The Dr. Hyman Show - Bonus Episode: Reversing Fatty Liver at the UltraWellness Center

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

This special bonus episode features Dr. Todd LePine from the UltraWellness Center, diving into how functional medicine can help reverse fatty liver disease—an often-overlooked condition that’s quietly affecting millions. While conventional care may miss early warning signs or focus solely on medication, Dr. LePine and I take a deeper look at the root causes. We also walk through a real patient case that shows how liver fat can be reduced and overall health restored through personalized nutrition and lifestyle changes. If you or someone you know has ever been told their liver enzymes are “a little high,” this is a conversation you won’t want to miss. You’ll learn: • Why you could have fatty liver disease—even if you're not overweight or drinking • What elevated liver enzymes really mean for your long-term health • How to protect your liver by cutting out hidden sources of sugar and toxins • Which foods and supplements support detox, reduce inflammation, and repair damage • What a real-life recovery looks like and how functional medicine makes it possible This is part of a limited bonus series spotlighting the work of the UltraWellness Center team, with new episodes dropping monthly on select Fridays. To learn more about the UltraWellness Center or inquire about becoming a patient, visit: https://ultrawellnesscenter.com

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. So even though we call it non-alcoholic fatty liver, what they're actually doing is they're becoming like a brewery. The bacteria in the gut and the food that the person's eating is actually having a low-grade production of alcohol, which is like sort of like dripping alcohol into the person's liver 24-7. Have you ever wished there was a trusted space where you could get real support on your health journey,

where your questions get answered, and you don't feel like you're doing it all, alone? That's exactly what's happening inside my brand new membership community, the Hyman Hive, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Thousands of members are already inside sharing wins, asking meaningful questions, and supporting one another like never before. The conversations are powerful, the camaraderie is real, and the community is growing every day. Inside the hive, you'll get monthly live sessions with me, office hours with our resident functional nutritionist, science-backed protocols, monthly challenges, behind-the-scenes content, and so much more,

all designed to help you create healthier habits that actually stick. Whether you're just getting started or fine-tuning your routine, the hive meets you where you are and gives you the tools and support to keep going. If you're ready to take control of your health with a community that truly gets it, join us at Dr.hyman.com slash hive. That's Dr.hyman.com forward slash hive, H-I-V-E. Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I've built several tools. to help you take control of your health.

If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive for live Q&A's exclusive content and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at Dr.hyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks,

don't forget, you can enjoy every episode of this podcast, add-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple podcasts and tap try-free to start your seven-day free trial. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to our series about chronic disease where we focus on a functional medicine approach is quite different and highlights the things that we do with the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, a practice I've had for 20 years. We've got five doctors, three physicians assistants, I think five to seven nutritionists. We do deep dives on people to find out root causes of all sorts of issues. Stuff that you just don't get when you go to your regular

doctor. And it's stuff that we should be doing because the science is here. It's just not getting and a practice. So we've got a great topic today and a great story that we're going to share with you around a common problem, fortunately way too common, which is fatty liver disease. And joining me today is my friend and colleague, Dr. Todd Lapine. We've been working together since the mid-90s, believe it or not, still are going at it. A long time. I think we have over probably 120 years of collective experience in functional medicine at our practice. Really incredible group of physicians and providers and helpers and a great team. And, And we help people deal with stuff when they've done everything else and tried everything else

and they can't get the answers. And we think about things differently. And we use the lens of functional medicine to think about how to understand the root cause of disease. And today our topic is going to be something all too common, which is fatty liver disease. It used to be called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And now it's changed the name because before we used to see this in alcoholics because they drink too much and would mess up their liver.

We see this in about 40 to 50% of the American population, which is kind of terrifying. You know, it's 70 to 90% of people who have pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. It's the most common liver disorder in the United States. And now that the new name for it is metabolic associated fatty liver disease. Metabolic, meaning your metabolism's busted, meaning you have high blood sugar, high insulin, and you're on that trajectory to pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. And it's scary because it's not affecting just adults. It's affecting kits.

And that's what's terrifying to me. I saw this guy once taught at a conference on childhood obesity and I was there. And there was this guy who was a hepatologist. And I'm like, well, what are you doing here? You're like a liver specialist, liver surgeon. I'm like, what are you doing here? He's like, well, a lot of kids who are young and drinking soda have fatty liver disease and we do liver transplants on 15 year olds.

Oh my God. And I'm like, oh my God, really? And so this is a real problem. it's mostly undiagnosed, mostly untreated, because there's no, quote, drug for it, but there's a lot of things we can do when we think through the lens of functional medicine. And I personally have seen this so much, and I've seen it reverse so quickly using a really intelligent approach of getting with the root causes. So, Todd, I want to you start by walking us through what are the factors from a root cause perspective that are driving this epidemic,

which is affecting probably one and two Americans. I mean, you know, anybody who's overweight, has this, right? 75% of Americans overweight, about two-thirds of people who are skinny, also have metabolic issues. So maybe it's like, you know, when you look at how do you define it? Because most people aren't getting liver scans, and we'll talk about the diagnosis of it. You know, if you have an MRI or you have a fatty liver scan, and I'll tell you, you can actually, you can actually see the amount of fatty liver. But most people don't have that. And you really want a liver fat less than 2%. And over that, you're starting to get into trouble. So, Todd, what are the things that from a functional medicine perspective we think about

How do we start to diagnose these problems? What are the clues that you have it? Kind of walk us through that thinking about it. You actually read my mind, Mark, because basically I was going to bring in two topics, which is basically just, you know, to sort of wrap your head around what's happening when you get fatty liver disease. I want you to think of soda and the big gulp sodas, which are laden with high fructose corn syrup, and then you also think of foie gras.

So the French have a wonderful, delicious, fatty delicacy called foie gras. And the way that they make foie gras is that they force feed ducks, grains, and they literally just shove it down their throat for days of the time. And eventually, they overwhelm the liver's ability to process food. So there's a metabolic overload. And what happens is those calories can't be burned. They get stored as fat. And that's what's really happening with people who have fatty liver disease is that it's a metabolic mitochondrial traffic jam. as to what's happening.

And yes, you know, you see this more commonly in people who are overweight, people are consuming too many calories, but you can also see in people who are not. So there's, you know, multiple ways of looking at, you know, what is going on in patients who have fatty liver. Sometimes it's picked up because somebody does some liver tests or a chem panel, and they notice that the liver tests are slightly elevated. one of the tests that is a really sensitive marker is a liver test called gamutalitamin transphrase or GTT and that is one of the most sensitive markers that you can pick up

fatty liver disease very early on and again mark here's not that in your routine panel right if you go to your doctor it's actually it's interesting you're actually bring up a good point because the reason why it's not brought up is because so many people have abnormal GCTs that they don't do it anymore routinely because they say every Everybody's got elevated GTT. And I know. Right. You don't.

Right. That's good. So in the other aspect of that is that an elevated GGT is actually a sign of glutathione deficiency. And glutathione, as we've all heard, is one of the major antioxidant systems in the body. So when you have an elevated GTT, it tells you that there is, it's like the check engine lights coming on in the liver saying something's wrong here. And that can be an early sign to tell you that a person has fatty liver disease. disease. And again, like you were saying, you know, one out of three Americans have metabolic syndrome, which is what you get years before you develop diabetes. So catching this early is

really, really critical because, you know, if you let it go long enough that you're saying, you're going to be doing liver transplants and teenagers. And that's not where, you know, we need to be headed. So it's really one of those conditions that you have to think about. And as a physician, you don't want to be fooled because somebody can have it and not actually be overweight or markedly obese. So you really have to have your antennas up to try to pick it up early. You know, there are other diagnostic tests we do because the GGT and liver function tests are telling you that you have a problem, but they don't really necessarily tell you why. It's a good screening tool, and it should be done for everybody. And we do this at the

Ultra Wellness Center. But the other big thing we look at carefully is insulin resistance. And there are some really interesting ways to actually diagnose this phenomena, which can happen, you know, obviously when you have diabetes, type of diabetes, when you you have prediabetes, but even before that, you can have low-grade insulin resistance that can still cause problems. And so how do we diagnose this problem of insulin resistance? You bring up, we actually just had a topic with one of my colleagues about that. And you typically can, I think the gold standard, in my opinion, for checking for insulin resistance is the glucose tolerance test, which measures both glucose and insulin level simultaneously. And some people

will say, you know, they'll check your hemoglobin A1C, and if it's normal, they say, you don't have insulin resistance, but you actually can have insulin resistance, even with the normal hemoglobin A1C. And I recently had a patient who had a normal fasting glucose and a normal fasting insulin. And when I did the glucose tolerance test, the person was, you know, maybe 10 pounds overweight, but I just had a sneaking suspicion based upon the history that there was probably some insulin resistance. And when I did the insulin glucose tolerance test, the patient's insulin level maxed out at

The gold standard is really the glucose tolerance test, which is really like a stress test for your pankeris. If you want to know what's going on with the heart, you get on the treadmill, this is like a treadmill for your pancreas. Good. It's a really good test. We've done it for decades. But, you know, I don't know if you're aware of time, but there's a newer test that's been developed by Quest. It uses mass spectrometry to measure insulin and C peptide. And that is as good as the glucose tolerance sensor, if not better. And it's sort of even equivalent to what they use in research called the Euglycemic Clamp test. So it's really sensitive.

And now we can, with a simple blood test without drinking the equivalent of two co-cola's, which we used to do, actually measure this. And again, it's one of those things that is not getting picked up by your traditional doctor, but there's all this emerging diagnostics available to help us understand this problem. What are some of the other things, you know,

we would look at that help us sort of diagnose this and that sort of see there's a problem. Besides looking at your liver function test, looking at your blood sugar, insulin, fasting or the insulin resistance score. There was somebody I read once had, high levels of blood alcohol, but they didn't drink at all. And it was because they had this auto brewery syndrome where the sugars were being fermented

by the bacteria in their small bowel because they had gut issues. Yeah. And you can actually get the auto brewery syndrome from both yeast because when we make alcohol, we basically take sugar, grapes or whatever, and then you add in yeast and they ferment it and the waste product is actually alcohol. That's why alcohol is a toxic, because it's a waste product. And that can happen both from yeast and also from bacteria. So you can get it from both of the organisms, which can produce alcohol, and that is one of the risk factors for developing fatty liver.

I did a deep dive on this. I did a series of seminars with a good friend of mine David Brady, and we did it on diabetes or metabolic syndrome and all the implications thereof. And as you mentioned, we used to call this non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And, you know, back in the day, I used to work at the VA hospital and used to see a lot of patients who were alcohol users and alcoholics. And it was, that was one of the main things that you would see where people would get fatty liver disease. Now, the interesting thing is the gut microbiome, and this is in the literature, this is really fascinating. There's specific bacteria, which, and there's probably more. multiple ones, but one of the biggest ones is when you measure the gut microbiome and you see

high levels of Klebsielle. Klebsiella is a gram-negative bacteria. It's found naturally in people. But when you have overabundance of Klebsiella, Klebsiella bacteria actually produce alcohol. So even though we call it non-alcoholic fatty liver, what they're actually doing is they're becoming like a brewery. The bacteria in the gut and the food that the person's eating is actually having a low production of alcohol, which is like sort of like dripping alcohol into the person's liver

24-7 because they're eating highly processed foods, highly lysemic foods. And a lot of times when you see these patients, these are patients who like, they walk around and like, I've got brain fog. Well, they have brain fog because they're having low levels of alcohol 24-7 in their body. So that's another thing that you can have to think about in terms of diagnostics is to look at the gut microbiome and also leaky gun. I think people in here fatty liver, they go,

oh, I'm going to eat fat and I'm going to get fatty liver. It's actually the opposite. You kind of hinted at it, you know, to get these duck to have or goose to have a fatty liver. And by the way, frog raw means fatty liver in French, basically. And what they do is they force feed them like corn, and that turned into fatty liver. But what we're seeing now is this increase in high fructose corn syrup in our population. Yes. It can be anywhere from 55 to 75% fructose.

Now, you know, people say it always the same as regular sugar, and in many ways it is, but the one significant difference is that high fructose is what drives fatty liver. It won't cause your blood sugar to go up or your insulin to go up directly, but indirectly it would lead to fatty liver and insulin resistance over time. So this is a big factor and why these kids who are drinking like big gulbs or, you know, two-liter bottles of soda day are getting fatty liver. Yep, absolutely. You actually just, that's a nice segue into.

the next aspect of fatty liver that I want to talk about. And fructose, as you mentioned, is one of the big drivers in high fructose. So we find fructose in place. If you have an orange or an apple and it's in season, there's a small amount of fructose. And the liver can only process so much fructose. And what happens is when you overwhelm the liver's ability to metabolize fructose, you deplete ATP. So ATP is the fuel that. or mitochondria used to generate energy, that's how we power our cells of our body.

And what happens is you actually get mitochondrial dysfunction when you overwhelm the liver with too much fructose because the incidence of fatty liver rises to two to three times when you have a high fructose diet. So, yeah, mitochondria is another aspect. And the way I also remember that is that when we burn our calories, where do we burn our calories? We burn our calories in the mitochondria, the on the fireplace of the cell. So you want to, you know, put the log in your fireplace and burn it. Well, my analogy to patients is that when you have dysfunctional mitochondria, it's like having a log that doesn't fit into the fireplace.

So you start stacking the wood on the side. And that's essentially the buildup of adipose tissue throughout the body, especially in the liver and the visceral fat, et cetera. And that's where it is, it's coming from. And I think, you know, we'll get back to the diet and the causes, but, you know, in terms of just diagnosis, you know, you can look at your liver test, and it could be a lot of things. You can be taking too much Tylenol, you can be doing other things. So, we're drinking too much. So there's other factors that we now know that we can look at, like C-reactor protein, which measures inflammation, not specific or ferretin. But there's some really cool kind of diagnostic tests that are derivative from irregular blood work.

And for example, there's something called the fib-4 test, which is a fib-4 index. and it basically can help you identify issues without biopsy. So it looks at platelets as well as your liver function test, AST, ALT, and there's another test called NAFLED or maybe it's changed Maffl-D fibrosis score. And that fibrosis score takes into six variables that are easy to measure, your age, your body mass index, your blood sugar, right? If you have impaired fasting glucose, your AST, ALT,

which your liver test, your platelets, and your albument. And that gives you an idea through about a lot of invasive tests. what's going on. And so there's another way you can screen for it. And that can be done through regular lab work. And then there's imaging tests, which can be very helpful. I mentioned the MRI, but there's ultrasound and there's also called the fiber scan, which sort of checks this pulse wave into the liver and sees how the wave goes and the elasticity

of the liver. And if it's, you know, fatty you can tell. If there's some fatty liver, you can tell if there's a more serious versions of this, you can tell if there's like more scarring. So it's a really interesting way. it's a really interesting way to kind of measure problems. It only takes a few minutes. And of course, there's an MRI.

So there's a lot of ways to sort of figure this out. And it's important people understand that, you know, most traditional doctors don't really measure this, don't look at these things, don't send people for these tests. And if you're hepatologists, you do. But otherwise, your most primary care, internal medicine doctors just don't have a clue about how to really diagnose this. And then they're like, what are you going to do about it, right?

So let's talk about some of the causes of fatty liver. We kind of hinted about fructose and diet. One other thing, Mark, I just wanted to, you talk about the diagnostic test. One test that I've been using a lot of my patients, which measures six biomarkers is a test called fibrosure, and that's available by mainstream labs, and that's another way of, they have an algorithm where they're checking the various biomarkers, and they put it into the algorithm after the blood draw, and that can help you to risk stratify how bad the fatty liver disease is.

That's another one. Yeah. So, you know, there's other reasons to have liver damage. like environmental toxins, you know, deficiency of certain nutrients, like coline, but, and obviously you can look indirectly at lipids because, you know, see lipid abnormalities when you have a fatty liver like small particles or high triglycerides because liver can't process all the less triglycerides. And, and so, you know, we can kind of start to measure something like stool testing, looking at the gut,

and kind of get a pretty good sense of like what's causing it. I think, you know, when you look at our current diet, I mean, 60% of it's ultra-processed food, There's a lot of fructose in that through high fructose corn syrup for most of them. There's starches in those. And there's also things that damage, they've got lining like emulsifiers. And so you have a whole perfect storm. Plus, we live in a toxic stew of chemicals and pesticides and herbicides and plastic, microplastics, you name it, heavy metals.

All that stuff puts a load in the liver. So it's no surprise that we have this. And I wonder, you know, when you're seeing a patient with this, how do you start to think about, you know, what to do with this person? And what's the sort of recommended treatment? Because like I said, there's no drug for treating this. If there was, you know, it would be a multi-billion dollar drug. I'd buy stock in it.

We don't have one. So you have to use a functional medicine approach to really heal a fatty liver, which, by the way, is really reversible unless you've already gotten to the point of cirrhosis and scarring, which is the end stage of this. This is why kids need liver transplants. They get cirrhosis, just like an alcoholic from the sugar. And that's why, like, anything, like any condition that earlier you can catch it the better. And you're exactly, you're hitting the nail right on the head because this is something

that you want to be preemptive. You don't want to wait until there's, you know, fibrosis and scarring and there's going to be irreversible damage. You want to catch this way before it happens. And, you know, obviously the first thing you're going to do is, is dietary changes. And like we're saying, there was a lot of different things that can contribute to disruption of the gut microbiome, disruption of the gut barrier. And we call that leaky gut. There's different. test that you can do that can determine if you have leaky gut. Always remember, this is another thing that I like to emphasize to my patients is the connection between the gut and the liver. So all of the blood from the gut, guess where it goes? It doesn't go into the circulation. It

actually goes from the gut into the portal system up to the liver to be filtered out before it goes into the systemic system. And that's, you know, where patients who have, technically we used to see patients with out of encephalopathy because their blood wouldn't be able to get filtered to the blood. And that causes all kinds of mental conditions. So having a healthy gut so that the blood that's then flowing into the liver is not going to be as pro-inflammatory with all of these lipopolysaccharides, the coating of the gram-negative gut bacteria, which provoke inflammation and then aggravate like adding gasoline to the fire. Have you ever wished there was a trusted space where you could get real support on your

health journey, where your questions get answered and you don't feel like you're doing it all alone? That's exactly what's happening inside my brand new membership community, the Hyman Hive, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Thousands of members are already inside sharing wins, asking meaningful questions, and supporting one another like never before. The conversations are powerful, the camaraderie is real, and the community is growing every day. Inside the hive, you'll get monthly live sessions with me, office hours with our resident functional nutritionist, science-backed protocols, monthly challenges, behind-the-scenes content, and so much more, all designed to help you create healthier habits that actually stick.

Whether you're just getting started or fine-tuning your routine, the hive meets you where you are and gives you the tools and support to keep going. If you're ready to take control of your health with a community that truly gets it, join us at Dr.hyman.com.com slash hive. That's Dr.heimen.com forward slash hive hive e so so basically diet would be starting with you know a low uh or no ultra processed food right getting rid of high fructose corn syrup in your diet i think if people listening can do one thing and this is you know again we focus on food is medicine at the ultra wellness center we focus on how to treat many chronic conditions with food and and you can dump huge amounts of liver fat by simply cutting out the starch and the sugar

particularly the high-frogose corn syrup, which is in almost every package-processed food there is. I mean, it's not something you have in your cupboard, right? It's an industrial food product. And you want to get away from that. Yeah, it's added to many foods. I mean, if you start reading labels, and again, we always talk about that.

Like, the best food is food that doesn't have a label, right? It's not manufacturer. It's not frankin food. It's not processed food. It's real food. And, you know, in addition to the, you know, the fructose content, processed carbs so that, you know, when we want to fatten up cattle, what do we do?

We feed them grains. And highly processed grains is another thing, which is basically acting just like sugar in the diet. It increases insulin and glucose levels, which would turn, you know, drive the whole metabolic path, the dysfunctional metabolic pathways. I mean, it's interesting. Also, you know, I remember reading a study where they did this in mice, but there's also in human trials, where they gave.

the mice alcohol to cause fatty liver. Yeah. But at the same time, they gave something called MCT oil, which is medium chain triglystriates. It's a special kind of fat that's absorbed directly, not through your lymph like most of your fat is, but actually directly into the liver. And it has a lot of benefits to the liver.

It helps get rid of liver fat. It helps inflammation. It helps mitochondrial function. It helps improve insulin sensitivity. Get rid of all your organ fat. But here you are treating you. a fatty liver with a fat, and it works pretty darn well. Pretty interesting to see those studies, I thought, I was like, wow,

basically even though they're giving a liver toxin, it still works. I was like, wow. And the interesting thing is, I use MCT quite a bit in my patients, and MCT is basically readily available to mitochondria for metabolism. So it's like a clean fuel. It's very, very clean. and it's also been shown to improve cognitive function in patients with, you know, dementia or early Alzheimer's because it's a cleaner fuel.

It just is, it's just burned through the mitochondria much cleaner than other food. So what other food should we be thinking of to support the liver and help deal with the issues that can be common? Another one in preparing for this, another one that, which you're familiar with is fatty 15, which is another name for docohexinoic acid. And there's some studies showing. that a lot of people are deficient in docohexinoic acid because of the decrease in dairy consumption. That's one of the big sources of fatty 15.

And that has been shown to actually help with mitigating the effects of fatty liver. Other things that can be done are flaxis. There's a great paper, which I just stumbled upon. And all he did was just use ground up flaxsees. And there's probably multiple mechanisms for why that happens because it changes that That microbiome gives good fatty acids. And there was a significant improvement with adding flaxseeds to people's diet. We're sure oftentimes will do that for people with aLA, alpha linoleic acid deficiency.

Another thing that can be used for patients with fatty liver is cocaitrianol, which is made from a nato. So it's a special form of vitamin E. And that also is very effective. And then, as I mentioned before, glutathione. But it's basically, it's a derivative from the Anato C and it's highly concentrated gamma vitamin E. It's a form of coquitriol. And there's some really good studies on that having benefit in patients with fatty liver. And then the other thing is supporting glutathio.

Remember, people who have fatty liver oftentimes have elevated GGT. And that is a sign of oxidative stress. So anytime you can mitigate oxidative stress, you're also going to be supported. according the resolution and proven and fatty liver disease. And so the supplements that you can actually take supplements that help boost glutathione, right? Yep. Like an acetyl-sysm or milk thistles and herb.

Often use these in people with fatty liver disease. And lipoic acid, these are things that you can actually help use to repair the liver once it's been damaged. So you start with diet, right? You start with low sugar starch diet with more good fats, lots of fiber. You talk about flax seeds, MCT oil. But you can layer in things that really help the liver repair and heal and boost the glutophile levels,

which helps it helps it get rid of the inflammation and the fatty liver. So anesthetal cysteine, lipoic acid, milk thisol, they're great. And even herbs like turmeric or curcumin can be very helpful. Yeah. And the other thing, I always give credit to Jeff Land to bringing into my awareness of the role of glycine. So glycine is what's called the conditionally. essential amino acid. And when you make, when your body makes glutathione and it's made from three different amino acids, it's made from glutamine, glycine, and cystine. And there's an

interesting paper that looked at the combined use of lysine with NAC or NACL cystine. And those are basically the building blocks of glutathione. And in this particular paper, they basically said this is an anti-aging combination. It increases inflammation. It increases inflammation. and improves butchondrial function, it helps with healthy aging. It's just a, it's a real winner. So any time you can support glutathione production is good. You mentioned alpha lipoic acid. So the other important thing is that glutathione goes between what's called the oxidized form

and the reduced form. So it's like a battery that has to sort of get charged. And the reduced form of glutathione is the active form. And in order to recycle your glutathione, you need the things like alpha lipoid acid. and also vitamin C. And, you know, I think that's, to some degree, you know, Linus Pauline, who was big on vitamin C. I think vitamin C has many, many different functions in the body,

but I think vitamin C actually helps to recycle your glutathione, which helps with the aging process. And, you know, there's so much you can do to really heal this. And it's something I've treated, and I know you've treated many times and many patients at the Ultra Wellness Center that we see who have, you know, that along with other metabolic issues. They usually have pre-diabetes.

They usually have abnormal lipids that are high triglycerides, They usually have high CRP and inflammation. And we created a holistic approach to these patients using diet and lifestyle, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, optimization, all those things. But then you sometimes need some of these additional supplements and nutrients like coline. You can get from food, for example, but also you can take it. Like eggs have it, grass-fed meats have it.

Sometimes soy has it actually from less than. Christopher's vegetables are great for boosting glutathione. That's a broccoli family. Omega-3 rich foods help reduce inflammation. Sometimes you need more stuff. Like you can take al-Mega-3 supplements. You can take, you know, the tocotrinols and the certain forms of vitamin E that can help. You can take MCTL.

You can take anesthetal cysteine and glycine and things that help boost glutathione. You can help milk this. It also does that burbrine, another one that helps improve liver fat and help blood sugar regulation. Yeah, and berbrine, berbrine is actually, I always tell my patient as a burparing is really almost like a natural learning. That's right. very similar effects as metformia. So what you're really saying is that diabetes drug, it's a diabetes drug. Yeah, diabetes drug.

And what you're really saying is that, you know, all these things that you're mentioning are what we call nutraceuticals as opposed to pharmacists. So, yes, I still prescribe medications. I framed as an internal medicine and I send patients to surgeons and I give patients thyroid and insulin and, you know, blood pressure medicine, whatever when needed. But, you know, getting out the prescription path. is the last thing that I do now. I don't want to use the prescription fat, but I can use a prescription fat.

If I need an elephant done, then I'm going to use the elephant. But a lot of things that we can do are relatively inexpensive, they're very safe. There's science behind it. So it really makes sense to be using diet, combining that with supplements. I always, one of the other, my pet peeves is that I tell people that I've never cured anyone with a pharmaceutical drug. get it never cured anyone just with a supplement. Supplements really complement a healthy diet.

So if you're not, if you don't have a good foundational diet, supplements are not going to have it to be as affected. You have to really have a healthy foundational diet. Then you complement that with the nutraceuticals. That's right. Supplements, they're called supplements, right? Right. So I think this is so important.

And so, you know, there's a few other things we do with these patients, you know, get them to exercise, get them to optimize their sleeve, manage stress, get rid of toxins because, you know, If you have a dietary-induced fatty liver, it's going to be exacerbated or worsened by exposure to pesticides and plastics. And one of the things that really commonly affects insulin resistance is BPA, which is ubiquitous. It's a bisphenol A, it's one of the most ubiquitous toxins.

It's not all plastics, lined cans, packages, boxes. And we were all, like, credit card receipts, ATM receipts, you know, your gas station receipts if you get those, I don't touch those, so I can't avoid it, you know? And those are often just these hidden exposures exacerbating things. So we help people reduce their exposure to toxins and improve the microbiome. And then we kind of follow them and see how they do. But we see usually complete resolution most of the time for these patients. The other thing you mentioned BPA is a lot of times they'll say this is BPA-free.

But what they do is they actually put other chemicals that are cousins to BPA. So just because it's BPA-free and it's still in plastic is not necessarily good. that's a that's a that's a big thing is they they have like oh we're this is bpa free plastic bottle or whatever that doesn't mean it's true i mean it's it's a tricky slippery slope it's all marketing it's it's all marketing because people they're aware that okay if you have bpa and your product people aren't going to buy it so we have a bpa plastic uh bpa free uh product so you're just another petrochemical toxic exactly exactly yeah got to be you know you know you're you've got to be a savvy consumer and a, you know, you have to do your own homework. Because when you go into the,

the, uh, regular, you know, mainstream grocery stores, and the way that I look at is most people are being slowly poison. I mean, literally, it's when you look at the processed food in this country with the, uh, preservatives, the food coloring, the, uh, food additives, uh, I think processed foods, um, people are literally being, you know, slowly poisoned in this country. And, you know, Robert Kennedy is bringing awareness to this, which is I'm really, you know, about making America healthy again because we have an epidemic of autism in this country. We have an epidemic of obesity in this country. We have an epidemic of metabolic syndrome.

And, you know, we're not going to be the leading country, no matter how, what our military is, if we have a bunch of sick population. One of the things that this traditional medicine really sucks at is dealing with chronic illness. Unless you have a pill for it, like a high LDL, which, by the way, and I don't think the main cause of heart disease, but like statins, we don't do anything. Like we don't go down the diagnostic rabbit hole, like we just talked about with all the different kinds of diagnostics.

And most of these are available through conventional medicine. They're just not used by traditional doctors unless you're a liver specialist dealing with someone with more end-stage liver problems. By the time it's that bad, you can pick it up. And so with the Ultra Wellness Center, you know, we have five physicians and three physicians assistants, seven nutritionists on a great team,

all working to help people understand root causes and get to the bottom of what's going on with them and then teach them after we've discovered through, you know, advanced diagnostic testing what's going on. We teach them how to do all the things they need to do, whether it's optimize their diet, heal their gut, get rid of toxins, both through reducing your exposures, but also through helping the body eliminate them. Optimizing nutritional status and dealing with all those factors that are modifiable and obviously lifestyle stuff so that we can actually help people get back to wealth. And it's really, you know, we've been doing this together for, God, almost 30 years now, Todd. I think next year might be 30 years. We're 30 years young. Right. And it's really

remarkable how people recover and do well when they have the right insights. And everything we talked about today is science backed is based on the scientific literature. It's just not stuff that's gotten into practice. It often takes a decade or two or three. or sometimes more for stuff from the bench and the scientific discovery to its implementation in clinical medicine. And that's all we're doing. We're kind of accelerating that gap.

And we're thinking about the body as a system through the lens of functional medicine. So anybody listening, if you have friends or family who have issues, chronic disease, we'd love you to come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center. Just go to Ultra Wellness Center.com. You can learn more about what we're doing. Send up as a patient, talk to our team,

and they'll walk you through what you need to know. But, you know, we love doing this and we really help so many people And again, people are just desperate, and I probably get, like you do, probably 10 to 15 emails and texts a day of I got this, my friends got this, my sister's got that, my uncle's got this. Can you help? Can you help? Can you help? Because they're not getting the answers from Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic even, which is a great institution, but just limited unless they're going to the center for functional medicine. So we really, we really have this chance to do better. You're absolutely right, Mark. I mean, the, I think the masses of people are waking up to realize that, you know, when you have these chronic conditions, now mainstream medicine is really good. You break your bone. You have a stroke or a heart attack. You can sort of do aggressive interventions. But for chronic disease, I'm going to say that mainstream medicine is actually dangerous. I think that the pharmaceutical approach of adding pill after pill to suppress this

and then you got a side effect for that. So you add another prescription medication. It's, you know, polypharmacy. And I'm going to venture to say that a lot of what regular doctors are doing not that they're intending to create you know iatrogenic which is physician-induced illness but a lot of stuff that we're seeing nowadays are atrogenic illness people are trying to treat these chronic complex lifestyle conditions with pharmaceuticals and they're lowering the cholesterol they're lowering the blood sugar but they're not actually addressing the recourse from that's what we do with telchuanas center and we'd love you to check it out and Todd thank you for joining us today and we'll see again when we're going to keep doing these

case studies and talk about chronic disease and how we deal with it differently. So we'll keep you hopefully thinking about things differently and get you on a path to wellness. All right. Thanks, Mark. Enjoy it. Have you ever wished there was a trusted space where you could get real support on your health journey, where your questions get answered and you don't feel like you're doing it all alone? That's exactly what's happening inside my brand new membership community, the Hyman Hive, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Thousands of members are already inside sharing wins, asking meaningful questions, and supporting one another like never before. The conversations are powerful.

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possible. Thanks so much again for listening.