The Megyn Kelly Show - Ending Chronic Disease, Forces Fighting RFK and MAHA, and Power of Functional Medicine, with Dr. Mark Hyman | Ep. 1044

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Mark Hyman, co-founder of Function Health, to discuss how functional medicine can actually fix Alzheimer’s and dementia, what the root causes of these conditions actually are, how to navigate the disconnect between functional medicine and more traditional doctors, the truth about the toxins in our food and environment, how RFK Jr. has been fighting back for years and is again at HHS, why we're seeing more diabetes and other nutrition-related diseases in America's youth, how changing nutrition and prioritizing health can actually reverse chronic disease in adults and kids, how these habits can improve overall brain function, the benefits of the Keto diet and how it could actually solve mental health diseases and cancer, what types of food to prioritize and what avoid, the massive and well-funded forces fighting RFK Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement, why nutrition and MAHA is bigger than politics, the dangers and benefits of Ozempic and similar GLP-1 drugs, the "skinny fat" effect, and more.Get Function Health: https://www.functionhealth.com/a/megynBirch Gold: Text MK to 989898 and get your free info kit on goldXX-XY Athletics: Go to https://TheTruthFits.com and use code MK20 for 20% off!Go to https://hometitlelock.com/megynkelly and use promo code MEGYN to get a FREE title history report so you can find out if you’re already a victim AND 14 days of protection for FREE! And make sure to check out the Million Dollar TripleLock protection details when you get there! Exclusions apply. For details visit https://hometitlelock.com/warrantyTax Network USA: Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://TNUSA.com/MEGYN to speak with a strategist for FREE today Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today we're going to take a break from politics to talk about a very important topic. Chill out about the tariffs and markets. We're going to check in on them another day. Today, let's talk about the fact that we all have nothing if we don't have our health. And we have the perfect guest to discuss how you can take control of your wellness and life. If you're into Maha, this is the show for you. If you're into living, this is the show for you. Dr. Mark Hyman is a practicing family physician and a leader in functional medicine. We'll talk about what that means. He is a 15-time New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Dr. Hyman Show podcast,

and the founder of Function Health, a resource that gives you the tools to own your own health. Dr. Hyman was on with us back in February, 2023 on episode 498. Tariff wars, stubborn inflation. No wonder gold has been routinely hitting all-time highs. In volatile markets like the one we have now, don't sit on the sidelines with your head in the sand. You can take control and safeguard your savings. This is why so many Americans today are turning to Birch Gold Group. They have helped tens of thousands convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in physical gold. Is it time for you to hedge against economic instability with gold? To learn how to own physical gold in a tax-sheltered account, text MK to 989898.

Birch Gold will send you a free, no-obligation info kit. Again, just text the letters MK to the number 989898. With an A-plus rating, with a Better Business Bureau, and countless five-star reviews, Birch Gold has helped many protect their savings with gold. It took us decades to get into the tangled mess that they're trying to unpack right now in DC. How long is it going to take to get out of it, and at what cost? Text MK to 989898 today. Great to have you. Good to be here, Megan. Okay, can we just start with that? What is functional medicine? Because it's not the same as like traditional medicine. No. You know, traditional medicine is really about sick care. It's diagnosing and treating disease as opposed

to the science of creating health. That's what functional medicine is. Instead, it reframes our whole perspective to get to root causes rather than just downstream symptoms. So medicine is sort of divided into specialties and different organs and different parts, but your body's one whole ecosystem. And now we begin to understand that and how things like environmental factors, toxins, our diet, stress, allergens, and so forth, interrupt our biology or lack of certain things we need,

like the right food, nutrients, amounts of hormones, light, air, water, hormones, light, air, water, sleep, connection, movement, all these things are ingredients for health. So functional medicine is about identifying the root causes, which are the lack of things you need to thrive and too much of the stuff that doesn't, your body doesn't like, whether it's heavy metals or whatever it is, and taking those away. And then your body has this natural intelligence and healing system that allows your body to repair, heal, and renew. And when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

So functional medicine is really about this new paradigm of dealing with the body as an ecosystem rather than going to a different doctor for every inch of your body. It should just be medicine. Yeah, it just makes sense. But it's not. It's not. It will be. It will be. It's coming.

It's where the science is. It's where we're headed. It takes a generation or two to change science. I was doing some of these things, uh, like a year ago. I said, getting my, my life in order physically and in every way. And, um, the woman who was advising me was like, we should, we should get you a test for the heavy metals in your body. And my doctor was like, no, he refused. Like he, it was actually something he would have had to order, I guess. And he's like, we're not doing that. And like, he was not open-minded to it at all. Some of the other stuff, he was like, okay,

because I had mold in my apartment or my house at the beach. And he's like, I guess, you know, you can get tested for mold. But then he's like, do you really think it's an issue? He was like, if mold were killing people, everybody who lived in the jungle would be dead a lot sooner than people who live in the desert.

And they're not. So I've been like pulled between these two, you know, because I functional medicine makes so much sense to me. And yet my like, very like no nonsense, traditional doctors like, no.

Yeah. No. I mean, the two things that make us sick are our diet and environmental toxins. And those things are ignored by traditional medicine. My daughter just graduated medical school. I mean, she learned nothing about these things.

And yet every day in my practice, I see people with chronic illness, whether it's autoimmune diseases or whether it's metabolic diseases or whether it's digestive diseases or neurodegenerative things like Alzheimer's. And they're all things that we now begin to understand the root causes and we can actually change those and reverse those chronic illnesses. Like nobody ever heard of reversing diabetes before. Nobody ever heard of reversing Alzheimer's or reversing autoimmune diseases. And you can, and that's the beauty of reversing diabetes before. Nobody ever heard of reversing Alzheimer's or reversing autoimmune diseases. And you can, and that's the beauty of what this approach does. It's really where medicine's headed.

It's where major sort of academic institutions are researching, but it takes a couple of decades for science to become practice. With RFKJ, who I know is a personal friend, Callie and Casey Means, Callie in particular, like a big advisor to him. That's great. He's totally on board with all this. Um, and then you mentioned Dr. Bredesen. He's the Alzheimer's doctor. I mean, he's, he's an expert in Alzheimer's and dementia. He's been on the show a couple of times and he's been saying, you don't have to get Alzheimer's. You can do things in your life to prevent Alzheimer's. But the so-called traditional

community looks at him as like, oh, you know, not, I won't say snake really, but like, yeah, exactly. Fringe. And like, you can't listen to him. I first got introduced to him by Maria Shriver, who was having fun when she was on the Today Show. She's very into Alzheimer's. Absolutely. Anyway. Well, she's not, she's into stopping it. Yeah, yeah. She loves Alzheimer's. Yeah. But so, but that's what's happening right now. And the same way we saw, you know, doctors who were like, you might not want to get your seventh COVID vaccine booster who got dismissed by people like Fauci as fringe, Jay Bhattacharya

as focus protection. That's fringe. Now we're having functional medicine doctors looked as, as fringe, but I think there's a different F word and it's future. That's right. It's future. That's changing. I mean, Toby Cosgrove. That's right, it's future. That's changing. I mean, Toby Cosgrove, who's one of the most visionary leaders in healthcare, was the CEO of Cleveland Clinic for many years, and he invited me to come to Cleveland Clinic to establish the Center for Functional Medicine

because he realized that the future is going to have to look different when it comes to chronic disease, that the old model of looking for a drug for every disease or a pill for every ill is not going to solve the problem. We saw this massive failure with Alzheimer's. We saw billions of dollars of money, federal money and private money and pharma money going to researching the drugs that they thought would cure Alzheimer's. And none of them have worked. Billions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of studies. Why? Because they weren't looking in the right place to solve the problem. They were looking

at the pathology downstream, not at the upstream causes. And so the causes are not that hard to understand. It's our metabolic crisis. Pre-diabetes, they're calling Alzheimer's type 3 diabetes, which is because of the sugar and metabolic issues in the brain. That's why keto diets work so well for Alzheimer's. They're looking at environmental toxins and how they play a role. There's heavy metals or petrochemicals or other toxins. Mold may be a factor. Tick infections may be a factor. Nutrition deficiencies might be a factor. I had a patient who was diagnosed with early dementia and she was an older woman who had absorption issues of B12

and also some genetics around vitamin B6 and folic or folic acid. I gave her like vitamin B12 shots and high doses of B12 and B6 and folate and her dementia went away. Now that's not saying all causes, all diseases with people with dementia have that as their cause, but you have to personalize medicine.

And where everything is going is personalized medicine. This is just where we're headed. Leroy Hood, who was the father of systems biology, which is how everything is connected and works together as the body's a network, he called it P4 medicine. It's preventive. It's predictive. So you can identify biomarkers or things along the continuum of disease, not wait till you get something.

Say, well, you know, I have this problem. I don't feel good or my testosterone. Well, you don't really quite have a disease yet. So come back when you really have a disease. Then I'll give you a drug. It's not how we should be doing it. So it should be predictive. I see this. I call it like the queen's medicine.

You know, how did the queen live to be in her mid-90s? How did the queen mom live to be 101 or two? Because they had personal care. That's right. That was looking at them all the time. That's right. On this level, you know, not just like an annual, but, and, and honestly, having known some super rich, like mega billionaires in my media career, they all have somebody who's looking at this stuff all the time. I saw this one guy, super billionaire at this event I went to two years ago. And this is a swanky event. We were there for a few days, put on by another billionaire, but notwithstanding billionaire number one had brought all of his food with him. You know, like he was at that level

where he was being advised at that level on his health. And the reason I'm mentioning this is because all these people who have money or royalty or whatever, they're invested in making sure it's one-on-one care. Someone's looking at their markers, advising them on what they're putting in their body. It's not just like, try to eat better, get a little exercise, don't smoke or drink so much. It's much more creative. But you're like with functional medicine and with your program too, you can get this without being a billionaire, without being royalty.

That's right. It's basically 500 bucks a year. That's right. So function health, you know, I'm one doctor and it's going to take a generation to change medicine or two maybe. So how do we leapfrog over that? We need to have business innovation. And that's where we created Function Health, which is a health platform that's personalized, allows you to understand your own biology, be proactive, be the CEO of your own health. And we're learning so much about what's going on underneath the hood for the population that never had been done before.

We now have over, I think, 180,000 members. We have over 20 million data points on these people. We can see trends like the severe metabolic crisis we're having in America with high levels of insulin and blood sugar and A1C, and also their lipids, which we do in a very deep way to look at the cardiovascular risk that traditional doctors don't do. Less than 1% of all tests are for this special new advanced lipid profile. And less than 1% of all doctors measure insulin, which is the most important test you want to know if you're going to live a long time and be healthy. It's the underlying problem. That's the prediabetes thing. Yeah, prediabetes. But it's not just prediabetes. It causes a heart attack, strokes, cancer, dementia. These are all diseases of, of insulin resistance when your body doesn't

like sugar and it keeps blocking the effects of insulin. You need more and more insulin. And then insulin causes storage of belly fat. It causes inflammation. It makes you hungry. It just creates this whole cascade. And so we're, we're seeing all these amazing things that people didn't know they have. Like inflammation is a big driver of disease. 46% of our population has inflammation. 33% have an autoimmune biomarker, which is sort of amazing to uncover because I don't know what it's causing. Is it our load of environmental toxins that are leaking?

God, is it the COVID, COVID, post-COVID phenomena? Well, the vaccine and even just COVID has led to this long COVID phenomenon, which is often driving autoimmune disease. And we're also seeing nutritional deficiencies. Over 70% of our population has deficiencies in nutrients at the minimum level to prevent a deficiency disease. So how much vitamin C do you not take? You get scurvy, very little. You know, that happened to my husband's good friend on Wall Street when he first started in investment banking. He was eating so poorly. He went to the doctor.

This is a guy working in Manhattan. He went to the doctor. They're like, you have scurvy. Have you been on a ship for six months? He's like, no, I've just been at my desk. But, you know, I've heard you discuss this on your show where we have what percentage of the population now that's obese? Yeah, it's scary. And yet you're saying they're malnourished.

Yeah. People are overfed and undernourished. So we see this double burden of obesity and malnutrition at the same time, especially in kids who are eating junk food. They're tremendous. We're seeing zinc deficiencies, folate deficiencies, iron deficiencies, deficiencies in vitamin D. These are omega-3 deficiencies. These are rampant in our population. And what people don't realize is that these nutrients are the basic lubricants that oil the wheels of your metabolic machinery. So every chemical reaction in your body, and there's 37 billion trillion every second, has to be facilitated by a helper, which is usually a vitamin or mineral.

And we're deficient. And it's because we're eating 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. It's 67% of kids' diet. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. So you do the math. I'm not good at math, but it's a lot of increase in mortality. Those omega-3s you mentioned,

so you can get those in something like fish. Fish, yeah. And then the bad omegas are the sixes, which you can get in vegetable oil. And unfortunately, the average kid has a ton of omega-6s in their potato chips and all this. They're not really necessarily balancing them out. And then if you do try has a ton of omega-6s in their potato chips and all this. Yeah. They're not really necessarily balancing them out.

And then if you do try to balance them out with seafood or fish, the odds are, if you just get it from the grocery store, it's riddled with mercury. That's right. And it may not even be worth the time. You have to get like wild caught salmon or like herring. It's the smash fish. Yeah, that's right. Salmon, mackerel. But not just any salmon.

It has to be wild caught Alaskan salmon. Small salmon mackerel but not just any salmon wild caught alaskan salmon mackerel anchovies anchovies and sardines sardines right yeah i love those i'm jewish i like all that so have you actually like have you been to russ and daughters in new york no no have you ever like opened up a tin of sardines and actually eaten fish like 100 every day is it the whole body like the little bones yeah you know bones the bones are great because sardines are one of the superfoods out there. Did you just throw up in my mouth? No, come on.

It's a superfood. You've got an incredible amount of protein. You've got calcium from the bones, which is highly absorbable. Is it crunchy? Yeah, a little bit. You've got a rich source of omega-3s that are great for your brain health and many other things. And you've got choline, which is also critically important for your brain. So it's an incredible food.

Is this available to me via supplement? Yeah, you can say sardine supplements for sure. Well, actually, I just heard something interesting because I was taking fish oil capsules for a while since I eat no fish. But then somebody's like, you know, you got to watch that too because be careful who you buy it from.

Yeah, you need a reputable source. Right, because they too could just be getting it from mercury-infested fish. So you're basically taking two mercury capsules every night. Yeah, most of them don't have that, but they filter it, they purify it, and you can look at the before and after testing and see if it's got-

Okay, that's good to hear. Yeah, but anyway, so that's just one of the many lists that you gave that your kids are doing. And I do worry about the kids a lot because you said something that I was like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. Bobby Kennedy's been talking about this too. I cross-examined him for four hours over vaccines.

That's how, that's part of his resurrection story. And it was great. He was very strong. He had answers for all of his critics' questions about him, which is what I was fronting. And one of the things he was saying was, no, I have not maintained that vaccines cause autism, but I think that we need to look at the toxic stew

the children are growing up in as a potential cause of autism. And what's in the vaccines, like the extras in the vaccines, like mercury or aluminum, should also be factored into that discussion. Made perfect sense to me. But he listed it for me in this discussion saying, look at all the things that kids are going through that were not present when I was a kid.

For sure. He was talking about like tics and ADHD, like everywhere, autism spectrum diagnoses, all over the place. Exploded, yeah. And so that made perfect sense to me. And then I listened more to you and you're even next level with it, I I think because you're like part of the toxic stew

is those potato chips and the soda and the, the absence of cauliflower and broccoli and kale or any of the cruciferous vegetables that might help absorb some of the terrible shit we're putting in our bodies, the kids, and we're allowing it. I mean, I'm guilty of this too, in part. We're allowing the kids to treat their bodies like dumpster fires. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, when you look at what happened from when I was born in 1959, it was a long time ago, about 50 years. Not that long. To now, the change in our chronic disease epidemic is staggering. The change in autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30-something kids, depending on where you look at the data.

The rate of neurodevelopmental issues is now affecting 1 in 6 children. We have rising rates of autoimmune disease and allergies in kids. We're seeing, obviously, obesity in kids, which we never saw before. I mean, when I was in medical school, there was no type two or type one diabetes. It was juvenile onset or adult onset. Then kids started getting it. Now 30 plus percent of teenage teenagers have pre-diabetes or type two diabetes. It's staggering. And so the question is why, why has this happened? What's changed in our culture and our environment and in the food? Well, we've industrialized our food system. We've made convenience king. We've, the food industry has basically taken over. And I, when I say food,

I mean the food and ag industry have taken over our society in ways that are pervasive, pervasive and actually measurable. They fund academic centers, which to do research, they fund 12 times as much quote nutrition research as the federal government. They fund academic associations like the American Heart Association, which gets $192 million from the food and the pharma industry. They fund the Academy of Nutrition Dietetics, which 40% of their revenue comes from the food companies.

And when you go to their meetings, and I've been there, and I've spoken there, there's like big exhibit halls that say no pictures allowed, why? Because it's full of junk food. And they're promoting for the nutritionists as sort of healthy alternatives. And so you've got them creating front groups like the American Council on Science and Health that is actually some of those guys have been in jail for Medicare fraud. And there are a bunch of quacks who are funded by big tobacco, big food, big ag, and say

they pesticides, trans fats, and high fructose corn syrup are all healthy for you. And then they fund social groups like NAACP and Hispanic Federation to get them to oppose things like soda taxes, which we can argue is good or bad, but they want to lie themselves so they don't push back on them. And they target those groups more directly than other groups. By the way, remiss if we didn't mention, they also fund our lawmakers. Yeah, well, I was about to say that. And they're their biggest lobby group.

So they fund huge amounts of miseducation and misinformation on both sides. Neither party is immune from this. The Republicans are just as corrupt as the Democrats are in taking money from these groups and voting accordingly. A hundred percent. I mean, I, I, Roger Marshall, who's now the head of the Maha caucus in the Senate, I called them out in my book, Food Facts. I said, you know, there was a panel on chronic disease and a hearing in Congress, and he was emphasizing, it was just exercise that was the issue wasn't diet at all and he was you know funded by the confectioner association of the show and i and i and now we become friends and i said listen roger i called you out in that book just hope you don't mind he says don't worry

him he's seen the lights yeah yeah so you know the people change no there was an update today hold on before it came to air, this just happened. Yeah. We're trying to get Cali Means and RFKJ are trying to get, to make it such that people cannot use food stamps to buy soda. Yeah, that's a big one. You know, to try to encourage our poorest Americans when they need food stamps to use them for high nutrition foods and not the worst of the worst. And tooth and nail, the soda companies are fighting this. It's worth something like $60 billion a year to them. And this just happened in Arizona where there was a bill to remove soda

from the things you could buy with food stamps, with SNAP. And they voted against it. And the bill failed to make it out of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Arizona legislature by a vote of 6-6. And who cast the deciding vote against it? A Republican, Ralph Heap, voted against it alongside the Democrats. By the way, not for nothing, but here is, I think we have Callie Means. Yeah, here's Callie Means reacting to that in Sat.1. So there's no correlation or causation between soda and obesity rates. If your concern is obesity, then we should be talking about obesity. We shouldn't

be talking about obesity for SNAP recipients who have social determinants of health beyond just what they eat. I think is that the general public would consider unhealthy. I mean, who knows what the general public considers unhealthy. If the government tries to define in state statute what's a good food and what's a bad food, it's very, very complicated. We are not going to subsidize sugary drinks for our kids. It's criminal. And this is a no-brainer situation. And frankly, these two speakers before me should be ashamed of themselves. You're crossing a line right there.

You're crossing a line. God bless him. Good. It's hard to imagine how those guys go to sleep at night saying what they say. Right? I mean, to say there's no connection between sugar and- It's social factors that's causing all the obesity amongst the poor. Yeah, it's not just poverty.

And by the way, it's affecting all sectors of society, not just the poor. Last I checked, J.B. Pritzker is pretty rich, and he's morbidly obese by anyone's standards. That's true. But when you look at SNAP or food stamps, it's called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But it's really about food security, which means you get enough calories. So you can eat 2,500 calories of soda a day, and that's enough to fuel your metabolism. Keep you alive. But it's going to kill you.

Yeah, for some reason. And it's not nutrition security, which is what we need in America, which is providing enough nutrients to people who have also food insecurity. And when you, and you look at SNAP, 20% of Coca-Cola's US profits come from food stamps. It's a big chunk of Walmart's profits. And the people don't realize that we pay for the problem multiple times. There's a new kind of concept called the commercial determinants of health, which is how multinational and transnational corporations privatize profits and socialize the costs of public health. And so the taxpayer is paying the bill. We pay like probably four times, for example, for the food.

We pay to buy that soda. That's right. We pay for the farmers to grow the corn that makes the high-fructose corn syrup that goes in the soda. Then we pay for the soda with SNAP. And then we pay for Medicare and Medicaid on the back end to deal with the chronic diseases like diabetes

that result from it. And who's paying for the environmental consequences of how we grow the food using methods that disrupt our soil, the loss of soil organic matter. We've lost a third of all our topsoil. Soon we're going to lose all of it.

The amount of water resources we use to irrigate, which are because the farming methods don't retain water in the soil. For every 1% organic matter, you retain 25,000 gallons of water per acre. So we're losing huge amounts of our water infrastructure. And we're also poisoning the rivers and lakes because all the neuro-electrician fertilizer flows down to them and causes the overgrowth of algae, which sucks all the oxygen out and kills the fish.

And so we have dead zones the size of New Jersey and the Gulf of Mexico or America, whatever you want to call it now. And there's 400 of those around the world that feed half a billion people. And then we lose biodiversity. 75% of pollinators are gone. So the list goes on.

Who's paying for all that? Who's paying for the bees being destroyed? Who's. So the list goes on. Who's paying for all that? Who's paying for the bees being destroyed? Who's paying for the water being destroyed? Who's paying for the fish being destroyed? So basically it's us. This is the part of the conversation where I just want to open up a bag of Doritos. I give up.

I give up. I can't. Like there's no winning, right? We're probably inhaling enough microplastics to kill us right now. You know, it's like, by the way, that was another thing I learned in preparation for today. The average person, is it here?

The average person now today has, this is from, it was in the New York Times today, on microplastics. The human brain samples from 2024 had nearly 50% more microplastics than brain samples from 2016. They estimate there are five bottle caps worth of plastic in the average.

Can't be good. Can't be good. Five bottle caps. Can't spare it. No. And so it's overwhelming. Like the farming that let's just start there. You know, that's what like Casey and Callie have been saying, we need regenerative farming, which I don't really totally understand, but it seems like it's going to be really hard to make the farmers do that and really expensive. And when I sat in on those RFKJ confirmation hearings, even the Republican senators seem to

be like a little like, I'm jolly for you, except when it comes to the farmers. Yeah. Well, the thing is the farmers are a big voting base and so you don't want to lose them, but you also want to take care of them. Because when you look at farmers in this country, suicide rates are higher than almost any population, chronic disease rates, Parkinson's, cancer, because of how they're farming. They're not able to make significant profits. They're really marginalized in terms of the way they're stuck between the bank loans, the crop insurance, and the seed and chemical companies that they have to buy the seeds and the chemicals from. So they're kind of stuck in the middle. And there is a way out.

And it's been demonstrated. The science is there. The economics are there to convert farms that are industrial farms to regenerative farms. And that can be done at scale. And this has been well shown in a movie coming up called Common Ground. I think it's going to be released in about a week on Amazon. A regenerative farm. Yeah.

And it shows how these big corn farmers can actually do this. And they make more money. They restore the ecosystem. And what is regenerative farming? It's basically mimicking nature. Gabe Brown was a farmer in North Dakota, a conventional farmer, and his farm was destroyed by drought, hail,

and all kinds of things. And he was like, what am I going to do? And he started reading Thomas Jefferson's journals. And in the journals, it explained how he used methods to restore the ecosystem, to use natural pest control methods, to actually use methods to restore the ecosystem, to use natural pest control methods, to actually use methods that actually restore soil, that retain water, that do all the things we want to do.

And Gabe Brown has demonstrated this on his 5,000-acre farm in North Dakota and has actually makes 20 times as much money, restored the soil, doesn't use irrigation, doesn't need to use chemicals. It produces much more food, much more nutrient-dense food. And it's all been well-documented through science. So it's possible. It's just a matter of how do we transition farmers? How do we support them to do that? And private equity is investing in this. I mean, private equity is in paying farmers to convert because they know they're going to get a return on the back end. To regenerative.

Yeah. They know it's a profit center and they're going to make more money than industrial farmers. I was just thinking about wind turbines, which many of us absolutely hate. Yeah. Most environmentalists hate them. Kill the birds. Yeah. They kill the birds. They kill the land. It's like they're full of toxins. The blades are as long as a football field. Each blade is as long as a football field and several tons. And you get up to hundreds of them in a wind farm. Anyway, we have a summer home along the Jersey Shore and they're about to get pummeled by one of these wind farms. And it's just so disgusting.

Thank God for Trump for stopping most of them in progress. I don't think that order was gonna help us. But in any event, all the money that Obama and Joe Biden have been funneling into wind and solar energy, which is very inefficient. It costs so much. It requires so much land and toxins and reliance on the Chinese and so on. Why don't we funnel that into American farmers to help them switch over to regenerative farming? 100%. It's one of the best things we can do for the environment, for the climate, for energy.

I mean, there's so much oil used in farming. People don't realize it's a huge amount of the inputs are all oil-based. The fertilizers, the pesticides, the amount of oil usage, the big machinery, all that is enormous amount of oil that we use just to grow vegetables and grow corn and grow soy and wheat. So that can be changed.

By the way, my husband wrote a book on Rudolph Diesel, who invented the diesel engine. They should be using diesel engines and powering them with corn. That's a place we could use good corn oil or vegetable oil. They can power the engines of the tractors. Better to use it in the engines than in their bodies. That's how the diesel engine was born. Okay. So regenerative farming is definitely one of the things. Now, what happens when the average patient comes in to see you? Like you do the blood tests and where do you start? Like what, for the average listener, like what are the top five? Cause they don't know how to read their blood tests. You know, I am consider myself a relatively

sophisticated consumer in this department. I don't know how to read my blood tests. I know you're supposed to look at the HDL and the LDL and beyond that, I don't really know. Right, right, right. So what should the average person be looking at? What's one of the most important things? Well, I think we've had this edifice in medicine where the doctor is the gatekeeper and the healthcare system is the gatekeeper between you and your own biology. And I believe that needs to be changed and people should be empowered to know what's going on in their bodies and to have the information to interpret it. And that's really why we co-founded Function Health

was to allow us to break down that barrier, to allow a personalized health platform that allows you access to your data and then to know what to do about it. What does it mean? Yeah. Do you give them a code? A code?

I mean, like you have all the numbers now after you get your blood tested through Function. But like now- What do you do? Yeah, so now essentially we're building the engine A code? I mean, like you have all the numbers now after you get your blood tested through function. But like, now what do you do? Yeah, so now essentially we're building the engine and we have tens of thousands of pages of content that educates people about what it means, what to do about it, what the root cause is. So let's say you have a positive autoimmune antibody.

In a traditional healthcare system, you say, okay, you're gonna go to the rheumatologist. They're gonna see if they can diagnose you with some autoimmune disease. And then they're gonna give you an anti-inflammatory drug that's going to suppress your immune system, whether it's a steroid or a biologic that costs $50,000 a year. They're not going to go, why is this abnormal? So we guide you through an understanding of what it means and why is this potentially an issue? Is it because you have a

leaky gut and your microbiome is messed up? Is it because you're eating gluten and it's driving that autoimmune biochemistry? Or is it because you're eating gluten and it's driving that autoimmune biochemistry? Or is it because you're exposed to environmental toxins that are immunotoxic that affect you? So we begin to sort of sift through, or is it because you had COVID or because you have Lyme disease or whatever? And then you can sort of sift through and say,

oh, gee, this is why I may be sick. And then we say, here's how you further investigate it, and here's the kinds of doctor you want to see, and here's the next steps, or here's things you can do on your own. So it's really about self-empowerment. By the way, this is all the stuff that Dr. Bredesen says about preventing Alzheimer's.

This is so worth it for everybody's time. 100%. It's preventing everything, because it's like there are a few common causes that drive all the chronic disease we're seeing, and it's not that hard. It's too much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff that our bodies need.

And when you take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff, which is essentially what functional medicine is. The body knows what to do. So I'll give you an example. So I had a patient come in and she had psoriatic arthritis. She had terrible inflammation of her skin and joints were swollen, you know,

the heartbreak of psoriasis. But she also had terrible heartburn and reflux. She had terrible irritable bowel syndrome. She had migraines. She had depression. She had prediabetes. She was overweight. And she was, you know, 50-ish-year-old business coach. And I said, gee, you know, what are all these things, how are all these things related? Instead of, you know, seeing the best doctors, which she did at Cleveland Clinic, the best doctors in rheumatology, the best migraine doctor, the best GI doctor, the best

depression psychiatrist. And she was seeing the best of every class and got the best migraine doctor, the best GI doctor, the best depression psychiatrist. And she was seeing the best of every class and got the best of the state-of-the-art current model of treatment, which was just pharmaceutical drugs. Nobody said, why is she having these problems? It's the medicine of why, not what. Why do you have this? Not what disease do you have?

Not what drug do I give, but why? And then we investigated, because she had all these gut issues. A lot of your immune system is in your gut. And so I cleaned up her gut. I got rid of the bad bugs. I gave her an antibiotic and antifungal, restored her microbiome with probiotics, gave her some fish oil and vitamin D, came back six weeks later. And she's like, doc, everything's gone. I lost 20 pounds. My psoriasis is gone. My arthritis is gone. My migraines are gone. My depression is gone.

I feel great. My irritable bowel reflux are gone. And I stopped all my medications. I'm like, I didn't tell you to do that. She was like, no, I just was feeling so good. I stopped them. And so once you understand how to unlock someone's health and give them the roadmap, they can do it. Have you seen this in children too? Yes, of course. I mean, I'm a family doctor and I've treated, you know, thousands and thousands of kids. And, and it's just so disturbing to me when I see the kinds of things that really are affecting these kids. I mean, I had one little girl who was 10 years old and she had this horrible autoimmune condition

that was triggered by her eating crappy sugary diet that was causing tons of yeast overgrowth in her gut. She also had gluten antibodies that were causing some injury to her gut lining that can trigger autoimmunity. She also loved sushi, which was weird for a kid, but she loved a lot of mercury-laden tuna. She was eating a lot of that. She had mercury toxicity. And we basically reset her gut.

We put her on an elimination diet. I gave her some things to get rid of the overgrowth of yeast in her gut. And I gave her chelation to get rid of the mercury. And she had something that was, she was on like 1,200 milligrams of solimedrol, which is like a horse dose of steroids. Every three weeks, intravenously. She was on chemo drug called methotrexate.

She was on like drugs to help with her rain nose and other gut issues. So calcium channel blockers. She was on a whole list of things. Aspen, because she had more blood clotting. She was on a pile of drugs. And she really couldn't function really very well. And she completely fixed it. She's 100% better.

And I checked with her 10 years later. She's doing great. You know, she's gone to college and is really healthy. And so we see that we started to dig into the root causes and help people understand how their body is actually organized, not how medicine currently organizes it. We can do tremendous amounts. And that's really why I think function health is so important because it helps us leapfrog over the current medicine, empowers people with their data, and helps them understand what to do about it. I heard you talking with someone, and forgive me if you weren't the one with this story, but I think it was you,

talking about a kid's handwriting. Oh yeah, that was me. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, we hopefully can show this on the show, but there's a kid I had who had ADD, and this is what first got me to realize that what was happening in the body affected the brain in a very profound way.

It wasn't just the mind-body effect, but the body-mind effect. And many of our psychiatric illnesses are caused by dysfunctions that we can treat, not with ADD medication, which is now prescribed. We are going to definitely spend time on this. This is interesting. Yeah. I mean, and this kid had ADD, but he had also all these other issues. He had asthma and he had allergies and he had stomach aches and he had headaches and he had a whole list of stuff. And he was seeing seven different doctors, about seven different prescriptions. And he was on Ritalin.

He'd been kicked out of kindergarten. He was that bad. And his writing was terrible. He had, these kids often have what we call dysgraphia. It means you can't read their writing, really poor handwriting. But like at 12 years old, you couldn't even read it. And his mother came to see me. We put him on a clean diet. He was only eating processed food. We did a nutritional testing and

it was, it was like so malnourished. I mean, he wasn't really overweight, but he was really malnourished. I don't know. Is it so strange that a mother who would be like taking all those doctors and like having, well, she finally got to me, she didn't like it, but she's like doing the best she could as a mother. You don't know. And then it. It doesn't even occur to you that maybe it's nutrition. I think for a lot of people, it doesn't even occur to you. Especially with a child who you think can process anything, no matter what you do. And two months later, the mother brings him back, and he's doing better at every level. And he's off all the medications.

But what was so striking to me was his handwriting before and after. She showed me his handwriting from his homework, and it was like a different kid. And it was at that moment I go, wow, how did his brain going from being chaotic and dysfunctional and not synchronizing properly to being kind of functioning and organized and structured so that he can actually function in the world and not have ADD and his handwriting go back to normal? Because it wasn't like I gave him a handwriting class. And I was like, wow, this is crazy. And that led to me writing this book called The Ultra Mind Solution,

which is how to fix your broken brain by fixing your body first. And this was like 15 plus years ago. And now there's departments of metabolic psychiatry at Stanford, nutritional psychiatry at Harvard. Guys, Chris Palmer is a Harvard professor, is a psychiatrist who discovered accidentally you could cure schizophrenia on a ketogenic diet.

And now there's $3 million grant that just got given to Mayo to study ketogenic diets and severe mental illness like bipolar disease and schizophrenia and we had such a stigma against this. Instead of understanding that this is something that actually is because our biology is just not functioning properly. You know what I'm thinking about right now?

After we had, did you watch that round table that they had in the US Senate with Ron Johnson and Callie and Casey were there? And the Atlantic did a big write-up of it after and called it the woo-woo caucus. Yeah, yeah. They were so dismissive and disgusting about these ideas being discussed in a serious way. And that's what we're up against is that you start to like, maybe we can head off schizophrenia with diet. And they say, I'm out. You're crazy. Yeah. But this is actually looking at academic medical centers. This is what they're studying. Like they're looking at these things seriously because

the data is there. And so, you know, Max Planck, who was a physicist said, no scientist doesn't advance by convincing your opponents and helping them see the light. But because a new generation grows up that's familiar with it. In other words, medicine advances one funeral at a time. And so it's unfortunate. People get very ossified in their ideas. And Thomas Kuhn wrote about this in the structure of scientific revolutions, how it's very difficult to convert people who believe a certain thing, like the earth is flat or the earth is the center of the universe or that species arise in their fixed state, you know, basically. Or that it was an insurrection. Whatever, yeah. Like people basically just have this very fixed view of the way things are. And it's very hard to change that. Paradigms are really hard to change. We just think autism

was caused by refrigerator mothers, that ulcers were caused by stress. And the guy who actually was a gastroenterologist would notice in the biopsy, so the stomach that there was this bacteria hanging around. He's like, what is this? Maybe this is the cause. And everybody laughed at him. The whole gastroenterology field just made him a joke. And he said, well, I'm gonna prove it.

He's drank a beaker of this bacteria. He got his partner to, like, he got an ulcer. He got his partner to scope him before and after. He took antibiotics, cured the ulcer, and then proved it. And he won the Nobel Prize for it. So, you know, what one day seems like a quack, he took antibiotics, cured the ulcer, and then proved it. And he won the Nobel Prize for it. Oh, wow. So what one day seems like a quack, the next day is actually standard of care. To me, it just doesn't seem quacky at all. It seems absolutely logical and sensible.

People won't accept it. And I think part of it is it's so much easier to take a pill. You'd much rather be told, just take this drug and you're good, as opposed to completely change the way you eat and buy the way you need to move more. I mean, it's so hard to do, Megan, in our environment because everything is set up for us to fail. We have a toxic wasteland of nutrition that we live in. We don't need to move our bodies at all if we don't want to. We don't get outside very much. We have so much stress. We have high levels of stress. We don't sleep well. These are just fundamental things that a human organism needs to have in order to thrive. And, you know, we, we, we take care of our dogs and our animals and our horse racehorses in ways that we, you know, in ways that are so much better than we take care of

ourselves. Like we wouldn't feed our million dollar racehorse McDonald's big fries and a Coke. We feed it to our kids. Right. Right. Well, I was thinking about what you just said about how we're just not set up, you know, for success here. And the family went to Scandinavia in June. We did Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. And they're all basically the same country, but in terms of their approach to lifestyle and so on. But in Denmark, they have it set up. There's some waterways there, and they have it set up so that almost every office building has a stairway down to the water. And it's encouraged that on your lunch break, you would go take a swim. You would

go downstairs, you'd eat outside and it's cold there. They know that, but they all bike to work. First of all, everybody bikes, even the royalty in Denmark and Sweden, they bike around a very sort of mobile culture. And then think about it. If you went to the office and the office culture was during lunch, we eat healthy. We go outside, we swim in the water. And then there are showers to shower off. When you get back into the office, you have a 90 minute break where you can do all of that. And then back to work. We're the opposite. We're like, what the hell are you doing away from your desk for 90 minutes? What do you think this is? You know, Scandinavia?

No, we're the USA. We produce. You know, we're the envy of the world in terms of our production and so on. That's our mindset. There are some benefits to it. But in the health department, not really. No. No, it's very disturbing.

I mean, when you look at us compared to every other country, we spend more than twice any of the national health care, which is almost $5 trillion, one in $5 of our economy. The federal government pays for 40% of that, and it's one in three federal dollars. So we're footing the bill. And we're 48th in life expectancy. I think Cuba and Albania are better than us. Oh my God, Albania? I think so. Maybe they don't have good records, but when you look at the list, it's like like what are we doing here at the bottom of the list? And I mean, Trump on Joe Rogan, he showed this graph. What's the number one reason for that? What's the number, if you had to pick one?

I think it's our diet. Ultra processed foods? Yeah, it's the takeover of the American food supply by the industrial food system. Chemicals everywhere? I mean, like within that, what's the number one culprit? Ultra processed or chemicals all over what we eat? I think it's sugar and starch. Sugar and starch. And then you can add in the natural food system. And- And- Chemicals everywhere. I mean, like within that,

what's the number one culprit? Ultra processed or chemicals all over what we eat? I think it's sugar and starch. Sugar and starch. And then you can add in the chemicals and all the rest of it. And by the way, is bread- Is bread bad?

Is bread basically sugar? Yeah, well, actually the glycemic, something called the glycemic index, which is how much is given food raises your blood sugar, is based on white bread. So that's 100. So that's the highest. Sugar is actually 80,

because it's made up of fructose and glucose. But it's a little bit trick, because fructose doesn't raise your blood sugar. But it's- But they both have the same- Yeah, below the neck, your body cannot tell the difference between a bowl of cereal or a bowl of sugar. Wow, or a loaf of bread?

Or a loaf of bread. It's just the same thing. So when you eat white bread, you're basically eating sugar. And the American population consumes 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person per year. That's almost three quarters of a pound per day. You know, I mean, the dietary guidelines, which need to be fixed, and I'm working on that with my nonprofit, that 10% of our diet, they say, can be sugar.

That's 12 teaspoons in an average 2,000-calorie diet. For a kid, the average kid's eating 36 teaspoons of sugar a day. And that's a pharmacologic dose. I feel like it might have been Cali or KC, one of them was saying, at the turn of the 20th century, you know, the 1900 or so, the average recommended daily, or no, the average intake of sugar

amongst American children was zero. Yeah. Zero on a day-to-day basis. Now they say it can have like 28 grams. Yeah, that's crazy. It was zero. Yeah. Well, you know, when the World Health Organization

tried to reduce the recommended amount of sugar to 5% of your diet from 10% in the recommendations, Donald Rumsfeld, when he was under Bush too, flew to Geneva and said, we're going to pull our $400 million of funding from you if you do that. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, that's how powerful the food industry is. They have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Not to mention they're basically accounting for most of the marketing and TV besides pharma. It's all junk food.

I mean, I watched the Super Bowl last year. It was 11 junk food ads in the first half. They're pushers. Yeah. They're pushers. If they were doing this with, you know, heroin, we would see the danger. Well, it's addictive. I mean, the science is so clear in this, Megan.

14% of adults and kids are biologically addicted to food. This is according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale. It's a scientifically validated metric for looking at food addiction. And I'm not talking about just like, oh, I love, I love cookies because I love cookies, but like people who really can't stop like an alcoholic, that's staggering. And then, and these, these companies know this, they've designed the food to be like this. They, the tobacco companies bought in the seventies, a lot of the food companies like RGN Abisco and Philip Morris craft, right? Yes. And then they got out of cigarettes and into crackers.

And they engineered these foods with taste institutes where they had craving experts to create the bliss point of food, to create heavy users. These are their own internal terms they use. And in fact, they actually have, take little two-year-olds and put them in MRI scanners to see which images will light up their brain

in their pleasure center. So they'll say to their mommy when they go to the grocery stores, buy this, buy that, give me the Cocoa Pebbles or whatever it is. Right. That is so dark. I was just thinking about my little guy today at breakfast. It was like, mom, there's this meal service that will deliver the meals pre-made if you

want to, you know, sign on to that. And I was like, well, they did a good job if they got to my 11 year old who brought it to me at the breakfast table. Right. Like they're definitely marketing to the right people. That's right. But there's so much to go over. I wanted to say something about the food. Oh,

is it true that Bayer bought Monsanto? So one of the biggest drug companies in the world bought one of the biggest chemical companies in the world that's spraying our food with everything, getting us sick by the day. And then where do we go? Back to the medical companies. Drugs. Well, it's actually Bayer who makes some of the drugs for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Oh, wow. And there's been multiple lawsuits that have been won.

Yeah, wasn't there just one? Yeah, $2.1 billion settlement for glyphosate, which is Roundup or basically an herbicide that is sprayed on 70% of crops that is in most of our bodies and most of our urine. I mean, I tested this and you can see it. It's pretty scary. And they basically, on one hand, cause the disease and then they, on the other hand, treat it with the drugs.

That is sick. It's a good business model. Glyphosate really scares me because one of the things you don't think about, even if you try to eat healthy, back to that guy who's carrying around his food everywhere, that billionaire is what about when you go out to eat? You don't know. What about when your kids go to school? You don't know. I mean, it's true. I mean, you can, you know, have your own garden in the backyard, but if you want to eat, if you're

out on the road, I mean, you're like, you and I are out there doing stuff. You can't always control your food's coming from, unless you're a billionaire with your own private chef in your kitchen that flies around with you on your jet. Then I met with a super billionaire who had his own cows. He got his own meat from his own cows that were like, I mean, like there are so many levels, but keep going. You don't know. Cause like in the restaurant, those vegetables are probably treated with Roundup. They're probably not getting organic vegetables in the restaurant. You're probably not getting grass fed beef, not getting pastured chicken. So it's like, you need to eat at home. That's expensive. It's harder. People are busy. It's to the point of, it's also overwhelming.

Yeah. But Megan, it's not an accident that Americans have been disenfranchised from their own kitchens. This is a deliberate plan by the food industry to make convenience king. Happened in the early 60s. They were worried about the advent of this woman named Betty, who was a home ec teacher, was teaching about families how to cook and grow gardens. Ms. Crocker? No, I'll get to that. I'll get to that. But there was federal extension workers that were teaching young families how to take care

of themselves and actually do the things that are not that hard if you know what to do. And so the food industry freaked out about this and they invented Betty Crocker, who was not a real person. I thought she was a real person. I didn't know that. Yeah, she was not a real person. That's what you tell me Aunt Jemima's not real. She's not real. But Betty Crocker cookbook, if you remember it,

because you probably had it in your mom's kitchen. Add one can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to your casserole. Add one roll of Ritz crackers. They insinuated processed food. It was delicious, though. Okay, all right. But it was like they insinuated all this crap into our diet. And then they got TV dinners.

And then we got, you know, you deserve a break today. We got Fleischmann's margarine and Tang and all these foods that were. Twinkies. Right, Twinkies. Like, I grew up on that stuff, you know. And it turns out that this was not an accident. This was a deliberate attempt to, to sort of, you deserve a break today. It was sort of like classic thing where,

where in women's lib also kind of facilitated that cause I get women out of the kitchen and women's liberation was in the kitchen at all. Right. That's right. And so we had now have generations of Americans who don't know how to cook. We don't have basic life skills. I was, I was, did a movie with, with years ago called Fed Up, which was, I think it's on Netflix. It was about childhood obesity. And it was talking about these issues. And as part of the movie, I went down to South Carolina into one of the worst food deserts in America. In easily South Carolina, I worked with a family of five who lived in a trailer on food stamps and disability. So they had very limited

resources and very limited access to good food. And the mother was, you know, massively overweight. The father was already at 42 on dialysis for kidney failure from type two diabetes. And the son was like 50% body fat. A kid should be 10%. He was big guy. He's like, Dr. Ryman, am I going to be a hundred percent body fat? I'm like, no, you're not. It was so sad. And I said, I'm not going to give them a lecture. I'm going to go to their kitchen and I'm going to show them what's in their pantry. I'm going to show them what's in their freezer and in their fridge. And I'm going to help them understand the things that are harming them because they are thinking they're trying to do the right thing because they want the father to lose

weight or they can't get a new kidney. So rather than give them a lecture, I taught them how to cook a simple meal. And it was from a little guidebook called Good Food on a Tight Budget. Food that's good for you, good for your wallet, good for the planet. And it was like cheaper cuts of meat, cheaper vegetables. I mean, you know, stuff that, you know, would be considered sometimes peasant food that my family grew up on. And I did it with them and I didn't know it was going to happen.

And the mother texted me a week later. She says, we lost 18 pounds as a family. In a year, they lost 200 pounds. You know, they didn't even have cutting boards and knives. Everything was, you know, microwaved or whatever. And they did it. And they learned how to cook. And they, I gave them a cookbook.

And it was just, it was like, I was like, wow, we're one meal away from transforming society. And I realized I had a bias. I had a judgment. I thought people who are overweight, and I bought the implicit bias in medicine, which is eat less and exercise more. Meaning it's your fault you're fat.

You're a lazy glutton and it's your fault. So get your shit together. But that's not true because people are hijacked. Their biochemistry is hijacked. Their brains can't hijack. Their metabolism is hijacked. Their hormones are hijacked. Their immune system is hijacked. Their microbiome is hijacked. And that drives you into this disease state that we have in America today. And so, and this kid was a 16-year-old. He lost 50 pounds, had to go get a job, and there was no place to get a job except fast food places on there. He gained 50 pounds back.

He's just like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar. Yeah, totally. And then he texted me later. He's like, hey, would you help me? And I helped him. He lost 132 pounds. First kid in his family to go to college. Finished college.

Emailed me and said, hey, Dr. Hyman, would you write me a letter of recommendation for medical school? And now he's a doctor. Oh, my God. I don't. So chills. Yeah. That's to me, that story is, is, is, is, uh, emblematic of the fact that we're literally one meal away from transforming the health of America. If we can go in and, and, and Paul Farmer did this with TB and AIDS in Haiti, it was an intractable problem that, you know, they didn't have clean water. They didn't have sedation and watches. And these drugs are complicated to take back then. And for multi-drug

resistant TB and AIDS. And he was like, we can fix this. And he was community health workers, neighbors, helping neighbors. And so we, we like, imagine if we created a workforce of, of community health workers to go out there and go into people's homes and show them how to do this. And we did this at Cleveland clinic. We, we did this with, I have the idea. We should take all the DEI instructors who are about to lose their jobs and train them in nutrition and send them into all communities and educate people on how to eat well. It's true. I mean, I was shocked. I was at Cleveland Clinic and there was a hospital there that takes care of a big African-American community

that's very underserved. And we had a cooking class. And I thought a few people would show up. 300 women showed up. Oh, God bless them. And we had this big cooking class. That's what I need too. I need it just to make food, period. Never mind healthy food. All right, we're going to take

a quick break, and we will be back with Dr. Mark Hyman after this, plus a special Function Health discount for our audience. That's exciting. Stand by. You might have heard about this new brand called XXXY Athletics. They are the only athletic brand that is standing up for women's sports. It was founded by former elite gymnast and longtime Levi's executive, Jennifer Say, the first gymnast to speak out about the abuse in women's gymnastics. Then she pushed back on lockdowns and closed schools during COVID. And for that, she was canceled by corporate America. Nice.

So she started her own brand. It's called XXXY Athletics, and it is the only athletic brand that actually knows men cannot become women. And it's not a gimmick. They make world-class products from the softest sweats to performance wear, including leggings, bike shorts, dresses for golf and tennis and workout tees that hold up to the toughest workouts. Check them out at thetruthfits.com or xx-xyathletics.com. Use the code MK20 for 20% off your order. Support brands that align with your values. Go to thetruthfits.com and don't forget the code MK20. We have Dr. Mark Hyman with me for the full show today.

He's the co-founder of Function Health. And I want to tell you that you can go to functionhealth.com slash Megan or use the code Megan100. Is it slash A? I'm reading in the prompter. Is that a... Oh, so it's not just slash Megan. It's function health.com slash a slash Megan. All right. So you have two slashies in there slash a slash Megan, like function health, a Megan function health.com slash a slash Megan. And that will get you a hundred dollars off your function membership, or you can just use the code MEGAN100 on checkout to get it.

So, Doc, what does that do for people? Well, it gives you an unlock for your health in the way you've probably never had it. And testing things that your doctor probably doesn't even know about. Doesn't and won't. It should be tested or that you might ask and won't test, right? Like your vitamin D level. Why should you know that, for example? And for $1.37 a day, and less with your discount, you get deep insights about what's going on with your biology

from your metabolic health and how your blood sugar regulation is to your cardiovascular health, your hormones, to environmental toxins like lead and mercury, to your deep analysis of your nutritional status, things that you're... I mean, we literally work with Quest and we broke their testing for essential fatty acids for omega-3

machines because we were doing such a volume. We're one of their number one clients. We do cancer screening, gallery screening, which is quite amazing to look at cancer detection. We found one in 180 of our members who's tested have undiagnosed cancer, which you can detect in a blood test now. Oh, that's amazing. And it's more accurate than many other screening tests we have. And it's something that should be available to everybody. And we're one of the number one providers in the world for this. So it's unlocking things that you'd have to go through the firewall of medicine to get. And then on the back end, you not only get your results, but you get deep insights about

what they mean. They give you like a printout of this is what we, you're high on this, and this is what you should look into. Well, it's a beautiful dashboard that you can track your data over time. And as a physician, when I see a patient, I have to pull up the PDF of the results and then look at the one from last year or the last month. And it's a pain in the ass. It's not digital. It's not visually presented in a graphic way that helps you understand where your trend lines are. And function has all that. But more importantly, it really has the deep insights that are formed by all the scientific literature in the world. I mean, imagine you're a doctor and you only read

every scientific paper that was ever published. Now technology can do that. Imagine having the knowledge experts informing what things mean from all domains. And imagine it being formed by your data, your your data, your personalized data, so you actually can understand what it means for you and then what to do about it and how to act on it to up-level your health. What happens if I have a question?

Like, who do I call? Well, we're still building the platform because we literally launched two years ago. We have a success that we never quite imagined, but we're building a chat where you can interact with your own data and ask questions. But you can go to your family doctor or you can interact with your own data and ask questions. But you can

go to your family doctor or you can go on to learn more from the platform itself because there's so much- You're not dispensing medical advice there, but you are giving people tools to go to their own- Well, we're giving them deep insights about what things mean. And there are medical insights, but we're not telling you what to do or not to do. But- Well, this leads me to my other important question, which is how do people find a functional medicine doctor? Good question. We need more of them. But I think part of the reason I co-founded Function

was that there aren't enough. There's thousands, there should be hundreds of thousands of practitioners so that millions and millions of people can access this. But before I die, I didn't want to die not having functional medicine being accessible to everybody or having their own health data being available to everybody.

And so it's a way of leapfrogging over a period where we don't have the infrastructure yet. And we will. I promise you, we will. Megan, have the future of medicine come to pass as the way it should be, just as we now don't any longer do blood leeches or all we do for some wound healing, or we don't have like drill holes in people's skulls to let out the bad, evil humors. I mean, we, we advance in medicine. And I think, you know, this new generation of the network systems medicine, it's going to the scientific paradigm,

it's going to come to pass. This makes it exciting. It's like, this is, this is a way of truly healing people and helping people get better as opposed to just, you're going in, you're going to be governed by the insurance companies. You've been upper limited on how much you can make and how much you can help. Yeah. Which is not an inspirational message. I mean, food is the biggest cause of disease and the biggest cure. And doctors learn nothing about it. Nothing.

Nothing. I was testifying in front of the Health and Human Services Committee about a bill that was to actually start to educate doctors about nutrition and to mandate it in medical schools and in graduate medical education residencies. I'm so excited about that because that'll be a domino effect. Once state starts to do it, it'll sort of be a trend. And then we can actually start to train the new generation of doctors that is in the right paradigm. And nurses, too. I mean, nurses can do this. There's so many people who can do this who, you know, short of getting an MD, which would be like more accessible

and more affordable for a lot of people too. So you've mentioned it several times, the keto diet. I've had it mentioned to me many times. I don't understand it still. No, I think I've looked it up and it says it's more like fat. Well, it's pretty easy to understand. So your body is like a hybrid car.

You can run an electric or on gas. Gas is dirty burning. Electric is clean burning. Gas is carbohydrates. So your body runs very well on carbohydrates, but there's a lot of downstream consequences of having a high-starch carbohydrate diet. For certain conditions, and this was first discovered in medicine with epilepsy, we found that if you took away all the sugar and starch and you increase fat to like 75%, you could actually stop seizures that no medications would touch. If you look back at the history of medicine and diabetes, treatment of type 1 diabetes where your pancreas just shuts down. All these kids would die.

And the way they would treat them would be putting them on a 75% fat diet. Jocelyn. Saturated or unsaturated? Everything. You know, lard, butter, everything. Wow. And I mean, by the way, Megan, 25% of breast milk is saturated fat. Yeah. It's gotten a bad rap. It's gotten a bad rap. I mean, we can go into that too if you want. But what was fascinating back in the teens and 20s was there was, medicine was actually prescribing ketogenic diets for type 1 diabetics to save their lives.

And now we see that we can actually reverse what is predominantly a carbohydrate intolerant society where we have 75% overweight, 93% metabolically broken, meaning they have some problem with regulating blood sugar and insulin. 93% of us, I mean, 6% of us aren't. Probably you and me are part of that 6%. But it's not a lot of people.

And when you restrict carbohydrates and you increase fat, you actually switch basically from a gas-burning car to a electric-burning car, and it's clean-burning. But now we're finding it's effective for reversing type 2 diabetes, for treatment of Alzheimer's, for cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee, you may have heard of him, he's a famous oncologist from Columbia, written a book called The Emperor of All Maladies,

won the Pulitzer Prize. He's now doing research on ketogenic diets for end stage cancer like melanoma and pancreatic cancer and seeing complete reversals. Because basically cancer runs on sugar, but it's not like a hybrid engine. It can only run on carbs. It can't run on fat.

So you starve it of these carbs and cancer cells die. It's pretty remarkable. So across the spectrum, whether it's autism or Alzheimer's or cancer or type 2 diabetes or schizophrenia or depression or bipolar disease. How does this jive with the old eat food, mostly plants? Not too much. Not too much. Yeah. I think you can do it on a plant-rich diet and you can do it in a way that doesn't include a lot of junk. Just put a lot of olive oil over your salads.

Avocados, yeah. Nuts and seeds. People people do well. I mean, I think, you know, you have to understand that there are certain people who do better or do worse depending on their genetics. And so I had a patient who was overweight, who was struggling with lots of inflammation, who was pre-diabetic, whose cholesterol was like 300, it should be 200, her triglycerides were 300, should be a hundred or less, her good cholesterol, we don't really like to call it good or bad, but the HDL was low, which is a sign of this metabolic dysfunction. And she was desperate to try to do something. This is the pre-Ozempic era.

All right. I said, listen, why don't you try ketogenic diet, see what happens. And let's follow your numbers and see how you do. Everything corrected. Her cholesterol dropped 100 points. Her triglycerides dropped 200 points. Her HDL went up 30 points. She lost, you know, 25 pounds and she felt great.

And so, and her prediabetes went away. So depending on the person, it can be a very effective tool, but it's not like a one size fits all. Why is that much fat bad for like somebody who has heart disease in the family? There may be, but there's actually a paper coming out soon, which looks at what we call lean mass hyper responders. So there are certain people who, when you have a perfect sort of metabolic health, in other words, you have no prediabetes or insulin resistance and no inflammation, and you're a fit athlete, and you have basically a lot of lean mass and not a lot of fat on your body, when they consume high saturated fat or ketogenic diets, they'll have a really dramatic increase in their

LDL cholesterol. Now, this is something that doctors have been trained is bad, and that you immediately have a knee-jerk reaction to prescribe a statin drug, which is something that doctors have been trained is bad and that you immediately have a knee-jerk reaction to prescribe a statin drug, which is the number one class of drugs sold in the world. Now, some of these people have LDLs not under 70, which cardiologists would like, or even under 100, which is their lab reference range, but they have LDLs of 200, 300, 400, 500, 700, and they have no heart disease through imaging tests. Right, because like the calcium score. Calcium score.

And so this is like a revolutionary new bit of data that's now emerging from the scientific literature. Like, what is going on here? How does this work? Well, when you don't eat sugar, you have to transport energy around the body. And how do you do it? Through fat, right?

And what is the biggest fat carrier? It's your lipoproteins, which is fat and water don't mix, right? So you can't just put fat in your blood. You have to connect it to proteins. So what is LDL? It means low-density lipoprotein. It's a, lipo means fat, protein.

So you put fat and protein together, it can be transported through your body for energy and other sources. So it's really, it's fascinating. The science is constantly evolving. And I think for certain people, ketogenic diets can be life-changing, like life-changing. I've treated schizophrenia with it, treated Alzheimer's with it, autism with

it, depression with it, obviously type 2 diabetes with it. And you can reverse up to 60 to 70% of type 2 diabetes. That's very advanced where people are on insulin. When I was in medical school, chronic diseases were chronic. They never went away to reverse heart failure, to reverse diabetes, to reverse kidney issues, to reverse diabetes, to reverse kidney issues, to reverse hypertension, these things don't happen in traditional medicine. What about the thought of mixing the keto diet with Mediterranean? Because that's the other one that everybody loves Mediterranean. Yeah, yeah. Well, you can eat a Mediterranean diet, but that's not necessarily a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic is a very specific thing that happens in your body.

Do you go on keto forever? I eat keto now. Some people do. And they thrive on it. Other people don't do well on it. So I think it's very- Like try it for a month and get your inflammation under control. You need about usually six weeks to adapt, to become fat adapted, to your metabolism shifts over. And then you can see where you're at and then check your numbers. But there's a company called Virta Health that's reversing type 2 diabetes with an online program of ketogenic diets. And not only have they seen 60% reversal, not only they've seen 12% weight loss, which is massive,

it's as good as any of these drugs that are out there now, that actually they've done a parallel study like comparing just, you know, their program to Ozempic and those drugs, and they're equally effective in the outcome. So it's not something magic about Ozempic. It's the weight loss, you know, and it's the change in metabolic health.

And so you can do it through various ways, whether it's a drug or whether it's a ketogenic diet. And they found their lipid biomarkers, over 20 different cholesterol and heart disease risk factors, all got better by eating a super high fat diet. And again, so you're saying, but also saturated fat. So like, well, that would be like red meat, like the fat that you get. I'm trying to think, what's good for you saturated fat?

I know bad for you saturated fat is in the ultra processed foods. Well, trans fat is basically the worst saturated fat. And that's basically vegetable oil shortening. And they call it shortening because it shortens your life. You know how many things call for that, by the way? Having like a daughter who's in eighth grade, every time she has to make brownies or cookies for the school,

all of it wants actual vegetable oil. And she's like, I don't know if you can use olive oil. I'm like, you're using it. It's olive oil cake. I mean, yeah, it's fine, actually. It tastes a little different, I confess, but it's healthier, I think. Yeah, you can. And so there's a tremendous amount of emerging data that saturated fats aren't the boogeyman

we thought they were. It was a long history of a scientist named Ansel Keys in the 60s who basically did this study called the Seven Country Study, which showed that people who had higher levels of saturated fat had higher LDL and higher heart disease risk. But they left out the other 14 or 15 countries where their data didn't match that, like Switzerland or France. So they were like, I was cherry picking a little bit. And then we got into this era of low fat and that led to the food pyramid, which told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day, which we did like a dutiful population. I mean, that was a nice time.

Let's be honest. We did that as dutiful citizens. And what happened to America? We exploded. Hand me that sourdough. I need more. That's right. Well, sourdough's not so bad, but the diabetes rates exploded.

I mean, we've tripled the obesity rates. So we've tripled the diabetes rates. You can see it. I mean, this is not a genetic problem. Do you see those memes online where they show Americans in the 1900s and they're all, first of all, they're well-dressed. And second of all, they're all slim. All of them are slim. It's very rare to see an obese person, even in the United States a hundred years ago. Not even a hundred years ago. I mean, African-Americans in the sixties were healthier

than white Americans. They were thinner and they had less disease. Now it's the opposite. You know, when we saw COVID attack certain communities like, like New Orleans or Chicago, and there were 70% of the deaths were for 30% of the population, which was African-American. And, and when you watch like a, there's a movie called Amazing Grace or the Aretha Franklin, it was filmed in 1970 in Oakland, there wasn't an overweight black person in the audience and she wasn't overweight. And you go like, wow, that's crazy. And now 80% of African women are overweight and obesity rates and heart disease rates

and hypertension rates and kidney failure rates far exceed the rest of the population. And you can tie this to ultra processed foods and to the demonization of fat and elevation of sugar. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the problem. And now we've kind of reversed that trend.

And I think it's a big sort of tanker ship to move, but we have to do it because we're not only threatening our personal health, we're threatening our national security. 70% or 77% of recruits for the military are rejected because they're unfit to fight because they're overweight or other reasons because of their diet. You've got global competitors being challenged. We're like 30 something in math and reading in the world because kids can't learn in school because they're all doped up on these drugs and eating sugar and these chemicals in the food. They're causing ADD, behavior issues, and all sorts of things. And depression. I've heard you talk about this too.

This is like everybody, you go to a therapist today, whether it's you or a child, the first thing they want to do is prescribe you something. They want to get your college age kid hooked on a drug like that. They're like, they've helped a lot of people. There's no explanation of, no one would ever ask, what are you eating? No. No one. No one.

It's true. It's true. I mean, it's the most amazing thing to me because it's so obvious. But as doctors, we learn that disease really doesn't have anything to do with nutrition. If you go to your rheumatologist, if you have an autoimmune disease, it has nothing to do with nutrition. If you go to a GI doctor, I mean, I'm like, what do you mean? A GI doctor.

I mean, think about it. You're putting pounds of this foreign stuff in your mouth every day. How does it not impact what's going on in your gut? Right. Right? It's like, it's kind of crazy. So, I mean, if you're feeling depressed or you're feeling anxiety, rule number one should probably be take a look at what you're eating. What are you eating? I mean, I have an incredible approach to one of my patients where I put them on a reset program.

It's like hitting your body's factory reset button. So go to back to your original factory settings. And I called the 10 day detox diet. I've written a book about it. And there's a website where you can kind of go and 10 day detox diet.com and actually learn about it and do it if you want to. And what's amazing is that in 10 days, there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases, which sounds crazy for me to say it, but I've done this so many times and so many people and track their symptoms and how they feel. And it allows them to see the connection between what they're eating and how they feel. Oh, I didn't know that this constant congestion I had was from when I was eating. I didn't know that this rash that I've got on my body all the time I can't get rid of is from what I mean. I

didn't know that my stomach issues are related to my, or my sleep issues or my depression or my migraines or whatever it is. Food is generally the first place to look. And if you can clean the deck and take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, you know, take is generally the first place to look. And if you can clean the deck and take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, you know, take out all the processed foods, all the sugar and starch, put in, you know, lots of vegetables, good, healthy, you know, protein, lots of nuts and seeds and get out all the ultra processed foods. The body is so smart. It's like quickly changes. And I, I'm sort of, I'm sort of shocked when I see it and it's repeatable every single time. Can we talk about red meat? Is there a lot of people who are on this carnivore diet.

There's hardcore red meat all the time. Yeah. We've got a good friend. The vegans and the carnivores on one side. No. We've got a good friend who's Argentinian, and he's like, every single member of my family had LDLs through the roof. And no heart disease.

And they lived into their low hundreds. Yeah. And all they did was eat steak. Yeah. That's it. Well, they had grass-fed steak in Argentina, and, right. And so there's no industrial part of it. But what's, I mean, when I was growing up in like the 80s, they were like, I remember because I was a young aerobics instructor.

Yeah. And my fellow aerobics instructors were shaming themselves for having meat more than once a week. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I didn't even know that was bad. Well, that was a result of this demonization of saturated fat. The meat has some saturated fat. So if you eat that, you're basically going to kill yourself. So there's a whole era where people were eating very low

amounts of meat and their meat consumption has gone down. And it didn't mean that all the disease rates went down. So something didn't kind of line up. And what happened with meat is that we kind of got confused because a lot of the population studies that were done at that time, and population studies do not show cause and effect. They just look at trend lines. And then it may be a cause or it may be a correlation. And what they found was that people who were meat eaters in those eras actually had more disease. But when you look at the specifics of their behaviors, the meat eaters in those studies, they ate 800 calories more a day. They drank more. They didn't eat their fruits and vegetables. They ate more sugar. They didn't exercise. They smoked.

Yeah, there you go. That's why they were sicker. It wasn't because of the meat. And when you look at studies, for example, when they've done this with 11,000 people who shopped at health food stores who were either omnivores and ate meat or vegans or vegetarians, they both had their risk of death reduced in half. It's because they weren't eating all the crap, right? So it's not the meat, it's what you eat with it. Is it the burger or is it the bun? And the sugar, you know, I have to, I just noticed this the other day, but for example, my kids love ice cream. Who doesn't? I was just looking at those, you can get those like dark chocolate bars at Whole Foods. I like the one that's like mint blackout. In any event, it's, if it's over 90%, you know,

cacao, which is going to mean it has less sugar. You can have four squares of that chocolate, which is a decent size. It's for the, you know, if you're watching this on YouTube, it's like about this big, maybe a little smaller, but about around there. And it's only five grams of sugar. Like if you really have a Jones for something sweet after dinner, you could have that for five grams. We could have a big bowl of ice cream, which might have 30, even more grams of sugar. People don't even know what a gram. And I mean, this is an example of how the food industry has taken over our government

in labeling. And we're trying to change front of package labeling and food labels, but no one knows what a gram of sugar is. If I say four grams is a teaspoon, if I say this soda has 15 teaspoons of sugar, you're going to like blink and look twice. If you say it has 39 grams of sugar or 40 grams, you're not going to know what that means. No. And that's on purpose. A teaspoon is about four grams? Yeah.

Okay. That's on purpose. A teaspoon is about four grams? Yeah. Okay. That's on purpose. Right. You know, I mean, you have to have a PhD in nutrition to decipher one of those labels. Right. They make it so hard. Make it really hard. So, so I think, you know, in other countries they have better front of package labeling, which is either red, this is going to kill you, yellow, eat with caution, green, you can eat as much as you want of it. Or, you know, they put warning labels in South America. They have big, like octagon stop signs with this. Yeah, basically. I mean, I don't even know South America. If you go to the, on a plane in South America, you get your snacks. It's like, you can't eat any of them because they're all have like three different giant stop signs on them with

basically warning labels. That's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, on a can of soda, which is diet soda, they put in warning labels that says this is going to harm your kid and this can cause neurologic issues and don't drink it. Don't feed it to them. Oh my God. Great. More like it. Yeah. Um, our executive producer has a third grader. He has two kids, but one of them is in third grade and he has a question I bet a lot of our listeners have, which is what can you pack in a lunch that is healthy for a third grade child? And frankly, for most children, because you try to send, try to send your kid to school with a bag lunch or send your kid on a field trip with a bag lunch. And I'll trade it with the other kid for the junk food. You know, and I too don't know where to begin. It's so hard. They're not going to eat a salad, first of all.

No, you don't need a salad, but they're, you know, it's real, it should be real food. And there's lots of yummy things that kids can eat that they like that aren't bad for them. And what we need to do is stop putting lunchables and Go-Gurts and all these sort of industrially designed foods that aren't technically food. As my doctor says, yogurt is a lie. He doesn't mean nonfat Greek yogurt. He's talking about- Or full fat Greek yogurt. No, no, he's not talking about that. He's not talking about yogurt that's not sugary. Yeah, I mean, people don't realize

that you can get your sweetened yogurt that's low-fat that has more sugar per ounce than a soda. Yeah, but you can, you know what? I have this almost every day for breakfast. I have, I'll either get non-fat or 2%, the phage, fahe yogurt, Greek yogurt. You can get the full-fat, Megan. Can I get the full-fat? I don't know. I don't wannae, yogurt, Greek yogurt. You can get the full fat, Megan. Can I get the full fat? I don't know. I don't want to, you know, I'm a little worried.

You can. And I'll put like blueberries in there and I'll put some chia seeds in there and I'll put some hemp seeds in there. I'm just, I don't even know why I'm just told those are good for you. They're protein, I guess. Yeah, protein and good fats. And sometimes I'll sprinkle just a little low sugar granola in there, which you can get with no seed oils on it. You got to like- Paleo granola now, yeah., you gotta look for that, but not too much because you don't want to like completely overload it with, you know, sugary products or whatever, but it's so good. It's, it tides me over for hours and I love it. And I know it's good for me. And if, you know, if you make your home a safe zone, you teach your kids about food, you cook with them, you show them what food's

about. That's what they learn. Okay. But let's give them an actual possibility that could go in there what could be in their school lunch yeah what could go in i mean you could put uh like uh i don't know i mean like you can make a sandwich out of healthy stuff right you could have uh i'm just blanking now because i haven't packed my kids lunch like chicken you can't you can't do chicken nuggets can you or can you do like the organic ones that you get it yeah you could do that i mean you can do that that are that are not you know deep fried organic ones that you get at a- Yeah, you could do that. I mean, you could do that that are not, you know, deep fried in the middle. But you can't get sliced deli meat, right? No, sliced deli meat's not good. That's the devil.

No, the bologna sandwiches with mayo and- Bread. I mean, you shouldn't be putting a sandwich in there. I mean, you could if it's whole grain bread and you know the source of it. I think the kids need to eat real food. And the problem is that they're not eating real food. And there are great guides on how to do this.

I'm like thinking on school lunches because basically- Well, an apple. An apple, fruit. Cheese. Cheese can be fine. We're okay with cheese? Yeah, cheese can be fine.

I prefer sheep or goat cheese. What else, Steve? What else do we need to know? Hold on. See if there's a follow-up. What kind of meat? Yeah, what kind of meat in the sandwich? Like real-

I'm thinking about turkey, sliced turkey, roast beef. Real, real, like not deli. No, not deli turkey, because that's like kind of ground up and mixed with all kinds of stuff. Like a chicken breast that you cooked yourself the night before in avocado oil. Something like that. That's pasture raised. Yeah. Okay.

It's just so much harder than it should be. You know, it's like- Yeah, it is. Well, the defaults are the wrong choices. How do we make the defaults easy choices and the right choices. Yeah. I don't know. I like, even in the summers, I'm sure there are a lot of parents out there who can relate

to this. The summers, the family eating goes to hell. The kids daily eating. Cause they're all over the place. You know, our kids go to this day camp and then they swing by the, the ice cream place that has a great menu, like a diner kind of place. And they're all eating just terrible food all day long. I don't even know what the alternative is.

You know, like without hiring a chef to live in your house and come up with healthy options for all three meals, you know, they're eating bagel with cream cheese in the morning. And then they're eating like a cheese steak for lunch. And then, you know, I'll get them for dinner. But it's so hard. It is. It is. And that's the whole point of what needs to change in our policies, to change the things from the top down so that we produce food that's healthier, that we have clear labeling

on foods that people know what they're getting, that we have access in a way that we don't have now to healthier options. And so those things will take time. And I think that's what the Trump administration is trying to do. I hope they succeed. I think there's a sort of a tension between the USDA and HHS because the USDA basically is to support farmers and not necessarily support the health of Americans. And they essentially are creating all the diseases inadvertently that, that health and human services and Medicare and Medicaid are having to take care of. So we have to be aware of the USDA.

Like the right hand is actually making the left hand jobs a lot harder. So what, what do you, how do you like RFKJ's chances of succeeding in this job, given all these forces? He's got a lot of forces right against him. I mean, there's a multi-trillion dollar industry that is basically wanting him to fail and that's threatened the food industry, you know, farming industry, you know, the pharmaceutical industry. industry it's it's not a small thing and i think you know if president trump gets behind him and supports him i think if he's able to get clear on what his objectives are if he's able to sort of get on the low-hanging

fruit and have the win the easy wins i think they'll win so for example getting all the additives and chemicals out of food is starting to happen now there's 30 plus bills around the country in different states some of them 10 of, I think are Democrat led, some most rest are Republican led. And they're, they're, for example, to get rid of the chemicals and dyes and food, or to have snap waivers, to get rid of soda and snap. These things are happening or to get nutrition education, like in Texas for doctors or, you know, stop punishing kids by restricting recess and gym, you know, like if they need it. There's things happening that are sort of the Maha movement has sort of catalyzed this groundswell. And I'm sort of shocked. I mean,

I never thought. It's awesome. I hear Cali Means Dropper all the time. He's like, you're going to tell the Maha moms out there that you won't take sugar out. And they're like, it's great. He's using it and he should. Because the Maha mom thing is real. Like they're out there and they're pissed off about what's been done. I'm 100% maha mom. Happily and proudly. Because I'm pissed off about what these industries have done to me, to my family, how hard they've made it for us all, how expensive they've made it for us. And the government's been sort of in collusion a little bit.

Yeah. That's the problem. Most people can't afford to shop at Whole Foods. It's very expensive. But it's so hard to get organic fruit and vegetable. Walmart is the biggest organic grocer in the country. It is? It is the biggest organic. There's not a Walmart near me. That's why. There are Walmarts near most of underserved populations. So I mean, I shopped at Walmart and during COVID, I was helping different people who couldn't get food. I would go get food. I was like, wow, I can fill up in a giant grocery cart full of real food. That's good. For 500 bucks.

Grass-fed beef and all that. Like a giant Walmart cart, like a regular grocery cart. Yeah. Not grass-fed, but just like real food. Okay. You know, meat, vegetables, you know. How important is the grass-fed thing? In the hierarchy of things, I think it's less important. Okay. I mean, it's more important to have regenerative agriculture to rebuild our soil and to sort of rebuild farms. In terms of your health, I think the kind of trade-off between eating real food and eating processed food, I would skip the organic and I would skip that.

I mean, this is my selling heresy, but in terms of like having a choice, if you can't afford it, I would always choose the- Their relative sense. Yeah, the real food versus the processed food. Back to RFKJ, they definitely want to destroy him. And so one of my feelings is for the next four years,

hopefully he decides to keep the job that long, we need to be super wary of hit pieces on him because the odds are they've been planted by one of his detractors. Just in the news now, they're trying to blame him for this measles outbreak down in Texas in a community of Mennonites who don't take vaccines and never have. That's right. Long before Bobby Kennedy came on the scene. Yeah. Nevermind became HHS secretary. It's like he

went down there out of empathy to this little boy's funeral and they're like, you you're to blame. Yeah. But I do wonder like that kind of story gets amplified and I don't think it's totally organic. Oh, it's not. I mean, it's, it's really not. I mean, it's sort of, sort of insidious. I mean, the, the, uh, with Dr. Oz, they did this New York times published a piece on him years ago, taking him down because this group called the American council on science and health had a wrote a letter to Columbia to take him off the faculty because he was a quack. And there was sort of eight or nine doctors on the letterhead that was from the American Council on Science and Health. When you look at who that group is, they're funded by the

pesticide industry, by the big food manufacturers, by big pharma, by tobacco. And they basically say that pesticides, cigarettes, and trans fats are fine. We shouldn't worry about them. I remember this. And they come after me. Is it because he trans fats are fine. We shouldn't worry about them. I remember this. And they come after me. Is it because he was pushing supplements on his show as an advertiser? I mean, maybe. That was their end. Maybe.

But he also was challenging things about the food system. Yeah. Oh, no. I'm just saying that's the excuse they found to come for him. And when you look at who that group was, one of the guys spent years in jail for Medicare fraud. Oh, my God. And I was sort of shocked that the New York times is an investigative journalist, you know, outlet

I thought, and it wasn't, they, I mean, it took me like 10 minutes to figure out who these people were by Googling them and what their backgrounds were and why they had this opinion and what this group was about. And there's so many of these front groups out there that seem noble and high, high minded the American Council on Science and Health, who would not believe what they have to say, right? Or like in another lane, the American Academy of Pediatrics. Yeah, 100%. Which we used to trust and now should not. All of the, everything, whether it's American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association,

American Academy of Pediatrics, some of them are doing good things. But on the other hand, they're also funded in large part by pharma and food industry. Well, why are, why are pediatricians still pushing the flu vaccine on us and grownup doctors too? It's one of those things that I do not understand, you know, in medicine and science,

the whole point is to question your assumptions and science is based on hypotheses that challenge given assumptions. So it's really about the questions. When you start to ask questions about vaccines, you're all of a sudden a heretic. And you're excommunicated. Oh, YouTube's labeling our video right now. For real information about vaccines, go to the CDC. Yeah, you're excommunicated as a scientist, as a doctor.

When I was at Cleveland Clinic, I had written an article years before I joined about a kid who had autism that I treated. And in the history, I said, this is the history and this is the kid had, you know, born by C-section or took antibiotics or had gut issues or this. And, you know, the mother said, and she was actually a VP at Pfizer, said, you know, by the way, you know, my kid had this MMR vaccine. And after that, he seemed to get regressive autism. And I'm not saying it was a cause, I'm just saying I wrote about it as part of the medical history. And even at the beginning of the article,

I wrote a disclaimer. I said, I'm not saying vaccines cause autism. I'm just saying like- This is part of the story. Part of the story. And this kind of got up through the ranks at Cleveland Clinic and the pediatric department said, you have to write a letter stating that you are

100% in support of vaccines or you're basically fired. What? Like that's the kind of thinking in medicine. And whether you're Jay Bhattacharya who got kind of blacklisted or you're people who start to question things, we should be asking questions. And when you look at vaccine history, there's great benefit,

but also we should be honest. They're like any other medical treatment that has benefits and risks. With the COVID vaccine, we saw myocarditis and other issues. I mean, young adults who got vaccinated more than once had a greater risk of myocarditis from the vaccine than they got from COVID. That's published in major peer-reviewed journals. This is not a heretic opinion. But what's so annoying about it, so now you can say it because it's been published and so on,

but at the time when we were first seeing signs of it and you had like pediatric cardiologists coming forward to say, hold on, I'm seeing this. Even then, when they knew something might be developing, they completely stifled debate or outing of those concerns. That's when it was most needed, but also most banned. You know, where like, you couldn't talk about that. Yeah, it's kind of nuts. I mean, I think it's just that we can't trust the American public to deal with a nuanced conversation, to

teach them about the benefits and the risks, to help them understand the difference between sterile immunity and disease immunity. Sterile immunity is you get measles vaccine, you never get measles. Disease immunity is you get a vaccine like the flu vaccine or COVID vaccine, you reduce your risk of getting the disease or the severity of disease or hospitalization or death. That's a very different thing. So when they say it's safe and effective, that's a trope that doesn't make any sense. Nothing in medicine is safe and 100% effective

or 100% safe. Whether it's, you know, getting an injection for a procedure, you can potentially get infection, you can get bleeding. I mean, I had back surgery and I, you know, after, you know, I had a huge bleed into my spine. It wasn't, the doctor didn't do it on purpose, but it was a complication.

And a risk. Yeah. So there are benefits and risks to anything in medicine, to any drug. Aspirin. I mean, we used to think aspirin was God's gift to mankind. People were taking it every day to prevent heart attacks. Everybody should take aspirin to prevent heart attacks. And then the data started emerging as doctors continue to ask questions.

We should be asking questions. Oh, let's look at this again. So they looked at it again and they kind of, oh shit, you know, like it's actually causing more deaths in people who are at low risk for heart disease from brain bleeds and GI bleeds, stomach bleeds, then from preventing heart attacks. So let's restrict the use of it to those who are at the highest risk, which is what we should be doing in medicine, constantly learning, evolving, growing. But when it comes to vaccines, you can't even ask the question. So, you know, I've been vaccinated.

I had my kids vaccinated. I mean, I'm not anti-vaccine. I think they're an important part of our medical arsenal, but they're not like perfect and they have problems and we should be studying this. Yeah, nothing is above questions in medicine or shouldn't be. And you know what?

We're in a new era. And when people say it's debunked, it's been settled, and these are just things that are so anti-science. Right. It's amazing. Those words should be retired. Exactly. But I mean, look, now we've got Trump, we've got Bobby,

we've got Jay Bhattacharya, we've got Marty McCary. We're slowly but surely turning this aircraft carrier around, but it's going to require antenna for the attacks on them. Yeah. And voices. We're going to have to get pissed off and follow the Cali Means method of yelling at everybody. I told him, he's got to calm down. I didn't get in the car.

He's got to just chill out a little bit. No, never. I disagree, Cali. Don't listen to Mark. All right, Sam, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. If you are a homeowner, listen up. When is the last time you checked on your home title?

That's the legal proof that you own your house. And the answer is probably never. Who goes and looks at that? The problem is in today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing home titles and your equity is the target. Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and boom, your home title has been transferred out of your name and you don't even know about it. Then they take out loans using your equity or even sell your property. So stop what you're doing and find out today if you are already a victim. Use promo code Megan at hometitlelock.com to make sure your title is

still in your name. You will also get a free title history report plus a free 14-day trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection. That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud should happen, they will spend up to $1 million to fix it. How about that? Go to hometitlelock.com now. Use promo code Megan. That's hometitlelock.com, promo code M-E-G-Y-N. The IRS is the largest collection agency in the world. And with April 15th fast approaching, it's more aggressive than ever. If you owe back taxes or have unfiled returns, waiting is not an option. April 15th could mark another tax year that has passed you by. So the smart move is to get ahead

of it now. But listen, never contact the IRS alone. Instead, you could let the experts at Tax Network USA handle it for you. Why? Well, not all tax resolution companies are the same. Tax Network USA has a preferred direct line to the IRS, so they know exactly which agents to deal with and which to avoid. With proven strategies to settle tax problems in your favor, whether you owe 10 grand or 10 million, Tax Network USA's attorneys and negotiators have already resolved over $1 billion in tax debt. Speak with one of their strategists today for free. Don't let the IRS control your future. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com slash Megan. That's tnusa.com slash Megan. April 15th, just around the corner. Act now before the IRS acts first.

I'm Megan Kelly, host of The Megan Kelly Show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megyn Kelly. You can stream The Megyn Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are. No car required.

I do it all the time. I love the SiriusXM app. It has ad-free music coverage of every major sport, comedy, talk, podcast, and more. Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. lost drugs because it seems like one of the first things that Trump did in the Maha lane was to take

them off of the Medicare and Medicaid two options. And, but that seems counterintuitive because being fat causes everything. It's true. It's, it's complicated. I mean, you know, Medicare part D is the drug benefit for Medicare. It's $145 billion. If you treated all the obese people in Medicare with those MPIC, it would be, I think, $267 billion, just for that. But wouldn't it then lower the cost of all the other things they need? It might, it might.

But the question is, is there a different way to go about this? And can you get the same benefits? And what is going on with our food system and the causes of this? So it's easy to look for that quick fix or the quick jab that's gonna solve all your problems, but it doesn't come without risk. So when you take these drugs,

when you might feel nauseous and not feeling right, so that's probably how it works. It makes you not want to eat because you don't feel good. So who wants to rock around with that? And most people discontinue it after the first year. I mean, it's a big discontinuation rate because of the side effects. Not only that, those are short-term, kind of short-lived side effects, but we see a 400% increase in bowel obstruction, which needs surgery. We see a 900% increase in pancreatic injury. We see increases in thyroid cancer.

Let me be able to debate that, whether it's just in animals or not, but it's still a concern. And you see people losing half their weight as muscle. Muscle is where your metabolism is. So here's the problem. You lose, let's say, 50 pounds. Half of weight as muscle. Muscle is where your metabolism is. So here's the problem. You lose, let's say, 50 pounds. Half of that's muscle.

You get off the drug because most people stop it. You gain back the weight. Now it's all fat. All fat. So then you could be the same weight you were when you started. Except a lot flabbier. But your metabolism will be slower because muscle burns seven times the calories as fat. So you need to eat less at the same weight just to maintain that weight. So it's a slippery slope unless you are, and I think this is something that we've talked about in, you know, in some of the policy

conversations we have had. If you're going to give this drug, it must be delivered along with a nutrition counseling program that makes you eat at least a gram of protein per ideal body weight. So let's say per pound of ideal body weight. So let's say you're 120 pounds, you need 120 grams of protein and a strength training program. So you keep your muscle. And if you don't do that, there's a huge risk on the backside. You're going to be skinny fat. Skinny fat. It's right. I know it's a terrible situation. Nobody wants to be skinny fat. It's like you look good in clothes, but then when you take the clothes off, it goes downhill fast. There's another word for it called toffee, not tofu. Thin on the outside, fat on the inside. Oh yeah. Nobody wants that. That's fine until you

get to beach season. These are an important advance in medicine, but they have to be prescribed intelligently. They have to be done in the right way for the right person. It's not a panacea for everything. And we have to fix our food system and we have to fix the reason why we're fat. But if you had like a morbidly obese person come in to see you, you wouldn't consider like saying, you want to check out a Zempik? Yeah, I think, you know,

what did we do before this? You know, there's a woman working with me who's been working on my nonprofit for years. She's now the first lady of West Virginia. She lost over a hundred pounds just following some simple guidance that I gave her about what to do. She's a brilliant woman,

but she didn't ever know about nutrition. And I saw another woman in Cleveland Clinic who had heart failure, type 2 diabetes, hypertension. She had multiple stents put in. She had fatty livers. Her kidneys were starting to fail. I mean, she was on her way to her kidney and a heart transplant. And within three days, and this sounds crazy, but she was off her insulin by changing her diet. In three months, she reversed her diabetes. Her A1C, which is your average blood sugar, went from 11 to five and a half, which is normal. Her heart failure reversed. We call it the ejection fracture, which is how much blood you're going to pump out per minute. Again, that got back to normal from being low. Her kidneys got better. Her fatty liver went away.

She got off her medications. She saved $20,000 in copay. I don't know what Medicare was covering for her, but that was her copay. You save a lot of money and it's just about teaching people the basics of what to do. And most people don't know. Like the family I was talking about, this was the pre-Ozempic era. A lot of people know and they just, they, it's very hard. Some people do and some people just don't know. And I think, you know, that's what I have changed over the years. I've, I sort of believe like, like I said earlier, that people who are overweight or who have these conditions,

they know better, but they just don't do it. No, it's more than that. They don't know because the whole society has sort of made it hard for them to know. I got to ask you, this is a different category, but I got to get this in. EMF and RF. This is like- Should we be worried about it like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and- Yeah. And so-called dirty electricity coming out of your outlets. Yeah. How big of an issue is it? I don't know.

I don't think that there's a lot of good data. I think there's some data that there may be some issues in human biology. When you think about it, we're electromagnetic beings. You have your heartbeat, your brainwaves. We can see those electrical signals. I mean, you know that if you go into certain areas, there's interference with your phone. So the stuff actually we know impacts our electromagnetic system, how it's linked to disease, you know, how bad it is.

I think it's very hard to understand or study because you can't do a randomized controlled trial with this. You can't like take- Wouldn't we all be coming down with cancer if exposure to Wi-Fi caused it? Yeah. I mean- I mean, everybody. We are.

The thing is we are seeing increasing cancer rates. So people say, oh, heart disease deaths have gone down. Yes, because we have better treatments. But has the incidence gone down? No, we've seen more people with heart disease, more people with cancer, more people with every single chronic disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, you name it,

autoimmune disease, it's getting worse across the board. And so it's multifactorial. It's not just one thing. And could it be a factor? Yeah It's not just one thing. And could it be a factor? Yeah. But I think- Do you think twice about having Wi-Fi in your house? No, I do, but I turn it off in my bedroom. And I know, and I noticed this, I mean, this is totally anecdotal, but when I go camping or I'm sleeping outside, like I sleep better. My whole wellbeing changes. And that could be nature. It could be a lot of other things, but

I always wonder if that, or sometimes even when the power goes out, because when the power goes out, sometimes it goes out for three or four days, like, wow, I feel a lot better, I sleep better. I mean, it's kind of amazing. So that's anecdotal, but I think it's something we should study. What about that?

You see a headline every other day that young people, like people in their 20s, are getting colon cancer at really alarming rates. Is that true, and do you know why? Yes, 100% true. I think the why is a question. My view is that it's related to the change in our microbiome from our diet and from the increased load of environmental toxins.

And that's probably driving most of it. What about antibiotics? You know, you were talking about the woman with the messed up microbiome and you mentioned you gave her antibiotics. I thought antibiotics caused a bad microbiome. Well, they can be good. They can be bad. So she had an overgrowth of bacteria called SIBO,

which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And she also had SIFO, which is small intestinal fungal overgrowth. So sometimes you need to get rid of the bad guys. Like if you have a parasite, you need an anti-parasitic medication. I would love to get a parasite. Every woman I know dreams of that. Yeah. Worm worms for weight loss. Yeah, exactly. It's our new company, Worms for Weight Loss. No, we used to joke, my hairstylist and I were joking during the COVID pandemic, if Dr. Fauci would just say to some ozempic

in those COVID vaccines, everybody would get them. Everybody would get them. Every single woman on earth would be like, I'll take it, I want all my boosters. It's true. But you know, antibiotics have a role in medicine, but we way overuse them. I mean, there's 29 million pounds of antibiotics to use in animal feed to prevent infection from overcrowding.

There's about a couple of million that are used for humans for therapy. So that's crazy. Antibiotic resistance, it kills 700,000 people a year. It's kind of a big issue and it's a big, big problem. But, you know, for certain indications, for example, like bowel overgrowth, there's specific antibiotics that are not absorbed that can be taken that are generally well tolerated, and that you have to then rebuild the gut after. So you have to use- How hard is it to rebuild the gut

after an antibiotics course? It's not that hard. If you take probiotics, if you eat healthy diet, if you feed your microbiome phytochemicals and fiber, it can come back. Okay. Yeah. I've been taking this like shot not not for antibiotics just because i was i don't know everybody says supposed to be good for you of uh

raw it's like honey what is apple cider vinegar yeah and some lemon yeah it is the most disgusting i like you take it and you're like oh yeah should i is this important like well i mean it can be it can be good to change the pH of your stomach, but I'm not a big subscriber to that. It's so painful. But I don't really like all that fermented stuff they say that you should eat, like sauerkraut and pickled this and pickled that. I don't know. I don't like this. I'm not having sardines and I don't love my vinegar drink and I don't want to eat a bunch of sauerkraut. I do like it, but yogurt's good too, right?

I mean, can I do that instead of the apple cider vinegar? If it's not industrial yogurt, yes. Okay, what's industrial? What do you mean? I mean like factory farm cows that are pumpable antibiotics, hormones, and it gets into the milk. I don't even know how I found that out.

I didn't even consider that. Well, you can buy organic, you know, yogurt. I don't think mine is organic. I've got to go look at that immediately. Yeah. And you considered it. Okay, so in sum, I don't think mine is organic. I've got to go look at that immediately. And you considered it. Okay. So in sum, we need to detoxify ourselves.

We need to detoxify our environment. You mentioned mold. You mentioned lime. All the ultra-processed foods. Buy organic. Yeah. Ultra-processed. I mean, if you could get a message out that's simple, it's like, you know, if it's a food that you can't

recognize or make in your kitchen with the ingredients that you have in your kitchen, you probably shouldn't eat it. If you don't have butylene hydroxy toluene that you put on your vegetables or you sprinkle on your steak, don't buy food with it. Better safe than sorry. It's almost like you need to get rid of your pantry. I think we need a fridge biopsy for most people and a pantry biopsy. And we need to get rid of the stuff that's harmful. Yeah. And I think that's the thing that most people can do.

They can look at their kitchen, go through everything. And I've written a lot about this in my books. But how do you actually have a healthy pantry? How do you get rid of those things that are harmful? And if you go through there and look at the ingredients, if it's stuff you don't recognize, get rid of it. If you can't pronounce it, if it's in Latin, don't eat it. Like it has weird ingredients like maltodextrin.

You or your kids. Yeah. Or your kids. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what you're saying is that my mom serving me wild berry high C with every meal was not exactly the best choice. No, probably not. Linda. Probably not. This is where we went wrong.

That's right. Dr. Mark Hyman, it's a pleasure. Pleasure. Function Health is the name of the company and you guys got to check it out wrong. That's right. Dr. Mark Hyman, it's a pleasure. Pleasure. Function Health is the name of the company and you guys got to check it out again. It's Function Health, right? FunctionHealth.com or Function.com? FunctionHealth. FunctionHealth.com slash A slash Megan and that will get you $100 off your membership there. Well worth your time. Thank you all. Thanks. And we'll talk to you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

No BS, no agenda, and no fear.