The Dr. Hyman Show - How Having Variety In Your Diet Creates Health

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker. It can be easy to fall into a food rut, eating the same things week in and week out. Consuming a variety of foods not only adds more excitement to your meals, but it’s also essential for expanding the nutritional diversity of your diet. There are thousands of phytochemicals, also called phytonutrients, found in whole foods like vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, spices, and tea, among many other things. These natural compounds create a variety of colors in our plant foods and signal various benefits. In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. William Li, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, and Dhru Purohit about why having diversity in your diet and eating a range of colorful produce is the ideal way to promote optimal health.  Dr. Li is a world-renowned physician, scientist, speaker, and author of Eat to Beat Disease—The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. He is best known for leading the Angiogenesis Foundation. His groundbreaking work has impacted more than 70 diseases, including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease, and obesity.  Dr. Jeff Bland is the founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature’s greatest innovations—the immune system. A nutritional biochemist by training, Jeff began in academia as a university professor. Jeff then spent three decades working alongside other pioneers in the natural products industry. In 1991, he and his wife, Susan, founded the Institute for Functional Medicine. In 2012, Jeff founded another educational nonprofit called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30 million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. William Li Dr. Jeffrey Bland Dhru Purohit

Hi, Doctors Pharmacy listeners, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me, you know that I'm obsessed with understanding the latest research on longevity and how we can apply it to our daily lives. So I wrote a book about it. Think of it as a roadmap to optimal aging. It's called Young Forever, and it comes out February 21st, 2023. It's never too early or too late to take control of your health. And this book will show you how. Visit youngforeverbook.com to learn more and pre-order now. Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We're beginning to understand there's this incredible journey that happens in our body with foods that we eat

and they activate our health defenses. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing

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nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. No single food contains all of the necessary ingredients for overall health and wellness. When we consume a diverse range of foods, we receive a diverse range of nutrients. Regularly eating a balanced diet and a wide range of food with a diversity of colors like ensuring our bodies have the latest and greatest software updates to improve immune resilience, reduce chronic inflammation, and improve cognitive health. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy on the importance of nutritional diversity in our diets. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. William Lee on how different foods interact with

our body, with Dr. Jeffrey Bland on using food as medicine to support the immune system, and with Drew Prowitt on different foods to feed the microbiome. Let's jump in. Most people understand they need to eat to live, and they need to actually have the ability to choose foods that are nourishing and have not too many calories. But people don't understand the power locked in the kingdom of plants and even animals that are medicinal, true drugs in the sense of pharmacologic activity. And as I began to think about this science years ago, when I was studying functional medicine, learning about food as medicine, I'm like, what does that mean? And I began to look at the biochemistry and biology and the pathways and how these plant

compounds somehow know to bind to specific receptors in our body. It doesn't even make sense. Like, it makes sense that you have, you know, testosterone binding to a testosterone receptor, insulin binding to an insulin receptor in the body. But why in the heck would we have a broccoli receptor or a seaweed receptor, you know? And yet the body has co-evolved with these compounds that we don't think of as essential, but I think of them as conditionally essential. You're not necessarily going to get a deficiency disease, but you're going to get a chronic disease if you don't eat them. And there's massively protective foods. And we were chatting earlier before the podcast that right now in science, and it's advancing so fast that we are understanding the mechanisms by which food

actually has its action and how we can use it in a pharmacologic way. It's not like, oh, just eat healthy. There are, like, just like there are thousands of drugs, there are thousands of molecules in food, and we can use those in very specific, targeted ways to do different things in the body to create health, or if we eat the wrong things, to create disease. So you're this extraordinary scientist. You've been, you know, published in all the major medical journals at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Tufts. And somehow, you come back to this simple notion that Hippocrates said 5,000 or how many years ago, let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. What made you take that left turn? Or maybe it was

a straight ahead. Every elbow else is going left. And how do you begin to unpack this notion that was so critical for you to understand that you could eat to beat disease? Yeah, well, so Mark, like yourself, you know, as an MD, we're trained to identify diseases, diagnose diseases, and write prescriptions and send patients to specialists to take care of the disease. But we all know that the ways that we have been trained in medicine fall short of what it is that patients really seek. And if you've ever been a patient yourself, you certainly know, you know, what we want is really to be healthy and to be well. It's okay to get sick once in a while, but if you are, you want to kind of bounce back. And so that

led me as an internal medicine doctor to ask the question that nobody in medical school ever taught me, which is what is health? Health is not just the absence of disease. That's an extremely unsatisfying definition, the absence of something like what's a good day. It's the absence of rain. That doesn't make any sense. So you want to actually have a definition and the working definition that I came to emerged out of 25 years that I had involved with drug development. I'm still doing it. But the idea with drug development is that we have to understand the body inside and out. We have to identify those molecular pathways, those receptors, the Achilles heel of disease. Well, turn that inside up, upend that idea. You still need to know what the mechanisms are and the

receptors are, but rather than looking at the Achilles heel of disease, let's take a look at the struts that support the infrastructure that support health. And if you take a look at everything that is unpharmaceutical with a pH, you wind up actually with pharmaceutical with an F, which is why I love being on the doctor's pharmacy. Right. So look, I mean, like you and I have had many of these conversations before. And for me, I've been involved with developing treatments that help to control the blood supply of cancers and blindness in the eye. I've been involved with diabetes treatments for complications like chronic wounds and cell therapies and gene therapies, you know, to treat these really ambitious diseases that we

don't have successful cures for yet. Along the way, what I realized is by looking at the, going back and walking that path that I was on, that these same pathways, same receptors that, you know, drugs have a very tall reach for, and most of them haven't actually climbed up the ladder yet. Mother Nature beat us to the punch. There are foods that already hit these receptors and usually not one at a time like we do with pharmaceuticals. Yeah. Mother Nature actually basically puts a Gatling gun of these natural biochemicals that activate our health. So treating disease, you send a heat-seeking misceline. But activating health, you basically take this cluster of incredibly wonderful, blooming, health-blooming molecules to be able to make our bodies do what

they want to do. It's sort of like a shotgun versus a sniper's rifle, kind of. But you said it was so profound, I want to highlight it because most people might have missed it. What you said is that these pharmacological targets are actually embedded in our biology. They weren't designed for drugs. They were designed for our internal metabolic processes, but also to work in this co-evolutionary way with plants and then with animals that eat the plants. This is a whole other conversation, which is kind of fascinating, about how we now know there are activated metabolites and phytochemical compounds in meat and milk from animals that eat a wide diversity of forage. So we're now learning that there are actually phytochemical compounds in animal food.

So it's not just plants where you can get it. And they may be even better for you. And I think that the concept of these compounds as acting on key aspects of our biology that are designed to create health is a really radical idea. And often people don't understand that these molecules were not created by the plants for us. They're their own defense mechanisms. They're their communication systems.

They're there to attract pollinators. They're there to attract seed collector. I mean, there's a reason nature does this. They're there to communicate messages to the neighboring plants, to ward off predators. I mean, plants have 20 different senses, which is just remarkable to me. And these plant compounds, we're really using them because our biology is lazy and is only doing what it absolutely has to do. And so we're going to borrow, like we get vitamin C from food, we borrow these phytochemicals to regulate key processes in our body from the immune function to the microbiome cell, the detoxification,

the hormonal regulation to our brain chemistry. And what you're talking about is so important. What you're talking about is taking food in a different context to create health. That most medicine is about trying to push down or shut down or block or interfere with some pathway to mitigate disease, not to cure it usually, right? Unless we have an antibiotic, but even that doesn't always work. And so we really have a whole different framework now about how to use food as medicine. It's not some theoretical concept. It's actually a scientific proven model of what to do to actually activate healing systems in the body. Yeah. And honestly, this is actually how medicine was practiced back in the days of these ancient food cultures.

I mean, I know that you have, like me, a great affinity for the Mediterranean and Asia. Both of us share lots of travels in that area. And you go back to 3,000 years ago, and you go back to Hippocrates, or you go back to Confucius, and the people who actually wrote the first kind of tomes relating to health and medicine. Look, people cared about health going way back, but they didn't have pharmaceuticals. A lot of people don't understand how recently pharmaceuticals actually were. Before, all we had was the material around us. And everybody knew inherently stuff that you eat, that there are stuff that you eat that your body doesn't agree with.

It's going to make you sick, right? A great example is just like poisonous mushroom in the woods. People learn how to actually avoid those. Well, somehow we've lost the defensive mechanism to avoid the poisonous things on the grocery shelves, yet we could recognize that deadly ring mushroom, blue mushroom in the woods. And I think what we're trying to do now is regain our own natural instincts. So they've always been with us. We're just kind of bringing it to the forefront. And the one thing that I think is new is we are bringing some really deep science, which is where I come from. I'm a vascular biologist. You know, the science is actually helping to illuminate a new depth of understanding it's

not just a what but it's the wise yeah so tell us down going on the rabbit hole a little bit of what some of the biggest discoveries have been of how food modulates our healing systems and how it actually helps us create health yeah well look you know, when I set out to study food as medicine, the things that I, I reached for was what I knew was proven in the pharmaceutical world. We know that your blood supply is important. Think about what cardiologists spend all this time doing, trying to get better blood flow, uh, or in, uh, oncology for cancer treatments, they're trying to cut off the blood supply to cancers. And so that was one of the things that I thought, well, maybe let's see what food does. So throwing food and food extracts and food bioactives into the same systems used to

develop medicines used by cardiologists and oncologists yielded really like a whole new playbook of how to actually use foods to help improve our circulation, which happens to be one of our body's health defenses, which is what I write about in Eat to Beat Disease. What I actually say is that when it comes to food and health, it's not just about the food. It's about how our body responds to what you put it in. That goes to stem cells, that goes to our microbiome, it goes to our DNA repair mechanisms, and it also goes to our immune system, which is both, it's a double-edged sword. You've got the inflammatory side, you've got the, you know, defense fighting the defensive side as well. And so when I think about how foods benefit us, I try to insert that lens into the thinking process

to say, all right, so which of our health defenses does any particular food activate? And give us some examples of how a particular food will activate a particular defense system and what those defense systems are. Because I think it's important. You know, you're one of the few doctors out there. I mean, I just had a conversation with Andy Weil yesterday. He talked about the body's own healing systems in a very kind of high level, but you go really granular and you're one of the few doctors to talk about how the body has its own healing mechanisms and that we're not doing enough to activate those healing mechanisms. We all know that we have that. If we cut our skin, it heals,

right? How does that happen? It's not a miracle. It's biology. And that doesn't happen only on the outside. It happens on the inside. So how do we activate our healing systems? What are those healing systems? And how do specific foods activate different healing systems? Yeah, well, okay. So let's follow a piece of food that we want to put in our mouth, right? So we're chewing it up. Guess what? Our food actually interacts with the healthy gut bacteria that lives in part on our tongue. So our tongue has healthy gut bacteria as well. The gut starts in the mouth and it goes all the way to the anus. And so when we eat foods like a beet, for example, or a piece of spinach, and we're chewing and enjoying the beet. It turns out that the

nitrogen that the plant naturally absorbed in the soil gets converted by our gut microbiome that live in the little recesses of our tongue. So think about it. You get up in the morning, and you're brushing your tongue. Okay, now it'll grow back. Okay. I don't do that. I think it's supposed to. Who brushes their tongue? I don't do that i think it's supposed to who's brushing their tongue i don't know you know but but people actually use this like dennis gives mouthwash yeah and they and they actually kill all the bacteria in your mouth it with the intent of actually um preventing cavities well look if you have good healthy gut bacteria in your mouth which is one of the body's health defense systems it actually works for you. It doesn't work against you. And it actually suppresses cavities by itself. So eat a piece of spinach or beet, chew it up. The bacteria actually change the nitrogen into a form that when you swallow it,

gets absorbed in your stomach. We're still following the food along as a chemical form that is nitric oxide. Now nitric oxide suddenly is absorbed in the stomach, in your blood, in your blood vessels, carried by the circulation, which causes vasodilation. Now your blood pressure falls. And why is that important? Because for every, I mean, hypertension, one of the big causes of stroke, for example, and for every single point, we can lower that top number in the blood pressure, you know, 140 over 90, we decrease our risk of stroke by 5%. So it's meaningful. So a nitric oxide also has other benefits for our body as well. It actually calls another defense system stem cells to help us heal. So the stem cells

live in a bone marrow, have nitric oxide. Now they fly into the bloodstream like bees in a hive looking for organs to actually repair. So just eating a spinach or beet, for example, will immediately help our cardiovascular system, help us, our regeneration system, and also can help grow blood vessels that we need to heal. That's just one example of how we can track kind of like the, you know, it's like being like a, like a, um, going on safari in Africa, you know, you're, you're in a Jeep with a camera and trying to follow, follow on what's going on. And we're beginning to understand there's this, you know, incredible, uh, journey

that happens in our body once with foods that we eat and they activate our health defenses. Yeah. One of the favorite things I love to talk about is how we've sort of lost our nutritional wisdom. And historically, we were attracted to the right foods. Now we're not, because our brain chemistry hormones and our microbiome have all been hijacked and are sending chaotic signals to our brain about what to eat. But historically, we crave the right things. And when you eat in a certain way, you don't actually look at food the same way. I mean, when you see, when I see processed food or I go by a Starbucks and I see all the muffins, it doesn't look like food to me. I'm like, well, why would I eat that? It's like eating a rock. It just doesn't even interest me. And it's not because I'm depriving myself. It's because

I've changed my nutritional wisdom in my innate biology to crave the right things. And what happens is when you look at this phytochemical story, the flavors in our food come from these molecules. So actually, the more flavorful a thing is naturally, not when you put all kinds of stuff on it, but naturally, actually, the better it is for you, the more medicine is in the food. Well, and you know, when you treat the food with medicines, like putting pesticides on foods, for example, you might make it look a little bit nicer. But in fact, you know, I always like to talk about this example. I used to be a skeptic about organic foods. And the reason is because there was so much marketing on

there. And I, and you know, like telling me to have less, less something bad doesn't attract me. I want to know, like, I want a different reason. And, and so I started to talk to a horticulturalist and, uh, and they told me something really important. They said, you know, that a plant like a strawberry or a coffee bean, uh they're existing in the wild and the pests, the little bugs, insects nibble at their leaves and stems. Yeah, they produce more chemicals. They produce more chemicals because they view the little nibbles as an injury. So in response, as a wound healing response, they create more electric acid in a strawberry or more chlorogenic acid in the coffee bean. And sure enough, when you actually put pesticides on a strawberry or a coffee,

which is conventionally grown, you wind up, they don't need to make more of those chemicals. And so what you wind up having is something that looks like a coffee bean and something that looks like a strawberry, but it's actually relatively deficient in what mother nature would have otherwise served up that's actually good forient in what mother nature would have otherwise served up that's actually good for our body. And so, you know, I started to change my mind more good as opposed to less bad. Now that actually attracts me. It's true. I think the other point to make on the back of that is that when we put these chemicals on the soil, it kills all the life in the soil. So when you till the soil, when you put fertilizer on it,

when you pesticides, herbicides, it literally kills the microbiome of the soil. And the plants are in an intimate relationship with the microbiome of the soil. They're feeding the microbiome by bringing in carbon dioxide, turning that into metabolizable starch. And then in turn, those bacteria are helping the plant extract nutrients from the soil, minerals, vitamins, all kinds of stuff that the soil has that benefits the plant. So it's this mutualism that occurs that when we break that cycle, we end up, as we see now, with many of our fruits and vegetables having dramatically lower levels of nutrients than they did even 50 years ago.

And that terrifies me because these nutrients are not just kind of window dressing on our food. They're critical molecules that are, they call them vitamins, vital for life. That's what they have, vitamins that they call. And that was the whole point of these things that you'd get sick and die if you didn't eat them. So we're in a kind of a pandemic of that. Well, and I totally agree because I think you and I

were at a meeting once where we both heard there was like only 60 harvests left in topsoil in America. Like, just think about that. Like, you can count that off, you know, with a family member on hands and fingers and toes. That is truly scary. And so I think that, you know, the greater, the more we're alert to the fact that if we want to take good care of ourselves, we don't want to get more complicated. We want to get more simple. We want to actually follow our body's instincts to eat those things that are more natural, that are less processed, that are plant-based. And, you know, ultimately, you know, you were talking earlier about,

you know, animals eating plants, you know, even these delicious seafoods, oily fish that people actually eat. At the end of the day, it's big fish eating smaller fish eating smaller fish eating plants. And that's where the omega-3s come from. Exactly. It's the algae, right? Exactly. Yeah, it's so true. I think, you know, the interesting thing that I've been learning about is that the animals left to their own devices, they'll eat three or four main crops or foods, but if they're free to eat and forage for a wide variety of plants,

they might eat up to 50 or 100 different plants, and they'll sample little bits of each one, kind of like taking their vitamins or their daily pharmaceutical drugs. And those animals, so if you take a feedlot cow, it takes an enormous amount of investment to keep it healthy. Antibiotics, hormones, you know, all kinds of, you know, very aggressive measures because they're not eating their natural diet. And the molecules

in there that we want aren't there. And there may be inflammatory molecules. When you take a grass fed cow, better. But if it's only eating one or two kinds of grasses, that's not great, and they need extra support. Whereas regeneratively raised cows foraging on maybe 100 different plants actually don't need medicines, don't need antibiotics, don't get sick. If the plants are the right plants to actually grow to their ideal weight as fast as feedlot cows and don't release as much methane. I mean, it's really fascinating when you get into the science of the biology of how

much the interrelation between soil, plants, animals, and humans exists. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Mark. I'm excited to share with you a brand that I trust whose product I've seen value in firsthand, InsideTracker. Inside Tracker is a wellness tracker that uses science and technology to deliver ultra-personalized healthcare guidance. Their cutting-edge algorithmic engine analyzes your blood, your DNA, your lifestyle habits, and then gives you an actionable set of recommendations to help you meet your health and wellness goals. Since 2009, Inside Tracker's science team from Harvard, Tufts, MIT have been bringing personalized nutrition and wellness to the world with a powerful evidence-based digital platform.

Their guiding principle is that your body is unique, so your nutrition, exercise, wellness plans should be too. And that's why InsideTracker gives you optimal biomarker zones and a customized dashboard to help you change your body for the better. My team tried InsideTracker and they loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to adopt improvements like taking a vitamin D supplement after seeing they were deficient or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels and not for me, of course, I promise that. If you're curious about getting your own health program that's tailored to your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out

InsideTracker. This Valentine's Day, they're offering my community 20% off at InsideTracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. That's InsideTracker, 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. What we've discovered is that there are compounds in food that we thought were, we call them secondary compounds, or I mean, this almost sounds like your second cousin, like it's not really that important. And these compounds in food are not protein, fat,

carbohydrate, fiber, vitamins, minerals, or something else, which turns out we've evolved with for millennia that are critical if we wanna be healthy. You don't necessarily get a deficiency disease like scurvy or rickets if you don't have it, but you get chronic disease later on in life. And so what's really exciting is this world of phytochemicals, which is a weird word, or phytonutrients.

Phyto, not the dog, but phyto, P-H-Y-T-O, which means plant. So plant compounds that are in plants that somehow affect our biology in real time. And this is what I think we mean when we say food is medicine or food is information. I mean, the macronutrients are information, the micronutrients are information, but the phytonutrients are also information. And it turns out they've been a completely ignored area of medicine that may turn out to be the most important discovery of our time of how to use food to heal chronic disease. And I see this all the time in my practice. And it's a miracle.

Like, I think, I mean, literally, if I saw this in medical school, I would have, like, won the Nobel Prize because you don't see this. But now we see it all the time for people who are doing functional medicine with real transformations. And I've told these stories over and over. I've had guests on the show. We talked about the – it's just tremendous. So what you helped us understand over 30 years is this field of food as medicine. And now we're getting more and more granular about it.

And one of the exciting areas is how to use food as medicine to rejuvenate your immune system. And that's what I want to get into. So we're going to talk about a bunch of compounds, and there's a lot of them. There's 25,000 or so of these compounds. The Rockefeller Foundation is spending hundreds of millions of dollars creating a periodic table of phytochemicals. We're learning about how they regulate everything in our biology from detoxification to our microbiome, to our immune system, to our mitochondria, to hormones. I mean, pretty much everything, right? And we don't really even learn about them in medical school.

We don't talk about them. And they are probably among the most important things we can do to regulate our biology. And we've heard about superfoods. Well, what makes them super? It's these phytochemicals, right? Blueberries, right? We've talked about that. We know about catechins in green tea

or parenthesitamines in berries or glucosinolates in broccoli. Maybe you don't know what that is, but anyway, they're all good stuff that's in the food. And it turns out that with this immune story, there are a bunch of compounds in food, some of them recently discovered, powerful effects to turn the clock back of aging of your immune system. And these compounds, you've come across through your research. So I want you to tell us a story of this product, this compound, well, not a compound, but this food called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And there may be other foods that help us rejuvenate our immune system, but I want to go down the trail of this buckwheat, because it kind of illustrates the science behind what we're talking about.

Yeah, I think this is so powerful. So before you start, I want you to tell the story, because what do they say? Chance, famous, impaired mind, right? So our genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. And you have been reading the science and you're reading all these weird papers that no one else bothers to read and, you know, end up, you know, with three readers. When you read this stuff and you came across something in one of these papers, it sort

of caught your attention about a molecule that you'd never heard about. Tell us about that date and the discovery. Yeah, this was one of those like ahas and one of the reasons I really like the primary literature because often you'll pick up little tidbits and you'll say, wow, that's interesting. I never thought about that. So this was an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2017 from Vanderbilt University. And it was describing a new way of managing blood pressure by using the immune system, because the immune cells speak to the walls of the blood vessels, and they can cause them to relax and lower blood pressure. And this compound that they were studying had a name,

scientific name, called 2-hydroxylbenzolamine. Yeah, something everybody has in their kitchen cabinet, right? Exactly. 2-hydroxybenzolamine. The abbreviation is 2-HOBA, H-O-B-A, so 2-HOBA. And I was reading the paper. I thought, well, that's really interesting how the immune system could be connected to blood pressure in ways that I hadn't thought about. So then I went to the experimental part of the paper and was reading the fine print.

And there was a little paragraph saying that there's only one place in nature that this two-hoba can be found. It's in this Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And I thought, well, hold on, I don't know anything about it. What's this Himalayan tartary buckwheat? I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about food. Yeah, never heard of it. But I never heard about this. So I think that you hit on an incredibly important part of this story. Because at first I thought, well, this Himalayan tartary buckwheat,, this Tujoba story is kind of interesting. But then as I started to do more research into what was known about Himalayan Ternary Buckwheat, I found out that this 60 to 100 times more phytochemicals had to do with over 100 different phytochemicals, not just to hobo. It was one of the most immune active

nutrient rich plant foods ever discovered in the world. So it's like the most amazing new superfood we've ever found. That's right. And then to make it historically interesting, I traced the history and I found out that that particular food had come from Asia across to Northern Europe and then had gotten on the boats to come to colonial America. And it was one of the first foods that was used in colonial America because it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, irrigation. It fights off weeds. It's very, very good and different climactic. And it likes toxic soils that are rich in aluminum because it has an aluminum detoxifying gene. And I thought,

oh my word, why didn't this product stick around if it was already in the American food supply system? And I came to the conclusion, I don't know this is absolutely for sure, but I think it's because new cultivars of higher yielding wheat and other grains, because Himalayan tartar buckwheat is not a grain, it's a seed. And these new grains from the cereal family, which are genetically entirely different than Himalayan tartar buckwheat, and that's why Himalayan tartar buckwheat has no gluten, whereas grains have gluten, those products had higher yields.

They were much more mild tasting. They could be built into different baking products more easily. And people like the ability to put different flavors and not have that flavoring of the tartary buckwheat because of all those chemicals. Interesting. Okay, so let's talk about these phytochemicals. Because here's a plant that was grown

in some of the harshest conditions in the world, in the Himalayas, for soils, cold weather, no water, you know, just like solar, a lot of sun, high altitude, lots of sun. And what happens to plants when they're stressed like that? What happens to them? Well, that's very important. If you take a plant that's not used, its genes are not used to those hostile conditions, and you try to plant them there, they won't survive, right? Yeah. But if over the largest experiment of plant development in history, which is called natural selection, which is millions of years,

that plant has become capable of being prosperous in that hostile environment, it now has the genes that can regulate its response to stress. A plant has immune systems. This was an aha for me. So phytochemicals, in a sense, are the plant's own defense mechanisms. That's exactly right. And they are the active principles of the immune system in the plant. The plant doesn't have the same kind of immune system we have with circulating white blood cells. It has a different set of immune active components, much of which related to their phytochemicals that are serving as the immune system in the plant. So a hearty immune system in a plant that is resistant to stressful

and hostile conditions when eaten transfers those principles to the human. Which is amazing. So basically, we're borrowing the defense mechanisms of plants to help regulate our biology. That's right. And this is true not just for Himalayan partridge buckwheat, but for all foods that we eat that are real whole foods and have different molecules in them that are not the traditional protein, fat, carbs, and all that. And what's fascinating to me is that the tougher the life of the plant, the more powerful these phytochemicals are. And that's why this Himalayan buckwheat that's grown in the most difficult conditions on

the planet is among the most powerful superfoods. And it explains, for example, why when you eat a wild food, like a wild strawberry, it might be like the size of a peanut peanut is actually way more tasty than a strawberry you buy conventionally grown this is a big red strawberry yes because of these phytochemicals the phytochemical richness of the food and it turns out that these phytochemicals are ubiquitous in plants that that are are so important for our development and our growth and our healing and our repair systems, but we basically bred them out of our food supply. So the phytochemicals in the modern food supply are so much less than they used to be. We see more wild foods. We used to eat

foods grown in more difficult conditions. We used to eat foods that weren't all hybridized for starch and yield and drought and all this. It actually removes those. And what we've removed also is flavor. I mean, you know a tomato, that you get an heirloom tomato that you grow in your vine, you pick at the end of summer. It's like an explosion of flavor in your mouth. I mean, Karen Washington was on the podcast, talked about the first time she had a tomato like that. It blew her mind and led to a whole life of gardening and urban renewal and you know urban community gardens and those phytochemicals are are the things that actually

help us stay healthy and they they somehow figured out our bodies are lazy basically and so we only make the things that we got to make we don't make vitamin c we don't make a lot of things we get them from our food but we've've evolved. I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. We've evolved symbiotically with the plants. So we borrow their defense mechanisms. And it turns out we really need these if we want to really have robust health. We need these to create optimal health. And so our whole food supply is basically denuded of these phytochemicals. It's terrifying. And it turns out they're way more important than we thought in terms of our health, and particularly in terms of our immune health. And we call them secondary compounds.

They're what the plants use to help regulate their health and biology, and we borrow them for ours. And it's just an incredible story of our intricate and intimate relationship with nature. What was even more fascinating is that the food that we're eating today is so lacking in these compounds. It's also flavorless, like a flavorless cardboard tomato. Even your vegetables that we're eating are not necessarily as nutritious as they were 50 years ago. And they are, unfortunately, the majority of our diet today. And that's why we're seeing all this chronic disease. So I have a theory that it's the lack of phytochemicals over a long period of time that's

really driving a lot of the chronic disease. So I interviewed in one of my audio magazines years ago a professor at a university in Britain, and he had just written a series of papers in the British Journal of Medicine talking about what happened to the health of the British people when they moved away from the agrarian living into urbanized city living. And this would be the Victorian period. And he said, you know, it was thought that the people before who were living on farms had the really poor health habits and they were not achieving good nutrition. But when he went back and looked at the health records,

because it turns out in England that they have detailed handwritten health records on individuals going back several hundred years. They were really good at keeping these records. And when he studied these records, he found out that actually it was a misnomer that people that were eating these traditional diets, these kind of poor people's diets, the thick brown bread and the vegetables from the garden, they were actually very, very healthy. And they actually, if they didn't die of an injury or infection, they actually had a very much longer life expectancy than people who lived in the more modern Victorian era that were starting to eat the more processed foods. And he attributed this

all to what you just said, because he did quantitative studies showing the reduction in phytochemicals that had occurred when they moved into this more urbanized eating environment, 80% loss of phytochemicals based on his calculations. So I think that your point is very well taken because let's use the word vitamin. Everybody knows the word vitamin. What does vitamin derive from? Vite, life, amine, some compound that has an amine structure that promotes life. So we have vitamin B1, two, three, six, and so forth. And what we recognize that those are essential for life because if you don't get them, you die of a deficiency disease,

scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, xerophthalmy, and rickets. But there's no deficiency disease that you can identify for the lack of these phytochemicals. They just then set the tone for age-related disorders like senescence, which are much harder to study if they come on 20 years later than something in two months you can have scurvy. So this is the problem we've had.

We don't have a good biomarker for people getting nutrient deficiencies of phytochemicals where we have a good biomarker for vitamin C deficiency. Yeah. And I feel like the whole idea of food is pharmacology, eat your medicine. The name of this podcast is Doctors Pharmacy with an F. I think the whole idea is that these are medicinal compounds and flavor is what they produce. So when you eat really flavorful foods and plants, they're rich in phytochemicals. And that is a fascinating observation.

So flavor and the medicine of the food are totally connected. Okay, so let's stop just for a moment. This is a way station. What is flavor connected to? Taste. What is taste connected to? Taste is connected to a neurosensory mechanism

through a variety of different specialized cells that respond to specific tastings. Sweet, bitter, salty, umami, we know about the sour. These are unique feature sets within our neurological system that then regulate to our brain some sensations saying pleasant or unpleasant. Now let me take this a step farther. What we now recognize is that many of these phytochemicals, which have a sensory flavor of bitter, that those bitter sensors are not just on the tip of the tongue. They are

distributed throughout our whole body. We have taste receptors in our gut. Our gut is tasting. And what happens if the gut tastes a specific bitter phytochemical? It turns on an activity to release into the bloodstream hormones, this is called the intro endocrine system, that regulate blood sugar and inflammation. When you eat food, there's information in it far beyond calories, beyond protein, fat, fiber,

carbohydrate, and that information in food is driving all the biochemistry in your body. And it's even building the stuff you're made of. And there's literally billions of chemical reactions that happen in your body every second, and they're all regulated by various inputs, your thoughts, your feelings, your microbiome, and so forth. But the biggest input every single day that we use to modify our biology for good or bad are foods. And those foods determine the quality of your biology, the quality of your health, and the quality of your life at the end of the day. So we're going to be talking about how food is medicine, how it's a biological response modifier, how it's literally code that upgrades or downgrades your biological software with every single bite. So I'm going to use these five foods as an example of the power

of foods to regulate your biology. And the truth about it is that it is more effective than most medication. In fact, it works faster, better, it's cheaper, and it has very good side effects. So there's really a new understanding about the role of food as medicine, not as a sort of medicine light, but actually as more powerful than most current therapies for chronic disease. You know, just take diabetes, for example. There is no drug that can reverse diabetes, but food can, and that's been demonstrated over and over. So let's jump into these five foods. My first is probably something you've never heard about called cognac. And I don't mean the drink. I mean cognac root. It's a special kind of fiber.

It's from a tuber. It's Japanese tuber that is used in Japanese cuisine. And it's got zero calories, but it contains incredible fiber that is both prebiotic, which means it feeds the good part of your microbiome, but it also slows the absorption of sugar and fats into your bloodstream. So it helps you balance your blood sugar and cholesterol. And it's something you can buy as a powder and you can mix it in water and drink it, but also you can take it as noodles. Yes, I said noodles. So you can have your favorite noodle pasta dish, but instead swap out these noodles. And it actually provides an incredible benefit to your body in terms of the fiber and the regulation of your blood sugar and insulin, as well as cholesterol. And the noodles are often called shirataki noodles.

This is the Japanese name for them. You can Google them, but they're really good and yummy, and you can put all kinds of sauce on them and just treat them like pasta. So that's one of my favorites. Another one is a food that's been recently rediscovered that's pretty striking that has among the most phytochemicals of any plant food ever discovered. And it's buckwheat. And it's a particular kind of buckwheat from the Himalayas called Himalayan tartary buckwheat that's been around for over 3,500 years, but only recently rediscovered by my good friend, colleague, and mentor, Dr. Jeffrey Bland. I won't go into the whole story because we've talked about it before on the podcast, but this particular plant has grown in very tough conditions up in

the Himalayas. There's poor soils, it's cold weather, not so much rain. I mean, it's nasty to be a plant up there. And yet, because it's under such stress, it produces its own defense mechanisms, which are phytochemicals. So the plants produce these molecules, not for our benefit, but for their benefit. It's their immune system. It's their defense system. And so the harder the plant is stressed, the more these chemicals are produced. So a wild strawberry is way better than a organic strawberry is better than a commercial strawberry that's an industrial strawberry. Same thing with any food. So when you stress a plant like that, it produces all these phytochemicals. And what's interesting about Himalayan tartaribukwe is that it contains some of

these molecules that are in no other plants. And one of them in particular has a particular power to rejuvenate your immune system. And as we age, there's something called immunosenescence, which is the aging of our immune system. And that's why we see with COVID, for example, so many people who are older or chronically ill are getting sicker and dying because their immune systems can't handle it. So what the Himalayan tardybucoid has is phytochemicals that actually kill the zombie cells that are the immune senescent cells and really help your immune system rejuvenate. They also contain, you know, over 130 more phytochemicals that are polyphenols, risperidin, rutin. Quercetin, for example, is very

abundant in Himalayan tartar buckwheat. It's been found to regulate allergy, immunity, gut health, as well as be beneficial in prevention of COVID. So there's really some interesting compounds in there. Plus, it's got more protein, less starch and sugar, more minerals like magnesium and zinc than almost any other what we call grain. And the thing about it, it's not a grain. So if you're grain-free, you get to have buckwheat because it's actually a flour, and I guess you can eat flour. So the next category of foods, which is really a staple in my diet, I eat this every single day because one, I have a genetic problem that makes it hard for me to make a molecule called glutathione. And two,

it's just such a delicious food. And three, it has all these other benefits. So these are the cruciferous vegetables or brassicas, and they include things like broccoli, cabbage, collards, kohlrabi, kale. I think arula is part of it, and Brussels sprouts. So all those kinds of family of vegetables contain compounds called glucosinolates and sulforaphanes and many other compounds as well. But these have turned out to be incredibly powerful to upregulate a molecule in your body called glutathione. And this molecule has so many functions in the body, but particularly it's powerful in regulating the immune system and improving your antioxidant system and detoxifying. In fact, it's the master antioxidant, master detoxifier, and master regulator of your immune system. And it's made by the body, but it often is sluggish in making it when we're exposed to so many toxins.

And some of us, like me, have a gene that doesn't make that much of it. So, I mean, historically, we weren't exposed to 80,000 different toxic chemicals and all this pollution and crap. And so we really need to have a robust detox system. And so for me, it's really important to have at least two cups a day of these cruciferous vegetables. I like broccolini. I love that one. And you can mix and match and have all kinds of different ones, but these are really critical. Plus, not only do they contain these compounds that are detoxifying, but they're also anti-cancer. And in China, they did an incredible study where they looked at the urine samples among Chinese, and they did food questionnaires. They found that those who had the most of these compounds in their urine, namely, you know,

most of the sort of broccoli kind of extracts, or broccoli metabolites in their urine, namely, you know, most of the sort of broccoli kind of extracts, we say are broccoli metabolites in the urine, they are the lowest rates of cancer. So there's a direct correlation between high intakes of these foods and low rates of cancer. And Mark, before you go into the next one, I was just going to add in that if people don't love broccolini or broccoli, although it's an acquired taste, and if you put some nice little bit of butter, sea salt, they can also do broccoli sprouts, which have 10 times the amount. If you could just chat about that for a second. Yes, sure. So yeah, broccoli sprouts are like broccoli on steroids basically. And you can put them on salads. They're really delicious. They're

a little spicy, yummy. And they have really high levels of these phytochemicals like sulforaphane, glucosinolates. And then all these other compounds are also in these vegetables like magnesium, folate, as well as vitamin K and iron and many, many other really beneficial nutrients that we need. So it's a real staple. The next major category of food is mushrooms. And I'm not talking about the white button mushrooms, which actually are not that nutritious and particularly should not eat them raw because they have a natural carcinogen in them. But I'm talking about mushrooms that have been used for thousands of years in China and Japan and other countries and that actually have powerful medicinal properties.

And they contain a class of carbohydrates called polysaccharides. And these polysaccharides have dramatic potential to boost immune function, to help cancer, and many, many other things. So for example, my favorites are shiitake, maitake, and lion's mane. So shiitake is wonderful for immune function. Maitake is also wonderful for immune function, but also cancer prevention. And there's many, many studies on maitake and cancer. And then the last is lion's mane, which looks like a brain and actually is great for neuroplasticity. So you not only can take them as supplements, but you can cook them. I roast them in the oven. I saute them. They're delicious, a little garlic, and they're really yummy and they're great for you. And

there's a whole new mushroom explosion literally happening in our country with exploration of different kinds of edible mushrooms, therapeutic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms. So we're really entering a mushroom revolution and stay tuned because there's billions of dollars flowing into this marketplace. And the last, and again, there's 25,000 different molecules and I could have picked 10 other foods, right? But these are the ones that I kind of really like to talk about today. And the other is green tea. Now green tea has a classic compounds called epigallactocatic and gallates, which are powerful antioxidants, but they also upregulate glutathione. they're powerful in detoxification they're anti-cancer they've been shown to improve immune function for example

around covid so they're really powerful and you can just drink green tea and there's matcha there's sencha there's uh you know i like uh the brown rice one green tea with brown rice i think it's called uh jimacha or something i'm probably screwing that up. And it's great. And those are something you can incorporate in your day just as a cup of green tea or iced tea. I put matcha powder in my smoothie, for example. So there's a lot of ways to get it. I think these are really important superfoods that we should be incorporating in our diet on a regular basis. Mark, help us zoom out a little bit. And you talked about the power of food as medicine. You know, I don't think a lot of people understand how many total global deaths are directly linked to us having an ultra processed diet and not having the right types of foods in our diet that support our ability to make all these beautiful things happen that you were chatting about earlier. Yeah, it's staggering, Drew. In my lifetime, I've seen a dramatic change. When I was born,

5% was the obesity rate. Now it's 40%. I mean, it's staggering. It's an eightfold increase. And the reason is we've increased our intake of ultra processed foods. It's now 60% of our diet. If we are adults, 67% of our children. And it's also lack of protective foods. So it's too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the protective stuff like the foods I was just talking about. It accounts for over 11 million deaths a year. And I think that's a gross underestimate because about 75% of global deaths are caused from chronic disease. And most of that is driven by poor diet. And that's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, high blood pressure, strokes, Alzheimer's. All the things that people get sick and die of are primarily diet-related diseases.

And so that's why we see 75% of Americans overweight, 88% are metabolically unhealthy. What does that mean? That means they have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or high blood sugar. Those are all diseases of too much starch and sugar. They're basically this spectrum of prediabetes. And so we're in a massive crisis. And the beautiful thing is that food can literally transform all of those things. Even with infectious disease, we think, oh, you know, what does it have to do with getting a cold or COVID? But it turns out that 63% of hospitalizations for COVID could be attributed to poor diet. That's a staggering number. When you think almost two thirds of all the hospitalizations in America for COVID could have been prevented by poor diet, that would mean that

we probably wouldn't have to worry about the extreme measures we've gone to, lockdown, the shutdown, the masking, the vaccinations. All that is because we want to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed and overrun by COVID patients. So it would literally change the whole structure of our response to COVID overnight. And I think people don't understand how important food is to regulate your biology. And the reason is, Drew, is that when you understand what's in food, and I think it would be worth breaking it down a little bit, the most important thing to understand is that the quality matters. The source matters. Where it was grown matters. The quality of the seed matters. The quality of the soil matters. The way it was grown and transported and processed and where you could

buy it, all those things influence the quality of the nutrition in the plant or in the animal. And so we've developed a food system, which is really great at creating a lot of starchy, well-preserved carbohydrate calories that can sit on the shelf for years and not go bad. But that is not what we want to be eating because within food, when you look at the quality aspect, it says everything about how food can regulate your biology. So for example, protein, fat, carbs, I'll just go through a couple of examples. So protein, you think protein is protein, protein. Is it all the same? Well, no, it's not. If you're eating a feedlot cow versus let's say a regeneratively raised grass-fed cow, the effects on your biology are radically different, even if it's the same grams of protein. So for example, the

feedlot cow will be full of antibiotics, will be fed a lot of grain, will have a lot of omega-6 fats, may have all kinds of other inflammatory molecules in them because of the diet they're eating and the way they're raised, plus all the antibiotics and so forth. The regeneratively raised grass-fed cow is eating maybe a wide variety of plants, 50 to 100 different plants, many medicinal plants with all kinds of phytochemicals. They have higher levels of omega-3, higher levels of vitamins, higher levels of antioxidants, higher levels of what we call phytochemicals. And you go, wait a minute, Dr. Hyman, how are there phytochemicals in animals? That doesn't even make sense. They're called phyto, which means plants. How can there be plant chemicals in meat?

So the animals eat the plants and we eat the animals. And basically we are whatever we're eating ate. So we're seeing, for example, as high levels of some of these beneficial phytochemicals, like the catechins in, for example, goat milk has been eating certain shrubs and plants as we do in green tea. So that's profound to discover that. And the quality changes the effects on your biology. And there's been some studies looking at, if you eat, for example, wild meat versus feedlot meat, eat feedlot meat, same grams of protein, your inflammation goes up, eat wild meat goes down, right? So the quality matters. Fat's another example. You can eat the same grams of trans fat, like basically shortening as you do of omega-3 fats, which comes from fish. And it binds to a part of your cell called PPAR, which is basically a receptor

on the nucleus of your cells. And when the trans fat binds to that receptor, gram for gram, it turns on inflammation. It slows down your metabolism. It makes you pre-diabetic. When you have the same amount of fat from fish oil, it will actually reduce inflammation. It will speed up your metabolism and it'll reverse diabetes. So same bat in terms of the amount, but the quality matters. Same thing with carbohydrates. If you have Himalayan tartar buckwheat flour and you make pancakes from that versus modern dwarf wheat, which is super starchy, has way more gliadin proteins than traditional wheat and is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest, which is a terrible destroyer of your microbiome and the soil microbiome and also affects the risk for cancer.

And it's then preserved with something called calcium propionate, which is a preservative that causes autism and animal studies and hyperactivity behavior issues in kids. I mean, that's a very different kind of pancake, even though you're eating the same amount of carbohydrate. So that's just on the macronutrient level. But on the micronutrient level, there's also big differences in vitamin and mineral content, but the bigger differences are in the phytochemical content. There's a wonderful book called Eat Wild, which talks about, for example, they don't treat a wild blueberry and a conventional blueberry or a small purple Peruvian potato versus a giant, you know, Idaho starchy potato or a difference between sort of traditional Native American corn versus the

modern corn. Even though they're all corn or whatever, the phytochemicals are profoundly different and have tremendous differences in their biological effects. So when we're eating food, we're not just eating for energy. We're not just eating for protein, fat, or carbohydrate, or fiber. We're not just eating for vitamin minerals. We're eating for this class of compounds, which turns out to be probably the most single, most important regulator of all your biological functions and is the major determinant of the quality of your health and aging. So if you want to create health, these are not optional. So we talk about essential nutrients and vitamins and minerals as being essential to life. And if you don't have them, you die. Well, you're not going to get a deficiency disease if you don't have these

phytochemicals like scurvy or rickets, but you will develop chronic disease and you will age faster if you don't have these protective compounds in your body on a daily basis. So it's so important to understand that the quality of your diet matters at every single level and the source matters and all those things along the entire supply chain matter if you're going to actually think about what you're eating. Mark, that was a great breakdown. Now you talk about these 25,000 known chemical compounds and foods. And I think one thing to expand on is that we're not just eating them for us. We're eating them for something else that's in our body. Can you just talk about what that is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, you know, the truth is we may just be, um, we just may be a vehicle for, for the bacteria.

I mean, we're, we're not actually more human than we are bacterial. In fact, there's more bacteria in you than your own body cells, about 10 times. There's probably 100 times as much bacterial DNA as your own DNA, which is, let's say you have 20,000 genes, or maybe two or three or five million bacterial genes, all producing proteins, all of which are information molecules that are being absorbed and regulating your body's function. And there may be as many of the metabolites from bacteria in your blood as your own body's metabolites. It's just staggering. And we have just begun to sort of understand this. We talk about our metabolome, which is all the biochemical

reactions in our body, which is like, you know, thousands and tens of thousands but there's also the metabolome of the microbiome and so the quality of your microbiome determines the quality of your health which is all those bugs in your gut which is essentially the biggest and most important organ in your body and what determines the quality of your microbiome is what you're eating so if you're feeding it refined oils and processed food and sugar and starch you're going to grow a bunch of nasty weeds in there that are causing inflammation causing aging causing diabetes causing you to gain weight and a whole host of other things including autoimmune disease and maybe even autism and dementia however if you're feeding them the good stuff which they like to eat

the good the good bugs grow so you either fertilize the bad bugs or the good bugs. And the good bugs tend to love polyphenols. These are really important. And these compounds are all these colorful things you see in the rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Pomegranate, cranberry, green tea, for example, feed a particular bacteria in the gut that is critical for immune function and for preventing cancer and heart disease. So when you increase the phytochemical richness of your diet, you're increasing the quality of the microbiome and your overall health. So people think of, oh, calories. They think of glycemic index or glycemic load. I like to think of the phytochemical richness of your diet, or what I call the phytochemical index, which would be about phytochemical index, which is, you know, how good are the phytochemicals in food? And the truth is that, you know, how we grow food in this country, in soils that are depleted, and in ways

that are not encouraging the growth of these phytochemicals, because the seed quality we pick, we're just depleted in these phytochemicals more than ever. We used to eat 800 different species of plants. Now 60% of our diet comes from three plants, basically corn, wheat, and soy, which are all turned into industrial processed food. And we should be eating a wide variety of weird foods. I love to eat weird food. Whenever I go to the grocery store and I see some weird vegetable I never ate before, I pick it up and I eat it. I figure out what to do with it. It's great. So Mark, tell us how food affects the different core systems in the body that relate to functional medicine. So just take a step back, Drew. We in medical school, I'm here visiting my daughter in Utah,

and she's in medical school, and I'm looking at her textbooks and everything is all about the organs. You know, you've got your heart system and your GI system and your respiratory system and on and on. And they learn that there's 155,000 different diseases and it's just overwhelming. The truth is that there are a few basic biological systems in your body that determine everything. So when they're out of balance, you get sick. When they're imbalanced, you're healthy. And these 155,000 diseases are just downstream consequences of imbalances in these core seven systems. And these seven systems are all networked together. They're all linked together.

And they're influenced by your genetics, by your environment and triggering factors, various, we call them antecedents, triggers and mediators or predisposing factors. And also they're influenced and they can be toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, and so forth, poor diet. And they're also influenced by your lifestyle, what you eat, sleep, exercise, relationships, meaning, purpose, all that stuff is influencing these seven systems. And when they're out of balance, you're sick. And when they're in balance, you're healthy. But the biggest thing that determines the function of these systems is food. And the beautiful thing about the way this works is I'm not treating disease in functional medicine, I'm creating health. And so when I need to create health, I go, well, what do these systems need to function? So let's just go through these systems and I'll

just give you a few tips on each one of what you can eat to actually regulate these systems. The first is your digestive system. We call it assimilation, which is your microbiome and the whole way you bring in nutrients in your body. Well, your microbiome is harmed by food, right? By starch, sugar, processed food, lack of fiber, but also is incredibly dependent on food. So, for example, we need prebiotic foods to feed the microbiome, things like asparagus, plantain, artichoke hearts, and things like Jerusalem artichokes. These are a whole class of prebiotic foods that we can eat and include in our diet that help to feed the good bugs. The second are probiotic foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, natto, all those ancient foods that we've been eating fermented for a long

time. Really important. And the third are polyphenols, which we really also recently discovered are so critical for the microbiome. These are these colorful plant compounds, like I was mentioning before, like pomegranate, green tea, cranberry, and all the myriad phytochemicals. And there's a lot of them out there and the bacteria just love them. So you need to feed the good guys. The second part that is very related to your digestive system is your immune system. And that is actually part of your gut because 60% of your immune system is in your gut. So how do you regulate your immune system? Well, if you eat sugar and processed food, you're going to suppress your immune system. But if you eat certain foods that are immune regulatory and immune beneficial, you'll actually improve your immune function,

particularly in things like garlic and ginger, things like turmeric, which is in actually a lot of Indian foods and curry, which has curcumin in it. Also other spices like rosemary, very anti-inflammatory. So there's a lot of foods we can eat that are colorful fruits and vegetables that are all anti-inflammatory. Cherry, for example. Cherry is very anti-inflammatory. So there's a lot of natural foods that we can use to boost our immune function and to reduce inflammation. The next is our energy system and our mitochondria. And so, for example, these mitochondria can be easily damaged by processed food and sugar, the same old stuff. We're not calling it SSP, starched sugar and processed food. You know, that's my new acronym, starch, Drink, and Process Food. And yet the energy system responds incredibly well to fats,

particularly certain kinds of fats like MCT oil, which is in coconut, can help improve the quality of the function of your mitochondria by providing foods that are high levels, for example, of the cofactors like the B vitamins, like liver is a great detox food, although, I mean, a great energy food.

So there's a lot of foods you can eat to help boost your mitochondria. And then there's your detoxification system, which is really critically important for mobilizing both internal and external toxins. And again, if we're eating all kinds of food with pesticides and chemicals and sugar, our body has to handle that. But if we eat foods, for example, like the broccoli family, like garlic and onions, like lemon peel, these are all helpful in actually up regaling detoxification curcumin ginger many other foods we may want to eat foods that contain for example high levels of zinc like pumpkin

seeds that help up really late turn detox pathways or selenium which is important for glutathione which comes from Brazil nuts or fish so we can start to incorporate these foods and I've written all about this. And if you look at my book, The Pagan Diet, it's all in there. And I explain how all these systems are regulated by food. And then we have the communication, I mean, sort of the transport system, which is your blood and lymphatic circulation. And there's a lot of foods that are really helpful in that. All the bioflavonoids, for example, like quercetin, rutin, asperidin, which are all in a lot of colorful plant foods and orange peels and onions and so forth. So there's a lot of food you can eat to help your circulation and lymph system. And then communication systems, you know, how do

you balance your hormones? And for example, flax seeds and whole non-gamous soy and cruciferous vegetables, all really important in regulating hormonal function. And then your structural system, which is what you're made of. So you need the right kinds of proteins. You need the right kinds of amino acids, which are more abundant in animal foods. For example, if you want to build muscle, you need muscle. I mean, you can get it from eating plant foods, but you have to work really hard. And usually bodybuilders who are vegan are pounding processed plant-based powders, which isn't real food. So I think there's real importance to understand that you really need to have all the right ingredients. If you want to, for example,

build your cell membranes, you need omega-3 fats, which regulate your cell membranes. So these are all sort of examples. And again, I could literally write an entire textbook on this. I could talk for 10 hours on this topic, but I just want to give you a flavor of how, when you eat in the right way, you start to, when I go shopping, honestly, when I go shopping, I go to the grocery store, I'm like thinking, okay, what am I eating for my gut? What am I eating for my immune system? What am I eating for my chondrite? What am I eating for my detox system? How am I improving my circulation? What am I doing for my hormones? And I literally go through the grocery store and I have like, it's like x-ray vision. I know what's in the foods because I've studied it and I go, oh, I'm going to pick the mushrooms for this.

I'm going to get that. And so I'm really very deliberate about the foods I pick because I'm always choosing my medicine and what I call my pharmacy, which is the grocery store. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. If you like this conversation, I know you'll love my new book, Young Forever. If you pre-order this book now, you'll get access to my discount bundle with deals from all my favorite health and wellness brands. Visit youngforeverbook.com to order my book and get access to these deals.

I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise.

And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter, and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. 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

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