magnesium into cells? And people with a gene variation that obscures the transport,

so basically they're not getting as much magnesium into their cells are much more likely to have type 2 diabetes. So there's really some, I would say more causal evidence there, right? Because one would argue, well, people that are low in magnesium are also eating a refined sugar diet and they're not exercising and all these other potential unhealthy lifestyle factors that could be contributing. But when you look at the genetics, right, I mean, it doesn't lie. So you're looking at someone that's not getting enough magnesium. There are, you know, insufficient and deficient in some cases. And their risk for type 2 diabetes just skyrockets. Yeah. I mean, I think this is so important that, you know, we're walking around. with a population that has got such treatable cheap solutions for so many issues and that we're looking for sort of drugs to treat this and drugs you're trying. I'm not against drugs at all, but it's like we're missing the boat because, yeah, somebody doesn't have scurvy

or rickets, but they're still insufficient and they're going to need these nutrients and actually optimize your health. And you kind of started to unpack the degrees of different nutrient deficiencies. And, you know, as you're going through the list, you're going through the things that are the most common deficient in our country. I know omega-3s, vitamin D, magnesium. And there's others, right? So there's other, there, you need every essential vitamin and mineral, right? You need all those for sure. But, but the ones that are really causing havoc are, you know, deficiencies in, you know, the methylation nutrients, like the B vitamins, folate, B-6, B-12, deficiencies in iron, deficiencies in zinc. Potassium. These are like, yeah, because we, we, we, we, we, we,

diet that's very plant poor, and that's where you get your, you know, potassium, which is from, you know, plants. And, and, um, and you need to actually not get as much sodium, which is where we're, you need all right. So not like salt is bad. We need salt. It's just, it's all the salt added by corporations to your food to make you palatable because otherwise it tastes like cardboard. They had sugar and salt and fat, and it makes you addicted to it. So we, and we, and we leave out all the key nutrients that are needed to regulate everything in our body. And so, so, so maybe you can kind of take us down that, that lists a little deeper. So we've got, we've got to get omega-3s, we've got to get vitamin D, we've got to get magnesium. And, and literally, we could

spend a podcast on each nutrient and probably 10 podcasts on each nutrient, but we're just going to go through. So we'll understand, like, these are the things that are non-negotiables that you've got to have and that you've got to test, you've got to measure, and figure out whether your levels are okay, because the average physician or a practitioner isn't going to do it. And they don't know how to do it. And they don't get taught at this in medical school. And I'm working on trying to change that in Washington, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, and they're not being addressed and often worse for being told not to fix them. Yeah. So the vitamin D, magnesium's, omega-3, we talked about, right? You know, believe it or not, a lot of people, I don't remember the exact percentage, but quite a bit of people are not getting enough vitamin C, something like,

30 or 40%, 40%, or something like that, are not getting enough vitamin C. Yeah, I heard the 10% are deficient at the level that would cause scurvy in America. That's unbelievable. Just not eating any vegetables or fruits, because vitamin C is also in vegetables, not just in fruits. Calcium is another one. So, I mean, these are things that can be tested for and measured. Another one is vitamin E. People are not getting enough vitamin E.

Again, that's also found in things like avocado, nuts, whole grains. And then potassium is a big one because it's so important for the sodium potassium pump, which plays a role in blood pressure. And so when you're talking about too much sodium and not enough potassium, it's really exacerbating that not getting enough potassium aspect, right? Because that ratio is so important. And so not only are, I think it's something like 96% of the U.S. population doesn't meet the adequate intake for potassium. Yeah. It's essentially everyone. Yeah.

And our potassium intake is Hunter gathered should be 10 to 1 potassium to sodium. Now it's the other way around. It's the other way around. Exactly. And so there's, there's, you know, all sorts of problems with blood pressure and, you know, gosh, it's like even like 30 percent of like individuals age 20 to 39 have hypertension. Yeah. These are young adults with hypertension. And we now know that hypertension isn't just a risk for cardiovascular disease. It's a risk for dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Particularly if you start. earlier, right? If you're like a younger person, so like it's cumulative exposure to hypertension, you know, it's, it's important because you have to get blood flowed to your brain. And, you know, you've got all these tiny, like 90% of the brain vasculature surrounding the brain is made of these tiny, tiny blood vessels that are like the smaller than the size of hair in terms of diameter. And they have to get blood flow to them. So exercise helps that. But hypertension exacerbates.

the lack of blood flow going to those blood vessels. And what happens is they're so tiny, they start to sort of constrict and sort of fall off. And you can get mini strokes. Many strokes, but also neurons don't get the nutrients and the oxygen they need. And so then you start to lose neurons, right? And you get brain atrophy. And so there's this connection between hypertension and dementia. And, you know, I'm talking about potassium here because potassium does play an important role in.

Rayleigh, blood pressure. Yeah. And so does magnesium, too. So it is magnesium. So it is magnesium. It's a relaxation mineral. And then exercise, of course, is one of the best things that you can do. I mean, as a doctor, when a patient comes in with preeclampsia, which is a problem of high blood pressure in pregnancy, or has preclampic seizures or anything that seizures, the treatment is intravenous magnesium.

Right. Right? Sure. Think about it. And so, like, this is something with uncontrollable high blood pressure. What do we do? We give them intravenous magnesium, because all the drugs don't work. I think there's some evidence also I've seen that vitamin D plays a role in preventing that as well.

Yeah. And it's funny, like, when I was pregnant, I asked my OBGYN for a vitamin D test. Do you want to know what his answer was? You don't need it. Why it's going to be low? Why is it going to be low? Why? It's going to be low anyway.

Like, I was like, vitamins, just take it anyway. Are you kidding me? Right. Like, you're telling me why do I need a test? It's just going to be low. And, you know, and I'm like, well, I want a test. And I, yes, I'm going to be supplementing, but I want to know how much I'm going to be, you know, should we supplementing with. But it was just really astonishing to me that mentality, you know, and actually just recently I went in for, I didn't go to my normal doc.

I went into, it was like a, you know, a sort of ER kind of urgent care doc. And I wanted to get my vitamin D levels measured. And he goes, you know that's falling out of vogue now. And I just gave him this long lecture. I mean, I was like, I went in deep. Oh, boy. And he goes, is this your area to area of expertise? and was like, yes, it is. I've done research on it. I've published studies on it. And he kind of

was like, okay. I mean, it's not their fault. I mean, I'm a physician, and, you know, I don't fault them. And my daughter's graduating from medical school this year, and like zero nutrition. It is, it is. Like, even micronutrients, like, I don't even think they covered any of that. And and it, to me, it's like, this is the center of our biology. And if we don't, we don't understand how our bodies work and how to work with them and how to facilitate and all. functional function, and it's not like the microneutral is the only thing, but they're a very key foundational part of being healthy. And when you go through the litany of things that we're deficient in, you know, it's a lot of things and, or insufficient in, and it's different degrees of

insufficiency in the population for different nutrients, but, you know, it were widespread deficient, you know, iron, zinc, lenient, a lot of things that iodine, I mean, it just, I see this all the time in our testing, and it's function health, and I'm like, sh, kind of shocked. And I've done testing for, you know, a lot of patients who've come to see me over the decades, but this is like 110,000 people. It's not like I can see 10,000 people or 20,000 in my lifetime, but like this is a huge amount of people. And it's sort of shocking to me. And yet it's not really being talked about as a sort of critical step in helping address a chronic disease epidemic. And what you're saying is that, yes, you can get deficiency

diseases like scurvy, but what's really the issue is how these contribute to our long latency deficiency diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer and heart disease and diabetes and osteoporosis and all the muscle aging and all the things that we don't want right yeah and so you know one of the last papers that Bruce published his second to last paper was called longevity vitamins and yeah and you know it was about these vitamins like vitamin D and magnesium and omega-3 tarine or some other like essential amino acids that play a role in the way we age and slowing age-related decline. Yeah.

And, you know, there was just a recent study that came out on vitamin D, sufficient levels of vitamin D. People that supplemented with vitamin D were 40% less likely to have dementia. Yeah. You know, so the reality is, is that... I mean, vitamins don't just quite expensive you run? They don't. They don't.

You know, these micronutrients are running everything in our body. Yeah. And when you have insufficient levels of them, you're not going to necessarily see it, Although you probably feel it, you know. You might have symptoms, but you don't attach it to that. Right. You don't attach it to that. But it's causing this insidious damage, right?

This insidious DNA damage, a little bit of oxidative stress, a little bit of inflammation. Or just I get sick all the time because my vitamin D is low. Right. Or you're getting sick. Or my muscles ache, you know, because I'm vitamin D is low. Or, you know, I've muscle crammed because my magnesium's low, right? Or I have depression because my, you know, methylation vitamins are low. Like, people have symptoms.

They just don't correlate it with the nutrient deficiencies. Depression is interesting. There's a pretty classic study that no one ever talks about where healthy individuals were injected with lipopolysaccharide. So for those listening, this is a component of your bacterial outer cell membranes. It's present in our colon because we have about, I don't know how many trillions of bacteria. So many bacteria in there, right? 40 or 50 trillion. Okay. 40 or 50 trillion. There's about a gram. of lipopolysaccharide in our gut because those bacteria do die off. And these are bacterial toxins. This is what pieces off your immune system to know it.

It does. And when we have gut permeability, lots of things that cause that, it releases it, right, also known as leaky gut, it leaches the LPS into our bloodstream. Well, this study took healthy individuals and injected them with an amount of LPS

that would be equivalent to something that you could get from intestinal permeability. Yeah. And it caused depressive symptoms in these individuals. Okay, one, that links inflammation to depression.

100%. Two, if those individuals were given EPA, so this is one of the omega-3 fatty acids, it does play a major role in dampening inflammation through a variety of mechanisms like resolvins and marisans and the SPMs, these are all molecules that are resolving inflammation very quickly. They did not experience those suppressive symptoms.

Yeah. If they were injected with the LPS. If they got omega-3s. If they have the omega-3s. Yeah. So it comes down to, like, again, you know. And omega-3s have been shown to actually help with depression. They have.

They have. Yeah. With depression, specifically EPA seems to be very important for depression. And I think that's because there's a really big inflammatory component to depression. Yeah. Where, you know, there's now studies showing that people that don't respond to classical SSRI, so serotonin reuptake inhibitors. No, like Prozac.

Exactly. People that don't respond to that, they typically have very, very high levels of C-Reactor protein inflammation. So there's like a subset of people. Some people respond and it helps them. Yeah, yeah. But there's a subset, a quite large subset of people that have very high inflammatory biomarkers and do not respond to SSRIs.

And so logically, the next question would be, should we lower their inflammation? Yeah. How can we lower their... I read some paper that was like, hypothesizing that we should use T and F alpha blockers to biologics for depression. In other words, these are drugs that massively suppress inflammation. The body use for serious autoimmune diseases, and they're talking about using our depression.

I'm like, wait a minute. Like, how about we find out why there's inflammation in the first place and get to the root cause of it, which is really what we do in functional medicine. I think what you're kind of hitting on, just sort of prooffully, and I want to sort of tie the dots together, is that when you don't have enough of the right nutrients and you don't have a proper functioning metabolism. There's a lot of downstream consequences. You get inflammation, you get oxidous stress, and you get damaged mitochondria, and you get DNA damage. And when you look at these processes, these are the fundamental things that have to be working for you

to be healthy across every organ, across every disease state. And it's what we're now calling hallmarks of aging are including many of these things. And what you're talking about is, and Bruce Ames figured this out, even before there was a word hallmarks of aging. You figured out that these nutrients are critical these pathways that degrade and become problematic as we age, but that we can offset that and actually take longevity nutrients and get up, quote, metabolic tune up. And he's even talking about things that I think are, we don't think of typically as essential nutrients that are, we call conditionally essential nutrients, and whether it's carnitine or

torrent or things that may not be kind of a typical deficiency disease, vitamin or mineral, but that are still really important for our biological function and we're still low in them. So I have this theory, I want to come back to in a minute about that I kind of made up called symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a big mouthful, but essentially it means that we've co-evolved with plants to borrow their phytochemicals to regulate key pathways in our body so we can stay healthy. And that without them, we don't get a deficiency disease. Like you don't get like, you know, like broccoli deficiency, but actually we kind of do because

the, the phytochemicals like sulflorophane or the glucosinolates or isothionates, these are these are molecules that regulate key pathways in our body, for example, liver detoxification or removing heavy metals or whatever controlling oxidative stress, they work to actually facilitate these pathways. And so I kind of this theory that it's more than just like essential vitamins and minerals. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's essential if you want to be really healthy. I completely a thousand percent agree. They just made this up. So I think that humans evolve, we evolved to eat. plants and meat and things, but plants because of the phytochemicals. You know, there are, so you

mentioned sulfurophane, right? So sulfurophane is present in a variety of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. It's much more, it's not present. I'm sorry, the precursor to it, gluca raffininin is present in it, and it gets converted into sulfurophane when the plant matter is broken, chewed, because it activates an enzyme called myrosanase, which converts glucoraphonate into sulfurophane. Big mouthful of words, but essentially when you chew your broccoli, you get cool chemical. that help your body. Exactly. And if you go even further and chew the young plant, the broccoli sprouts,

there's about 100 times more glucoraphon in it. Damn, I'm trying to grow broccoli sprouts, and I keep trying to forget. And then I've got to get back on that. Yes, broccoli sprouts are really, really high in glucoraphon. I also take a supplement that's been used in a lot of clinical studies called Avicol. I don't have any affiliation with them, but they've got a really great method of,

of stabilizing that myrosanase enzyme, which is very unstable. It's also very heat-sensitive. But before I get sidetracked, sulfurophane is the most potent dietary activator of a what's called transcription factor in our body. It's NRF2. And this is... NERF2. Yeah. It's a master regulator of, as you mentioned, detoxification enzymes. So they're called phase two detoxification enzymes. Also, phase one biotransformation enzymes. So those are enzymes that will convert pro-carcinogens into carcinogens. So NRF2 activation will blunt that. It'll stop that from happening. So think things like nitrites being converted into nitrosamines. Nitrites are present in a lot of processed meats. So NRF2 activation, typically it's like it gets

activated every 80 minutes or so inside of our cells. But if you take sulfurophane, it gets, sorry, it gets activated every 130 minutes. But if you take sulfurophane, it gets activated every 130 minutes. But if you take sulfurophane, it gets activated like every 80 minutes, something like that, where it's like you're getting like a 60% increase in the activation of this important transcription factor, which is regulating just hundreds of different genes that are antioxidant, involved in antioxidant function, anti-inflammation. Clinical studies showing that if you give someone broccoli sprout extract or sulfurophane or glucoraphenin plus the enzyme myrosinase, it increases glutathione in plasma and in the brain by fMRI. I mean, this is unsueasable. Glutothion, as you know, it's one of the major, major antioxidants that our body has. It's very important for the brain. Other studies in China where there's a lot of air pollution show that people that take about 40 micromoles of sulfurane, they start to excrete some of the chemicals that are in air pollution like benzene, which is a carcinogen. They excrete it by 60% after 24 hours. Again, because the activation of the phase two detoxification is. I'm thinking about all the people in L.A. right now. Exactly. It's very, so I've been telling all my friends in LIDA. toxins get released into the air, dioxin, and all organic compounds and heavy metals and, you know, plastics. I mean, it's just, it's pretty frightening. So I think people can protect themselves to some degree by upregulating these pathways and taking the right foods and the right supplements. I think the phytochemicals, again, I'm 100% with you. I think we were, we were supposed to eat these. These are, these are pathways.

in our body that are activated by a little bit of stress, their stress response pathways, and the phytochemicals provide that tiny bit of stress that activates them in a way that's powerful enough to not only deal with a little bit of stress, but to like deal with the stress of aging. Yeah. And anthocyanins from blueberries. I mean, this is another one. We've got so many randomized controlled trials now on giving people blueberry extract powder

with actual anthocinins versus like the, you know, just taste of it. So it's placebo. it improves cognitive function across the lifespan, kids, adolescents, older adults. It lowers damage to DNA. It improves blood flow to the brain. You know, this is equivalent to like a cup of blueberries a day. So it's so important to get these phytochemicals. It's not only important to eat the fruits and the vegetables because of the micronutrients, but the phytochemicals as well. And Bruce would argue that. Like some of these phytochemicals, they're longevity vitamins. Yeah. You need them. Yeah. And he argues that.

I mean, that's sort of striking to me as I sort of dug into this, you know, 25, 30 years ago is like, wait a minute, like, how did these molecules know what to do and how did they know to bind to this receptor? It's just from a plant. Like, so why is it working in my body? And how is it regulating all these different enzymes or pathways that regulate, you know, immune function and your microbiome? I mean, it's the list goes on and on. And I, and so it occurred to me that, you know, we, we grew, uh, through evolution, consuming over 800 different plant species. And now I think we have three are the main staples,

you know, corn, wheat, and soy and rice, depending where you live. And then another 12, it make up the total amount of vegetables. And plants, we typically, like, onions and cabbage and whatever, carrots, and tomatoes. But, like, when you look at the full array of plants out there, we ate all these plants, and those molecules are not there for us. Like, those plants didn't say, Oh, gee, I'm going to make this like sulflorophane so I can help my little human friend over there.

They're the plant's defense mechanisms. So they're actually there to help the plants protect themselves against damage, predators, UV radiation from the sun. Like pretty much they're their immune system. And so they are a little, kind of can be a little toxic, right? But that's what you're saying. It's a little kind of tiny stress, the xenohormesis kind of concept where you're taking some form thing and stressing your body with like a sauna or,

a coal plunge or being up at altitude or being, you know, under the sea level, or hyperbaric temperature, these are all stresses on the body that activate our body's own innate healing response. And so that's kind of how I see these phytochemicals. Exactly, exactly. The antioxidant response element, you were talking about DNA having, there's a sequence in our DNA, in genes in our DNA called antioxidant response elements that respond to this NRAF2 activation, right? So it is. It's evolved into our DNA, and there's ways to do it. Xenohormesis, you're talking about plants and phytochemicals, exercise, all these different, like, you know, ways that were meant to basically stress ourselves a little bit, right?

And not just sit and be sedentary and have all the calories we want and, you know, consume all the ultra-processed foods. I mean, it's the Instacart. Holy go. Terrible. I mean, it's crazy. You don't actually have to leave your house with Amazon, Instacart, you know, like Uber E's or whatever. like, you don't need to go anywhere. Yeah, and we really do need to move. I mean, it's not an add-on. It has to be something that's part of your hygiene that you do every day, like brushing your teeth. You have to do it.

Like, it's not, like, even if it's just 10 minutes of exercise, like, you have to do it. It makes a difference. And our bodies need it. Like, you're depriving your body of it if you don't. Okay, so let's kind of back up a little bit. We were talking about all these incredible things. And yes, exercise 100%. But that's another podcast.

This one is about micronutrients, the widespread deficiency we have in the population that's undiagnosed, that's not tested for, that people walk around with, that's fixable for pennies a day at levels that are relatively infinitesimally small. Like when you, for example, eat a piece of chicken breasts, it's four ounces, that's 30 grams. we're talking about milligrams or sometimes microgram doses like tiny little bits of stuff in micronutrients can have profound effects on our well-being and our health, on our mental health, our risk for chronic diseases, and yet most of us are walking around in this invisible cloud of insufficiency or deficiency and have no clue. And then you're not a doctor and a practitioner, but you're like a PhD doctor, not like an MD doctor. What do you recommend, and does it have to be difficult and onerous and expensive?

How do you sort of stack the deck so you're like getting the basic things you need and not running into this trouble? Yeah, I do have some of the basic things that I think, well, that I take, but also that I think that would help a majority of people that are insufficient and a lot of these micronutrients. And first and foremost, vitamin D supplement. And again, I think generally speaking, vitamin D, 4,000 I use a day, pretty, for the most part, gets people to a sufficient-ish level. You have to do a blood test to really know for certain. You may have to take a little more, you know, but starting at 4,000 IUs a day, which is the upper top of the board day, is safe. And this is a business actually by the National Academy of Science is saying this is a safe level. Exactly.

Yeah. Number two, omega-3 fatty acids. And, you know, this is something where Bill Harris has published studies, published studies, looking at how do you get someone who is low omega-3 index, so 4% omega-3 index, up to an 8%. Turns out it takes close to about two grams a day. Two grams of EPA and DAQ. So when you get this, for clarification purposes, if you get a pill and it says a gram of fichua, it might not have a gram. of EPA and DHA. It would be like 300 or 200 milligram. So you have to look at the concentration of EPA and EHA in the milligram amounts on the label. Otherwise, you know, might take one pill or it could take five pills. Exactly.

So that, I think, is a pretty simple solution. So 1 to 2 grams? 1.5 to 2 grams. You get most people that are in a 4% low range to an 8% thyroid. And the balance of E.P. And the balance of E.P. and DHA, does it matter? Not really. It's a 50-50.

Usually it's like a 2-1 ratio. EPA to BHA. Yeah. For the most part, something close to that. Okay. But I wouldn't sweat the small stuff like. Number three and number four kind of tie. But I think a multivitamin is a really good insurance because, you know, there's selenium, you know, boron. Yeah, there's, you know, the B vitamins. You know, you're getting, there's vitamin A. There's so many different micronutrients and there really covers a lot of the bases. So I think a pretty high. quality multivitamin is good along with magnesium. So magnesium, because such a large percentage of people are not getting enough magnesium, it is so important for a variety of, you know, processes, DNA damage, brain function, muscle function, you know, people that are physically active, they sweat out magnesium, so you might need anywhere between 10 to 20 percent more than the RDA. And stress and coffee also. Stress to please it. Exactly. So you're like, what is the American life, stress, coffee, and alcohol.

That's exactly right. That's why we're all deficient. We're literally pee it out. Yes. And so you want to make sure you're getting an organic salt. So that would be something like magnesium citrate, magnesium malate, magnesium glycinate. Citrate if you're constipated.

Right. So those are the organic salts, which are more bioavailable. I tell a funny story. I just decided I was in the hospital recently for a back surgery, and I wanted to get magnesium, and I talked to the hospitalist, and, he gave me magnesium oxide, and I'm like, that's not bioavailable, and I sort of went through this with him, like, you did. Yeah, it wasn't as confrontational as that, but, but, you know, he's like, oh, you're right, I look it up, and actually, no, true. I'm like, yep, so, but that's the main

nutrient form of magnesium that you get in, in a lot of the supplements that you buy over the counter because it's the cheapest form. So magnesium oxide, if you see that on the label, just skip over. Right. So that would be another one. And then I add to my essentials, the sulfurophane. I used to sprout, and I no longer do that because... Life is busy. My excuses. Yeah, I'm, I'm, you know.

So... You're busy telling the world how to eat better and be healthy. It's like the worst thing you can do for your health. But I trust the science that I've read looking at the supplement that I take, which, again, it's a really good supplement in Abmacal. And they have about the advanced formulas, what I take. I take about two to four a day depending on. And we'll put the link in the show notes for that. They're great.

And they're like published studies on them, improving autism. So it's affecting the brain. So it's approved autism spectrum disorder and kids with autism, adolescence with autism. But it's a very strong activator of glutathione, right? So NRF2 pathway. So that's my phytochemical. I actually wrote a blog about glutathione years ago.

If anybody wants to sort of find out more about glutathione, going on Hymen and glutathione, and you'll find it. And it's kind of a master detox, the master antioxidant, the master your immune regulator. It's like it's so critical, and you get it through some of these plant foods. You get it by sulfur-containing amino acids, you know, which are found often in animal foods or weight protein, it's a great source. It is, yeah.

It's a major, major antioxidant in the body. So I think those are really some of the their... Vitamin D, fish oil, vitamin D 4,000, fish oil, one or two grams of the actual EPDHA, a multivitamin and high quality. High quality, meaning it shouldn't be blue or purple or green or yellow and have titanium and dyes and should be just, you know, the right, and the bioavailability, the form of the nutrient matters. I mean, I think you and I've both done a lot of work on this and people can dig around,

but it's not just like go to get your, you know, Walgreens or CBS multibitamin. Right. A little bit more judicious. And then magnesium. And how much magnesium? You know, it depends. So some people get a laxative effect. then they want that.

That's what's citrate. Even with higher doses of other forms, they can. But yeah, so I mean, I think it depends on your diet. Like, if you're not eating a lot of plants, shame on you, you need to increase that. But, you know, about 250, 300 milligrams, you know, is a good range. Now, if you're trying to treat, like, migraines and stuff, you might have to go higher, like, some study you show, like, 600 milligrams. And then there's the form of magnesium, magnesium, theranate that's thought to correct. the blood-brain barrier more effectively for brain health because magnesium doesn't cross

the blood-brain barrier very well. But magnesium 3NA isn't essentially, it's not necessarily going to do the DNA damage repair aspect of magnesium. So make sure you're getting both if you're doing that. Yeah. So like for me, I take like 250 milligrams, maybe 300 milligrams. Yeah, and it depends on you. I mean, I remember I had a big magnesium, aha, when I had a patient you know, decades ago, who was a radiology resident. So I radiation oncology resident in Mayo Clinic. And she had debilitating migraines. Like, I mean, she saw the best doctors at Mayo Clinic.

She said everybody. She tried every drug. She'd done everything. And she came to see me and we took a history. Amazing thing to do in medicine these days is to take an in-depth medical history. But it's like critical. I'm being facetious. But like, they don't, doctors-

You get into the root cause? Yeah. I mean, I have a 32. page questionnaire. So I was like, oh, you're constipated. Oh, you have muscle twitches and muscle cramps and you have headaches and you have anxiety and you have insomnia and you have palpitations. Hmm, this sounds like pretty severe magnesium deficiency. So why don't we load you up? And so we gave her like 1,200 milligrams of magnesium and like migraines just went away and she was fine and everything else is kind of corrected. And so she had all these quote different problems, right? Everything constipation to

insomnia, it's a palpitations, which you don't think are related, but they're all connected. As the body's one system, and that's what I'm talking about. These nutrients have so many different functions, and they're so critical. So anybody listening to you, you know, you can't really get away from the fact that we live in a nutritionally depleted world, no matter how hard you try, even the foods if you're eating organic, may not have the nutrients that they did 50 years ago, and, you know, most of us, you know, should test, and that's why I created functional health with my co-founders to allow people access to this data because they weren't getting it, like you said.

The doctor's like, oh, you don't eat vitamin D, you know, why bother testing? You know, that's what people are facing. And then, you know, just take a multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, and then, you know, maybe a broccoli pill. Yeah. Then there's a bunch of other things you could add to that list as you're going. That's really, that's a dollar to a day, you know, and that's not an insignificant amount of money. But, you know, given the benefits, you know, the risk benefit, cost benefit ratio is pretty good on this. It is.

It's amazing. I mean, I think it's a, as Bruce would say, you know, it's a really, it's affordable. It's easily correctable for pretty cheap and it will have a huge difference in the way you age. Yeah, this is amazing. So we're going to link to a lot of these studies from Bruce Ames, from your work. I want people to follow you, to learn about what you're doing, to listen to your right podcast, family fitness. You've got a great website. Tell us all the places that we can find you and learn more about your work and keep up with your science.

Okay, great. Thank you. So I have a podcast. It's called Found My Fitness. I'm on, you know, YouTube. Which I hope to be on someday. Yeah. That's great. Let me know when you're in San Diego. Okay. All right. So Found My Fitness. It's on YouTube. It's on Apple Podcast, Spotify. I have a website, found my fitness.com. And I also, I'm on, you know, social media, Instagram X as Found My Fitness or you can look up Rhonda Patrick. I have some free guys out there. I have one on Omega 3. We talked a lot about it. So how to choose a good omega-3 supplement. So I kind of have a guide on that in terms of like, and I talk about some of the science of omega-3. So you can find that at omega-3 guide.com. And then I-

Three guides on how to do this and go into detail and have the scientific papers. And then I have another free guide on improving brain health through brain-driven neurotrophic factor and a variety of exercise protocols and polyphenol protocols that have been published to improve brain health. And that's B-D-NF protocols.com. You can find that there. I have a new guide out,

how to train from all the exports that I've had on the podcast. Oh, I want to see that one. It's a good one. It's how to train. So it's like to improve VO2 Max. We talked about that, how to train to improve muscle mass, strength, function. And it's according to all the incredible experts that I've had on my podcast.

And that is the how to train guide.com. So those are all just free information that people can get by going and downloading the guide. So thank you so much, Mark, for having me in the podcast. Very interesting discussion. We share a lot of common passions with nutrition and micronutrients. Totally. Totally. You know, we didn't cover a thousand topics from protein to exercise to hermesis.

So I think I can see three or four more podcasts. I'd love to have you back to talk about these things. Because there's so many people out there who are, quote, health influencers who don't have a degree who may be educated. Some better than others. I'm not saying any degree to be smart or to have an opinion. But there's a lot of normal. out there. And if people want signal and they want the kind of juicy truth, go to Rhonda. Appreciate it. Thank you, Mark.

If you love this, do you have a question about my favorite books, supplements, or recipes, then sign up for my free Marks Picks newsletter at Dr.hyman.com slash markspicks, where I'll share all of this information with you and so much more. You'll get emails from me every Friday with recommendations on things that have helped me on my health journey, and I hope they can help you too. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next week on the Dr. Heimann Show. This podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman.

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