The Dr. Hyman Show - Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Methylation, Making Healthier Choices, Lectins, And More

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

My team and I are excited to tell you about our revolutionary new platform, Dr. Hyman+, which offers premium content, perks, and information available exclusively for Dr. Hyman+ members.  In this teaser episode you’ll hear a preview of our monthly Dr. Hyman+ AMA. To gain access to the full episode, head over to https://drhyman.com/plus/. With your yearly membership to Dr. Hyman+, you’ll gain access to: Ad-Free Doctor’s Farmacy Podcast episodes Access to all my docu-series, including Broken Brain 1, Broken Brain 2, Longevity Roadmap + bonus material Exclusive monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives Monthly Ask Mark Anything by you and only for you

Hey, podcast community. It's Dr. Mark here, and I'm so excited to introduce a revolutionary new platform my team and I've been working on. It's called Dr. Hyman Plus, and it's a premium membership exclusive for my community. With Dr. Hyman Plus, you get a ton of private content and special access that nobody else gets. Now, the yearly membership gives you exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes, access to all of my docuseries, including the Longevity Roadmap and Broken Brain 1 and 2, plus all the bonus content. You get monthly functional medicine deep dives where one of our doctors goes deep into a health topic to tell you everything you need to know. You also get access to my monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus community's biggest health and wellness questions. And this Q&A is only accessible with a membership.

Because I'm so excited to share this platform with you, I'm releasing a teaser of my brand new Ask Dr. Mark Anything episode. And I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you head over to drhyman.com forward slash plus that's drhyman.com slash PLUS for more information. Okay, here we go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Mark Anything, which is exclusive for the Dr. Hyman Plus community. I am Herschel Perweth, the Dr. Hyman Plus community manager, and I'm here with Darcy Gross, who was one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. And we're here with our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. Hello, Dr. Mark. Hi, how are you?

Good. And so we've collected the questions from our community, and we're going to be asking Mark anything. So let's get started with the first question. Darcy, do you want to start us off? Yeah, for sure. Well, welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. So to start off, we're just going to talk about something that affects a large percentage

of the population, and a lot of people actually don't know that they have this, which is a specific mutation or otherwise known as polymorphism in the MTHFR gene. So can you talk a little bit about this gene and what methylation does and why we should care about it? Oh, yeah. My favorite topic. Actually, I wrote a whole article about methylation years ago. It's on my blog and it goes into great detail about this whole phenomenon in the body we call methylation. And what is this phenomenon? Well, it sounds like a big word, but why is it important? Well, you have 37 billion, billion chemical reactions that happen in your body every second. It's a lot.

I think it's 37 with 27 zeros or something. And each of those reactions requires a helper, an enzyme. And each of those enzymes requires a helper. And usually those are in the form of nutrients. And in fact, one third of your entire DNA codes for enzymes. That's amazing. And then that means that one third of your entire DNA can only be properly read. And the function of those genes can only be properly expressed if you have adequate

levels of the right nutrients or the right form of the nutrients. Now, there's a common variation in your gene called MTHFR, which affects about 35% of the population and this you can have one or two copies from your mom or your dad and these are what we call snip single nucleotide plomorphisms there's one slight change in the basically the function of the gene that's uh has to do with the four letter code that that you know it gets turned into genes so your your computer is a one to zero right so it's a binary code can do all these complex things like look at this zoom podcast amazing right that's all one to zeros your body is four it's a quaternary code a c t g uh and and it could and any three letter combo is a gene so a c t or a g t or g g t or you know a aG or whatever. These are, these are, these in right for various proteins or they express various proteins as part

of the gene expression. And I said one third of all those proteins that are made are enzymes and those enzymes need helpers. So one of the enzymes it's made is an enzyme called MKHFR and it can be slightly different for some people. And if you have the variation, it means you need a certain kind of folic acid and a certain kind, and may even need a lot more of the folic acid

in order for the enzyme to function properly. And the danger if you don't have this is it can cause all sorts of problems. It can cause birth defects, which is sort of how it was first discovered. It can cause depression. It can cause cancer, heart disease, dementia. I mean, it can cause a lot of problems and most people have no idea. And I'll just tell you a quick story of a patient. They're actually not a patient. She was a woman who I worked with

on the movie Fed Up, who was the director. And she was struggling because she was having miscarriage after miscarriage of babies. She was having babies born with spina bifida with kind of anencephaly, which means no brain. It was horrible. And she was struggling. And she read my article and she checked her gene and she had this polymorphism. She had two copies of it. It was quite relieved to find this out.

She told her doctor, I need to take the right kind of foliage. She said, well, you just recommend folic acid. I said, no, no, Dr. I was telling you to take a special form called methyl folate or five methyl tetrahydrofolate. And, and so she took this right kind of folate and she literally had this perfect baby and, and, and was actually breastfeeding the baby during the release of the film, which is kind of fun. So it's super important to have the right type of methylation. And the way I think about methylation is it's like the currency of the body. We use money and coins to exchange transactions all the time in our economy.

In the economy of your biology, changing methyl groups is a key function. And it's basically carbon and four hydrogens. That's a methyl group. CH4, that's a methyl group. And the methyl groups have to be transferred constantly between different molecules in order for the body to work properly and for your genes to be expressed or genes to get turned on or off. Like I mentioned, all these other factors, whether it's mood or cancer or heart disease or dementia and so forth, are birth

defects. There's so many things affected by this. And if you don't have the right function of these pathways to methylate, you end up with all sorts of problems. And that's why taking the right nutrients in the right forms can be really important. And doctors say, just take folic acid. Well, no, because you might be the person who can't convert the folic acid from your pill into the right form, which is methylfolate. So you might need to take this special form of methylfolate or methyl B6 or methylated B12s, other forms of these nutrients to help regulate these pathways. So the key long-term is to identify if you have this issue and also take

some methylation support. I mean, you can take too much, but for most people, they're not getting enough and it can make a huge difference. So the MTHFR gene plays a huge role in human health and all kinds of issues. And it's the center of our biology. So making sure you have good adequate methylation is key. I'd encourage you to read that article. I think you guys can probably post it in the notes. It goes into way more detail about this, but we'll share it with you. Yeah, we can definitely include it in the links for resources below. Okay. The next question is about finding someone that can help you be accountable for your health. So how would one go about finding someone that could help them be accountable to have established like a healthy

routine? You know, could it be someone that does like one-on-one coaching? You know, someone that could help you with maybe strength training? What's the best way to go about finding someone that could help you? Well, first of all, the question really is, is how do we change? What is the science of behavior change? What is the science of doing the things you need to do to get healthy? Because we all know we need to be better. We all know we need to exercise. We all know we should do de-stressing

things. We all know we shouldn't do these bad habits and yet we continue to do them. So even me. So the question is, is how do you, how do you actually best structure your life to support the positive choices you make? As it turns out that if you are overweight or you have bad habits, you're more likely to hang around when people have bad habits. In fact, if according to the data from Christakis at Harvard, if you're overweight and you're looking at why, if your friends are overweight, you're four times or 70% more likely to be overweight than if your parents

are overweight. So the fact is that our genetics are less important than our social networks. And so pick your friends wisely, because if all your friends are eating cheeseburgers and having fries and soda and watching TV all day and drinking beer every day, then you're probably not going to be so healthy. But if all your friends are going to green, drinking green juices and going to yoga class, you know, probably you're likely to have their health habits rub off on you. With that said, depending on what area of your life you're working on, you might need different kinds of support. Sometimes it can just be a friend or a spouse or a partner to do stuff with. Because change happens better in community.

So whether it's someone at work or whether it's a friend or a partner or a kid or a parent, whatever, just you need to enroll somebody to be your buddy. Everybody needs a buddy. Or as Rick Warren says, everybody needs a buddy. And getting healthy is a team sport. So that's really, really important. Now, some people do well with coaching. For example, certain behaviors are harder to deal with. And so having a one-on-one

life coach or a health coach can be really helpful. There's a lot of ideas about how to change habits. Tiny Habits is a great book by B.J. Fogg. There's another one called Atomic Habits. It's quite good. And there's Charles Dukes' book on habits, which are all really good ideas for how do you start to be able to build new habits. But the key really is to decide what you want to do, to find someone to hold you accountable, to do it together, and to sort of make it fun. You know, when I worked at Saddleback Church, it was a very unhealthy church. The average weight for women was 170, men was 210, I think. And there were many who were a lot worse, and many were very, very overweight and ill. And, um, they really were not focused on getting healthy, but they were studying every week together in small groups of

Bible study. And so I said, why don't we use these small groups to put in a healthy living curriculum? And we did. And 15,000 people signed up and by supporting each other, they were able to lose a quarter million pounds in the first year and get rid of all kinds of health issues. And they had fun things like jogging for Jesus and, you know, just all kinds of fun activities that they did that were positive. So getting that is really, really important. Now, personally, like I, I don't like weightlifting. So I basically hired a online coach, TB12 sports, which is great, super inexpensive. And I do four times a week for 30 minutes, really intensive workouts. And I wouldn't do it on my own. I need someone to be yelling at me, kicking my butt. So other things I'll do on my own, I'll go bike riding or I'll play tennis or

I'll do things that I'd love to do. But certain things that I don't want to do, I kind of need help. So I think it's really important to find someone who can really support you in your journey. Yeah, that's definitely helpful. And I feel like that's actually one of the benefits of our Dr. Hyman plus community Facebook group is that we kind of see different people posting about the recipes that they make from your books or what they're up to that weekend and kind of motivates the rest of us to keep it going. Because we know we have a friend that's sort of watching over us as well. So that's great input. Thank you. Yeah, so switching gears a little bit. One, one topic that's a repeat question that we see coming up a lot is all about lectins. And so essentially, when somebody is looking to heal their leaky gut, how concerned

should we be about consuming high lectin foods? And I guess that question really goes for both just a regular healthy population as well as somebody who's dealing with leaky gut. I mean, what are lectins? Why are they a concern? And who should be concerned about monitoring lectins? Well, plants make all sorts of defensive molecules for their own benefit. And one of them are lectins. And it doesn't make them bad. It just means that they're part of the plant's defense mechanism. And certain foods have higher lectins, beans and grains, for example,

have higher lectins, certain nuts have higher lectins, certain vegetables have higher lectins. And I think, you know, they are a potential issue for people who have really key gut, who have autoimmune disease, inflammation. And I think it's not a universal thing that everybody should avoid food with lectins. You know, they are a potential issue for people who have really key gut, who have autoimmune disease, inflammation. And I think it's not a universal thing that everybody should avoid food with lectins. I think people can try it if they're not feeling well and see what happens. But for most people who are feeling fine, you know, no winning lectins eliminates a whole bunch of foods that are really good for you, like, you know, vegetables. So I'm sort of low to recommend that. But I do think if you're struggling with autoimmune disease or other issues that you want to sort of reduce that as a trial and sort of

really come up with a sense of what are the things that are really triggering. So the foods most common in lectins are kidney beans, soybeans, wheat, peanuts, tomatoes, potatoes, tomatoes, I would find a hard time living without. But, you know, if you really want to reduce the exposure for a while to see if it makes a difference, you can do that. Yeah, it's like one of the things that you say so often, and always, I love it so much, which is your body, your body is your best doctor. It knows you the best and it can tell you the foods that don't sit well with you and the ones that do. And I think that's a great mantra to live by. Absolutely. So our next question is from a community member and she states,

my 19 year old son is a football player heading off to college and would like to put on more weight. But mainstream advice includes heavy dairy or unclean protein powders, which of course have intensified acne in the past. And they're wondering what foods diet would you suggest for someone in this situation? This is, I think, a super interesting question for people that are trying to maybe gain some muscle, even if not playing football, but or any age, just, you know, what's the best way to do that? The best way to really gain weight is to understand, um, how, how to build muscle weight, which is what really is key. You don't want to build weight because I can gain weight if I, if I want to eat, uh, you know, ice cream and, and cake and cookies

and I'll gain weight just like that. And I'll gain belly weight. You don't want belly weight. That's the worst kind of weight. So you want to have protein and fat. And then the studies, the best way to gain muscle and weight is using a combination of a low carbohydrate, higher fat diet, along with adequate amounts of protein. And the more you exercise, the more active you are, the more muscle you want to put on,

the more protein you have to have. So, you know, normally it's about 30 grams per meal, but you can have that more frequently, uh, you know, maybe four times a day into the three times a day, or even more if you really are trying to drive up the muscle mass, which is really important that combining that with strength training, uh, it really works well. And there are a lot of clean proteins out there. We have our peak and shake protein, which has grass fed collagen and pumpkin seeds and, and, um, pea protein, this organic and MCT also it's protein, fat, and fiber. You can jack that up if you want with go away. I like go away particularly better than the traditional way proteins that are out there from factory farm cows. So I think it's possible to get really clean dairy as well. That can be a very effective way.

There are also amino acids that can help as well. That branched-chain amino acids can help increase muscle synthesis. There's a product called Urolithin A that comes from Pomegranate. It's marketed as a brand called MitoPure that actually increases muscle building as well. So I think combination of increasing protein, fat, calories, decreasing starch and sugar and increasing certain muscle building components like branched amino acids or things like urolithin A, combining that with exercise and strength training is probably the best way to help people to put on more weight in the good way, which is muscle. 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 all the content from my docuseries, and of course, any future ones we're going to release, plus monthly Ask Mark Anything episodes, plus, that's what we call plus, right? Plus monthly functional medicine deep dive episodes. I guess, right, that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus. Head over to drhyman.com forward slash plus, that's drhyman.com slash PLUS to learn more. I'll see you there. 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 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.