The School of Greatness - 1075 How Food Heals or Harms Your Body, Aging & Mental Health w/Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

“Meaning and purpose are predictive of longevity.”Today's guest is Dr. Mark Hyman, who has been on the podcast a few times and every episode has been extremely powerful. Mark is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. In today's episode Mark and Lewis discuss the foods you should avoid to better your mental health, what the Pegan Diet is and what it consists of, how foods can actually acts as medicine, and so much more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1075Read Dr. Hyman’s new book: The Pegan DietCheck out his website: https://www.drhyman.com/ Listen to previous episodes with Dr. Mark Hyman:www.lewishowes.com/916 www.lewishowes.com/714 www.lewishowes.com/616 www.lewishowes.com/293

This is episode number 1075 with number one New York Times best-selling author Dr. Mark Hyman. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders often caused by the food we're eating. What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health? Oh, that's not hard. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock

your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. let the class begin. Shonda Rhimes said, you can't say yes to everything and not say yes to taking care of yourself. And Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the first wealth is health. My guest today is my good friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, who has written many New York Times bestselling books. And we've had Mark on a few times in the past because every episode he has on here is extremely powerful and insightful. And Mark is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of functional medicine. And today we talk about Mark's new book,

The Pagan Diet. And these are 21 practical principles for reclaiming your health in a nutritionally confused world, which was written to provide clarity in a world of 100 conflicting diet philosophies and to address the frightening burden of chronic disease and obesity that we face. In this episode, we discuss the foods you should avoid to better your mental health, what the Pegan diet is and what it consists of, how food can actually act as medicine, what Mark believes is the key to anti-aging and all the different things he's doing for anti-aging, what insulin resistance is and how we can either prevent it or treat it, the seven systems of functional medicine and why Mark is an Advocate for It.

And I want you to share this with someone who needs to hear it because there's a lot of people in the world who, even if they feel like they look healthy, they might be doing things internally to themselves with the food they ate, the habits they have, their sleep patterns, their thoughts, all these different things that could be hurting them long term. So make sure to share this with a friend that you want to see live a long, healthy, happy life. lewishouse.com slash 1075. You can send them that link or just copy and paste wherever you're listening to this episode right now. And also this your first time here. Welcome to the School of Greatness. Very excited. Make sure to click that subscribe button over on Apple podcast right now or over on Spotify. And in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about my guest. Dr. Mark Hyman is in the house, one of the most recognized functional medicine doctors

in the world and a good friend. Mark, good to see you, my man. Good to see you too, Lewis. How you been? I'm doing good. And I'm always grateful when you come on because so many people have confusion around diet, nutrition, disease, chronic illness, and there's so much information out there and it seems a little overwhelming at times. I bring on different people who share different facts and data and research as well. So sometimes I'm confused, even though there seems to come to a consensus that if you have whole foods, you sleep well, you move your body, you let go of stress, that takes care of a lot of challenges in life. I'm oversimplifying it.

But I'm curious, with a lot of the mental stress and depression and anxiety that has been overwhelming, especially in the last year, how much does food play a part with mental health in your mind? Absolutely. You know, Lewis, we are in a mental health crisis. We are in a immune crisis. We are in a food crisis. We are in a social crisis that is sort of the of which we i don't think we've seen in our lifetime maybe back in the 60s it was a little bit riotous i was around then but i was like eight and and i think what's happened is that we've we've gotten so um confused about what to eat

and and and our diet has changed so much that it's driving so many chronic diseases, and most people don't understand the connection between food and mood. So to your question, how does food affect our brain? Well, I wrote a book about 13 years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution about how the body affects the mind. We often know about the mind-body effect, which is real, but there's also the other direction going on. And it turns out that food is probably the biggest driver of dysfunction in the brain when it comes to mood, behavior, attention, memory. And this is not just sort of hypothetical, but there's a whole department, for example, at Harvard of nutritional psychiatry.

There's a whole department at Stanford of metabolic psychiatry. I've had both of them on my podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy. The doctors from those institutions are talking about the role of food and the brain in the mood. And we see depression, anxiety, irritability, stress. It turns out that when you eat the American diet, or otherwise known as a sad diet, a standard American diet, that people are damaging their brains in ways that create inflammation in the brain. And we now know that mental illness often is an inflamed brain. You know, when you cut yourself and you get an infection, it's red and hot and sore and inflamed. If you sprain your ankle, it's sore. If you get a sore throat, it's sore and red. When your brain

is inflamed, it doesn't hurt. The only way your brain knows how to say ouch is by getting depressed or anxious or angry or irritable or having even more serious consequences. And so the food that we're eating, predominantly the sugar and starch and processed ingredients, additives, the lack of good fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils,

the nutrient depletion of our diet. I mean, 95% of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats, the predominance of bad fats and refined oils, the nutrient depletion of our diet. I mean, 95% of us are deficient probably in omega-3 fats. 90 plus percent of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent deficiency, which all play a role in mood like folate, magnesium is incredible for anxiety, iron, zinc, all these vitamin D, all these play a role in the brain function. I mean, you hear about winter blues, you know, that's because of lack of vitamin D. So we know about this intimate connection between food and mood and nutritional status and mood. And the clinical trials have been really staggering, showing that people who eat a whole foods diet and get rid of the junk actually can get rid of depression. I see panic attacks, anxiety disorders

often caused by the food we're eating. Just an example, when you eat sugar or starch, your cortisol level goes up, which is the stress hormone. Your adrenaline goes up. So if you eat a bagel or a cookie, your body literally has the same reaction as if you're running from a saber-toothed tiger.

Wow. And that can create anxiety internally with the insulin internally yeah yeah i mean you could be totally fine and calm and take five deep breaths before your meal but if you eat all that crap your brain is going to feel it your your body's going to feel it so what happened what happens to the brain when the when you're eating a bagel or an ice cream cone or whatever it is and it it goes into your gut, does it send signals to your brain? And then it starts to, uh, you know, what does that do? Is it inflamed in that moment? Does it take time to inflame something? So, so there's a whole cascade of things that happens when you eat mostly the starch and sugar, that 60% of our diet, right? It's ultra processed food.

It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. It's the main ingredients of corn and flour and sugar that are in everything. And what happens is you get this spike in blood sugar, which then creates a spike in insulin. At the same time, you get an immediate spike in cortisol and adrenaline. That's the first phase of response. Of course, it affects your liver and screws up your cholesterol and all that. But what happens next is even more concerning. It drives all the available fuel in your bloodstream from all the food you've eaten, sugar and starch and whatever bad fats, drives it

into your fat cells. And it's a one-way street into your fat cells called your adipocytes around your belly, those belly fat cells. Those fat cells in turn create a whole series of chemicals, hundreds of chemicals, hormones inflammatory marker markers and messengers and there are transmitters it's it's quite striking when you look at they're not just like holding up your pants it's fat there it's like it's actually doing stuff and when you eat in that way it drives hunger it stores fat it shuts down your metabolism and it slows literally slows your metabolism and even worse it locks the fat cells so that fat can't get out. It's like a one-way turnstile.

All you can get in. And then on top of that, it releases all these inflammatory messenger molecules. We call them adipocytokines. They go to your brain and they create inflammation in the brain. So it's kind of a downstream effect over chronic eating this way. If you have one cookie or one bagel, it's not going to kill you, right? Right. But if you're constantly eating this stuff and we're talking

about the average american eats a pound almost a flour and sugar a day wow a pound like 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour you add that up and it's and i know i'm not that eating that much and you aren't so a lot of people are making up for the difference right right so food affects your mood for sure yeah and then not only that it's not even just uh you know what it was striking and i don't know if you had david plumetter on the show but he wrote a book called brainwash and it's it really speaks to what happens to the brain when you don't eat real whole foods and you eat too much of this uh american that we're all eating, it disconnects the frontal lobe from the amygdala. Now, what does that mean in English? The frontal lobe is the grown-up.

It's the adult in the room. It's like you think you're going to punch that guy, but you go, I better not punch that guy, right? Right, right, right. It's that adult in the room that sort of is your higher self. And the amygdala is your reptile brain. It's your lizard brain. It's going to just run or fight or flee uh-huh and it's and and what happens is literally physiologically these parts of the brain are connected but when you eat crap they get

disconnected and so you're constantly reacting from your amygdala with no grown-up in the room which is why we see this level of divisiveness and hatred and i mean just all the upheaval we're seeing in society now i think a large part of that has to do with uh our brains being constantly triggered by this reptilian uh insult that is driving uh behavior change and when we look at and we look at the fact of of other data to support it's not just a theory in prisons if you give prisoners healthy food, swapping out all the crap they eat in prisons, which is pretty darn bad, there's a 56% reduction in violent crime in the prisons. If you add a multivitamin,

it's an 80% reduction. Come on. If you look at kids, and this is in juvenile detention centers, they've done clinical trials because he's got these people locked up. So you've got, it's a really great kind of study. Now these kinds of studies are hard to do because mostly we're free we call them free living humans who don't really behave and they'll do whatever they want they don't follow the study protocol when you're locked up you get what you get right and so they took these kids the environment's the same for everyone yeah all that stuff that's right and they took these kids and they and they uh these were kids were disruptive violent aggressive oppositional suicidal it was by cleaning up their diet and giving them whole foods there was a 91 reduction in all

violent behavior you know oppositional behavior need for restraints went down suicide went down 100 i mean it's the third leading cause of death in that age group it went down 100 no no suicides and so you see this incredible data that comes from understanding nutritional psychiatry and you know wait a minute maybe some of our messed up society has to do with not only the problems of obesity and the problems of chronic disease and the fact that covid is is landed on a perfect you know laboratory for spreading in america because we're all so unhealthy and our immune systems are so sick because of our diet. But it's also led to this incredible disruption of our brain and our mood and our behavior, which we're seeing it rampant in society today.

What would you say are the three foods we should all stay away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health? away from in order to increase the happiness of our mental health? Oh, that's not hard. So, I mean, you know, in my book, The Pagan Diet, it's called 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. And it's really practical. And there's a bunch of steps at the end. But I think, you know, the real dangers are, one, steps at the end but but i think you know the the real dangers are one um high fructose corn syrup because anything with high fructose corn syrup almost by definition is a highly processed food that comes with all kinds of other bad crap so if you're reading labels like if you just can eliminate that that would be like number one number two would be trans fats hydrogenated fats

which what is that what's really what's that in what foods is that in is that processed packaged foods what hydrogenated fats is that fried is that french fries yeah so hydrodinamide fats have literally been have been banned by the fda essentially ruled not safe to eat but they're still out there okay there's you can still find them it's less but it's and they used to be really that's it makes crisco shortening so anything that comes with a baked good or any processed food. And the third thing would be, you know, you should only eat foods with ingredients that you would have in your cupboard can pronounce and recognize. In other words, would you have butylated hydroxy toluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your salad, you know, which is also known as BHT. It's a preservative that's been linked to cancer it's

banned in europe we have it in everything here you know so if you wouldn't have you know azodicarbonamide in your cupboard that you would use in your stir fries you probably shouldn't eat it and yet this is in so much of our foods in fact in america it's legal this is an ingredient used in breads to make them fluffier subway used it in their subway sandwich didn't they have to take it out didn't var get it yeah yeah so our friend our friend ashamed them into taking out but it's still legal here it's not illegal they just she just shamed them publicly by trying to eat her yoga mat in front of the subway and got them but in in singapore for example if you're a food manufacturer and you use this ingredient in your food, you get a 15 year jail sentence and a $450,000 fine.

No, you do not. Yes, you do. I swear to God. In Europe, a lot of these chemicals are banned. So basically, just eat real food. So get rid of all those three things that would make you likely to end up in trouble. And then there's another hierarchy of how do you even upgrade the quality. But the whole principle of the vegan diet is that one, food is medicine. Food is medicine and quality matters. And then it's not just calories, it's information. And it literally can upgrade or downgrade your biology with every bite. And so when you're putting something in your mouth, you're literally speaking to your genes. You're speaking to your hormones, your brain chemistry, your immune system,

your microbiome your mitochondria everything is controlled by what we're eating so the book is really focused on two key principles one is food is medicine and the other is personalized nutrition and medicine because you know i call it the pecan diet as a joke between paleo and keto right sure you know and i had i was sitting on a panel with a friend of mine who was a vegan cardi cardiologist another one was a paleo doc and they were just fighting and i was in the middle and i felt like a ping pong ball going back and forth and i was sort of i was like trying to break the break the tension a little bit and i said hey if you're a paleo and you're vegan i must be pegan and it was kind of a joke and everybody laughed i was like oh wow that was good and then i thought

about on the way home and basically they're identical except for where you get your protein. Animals or grains and beans. They both agree that we should eat whole foods. They both agree we should eat lots of vegetables and nuts and seeds and good fats and get rid of processed foods and low sugar. And even agree that we should not be eating dairy, which is a whole controversial subject. But they're pretty identical. Sure.

And so the goal of this book is not to create a dogma, but to create a big 10 inclusive framework for people to think about food in a different way. So what are the principles of healthy eating that are adaptable to different cultures, different preferences, different belief systems? And I think, you know, I always encourage people to listen to their body, not to dogma. You know, a lot of our nutrition advice is based on, oh, be keto or be paleo or be vegan or be this or be that be raw and the truth is it's it depends on you if you are if i do keto my body doesn't respond great i mean i do higher fat but but it might but another person who's a diabetic they might do

great on it right you know one person on a vegan diet like rich, may be able to run triathlons. I mean, just incredible Ironman stunts of heroic effort. But he may be a unicorn, or maybe he's figured out how to do it. And other patients of mine, see, are extremely ill after years of being a vegan because of their nutrition depleted, or they don't have protein, or their body doesn't like it. I just had a patient, for example, this week, who was a young woman, 26 years old, who's been a vegetarian vegan. She was basically a vegetable and sugar vegan.

And she didn't even like to. So she would eat sugar as well? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, a lot of people who are vegan eat sugar because the body starts to crave the carbohydrates and sugar. So it's not uncommon. And so she wasn't overweight at all.

But metabolically, she was super unhealthy. She had acne and her gut was a mess and she had very low protein, like very, very low amino acids. She had very low vitamin D, extremely low B12, very low iodine, very low zinc. I mean, and she was extremely unwell and her diet was just so not fit for her. So we had to sort of upregulate it and change it a little bit i had to get her on some different protein shakes which she needed i had to up regular vitamins i had to sort of get her off the sugar i mean but i think you know it takes a lot of work so the key is how do you personalize the diet and get away from the

basically religious nutrition that we which is is either all vegan, vegetarian, keto, carnivore. There's all these extreme diets, right? Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and again, I only encourage people to listen to the smartest doctor in the room, which is their own body itself, right? Like, how do you feel? Uh, do you feel great? Do you feel bad? How's your stomach? How's your head? How you're clear? Are you have energy? Are you, energy? I mean, what is happening to you? So I think it's important to understand that we are all different and that the future of medicine is personalized medicine. There's a whole section here on personalized nutrition and how do you identify your particular needs by various kinds of testing, whether it's genetic testing, whether it's metabolic testing, food sensitivity testing,

and how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet? food sensitivity testing and how do you actually figure out how to dial in your perfect diet everyone's kind of swearing by their way is the way uh but it seems so extreme in my mind you know and i yeah and i i empathize with vegans and i'm like yeah i don't want to hurt animals either and you know but then i've tried it for a while and i'm also like gosh but i miss meats and it's like yeah yeah what is the way and what i'm hearing you say is that there is not one size fits all you have to really figure out what works for you yeah the one size that fits all is quality is is understanding food is information just meat for example so feedlot meat it's an abomination it's it's horribly cruel to the animals it it it grows the animals in ways

that are extremely destructive to the environment by uh these monocrop corn and soy fields we use to grow feed, the feed loss that produce tremendous amounts of pollution, all the hormones and antibiotics that we use. And the quality of the meat is very different. So it's basically bad for you, bad for the planet, bad for the animals. So it should be banned, 100%. But that doesn't necessarily mean that eating a wild buffalo is bad for your health right sure and or eating a wild grass fed yeah yeah or eating a fully grass finished regeneratively raised cow or animal is bad for you in fact there's a chapter in the book as one of the principles is is you know eat is is meat

medicine right and and it's kind of a joke in a way, like a little bit of provocative comment. But what's really fascinating to me, there's an article just published a couple of days ago, another one, about how if you look at feedlot meat, it produces inflammation in the body. It actually is really not that great for us. But if you look at these animals that have foraged on hundreds of different plants with all different phytonutrient compositions and all different vitamin and mineral contents, they literally seek out and forage medicines in their diet. And there's a

guy I had on my podcast, Fred Provenza, who has studied rangeland animals his whole life and is working with researchers at Duke. And they've discovered in properly raised meat actually phytochemicals and this blew my mind meaning you have plant compounds like catechins that you find in green tea at the same levels in certain meat depending on what they eat wow so you have all these antioxidant anti-inflammatory detoxifying compounds found in meat that's raised properly and the other argument obviously is climate and yes you know uh i think the the the factory farming of animals is an abomination, and it is a huge contributor to climate change and environmental degradation, ecological collapse. However, that doesn't mean that, you know, we had 169 million ruminants roaming around the plains in America hundreds

of years ago. I mean, we shot them, we shot them all. Like, we basically, Buffalo Bill said, every buffalo killed is an Indian dead. And they literally decimated like 60 million buffalo to down to a few hundred. That's crazy. Yeah. And so those buffalo and those ruminants put in 58 to 50 feet of topsoil across America,

which is why we had such rich agricultural lands. Now we've lost over a third of that topsoil because of our farming methods like monocropping and tilling that's degenerated the soil so that the soil can't hold the carbon because plants breathe carbon from the atmosphere. They suck it into the plant that goes down to the ground, into the roots, and it feeds the microbiome of the soil. And the microbiome of the soil then feeds the plants because you need this beautiful symbiotic relationship

where the nutrients from the soil cannot be extracted unless the microbiome is healthy in the soil. So we get all these nutrient-depleted plants, and then we lose the carbon in the soil, and we end up with climate change at an accelerated level. In fact, the food system itself, end-to-end, is the number one cause of climate change, by about 50% of it. Not even fossil fuels.

Wow. Yeah, more than fossil fuels. Because when you look at end-to-end, you know, factory farming, deforestation, soil erosion, food waste, you know, refrigeration, transport, all that stuff, it's huge. And so, yes, factory farming should be banned but it turns out that regenerative agriculture and i talk about how to be a regeneratarian in the book which is a really kind of interesting concept nobody can disagree with right you want to regenerate human health you want to regenerate planetary and ecological health who's going to be against that right you can be vegan or paleo but like you can't be against that it's like being against motherhood or apple pie so and i and so i i I basically create a framework of understanding the science around how if we use animals in an ecosystem on a farm, we can dramatically accelerate the production of soil.

Dakota, who was a traditional farmer, monocrop, went through cycles of destruction of his farm through hail and storms and droughts and was going to go bankrupt, and then discovered the writings of Thomas Jefferson and discovered that the practices that they used a long time ago to preserve and conserve soil, cover crops, crop rotations, putting in animals as part of the ecosystem and having roots in the ground at all time. All these very simple ideas that are regenerative agriculture. And he was able to turn his farm around and has built 29 inches of topsoil, makes 20 times what his neighbor does in terms of profit, makes more food, better food, does not use any chemicals, inputs, or water. It's unbelievable. And it's something that is now scaling up across the country. And the says that if we took and by the way 40 of agricultural land around the world is not

suitable for growing crops so even if you're a vegan you want to grow crop you can't do that on that land then it's just going to waste and what animals do is they have like all these stomachs and the ability to eat stuff that is inedible to us and turn into incredibly high quality nutrients grass and yeah. Yeah, right. And we're not going to be sitting like a gorilla, eating 400 pounds of food every day just to get the nutrients we need. So I think, oh, gorillas are strong. Yeah, but they eat all freaking day,

and they eat an enormous amount of food in order just to get a little bit from it. So we have to understand that the UN says that if we took these 2 million of the five million degraded hectares of land around the world and we converted them regenerative agriculture we could stop climate change for 20 years so it's not like eat vegan and save the planet it's like not someone someone russ konzer as a farmer said it's not the cow it's the how right and and their studies have shown that for example if you eat kangaroo meat versus feedlot meat all your inflammatory markers go down.

Whereas if you eat the feedlot meat, your inflammatory markers go up. Kangaroo meat? Well, it was done in Australia where they had a lot of kangaroos. Wow. You can actually go in the grocery store and buy kangaroo meat there. No way. Yeah, yeah. I wonder what that tastes like.

That's interesting. Have you had it before? No, but I've had the llamas from um from south america what was that guanacos the guanacos was incredibly delicious it was uh this patagonia i had the guanaco that was the closest thing i've had to a kangaroo that's interesting but i've had ostrich i've had king i've had buffalo i've had elk i've had venison what's the best tasting meat you've ever had i like elk oh god a good elk chop is like the best i just don't know why but it's so good

that's just it it tastes better than a steak i really do think so and there's this company i have nothing to do with this company but a friend of mine turned me on to it called wild idea buffalo which is basically grass finished wild buffalo and they harvest in really humane ways, and it's super yummy and tasty and tender and delicious, and you're eating basically like the Native Americans did. Wow. I mean, honestly, the Plains Indians, the Native Americans, they lived very long. They were, at the turn of the last century, they were the longest-lived people, had the

highest number of centenarians yeah in 1900 and pretty much all they ate was buffalo with a few berries and seeds and stuff that they gather did they have fruit or did they not have fruit a little bit yeah you know you've heard of the pemmican right you know what pemmican is what's that pemmican is basically dried uh dried meat and fat from like usually was buffalo or other animals with a little bit of berries okay um and it and it was super nutrient dense and when lewis and clark uh went across america they carried pemmican because one pound of pemmican a day would feed would feed you um if you're a woman it would half a pound and so they literally could bring 30 pounds of food for a month and and they had this it was dry it lasted forever so they literally could bring 30 pounds of food for a month and and

they had this it was dried it lasted forever so it was the food that the native americans used which is dried pemmican so it was like some buffalo meat dried with it's kind of like a beef jerky type of thing with some yes but it's high in fat very high in fat so very high in fat and meat and and berries interesting so the native Native Americans lived on that. They probably had much smaller fruits back then as well, like little baby apples. Well, it's wild, right? It's wild. Like two bites.

Yeah, well, all those foods were so more nutrient-dense. I mean, another example of food is medicine. We talked about the meat is medicine, but one of the most exciting things I've heard about recently is, well, here's a concept. When you look at plants, or animals,

the harder they have to work to survive, the more nutritious they are. So what are those plants? So if you're eating a monocrop vegetable or plant or grain, it's the worst. It's almost devoid of nutrients. It's bread for starch and sugar. Monocrop means?

Meaning like you have a giant corn field or a giant soybean field or one one crop you have like acres you know right you have like you know 2 000 acres of broccoli or whatever that's the least nutrient dense yes yes and then if you get and then if you get and if you get organic a little better if you get regenerative it's even better because the soil is so nutrient dense because the soil think about like these traditional crops are growing now they're grown basically in dead soil yeah and all the nutrients have to go in so it's like it's it's like they're getting the npk which is essentially the the basic nutrients for plants nitrogen phosphorus and potassium but they don't get all the other stuff right and so they don't get all the the rich things that come from the microbiome of the soil extracting all these incredible minerals nutrients i mean your broccoli today is 50 percent less nutritious than it was 50 years ago so they don't

they don't get all this incredible nutrients from the from the soil and and and so when you're looking at these incredible uh stresses on plants that happen for example in a regenerative system which is a little harder for them to grow or or a wild system, the nutrient content is so much higher because there's this phenomena in science and medicine called hormesis. Hormesis means a stress, but then that stress makes you stronger. So it's essentially what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? So if you lift weights, you know, you're going to tear your muscles, but then they'll get stronger get stronger if you do interval training you're going to like feel like crap and it's hard it's stress but it'll make you stronger or if you you know do any kind of stress to your system it actually can create a rebound effect like ozone does that and many other therapies will literally

create a stress and then the body will come back and fight it wild plants are are the most nutritious so wild blueberry is better than a regenerative blueberry, better than organic blueberry, better than a monocrop blueberry farm, right? That's full of pesticides and chemicals and so on. So not all broccoli is created equal. No, not all plants are created equal. So I like to eat weird food. I like to eat strange food.

I'm here in Hawaii and I'm going to the farmer's market and I'm eating stuff I never ate before. I don't even know what half of these fruits are. I had a Suriname cherry, which was like an explosion of flavor and color. I'd never even eaten or heard of it in my life. So I'm big on eating weird food. We eat about three crops. 60% of our diet is three crops, basically corn, wheat, and soy.

And in the rest of the world, it's often rice. And then about 12 plants comprise the other part of our diet. And there's like 800 species of, of plants we used to eat. There's many livestock species. We lost 90% of our edible plant species, 50% of our livestock species. So we're eating all this mono junk. When you go to Europe, you get a lot more, you know, artisanal stuff. And so anyway, what's amazing about, um, food is that when you eat the right foods

and you're eating quality foods, you literally can activate all these healing mechanisms in your body by using the plant's defense mechanisms to help you. So here's a really cool story that explains how food is medicine. And last night, you know what I had for dinner? What's that? I had pancakes. Ooh, that sounds good.

But I didn't have just any pancakes. And you're like, Dr. Hyman's having pancakes for dinner? What is up with him? No, I had special pancakes made from himalayan tartary buckwheat himalayan tartary buckwheat is is a plant that has been almost forgotten that was grown in the himalayas under extremely rough conditions right no water at high altitude, you know, basically crappy soil, you know, cold weather. I mean, you name it. It was the worst place.

I mean, you don't want to grow something. You don't want to grow it in Tibet. You want to grow it in like, you know, Iowa, right? Yeah, yeah. And so, but this plant, as a result of all these stresses, this special type of buckwheat developed all these defense mechanisms. And it is one of the most powerful superfoods on the planet. It's developed over 130 or 140 phytochemicals,

some of which are not found anywhere else in the world, that regulate your immune system and literally can rejuvenate your immune system. What's this called? Himalayan buckwheat? Himalayan tartary buckwheat, like the tartars. I got to get this. Where can we get it? You can't yet, but you will.

How'd you get it? Oh oh i have an inside track my my mentor and and my friend dr jeffrey bland is a nutritional biochemist student of linus pauling who has you know taught all of us about food as medicine and food is information and functional medicine and and discovered this almost by accident there was he read about in in a journal. There was some obscure reference. He tracked it down. Long story short, he found this farmer who'd gotten some of these seeds by accident from the USDA, grew a little bit of it. And he started working with him. And this summer they produced the first hundred thousand pounds of Himalayan tartar buckwheat. So he sent me a couple of pound bag of this flour. And so I made pancakes from

that flour. And it's basically higher in protein, higher in vitamins, minerals, and higher in, it's the highest protein of any grain. And it's not really great as a fruit. And it's got all these phytochemicals that rejuvenate your immune system. So here's just to take you down the rabbit hole for a minute and explain how does food act as medicine? I mean, it sounds good, Dr. Jaime, but how does it actually work? Okay. So here's what happens. As we age, this is a little complicated story, but it's worth telling. As we age, our immune systems age as well. It's called immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system. And part of that happens because in our bone marrow, we have stem cells. And we have stem

cells for white blood cells. Now now if you are eating the typical american diet you're exposed to all the crap in our food and the toxins in our environment and all that these stem cells get injured literally get mutated and they produce their progeny which are their white blood cells we produce a million white blood cells in our bone marrow every minute one million and then they go out in the periphery and the rest of your body and they do their job We produce a million white blood cells in our bone marrow every minute. One million. And then they go out in the periphery and the rest of your body and they do their job, right? When you have these mutated, funky white blood cells, they're called chips. They get in the circulation and they become zombie cells.

You might have heard of zombie cells, which create aging. And these zombie cells create cancer and heart disease and inflammation and and autoimmune diseases and all kinds of stuff and they're very hard to get rid of because they just live forever they're like zombies how do you get rid of them well it turns out by some magical twist of uh nature that the himalayan tartary buckwheat phytochemicals target and kill the cells that are zombie cells. So literally, I had an immuno-rejuvenating pancake dinner last night. I'm so proud of myself. It was the first time I ever had breakfast for dinner. It was so good. I made it with berries, put a little cinnamon in there, which is good for your blood sugar. It's so high in protein. I put an

egg in there, macadamia milk really simple no it wasn't super starchy and it just it was delicious and it was rich almost yellow color to the flour with all the phytochemicals so that's an example of how food is medicine so i think we are just beginning to understand this in fact the uh the rockefeller foundation has funded hundreds of millions of dollars into studying what they call the periodic table of phytonutrients, which means they're classifying the 25,000 plus phytochemicals found in plant foods. And everybody's heard about this. Oh, wine has resveratrol and green tea has catechins and broccoli has sulforaphane and, you know, Himalayan tartary buckwheat has, you know, a whole list of

stuff, right? So we're kind of familiar with the idea of phytochemicals. Why do you eat blueberries? Because they have promethosyanidins, right? But they're cataloging all of these. And there's many unknown ones. Like in Himalayan tartary buckwheat, we're discovering ones we never even knew about before. And we want to be eating these.

These are the medicines that are in food. This is when the animals are foraging around, eating this. They literally can get these in their meat. the animals are foraging around eating this they literally can get these in their meat and the thing about the the climate change thing when you actually look at at the regenerative agriculture model for raising animals now you don't have to eat them or not right you don't have to eat them but you have to include them in the in the cycle because without them you cannot build soil at a rapid rate right we've lost a third of our top soil we are projected to lose all of it within 60 to 80 harvests this is according to the un and also an obama report

from from soil so the only way to really build soil is to include animals in the process of agriculture by having the manure by having yeah yeah so you poo and pee and move around they move around like in this we call it adaptive grazing uh or there's different different terms for it but essentially it's a way of raising animals and herds and moving them around quickly in different fields not letting them overgraze and they chomp down and like like the buffalo did or the elk that they'd move they'd eat and they moved to the next spot and they wouldn't ruin the land they would and that peeing and pooing and their hoofs digging in the saliva from their mouth that that saliva would literally make the plants grow more.

It's like fertilizer for the plants. So they get all the saliva, and then the plants come back stronger, and they put more roots down, and it pulls more carbon in the atmosphere, and it creates this virtuous cycle. So if you're looking at, for example, eating a vegan burger, a plant-based burger like an Impossible Burger, yeah, it's better than a feedlot burger, but they're growing the soy with glyphosate rich monocrop culture soy cultures and it's destroying the

soil it's destroying the microbiome of the soil the glyphosate destroys your microbiome but in terms of climate change it adds three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment whereas a regeneratively raised beef burger removes three and a half kilos of carbon. So it's seven kilograms of carbon less than an Impossible Burger. So we have to sort of get into the nuances a little bit. And that's why I like to just people to eat real food and follow the principles of nature. And it's amazing. Not only will it be good for the animals and good for the planet,

but it will regenerate your health. And that's really what I see with my patients, that the food is the most powerful drug on the planet. What are you doing personally to help with staying young, anti-aging, beyond food? Are you doing stem cell, bone marrow, everything you're doing? I have a, in the book, I have a whole section on how to eat for longevity. So that's, you know, that's a lot of the principles there. But in addition to the food, and I think if you were to pick the number one, two, and three thing around longevity would be your diet.

Yeah, really? And then, you know, yeah, for sure. I mean, you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. I hope I look as good as you when I'm your age. I'm 61. It's unbelievable, man. It's great. I've been working out. Yeah. So I think exercise obviously is really important. Sleep, unbelievable, man. Great. I've been working out.

Yeah. So I think exercise obviously is really important. Sleep, meditation, all those things. Those are the foundational things. And then there's all the hacks, right? And I think there's a whole class of things that people are using from things like NAD to peptides, to exosomes, to hyperbaric chambers, to ozone. I think these are all around the corner.

And I use a lot of them personally. I use ozone, I use peptides, I'll use exosomes. I'd love to get a hyperbaric chamber, but I can't get that, you know, but there, there are, there's a lot of, there's a lot of really cool things out there on longevity. And I think we just launched our longevity roadmap docuseries, which discusses all this sort of emerging technology around aging and people, I think it's called longevity roadmap i think they just google it okay yeah that's interesting what would you say are the the three things you you would keep doing for as long as you could to help you with anti-aging and living longer and staying at what it'd be the peptides would be something else i i listen i think it's like those are those are like there's the 80 and that's the 20 so that's the 20 is all that fancy stuff and the 80 is food

your food and fit exercise and i've been doing more strength training and i've been doing more cardio and um and i think you know sleep and meditation and then the other thing that people often don't think about for longevity is community, love. Because love is medicine, just like food is medicine. If you've got stress in your heart, you're going to die. I mean, it's going to make you sick. It's really true. And what's really striking is when you look at the data, some of the most potent predictors of longevity is not your diet, actually.

It's whether you are socially connected. it's whether you are socially connected so if you're part of a knitting club or a bridge club or a bowling club like the longevity numbers just go crazy even and there's a great study that was done years ago in a little town called i think it's called rosario uh uh what was it rose rose something uh pennsylvania and it it was basically a community of Italians from this one little village in Italy that all kind of moved over to this one town years and years ago. And they kind of left their old Italian diet behind

and adopted the American diet. But this community was so tightly knit and there are all different economic spectrums in the community, but they were always there for each other. They would eat birthdays and parties and holidays. There was a sense of connection and love in the community. It was really unique.

And what was striking is even though they adopted all the American lifestyle habits, they didn't get the same mortality as the rest of Americans. Because they had this incredible social fabric that was providing them a foundation of love and connection and meaning and purpose. And what's striking is I just saw an article, even one of the major medical journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association, that was striking to me because it was so clear that meaning and purpose are also predictive of longevity. So if you have no meaning and purpose in your life. What's the point of being here? I might as well end it. Right. You kind of have nothing to live for, right? So I think it's really quite interesting. And I think we're in this moment where we're learning so much about medicine and well-being and health, and we are in a massive paradigm shift. That's what functional medicine is. That's

what this book is about, The Pegan Diet. It's really a functional medicine view on food and nutrition and health and longevity. You talked about insulin resistance as one of the leading causes of chronic disease today. What is insulin resistance? How do we prevent it? And then how do we treat it? Yes. Well, great question. And I think we hinted about it a little bit before. But 88% of Americans are in poor metabolic health. That's staggering. That's almost 9 out of 10 of us. And poor metabolic health means insulin resistance. And I'm going to unpack that in a minute. 75% are overweight.

42% are obese. 40% of kids are overweight. I mean, it's terrible. One in two Americans has preddiabetes or type 2 diabetes. All this is caused by the amount of starch and sugar in our diet, right? Broccoli is a carbohydrate. That's fine to eat. But white flour is also a carbohydrate. It's worse than sugar in your body. So the volume of starch and sugar that's predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health. And what happens when you eat starch and sugar,'s predominantly our calories is driving this poor metabolic health and what happens when you eat starch and sugar which by the way we really didn't have right for most of our human history we basically were hunters and gatherers till 10 000 years ago and then you know

if we had grains we had whole grains the the milling of flour didn't happen till about 150 years ago and when that started and they started to actually refine the flour is when we saw these nutritional deficiencies like like beriberi and pellagra and these horrible vitamin deficiencies it was really terrible and they actually uh you know they actually discovered vitamins because they started depleting the food so when we when we eat in a way that has all the starch and sugar, it causes our blood sugar to go up. That causes our insulin to respond to try to keep the blood sugar down. So you can have normal blood sugar if you go to your doctor. You can have a normal A1C, which is your average blood sugar. But if your insulin's high, you're in big trouble. I saw a

guy who was 400 pounds. His blood sugar was perfect. His average blood sugar was perfect. His insulin was like 20 times normal because it was keeping everything down. Oh, man. Now, insulin gets that high because the body becomes resistant to the effects of the insulin. It's like the boy who cried wolf.

So you need more and more and more insulin to get the blood sugar down. More and more insulin. What does that do? Well, insulin has a number of roles. In a small amount, it's good. Keeps your blood sugar good. If you're healthy, fine.

If you have no insulin, you get type 1 diabetes. You need insulin shots. But most people have what we call type 2 or prediabetes or insulin resistance. And it turns out that this is the driver of cancer, like the most common cancers, prostate, breast, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, heart disease. Most heart attacks are caused by this. Diabetes, obviously. Dementia, they're calling type 3 diabetes. Depression. So many issues are driven by this insulin resistance

that are burdening our society with chronic disease, which affects 6 out of 10 people. And so when you have this phenomenon in your body, it drives inflammation. It drives fat storage in your belly. It causes more hunger hunger it slows down your ability to lose weight and it creates this vicious cycle of muscle loss and fat gain that just it's like super fuel on on the aging process that's why you see diabetics you know have you know far more heart attacks they're four times the risk of dementia they're more likely to get cancer there it's just all related to this phenomena and then if you're talking about the game of longevity, I remember this lecture I heard like 20 plus years ago

from a Harvard professor who was talking about preventive cardiology. He said, Mark, if you could take a group of 100-year-old people who have perfectly clean arteries, they'd have one thing in common. I said, what's that? What's that? He says they're insulin sensitive meaning they are able to easily regulate their blood sugar with very minimal amounts of insulin but most of us well most because they're basically healthy or they have genetics that help them or

they eat you know well but the key is to keep your in the game of aging is to keep your insulin low right and if you keep your insulin low you're going to be activating all these anti-aging mechanisms your body if your insulin is, you're going to be activating all these anti-aging mechanisms in your body. If your insulin is high, you're going to accelerate all the aging. So that's why starch and sugar are poison. When insulin is high, it's weakening your immune system. It's increasing inflammation, which is making you age faster, essentially, and get sick, right? Yes. And not only that, Lewis, what is happening now with COVID in America, why are we the worst country in the world with COVID? It's not just political mismanagement. The fact is that we were the sitting duck perfect place for COVID to land and cause havoc. Why?

Because we're obese. Because we're obese, we're overweight, we have chronic diseases, and these are all diseases of inflammation. So we are pre-inflamed. And when COVID hits, it's like gas on the fire, right? It just blows up your immune system, which is why you see these cytokine storms and this overwhelming inflammation in the body. It's not the virus that kills people. It's it's people's own bodies overactive inflammation because it's primed because of our inflammatory diet and so nobody's talking about this i think bill morris the only one i've seen talking about in the media who says hey guys the thing we can do yes maybe we need to be protecting ourselves and practicing social distancing maybe getting vaccines that's a whole rabbit hole we shouldn't go down but but nobody's talking about

getting healthy our diet or losing weight or immuno rejuvenation or even things like vitamin d which are so cheap and simple i mean if i were president i would literally give free dose of vitamin d to every man woman child in america just boom give it to them there's a lot of research showing that vitamin d is defending uh the body against uh covet right yeah if your vitamin d is defending the body against COVID, right? Yeah, if your vitamin D is low, you're 80% more likely to end up in the hospital and die. If your vitamin D is high, you're 94% less likely to end up in the hospital or in the ICU.

94%. That's better than vaccines, right? With a lot less hassle and risk and side effects. Yeah. Wow. Okay, so how do we treat it then? What are the things that we need to do when our insulin is high? Well, guess what?

I wrote a book. It's a really good book. It's called The Pegan Diet. Yes. It helps you do that. And essentially, the principles are things that I'm almost embarrassed, Lewis, that I have my career telling people to do stuff that's so self-evident, right? Like eat real food. Don't eat crap, you know,

eat lots of vegetables, eat lots of good fats, get good quality protein. It's, it's not that hard. And the key to insulin control is fat. And here's why. If you look at protein, if you eat a lot of protein, that can spike insulin because there's a process called gluconeogenesis where the protein gets turned to sugar when you meet your protein needs. If you eat sugar or starch, yes, you'll jack up your insulin. If you eat fat, there's zero insulin response. Really? So what's interesting, if you look at the fat thing, you'll go, fat's fattening. It's going going to make you fat it only makes you fat in the context of insulin so if you look at type 1 diabetics their their pancreases are gone they can't make insulin these people are starving all the time because insulin gets the fuel in the cell so they literally

are metabolically starving and they're losing weight. So they can eat 10,000 calories a day and would lose weight. It's not the calories, it's the insulin. So the foods to help you in terms of insulin and the fats are avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds. Those are all sources of great fats. Macadamia nuts, pumpkin seeds, walnuts, all the great nuts.

And then depending on your metabolism, your genetics, you might tolerate saturated fats like coconut oil or grass-fed ghee or grass-fed butter. Those are all fine. I would stay away from all the refined oils, which are called plant-based oils right they're problematic for a number of reasons because they're extracted with hexane solvents they're oxidized easily they're unstable and we eat them in huge quantities that we never ate before right so i'm sort of a little bit of an evolutionary eater in the sense that you know like we never we had 22 teaspoons of sugar a year when we were hunters gatherers we found a honey somewhere. Now we have how many a day? 22 a day.

Wow. And some kids have 34 teaspoons of sugar a day or more. And so, you know, the fats we're eating are totally different than we used to eat. 10% of our diet is soybean oil, which is something that's increased a thousandfold in the last hundred years. And it's not something our bodies really handle. So I think my fats that I have in my kitchen are olive oil avocado oil coconut oil ghee and a little grass food butter and then you know i have a little toasted sesame oil for flavoring for asian dishes

and you can get you know various kinds of nut or seed oils that are low you know processed with expeller pressed or cold pressed so they're not highly refined and you can use those as flavorings like walnut oil or macadamia oil and so forth so i but i think the majority of oil should be that and can you share uh there are seven systems of functional medicine is that right yes what is that so people are yeah so okay well at high level what is functional medicine i always joke it's the opposite of dysfunctional medicine. And the body is not organized the way that we all learned in medical school. In medical school, you know, you have your head doctor and your joint doctor and your stomach doctor and your heart doctor and your lung doctor, your this doctor, that doctor. One patient said, I have

a doctor for every inch of me. None of them talk to each other. And the truth is that these are all connected. These body systems are all connected. Your body is a network. It's an ecosystem. And so the siloed approach to medicine based on diagnosis and symptoms really has nothing to do with the natural laws of biology. They're just things we've observed. And we're in a very primitive state of medicine right now. We're going to look forward in maybe 5, 10, 20 years and go, what were we thinking? So functional medicine goes right to the root cause. So we're treating the symptoms. Functional medicine treats the causes. You know, we're suppressing symptoms. Functional medicine is addressing the mechanisms of these diseases. So if, you know, for example, you can take all the diabetes drugs you want you can take all

the blood pressure drugs you want but if you're if your lifestyle and your diet is causing the diabetes it's not going to work right and you can and the joke is if you're standing on a tack it takes a lot of astra to make it feel better the treatment is take out the tack right sure so so you know that's what western medicine so. So functional medicine has this framework, which is you're predisposing factors, genetics, triggers, stresses, exposures, toxins, whatever, allergens, infections, interact with your lifestyle to drive imbalances or to create balance in seven key systems in your body. And this is the key to health. So we treat these systems by getting rid of the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff, whether it's food or whether it's meditation or sleep, whatever

nutrients. And it's really what this book is found on is how do you activate and optimize these seven functional systems that are all interconnected, that are web-like, they're biological networks, it's one big network. How do you activate them through food? And I talk about how food influences each of these systems. Like, for example, your microbiome is one of them. Your immune system is another. Your energy system is another. Your detoxification system is another.

Your communication systems, hormones, neurotransmitters, is another. Your structural system is another, which is your biomechanical structure all the way to your cell structures and so forth. So these are the systems we focus on. But let's just take, for example, one, the microbiome. Well, we know that, and this is striking to me i used to talk to gastroenterologists all the time like well don't you think food has something to do with maybe what's going on with the irritable bowel or reflux or you know like oh yeah we'll eat more fiber or yeah don't don't eat drink coffee or alcohol or eat spicy foods or whatever don't eat fried foods like that was the extent of their

advice i said didn't ever occur to you that you know you've got this entire tube there with all this stuff in it you're putting pounds of foreign material every day don't you think that would have something to do with what's going on in there and your digestive diseases and they're like wow what a novel idea i just never thought of that i'm like wow so um which is really striking actually and and you know the microbiome turns out is the big regulator of most of your bodily functions, your immune system, your mitochondria, your brain function, your levels of inflammation, vitamins and mineral production. It really controls so much of what's going on in your body, detoxification. And it's like the new frontier. Because we thought it was just poop.

Oh, who cares? It's just poop. It's just waste. It doesn't matter. Turns out it is the most important organ in your body that controls everything. In fact, probably a third to a half of all the metabolites in your blood come from the microbes in your gut. You've got 10 times as many bugs in your gut as your own cells, 100 times as much DNA. So you might have 20,000 genes. There might be two or three or four or five million genes of bacteria in your gut.

And those genes are producing proteins. Those proteins are being absorbed in the body and they're interacting with your biology and they're regulating all these chemical pathways for good or for bad. So if you have bad bugs growing like weeds, it's going to kill you, make you sick. If you have good bugs, it's going to make you healthy. So here's an example. Again, how food is medicine. So it's not just eat more fiber have probiotics or whatever turns out that there's a bacteria in your gut that's super critical it's called acromantia mucinophilia this bug creates a mucus coating lining on the gut so you don't get a leaky gut and you don't have damage to the barrier think about like a second skin like if your skin is damaged and you

put it in the dirt you'll get infection right but if your skin's intact and you put it in the dirt, you'll get infection, right? But if your skin's intact, you can stick it anywhere. It's fine like that with your gut. So this bacteria helps produce this sort of barrier layer in the gut. How do we create that bacteria? Good question. So you sent me right out, Louis. So, so the, the, this bacteria, uh, likes certain foods. It turns out you can't take it as a probiotic and taking probiotics or prebiotics doesn't help that much, but it loves what we call polyphenols. So what are polyphenols? These are these thousands of phytochemicals and there's certain ones it really loves like pomegranate and cranberry and green tea. Now what's really fascinating is that there's a new drug class called checkpoint inhibitors that are used for

immunotherapy, which is to help your own immune system fight cancer. And they can be very effective. So you've got a stage four cancer, you get this drug and boom, you're cured, like in a month with no side effects. It's pretty miraculous advancing cancer therapy. However, it turns out that most checkpoint inhibitors, these immunotherapy drugs, require acromantia in your gut in order to be effective because acromantia regulates so much of what's going on in your immune system. So many people have very low levels of acromantia. And what is amazing is I've heard stories from one of my colleagues, for example, William Lee, who said his mother had stage four uterine cancer, not responding to the checkpoint inhibitors, on her way to dying

quickly. He did her stool test because he knows about this because he's into food as medicine. He wrote a book called Eat to Beat Disease. He found no acromantia, gave her all these polyphenols and then got her retreated, got her acromantia up and she's completely cured of cancer. Come on. Yes. I'm not kidding. So this is the power of food as medicine. It's that specific. So these seven functional systems, like your detoxification system, how do you get rid of internal waste and environmental toxins? Well, certain foods are powerful up regulators of your own body's detox systems. So for example, glutathione is one of the most important detoxifying compounds in the body. When you eat broccoli or the cruciferous vegetables, collards, kale, cabbage, brussel sprouts,

kohlrabi, all that, garlic, onions, certain other foods, you know, all these foods will help to boost the glutathione levels in your body and help you detoxify. For example, if you look at in Asia, if you have like a green tea, they eat a lot of sushi and stuff in Japan, but they also have green tea. Green tea is a chelator for heavy metals. So the body has this innate intelligence that can be activated by these phytochemicals. So we think, what do we need to eat? We need protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and we stop there. But maybe it turns out these 25,000 phytochemicals like all these things we've been talking about from the agarmancia or the himalayan tartary buckwheat or the you know

the all these things that glucosinolates and broccoli these compounds turn out they may be the key to to really good health so you might not get a acute disease but you'll get what we call a long latency deficiency disease meaning you know if you don't get a vitamin c, but you'll get what we call a long latency deficiency disease. Meaning, you know, if you don't get enough vitamin C short term, you might, you know, you won't get, you'll get scurvy if, you know, but if, or let's say, let's say vitamin D is a better one. If you don't have enough vitamin D in the short term, really aggressively, you'll get rickets. And in the long term, it might cause cancer if you're low in vitamin D. It might cause osteoporosis. It might cause other problems.

And so these phytochemicals, I think, we're going to find out pretty essential if we want to optimize our health and performance and become great. Yeah. Man, you're giving it to me today. I love this. I'm trying. I'm trying. I've got one or two final questions, and I'm going to let you go. I want to make sure people get this, though, the Pegan Diet. The 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confused World. It's very confusing right now for a lot of people, so make sure you guys get this book. You can get it online, Amazon.

You can go to your site as well. Is there any bonuses for people if they pick up the book? Yes, if they go to PeganDiet.com, they can get a whole list of amazing foods. We've partnered with all sorts of like regenerative farmers and are great food suppliers and wonderful bonuses. You can go on pegan diet.com and check it out. And there's a nice video there explaining a little bit what it is and some

bonus, bonus material as well. I love it. If you guys have enjoyed this and this is just the beginning of what you'll get inside of this book, uh, treat sugar like a recreational drug. I need to always remind myself that.

That's one of your chapters. Lots of good stuff about eating brain-boosting foods, balancing blood sugar, all the things you need to know to heal yourself with food. So make sure you guys get this book. I'm curious, final question for you. And we've had Mark on a few other other times so if you guys want to hear his three truths and his definition of greatness we'll link up the previous episodes you can check those out i'm curious you're 61 you said mark is that right yes yes 61 you're you're about to be a

14 time new york time best-selling author thank you i hope you're right you're you're extreme you're extremely educated on so many things about the body, the minds, about food, nutrition. You're well connected to some of the brightest minds in the world in medicine, religion, spirituality, business. What's your biggest personal challenge right now at this stage of your life that you have yet to figure out how to overcome or something you're dealing with that you're still struggling with, whether it's personally, professionally, health, whatever it may be?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, it's an interesting moment, right, for all of us because COVID has really forced us all into introspective time to think about the meaning of our lives, what we're doing, what's important, what's not important, how we spend our time, who we spend our time with. And for me, I've gone through some personal challenges,

recent separation from my wife, which is fine. I mean, it was really loving and great, but it's still hard. And I had a recent back surgery last summer that I fully recovered from and I'm working out two, three hours a day sometimes. But what was more important is sort of at the stage of my life where I've accomplished a lot. And 13 New York Times bestsellers, I have a clinic in Cleveland, a clinic in Venice,

online presence, doing all sorts of wonderful things. And I sort of decided to take a minute to stop and sort of reassess what I want for the next 30 years. So my first 30 years were essentially becoming who I was. The next 30 were doing what I was, right? Really full on 30 plus years of grinding it out, but in a way that actually was great for me because it led to so much goodness, but I was working really hard to a question of what's the next 30 years look like for me? So I took a moment to, instead of becoming somebody, to become nobody for a minute. Wow.

So I've gone to Hawaii, and I'm still doing a little bit of work, but I've taken more time off. And I'm looking forward and saying, how do I design my life in a way to create the most impact, which will bring the most healing and love to the world, but also do it in a way that helps me to be fully fulfilled and happy and regenerate my own wellbeing. You know, because I sacrificed myself and my body at the altar of service for way too long. I mean, I was on the road 50% of the time. You know, I just, I was a master of hotels, car services,

airports. Like I was just, you services, airports. I was an expert in things I didn't want to be an expert at. And I just realized how much of a toll that took on my social connections, on my own health and well-being, on my ability to really savor life. And so my challenge is, how do I change gears a little bit and start to design a life that allows me to have the most leverage and impact to change the things I want to see changed in the world, but at the same time, help me thrive and live in a way that I can savor life, that I can, that I can inhabit the moment and I can have more spaciousness to do the

things that are the most important that I think, you know, I can do for the next phase of my life. So it's going from being like a warrior on the battlefield to being more of like a, a Merlin King position where I can, you know, but I'm sort of working through it all and I feel like I'm getting close, getting close. And it's just a, it's just an interesting moment for me in this, in this time to think about how do I struggle with letting go of the things that define me and actually reimagine things that will redefine me to be who I want in the next phase of my life. Ooh, man. Yeah, I'm going to have to learn that someday, I'm sure.

I'm in that stage too where you were at. I'm in the let's build and grow and create and make it happen mode so uh well i acknowledge you uh dr mark for for constantly showing up in in a way to serve the world and now reimagining your life to serve yourself and the world in a different unique way so uh thanks for for sharing that and thanks for giving us so much wisdom and practical principles in this interview i appreciate you very much i'm always grateful for your wisdom and practical principles in this interview. I appreciate you very much. I'm always grateful for your wisdom and our friendship and all of that you do for me. So I'm sorry for the challenges and the changes that are happening, but I also know that they're happening in your favor and they're all benefits you for the future. So appreciate you very much. Make sure everyone get the book, get it for a couple of friends you think could use this for their health as well, as we could all use more. And thank you so much, my man. I appreciate you. Of course,

Lewis. Thank you. Hope I get to see you in person. Give you a big hug soon when this nonsense is over. Let's do it, man. My friend, thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it and you have people in your life that you care about, then make sure to share this episode with one or two people that you wanna see live a long, happy, healthy life. There's some powerful wisdom in this episode from Dr. Mark Hyman, and I want you and your friends to enjoy it,

to share it, to live it, to practice it. So make sure to share this with some friends, post it on social media, make sure to tag me, Lewis Howes, as well as Mark Hyman. And the link for this is lewishowes.com slash 1075. You can just share that out, text it to a few friends and say, Hey, let me know what you thought about this, what was powerful for you get some feedback and a conversation started. And if this is your first time here, and you got value out of this, we'd love it. If you subscribe over on Apple podcast,

just click that subscribe button right now to be notified when we have the greatest minds in the world share how to live a great life and also leave us a review and a rating and let us know your favorite part about this episode when you leave a review when you do that it helps us spread the message to more people so if you care about others if you want to help people improve the quality of their life then make sure to subscribe leave a review and share it with a friend and if you want inspirational messages for free sent to your phone from me every single week with other motivational quotes, surprises, and goodies to get you inspired every week, then text the word podcast right now to this number, 614-350-3960. Again, text the word podcast right now, 614-350-3960, and we can start texting together.

And I send some good stuff every week. That's right. And I want to leave you with this quote from the Buddha, who said, to keep the body in good health is a duty. Otherwise, we shall not be able to keep the mind strong and clear. And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately that you are loved,

you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.