The Dr. Hyman Show - Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Increasing Metabolism, Anxiety, And More

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

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Hey podcast community, Dr. Mark here. I'm so excited to offer you a seven-day free trial of my revolutionary new platform called Dr. Hyman Plus. For seven days you get special access to all the private content included in Dr. Hyman Plus entirely free. It's so easy to sign up. Just go to Apple Podcast on your phone and click try free button on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. You'll get exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes and functional medicine deep dives where a practitioner dives into topics like heart health, muscle health, insulin resistance, and more to help you understand the root cause of specific ailments and walk you through the steps to improve your health today. You'll also get access to all my Ask Mark Anything Q&As where

I answer the community's biggest health and wellness questions. Because I'm so sure you're going to love this platform, I am offering you free access to all of this content for seven days and a teaser of my brand new Ask Mark Anything episode. Head on over to the Doctors Pharmacy podcast on Apple podcast and sign up for your free trial. Okay, here we go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Herschel Perth, and I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager. And I'm joined by Darcy Gross, the producer of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Hi, Darcy. And of course, we're here with Dr. Mark Hyman. Hi, Dr. Hyman.

Hi. Well, welcome, everybody. So we gathered all of your questions this month and we're ready to ask Mark anything. So let's go ahead and get started. So the first question, Dr. Hyman is all about increasing your metabolism. What's the best way to increase your metabolism? Should you be calorie restricting? Should you keep it under a thousand calories? How would somebody go about doing that? Well, that would be the worst idea you could possibly do. If you eat under a thousand calories, your body's like, I'm not getting any food. I better shut down the system and slow down and go into hibernation mode and conserve

calories. So you're not going to lose weight by restricting calories to a thousand for a long period of time. But you obviously will initially, but then, you know, your metabolism will slow down and you'll, you'll be in trouble. So what is metabolism anyway? Because that'll be in trouble. So what is metabolism anyway? Because that is a big question. And what is metabolism? Well, it's really something people misunderstand is essentially the simple phenomena of how much calories you can burn or

how many calories you can burn per minute, which is limited by how many liters of oxygen you can burn per minute. So essentially you take calories in and breathe in and they are combusted or burned in your mitochondria, which are the little energy factories that you have in every cell. And there's hundreds to thousands and thousands of them. And they're essentially your metabolism. So the slower they work, the slower your metabolism, the faster they work, the faster your metabolism. And the question is, what do you do to improve your metabolic state? How do you improve your mitochondrial function? And then what is the cause of poor mitochondrial function? So let's just go into what is the cause of poor mitochondrial function? We'll talk about it and metabolism and how do we fix your mitochondrial function and metabolism. Sound good? So, okay. So here we go. So the,

the things that really affect your energy metabolism are your diet and obviously exercise. The diet part is interesting because what causes poor metabolism is essentially something we call insulin resistance. We've talked about it a lot, but essentially this phenomenon where our bodies become resistant to the effects of insulin. So every time we eat something with starch or sugar, we get a bump in insulin in our blood. And over time, if we eat too much starch or sugar, that insulin just goes higher and higher and higher because it stops working because the cells don't listen to the insulin signals and they just keep the sugar and the calories out in your bloodstream. And that's not a good thing. So you end up having more and more insulin, which makes you gain

weight. It slows your metabolism. It causes inflammation. It makes you hungry, all of which are disasters when it comes to trying to lose weight or increase your metabolism. So that's really the biggest phenomenon, which is too much starch and sugar. We need about probably a pound, almost a pound a day combined of starch and sugar per person, about 152 pounds of sugar and about 133 pounds of flour per person per year. That's about a pound a day. So that's going to screw up your system. Our bodies are just not adapted to it. We never had these refined flours. In fact, we didn't have flour mills, proper flour mills to have refined grains until the 1800s.

And the way they figured out that it was vitamin deficiencies was because they actually were feeding the prisoners the white flour. And they were giving the kind of grain stuff that they took off to the chickens. And the prisoners started getting really sick. So they actually began to realize there was something lacking. So white flour is terrible and sugar is just nasty. It really drives all these metabolic processes. The other thing that can affect your metabolism are things like environmental toxins. They're basically mitochondrial poisons, so heavy metals, pesticides, chemicals. And I'm on the board of the Environmental Working Group or ewg.org. And they have great

guides on how to reduce your exposure to food and household cleaning products, skincare products. And it's really a great comprehensive approach to looking at how to minimize your exposure to environmental toxins, which I would encourage you to do because we're all kind of inundated. The third thing is, you know, you can have thyroid problems, which is about one in five women and one in 10 men. That's a lot of people. That's 20% of women and 10% of men have some type of low thyroid function. And about 90% of those are inadequately treated. They'll often be given maybe a little bit of Synthroid or T4,

but doesn't actually address the entire need of the thyroid to function properly. Because T3 is the active hormone. And when that's low, then your thyroid doesn't work. And thyroid is necessary for your mitochondria to function properly because T3 is the active hormone. And when that's low, then your thyroid doesn't work. And thyroid is necessary for your mitochondria to function properly, for your energy to be burned and so many other very important functions. So that's another factor. So insulin resistance, toxins, and obviously, I mean, obviously thyroid. So those are three big ones. There are many more, but those are the three big ones. So then what do you do to actually increase your metabolism? Obviously you have

toxins, you got to get rid of them. If you're thyroid, you got to fix it. If you're insulin resistance, you have to really cut the sugar and starch. But, but in terms of increasing your metabolism, the best way to do it, there's a couple of key ways to do it. One is, is through what you eat, right? So certain things burn better than others. For example, fats burn much cleaner than starch and sugars. Protein also helps to improve your muscle function and muscle mass and metabolic function. So it's really important to get the right quality protein, the good fats, and to cut down on the starch and sugar.

Essentially what I call the Pegan diet, and there's more kind of aggressive versions called the 10-day detox or 10-day reset, which is essentially about getting your body kind of rebooted and your metabolism rebooted. The other thing is exercise because we often don't know how to exercise or exercise the right way.

There are two key ways to increase your mitochondrial function and number, make them faster and better and smarter, and also to actually increase the amount of mitochondria you have. To increase the amount of mitochondria is basically through strength training. It can be body weight, it can be bands, it can be weights, whatever works for you. There's a lot of approaches out there to increasing muscle, but you have to build muscle.

No question about it. If you want to be healthy, muscle is health. And if you age, your metabolism slows. You might, for example, see someone who's very overweight and say, God, they're not eating that much. How come they're so fat? Well, it's because their metabolism is slow, slow because they've lost so much muscle and they've replaced with fat. Or people who are older, they can have an appearance of looking thin, but they're actually fat on the inside and they are far slower in their metabolism and end up in trouble. The other key thing is something called VO2 max.

VO2 max is essentially the amount of oxygen you can burn per minute in your mitochondria, which is also limiting the amount of calories you can burn and how much energy you can produce. And so elite athletes like Lance Armstrong, one of the tour fronts, his VO2 max was like 90 something. So he could just climb up those mountains in France with no problem because he could just continually burn energy and run his, it was like a Ferrari, right? Whereas, you know, many are like a tractor, can't go more than 30 miles an hour because they basically screwed up their metabolism with their diet and lack of exercise. So VO2 maxes in diabetics, for example, might be 15. If you're

a relatively healthy, you know, 40, 50 year old, it could be in the forties, fifties or more, depending on if you're an athlete. So you want to increase your VO2 max. And the best way to do that is, is to actually do what we call interval training or high intensity interval training. Essentially it's where you're doing sprints. So slow, fast, slow, fast. You may have to exercise long, but you exercise smarter. So you could go for a one hour slow run, or you can do a half an hour of interval training and get more, more, much more benefit by exercising far less time in terms of your energy efficiency, your metabolic rate, and your continual metabolic rate after even you're not exercising.

So it's not what happens while you're exercising. It happens not how many calories you burn while you're exercising. It's how your mitochondria after you exercise, are they burning a lot of calories? The best way to do that is to do this high-intensity interval training. There's a lot of techniques for doing that,

but essentially it's as simple as, you know, sprinting for 30 to 45 to 60 seconds as fast as you can, like you're riding from a tiger, and then 45 to 60 seconds as fast as you can, like you're riding a tiger, and then slow walk or slight jog for three minutes. So it's 30 to 60 seconds fast as you can, three minutes kind of chill. That's just one technique, but there are many. And I think it's really important to understand at any age, you can increase your mitochondrial function.

You can increase the mitochondrial number. You can increase your metabolism and actually lose weight. So I love to eat a lot with my gang. So I actually make sure I have a high metabolic rate by making sure I do all those things in terms of the quality of food that I'm eating. And then also the type of exercise I'm doing. No, that's really great information. I think that it also goes to, you know, a lot of people think that, well, I'll just eat less, you know, and it's really great information. I think that it also goes to, you know, a lot of people think that, well, I'll just eat less, you know, and it's really important to consider other factors. No, no, no. Cause our bodies are deactivated starvation. So we start to over time eat less. It slows our metabolic rate. Yeah. You'll see this a lot. People will lose weight initially

with calorie restriction and then they'll just plateau. They'll just hit a, they'll just hit a floor and they can't lose any more weight. And I think that's just because the metabolic rate slows down. And if you lose losing weight. And I think that's just because the metabolic rate slows down. And if you lose losing weight, you have to do strength training because you will lose muscle and fat. And often when we gain back the weight, we gain back only fat. And so we ended up, if we yo-yo a little bit, we ended up in a much worse metabolic state.

So you end up having to eat less calories than you did at the same weight before you did the weight loss, because if you yo-yo up and down, you're going to just kind of keep replacing muscle with fat. And that's going to just screw up your metabolic rate because muscle burns seven times as many calories as fat. Wow. Okay. Good information. Darcy, we'll go over to you for the next question. Yeah. Before we jump into the next question, I have one follow-up for the one that you just said, Dr. Hyman, and that's, is there a way to test how many mitochondria you have to know, oh, I'm actually increasing them or not? Well, you can look in the mirror at your muscles. That'll tell you in terms of function of

mitochondria, the, the, there is a test it's called VO2 max. And it's essentially, it's the liters of oxygen you can burn per minute. V is volume, O2 is O2, and max is, you know, maximum, right? How much volume of oxygen can you burn per minute? The way to do that is a bit complicated. There are kind of cool metabolic rate tests, like Lumen is a cool device that actually can track it at home using your breath. It's probably not as accurate as, for example, what we'll call a cardiometabolic stress test, where you go on a treadmill, your face is hooked up to like this mask, which kind of measures the amount of oxygen you're breathing and how much carbon dioxide you're actually producing. And

through that, through, you know, kind of mathematical equations, you can figure out based on how much oxygen you're taking in and carbon dioxide you're breathing out, what your metabolic rate is and what your VO2 max is. And what's fascinating is your VO2 max is correlated in a linear way with longevity. So the higher your VO2 max, the longer you're gonna live. Heck yeah, okay, I like that. So after this, I'm gonna go do some sprints. Right, yeah, me too, geez, okay. Okay, so switching gears,

I kind of wanna bring up a topic that's been really, really common and it's being talked about more and more as we're bringing light to mental health. And which is an amazing conversation. I'm so glad that people are really opening up about that. But I also think that there's definitely a role for functional medicine when it comes to mental health and really supporting the best possible mental health that we can when possible. And so I just kind of want to bring up the topic of anxiety. Is there a cause? And is there a way to approach treating anxiety using

functional medicine, whether it's in conjunction with, you know, prescription medication or what have you, I know that there's just so many facets that play into it, but if you could just kind of, if we could just pick your brain about anxiety a little bit. For sure. Well, it's, it's pretty, it's a pretty rampant phenomenon in society and from, you know, mild anxiety to just severe crippling anxiety. And, you know, we spend tons of money, and people use medications, use narcotics, use street drugs, everything to kind of manage their anxiety. And the way I like to think about anxiety is really twofold. One is what's causing it from the outside, or what could be causing it from the inside? And what I mean by the inside is what are the biological reasons that have nothing to do with your life circumstances or your thoughts, but have to do with biology. And then what are the things that are really from life stresses and circumstances that overwhelm us and make us having, have trouble kind of managing.

I'll just start with the things that come from inside. You know, most people don't realize this, but if you eat sugar or starch, and I'm just talking about this, but it's just so fascinating. When you look at the data, if you, if you give kids oatmeal for breakfast, literally just oatmeal, which you think, oh, that's a healthy breakfast. And we're not even talking about Fruit Loops or Captain Crunch or Cocoa Puffs, right? Which is basically the American breakfast or muffins or bagels or whatever, but like oatmeal, if you give them oatmeal, and by the way, it's going to be much worse for those other things,

then it releases adrenaline and cortisol into the blood. So when you're anxious, you release adrenaline. It's the anxiety. You get pumped up with adrenaline. And so you feel jittery, anxious. Your body feels like that. And you get mentally anxious. That could just be coming from what you're eating.

It literally can come from eating sugar and starch. And of course we see this. and you get mentally anxious, that could just be coming from what you're eating, okay? It literally can come from eating sugar and starch. And of course we see this. We see kids who sugar binge and are bouncing off the walls at a party. Like you don't have to be a PhD scientist in sugar to figure that out. And the other thing that can cause it is your microbiome. So anything that can cause inflammation can cause anxiety. And one of the biggest drivers of inflammation is the microbiome, So anything that causes inflammation can cause anxiety.

And one of the biggest drivers of inflammation is the microbiome, the imbalances in the bacteria in our gut. We have three pounds of bacteria in there. They're all doing important jobs. And there's more neurotransmitters in your gut than your brain. And there's so many nerve endings, almost as much as your brain. And there's a constant bidirectional communication between your brain and your gut. And we know people have, quote, irritable bowel syndrome.

And we tend to label them, this is what we've done when I was in medical school, as sort of neurotic, anxious people. And we had a really pejorative joke that we used to say, which is, it's always super tentorial. It's this fancy way in medical terms to say it's in your head. Because your tentatorium is like the part of your brain, which is like above a certain area. So that's always a super tentatorial phenomenon, whatever. It means you're just, it's in your head. And what we're learning is the opposite is true. Actually, you know, the irritable bowel can cause an irritable brain and that can lead to anxiety and behavioral issues and all sorts of things. The other major reason is hormones and fluctuations in hormones that can drive anxiety, whether it's PMS and causal symptoms. And there's a lot of reasons for hormonal disruption. That's

a whole nother rabbit hole I could spend an hour on, but essentially what is one of the causes of hormonal disruption? And it's the usual stuff, right? It's our processed American diet. It's high sugar and starch. It's lack of good fats. It's lack of enough fiber. It's all the inflammatory foods we eat. It's all the estrogenic foods we eat. It's the dairy and the hormonally active foods we eat. It's lack of exercise. It's stress. It's caffeine. It's alcohol, lack of sleep, even change in our microbiome. All these things can affect hormonal balance and lead to anxiety for women. And that can be particularly important around cycles and PMS. So those are really important to think about. So you've got, you've got some big internal reasons, and then I've got nutritional deficiencies

that can cause anxiety. If you have low magnesium, if you have low omega-3 of fats, if you have low vitamin D, those are all really important things to think about. So there's a lot of sort of medical reasons. And I remember this one guy, he was like, he's kind of a very overweight guy. And he's like, Dr. Hyman, I am just struggling so much with panic attacks. Every afternoon, I get terrible panic attacks. My heart races, I have palpitations, I can't breathe. I feel like I'm going to die. I start sweating. I'm like, oh, really?

Okay, but tell me about what you're doing around that. Well, you know, I really don't eat much, but I drink Coca-Cola all day. And then I get this in the afternoon. I'm like, oh, well, you're probably having huge sugar swings and you're hypoglycemic. And when your blood sugar drops too fast, it's a life-threatening emergency.

So what happens? You cortisol, which raises your blood sugar, adrenaline kick in, you gotta go find some food. So it's like, you you know even low blood sugar and swings can low blood sugar can drive anxiety so there are a lot of biological reasons for anxiety and then and then of course there's the and so in other words in how to treat anxiety i always think of that and like i'm not going to assume this person's neurotic or crazy or some other problem i'm gonna i'm gonna dig in and figure are there reasons? Because the body affects the brain.

Sort of what I wrote about in the mind-body, sorry, in the Ultra Mind Solution, which is essentially a book I wrote about more than 12, 13 years ago. And it was really the first time I think people had really started to think about how do we not just treat the mind-body effect, right?

Our thoughts affect our biology, but how does our biology affect our thoughts? How does our body affect our mind? And that's really an important discovery. So I wrote a whole book about it. It describes how to do this, but I think those are important. And then of course, there's life stresses, you know, whether it's work or relationships or kids or family or climate change or the economy or COVID, whatever is, you know, making us all a little nervous, right? And so your ability to handle anxiety also is depending on all those things being okay. So you want to be anxiety resilient. But then I think there's some really wonderful things to do to deal with our

minds because those are the things that generate a lot of anxiety. So before I get into the mind stuff, I just sort of, there's things people can do to just help, you know, really improve their overall level of their nervous system to calm down the sympathetic nervous system and to increase the function of the parasympathetic. That's the relaxation nervous system. Sympathetic is the stress nervous system. It's sort of the fight or flight or freeze or, you know, feeding reproduction is sort of the key functions of this ancient part of our brain that keeps us from danger. So we want to calm that down and we want to increase the parasympathetic system. And again, there are a thousand ways to do that from meditation to yoga, to massage, to hot and cold, like a sauna and a cold dip, cryo. There's all kinds of ways to access the nervous system through the skin, through breathing, through breath work. We've got an imagery through Reiki healing.

There's a thousand ways to do it. Acupuncture, all of which will be helpful. And I encourage you to find the things that work for you. I know my go-tos are meditation, hot and cold therapies, breath work, massage. I like, you know, I think you just have to find what works for you, but you know, there is a deliberate and intentional strategy for helping manage that constant dynamic between, you know, fight or flight, you know, and parasympathetic nervous system relaxation.

Super important for people to figure out and hack for themselves. Because if you don't, life will just amp you up. It's just that we live in a weird world of technology and disparities and environmental stress and economic stress. And it's just like, it's a lot for people, just daily life. So I think learning these techniques can be super, super helpful. So those are a huge take home. And then there's other things you can do. For example, herbal therapies can be great.

And there's great things like theanine, GABA. These are natural amino acids and compounds. For example, green tea you can take. There's certain herbs that are great, like valerian, kava, passionflower. And there's many, many calming herbs that people can use to help chamomile. And so you start to begin to maybe incorporate some of these into your life. So I encourage people to do that. My favorite is a hot Epsom salt bath. I call it the ultra bath. It's basically a lavender drops, which lowers cortisol. Lavender drops is you can get essential

oils, two cups of baking, a cup of baking soda, two cups of Epsom salt, hot, hot, hot water as hot as you can stand it and stick soak in there for 15, 20 minutes. And I promise you, when you come out, you're going to be so relaxed. So that's a good way to handle anxiety. Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus monthly functional deep dive episodes, I guess that's why we call it Dr. Iman Plus, then head on over to the doctor's pharmacy on Apple Podcasts and sign up for your seven-day free trial. Hi, everyone. Just a reminder that this podcast

is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.