The Dr. Hyman Show - How Eating An Anti-Inflammatory Diet Is Key To Regaining Your Health

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

How Eating An Anti-Inflammatory Diet Is Key To Regaining Your Health | This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker Inflammation is part of the body’s natural defense system and can be a good thing in balance. However, when your immune system shifts out of balance, inflammation can run rampant—causing a chronic, smoldering fire inside your body that contributes to disease, weight gain, and more. What we eat is one of the biggest levers we have when it comes to driving or reducing inflammation. Industrial food drives inflammation, oxidative stress, hormone and neurotransmitter imbalances, overloads your detoxification system, depletes your energy, damages your microbiome, and changes your gene expression to turn on disease-causing genes. Real whole nutrient and phytonutrient-rich food does the opposite. It turns off inflammation, increases antioxidant systems, balances hormones and brain chemistry, boosts detoxification, increases energy, optimizes your microbiome, and turns on disease-preventing, health-promoting genes. In this minisode, Dr. Hyman speaks with Vani Hari and Dr. David Perlmutter about the dangers of inflammatory foods and how to eat a diet that is anti-inflammatory. Named as one of the “Most Influential People on the Internet” by Time Magazine, Vani Hari is the revolutionary food activist behind foodbabe.com, co-founder of organic food brand Truvani, New York Times best selling author of, The Food Babe Way, and Feeding You Lies. She has led campaigns against food giants like Kraft, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Subway and General Mills that attracted more than 500,000 signatures, and led to the removal of several controversial ingredients used by these companies. Through corporate activism, petitions, and social media campaigns, Vani and her Food Babe Army have become one of the most powerful populist forces in the health and food industries.  Her drive to change the food system inspired the creation of her new company, Truvani, where she produces real food without added chemicals, products without toxins, and labels without lies. Vani has been profiled in the New York Times and The Atlantic, and has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN, The Dr. Oz Show, The Doctors, and NPR.  Dr. David Perlmutter is a Board-Certified Neurologist and four-time New York Times bestselling author. He serves on the Board of Directors and is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals including Archives of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and The Journal of Applied Nutrition. His books have been published in 34 languages and include the #1 New York Times bestseller Grain Brain, The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs and Sugar, with over 1 million copies in print. Dr. Perlmutter’s new book Brain Wash, co-written with his son Austin Perlmutter, MD, was released in January 2020. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker. If you’re curious about getting your own health program dialed-in to your unique needs, check out InsideTracker. Right now they’re offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 25% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Vani Hari, “How To Be A Food Activist In Your Own Kitchen” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/VaniHari   Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. David Perlmutter, “How to Prevent Alzheimer’s with Your Fork” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrDavidPerlmutter

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Go look in your kitchen, get rid of all the corn, soy, canola, cottonseed oil. They just do not belong in your diet because every time you go out to eat, there's a likelihood that you're eating one of those oils and that's, you know, very much contributing to the demise of our health in this world. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. When I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is. Now with the technology

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forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's Dr. Hyman. InsideTracker.com. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea Perot at one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Just about every chronic health problem is driven by inflammation or has an inflammatory component. This comes as no surprise when we consider the inflammatory nature of our modern day diets. Simply put, the food we eat is making us sick and inflamed. Food activist Vani Hari recently shared her personal realization about this in her conversation with Dr. Hyman. As a child, I was severely sick. I mean, on several medications, eczema all over my body,

asthma, always just having a very allergic reaction to every season, just always feeling under the weather or having a stomach ache. And I felt like a zombie for most of my life. And it wasn't until my early 20s where I hit rock bottom, where I was overweight, I was working this corporate job in the rat race lifestyle, trying to keep up with my co-workers and just work through breakfast, lunch, and dinner and eat whatever's being catered in or sent into the office that I finally made a choice. And it took, you know, being hospitalized, getting my appendix out, and taking a long time to recover, you know, being hospitalized, getting my appendix out and taking a long time to recover from that surgery to finally say, okay, enough's enough. And so

what I did back then, which, you know, we didn't have Google when I was going through high school. So I learned how to research the hard way. You go to the library, you check out periodicals, you look through law journals, you look through the microfiche, all that kind of stuff. And so I went to the library to learn about health and how to improve my health and lose weight and feel better. And one of the first books that I came across was actually by Gabriel Koussens, Conscious Eating. And he had this concept in there that just, it just hit, you know, hit my head so hard that I was just like, what have I been doing? And what he says in this book is that the majority of foods on a grocery store shelf are dead. It's dead food.

And that's exactly how I felt for most of my life was dead. I felt like a zombie. And so I was like, oh, okay, I got it. I got to eat alive food. I got to eat real food that comes from nature. And so I slowly started to make these changes and then finding alternative societies that didn't eat kind of the garbage out there didn't eat the processed food weren't going to the fast foods and and trying to find these different um you know uh role models and books and other things and of course one of your first books ultra metabolism back then um you know i came across and i was like yes this is it right and? And so I started to make these changes.

And everyone around me was like, Bonnie, what's going on? You look like a completely different person. And I look back at those pictures of when I was so inflamed. I mean, because really that's what it was. It was just inflammation of my entire body. And when I look back at those pictures, I feel the pain that I used to feel. And you asked me, you know, what drives your passion for quality ingredients and doing this work? It's that feeling of, I don't want anyone to feel that way. And I know there

are so many people out there that feel that way right now. And they have no idea how easy it is to stop feeling that way and make a change for the better and their whole life can improve. I think there's so many people in this world right now are on these endless cycles of trying to lose weight every, you know, few months and then they gain it back and then they get another health ailment and then they, you know, gain more weight and then they lose it and then they gain it back and they're just on this constant yo-yo cycle. But when you move to real food, whole food that hasn't been adulterated by the food industry, your body regulates itself. Yeah. And I mean, I have so many stories of people in my family and people you've helped, like when I called

you when my dad was really sick. And, you know, I explained everything about what was happening with my dad. And you told me, you said, Bonnie, it sounds like inflammation of the brain, diabetes of the brain. You need to get his food under control and that those those episodes will go away. You know, he will get better. And that's exactly what's happening. Inflammation is part of the body's natural defense system. However, when your immune

system shifts out of balance, inflammation can run rampant, causing a chronic smoldering fire inside of your body that contributes to illness and disease. Dr. Hyman discussed how our diet drives inflammatory diseases in his conversation with Dr. David Perlmutter. You talked about inflammation being a huge issue in Alzheimer's, but it's also an issue in depression, in ADHD, in autism, in Parkinson's disease. In cancer, in diabetes, in coronary artery disease. It's pretty much every chronic illness, but particularly the brain, and I don't think people realize that. And so the the question is what is driving all this

inflammation right in a word uh our diets and we can start there and then work through the whole mechanistic pathway that ultimately leads to people losing their cognitive function so our diets being higher in simple carbohydrates with reduction in healthy fat reduction in dietary fiber paves the way through multiple mechanisms for our blood sugars to rise our insulin activity to reduce and ultimately that leads to inflammation and they call alzheimer's now type 3 diabetes that's right diabetes of the brain exactly right so it puts the ball back in the court of you the consumer not you mark i'm the doctor but you the consumer to do something and do it right now and that is simply change your diet other things are really important restorative sleep aerobic exercise meditation we could talk about

a lot of things that's anti-inflammatory to meditate you bet but if we can simply focus on the fact that the global diet is becoming westernized that is increasing inflammation globally and we're seeing incredible increased rates of things like alzheimer's globally those are important dots to connect and important dots to leverage because we could turn this thing around yeah it's both it's both the diet and how the diet affects our microbiome exactly right which is influencing our brain all the time through creating inflammatory molecules that get to the brain and how does how does your poop get to your brain that doesn't even make sense could you break that down for us sure break down the poop uh and as you've written about, and you coined the term

diabesity, the relationship between diabetes, higher blood sugar, obesity, creation of inflammatory chemicals damaging the brain, heart, et cetera, we now know that what sets the, what we call the set point of inflammation in the body is a one-cell layer thick that, as you've said in the past, separates the set point of inflammation in the body is a one cell layer thick that as you've said in the past separates the garbage dump those are your words from right i think i call it from the rest of the body chemicals in the gut remain by and large dangerous damaging chemicals we call them antigens need to stay there when they transgress the gut lining get through the gut lining

they stimulate immune cells to create the very mediators of inflammation chemicals that we call cytokines that then initiate these damaging activities for cells throughout the body the downstream effect of inflammation is an a turning on of the production of chemicals called free radicals, damaging chemicals that damage our protein, our fat, and even our DNA, and even our energy producers called mitochondria. So it all starts with diet. Diet nurtures our 100 trillion microbial friends that live in the gut and want me to be healthy.

They want you to be healthy, but we have to feed them right. The ball is very much on your side of the net. It's not up to me on the other side of the net, the doctor, to fix this. It's up to you to hit that ball appropriately with some topspin so that I can't return it. Give it a good shot. And here's how to do it. How? The broad strokes are more dietary fiber, less simple carbohydrates, and changing the quality of the fat that we eat. I think those are, nothing's indelible, but I think, you know, those are important bullet points that if we could just get that message across, that's really

very, very fundamental. The type of fat that is eaten in Western cultures is awful. It's highly processed omega-6 oils. Soybean oil, canola oil. Soybean, sunflower that dramatically increase the production of inflammatory chemicals in the body and get back to where you and I started our conversation today. These are new. I mean, we didn't have these oils a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago. You're right. We increased our intake of soybean oil, which is now 10% of our calories, 1,000-fold since 1900.

And canola oil that health advocates still talk about, which was developed at the turn of the century as an industrial oil to lubricate machinery. Whereas the wrong foods will make you sick, the right foods will transform your body in even just a few days. Dr. Hyman and Vani Hari also discussed how we can start to turn our health around by making more informed decisions about what we eat. We're in a situation right now where we need to take our health very seriously. If anything, if anything about the world's events today show you is that government is not going to save us. We need to save ourselves. And so,

and we're going to have to save our kids and we're going to have to save our families. And so we have the responsibility to learn about these chemicals in food and make a choice and not make a choice not to, you know, obviously buy these products and support these companies and vote with our dollars. I'm a little more hardcore than you. I'm like, don't buy anything with a label. You know, if it ain't made by God, don't eat it. If it's made by man, don't eat it. You make sure you don't eat it, right? So you want to make sure if you look at a food, you recognize what it is. An avocado is made by God, but a Twinkie isn't. And Lucky Charms are certainly not made by God. So that's an easy

thing. It's hard to do because people want convenience, I understand. But we really have a crisis in this country. But one of the things you help us understand is how to read labels and how to be a smart consumer. Because unless we're paying attention, and I even get duped sometimes. Sometimes I'll pick up something and look healthy, and I'll forget to turn the ingredient list over. And I get home and I'm like, oh, God, this is terrible. Why would I even want to eat this? You know, I think what's really important about reading labels is that, you know, there's this kind of three-question detox that I talk about at the end of Feeding You Lies.

And this is kind of how you start the process of really training your mind to eat real food. You start with the question, the first question, what are the ingredients? So you have to know kind of everything that you're eating. And so if you sit down for a meal and you don't know the ingredients, stop eating that meal and find out. And once you read the ingredients and look at look at them do you understand them all do are they real food are they you know is it an apple cinnamon and sea salt or is it tbhq and you know blue number one uh tbhq by the way is a very popular synthetic preservative that they use in very popular products. And Reese's peanut butter cups comes to mind. Oh, no, I used to love those.

Oh, yeah. And this is actually an ingredient that negatively affects your T cells in your bodies and promotes allergies. So if you have an allergic, just an allergy to anything, it can just increase your immune response to that allergy. And you can have a very adverse reaction. And if you eat a lot of foods with this, it's been linked to vision disturbances, stomach cancer, behavioral problems in children, all sorts of things. And this is a preservative that's in a lot of things. But, you know, when you read that on a label, TBHQ, you have to ask yourself, what is that, right?

And so that leads you to the second question, which is, are these ingredients nutritious? Is TBHQ nutritious? Hell no. No, hell no, right? And so then you start to realize realize like, why am I eating these non-nutritious ingredients? And maybe I need to choose something different. And then the third question you ask yourself is, where do these ingredients come from? Are they made in a

laboratory, in a chemical factory? And in the case of natural flavors that you mentioned, yes, they are. And so removing natural flavors from your diet is like the number one thing, I think. And it's so, you know, even though there's many more chemicals that are many more, much more harmful to you, almost 99% of the products on product shelves at the grocery store have natural flavors. So if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. So one of the things that I want you to do when you go look in your kitchen, if you avoid natural flavor, you avoid many of those. So one of the things that I want you to do when you go look in your kitchen, if you're watching this, and I just want to make

sure you just get rid of all the corn, soy, canola, cotton seed oil, any of those, just throw them away, get rid of them, don't even donate them. They just do not belong in your diet, because every time you go out to eat, there's a likelihood that you're eating one of those oils. And that's, you know, very much contributing to the demise of our health in this, in this world. Not only are those oils high in omega-6, which again, affect our omega-3 balance, but also are somewhat rancid of the way that they're produced. They are produced with hexane, a carcinogenic substance that is a chemical that allows the solvent to allow them to extract the oils from corn and soy, etc. And this is a very popular way to extract the oils. And it's something that

the FDA doesn't even regulate, doesn't even test for the hexane residue that's left in a lot of these oils. So when you're cooking with an oil, I want you to start with something that is as close to nature as possible. An extra virgin olive oil, unrefined coconut oil. I found that actually refined coconut oil is a great substitute for frying things in. The reason is because it doesn't have the flavor of coconut oil, but has some health benefit versus frying in a corn or canola oil or soybean oil. And grass-fed butter and ghee i use those four the most in my um in my kitchen now what about avocado i do use some avocado oil in some of the products from like primal kitchen and others that you know have popularized avocado oil

and okay last question because this is really important You know, you are guiding us on how to reclaim our health and reclaim our kitchens and our bodies through making different choices about what we eat personally, what we feed our families. But you're also driving huge change in the food system. And my question to you, Bonnie, is, you know, people listening might go, well, you know, she's very special. She's an activist. What can I do? I can't make a difference. But that's not really true. So what can people do? What action things can people do to be our own food activists and advocates and change the system? Because we all need to change the system together. So the best thing that people can do is to share what they learn about food with the people they love, their friends, their family, do whatever they can

to teach them, educate them. If you learn about an ingredient, tell someone about it. You know, try not to be the food police or go into people's pantries and throw stuff out like I do. But you can do it in a very respectful way, in an educational way. And that's how you bring about changes, you know, through education of what's lot of bad food, always bring something that's amazing and healthy, that's delicious so that people can see, you know, what it tastes like and try a new food and, you know, really become the change, right? Be the change in your environment and to those around you. Taking back our kitchens and embracing the act of cooking real food is one of the single most important things we can do to reclaim our health. While food is the primary driver of our chronic disease epidemic, the good news is it is also the solution.

Not just for prevention, but for reversal or even long-standing and difficult-to-treat chronic diseases. And it works fast. Not in years, but in weeks or months, sometimes even days. If you'd like to learn more about the topics you heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Bonnie Hari and Dr. David Perlmutter. If you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. 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.