The Dr. Hyman Show - Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Functional Medicine Deep Dive: Lessons From Our Past On How To Live Better and Longer In Our Future

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

Hey podcast community, Dr. Mark here. My team and I are so excited to offer you a 7 Day Free trial of the Dr. Hyman+ subscription for Apple Podcast. For 7 days, you get access to all this and more entirely for free! It's so easy to sign up. Just go click the Try Free button on the Doctor’s Farmacy Podcast page in Apple Podcast.  In this teaser episode, you’ll hear a preview of our latest Dr. Hyman+ Functional Medicine Deep Dive on lessons from our past on how to live better and longer in our future with IFM practitioner, Dr. Elizabeth Board. To learn more about the Institute of Functional Medicine, sign up for IFM’s newsletter: https://www.ifm.org/about/free-newsletter/. Want to hear the full episode? Subscribe now. With your 7 day free trial to Apple Podcast, you’ll gain access to audio versions of: - Ad-Free Doctor’s Farmacy Podcast episodes - Exclusive monthly Functional Medicine Deep Dives - Monthly Ask Mark Anything Episodes  - Bonus audio content exclusive to Dr. Hyman+ Trying to decide if the Dr. Hyman+ subscription for Apple Podcast is right for you? Email my team at [e-mail] with any questions you have.   Please note, Dr. Hyman+ subscription for Apple Podcast does not include access to the Dr. Hyman+ site and only includes Dr. Hyman+ in audio content. 

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 functional medicine deep dive episode diving deep into one of the most important topics in health. Head on over to the Doctors Pharmacy podcast on Apple podcast and sign up for your free trial right now. Okay, here we go. So I do want to talk about the mechanisms of aging because one of the best things that you can do for aging is exercise. And we talked about part of our journey is to learn how we can live longer. And these are some of the mechanisms of aging. And what is fascinating is that exercise positively

affects every single one of them. And so not moving is a mistake. And if you stop and think about it's the movement itself that allowed us to, to change who we are, that's a good reason. But another great reason is just, that's how you're going to slow down aging. And it doesn't matter what kind of exercise you do. I think to exercise with others, we're going to talk about that as well is even better than exercising alone, but here's a group of people they're out walking or running, they're doing it as a group. Here's another group of people enjoying some volleyball. So whatever kind of movement you can get, do it, do a variety, enjoy yourself, do it with other people, do it outside. Exercise isn't just great for aging, but it's also great from this British Medical Journal

article in 2016, because it decreases a lot of our chronic illnesses and some of the illnesses that kill us at a very high rate. So it's great for breast cancer reduction, colon cancer, diabetes reduction, and obviously ischemic heart disease. And the reasons for why it works are so extensive. I couldn't even get them on the slide, but you could go through them. Angiogenesis, improved endothelial function, increased insulin sensitivity. It increases adiponectin, which is a very helpful adipokine. It's from healthy fat cells. It decreases inflammation, increases the number of mitochondria and white adipose tissue. And mitochondria, of course, is what is so important for our neurons and also for our

heart. All of our musculature needs and our energy needs ATP produced from mitochondria, decreases our blood pressure, improves our cholesterol, also increases BDNF, increases dopamine. And dopamine is what makes us feel great and happy. It's our, makes us feel, you know, satisfied and successful. It's our motivating neurotrans feel, you know, satisfied and successful. It's our motivating neurotransmitter. And we can get that when we exercise. That's why a lot of times people start exercising, they continue exercising. They got to get that dopamine. Now, what are the risks of excessive exercise? Because one of the key points that we've learned from our past and actually even today is that excessive exercise isn't good. And I may have shocked you when I said that we are

kind of built to want to rest. That's important. I mean, we do have to rest and recover. Think about the hunter gatherers. They didn't get to take a couple of days off. If they didn't have, they weren't hunting and gathering, they weren't getting fed and their tribesmen needed that. And the babies at home needed that. So they were exercising a lot. And when they had time, they rested. So excessive exercise can cause problems. And some of those problems are atrial fibrillation. You've probably heard about that. Long distance runners, sadly, can have an increased risk of atrial fibrillation and from the excessive oxidative stress that happens. And then there can also be increased calcifications of the coronary arteries. And in animal models, I didn't see it in human models, but animal models, they actually had

elevated troponin, which indicates some cardiac damage to the muscle. And I love this curve. This is a curve that came out of a doctor in current treatment options for cardiology and medicine in 2018. And it's really a J-shaped curve. And what I mean by that is if you start at the top where it says to the right side versus no exercise, you have the highest risk. And as you increase your exercise, and of course that's on the X axis at the bottom,

as you keep increasing your exercise, the health risk drops, it drops and it drops and it drops until a certain point. And that's the point where too much exercise actually starts to increase your health risk. Now, everyone probably has a different J-shaped curve. And so again, when I was shocked about this desire to kind of be lazy sometimes, I looked at this study and I thought that makes so much sense because we don't want to overexercise. We should not be overexercising. It could be harmful. But at the same time,

we should probably be moving every single day. And so I know with my patients, I talk to them about telling themselves, I move every day. I may just move 10 minutes. I may just move 20 minutes, but I move every day and getting used to that. Moderate exercise has been shown

to be very, very beneficial. And why wouldn't it? We did it for so many thousands of years. Benefits of moderate exercise. So this was research showing that a minimum of 112 minutes a week improve lipids, blood pressure, and inflammation. But if you went over 255, then you started to lose some of those benefits. And that's another from a different researcher looking at moderate exercise, that J-shaped curve we talked about. We evolved to avoid exercise. So don't feel guilty

about it, but you're not off the hook. You still got to do it every day. And Dr. Lieberman writes in his book about the hot side. He followed them. He's a runner and these are South American runners. One of the most beautiful stories he told in this, this books that I read about him were when he interviewed and talked to them, they never actually, uh, they were the greatest runners in the world, but they never practiced. They never trained. What they did is they ran with their friends and they would kick around a ball or, um, they would, you know, do it for spiritual reasons, but they were running for other reasons

than just exercise. They were running for other reasons than just exercise. They were running for other reasons than competition. It was a spiritual or a convivial or a sociability experience. And so I want to share with you that movement itself can be combined with learning and movement that is combined with learning is actually shown to improve learning, actually. And they've have to memorize where you were going and what we were doing and where the berries were and where the snakes were and where the tigers were and what have you. And so it is natural for us to want to move and remember things. I found this fascinating because I had been a runner and I would listen to podcasts or I would listen to lectures when I was running.

And I felt like I could remember them better when I ran. This is a beautiful research study that was done in Copenhagen back in 2018. And what they did is they took these seven different types of exercises and they wanted to see, it was a long-term research study, and they wanted to see how many years were gained in individuals that participated in these different sports activities. And surprisingly, you might've thought that it was going to be jogging or swimming. We always hear swimming is such a great exercise. It ended up being tennis and badminton at the highest. And they theorized again, that it was the sociability. It was the exercising. It was with others that was most beneficial. In other words, you were killing two birds with one stone. You were reducing stress. You were

receiving that social support. You were having fun as you were moving, as you were exercising. And this is not to say that you shouldn't jog or go to the health club, but I would encourage, again, variety confers stability. So jump out there and do some fun things, some exercising with your friends. It would be very good for you. I don't want to forget about sleep and rest. And I'm bringing up one of my most beautiful slides that I have. And this is a photo of a painting or actually a photo of a photo at a museum that I was in in Norway of the bison in Altamira that were painted in northern Spain. There's a beautiful movie about this. I think it's called Finding Altamira, and I heavily recommend it. It's about the individual who found these cave dwelling,

these paintings, and how people didn't believe him, but it was, you know, he really was early man's Stone Age cave art. And I can just imagine these cavemen in this area resting, waiting, and, you know, painting. Isn't that beautiful? So we have to remember that, you know, being healthy also means taking time out and resting and getting adequate sleep. And hunter-gatherers actually slept on the ground and they slept with children. And they also slept with noise. And yet we now feel like we can't do that, but that's what they did back then. They didn't have the luxury of a very quiet room all the time. And it was very normal for them to have disruptions during their sleep and being able to go back to sleep. Today, we have modern sleep disruptors that they did not have back then,

like long work hours, blue light, loss of circadian rhythm, and all those high sugar foods, which really mess up your sleep by raising insulin, causing your blood sugar to crash and causing your cortisol to go up. Alcohol is a terrible sleep disruptor. If you've ever had some alcohol, you may find that a couple of hours later,

you wake up and you can't go back to sleep. And stimulants, a lot of things that we take have, you know, caffeine, different drugs that people use can be very stimulating and not allow us to sleep. Connection, strong social support. So the story of Homo sapiens out surviving Homo neanderthalensis, I hope you remember that and how important social support is. I am such a huge fan of the PhD from Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And he really gave legitimacy to this idea that stress really is integral, major, major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And there's actually more and more research about that now that you'll find. And so another book that he has out now, which is called Behave, which I'm listening to now is fascinating too, about, you know, how people behave, violence, not violence, parts of our brain and how it's affected.

There's another book you may have heard about, The Blue Zones. And talking about longevity, Dan Buettner found that he had these commonalities of these groups of people that lived to be over 100 years old. And four of those nine commonalities, it wasn't really what they were eating and other things. It was actually their connection to family, their connection to community, their connection to their internal purpose for being, you know, they need to be here because they have a purpose in life. And those connections and that strong social support actually impacted the longevity of these individuals.

So here's Hippocrates. He is our tour guide, and he's telling us here from the wisdom of many years ago that natural forces within us are the true healers of disease. And so many people can heal with social support. So don't underestimate that. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about dopamine and also oxytocin. Now, oxytocin in this case, this explains kind of how oxytocin works. Oxytocin can be released by being close to one another and like kissing or even saying kind, loving things to one another. Look at the impact. So oxytocin is very powerful. They're using it today for lots of different conditions, like conditions where people might have Alzheimer's disease or they're being irritated or dangerous or threatening, because it is something very

natural to us. We've all had oxytocin if we're human beings, because we were all, you know, had that connection to our mother breastfeeding, what have you. So I really like this a lot. This oxytocin system was actually conserved through many organisms, not just human beings. And it's been around for over 600 million years. It's an allostatic hormone. It's a neuropeptide. And what it does is it helps maintain stability in different changing environments. So when things are bad, it can help us feel more

hopeful. When things are good, it can bring us closer. It's produced in the hypothalamus and also in the systemic bloodstream. It's involved very heavily with survival. It is a major survival neuropeptide. And it can be very pain relieving. And in babies, it's been found to protect against hypoxia, which was fascinating to me. So here's something that we think of mostly being related to offering breast milk to a baby, but actually it's important for hypoxia. Sensory deprivation actually decreases oxytocin and oxytocin release. And so we know that sensory deprivation is very devastating at certain unique times in a baby's newborns or baby's life. And then that connection to oxytocin kind of emphasizes how important oxytocin really

is. I think we're just learning more and more about it. Of course, it enhances attractiveness. It helps facilitate those romantic bonds. And I mean, that's really important if you're going to, you're going to try to keep your genes passing through generations. And it also can be adaptable, decreases appetite, increases gastric function. And of course we know about the breast milk release and maternal behavior. That's what we mostly associate it with. Now, I also love dopamine and the dopaminergic system. This is a fascinating story as well. It turns out that,

well, first let me talk about dopamine. Dopamine is designed to keep us motivated to stay alive and reproductively successful. But also it is sort of, it can be at times, and I think this is part of why people overeat or gamble, what have you, too much dopamine, it can be at times, and I think this is part of why people overeat or gamble, what have you, too much dopamine, it can be a bit of an exaggerated risk reward complex. And so while it was very important for us to the differentiation of humans from apes, we do have to be careful. We have to guard against too much dependency on dopamine.

The reason that dopamine came about was because as our microbiome changed, because as we changed our diet, it goes back to diet once again, as we had a more omnivore type diet and we changed it, the microbe population changed. And as you know, the gut is the source of a lot of neurotransmitter production. As those neurotransmitters were produced by the different microbiome entities that lived within us, the neurologic system developed in the brain. It reminds me of Field of Greens. If you build it, they will come. If you have the dopamine, the neurologic system will develop. And that's really what happened. And this is really important because it emphasizes again that host-microbe interaction and how

powerful it can be. Because what I'm going to tell you next is that the apes are acetylcholine driven. Have you ever gone to the zoo and you've seen the male apes beat on their chest and they have this, they'll spare their teeth and there's aggression. This is kind of how they're driven. They don't mind if they scare you or they get upset. Human beings, they don't, we don't want to offend anyone, right? I mean, we're dopamine driven. We want social conformity. We don't want to look bad in front of others. Those apes don't care. They're like, I'm going to beat you up or you're going to submit to me. That's how it's acetylcholine driven. So I love this idea that the microbes themselves were the ones that set the shop up so that we would be dopamine driven.

And I always say that if you want to pass on genes successfully, love, which we think of as dopamine and creativity, particularly creative problem solving, because dopamine is very motivating to survival, you add love and a desire to survive together, you're going to pass some genes on. So of course, dopamine is going to be connected in our evolutionary history. Now, this is the neurotransmitter of anticipated pleasure or reward. And it's the reason why we want to make straight A's. It's the reason why we can't wait to get to the ice cream shop to eat some ice cream, or we've got that winning ticket and we want to see if our horse wins the race. So dopamine is part of all of that, but we've got to be

flexible because it is a little bit of a hidden danger. It can be why people over consume things like tobacco or alcohol or drugs or overeating because all of these things can increase dopamine. There's so many good things that increased dopamine, um, that we just need to turn our attention to those things, the things that will not hurt us like exercise, but not excessive exercise or being around people that we love to be with or sharing a hug or sharing a smile. Um, smoking, if we do get addicted to dopamine and we want to smoke, that can decrease fertility and lead to earlier menopause. And of course, earlier menopause can be associated with a shorter life expectancy. So dopamine could even shorten our life and

shorten our functional life as well. So it's a hidden danger. I'm going to talk about disevolution. We talked about evolution, but what is disevolution? And this is a concept I'm going to talk about dis-evolution. We talked about evolution, but what is dis-evolution? And this is a concept I'm going to explain to you and you're going to get it. It is, we're going to read the definition, but then we're going to give you an example. And I think you're going to get it from the example. It's the failure to treat the root cause of a mismatched disease. And a mismatched disease again, is when the environment that we, we should be in no longer exists. So our DNA is designed for a specific type of environment and a certain set of behaviors, but we're in a different type of environment now

so that we're starting to develop some chronic illnesses and some side effects, if you will, some complications. So it's a failure to treat the root cause of a mismatched disease often provokes a pernicious feedback loop, allowing the disease to persist or intensify. This is like almost functional medicine. So if you think about functional medicine, we want to treat the root cause. We don't want to cover up the symptoms. Disevolution occurs when we quickly fix the symptoms and we never fix the

root cause. And this is why I'm showing you how functional medicine and evolutionary medicine have a lot of things in common. So this is a form of cultural evolution that passes on behaviors and environments that promote mismatched diseases. Isn't that terrible to actually promote mismatched diseases? And I'll give you a beautiful example. If you've ever had a cavity and then you try to eat sugar, oh my gosh, does that not hurt? That's miserable for you. So the root cause is eating too much sugar, for example. That gives you a cavity.

But we go to the dentist. The dentist treats it with a filling. Now the pain's gone. So we go right back to eating some more sugar. See, the eating of the sugar is never selected out. It's never considered a bad thing to do because we just go back to the dentist. And so eating of the sugar is perpetuated. It's never checked.

It's unchecked. And filling a cavity does not treat the underlying cause. The underlying cause was the consumption of the sugar and the failure to eat high-fiber foods, natural foods. And now when you read this failure to treat the root cause of a mismatched disease like a cavity provokes this pernicious, this nasty feedback loop that allows disease to continue, to persist, or even get worse in that case. And I found this fascinating.

In the old Oxford English Dictionary, the term palliative care meant to relieve the symptoms of a disease or condition without dealing with the underlying cause. And in many ways, today, a lot of what we do in medicine is all palliative care. But today, we think of palliative care as care that's given to someone right before they're going to pass away or care that's given to someone when there is literally no hope. But think about that for a minute. Maybe all palliative care from the past is palliative care of the future. Because if we never get to the underlying cause, we are just speeding the inevitable, aren't we? So that's something to think about. Now, a great example of this, of dis-evolution as well, is if I'm diabetic and I want to keep my blood sugars down, but I want to eat that yellow cupcake, I'll just increase my

insulin dose. That way I can eat more cake and ice cream. But if I have high blood pressure and I don't want to go out and exercise and I don't want to try to lose a little bit of weight, or I don't want to do other things like meditation, then I'll just increase my blood pressure medicines instead of losing weight, exercising and meditating. Increasing doses of statins instead of changing diet and exercise and just go ahead and have a bypass graft. That way I can keep eating whatever I want and not exercising. You can see how that persists the condition because the root cause was never actually addressed.

We become so adept at treating the symptoms of mismatched diseases that we reduce the urgency of treating its causes. I love this phrase that came out of Lieberman's book, but it talks about really in some ways today we're favoring procrastination. And as if you're a healthcare provider or a mom that cares for her kids or a dad that cares for his kids, you really want to think about, when I'm relieving symptoms, that's good, but I need to get to the root cause because that's what's really going to make a difference. And another example that I love about sugar, evolutionary medicine can also be root,

can be systems biology medicine, which is of course part of functional medicine, a big piece of what functional medicine is. See, sugar is not just destroying our teeth. We eat the sugar, we fill the cavity. You say, okay, well, okay, I get it. I get it. It's going to mess my teeth up. Problem is that's not the only thing the sugar is going to do. If that was the only thing

that sugar was going to do, that'd be bad enough. But if only we had heated the sore teeth to stop the sugar, then all these things wouldn't happen. Because it turns out that sugar causes endothelial damage to affect vascular health negatively. And it can cause hypertriglyceridemia, which leads to hypercholesterolemia and you can get kidney damage. So we're actually affecting not just the structural dental system, but also the vascular system. And because we filled that cavity and we decided to keep eating sugar instead of stopping the sugar, now we're at risk for diabetes and possibly PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, which by the way, can affect the ability to be fertile. And now we have low testosterone. That's the endocrine system. And then if we keep eating

that sugar, because we never filled that cavity, which was the pain signal that we covered up with the filling, now we have neurotoxins peripherally to damage our neurons peripherally. and of course, also centrally. And we know that Alzheimer's is type three diabetes, and that's the neurologic system. It can also affect the immune system by stimulating the growth of cancer. We know that cancer's favorite food is sugar. And it can also affect osteoporosis and actually sugar is a terrible bone saboteur, and it also can increase joint pain. And it can also affect the gut because you could get yeast or bacterial overgrowth. In addition, if you damage the gut lining, then you can have autoimmune disease. So it turns out that in evolutionary medicine, this dis-evolution is actually, the repercussions

of it can absolutely be a systems biology effect as well. So you can see the functional connections of just one imbalance of consuming too much sugar affecting so many different parts of our system. And I love the spider web because you pull on one part of the spider web and everything else moves as well. All right. So what are the arguments against evolutionary medicine? Well, I mean, a lot of people in medicine, and I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to spend a lot of times doing medical research and really figuring out ways to treat the elderly, because we do need to do that, and how to treat different types of infections, developing ways to offer transplants to patients and also severe

traumas that may never have happened in our evolutionary history, but are happening today. So that's very important. So evolutionary medicine doesn't solve everything because some of these conditions we need to deal with and medicine, thank God we can. It's also in some circumstances you have genetic predispositions, but those can be tailored with therapies. And there's a movement to just develop these unique disease treatments for those types of susceptibilities that are just very unique. They wouldn't have been selected out of with through evolutionary medicine. And of course, all the technology that's happening in medicine, nobody wants to stop that. So I agree that we need to do all of those things and they're all fabulous, but we don't

want to ignore the foundation because so much of chronic illness, I think can be supported if we look back to the past to do many of the things that we should be doing all along. We've talked about that. And be aware of cultural evolution because it's rapid and powerful. Cultural evolution is faster than like natural selection. And I'll give you a couple of examples of why that's true.ated socially, and we're over-medicated. And so we do that at, we've done that at such a very fast rate, particularly with the computers and cell phones and what have you. Look at what's happening to our sociability. It's changed dramatically in a very compressed short time. And we're now seeing some issues, you know,

with children and depression and ability to communicate now. I mean, just in one lifetime, you've seen that change. People with unfit lives are still able to be reproductively successful because we have workarounds on that. And I'm not saying that's a bad idea, but it's showing us that natural selection is being kicked aside because of the cultural evolution. Now, there are good things about it too, like stop smoking smoking campaigns so it's now become very passe and not very it's looked down upon if you smoke and that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that someone smokes and they cough and they don't want to cough they don't want to look bad remember that dopamine we really care about what people think about us so stop smoking campaigns

can be a benefit of a cultural evolution. Meditation. Meditation is now very popular in yoga and heart rate variability and all the sleep apps. Those are types of cultural evolution that can be beneficial. You're hearing more about organic farm to table, the whole 30, all of these sort of cultural in vogue movements that can help a lot of people. So we want to use the cultural evolution to our benefit. Actively adding movement. This is a photo of, I wanted to go run a race. And so I invited my girlfriend on the far right, and she called our mutual girlfriend

in the middle of us. And then she called her friend to the left. And so it started with one person running. And then we all six then all four of us ended up running. And then I actually invited another friend. So we had a lot of people running because one person wanted to do it. And you can do this with cultural evolution. Lots of things that we do today can be helpful. We just want to use that cultural power

for good and not evil. Now, also evolutionary medicine can help us decrease the use of antibiotics and decrease the use of opiates. Evolutionary medicine may eventually unlock the secrets of cancer, infection, and aging. So what are the key behaviors I want to review with you? High insulin demand food led to increased fat deposition, which was beneficial for us, but not so beneficial today. Population compression leads to transmission of infectious disease. Don't resist the cytokine mediated sickness behavior. It's a beneficial thing for us. Obviously, some people can have an overactive cytokine response like with COVID, but that

little mild nagging illness that you have, it's there to keep you home. It's keep you away from work, let you get over it, let you get some rest. Let you fight one illness alone. Stress reduction is very important. And then it turns out that when they look at hunter-gatherers compared to human beings, to those of us who work, you know, 14, 16 hours a day, they found that their workday is actually shorter. So you would think it might've been longer, but they actually rest quite a bit. One thing they found with hunter-gatherers though, is that when they are resting, they're often doing something. They might be building a basket. They may be talking, they may be cooking.

They may be doing something that's very low stress, very pleasant with people that they care about, but you know, as a group, but they do rest a good bit and talk and enjoy being together. And we do need to do that more. We can learn that from the current hunting-g gatherers that still exist in our world today. Moderate exercise is safer and more beneficial than excessive. Now, remember, I'm saying excessive exercise. I'm not saying no exercise. I'm saying excessive exercise. Moderate, regular exercise is one of the best things that you can do for your body. And that's what hunter gatherers were doing all those 300,000 years ago. And especially if you exercise along with a spiritual centering or with your social connection,

because it provides that synergistic benefit of reducing your life for lots of different reasons. Studies of health close relationships actually talk about increasing progesterone. So when we are very close to someone, we actually can produce more progesterone. And progesterone. So when we are very close to someone, we actually can produce more progesterone and progesterone has a metabolite called allopregnenolone, which actually binds the GABA receptor. And that's like nature Xanax because the GABA receptor is bound by alcohol. That's why people a lot of times drink alcohol to relax, or it's bound by Xanax or Ativan. And instead of using Xanax and Ativan, when we're close to people, we produce more progesterone, which makes us calm. Isn't that amazing?

I mean, when I think about that, it's just, I mean, the elegance of how the body fits together. But progesterone also decreases death of brain cells. So it's a fantastic neurosteroid. We know that progesterone balances the effects of excess estrogen by down-regulating receptors. And so it's a critical hormone for preventing estrogen excess conditions, not just breast cancer, but uterine conditions as well. It decreases inflammation and promotes the repair of mucosal surfaces. So this was crazy fascinating for me to learn about. And this is a study that came out of mucosal immunology,

and they're referring to natural progesterone as P4. And I hope they continue to do that so that we don't confuse progestins, medroxyprogesterone, other levonorgestrel, different synthetic progesterones with real progesterone or bioidentical progesterone, P4. And you can see the changes through a woman's life when she has really high elevated levels of progesterone. You can see how high they are woman's life when she has really high elevated levels of progesterone. You can see how high they are and how they cycle in and out during the reproductive age. And then how in pregnancy, they get quite astronomically high.

And I always love to ask women, how did you feel when you were pregnant? And most women, not all, but most of us, I felt great. I'm thinking, how is that possible? You couldn't sleep. You had to pee all the time. Your feet were swollen. You had indigestion. None of your clothes fit. You're like, but I felt great. And I'm like, that's because you've had nature Xanax all that time. So progesterone is a wonderful hormone and I wish it was not so demonized in the past. This is a research that shows how it works as an anti-inflammatory. You

can see that it has an effect on the PAMPs, the pathogen associated process there. And then also it actually creates proteins and growth factors that also inhibit inflammation from the diagram I've shown you from this particular research article. But it also heals epithelial, the mucosal epithelial line cells. And think about where that is, that sinuses, the vaginal vault, also the gut, the mouth, anything where you have a wet mucosal surface or wet skin surface. And I'm not going to go over all this diagram. It's beautiful to see, but progesterone itself is very protective. And there was a study done for COVID where they gave gentlemen progesterone and to see if it would improve their chance of fighting the COVID infection. And they all did

very, very well. Of course, progesterone does not turn into estrogen in a man. It turns first into testosterone, and then it may turn into estrogen from there. But progesterone is kind of a unisex hormone in a way. Very good for the brain health as well. So what does Hippocrates say? He tells us that if we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little, not too much, we would have found the safest way to help. And I'm going to review for you just with a little break before we go into the mismatched diseases about common themes that we've learned from our history, from this little journey we took back through our history of the early hominids. So that connection to and cooperation with others,

that sociability, that's an important piece to remember. And we need to address the root cause, avoid procrastination. Remember that the early agriculture farmers, they just planted what was there and they treated each other without waiting. There was no procrastination going on and treating the root cause is what makes the biggest difference. Variety confers stability and a variety of food, variety of exercise, exercise regularly, we were built for it, and moderation and energy expenditure, but also in energy consumption. And that has to do with eating. We are designed to want to eat more and we have to fight against that. And we have to be careful with foods that make us want to eat more,

you know, food that does not have brake pedals. And so that we just continue to over-consume. We want to avoid others when they're sick or when we're sick. And we want to pay attention to the fact that nutrition throughout our history plays a huge role in gut health. And of course, gut health relates very much to brain health and you can remember that because it spells the word caveman so when you leave this lecture you can remember each one of those and i'm going to give you we'll go over it again and if being a caveman bothers you then you can just replace it with save man's because s stands for sociability so either you say save man or caveman you can remember because you know whenever i teach i have to give you a mnemonic so you can remember, because you know, whenever I teach, I have to give you a mnemonic so you can remember something from it. This, all the different beautiful things that evolutionary

medicine is teaching us. Now, what are mismatched diseases? These are diseases that are more common or severe because the body is inadequately adapted to novel environmental conditions. So I'll give you an example. I like this phrase, when we change the world to suit us, we were no longer suited to the world. So we've made things too comfortable, too convenient. And that's not what our genes were designed for. And if we're smart, we can just start to create an environment that suits our genes better than continuing to engage in behaviors that just are mismatched with our genes. Because if we do that, we'll continue to have illness. So Hippocrates even said, illnesses do not come out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against nature. Think about that.

What he's really saying is we're doing things that are against what we were designed to, to what we should be doing. And he says, when we have enough sins or enough of these little behaviors, illness will suddenly appear. It turns out that greater than 70% of diseases that we treat today are actually mismatched diseases. And they could be either mitigated or completely prevented. And if that's, that to me is one of the most powerful statements of this whole lecture about evolutionary medicine. And we're going to dive right into those. So these are some of the hypothesized non-infectious mismatched diseases. And if the red ones that you see there are some of the ones that are in the list of the top 10 causes for dying, in other words, mortality.

Now COVID's not on there yet, but we might at some point throw COVID on there if we start thinking about, we can never figure out where it came from and what have you. But you might say the reason that we did get COVID too was because we were so close to one another traveling on airplanes and what have you. And maybe that would not have been the way that it was. But look at all these conditions. And this is not a completely full list. It's a non-limited list. So many of these conditions can be related again to the mismatch of the life that we live, the food that we eat, maybe even the thoughts that we have, and the way our DNA was originally designed. And I believe that our brains are all smart enough to overcome that, to compensate for these.

So leading cause of death, the ones I had made read before, heart disease, cancer, and until recently it didn't used to be COVID, but now COVID is in the top 10 there. Unintentional injuries, and a lot of that's going to be a mismatched disease too, because car accidents, for example, falling off of a building or what have you. These are things that wouldn't have happened in our evolutionary history. Stroke and cardiovascular disease are somewhat combined, but they did separate them out this time. Respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's disease is still there and so is diabetes. So let's start with cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disease. And I'm just going to give some tips of what could we do to sort of

overcome this mismatch that puts us at risk? Well, go back to consuming nuts and seeds. The research supports that as far as cardiovascular disease is concerned. And our animals that we eat should be free range, not grain fed. I don't believe that cows were really designed to eat corn because corn grows very tall and cows have a short neck that should be down eating grass. High omega-3s and low omega-6s, that's really the way our hunter-gatherers really ate in the past. We need high fiber, low insulin demand, not so many starchy foods. Remember what happened to us when we went through the agricultural revolution. We actually took years off our life and actually got shorter episodes of fasting actually are beneficial

because they limit insulin and early man did not wake up in the morning in order for McDonald's. He went out and hunted and gathered. And if he was lucky, he found something by lunchtime. If he's real lucky, maybe before lunchtime, but oftentimes I'm sure that they didn't even find anything all day. So there were periods of time we are designed really too fast, probably more than we realize. So we've got to adapt our environment to suit our genes. We need stress reduction. We need to restorative sleep. We need to maintain our oral and gut health. So we now know that the mouth is

very much connected to cardiovascular disease. The majority of atheromas that have been ruptured have been found to have bacteria from the mouth in them, something in the seventies, I believe I read. So keeping the mouth healthy is very important. And part of that is starting with what we put in our mouth. And this is a beautiful photo of all the rich colors that we can eat and all the phytonutrients that are there for us. We need to eat that colorful plate every day. And again, we talked about regular moderate exercise instead of excessive exercise because

excessive exercise could actually be harmful for the heart. Don't forget about what Sapolsky said about how zebras don't get ulcers, but zebras also may not be getting heart attacks because we need those supporting, forgiving relationships. That's what allows us to release that oxytocin, which has all those benefits that I showed you in the diagram, and also the dopamine. We need dopamine from hugs, not dopamine from drugs. So keep going. Now, this always bugs me because we have breast cancer awareness and then we have these cookies and cakes where sugar is the worst thing that you could eat when somebody

has cancer. So we got to replace those with berries. We need to eliminate toxins in our environment. 35% of cancer is attributed to diet and nutrition. That's unbelievable. 35%. In fact, the second most important determinant for cancer is actually diet and nutrition. That's unbelievable, 35%. In fact, the second most important determinant for cancer is actually diet and nutrition.

And that's just a choice of what we put in our mouth. It's just a choice. We live in a world where we're so lucky to be able to choose what we eat and we can make that choice. The number one risk, of course, is smoking. That's another choice. So you don't smoke and you

watch what you put in your mouth you may still get cancer but you're cutting your risks dramatically those two them together dwarf every other risk factor the other ones are all just kind of minute and that's a powerful statement for women that are worried about breast cancer so get rid of those uh breast cancer awareness cookies and cupcakes and replace them with high antioxidant, high color variety berries, as long as they don't have pesticide on them. Avoid when we, when cancer is the second leading cause of death, but when we avoid increases of hyperinsulinemia and obesity and type two diabetes, we also cut our risk of cancer. High insulin levels are associated with a poor prognosis in cancer. And of the overweight, intentional weight loss actually can decrease cancer death 40% to 50%.

Isn't that fantastic? And I've had patients that I've taken care of, which I don't treat cancer patients, but they were being treated for cancer. And they actually did quite well when we were very, very tight and very strict with their diet. And they really were highly motivated and they really did really well. It was really, uh, really opened my eyes as a practitioner in Europe and North America, 20% of cancers are direct, directly related to obesity. That was like the direct connection. And that's something that is absolutely preventable. See, obesity is a mismatched disease. It is overconsumption of high energy food with under expenditure. And it's something that we

could work harder on as human beings. I think understanding evolution can help us understand how to fight obesity. So look at the connections of obesity with all of these conditions listed here, cancer, inflammation, obstructive sleep apnea, obviously cardiovascular disease and diabetes, even asthma. Asthma is connected to obesity, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis. And now we have to add COVID vulnerability. So those that were obese had a significant increased risk with COVID. Look at all the cancers associated with almost, almost not all, but almost every cancer is associated a huge percentage with either hyperinsulinemia, hypersugar, or overweight and being overweight and obese. And obesity trends are still going up. Remember that genetically we are designed to store fat. We just are. And if

you could just accept it and go forward and say, I know that I'm designed that way. So I'm going to combat it. I'm going to compensate it. I'm going to be very cognizant about what I eat, how much I eat, what kind of food that I eat, and I'm going to move every day. You can combat that. That was what allowed us to be reproductively successful. So of course, it's going to be throughout our genes. It helped us be resistant to famine. It was a superpower that we had. What if we returned to the same behaviors? What if we did intermittent fasting? What if we ate whole foods? What if we minimize those high insulin foods? And what if we did engage in daily moderate movement? And what if we added adequate sleep time and got connected to those that we love? And I always say that the best kind

of sugar is the sugar you get on your cheek or on your lips, not the sugar that you put in your mouth and causes diabetes. So get your dopamine, not from food and drugs, but others, people that you love, and you'll be giving them dopamine at the same time. This is really scary, isn't it? Looking at these charts where obesity is going up. If you look at the green line, that's severe obesity. So even 10% severely obese. Unbelievable. Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with

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