The Dr. Hyman Show - Special Episode: Mark Hyman on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu - Why You Need to Examine Your Entire Health History to Heal Properly | Health Theory

Episode Date: February 22, 2020

In honor of Dr. Hyman’s upcoming book, Food Fix (foodfixbook.com), out on February 25th we are sharing a recent interview he did on Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. Watch Impact Theory at https://www.youtube.com/tombilyeu *** Mark Hyman on Why You Need to Examine Your Entire Health History to Heal Properly | Health Theory  Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu   Functional medicine aims to uncover the laws of biology, treats the human body as an ecosystem, and is about creating health, not just curing illness. Mark Hyman is one of the foremost practitioners of functional medicine, one of its earliest advocates, and is certainly one of its best spokesmen. On this episode of Health Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Mark Hyman explains the rationale behind functional medicine and describes its most important features. He also gives detailed advice on improving the diet, talks about what it means to say that food is information, and discusses the connection between the body, mind, gut and brain.    Get a copy of Mark's new book "Food Fix" here: https://amzn.to/38mWyY8   SHOW NOTES:   What does it mean to say the body is an ecosystem? [1:18] How do you find the root cause of an illness? [2:50] Functional medicine is about creating health, not curing illness [5:45] How should you deal with bacterial overgrowth in the upper gut? [9:42] Mark explains how to test your microbiome [11:10] There is lots of conflicting information on nutrition but there are some common principles [14:17] Factory vegetarian diets harm the environment, but regenerative meat diets help [18:54] Why should we eat more vegetables? [21:07] What are the laws of biology regarding diet and nutrition? [22:56] Soy traditionally was processed in a very different way than it is now [26:07] All food is information [27:37] Mark describes the dietary principles nearly everyone should follow [28:54] Which kinds of vegetables should you be eating? [33:49] Mark explains the effects of eliminating the most toxic foods from a diet [35:33] We have the most inflammatory diet in history, and it directly causes illness [37:54] Mark shares his journey towards Buddhism, wisdom and compassion [40:47] Your brain, mind, body and gut are all connected [43:03] Mark shares the one change people need to make [47:48]   FOLLOW MARK:   WEBSITE: drhyman.com INSTAGRAM: https://bit.ly/31IKBcR  FACEBOOK: https://bit.ly/2tN13MP  TWITTER: https://bit.ly/2vpGFS4

Hi everyone, this is Kea Perot, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Dr. Hyman was recently interviewed by Tom Bilyeu of the Health Impact Theory podcast, and the interview was so fascinating that we wanted to share it with you. Hope you enjoy it. Hey everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, a giant in the health and wellness space. He's not only written 11 number one New York Times bestselling books on a wide range of health related topics but he's also the director of functional medicine at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic additionally he's consulted for the Surgeon General and

testified before Congress on the issues of health care reform and functional medicine and further proving that healthy living apparently makes you essentially superhuman he also founded and serves as the medical director of the ultra Wellness Center acts as the medical director of the Ultra Wellness Center, acts as the chairman of the board for the Institute for Functional Medicine, and somehow has time to be the medical editor of the Huffington Post. And quite honestly, all of that is just the tip of a very large iceberg of incredible accomplishments. It really is crazy, dude, doing the research on you, like seeing how many things you're involved in and it all seems to revolve

around a couple of core things one of them being shocking we'll get to that one in a minute around Buddhism and Connection and love and all that which I was really blown away by yeah, but the the core notion of the body as ecosystem Yeah, talk to me about that. What does that mean? Well, you know, I went to medical school and we learned about the body as a bunch of separate parts. There was your heart and your cardiovascular system, your GI system, your nervous system, and on and on. And there's all these specialties that are all siloed. And you go to the doctor and you have a whole bunch of different symptoms. And when you basically ask about, well, you go to the cardiologist, well,

I got this rash. Oh, don't talk to me about that. I won you go to the cardiologist well i got this rash oh don't talk to me about that i won't go to the dermatologist or you feel like a little depressed oh go to the psychiatrist you know you've got a doctor for every inch of you and the truth is the body is one ecosystem and i discovered this by myself becoming really really sick and having to reverse engineer my way to health and I discovered this model of thinking that was basically a systems model. And it helped me to understand the root cause of disease and how the body works together and everything is connected like a web. So when you pull on the right strings, you don't have to treat everything separately with multiple medications. You can get to the root cause and everything goes away. Now, one thing, so having lived through this myself with my wife

and seeing how complicated it becomes when you start thinking of the body as an ecosystem, because she's had massive microbiome issues, digestive trouble. Yeah, which is where it all starts. Right? So we started trying to use traditional Western medicine. So it was like, okay, what is this? How do you, and maybe you walking us through what you did in your own life, because I know that you ran into a very catastrophic health problem. How do you begin to figure out what is the root cause and then actually take steps to repair? So functional medicine is basically a methodology. It's an operating

system. It's a way of thinking differently about disease. And it's becoming a medical detective to connect the dots between all these disparate things. And so I basically look at a person's story and try to get a sense of how they got to where they are. So for your wife, I'd want to know, oh, was she born by C-section or vaginal birth? Was she bottle fed or breast fed? Did she take early antibiotics? Did she have gastroenteritis or was she traveling to a foreign country or something happened where her gut didn't develop properly?

And then I want to know what other exposures she's had and whether she's exposed to toxins, heavy metals. So I ask a lot of questions. I want to know everything she eats, exactly her lifestyle, what she does, how she sleeps, exercise. So I'm looking at whether the body's in balance in these systems. Functional medicine has a map. We call it the matrix.

Okay. Essentially, if we look at your genetics and triggering factors, we look at your lifestyle. Give me an example of triggering factors. Were you exposed to a moldy house? I got really sick living in a moldy house. In China, I got exposed to mercury. That's a triggering factor. You could've got Lyme disease.

You could've eaten bad sushi and got something. So all that is relevant as a triggering factor. But then there might be predisposing factors like she had a gut that wasn't so great in the first place. She might have had, again, born by C-section, bottle fed, not taking antibiotics. And then we see where things are in or out of balance. When you have too much of the bad stuff and not enough the good Stuff that your body needs, you know sleep exercise nutrition relationships connection love meaning all that stuff

When you have too much the bad stuff not of the good stuff your body breaks down So we look at these seven systems and how they're in balance or out of balance and that relates to all disease So there's your gut and they're all connected. They're not really separate. They're like a web But we just break them out for the purposes of thinking about them, right? So there's the gut, and they're all connected. They're not really separate. They're like a web, but we just break them out for the purposes of thinking about them. So there's the gut and digestion, the microbiome. There's your immune system. We call it defense and repair. Your energy system, how you make energy from oxygen and food.

Your detoxification system, how you process your metabolic toxins, environmental toxins. Your transport system, which is circulation, lymphatic circulation. Your communication system, which is hormones, neurotransmitters, messenger molecules that communicate, and then your structural system, which is everything from your biomechanical skeletal structure down to the structure of your cell membranes. And all those are influencing how you feel at any moment, influencing whether you're getting more disease or less disease.

So when your gut breaks down, and the gut is really the central thing, because when your gut breaks down, and the gut is really the central thing, because when your gut breaks down, everything breaks down. Because the microbiome is this extraordinary ecosystem of bugs within you that control a lot of what happens in your body. And when they're out of balance, you not only have digestive symptoms, but you can have everything from dementia to cancer to heart disease to, to autoimmune diseases, and lots more. So I know you've talked a lot about the need for coaches and getting a health and wellness coach involved in your life. If somebody right now is at home listening, so now they understand the seven systems that are working together, how can they begin to diagnose what's going on? Are there like

simple questions that they can ask themselves? So like in Lisa's case, we sort of backed into, there are probably several problems, including, um, bordering on an eating disorder when she was younger. Yeah. And then I'll mess up your system for sure. And then a lot of antibiotics and the threshold event ended up being, she just got some sort of bug of some kind. But it was because she had taken antibiotics. I mean a lot, she was taking antibiotics for like four or five times a year for years. She had chronic chest infections. Right. And so then she hits this bug, whatever here in LA LA. An intestinal bug. Yeah, yeah. That was a tipping point. That's a triggering factor, right?

So the whole point of functional medicine is about creating health. You know, regular medicine is about diagnosing and treating disease. I don't really care what disease you have. I want to know how do we create health. How do you get the best microbiome on the planet? How do you create a healthy inner garden? What do you have to do to do that? How do you diagnose what's out of balance there and get rid of the bad bugs and then

put in the good bugs? But it's not just as simple as taking probiotics. You know, I actually had a- Do you think probiotics work? They're like tourists. You know, they come through the economy, they affect things a little bit, but they don't stick around that long. So you have to keep taking them, which is not bad necessarily. But what's really extraordinary is that I recently developed ulcerative colitis as a result of taking an antibiotic for a bad tooth. I had a

tooth infection that led to C. diff, which is a deathly intestinal infection that then spiraled into colitis. And, you know, doing what I do, I was like, okay, well, this is kind of messed up. I got to rebuild my gut and I you know Took all the things I knew and I put together this cocktail of stuff and there was one particular bug called Ackerman SIA which is really important in regulating immune function and cardiovascular health and lots of things and it protects the biofilm it restabilizes your gun and This is all really relatively new research If you have you have low levels of this for example If you get those new checkpoint inhibitors that are anti cancer drugs that are immunotherapy. They don't work checkpoint inhibits

It's an immunotherapy drug which activates your immune system. Okay to kill the cancer And this is like an a hundred percent like if it works you're cured you have melanoma like Jimmy Carter. It's stage four melanoma You're gonna be dead in a few months you take this drug you're cured and he's still building houses at 99 years old or something So that's these are amazing drugs, but they don't work on everybody and turns out if you don't have a healthy microbiome They don't work. So all this research is going on. I started looking at I realize you know what taking Prebiotics is good take which is fiber feed the good bugs taking probiotics is good But they also like polyphenols, which are these extraordinary compounds in colorful fruits and vegetables

that the microbiome needs to grow. And so think about creating healthy soil. You can put all kinds of chemicals on, right, fertilizers and this, and you have a damaged soil, it doesn't really grow good food. But if you have a healthy, rich soil, you can create health. And so we put in all these things like cranberry, pomegranate, green tea, and they are really great for acromancy. And then I used prebiotics, fiber, like acacia fiber, to help feed the good bugs. And I also used a form of colostrum, which is immunoglobulin. So

it's like passive immunity, helps regulate the immune system and he's a little collagen peptides I took some something called pro butyrate which is a product that helps with fats in the gut And this is a general cocktail that I take it's a shake take it every morning and within three weeks My ulcer class was gone like gone and now I'm like best poops in my life So that's this very interesting. So first we had to kill the C. diff, then we have our magical cocktail. What if somebody has SIBO? Would you recommend doing a round of antibiotics to kill the SIBO first? Yeah. SIBO, for everybody listening who doesn't know what that is, it's basically where the bugs migrate up into your small intestine from your

large intestine. So you normally should have a sterile upper gut and your lower gut, your colon is where your poop is and your bad bugs are or good bugs. When they migrate up, that's when you get bloating, distension. I call it food baby. You know, you know like every time you eat you just feel bloated and full after. That's often a sign of bacterial overgrowth. Really common. So you can, you have to figure out why it's happening, because if you just treat it without knowing that, it can come back. That's interesting. Why would it happen?

Well, it can happen because you have motility issues, you have low magnesium, you have a parasite. There may be some reasons why. You could have Babesia, which is a tick infection. So you have to figure all that out. But then you can take herbs or you can take special antibiotics that are only in the gut. And I also use antifungals that clear out the bad bugs. I call it the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. You weed out the bad bugs, then you seed it with good bugs, and you feed it with all this good stuff.

Okay. So if we're doing weeding, seeding, and feeding, what do you use to identify what the current state of your microbiome is? Is there a particular test that you recommend? Yes. There's so many tests out there, but clinically, I think the most useful one, I've been doing this for 30 years, and it's called GIFX from a lab called Genova. It looks at not just the microbiome from measuring the bacteria, because you can do that. You can measure with new DNA testing, is really actually RNA testing for bugs you can

actually measure all the bugs in there but then what does it mean how clinically relevant is it so I I look at the function of the gut are there are there the products for example in there that are made by healthy bugs called short chain fats if they're low you know that there's no good fats and that's the fuel for the colon I want to look at, are your digestive enzymes working? Are you absorbing food properly? Is there inflammation in your gut? What's your immune system doing in your gut?

What is growing in your gut? Do you have a parasite or bad bugs? So I look at all that, and then I can come up with a sense of what's going on. And often people have leaky gut and food sensitivities, and this vicious cycle of these bad bugs and food sensitivities and it's what makes so many people sick. How long would you expect, when done well, how long would you expect this repair protocol to take? If you combine it with diet, you'd also have to eliminate the things that are in your diet

that are driving gut problems, right? Because think about it, you're eating pounds of food every day, and that is what's landing in your gut and feeding your bugs. And if you're eating processed food, sugar, starch, bad fats, it's going to be a problem. You're not going to get better. So you need a whole foods diet.

I call it the vegan diet, which is kind of a joke, but it's like, you know, less extreme, more inclusive, but whole foods, focusing on quality, not so much worrying about quantity. And sometimes eliminating things like gluten and dairy and other things that can trigger food sensitivities. And combined with the diet and this protocol, within a few weeks, people started to feel significantly better.

And then it takes about three months to really kind of reset the whole thing. When somebody has a stubborn problem, like Lisa is insanely disciplined. If you tell her to do something, she's going to do it for sure. Her diet is clean. In fact, I would probably consider that one of the things that became her problem was- Was too restrictive? Too restrictive. And then once the SIBO kicked in, once she encountered the parasite and had the threshold event, it's like the weed, seed, and feed thing. I don't know that we've ever gotten perfect. Is there any particular thing that creates a stubborn problem when the person is being disciplined,

but it continues to not go away? Almost 30 years ago, I had another problem, which was mercury poisoning. And that messed up my gut big time. And I got a triggering event, which was some bug I picked up somewhere in a lake in Maine. And then my entire gut broke down. And I literally had diarrhea, bloating, pain for years. Whoa. And I developed chronic fatigue syndrome.

My whole system broke down. And it wasn't until I got rid of the mercury that my gut sorted out. So if she has mercury poisoning, if she's mold toxic, if she has a tick infection, some underlying thing, it can impede people getting fully better. Yeah. So now let's say that we've identified the problem, we've done the weeding. What should somebody be eating? So obviously in your new book, What the Heck, you go into, it's all whole food based, but there's obviously a lot of whole foods in the world. So what should people be aiming at? Well, here's the thing. There's so many diet wars. Nutrition is often based on ideology, not on good science. And there's so much conflicting information and

people are buffeted about by the media. One day the meat's bad, then it's good. One day eggs are bad, then they're good, then they're bad. I mean, it kind of makes people crazy and give up and what a scientist is doing and it's just a mess, right? But I've been studying nutrition for 40 years and I've been not only studying it in a book, I've been using food as medicine for 30 years as a doctor. And I'm humbled by it because I realize everybody is different. Everybody needs different approaches based on their genetics, their preferences, and so forth. But there are some common principles. I call them the Pagan principles that are universal that no one will argue with. And I,

you know, I was sort of joking because I was on a panel with a friend of mine who was vegan. It was a cardiologist. Another guy was a paleo doc and they were fighting and I was in the middle. And I'm like, well, if you're paleo and you're vegan, then I must be Pegan. And it was like, just kind of a goofy joke. And I realized, wait a minute, they agree on about everything except where you get your protein from. So they all agree that we should be eating whole foods. They all agree we shouldn't be eating any industrial processed foods. They all agree we should be eating a ton of vegetables, lots of good fruit, lots of nuts and seeds, lots of good fats.

Everybody agrees that. The things that are different are, should we have our protein from animals or from beans and grains? That's the only difference. The things that are different are, should we have our protein from animals or from beans and grains? That's the only difference. And I thought, well, not everybody has a problem with beans and grains, and not everybody has a problem with animal protein. In fact, it can be a very important source of food for most people.

The question is what? What grains? What beans? What meat? What fish? And so that's really what those principles are about. It's focusing on quality So for example, do you want to eat a feedlot burger? Heck? No, right because they're raised on grain for many reasons one

They're they're raised in a way that is inhumane for them. They're raised on foods that Create, you know bad metabolic profiles in the animal. So you're eating a lot of inflammatory stuff. They feed them chicken shit. They feed them candy. They feed them corn. And then there's how they grow the food for the animals, which creates massive environmental destruction, loss of biodiversity in the soils and animals, loss of water resources because of all the irrigation

to grow the crops for the animals, the deforestation that results, the destruction of our soil, the use of fertilizers, pesticides, the fertilizers run off and destroy all the rivers and lakes and oceans and create dead zones, the size of New Journey in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 212,000 metric tons of fish a year. And there's 400 dead zones like that that the size of Europe around the world that are in coastal areas that are killing the food supply for half a billion people you know that's because of the consequences of how we're growing our food and not only that it's a giant source of climate change for all those reasons so no but he should be eating factory farmed animals

on the other hand you look at regenerative animals, which means regenerative means you farm or grow animals in a way that is bringing the ecosystem back to health, which is restoring soils, reducing water use, reducing or limiting fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. And there was an interesting analysis. Everybody's into these plant-based burgers now. And I think, yeah, it's better that we eat plants, and that's great. But what plants?

Should it be a highly industrial product, like Impossible Burger, for example, is GMO soy. So it's grown in a way that you're getting lots of glyphosate, which is not good for you. It destroys your gut. The food is grown in big monocrops, intensively with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, destroying the soil, using up water, and so forth. It's way better than a feedlot beef. But when you compare it, this was done by an independent

life cycle analysis company, Qantas, that looked at both Impossible Burger and a regeneratively raised beef burger from White Oaks Farms in, I think, Missouri. And they found that you literally had to eat one regeneratively raised burger to offset the carbon emissions of a plant-based Impossible Burger. To offset it? In other words the the soy burger added three and a half kilos of carbon the environment the grass-fed burger took out three and

a half kilos of carbon from the environment because soil Is the biggest carbon sink on the planet? It can hold three times the amount of carbon in the entire atmosphere If we took care of it and built organic matter in the soil Which only happens for the use of animals, right? That dig and pee and poo and move around and chew down the grass and that builds soil in this and that Doesn't use fertilizer. It doesn't use pesticides, it doesn't use herbicides, it uses rainwater,

so you're not using 1,800 gallons for every pound. It's called green water. And producing higher quality meat with high levels of antioxidants, high levels of omega-3 fats, better for the animals, and you're not destroying ecosystems. When you grow soy,

you're destroying ecosystems. You're destroying the habitat of animals and rabbits and mice and birds when you're making these giant mega farms. So I mean, probably eating a regenerative grass-fed burger is probably the most vegan thing you can do. And I think it's just, we get this false dichotomy, like all meat is bad or only vegan or, oh, you should only eat paleo.

It just doesn't make sense. That's really interesting. The green argument is fascinating, seeing sort of the balancing out that's going to happen between whether there is some amount of farm raise that's actually necessary. I've heard you talk about the topsoil before and that that's actually something that without animals, you're going to erode the soil,

and that in and of itself causes some dramatic issues. We lose 200,000 tons of soil every hour. Every hour? Every hour. We lose a country the size of Nicaragua or North Korea of soil every year. We have 60 harvests left, according to the UN, before we run out of soil and can't grow food. No soil, no food, no humans.

Forget climate change. I was going change This is that sounds relatively problematic and by actually using the strategy of regenerative Agriculture we can draw down carbon not add to the carbon in the environment. Even if we stopped all fossil fuels Tomorrow we still would be screwed We need strategies that draw down carbon out of the environment. And the food system is the number one set of solutions. Let me ask you, so even just forgetting anything ecological, why plants? So when you were saying everybody agrees we should eat more vegetables, obviously, I would say Stephen Gundry probably doesn't agree that we should eat more vegetables. Maybe if there's certain, yeah, the right vegetables. Do you have a take

on that? Like what's your vibe about lectins? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think it's, it's really personalized. And so for some people who have serious illnesses, getting off of inflammatory foods, including lectins can be helpful. Um, but you know, look, 60% of our diet is ultra processed food. That's the first priority I have is get people off that stuff. Don't restrict vegetables, you know, because like, unless you're really sick and you want to try it as a therapy, fine. But I'm really not, you know, a big fan of telling people to not eat vegetables because I think there's so much value in them. And I think if we actually have the problem of restricting unnecessarily for people, it's not great. Well, let's talk about, so what do you think about the carnivore diet? Is there any logic there? Well, you know, it's interesting.

I mean, you know, like Jordan Peterson's doing that and his daughter did it to cure autoimmune disease. And yes, if you are really sick, sometimes it can be profoundly helpful. I mean, if you have autoimmune disease, if you have severe obesity, I mean, there can be real benefits. But again, you know, we used to eat 800 species of plants as hunter-gatherers. We ate animal products when we could find them, you know, or hunt them. And it was a part of our diet. It wasn't a staple. Some cultures like the Plains Indians, like the Lakota, they lived mostly on buffalo. And they were the longest-lived people in history. They had more centenarians per capita than any other population at the turn of the century.

So you've talked about one thing that medicine really has got to start doing is looking at the laws of biology. So physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology. So physicists are looking at the laws of the universe. What are the laws of biology? I'd love to hear what are some of the laws of biology? How does that play out in terms of plants? Because I can walk you through, it's admittedly like a lay person's understanding, but when I walk through the notion of the plant paradox and you start thinking of a plant as having a basically a chemical evolutionary advantage or the way that they stop predators is by creating these chemicals that either upset their stomach or they're bad for them or they're bitter tasting or whatever.

It's like, oh, that makes sense. When you have something, it has to have a mechanism against predation. Yeah. And humans are one of the predators. And so, okay, it didn't develop claws or whatever. It developed like these chemical signals. You've talked about food being signals yeah more than just calories and so it's like okay well there's actually some logic whether it's true or not is a totally different question

but there's a followable chain of logic to why plants potentially have issues and so it's like is there anything that they all share that for somebody with the sensitivity, they're, you know, they're an issue or no, no, no. Like there's so many other nutrients in vegetables. If you're not eating them, you're committing a cardinal sin of the laws of biology. Well, if you're eating nose to tail, like you're eating the liver, which has more vitamin C, more vitamin A than any vegetable on the planet, right? You know, you can get by, but... You can get by or it's ideal? I don't think it's ideal.

I mean, I think your gut, the microbiome feeds on carbohydrates, feeds on phytochemicals. So it feeds on fiber, right? What does happen to your microbiome if you're only eating carnivore diet? Nose to tail. It changes. But in a bad way? Potentially, potentially. It does happen to your microbiome if you're only eating carnivore diet. Nose to tail. It changes. It changes.

But in a bad way? Potentially. Potentially. I think there's some interesting experiments. I think we're still in the exploration of what happens when you eat different diets. But I have a little different view about vegetables. And I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation, which is a fascinating concept but essentially yes there are defense mechanisms in plants that help the plants but also can help us right so

for example we don't make vitamin C we get it from plants we need things to help us detoxify so when you eat broccoli you up regulate the glutathione the pathways of detox in your liver through phytochemicals called glucosinolates. Your microbiome loves the polyphenols in pomegranate and cranberry, right? So I think we have evolved, co-evolved with plants. So we use these compounds, these phytochemicals, to regulate all sorts of biological functions, from inflammation to our microbiome to detoxification

to brain function or transmission and so on. So I think there are plants you don't want to eat. You don't want to eat poison mushrooms, right? You don't want to eat foxglove, which will kill you. But there are a lot of plants that we've evolved with that we use in our bodies to regulate our biological functions. And I think they're really necessary. Talk to me about soy. I heard you say something, which I'd heard before, but I don't know. There's something about the way you said it that really hit me that, um, you see women drinking or young girls drinking like soy milk, like it's going out of style and then it, it will put them into premature. Yeah. Happened to my stepdaughter. You know, soy milk was the big rage and she liked to drink when she was allergic to dairy. So she was like drink, you know, quarter soy milk was the big rage and she liked to drink i mean she was allergic to dairy so she's like drank you know quarter soy milk a day and she ended up like at nine years old

getting little boobs whoa and we're like oh because it's upping her estrogen yeah so so soy soy is a very controversial topic for many reasons there's all the environmental issues obviously of big monocrop fields of tearing down rainforests in Brazil, of all the consequences of climate change and all that. But from a dietary perspective, it's been a staple in diets for millennia in Asia. And it's always been processed in a way that makes it more digestible. Tofu, tempeh, miso, soy sauce. Those are traditional foods. When you start making soy hot dogs and

soy burgers and eating all these processed things, even soy milk is not something we used to consume. You get one, trouble with digestion, two, increased risk of allergy, and three, you get extra hormonal effects when you have these massive quantities of these things. Yeah. Thinking of food as a signaling molecule and then all the talk around soy, what is the mechanism that's happening that makes soy trigger an estrogen response? I've never understood that. Well, all food is information, not just calories. It's all information. It's instructions. It's literally information. It's instructions. It's literally like code that programs your biology with every bite. At like an epigenetic level?

At every level. So every bite of food you take can change your gene expression across a whole range of genes. So you drink green tea or eat broccoli, you upregulate the gene called glutathione as transferase that helps you detoxify heavy metals environmental chemicals metabolic toxins so so it regulates your genes it regulates your hormones so if you lost starch and sugar it increases insulin lowers testosterone increases estrogen for example it affects your brain chemistry and what your hunger hormones are your craving levels are and what foods you you know you're attracted to it affects your immune system and it regulates inflammation or it's anti-inflammatory.

It regulates your microbiome with every bite. So every single system of your body is regulated by the quality of the food you eat. And when you realize you shouldn't just focus on calories, you should focus on quality and the information you're eating changes everything. So that's really what I have people focus on. And I think when people do that, then you have a different relationship to your

food. You go, well, I'm eating, am I going to eat toxic information or am I going to eat healing information? So if you were to put together a few groups of the sort of healing signals, what would they be like? What would be, if, if you were so, um, in investing, there's this thing called the all weather strategy and they say, okay, look, uh, I'm sort of blindly talking to my grandchildren. I'm, you know, going to pass away and all I can leave behind is a strategy that will work in, in any environment. But if you had to just put together an all weatherweather eating strategy, what would the ideal, in air quotes, diet be? I wrote about it.

I wrote a whole book about it. It's called Food, What the Heck Should I Eat? And it's about these principles. I call them the Pagan principles. And it's really focused on quality first, right? Nobody thinks we should be adding additives and hormones and antibiotics and pesticides and glyphosate to our food.

Like it's in it, but nobody's like, yeah. How do we avoid it at the grocery store? You know, if you look at the label of something, if it has something you can't recognize, pronounce, then you shouldn't have it. Or if you don't have it in your cupboard at home, like butylated hydroxy toluene, which is in almost every processed food, is BHT, it's illegal in Europe, you wouldn't sprinkle that on your salad, would you? No.

No. So that's a good rule. The second principle is we should be eating a plant-rich diet, and across the spectrum from fruits and vegetables to- Do you treat fruits and vegetables as sort of one and the same? No, it should be vegetables and fruit, right? so it's like we should you don't to be consuming only fruit because that's full of sugar and and if you're diabetic or you're Overweight or have issues you might want to come back on the sugary fruits or eat berries, which are less glycemic

Lots of nuts and seeds everybody agrees with being lots of nuts and seeds. You want to soak them, reduce the lectins. That's fine. If you're going to eat beans and grains, pick low-starch ones, right? And also... Give us a few examples. So like black rice, which is like the blueberries of rice. Quinoa. What does that mean? Well, the black rice is called the emperor's rice or forbidden rice. And it's full of these dark...

It's black. So anytime you see color in nature, there are polyphenols and phytochemicals in there. So it's got more antioxidants per serving than blueberries. And then you want to make sure if you're eating grains, the gluten grains are interesting. So most of the gluten we eat is wheat. It's 133 pounds per person per year. That's a pharmacologic dose.

It is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar. Really? Yes. What? Yes. When you look at the glycemic index, which is how much the fixed amount of the food will raise your blood sugar,

table sugar is 80, bread is 100. Whoa, I had no idea why. Because it's so processed and so quickly absorbed. And if you want to eat like, if you're not gluten sensitive, you want to have farro or einkorn wheat or spell, you might tolerate those because those aren't highly altered genetically. But the wheat we eat is super starchy, has a lot more gliadin proteins, create more gluten sensitivity, is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest to defoliate the plants. And it's also has

preservative called calcium propionate, which causes autism in animal models and is shown to cause behavioral problems in kids. So ADD, all that stuff could be all the flour. So I'm not a big flour person. Plus it's just like sugar. So if you want to have other grains, if you're not going to say like rye or barley, that's fine. And then beans again, you know, lime beans, kidney beans. If you're, if look, 75% of Americans are overweight. So most people should be eating a lot of starch and that, you know, you have to eat three cups of beans to get the equivalent of like four, six ounces of protein. Uh, so I have this lentils and things like that, um, which are lower starch beans, the Zuki beans, other kinds of beans I talk about in my book. And then if you're eating animal products, you want to eat animal products that are not

going to hurt the animals, not going to hurt you, and not going to hurt the environment. So for beef, it should be regeneratively raised ideally, which is hard to find, but you can actually get more and more of that around. And there's ways to do it by looking online to get it. Thrive Market is a great resource for regeneratively raised beef. And again, chicken should be pasture-raised. Pork and all that should be raised in ways that are more organic or sustainable. Fish, you want to eat fish that's sustainably harvested

or sustainably organically aquacultured because we over-harvest the fish. And then we don't want to eat big fish's like full of mercury and tuna and swordfish. Just because they've lived longer? Well, what happens is the coal and all the fossil fuels go in the ocean, go into the algae, get stored in the algae. The little fish eat the algae, then the bigger fish eat the little fish and it goes on up the food chain. When you've got a swordfish or a tuna, these are monster fish and they bioaccumulated all

this. And so you want to eat the right animal products. You want to eat the right grains, the right beans, the right vegetables, the right fruits, the right nuts. And so give me the right vegetables. Are we just looking for color spectrum? So non-starchy vegetables. If you want to cut out nightshades and give it to the lectins, that's fine. But I love tomatoes, and it'll make me feel bad.

So there's no point in restricting your diet necessarily if you're not sick, right? Talking really fast, just because you mentioned that you eat nightshades, which are problematic for a lot of people. I've heard you say that your body is the best doctor. What do you mean by that? Yeah, exactly. So, man, you listen and watch my stuff.

I'm impressed. So the whole idea is that you can listen to all the nutritional advice you want, but pay attention to how you feel. Your body's going to tell you. If you go vegan and you stop having your period, you lose muscle, you feel tired, you're B12 deficient, you feel like crap,

you develop autoimmune diseases, you gain weight, whatever, maybe it's not for you, right? I mean, I literally just did a whole analysis on a very well-known celebrity, and he's a vegan. And he's massively nutritional deficient. No omega-3s, extremely low vitamin D, extremely low B vitamins, extremely low zinc, selenium. I mean, it was frightening to see in a young guy how depleted he was. But other people it works really well for. And then see how you feel. If you get rid of gluten and dairy, do you feel better, right? So he was but other people it works really well for and then

See how you feel if you get rid of gluten and dairy do you feel better, right? So I have people do a detox but essentially a dietary cleanse Which is get off all the junk get off all the sugar get off all the processed food eat whole foods get rid of gluten And dairy even get rid of grains and beans for a while and see how you feel and if you don't feel good You know try to add things back if you feel amazing and your autoimmune disease goes away, your digestion problems clear up, your brain fog is clear, your migraines are gone, well, then that's probably a sign that your body likes that way of eating. Walk people through really fast your 10-day detox.

What does that entail? How do they take advantage? One of the essential therapeutic approaches of functional medicine is food is medicine. And in that thinking, one of the ways we treat people is taking away the most inflammatory foods. So gluten and dairy are number one and two for most people for a lot of reasons. But then there's a whole host of other ones like eggs and soy and some nuts for people. So the 10-Day Detox essentially is whole foods based.

It's high quality animal protein, lots of veggies, but non-starchy veggies. So it's extremely low glycemic. So there's not starch and sugar and flour. It cuts out grains, cuts out beans, cuts out fruit except for berries. And it's got a lot of good fats. I cut fruit except for berries. Just you're trying to get the sugars. Well, the diet is designed to be like, it's not one size fits all, but it's close because it's low glycemic. So it helps you lose weight. It's anti-inflammatory. It fixes your gut. And it's highly nutrient dense and has lots of fiber, lots of phytochemicals,

lots of good fats. So it's high fat, low starch and sugar. So it works for autoimmune diseases, for gut issues, for weight issues, for diabetes. I mean, I should show you this picture of this woman who literally had type two diabetes for 10 years on insulin heart failure kidney failure liver failure high blood pressure tons of medications 65 years old on her way out she came into one of our group programs at cleveland clinic went on the 10-day detox took basic supplements like a multivitamin fish oil vitamin not a lot of stuff and within three days she was off her insulin whoa in three months she reversed her heart failure her kidney failure her liver failure her high blood pressure got off all her medications lost 43 pounds and in a year she lost 116 pounds and is off everything and she saved

twenty thousand dollars a year in co-pays for her medications because insulin's so expensive and and that was food i mean it you know, she was seeing so many doctors, she was seeing the best in the field and they were managing her disease. And I don't really want to manage people's disease. I want to get to the root of it. And for so many people, food is really the root. What I like about that approach is that it's a detox, right? So it's more about what you're removing even than what you're adding. And I find a lot of times, that's interesting. I want to hear more about that. Cause what I find a lot of times is that people want to just add like, Oh, if I add broccoli to my Twinkie diet, that I'll be fine. So what, where do you think that balances? Like

how much of this is a removal? How much of this is an addition? Um, I think, you know, we, we have the most inflammatory diet in the world right now. And all the diseases that people suffer from, whether it's gut issues, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, these are all inflammatory diseases. So the foods that we're eating, 60% of our diet is considered ultra processed food made from corn, wheat, and soy, mostly in the form of white flour, high fructuctose corn syrup and trans fats or soybean oil now and The people who eat the most of it are the sickest and the people who eat it for every 10% of your diet That's ultra processed foods. Your risk of death goes up by 14%

So we eat 60% And and so we have to get rid of that stuff that's destroying our biology because we're it's like literally putting poison in our body and And our bodies don't die immediately. It's a slow long prolonged Painful death, right? Yeah, so it's taking out all that stuff It's taking out things that are often inflammatory like the the wheat we eat isn't the wheat that our ancestors ate right the dairy we eat is not the dairy that our ancestors eat it's been highly altered through genetic breeding the changes of quality the the fats the proteins

the the allergens in there so like we used to have heirloom cows which were you know if you travel around the world and you see these cows like wow that's a weird looking cow you know like I was like I never like that because they're all like these same cows in America they're like white and black Holstein cows they're all bred by like three bulls and they're pretty much genetically the same and they have high levels of a1 casein which is super inflammatory whereas heirloom cows don't or cheap and goat also have A2 casein, which is less problematic. Wheat, same thing.

The way they've created the dwarf wheat, they breed the wheat for all these properties that are drought resistant, more starchy, and so forth. And the guy won the Nobel Prize for this, but the unintended consequences is when you breed plants, it's not like humans. You get your 23 pairs of chromosomes. Every human has 46. If you were a wheat plant and you have 46 chromosomes and you breed with another wheat plant that's 46, you get 92 chromosomes, right?

And then what that means is you're making extra proteins because chromosomes genes make proteins and you're making way more gluten proteins that are much more likely to cause celiac, which is why we've seen such an increase in celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. That's really interesting. Okay. One thing I want to go back to is where you started and like your whole thing around love and community and how, if you really want to make change, it's about connection and getting other people that are around you to change

their lifestyle as well. And then it self reinforreinforces. One, walk us through, how did you end up going so deep on Buddhist studies? What did you draw from that? And then as you were having, not really a near-death experience, but I mean, you were in a risky place there the first time you had that medical emergency. Yeah, yeah. Like the peace that you had during that whole process,

which I found very interesting. Yeah, well, you know, I was always a weird kid. I always like, didn't really have any friends, just read a lot of books, couldn't really relate to anybody except grownups. And then I got to college and it was like, wow. And I read Walden when I was like 14, 15, and I just like studied it like a Bible.

And I then I took- What specifically is hitting you? Like at 15, to encounter those ideas which would be very run very contrary to a standard american upbringing yeah but what specifically were you like whoa that that well it just you know i i i remember being like three and you know just feeling so much love for everybody and just feeling in a state of love all the time. And I remember noticing how all the grownups were just so weird and why were they so disconnected. And I always felt that sense of love. And I think when I began to understand what Buddhism

was about, it was about understanding compassion and kindness and service and also like wisdom. How do we see the world? So Buddhism isn't a religion. It's basically a phenomenology of the mind. It's a description of how our perception works, why we suffer, and how we can break down that in slow motion like the matrix. You break down the ways in which we get into this suffering pattern of getting attached to our meanings. We put on things and that creates

all this misery and suffering. It's all created in our head. And I, and I really was looking for a way out of my own suffering as a kid. And it just was really spoke to me. And how does that become so important as you look at wellness and think of that as, as a sort of a critical pillar of actual wellness? Do you talk in functional medicine when somebody comes to see you, do you talk at all about the need to meditate? Of course. Yeah. A hundred percent. So what is that? What's the connection there? What's the mind gut connection? Like how this all play together? Well, like I said before, we're one system. So your brain is connected to everything else. And when you're stressed, you're dysregulating all the functions in your body, right? It's fine if you're running for a tiger, but if you're

stressed all the time, your gut shuts down, your immune system doesn't work. You're, you know, you're constantly in a state of vigilance and stress which is just degrades every system in your body so it's a huge component is both dealing with your mindset and your way of thinking to sort of be able to unhook from all the meanings we attach to things all the perceptions we have that aren't really true and the suffering we self-generate. And then I also teach people tools and techniques to help them reset, right? So we're all stressed. Like I'm running around in LA today, you know,

doing my TV shows and this and that, you know, for my new book, but like I make sure I meditate. Like I meditate this morning, you know, sometimes I'll be able to squeeze in a yoga class. Like I'll, you know. You used to be a yoga instructor. I did, I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor. Yeah, I was kind of weird, I told you I was weird. It's it's so interesting man

Here's the problem with where you're at today functional medicine is no longer like this alien notion But the fact that you've had your finger on this for as long as you have is really interesting The fact that it was born into the mind of somebody that was so into Eastern philosophy does not surprise me. Well, it's a system's view, right? And, you know, what is, you know, Buddhism is sort of a description of the laws of the mind, right? And so functional medicine is an description of the laws of biology. For we have no theory. We have theories of physics, right? We have the laws of physics. We can build a bridge or a spaceship based on the laws of physics, right? And it works because there are natural laws. Well, what are the natural laws of biology? There are

natural laws. And in medicine, we've not thought about that. We were like, well, this hurts, so fix this. It's like a knee problem. The knee problem might be related to your gut, right? And how do we think about that? So functional medicine attempts to describe what are those natural laws? What are those essential elements? So when I look at traditional medicine, there's now 155,000 diseases. If you look at your code book, it's ridiculous. And it used to be 12,000. They subcategorize them to say you have depression. It's just the name of the disease. It doesn't tell you the cause of the disease. So functional medicine, what are those natural causes? And you can have a few natural laws that describe an immense number of phenomena that you see, right? So that's like the laws of physics, immense number of phenomena. So the same thing is true in biology. And functional

medicine, I think, is an attempt to codify what those natural laws are, how the body actually works, how it's connected as a web, what are the root causes of diseases? And there's not many, right? It's stress, poor diet, toxins, allergens, microbes. And what are the things we need to create a healthy human? It's a short list. The right food, nutrients, balance of hormones, light, air, water, love, meaning, connection, purpose. Those are the things that we need to thrive. And you just take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff and you know, miracles happen. Dude, that is such a powerful way to explain all this. Yeah. That was amazing. Thank you for that. Where can people connect with you? Oh, they can go to drhyman.com. I've got a podcast, the doctor's pharmacy,

which is killing it. I don't know why, but people love it. And, uh, you know, um, yeah, very easy to answer why people love it. It's absolutely amazing. High quality as is everything that you put out there, dude, it's amazing. What you're doing is really, really extraordinary. I can think of few voices that would be able to, to match yours in this space. And so the fact that you've stepped out front and are doing all this is really incredible and just the knock-on effect with you getting involved in regulation and everything i think yeah we got we all got it we all got to save ourselves here because nobody's coming to save us and i think we have to understand that that our food system is generating most of the problems we see in the world the chronic

disease the burden on our economy our 22 trillion dollar debt a lot of that has to do with the food we're eating and how It's causing chronic disease. It's burdening our Government the climate change of the results from it the environmental degradation violence poverty injustice malnutrition I mean, it's all it just goes on and on all the web It's all connected. That's the beautiful thing. It's like functional medicine when you see how it's all connected and Not in silos you can actually fix one thing and everything gets better right yeah all right if you could have people make one change that would have the biggest impact on their health what change would you have them make

it's pretty simple i mean eat whole real food i, follow the Pagan diet. Get my cookbook. I mean, it's pretty simple. I mean, I kind of laugh because I got paid a lot of money to tell people to eat real food. And I'm like, you know, it's sort of obvious, right? I think it is a very effective answer. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you. Guys, go check out everything that he does. The books, he has so many they're so good you can literally pick them almost at random but starting with the one that he just released i think is a very good start and then be sure to check out his podcast the doctor's pharmacy with an f uh it is really fantastic everything that he does i think is incredible and is leading everything in the

right direction if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care