The Dr. Hyman Show - What To Eat To Support Your Gut, Reduce Inflammation, And Have More Energy

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and Mitopure. There is no other activity you do every day that has more power to change your biology than what you eat. Food carries information molecules, instructions, and code that programs your biology with every bite for better or worse. Food is more than just calories; it is information that controls every aspect of your health. Unfortunately, the Standard American Diet (SAD) comprises over 60 percent ultra-processed food mostly from commodity crops—wheat, corn, and soy—turned into hundreds of thousands of food-like products that bear little resemblance to our evolutionary diet.  In this episode, I explore how to use food as our greatest ally for achieving an optimal state of health and healing from states of disease. I discuss what to eat to support every system in the body, what foods you should avoid, why the quality of what you eat matters, and more. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and Mitopure. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 35 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Right now, InsideTracker is offering my podcast community a super special deal of 31% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.  Mitopure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new, healthy mitochondria. Get 10% off at timelinenutrition.com/drhyman and use code DRHYMAN10 at checkout. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: The Pegan Diet: Use Food As Your Farmacy The #1 Thing You Can Do Every Day To Improve Your Health Eat These 5 Superfoods To Enhance Your Brain And Body

Hi, Doctors Pharmacy listeners, it's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me, you know that I'm obsessed with understanding the latest research on longevity and how we can apply it to our daily lives. So I wrote a book about it. Think of it as a roadmap to optimal aging. It's called Young Forever. It's never too early or too late to take control of your health, and this book will show you how.

Visit youngforeverbook.com to learn more and order now. Coming up on this episode of The Doctors Pharmacy. Visit youngforeverbook.com to learn more and order now. Hi everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a functional medicine doctor, looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables, it helps me find the most effective path to health and healing for my patients. But such extensive testing can be very complicated and time-consuming for both the practitioner, somebody like me, and our patients.

But lab ordering became very quick and painless since I started using Rupa Health. I can order, track, and get results from over 35 different lab companies within a few clicks in one lab portal. And this means one invoice for all labs paid online up front. Plus, patients get practitioner pricing and receive full patient support through easier personalized collection instructions, automated follow, super bills, and answers to testing questions, and so much more. And best of all, it's free for practitioners. So sign up free today. You can find out more information by going to rupahealth.com.

That's R-U-P-A health.com. I'm excited to share with you a brand that I trust whose product I've seen value in firsthand, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a wellness tracker that uses science and technology to deliver ultra personalized healthcare guidance. Their cutting edge algorithmic engine analyzes your blood, your DNA, your lifestyle habits, and then gives you an actionable set of recommendations to help you meet your health and wellness goals. Since 2009, InsideTracker's science team from Harvard, Tufts, MIT have been bringing personalized nutrition and wellness to the world with a powerful evidence-based digital platform. Their guiding principle is that your body is unique, so your nutrition, exercise, wellness plans should be too.

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

podcast community 31% off. This is a super special deal they're offering my community. Just go to insidetracker.com slash hymen to get your discount code and try it out for yourself. That's insidetracker.com slash hymen for 31% off. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Most doctors have not seen the power that food can have on preventing and reversing disease, mostly because they were not trained in using food as medicine. And many of us don't understand the link between what we eat and how we feel. But what we put into our body has a direct and immediate impact on our health.

In fact, there are 37 billion chemical reactions happening within your body every second, and every single one of those reactions requires vitamins and minerals to make it work. This is why what you put on your fork is the most important thing you do every day. In this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, we revisit three episodes where Dr. Hyman explores the power of food. First, he discusses what foods to eat to impact every system of our body. Next, he outlines how to personalize your diet, what foods make up an optimal diet, and which ones we want to avoid at all costs. And lastly, he talks with his friend and business partner, Drew Pruitt, about why the quality of what we eat matters. Let's dive in. 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 in 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 in 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, etc., etc., 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, shiitake, 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 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, Co vitamins coq10 carnitine which comes from meat or carne zinc magnesium selenium omega-3 fats lipoic acid things like n-acetyl cysteine 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 each 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 an 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 that reduces inflammation, 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 aisles, 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. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark. In my over three decades of practicing functional medicine, I've learned a few things. Take old age, for example. Aging has long been considered a normal process. We used to think disease, frailty, gradual decline were just inevitable parts of life, But it turns out they're not. The negative health effects of aging are actually treatable if you understand the root causes. Mitochondrial dysfunction is one of those root causes of rapid aging that leads to all sorts of long-term health issues. By treating your mitochondria well, you can live a longer,

healthier, more active life. And that is why, my friends, I'm super excited about MitoPure. MitoPure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new healthy mitochondria. New science is showing that healthy mitochondria also improves immune function too. I've been using it for over a year now,

and at 63, I feel stronger and more energized than ever. Right now, Timeline Nutrition is offering my community 10% off MitoPure, which you can get in a capsule powder or protein blend at timelinenutrition.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E.com slash Dr. Hyman. That's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And use the code Dr. Hyman10, just D-R-H-Y-M-A-N, and use the code drhyman10, just D-R-H-Y-M-A-N 10, number 10. 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, prediabetes, 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, NO, 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 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 and 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 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 9 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 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. 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, 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% water, 16% protein, 23% fat, if an average woman, and 6% minerals, and less than 1% 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. Okay, so how do we personalize our diet for us? What should we be eating? What's an optimal diet? It doesn't really have to be

complicated. Listen to your body. I always say the smartest doctor in the room is your own body. How do you feel when you eat this? And I just talked to him yesterday. So when I eat dairy, my nose starts to run immediately. Well, guess what? Your body's telling you something. Listen to it, right? Don't eat the dairy because you're having some reaction. Or if you're eating, you know, if you eat a ton of pasta

and you feel like you're going to a food coma, probably good clue, you probably shouldn't be doing that. So listen to your body. And it's amazing to me after decades and decades of being a doctor that people, even the smartest people I know, do not connect what they eat with how they feel. It's just mind boggling to me. And then when you start to connect the dots, they go, wow, this is powerful. So you need to customize what you're doing. You need all the bad stuff. You got to take it out. Processed food, sugar, junk food, refined oils, all that stuff goes.

I mean, just take out the bad stuff. We know what all it is. I've talked about it. And then add in a ton of good stuff. I went to the farmer's market and bought all this stuff the other day. And it's yummy. It's fresh. It's local.

It's way more tasty than stuff you buy in the supermarket. If you can do that, do it. If you can't, fine. Even with Snap or food stamps, you can get double bucks. So you can go to the farmer's market and afford it, even if you're struggling with food security. So really important to customize your diet. And then what actually is a good diet?

And I've written a lot about this. I wrote food, what should I eat, the vegan diet. There's no guessing what I think. But essentially, it's whole real food. I kind of used to do a lot of speaking in churches with the Daniel plan I did, and I used to say it's really easy to figure out what to eat. I just ask you to have one question. Did God make this or did man make this? Did God make an avocado? Yeah. Did God make a Twinkie? No. Did man make an avocado? No. It's pretty easy. Even a kid in kindergarten could figure out what to eat.

So ask yourself next time you go buy something, who made this? Was it coming from nature and God or was it just coming from a factory somewhere? And then you should probably stay away from the stuff that's not actually made by God or nature. So you wanna eat whole foods, real food, lots of plant foods.

80% of your diet should be unprocessed whole plant foods, vegetables, fruits, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds. Obviously some grains and beans are good, some aren't. Like gluten is a problem, especially modern wheat. You want to probably want to stay away from that. You need to eat foods that have good fats in them. Avocados, nuts, olive oil, fatty fish like sardines, mackerel, herring. You also want to eat a lot of fiber. So that's going to happen naturally as you eat a lot of plant foods. You want to make sure you have prebiotic foods like plantains and artichokes and asparagus. And I even sometimes add that from a microbiome. You also want polyphenols for your microbiome. Things like cranberry and pomegranate and green tea and all these prickly

pear and olive leaf extract and all these different things that you can use to actually increase the growth of the good bugs in your gut because that determines so much of your health. You're not only feeding yourself, you're feeding all those guys in there. And then you can also take fermented foods, things like tempeh and sauerkraut and miso and kimchi. These are all foods that are traditionally made in diets because we had to preserve our food in the past. We didn't have refrigerators, so we had a way of preserving all this stuff. And also protein is important. Now, especially as we get older. Now, you don't want too much protein, but you want enough protein, and you want the right kind of protein. And I've written a lot about this, especially in my book, Young Forever. But there's basically a few... The rule is a palm

size full of size amount of protein in most meals. And this can be plant proteins, but often you need a lot more nuts and seeds grains and beans are okay but they're lower quality they don't have all the amino acids you need for or in the right volumes for building muscle particularly as you get older so i like grass-fed meat i like pasteurized chicken i like pasteurized eggs i like small wild fish i like goat whey these are my kind of go-to proteins. So that's what I think. Tofu, tempeh are probably the most dense plant-based proteins, but you want to eat the right protein. Now, what should we not be eating? Well,

it's stuff that's not food. Obviously, there's another thing is junk food. There's junk and there's food. So obviously, if you see a label with 45 different ingredients, don't eat it. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, don't eat it. If you don't recognize what the ingredients are, don't eat it. You know, you can shop around the outside of your grocery store. There's a few key tips that you should just stick to 100%, never fall off of this. No high fructose corn syrup every period. Why?

Well, one is sugar and two is a special form of sugar that does a lot more damage and is a lot more likely to cause harm. The next is hydrogenated fats. Never eat anything with that. And it's supposed to be not safe to eat according to the FDA, but it's still everywhere in the grocery stores. I don't know how they get away with this, but seven years ago, they said it's not safe to eat, and it's still in the grocery stores. You can go figure. Anyway, I won't get into that. Refined vegetables, want to stay away from stores. You go figure. Anyway, I won't get into that. Refined vegetables, want to stay away from that. Stay away from additives, chemicals, preservatives, pesticides. I mean, if you wouldn't sprinkle it on your salad or on your vegetables at night, well, why would you eat it? I mean, who has butylated hydroxy toluene in their

cupboard? But that's a common preservative found in most processed food. Also, artificial sweeteners are really bad. They tend to cause bacterial overgrowth in the gut. They actually increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. You don't want to do that, and they'll wreck your health. So what's the number one take-home philosophy? Just that simple question. Did God make this, or did man make this?

And ask yourself that next time you pick something up at the grocery store. The most important thing to understand is that the quality matters. The source matters. Where it was grown matters. The quality of the seed matters. The quality of the soil matters. The way it was grown and transported and processed and where you could buy it. All those things influence the quality of the nutrition in the plant or in the animal. And so we've developed a food

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

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

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

which is basically a receptor on the nucleus of your cells. And when the trans fat binds to that receptor, gram for gram, it turns on inflammation. It slows down your metabolism. It makes you pre-diabetic. When you have the same amount of fat from fish oil,

it will actually reduce inflammation. It will speed up your metabolism and it'll reverse diabetes. So same fat in terms of the amount, but the quality matters. Same thing with carbohydrates. If you have Himalayan tartar, buckwheat flour, and you make pancakes from that versus modern dwarf wheat, which is super starchy, has way more glycine proteins than traditional wheat, and is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest, which is a terrible destroyer of your microbiome and the soil microbiome, and also affects the risk for cancer. And it's then preserved with something called calcium propionate, which is a preservative that causes autism in animal studies and hyperactivity behavior issues in kids. I mean,

that's a very different kind of pancake, even though you're eating the same amount of carbohydrate. So that's just on the macronutrient level. But on the micronutrient level, there's also big differences in vitamin and mineral content, but the bigger differences are in the phytochemical content. There's a wonderful book called Eat Wild, which talks about, for example, the difference between a wild blueberry and a conventional blueberry or a small purple Peruvian potato versus a giant, you know, Idaho starchy potato or a difference between sort of traditional Native American corn versus the modern corn. Even though they're all corn or whatever, the phytochemicals are profoundly different and have tremendous differences in their biological effects. So when we're eating food, we're not

just eating for energy. We're not just eating for protein, fat, or carbohydrate, or fiber. We're not just eating for vitamin minerals. We're eating for this class of compounds, which turns out to be probably the most single, most important regulator of all your biological functions and is the major determinant of the quality of your health and aging. So if you want to create health, these are not optional. So we talk about essential nutrients and vitamins and minerals as being essential to life. And if you don't have them, you die. Well, you're not going to get a deficiency disease if you don't have these phytochemicals like scurvy or rickets, but you will develop chronic disease and you will age faster if you don't have these protective compounds in your body on a daily basis.

So it's so important to understand that the quality of your diet matters at every single level and the source matters and all those things along the entire supply chain matter if you're going to actually think about what you're eating. Mark, that was a great breakdown. Now you talk about these 25,000 known chemical compounds and foods. And I think one thing to expand on is that we're not just eating them for us. We're eating them for something else that's in our body. Can you just talk about what that is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the truth is we may just be, we just may be a vehicle for the bacteria. I mean, we're not actually more human than we are bacterial. In fact, there's more bacteria in you than your own body cells, about 10 times. There's probably a hundred times as much bacterial DNA

as your own DNA, which is, let's say you have 20,000 genes, or maybe two or three or five million bacterial genes, all producing proteins, all of which are information molecules that are being absorbed and regulating your body's function. And there may be as many of the metabolites from bacteria in your blood as your own body's metabolites. It's just staggering. And we have just begun to sort of understand this. We talk about our metabolome, which is all the biochemical reactions in our body, which is like, you know, thousands and tens of thousands. But there's also the metabolome of the microbiome. And so the quality of your microbiome determines the quality of your health, which is all those bugs in your gut, which is essentially the biggest and most important organ in your body.

And what determines the quality of your microbiome is what you're eating. So if you're feeding it refined oils and processed food and sugar and starch, you're going to grow a bunch of nasty weeds in there that are causing inflammation, causing aging, causing diabetes, causing you to gain weight, and a whole host of other things, including autoimmune disease and maybe even autism and dementia. However, if you're feeding them the good stuff, which they like to eat, the good bugs grow. So you either fertilize the bad bugs or the good bugs. And the good bugs tend to love polyphenols. These are really important. And these compounds are all these colorful things you see in the rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Pomegranate, cranberry, green tea, for example, feed a

particular bacteria in the gut that is critical for immune function and for preventing cancer and heart disease. So when you increase the phytochemical richness of your diet, you're increasing the quality of the microbiome and your overall health. So people think of, oh, calories. They think of glycemic index or glycemic load. I like to think of the phytochemical richness of your diet or what I call the phytochemical index, which would be about phytochemical index, which is how good are the phytochemicals in food?

And the truth is that how we grow food in this country, in soils that are depleted and in ways that are not encouraging the growth of these phytochemicals because the seed quality we pick, we're just depleted in these phytochemicals more than ever. We used to eat 800 different species of plants. Now 60% of our diet comes from three plants, basically corn, wheat, and soy, which are all turned into industrial processed food. And we should be eating a wide variety of weird foods. I love to eat weird food.

Whenever I go to the grocery store and I see some weird vegetable I never ate before, I pick it up and I eat it. I figure out what to do with it. It's great. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in. If you like this conversation, I know you'll love my new book, Young Forever. If you pre-order this book now, you'll get access to my discount bundle with deals from all my favorite health and wellness brands. Visit youngforeverbook.com to order my book and get access to these deals.

I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up

for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash PICS,

P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit 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.