The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Quit Eating Ultra-Processed Foods

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

How to Quit Eating Ultra-Processed Foods | This episode is brought to you by Even The SAD (Standard American Diet) is over 60 percent ultra-processed food mostly from commodity crops—wheat, corn, and soy turned into hundreds of thousands of food-like products that bear little resemblance to our evolutionary diet. These addictive, nutrient-depleted foods not only make us obese and sick but drive us to consume more and more “food-like substances,” looking for the missing nutrients. Yet, a desire for real food is a fundamental part of our basic biological blueprint. Given the chance, our taste receptors will naturally gravitate toward the inherent goodness found in real, whole foods. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman speaks to Dr. Elizabeth Boham, Dave Asprey, Fred Provenza, and Dr. Assem Malhotra about how our taste buds, hormones, and brain chemistry have been hijacked by the food industry. They discuss how ultra-processed foods are leading us to be overfed, yet undernourished and how we can reclaim our nutritional wisdom by eliminating ultra-processed foods from our diet. Elizabeth Boham is a physician and nutritionist who practices Functional Medicine at The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Through her practice and lecturing she has helped thousands of people achieve their goals of optimum health and wellness. She witnesses the power of nutrition every day in her practice and is committed to training other physicians to utilize nutrition in healing. Dr. Boham has contributed to many articles and wrote the latest chapter on Obesity for the Rankel Textbook of Family Medicine. She is part of the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine and has been featured on the Dr. Oz show and in a variety of publications and media including Huffington Post, The Chalkboard Magazine, and Experience Life. Her DVD Breast Wellness: Tools to Prevent and Heal from Breast Cancer explores the Functional Medicine approach to keeping your breasts and whole body well. Dave Asprey is the founder and Chairman of Bulletproof 360, a high-performance coffee and food company, and creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee. He is a New York Times bestselling author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today show, Fox News, Nightline, CNN, and dozens more. Over the last two decades Dave, the “Father of Biohacking”, has worked with world-renowned doctors, researchers, scientists, and global mavericks to uncover the latest, most innovative methods, techniques, and products for enhancing mental and physical performance.  Fred Provenza grew up in Salida, Colorado, working on a ranch and attending school in Wildlife Biology at Colorado State University. He is professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University where he worked for 35 years, directing an award-winning research group that pioneered an understanding of how learning influences foraging behavior and how behavior links soil, plants, herbivores, and humans. He is the author of three books, including Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom; Foraging Behavior: Managing to Survive in a World of Change; and The Art & Science of Shepherding: Tapping the Wisdom of French Herders (co-written with Michel Meuret). He has published over 300 research papers in a wide variety of scientific journals.  Dr. Aseem Malhotra is a founding member of Action on Sugar and was the lead campaigner highlighting the harm caused by excess sugar consumption in the United Kingdom, particularly its role in type 2 diabetes and obesity. In 2015, he coordinated the Choosing Wisely campaign by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges as lead author in a BMJ paper to highlight the risks of overuse of medical treatments. In the same year, he became the youngest member to be appointed to the board of trustees of UK health think tank, The King’s Fund, that advises the government on health policy. His first book, co-authored with Donal O’ Neill, The Pioppi Diet, has become an international bestseller. This episode is brought to you by Even. Even provides personalized nutrition for medication users and right now, you can schedule a complimentary consult with an Even expert to figure out the right nutrient companion for you. Plus, you can get 20% off your first order. Just go to feeleven.com/drmark and use the code DRMARK20.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Boham, “Underweight, Overtired, And Malnourished: How To Get Your Health Back On Track” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/uxosLUlE Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dave Asprey, “Fasting: Hype Or Ultimate Health Hack?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DaveAsprey2 Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Fred Provenza, “How The Intelligence Of Plants and Animals Can Help Us Reclaim Our Health” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/FredProvenza2 Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. Aseem Malhotra, “How Diet Is Driving COVID-19 Outcomes” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrAseemMalhotra Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. When you eat nutrient depleted food, you want more food. And this is the body's natural intelligence trying to accommodate for looking for nutrients, but they're looking in the wrong places. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. And one thing I look at with every patient is possible nutrient deficiencies. And I'm actually finding them all the time, making them a key focus area for us to work on. Nutrients are the literal instructions our bodies need to function properly. Without the right kinds in the right amounts, we're limiting our energy production, hormone balance, our gut function, our neurotransmitters, our brain chemicals, and so many other things,

leaving us feeling tired, moody, bloated, confused, and worse. We can really feel the consequences of even just one nutrient deficiency. Now, most people don't realize that medications are one of the leading causes of nutrient deficiencies, depleting specific vitamins, minerals, and other things like good bacteria, which we really need for optimal health. So they might be solving one problem, but causing another one. There's actually even a special name for this, medication-induced nutrient depletions, or MIND, MIND. That's a good one. Anyway, I was recently introduced to this company called Even that provides personalized nutrition for medication users. Their products

are created by physicians, nutritionists, and pharmacies who have identified the exact recipe to rebalance nutrient levels and biochemistry while taking certain medications. They currently have products specifically designed for complementing birth control, antidepressants, and statins. Right now, you can schedule a complimentary consult with an Even expert to figure out the right nutrient companion for you. Plus, you can get 20% off your first order. Just go to feeleven.com, Dr. Mark, that's Dr. Mark. Use the code DrMark20, that's DrMark20. That's feeleven, F-E-E-L-E-B-E-N.com, backslash DrMark with the code DrMark20. That's D-R-M-A-R-K-20. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Kea, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast.

Most of us know what it feels like to eat sugary processed foods and feel stuffed only to find yourself feeling hungry again after just a few hours. And not only hungry, but wanting more of the same food that left you feeling stuffed and miserable in the first place. This is largely because the trillion dollar industrial food industry has hijacked our taste buds, hormones, brain chemistry, and metabolism. Dr. Hyman spoke to his colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Boham, about how these foods lead us to be overfed yet undernourished. And they've done controlled trials with this where they'll take people and say, okay, eat as much as you want of nutrient-dense food, like eat 14,000 avocados or 10 pounds of

broccoli or 20 chickens, whatever. You can eat as much as you want. And then they say, okay, another group, you eat all this other food, which is, you know, the typical American diet, which is more processed food. And you can eat as much as you want. And what they found was that the people who ate the processed food were hungrier and they ate 500 calories more a day, which is interesting that when you eat nutrient depleted food you want more food and this is the body's natural intelligence trying to accommodate for looking for nutrients but they're looking in the wrong places so we remember this thing we learned about in medical school called pica which is where kids will eat

dirt if they're iron deficient right just like animals will go to a salt lick or lick I mean I remember being in Bolivia and Peru on the beach and there was this mineral rich like deposits on the beach and the birds and the animals just were flocking to go get these minerals and nutrients, which they knew they needed. Well, we try to do the same thing, except when we go to get the Twinkies or we get the Doritos or we get the whatever, Coca-Cola, there's nothing in there. And so we keep looking and looking and looking.

We're looking in the wrong place for the nutrients that we need to optimize our health. It's really sad just to see the level of malnutrition that we are seeing. And I think that because our food is so processed and devoid of nutrients and people are just eating more and more of it to get what their body needs. That's why we're seeing so much obesity. So, you know, the first thing we always focus on with people is to say, make sure that everything you are eating is as nutrient rich as possible. Because, you know, unfortunately, like you mentioned, this, you know, the, the, our, our mineral deficient soil and the farming practices and

everything, it's really stacked up against us. So we really need to think about it. You don't want to waste your calories on food that doesn't have all the nutrients that your body needs, because that's just going to help you feel better and help everything work better and help our skin look better and help make it easier to maintain a healthy weight and have better energy and be able to go out for a run and be able to focus in school. I mean, it's impressive what we see when we just clean up somebody's diet. Dr. Hyman also spoke with biohacker Dave Asprey about how they stopped

craving unhealthful foods. We are talking about eating foods that are more satisfying, more delicious, and more tasty, to the point that if someone puts a piece of, you know, big pharma or big food birthday cake from some commercial bakery versus something that you would recommend or I would recommend, you'll look at that and you'll say, that one's pretty, but I want to eat the thing that tastes really good and nourishing and satisfying,

and your body will actually guide you to the good stuff yeah you know i've noticed that i mean over the years you know i used to eat more junk and crap when i was younger yeah and now if i like walk through like you know a starbucks case full of all this stuff or i go in some restaurant it doesn't look like food to me it's like why would i eat that it's like a rock like i'm not gonna eat a rock or a piece of wood but like i it doesn't actually look like food to me anymore and i don't crave it i don't want it it's not like i'm depriving myself i just literally don't actually have an interest in it and it doesn't actually look appealing to me and it doesn't even i don't even think it'll taste good and And when I, if I do taste it, it's like, ugh, I want me to eat that. I, I'm with you there. And people think it's a little bit crazy. Cause I remember when I weighed 300 pounds, I would have the worst cravings and you'd

see those, those scones or whatever in the case at the coffee shop. And you're like, oh, I really want that. And you walk past, it would just call to you. Those are your damaged mitochondria, desperate for energy going, you know, please, please eat that and it's same thing now in my pattern matching system those don't register as food anymore because they're actually not food for humans right and now that my pattern matching system is right i just like like you said if it could be a rock it'd be a cactus but you wouldn't put it in your mouth right so therefore the willpower it takes to do it is gone it's not like i gone. It's not a willpower thing anymore. Not at all.

Once you rewire your hormones and rewire your brain chemistry, your body will actually want the right stuff. It actually will like it. Dr. Hyman also spoke to behavioral ecologist, Fred Provenza, about how to reclaim our body's innate nutritional wisdom. We've really lost our natural wisdom of what to eat.

And one of the studies that you wrote about in your book, Nourishment, which everybody should get a copy of, is the study that was done in the 20s by a woman, I think in Canada, who took kids from an orphanage. And I don't know if you can get this through an ethics committee today, but she took these kids from orphanage and she fed them an array of foods. She offered them these foods so they could naturally select what their bodies wanted. And these kids would eat stuff that you wouldn't even think they would. For example, a dinner might be orange juice and how as humans living in a world with a disconnection from our food supply and a disconnection from the kinds of foods that helped us maintain our nutritional wisdom, how it's led to all this chronic disease. So this study really informs a lot of the thinking about why we are all sick and overweight yes it Clara Davis was the scientist who did the studies she obviously had this belief in the nutritional wisdom of the body but wanted to wanted to study that and see

what happens so she had 15 children that were given up for adoption or put in an orphanage and she ran the study over a six year period and they had 34 different foods that were offered seasonally and some of the things like you mentioned and and then they simply recorded what each child ate meal in meal out day can you imagine that amount of data they just got to pick whatever they wanted yeah the kids could pick whatever whatever they wanted and they had pediatricians that were involved in that study and they wrote papers about it and they said they've never seen a healthier group of kids ever in their careers and the kids did things and this was interesting so there's no nutritionist telling them what to do no dietary guidelines getting in the structure no nutrition facts labels with all the right stuff and

and clara made it clear she told the people who were helping on the study you're not to give any indication of to those children of something to eat you put it on that and put it in front of them and it was interesting when they first started started this study they said the kids sampled everything. Everything went into their mouth, the napkins, the silverware, anything that was on there. But given a little bit of time, each child would figure out what worked for its body. And I just love this because she said no two children ever selected the same combination of foods. And no child ever selected the same foods from day to day right but they all selected diets that met their needs and

they knew when some of the kids would come in with deficiency uh symptoms they paid particular attention to what they would select yeah and and they would select things that they needed. So if they're vitamin A deficient, they'll go for the liver. That's right. That's absolutely the case. Or if they come in with rickets, they're going to go for vitamin D. Yeah. So they documented all of that.

And it's just amazing to think. And that's where if you're eating wholesome foods, it works. The system is as solid as it can be. but if you get on the ultra-processed, it gets hijacked. And the food, people in the food industry have really learned how to do that well. And then to put not wholesome herbs and spices, let's say, as a flavoring agent, it's only 600 million pounds a year or whatever. Wait, wait, wait.

Artificial flavoring. 600 million pounds of artificial flavorings are added to our food every year. That's frightening. Yeah. And it's caused this disconnect between our natural inclinations to eat foods that nourish us with our ability to pick those foods. And we tend to eat foods that are associated with these artificial flavors because they've scientifically figured out how to hijack our brain chemistry

and our hormones and our metabolism. And so we tend to crave all the wrong stuff. So basically we've gotten this predicament of a food system that's producing food in a way that depletes the plants of the phytochemicals and the nutrients that's needed to feed animals and humans, in a way that destroys the soil microbiome, in a way that has hijacked our own ability to know what's good for us or not good for us, because our innate nutritional wisdom has been hijacked by these industrial chemicals and starch and sugar and food

that has completely disconnected us from our ability to have any nutritional wisdom. And for anybody listening, if you've ever done a detox or an elimination diet where you get rid of all the junk, all the processed foods, even on my 10-day detox diet, you'll very quickly start to reclaim your natural wisdom.

You'll start to crave the things that are good for you. Like I don't crave starch or sugar or processed food. In fact, I can walk by the Candy Island. I mean, it just looks like a rock to me. I'm like, why would I eat that? It doesn't even look like food or a muffin or something. I was at a coffee shop today in Montana, and I was getting some coffee. Although coffee is the richest source of phytochemicals in the American diet,

which is not a good thing, by the way, because you just drink coffee and don't eat any plants. But they had this sugar cookie and this banana bread and lemon bread. And I was like, oh, I want to eat that. But I was like, no, I actually don't. I looked at it. It sounded good. But then I looked at it.

And I was like, no, that doesn't look like edible to eat that. I was like, no, I actually don't. Like I looked at it. It sounded good. But then I looked at it. I was like, no, that doesn't look like edible to me anymore. And I think I used to want to eat that stuff. I think if we can kind of reclaim our own bodies, it doesn't take long to do that. That stuff's really hard to resist when you're on it, right? I mean, you talk to a lot of their hosts. Once you start, it's hard to stop. Yeah, you're hooked. And sugar can be addicting and all those things.

So the place to stop is at the grocery store. It doesn't go into the basket. Dr. Hyman also spoke with Dr. Asim Malhotra, who shared his tip for eliminating ultra-processed foods from your diet. Right now, the big issue of our time, what's responsible for more disease and death globally than physical inactivity, smoking and alcohol combined is poor diet. And ultra processed foods really are the low hanging fruit that we need to concentrate on. You've used that term a number of times.

I don't know if you all know what it is. What is ultra processed food? Let's define it. So it comes from something called the NOVA classification, which came from Brazil. It's an internationally recognized classification of different types of foods from minimally processed to ultra-processed. And group four is the ultra-processed, the worst type of foods. It's really linked to chronic metabolic disease, heart disease, cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes. And before I define it, what's really interesting about it, it appears these sorts of foods

also encourage overconsumption. So, Kevin Hall, a scientist in the States last year, did a very interesting, what was described as a randomized controlled trial, that just within two weeks of people eating ultra-processed versus millinery-processed foods, there was a two-kilogram difference. So they were just encouraged to eat to fullness, and people who had the ultra-processed food end up consuming more and end up gaining more weight. What is ultra-processed food? Well, overall general term is usually mass-packaged food that is deficient of nutrients and fiber and is high in sugar, in starch, in unhealthy oils, additives and preservatives. And most of the time, quite often it's five or more ingredients. So what I tell my patients in a very simple terms, and it has five or more ingredients, it's ultra processed, don't eat it. Very simple,

very simple. So if you go into the grocery store, the supermarket, whatever, and you're thinking about what to buy, pick up, you know, even bread, modern packaged bread. If you pick it up and you can count five or more ingredients and you can't recognize some of them, you know, they're preservative additives, don't eat it. It is much easier to control what you eat than how much you eat. And it is the quality of the food and the composition of your meal that matters most in creating health. We know that sugar, starch, and ultra-processed foods are biologically addictive. This is why Dr. Hyman recommends eliminating processed carbs and refined sugars from your diet for 10 days to reset your biology. During this time, focus on eating plenty of fiber, healthy fats, and clean protein.

This means loads of non-starchy veggies, good fats like avocado and olive oil, and healthy protein like grass-fed meat and organic meats, fish, chicken, as well as plant-based sources of protein like gluten-free tempeh. He also recommends making your kitchen a safe zone by removing all ultra-processed foods. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store first where you're going to find the healthiest foods with the fewest unhealthy ingredients. And remember, eating food that is good for you is not about feeling deprived. You can finally get off the cravings roller coaster and reclaim your freedom from sugary processed foods that hold you hostage. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations

with Dr. Elizabeth Boham, Dave Asprey, Fred Provenza, and Dr. Asim Malhotra. 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. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey,

seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.