The Dr. Hyman Show - Bonus: Why Chronic Disease Is Exploding (Full Conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger)

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

This is the full, unedited version of Dr. Hyman’s conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing and clarity. This extended cut includes the entire four-hour dialogue as it happened — a deep dive into the systemic roots of chronic disease and the future of real prevention.

Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark Hyman, and you're about to hear the full, unedited version of my conversation with Daniel Schmachtenberger. The original episode was edited for pacing, but this is the complete 3.5 hour discussion. Every moment, just as it happened. I hope you enjoy the full depth of this important conversation. 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 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 Hymen 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 DrHeiman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Heiman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial. All right, Daniel, I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is a long time in coming. Uh, we had many conversations, which I've tried to keep up with, uh, understand how you think, because I don't imagine many people have heard of you know about you or know who you are, but your background and your thinking is so

remarkable in its depth and its clarity and its ability to bridge many different disciplines and come up with an overarching understanding of what's wrong in our society and where our existential threats are and how we can fix them. And today we're going to talk about, we can talk about a lot of things from AI to the nuclear war, to everything that you think and do, but we're going to focus on health and healthcare today. Cause I think this is an area where we really are in a mess.

Uh, I'm just going to be straight. We're in a really shitty situation where we have more and more healthcare, quote, sick care and more and more illness. And it's exploding at such a rate that we can't even keep up with it. Just in my 40 years of being a doctor, it's going to be two years, it'll be 40 years, I've seen just the acceleration of chronic diseases and both in the amount of suffering, the severity, the scope of them, the increase in new diseases.

It's just, it's remarkable. And, you know, when you look at the kind of history of trajectory of, of human experience, you know, we, we had pretty good run through most history and we say, well, the, you know, the, there was all this early death and life expectancy was 40 and a lot of that had to do with high rates of infant mortality, overcrowding in cities, urbanization, pollution, sanitation lack, and, and they were more sort of infrastructure problems and, and those infrastructure problems of sanitation and basic, basic cleanliness and things that were, were sort of,

were solved in the 20th century led to an increase in life expectancy. But it really kind of misses the point because a lot of, a lot of populations looked very old. I mean, the, the Plains Indians had the highest number of centenarians at the turn of the century of any population, they were hunter-gatherers. And so it wasn't like every hunter gatherer died at 40, but the last, you know, a hundred

years, we've seen this sort of inversion've seen this inversion of the life expectancy curve. It's starting to dip down and we're starting to see a drop in life expectancy. And I think it has to do with the rise of what you have termed anthropogenic disease, which basically, I want you to define it, but my understanding is it sort of echoes what I think Paul Farmer talks about, who's one of my heroes who I got to know before he died. When he saw the horrific conditions in Haiti that were breeding grounds for TB and AIDS, and every public health community had given up on them, he said it wasn't that we need better medication or surgery, it was that we had structural problems, he called it structural violence. What are the social, economic,

political conditions that drive disease? And I would add what are the environmental conditions that drive disease? And I kind of like to start out by sort of having you kind of define what do you mean by this concept of anthropogenic disease? Yeah. First, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. I followed your work for a very long time before we got to know each other through Institute of Functional Medicine and things like that. And I have huge respect for your work bridging between traditional conventional allopathic medicine and kind of integrative processes and having such a huge data set over 40 years with Cleveland Clinic like that to be able to really kind of advance medicine. You're bridging those worlds in a way I don't know many people who are bridging and also kind of cutting edge science and research

with Leroy Hood and systems biology and things like that. And then now starting to actually help policy work at the level that you are. And I know- Can't help myself. Just haven't got to spend a day here with you and your friends and everything coming over. It's so clear that your friend group and your colleague group spans political ideologies and parties and that you're almost blind to that. And just like a doctor, I'm here to help people get

better. That's right. Everybody suffers. I would work with any administration, any institution if it helps kids and mothers and elderly people be healthier. And I just have mad respect for that and grateful to be here speaking with you. In prepping for this, I watched your talk on Andrew Huberman and a bunch of them.

And one of the things that's so cool is that they were ones on mainstream news and these topics I've never seen on mainstream news, especially kind of long form. But a lot of the things that I would describe first, you have described really well in terms of what are the underlying causes of complex chronic disease, which is that they're anthropogenic, meaning things that are not just problems

of nature, meaning our biology or nature or the way life is, but things that are the results of the way our civilizational system is. There are our agricultural system, our industrial systems that create pollution, our systems that affect human behavior. And you're saying- They're not inevitable. I mean, I just interrupt you. and our systems that affect human behavior. And you're saying- They're not inevitable.

I mean, I just interrupt you. The thing that I think we have a way of talking about disease in medicine, I got cancer, I got heart disease, I got diabetes, I got Alzheimer's. You don't get it. It's not like a bug that you catch or a cold. It's a consequence of the environment in which we live.

And that's sort of what you're talking about. Yeah, so you're saying that you have seen a rise over the 40 years that you've been in practice and obviously the 40 years you've been in practice that was already after the better living through chemistry boom started and you know modern industrial agriculture started so it would be even a more extreme picture if we went back further. You've obviously studied the history on going back further. But a lot of people think, Lowell, the rise in diseases is just a result of we're diagnosing more or something like that as opposed to, no, there are ways. Like we have a progress narrative that things are getting better and better because of tech and capitalism and democracy and whatever. And there are certainly areas where that's true. It's just not the whole story. Right. And there are areas where some of the effects of tech and

capitalism create environmental pollution or cheaper health care or cheaper food that has side effects and externalities that affect the environment but help affect our bodies. I really like the framework that you shared about what the upstream causes are. Do you mind recapping that because you do it a lot better than I can? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's complicated. There's a really important principle in functional medicine, which is that you want to look for

the root cause, and you want to find the cause of the cause of the cause of the cause, and keep digging until you find out What's at the root of all of it and and most of medicine is not focused on root cause it's focused on diagnosing based on symptoms and Geography, where is the disease and what are the symptoms? Not mechanism and cause and and medicine is now shifting where we're beginning to actually understand what those root causes are And actually I'm excited about an upcoming Commission report from the

HHS department and the and the Presidential Commission on Americans health looking at what are the causes of chronic disease and how do we begin to identify those and Rather than just labeling disease and then treating the label with a drug, we call it the name it blame and attainment system. We name the disease, then we blame the name for the problem, then we attain it with the drug. So we say, oh, you're hopeless and helpless and sad and depressed and I know what's wrong with you. You have depression.

Well, no, that's just a name we give to people who share those symptoms. It's not the cause of those symptoms. It could be a myriad of things from what you're eating, your microbiome, from nutritional deficiencies like vitamin D or folate or excess of toxins like heavy metals or mercury or gluten that can create a plain inflammation. So there's a lot of reasons why you can have

any particular disease and we just, we have it all wrong. And I think it's a real shift. It's a real shift in thinking. So medicine needs to move from this name and blame it process to what we call thinking and linking where we start the thinking process once we make the diagnosis. We start to try to create an understanding of one of the patterns in the data, one of the story that's being told. How do you take a deeper diagnostic history? How do you do deeper diagnostic laboratory testing and work to kind of see what's

at the root cause of everything. And by peeling back that layer, you can start to see emerge a picture of, of, um, uh, chronic disease epidemic that it is rooted in things that are caused by. I would say man, and I would probably say man man because it's mostly men who've done it And I think that's something in a way is good news because it means we can have agency over it It's not something that just falls from the sky that hits us on the head that we get struck with some illness It's it's actually now something we understand what it's about. Yeah, it's not just better diagnosis Trust me like the autism epidemic is an example We've went from one in ten thousand when I was born to you know

One in a hundred and thirty even if fifty percent is better diagnostic or seventy five percent is better doctor's criteria still something's going on Now you're running off a list of things that can be underlying causes and you mentioned vitamin D deficiency and mercury and I think it's worth just underlying causes and you mentioned vitamin D deficiency and mercury and I think it's worth just Going into this a little bit because vitamin D deficiency in terms of acute causation is rickets and not many people have rickets But there's a pretty big level between you have rickets and you have optimal levels Yeah, and the same is true for vitamin C and scurvy or berry berry or whatever. So The idea that deficiency means you don't have an acute disease that is killing you in a fast way from it,

but that as soon as you're above that, we're fine, as opposed to what are optimal levels. Would you speak to that a little bit in terms of also what you find in your practice and what you find when you take someone above rickets, treat them and treat them and they get better? I think this is just a really important idea that it's sort of medicine is trying to catch up with You know we used to talk about having type 2 diabetes and then we said wait wait

There's pre diabetes and then we talked about having hypertension or high blood pressure now There's pre hypertension and we say oh you have an autoimmune disease Oh now there's pre autoimmune disease and And the reason it's pre anything is because we're understanding there's consequences, even at levels we thought were quote normal. And so this idea of disease being an on or off phenomena is wrong. It's a continuum from mild in biochemical

imbalances, which are barely detectable, which we might be able to now screen for with metabolomic testing and proteomic testing and, you know, more subtle things that we can measure to sort of pre-symptomatic to symptomatic disease, symptoms to finally full-blown disease and death. And so there's a whole long continuum that can start in utero or even, you know, with your mother's help before she was born that impacts your health through epigenetics and through the intrauterine experience and through early childhood influences and

all those things you can start to map out if you listen carefully to somebody's story about what's happening early and pick these things up. And so, you know, the fact that we have these sort of arbitrary cutoffs for, you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, vitamin D, you know folic acid I mean Function health which is a company who talked to you about that it allows people access to Comprehensive lab testing and have their own personal health data set You know the reference ranges there are ridiculous for some of the things that they have like homocysteine

Which is a measure of your B vitamin status very important important in methylation and genetic control, neurotransmitter function, detoxification, mood. I mean, a lot of things, their cutoff level is like, I think 15 or 16 or something. And any level over 14, according to the literature, increase your risk of dementia by 50%. The optimal level should be six to eight. Same thing with insulin. I think we, we, we see insulin levels being reported as normal, anything up to 16 or 18.

That's because we have a sick population and the way we determine what's quote normal is basically on a bell curve in a population. So if the bell curve is shifted to the right or the left because people are sick, you're picking up what's normal in the population, not what's optimal. All right. There's a lot of topics in there to unpack. So the first is obviously absence of acute symptomology does not equal a good definition of health. Cause we all know cases where someone went to the doctor for a routine checkup

and they find out that they have cancer and not that long to live. And that cancer has been developing for a long time. And as you're mentioning with pre-diabetes, a long time before the acute diagnosis of now you have diabetes and you have to take a med for it, you were in metabolic syndrome. And a long time before the autoimmune disease that produces enough symptomology, you had inflammatory markers that you could see.

How many years ahead can you see signs of- Decades. Exactly. Decades. Now if you see it decades ahead and you haven't had a humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advance tissue damage, it humongous amount of tissue damage, you can do stuff about it. By the time you've got to advance tissue damage, it's a lot harder.

You can still do stuff about it, which is amazing, and your clinic will attest to that. So in med school, there's this stages of disease, which is you start with health as all the homeostatic systems, and homeostasis is kind of a silly term because it's not stasis, right? So the homeodynamics. So you have all these homeodynamic systems in the body that are responding to various stressors and the level they're at matters less

than their responsive capacity, right? You want to be able to respond to hot and cold and to pathogens and whatever well. So you've got homeostasis or homeodynamics. Then you've got deviation from homeodynamics. Something comes, it takes you out of range and you don't respond properly. What is that something? Right? We'll get back to that. If that doesn't come back into range, if it comes back, great, you're still healthy. If it doesn't come back in, then you have pathophysiology,

right? The physiology is operating differently as a result of that. If you keep operating differently for a long time, you'll start to get pathomorphology, the structures will start to change. And oftentimes it's not until after that that the symptoms occur. And that's when you go and you get the diagnosis and you've been in a very advanced development of illness that whole time. So obviously you don't want to wait till symptoms and most people are walking around with a lot of symptoms, which means actually pretty advanced disease relative to what good health would be. And so obviously the an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure thing.

I think you have two really good pieces of news. One is even once you're in the symptomology stage, a lot of things that we think are untreatable are treatable. And universal. Absolutely, yeah. Even pretty late stage things like heart failure and Alzheimer's and autism and type 2 diabetes. Will you tell a couple, just so we can wrap it together? I know you have another place to tell like a couple stories about that of things

that people used to think were totally unreversible and most people still do. Yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, in medical school and throughout my medical training and even in continuing medical education and postgraduate training, where you go CME courses. The orthodoxy is pretty rigid about certain beliefs. If you have heart failure, it doesn't go backwards. You can't improve it.

If you have dementia, you can't reverse it. If you have type two diabetes, it's not reversible. You can manage chronic diseases, which is great for the medical industrial complex because it provides the ability to have a Pharmaceutical driven health care system that makes huge amounts of profit off of long-term chronic use of medication What I've seen is

Surprisingly when you apply these principles of creating health, which is what functional medicine is it's not about treating disease It's trying to understand what is health? What are the deviations from health and how do we measure those dysfunctions and the lack of resilience and balance and function in the body, and kind of tweak things to correct it, you can actually see reversal of these diseases, complete remission and reversal of type two diabetes.

That's easy, that's an easy one. And there's now, that's sort of- But that's a humongous deal, because what is the curve of type two diabetes from when you were born to now? How many upstream diseases does that contribute to and how many people how many doctors treated like it's reversible? Yeah I mean, it's it's the thing that's causing everything so the phenomena of insulin resistance which underlies type 2 diabetes is Causing dementia for example your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have all a type 2 diabetes is causing dementia. For example, your risk of dementia is four times higher if you have type two diabetes.

Your risk of heart attacks is dramatically higher. Your risk of cancers, many of the most common cancers, breast, pancreatic, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, these are diseases of insulin resistance. And to say all those diseases are largely, not perfectly, but largely preventable with some pretty basic stuff. Yeah. And oftentimes even reversible is a really important thing

everybody should know and start to update on. Yeah, I mean, they're even taking some, I mean, I've talked to Siddhartha Mukherjee about this, they're doing studies of stage four pancreatic cancer using ketogenic diets and seeing remissions in some of these patients, which is almost like heresy in medicine. And so I think we're not taught that these things are

fixable, but if you understand the underlying root cause model of medicine and understand how to identify the root causes and figure out also how to create a thriving human and provide those conditions, because right now, as you know, you sort of talk about this anthropogenic disease, this really means we've created an environment in which disease flourishes. It's sort of a disease causing culture, society, environment, food environment, toxin environment. When you kind of remove those things as best you can,

these diseases can reverse. I had a guy who was living in Pittsburgh who was seven years old and he, and I didn't know this, but Pittsburgh, they had the steel plants and they, they, he, they, they use coal to, you know, make steel and they use the coal ash to cover their fields and to, when there's snowy icy roads to put them on the

snowy icy roads and coal ash is full of lead and mercury and he was extremely mercury toxic and also had other issues. He had insulin resistance. He had Gut issues his whole life. So he had a lot of dysbiosis and gut inflammation He had methylation issues of e vitamin problems. We had a whole series of things It wasn't just one thing but you add all that together plus his APOE double four status, which puts him at risk and he was presenting with

Alzheimer's. And yet, by a very aggressive detoxification program, by getting the metals out of his system, by chelation, which is heresy in medicine, by giving him methylated support, optimizing his gut function, fixing his insulin resistance, he reversed his cognitive decline and he was actually able to improve his mental status

and go back to work, which was again something you just never see. I mean, who's seen a survivor of Alzheimer's? Well, I know that you have for a long time known Dale Bredesen and his work in the space and I think you are friends with someone. I'm good friends with Dr. Heather Sandison who wrote the book, Recently Reversing Alzheimer's and I think that was a number one New York Times bestseller for a while. And that particular study that she did there was an inpatient using a Bredesen-like protocol that was reversing the MOCA scores in 70% of the people that went in within six months with pretty basic stuff,

like largely diet, lifestyle, and a little bit of functional medicine. And the MOCA score is a sort of a cognitive assessment that's easy to do, and it's pretty predictive of where you are in the trajectory of memory loss and dementia. Now, this is another one, if you look at Alzheimer's, historically versus now, that is really a disease of modernity.

Yeah. Do you wanna say anything about that? Alzheimer's did diagnosis way back when, in the turn of the century with this patient he had. But the rise in dementia is staggering, and it's one of the most costly conditions for humanity, not because of the direct medical care, but because of the long-term care that they need,

and because of the loss of the ability to work for their caregivers, their family members. But I've seen a dramatic increase in dementia and cognitive decline. And it's sort of paralleled the rest of the chronic diseases that we're seeing increasing. And people say, oh, we're winning the war on heart disease. I'm like, nonsense, we're seeing less deaths

because we have better advanced medical treatments like bypasses and stents and trauma, last-death trauma litics and blood clot dissolvers. But we are seeing more and more people getting heart disease, more and more people getting cancer, more and more people getting diabetes, more and more people getting dementia. So despite the fact that we're spending

trillions of dollars on healthcare, we're not getting much for our money. And this is kind of shocking. This is why people need to understand statistical warfare as part of information warfare is that you can cherry pick your stats, right? And you can lie with facts. You can mislead with facts.

You can say less people are dying. And what you're alluding to is the issues getting better as opposed to, there was even one case in which the stats were used that less people were dying of gun violence. And they were suggesting in that the gun violence went down, gun violence went up, just emergency care so people didn't die after they shot or went up. That's right, same people, yeah.

So it's entirely possible just to speak to the larger political environment. And this is a bipartisan kind of universal marketing driven issue is people who are pushing a narrative at scale usually have a motive to push the narrative, political motive, a capital motive, something, right? And so you can take the whole story, just take parts of it, and you can have facts that make it through the most rigorous fact checker that are true,

but are still misleading, right? And so this makes- Well, what Mark Twain said, he said, there's liars, there's damn liars, and there's statisticians. Yes. And so as you're mentioning, winning the war on heart disease, Well, I wouldn't... What Mark Twain said, he said, there's liars, there's damn liars, and there's statisticians. Yes. And so, as you're mentioning, winning the war on heart disease, what you're actually seeing is the rates of heart disease are increasing. And so this is like this mortality, morbidity trade-off, right? Which is, oh no, where people are living longer.

And recently there's been a downturn in living you know, living longer, but like that kind of doesn't matter if the latter part of their life is on polypharmacy, is on a huge amount of meds with decreasing quality of life and only being kept alive kind of artificially. Like if someone gets off their meds, they die. That's kind of like they're on life support. Which speaks to quality of life. I think a lot of people don't understand the mortality morbidity trade-off and that the stats that are cherry picked to say, longevity is going up or heart disease is going down.

What it's not indicating. Is there more on that you would say? Yeah. I mean, I think we're, we're, we're losing the battle on disease. We're, we're spending more and more. I mean, we spend twice that of any other nation often three, four, five times as much.

We're 48th in life expectancy and going down. A lot of our statistics are worse than most of the countries. That's just, it's worth saying again, 48th in life expectancy. 48th, I think we're going down. It's getting worse. And that's crazy. With a $5 trillion a year healthcare budget. Yeah. We're, I think 30th among the top developed nations in healthcare metrics, like infant mortality.

And, you know, we're spending huge amounts. I think 40% of people who are over 65 take five or more medications a day. 20% take 10 or more medications. I think- Some of which are for the side effects of the other meds. Yeah. Yeah. You know, 81% of Americans aren't at least one medication.

So is this making us healthier? I don't think so. I mean, it's mitigating symptoms sometimes, maybe it addresses issues sometimes, but you know, we know that our healthcare system itself is, uh, and is the third leading cause of death through, uh, prescribed drugs given for the right reason at the right dose for the right patient, not mistakes, medical errors is another huge category, but I mean.

Let's put those together. Cause when Ralph Nader was kind of popularizing this topic, some of the issues have gotten better on iatrogenesis. But if you take iatrogenesis to mean diseases that come from interaction with the healthcare system writ large, the broadest definition. So then it includes, as you mentioned,

prescriptions that are rightly given, prescriptions that are wrongly given in allergic reactions to meds and drug interactions and whatever, surgeries, infections you get well in the hospital, et cetera. If you add those up, many people add those up and it's the number one cause of death of Americans in the country. Yeah, so basically we shut down all the doctors

and hospitals and got rid of all the drugs, we do better? We're not saying that because of course, we don't wanna do statistical warfare because they're also saving lives, right? For sure. But we can say, damn, we should be able to do better on that side, and we can, right?

Like you have plenty of clinical cases where you're saving more lives and causing much less iatrogenesis, and it actually costs less money when you factor all the matriculated thing. ["The Last Supper"] Yeah, if you know what to do, and I think this concept of iatrogenic disease, you know, we were just chatting earlier before the podcast and I remember this book I read when I was in college by Ivan Illich called

Medical Nemesis. And it really influenced me because it talked about the failure of our healthcare system back then and talked about this idea of iatros, which means physician, and genesis means his origin. So the origin of disease being caused by the physician. And that's something that I think is sort of underappreciated by most people. Doctors don't intentionally cause people to be ill. They're not bad people.

They're well-intentioned. They're trying the right thing, but they're trained in the wrong paradigm. Let's just double score. This is not actually a critique of doctors. It's not even a critique of hospitals. It's a critique of some systemic mistakes that affect what the doctors are even allowed to do.

Sometimes the doctors are really upset about it, and it affects how the doctors are trained. And so the critiques we're giving are systemic. Yeah, so let's talk about that. I mean, let's dive into what, we're sort of set the stage for the fact that, you know, we're having increasing rates of these chronic diseases, increasing mental health crisis, increasing rates of neurodevelopmental issues, decreasing life expectancy. I mean, it's a grim situation and we're spending more and more and getting less and less.

So the question then is, what is this context in which the disease is occurring? Why is this happening? And what are the anthropogenic reasons for this chronic disease epidemic? So you were, as you were going through the list, you mentioned vitamin D, you mentioned mercury, that's obviously deficiency, toxicity. You mentioned some pathogens. You mentioned stress., you mentioned stress. So you have a model of what the underlying categories are.

And a lot of them are things like, everybody knows what acute deficiency is, what acute toxicity. You just got a bag of chemicals poured on you, you have acute poisoning, you're vomiting, you have to go in for toxicology. But there is something that is called toxicity that is not just a hippie nonsense idea, it's a real thing.

It is not acute poisoning that is chronic, that is subclinical or subacute. Same with infections. You have acute infection, you're producing symptomology versus kind of subclinical infections, which is in Lyme disease or in viruses that cause cancers or whatever it is. Would you outline the model as you see it in your practice of what are the things that cause the deviation from homeostasis or homeodynamics to begin with?

What are the kind of categories of things that can be part of a causal landscape of illness? Well, you know, the question is important because we do know a lot of what are the anthropogenic reasons for disease or things that may not necessarily be anthropogenic but are still issues that are making us sick. And the framework that we use in functional medicine is really simple and elegant. I think of it like the E equals MC squared of disease. You have something called the Consilience Project,

which is incredible because this book I read years ago, and I'm wondering if that's where you got the title of this project that you're doing, was from E.O. Wilson's book, The Unity of Knowledge. Is that where you got it from? I mean, Consilience is a great term. He definitely popularized it, and he's definitely somebody that I respect.

Yeah, so I remember reading that book, which is kinda heady and thick, but there was one section of the book where he talked about medicine, and he said, medicine has no theory. It's just a hodgepodge of reactive assumptions that don't necessarily connect to any fundamental principles. Like what are the laws of nature?

And we know the laws of physics, pretty much, not all of them, but most of them we've kind of sorted out. And we can do great things with that. We can build bridges, we can build rocket ships, we can do all sorts of stuff, make computers. It's basically physics. And for medicine, there are no laws. You say, well, evolution, that's a kind of a law. Okay, well, that's one. But how does that apply to human health? What are the laws of biology when it comes to human health, medicine really hasn't described those. And, and what, what, um, Pierre Laplace, who was a incredible, uh, uh, scientist back in the, I don't know, 17th century, he had, you know,

Laplace's law and all that was law of physics, but he, he talked about how you can have a great number of observed phenomena from a small number of general laws and, and medicine has failed to produce those laws. So instead of having like a few principles that explain everything, we get more and more granular about the diseases we describe. For example, the Diagnostic Manual for Diseases

is called ICD-10, the International Classification Disease Volume 10 or Version 10. And there's 155,000 diseases. It's gone up from 12,000. Used to have things there like visitation from God, we got rid of those. But it's basically descriptive. It's phenomenological.

It's based on symptoms, not on our understanding of the disease or the pathogenesis of the disease. And so functional medicine, I think, is the first attempt to create a set of principles of laws and, and the, the equals MC squared that explains the, what you're asking, which is what is anthropogenic disease is, is. Are you suffering from exposure too much of something that your body doesn't like?

It doesn't agree with you, or are you lacking certain things that your body needs to thrive and be resilient? And so for me, being a functional medicine doctor is just a detective work for figuring out what you have too much of or too little of. And it's not just one thing. It's often many things. So you can't just treat one thing, which is what we learned in medical school, just Occam's razor, just single disease, single drug.

That's the best practice of medicine. That's your gold standard, that's what you should shoot for. And that's just unfortunately not how the body works. It's a complex dynamic system, and it's infinitely unknowable. But you can actually determine from these basic laws and principles how to treat disease, even if you've never seen it before. In The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, he talks about this idea that following these

basic principles, you can treat diseases and be successful even if you've never seen them. So often people say, well, have you treated this? Have you treated that? Have you fixed this or that? I'm like, maybe not. I've seen that. I've never seen it, but I know what to do. I know how to get to the bottom of this problem.

And so my job is to go through that list and it's a really short list. And maybe you can add to it, but you know, it's toxins and these can be environmental toxins, all the petrochemical based toxins, like the forever chemicals or pesticides, phthalates, PCBs, dioxin, flame retardants. So the list goes on. Uh, it can be elemental toxins, like heavy metals, mercury, lead, arson, cadmium, and they're buried in the earth.

We've excavated them and industrialized different processes that liberate these things like coal burning is a great one. They can be biological toxins. If your liver kidneys aren't working, you're going to be pretty sick and die pretty quick. And then there's allergens, which can be both environmental allergens, food allergens. Toxins can also be things like mycotoxins, mold toxins, which I put in that category, although it can also be an allergen. So when things cross over, it can be, that allergen category can be sensitivities or imbalance like

you know, things that you might not think of as a true allergy like we'll call an IgL which would be a food sensitivity, which is like gluten, for example. And then there's microbes. So it could be infections that are persistent like COVID or Epstein-Barr or CMB, which kind of burden your immune system and lead to all kinds of symptoms, or it could be a more subclinical but debilitating conditions like tick infections,

or it could be an acute infection. Like, you know, I had an abscess recently in my back that was an acute infection that almost killed me. So it can be microbiome, so imbalances or dysfunction in your microbiome, which we're all suffering from in modern society as a core driver of disease. And it can be stress as a physical stress or psychological stress. And that creates physiological change in your body or it can be a poor diet.

And we can get into what that is, but we all eat a pretty crappy diet in America. All those influence your gene expression. All those dynamically are interacting and are often in combinations in any individual that may be precipitating a problem. Like I mentioned, the Alzheimer's guy, he had a poor diet, he had gut issues, he had heavy metals, he had a lot of these things. Then there's the too little. uh, are you not getting enough of the whole nutrient dense food? Are you not getting enough of all the nutrients, right?

So you can have deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, which play a role or even conditionally essential nutrients that are things we don't necessarily think of as necessary. And I think there's a whole conversation around phytochemicals and are those conditionally essential, have we co-evolved with plants to use their compounds to upregulate our biology? Like I did a podcast recently with someone who was studying this compound that comes from pomegranates and walnuts and berries called elagetanins that gets converted in the gut through the microbiome to a compound called urolithin A that helps recycle old

mitochondria. And there's not very many things that do that. So maybe we've kind of evolved with these plants to help us do our body's work. And then there's the right balance of hormones. There can be hormonal deficiency. There can be deficiencies of light and circadian rhythm and clean water and clean air, which are all things we need. And movement, exercise, rest. So it could be like parasympathetic activities like meditation that restores our nervous systems function, asleep, adequate sleep, connection, love, meaning, purpose.

These are all belonging. These are all things that we need. And if you, even something as obvious, belonging, these are all things that we need. And if you, even something as obvious as belonging, if you're lonely, you know, you're, it's like smoking two pack of cigarettes a day in terms of your risk. So you kind of go through that whole list and you can kind of see where people are. And, uh, and some of those things are just a consequence of our modern world, like the increasing isolation, lack of connections, lack of belonging, lack of being part of a tribe. And it may be, is why we see such an increase in tribalism and divisiveness in society,

because people are wanting to be part of something even if it's bad, you know? Like a gang, right? Or it could be AA, or it could be Weight Watchers, it's all still a club. So I think we have this kind of interesting moment where we're starting to kind of map out what these things are that impair human resilience and function

And that's really why we call it functional medicine. Yeah I think everything you're saying is kind of Intuitive if someone is not excessively indoctrinated in an alternate thought thought process and makes sense, but I want to formalize it a little bit so The first thing is that you're mentioning disease having many causes, and that's in distinction to the idea that it has no cause,

it's just whatever, we don't understand what it's from, it's idiopathic. It's random, acts of the universe. Yes, or single cause, right, in which a single molecule for a single molecular target would make sense. Yeah, you eat saturated fat, you get high alveol cholesterol, you get heart disease, it ain't that simple.

And so complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story, right? Yeah, you eat saturated fat you get high all the cholesterol you get heart disease. It ain't that simple and so Complex causation versus simple causation is a major part of the story, right and simple causation is usually immediate Right, you're exposed to something a pathogen a poison You're starving and a disease that correlates to it exactly starts to happen immediately Delayed causation as you you mentioned, certain diseases, you can find early signs that we're moving in that direction in utero, or even the predispositions in the mother's body that are going to affect the developmental environment

to the baby. So acute versus kind of chronic is a major part that we wanna make a distinction. The other is single cause versus multifactorial, because you're mentioning this person's dementia was a whole suite of toxins, lead and mercury and whatever, and a whole suite of deficiencies and a whole suite of maybe subclinical infections and maybe behavioral patterns and maybe psychological patterns. So it's not one thing is causing one deviation is causing one disease that will be treated with one process.

Each thing is taking the system out of optimal performance. It's causing a deviation from homeodynamics, it's causing pathophysiology. Now that system is more susceptible to the next one because it's already operating a little bit suboptimally. And so this low grade toxicity that's messing up the liver and kidneys and lymphatic system makes it to where the normal toxins, metabolic waste, the body produces it as a harder time with, right? And then this nutrient deficiency that is part of the detox processes compounds on that. So the key is you get a compounding effect of a lot of things that are, some of them happened a year ago. The thing that might have caused it,

seemed to have caused it, was actually just a trigger. It was the last step of a causal cascade that took somebody to the straw. It was the straw that broke the camel's back, yeah. Yeah. So I think these concepts of delayed causation, as opposed to immediate causation, multifactorial as opposed to single factor,

subacute issues, things that cause no symptomology immediately, but are part of a compounding effect. Also, unique pathoideology, right? That two people's MS or two people's rheumatoid arthritis are not the same disease. Not the same, yeah. And as opposed to. But I would say you can have one cause

that creates many diseases like mercury or gluten, and you can create one disease disease. It has many causes. Yes So I think just maybe speak to that a tiny bit more in terms of when people think cause and effect There is a reductionist thing where they think billiard ball one thing caused one effect immediately and yet when you're talking about a complex organizational system where you know a Circuit board or a computer or a car, you can take a part out, put another part back in, upgrade it. It didn't grow. It's not self-organizing. It was built. And we apply that methodology from clocks to computers

to something that grew and self-organized where each, there's no such thing as a lung outside of a body or a liver outside of a body, right? So when you try to separate gastroenterology and oncology and neurology, you get still a bunch of diseases that make no sense. Yeah, it is. It's such a failure of imagination and thinking that we have these specialties in medicine and we divided up the body into these organs and parts,

which is still how we teach medical students. My daughter just finished medical school and it's just so antiquated. And you know, there's emerging from the scientific community, not, not necessarily the medical community, but I would say the scientific community, this emerging paradigm of multi causality and multi, multi modal treatments.

In other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for any petition. And there's multimodal treatments that are other words, there's multifactorial causes, many causes for a unique condition, and there's multimodal treatments that are needed, not just one thing. And the body is seen to be a network and a web where everything is inextricably tied to everything else and you can't separate all these things out, but you can start to understand how they influence each other

and are dynamically acting together to create dysfunction in the body and disease. And it's very personalized because you know the name of the disease, it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with that person. And the name of the disease, that person might be missing some of the symptoms that usually go. They might be missing some of the biomarkers. They might have other biomarkers.

They might have other symptoms. And we just said there's enough of a cluster to meet the diagnostic threshold for insurance to cover it. But this person, this unique person, who we say has rheumatoid arthritis and this other person we say has rheumatoid arthritis, don't have the same presentation. They don't have the same medical history, but they don't have the same presentation.

You run enough labs, they have totally different stuff going on in their blood. And they have different symptomology. So what does rheumatoid arthritis mean? Yeah, it's just the name we give to a group of people who share certain criteria that have been established that create the diagnosis based on symptoms, morning stiffness, certain joint pattern of inflammation, certain lab tests. But it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be an antimebrile, a paracite that causes it, or it doesn't tell you anything about why. It could be an entomelohistolytica parasite that causes it,

or it could be gluten that causes it, or it could be Lyme disease. But it's almost never one of those, right? Right, no, it's usually not, right? Exactly. It's usually not. And that's what's so hard in the research paradigm, and I'd be very curious of what you think about this, because the entire medical research paradigm

has been set up for drug discovery. It's the randomized double blind. I want to go there. I want to get to reductionist medicine, but before we go there, you just mentioned you're like, it could be entomoeba histolytica. So you already explained kind of subacute toxicity, but subacute infection you didn't get into yet. Most people are like dysentery is very obvious, but there are things where there is a chronic GI infection

You know that isn't dysentery. No Can you talk about that for a little bit? Yeah, you know, I think I think we think of infections as Something that you know come and go But the truth is and AIDS and I grew up in the era of AIDS. I went to medical school in that era I I did residency at UCSF, which was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic with the gay community there. And it was the number one admitting diagnosis

to the hospital where I trained in my residency. And nobody died of HIV infection. People died of all the other bugs that happened to live in us and on us that get unleashed when your immune system isn't working. So whether it's pneumocystis Infection of your lungs or cytomegalovirus Which is a common virus that we all carry like, you know people have herpes And you know, then people know this right you have herpes and you get a cold sore when it's people know it for

Oral herpes or genital herpes, but they don't know there are more kinds of herpes No, there's a lot of kinds of her CNBS herpes FC bars herpes or genital herpes, but they don't know there are more kinds of herpes. No, there's a lot of kinds of herpes. CNBS herpes, FDVARS herpes, they're just herpes, the whole family of viruses, but people know, oh, I have herpes, which means when I'm stressed or when it's cold out or when I'm tired or when I get a cold, I get a cold sore. People understand that there's this latent infection

in their body, but there's so many of those, and they're often hidden and they're latent and they're maybe marginally symptomatic or not symptomatic. Even tick infections can cause all sorts of issues and be latent and then they emerge. Or even with COVID, we're now seeing these, when we're seeing replicating COVID viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long COVID and long-term illness.

And so, I think that's a very important point you know, when we're seeing replicating COVID viruses in people who've recovered months or years later in their bodies that are producing ongoing effects that lead to long COVID and persistent disease. So just so people have a sense, what percentage of people have CMV? What percentage of people have Epstein-Barr? What percentage of people have some strains of HPV that are part of pathogenic predisposition?

It's a lot. I mean, I would say everybody's walking around with something, you know, like probably, if you like, most people have some Epsom bar that's kind of hanging around, that can emerge and be problematic. Probably half the population has CMV. You know, it's a lot of people. There was a study I found interesting that was looking at removed prostate cancers that were removed for cancer

and that were biopsied and doing a viral assessment on it and found that the combination of EBV and HPV was present in the vast majority of them. And so that's not one or the other. It was actually the combination. And obviously we know HPV causing cervical cancer, causing throat cancer. That's kind of new though, right? That people really understand that. And H. pylori causing stomach cancer.

And obviously like EBV causing chronic fatigue, but it's pretty reductionist to say EBV causes chronic fatigue. There are people who have EBV who get other diseases, MS or something. There are people who have EBV who never get chronic fatigue. And there are people who have chronic fatigue who have get chronic fatigue and there are people who have chronic fatigue who have a load of other viruses or pathogens

that aren't EBV. Yeah, we talked about the infections can cause a myriad of problems. Like herpes can lead to increased risk for Alzheimer's. Which doesn't just cause a cold sore but maybe something more serious. And that doesn't mean all Alzheimer's is caused by bacteria, but you know, look at Rudy Tanzi's work and there, he was an Alzheimer's researcher

and he talks about how there's, maybe brain bopsies are finding all these bugs in the brain from the microbiome, from viruses, from other bacteria that may be causing an irritation that leads to the deposition of the amyloid plaque that everybody sees on the microscope, but is only a secondary response to some other triggering factor. That if you dealt with that triggering factor, you might not actually get Alzheimer's. So this is something that Rudy Tenzi's work is good at, Bredesen's work is good at, is

Alzheimer's isn't one disease. Yeah. Right? Some people have described it as type two diabetes of the brain. Some people has rheumatoid arthritis of the brain. Some people has infection of the brain. These are all true. Yeah.

Different times, which means different treatments. So if you hear that somebody has rheumatoid arthritis or MS or Alzheimer's, you don't instantly know what you're going to do. No, I don't. I don't. I know, I know there's a, there's a group of things I'm going to look at. Yes. Like I'm going gonna look at things

that piss off the immune system, right? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet, right? All the deficiencies of certain things like vitamin D we know is increasing risk for MS because it's important in neurologic function and immune function. So I think we kind of have to come to terms with this framework of multi-factorial

causes and multimodal treatments. And we just have failed to be imaginative in how we do research. I think you're saying two things at once that are important. One is the disease doesn't have one cause. But you're saying think about causal stuff, but the disease doesn't have one cause. So it could seem overwhelming, like what? It says all these things. But there's also a framework that's really simple.

So the treatment of everyone's gonna be personalized, not based on a disease diagnosis, but based on their actual medical history, their symptomology, their labs, and what's uniquely going on for them. But it's gonna be personalized within a framework that is kinda not that hard. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, the laws of nature are pretty simple. Like Pierre Laplace said, they're the laws of biology when I think we're describing them and I think we're getting to our approximation of what that looks like. And there's, you know, functional medicine is just a heuristic.

It's not the end all and be all. It's just a framework that we're continually evolving to understand the complexity of human biology, which is infinitely unknowable, but even though it's so complex, you know, a rocket ship is complicated, right? But it's knowable. It's a no-no. Well, there's a blueprint that specifies it completely. And DNA is actually not a blueprint.

It's a generator function which can make a new protein that's never made exposed to a new thing. Yeah. Right. And it evolved rather than was designed, which is why it's self-repairing, right? The rocket ship doesn't self-repair. No. It doesn't self-evolve.

Yeah. And so biology is not mechanics, right? It's like, it's a different, unique thing that to have a system that's self-organizes, wasn't created from the outside, that has an immune system, right? Like it'd be dope if our computer had an immune system, but it doesn't, or our car, right? Things that self-repair and self-evolve.

And so we're like, okay, what's happening in a system that is building itself, evolving itself, repairing itself is obviously different in type than a system that doesn't repair itself, that doesn't evolve itself. So we have to make sure we're using the right epistemology, right? The right kind of scientific framework. And so you were talking about laws of biology and you mentioned, well, evolution's kind

of that. And we're talking about anthropogenic stuff, which is like stuff in the current world that is different than the evolutionary environment, even though our genes aren't different. Right? Like modifying the environment in a way that we are not actually genetically fit to. That mismatch is really why we're sick. So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think the first thing is a lot of people

are still suffering from the propaganda of Hobbes, and Hobbes' descendants, right? Man in the state of nature's life is brutish, short, nasty, and mean. And as you already mentioned, the average life expectancy was 30, and their life was shit the entire time until they were 30, and that's nature, right?

That's just nature. That's human biology, that's nature, and are civilizing ourselves. Technology is creating longer lives, and everything's getting better and better. And this is like awesome propaganda if you're colonialist and you wanna kill all the natives. And-

We're helping them by killing them because they won't have to suffer so much. I mean, Churchill has a famous quote that says, I'm gonna paraphrase it, actually have a whole list of quotes about manifest destiny of kings. I mean, manifest destiny in the US and divine right of kings and like,

just stuff that when we look back, we say, wow, that was the most dreadful propaganda nonsense. We still do the same kind of thing. But Churchill said something like, you know, I don't hold for one second that our treatment of the red man is a bad thing in any way because evolution selects for higher life forms and a higher species, replacing the lower species is good. Right. And you're like, shit, that's a big deal. So North and South America, the Americas

before Columbus, et cetera, right? Before colonization was roughly, depending on who you look at, 140 million people. And within a short period of colonization, both from infections and war and driving them out of viable habitats, the population was decimated by 90%. Yeah. And if you look at that and you compare it to whatever, six million Jews in the Holocaust, right? And you're like 90% of 140 million,

which is so many different civilizations that had different languages and songs and art and pharmacologies and just gone. Yeah. Right? And similarly, so many ecosystems, so many species, like we don't have the giant sloth, we don't have the mammoth. Those were largely, you know, many of those were early human extinction from overhunting, from destroying habitats. But so there's the story, no, no, those. And of course it makes sense that like if the winner writes history, of course they're the good guy. Right? The winner's not going to say we were the bad guys,

but we were better at weapons than them. And we destroyed them because they were peaceful and lovely. No, we're going to say they were brutish and terrible and we brought democracy and Christianity and whatever. You can say Christianity, you can say Islam, you can say whatever the thing is that is justifying Wyatt I. So there's something where it's like the dominant narrative of a power system has to justify the power system. And so it's gonna be apologism for the power system. We saw that through the crusades, through the dark ages, through the, and so history is hard, right? Because we gotta read this stuff

that's written by the winners. Yeah. And you're like, in general, more peaceful cultures got slaughtered by more warring cultures. It's not like everybody that Genghis Khan slaughtered was a less good civilization. No.

They were less good at war, but how many people that knew how to live in more peace got slaughtered in the process, because they didn't build maximally lethal militaries. And yet we are the descendants of who made it through history. Which was- People were good at war and weapons and killing.

Growing massive populations, not keeping populations in stable relationship with their environment, good at technology that can be used in competition and war. And so it's a really interesting selection criteria. So then we tell the story, oh, they only lived for 30 years and life was terrible. But you were just saying like, hey, no, actually some of the Plains Indians lived into 100, a lot of them were living to 100.

This is such an important story because I think one of the things that I want to get across in this conversation is there's still this general idea that is a part of the progress narrative that is a part of just propaganda, let's say. That is the diseases come from nature, right? Man in a state of nature's life is brutish or nasty, I mean. And the progress comes from science and the application of science, the technology brought to the world via the market, blah, blah, blah. And now look at how long we live and, you know, vaccines solved all these issues and whatever. It's not that there's no truth to it,

but it is cherry picking. The stat is pretty heavily- 90% of measles was gone when they introduced the vaccine because of better sanitation and health. This is a pretty important part of the story. And so if you rewind a little bit to say, you know, dark ages Europe, this is not an indigenous culture. And then if the indigenous cultures you're studying post-science, which is very recently, are post trail of tears after you've already slaughtered most of them, move them to an area where they don't understand the plants or animals and that were like crap areas.

And then they're drinking and whatever you like. You're like, this is not a study of indigenous people. So there's a lot of indigenous scholars. They're like, come on, this is ridiculous. Like, no, we had a lot of people that were a hundred years old and there's a lot of diseases we just didn't have. And so this idea that diseases just come from nature. Our genome is a bummer, right? Like nature's a bummer. Tech is gonna solve it. As opposed to like,

actually technological agriculture has really made a lot of people sick. Technological mining and et cetera that has caused ubiquitous pollution made a lot of people sick. So when we say anthropogenic disease, we're not just talking about iatrogenic, right? Anthropogenic meaning diseases we have that are a result of our own action as a species, right? And so if you take mining, for instance,

right? There's 2 billion tons of municipal waste produced every year, waste that comes from our house. It's a lot, 2 billion tons, like mind-blowing when you think about it. There's about 190 billion tons of mining waste produced every year. That's a lot. Because you mine stuff, but that rock, it's not all the thing you want, right? You want a particular metal. All the stuff you don't want is waste, is tailings. That stuff is almost all super toxic. and it gets put in some big dam that eventually breaks and all goes in the water. And this is comprehensively undoing what took the biosphere a billion years to do that made life possible in the first place.

This is, you had actually mentioned something I want to, it's a tangent, but I want to double down on this. Maybe there's aliens, who knows? We're not going to get into that part right now. But when we look out at the universe, we see a lot of planets that are not habitable. And we don't see a lot of places that look habitable. This place is pretty awesome.

We don't see any. Right, Carl Sagan's pale blue dot is as relevant today as it was back then. Yeah. So this, like the fact that it's habitable to life is a big deal. We should want to protect it more than anything. Not move to Mars?

Obviously if you deal with radiation and other issues, 0.4G is a pretty tricky issue to deal with, right? As you see, the people who go into 0G and they do a lot of resistance training and everything to try to deal with it, bone density goes down, neural density goes down. Neural density drops pretty massively. So obviously we have all fit to this planet. We have a planet that supports life. It's rare as can be, right?

Everything we care about depends on that. And it took a long, like the other planets didn't do that. At least in the time period that we can see, that's very special. It took a whatever, a billion-ish years for geological, hydrological processes to make a space where abiogenesis could start to happen, right? Where life could start to emerge. And that was trapping all the super toxic stuff in which life couldn't emerge in rocks in the lithosphere and making a certain temperature range and, you know, whatever that life could emerge in. And then it took like a billion years of just single cell creatures

to make a biosphere in which multicellular creatures could emerge and on and on. And and then you look at the biosphere, a complex biosphere, and you're like, it's pretty much six atoms, right? Like there's 92 elements in the periodic table. Yeah, oxygen first, right? Like 65% of our body by weight is oxygen, because water, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, make up 96% of our weight. And you add a few electrolytes in there

and it's 99% of our weight. And then you have trace minerals. And the trace minerals are important. They're a tiny bit, but roughly every animal plant, whatever, has the same distribution of trace minerals, the same building blocks, the same type of molecular bonds. It's a humongous deal to understand. Me and you and a dog and a mouse and a scorpion

and a tree and a fungus are made of the same stuff, same atoms, same molecular bonds, which is why any of them can die, go on the soil, turn into soil, turn into new stuff. A tree can fall, body can fall, an animal can defecate, rattlesnake poison, right? Like super duper poisonous stuff. Still the nature of the bonds. It dies, breaks down.

Doesn't stay as an enduring toxin. And like plutonium which stays around forever. Yes, or PFOS or whatever, right? Styrofoam. Because those are either atoms that were not part of the biosphere that we got through mining or molecules that we made up in a chem lab that nothing in nature knows how to break down. Right? Like your bond. So just to get a sense of like

part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all Nothing in nature knows how to break down, right? Like your bond. So just to get a sense of like part of what allows evolution to work is that we're all made of the same stuff and we need the same physics, right? Obviously the North Pole to the equator are different temperatures so polar bears don't do very well in the savanna and cheetahs wouldn't do very well in the Arctic but the temperature difference from the North Pole to the equator is almost nothing compared to everywhere else in outer space, right? Suns are really hot. Well, some things are very hot, some things are very cold. But like, everything here operates with the same pressure, the same physics, the same ionizing radiation, the same chemicals, the same temperature ranges. That's a big deal to get. And the same chemicals and the same molecular bonds, a huge deal.

And it's part of why coevolution works, why there can be mutual symbiosis is we are literally recyclable into each other. Yeah. Right? Now, if you think about, from that perspective, how rare life in the universe is, how rare the biosphere is,

how it's all based on basically these same six atoms, same molecular bonds and a little bit of trace minerals, then you start to think about how mind-blowingly stupid mining is. Like mining, just to think about it. Other weird things out of the earth that should be buried in there and things

that we should be protected from because they don't do well with our biology. Things that are omnitoxic to all life forms, right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms. Cadmium is bad for all life forms. Lead is bad for all life forms, right? Like mercury is bad for all life forms. Cadmium is bad for all life forms. Lead is bad for all life forms, etc. So fortunately for us, the Earth has a lot of those, but they're all bound in rock in the lithosphere under the biosphere, not part of the biosphere. We don't have to deal with them. So what do we do? We say those are useful

for industrial purposes, so let's actually destroy the biosphere on top to make a mine. Let's pull this rock up. Let's pull that super toxic thing out through smelting and metallurgy and whatever. And if we just kept it all in a perfect metal and recycle it'd be one thing. But we burn the coal and put the mercury and lead in the air, we put the lead in the gasoline, you know, and aerosolized it.

And then also the rest of the part that is toxic tailings also goes out. So you're like, we have one planet that we know is habitable. It's habitable because of specific chemistry, and we are as fast as possible making omni-toxic shit that chemistry can't deal with. And that's a big part of what's making us sick,

and it's something that medicine sort of ignored, which is this chronic low-level burden of toxins that we're all exposed to, and we're all basically assessable. If we were food, we wouldn't be safe to eat. The average newborn has 287 toxins in their umbilical cord blood. And before they take their first breath.

We see the same thing in the mother's breast milk, right? And in her blood, like just people need to have this sink in. Mother breast milk, mother's blood, baby umbilical cord, two to 300 petrochemical and industrial toxins. Yeah, it's crazy. I umbilical cord, two to three hundred petrochemical and industrial toxins. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, you should still breastfeed, but it's still- To even call it low level is ridiculous, actually.

I mean, I've thought of a business of creating a breast milk filter. I don't know how you'd do that, but. Well, the lymphatic system is a filter, but it can only filter, like, in our evolutionary environment, we were not exposed to organophosphates. evolutionary environment. We were not exposed organophosphates So what evolutionary process can deal with organophosphates?

Yeah Right like and so we figured out organophosphates napalm awesome We can kill a lot of people and defoliate the whole jungle of Vietnam with this Oh, guess what we can also make an herbicide and spray it on all of our food, right? Glyphosate. Yeah, but to think about this thing that we invented as a chemical weapon to destroy nature at scale. Napalm, which is dioxin. Same molecular class, we figure out,

oh, we can kill weeds in agriculture settings, but we're gonna spray it on all the food and humans are gonna eat trace amounts of all of it. And the pesticides, like the thing that blows my mind about pesticides, you're like, okay, nuclear modeling. Nuclear war happens, nuclear winter, almost everything dies. The only things that make it are bugs with exoskeletons.

We wanna make something poisonous enough to kill bugs that can make it through a nuclear winter and we spray it all over our food. And then eat it. And just because we're bigger, it's not a lethal amount, but it's a long term lethal amount. But it bioaccumulates and it's additive. And over time, it's sort of like,

that's what I see so many of the times that we see. And in many of the diseases of aging, chronic diseases we're talking about, including autoimmune diseases, are all the result of this total load phenomenon. It's not just one thing, it's a total load of everything. And you keep adding and adding and adding. And it's-

So when you say low level, it's important to say, so we're talking about lead poisoning, right? There's like, you have acute lead poisoning, you have Mad Hatter syndrome. Okay, that happens because you're working in a lead mine or some industrial source, right? But how much was there in an evolutionary environment? None. So what amount is an evolutionary environment? None.

So what amount is good for you? None. So- That's why I laugh when I see the reference range on the lab of like the level of mercury that's considered normal is one zero to 10. I'm like, well, there's no biological requirement for mercury at zero is the normal level.

Yes. And yet that would mess up so much industry that the industry is gonna lobby the EPA to make a number that doesn't mess up the industry too much. And the cost, the externalized cost, is your children's health. And your grandparents' health, and your health, and the cancers that everybody's gonna get.

Yeah, I see this. I mean, I saw this kid my practice years ago. His mother was just such a good, attentive, observant mother, and she saw this kid who went from a normal little kid to being extremely difficult, extremely aggressive, violent, learning difficulties, dysgraphia, dyslexia, just a whole bunch of things, neurodevelopmental things.

And she said, we live north of Albany in this town where there's a cement plant across the street from the school. This is, this is why the history is so important. How many doctors asked their patients if they live near a cement plant or a coal plant or not. Nobody asked that. Right.

But it's part of the history that we find really essential. And she said every day after school, the cars would be coated, like in Austin here, when there's pollen season, like your car's just coated with pollen. Their cars every day were coated with dust from the cement plant and that quote dust was a toxic soup of chemicals.

And when I actually did a chelation challenge test, which again, it's something we don't do in traditional medicine, but we look at your blood levels and that can tell you if there's any acute exposure. And often there are levels that are significant. see kids for example high lead from environmental exposure But it's it often is stored in the tissues and so we give a drug called the DMSA Which is a FDA approved drug for chelation That's a Greek word that means to claw to bind some things things, it binds the metals, and then we collect the urine,

and we saw this kid was just, everything was just lit up, you know, arsenic, aluminum, mercury, lead. I just want to specify that one of the things you said is you had to use a different testing method. Yeah. Right, because of course if there's something that's circulating in the blood, it's gonna cross the blood-brain barrier,

that's gonna go into the kidneys and hurt the nephrons, it's so dangerous to keep in the blood, the body will excrete it as fast as it can. If it can't excrete it fast enough, it wants to get it out of the blood. So it goes into a tissue. So you do a blood level, blood level's the wrong thing to do, right?

If you're not looking at tissue levels, which is what. But tissue biopsies are not a non-invasive thing to do. But this is just important to be like, people could say, oh, this is nonsense, I've ran the labs and nobody has heavy metal, well, are you running the right labs? Very important topic. And again, there's some theory under it.

Right, and one of the gold standard tests for lead, for example, is looking at bone levels through various specialized types of imaging that are used in research. And that's what you should be looking at. It's sort of like the joke I always tell, that this guy drops his keys on the street and he's looking for him in his

under this light post and his friends like what are you doing he's I'm looking for my keys he said where'd you drop him he's like you drop him down the street says why are you looking here he said the lights but are here and that's what we do in medicine we tend to do testing that we have available but not the right testing and I even remember an article in the New England Journal of Medicine or a JAMA was one of those I was talking about, like mercury. And they said, when we check the blood, because that's the easiest thing to do. I'm like, well, that's not where you want to check, you know, to see what's really going

on. And so these kids who were living at the cement plant were severely affected by these. And by treating them and getting rid of the metals and decreasing their toxic burden, they were able to actually recover and do well. Okay. So this is important. People will say N equals one nonsense, whereas the RCT, randomized control trial, and placebo effect could do that. No, placebo effect couldn't do that.

Placebo effect does some things, it doesn't do other things. It's not going to increase bone density, right? It's not going to reverse in a kid who's not even paying attention, really severe diseases and biomarkers. So it's hard to do a randomized control trial on a bespoke process. And yet, if you're seeing things that placebo does not describe, meaning placebo never does that thing enduringly,

that should not be an immediate dismissal. And if it's something that there would be no way to set up an RCT easily for and or no one has money to do it, someone should not immediately dismiss based on that. It should be like, well, let's look at the total body of evidence and try to understand it. Let's try to make sense of it.

Yeah, and I think where medicine is also going is the NF1 studies, which is now understood to be a really valid type of research, which is where you measure your own biology against your own biology with different interventions over time. And we also had a whole group of special forces, soldiers at Cleveland Clinic who were coming

with all sorts of weird, mysterious, chronic illnesses, and they were having fatigue and metabolic issues and cognitive issues. And, you know, these guys in special forces are not whiners or complainers. You get through a training, you're like a tough guy and, and they were being dismissed and we started looking and listening to the stories and they were often guys who were exposed to burn pits or were in blast houses. So they were training how to blow up shit, like how to blow up a door, blow up a building.

And they would practice. They had TBI's from it. And they would, well, they would get brain injury, but they would also- Chemical exposure. They would get the release of the metals. And they were very high in lead and mercury. And by getting rid of these in these patients,

they did remarkably well. And then there was a guy, actually it was in the New York Times Were this expert in lead who I think was at Albert Einstein who studied the bone lead levels with this fancy test Said he'd never seen Anything like this where lead levels decreased. Yeah, I'm like we've never seen it because you guys don't practice medicine that actually helps you Detoxify these compounds from your body. That's possible.

We know how to do it. Right. But again, it's sort of on the fringes of medicine. Okay. I want to talk about lead for a minute. So everybody, or most people know the story of leaded gasoline, tetraethyl lead being added to gasoline. Most people don't know the story well.

There's actually an exceptional video on this made by Veritasium, a YouTube channel online that describes the tetrahedral lead story. But it was an additive for gasoline in the early phases of internal combustion engines that stopped engine knocking. As in, not even absolutely crucial. Heaps of other chemistries that could stop engine knocking, as obviously we know because we don't have lead anymore. The early studies that were done on tetraethyl lead, on toxicity, the people did get sick, including the researcher, and the results were hidden. So it wasn't that we couldn't have possibly known, it was we actually knew, hit it,

and brought it out anyways because of the economic interest. And then to think about like what adding lead to gasoline means, which is you're aerosolizing it, right? You're not just putting it in the water or the soil. You're literally atomizing one of the most toxic chemicals that exists and putting it into the air at scale, right? So of course, even though it was already known toxic, that was hidden. And then the companies that were producing the tetrathal lead fought really hard to keep it there and not ban it. And it only finally got banned after the preponderance of how much harm it was causing got proven decades later. The effects when you look back in just America are

estimated at a billion points of IQ loss for America. Yeah. And that's staggering. I just would like people to IQ loss for Americans. Yeah. And if you just- That's staggering. I just would like people to take in- Make Americans dumber. Yeah. A billion points of IQ loss for a population that was less than 300 million people.

Yeah. Is a lot of IQ loss. And then there were also studies on increased violence and aggravation. Yeah. That showed that populations that were heavily exposed had something like 4X, the impulse control disorders. Impulse control, skull performance, cognitive deficits.

Not to mention the bone issues, the osteoporosis, the cancer, everything else, but if we just look at even the psycho-cognitive elements, because one of the, like again, one of the bullshit stories that is real politic is like, it goes back to the Hobbesian story, it's like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why Hobbesian stories, like humans are kind of dumb and nasty. That's why we need rule, right?

Humans are kind of dumb and nasty. Well, empirically we made humans dumber and nastier with just the aerosolizing lead. And you're like, who would the humans be if we hadn't done that? So then you say, okay, well, that's an old story because we got rid of lead. Well, no, those effects are enduring.

And as you see- Lead doesn't go away, it's in the soil still. It's still we got rid of lead. Well, no, those effects are enduring. And as you see- Lead doesn't go away, it's in the soil still. It's still in most of the pipes. It's in the pipes, right? It's like we still see it in water. That's in Flint, Michigan, that whole thing that happened in Flint, Michigan.

But Albany's worse than Flint, Michigan. Yeah. Right? Still. Yeah. And, but even though we supposedly banned lead and gasoline, it's still used in prop planes, it's still used in certain military and farm equipment and other kinds of things. So we're still using it.

It's supposedly banned around the world, but it's still used because not enforced in the third world pretty heavily. But then the lead that comes from mining, specifically mining of fluent, there's a study I saw in 2019 that showed children under five lost 780 million IQ points just in 2019, just from lead. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. It's not just that it affects your cognitive

function, it affects everything. You know, there, there's, it was a really pioneering study that I saw in, um, American journal cardiology, where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two. And by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over. Yeah. Then it was just over 20. Journal of Cardiology where they found that anybody with a lead level of over two, and by the way, the lead levels that they thought were harmful were 40 and over. Then it was 20, then it

was 10, now it's 10. But that was not based on proving that they weren't, that was based on lobbying from the company, from the industries that produced the lead that wanted to not have that much restriction. But still the lead levels that quote normal is one to zero to 10, right? Right. And in this American Journal of Cardiology study, they found that- Excuse me, I was saying the arguing for it being higher was the lobbying side.

The proving the toxicity brought it lower, but it's still, as you're mentioning, one to 10. Yeah, still one to 10. So it's still pretty bad. And what they found was, in terms of kids' cognitive function, it was a continuum from 0 to 10 still causing a problem. It wasn't like you had no effect.

So that's been well proven. But what was really interesting was the American Journal of Cardiology found that if your lead level was over 2, 2 out of 10, which is 39% of the population of adults and kids. It was a bigger risk factor for stroke and heart attack than having abnormal cholesterol, which nobody talks about. So you go to the cardiologist,

they're not checking your lead levels. And even if they did, that's only one fifth of the allowable level. Right, and what's really interesting is that there was this whole movement in the 70s and 80s for chelation therapy, which was thought to be quackery, and the NIH did a $30 million trial called the TAG trial, where they used EDTA IV chelation,

EDTA specifically removes lead, and they found that it was very actually effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks and yet it's not part of standard medicine. Yeah. Okay, so lead increasing heart disease, use it more than cholesterol markers? Yeah. And how much do people hear about the safe quote-unquote safe levels of lead compared to cholesterol when it comes to heart disease from the cardiologist, right?

But and again, we're not just saying within the safe range, we're saying not even close to the top of the range. Yeah. Right? Someone would look at it and they'd be like, oh, I'm near the bottom of the range. That's awesome. I'm too. I'm like, yeah.

Except the range, you're like in evolutionary levels, it's not even the right scale because what we're calling one to 10 is actually like one to a million in terms of what should be the right part per billion scale. I mean, there were moments in human history where there were volcanoes and there was exposures, but not much, right? Not much, yeah. In terms of like the famous topic people like to talk

about right now of what caused the fall of the Roman Empire, there's a whole hypothesis about it. Lead pipes, lead pipes. Well, lead was added to sugar to make a particular kind of sweetness, and lead was actually added as a food additive and to alcohol plus the lead pipes plus the lead holes. Actually, I love this story. I have a few patients who are wealthy

and they get fine crystal or they have wine out of leaded crystal. I remember buying wine glasses once and I went to the store and I'm like, these are five dollars a piece and these are $ dollars a piece I'm like what why is this fifty dollar wine glass? He said well it's you know it's leaded crystal. I'm like leaded crystal why? He says well because the lead makes the wine taste sweeter that's why I kid eat paint chips because it tastes sweet. I was like wow and then they have fancy

glaze plates which are from Italy or France, which is the glaze is full of lead So you can get it in lots of different ways, but okay, so the fact that in 2019 children under five Globally had 780 million points of IQ loss. That's like that should be Up there in crimes against humanity as like whoever the fuck did this needs like the whole industry needs to be punished like Because those kids' lives are ruined right like massively ruined forever the civilization That those kids run

Yeah with less cognitive power as we're moving into an increasingly complex world Yeah, and the iq is obviously just one thing. It's increased heart disease increased cancer increased osteoporosis and Increased impulse control disorders aggression. aggression, like their psychiatric components. So sicker, dumber, and meaner. And we're just talking about one compound. And you're right. I mean, you know, they looked at the children of the farm workers in California who were

exposed to large amounts of pesticides and herbicides, that cohort of kids that they studied lost 41 million IQ points just from exposure to pesticides. It was not just lead. So you add the pesticides up, you add the lead up, you add the mercury up, you add the... There's 350,000 chemicals that are in regular industrial use that are regulated, something like that. There's 280 million chemicals in the database of the American Chemical Society. And we're talking about things that were not part of our evolutionary environment, are not part of the makeup. I mean, DuPont was wrong. It's not better living through chemistry. I mean, it's just like satire now to say better living through chemistry,

because they were advertising DDT. They were advertising to say better living through chemistry because they were advertising DDT. They were advertising, you know, the better living through chemistry stuff was advertising methamphetamine, methadrine, right? You remember the advertisements like makes mom happier and more productive and helps with weight loss for the whole family. And they were advertising asbestos, and at the same time as prefrontal lobotomies. Right. Right? The propaganda's gotten a little bit more sophisticated now, but it's the same shit. Yeah, and I think, you know,

we were chatting a little bit about this low-level toxicity in the anthropogenic disease. I think it's one of the most under-appreciated things in medicine. I mean, the microbiome is finally getting its day. You know, diet nutrition is well being understood, although it's not being implemented in medical care. The subclinical deficiency from soil management and even which types of plants, hybridized crops and diversity

and seasonality, not. Yeah, I want to get into that because that's a whole other how we've screwed up our food system. But what's really interesting is that this low level toxicity framework is not accepted at all. And it's not taught in medical schools, doctors don't know how to assess toxins in the body, they don't know how to treat toxicity. The preponderance of data of looking at it is clear, like you mentioned the NIH study,

but also the common sense of it is pretty clear. Yeah, right. And I just want people to just step back from a moment from emotional reactions and just think about it. And you're like, yeah, the biosphere is the only one in the whole universe we know. And everything really is made of the same stuff and stuff that is in high amounts, omni-toxic to it,

and that our body didn't evolve to process at all, that are totally alien, maybe we shouldn't put everywhere. Yeah. And I think, I think there's some groups like American Cancer Society and others and cancer research groups that have said, look, one of the big drivers of cancer is environmental chemicals, but it doesn't really tell you what to do about them. How to deal with it.

WHO said air pollution is number one cause of death worldwide recently. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. I think food is, but maybe that's strange. Attribution is difficult, but it's up there. It's up there, yeah. Because they're looking at third world and they're looking at, again, like you mentioned, the coal burning that causes all the lead, et cetera.

And then detoxification is considered this really fringe lunatic, heretical framework of medicine that we shouldn't be thinking about. Your body detoxifies. Your liver's work, your kidneys work, your sweat, your pee, poo, your hair grows out, your skin falls off. You're detoxifying. It's true. Well, all that's true.

Which is why you want to support detoxification systems if they have an increased burden. That's true, but there are more interventional ways to actually detoxify, which I've been doing for decades through various treatments, whether it's. But you would do those after supporting the organs of elimination. Yeah, you wanna make sure the pathways are open to get rid of that stuff.

Let's talk about the lymphatic system, not having a pump and exercise, an evolutionary movement versus this. That's a good one. Yeah, I mean, a lot of us are very sedentary, and the only way your body gets rid of toxins is it dumps all the pollution into your body, into your lymph system, which is a parallel

circulatory system that goes along with your veins and your arteries. It doesn't have a heart. But it doesn't have a heart, right. And the only way it moves through your body is through exercise, through the pumping action of your muscles. But exercise is a nonsense concept

to an indigenous person. They're just moving. They're just moving, right? Like you gotta climb trees, you gotta run, you gotta. And the number of moving hours, relative to sedentary hours per day, for the entire evolutionary history of our genome, was a lot of moving hours.

It's probably reversed to what we have now, right? And so the fact that the lymphatic nodes are in the armpits and in the crotch and in the areas that move so they get pumped, they were the amount that you needed when you had eight hours of movement today or whatever it was and complex dynamic movement. And so then if you're not having that movement, but the system evolved that that was the pump. Yeah. That's a big deal.

Yeah. That's a big deal. Yeah, and so you don't even before chelation right like Sedentary means that even if you weren't being exposed to more toxins than normal just the metabolic toxins your body couldn't deal with them Yeah, so, you know, we've got we've got like a few major anthropogenic causes environmental toxins and liberating Toxins from deep in the earth whether it's through elemental toxins like heavy metals or Petrochemical toxins which you know, it's basically how we whether it's not deep in the earth. whether it's through elemental toxins, like heavy metals, or petrochemical toxins, which is basically how we, whether it's- And that's not deep in the earth, that's chem lab. It's chem lab, but it also, it's from plastic,

petrochemicals, a lot of these things are synthesized, like plastics, or PCBs, or dioxins, or these are things that can be- Including all the ones in the paint. Yeah, right. I tried to get clean paint when I had my house painted, but who knows if it actually is. The formaldehyde and the other VOCs in paint

that cause indoor air pollution to be worse than outdoor air pollution in the environment where people spend 90% of the time. Yeah, Cleveland Clinic, I was very insistent that when we built our 15,000 square foot center there, that we made sure that they had a very good air filtration system, water filtration system, that all the materials used, the paint used,

the furniture used was non-off gassing, disposing and producing volatile organic compounds that are absorbed in your body and create havoc. So it actually was an incredible place to work, because people would walk in and just feel better. It was the healthiest place in the whole hospital. This is something that, you know, there's this phenomena that when people get drunk, or the part of their mind and brain that can assess drunkenness is also getting drunk, right?

So they can misassess and think they're less drunk than they are. Mm-hmm. Dunning-Kruger is another kind of effect like that. There are people who don't know how bad they feel relative to what they would feel in an evolutionary environment It's like when you think about the decrease in sperm count, which we haven't talked about ubiquitous fertility issues, right? That we are becoming a species that cannot reproduce is a big deal. People should be like whoa That's not a good sign. We shouldn't all need IVF to be able to reproduce the healthier being is the more

reproductive capacity it has right and The healthier it being is, the more reproductive capacity it has, right? But when you look at the decreasing testosterone, decreasing sperm count studies that sperm count has dropped 50 to 60% in the last 60 plus years, and the testosterone has and other androgens have similarly, you're like, that means that everybody feels so bad in comparison to how they, like the low sperm count environment is also a low vitality environment, but you don't know

because you don't have a reference range. Yeah, I mean, that's true. I think it's often a comment I would hear from my patients when I treat them. They'd say, Dr. Hyman, I didn't know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling so good. Right.

They literally just thought it was their normal. It's normal to be achy, to be tired, to have all these weird- Brain fog. Low-grade symptoms, brain fog. Depression. They don't maybe rise to the level of a disease that's classified as a disease, but you feel like shit. Very low vitality.

I call it FLC syndrome, feel like crap. And it's real. And it's amazing how easy it is to fix that if you know what to do. But it's also amazing how, and heartbreaking, how much low-grade sickness and IQ loss and psychiatric illness, whatever, is totally normalized and people don't think there's anything wrong.

But then, of course, they crave stuff a lot because they feel bad. They wanna feel better. And then now that's part of an ongoing cascade cycle. I mean, crave bad food, drugs. Anything that's gonna give a hit of a hypernormal stimuli. Bad food, drugs, news, porn, bullshit productivity that is just checking a list

so that you have some hit of dogmean. Right. Yeah, no, it's true. I think we, we, we have to sort of stop normalizing feeling bad and then we have to help people understand what's happening in their biology and to be proactive about doing something about it. Cause, cause despite all this doom and gloom we're talking about and all the, the amounts of insults that

are a result of our society and industrialization and technology and some of those things are good you know we all benefit from them but you know there are methods to actually help optimize your health to detoxify to improve your microbiome to to regulate the fundamental physiological systems that you need to be working in order for you to be healthy, whether it's your mitochondria or anything. I don't wanna say doom and gloom because talking about real things is real things.

And people shouldn't have the bias to be like, I don't want to look at real things, right? Well, it's better if there's hope on the other end. If they say, we're all toxic waste dumps and there's nothing we can do about it, we're all gonna get sick and die. Well, I can only do something about it as soon as I know about it.

As soon as I know about it, of course you could do something. So one of the other ubiquitous illnesses is learned helplessness. This is an ubiquitous psychiatric illness where people go from not knowing about an issue at all to the moment they hear about it feeling helpless. It's like, what the fuck? What about that you heard about it

and you study for a little while the issue before jumping straight to helplessness and be like, what do the people who know a lot think we could do? What do I? And so the straight to I heard about it and I'm straight into doom and helplessness is total nonsense, right?

People need to be able to learn about an issue and know once I understand it, I have some chance of thinking about what might actually be able to improve it. Yeah. And so, you know, if we go to Okinawa, we see a very advanced society that has advanced technology where the rate of people that make it to 100 is way, way higher. So we're not saying everybody has to be cavemen, right? Like we're not saying a Luddite thing.

We're saying, could you manufacture stuff in a way where you just actually cared about the pollution? Could you do longer-term studies first to make sure something was super toxic? Like totally. Could you do a better agricultural system? Totally. These are not scientifically hard problems. Does it make it totally market unviable? No. Look at how huge the margins are in the areas that are externalizing all the costs. The margins don't need to be that high. So what you're saying is there are ways to do things better. Obviously.

Yeah. And they don't... And necessarily. Right. I mean, it's just sort of what we're dealing with lately with the food dyes. There's no need for these things in food. They're designed to make unpalatable food attractive and palatable. And I think that there's a movement to try to remove a lot of these compounds that are

used in ultra-processed food that are used for flavor enhancers or for color enhancement to make it attractive. When you take those things away, those foods are gonna disappear because they're gonna be like, I mean, imagine taking like Pringles, which, you know, I've eaten Pringles, they're not that bad, but they're all perfectly formed, perfect shape,

they fit in the container perfectly. If you take them out and just crush them, which would take about two seconds, they're not really potato chips, they're a bunch of cocktails of weird chemicals and some potato, I think, and then you can kind of turn into a powder and you just put it on your plate

and try to eat it with a spoon, it would be gross. No one would want to eat it, right? And so I think if we remove a lot of these things from foods it's gonna change the food landscape. Okay, so I wanna go to the topic of food in our evolutionary environment. We talked about toxicity, we haven't talked about deficiency. Yeah. But I want to go back and just kind of underscore something that you said, which was you're like, all right, there are toxins which means too much of something for optimal health. That's pretty simple. There are

some toxins where any amount is too much. It may not be causing immediate acute illness, but like less would be better for you. Lead and mercury and organophosphates and BPA and whatever all fit in that category and it's a lot and there are hundreds in the umbilical cord blood, right? So it's like it's a lot and serious thing. There are other toxins that are too much of something that the body actually needs is just too much and it might be too much in absolute. And so this is where we look at cholesterol or we look at zinc levels or something, right? Blood sugar, whatever. Blood sugar, too much of something relative to something else or what it should be. Those are different categories, but just the idea, and it's important to make the distinction

where you want to bring something down to zero versus you want to bring it into evolutionary balance. And then there's not enough of some stuff and not so little bit again, you're acutely dying of rickets or berry berry, but you're very far from optimal. And that can be vitamins like that, but it can be trace minerals. And soil can be like a lot of things. And so you're like, okay, well, many of those things that there's not enough of, that there's a deficiency,

are also parts of the immune and detoxification system that would deal with the toxicity. So you get these compounding effects, right? And so deficiency. I think there's a lot of people who are like, hey, most people are obese today. This seems like diseases of excess, not deficiency. It seems like we have caloric excess.

So talk to me about deficiency. And obviously we're gonna be talking about micro versus micronutrients and stuff. And evolutionary environment diet versus this diet. I mean, you brought up something really important is that, and I remember reading these studies and just being flabbergasted, that the most obese are the most malnourished.

Yes, that's why they're hungry all the time. Kids, right, and we're looking for love in all the wrong places. And this is phenomena as well described in medicine. Kids, for example, are iron deficient. They get something called pica, which is they eat dirt because they're trying to get iron. The body craves the things that it needs.

I remember going to the Amazon, and it was fascinating because there was this wall-like minerals, like a kind of an exposed, on the bank of the river of dirt, looked like dirt, but it would just flock with parrots. It would come and just eat that dirt because they were trying to get the minerals. And when you have a diet that's so nutritionally depleted,

it's so high in sugar, starch, and bad fats, and chemicals, but has very little nutrients. Now this is important, because sugar equals carbohydrate calories, equals a macronutrient. Yeah. So for people who don't have macro versus micronutrients, would you break that down real quick?

Yeah. I mean, the macronutrients are protein, fat, and carbohydrate, and you can maybe say fiber. There's vitamins and minerals, which are micronutrients, and there's phytochemicals, which I think are a different category, but I think they're conditionally essential nutrients. And then there's other things that you might not necessarily, the body can make, but you might not necessarily have enough quantities like co-guten, which you can get from certain foods, or lipoic acid, but you need to sometimes

supplement with those. But I think the amount of bad macronutrients we have, namely sugar and starch, and the lack of good macronutrients that we had was like good certain good fats, and even protein, that's another conversation, but there's such depletion of the micronutrients because of the way we farm, because of the soil, because of how plants are bred,

they're bred for starch content and for yield and for disease resistance and drought resistance, they're not bred for nutrient density, they're not bred for flavor,. They're not bred for flavor. Except now there's Dan Barber, who's been on the podcast, created Stone Barns, which is sort of his regenerative farm up in upstate New York. He created Row 7 Seeds. And now you can buy these Row 7 crops

that are in the supermarket. For example, he said butternut squash is tasteless and as a chef I don't wanna cook this. I wanna reverse engineer flavor. And he re-engineered with peppers, tomatoes, winter squash, a whole series of foods that are more flavorful because they have more nutrients. They're more phytochemically rich, more nutrient dense. He didn't breed it for that

But it's a set of natural consequence and in nature flavor always follows Phytochemical richness the the the colorful like if you eat a if you eat a wild strawberry it's so dense and some of these amazing phytochemicals like if I see it which is great for longevity and killing zombie cells and phytochemicals like phycetin, which is great for longevity and killing zombie cells, and a tiny little strawberry will clear this flavor explosion in your mouth. But if you have a giant strawberry that looks red and delicious, but it tastes like cardboard that's grown in an industrial way, you're not going to get those phytochemicals. But the problem is that so many people who are obese or overweight are nutritionally

deficient. And when you look at their levels of nutrients like vitamin D or minerals or vitamins, they're often very low. And so they're constantly hungry, they're constantly looking for more food, more nutrients, but they're not getting it. So we know that a lot of the studies of blue zones were flawed, and there's kind of debate

about what makes the areas where people make it to 100 the way they are. But one thing that is pretty commonly known that led to all the caloric restriction studies is that very rarely do overweight people make it to 100. Yeah, actually more of a obese 100 year old. They're skinny and typically they're what we actually consider malnourished from a just

macronutrient caloric perspective. But their diet is actually micronutrient dense, macronutrient low, which means they're getting protein, fat, and carb, but they're getting a little bit less total calorie, but a lot more mineral, vitamin, phytochemical enzyme per calorie. This makes a lot of sense, right?

And if you, this is where, you know, talking about evolutionary environment food, because sapien is depending upon who you ask, 200,000 years old, 300,000 years old, something like that. And hominids are three million years old. And obviously, it goes back because we are genetically almost identical to the chimpanzees and other things, right? So evolutionary environment, billions of years of life

being a particular way, we evolved to that environment. This is actually one of the concepts I think is so important is evolution is a process by which creatures emerge, they are selected for based on fitness to an environment, right? The environment is shaping the creature. The environment has leaves up really high and the mutation that leads to a long neck gets selected for, right? And you get a giraffe. You wouldn't get a giraffe if there were not things really high. So it's the environment shaping the creature. There's a little bit of the niche creation where the creature will try to modify the environment and of course like next to humans, the most environment modifying creatures are like beavers.

That's right. You know, maybe a termite. If you look at a beaver, and then you look at Tokyo. Right, you look at a beaver dam, and you look at like Tokyo or New York City or LA, and you look at LA when you're flying in and you're like, as far as I can see is this orthogonal grid of concrete. There's actually no sign of the natural world left, right? It's an Anthropocene technosphere that has eaten the biosphere. Then you look at a Beaver Dam, you're like, we are not like any of the other creatures. Like really obviously. We are like them in terms of made of the same stuff, but our capacity to do tech has really changed us profoundly So we're a creature that started to change our environment rapidly

But change it to something that is not the environment we were genetically adapted to faster than our genes can adapt It's a mismatch. It's a genes environment mismatch so the idea that we are not paying attention to the way that our environment continues to shape us as creatures and we're making an environment we're actually not fit to is the concept of anthropogenic disease, right? It's the concept of, and this is not romanticizing that in an evolutionary environment everything was awesome, like famine was difficult. There were a lot of things that were difficult, but we still need to pay attention to what did we actually evolve to have fitness in. And you've mentioned vitamin D a few times.

Actually, it's a good example. We spend 90% of our time indoors. We evolved outdoors. We evolved to have vitamin D synthesis per unit time based on spending most of our time outdoors. And the sun, yeah. Not only does indoor light not do what sunlight does, but energy efficient light is even worse. Yeah.

Right? Like we try to take the UVB out, and then we try to take the warm parts out to make it energy efficient, which the reason you have red light sensors is because the synthesis of nitric oxide and other things where we actually do photosynthesize some stuff, right?

We actually modulate chemistry based on different frequencies of light. And so again, like there's an externality on health of being indoors, an externality of health of even the attempt to make environmentally friendly lighting. But does supplemental vitamin D do the exact same thing as sunlight? Not really. I mean, it's good, but it's not the same. No, because you get... First, are you supplementing calcifediol or calcitriol or some enzymatically processed form or just D3? And then the binding proteins, the light plays some role in that,

right? The light plays a role in a whole complex of things. And so supplementing it better than not supplementing it. But again, this is a, it makes sense that if you evolved outdoors, moving a lot, that your body would need to move for lymphatic systems. Like, oh, we don't need a pump on this thing because the body's moving all the time. And an extra pump would be metabolically,

evolutionarily expensive. And just when you stop moving, you don't automatically get another pump, right? And we will synthesize vitamin D from light and nitric oxide and other things based on the amount of light exposure. And so the idea that we can create an environment without realizing it, where you do something for a reason, right? You make a building for reasons, but it's doing other things than the thing it intended. And a lot of the other things were not what we optimized for our problems, i.e. an externalized cost. And the externalized costs to the environment are also reflected in the externalized cost to our health, right? If you look at the planetary

boundary perspective, the chemical pollution in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the chemical pollution in people's bodies. The species extinction in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the chemical pollution in people's bodies. Yeah. The species extinction in the environment is pretty much mirrored in the species extinction in the microbiome. Yeah, and diversity loss, right. And so, you know, Chief Seattle might sound like a hippie saying we're not the web of life,

we're merely a strand in it, whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves, but it's like just also straightforward ecological science and medicine. And so let's talk about food systems a little bit more in terms of in an evolutionary environment, what was different about food and the micronutrients and macronutrients and what has first the agricultural revolution, plow and stuff, and then kind of the green revolution, hoverbosher and then pesticides and et cetera, done to food. Yeah, I mean, you know, going back historically, you know,

and sort of that analysis of paleolithic diets, and there was such a high level of micronutrients in the diet. There was such an incredibly high level of fiber, of omega-3 fats. There was an inversion of our sodium-potassium intake, so we had much higher potassium, lower sodium intake. And you kind of look at the amount of sugar and starch, it was almost nonexistent. We might have 22 teaspoons a year,

we now have 14,000 times that, which is staggering. As human biology has had. Again, that's something people really underscore, 14,000 times that, which is staggering. And human biology. Again, that's something people really underscore. 14,000 times what we evolved to process. Yeah. I mean, we got a honey, you know, we found a honey thing that was great. Or we got some berries. We've got some sugar.

But it was also very expensive to try to find honey. Yeah. Evolutionarily, right? Like the bees were not just giving it up. No, no. Like the Nepalese honey hunters figured out they would climb these trees with burning sticks, like smoke them out. But yeah, it was so easy. You had to climb a tree with a burning stick.

Every time you want a cookie, it would be a different thing. As opposed to push a button on Amazon and shows it with the door. Yeah, my wife's really good at that. I'm like, what is going on with all this ice cream showing up at the house? Well, if you have to climb a tree to get honey,

you're not going to get honey, you're not going to get diabetes because you just exercise. That's right. And if you had to like chase game, right? There's a lot of things where also the reward was following an activity that had evolutionary relevance.

Yeah. So, so we have changed our food system and then the, the phytochemicals in the food is dramatically changed because of our agriculture practices And so what happened, you know, we mentioned fritz hopper that basically the ability to extract nitrogen from the air and turn into fertilizer happened, you know in the you know early 1920s and

Then we after world war two we took all the factories that were making nitrogen And then we, after World War II, we took all the factories that were making nitrogen to make bombs, because that was what it was used for. It wasn't for agriculture initially. Turned them into fertilizer, which now, you know, are these huge companies that actually, to make the fertilizer takes up 2% of the world's global energy supplies.

And then of course it has all these downstream consequences when we put it on the soils. The nitrogen causes the release of nitric oxide which has adverse climate impacts that runs into the rivers and streams causing eutrophication, essentially fertilizing all the plant life, sucking out the oxygen from river streams and estuaries and create dead zones. There's 400 around the world that feed half a billion people. That's just the fertilizer. Then we turned the bioweapons factories, which were neurotoxins.

So the gas in World War I were all nerve toxins. They're chemical weapons, right? Those got turned into pesticides. Then we developed herbicides. And then we started hybridizing plants to breed for different traits. Not GMO, but just plain old breeding, plant breeding. And the traits we bred for were increased yield,

increased starch content, increased drought resistance, pest resistance. So we basically. But when we hybridized for that, the plants got less good at other things. Yeah, so then you had less protein, there's increasing protein deficiency in the world because there's less protein in these foods. There's less vitamins and minerals,

there's certainly less phytochemicals, there's more sugar. So you kind of created this disaster. I mean, gluten is a great example where, I remember being in Sardinia and they had this incredible wheat they used to make, that these flat kind of crackers that would get rehydrated that the shepherds would use.

They'd go out and hike and spend days and weeks out in the middle of nowhere raising their animals. And they would have these large amounts of this rono capelli wheat that they made into these crackers that they would rehydrate and take with them. Very different than dwarf wheat, which was made by Norman Borlaug.

It was one of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of this hybridization process. But basically, then I actually met his daughter once. I don't know why. I got invited to this food conference and I, I, it was an agriculture conference. I gave a talk on food as medicine and I was sitting next to this guy, Mr. Cargill. And this was like, it was like, I was in a strange and I said to something, I was

like, so what do you do? He said, I do plant medicine. I'm like, really? Plant medicine? What's that? He said, you know, pesticides, the size. I'm like, wow. So it was very funny. But I digress. And so when we hybridize the wheat, when we breed plants, we combine the genetics of the plants. It's not like humans where you get half of your genetics from your mom and half from your dad. You don't get half from one strain of wheat and half from the other strain of wheat.

You add them. So like 46 chromosomes instead instead would be 92. And what genes do is they make proteins. All of a sudden you've got this wheat that's making all these extra proteins. And one of those proteins they're making, they're extra gluten proteins, gliden proteins, and they're way more inflammatory.

And then they create, and the amount of starch you create was a super starch called amylopectin A, which is much more starchy, higher glycemic load, and creates diabetes basically. So you have all these benefits of drought resistant, hardy, short, stubby wheat that's replaced the old amber leaves of grain that I think is in our national anthem,

you know, which is tall fields of wheat. But there are many harmful consequences of that breeding. That's just one example. And so we're seeing increasing levels of nutritional deficiencies of protein and zinc and minerals because of this. And then we destroy the soil with the chemicals we put on with the pesticides herbicides, fertilizer, and the tillage and the industrial farming methods that deplete the soil organic matter in order to actually get the nutrients out of the plants, you've

got to have a living soil with bacteria that act in symbiosis with the mycorrhizal fungi to extract the nutrients for the plant. You might have a soil that's full of minerals, but it can't get to the plant. You've created this cascading set of effects that have ended up with a diet that is highly industrialized, highly processed, scalable, shelf stable. You know, when was that show? I forget, but they found the guy, found a hamburger in his pocket. It was 20 years later or something, a Big Mac, and it was still perfectly preserved. No, it doesn't break down.

I mean, there's that joke, you should only eat food that rots, you know, so we've gone so far away from that. So it's no wonder our diet's killing us. Okay, so you were mentioning the way Ivan Elitch's book influenced you. One of the ones that I read early was Bernard Jensen's work, one of the kind of founders of anthropophic medicine. He wrote Chemistry of Man, which was looking at what all the different trace minerals do in the body and what the trace mineral deficiency does. But then he wrote a great book, and there are many like this. It was just the first one I read called Empty Harvest that

was about correlating deficiency of trace minerals in the soil with specific kind of trace mineral deficiency diseases. And he was showing when agricultural soils in the US, in the soil with specific kind of trace mineral deficiency diseases. And he was showing like when agricultural soils in the US in the USGS surveys started showing almost no selenium levels and then heart disease becoming rampant. And of course, heart disease is multifactorial. It was from sugars, from a lot of things, but like that was a thing. And where chromium and vanadium started to become lower, type 2 diabetes also got higher, which play roles in insulin. Potential regulation. And so if you think about again, and from the evolutionary perspective, that everything in the biosphere is made of the same stuff.

So then it makes sense that if you're eating stuff, your body can break down that form and make it into the stuff that you're made of because it's made of the same stuff. But as soon as you start engineering food that is not actually made of the same evolutionary stuff and you start changing the soil, that's going to change a lot. So even before you deep fry the stuff, like the plants you're talking about are already just not food, even when they're taken from the ground because again, in a forest, there's no such thing as waste, right? Everything that falls on the soil turns the soil, turns into soil, turns into plants, turns into animals.

And so it's important to get in an ecosystem, all the loops are closed, right? All of the old stuff turns into new stuff. And there's no such thing as unrenewable resource extraction, right? The forest is not doing mining on renewables. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, right? So we now call cradle to cradle as if it's a fancy thing.

But obviously closed loop cycling is how nature works. We start extracting stuff from nature faster than it can replenish, leading to deficiency issues on one side of the ecosystem, and then turning it into trash and pollution on the other side faster than it can be processed. That's ecological overshoot, right? But in our food systems, right,

like what is the fertilizer in a forest? Everything that came out of the forest goes back into the forest. Nothing's removed. Nothing's extracted from the forest so if we clear cut a forest and Then we turn it into cropland and then we grow a single kind of crop It's gonna pull out of that good soil all kinds of nutrients. We're gonna take all of that out Then we're gonna spray with NPK, right? So we've got nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and that's it. Maybe some calcium or something, depending.

But what about the whole rest of the 72 critical trace minerals and what are they? And that NPK is going to kill the living matter, which as you mentioned, the living matter not only helps the plants uptake the nutrients, but also modulates its genetic expression and all those things. Once you do that a few times, there's just nothing left in the soil, which is why you get desertification. And then you can keep it alive artificially. It's not alive. It's just like some weird growing substrate. And then because it's minerally deficient, the plants are sick, right? They don't have good immune system. They can't produce volatile oils, so now they're much more susceptible to pathogens,

and because they're monocropped, right? Because in a natural environment, you'd have a little bit of one plant that a bug might eat, but you'd have plants that produce something that that bug doesn't like right next to it that grow in symbiotic gills. I think it's so important when you said plants have their own defenses, they have an immune system.

And the way that they keep away pests and diseases and things is through these phytochemicals that they make. And we essentially created a food system that's bred phytochemicals or engineered phytochemicals out of the food. Both by removing everything from the soil then by hybridizing the crop. So if you think about hybridizing, like we started learning this with animal husbandry, call it 10,000 years ago, right? 6,000 to 12,000, whatever.

And before that with dogs, right? Even well before we started to do with goats and then cows and stuff, the wolf part. But we didn't want to keep them like wolves, right? So we started to breed them. And we've got chihuahuas and we've got St. Bernards. And they're both wolves. And you're like, damn, these are really different creatures.

This is not synthetic biology and genetic engineering. This is literally just selective breeding. Dog breeding. But we learned that. We started being like, man, we can do that to plants. We can do it to all kinds of things. There's unintended consequences. We have a hybridized dog.

It's a Bernadoodle. And we just found out it has allergies because these dogs have more allergies. So they're not... And so you don't get only upside, right? You get upside and you get downside from that. So then we start hybridizing all the animals. And if you look at what used to be what we call a chicken,

this beautiful, colorful, small bird that lives in trees in Southeast Asia, it's a gorgeous bird. It doesn't have much meat on it, right? In a natural environment, it'd be very gamey. And you look at the hybridizing of that to this and that's even before you shoot it full of estrogen and steroids and antibiotics and give it a super toxic feed. Full of arsenic. But you're like, okay,

so these are not the same genetics at all. And in the same way that those animals now are gonna have hip dysplasia and allergies and whatever, when you eat them, that a lot of those effects translate, right? And now because the plants don't have the volatile chemicals, and because you didn't plant them in guilds, you've monocropped them,

you're going to get locusts, right? You're going to get pesticides issues. I mean, you're going to get pest issues. So now you've got to spray them in pesticides that again, like we said, are toxic enough to kill the thing that makes it to the nuclear blast on the food. And then we don't want any other crops because we're designing for tractors. So then we spray the herbicides, which, and so you're like, OK, we took all the nutrients out of the soil. We just put back the nutrients to make the thing look like a thing, but there's

no actual micronutrient in it, right? Looks like a tomato, but the nutrient deficiency is pretty radical. The genetics are hybridized to be like an heirloom citrus has got a lot of seeds in it. Yeah. Like what does it mean to make a seedless thing when it's growing for reproduction?

Yeah. Right, you're growing this weird sterile thing. Like obviously the thing that can't reproduce is not healthy. And so in the process of getting it seedless or making it huge or whatever, you also breed all these nutrients out. And like you mentioned, you might breed types of proteins

in the gliadin or whatever that are hard to digest, cause inflammatory issues. And then, then you spray it with pesticides and herbicides. And then that would be what you put in your salad if you're trying to eat like raw or fresh stuff. Yeah. Now, then it gets even worse because you're like, you go to the grocery store to buy an

apple and it's about to be apple season. You're like, wait, it's about to be apple season. Where was this thing? Maybe it was a greenhouse somewhere else that got shipped here, usually even worse conditions soil. Maybe it was actually stored. Most apples are stored for about a year before they're eaten. Exactly.

They're stored in a nitrogen environment so it doesn't oxidize in a fridge. And so the thing that even if you're trying to do fresh stuff, you're like, this is hybridized, demineralized, poisoned, and a year old. And so you were mentioning what does it mean in another podcast to eat not ultra hybridized, what's the term? Ultra processed food. Ultra processed food, yeah. One of the people who I got to study with

when I was young that influenced me the most was Dr. Everett's Loomis, Healing for Everyone. I don't know if you ever came across. He was one of the other early naturopaths, Dr. Christopher and those guys. Yeah. And my family had actually had some, quote unquote, incurable illnesses

that got help through alternative processes that kind of got us in that path. And we actually got to go live with that guy, Dr. Loomis, on his healing clinic when I was a kid. And I got to see people coming in in wheelchairs and leaving on wheelchairs, just having really radical kind of change. It was very old school, it was kind of Ann and Wigmore like stuff. And, but it was real interesting to hear. He was also a medical doctor, but like he was 85 by the time I met him and he had boiled it down to a very simple thing.

And he's like, number one principle of nutrition is eat as close to that living ecosystem as you can. Number two is pay subtle attention to how the foods feel in your body. Everything else, whatever. Like nightshades and ratios of macronutrients and whatever. Yeah, I agree. So he had these gardens, these kind of huge gardens and orchards,

and he told people, go pick the food you feel called to and eat it right there. Don't even just stand outside with your feet in the dirt and eat it and that and that's it that's your diet while you're here there's an inpatient thing and it was amazing how much people got better if the only food they could eat was standing by the tree or the plant that they picked it off of while they ate it and of course he emphasized heirloom species and good soil and no pesticide herbicides. Well, you know, there's, there's a guy who kind of looks like you a little bit with the beard, his name's Fred Provenza.

Do you know him? Oh God, you would love him. You guys would just jam. He's a, someone I got to know recently who's a professor for years at Utah State University and studied rangeland ecology and the relationship between plants and the soil and animals and humans. And basically, he wrote a book called Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom. And he basically said that animals intuitively know what to eat when to keep themselves healthy.

So they forage on some major food crops, but then they'll forage if they're left their own devices and there's enough variety of wild plants around on different plants that have different medicinal properties or different nutrients. And in the book, he talked about this, uh, study that was done, I think in the twenties in an orphanage in Canada, or they took kids who really hadn't been exposed to a lot of whatever junk food or American diet, and they gave them like weird stuff like brain and organs and all kinds of weird food that we wouldn't think would be things we'd want to eat.

And the kids would want to eat. And these kids actually were eating completely in harmony with what their bodies needed and seeking out those foods and nutrients and the food that they needed and were far healthier than kids were control group that were fed a regular diet. And I was like, that's fascinating that humans have lost their ability to understand their sort of nutritional wisdom and to understand how things affect us. If people pay attention like like, okay, I'm eating this food. Do I feel sleepy afterwards?

Do I feel very heavy and lethargic? Does my belly hurt? Am I still craving stuff? Do I have strong cravings? Like, most people just don't notice, right? And if you, this is why his second principle was kind of pay detailed attention how your body feels, which doesn't mean just, you know,

what food sounds good to your mind. It's when I eat this thing, how do I actually feel? And he's like, if you eat close to the living ecosystem, as close as possible, and you pay attention to how you feel, you're going to do pretty well. And it's true, like there are some other things you could add to that, but you should start with that as the foundation. I remember one study from an indigenous scholar that said the pharmacopoeia of plants that the Native Americans considered edible plants,

when obviously there are many Native American groups, but there were some pharmacopoeia they were referencing, that had their list of edible plants as about 5,000 plants in North America. And you go to the grocery store and you're like, there are not 5,000 foods in the produce section. And 5,000 foods in the produce section. And even of the ones in the produce section, I don't get the bok choy or whatever all that often and you're like, how many different plants? So the plants I'm getting, one, probably were grown a long time ago and stored, right?

Because they're not seasonal. Two, they're hybridized. Three, they're grown in crap soil and sprayed with stuff. And I'm eating very few and each one has different phytochemicals and different things that modulate genetic expression. So again, evolutionary environment, you don't have very much of any one plant before you start row-cropping.

You have a very little bit. They're seasonal, and the whole ecosystem has shared needs. Yeah, I mean, I think 60% of our diet is corn, wheat, soy, and depending on where you are in the world, rice. And then the rest of the 40% is another 12 plants like carrots and onions and potatoes and iceberg lettuce. And those four you mentioned were how much of a hunter gatherer diet? Zero. Zero.

I mean, it's a significant thing because we're not trying to do some romantic savage myth, but we are saying we evolved to be fit to a particular thing. Yeah. And our genes haven't changed when we have changed what we've exposed us to so radically. Yeah, I mean the whole idea of the intuitive eating, it's really what animals do.

And we've lost the ability to do that. And not only that, but the foods we've produced have hijacked our normal regulatory pathways and dysregulate our appetite, dysregulate hunger, have immune effects on our body that create inflammation. So people don't crave what's good for them most of the time anymore, right? Because the system has become addicted

to hypernormal stimuli. Yeah, and I crave chopped liver. Well, if you're pretty healthy, you crave what's good for you. But if you're pretty unhealthy, you'll typically crave what will make you feel better instantly because it's providing some dopamine or a jiquette. It's interesting, because I had a surgery

and I lost half my blood volume four months ago, and I've gotten most of it back. But my iron stores are low because I basically sucked up all my iron reserves, like all the money in my bank account. I got used up to pay for what I needed to sort of run my body. And I noticed myself craving things like liver.

I want some liver and my wife's like, what are you doing? But talk about the craving in Super Size Me. Yeah. Because that's different, right? And most people find that they're dealing with cravings for things that are totally not good for them. And it's different than like your instinctual wisdom.

It's really hijacking of the brain through its effects on dopamine and the way these fuzes are designed to create a dopamine hit that creates sort of short term pleasure and long term pain. And these are highly addictive and the shocking stat, and this was sort of amazing to me, and I obviously had many patients who I knew had food issues and were craving the wrong things.

But according to the Yale food addiction scale, which was a validated metric for looking at not just like, oh, I crave ice cream, but like actual people who are truly addicted and who go through withdrawal, whose life is occupied by food, who can't think of anything else, who who's have their lives destroyed by food. Just like the criteria for being an alcoholic or any other addict, your life kind of degrades dramatically. It's 14% of the world's population, including 14% of kids,

which is pretty frightening when you think about it. I mean, it's like one in five, or one on one, I'm not good at math, one in seven, I think people have a food addiction that's controlling your life. But on the not quite that bad gradient there is like almost everybody. Yeah. Which is pretty important.

Because if you define addiction in the broadest sense of just a compulsive behavior for something you know isn't good for you, you can't really stop. Most people's relationship with food would be described that way. Yeah. And meaning they know, they do not eat what they know the best diet for themselves would be.

Not because of money and not because of time. No, I mean, it's like the body snatchers, the food industry has understood how to design foods that are hyper palatable that hijack your brain chemistry, your microbiome, your metabolism, your immune system, uh, in ways that, and your hormones in ways that never happened before in human evolution. And they, I mean, nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna be overweight.

Nobody wakes up and goes, I wanna become diabetic. I wanna be three, four, 500 pounds. It is not something that people willfully choose. I was very overweight as a young teenager, and my family just didn't know better about that particular thing of like, which they should have having met Dr. Loomis, my family just didn't know better about that particular thing of like, which they should have having met Dr. Loomis, but it was like all pizzas and

that kind of food. And I remember feeling really bad about being overweight, really wanting not to eat and just having such a hard time, especially cause my environment was everyone else was eating around. Right. And then I remember when I started to learn more kind of early teenager about it and switched to like, started to eat salads where it wasn't iceberg lettuce. It was like a bunch of deep dark kinds of greens with a bunch of fresh seeds and nuts and seaweeds and like whatever a lot. You couldn't eat that much. Like a very morally rich thing that is very fibrous and takes a lot of chewing. And yet with the other thing, like after you're already in pain because you're full, you want to

keep eating. Yeah, it's true, right. I mean, I think that's what I say. You know, nobody binges on a bag of avocados or 10, you know, ribeye steaks, right? And you just can't. But you could easily eat, you know, two quarts of ice cream or a giant bag of cookies on your own. And what the cookies and the ice cream have in common is it is the combinatorics of salt, fat, and sugar with palatability, right? Which is like, this is the interesting thing of like, okay, so we need some macronutrients,

but we need a lot of micronutrients is what we're made of, right? Is, it's enzymes that catalyze stuff but we need a lot of micronutrients is what we're made of, right? It's enzymes that catalyze stuff, we're obviously made of proteins, but we're also made of minerals that make up bones and all the stuff. And so in an evolutionary environment, as you mentioned, you got very little sugar, right? You got little bits of sugar that were naturally in fruit, but that fruit, again, the orange before it was hybridized, or the berries, there was just, they were not that many of them. They were only around a certain time of year,

other animals were competing for them. So because though, people could die of famine, anyone who could fill up on something that could create some caloric storage, there was an evolutionary incentive for that, right? So you get a dopamine hit when there is sugar, because there's almost no sugar. Yeah, and they're designed to gain weight.

That's what we're designed to do in the face of, yeah, excess food or calories we'll store it for later. And if there's very little fat in the evolutionary environment that you can get super easy, the wild game is gaming, right? Not, Yeah, hunter-gatherers would, when they would kill an animal,

and then the Hadza are like this, we visited them in Africa, they would break the bones and suck the marrow to get the fat, because that was the most prized part. So there's not a heap of fat, there's not a heap of sugar, salt's hard to come by, so those things in an evolutionary environment you get a dopamine hit for because they're important, right? There's a lot of green vegetables, right?

Like leafy things, there's a lot of plants, and so you don't need a dopamine hit for those, because those are the things you kind of have to do most of your eating on. So then we figure out how to produce excessive amounts of food, extract the sugar, fat, salt, and recombine it into shakes and donuts and hamburgers and whatever. But it's basically least amount of chewing, right? Like maximum palatability or easy chewing, salt, fat, sugar combos that have almost no real nutrients but are maximally dopaminergic. And that process of make something

that is a hypernormal stimuli, but it was a stimuli because it was evolutionarily relevant because one, it was rare, it's not rare anymore. Two, you had to go do exercise to get it. And three, it was bound with trace minerals and phytochemicals and other things. So when you separate, you don't have to do that evolutionary work to get it. It's not rare, we have way too much of it,

and it's devoid of all the nutrients, yet your genetics still have a dopamine response. And so from a supply side, economically, this is awesome. Yeah. Right, because if I'm just a businessman thinking about I actually have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. Like I can literally be in committing a crime of fiduciary responsibility if I do not maximize

shareholder profit. How am I going to maximize shareholder profit? Well, I want the most customers I can have. So how do I maximize my total addressable market? And I want the most revenue, but lifetime revenue. For lifetime revenue, addiction's awesome. Especially addiction that starts in childhood. And if it's food, total addressable market's everybody.

So from a business point of view, that's just almost all. I think it's more stomach share. I call it stomach share. And it's interesting, there's an extra 500 calories a day created in our agricultural system per person in this country that people are eating. You know the calorie consumption has gone up historically from the 70s although there's been an interesting decrease in

calorie consumption with an increase in obesity which is a very interesting conversation. It's a separate conversation really about how all calories are not the same and certain calories are not the same and certain calories are more problematic. They cause the body to store the calories, which is this fuel partitioning theory of obesity, which is different than the energy balance theory, which has to do with just too many calories

and not enough exercise. So if you look at calories multiplied by the type of calories, right, glycemic index, whatever, So if you look at calories multiplied by the type of calories, right? Glycemic index, whatever, um, kind of subtracted or divided by the, uh, um, trace mineral micronutrient density and exercise needed to get the food. That ratio looks pretty bad. Hmm. It's not just 500 more calories.

It's that whole ratio thing. And then there's a deconstruction of the food. it's that whole ratio thing. And then there's a deconstruction of the food. That's even worse. The sort of industrial chemical separation of all the components of food, like corn or wheat or soy into different things that are not found in nature. And the chemical structure has been altered and the properties have been altered. And that seems to have this unique effect on us.

And this is why we're seeing such an increase in the research that's showing the ultra processed food, which still needs to be defined more carefully, but we kind of intuitively understand what is a Cheeto is an ultra processed food. It's like, what is that? There's no Cheeto tree out there. And that has a really unique effect on our biology and it's driving so many chronic illnesses and it's causing such food addiction. So Daniel, we've kind of covered a lot.

We've covered the load of environmental toxins that we're all exposed to and that none of us is exempt from. This is sort of evidenced by the Bill Hulquhart studies or fat biopsy studies they've done on humans where everybody's pre-polluted. We've talked about the problems with our diet and both the depletion of our food supply through the hybridization and the soil damage as well as the growth of ultra-processed food

and the reduction in the variety of foods we eat. But there's other ubiquitous things that are causing us to be ill. And one of the things I think you talk about is the fact that there really are no healthy humans left. I mean, there are people that are healthier than others, but how many times do you see someone who is an athlete who still shows markers of diseases on their way? A lot.

Yeah. And of course, those athletes then later in life will get diseases where you trace back and they were already in pathoadiology. Right? And so the idea of disease as this individual thing is different than disease that is a result of systemic factors everybody's swimming in. And that's kind of one of the things we want to talk about is there's ubiquitous pathology that is not necessary. It's not obligated, it's stuff that we could change.

So we're swimming in a disease causing soup, essentially. And disease meaning lots of things, right? Like if we think back about an evolutionary environment, the unit of selection was not the individual. It's actually such an important topic. An individual is a group, right? There are animals that are pretty solo animals and there are animals that are social animals and they have different selection processes, but a solo sapien in the Serengeti is dead.

Bad news. Still a leopard, they'll get by. Exactly, right? Cats are more solitary in most environments. Land's a bit of an exception, but humans are a social primate. And so it was groups of humans coordinating together that were what was selected for. So things that make humans' physiology unhealthy, things that make their psychology unhealthy, things that make the social relationships break down are all breaking down the evolutionary substrate.

It's really important, right? And so if we think about ubiquitous psychopathology for a moment, so in the same way you've got like, okay, your vitamin C's so low you got scurvy, or your vitamin D's so low you got rickets. scurvy or your vitamin d solo you got rickets well above vitamin d solo you got rickets you've got way increased likelihood for immune disorders and osteoporosis and stuff with the dsm and mental illness you have this person has major depressive disorder but below that is this person's depressed yeah this person has diagnosable

generalized anxiety disorder, we're going to put them on benzos. Well, that's actually a lot of people. It's actually really sad. And benzos are a horrifying drug from a side effect and addiction point of view. And a society responding to its problems is pretty hard when a lot of people are on benzos and SSRIs and opiates. It does not make a population. Don't forget sugar. That's really the opiate of the masses. But opiates are also the opiate of the masses, right? More people died of fentanyl last year in the US than all the soldiers in the Vietnam War over 11 years by 2X. Yeah.

Right? That's a lot. That's a lot and When you look back at the like opioid crisis Sackler family thing that case got prosecuted Just there are a lot of cases like that that don't get prosecuted right the perverse incentive is really profound. So, iatrogenic disease, disease that is caused by some aspect of the healthcare or medical system, is a subset of anthropogenic disease. Right? Mining is causing diseases. Agriculture is causing diseases. And then we have to medicate those. Social media is causing diseases. Right. Yeah. Now, we said earlier that from a business point of view, lifetime revenue of a customer minus costs to do business multiplied by total addressable market and then the penetration of total addressable market is kind of the equation.

Right. Well, for profit. Well, all of that equals total profitability. And so if I think about it, I want addiction is really good for lifetime revenue, but so is upsell and cross sell. is really good for lifetime revenue, but so is upsell and cross-sell. And so if there is a medicine, the side effect of which is another medicine I also own, and whether it's the company or whether it's the financial institutes that invest across the companies, if there is food that you make a lot of money on that causes diseases that the medical system can make money on, you're like, okay, just if one was just following their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit, they would do it that way. This does not equal making healthy humans at scale. And then you can say, well, caveat emptor, what the market,

you know, like buyer beware. And no, this is total nonsense. If you think about, it's really important to understand how much our core social systems, when you're reading Adam Smith or the Founding Fathers, were a different world in 1700s. Or, you know, so when you look at free speech in 1776, there wasn't much classified stuff. There didn't have to be much classified stuff because, and nobody's talking about free speech absolutism, is saying let's declassify all the classified military stuff. Now, when you had the whole continent, because nobody was here that had militaries to defend themselves at the same scale. There were a lot of people here, but they could all be kind of destroyed.

You got the whole continent, and the fastest way to, if you share information with the population, your enemies, they would literally have to take a boat, a very slow-moving sailing ship, to get somewhere, and then they would have to take a boat back. It's very different than when they can send a signal message and then send a missile or a cyber attack. In like, back seconds, yeah. So now, so as soon as you start getting a world where if the citizens know, the enemy knows. And more and more things in systemic warfare are

an aspect of national security. Do you want them to know where the big aquifers are and do you want them to know where the fertilizer supplies are because it's weapons and food and phosphorus and blah blah blah. So you get more and more things that the public couldn't know about because they're classified because their national security because if the public knows The Chinese know the Russians know you're like, okay the founding fathers do not have to deal with that issue There were no cyber attacks were no sick. So you got to like rethink through it and say how should we do it today? Right. We want as much open society as possible thinking through national security seems reasonable. We've got kind of got to redo it founding kind of market theory. Founding market theory, if you think about like we're

going to a market and I'm going to sell some stuff and you're going to buy some stuff, I'm going to sell some stuff, me and a couple people, right? There is a symmetry between the supply side and the demand side where you can literally go to all the people making shoes and you can see what is the best product. I can feel them, move them around. What's the best product at the best price? And you can do that, which creates an incentive for the suppliers to make the best product, the best price. Okay. That seems cool. But as soon as you're dealing with the supply is getting larger and larger and the demand in aggregate is, but the consumer is still the consumer. So now you've got multi-billion dollar multinational corporation,

employing massive amounts of psychologists, split testing, whatever, to be able to manufacture demand. And the individual person who can't begin to compete with the information warfare of that. Now to say, well, demand is driving supply, demand is obviously not driving supply. People are buying trucks.

That's the line I hear from these big CEOs of food companies. We're just giving your customers what they want. Yeah, every drug pusher says that. If you have that rationale, you say, well, they could sell $2 bags of cocaine. They could say, well, just give them your customers what we want. And you give them the first hit for free, and then you say, I'm just giving them what they want.

That's the plausible deniability to be driving addiction. Now, if you have that much power relative to this and you're starting with kids, like buyer beware, no, that's absolute nonsense, right? And so this is asymmetric information war on people. And then you didn't have the, like humans were small then, relative, you think about time of Adam Smith, there's a half a billion people

in the world. We don't have an industrial revolution at scale. A couple hundred years go by, you 16x the population, you 100x the resource consumption per capita. How big we are relative to the planet changed. Externalities are a much bigger deal. You can't just think of nature as a place you can pollute and put trash and steel from for free forever. And so now, not pricing in the externalities is a really big deal because my margin goes up if I don't pay my externalities.

The pollution that I don't have to pay to process is better margin. They're not really externalities. They're just, they call these side effects of drugs. They're not side effects, they're just effects we don't like. When we say externality, what it means is it's externalized from the cost equation.

Right. Right, this is a financial term, which means, so my- Like the guy who makes soda is not paying for the diabetes care. They're not paying for the damage- They're not paying for the diabetes care, right? They're not paying for the damage to the soil to grow the corn syrup that they're putting in their soda.

So those are real costs that people are going to have to pay. The environment pays, but they're not paying. So they are socializing the cost and privatizing the game. At this scale, that is a totally catastrophic thing. This shit has to be rethought. That leads to a disease creating economy, which is what we have. Of course.

So when people are sick and need to buy more medicine, GDP goes up. And if maybe even total GDP long-term will go down because of productivity issues, that business's GDP that is being optimized for is still going up. And so like, so think about, think about this way for a moment. So you mentioned there were people that lived to be 100 years old. Now, when we're looking at diseases, we have a complex of an IP structure,

an intellectual property structure, a regulatory apparatus, and a set of financial incentives, and a reductionist epistemology that all cluster together into a clusterfuck. And I want to just kind of describe this. Yeah. So unpack that. To be able to say this is going to treat a disease, you have to go through a phase three clinical trial. And we like that. We say that's the government protecting us because you're testing that it's safe and effective. You know phase three clinical trials are not cheap. Almost nobody can afford them, right? They're getting a little bit cheaper, but they're still most of a billion dollars.

And when you factor all the ones the company does that fail in phase one or two or whatever, and you amateurize those, it's like it's most of a billion dollars to get a drug for approval. That's a lot of pre revenue money for a company Yeah, if you think about it from the point of view of almost any other company Hey, we're gonna spend years and a billion dollars before we make a penny The startup model. Yeah. Well, it is a good business model If you can make enough back and make enough back is going to be we need to look at drugs. You need chronic drugs I need chronic drugs for large populations.

I have to make enough money to pay for the class action lawsuit and to pay for the legal firms to try to make class action lawsuits illegal, right? Like that's all part of it. And, but to pay that most of a billion dollars for the phase three clinical trial, to ever make that money back, I have got to patent that thing. So I'm the only one that can sell it because if I was studying a vitamin or an herb or an endogenous chemical the body produces, and once I put the

billion dollars in, anybody else could produce it with the same cost as me, then my business model wouldn't work. Now, why isn't NIH paying for that? That's a good question. They should. But as a result, I can't patent vitamins. I can't patent minerals, nutrients, or parts of the human physiology. So I'm only going to study novel synthetic chemicals that were never part of any healthy human or any evolutionary environment.

And to just think about how batshit absurd it is to say, the only things we will study to treat illness are synthetic chemicals talk Alien to any healthy human or any evolutionary environment. New to nature molecules. Yeah, you're like, yeah, it's weird It's weird that the only things we would study are those things Yeah And what about like the things that healthy people have more of naturally than unhealthy people and that when you were young you Had more of right so you start looking at peptides that your thymus gland produces or whatever and you're like

Maybe that stuff is used but the patent structure makes that difficult and you kind of don't want people to own a patent on something The body produces so maybe the funding structure has to become different right but then again if like okay, so The different, right? But then again, if like, okay, so the five billion dollar a year, five trillion dollar a year budget in the U.S. for health care, it's a lot of money, right? Which roughly half the government is subsidizing. You look at the desire to cut trillions from the government spend right now and you say... Nobody's talking about this. Talk about it. You talk about it for a minute. This is what Make America Healthy Again should do. And this is totally nonpartisan.

This is just straightforward science and economics. Yeah, I mean, considering our federal deficits exploding and that our economic system is now shaky, that trust in the dollar as a world currency is kind of crumbling. I mean, we're kind of in due to it, and a lot of it has to do with the incredible amount of health care costs that the government covers.

And most people don't know this. But I want to say, this was all true during Biden. And it was true during Obama and Bush and whatever. This is like, it's not new stuff. No, it's not new. So we're saying. It's been going on for a long time. Yes.

So of the total tax revenue collected by the United States, one third of it is used for health care, and of the total health care bill, which is almost five trillion dollars on the whole country, about 40% of it's paid for by the government in various health programs. Not just Medicare and Medicaid, but Indian Health Service, Children's Health Insurance Program, the VA, the Department of Defense, federal employees, the list goes on. Wait, wait, I just wanna make sure everyone hears that this is a T, not a B, right? Five trillion. Yeah, five trillion, yeah.

Five trillion, so the government pays like upwards of two trillion dollars. And how much money are we hearing right now we wanna try to cut from the government? Something like a trillion. Two trillion dollars, yeah. Or like a trillion. Now, isn't it something like a half of all the Medicare costs would go away if you just fixed food?

Yeah, yeah. If you fixed food, yeah. And it's tough to get people to understand this. Please break this down, because it's like cutting off. OK, sure, if there are some government services that are lame and we need to redo them, but we need less government services of the lame type, but we need more of certain other types, whatever.

But if half, if we spend more money on healthcare than we do on war or anything else. Hmm, very far. If more than half of it, you just change food and goes away simultaneously. Now people's fertility goes up, their depression goes down, their health goes up. The DOD can have fighting guys again, because

right now they're all obese and there's no, like it's kind of omnibetter for everyone. GDP will go up because there's not as many sick days and people work longer. Like outside of- It's a win-win-win for everybody. Outside of maybe some pharma companies and some food companies, this is omnibetter for everyone. That's right. That's right.

And there's not that many food companies. I think 10 big processed food companies, there's a handful of ag companies that make fertilizer, probably four big ones, there's probably five or four or five seed companies. There should not be four or five seed companies. There should not. But there used to be hundreds of seed companies,

and now there's just a few, one of the big ones in China, Monsanto, and a bunch of other big ones out there. There should not be Terminator props. No, but you know, when you think, right now we're talking to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, which is an innovation hub of Medicare and of the CMS.

And they're looking at diabetes reversal. Imagine if we could find a treatment for obesity and diabetes that wasn't ozempic. And it not only just managed the problem, but actually got rid of it and didn't come with a whole bunch of side effects. How much diabetes was there in 1950? Almost none. I mean, there was just so little. Back 150 years ago, there was pretty much none. If you go back and look at the hospital records of Mass General back in the 1800s, it just was not happening. And the pictures, even the fucking photographs.

Yeah. Right? The obesity rate was not the same thing. No, I mean, you just look at pictures from the seventies, like a Woodstock. I mean, there's no chubby kids there or look at the beach pictures or, I mean, I remember seeing Amazing Grace, which was a movie made in 1970, uh, that Aretha Franklin, uh, you know, was in Oakland and she was giving this concert in this church and it was incredible.

And there was not a single overweight black person in that church. And in the 60s, they were healthier than whites and now there's obesity rates are higher than the rest of the population. They're 80%. Okay, so this is important. We're not talking about figuring out how to do

some new super hard unprecedented shit. We're actually talking about reversing a completely new, unnecessary, retarded phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing to me, Daniel, that the physicians and the NIH doesn't go, wait a minute, where were all these diseases 60 years ago

and like, what happened? And maybe we should study that and maybe we should design this healthcare system that reimburses for doing the right thing. Does our NIH pay for all the nutrition studies? No. No, who pays for them? The food industry is 12 times as many nutrition

studies as the government funds and, and they spend about $12 billion a year. And they find that there's, when they look at government versus industry funded studies, the industry funded studies find a positive benefit for their product eight to 50 times more than a independently or government funded study. So for everybody who wants to take all of the studies,

put them in AI to know what's going on, most of the studies are shit. This is important. Don't like crap in, crap out. Most of the studies are shit. This is important. Don't like crap in, crap out. Most of the studies are propaganda. And like, I love science. Science is rad. We don't have much science in the world. No. Science is, as Eddington defined it, the earnest endeavor to put into order the facts of our

experience. Earnest endeavor, not the motivated endeavor to prove something in particular that we have an incentive to try to prove. And can you lie with facts? Yes. Can you manipulate science? Totally. So everybody is paying attention to the replicability crisis.

Yes, there's a huge replication crisis. People are paying attention to P hacking. There's a huge issue with P hacking. P hacking means is the P value of a study is how accurate is that and more likely it is to predict that the certain outcome was not the result of chance but the result of whatever intervention or thing you did.

And then the study can say, yes, it improved that one molecule, that's true. It did a lot of other stuff too. So that doesn't mean, the fact that it passed the phase three clinical trial doesn't mean it was awesome, like Bioxx passed. Yeah. Cremorin passed.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. And then they had to get pulled from the market because they killed too many people. And so what about the long term, when we realize there's not only acute causation, there's long term causation. What about the long term studies on new chemicals?

Don't exist. That's ridiculous. If you're saying, let's enter something, let's enter something into the human body or into the biosphere the human body will take in that never existed before, that has molecules in it that nothing has ever interacted with before,

that is designed to be biologically active. We understand that someone gets diagnosed with, you only have six weeks left to live with cancer, but that cancer is growing for 20 years or whatever, right? We understand that there is long-term issues. And we test the drug for a very tiny amount of acute safety issues over a couple of years and then put it out.

What the fuck? Or a couple of months. Yes, a couple of years being generous, right? Now, from the point of view of like, I gotta make all that money back that was in the phase three clinical trial before the patent life ends. Because once the patent life ends in my name.

Yeah, pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than they do on R&D. People don't know that, but they go, oh, we have to price the drug so high because of all the R&D, well, nonsense. And most of their costs in pharmaceutical companies are in marketing. So I consider most of the science kind of like the R&D arm of capitalism because there

are like science costs money. Who's going to pay the money? Well, some pool of capital is going to go to it. That pool of capital came from capital accumulation. It's not going to put it in to lose it. It's going to put it in because it sees a ROI on that investment. So if we say, hey, here's a thing that we could study that would make people healthy on their own and they don't need to buy anything, who's going to fund that thing? It has to be the government. And now everybody right now might be concerned about how much we would ask the government to do.

Yes, the government. Or philanthropists. And philanthropists have weird agendas. So, in fact- Some of those are not bad. I mean, there's a group called the Bozinski Group that's funding a lot of studies on psychiatry that have never been done before,

looking at dietary interventions at Mayo Clinic, but they're spending millions and millions of dollars, which I think is good. Yes, there's good philanthropy, and we want that. But whether you're looking at kind of the Koch philanthropy on the right, driving the dark money thing or the Gates philanthropy on the left or like, there's a lot of people's dubious of philanthropy right now. Fair. Right. So, and there's a lot of people dubious of government. Fair. Now,

does that mean you don't have them or does it mean you fix them? You have to fix them, right? You can't, like the market incentives alone here is the most powerful organization seeing people as extractively as they see the environment. That doesn't work. So you need something that can serve a protective role. It is not currently a adequately integrist trustworthy system.

The answer is it must be made better. Yeah, so that's the question. How do we redesign civilization for health rather than what we have now, which is some by design, but I think most inadvertently by just ignorance or lack of paying attention, has been a civilization designed for disease. Well, I mean, okay, I wanna, how much is, like when we were mentioning the tetraethyl lead, they actually knew

that was toxic, put it out anyways. Not a mistake. Right. We mentioned the Sacklers and the opioid crisis knew not a mistake when. We tobacco companies initially didn't think tobacco was bad, but then they they started covering stuff up and they started covering stuff up, yeah. Yeah. And so there's more of that. So PFOS is a very famous one, right?

Like when we're talking about ubiquitous pollution. Yeah. PFOS as in P-F-O-S, the whole category of molecules. Capillin. Yeah, but it's about 10,000 molecules in the fluorinated surfactants, right? I'm a little nervous. I just had my PFAS levels checked in my new function labs through Quest.

I'm excited to see what that's going to be. But nobody can check all 10,000 of them, right? You're going to check some tiny subset. But this is really important is right now, some studies that came out last year showed that every rain sample in the world has PFAS in it. Every single rain sample in the Amazon, in the Himalayas, in the Arctic snowfall has PFAS in it because the molecules are so small that they evaporate and then come down the

rain, which means also the water surface area in lakes and oceans and whatever all has PFAS affecting the gas fluid exchange which is really fundamental to how life continues to exist here and that means it's of course in the blood and in people and why we call them forever chemicals is because nature does not do these poly fluorinated things so there is no natural process no bacteria no nothing can break it down. So this is like, you can't be a prepper and move off grid if it's in the rainwater ever and get away from this. You have to actually lean into helping change the civilizational system.

We should not be putting PFAS into the atmosphere of the scale. Could we solve that? Yeah, we never used it before. Are there other solutions that can be surfactants? Yeah, totally. But you just have to be motivated enough to do the thing. So the reason I bring this up is I don't remember right now if it was DuPont or Dow.

It was one of the two, or three actually. It was one of the three that originally developed Teflon, PFAS. And then they sold it to the other one. And there was a court case that was just one this last year where they had to pay out Ten billion in damages from the fact that they knew it was toxic covered it up and put it out anyways Yeah, it was a movie called dark water about this They did a stud they did studies where they laced tobacco with it all the people got respiratory illnesses

They gave it to mice the mice got cancers and stuff Then they hit all that did everything they could do suppress it in the scientific literature, whatever, get it out. Now it's in the rainwater everywhere. This was not a mistake. Right? Now, there were, so they had to pay 10 billion in damages. There was a study done by a group of environmental scientists on what it would take to remove the PFAS from the environment because we don't know how to break it down. So you have to absorb it, absorb it particularly. Current technological take to remove the PFAS from the environment because we don't know how to break it down. So you have to absorb it, absorb it particularly. Current technological processes to remove the existing PFAS will cost $160 trillion.

Yikes, that's a lot of money. It's more than the global GDP. Yes, so even the idea of externality is nonsense, right? It's not like you externalize a little bit of the cost. It's that you externalize almost all the costs. The only thing you externalize a little bit of the costs. It's that you externalize almost all the costs. The only thing you externalize, like, what is the cost of wood or a tree? It's literally the cost for me to cut it down, just the cost of

extraction, cost of oil, cost of extraction. What did it cost nature to make it not relevant? What would it what are the harms not relevant. So literally, the only thing we internalize is the cost of extraction. Yeah. Right. Or production and nothing else. And so you're like $160 trillion to fix that. That's one problem. That's not including the health care effects of it. Yeah. Or the permanent modification of the soil organisms. So we have been optimizing for narrow, short-term goals in ways that affect lots of other things

that cause some really serious problems. There is a comprehensive thing that has to be addressed. Like in functional medicine, you find, hey, there's a lot of people that are told they have an incurable disease. And you find they're not all incurable. You find that a lot of those people, if you know how to do the approach,

through personalized approach, they can get a lot better. Yeah, if you know how to do the approach, personalized approach, they can get a lot better. Yeah, if you know how to think about it. Now, what you have to look for is do they have mercury, do they have lead, do they have cadmium, do they have mycotoxins, do they have glyphosate, are they nutrient deficient in these things, do they have these subclinical infections, blah, blah, blah. But all of those issues shouldn't exist for anybody. Those are all ubiquitous. So what percentage of people do you find has one or more heavy metal elevated?

Most people. If they're eating fish, almost all people have mercury in their blood. If people have fillings and fish, it's more in their systems. The only people I've seen when I'll do a chelation challenge, those who don't have heavy metals or mercury, are people who are don'ty fish and don't have never had any fillings. And this is not looking at if they have lead from the pipes and the water system. Yeah, I mean, you know, lead is out there and so some people have more or less than lead. And I'm sort of shocked at how many people have really high lead levels

and how many horrible diseases it causes. And again, what percentage of people do you see have more mycotoxins or gliotoxins or biotoxins than is healthy, ideally? Oh, a lot. I mean, a lot of people have these mold toxins, that's what you're talking about. And they're probably half of all buildings

are water damaged. And a lot of people absorb these micro toxins that don't get out of their bodies and recirculate and cause havoc and inflammation. So you said something earlier that's important, which is you were talking about gluten and there's a lot of people that are like, man, very few people have celiac, everything else is some kind of psychogenic nonsense. This is not true. When you're talking about gluten intolerance, you're not talking about full blown celiac

disease, but you are talking about- intolerance, you're not talking about full blown celiac disease, but you are talking about. Oh, that's gone up 400%. Yeah. Because of these increase in these proteins and how damaged they are to the gut. So if you're talking about an evolutionary wheat plant that had like a few berries on it, and then hybridizing it to something that has a gazillion

berries where you changed the chemical structure, then you sprayed glyphosate on it and it's grown in de-mineralized soil. Like it kind of makes sense and you eat a humongous amount of it. Kind of makes sense that maybe it would not respond as well for a lot of people. So this is not saying everyone evolutionarily had a bad time with a native grain. To say that gluten toxicity is kind of ubiquitous Yeah, I mean gluten intolerance. So the same way with mold because people be like Mold forever every tree breaks down with mold. We weren't all dying. What's the issue?

So would you say a little bit about why mold is a way bigger deal today than it was and this is not Psychogenic nonsense. No, I mean, I think you know, there's a lot more sort of mold damage and water damage buildings. There's also the sort of preexisting kind of, um, dysregulation of your biology that makes you susceptible. So it's the total load phenomenon. Like mold in and of itself may not be an issue, but if you've got a load of environmental toxins, if you're diet scrap, if you're microbombs

crap, if you're nutrient deficient, then you get hit with mold, it's going to be a bigger issue. So partly the issue is because a person who's inside getting the indoor air poisoning is also not moving. So the lymphatic system is not flushing it out. They are not sweating. So their sweat system is not flushing it out. Just that alone would make a huge difference. Now they're also missing key nutrients that are needed for how the detoxification works. They have other toxins that are messing up the pathways. The indoor air not moving can allow concentrations to build up beyond what outdoor air has. It's a big deal. The indoor air also has the VOCs and stuff. The outside environment, those funguses were balanced with microbiome of the time right the indoor air also has the VOCs and stuff the outside environment

Those funguses were balanced with the microbiome of the soil and heaps of other things that made it to where you didn't get species Overgrowth in the same way, but also we started adding fungicides to all the paints Right so as to not get mildew inside. That's right. And just like using antibiotics didn't give you no bacteria You got merces. Yeah, and now the merces are super nasty more more molds Yeah, the we have fun fungicide resistant molds that produce more dangerous mega toxins and and then building wise like drywall is a lame thing to build with and and Fast growing cheap soft woods right is really not the same as stone or hardwood or things. So like you basically build with a mold substrate.

Like if you wanted to say, what would a perfect mold substrate be? We build with a perfect mold substrate. You make it to where the air doesn't move through the place. You put fungicides in the pain to make fungicide resistance. You make susceptible people, like of course you're gonna have a mold epidemic. Yeah, it's a big deal.

And again, it's one of those areas in medicine it's kind of a black box. Nobody looks at it. Nobody thinks about it. So if somebody's living in a house that has mold, and you take them to a kind of traditional medicine where you're just going to put them on meds, are they really going to get better?

No, they don't even know how to diagnose it. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know how to test for it. They don't know how to look for it. They don't know the biomarkers that go off. They might end up calling it not immune disease and putting them on biologics and steroids and stuff. Or say you're you're tall in your head in your Pearson Prozac, more likely. And then you'll get an iatrogenic cascade from that. But then also, even if someone goes to like a functional medicine doctor an atropath Can you get rid of the mold if you're still in the moldy environment, you know, you have to get out of it you know, and

so if you start now we're talking about like There's one transition from medicine that is only thinking about synthetic like only thinking about synthetic, like giving a drug or a surgery as the solution or radiation, right? Like some toxic thing. Every one of those is like toxic. Our toolkit is pretty narrow. And the toolkit in functional medicine is pretty broad. And that's the difference.

So the functional medicine thing is let's deal with the upstream causes in the body. But then the next thing, the systemic healthcare thing is nobody should be having elevated mercury and lead and micro toxin in in the first place you could build differently Yeah, you could do industry differently and then So how do we have all the things we want in the society? we want the things we like like our computers which are full of toxic metals that our iPhones and

And and have a different environment How do we redesign civilization for health because we've kind of unpacked a lot of the disease issues and the risks and the problems. Because I think we need to rethink food, we need to rethink industrial processes. How do you envision a future where we can actually create a better? Well, let's just say some super basic things.

First, you said we're number 50 in health. A lot of those other countries have laptops. That's true. Japan has laptops, right? And Okinawa does. Well, the food is a big difference too. They're nowhere near as healthy as Absolute Optimum would be because they're dealing with some of these same systemic issues,

but they're not dealing with all the same ones because they've done a better job of certain parts of the healthcare system or the environment management system. And so the, you know, an average life expectancy of 76 or whatever here while on a dozen meds and shitty quality of life for the last long time and maintained with surgeries and stuff versus a hundred autonomous for most of the time still have laptops. So just empirically, we can do better, right?

Now, could we do better than them? Totally. Now, what are some of the obvious things? Should we only study alien synthetic chemicals for health? Nothing else gets to make it through phase three clinical trials, because there's no way to fund it. We don't study anything that was in an evolutionary

environment, a young body or healthy body. That seems bad shit crazy. How about figure out how to fund the study of the things that make people healthy that decrease with age, that correspond to more diseases that you just couldn't say let's do more of those things. You know, like peptides or hormones or. And those things make a huge difference or

vitamins, minerals and herbs, right? Like when people say, oh, well vitamins and supplements don't work, whereas the basically clinical trials, who's going to pay for it? Like who. And when they do them, they're fatally flawed in their design because they're treating the nutrients like drugs in terms of how they

stay due to the study design. I got so upset during COVID when some, some agencies reached out to me for help. I was trying to help them and early on we're like, okay, let's do studies on all the small molecules that have antiviral effects that already exist, particularly the old ones. So ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, but you know, valcyclovir, acyclovir, whatever, all the things. Why do you want to use old ones? Because you already know the long-term safety profile. What about a new one? Well, OK, so we're making a remdesivir.

We don't know the long-term safety profile. How about let's start with ones where you already know the long-term safety profile, so all you've got to study is efficacy? It just makes fucking sense. But where's the money in it? There's no money in it, because they're already past patent.

So I'm like, NIH should be funding studies on just efficacy. They don't have to be long-term. On things where we already know the long-term safety, we already know the drug interactions, we already know that shit on these old antivirals. Did that happen? No. And yet we saw things like synthetic, like drug vitamin D, calcifediol, people got better. And like even a combination of an H1 blocker and an H2 blocker and people got better. And then, you know, like Miraviric and hydrocortisone

together from long COVID, like there were a lot of things, right? And let alone, I'm not even going to talk about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or those things because it becomes so politicizing. Like this should not be a political topic. This is just an empirical topic. So I remember saying doctors should have,

in the very beginning emergency authorization to prescribe the things that have antiviral effects based on patient presentation. And I won't say who but someone put very very strong push back and said no no we have to do randomized control trials first. I'm like okay if you're gonna do the randomized control trials do it for pre or post exposure prophylaxis. Don't do it once people are already in the ICU because what antivirals work late stage? Valis-Hecroft there really works for herpes but only in the first 24 or 48 hours.

It doesn't work once you have a full blown outbreak. So if the whole pharmacopoeia of antivirals only works at the beginning. And so they said, okay, yeah, we'll do that. And then they funded the study and it was in the ICU when people were already sick of shit. And then it said they don't work. And I'm like, what antiv, we'll do that. And then they funded the study and it was in the ICU when people were already sick of shit and then it said they don't work. And I'm like, what antiviral would work in that position?

Intentionally designed to create a negative outcome. This is information war based on financial incentive. This was not just innocent. Like I know this was not just innocent because the people who are funding that ended up being, I won't say the rest of it, invested in other things that happened. Yeah. And that shit has to go, right?

So one of the kinds of, these are all like sort of perverse incentives that make us do the wrong thing and not actually study the right things or do the right kinds of research or create products and services that actually promote health. Who should research nutrition? Yeah, well, the NIH should, I think. Not food companies. Food companies research should be suspect. Duh. Particularly if it says their food is good for you and you should eat lots of it. Yeah. Just look at the funding. So how about like one of the things government science does is nutrition. Duh. How about we study old drugs again for new purposes like the redo project for cancer

or whatever. We actually put real money into that because we already know the long-term safety profile and we just have to look at efficacy. How much money does that get? This is not hard. And it's so it's hard for the average lay person. I mean, there was this sort of, there's this big going on about the kind of calories we eat and whether some are different than others. In other words, are sugar and starch calories worse for you than-

This is not a hard topic. Well, I mean, it's not. If you look at the science, the science is really clear. But you look at the science, it's not. But there are debates published in major journals. Back and forth, I just read one. Funded by who? Well, it depends who was the person who was the researcher.

And one of them was this guy, Dr. Anstrup, who's I think a Belgian physicist, who got funded by Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and who works for Nova Nordis now, on the same thing, and trying to find ways to sort of bypass the mechanisms with food design. And, and he's debating and saying, you know, look, yeah, Coca-Cola calories are the same as any other calories. It doesn't matter where you get them, as long as you don't exceed your calorie need for the day.

You're going to be fine. No thinking person. It doesn't even make sense logically, right? But. Cause it's absurd. Right. Right. Well, but.

It's empirically wrong and it's absurd. Well, then the argument is that you're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. But like, no thinking person. It doesn't even make sense logically, right? Because it's absurd. Right. Right? Well, but they go all the way. It's empirically wrong, and it's absurd. Well, then the argument as well is just thermodynamics.

Who are you to argue with physics? I'm like, yeah, but if you understand the law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved, yes. But the final part of that sentence is in a closed system. And the body is not a closed system. Wait. When that argument is so dumb. I agree.

Energy's energy, sure. Can I just plug me into the wall and run on it? No, I need different forms of energy. Can I run my DC computer on AC without running through the transformer? No, energy's not energy. AC and DC are different. If I put AC into my computer without a transformer,

it's gonna blow the computer up. Can I feed my computer hydrocarbons? No, it doesn't know how to do that. Can I put gasoline into a diesel engine? No. Gasoline and diesel are more similar to each other than evolutionary food to the shit we eat now. By a lot.

The fact that we are so metabolically flexible is amazing, but you pay for it. Can I make one mineral out of another mineral? No. No amount of potassium gives me any amount of phosphorus. So it's all thermodynamic. What the fuck? That is just like, it's just trying to say sciency sounding shit to make people stop thinking.

Well, it's, it's a lot of, there's a lot of money to kind of declare that all calories are the same and weight loss. All atoms are different. Yeah. All amino acids are different. All enzymes are different. They are not inter-exchangeable.

They're not all fungible. No, but yeah, I agree. But if you look at the medical literature, it's so full of this nonsense. Paid for by fucked up interest. So it's bad epistemology, but it's also fucked up interests. Yeah. So these perverse incentives, sort of malalignment of, you know, of our institutions, our research infrastructure, our healthcare system, the payment

systems, reimbursement systems. How do we get out of this mess? Because if we have anthropogenic disease, how do we create the opposite, anthropogenic health? Yes, so kind of the idea of ontological design is like most creatures are being designed by their environment. They're evolving to fit environmental niches.

That's what they're being selected for, right? We're changing our environment. In turn, the environment's changing us back. We should think about how we wanna change the environment that makes the kind of people we wanna be. And rather than just like this provides something you want and like the consumer's demanding it. Yeah, the consumer's demanding it

after you made it requisite to operate and manufactured demand, right? So like someone can be, oh, just don't use Facebook. Well, your company cannot compete in marketing if you don't have Facebook, because they have a monopoly on attention. So you say, don't use it, fuck off, that's not true, right? And if there is a patent on a drug

that's the only drug that does a thing, that sounds a lot like a monopoly. And so we have to think about, let's make stuff. Like what are the other ways of doing the thing? And what are the total set of effects? And is this making healthier, happier, better people or not? And could we do it a better way? And if we're already getting worse outcomes in an area than we used to get, we for sure can do it a better way. Just reverse it, right? Of course, we can innovate new better stuff.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle that easily. I mean, we can't all of a sudden turn in a dime and change our agricultural system or get rid of 70% of the foods in the grocery store. And I mean, we can eventually do it, but. How much money subsidizes conventional agriculture? Depending on the year, I mean, it's 13, 14 billion, and then you've got the extra payments

that just got made like 30 billion or other. Yeah, so you look at the direct subsidies, the tax credits, the research credits, the blah blah blah and you got like a hundred billion dollars that goes to subsidizing the super toxic stuff. And the argument is, well, we need food security and without that the food system wouldn't work and only these big companies are the ones that can produce enough for food security. Hogwash, that's not why. It's because only the big companies lobby well.

Little bitty farmers don't know how to lobby so they're not going to get subsidies and revolving doors. The person who's running the regulatory agency that used to work at the company that does the interest of the company like so one of the things, fix revolving doors. Corporate capture is a big... Like you should not be allowed to be the regulator of an industry that you have owned stocks in and all of your friends own stocks in. Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing to me that Vilsack, who's the Secretary of Agriculture

and is sort of supervising the dietary guidelines, which tells you to drink three glasses of milk a day as adults and two as kids for which there is no scientific justification was on the board of the dairy council in between his two stints as ag secretary. I mean, that's just crazy. Just start to look at everybody in government regulatory positions and look at what they did in commerce before and then what they do in commerce afterwards, right?

Because it's also after, because someone can just say like, Hey, you don't make that much work in government. You're going to leave public sector, go to private sector. Uh, I'm going to bring you here and pay you a lot of money, but not if you hurt my business by regulating against its interests. Yeah. I mean, it's a little disturbing to me that the chief of staff for the

secretary of agriculture now was a former lobbyist for the snack food association, the corner finance for America. And, you know. I am going to avoid mentioning names, but I'm going to say, look up all the names. Look up everybody in USDA, look up everybody in HHS and just say what industry connections, and then look at the policies they make.

And just look at how often the policies they make are aligned with industries they have been connected to or that they go working afterwards. And Jesus Christ It's obvious so fix the revolving door. That's really fixing the incentives, right now the government We do we do we try to build in the external We just said NIH doesn't study food, but it subsidizes the toxic food Well, but we don't have the money to study.

Shut up. Like, why 100 billion? So if you just didn't put the 100 billion to the toxic food in the market, that's not even a market. Right. Let the market just compete. The regenerative agriculture actually beats it in many areas. Now the trillion dollars of capital markets start to flow to the other thing. We are literally making something that is less profitable and that makes everybody sick or win because of government subsidies from taxpayer money. Nobody got to vote on it.

It's less profitable for the farmers. It's more profitable for the seed makers and the fertilizer makers. Especially when they get subsidies. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty crazy. I mean even advertising. I think,, I think the food industry spends about $14 billion a year on ads, all of which is a tax deduction. And the average kid sees about 1,000 ads for junk a year. Buyer beware when it's a kid going against a multibillion dollar company that employs childhood psychologists to split test what ad makes the kids cry the most when they don't get the food until they get it.

And not even just psychologists, but use neurologists to look at functional MRI imaging and see which foods are the most attractive. This is not just mistakes. This is worse than mistakes. Mistakes are a cover story. There are mistakes, but even the mistakes are because there was no incentive to try to figure it out.

So how about like, before you come up with a new drug, study all the old drugs. How like before you come up with a new drug, study all the old drugs. How about... Yeah, it's interesting that RFK Jr. is saying we should study vaccines against placebo and it's getting so much pushback because most vaccines are not studied against placebo. I mean, imagine if you were studying... But also cumulative effects, combinatorial and cumulative effects.

So how many drugs are there that by themselves are fine but combined the wrong way kill you? A lot, right? Don't do your opiates, your benzos, and your alcohol together. And so you want to study not just the individual effects but the effects in combination with other things. We know that, that's included.

So of course every new vaccine is studied in combinatorial effect with all the other vaccines, right? No. For long-term safety. No. Why? When you mandate them all together. Well, that's when they talk about evidence-based medicine.

It makes me a little crazy. You know, where's the evidence that taking five drugs, all independently studied together, is effective or safe? Where the studies say that, you know, one vaccine may be safe in itself, but when you combine them with 10 other vaccines or 20 other vaccines, are they safe? We don't know the answers to those questions.

I want to talk about a few things, small molecule drugs versus vaccines and biologics in general. A small molecule drug that is going to have been flushed out of your system in 72 hours, if you're taking it for a short period like an antiviral, the likelihood that it produces long-term negative effects is smaller than something that's intended to permanently or long-term affect your immune system. Like just, duh. If something is intended to produce lasting effects

versus only effects while it's there and it clears. So what should get longer term studies? Is the thing intended to have long-term effects? Like, of course it should. So in general, I'm going to default to small molecules over long term endogenous modifiers every time. Only if all the small molecules can't do it would I look at the other thing. And then next is I'm going to default to old ones over new ones where you already have longterm studies. There's no money in either of those things. But then the net result is sicker people that then mess up long-term GDP in terms of productivity

and whatever. So we could change that. We have a system that's driven off of business and business innovation, but the incentives are wrong there. And either we have to fix this. There's nothing not innovative or scientific about studying a drug for a different purpose

that already exists. There's just a financial incentive issue. Right. That's what I mean. So it's... But it's still science and it's still innovation, if you want to tell that story. But it's not, right, it's innovation,

but it's not going to create a profit. And so that's where the government has to come in. But think about how much of our Tax dollars should we be spending toward this? I mean, yes, we'd have a trillion extra dollars if we fix the food problem in this country We'd have you know a lot of extra money So if you just don't like think about this just don't pay the subsidies on Food that is toxic for everybody. Just don't don't like let the market be a market. Just don't

Artificially is toxic for everybody. Just don't, don't like let the market be a market. Just don't artificially prop up that thing. The farmers are the ones that are suffering and they're the ones that are caught in this grip of the banks and the bank loans, the crop insurance slash subsidies and the seed and fertilizer companies. And they're just kind of spinning around in the middle and the, everybody else is winning. Yes, but the smaller farmers do better when they move to a system that is not based on the systems of the subsidies.

They do, they do, they do, but there's no incentives to do that, that they can't get out of it, they have all their investments. There's no incentive for them because the larger guys are better at lobbying, and they're doing revolving doors, but if you just look at, don't subsidize the toxic thing,

maybe if anything, subsidize the better thing, invest in nutrition research so you see what's actually good. Make companies pay for some of the externalized cost if it is causing diabetes or whatever and maybe make some regulation around what can you advertise to children, right? Because buyer beware for children does not work with asymmetric information warfare, right? Like this is just reasonable governance. And then all of a sudden, if you just don't, we're not saying a more expensive government thing, don't put a hundred billion into that stuff. Then you start having the market naturally start to

favor what we call regenerative agriculture, which is just how agriculture was. And as a result, you cut a trillion dollars off the medical spend right away. And actually towards, because it's five trillion and it's going to do half, it's more like two and a half trillion gets cut, which is all deficit kind of money. And then productivity goes up. So the debt to GDP ratio gets better and you have to spend less to make it happen up front. Sounds like a good winning deal. This is not super duper hard. No.

Well, it's hard if you have people who are running things who are incentivized to not do that. So revolving- I mean, I just, working on a project where we're sort of looking at root causes and environmental chemicals and toxins, affect our health. And there was a letter that was written by Senator Grassley and others in the Senate and Congress basically calling out the fact that the pesticides and agricultural chemicals were not harmful, that the data was clear that they were safe and that we should continue

to use them and we should not heed to a bunch of hippies who say that we shouldn't be using them and I was like wow and then you do a little homework on them and you See they're all funded by the the big ag and seed and chem companies. So like what are some things we can do? Stop revolving doors really make some laws that regulate revolving doors. That should be super duper obvious You should not be regulating industry to protect the people but actually in the benefit of industry because you have a perverse incentive as the regulator. Like, I don't know anyone who thinks that's a good idea. Have things that their companies have an incentive to research badly. Get government and non-profit funding for that and get enough oversight that you can trust it. get government and nonprofit funding for that and get enough oversight that you can trust it. Okay. Company funded stuff, company funded research that did not have replication,

that says their stuff is awesome, should be suspect to non vested interest verification. Should have a warning label on it. Yeah. This study was not replicated and it was funded by industry. And then I heard Bobby Kennedy talk about something that is a very common sense good thing, which is he's like, look, I believe in the market, but you should actually have to pay the costs. So if the cost is, you know, your coal company put a bunch of mercury in the environment and made a bunch of people

sick and they have to pay medical costs and their life is fucked but you don't have to pay it, that's not the market. That's stealing. Right? You're stealing from those people's lives. And if it's really a market, it's just revenue minus cost, but it should be your whole costs until only the things that are actually profitable and you pay all the costs, those things happen

and the other things don't happen. So he's like, I just want to identify empirically where the externalities causing harm, what it would currently cost to fix it and just force those companies to have to do that thing. But then these whole businesses have gone out of business, right? I mean, if the food companies had to pay

for the cost of chronic disease. But think about how nonsensical it is to say in the whole history of humanity, humanity always fed itself and that right now there is no economically viable way to feed ourselves. We're just saying go back to a previous system. Yeah. So like the argument is, oh, we can't feed a growing hungry population. We need to feed the world. And that's what America's doing. But, you know, this is not an earnest conversation, though, right?

Because the healthier food is not necessarily more expensive. And when you take the amortized health care costs and the loss of productivity, it's way more expensive the way we're currently doing it. So if you had a little bit of long term thoughtfulness, which is why the healthcare outcomes in Finland and Japan and certain other places are better, is because they actually make some choices slightly better by looking longer term. They're like, this actually doesn't even make sense for our own country's wellbeing.

country's well-being. So another example, you know, DDT, better living through chemistry and you spray it over the kids while they're all the nonsense, right? And then, oh, unfortunately DDT is super lethal and the thing that kills the bugs kills people too. Yeah. Okay, so then we get rid of it, but what do we do? We sell it to Mexico for them to use on the food and we buy the food back. And then we replace it with malathion. Then we say, oh, that's bad. Then we replace it with parathion. Come on. Like, how about there's a lot of toxic things you can come up with. We put the toxic thing out there before studying toxicity and then only regulate it after so many people have died. How about, no, no, no, you have to do longer term studies to show safety before you put a new thing in the environment.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean... This is not ridiculous. No, it just makes... It's common sense. But again, Mark Twain, he's my favorite author to quote, he says, the problem with common sense is it's not too common. When you have no other planets in the foreseeable universe that are hospitable to life, the hospitability to life has to do with the chemical makeup of the biosphere. Maybe don't completely fuck the chemistry of the biosphere for super, super short-term interests.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're doing. That seems pretty reasonable. So what's a hopeful note we can leave on? Because we impact a lot of what's wrong. And I think the things you're talking about in terms of incentivizing the right things and revolving door changes and pricing and externalities all make sense. And there's a lot more we didn't get into. I mean, I wanna add one thing

and then we'll do good notes to leave on. You know what a racket is, right? Like a protection racket. Yeah, racketeer. So let's say I've got a protection racket where I'm the mob and you're doing business in my turf. So I have some guys go rough you up and then you're scared of those guys and there's not

enough law enforcement here. Then I have some other guys say, hey, we can protect you, but you're going to have to pay us a certain amount every week. But they're from the same group. That's a racket, right? Which is you're manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply. Right. Okay. manufacturing the demand and then offering the supply. Right. Okay, so if you make a food system that creates addictions

where the people need to keep getting more of it, but then it also makes them need medicine that they wouldn't need otherwise that is profitable, where the side effects of the medicine make them need other medicines, that's a systemic racket. It is a racket, for sure. It's a systemic racket, it's a distributed systemic racket. But if- It's like Bay rack. It's a distributed systemic racket. But if it's like it's like bear

They they bought man's hand to which makes glyphosate Which causes lymphoma and then they make the drugs to treat the lymphoma. That's a racket So that's a direct racket if it's the same company if they're separate companies that are just all owned by the major private equity Or whatever. It's a it's a systemic racket. Yeah, but think about Just from a logical perspective. I think about just from a logical perspective, I'm trying to solve a problem. I got a problem. First thing I wanna ask is did we always have that problem?

No, no, no, it's a new problem. Oh, when we didn't have it, what was happening then, let's reverse something. The first thing should be if it's a new problem that was caused by something, reverse the cause. How often in medicine do we do that? That should be the first thing you do before you try to come up with totally new novel shit.

Say like, wait, this is a new disease that has a cause, let's reverse the cause. And then only, and then you say, okay, well, if we can't, if our history is not good enough, is there anywhere else that doesn't have it? What are they doing? Yeah. And then only if you can't reverse the causes

and there's no good existent prototype, then you look at research, but then you should look at technologies we already have, if any of them could be reapplied that we already know a lot about. Like? Like redo on existing drugs and stuff, right? So for instance, like you've probably followed

project redo on oncology, where you've got drugs that people were getting for other purposes, but while they were taking them, their cancers went away. And so they're certain to look at them and it's like, I'm a bend is all and I'll bend is all like old anti worming things that reverse bowel cancers that are super cheap, that are actually quite safe. What the fuck? People should be researching that right? Like people should really be researching that. And so figure out the financing for that. So anything that looks like a racket

should be investigated. Anything that looks like, oh, there's a problem. Let's not look at what the root causes were. Let's not look at when we didn't have it. Let's say that we got this problem forever now and we can't possibly not have it when we didn't have it for most of human history. Then let's come up with a new thing

that we can make money on that will then itself cause new problems that we will also cause a new solution for that will cause new problems. That is a systemic, exponentially escalating bracket. This is not a good method of problem solving. This is solving problems in a way that doesn't solve the cause, that symptomatically addresses it

and makes worse problems in the process. Let's start actually trying to solve problems. a way that doesn't solve the cause, that symptomatically addresses it and makes worse problems in the process. Let's start actually trying to solve problems. What is the cause? How do we undo the cause? Harnessly. And how do we get people incentivized to do that? Because right now everything is flipped. Everyone is actually incentivized

if they pay attention to, we're talking about your own health. Yeah, that's abstract. I mean, like the guy who's you know running Coca-Cola or Bear is not okay. I'm sorry thinking about these things Coca-Cola is not a food company Right because it's not food beverage, right? They call it beverage

But like I remember talking to someone who's the CEO of Pepsi once and they said they were thinking about categorizing it as an entertainment company Because they're like we know this is not food. This is something people do for fun. And it's like, Jesus. So what good does this thing do? Well, it causes diabetes and increases likelihood for Alzheimer's and everybody. But what real good does it do? Well, it'll cause addiction.

The world would be better if that company didn't exist. Any company where the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should figure out how to have it not exist. Not try to retrofit some fucking weird corporate sustainable responsibility or something on it. Just if the world would be better if it didn't exist, we should do that.

The number of companies that fit in that category are high. And just from the actual perspective, Yeah. The number of companies that fit in that category are high. Yeah, that's a problem. And just from the average citizen point of view, you have some say in your government. You have way more say than you think, right? You have way more say if you really wanted to be engaged. Now, I want to speak to a problem. We talked about ubiquitous pathology, right?

Almost everybody that is going to get Alzheimer's or autoimmune disease or cancer, endocrine disruption, they're already infertile or decreasing fertility or whatever. That's a bunch of subclinical disease. Ubiquitous. It's not their fault. Right? It's systemic stuff. There is subclinical mental illness we were talking about. How many people have low-grade anxiety, low-grade depression, and anhedonia, meaninglessness, loneliness, addictive compulsive tendencies. A lot.

Right? Like pretty much everybody. Now, derealization. Derealization is this very serious thing that happens when someone goes through a severe trauma where like nothing feels real. I would say almost everybody I know is in some degree of feels like Derealization because and here's how I can tell if I tell somebody something about It doesn't matter what it is Whether it's about health care or whether it's about the increasing likelihood towards World War three or AI I would it doesn't matter what it is the environment

That their tomorrow will be identical They cannot be moved by real information about the real world they're in. They are derealized. The real world does not matter to them. And they're like, no new information could change my life. Well, you're being a doomer. Wait, no, the Mongols are coming. If the Mongols are coming, do you want to know? No, you fucking want to know? You want to do something about it? Oh, I can't do anything. Did you try? Like, did you think about it for one whole day what you could do before you said, I can't do anything?

Most people don't. They're just so… So I want to just say, let's break the fuck out of ubiquitous derealization and learned helplessness and say, problems that didn't used to exist that we caused, we can solve. And your own health and your parents and your children are an incentive. Yeah. And if you think about it for a little bit,

if you talk to the people who thought about it their whole life, they probably know stuff and you could do stuff. But you just have to act like reality is real and reality matters and your life matters. As opposed to the nihilism of like, I can't do anything. I've already given up on my life mattering. I can't possibly make sense of it.

You've already given up on your life mattering. It's hard, and the problem is that so many people are not just derealized because of the trauma, the psychological trauma of our society, but also the way in which our diet and lifestyle and environment affects our cognitive function and brain and mood. So it's sort of a double problem,

because you're sort of stuck. If you look at the American Revolution and the condition of the people who were involved in the American Revolution or civil war, whatever it was historically, one, they were doing labor jobs. And using a pitchfork all day translates to a much hardier body that can do rebellion and whatever.

But also, they weren't obese, they weren't on opiates and benzos, and they didn't doom scroll. Now, I have found that I don't care how outraged someone is or how horrified or how depressed, that emotion will not make it through 15 minutes of doom scrolling. Because they will actually forget they ever heard the thing. They'll forget all the emotion. Because in that 15 minutes I see something that makes me excited and something that makes me feel left out and something that makes me feel belonging and something that makes me horny and something that makes me scared and something that makes me outraged and then sometimes kind of funny.

And I just flushed my entire system of continuity. Yeah. Now I can go back to my life exactly the way it was. And a small number of people ensure that they don't do that so they can actually work on controlling things at scale. Yeah. And everybody else lets them. Yeah.

But you don't have to. Well, how do we have more agency? That's it. That's what you're talking about. It's creating a society where there are people who feel agency and that their actions, that their thoughts, that's it. That's what you're talking about. It's creating a society where there are people feel agency in that their actions, that their thoughts, that their voice matters. So find all the things that damage your agency and get them out of your life.

Yeah. If you reflect on like. Social media, bad food. Yeah, so take the social media apps off your phone. Even if you're gonna still have it, have to do it on the computer. Don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time. Just take apps off your phone. Even if you're gonna still have it, have to do it on the computer. Don't have it in your goddamn pocket all the time. Just take them off your phone.

Simple. If you're on psych meds, go to a Cleveland Clinic. Go to an integrative doc who can see if maybe there's a better solution for you. I'm not telling people get off their psych meds. I'm saying go talk to a doctor. But talk to someone who knows other possibilities Because you're not going to be self regulating or think well or whatever while you're intentionally altering your neurochemistry that way, right and

So and then if you're taking any information streams that make you feel helpless stop Now I will say I know people high up in most of the major news companies. They are not news. Not on the right, not on the left. It's not news. No, it's not news. Propaganda. Yes.

It is information war, right? Bannon at least admitted in an interview with Megyn Kelly recently, he's like, I'm not a journalist. I'm into information war. But he's just admitting like, I just make shit up. That's compelling because I have a reason. He's admitting it. I can criticize the most erudite journals because, well, they'll lie with facts, but they cherry pick their facts. They like off frame them in a particular way, right? So you either call it an illegal alien or an undocumented migrant. It means the exact same thing, but you have a totally

different emotional valence. You cherry pick your facts and you say this thing is getting better when it's actually getting worse, but you're treating the symptoms or whatever it is. So who puts narratives out there? Again, it takes a lot of money to fund research, it takes a lot of money to put a narrative out there. Typically capital streams associated with goals that support those capital streams or the political institutions and agendas that support the capital streams put out political institutions and agendas that support capital streams put out narratives that support what they do. So you should understand whenever you're watching a piece of news or reading something, what you should be thinking about

is this tells me what some people want other people to believe. Yeah, not what's actually true. So every time you read Breitbart, you should also read Mother Jones on the same topic. Every time you read Al Jazeera, you should also read Jerusalem Post on the same topic. Every time you watch Fox, you should watch MSNBC. Every time you... And if you do that, and every time you scroll X, also go scroll Blue Sky. Do both. And you will realize that there is not real news. There is information war that is fighting for your mind. Someone gave me a link to a website, I forget

what it's called, which basically had the same news item, but reported from the right and the left and then the middle. And it was totally different stories. Yeah. Yeah. And there really isn't a middle currently. So to just realize you cannot let someone spoonfeed you your

narrative on what is true. Cannot. No one has the right incentive here. So you have to work at it a little bit. But you can't have a meaningful life devoid from understanding what's real. Because to make meaningful choices they have to be in relationship to reality. And I think what you said was really important is to take away the things from your life that interrupt your ability to have agency. And what is the food you're eating, the news you're watching, the social media you're scrolling, the friends you're hanging out with, the things you care about. Like, you know, we need to sort of have more agency.

And I think that's part of why I created Function Health, co-founded Function Health was to give people agency over their health because the healthcare system wasn't doing it. And I think that's what you're doing a lot of the work you're doing. We didn't get into a lot of the things you're about. So people can check out your work at. Now I wanna see function health have tremendous success because I think it can help a lot of things. But I also want to see that whole business not be needed

because we're not causing all those issues in the first place. This is true. Which is why I'm also super happy that you're engaging with policy. Yeah. Now right now, functional medicine is the most amazing thing because it says,

you can actually take some control over your health and have way better outcomes. And your mom doesn't have to go through the completely ignoble, horrible process of dying of Alzheimer's when she was a smart person and whatever. And your kids don't have to have diabetes. And you can do something. That's amazing.

But then it's like, damn, how about we just make industries and environments that make people healthy? Yeah. Or at least that don't make them sick. We could do that. Yeah. So. We have to, otherwise we're gonna go extend

sooner than later. Yes, but when you have a population that is becoming ubiquitously infertile, that is an extinction process. Yeah, that's what happens in animals. When you have a population where nobody lives, like everyone's life depends upon a complex medical system with a five, six continent supply chain, this is not healthy people.

That is a process of extinction. Now there's a book you might have read about, called Our Still and Future by Theo Colburn, who sort of like the Rachel Carson of her day essentially talking about how these environmental toxins and chemicals are causing infertility and sexual dysfunction and hermaphroditism and who knows if it's affecting this gender kind of crisis we're having now. And I mean, it's sort of striking.

When you see the radical drops in fertility and even someone who's fertile but the sperm count is really low, are the kids as healthy? I mean, just think about it, right? Just think about it. If someone's sperm count is 2% of what it was, a lot of things like, is the motility affected? Is the morphology affected?

Is the like, this is not as healthy a person. They're not going to have as healthy a children. It's just not, right? This matters. Yeah, it does matter. This matters. And so that person whose fertility's decreased and even if they're quote unquote fertile,

but they're radically less fertile, they're also radically less healthy. They're also radically less happy. They're also radically less capable of They're also radically less happy. They're also radically less capable of solving the problems of the world today. And as you see in your clinic every day, it's all changeable. And it's changeable acutely for each person with behaviors they can take.

And it's changeable at scale for everybody with behaviors we can take to do systemic changes. Thank you. That's a good point to end on. We each can do it of ourselves and we have to do it systemically. And I think I'm working on both ends of the problem. So are you.

So thank you for everything you're doing. I, yeah, I really hope that, um, function can bring a lot of these concepts and tools to everybody because they have been very niche and they shouldn't be. And I love that you're making it not only medicine for the rich, but like medicine that everybody can afford. It's super important Yeah, and then I hope the policy work can really gain some success and gain success that can keep working across administrations because science has nothing to do with political parity and

That's the plan that's the plan That's the plan and for those who want to learn more about Daniel's work, look at the Consilience Project. It's ConsilienceProject.org. We'll put links in the show notes. We'll put links to a lot of references we talked about today. This has been an incredible conversation and I feel like we could talk for another 10 hours and still keep going. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.

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