The Dr. Hyman Show - The Pegan Diet: Use Food As Your Farmacy

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Many of us don’t understand the link between what we eat and how we feel, or between food and the myriad ailments to which humans are prone. Foods are made not of ingredients but of complex compounds, all dynamically influencing your biology. Think about the implications of every single bite of food you eat. You are literally programming your biological software for better or worse. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman discusses the power of using food as your farmacy, the first principle in his new book, “The Pegan Diet: 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World” out February 23, 2021. Learn more and pre-order the book at pegandiet.com The Pegan Diet is Dr. Hyman’s definitive guide to using food as medicine and understanding how food impacts every system of our body. It has 21 easy to follow principles for anyone, regardless of where they are on their health journey. It also contains 30 delicious Pegan-approved recipes. Get Dr. Hyman’s discount bundle which includes discounts to all of his favorite brands when you pre-order The Pegan Diet today. 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you eat too much food, if you eat too much sugar and starch, if you eat processed food, if you don't have enough phytonutrient, antioxidant-rich foods, you basically get this process called oxidation or rusting. This is what happens when your skin wrinkles, when an apple turns brown and nuts turn rancid. That's oxidation oxidation and that drives inflammation in your body. Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And today we're going to have a special episode on my new book,

The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. Today's principle we're going to focus on is use food as your pharmacy. Wow, what a concept. This is the foundation of the future of medicine. No joke here. This is what we all will be doing in the future. Focusing not just in a general way about how food is healthy for you, but on. They think it's energy. They don't realize it's information, that it's instructions, that it's code that upgrades or downgrades your biological software with every single bite. So what is in food anyway that does all this? How does it work? And what does it do to your body in ways that can transform your health for good or bad. So first of all, food is a whole array of molecules, right? It influences every aspect of our biology, literally every aspect. And we're going to go into what that is and how that relates to functional medicine. But what's in food? It's

proteins, it's fats, it's carbs, it's vitamins, minerals, it's fiber, both soluble and insoluble, and resistant starches, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, probiotics, prebiotics, phytochemicals, even microRNA, which is the genetic material of plants that we actually absorb and then communicates with our own DNA. It's pretty wild, huh? So food is not made of different ingredients or components, which is the reductionist view we call nutritionism. So let's eliminate saturated fat or sodium or sugar. This doesn't speak to the idea that food is a complex array of dynamically interacting molecules that all

influence your biology. And taking these nutrients out of context called nutritionism is really not relevant for understanding how food interacts with our biology. In fact, most people really don't understand how what they eat connects to how they feel or the link between food and a whole series of different illnesses, which we all get as we go through our lives. And what we do is pretty amazing in medicine. We rely on medications and prescriptions and hospital visits and doctors to rescue us from our poor food choices, which really, if we thought about it, would solve so many of our problems.

Because food is, as I said, not just calories or energy, it's information, it's instructions, it's code, It's medicine, literally medicine, that regulates all the major functions of our body. You see, medicine is kind of screwed up. It's based on an old paradigm that has nothing to do with how the body is truly organized. It's not organized by specialties like rheumatology, gastroenterology, neurology, endocrinology, all the ologies. It's organized by a basic few systems or networks that are all connected. These interconnected biological networks make up your overall ecosystem. When you understand these basic functional systems, which we'll review in a minute,

you can have a profoundly different view of your health and how to create health. And you can use food as medicine to optimize every single one of these biological systems in your body that's driving health or disease. We categorize disease according to symptoms and geography. What's the symptom? Where is it in your body? And then we group people into these categories that have nothing to do with the cause and that don't really tell us what to do to fix the problem. Functional medicine doesn't think that way. For example, if you come in with the feeling of sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, no interest in sex, you don't want to eat, your doctor goes, I know what's wrong with you. You're depressed i know the cure it's an antidepressant but depression is just the name of your symptoms it's not the cause and depression is not a prozac

deficiency it could be because you are eating gluten and that creates brain inflammation or it could be because you have a low thyroid function or it could be because you're b12 deficient from taking acid blockers your last 20 years because of refluxes of your bad diet. Or it could be because you have vitamin D deficiency because you live in the Northeast and never get out and you're always working inside. Or maybe you take antibiotics after infection and that disturbed your microbiome that affects your brain chemistry.

Or maybe you eat too much sushi and have mercury poisoning. Or maybe you don't eat fish at all and you have omega-3 deficiency, or maybe you eat too much sugar and have prediabetes. See, depression can be caused by any one of these issues or many of these issues, and the way we diagnose disease doesn't help us figure that out. Functional medicine is a whole new way of thinking about disease. It's not a test or a supplement or a particular modality. It's a way of thinking about solving the puzzle of chronic disease by root causes. And in order to do that, we have to look at the basic way the body's organized. You see, your body is a set of biological networks

that all are part of a bigger network or ecosystem. And they're influenced by your genetics and your lifestyle and environment. And food is the biggest modulator of these systems that determine health and disease. So what are these systems? And then we're going to go into how food affects each of them. The first is the gut. Yes, we know all about the gut and the microbiome. It's hugely influenced by food.

And it's striking to me that most gastroenterologists go, I don't know. It doesn't matter what you eat. When you think about the fact that there's this tube that's probably 20 or 30 feet that you're putting pounds of food in every day, and how could food not have anything to do with it? Well, I don't get that, but maybe they can explain it to me. Then there's, of course, your immune system and your inflammatory system. That's modulated by food and everything else that you do.

Your energy system, how you make energy in your cells and your mitochondria, that determines so much of your health. Your detoxification system, how you handle metabolic waste, environmental toxins. Your circulatory lymphatic system and your communication system, which is how your cells communicate through hormones, neurotransmitters, immune molecules, and much more. And lastly, there's your structural system, which is what you're made of. Everything from your subcellular organelles to your cell membranes to your bones, muscles, tendons, brain, everything else, all your cells are made from stuff. And where does that stuff come from? Where do the raw materials come from? What you eat.

So let's take a deep dive into how food both harms and heals each one of these systems and what you can do to actually use food as medicine within each of them. So the first is the gut and the gut microbiome. Now, what is your microbiome? What's this magical kingdom of microbes that lives in you? And it's probably the most important organ in your body that we've ignored for most of medicine. If it's unhealthy, well, you can get heart disease, cancer, diabetes. You can become obese. It contributes to autism, autoimmunity, dementia, allergies, asthma, fibromyalgia, Parkinson's, skin problems, acne, eczema, asthma, psoriasis. And of course, all the digestive issues like IBS and reflux and colitis.

I mean, that's pretty much everything, right? Everything is connected to your gut, even depression. I mean, think about that. We now know that your mood is connected to the activity of the microbes in your gut and whether they're good or bad ones. And guess what determines which bugs grow in your gut? What you eat, obviously. Now, bad bugs grow on our gut for two reasons. One, we don't feed the

good guys. We don't eat the food that feeds the good guys. And we eat too many gut-busting foods. And of course, take gut-busting drugs. So what are the gut-busting foods we should be really careful of? Number one, two, and three on the list, guess what? It's gluten. Modern wheat has an excess of these powerful anti-inflammatory proteins called gliadins that cause you to have a leaky gut. And of course, that drives inflammation throughout your whole body because when your gut barrier that keeps you protected from the outside world, right? It's only a cell thick. It's literally the size of a tennis court if you laid it out flat, but it's only a cell thick between you and a sewer. When that barrier is breached, which happens because of our poor diet

and bad microbes and food sensitivities, particularly gluten, you are exposed to a whole world of bad things, food proteins, bacterial toxins, and that creates inflammation throughout the body. In fact, 60% of your immune system is in your gut. Why? Because it's there to protect you as a first line of defense against the outside world. Now, when you eat a diet that's rich in sugar and starch and processed foods and refined oils, you feed the bad bugs and you get a leaky gut. And of course, if you're eating a lot of gluten, a lot of people react to that too. Even if you're not gluten sensitive, if you don't have celiac, it does create a little bit of a leaky gut for everybody. Well, that's not good. That's what America's

eating. So it's why we're all so sick and overweight and miserable and inflamed because all the diseases of aging are inflammatory diseases. And we're going to get into that in the next system we cover around the immune system. So if what we just talked about was a gut busting diet, what is a gut healing diet? Well, you can use food as medicine because the good bugs in your gut love different foods. They love fiber. And the most essential fibers are called prebiotics. And certain foods have really high levels, things like artichokes and plantains and asparagus and seaweed. Pretty much any fiber-rich food will help grow an inner garden that's healthy. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and beans. Now, in addition to fiber,

we need probiotic foods. And you can take probiotic supplements, but you can eat them in fermented foods like sauerkraut and pickles and tempeh and miso and natto and kimchi. All are really, really helpful for your overall well-being. One funny story is that Polish women eat 30 pounds of sauerkraut a year in Poland. When they move to America, they don't eat any. And the rates of breast cancer go skyrocketing just because of the sauerkraut, because of how it affects your microbiome. And at Cleveland Clinic, we study the microbiome in cancer, and particularly breast cancer. So the linkages are there. Of course, there's also other nutrients

that your gut needs to function well. Zinc, for example, is really critical for enzyme function, your digestive enzymes, and it's found in pumpkin seeds and oysters. You need omega-3 fats from fish, like sardines and herring, that regulate inflammation. Vitamin A is really important for epithelial lining and the gut lining. You can get that from beef liver, cod liver oil,

salmon, goat cheese, and collagen is great. So you can get bone broth, like costa amino glycans are in bone broth, which help heal the gut. Kudzu is a Japanese root, also a gut healing food. And new research has shown that a whole class of molecules will be pretty much ignored for the gut called polyphenols, maybe among the most important things you can consume to optimize your gut flora. These are all the colorful antioxidants and pigments in dark fruits and vegetables, berries. For example, pomegranate, green tea, and cranberry fertilize a bug called acromantia that's been shown to regulate autoimmunity, protect against heart disease,

and even help you fight cancer if you get immunotherapy. So we are just learning more and more about these things all the time, and it's pretty exciting. But you got to feed your gut well. You got to take out the gut-busting foods and fix your gut with food. The next system in your body we have to talk about is your immune system and inflammatory system, and these are highly regulated by food. Now, we're all thinking about immunity in this age of COVID, and how do we boost our immunity, and how do we take care of ourselves better? And the scary thing is, is that if you're overweight, you're inflamed. If you have a chronic illness, like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, et cetera, et cetera, you're

inflamed. And what's happening is that COVID is hitting these people who are pre-inflamed. And those are the ones who are getting really sick, getting in the hospital, the ICUs and dying. So what are the foods that cause inflammation? No surprise. It's our ultra processed junk food process diet, right? Bad fats, refined sugars, too much starch, dairy, most dairy, poor quality food, all drive inflammation. And sugar and starch are hidden everywhere. Now, when you have sugar and starch, which pretty much are the number one and two drivers

of inflammation in this country, it spikes insulin. And that creates insulin resistance, which means your cells get numb to the effects of insulin. You need more and more. And that creates a cascade of a vicious cycle that drives inflammation throughout your body. Because those fat cells that get deposited around your belly are not just there holding up your pants, they're literally producing molecules of inflammation called cytokines. We call them adipokines or adipocytokines. It's a fancy medical word, but essentially it means you got a fat belly and that fat is inflamed.

It's angry fat. And guess what? That is what's leading to what we call the cytokine storms that are killing people with COVID. So you don't want to be doing things that are driving inflammation. You want to remove the things that are causing inflammation. So yes, we talked about all the gut busting stuff. That's number one, because your immune system is mostly in your gut. Also food sensitivities and allergens that happen as a result of a leaky gut

drive a lot of inflammation. And the number one and two are gluten and dairy. So what do you do to boost your immune system? How do you get to use food as medicine to help reduce inflammation and actually be an anti-inflammatory? Well, the easiest thing is to cut down on sugar and starch or get rid of it and gluten and dairy, take a holiday for a few weeks and see how you feel with inflammation and you notice it. But more importantly is what you eat. And there's a whole array of anti-inflammatory molecules called phytochemicals, the 25,000 molecules that are in plant foods and some animal foods actually that are anti-inflammatory. For example, extra virgin olive oil contains oleocanthal, which activates the same anti-inflammatory receptors as ibuprofen and no side effects. Other spices like turmeric, ginger, rosemary,

those can be incredibly powerful antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. Omega-3 fats are found in wild foods like fish and seafood and some nuts and seeds. They also are critical in calming down inflammation. Mushrooms that you can eat, shiitake, maitake, reishi, shiaga, turkey tail, cordyceps, some you can take as supplements, some you can eat. They have polysaccharides, which are powerful immune-regulating compounds. And of course, foods that are rich in vitamins and minerals help immune function and reduce inflammation, like vitamin C and zinc and selenium and vitamin D. In fact, vitamin D regulates hundreds of genes that regulate inflammation and immunity.

So let's see, what could you eat for dinner? Guavas and parsley, lots of vitamin C. pumpkin seeds and oysters, lots of zinc, Brazil nuts and sardines, selenium, porcini mushrooms and herring with vitamin D. It's a great anti-inflammatory immune boosting super meal. It might be weird to eat all that together. I get it. I don't know what you'd make with it all, but you kind of get the the idea food is medicine and it's anti-inflammatory the next key system in your body is your energy system how you make energy in your cells you essentially take food or calories and oxygen you breathe it and it combusts in these little powerhouses in your cells called mitochondria and creates something called atp or energy which runs every single function of your body.

Now, if you eat too much food, if you eat too much sugar and starch, if you eat processed food, if you don't have enough phytonutrient antioxidant rich foods, you basically get this process called oxidation or rusting. This is what happens when your skin wrinkles, when an apple turns brown and nuts turn rancid, that's oxidation. And that drives inflammation in your body and also damages the energy factory. So if you overeat food, if you eat the wrong foods, if you don't eat enough of the protective foods, you get into trouble. And so many diseases are related to dysfunctional mitochondria from obesity and diabetes to Parkinson's disease to autism,

chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and just the process of aging. Age-related disease is all related to poor mitochondrial function. Because if you lose energy, your body starts to break down, you age and get sick and die. Not what we're looking for here as a strategy for maintaining and creating health. So how do you actually get more energy production? Well, you get rid of all the junk as we talked about, and then you need certain nutrients in your food, vitamins and minerals, things like B vitamins, CoQ10, carnitine, which comes from meat or carne, zinc, magnesium, selenium, omega-3 fats, lipoic acid, things like N-acetylcysteine, vitamin E, vitamin K, sulfur. It's a lot of work to make energy. You need all these nutrients. So how do we get those? Well, get off the junk, right? But eat foods that are full

of these compounds like blueberries, pomegranates, grass-fed beef and butter, broccoli, sardines, extra virgin olive oil, avocados, almonds. You know, one of the best fuels for the mitochondria is a special oil. It's called MCT oil or medium chain triglycerides and it's found in unrefined coconut oil. Now, it's the cleanest burning fuel for your mitochondria. It's great for performance. I often use it before I go for a long bike ride. So we actually know how to upregulate our mitochondria and improve their function through food. And also even when you eat, timing of food. We talked about autophagy and intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating. These are all designed to optimize the mitochondria. So you got to get your energy straight and food is the way to do that. The next system in your body we have to optimize through food and use food as medicine is our detox system, our detoxification system.

Now, most of us, when we think about detox, we think about drug rehab or alcohol rehab or some weird fat or cleansing diet. Not talking about that. Our body has its own detox system, right? You pee, right? You pee every day, which gets rid of waste. You poop hopefully every day, which gets rid of waste. Your liver has to detoxify. Imagine if you didn't pee or poo for a week, you'd be in big trouble. But your liver is so overloaded with the wrong foods, with environmental toxins, that it needs a lot of

help. So some of it's obvious, right? You want to drink a lot of clean water so you can pee. You want lots of fiber to keep your bowels moving, but your liver needs a little extra love. And in the liver, there's a lot of pathways that metabolize toxins, both ones you make yourself, your metabolic toxins and environmental toxins. And by the way, we're exposed to a lot. There's 80,000 new chemicals that have been introduced into the world since 1900, and most of them have been not tested for safety. So we are in a sea of toxins, and every single person, if you did a fat biopsy, would have all kinds of nasty stuff in them. In fact, there was a umbilical cord study

done of newborns where they drew the umbilical cord blood before they took their first bath, and there were 287 known toxins, 210 of which were neurotoxic, including heavy metals, pesticides, phthalates, PCBs, flame retardants. I mean, you name it, it was all in there. Teflon, pretty scary. Anyway, so we need a lot of help. And where do you get the help? Food, food, food, food. Food is so powerful because it regulates these functions. Things like methylation, glucuronidation, acetylation, glutathione conjugation, lots of big words. But essentially, these are the pathways that need support and help. So what do you do to boost these pathways? Well, there's a group of foods that is the superheroes of detoxification foods,

the cruciferous vegetables. Now, this includes broccoli, collards, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts. This family has sulfur in it. It also has glucosinolates, sulforaphanes, all these phytochemicals that upregulate the production of a very important detox molecule called glutathione. Glutathione is the body's master antioxidant, master detoxifier, and master anti-inflammatory. Garlic and onions are also great for the same reason because they contain sulfur. You need amino acids from protein. If you're low in protein,

you can't metabolize toxins very effectively. Green tea is also important. There's a super detoxifying compound called catechins that is important for getting rid of mercury and heavy metals. And the liver needs a lot of vitamins. It needs B1, B2, B3, B6, B12, folate, lots of minerals, manganese, magnesium, zinc, selenium, helps all these chemical reactions. And these nutrients are found in our food. You can get them in animal protein, seafood, nuts, seeds, green veggies. And also the liver needs other stuff too, besides just the vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. It needs a whole array of these, what I call conditionally essential compounds called phytochemicals. See, I think we evolved to be adapted to eating a lot of these

because we eat 800 different species of plants as hunter-gatherers with all sorts of phytochemicals and phytonutrients and our bodies are lazy. Like we don't make vitamin C because we can get it from food. We don't make omega-3 fats because we can get it from food. Well, not so much anymore. But a lot of the compounds that we need to regulate these basic functions of our body are found in these phytochemicals, these 25,000 molecules that are found in food that we're still mapping. And some of the best ones for your liver are curcumin, which is found in turmeric, the Indian spice.

It reduces inflammation, oxidative stress, and helps detox. Rosemary, ginger, cilantro, awesome. oxygenation oxidative stress and helps detox rosemary ginger cilantro awesome also foods like dandelion greens parsley lemon peel watercress burdock root artichokes all great detox foods and literally when i go grocery shopping like i walk through the aisles i don't really go through the house i just go around the outside and i'm looking for drugs i'm looking for drugs that's where i get my drugs, in the grocery store. And I look for these foods and then I incorporate them in my diet. So I buy artichokes.

I buy watercress. I buy lemons and I grate the peel into salads. I have dandelion greens. I use ginger in everything. I make cilantro pesto. I mean, there's all kinds of ways to use these foods. And I encourage you to start to incorporate them and understand what they do so you can use food as medicine, just like I do. The next system we have to optimize with food is our circulatory

system, or we call our transport systems. Now, the biggest killer in the world is cardiovascular disease, and it's caused by, you guessed it, our standard American diet, which we're basically exporting to every country on the planet, which is why they're also getting it. And this is driving insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and leads to clogged arteries. It leads to strokes, amputations, and diabetics, even dementia. But the problem is this is not a plumbing problem. It can't be fixed by roto-rooter treatments like angioplasty or stents. And cholesterol is really not the whole problem here. It's not even the major problem. It's inflammation.

Now, of course, as we've talked, the standard American diet causes a lot of inflammation. And it's got all the inflammatory foods like bad fats, bad meat, sugar, starches, all that stuff. In fact, a single fast food meal harms your blood vessels. Really, you can see the lack of increased dilation, the lack of blood flow. It's crazy. But the good news is if you include a lot of protective foods, the antioxidants, phytochemicals, the anti-inflammatory foods, that you can literally protect yourself against the harms from these foods. In

fact, you can eat a fast food meal and it will not do the damage that it would otherwise. Although I'm not asking you here to eat junk food and take antioxidants or take phytochemicals. I mean, that's not what I'm saying, but it's pretty impressive when you look at the research. There is one thing you can do to really improve your vascular health, which is no, N-O, nitric oxide. That is the bomb. In fact, we have a podcast coming up with a Nobel Prize winner on nitric oxide, which turns out can help to even cure COVID, but it dilates your blood vessels.

It reduces inflammation in your blood vessels. It prevents clotting. It's an incredible molecule. And how do you get it? Well, you eat the right foods, right? Arginine is an amino acid that is the precursor for nitric oxide. And where do you find it? Pumpkin seeds, almonds, walnuts, sesame seeds, turkey breast, soybeans, seaweed. You can literally increase your nitric oxide by what you eat. Of course, not eating all the junk food helps too. Omega-3 fats are also wonderful for reducing inflammation,

for blood vessel health, and to prevent clotting. And olive oil also is an incredible heart-healthy food. The olive oil effects are from these polyphenols and how they affect the endothelial function. That's the lining of the arteries, and they reduce blood vessel inflammation. Pretty amazing. So you can literally modulate these systems in your body by food, by eating the right foods, by getting rid of the wrong foods, by making sure you include all the protective foods and learning essentially like scales to play the music of your biological

symphony by choosing the right notes. And the notes are the food that you're eating. The notes are the wonderful array of compounds in real food, in whole food, that literally will heal your body from all sorts of ailments. All right, let's look at the next system that we have to think about when we talk about food as medicine, how it works to optimize these functional biological networks that we rely on in functional medicine to diagnose and treat disease. It's the communication system, our hormones and neurotransmitters and all the molecules that are our communication system. And they're sending messages everywhere on the body all the time. And when they play out of tune, well, it's like instruments in a symphony orchestra that don't play together. Bad things happen.

Disease happens. Depression. Anxiety. Insulin resistance. Chronic fatigue. PMS. Polycystic ovarian syndrome. Infertility.

Sexual dysfunction. Breast, uterine, cervical cancer. Low sex drive. Erectile dysfunction. Well, you get the picture. Not so pretty. Now, I've written many books about hormones and food, and the single biggest hormonal low sex drive, erectile dysfunction. Well, you get the picture. Not so pretty. Now, I've written many books about hormones and food,

and the single biggest hormonal disorder we are facing, by far, is insulin resistance. Too much insulin. I mean, one in two Americans is pre-diabetic or type 2 diabetic. And if you look at the 88% who are metabolically healthy, they're on that continuum too. That means almost nine out of 10 Americans have this problem. And what's striking and scary is that in terms of COVID,

one of the biggest risk factors for poor outcomes in hospitals and deaths and ICUs is entering the hospital with a higher than normal blood sugar. Not diabetes, but just a slightly elevated blood sugar. This should have everybody paying attention and ditching the starch and sugar. So what happens when we eat in a way with all the starch and sugar, basically 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year, that's about a pound a day per person, which is scary. I know I'm not eating that much. So some of you might be eating a little more. When you have this high insulin, it creates a domino effect. First, it drives all the excess calories you're eating into your fat cells. And then these fat cells produce all these

messenger molecules, these cytokines we talked about that drive inflammation. They increase hunger. They slow your metabolism. They prevent fat burning and they cause all this inflammation. So it's really a disaster when you have too much sugar and starch in terms of the hormone insulin and what it does. And on top of that, if that weren't bad enough in women, too much insulin turns estrogen into testosterone, which means women get something called polycystic ovarian syndrome. It's not really an ovarian problem. It's a dietary problem. And that testosterone causes women to have facial hair, hair loss on their head, acne and infertility and weird periods. And men, you know, the bigger your belly, the lower your testosterone and the lower your sex

drive and the lower your sex function. And the testosterone gets converted into estrogen because your fat cells contain aromatase, which turns testosterone into estrogen, which is why men get man boobs. They lose the hair on their arms and their belly and their bodies, and they end up maybe looking more like women by the time they're 65. Also, when you eat a lot of sugar and starch, other hormones get wacky. Cortisol, adrenaline. So you get high levels of cortisol, which is good for an acute stress, but long-term it causes muscle loss, causes dementia, and basically worsens every disease. So maybe that's a reason you should put down the starch and sugar. Now, there's a lot of good

things you can do to help regulate your hormones. Of course, using the vegan diet, which is a whole foods, good fat, plant-rich, fiber-rich, low glycemic diet. Now, if you're a woman and you're dealing with too much estrogen, which can cause PMS and many female cancers, I think it's important to work on a gut microbiome by increasing the right fibers. For example, flax seeds have lignans, which is a phytochemical that can detoxify and remove excess estrogens. For men who have low testosterone, getting rid of the sugar and increasing fats can make a big difference, especially saturated fat. In fact, where do you get your testosterone and sex hormones from? Cholesterol. Yes, they are made from fat and

cholesterol. Also, our thyroid function is also affected by what we eat. Your thyroid function can affect your hormones, metabolism, your energy, and it's common. One in 10 men have low thyroid and one in five women. Now, what causes it to mess up? Well, gluten, maybe too many raw kale smoothies because that blocks your thyroid function. Also, if your diet's low in zinc, selenium, vitamin D, and iodine, all necessary for making our thyroid hormones work. Also, environmental toxins, which are found in our food, like pesticides, mercury, these screw up our thyroid. So what do you want to do?

You want to add foods that help your thyroid function, like zinc, which is in pumpkin seeds and oysters. Selenium, which is in sardines and Brazil nuts. Vitamin D, which is in herring and porcini mushrooms. And iodine, which you can get from seaweed and fish. All these help optimize thyroid function. So that's a few examples of how food regulates our hormones. And there's lots more.

This is just scratching the surface. I just want you to get the idea that there are foods that harm and foods that heal, and that we can use food as medicine to regulate every key system in our body that then in turn will create health for all of us. The last biological system is our structural system. It's our cell membranes. It's our musculoskeletal system. And like I said, you are what you eat.

You literally are made from the stuff that you put in your mouth. How do you think tissues, cells, membranes, everything gets made? It gets made from the raw materials that you put in your mouth. Now, do you want to be made from a Twinkie or a Coca-Cola, or do you want to be made from maybe wild blueberries or grass-fed beef? I mean, think about it. You are literally providing the building blocks for your whole body. And these proteins, fats, the minerals, these building blocks are so important. Now, carbohydrates are not really that relevant honestly there's essential fats there's essential amino acids and proteins but there's no

such thing as essential carbohydrates in fact if you look at what we're made of we're about 55 percent water 16 protein 23 fat if an average woman and six percent minerals and less than one percent carbohydrate and small amounts of vitamins. Problem is most of our diet, about 60% is mostly low quality refined starch and sugars that are the raw materials for processed food. So what do we need to do? Well, how do we support our cells, organs, muscles, bones? We need the best quality food.

If you're building a house, you don't want to make it out of crappy materials. You want to make it out of strong materials. So we need healthy fats because our brain is 60% fat. Every single one of our nerve coverings are all made from fat. Every one of our 10 trillion cells is wrapped in a little fatty membrane. So what fats do you want to eat? Do you want refined junk oils? Do you want trans fats? Do you want oxidized oils? No, you want high quality fats, omega-3 fats. You want even fats from grass-fed animals, eggs, avocados, nuts, seeds. All these things are great sources of fat to build your body. We need quality protein, right? Protein is what your body is made of, particularly your muscles. And what kind of proteins you need?

Well, there are different sources of protein and they all have different abilities to build your muscle. I mean, you can get protein from plant foods, but the quality is lower and plants have lower levels of key amino acids, which are called branch chain amino acids, things like leucine that are really important to synthesize new muscle. In one of the principles in the book, if you get the book, which I hope you do, we go deep into the science of how to address something called sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle. And it's the single biggest factor in the aging process. And we need to learn how to

build muscle, particularly as we age, and avoid the foods that cause muscle loss like sugar and starch and eat high quality protein, particularly as we get older. So we will go over all that in the book. But this is the bottom line. Food is medicine and it can be poison or it can be a miracle drug. And I have seen over and over the miracles that food can bring when people swap out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, and understand how to optimize each of these biological systems. And for me, I'm kind of lucky because I understand nutrition. I understand what's in these foods. I understand which foods have which medicines and how to apply them, how to eat prebiotic foods, probiotic foods, anti-inflammatory foods, foods that regulate my hormones, foods that

build my structural system, foods that produce more energy in my cells. All these things are critical for staying healthy. So I want you to really dig down on this whole idea that you should use food as your pharmacy. And maybe that's why I called my podcast The Doctor's Pharmacy, because that's what it's all about. Food is medicine and how to heal from all the chronic illnesses that are due to the processed food we have by swapping out and including real food, what's in the vegan diet. So thanks for listening to this special episode of The Doctors Pharmacy on my new book, Vegan Diet, out February 23rd, 2021.

I hope you all get a copy wherever you get your books. Let me know what you think about it. Share this podcast with your friends and family. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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 to 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 cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash PICS, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter,

and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. 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.