The Dr. Hyman Show - Key Takeaways from January 2024: Episode Recap

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

View the Show Notes For This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Get Ad-free Episodes & Dr. Hyman+ Audio Exclusives In today's episode, I’m sharing key takeaways and powerful moments from episodes that aired last month, January 2024. Links to each episode can be found in the show notes, so you can easily go back to any episode you might have missed. Here are more details from the episode (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): How mental health issues are tied to diet with Dr. Uma Naidoo (2:23 / 0:36) The importance of protein (6:24 / 4:37) The brain-microbiome connection with Dr. Steven Gundry (8:34 / 6:48) Magnesium deficiency (11:42 / 9:56) Probiotics and fermented foods with Raja Dhir (14:11 / 12:25) Optimizing our immune system to fight Covid and other infections (20:15 / 17:10) Childhood nutrition with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (23:32 / 20:28) How our hormones make us hungry (27:19 / 24:15) How the food industry hurts our health (31:13 / 28:09) This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, AG1, and Momentous. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Get your daily serving of vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, and more with AG1. Head to DrinkAG1.com/Hyman and get 10 FREE travel packs + FREE Welcome Kit with your first order. Head over to livemomentous.com/mark for 20% off creatine, collagen, and all of their best-in-class products.

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, if you have a swollen joint, it hurts. But if your brain's inflamed, it doesn't hurt, but you get anxiety, depression, autism, Alzheimer's, bipolar disease, OCD, schizophrenia. These are all brain inflammation diseases. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Time is our most valuable asset and Rupa Health understands that better than anyone. They've created a game-changing solution to simplify lab ordering for functional medicine practitioners like you. With Rupa Health's online portal, you can access over 3,000 tests from dozens of labs like Dutch, Great Plains, Genova, and Access Medical Laboratories, all with just a few clicks. That means no more headaches or administrative nightmares that come with

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Check it out. And 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. In today's episode, we're recapping key takeaways and powerful moments from episodes that aired last month. Links to each episode can be found in the show notes so you can easily go back to any episode you might've missed. To start us off, here's Dr. Hyman in conversation with Dr. Uma Naidoo about how mental health issues are tied to diet. You're at the forefront of a really radical paradigm shift. And I think that people don't understand it in the general public. I think they still misappropriate meaning to certain diagnosis. You know, you're depressed and you're anxious, and that means that it's a psychiatric problem. But it might not be a psychiatric problem. You know, I always say,

if you have a swollen joint, it hurts. But if your brain's inflamed, it doesn't hurt, but you get anxiety, depression, autism, Alzheimer's, bipolar disease, OCD, schizophrenia. These are all brain inflammation diseases. And it's really a key part of your new book, which is just so fabulous, called Calm Your Mind With Food, really talking about how our inflammatory diet is driving, not the only cause, but is driving so much of the changes we see in our mental health and in this world. And I guess the question I would have for you is, you know, how do we start to change the paradigm? You know, how do we need to think differently about mental health given this paradigm shift

in psychiatry? There's people now at Harvard like Christopher Palmer, your colleague, who's written a book called Brain Energy. He's been on the podcast talking about curing schizophrenia with ketogenic diets and using bipolar disease treatments, using diet. I mean, this is just a radical concept that food has something to do with that. Sabani Sethi at Stanford has a department of metabolic psychiatry. We're talking about psychedelics and trauma. This whole field is just undergoing this revolution. So you're at Harvard. I mean, I imagine, you know, your average psychiatrist at Harvard is not thinking like you do.

There's a couple of rogue characters like Christopher Palmer and yourself who are trying to pave the way for a new way of thinking about mental health. But, you know, I just want to point to the fact that, you know, these drugs that we use, particularly the SSRI drugs or anxiolytic drugs like the benzodiazepines, you know, they're problematic. And I think people don't understand the data around these medications. You know, I think, you know, when I took a deep dive on this, it was sort of shocking to see how poorly they worked. You know, they can be helpful for some people with severe depression, but for mild to moderate depression, they really are no better than placebo. And yet they're among the top selling drugs in the world. I mean, the top is statin drugs, the second are psychiatric drugs, and the third category

are stomach drugs like acid blockers, right? That's right. That's right. And these are a huge business. And yet, you know, depression or anxiety are not Prozac deficiencies, right? There's something else going on. And the benzos, which we use like Valium and other versions of those are really not great for long-term use because they're highly addictive.

They cause long-term side effects. And, you know, it was sort of the Valium generation. It was, I don't know if you followed the Sackler family story, but they were the Valium people too, not just the Oxy people. And they were hugely marketing this in the 60s. It was a way of sedating women so they wouldn't be upset and want to have more autonomy and power. It wouldn't be hysterical.

Yeah, it was sort of anarchitizing the female population at the time, suburban housewives who were miserable and anxious. So I think we're now entering an era where we're really entering scientific psychiatry, I would say. We're entering an era where we're actually being able to understand the mechanisms and the biology of what happens in the brain when it comes to these symptoms that we have. And we often, like I said, misappropriate meaning. If you have depression, we typically label people with a disease and we think the label is the cause of the disease. So we say, oh, I know why you're sad and hopeless and helpless or why you're anxious and why you have all these symptoms. It's because you have an eating disorder or you have depression.

Well, depression isn't the cause of those symptoms. It's the name of those symptoms. Here's Dr. Hyman talking about the importance of those symptoms. It's the name of those symptoms. Here's Dr. Hyman talking about the importance of protein. We've known for years and decades that protein is a critical part of our diet because they're basically the building blocks for our body. It makes everything from muscles, organs, our skin, neurotransmitters, cytokines, peptides, all the things that our body is doing to actually run everything. It's really one of the most essential things because we can't get all the amino acids from eating other foods. We have to

eat the protein in the right amounts and we have to have the right amount of amino acids. Our body doesn't make them. Some are derivatives. So there's some core essential amino acids and we have to make sure we get them from our diet in the right amounts and the right time. And when we look at research on longevity, there's a lot of controversy. Some people say, oh, don't eat protein because it's going to actually activate mTOR or what is known as one of the key regulators of longevity. If you activate mTOR, it increases protein synthesis. It increases muscle mass. It can actually accelerate even cancer growth.

So it's not good in certain ways. But if you inhibit mTOR, you actually cause autophagy and self-cleaning and the longevity process. So what should you do? Well, I wrote a lot about this in my book. It's like anything else. You want periods of fasting and not eating, like overnight at least, 12, 14, 16 hours. And then you want to make sure you have enough protein during the day so you actually can do the functions of protein in your body, for example, muscle building and so forth. So it's not like it's all bad or all good. It's really about how and when and what.

So we're going to get into the how and when and what. And if you look at the biggest risk factor for age-related decline, it's loss of muscle. Because when you lose muscle, you increase inflammation. You increase insulin resistance. Your sex hormones go down. Your cortisol goes down. Your growth hormone goes down. I mean, cortisol goes up. I mean, so you basically end up in this hormonal chaos of levels of inflammation, prediabetes. It's really bad.

Here's Dr. Hyman in conversation with Dr. Stephen Gundry about the brain microbiome connection. Major depression is a big issue and depression is the biggest cause of disability in this country. And the microbiome of people who are depressed is different. And in 2022, there was a study of microbiomes of over 1,000 people with depression, and they found changes in about 13 bacteria. And these bacteria are known to produce various neurotransmitters. So can you kind of unpack that for us and just give us a little taste of the mood, brain, gut, microbiome connection? Yeah, I guess, you know, I suppose we should have known this. But again, now that we're being able to look at individual bacteria and the compounds that they produce, you're right.

Brand new studies in the last year or so have shown that depressed individuals have a depressive microbiome. And you can constitute these particular abnormal species. What's really interesting is, let me step back one. We've known that glyphosate, which is a lovely weed killer, was actually patented as an antibiotic. And one of the recent findings about glyphosate is that glyphosate targets the tryptophan pathway bacteria in our gut. Now, why should that be interesting is because tryptophan makes 5-HTP, makes serotonin, which, and GABA for that matter. And so glyphosate is really good at knocking out all the feel-good bacterias, specifically in our gut. interesting that this epidemic of depression and anxiety correlates pretty doggone good with the advent of glyphosate. And now we know, well, you can say, oh, well, glyphosate's bad for you. But

wait a minute. Glyphosate is after the bacteria that are essential for our mood. Yeah, I think that's so key, Stephen, yeah. It's like, what have we done? Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's the unintentional side effects that happen from things we think we're trying to do good. Oh, weed killer, great, herbicide, we need it, blah, blah, blah. But these, you know, people say, oh, I've had cancer, this and that.

Maybe, okay, there's been some, you know, lawsuits that have been successful around non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I guess if you douse yourself in it. But what's really striking to me about glyphosate, in really small amounts, it wipes out your microbiome. It doesn't take a lot. It's not like you have to, like, drink Roundup in order to actually mess yourself up. It literally is in small amounts. And that has led to maybe an increasing epidemic of low microbial diversity that we're seeing and an increase of all these chronic diseases, including psychiatric disorders, which could be really from this sort of altered microbiome, in part from glyphosate. I mean,

there's a million other reasons, obviously, xenobiotics and other toxins and other things that are really, really important. This is Dr. Hyman from our Know Your Numbers series talking about magnesium. About 20% of the population is living with overt magnesium deficiency. This is full-blown magnesium deficiency, and that's like one in five people. That's a lot of people. Subclinical or insufficiency, not true deficiency, which you see on a lab test, but insufficiency can affect up to 80% of the population. Now, why is this important? Well, unlike drugs, which work with one pathway and one particular reaction in the body, magnesium and most vitamins and minerals, by the way,

work on hundreds and hundreds of different pathways. And magnesium is involved in over 600 enzymatic reactions in your body. Now, enzymes help convert one molecule to another, critical for everything. And it basically influences every single one of our biological systems, which is why it can cause symptoms all over the place, from your brain to your heart, to your gut and constipation, to menstrual issues and cramps and muscles. I mean, it's literally everything. And in low levels or suboptimal levels impact every area of our health, increase our risk for chronic disease. So it's not just kind of annoying symptoms like muscle cramps. It puts you at big risk for serious illnesses. Now, it really probably should be considered a public health crisis, but most physicians

don't test for it. It's not on your regular blood panel you get every year. If they do agree to test for it, they'll likely run what we'll call a serum magnesium test. That's what I learned in medical school. But it's not really the indicator of what's happening in your body. It's like this joke I often tell when I'm giving lectures. You know, this guy dropped his keys on the street, and his friend comes over and sees him looking under this lamppost. He goes, well, what are you looking for? What are you doing? He says, well, I'm looking for my keys.

He said, where did you drop them? He said, well, I dropped them down the street. But he said, why are you looking over here? He says, well, the light's better here under the lamppost. So that's how medicine is. It's easy to test serum magnesium, but it's not the right way to find out if you're low or not. I mean, if it's low on serum magnesium, you're really, really low. By the time it gets low, you're in trouble. Now in a perfect world, I'd have the chance to see millions of patients, but the truth is I'm just one doctor. Over 30 years of seeing millions of biomarkers in tens of thousands of patients, I've come to understand that much is being missed by conventional healthcare. We often wait until we have symptoms

of diseases, then we get tested. But the transition from wellness to illness can often be detected decades before any symptom or diagnosis. I want people to have access to their own health data and the ability to engage in self-care and lifestyle practices that I believe can optimize their health and reverse the trajectory of chronic diseases that now affect 6 in 10 Americans. And it accounts for over $4 trillion in healthcare costs. Here's Dr. Hyman and Dr. Raja Durr talking about probiotics and fermented food. We're not quite yet at the place where we can, you know, go get a poop test and figure out what probiotic we need. But we are understanding the probiotic use in medicine as a valid interventional tool to treat various diseases, optimize health.

Except, you know, there's so many probiotics out there. You know, you go to the grocery store, you go to the health food store, there's ones in the fridge, there's ones not in the fridge. There's with this strain, there's one with that strain. Nobody knows what's going on. Even most doctors have no clue what's going on. Can you define what's a probiotic and whether we should actually be taking probiotic supplements? We've been taught, for example, that when you take probiotics, they don't really take up residence there. They just pass through and do little things and they go on. Do they colonize? Do they not? Does it matter? And

should we be thinking about probiotics from a basic health maintenance perspective? Should we all be taking them? How do we pick the right probiotic? And, you know, should we just be eating sauerkraut and kimchi and forget about probiotics? Can you help us unpack some of that? I think probiotics are fascinating in the sense that anytime a piece of news or press comes out that says probiotics don't work or they don't do this, it seems that probiotic usage goes up.

And so I can't explain it, but people love them, people use them, but the science and the understanding and the development of them is very confusing and varied. And so just to start with some definitions, probiotics are defined as live organisms that confer a health benefit to their host. It's a very simple definition. Gregor Reed chaired the panel at the UN that wrote it in 2001. At its core, probiotics are not a new discovery or not a new hypothesis. Typically, they were in the early 1900s, organisms that were isolated that were found to be beneficial and benefit has changed over the years dramatically. I mean, back then it was just keeping your

food sterile or safe from pathogens that could be considered a benefit and preventing you from getting sick from what you eat could be considered a benefit. Today, people look for a lot more complex things. So what is it intended to do? And what is the health benefit? That's the question that you have to ask. Anytime you hear the word probiotic, that's what you have to say right back. Say, okay, so it's a live organism. Yes or no? You'd be surprised. Many times they're not live or they're not guaranteed to be live or they don't make it to your colon alive. And so there's a whole spectrum of even that live part. And part two is, okay, so beneficial. What are they beneficial for? What are they going to do? What is the basis for if

they're beneficial or not? I think people confuse probiotics sometimes with fermented foods, which have a very different definition. Fermented foods are microbially metabolized food matter that carry a microbial load. And so that actually was just defined in a Nature Review this year for the first time. And they're both good. They both can be good or they both could do nothing. It really depends on what you're looking at. So fermented foods are different from probiotics, but sometimes fermented foods can be probiotic and sometimes probiotics can be fermented foods, but it depends on what they are and what you're trying to

accomplish. Classically, probiotics have been lactobacillus and bifidobacterium. Two years ago, the scientific community convened and said, okay, this is way too generic. And so lactobacillus actually was broken into about 200 subclasses and was completely renamed. And so we don't really use lactobacillus anymore, but there's way more genus and species variation now from what was originally called Lactobacillus. Bifidobacterium, at least Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium and Streptococcus, I would add, is the third, are the three class of probiotics that have been used in food in Japan, in Europe, and predominantly in North America. And so almost every probiotic product that is a microbial product that's standardized will contain or derive some version of these,

or it's going to come from soil. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. Now a good diet is foundational to living a long, healthy life. But because our food just isn't as nutritious as it once was, most of us have to supplement to get all the vitamins and minerals we need. Unfortunately, finding a high-quality, no-filler supplement used to be a real challenge. But not anymore. That's why I chose Momentous. Their supplements are developed in collaboration with leading experts like Andrew Huberman and Andy Galpin and are used by 90% of the teams in the NFL, as well as nearly 200 pro and college

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That's libmomentous.com, L-I-B-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com forward slash mark for 20% off. Here's Dr. Hyman from our Health Byte series talking about COVID and our immune system. What do we do to actually help the host, right? So we can give vaccines, which artificially jack up your immune system to fight a particular infection, or, and maybe not or, maybe and, we can also help our own immune system optimally function better. And that's what I want to talk about. So how does functional medicine look at this problem? How do we understand why we are seeing such an epidemic of inflammatory diseases?

Not just COVID, but everything, all the chronic illnesses, autoimmune disease, allergic diseases, compromised immune systems. How do we deal with that? Well, we have to look at the modifiable risk factors that we can change. And there's a large number of modifiable risk factors for COVID-19 and for pretty much everything. So this kind of goes across the gamut, but let's talk about how the data pan out around what we can modify in terms of our risk of getting infections and viral infections and particularly COVID-19. First is all these chronic illnesses, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease. These are things that I've written about, talked about for decades. They're fundamentally diseases of affluence, diseases of excess, diseases of abundance, diseases that occur in an oversupply of ultra-processed diet that's high in starch and sugar, and it's a real, real problem. So these are not inevitable things.

They're things that can be modified and be reversed. The other thing that really drives our risk is our blood sugar regulation. And I've written many books about this, the 10-Day Detox Diet, Blood Sugar Solution. But blood sugar is a huge factor in your risk. As I mentioned earlier about the diabetes, increasing risk for COVID hospitalizations and deaths. And managing your blood sugar is really important. So, you know, cutting down starch and sugar and optimizing your diet to increase more fiber, protein, fat, following, you know, a simple exercise program, really important. Our diet overall, the diet quality plays a role. So, you know, our microbiome, our gut, everything, we'll talk about that in a minute. But all that plays a role in our risk.

Environmental toxins, we have less control over, heavy metals, air pollution. I just saw a patient yesterday who was in China and she lived there for a while and her lead levels were off the chart. I've never seen this in all my years of practice. And she literally had just come from China. She had just done her labs and I was like, holy mackerel, you know, the air pollution is so bad there that it's literally, you're breathing it in, you're getting in your blood and it's on your food. It's pretty much everywhere. So air pollution, heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, all these things are prevalent in our environment and we need to reduce our exposures. Our nutritional status plays an enormous role, like enormous role in our immune function, because it's not just the food we eat, but it's also the vitamin and mineral levels that play a role. So vitamin D deficiency,

I would say, would be number one. If you can do one thing from listening to this podcast, get your vitamin D tested and make sure your level's 50 to 75. And if it's not, you need to take increasing amounts of vitamin D3 to get it to that level. Some people need 2,000, 5,000, depends on your genetics. Some people need 10,000, but it's really critical to get your vitamin D level up. Here's Dr. Hyman in conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking about childhood nutrition. Today, our kids' schools are the biggest fast food system in the country. If you combine McDonald's, Starbucks, and Subway, our food system, schools, provides more junk food

than all those combined. And it's really, again, driving so much of our mental health crisis. You know, we didn't see this when we were kids, Bobby. I didn't see kids with depression, anxiety, and the mass amounts of ADD and trouble with school. And in the school, lunches have really shifted into be basically outlets for fast food companies. How would you begin to think about that? Because

I think that's contributing both to the poor health as well as the mental health crisis we're seeing. I mean, that's actually something that the Department of Education has an $80 billion budget. And that's one of the things that it ought to be doing is to make sure that school lunches are healthy and that the food that we're giving to kids is directly related to their behavior, to their moods, to their performance in school. And, you know, to be able to tell people that you're much more likely to have kids who are in a learning atmosphere if they're not pumping up on sugar and all of these other poisons between classes that are making them

behaviorally, that are ruining their moods, their behavior, and their learning capacity. Yeah. Bobby, there was a school in Washington I heard about that was really interesting. It was a charter school started by a very wealthy guy. And it was really for kids who are underserved, who came from poor socioeconomic environments, who are often going to be more likely to end up in jail than go to college. And what they did with these kids was they not only just had a great academic curriculum, but they fed them three meals a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day. The kids ate three meals of whole healthy food a day. And these kids do so well. They were going to Harvard, Yale, all the Ivy League colleges, they were succeeding. And then all the parents of the wealthier neighborhoods

wanted to send their kids to school because they were all having such high performance standards on testing. And I think in terms of research, we should be doing that research on what happens when you take school, and this one school gets this typical standard school lunches, which is fully junk food and sugar versus a whole foods lunch and breakfast and dinner for kids, and seeing what the different academic performances is, behavioral issues are, aggression is in schools, what their other issues are on ADD and allergies and autoimmunity, all these things we're seeing, it would be such a simple thing to do,

but we've never done it. We've never asked those questions. So I get very excited when I think about you starting to do these things with NIH. In the NIH budget, their whole 100-plus page budget, food was only mentioned once, and that was in the context of the Food and Drug Administration, which just makes me kind of crazy because it's the biggest thing that actually we can do to make a difference in our country's health. Yeah, I love that idea.

I love the idea of being able to – I mean, to me, Mark, as you know, kids are the biggest – kids ought to be the focus of everything in this country. We shouldn't be talking so much about going to war in Ukraine. It's $113 billion we're spending, and we've already committed to the Ukraine war, and President Biden wants to bring that up to $200 billion. The entire budget for EPA is $12 billion. The entire budget for the CDC is $12 billion. Imagine if we had that money instead of spending it on weapons and wars and making war in another country. What if we brought it home and made a war on bad health? And here's Dr. Hyman from our Health Bytes series talking

about hormones and hunger. It's not your fault you're overweight. There's something going on here. It's not about willpower and white-knuckling your way through just restricting calories and exercising more and eating less. It's just not how your metabolism works. Nobody's trying to gain weight. And so what's going on here is something that's dysregulating our biology. And there are many things that do it. It could be our microbiome. It could be inflammation. It could be toxins.

It could be pesticides. It could be heavy metals. It could be even infections. Viruses can be linked to inflammation. So anything that drives inflammation will cause weight gain and dysregulate your metabolism. And it's something that can be addressed and fixed. What are hormones? Basically, they're the messenger molecules in your body.

They regulate so many functions. We know about your pituitary, your hypothalamus hormones, your thyroid, your adrenals, your sex hormones. There's so many hormones, right? So when you have imbalances in these hormones, you have dysregulated appetite and you don't actually feel full. So you tend to be hungry or more and not feel full regardless of whether you're eating. And that has huge adverse effects, which makes you gain weight.

And then, of course, if you're doing that, you're going to see higher levels of blood sugar, higher levels of insulin. You'll get prediabetes, hepatitis. You'll even dysregulate your sleep cycles, instigating rhythms, melatonin signaling, and it's a vicious cycle. So you get more dysregulation. It's a feed-forward negative cycle. So how do you keep your ghrelin and leptin levels balanced? What do you do? Well, there are hormones that are naturally produced, but we don't have a particular supplement or food that's going to do it.

But there's a number of strategies that actually can help reduce inflammation in the body, that can help regulate your appetite, and that make a huge difference. And there's much research on this. First is, again, not rocket science, but eat real food. Get rid of all the ultra-processed food. We know, for example, from Kevin Hall's NIE study, where he gave people unlimited amounts of ultra-processed food. Crossover study, another part of the study, gave them unlimited amounts of whole real food. And the people who were eating the ultra-processed food at the time ate 500 calories more a day. That means basically their appetites were dysregulated. They weren't feeling full, and they were eating all this industrial processed food that was driving imbalances in their hormones. So studies show that also high levels of fructose

are a problem. Fructose is often found in soda, right, and juice and fruit. Fruit is okay, but when you're having high fructose corn syrup, it's driving huge amounts of leptin resistance, which makes you not feel full, it makes you eat more, and pretty much any kind of sugary stuff will do the same thing. And when you have high levels of any kind of sugary stuff will do the same thing. And when you have high levels of fructose sugary beverages or simple carbs like refined starch, it also impairs your ghrelin response. So your appetite doesn't go down, you don't feel full, and then you kind of, you know, get in this vicious cycle. So eat real whole foods as close to nature as possible, stuff that I've talked about in my book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat, and The Pagan Diet. Also, another trick is don't eat at night.

We should not be eating at night for a whole host of reasons. But don't eat within three to four hours of bed. I heard a guy the other day talking, he leaves eight hours between his last meal and bedtime so he can actually sleep better. So I think that's hard. But you should not use your refrigerator as a nightlight. And a Harvard study found that nighttime eating had profound effects on hunger

and the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin. In fact, leptin levels decreased for 24 hours after indulging in a late-night snack, which basically means your appetite control break, the break on your appetite, was turned off. So you basically have no breaks for 24 hours if you eat late at night. So you're going to eat more the next day. You're going to want to be hungrier.

Again, vicious cycle. Here's Dr. Hyman in conversation with Callie Means talking about Callie's experience working for one of the most influential lobbying groups in the country. What was it like being on the inside of the Heritage Foundation, which is a conservative think tank? And what was happening in there as you're working with big food companies and they were working with you to try to shape what was happening on a political level? The word that comes to mind and the overarching goal is rigging institutions of trust. Rigging institutions of trust. Rigging institutions of trust. Rigging institutions of trust. So you have a company, you have an interest, who are their stakeholders? Their stakeholders are consumers. Obviously you want to impact what

they think. You want to impact the media, which has a big impact. You want to impact government leaders. You want to impact research. You want to impact groups like civil rights groups and other medical groups that people trust. So you want to, as a company in the United States that's trying to get something accomplished, you want to impact all of those groups. And the truth is the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry at large is the largest funder of government, it's the largest funder of think tanks, it's the largest funder of academic research, it's the largest funder of news funding.

It's 50% of news funding. So the objective and- So they basically infiltrated every- They're the largest funder of every single institute. They're the largest funder of medical groups. They're the largest funder of civil rights groups, actually. The NAACP. So every group that we hold sacred, Harvard, the NIH is highly...

The FDA, as you've pointed out, is more than 50% directly funded by the pharmaceutical industry. And then food's not far behind. So you literally have the core institutions that set our culture, that set the guidelines. Their bills are paid by pharma. And as a consultant for these industries, that's just the simple question. And these are not really geniuses working at these consulting companies or for the pharmaceutical companies. It's actually very simple. It's like, how do we get money to the right people?

How do we fund research? How do we fund the medical groups? How do we fund the politicians themselves? And then the healthcare industry is the largest. I mean, that's five times more money spent by them on lobbying of public affairs than the oil industry. Food is not far behind. And I got to admit, Mark, and I'm ashamed to say it, it took me many, many years. It took more than a decade out of the swamp to really put all the pieces together.

You were a swamp creature? I'm a reformed swamp creature and have been out for more than a decade, you know, working to start companies. But looking back in retrospect, you know, it's very interesting. And I think very telling that you have one meeting, you know, in the morning with the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industry and the next, you know, in the afternoon, you're meeting with the food industry. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And

we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing 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.

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