The School of Greatness - Dr. Mark Hyman: How To Reclaim Your Health In A Food System Designed To KILL You

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

Welcome back to the School of Greatness. Today, I sit down with renowned physician and 15-time New York Times bestselling author Dr. Mark Hyman to uncover the shocking truth about America's health crisis and food system. Dr. Hyman reveals how our modern food industry is literally designed to make us sick, with 6 out of 10 Americans now suffering from chronic disease. But there's hope - through simple dietary and lifestyle changes, we can take back control of our health. Dr. Hyman shares inspiring patient success stories, breaks down exactly what's wrong with our food system, and provides practical steps anyone can take to start healing their body naturally. This conversation is a wake-up call about the state of our health and an empowering guide to reclaiming control of your wellbeing.In this episode you will learn:The shocking truth about how 90% of the $4.1 trillion spent on healthcare in America goes to treating preventable chronic diseasesWhy ultra-processed foods are driving the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer - and how to eliminate them from your dietThe five essential steps anyone can take to start reversing chronic illness and optimizing their health naturallyHow belly fat acts as a "toxic organ" in your body and the most effective ways to eliminate itWhy getting healthy is a team sport and how to build the right support system for sustainable lifestyle changesFor more information go to https://www.lewishowes.com/1695For more Greatness text PODCAST to [phone]More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Dr. David Perlmutter – greatness.lnk.to/1693SCDr. William Li  – greatness.lnk.to/1410SCGlucose Goddess – greatness.lnk.to/1575SC

Six out of ten Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime. Is that cool? No. Six out of ten Americans today have a chronic illness. Six out of ten have it now. We went from relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations in the world. Do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us? Oh, that's easy. It's designed to kill us.

Physician and wellness expert Dr. Mark Hyman. 14 New York Times bestsellers, none other than Dr. Mark Hyman. We're spending more and more money, it's one in five dollars in our economy. We're throwing more and more drugs on everybody, getting sicker and sicker. We're always asking why. I'm sorry, if another country was doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them. What we just say are three to five things

that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness forever in their family? That's a beautiful question. We have thought a lot about. Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm very excited about our guest. We have the inspiring Dr. Mark Hyman in the house. Good to see you, sir.

Good to see you, buddy. Welcome back to the show. We've got a crazy stat here. You've got 15 New York Times Dressaling books. You've got amazing businesses, podcasts that are helping millions of lives around the world understand their health and understand what's causing them to get sick and unhealthy.

That's right. And there's a stat that I saw online that said nearly 90% of the $4.1 trillion dollars spent on health care in America each year is attributed to chronic disease. My first question to you is do you believe our food system is designed to help us heal or to kill us? Oh that's easy. It's designed to kill us. Really? 100%. It wasn't starting out that way, Louis.

I mean, we had, after World War II, a need to feed a hungry growing population around the world. And so the huge push to industrialize agriculture, to produce more calories, more starchy carbohydrate calories that could feed a growing hungry world. And the unintended consequence of that was two things. One, producing massive amounts of sugar and starch. We actually have about 500 calories more per person

in America than we did in 1970. Two, we also increased the amount of starch and sugar. And three, we industrialized agriculture in a way that has destroyed the environment, because of the tillage that's destroyed the soil. Soil, yeah. That is now, you know, one-third of all the carbon in the atmosphere comes from the loss of soil carbon, which is the life in the soil.

We destroyed our rivers and waterways because of the runoff from nitrogen that's caused eutrophication and has dead zones the size of New Jersey and in the Gulf of Mexico there's 400 around those, around the world of those that feed a half a billion people. What's a dead zone? Dead zone means, you know, when you have too much fertilizer in the water, it makes the algae grow, sucks all the oxygen out of the water, and all the fish die.

That's a dead zone. It's dead fish. There's no fish. Dead fish. And so people are depending on that fish to live. And then, you know, we have the pesticides and the glyphosate, which is during this whole microbiome, our microbiome that causes cancer.

And so we have all these downstream consequences. I don't have to mention how horrific factory farming is. So the whole industrial food system, from field to fork, is completely effed. And I've actually had a non-profit called Food Fix Campaign that's based on my book, Food Fix, that was entitled, How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, and Our Planet and Our Communities One by the Time.

And it was really laying out from peel to fork what's wrong with our food system, with our food policies. And we really have to address this because it is why we're gone from a relatively healthy nation. If you look even back in the 70s, you can't. Pretty healthy, pretty fit. Yeah, I mean you can't see that many overweight people.

Now you can't find a skinny person. You know, like if you look at the data, we've gone from about five to 10% obesity when I was born to now 42%. It's so interesting you say that because I was in Mexico City with Martha, my fiance, the other week, and then we flew into St. Louis and as we landed in

St. Louis which I lived in for about eight years I grew up in Ohio lived in St. Louis for a while at high school college and as we landed I said notice what you see when we get off the plane yeah and if we're walking through the terminal I said what do you see she knows people a little bit bigger here yeah it's hard to find like, the majority was a bigger set of individuals walking through the airport. And I go, unfortunately, as much as I love the Midwest, the people in the Midwest are the best. That's right. Kindest, the best values. Yes, ma'am. Yes, sir. Let me open the door. How's your day? Like beautiful people.

But it just seems like a majority are leading into chronic disease, pre-diabetic, diabetes. Everywhere. And I don't know if this is your stat or if this is something else online, but I saw that six out of ten Americans will have a chronic disease in their lifetime. Is that correct? No, no. Six out of ten Americans today have a chronic illness. Six out of ten have it now.

Four out of ten have more than one. If you're over 65, it's 83%. We'll have a chronic illness. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, autoimmune disease, you name it. And what is a chronic disease, what is the root of all chronic illness? Well, we're going to unpack that, but it's primarily our food and our lifestyle and our environmental toxins. I would say those are the big three things that are driving it, and we can unpack that.

But I kind of would love to just help people understand the problem we're in. And it's sort of the frog in the boiling water when you turn the heat off slowly, you kind of don't notice it. It's kind of where we are. We went from relatively healthy nation to one of the sickest nations

in the world. We've seen not just sort of this rise in obesity and diabetes. We've had a huge rise, for example, in heart disease. We think, you know, we're improving heart disease treatments. We're getting better and better health care. We went from spending, you know, $1.3 trillion in 2000 to spending almost $4.9 trillion in 2023 on healthcare, most of that's for chronic disease, most of it's preventable, most is caused by dying lifestyle. And so we've seen heart disease go up by 50% in the last 50 years, cancer go up by 30%,

it's gone up by 50% in those under 50. Like colon cancer, we're seeing young kids getting cancer now. Not the typical kid cancers like leukemia, but like adult grown up cancers. And if the root cause of that are food? 100%, type two diabetes. When I went to medical school, Louis,

which I'm ancient, but not that old, right? It's coming to 65 next month. There was nothing that was called type two diabetes. It was called adult onset and juvenile onset. Juvenile onset is basically an autoimmune disease requiring insulin. Type two diabetes is a lifestyle disease because of too much sugar. It was called adult onset and juvenile onset. Juvenile onset is basically an autoimmune disease requiring insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease

because of too much sugar. Now they threw out those terms because kids as young as two or three years old are getting type 2 diabetes. Kids as young as 15 are needing liver transplants from drinking soda. Wow. Yeah, this is a big problem.

We're seeing autoimmune diseases, 100% increase in autoimmune diseases. We're seeing 100% increases in mental illness. Right? What illness? Mental illness, depression, anxiety, especially in kids. 20% of kids have some type of mental illness, autism, ADD, depression, anxiety.

We've seen the rates of autism go up 1000%. We've seen digestive issues go up, doubling to 100% increase. So we've seen dementia go up 1,000%. We've seen digestive issues go up doubling to 100% increase. So we've seen dementia go up 150%. And we're spending more and more money. And we're getting worse and worse and worse. And we're spending more and more on drugs. That's even the other thing that's sort of shocking to me.

How much are we spending on drugs a year? It's collectively, I haven't done the math, but just for example,, statins alone is almost a $40 billion a year industry. That's the number one selling class of drugs. But if you look at the drugs that are sold, it's the lifestyle drugs we're selling. Heart disease prevention like statins, acid blocking drugs, mental health drugs, which are often lifestyle related.

Now we understand there's a whole role of nutritional psychiatry, metabolic psychiatry, that it's, you had Casey Meade on the show, but you know, she talks about brain energy, but Christopher Palmer, who's a psychiatrist, talks about brain energy, how the loss of metabolic health in the brain causes psychiatric illnesses, everything from depression to bipolar disease, to schizophrenia, to autism.

So these are things that are- And brain health is affected by what we eat also, right? 100%, 100%. The brain is, as a famous saying in medicine, psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain and neurologists pay no attention to the mind, right? And so they're connected. And often the mind doesn't work

because the brain's not working. And the brain's not working because, in large part, we're eating a diet that's full of sugar and starch that causes insulin resistance in the brain and creates a metabolic crisis in the brain, it creates inflammation in the brain, and all these diseases are inflammatory diseases, even things that aren't like allergies and autoimmune

disease, and we've seen allergy rates go up dramatically in kids, and we've seen all these problems, and we're spending more and more on all these drugs we're spending more and more. Like we've seen a 400% increase in use of diabetes drugs, a 300% increase in use of cardiovascular drugs. We've seen a 400% increase of psychiatric drugs increase. We've seen increasing cancer therapies and 500% increase in use of autoimmune drugs and respiratory drugs 200%, pain drugs 400%,

GI drugs 300% increase. So we're pouring more and more drugs on everybody, we're getting sicker and sicker, we're spending more and more money, it's one in five dollars in our economy, and nobody's asking why. It's like we're just trying to plug the holes, like if you've got 100 holes in the boat, or we're trying to bail the boat while the boat's sinking instead of going

Why are the holes in the boat? What is the I want to ask you? Why is this happening and also? What needs to happen in order for America or the world to have a radical shift in? Their approach to health because it seems like there's more and more doctors like yourself who've been speaking up and educating the world and more books teaching us how to do these things, more documentaries showing the strategies and all these things.

What needs to happen to America or the world in order for us to get healthy? Great question. Do we need to go through extreme pain and suffering and horrific death in order for us to wake healthy? Great question. Do we need to go through extreme pain and suffering and horrific death in order for us to wake up? Because I feel like that's- I mean, we're kind of there, Lois. We're boiling, right?

We're in the boiling water right now. We are. And right now, probably, we're talking about the economy and inflation. Probably there's $2 trillion added to our federal deficit every year because of unnecessary healthcare costs because of what we're eating and because of environmental toxins and because of our lifestyle that are totally fixable.

And what's happened is companies develop, they create products, they make money, and then they keep wanting to do that. And so if you're making cigarettes, you want to sell more cigarettes. If you're making sugar, you want to sell more sugar. Or if you're selling Kellogg's Fruit Loops, you want to sell more Fruit Loops you're making sugar, you want to sell more sugar. Or if you're selling fruit loops, you want to sell more fruit loops. And so there's only so much that you can do. So you have to get people to get more and more of the same stuff. There's only so many people on the planet.

And in the food industry, it's the number one industry on the planet. And if you look at the full industry from farming to food processing to fast food to processed food to the restaurant industry, and in grocery stores. It's the number one industry on the planet. It employs more workers than anybody else. And so it's a huge economic driver. And there's an incredible set of insights that have now come out of the World Health

Organization that I wrote about in my book. I didn't call it this, but essentially it's what they were talking about called the commercial determinants of health. We've all heard about the social determinants of health, which is if you're poor, access to food, if you're stressed, if you have trauma, if you live in tough neighborhoods, understand all that plays a huge role in our risk of illness. But the commercial determinants of health is the role that multinational corporations play in subverting public health and privatizing profits.

And they will do it at any cost. They're amoral, they're not immoral, they're amoral. So Coca-Cola just wants to sell more Coca-Cola, right? Of course, they don't feed it to their kids. Right, right. Yeah, if you go into the Coca-Cola building in Atlanta, they don't really drink a lot of Coke there. They drink all the other products like water.

Darsani and they're not, yeah. It's kind of, you know, like Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use an iPhone or an iPad, right? So I think there's something we know about that. And I think, so we now have a whole industry that profits off of doing the wrong thing. And governments are now paying the price, right? So we socialize the costs and we privatize the profits,

right, we taxpayers are paying the price, right? One, with government money, we pay for farming crop insurance that subsidized commodity crops like corn, soy and wheat that are turned into ultra processed food that are deconstructed science projects. They're not actually food by definition. Food by definition is something that supports the growth

and development of an organism. This doesn't do that. It makes you sick, right? So not actually food. And it's then turned into all sizes and shapes and colors of chemically extruded food-like substances that we are consuming. It's 60% of our diet.

It's 67% of kids' diet. And it's dysregulating our biology. It's screwing up our microbiome. It hijacks our brain chemistry. It hijacks our metabolism. It creates inflammation in the body and it leads to all these chronic illnesses. And there was a major published paper in the Lancet that recently showed there were 32

or 37 different illnesses that were caused by or made worse by ultra-processed food, and yet this is what we're eating. So we pay for the growing of this food. Then with our largest government program, SNAP, or food stamps, we pay for $125 billion of food for the poor, which is important. Over 46 million people depend on this. But 75% of that is junk food, is ultra-positive, and 10% is soda.

So our government is paying for over 10 billion servings of soda a year for the poor. It's 20%- Making us sicker. Yeah. The government food stamp program is, 20% of Coca-al's American profits. No way.

Yes. Wow. Yes, and then we pay on the back end for Medicare and Medicaid to take care of the illnesses that are caused by these foods. And then there's all these other collateral damage that we don't pay for directly, but we pay for indirectly. Like we talked about the loss of all the fish,

like the damage to the environment, the damage to our soil, the increases in climate change, and the consequences of that. I mean, how much are these hurricanes costing, right? That's not even factored in. And when you calculate all that, this comes from climate destabilization because of how we're growing our food.

And by the way, the food system is the number one source of changes in our climate. It's not in fossil fuels. People don't realize that. And partly it's because a lot of fossil fuels are used in the production of our food. 2% of global energy use is used to make fertilizer. Wow.

Because it's a very energy intensive process, right? And so we're kind of in this vicious cycle where we have to actually have some serious policy changes. So the WHO report is coming out next year on the commercial determinants of health. So the WHO report is coming out next year on the commercial determinants of health. And the goal, and I talked to one of the scientists there, is to help educate governments on how they're kind of

being manipulated by these companies in ways that are driving policies that are helping them, meaning them, the food industry, and too, hurting populations. And so we're left holding the back. So we should be doing things that other countries are doing that we're not. For example, in Chile, they decided they were gonna

do some radical things and over years ago. And this was because they had a doctor, Michelle Bachelet, who was a pediatrician, who was the president of Chile. Wow. And they had a doctor who was the vice chair of the Senate. And they kind of got together and they said, this is our moment, let's do this. And then of course we're gonna kick that off us,

but let's do it anyway. They put in an 80% soda tax, which wasn't actually even the biggest thing they did. What they did was they ended marketing of junk food. They do this all the time. No marketing of junk food. Fast food, junk food. From six in the morning until 10 at night.

So, note, no, and they took off all the cartoon characters. So no more Tony the Tiger. No more, you know, on the Frosted Flakes. No more Froot Loops with the Toucan character. Cause they're not great. No, they're not. They're not great. No, they're not great.

They got rid of all the cartoon characters. They got all the junk out of schools. Really? They got rid of all formula advertising. They put on front of package labeling, meaning they put, if you go to South America, I mean you've been, but I think your fiance is from. Mexico, yeah.

So they have like these now stop signs on the front of. Excessive calories. Yeah, too much calories, too much sugar, too much whatever. And every different countries have done different things, but it's like a stop sign in black. It's a reminder, yeah. When I'm in Mexico, I see these, I think it says excessive cutlery or something.

It's like Excessivo or something like that. It's excessive calories and it's right in the front. There might be multiple of them. And it makes you, listen, you know, as a human being, my only advice is really sugar. It's like, I don't do drugs. Yeah, I don't do drugs, I don't smoke, I don't do alcohol, I don't do any of these things. I don't know if anything external is

meant for us unless it's organic food. Yeah, for me personally. Yeah, I believe we have the the most powerful pharmacy within us that can heal us and take us to astronomical universes within our own mind. That's for a whole another conversation. That's right. The greatest pharmacy is between your ears. 100%. Yeah. And I don't think we need an outside drug unless you're in extreme cases or But that's for a whole nother conversation. That's right. The greatest pharmacy is between your ears. 100%. And I don't think we need an outside drug, unless you're in extreme cases, or you've hurt yourself so badly that you need that for that moment.

But I think that's another story. But being in Mexico, it reminds me to pause. Do I really want that? Being here, I don't see it. Unless I turn it around and I see, oh, this has got 50 grams of sugar and this many calories. It's less of a pause. It's true, so we need a whole set of sweeping policies

and I think the WHO is going to come out with a series of recommendations. In my nonprofit, the Sweet 6 Campaign, in my book, I also laid out a whole set of things that we're doing and we've been doing this in Washington, making some progress actually. We're working on front of package labeling in America so we can catch up with other countries.

Right, I saw Vani Hari. Were you working with Vani Hari on this whole petition thing? The Kellogg's thing? Yeah, we were helping out. You were supporting out? Yeah, for sure, yeah. But even with Vani, she had, I think it was 400,000 petitions, right, that she took to signatures, that she took to the headquarters of Kellogg's.

And was she able to make any changes with this process? I know she's done it in some other companies. Think about change. It takes a grassroots movement. It takes years and years when you think of the end of slavery, took a civil war. Hopefully you don't need that. Look at women's suffrage.

Look at the right to vote. Look at civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. I mean, these are just things that slowly happen over a long period of time with a lot of people working for a long time to push Congress to make the change they need to make, right? And so that's how we are. I was talking to Cory Booker, who's a friend,

a Senator from New Jersey. He's like, Mark, this feels like 1959 in the food movement. For example, he put a bill together we were supporting as part of our nonprofit, which is called the Safe School Meals Act. And essentially, they found that 94% of school lunches in California are contaminated with pesticides and heavy metals. Things that should not be in the food that we're giving to our kids. And two, there's all these ingredients that are in the food

that add it and dyes and colors that are banned in other countries. You can literally go to jail in Singapore if you put that in the food. If you're a food manufacturer, you go to jail for 12 years. According to them, they're a little extreme. You spit gum on the floor, they cane you, whatever.

But that's extreme. But the reality is that we allow things in this country that are banned in other countries. Like food marketing, many other countries have shut down down. Pharmaceutical marketing, us in New Zealand are the only countries that allow that. It wasn't around when I was in, gradually.

No, when I graduated from medical school, there was no pharmaceutical marketing. When I go on and watch Sports Center at night and the commercials happen, I have to turn them off. My dad never allowed us to watch commercials growing up because he didn't want drug commercials telling us that you're gonna get sick and you're gonna need this. Right. So he didn't want the subliminal or conscious marketing and so I have to mute them and turn them off

because the commercials are fast food and drugs. Yeah, they're like, oh, they're drug companies. Oh, we have to charge all these high prices for these drugs. So we put so much into R&D. BS, they spend twice as much on marketing than they do on research and development. Twice as much.

Wow. So I mean, yes, they spend money in a hernia, but I'm telling you, and those commercials are not for the patients, they're for the, really they get to prescribe by the doctor. But they know from the data that 40% of the time when a patient says, hey doc, I saw this drug on TV and says blah, blah, blah, can you prescribe it?

They go, yeah. So they know, is there any drug in the world that has zero side effects? No, you could die from drinking water. I mean, you can die from drinking water. The dose makes them poison. If you know people who are marathon runners and they over hydrate and they get seizures

and they get dilute their blood, they get low sodium in their blood and they get seizure and they die. So water can kill you, right? So there are no, even anything, like a vitamin if you take the wrong dose. So I think drugs used in the right way, prescribed by educated doctors, delivered by trained nurses that are not medical errors,

are between the third and fourth leading cause of death in hospitals. Wait, drugs that are not medical errors are between the third and fourth leading cause of death in hospitals. Wait, drugs that are used the right way? The right way, right. Not the wrong way. Not the wrong way, no. So, see.

Not like a mistake, like oh I gave you too much of this drug and it kills you. It was like. This is not like oh you were allergic to this thing. No. So, I say this one more time. Drugs used the right way. This is published, this is not my opinion.

This is the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was published quite a while ago, and there's more data recently. But basically drugs prescribed by doctors in hospitals for the right patient, for the right indication, at the right dose. The right symptoms. The right symptoms delivered the right way

is between the third and fourth leading cause of death. Holy cow. The third and fourth leading cause of death. Holy cow. The third and fourth leading cause of death in hospitals or just in total. And I agree. Really? Yeah. It's I, well, I, I, I have to never check that. I have to check that fact, but I think it's either way it's, it's a lot. And, uh, and I think that, you know, how many people die in hospitals based on something just not working out like Prescribing the wrong thing or a surgery that goes wrong like how many look there are medical errors and it's significant

And then Institute of Medicine did a report on it. It's not trivial And and there's and the good news is there's better systems and processes now to help reduce those medical errors and better Yeah, you know tracking of things and better systems. So I think they're getting less, but it's not insignificant. Wow. Now, going back to chronic illness, did you say how many people are chronically ill now

or will be chronically ill? Look, it's six in 10 Americans. Six in 10 Americans. It's 51% of children, Lewis. Wow. Have obesity, asthma, allergies, autoimmune diseases, type two diabetes, type one diabetes, autism. Does it matter, and does it matter,

if we can any certain politician, president, government save us from being less chronically ill, or what will save Americans from being healthy? What will help us get healthy? You mean? Yes. Can someone save us? Is there a government that could save us? Is there one politician that could save us? Is there a company that could save us? Like what will save us from being sick? Well, I think we need a systematic understanding of the problem first. And I think whatever political party you adhere to,

whatever you believe or not, the fact that there's a conversation now about health in America in a presidential campaign is important. And calling out the corruption in our systems, how the FDA is captured and the NIH is captured and the HHS and USDA. I mean, the USDA has checkoff programs

which are supposed to be research programs and also promoting healthy products. They're the ones who came out with the Got Milk ads. So the US taxpayers paid for those ads with the dairy council. Those ads had to be stopped. If you notice they don't have them anymore. Why? Because they were very effective. Because the Federal Trade Commission said they needed to be stopped because they were unscientific and they were making claims in there

that were not based on science. Like it's good for your bones, right? It's not. And this is not my opinion. There's a major published paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Ludwig and Dr. Willett, two of those esteemed researchers in the world, showing that milk and health, it was called milk and health

and all the fallacies in our belief about we should be drinking three glasses of milk a day. The US government says today in the doctor guidelines that Americans need to drink three glasses of milk a day and kids need to drink two. There is no scientific data to support that. Why do we have it? Well, guess what?

The Dairy Council is a huge influence on our policies. In fact, guess who was after his last run as Secretary of Agriculture between his current run as Secretary of Agriculture was on the Dairy Council Board, Thomas Vilsack, who's our current Secretary of Agriculture. Wow. So the whole-

The Dairy Board. Right. The Dairy Council, which is our current Secretary of Agriculture. Wow. So the whole of the Dairy Board, right? The Dairy Council, which is basically the sort of trade group that represents the dairy industry. Right? And so it's just so corrupt. And so someone needs to come in and go, OK, we've got to address this problem. It's bankrupting our country.

The US government collectively spends 40% of the money on health care. In other words, a $4.9 trillion spends 40% of the money on healthcare. In other words, a $4.9 trillion, 40% of that is floated by the taxpayer. When you're not just Medicare, but Medicare, Medicaid, the Indian Health Service, Department of Defense, federal employees, the VA. You add up all the programs end to end. It's one in three dollars of our entire federal budget, which is over six trillion dollars. One in three dollars that we spend on our taxes is going to healthcare, and about 80% to up to 90% of that is lifestyle preventable diseases that we can do something about.

So it's going to take some sweeping changes, and I think some really committed politicians in Washington, hopefully the next president will take this on. There's a lot of pushback from industry. It's like I said, the biggest industry, it's the biggest lobby group. I mean, just one bill to label GMOs. And by the way, I think us and Syria are the only countries that don't label GMOs.

China does, Russia does, not known for transparency, right? Those two countries. But they label GMOs. The GMO labeling bill in this country, but they labeled GMO, the GMO labeling bill in this country, the food industry spent $192 million lobbying for one bill. To pass it. To not pass it. To not pass that.

To go against. Yes, you cannot label foods with GMO because that's going to make people not want to buy it. Oh my gosh. Right. Yeah. And then they did the same thing. They put in a bunch of them colluded, which they got actually sued for by the Attorney General of State of Washington,

and they had to pay the biggest fine ever assessed because they colluded to actually put a ballot initiative in that was anti-GMO labeling. Wow. To get people to vote against the labeling of GMOs in Washington. This is what's going on, and it's very dark. And it's not like, oh gee, we don't know.

Like there's a lot of actually malicious intent. There's also people who are just trying to do their job and make better products and do the right thing. But you know, look at Mark Schneider, who was the CEO of Nestle, biggest health company, I mean the biggest food company in the world, got fired. Because he was pushing things too much in the health direction, and I was working with him.

Really? Yeah, and there was the head of Pepsi in New East. She got a lot of flack and got canned for trying to push Pepsi to be a healthier company. Yeah, so it's very complicated, and I think we do need a strong leadership in Washington. We need an educated consumer base, we need grassroots movement, And I think we do need a strong leadership in Washington. We need an educated consumer base.

We need grassroots movement. We need clear research to actually show what works and what doesn't work. We need, I mean, okay, $46 billion is spent on the NIH budget. The amount of spent on nutrition is 121 million. It's.02% or zero zero two percent. I'm not good at math, but anyway,

that's not my show, but it's very little. And most of that is not actually for the nutrition research for chronic disease, it's other stuff. So it's almost nothing. And yet, it's the number one cause of death and illness. And we're not even studying it. It sounds like what I'm hearing you say is that

this is not something that's gonna happen overnight. That's gonna take time. It's gonna take time to happen overnight. That's going to take time. It's going to take time to make changes. It takes time until it doesn't, right? The Berlin Wall came down in one night. So it takes time, it takes decades, and then it happens. So I'm kind of, hopefully I'm going to try to, I wrote a book called Young Forever on how to stay healthy and I've reversed my biological age four years in the last two years.

So I'm counting on staying alive long enough till I can see this. But it sounds like it's not gonna happen any time in the next four to eight years. It might, it might. It really does. It might, Lewis. I see consumers are caring more about their health. But people are sicker than ever.

People are sicker than ever. I co-founded a company called Function Health, which allows people to access their own lab data, kind of disrupts the healthcare system, so they have to go through the doctor insurance company. And people are flocking to that. We've had over 80,000 members, 300,000 people on the wait list.

We have over 110 million biomarkers we've now tracked. And we test like five times what you'd get in a normal doctor's visit and look at everything from your metabolic health, hormones, and your nutrient levels, toxin levels, things that you should be looking at. And people are wanting this, because they get that the healthcare system is broken,

they're not getting the answer from their doctor, they wanna get healthy, they wanna be empowered. And so I think there's a grassroots movement, we saw the 400,000 people on Bonnie Harry's petition, that's significant. Yeah, there's movement, but it's still, most people have chronic illness. Yeah, and they don't know,

they don't know they don't have to. That's the thing. They don't know this is optional. Even if you have it, you can reverse it with food. Food can heal and food can harm, and if you know how to use it. So then what are the most dangerous foods that cause chronic disease that we should be avoiding? Well, as a class, I think what's come to light in the last decade or so is this concept of ultra-processed

food. Now what is ultra-processed food? Well, everybody understands whole food. That's an apple or an egg or a piece of chicken, right? Then there's minimally processed food. So if you make sauerkraut while you're taking cabbage, you're chopping it, you're fermenting it, it's still pretty much whole food, but it's got some processing. Then there's maybe some little more extra processing that can happen.

It's not so bad like canning or something like that. Those are all real foods. Like if you buy a can of tomatoes, it says tomatoes, water, and salt. You know what it is. Then there's ultra-processed food, which is not actually food. And this is based on the NOVA classification, which they developed out of Brazil. And it's not perfect, but it's a pretty good barometer for what to eat and not to eat. So ultra processed food essentially is industrial foods

like commodity crops, corn, meat, and soy. They get chemically broken down. So the molecules are just completely disassembled. They're reassembled, but not in ways that our body recognizes or probably can process. They're incredibly inflammatory. They destroy microbiome. They dysregulate our appetite.

Kevin Hall at the NIH did a study where he took a group of people and he gave them whole foods diet for a few weeks and then gave them a washout period and then a few weeks of an ultra processed diet. When they, and they were pretty matched for calories in what they were available. They were matched for fat, protein, carbs, fiber.

And what they found was that when these people were eating ultra-processed food, they ate 500 calories more a day. Now if you do the math, in a week that's 3,500 calories. That's a pound. That's right, 3,500 calories is a pound of weight gain. And so in a year, that's 52 pounds. Holy cow.

Right? So this is what America's eating. If you're not burning those calories in some other way, you have to work out more. And by the way, if you, here's what happens. This is a, it's a fuel partitioning issue. This might be a little too technical for reality, but I'll try to break it down.

Part of the problem is that these foods are extremely starchy and sugary for the most part. And they have, you know, bad fats and they have, fats and they have other additives, ingredients and weird things that make you addictive. But when you eat sugar and starch, it causes your blood sugar to spike. Then your insulin goes up and then the fuel goes into your fat cells. So it basically drives all the available fuel. So you store the fat in your belly.

But then, in your blood, it feels like you're starving. So you need more. You want to eat more. Because you're actually not regulating your fuel properly. So it's a fuel partitioning issue. And so you're basically starving in the midst of plenty. So it's really crazy. And so you want to eat more and more.

How people can get to be two, three, four, you know, because they're so dysregulated by these foods I had a patient who was Eating these foods for most of her life. And by the time she got to be 66 She was educated but didn't know anything about food. She was from the Midwest and And she had heart failure. She had type 2 diabetes. She had multiple stents. She had high blood pressure And she had heart failure, she had type 2 diabetes, she had multiple stents, she had high blood pressure, she had fatty liver, her kidneys were going,

she was on a pile of pills, her copay was 20,000 a year. Who knows what we were paying for Medicare. She was on her way to a kidney and a heart transplant. Terrible. And we put on a program, it was a group support lifestyle change program, we put on a very cool foods, anti-inflammatory diet, essentially what I wrote in my book, the 10 day detox diet, which is really great for

just resetting the body. And in three days she was off insulin, which sounds crazy. In three months she went her A1C, which is a measure of bullet sugar, went from 11 to five and a half. Five and a half is normal. Eleven is like you're, should be in the hospital, right? Her heart failure, which was significant for those doctors listening, it was 35% ejection fraction, went back up to 50%, which is normal. So basically that

doesn't happen in medicine. You don't see that. Like these are one-way diseases. Once you have high blood pressure, diabetes, heart failure, you can manage them. You can't reverse them, but you can. Right? So she reversed her diabetes. She reversed three months. She was off all her medications, had lost 43 pounds, everything was normal, and then in a year she lost 116 pounds and got her life back. Wow. And she was on her way to the grave

and she was able to resurrect herself just by using food as medicine. So food can heal or can harm, and if you understand how to use food in the right way, it has incredibly curative powers. So yes, food got us into this, but it can also get us out of this. So ultra processed foods are,

sounds like the worst things. The worst, yeah. But that's where the food industry makes the most money. It's, I think 73% of what's on the grocery store shelves, it's all, you know, it's stuff that looks like food that isn't like Fruit Loops is not food, you know? And Top Tarts and Lunchables, and I mean, how did the USDA allow Lunchables to be in school lunches?

I mean, this is just criminal, you know? And these foods are driving most of the problem. Now, a lot of these foods have also starch and sugar, which is the other big driver. So you mentioned sugars or Achilles heel. It's not an accident, Louis. Nothing wrong with you. It's how we were designed.

You know, think about bears, right? They kind of starve all winter, and they eat a lot of salmon at the beginning of the season when the salmon are running, they're a lot of protein and fat. They don't gain that much weight a little bit. Then it's berry season, and they go to town, and they gain 500 pounds, literally 500 pounds of fat, because they're eating sugar.

Pretty fructose, which increases fat a lot. And then they go to sleep, and they sleep all winter, and they're eating sugar. Bringing fructose which increases fat a lot. And then they go to sleep, and they sleep all winter, and they burn off. We just keep eating all winter. You know? And so our bodies are programmed, when we find something starchy or sugary, to eat it and to eat as much as we can,

because we don't know where we're gonna find our next root or berry, we don't want to, we want to find our next animal to hunt and kill. Like, we didn't have grocery stores and Uber E to hunt and kill, like we didn't have grocery stores and Uber Eats, you know, when we were hunter gatherers, right? And so we're programmed to eat sugar because it's stored quickly and that's good

in a situation where there's scarcity, but not in America. I mean it just seems like there's going to be more and more conveniences in life, you know, with the ability to push a button and have ice cream at your door in five minutes or go to the grocery store and see all the, even if they stop all the marketing,

even if they put the labels on there, there's still gonna be foods available that are not good for us. Yeah. I was talking to Casey Means about this this morning about how she was saying that, you know, society, humanity is spiritually broken also. And we need to find spiritual healing so that we can just have awareness and make better choices. I don't know if that's a different mindset and being

disciplined to just not take the action to have the easy fix or the thing that's going to make us feel good because we're In a fight-or-flight state or through a breakup or we're going through stress at work or whatever might be and this is going to make us Feel comfortable comfort foods. Yeah, or if it's a spiritual brokenness and Because we're spiritually broken or emotionally broken. We don't have a, we don't feel whole. And therefore we need to refuel things to try to make us feel better. But those things aren't healthy for us. And if we could start to heal ourselves spiritually,

could we start to see and notice things and say, I don't need this right now, or I'm going to have this once in a while and it's okay. But it's not gonna be every day constantly to fuel something inside of me where I feel wounded, broken, less than, unworthy, guilty, shameful, needing this to feel quick fix and then take me to my grave. That's right.

Obviously it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you that's the problem. Yeah. And if you understand what's eating you. That's the problem. Yeah. You know, and if you understand what's eating you, and it's the stress of our modern life, it's the political division, it's the conflict around the world, it's the threat of nuclear war, the threat of climate change, the economic instability, the pressures to work hard. I mean, there's so much going on.

The social media is created as such a bunch of chaos in our life that technology, which should have sort of freed up time, seems to suck all our time, right? And so we're kind of in a state where we're disconnected from nature, we're disconnected from each other, we're isolated. And so what do we do? We have to feed the emptiness.

We have to fill that hole. And so I get it, you know? When I feel like crap or I had a stressful day, I want a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben & Cheese. Tell me about it. It tastes amazing. I love it. It tastes great.

I just try not to have it in the kitchen. All right. All right. Sometimes my wife's having a bad night and she's like, orders a pint of ice cream and then she orders me another pint of the Sicilian Van Leeuwen Pistachio, which is my favorite.

But I'm like, I don't want that. And she's like, oh, I just got it for you. I'm like, no, you got it. So you didn't feel bad that you're eating it. All right, which is my favorite. But I'm like, I don't want that. And they're like, oh, I just got it for you. I'm like, no, you got it. So you didn't feel bad that you're eating it. Eating a load, exactly. But I really feel like it is something to what you were saying about the spiritual brokenness of our society of feeling empty

and needing to fill something up because we feel broken or empty or less than. And trauma is a real thing, Louis. I mean, of course, we talked about this before. When you look at the ACE questionnaire, which is, I think everybody should go and check this out. It's available online. It's adverse.

I said like 15 or 16 different things. It's adverse childhood events. And it's essentially, instead of a few questions, you fill out, you get a score. Like, did my parents get divorced? Was any of my family an alcoholic? Did anybody go to jail? Did I get hit?

Was I neglected? No, they're not. Sexual abuse, all these things. Right, sexual abuse. I think I hit every one of these things. Yeah. And it's real. Yeah, it's real.

And so when you have that, and the more you have, it's almost more correlated with chronic illness than anything else. Well. Smoking or diet. I mean, if you look at the risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, suicide, I mean, you name it.

Yeah. Mental health issues, all of it, it's related to these traumas we have and we don't really have a great way of thinking or dealing with it. I look at my parents' generation, they just didn't have a language for it. Now we do, we're talking about psilocybin therapy

and MDMA therapy and trauma and there's people like Gavramati out there talking. So there's a really interesting conversation happening around that. And I think, for me, we're a traumatized society, you know? And all of us to some degree or a little degree. He talks about big T traumas, little T traumas. Big T would be sexual abuse.

Little T would be your parents just didn't understand you and neglected you and you know we're just too busy and self-absorbed. You know, it doesn't matter. They all have an impact on us and they drive our behaviors and the healing spiritually is a key part of this and the challenge is if we're raised as a child, you know even There's so many things that to go in here. It's like were you Were you born?

You know through a vaginal birth or through a cesarean In birth did you have multiple shots as a kid? Did you not have shots as a kid were you given sugar have shots as a kid? Were you given sugar right away? Were you breastfed? It's like all the decisions from birth could compound and impact you over time till when you're in your 20s and you can be chronically ill

not knowing how you got there. That's right. Because your parents influenced what you ate and the environment and everything. And it's like you have to unlearn it all and learn how to get healthy in your 20s or 30s when you finally start waking up to it. That's right.

Right, it's like you're not aware when you're eight that I'm like, you know, I don't know, unless you're getting picked on or bullied, but it's like the food is available for you to eat that, your parents are taking you out, you're eating sugar or junk food or whatever it is. They're not educated. And so you're in your 20s and you're just sick.

Yeah that's right. It's quite astounding how many people are unwell and you know as I mentioned this company Function Health we've done you know tests now on 80,000 people and this is a health-thorough population and like over 95% have some metabolic dysfunction which means they like have normal cholesterol to small particles, 46% have high inflammation, 33% have an autoimmunity problem. And these are people that are actively focused on being healthy. Yeah, 67% have a nutritional deficiency,

and this is at the level the lab says is deficient, not what I would think is a good level of vitamin D or iron or whatever, right? It's like vitamin D level should be over 50. Well, there's under 30 is, over 30 is okay. Well, I'm like, 30 is not good. You should be 50. And so there's such a prevalence of people having all these low grade things

that they don't know about. And you know, illness doesn't just happen, Louis. It's not like one day you get dementia, heart disease or cancer, diabetes. These are slow progressive things that happen over decades. And so there's a slow transition from wellness to illness. And we have not paid attention to that medicine at all.

We're like, you know, come back to me when you're sick, I'll give you a drug. Like literally I had a patient, I saw him and he's live test showed how to high blood sugar was like 113 which is pre-diabetes. I said, did your doctor, you know, talk to you about this? Oh yeah. I said, what did the doctor say? He said, oh well, he says when it gets higher and I get over 126, I have diabetes and he can give me medication.

Oh my gosh. This is straight up. Straight up, Louis. Not talking about how to prevent it or reverse it or like prove it. Oh, your autoimmune disease isn't so bad, but when you get worse, come back and I'll give you a drug. It's like, that's nuts, Louis.

The doctors also aren't incentivized to help prevent people from being sick. They're not, because they don't make a living. So that industry is a little bit off. Oh, for sure. incentivize to help prevent people from being sick. That's true. They're not, because they don't make a living. So that industry is a little bit off. Oh, for sure. I mean, that's one of the things we're working on in medicine now is how do we, in Washington with the food fix campaign is how do we reimburse for nutrition services and healthcare?

How do we get doctors paid to do the right thing instead of the thing that's paid for, right? I mean, you can get paid for doing an angioplasty, but you can't get paid for a lifestyle change program that will prevent them from eating the angioplasty, right? My daughter's in medical school, no nutrition education. 40 years later, I had none, she's got none, right? Less, there are a very few medical schools providing any nutrition education,

and we're working on that. For example, we spent $17 billion a year as a federal government, paying to support graduate medical education programs. on that, for example, we spent $17 billion a year, it's the federal government, paying to support graduate medical education programs. There's no strings attached. We're like, hey, maybe you should add some minimum competency requirements for nutrition. Hey, maybe on licensing exams for medical school, you should have nutrition questions, because

that's just killing all your patients. And so we're trying to change reimbursement, we're trying to change education. These are the kinds of things we're working on. Changing SNAP policies, changing food packaging, labeling, changing dietary guidelines, paying for medically tailored meals, basically getting NIH to have a National Institute of Nutrition, we don't have that.

Other countries have it. There's many levers to pull from the packaged labeling, at the FDA regulation, getting junk out of school. There's so much to be done, and it's not gonna be one thing, ending food marketing to kids. I mean, just like, why should we allow, I mean, if we were doing to our kids,

I'm sorry, if another country was doing to our kids what we're doing, we'd go to war to protect them. Right, think about it. Wow. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of levers to pull, a lot of different industries, policies, companies that need to make changes, but say that never happens. And each individual on this planet has to make their own decisions and own changes and

take full responsibility of their health, no matter what these companies or governments do for them. What would be the three to five things that an individual listening or watching right now can say, I'm gonna take back responsibility and control of my health and my family's health. We start with myself and my family. And we're gonna start implementing

only three to five things. Because anything more than that is overwhelming. I don't have the time, but it's already a struggle. We're already chronically ill or on the way there. It's tough. Life is tough. Responsibilities are hard. Managing it all, making money.

Relationships are challenging. Marriage is tough. Kids are not easy. There's ups and downs. Parents are dying. All these different things. I don't have much more energy. Although I know when I do this,

I'll have a lot more energy because I'm healthier. So I need to get through a three month window to take actions on three to five things to help me reverse chronic illness and be the difference maker in my family to say, I'm the one who stood up to this suffering. I'm the one who took responsibility

and took ownership back in my life. And therefore, I'm going to change my family's generational history because of decisions I make today. That's right. Based on what you say here, what would you say are three to five things that could help someone reclaim their health and end chronic illness forever in their family?

I mean, that's a beautiful question. I mean, I've thought a lot about it. And I think it's not as complicated as people think. Yes, it would be easy to do if we didn't live in a toxic food environment. Yes, it would be easy to do if the systems around us support us to do the right thing. But even against all those odds.

Yeah, we have the easy choice being the bad choice for us. The unhealthy choice. We have the hard choice being the healthy choice. We don't want that, right? And I'll just tell you a story that kind of illustrates how this could be done. And I think, you know, I had a belief, and I'm just gonna be upfront about it.

I believe that people kind of knew what to do. They just didn't do it. They were lazy, they just liked to eat the junk food, they didn't really care. And I was like a little bit arrogant, honestly. And about 10 years ago, or more actually, I went down to a place called Easley, South Carolina, as part of this film called Fed Up

that we did with Katie Couric and Laurie David, who did In Convincing Truth. And I got interested in this family of five that lived in a trailer. They were on disability and food stamps. The father was 42. Already had kidney failure on dialysis from type 2 diabetes, which is usually you get later in life, but he's already so bad.

The mother was easy 100 pounds plus overweight. The oldest kid was about 16 and he was 50% body fat. Now a guy should be 10 to 20%. He was practically diabetic, almost diabetic. And I rather than give him a lecture, I said, why don't we cook a meal together? And here's the truth, the food industry has hijacked and disintermediated us from our kitchens. They basically like, you deserve a break today, convenience is king, don't bother cooking, we'll do it for you.

And most people, families don't have meals together, they don't cook together, they eat from a different package, made a different factory, cooked in a microwave all while they're on their phones or watching TV. Not exactly conducive to health. So I went down to this family and I said, let's cook a meal together, let's get some simple ingredients. I'm on the board of the environmental working group and there was a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget,

which is how to eat well for you, well for your wallet, and well for your planet, right? And they had some turkey chili recipe in there, a nice salad recipe, some roasted sweet potatoes, simple stuff, and cheap ingredients. Roasted ingredients. And they lived in one of the worst food deserts in America. When you look at something called

the retail food environment index, how many fast food and convenience stores are there to a grocery store, healthy food? It was like 10 to one, it was like really bad. And I said, let's look at what's in your cupboards first. And so we took out all the packages grocery store or healthy food, it was like 10 to 1. It was like really bad. And I said, let's look at what's in your cupboards first. And so we took out all the packages and stuff in the freezer and the cans and the packaging and they were like, you couldn't tell if it was a Pop Tart or a Corn Dog by looking at the label and the ingredient list.

I mean, it's just the same processed ingredients. They were talking about all the ultra, you know, the 2,500 things you see on a label, right? That you don't even know what they are or how to pronounce them or where they came from, right? See, you know, the 2,500 things you see on a label, right, that you don't even know what they are, how to pronounce them, or where they came from, right? See, you know, maltodextrin or butyl dehydroxy toluene, you don't know what that is. Like, that's not something you sprinkle on your salad, right? Right, right. And so I started showing them,

this is not good for you, and they had, oh, a Cool Whip. It's good, because it's a, you know, low fat dressing, it says zero trans fat, but yes, it's all trans fat, because the FDA was under the thumb of the food industry and when they basically made them label trans fat, they said if it has less than half a gram per serving, you don't have to label it.

And it says zero trans fats, but it's almost all trans fat because it's like mostly air, right? So it does all this crap. And so I showed them what they're eating and they're like, oh my God, this is terrible. We didn't know. So we cooked and didn't have cutting board,

didn't have knives. We were cutting garlic and sweet potatoes with like a butter knife and we did dinner. It was fine. It was delicious and we all ate together and the son was like, Dr. Hyman, do you eat with your family like this every night? I'm like, yeah, I cook and eat every night like this with my family. And he's like, this is amazing and they loved the food. I said, listen, I don't know if you can do this but here's the guide on Heating It Well for Less. Here's a cookbook that I wrote. Just follow it on how to balance your blood sugar. And on my way home on the plane, I ordered them cutting boards and knives because they

didn't even have them. And the first week, the mother texted me. She's like, we lost 18 pounds this week together. Wow. In a year, they lost over 200 pounds. The mother lost 100. The father lost 45. Was able to get a new kidney, which was their motivation.

The son lost 50, went to work at Bojangles after that, and that's like a fast food store in the south, and he's like putting an alcoholic to work in a bar, and he gained back the weight, and then some, and then he reached out to me, he says, Dr. Heim, will you help me? I'm like, sure, so I coached him, and he lost 132 pounds. He then, a few years later, he was the first kid

in his college to go to, family to go to college. Wow. A few years later, he wrote me, he said, Dr. Hyman, would you be willing to write me a letter of recommendation for medical school? Now he's a doctor. No way. Yeah.

So that taught me something, which is that- You thought they knew the information. I thought they knew. And so it's, and they thought that hard. So what I would say to people is a few things. One is make your home a safe zone. Just, if you want to eat crap, do it. Make it the hard, hard choice, right?

You have to go to McDonald's, drive there. But you know, in the home, only have stuff that's gonna support your health and wellbeing. No ultra-processed food in the house. So that's really straightforward, simple. Honestly, that doesn't even look like food to me anymore. Like if I see M&Ms, like I'm at an airport and I'm craving sugar, I see a package of M&Ms

or a Hershey chocolate bar. I'm like, it doesn't look like food, it's like a rock. So I'm like, why would I eat the rock or why would I eat that camera? Or like I was like. But you know, I might eat like real good chocolate. I might eat that camera or like I was really sure but you know, I might eat like real good chocolate I might do that some dark chocolate. Yeah, so So I just you know ultra processed food is gotta go like if you if you really want to be healthy

That's just you just got to cut that out your diet the third thing is is Don't drink your liquid sugar calories. Mm-hmm Sodas sweetened coffees, sweetened teas, energy drinks, sports drinks, gatorade. That's just gotta go. And artificial sweeteners aren't a whole lot better, really. Even if it says zero sugar,

but it's got artificial sweetener? They're problematic. The sugar alcohols can mess up your microbiome. There's some research that's concerning that they might be increasing the risk of diabetes, obesity, affecting your microbiome. Some of them may be okay, like Stevia or monk fruit a little bit here and there.

It's not anti-sugar. Like if you want, look. What about this whole? If you get a 20 ounce soda, you're having like 15 teaspoons of sugar. You're not gonna put 15 teaspoons of sugar in your coffee. So put a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee. That's fine.

Don't put 15, right? What about this alulose sugar? That can be a little better. So there's little hacks, but I think that's the addict in you talking, Louis. Yeah, yeah. How can I get around it? You're negotiating. Exactly. Don't do it.

That's okay. I'm not a yes or no extreme person, but it's just like understand that liquid sugar calories, ultra processed food, about keeping your home safe. And then, I think the other thing that people don't realize is, you know, getting healthy is a team sport, right? Find a buddy. Rick Warren, who I did this program with, this church with, called Daniel Plan,

where we got 15,000 people to lose a quarter million pounds in a year, did it together in small groups. He says, everybody needs a buddy. He wrote Purpose Driven Life, right? Yeah, Purpose Driven Life, so more books than any non-fiction other than the Bible. It was like 30 million books or something, crazy, right?

That was huge back then. Huge, huge, yeah. So he's great, and we did this whole program, and it was the same thing, we used the community. So community is medicine, love is medicine, just as food is medicine. So if you understand that part of the drivers of chronic illness is loneliness, is disconnection, is isolation, is focus on cultivating your friendships, cultivating your relationships,

invest in those. Those are the most important things. Even if you have two or three, doesn't have to be a million people, but how many people in America don't have somebody to pick up the phone and call when goes down and they're struggling? A lot of people. And men, even worse, most men don't have real friends. It's like, hey bro, let's grab a beer, watch some football.

That's fine, what's wrong with that? But can you talk about it at your marriage or can you talk about the stress you're having with your kids or you can talk about your worries about money or you can talk about your struggle with like I'm sick and tired of this job and I want to figure out what to do with my life. Like there are things that we need to be

in community to thrive. And so in terms of health, loneliness is like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Getting healthy as a team sport, what would you say is the fifth thing if you could add one more thing? Oh, you let me roll, huh? I think we have to live in our bodies.

Because we feel we're disconnected from our bodies, and you're an athlete. Yeah, of course. I'm not an athlete, but I definitely love to exercise. And I think it doesn't have to be a lot. Going from zero to something, you see most of the benefit. So going from zero to a half an hour walk a day, you get enormous benefit. Especially if you walk after dinner, because it helps to regulate your blood sugar and

insulin, because you basically control your blood sugar through your muscles, and even without insulin. So even if you're insulin resistant, you can dispose of the sugar and fuel. So I think exercise is again such an incredible medicine. If you look at all the benefits of it across every aspect of health, it's as good as Prozac for depression. Wow. It helps him prevent and reverse diabetes, heart disease, cancer just walking prevents

dementia, cancer, arthritis. I mean, this list goes on and on. So in every metabolic biochemical level, and I can give you all the sciency parts of it, but the bottom line is exercise is medicine. And if it was a drug, it would be a multi-trillion dollar drug. Literally, it would be like,

you would buy stock in that and you'd be a billionaire overnight. Wow. Because of all the things that it does for the body. And what about, you know, the business of supplements is a massive business. You know, I don't know how many supplement companies there are in the world.

What is the science of supplements in terms of helping us prevent chronic illness? Yeah. Is there any research on it helping us? For sure, for sure, for sure. Or is it like all just kind of? No, no, there's a lot. There's a lot.

I mean, there's a guy named Robert Heaney, who was one of the pioneer researchers on vitamin D, and he wrote a beautiful paper, it was sort of a thought piece really, but with a lot of scientific evidence behind it, that was called Long Latency Deficiency Diseases. And what did he mean by that? Well, if you don't have enough vitamin D acutely, you get rickets and your bones bend and you,

you know, what the kids used to get from being out of the sun and not having vitamin D, right? And you get vitamin D from the sun or from, you know, wild fish and certain things like wild mushrooms. So you don't need very much, like 30 units. But if you don't have optimal levels of vitamin D, let's say 50, the anti-migratory desolator of your blood, right, and that would maybe require 1,000 to 5,000 units. So anywhere from like 20 to 100 times more than we typically think you need to prevent the disease. If you don't have that, you're going to get osteoporosis, you're going to be more prone

to infections, you're going to die from COVID. Big meta-analysis just came out about COVID and vitamin D that prevents hospitalizations and deaths. So, we need to have optimal levels of nutrients. Now, why don't we? And why do we need vitamins? I mean, why should we? We weren't, it wasn't a design flaw that all of a sudden God or whoever of nature, whatever you believe

in made us and we're screwed up and we have all these problems. No. If you look at the nutritional density of the hunter-gatherer diet, it was humongously more nutritious, really, in terms of vitamins, minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, all the things that we are deficient in now. And when you look at, you know, I was actually talking to Bill Gates not too long ago and he was telling us about this bullion

that he created for this bullion cube with extra vitamins in it for the developing world because there were so many vitamin deficiencies. And I said, you know Bill, there's a lot of nutritional deficiencies. And he was like, oh, there's no deficiencies here. Everybody's got plenty of food and protein. I'm like, no Bill.

Just because he has it doesn't mean everyone else does. Yeah, yeah. Well, he just didn't know because he's focused on the developing world and that's great and whatever you think of it. But he just didn't quite get that in America we're also nutritionally deficient. When you look at the NHANES data, it's the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. It's a government research project that's ongoing, which tracks blood work and tests

and diet and everything. They found that over 90% of Americans are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level to prevent a deficient disease like scurvy or rickets, right? And so we've got probably 90% deficient in omega-3s, 80% insufficient in vitamin D, 45% deficient or deficient in magnesium, probably 30% in up to 40% iron, you know, folate. Because there's no vitamins in ultra processed food. No, there's not. So if that's what our diet is, we're not, you know.

Unless you're outside in the sun and getting vitamin D, you're not getting it from your food. No, no. I mean, I had a patient once, she was like, I don't want to take vitamins, but I'm willing to do whatever it takes to get my nutrients. And I'm like, great, okay, well,

I want to get 200 micrograms of saline. OK, you need to eat four Brazil nuts. OK, I want to get 30 milligrams of zinc. OK, you need to eat 45 pumpkin seeds. Or like, you know, she was like that. She had a whole spreadsheet of everything. I'm great. Good for her. You know, like, I need to do this many Kansas sardines a week

to get my omega 3s. And I need to do. So it's fine. But what if you aren't going to do that? Those are whole foods. They're whole foods. Those are whole healthy foods. That's right.

That's right. And so, you know, and also we have more toxins in our environment. We have more stress. We have more dysregulation or more circadian rhythm. We have foods, even if they're eating whole food, like if you're eating a broccoli today, the soil has gotten so destroyed

that it's got 50% less nutrients than it did 50 years ago. Even the broccoli. Really? 50% less nutrients. Yeah. If you go to Europe, like I was in, when I did my research for my book, Young Forever, I was in Icaria and in Sardinia,

and they have the old food ways that they haven't changed in thousands of years. And you eat a vegetable there, or you eat something there, it tastes totally different. Really? Yeah. What's it taste like? It's like, you know, like when you go to the garden and you pick a tomato at the end of

August and it's like, this cherry tomato explodes in your mouth with flavor. It's like, it's like that. Or you got a wild strawberry. It's like, it's just, and flavor always follows the nutritional density and the phytochemical richness of the food naturally. So if you have to put a lot of stuff on food to make it taste good, which is what ultra processed food is, it just tastes like garbage. But natural whole food tastes amazing if it's grown in the right way.

And so it has to do with the soil health, it has to do with the soil microbiome, it has to do with the ability to extract nutrients. I mean, it was amazing. There was a guy who served me this pig meal, it was a nose to tail meal, even at the lung, which was kind of weird, but I've never done that before.

And he's like, his name was Olinto, he says, Mark, we flavor the meat before we kill the animal. I'm like, what do you mean? He said, we know if we give it acorns and we give it this carob thing and we give it this plant and this thing, that it tastes better. Wow. They're not doing it because it's good for you. They're doing it because it tastes better.

They go, oh, we have all these goat and sheep. They're sheep herders. They know if they feed the sheep and the goat these certain wild plants at certain times of the year, like mirtou and other plants, that the cheese and the milk tastes better. But they're full of phytochemicals. And now we know, for example, you can get catechins or in green tea or they're full of phytochemicals. And now we know, for example, you can get, like catechins are in green tea, or they're a great compound for longevity, for health, they're antioxidants, detoxifying. That's why green tea is so great for you.

You can get as high levels in the milk, in the meat, in the animals as you do from the green tea if the animals are eating that food. Well. So it's not only what you're eating, it's what you're eating ate. The food's eating. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. This is fascinating. So supplements you feel like are... I think we need them. We need them. I mean,

I think minimum, multivitamin, vitamin D, fish oil, magnesium for most people, and probably a probiotic because of all of the... I mean, I gave a talk the other day to like a thousand people and I was like, who's never taken an antibiotic in this room? And like one person raised their hand. Right, antibiotic you said. Yeah. So pre-biotic or probiotic? No, antibiotic.

In other words, people's guts are messed up. One dose of antibiotics, you're changing your microbiome. So pre-biotic or probiotic? Probiotic. Probiotic. Yeah, probiotics, yeah. So I think those are, you know, multivitamin official vitamin D for sure.

Magnesium probiotic would be kind of rounding it out. But you know, that's, you know, a penny a day or two. I mean, not a dollar a day or less, you know. You know, it's a fair bit of money, but it's doable. It's doable. There's one other thing I want to ask you about, and I don't want to scare people necessarily, but the belly fat that, I mean I have belly fat, but the belly fat that a lot of people have, how dangerous is that for them, for their health long term?

Terrible. As a doctor, you've been in this field for how long? 30, 40, 40 something years. For 41 years. How 41? No, in medicine 41 years. 41 years. How? In medicine, 41 years. 41 years. You've seen, you know, people extremely obese, you've seen people with just some, you know, belly fat and everywhere in between, right? What is the link to belly fat and I guess overall just long-term health

or how much is belly fat linked to chronic illness and disease? It's the main thing. So if you look at it... And I don't want to scare people, but I want to wake people up. No, please. I mean, people need to know. Like that fat around your middle is not just holding up your pants. It's a metabolically active organ that's spewing out harmful chemicals all the time.

That's dysregulating your appetite, making you hungry. That's slowing your metabolism. That's causing inflammation. That's screwing up your hormones. It's bad. And what drives it is this sort of pharmacologic doses of sugar. As a hunter-gatherer, you know, we would maybe get

22 teaspoons of sugar a year if we got lucky to find some honey or something, right? We eat that every day in America. We eat 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour per person Per year Wow, that's 152 pounds of sugar Per person per year. That's almost a half a pound. Sorry three quarters of a pound of sugar and flour By the way flour is no different than sugar in your body. Below the neck, your body can't tell the difference between a bowl of cornflakes and a bowl of sugar.

That's almost three quarters of a pound a day per person. Now, I'm not having that much, so some people are eating a lot more. Maybe you are. But the bottom line with this belly fat is that it was a good thing when we were hunter-gatherers if we could eat a lot of sugar, berries, whatever, honey, and we'd store it. Now, we just keep it on. And what happens is that that fat is causing something called insulin resistance, which we talked about on the show, I think.

That's like a form of pre-diabetes, or I call it diabeticity, which is this continuum from optimal metabolic health to poor metabolic health. Now, this stat is terrifying to me. When you look at this recent data that came out, 93.2% of Americans have this. 6.8% of Americans don't have it. That's frightening to me. Wow. That means they have high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, are overweight

or have had a heart attack or stroke 93.2 percent of Americans and what that means is that they're all somewhere in that continuum of pre-diabetes to type 2 diabetes Wow, and why is that connected to everything? It's the biggest driver of cancers Pancreatic cancer colon cancer breast cancer many cancers prostate cancer Heart attacks probably two-thirds cancer, heart attacks, probably two thirds of all heart attacks caused by this, dementia, they're calling type 3 diabetes now, and of course type 2 diabetes.

These are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, as you get older. All of them, every single one of them, is driven primarily by insulin resistance and its metabolic dysfunction, which is caused by belly fat. Which is caused by starch and sugar and ultra processed food. It's not that complicated. That's the root cause, yeah.

Yeah, the root cause. The challenge is, you know, in the last year, I've lost close to 25 pounds of fat, and I've been putting on muscle too, so I've lost 25 pounds. And I remember, I still have belly fat, a little bit of belly fat, right? It's like, I'm not where I wanna be know, I still have belly fat, a little bit of belly fat, right? It's like I'm not where I want to be necessarily. I feel like, and I can speak for myself,

but I feel like others might have a similar feeling. If they look in the mirror and they see belly fat, they might feel a little shame. They might feel a little guilt, a little shame. It's what I felt. Not your fault though. That's the problem. Right, right. It's not your fault, but it can feel so hard for people to make that change and see results. Because it doesn't happen in a week or a month or a few months to lose all the belly fat. It takes time. It took time to build it on and it takes time to get it off and then keep it off. It is a complete lifestyle shift. It's a complete identity shift of saying,

I'm gonna kill off the person I once was for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years, and I'm gonna become a new identity. And that is a big change. It is, I mean the question I was asked was why. Like Simon Sinek was her friend, goes why, what's your why? Why do you care? I wanna feel better. I wanna be able to show up and do the question I was asked people was why. Like Simon Sinek was her friend, goes why? What's your why? You know, why do you care? I want to feel better.

I want to be able to show up and do the work I want to do and not feel like crap and watch TV all night. You know, I had a patient recently who was like, you know, she was working really hard. She was a med student. She was eating crap to get through coffee, sugar, gain all this weight. And she said, look, I would come home

and all I wanted to do was lay in bed and watch TV. I would want to exercise, I wouldn't do anything, I just wanted to eat more sugar and crap. And she was in this vicious cycle. And within like two or three days of changing her diet, she was like, my mood's better, I have energy, I just rode my bike 30 miles. I'm like, wow.

So I always say, we're only a few days away from feeling better. Most people don't know how bad they feel until they start feeling good. Even if you can start to feel good, you can stay more consistent. That's right. So then you know, oh, if I'm doing this,

I'm gonna feel like crap. Most people don't connect to the oxygen, what they eat and how they feel. It's just astounding to me. I have very smart, educated patients in my patient cohort. And I'm like, God, really don't know that this is making you feel like this. And people don't know, God really don't know that this is making you feel like this and it's people don't know They just don't know and that's part of why I created this this program

Which is basically an elimination diet where you put in whole foods you take out the bad stuff You put in the good stuff and 10 days and most people do anything for 10 days And we see a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases. Wow, that's my grains it'll bow depression joint pain, congestion, sinus issues, whatever. Just biting the whole foods for 10 days. Yeah, but it's a more extreme version. It's gets rid of sugar, alcohol, all grains, all beans. Sugar drinks, yeah, yeah.

All starchy foods. All grains, all beans. All beans, yeah, for a short period of time. To see, because a lot of people have gut issues and just can have inflammation from gluten and people don't know. So what do you eat? Get rid of dairy, lots of veggies, protein,

nuts and seeds, berries. That's it. Some sweet potatoes. 10 days. Yeah, 10 days. And it's the most unbelievable thing. I read these receipts around the world and people just have the most unbelievable transformation.

So I would say to people listening, if you wanna do something, just see doing something like that for 10 days, what you'll do. And I'm gonna be running, starting in January, we're gonna be launching an online 10 day detox course. You can find it on drheimann.com. But essentially it's a way for you

to just hit the reset button. The way I explain it is like, imagine if you could, put your body back to its original factory settings. You know like when your computer is not working you got to reboot it or you got to reinstall the software. It's kind of like that and it's sort of you can upgrade your biological software so fast. Like I said this woman had diabetes on insulin and three days she was off insulin. In three months she reversed everything. And she lost 43 pounds. So it's possible if you know what to do.

And you have the right information. And for you, you know, the question around shame and how you feel, I'm gonna tell people something. This is a message that's been put out there by our culture, by the food industry, by doctors, by nutritionists, by our professional associations, whether it food industry, by doctors, by nutritionists, by our professional associations, whether it's the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Academy of Nutrition, Dietetics, it's the prevailing message out there that it's your fault, your

weight, you're a lazy glutton is a subtext. Just eat less and exercise more. Subtext, you're a lazy glutton who doesn't want to do anything. It's not about eating less and exercising more. Subtext, you're a lazy glutton who doesn't want to do anything, right? It's not about eating less and exercising more. It's about understanding what you're eating is more important than how much you're eating. And the quality matters more than the quantity, because the quantity will take care of itself. Could you eat 10 ribeye steaks? Well, maybe you could, but you could eat 10 giant chocolate chip cookies in a minute.

You could eat a quart of ice cream, no problem. But you could eat 10 avocados, no. Your body will self-regulate. And so it's not your fault, it's number one. It's not about blaming yourself, it's about understanding that you're in a toxic food system that's set up for you to fail. And then the food industry has these talking points. There's no good and bad foods. It's all about moderation. Just eat less and exercise more. It's okay. You're getting Coca-Cola as long as

part of your calorie, you know, gluttony for the day. Nonsense. It's basically the food industry talking points and they're wrong. They're just wrong. Because when you start to accumulate this belly fat, it's hungry fat. It's literally hungry fat. That fat is going to make you crave and want more food. And this is the startling statistic.

When I learned about this, there's something called the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which is a validated scientific scale of questions that you can take and find online. You'll link to it in the show, I'm sure our show knows, that tells you whether you're a food addict. Like you have biological addiction based on the definition of substance abuse, whether it's heroin or cocaine or nicotine. And 14% of the population are food addicts. 14% of the adult population are alcoholics. What's even worse is 12% of kids are food addicts. I was at an obesity conference, a childhood obesity conference not too long ago, and there

was a hepatic surgeon there. I'm like, what are you doing here? He said, oh yeah, well, we're seeing the need for liver transplants in kids now, because their livers have cirrhosis from drinking so much soda. Right? That's what's going on.

So this is not their fault. A three-year-old with type 2 diabetes, it's not their fault. Okay, this is just ridiculous. The fact that 40% of kids are now overweight, You know, a three-year-old with type 2 diabetes, it's not their fault. Right, right. Okay? This is just ridiculous. The fact that 40% of kids are now overweight? I mean, there was that one kid in my class when I was going up, Erica, and she wasn't by today's standards, wasn't even that overweight.

She was a little chubby, you know? And now, I mean, you see kids who can walk. We're all skinny growing up. Yeah. There's a couple things I want to leave people with. One, what you said is getting healthy as a team sport. I think it's probably the hardest thing to try to do it on your own. 100%.

And maybe if you're watching or listening, you may not have the support you want or people may not want to get on board with you, but it's whatever you can. Enroll a friend, hire a coach, find a nutritionist, someone to support you. If you can't afford a coach, find a friend and beg someone. Whatever it might be, find the healthiest person you know and say, hey, can I just keep you accountable and you keep me accountable and we go to the gym a few days a week and we just try to help each other.

Getting healthy is a team sport. It doesn't even have to be your healthiest friend. It could be anybody. You both could like overweight or struggling. Getting healthy is a team sport. It doesn't even have to be your healthiest friend. It could be anybody. Exactly, exactly. You both feel like overweight or struggling. Getting healthy is a team sport. That's something I think that everyone here should be thinking about. Do not do it alone.

The second thing is, your new company that you're a part of called functionhealth.com, it gives people data. Yeah. I think when you get tested, you know, everyone's talking about glucose monitors or rings or just something to get data. I think when you get tested, you know, everyone's talking about glucose monitors or or rings or just something to get data. If you can get

data about what's off inside of your blood work and you can say, oh I have the information, how can I just improve it a little bit here over time to improve the data inside of me. That's right. And functionhealth.com offers a process where people can get blood work and have the information, is that right? Super easy, it's like five minutes, sign up online, you get to skip the wait list of 300,000 people, greatness 100 is the skip the wait list code.

Greatness 100 if you wanna use it. It's five minutes to sign up, you'll tell you a lab near your house, it's all on the top of Quest Labs, so it's thousands of draw centers, you go in, it's 15 minutes to sign up. You'll tell you a lab near your house. It's all on the top of Quest Labs. So it's thousands of draw centers. You go in, it's 15 minutes in and out. You get your labs in a beautiful dashboard. That not only tells you your lab results,

but you're not a doctor, how do you know what they mean? But the results are interpreted based on knowledge input from the world's leading physicians and from all the scientific literature about what it means and what to do about it. So well, okay, my blood sugar's high, now what? Or my thyroid's not right, now what? Well, it gives you a very clear idea of insights and education about what you can do and how

to be an empowered consumer. And O-R rings are great, I have one, you know, it's fine. But it's only skin deep. But blood work is what you... It's only skin deep. Like, and you can pick stuff up that's causing you to feel like crap and you don't even know it. Like a patient today, she had low iron, her hair was falling out, she was tired,

her thyroid was off, she had all these different things going on that she didn't know about. They were easy fixes, they're easy fixes. And sometimes it's more serious. You have diabetes or you have high blood sugar or whatever. I mean, we've had people actually just come up to us in a restaurant, we were having dinner with the team from the company,

and this guy walks up, Dr. Hyman, I used function, I found out I had all these metabolic issues, and I changed my diet based on what you guys said, and I did all these other things, and now I lost 20 pounds, and I feel great, all my numbers are great. So, we don't have to wait for the healthcare system to catch up, right?

We don't have to go through insurance and your doctor visits. It's $1.37 a day for twice a year testing. You can add on other stuff if you want. In fact, we're doing cancer screening now because as I mentioned earlier in the show, we're seeing a 50% increase to 60% increase in cancers, significantly colon cancer in people under 50,

even in 30s. And so there's now a screening test called GALERY, which is a blood test for cancer. It's like liquid biopsy. So rather than having to like do a colonoscopy or a scan, it's pretty good at picking stuff up early. And we've, out of the people we've tested, it's one in 188 have had a positive cancer signal,

which means then they can go get checked out. And early stage cancer is pretty much curable, but if you wait too late, it's not. Right, right, right. And so we're thinking these early stage cancers that people can get cured of. So it's really empowering, and I feel like for me, it's a way for getting people to be the CEO

of their own health, to understand what's going on with their bodies, and to be empowered with the data. That's what I think is gonna be the future, is having accountability and having your own data accessible and affordable, and it's something that function health.com offers. And again, if you guys use greatness, 100 as a code, um, the first hundred people that use that will get early access to it. You'll skip the line 300,000 people on the wait list.

So function health.com for that. And then, um, and I think having that accountability, it's like, okay, twice a year, I'm getting blood work or quarterly or something where you can at least know the decisions I'm making or they're helping me or hurting me. And you take back responsibility. You don't need government to change policy. You don't need a politician to make some changes. You don't need the food industry to change.

Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But at the end of the day, you got to take back the power. I think having data is extremely helpful. And you being aware of like, okay my decisions now are hurting me moving forward. Yeah. And I'm gonna get the blood work again and oh well I did continue to eat processed foods. My sugar's going up. So it's it's on me at the end of the day to take responsibility with the actions I'm taking once I'm informed. That's right. And at your website drheimHyman.com, you've got a ton of free resources to continue to educate people.

Your Instagram is amazing with just quick free resources as well and content. Did you say you have a program in January? Yeah, 10 Day Detox. 10 Day Detox. That's great. So people can sign up for that. Yeah, sign up. It's a co-coached program.

It basically goes for a month of support. And it gives people really a transformation. It's starting in January. So drheimann.com, at Dr. Mark Hyman on social media, functionhealth.com, and use code greatness100. If you're not sick of listening to me, you can check out my podcast, Dr. Hyman, Dr's Pharmacy. Dr's Pharmacy. and use code greatness 100. Now, if you're not sick of listening to me, you can check out my podcast, Dr. Diamond,

Doctors Pharmacy. Doctors Pharmacy, you got another one, Health Hacks, right? Health Hacks, yeah. Health Hacks, so you got a couple great podcasts. How else can we support you or get involved? Now, you're doing it. I think for people actually taking ownership of their health is so important because,

once people start knowing what's going on with themselves, they start to kind of change and when you create that change it starts to create change in the system you know one of the one of the best stories I ever heard recently was that one of the CEOs of this big food companies called up this CEO of Nova Nordisk and saying we're in trouble because with those Zempik people are not eating as much of the crap. Right. Wow. Sales are going down. Now they're going to start fighting the drug companies.

Wow. It's a whole other conversation. Dr. Mark Hyman, make sure you guys check him out. Follow his work. Get one of his 15 New York Times bestselling books. All the things. We appreciate you, Mark. Thanks for all your support and your service in helping us continue to heal from all this sickness that we have. We appreciate it. Thanks, buddy. Well,

it's great to be here and love you, man. You've been doing this together for years now. Of course, man. I love you too. Appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps

us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.